Poetry

[foxandpeng]

You can send it to the addy posted in my profile

Sarge

Ah, no email address visible on your summary profile either 😔

[Sergeant Rock]

irenedale75@googlemail.com

[Sergeant Rock]

JEAN THIRTY-EIGHT
(University of Akron, January 1972 )
       
She wore her hair short
in a style that was fashionable
for high school girls in 1967.
Every girl wore her hair that way:
200 clones
200 Stepford students.
I liked individuality
in a person
and she was,
in at least one way,
individual:
She loved me.
I should have been content.
But I said, Let your hair grow,
let it grow for me.
She did once--for two weeks.

Years later I saw her again
at university.
I was stunned:
The short chestnut cut
of memory was gone
replaced by a long long mane
of Celtic auburn waves
reminiscent of those fabled women
in Pre-Raphaelite paintings.
My imagination had been surpassed a hundredfold:
It was the most beautiful head of hair
I'd ever seen
and exerted an attraction like a Siren's song.
She had finally let her hair grow long
--for someone else.
It was the cruelest thing she ever did.

[Sergeant Rock]

JEAN FORTY-FIVE/SONNET TWENTY

You are my text, my reason to write. Not
a day has died since sixty-six, the Fall,
when you haven't appeared, disrupting thought
and dashing expectations like the "wrong"
notes in a sixteenth century madrigal
by Gesualdo that startle but enthrall
and weave us moody into dissonant
textures. You clash with my life; like a gong,
shatter my peaceful consonance in the light
of 9 p.m., walking down hillside vines;
the clashing note I use to fashion lines,
a song, as evening darkens into night,
broods into West where, still, a pale light shines,
where my text doth lie, my reason to write.

[Sergeant Rock]

Me surrounded by Stepford girls.



Sarge

[KevinP]

Some cummings.

And yes, that's me.

I regret the use of the limiter which brought up the volume of my breaths.

[KevinP]

Langston Hughes' Kids who Die

[KevinP]

These three complete all the poetry reading videos I've made, so I won't be flooding this page with endless videos. I'm sure I'll make more, but only when the inspiration hits.


Delmore Schwartz' 'Calmly we Walk through this April Day'

Nikki Giovanni's 'For Saundra'

Maya Angelou's 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'

[Sergeant Rock]

LOCAL HEROES

PFC Kim Raupach  4 Nov 1948-14 Jun 1969
PFC James Clark  15 Nov 1949-18 Feb 1970
SP5  Forestal "Mutt" Stevens  20 Jun 1946-25 Aug 1968

Where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the soldiers gone, long time ago?

Kim is gone:
Kim with his elegance and gentleness and quietness
who studiously carried more books home from school than anyone
was tossed casually into his first feral firefight
and consumed in seconds like a paper match
and I don't know why.
      
Jimmy is gone:
Jimmy with his hillbilly soul
whom I loved almost as much as Sherry Daniel in 5th grade
did his duty like all proud patriotic southern gentlemen
and died for another South
and I don't know why.
   
Mutt is gone:
Mutt with his priapic passion and love
who caused a minor scandal in our small town
turned his love and lust into a green-beret'd desire for death
and left his babes fatherless
and I don't know why.
      
I am gone:
I with my romantic belief in love
who lost all love and then all belief
stand frozen in a winter wasteland M16 locked and loaded
staring into northern hell with a dead soul
and I don't know why.
   
There must be meaning in death
or how can we live?
But I can fathom no meaning.

At sunset I stand near the Imjin but see the Styx. I shiver.
I watch the sun sinking slowly over the wide winter river;
it seems to touch the frozen water setting it alight
in a paradoxical blaze of fire and ice
just before the coming of darkness and night.
Perhaps the Beat manifesto
of Orlovsky Ginsberg and Corso is right:
Only the wonders of sunset have any meaning.

The Imjin moans as the ice shifts: sounds like keening.

[Sergeant Rock]

AUBADE FOR MISS KIM
   
(Yobo is a Korean term of affection between lovers)
   
I stood beside you in the chill October
morn and you so warm, Kim Kil Cha, cocooned nude
in the fat, garish quilt, your flesh like fire
hidden. Yobo, you wake? Come back to bed.
Come. I think on these things as I read her

old letters of pressed clover and flower
once letters of luck, the stationary of spring.
But twenty-eight autumns crumble like leaves
in my hand, dusty and dried to a sullen
yellow, a terminal gangrene.

Raked by the years, I see you standing
where the sadness ran so deep that morning,
in the doorway, a stricken Butterfly
in the dawn, the servant at your side, smiling,
dust rag in hand, waving goodbye, goodbye...

