Poetry, Catastrophe, & Disaster

Always on the verge of disaster.
The poet writes to keep himself
From falling apart.
The smoldering ruins
Of his past lay abandoned
In the bare-bone archaeology
Of his mind’s survey.

Poems like potsherds,
Or verse, the debitage
-Catalogues
Of a broken heart’s assemblage.

Ever on the edge of the precipice.
Of the falling off place.
He weaves wings of bivalent lead
And leaps into the depths
Of Love’s abyss.

 Heavy as death he descends
To attempt to become repossessed
By the beautifully tragic notes
Whose hauntingly tremulous music
Ascends above the ambisagrus clef
In measure to Orpheus’ quickening lyre.

But all that left aside. Coming back
To life in this world. He sits
Beside an open window
Alone in his rented room
Listening to the crickets barróg
In the early evening.

Quits wrestling with poems
And goes onto writing
Horribly comical and absurd fiction
In imitation of his favorite obscure
European auteurs.

Writing a story about an eye.
Or is it the one about a French
But friendly stranger
Drunk on Columbus Circle
Smiling and winking
At all and just about only
A few blonde and surprised passersby?

-Cigarette ashes fall onto the carpet.
-Coffee gets cold.

-He forgets to call her back.
-Waters boiling in the red pot with pasta.
   The banality of it all.
-A beautiful yet boring world.
     [ an interruption]
Who’s there? Oh it’s you again,
            Pedro, que quiere?
   What is it that you want?

-He puts the pen down.
Puts the pen down
And he redundantly
             Perceives
         Projects
His senses
      Outwardly again
And looks back into the world

  His gaze backward and tense
And he grins for what it’s worth.
" He settles within himself
A sense of horror
In accepting that everything’s absurd.

Turns the lamp on. 

Takes his shoes off
And feeds the birds.
Smiles again as they chirp
And saunter in satisfaction
Flitting from perch to perch.

-His happy heart smiling
And laughing
Like a poor, lucky soul
Who has barely survived a disaster.

Quite pleased with himself
In having withstood
Life’s exquisite catastrophe
For just one more day.

Reviews

[W. Barrett Munn]

Hi,
I admire your lexicon. I am rambling, now, but as a fellow poet you might be interested that I have been reading Hass and he quoted someone else whom I have forgotten that it is easier to write a poem than to write a good line. I found this book I'm reading profound. It begins with a study of one line poems, basically what haiku is. Then it moves on to two line poems, and on. It really gets back to the heart of it. We doen't write poems. We write lines, then, couplets, and on.
No word should go to waste.

Winston

[AYVID N]

A poet has such a complex, intricate and brilliant inner world. There is no end to the magic that happens there, the epics lost, the universes won. You have so beautifully described what a poet is all about. Thank you for this tribute to all the poets, everywhere in the world.

[jacob erin-cilberto]

A poet is possessed by the muse, by words and thusly uses that to repossess his or her heart.
I think of Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Jarrell and others...and how unfortunate they were not to be able to write themselves away from that abyss.
This is so well done, and an anthem that fits so many of us.
j.