Good Work: "Void and Compensation (Karaoke Genesis)" by Michael Morse

Please take me seriously. Please.
I wish I could claim that tears fall uphill onto laptops hitched up on knees in hospital beds, the keyboards held by ribs, head cocked by a funky pillow and a cat watching blessed neighbor Michael mow our lawn (need it or not, before dawn or not!). Ah, that slight pause that had Buddy so enthralled was a switch to a mulcher do-dad.  When Michael retired as a High School Football Coach, two things happened: his wife, who kept teaching (some mysterious course) became a bona fide screeching witch and, shortly thereafter, Michael opened a 7-day-a-week landscaping service.  And he included, gratis, all his neighbors -- mowing only.
Buddy has departed. Doesn't like my tears. Or Fred has put out the kibble.
Buddy also likes to eat before he watches, with big round eyes, the bedpan saga.  He doesn't miss a trick. He provides comic relief.  For *me*, at least.
So...before my big announcement, some smaller ones.  My nurse has disappeared.  Hasn't shown up since last Thursday.  I sorta kinda not-so-much liked her. She took my temp and my blood pressure, talked politics, had me sign two papers and left. Made a big deal about how she had 6 more patients to see, and it was always at least 4 pm. One day a bill collector called. That was pleasant for the both of us.
Let's see, what else?
I have two bedsores on mine buttocks, and more on the way, and they're bleeding. Fred is not equipped, let us say. To be fair, with one hip collapsed and the other quite painful, I am not equipped to pull off the ever- lovin' "turn every 20 minutes, turn! turn! turn!" advice that Fred 'n I keep getting chirped at -- without a breath between chirps.
I'll spare you the bowel movement data, as that's Fred's domain, statistics and all. He likes to loom over me, and if any of you can quell that habit, and I AM NOT KIDDING, please do so. He says, booming, looming: "I'm going to have to have to have to call 911 again, you're going to be back in Emory. You remember Emory?  No? Well, it's going to be that nightmare all over again if you don't go to the bathroom." Well, or something a little gentler and kinder.
Pain? Worse, but since Fred and the nurse both mocked my moaning when having to turn on my left hip, I've kept it to muffled moaning and silent tears, and asked them to "please shut up."
And then there's the fact that I am definitely sure I've finally suffered brain damage.
Don't make me go through the various proofs accumulated over the past 3 weeks.  They MIGHT defy physics, or logic, or geometry, or whatever, and cause tears to reach my laptop.
Fred is big on "You've messed up your drugs," because Fred is big on getting mad at me.
And if any of you can quell that habit, and I AM NOT KIDDING, please do so.

I chose this post to repost because it was the last post I could clearly remember and because it was the last beautiful thing I remember sending to Fred -- two poems, and he thought I meant the other one!  Poets, always learning, but never learning to shut up, at least not in this house.

I've finally suffered brain damage.

****************************************************************************************************************************************

Part of the loveliest gift of each day, always full of promise, sometimes a complete, embarrassing failure, sometimes such a triumph as to invoke sacred quiet, or a rowdy fist pump, and often, the kerplop of a spilled diet ginger ale in the wild, waving, anachronistic search for a paper towel with which to wipe it up.

Leave it alone.  Just leave it alone.  Completeness ain't all it's cracked up.

I mention, and plagiarize, from time to time, the Academy of American Poets' project "Poem-a-Day":

Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.

A lovely thing to save in your email listings until that certain time of the day.  Or to stockpile for a few days, if you feel the need to sort, to rank, to wield, that sorta impulse -- which will be deflated nicely by some rhyme internal, infernal, joyous, near, far, or almost failed, on purpose -- which will curl your toes, manicured or fungused [boozed, bruised, cruised, fused, fuzed, mused, oozed, rused, schmoozed, snoozed, soused, used, abused, accused, amused, bemused, confused, defused, diffused, enthused, excused, infused, misused, perused, recused, refused, reused, suffused, transfused, disabused, overused, underused], according to ancient watery rhythms.

Or to open straightaway, a child, or a woman, hair held back by a thirsty towel, face shiny from witch hazel, and whatever signifies a man, intrepid.

Today's Poem of the Day merits.  Deserves.  It shames my verbs, as a matter of course.
"Too many words, kid," Lumpy would say.

Still, still -- the quiet moment together with the need to turn and share the work of this Michael Morse.

Michael Morse is the author of Void and Compensation (Canarium Books, 2015). He teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City and lives in Brooklyn.

