Professor Jackson in Music Appreciation

You cram our course with lore of candlelight,

Of Beethoven’s and Haydn’s bursting heads:

We feel their music pulsing through the white

Plain walls. We know they really can’t be dead.

You wear the tones of music without fail,

A dress of black and white, your hair the shades

Of crows and chestnuts, face in creamy pale

Like paper marched with musical parades.

You tell us, “Put your ears on! Here it comes!”

It’s the bassoon, the awkward brother-wind.

Though reared on rock and roll, I feel at home

Beside your tender lisp and slicing grin,

And even with these music men, long gone:

If music be the food of love, play on.

The Elements of Style and Zinsser

I bought The Elements of Style in high school, having heard that it contained some magic key that unlocked mysteries for wordsmiths.

I chose the smooth white edition from Penguin with the dog on the front and the catch-your-breath paintings marching through the pages. The other edition, silver and compact, would have fit into my pocket. In choosing art before utility I forfeited its perpetual back-pocket-companionship, which, I heard, distinguished all serious writers.

I committed the white work to thorough ingestion. The black arrows running throughout my margins indicate places that pierced me with conviction. “Brevity is a byproduct of vigor,” said Strunk and White. They spoke with so much cleanliness and sparkle themselves that I could not disbelieve them.

Zinsser I read last semester while I sat in a yellow chair in a coffee shop avoiding my homework. I recall feeling important as the title On Writing Well flashed at my peers walking by.

“Be grateful for everything you can throw away,” said Zinsser.

I knew what he meant. They say that in writing you kill your darlings, and I felt prepared to murder most of mine. I owed my resilience, if you’ll believe me, partly to my experience helping a widow clean out her house the previous summer.

I fondly called Barbara “my widow.” Because of her Depression-era rearing Barbara amassed all manner of trash inside her lovely Victorian home. She allowed me to discard no cat litter boxes, no tissue scraps, no bits of paper scrawled over with the telephone numbers of the long deceased. Above all, we kept water. Water stored in cans and antique pitchers, growing green, an unfortunate residue of her Cornell ecology education. I became a Hemingway out of desperation and threw away cat food cans on tiptoe. By “threw away” I mean hid, for later disposal, for she kept no trash cans.

All the food, too, we scrupulously conserved.

The cats would not have drunk the thin, yellow milk she kept. We had thawed it in the microwave, and an iceberg floated in the center. Barbara tried to stir the iceberg out of it with her beef stew spoon, and I clenched my teeth, watching the beef strings float.

I practiced concision with words while Barbara ate. I chose a medium for translating life with brevity. I scribbled in iambic pentameter:

“The freezer is antarctically steeped.

From it she draws a dubious iced stew –

Not to be wasted, this what we’ll eat.

It can be stretched for satisfying two.

Upon the shelves five-score half-meals subsist,

All deep and hard in frost, and heaven knows

How many years between ourselves and those

Iced harvest stews and stiff skim milks have passed.”

So when Strunk, White, and Zinsser tell me to eradicate clutter, and apply their sharper eyes to my own writing, I believe them. Brief is beautiful. If only, now, Penguin would apply both the briefness and the beauty to one volume. I would like the catch-your-breath paintings to fit into my pocket.

Vodka and the Cat

The stairway smelled of smoke. On top, the door

cracked open an apartment where a gray

lean cat crouched on the table close behind

a shining flask of vodka and some wine.

 

The feline had the attitude of haze,

or a half-clothed woman lounging in the day

a blear-eyed morningtide, not much to say

(though it was evening – seven, probably).

 

Anthony, asleep in the next room

curled fetal in a blanket of soft green,

would not have startled at my brother’s touch

with such a gasp without the alcohol.

 

My brother said, “I’m sorry, man.” The gasp

expired, and Anthony recurled himself

soft and green and caterpillarous.

Ashamed to see him, I observed the cat.

Goodbye You Crashbang City

Goodbye, you crashbang city. Unlike you,

I like my quivers fat and callous-toed:

I mean deep-hearted families by the stoves

propping country feet against hot wood.

I flout you, you big city, lonely-faced.

You swarm with slick successes, narrow youths,

Thin visages: the popping pot of soup

America the sterile melts into.

