THE SECRET NOTEBOOKS

Everyone, it seems, keeps
a secret notebook in which
they write their most profound
thoughts and ideas, thoughts so
deep they frighten you with
their stunning clarity and
grace, philosophical knives
that cut to the very essence
of what we know, and beyond,
the inexplicable mysteries.
It turns out we all know
how to define beauty, how
to resolve the universal
paradox, the story of
human origin, the
stupefaction of the life
force, we know why we love,
why we pervert love, why
the Babylonians built
a tower and a ziggurat,
we know why the praying
mantis devours her lover
when mating, we know
why the locust swarms, how
the mind translates all signs
and symbols in every
language, why we score our
skin with the truth when stars
burn under the surface,
we know why some of us
are born imbecilic,
stricken by lupus or
leprosy, are devoured by
craving, stung by evil's
honeyed lips, torched by
obsessions, why some of us
drown in schizophrenic seas,
why the agonies of desire
and loneliness scratch us
so horribly, why we
prey on children, lop off
the arms of boys with
machetes, why we pray
to goat heads, blood-stained
altars, ethereal manifestations
of abstractions.

We keep
these words a great secret,
hidden even from ourselves,
every night we scrawl them
with fat pencils, or ashen sticks
pulled from the smoldering,
feldspar, chalk, our blood and
piss, bone, spider silk, our
souls, the traces of our flesh,
our nails, and the tablets, the
journals, the notebooks, they
are everywhere, we surround
ourselves with extraordinary
truths, clarifications, theories
that explain everything, they're
quantifiably certain,
phenomenologically ever-
apparent, they're ontologically
indisputable, and yet,
and yet they're indecipherable,
a great babel, indeterminate,
but the very fact that all of this
truth exists, that we all know,
and what's more that we do this
at all, that we record this,
that we keep these riddles
and divine knowledge, this
esoteric gnosis so private
not only from each other
but from ourselves as well
and that hey, we've always
done this, and that we always
must, knowing that there's no
hope for breeching this innate
indwelling truth, this
instinctive constant we know
as the intuitive gospel,
the preternatural preface,
the undeniable, whether
or not what we know is
sacred or profane, well,
that's the only thing we
don't know, isn't it? I mean,
I'll show you my notebook if
you show me yours.

You first.





,

UNTITLED

Just now I recall that red bug

driving past Boogie Records, the

head shop, the People's Coop,

we were firebombing Vietnam,

burning Detroit, and your roommate,

a Navy rat who eavesdropped

Cuban radio for plots to overthrow

America, you drove to crazy

Haberman's wedding, Pressley rolled

joints while you held the wheel, eyeballed

the centerline in gas fumes.

You stopped off at Hamtramck,

Margie's gypsy Polish bungalow

so they could fuck while you drank Schlitz

tallboys and ate fried pickles and

drowned your head in the sink.

Wedding day was sweltering.

You drank gin and tonics with rich

strangers at Crazy Haberman's

reception, sweating off the beer

and fried pickles and driving buckets

of balls into the depths of the

Birmingham Hills Country Club,

the migraine taking over, the taste

of silver on your tongue, stoned on

hash when Crazy Pete snuck out

behind the kitchen, then Crazy

Pete's father-in-law grilled you--

"What are you doing with your lives?"

and Crazy Pete was thinking Fuck

man, I'm just gonna get fucking

stoned and make love to your daughter

and laughing that crazy-assed laugh

that made you think, shit man, Birmingham

fucking Hills, this guy's fucking

looney tunes, and Pressley thinkin'

I don't know and you were thinking

When did I learn Bolshevik? When

did I become a leper? When did I

turn into Tiresias? stirring the burning

gristle of chickens grilling on the spit,

wielding swords of flaming Greek cheese

in the night, pouring libations, gin,

champagne, Asti, spouting apostate

invectives, proselytizing

to the checkered trousered golfers,

cursing the bastard sons of Ford

and Chevrolet, all the captains

of industry, and when the Greek

boys serving the drinks hauled you

behind Pressler's bug and kicked

and punched your ribs till the fire

raged and emptied your stomach

and lungs, you barked like Cerberus

at the country club gates, the

ancient fireworks exploding

overhead, ashes dying in

punk.