But you, Kil Cha, you my love, my yobo,
said nothing, moved not in the morning chill.
Your final word, your last goodbye, a soundless O
but I heard what you felt, I felt you cry, No!
It doth make me still.

[Sergeant Rock]

JEAN FORTY-THREE
   
What will become of you and me
besides the photo and the memory?
              —Delmore Schwartz, For Rhoda

Our world fades and shrinks as we grow:
that old throw rug was once a plateau;
the cramped attic room, now so petite,
contained a child's vaulted penthouse suite.   

Fathers who towered ten feet tall--giants inspiring a child's awe
--today look up at us, their good but frail hearts weak as straw.
Grandfather bears, burly and big, who sat with us at the piano
and smothered our senses in song, shaving soap, Old Spice, tobacco
who conquered with baritone ease the immense music of Wagner
and fought the world with iron-cross'd valor,
pale to whispers and skeletal fear in wards of cancer.
   
And Jean--once upon, once upon....my muse, my nymphet,
my sin and my soul, my love and regret
--is a fading three by five photo three decades old
kept in a worn notebook like a nostalgic quote.

[Karl Henning]

A project I've been toying with:

A lobster roll on a wharf in Maine. Hazy writing for solo flute. Triad is officially dying. Happy as a clam at high tide. "I am the Bishop of East Anglia." My friend took me out for a quick sail, the only time I've been on so cozy a sailboat. "The Business Ain't Nothing But the Blues." I'm certainly sad about the demise of a choir at whose formation I was present and which was dedicated to new music. A speeding ticket (my only such) while driving from New Jersey to Maine. "According to my careful prosthesis." In some ways, it's the Summer of Rahsaan Roland Kirk. In the chamber orchestra adaptation, I decided right away to lose the timpani. It was only on the Internet, but I met the bra designed especially for small boobs. "Crisp, aggressive water chestnuts." Not that I was in a hurry for the lobster roll. No tomato for Plato. Notwithstanding a number of elements (Liz Taylor, Montgomery Clift, a screenplay based on Dreiser's An American Tragedy) the movie just didn't draw me in and I gave up after perhaps half an hour. In some ways it has been a trying week, but I'm okay. Given my plans for the piece, shedding timpani is no disappointment. Kirk and I share the coincidence of suffering a stroke the week of Thanksgiving. Funny, in a way, remembering what finding one's way by car was like, in the pre-GPS epoch. And Molson Golden Ale. One of my unfulfilled pipe-dreams was that Triad sing the entire Mass, Opus 106. The trailer trying to sell it as "one of the great on-screen romances" may not have helped much. At the time of the trip to Maine, I had not yet formed a definite idea of being a composer. Philip has lost his Melinda, and my heart goes out to him. Triad did, after all, sing the Kyrie, Gloria and Agnus Dei, and beautifully, too. My black Mustang was totaled by a privileged white jerk who ran a red light. That angle in the trailer really alerted my skepticism sensors; I don't apologize for that. Also of suffering impairment of the left hand as a result. Not yet formed a definite idea of being a composer? I still hadn't any idea of how to go to college. Since I am unable at present to play clarinet, composing for flute solo is gratifyingly vicarious. Those were days (not to glamorize them) of my being an unmoored clarinetist in his late teens. Predictably, the cop let the fat cat skate. Nice work, if you can get it.

I'm still wavering on this.

[T. D.]

Enjoyed that, Karl.
Not sure I understood much, but seemingly there's a nice "polyphony" of sub-narratives.
OTOH I recall once being surprised that you listened to RRK, and I hadn't realized the connection mentioned.

[KevinP]

Agreed. I'd like to hear a reading of that.

[San Antone]

e e cummings died on this day in 1962.

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did.


Excerpt of E.E. Cummings, "[anyone lived in a pretty how town]" from Complete Poems 1904-1962, edited by George J. Firmage. Copyright 1926, 1954, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1985 by George James Firmage.

[Karl Henning]

sleep took me—i was seeking asylum driven out of the world of waking
women i once loved ringed me round
bandying the edges of undullable disappointment
they bade me adieu with smiles & kisses
H. P. Lovecraft checked my coat & i raced up
the stairs to catch the last bars of sleep's
sweet overture
sleep dragged me into a plush
velvet seat and i smiled knowing it would be
hours before the fat lady would ring but
before i lapsed fully into the first act
i stepped up to read a little Dostoyevsky
while listening to Dire Straits **** i slept
but my ambitions fidgeted and climbed off
my shoulders they reached up to caress
the windowpane to feel the imprint of
moonlight (i dreamt i and my love saw Venus
shining over the Lunacharsky Prospect) as my
ambition rested its cheek against the cooling glass
night shuttered the windows with political ambiguities
and the claws gripping the sill were commas
changing the meaning of love-letter sentences


(...pillow talk 3 October 1993)

[Sergeant Rock]

This will be too long for one message so I'll post it in several parts. I spent most of the night reading, writng and drinking on the 28th anniversary of Jean dumping me. This poem ends with Jean's story.