Void and Compensation (Karaoke Genesis) Michael Morse

Since when did keeping things to ourselves help us to better remember them? We need tutorials from predecessors. To restore what’s missing makes a science of equating like with like, or touching small pebbles on a larger mental abacus. We hitch a memory of order to ourselves: From rotating bodies in space comes wind, by which we’re buffeted, cooled, or graced; The sun warms both the sunflower and the angel with whom we might wrestle; We get some lyrics from a higher power and then we act on or for each other. In calculated reunions of broken parts, the latter must always feel the former, inherit both the track and the turn. A situation like an empty orchestra. And when we try to sing above it, intuit, and even in our singing are mistaken— if pitch is something sought and never pure, if latter sounds like something we can climb as opposed to where we find ourselves more recently in our relations, in time, having been left or starting our leave-taking— something happened—someone followed someone. Someone had. Even held. Our formers. We’re doppelgangers, saintly or undone; pick a song and listen for your cue. Here’s the void. Now sing some compensation. About This Poem  “Karaoke translates into English as ‘empty orchestra’—a portmanteau of sorts from the Japanese words for empty (kara) and orchestra (ōkesutora). I can hardly sing a lick and my limited range yields Karaoke choices that are more talky than sung. And yet I love the idea and essence of the act. Singing lyrics that we learn (or read) parallels what we inherit—as family members, as inhabitants and citizens of particular places, and as poets—from whomever and whatever we follow. What follows is a kind of genesis, a making in which we simultaneously borrow and add our own stamp.”—Michael Morse

Read This, Thought of You...

Yesterday's "Poem of the Day" from The American Academy of Poets

Nick Flynn

Forty-Seven Minutes

Nick Flynn, 1960

Years later I’m standing before a roomful of young writers in a 

high school in Texas. I’ve asked them to locate an image in a 

poem we’d just read—their heads at this moment are bowed to 

the page. After some back & forth about the grass & a styrofoam 

cup, a girl raises her hand & asks, Does it matter? I smile—it is as 

if the universe balanced on those three words & we’ve landed in 

the unanswerable. I have to admit that no, it doesn’t, not really, 

matter, if rain is an image or rain is an idea or rain is a sound in 

our heads. But, I whisper, leaning in close, to get through the 

next forty-seven minutes we might have to pretend it does.

Farid Matuk

It's been a long while since I've bought a book of poetry, new.  You'll remember that I often regale you with what I receive from the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day email offerings.  I know that I'm probably regaling people who are, themselves, subscribers, but the joy of it is not being able to help one's self when confronted with something wonderful.

Today's submission is so wonderful that I've already ordered everything that I can find in published, hold-in-the-hand form by the poet Farid Matuk.

Since maybe you aren't quite awake from your mid-afternoon nap, or maybe you're rushing off to a second-shift job, or a late seminar... or maybe you take your poetry slow -- I'm just giving you what I was given:  One poem.


My Daughter All Yourn
by Farid Matuk

will she be closer to the falling away of the gaze of
   things than others?
hands on the water she calls scene setting
hands on the table water over the houses and hills
   swimming
not the ocean or the sea but the frame of time she'll
   tell of
wild happy yeses in her hands
she bites through in rage when rage
comes to her or we do and she's too small a flag
what does our house say? these borrowed things solid
   and whole
fabric lost to her a greasy boy speaks fast at the
   pizza stand
more available to be seen the young in their concerns
amidst the old artifice paint a boat and it will mean
   a dream
put names of your dear ones in it all yourn standing up
these little soft hands she bites through the bright
   white light of summer
shines off sand and vinyl siding itself composed against
   the salt 

"Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie..."

by Stewart Swan

The sky is that crystalline blue.  

The Acadeny of American Poets sent me, as my "Poem-A-Day" gift, all wrapped up in the inky colors of last Sunday's print version of the comics, with a dark green stick-on bow, this:

To a Mouse,
by Robert Burns

On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November 1785.

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O' what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
                        Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
                        Wi' murdering pattle.

   I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
                        Which maks thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
                        An' fellow mortal!

   I doubt na' whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
                        'S a sma' request:
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
                        And never miss't!

   Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
                        O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's win's ensuin,
                        Baith snell and keen!

   Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
                        Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
                        Out thro' thy cell.

   That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turned out, for a' thy trouble,
                        But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
                        An' cranreuch cauld.

   But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men,
                        Gang aft a-gley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
                        For promis'd joy.

   Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
                        On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
                        I guess an' fear!