How many thousand for my chipping flat?

The bathtub’s paint, the broken light, switched off?

I’d like my family. Write an add for that.

Big city money, honey, don’t buy love.

Physics Makes Me Weep

The arbiter of Physics, Dr. Kucks,

is like a sweatered fruit and walks the room,

hands pocketed. I eye the glossy book.

He titles good the diagrams of doom.

But Virgil cousins my creative brain;

like me, the forest reared him and he wrote.

I bite my pen in half at formulae

and smear the bleeding ink blots into art.

The stupider I am at this the more

tough tenderness the arbiter extends.

I tell him I am loster than lost lost.

He holds the scepter out to me again.

 

 

I Hate Hope

Sometimes I hate to hope, and what I mean

is that I go a-publishing my loves

to persons who will laugh them back at me:

A hazard of my personality.

I heap a secret slow this time, all smiles.

I shall not let it leak, whatever comes -

then do. The New Year had me certain; now

I tiptoe toward  the brink with little grins.

Word Girl

I’ve longed in life for words, red-apple fat,

To fall for me in grace, in perfect time.

I wanted hard to be young when they fell

And be loved widely long before my death.

My hands were right. They knew to page-turn slow,

To labor over letters with a quake

Of one wee hand with one first word: a – t.

A country child with yellow hair, stick straight,

My careful bones began to carve away

What silent lips, once squalling, could not say.

…

My lips caught up. The awful seventh grade

Taught me debate, with fat Brett Herrington.

He sides with PETA, I oppose. I call

His reason clouded by his sentiment.

It’s glory to me. Often afterwards

They call me “Shakespeare,” whom I’ve never read.

…

Next comes love.  With words, as well as boys;

The two are symbiotic: lichens, trees,

One feeds the other. While I write to see

I also write lest I be overlooked.

There’s guilt for this. Much like the pruned school nurse

had always told me that I wasn’t sick,

I think I can’t like boys, so I like books.

…

I cannot let life slip unwrestled with,

Uncaptured and unchronicled and – gone—

This is my two-edged sword, my pride and guilt,

My righteous passion, my gift to the world.

It is my idol, my long-gazing friend,

too often with me, yet not quite enough;

my mighty weapon and my ready salve:

With it I kill my friends and doubly bless

The neighbor whom my heart will never know.

…

Some long for figures, some for fancy hats.

I long in life for words, red apple fat.

Your Umbrella May Save Europe

A crying shame it is, that you can’t sit

outside inside the blowing hurricane,

the weather touching you – not everyday

its fingers come so close  to you as this.

It’s just her fringe. She oversnows your clothes

with rain so fine and soaking it is strange.

Umbrella-bring, unless you want to change

ten times out of your collars and your shoes.

I saw a boy preeminent, prepared:

his bumbershoot at ninety straight degrees,

above a book – fat, terrible to read -

called Europe, which regrettably was spared.

More Important than Plato

Returning to this classical brick school,

attended always by that stinging scent -

in saying so, my love alone is meant -

of ladybugs and drying soccer shoes:

Returning here is golden. When I roam

I cannot help but speaking  of this place.

By some unsought and terrifying grace

it’s something like a womb away from home.

By “womb” I mean it birthed me (the third time)

and taught me how to whistle, paint and dance -

never would I give those half a chance

at anyplace but this one, which is mine.

I like the books and square-jawed teacher-types.

The freedom, though, to suddenly be safe

in one’s own skin magnificently rates,

outstripping every wordy dusty Greek.

Back to School

A day of visits is the best goodbye.

The guests stream thick, my black dog at their legs:

For them we scramble. Seven grinning eggs

We break against the cast to spit and fry.

Potatoes, too, and waffles, and real bread

my hands pushed life to (generation three)

were percolating in the mind of me

before I’d even gotten out of bed.

Young cousins come with eyes and eager tongues;

some relatives in heart (by blood of God)

come too, and bring along their knowing nods;

and Aunts with shining humor in their bones.

Like Updike said, they’re “all a writer needs;”

each face I sadly give goodbye again

is sharer of my days and my true friend

and makes a bright page for my history.