MY FATHER IN CHICAGO

In my dream you're alive again,
I meet you walking Michigan Ave,
panhandling, coffee-stained cup
in your thick wind-worn mitts, nothing
big, just a few bucks, pocket change.
I dip in and search for coins, just
as you did at the Knob Hill Tavern
when I wanted a nickel for
the juke or a slim jim. You
pulled out a handful of dirty
coins, dust-lined rootbeer barrels,
ten penny nails, and sorted
them with a miser's patience
which I later discovered was
just fatigue and too much beer,
you wanted this nickel to mean
something, something you had no
words for, so you just handed me
the coin and I smelt its terrible
mettle, held its heat in my fingers
and placed it on my tongue to taste
the Indian. You drank beers with
carpenters, painters, plasterers,
Cookie, Emo and Jimmie,
black men and white men, men you'd
trust your life with, fuck the politics,
men who dragged their tired souls into
this tavern and confessed their fears
in hopes they might redeem themselves,
knowing their thick callused hands
betrayed the gentleness of prayer.
And so we meet here in the cold
winds of Chicago, father, your
eyes like knot-holes, fierce and distant,
we agree to the old arrangement,
I don't know you, you don't know me,
I reach for my wallet and pull out
some dollars and fold them in your
cup. Here mister, I say, get yourself
something just as you told Cookie
and Emo when they lost everything
and you walked by thinking It's a
shame, a goddamned shame, knowing
there was nothing else you could do
for them, you drove the truck back to
the Knob Hill and buried that in
drafts. Here mister I say, pretty sure
I don't slip when I look in your eyes
and say something like Here dad,
that raw grizzled face, carpenter
greens, then give yourself something,
knowing full well you won't, that
in this dream I keep walking
the cold sun of Michigan Ave,
staring at the slippery reflections
of people in the windows,
muttering to myself like an angry
street prophet, schizophrenic,
promising myself to never return,
to never look back, to never
dream this dream again.

CORPORATE SECRETS

Inside the top secret 

corporate research facility,

under the scan of covert 

cameras. Security 

greets you at the desk 

where you divulge your

identity, sign in and sign 

off your rights to

anything you may see 

or think about anything

you see, your badge

clears you for certain

corridors and labs, 

the complex systems lab

but not the human-centered 

design interface compound,

the cognitive architecture 

facility, but not the 

mainframe endoskeleton, 

when you step into 

comprehensive risk 

management an escort from

human resources shepherds

you to the relative safety

of stylistics, surface analysis,

where all of the desks and

drafting tables are draped

with sheets, as if the joint's

being moth-balled for the 

season, or one of the

company geniuses is 

making tents for some 

fabulous glass-walled

executive sleepover!

Let's face it.  You're no spy,

no undercover snoop, 

no operations espionage 

expert, you wouldn't know

a secret formula from

a secret recipe or a 

secret phrase for $50

on Groucho Marx, is there

some classified code

buried behind that man's

furrowed brow?  Is there

some cryptic truth 

disguised in that woman's

crossed eyes, her cold 

stare behind those cloak-

and-dagger hornrims?

There are scarlet A's

burning on everyone's

breasts, ulterior motives,

darker forces, you avert

your eyes, dare not get

caught gaping at anything,

his handsome carriage, 

her bold calves, you're

just waiting for security

to retrieve you from

your proposed visit 

which was, what?, 

you no longer recall, 

please, relieve us 

of these badges, this

confidence, we're 

breaching security even

now just thinking

about it.

 

FALL

Listen. I don't want to 

get dramatic

or anything like that but

while you were gone

the leaves fell, the yard

denuded itself, now

stripped and naked

to the morning sun

so when I sit here 

drinking coffee and 

watching my breath

into the cold openness,

I wasn't thinking 

of you or me or

all those mornings

we've spent listening 

to the crows howling

in the silver birch splashes,

the woodpecker working

the apple tree carcass,

the splendid cardinal 

swaying in the highbush

cranberry, you spreading

orange marmalade on

croissants, no, those 

are vestigial remains,

what we once beheld. 

No, I was just thinking 

of you sleeping naked 

beside me, twisted

in the sheets, and,

well, so naked, so

lovely, so nude.