Part 1

WHISKEY AND INK,  WHISKEY AND INK
          (March 18th 1996)

Quiet his loves lay, at the bottom of his mind.
Now & then, O now & then, at intervals
he took one out & inspected it.
They did him homage. Which he did repay with memory.                                       
                                                                          —John Berryman

Reading (the Berryman of youth remembered from middle-age,
Love & Fame) after midnight, I slide back the years
as Irish whisk' (the Dew) lubricates memory
and Satie (Gnossiennes) supplies the mood: wistful melancholy exposed.
"La musique de Satie va toute nue" said Cocteau.
Berryman's music, too, goes forth naked:
   
    "...in one of Brooks Hall's little visiting rooms
    in blunt view of whoever might pass by
    we fondled each other's wonders"

    "...who turned out to have nothing on under her gown
    sprawled out half-drunk across her hostess's bed
    moaning, Put it in! Put it in!"

The reception room of the women's residence
at Barnard College, in the early thirties, more
interesting than any co-ed dorm (ruled in loco parentis)
at Ohio University during the sexual revolution. Apparently!
But student/faculty parties I recognize, the women of arts liberal & hot! (Oral Interp prodigies, English Lit muses, the Nude in Art models,
the best & the brightest, the buxom & the barest;
and not just the potential poets, painters, actresses & trophy wives: the music department, too, sounded diverse possibilities:
modern sexual symphonies, short, perversely complex, fuguing!
two, three, even four part inventions,
interweaving lives & loves in cacophonous counterpoint,
building quickly toward dissonant climaxes
of emotional & structural disintegration.
Or orgies operatic of Wagnerian endurance:
"I need a man who can do it three times a night, who can go all night"bluntly challenged one Valkyrian girl with an amazing embouchure: mouthlipstongue tireless from ten years of blowing
French horn.
And I gave it a damned good try!

Berryman's poetry (mine too) not exactly she walks in beauty like the night but we're closer to the real language & passions of youth. Romantics don't flourish in the late twentieth century; women don't swoon to the tune of my love is like a red red rose any longer. They want a hard body, a firm guiding grip,
and power & prose, not an artsy-fartsy wimp dispensing
posies & poesies!

Love poetry has only this use now: to conserve the memory
of ancient ecstasies and preserve the regrets of grizzled poets.
And Berryman is my biographical twin in love & regret;
I read in his poetic history me:

[Sergeant Rock]

Part 2
    "She was keen on me but too tall for my then romantic image"

And I remember, see again from thirty years, tall Barb & Ann
  Barb's playground pose & seductive debate;
Ann's earth mother body and wifely virtues list  giantesses both,keen on me but rejected for statuesque sin. See, across the field,stunning Mary Jo, with her blazing braid of antique hair,
just an inch  an inch!  too tall for romantic consideration.
All I can do now is shake my touch of grey in disbelief.

    "...up & down in front of her blue house passionate
    in the late afternoon barely to be noticed. O Charlotte"

O Sherry! my secret love from fifth to ninth grade
and my secret lust from tenth till today (but betrothed,
then married, to a friend of a friend; her body off-limits):
so many adolescent afternoons, walking up & down Clinton,
hoping to glance her by chance & domestic,
but she didn't exist outside the academic, I guess.
At age eleven I saw her daily at school, bespectacled, studious,
and years later, short-skirted & twirling our dissonant blue band but never once near her home or downtown D-town.
Didn't she ever buy milk & meat at Dave's? grab a pizza?
or melt a Sweet Shop cone with lascivious licks? But I saw her
sans glasses, nearly naked, once. At Clay's Park. Once was enough because she blinded!—golden like the sun: a radiant, bikini'd goddess with long everything (limbs, body, blonde) playmate proportioned and the girl next door O yes! Someone should've tip'd Hef.
(Her future, in Dakota, with clown fish & cockers, lonely & barren while Fred flew aborted Armageddons;
the fading scream of the Stratofortress,
the soundtrack of her life.)