It's been many an edition of Norton since I've read that, and what I'd give to hear Burns read it.  More desires to be out of place and out of time!  Even if the sky is that crystalline blue.

I can imagine myself understanding, being, the Mousie, my home and life upended, one moment cozy, warm, and safe, the next laid bare, torn apart, towered over.  And my understanding is Burns' real gift, what makes us know he really was a sweet man, that his apology was sincere, that his field was that level.

He was only 26 at the writing, and already on intimate terms with the despondency of the turned-out, the homeless, the upset, the shock of it all.

"[O]f mice and men" and "best laid plans" went on to fame, of course, as if those were the lines that mattered.  It's a perfect poem, to me, that can't be picked apart.  I thought, first, this morning, of using only the first two verses, as they were "the best," and couldn't, because they were just some of the best parts of the best apology ever to a mouse.

I spent the evening, then the night, and much of this morning, in Hell.  The pain belies description. When I slept, that weird sound which woke me was my scream.  When I tried to walk to the bathroom without benefit of my much admired flowery cane, there had to be a change in plans, and a hail to Mary in hopes of making it back to the bed before the floor.  I wanted to cry but my eyes were dry, so I made sore-throated crow calls, placing them just under the main musical line of an unplugged Jackson Browne CD.  There are moments when he hides a drawn out throaty wail, and I remember that once I was a dancer, too.

In the box forwarded to me after my father died in July, a box which contained confused manila envelopes that, together, were called my "file," there were some of the sample photos taken of me at whatever age one is in when in the second grade.

I had a new mother, known for her dancing.  She had been a real ballerina.  I saw the pictures of her in beautiful costume, en pointe, en arabesque, her hair up, her lips full, and black, the way deep red lipstick photographs in black-and-white.

I'm gravity bound.  Remember the Presidential Fitness Tests?  The standing broad jump?  Every year, I killed that evaluation, came in at the top of every fiery challenge -- except for the standing broad jump.  I would think "leap," think "let go the earth and go," think "please, please, God, just one good jump," and then, kerplunck!  A foot.  Maybe 18 inches.

I loved baseball and tetherball.  Kickball.  I eventually became a very fine tennis player.  It seems I require equipment, and opponents, for my body to get all airy and free from the Earth's insistence of me.

The day that those photos were taken -- of me in a multicolored short tutu and a plain black leotard and black capezio shoes -- my stepmom had yelled and yelled at me.  Probably she just yelled once, but, not being a yeller, that one yell reverberated in my relatively empty head.

I had beat the crap out of a boy during recess -- in a tetherball match.  The way I played, my hands took a beating and sometimes bled.  Not the way her toes bled when she was breaking in a new pair of toe shoes, daintily staining the cotton stuffed into the toe, just ahead of that beastly metal insert, crimson, cranberry.  Me, I clotted and had Harry Potter zig-zag scratches.

I needed to get home quickly from school because it was Picture Day for all of the hopeless little ballerinas in my twice-weekly class.  I remember, somehow, that it was a beautiful day, and that I was skipping along the sidewalk.  I had a big brown paper bag, the top all smudgy and crumpled.  I wonder what was in it?

The boy I'd beat rode behind me on his bicycle and before I knew he was even there, he'd aimed his front wheel at the middle of my right calf -- California brown, muscled.  And then, so quickly, pretty deeply gouged and bleeding.

I look for all the world, in those ballet picture proofs, like a happy tom boy, goofy-grinned, with hair that was weirdly blond and just a bit curly.  All pointy elbows, but with excellent foot positions.  (I believe that I was then doing nightly ankle-exercises at the behest of some bored military pediatrician.)

You never even catch a glimpse of my right calf and all that damage done.

More Gifts From Poem-A-Day: I'm Rich

Vocabulary
by Jason Schneiderman

I used to love words,
but not looking them up.

Now I love both,
the knowing,

and the looking up,
the absurdity

of discovering that "boreal"
has been meaning

"northern" all this time
or that "estrus"

is a much better word
for the times when

I would most likely
have said, "in heat."

When I was translating,
the dictionary

was my enemy,
the repository of knowledge

that I seemed incapable
of retaining. The foreign word

for "inflatable" simply
would not stay in my head,

though the English word "deictic,"
after just one encounter,

has stuck with me for a year.
I once lost "desiccated"

for a decade, first encountered
in an unkind portrayal

of Ronald Reagan, and then
finally returned to me

in an article about cheese.
I fell in love with my husband,

not when he told me 
what the word "apercus" means,

but when I looked it up,
and he was right. 