THESE DAYS

Here at the local Starbucks you
sit in the college outskirts, wind
ruffling your papers, sky so deep
you're falling, all these ideas
chick-scratched in notebooks, ink-stained
napkins nested in your journal,
blue smoke from Russian dilettantes,
Polish lovers mooning over
the linguistic patterns of starlings
and coffee, Indian physicists
sipping caramel macchiatos,
arguing flights of particle theory
poetics and super colliders,
while scruff-feathered sparrows
beg for cake crumbs. The birds perch
beside a child standing on a
plastic chair, teetering, barely
able to speak, the wind blowing
hair in her lips, her Turkish mother
smoking, studying the season,
the girl picks up her mother's
flip phone and studies its black
odalesque screen as if it's some
talisman to another world:
she licks the screen with her tiny
pink tongue, giggles, puts it to
her ear, "Hallo! Hallo! Hallo!"
while her mother smokes in silence.
The phone clatters to the cement.
Birds scatter like the host.
The wind from their wings
pushes hair off her eyes.
Swaying in the tiger lilies
behind her, she's your wild aesthete,
your soul, your restlessness,
waiting to be loved.

MIDLIFE

Migod it's noisy this morning!
I can hear the ahhh of tires
on the tri-state, the dragonfly drone
of a Cessna scrawling overhead,
the high-pitched yips of chipmunks,
the scrabble of squirrel claws on ash bark,
morning trollops of cardinals
in the dirt and creeping charley,
the flagging moan of the diesel
drifting from the valley with the
steel clatter bouncing off houses.
How can one be so alone out here
among the overgrown lilacs,
the low-slung electric wires, the
leaning and chink-walled garages,
rusted ladders sprawling across
plastic lawn chairs, a misbegotten
apple tree stinking of ferment,
a tree so ugly even the wasps
shun its lurid juices, baskets
of bedraggled impatiens hanging
like twin iridescent squatters
condemned to life without parole,
monstrous swordleaf daisies
horning in on the neighbor's sundeck,
the slack clothesline, backyard jalopies,
rustbuckets, broken down wheelbarrows
invaded by trumpet vine, abandoned
charcoal grills upended, baring
their bent and skinny insect legs
to the sky, and, at long last,
as if to announce the end, a
single blue jay proclaims some
terrible household tragedy, as if
all tragedy were the same,
the bird bath's been tipped over,
the basset hounds are whelping in
the basement or someone finally
found the philosopher's wife dead
as a doornail dead on her lawn
in her robe and slippers, a
metaphysical mystery, she'd
been haunting the sidewalk for weeks
shouting "The darkness! The darkness!" ,
and it's not what she deserved but
it's certainly a sign of the times,
these are all auguries, predilections,
this world is an Old Richard's
almanac warning you it'll be
a hard winter, and this is what
you get for coming out here
in the first place, determined to
think of nothing in particular.

EMBARRASS RIVER

To live here you must absolve

     yourself of all pretense, 

all worldly signs of wealth

     or possession -- not that it's

hard, there's never been anything 

     here, really, save the damned 

river -- there's nothing to mortgage

     except what you do

to each each other, women and men,

     seeking redemption in

each other's wrinkled flesh,

     but it's the eyes that shame,

you can't escape, the deeper fear,

     like a furtive skunk behind 

the eyes, the mind embarrassed.

     There's no privacy here, no 

escape, the sensual and the 

     practical, the poverty of 

a river dock, you fish for

     trout and suckers, trap crayfish

in the claybanks, even pull

     wild rice from the oxbows.

Even on our death beds

     our friends and family

are too embarrassed 

     by the end to cry, to smile,

to hold our lifeless hands, 

     the skin sinking to bone,

oh the personal ownership of it!, 

     the selfishness!, the shame 

of causing such a fuss!

     And when we pass you wonder

What was all of this for?

     This economy of feeling,

this abstention from 

     all things carnal, all the

empty hours, that damned

     dying river?  What value 

remains from all this 

     fierce holding on?  

    

     

SUNDAYS

Sunday mornings, 4:30am,

walking past the last houses on the hill

painted in psychedelics, purple haze

and sunshine acid orange, redbud gold,

abandoned by the paper mills hippies and

left to squatters—those houses with the stark

and narrow windows, yellow shades, bloodshot

porch lights, one house filled with cubist nudes,

deconstructed whores languishing in

celluite and cigarettes, waiting all night

as the fuckfest continues in the great room

while the Rolling Stones bang out “Gimme Shelter”

and the Allman Brothers play “Ramblin’ Man.”  

