Poems, 20-30 March 2016

April 1st, 2016 by Charles Cameron

or out, soak voice in whiskies, wreathe it in smoke —

sing it — above all, doubtless and doubting — SHOUT!!

Zen it. Turn your head into the headwinds, face whatever

sandblasts you back to your original face. You, I

are forever baby-faced, mirror-faced, and wizened.

How best to crumple your face? How dare you even ask?

You think that life’s a whaddayacallit goddam task?

**

Assessment

,

Rough me up, chisel, throw me down, rampart, cliff,

brine me in and dry me out, season me, in and out and about

in all seasons, snow me under, bake, broil me, boil,

blister, shell-shock, shake, shellac me, chain, drain on me,

break, bust me, cake me in excremental blood, curse,

catcall me, caterwaul, blame, shame me, if I protest, bluster,

I am naked, spare, your slings and arrows wound me, you

have nothing on me, I am but better for your battering, bruising.

Brush me, wash, bathe, comb, coax me, clean me, I

shall remain pliant to your pleasing, soap, soft soap, sponge

me up and down, inside and within, I will respond

in response, loathe me — but clothe me, rob me

but robe me, foist your delusions on me, I am hoist

on my own penis, pride, flagpole, priesthood, petard.

**

Of Diotima and Beatrice

.

Who spawned Diotima of Mantinea? For Socrates

drank wisdom at her teats, Plato from Socrates, Aristotle

from Plato, Alexander from Aristotle, so who

was Diotima, what her thoughts, and who spawned

the thoughts which taught her? I have asked Siri,

I have interrogated Wolfram’s Alpha, have challenged

Googles AI to fight Wittgenstein’s PI to the death —

yet for me it suffices that she, Diotima was no he but a

she, female, a woman. To say more would be to

slather it on, mansplain, overtell, sell, hence overkill,

to say less would leave Aristotle with the boys,

and what could be worse? Think you on this: peace

outshines war by far; Venus is brighter than Mars.

Love’s gravity it is, spins hearts, the sun, all other stars.

**

I was writing these over Holy Week, four of them on Maundy Thursday, and the most recent one came through yesterday. Jim Morrison’s death was the occasion for th poem in which he is named.

Your comments are welcome.

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Posted in blog-friends, Charles Cameron, madhu, poetry, Uncategorized | 5 comments

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  1. Grurray:

    April 1st, 2016 at 3:52 am

    “Zen it. Turn your head into the headwinds, face whatever
    sandblasts you back to your original face.”
    .
    Good line. Thanks for this. Very Harrisonian (if that can be considered a term).

  2. Charles Cameron:

    April 1st, 2016 at 4:11 am

    Thanks, Grurray.
    .
    ou nudged me. So I just searched and found my first Harrison poem —

    Where Is Jim Harrison?
    .
    He fell off the cliff of a seven-inch zafu.
    He couldn’t get up because of his surgery.
    He believes in the Resurrection mostly
    because he was never taught how not to.

    I’ll set that beide Gary Snyder any day:

    Not all those who pass
    before the Great Mother’s Chair
    get past with only a stare.
    Some she looks at their hands
    to see what kind of savages they were.

  3. Charles Cameron:

    April 1st, 2016 at 4:18 am

    This is the photo that caught my attention to him when he died:
    .

  4. mike:

    April 1st, 2016 at 3:59 pm

    I like the one you titled “Assessment”. Reminds me of John Donne, in a good way of course.

  5. Charles Cameron:

    April 1st, 2016 at 6:06 pm

    Thanks, Mike.
    .
    Indeed, Donne’s sonnet Batter my heart, three-person’d God is certainly the stone dropped in the well to which my mind attached its lichen in this case. It has always been a touchstone for me, since Oppenheimer quoting it is one of the rare places (his two quotations from the Gita being others) where my personal interests in poetry and interiority intersect with the external, impersonal, implicit and ever-pending horrors of nuclear war.
    .
    Hopkins was my first love among poets, and I’ve long had the sense that he and Donne required the same sort of reading. Wanting to back that idea up today in light of your comment, I ran across a piece titled Eucharistic Poetry: The Search for Presence in the Writings of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Geoffrey Hill, by Eleanor J. McNees. Her subtitle names four poets I greatly admire and whose company I would aspire to keep:

    Though widely separated chronologically, all four poets use the Anglican and Roman Catholic doctrine of eucharistic Real Presence (the literal embodiment of Christ in the sacrament of Holy Communion) as model for their own poetry. Each poet seeks to charge his words with a dual physical/spiritual meaning that abolishes the gap between word and referent and so creates an immediate presence that parallels Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist.

    That’s where Trevor Huddleston was steering me when he introduced me to Hopkins, and that’s what the great Welsh actor Emlyn Williams showed me the human voice could achieve, when I heard him give a one-man reading of Dylan Thomas at the Oxford Playhouse when I was seventeen or so. His reading of “It was my thirtieth year to heaven” at 15.07 here will give you a taste: the live voice falling on youthful ears went very deep.