There's even a word
for when you use a word

not to mean its meaning,
but as a word itself,

and I'd tell you what it was
if I could remember it.

My friend reads the dictionary
for its perspective on culture,

laughs when I say that 
reference books are not really 

books, but proleptic databases.
My third grade teacher

used to joke that if we were bored
we could copy pages out of the dictionary,

but when I did, also as a joke,
she was horrified rather than amused.

Discovery is always tinged
with sorrow, the knowledge

that you have been living
without something,

so we try to make learning
the province of the young,

who have less time to regret
having lived in ignorance.

My students are lost
in dictionaries,

unable to figure out why
"categorize" means

"to put into categories"
or why the fifth definition

of "standard" is the one
that will make the sentence

in question make sense.
I wonder how anyone

can live without knowing
the word "wonder."

A famous author
once said in an interview,

that he ended his novel
with an obscure word

he was sure his reader
would not know

because he liked the idea
of the reader looking it up.

He wanted the reader,
upon closing his book, to open

another, that second book
being a dictionary,

and however much I may have loved
that author, after reading

that story
(and this may surprise you)

I loved him less.


they've only two of schneiderman's poems on their site, and i like them both.  here is the other:

Graphic Credit

Sita
by Jason Schneiderman

Do you remember Sita? How when Hanuman came to rescue her
she refused, how she insisted that Rama come openly,
defeat her captor Ravana openly? She had no desire for stealth,
no desire for intrigue, and though Ravana could not touch her
for the curse on his flesh, she remained captive until Rama came.
Do you remember that she was tortured? That Hunaman asked her
for permission to kill the women who had tortured her? Do you
remember how she walked through fire to prove her purity,
even though everyone knew of the curse on Ravana? How the people
said the fire didn't matter because Fire was the brother of her mother,
Earth? How Rama was as weak in the face of his people as he
had been strong in the face of Ravana? Can you imagine the eyes
of Sita when she refused another test? When she looked at Rama,
a man she loved enough to die for, a man who was a god, and knew
it was over? Can you imagine her eyes in that moment, as she asked
her mother to take her back, to swallow her back into the earth? I think
my eyes are like that now, leaving you.

From The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day

{peeking out between my webbed fingers in embarrassment} I've never read ANY Edna St. Vincent Millay.  As in NONE.  Her name annoys me, her reputation annoys me.  Too much of my life time has been spent being annoyed. (Sonnets annoy me.)

But I just read her one-act anti-war play, Aria da Capo, available online thanks to the Penn State Electronic Classics Series, and loved it as I haven't loved a one-act, anti-war play in years. Head-over-heels love, I'm talking.  Never mind the anti-war treatment, neatly done in a nicely original way, she had me early on -- when embedded in her 1919 cheek we find her wiggly tongue having Pierrot say such things as:

PIERROT: [...] …. I am become

A painter, suddenly,—and you impress me—

Ah, yes!—six orange bull’s-eyes, four green pin-wheels,

And one magenta jelly-roll,—the title

As follows: Woman Taking in Cheese from Fire-Escape.

And shortly thereafter, not to overplay it:

PIERROT: Hush! All at once I am become

A pianist. I will image you in sound ….

On a new scale …, Without tonality …

Vivace senza tempo senza tutto ….

Title: Uptown Express at Six O’Clock.

Pour me a drink.

And then she won me over, completely, with this exchange with Columbine:

PIERROT: Don’t stand so near me!

I am become a socialist. I love

Humanity; but I hate people. Columbine,

Put on your mittens, child; your hands are cold.

COLUMBINE: My hands are not cold!

PIERROT: Oh, I am sure they are.

And you must have a shawl to wrap about you,

And sit by the fire.

I'd love to have known her.  In spurts, short spurts.  And only with an assured end date.  I bet the artists of 1919 giggled, nervously, and the pacifists wished she wouldn't glom too many things together ("It's confusing!") but maybe crazy, piecemeal, found art and crazy, piecemeal, found war do complement each other.

What clenches my New Deal with Millay?  The house.  The skinniest house in New York City, it is said, owned by The Cherry Lane Theatre:

Yes, so, all of this Millay talk is thanks to that annoying Academy of American Poets with whom I am linked by subscription to their "Poem-A-Day" e-service.  I'm loving it.  And this was today's offering -- and it surely holds true today, here in Marlinspike Hall, deep, deep in the Tête de Hergé, where the world is clearly seasonal.

God's World

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year.
My soul is all but out of me, let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.