Next door a roach squalor booze fest, bottles

of Wild Turkey and Cactus Jack and shattered

Mad Dog, it’s all Merle Haggard and Dean Martin

and “Little Ole Wine Drinker, Me.”  Now it’s

a philosopher’s den, epistemologists

and phenomenologists, goggle-eyed

anarchists and neo-Platonists holding court,

rolling Bugler cigarettes and drinking

Carling Black Label and chomping cold

french fried pickles, it’s Chopin’s etudes,

Ravi Shankar ragas, and of course The Doors,

“The Peace Frog” and “WASP (Texas Radio and

the Big Beat)”.  Then the graveyard.  The long

descent into the darkness and the city’s

stillness, the cold wrought iron fence,

the hill busting through the iron spikes as if

the dead, burgeoning underground, seek

redemption. The stones and mausoleums

of the city’s great fathers and sinners

are not haunted, they’re just buried in

bottle rockets and spent rubbers and

Michigan dirt. Comatose, like the city,

like the bums in the rail yard seeking

their hovels, the psychotics released from

the State Hospital for the Insane

scurrying in sumac like opossums

from the hill’s pre-dawn corona.  Cross

the tracks and spill into the main drag,

furniture stores and failed banks, and finally

the News Agency, where bundles of papers

wait among bleeding-eye men squatting in

Greyhound diesel fumes, news from Chicago,

Detroit, Cleveland, LA, New York, everywhere

that matters but here.  Switch on the neon

sign and the first drunks and scholars and

stoners stumble in from the pureness of Sunday,

sanctimonious, baptized and redeemed.

The headlines confess that the day’s begun,

like every other, interminable, precious

and smeared across flesh and cheap newsprint,

desperate for the future.

TURCOTT'S LANDING

After the coke bust the owners 

absconded to Patagonia, so 

the house was up for grabs until Turk 

and Posthumus parked their Econolines

on Sugarloaf bluff.  There were parties 

every night, skinny dipping in the pool, 

fucking in the hot tub,  shagging 

on the carpet to the Moody Blues 

because the Turk loved the Moody Blues

and when someone dropped an M-80 

in the pool and fired roman candles 

from the diving board like a stoned 

statue of liberty my new girlfriend 

and I snuck down to the lake drinking 

Annie Green Springs peach wine and shivering 

in the shallows, slick minnows on our skin.

We waded through cattails all muddy 

and naked in darkness.

Later it was girls in halters smoking 

Virginia Slims and snorting lines 

and guys drinking flaming shots of wild turkey  

and getting all philosophical, tits and 

death and weed, and the Turk, the visionary, 

was going to hitchhike to Mexico

to find the real shit, something to smooth 

the wrinkles in your brain, blind-your-inner-eye 

stuff, divinity.

This is how we ushered in our new era, 

making way for the new millennium, 

a new paradigm, the new order, the 

revolution: the gypsies were no longer 

gypsies but an orgy of lotus eaters.

We astonished ourselves not so much at 

our ecstasy or our excess but our 

clumsiness, our awkwardness, the algae scum 

in our hair, the claymuck  on our feet, 

our cold wrinkled fingertips and groins.  

We were suddenly the drug of each other's 

flesh, and that terrible craving 

afterwards.

Death and Early Cinematography

Every film maker's first 

film explores death, naturally.

Morpheus, Terminal, 

Expiry, or just The End,

the sweet kiss of poison 

on curiosity's lips, probing 

the world for mortality 

with their lens to capture

the mystery of our 

enchantment with the

loss of being.  You see it

in the shadows, the ghosts, 

as if  their art breathes life

into some lifeless scene --

a blade flashing in the

blazing sun, a blind frigate

bird soaring to the sun

and then falling like some 

dumb boomerang into the sea,

Dirk Bogarde, stumbling 

and pathetic, sweating 

in the plague-heat of the

Venice beach, puckering

on the sand like some 

old carp.  In my brother's film

I'm caught in slow motion,

a stupor, climbing a dune,

grasping the weeds to 

pull myself up, then the 

obligatory montage, cut 

to the westbound  Amtrak

effacing me, cut to 

staring at the mirror

and seeing nothing but 

the silvery darkness, the

liquid memory pool of 

nothingness, the old

existentialist trappings,

cut to a graveyard, 

lichen-spotted stones and

the camera swings skyward

to the November cold,

but once the production

is splashed on the screen

the great mystery is 

reduced to a scrim of 

slippery images sliding

before our eyes--there's no

transcendence, no epiphany,

no elegy, the sweet cello

fades, it's a film, after all,

about nothing, the other side

of a story, a sequence 

of dead flowers left beside

the road, a field of chopped

corn stalks in the snow,

a redemption, a benediction,

a way of being that can't

be sensed or repeated,

and that failure, grandiose

or felt, cannot be captured

or known by image, it

can only be known by

surrender, whether 

by the eros of music or

first person narrative, 

limited.

GODLESSNESS

The first

     sunny day 

            after Easter

the neighbor boy

     rakes through

          the brambles 

with all the patience

     of a Catholic,

          steady strokes

cleansing their yard

     of stubborn oak leaves

          and winter trash,

the trumpet vine

     and lopped roses --

          dead wood 

and snow-burnt

     grass, all gathered

          in a circle

triumphantly set

     ablaze and smoldering

          toward heaven, 

the  yard now redeemed

     by this ceremony,

          by this sacrament

of smoke and ash.

     His sister brings

          a fistful of wieners

they impale 

     on barbecue forks

          and snack on, 

burst and

     sizzled flesh.

          My penance?

To observe this 

     carnal worship, 

          this Spring sweetness,

and beg forgiveness

     for my sons and I, 

          how we raked 

our hard scrabble 

     in haste, in haughty 

          anger, shouting 

at the wind, 

     cursing our lot, 

          the very life 

          

we were borne

     into, the punishment 

          of raking.

AFTER SEEING MATISSE

 

(the curvilinear steel bridge

 

             a reclining nude

 

      Matisse’s line)

 

 

 

the first two drawings

simple graphite on ivory     allure

 

a woman standing, nude

flesh captured not by marks

but by what is not marked

 

            her calves

            her arms

 

            lines

                        slightly bent

           

     but mass,

  volume, not

       desire, but

     woman

 

 

 

just        seeing that

 

 

       the buses on Monroe

                        on Michigan Avenue

                        everywhere!

                        emblazoned

                        MATISSE

 

 

two silver-haired women

stand before Matisse

a woman in a shawl

”I don’t believe that sentence!”

she declares, “there’s no

intuition at all!  I wonder

how she felt about this picture!”

 

 

                        in a film Matisse

                        draws a school boy

                        with one hand

                        while with his left

                        he touches the boy

                        as if he were divine,

                        as if he were reading Braille,

as if to guard himself

from the boy’s innocent fire

 

 

the woman reclining

in the studio

voluptuous line

among so many others,

that line is eros

 

            two gold fish!

            swimming

            in a blue room!

 

                        floating in consciousness

 

            they have been

            swimming in your mind

            behind your eyes

 

 

a lilac branch

like a peacock’s tail

 

                        some wonderful

                                    language

                                    spilling

                             from your lips. Chirps,

                        whistles, clicks, something

                                    beyond the mind

 

            all these people

            so self-conscious, cold

            reading words

            and walls

            ghosts          waiting

            for

            something

            something real

            the words

            the fish

            the lilacs

            to shimmer or speak

            or blare out some Saint-Saens Marche Militaire Franchaise!

 

in Millennium Park

two copper mockingbirds

perch on a bench

            and yelp out

            their hillbilly calls

while skinny Russian girls

in pink slippers!

Slurp frappacinos

 

            Oh Matisse!

            everyone’s

            snapping photographs

            at the cloud gate,

            the mercury-skinned bean

            reflecting the cosmos,

            a pulsar!

            circumscribed by

            the magnificent line!

             

Matisse’s nude bathers

inspect themselves

sure in their being

sure in their eros

 

           

            after the show

            people can no longer see

            exhausted,

            faces washed

 

            they were          somewhere

            for a moment          (open)

            THAT

            is radical invention

            before they returned

 

 

the fish?

the line?

the blue?

 

            and then

            the words

MATISSE

MATISSE

MATISSE

from every

light pole

 

            You see him

            In those apples in a bowl!

            those gold fish!

            that lilac!

            that woman’s leg

 

the words

you scribble

a line

before breakfast

in Tangier

consciousness

radical invention

unguarded / breathe