    "Dance! from Savannah...with your slur hypnotic"

To an Ohio boy who couldn't get no satisfaction,
Judy Spurgeon Savannah Georgia born & bred,
was a mesmeric sound: her odd last name, her magnolia drawl,
sent off vibrations, creating desires visceral & decades deep.
Blonde beyond blonde like a pur sang Dane, the idea of north,
island isolated, millennia unmolested by the dark barbarian,
she possessed a purity as cool & white as an angel in the snow
and seemed untouchable. So I didn't try...
not even that vernal afternoon we spent alone, field tripping,
hours on the hunt for the rarest insect, in a verdant place
as close to the Garden as is possible in this millenium, in Ohio.
She appeared & disappeared during my sixteenth year; last seen
dancing  slow dancing!  with Fred B her dramatic topology,
set in relief by short tight cloth, caressed & embraced
by the barbarous boy: black haired, older, wheeled, her steady.
Those textile contours, the cotton peaks & silken valleys,
her bare white legs, her white blonde hair, her pale white face,
that face, that look! the estral smile, blue eyes closed, ecstatic
as she danced! haunt me like the thought of pallid death...

[Sergeant Rock]

   Part 3 

"I almost lost not only my mind but my physical well-being!
    night on night...intertangled breathless, sweating,
    on a verge...but she wouldn't quite sleep with me"
   
Nor would early Pear throughout nights (& days) of pain & passion: at the prom, Mohican, her house, my house, frontseats, backseats,
all around Big Rock, near the swings at Hazel Harvey,
and in the green grass behind the stadium vide Van Morrison
(but he got the color wrong: she was a blue not brown eyed girl).
Love was whispered because parents near, in real proximity often
(just a closed door or disturbed sleep away) and always in her mind near. She drove me crazy, necking & petting for hours & hours, day after day, night after night. We practiced safe sex, 60s style: sweaty intense intercourse, wearing double denim condoms... Arrghhh!!!
She sympathetic (& satisfied) but wouldn't quite help me.
We saw Goodbye, Columbus. Thereafter, I lifted cars
with an imploring puppy dog look;
her laughter, not the exercise, deflationary: a temporary cure.
Then Dylan crooned lay lady lay, lay across my big brass bed:
radiating every two hours from WHLO Akron, the not subliminal message
why wait any longer for the one you love beamed directly
into the hearts & minds of smalltown American maidens.
It climbed the Top 40, stalled at number 9: a Top 10 hit! just.
But that cured her; then me. O the Power of Pop! Thank you, Bob.

   "I fell in love with a girl. . .
    She muttered something in my ear I've forgotten as we danced"

And in my senior year I fell in love with Jean:
Betty Jean Stevens, Chippewa cheerleader, a girl of fourteen.
We danced a million times but whatever she
muttered, moaned, whispered or claimed in my ear
is forgotten in a fog of living & dancing other women.

   "I bet she now has seven lousy children"

Does Jean have children? a sure bet, a genetic certainty,
even seven's possible: her parents were prolific: seven-teen!
Number sixteen she was...she made headlines!
Her big, blue-eyed, baby-faced facade, front-paging
a West Virginia weekly, warmed many a hillbilly heart
in the deep chill of February '52.
As the clan's baby she wallowed in goo-goo celebrity
until that night Helen Seventeen was casually conceived & Jean's special status revoked.
(Years later she spoiled daddy
by cooking chicken livers she hated
but he loved—to regain his attention.
She earned three star parental praise
and hugs she valued more highly than my hugs & praise!)

   "I wish she'd write to me"

In '68 she went suddenly silent, during a disagreement, mild,
about a trivial dance; a silence that is stretching towards forever.
I've wished for years she would write
or speak to me   I dream it! Often.
Once, from a combat zone,
I sent a pure silk card, white as Christmas.
I thought she couldn't romantically resist a little soldier boy
far, far from home
or his words elegant & simple, I still dream about you
and literally true: she haunted my REM
(that was when I still believed in the Shirelles & romance,
the orange cat my confrère). But she could & did resist
and her silence is twenty-eight years old today.
Happy Anniversary!
Her father is long gone now; her mother just last month;
and Jean could be dead   I really don't know. . .
her silence like the grave anyway.
My poetic congratulations she'll never read, I guess.

   

[Sergeant Rock]

Part 4
   "How did we break off. . .I puzzle"

She not only broke our relationship & my heart,
she broke my life.
How it happened, & why, is a long puzzle,
a mystery for nearly three decades pondered
in silence & solitude...sometimes despair;
her forty letters read & reread
for clues that remain elusive after half a lifetime.

   "...bleary as an envelope cried-over
    after the letter's lost"

I have all her letters save one: "Dear John" it should've begun.
That final (dis)missive went up in flames seven years later
just like the relationship its sacrifice was supposed to save
but Fricka refused the burnt offering & Cherie walked
as the funereal fire consumed, like Valhalla, our marriage by the Rhine.
I still have the envelope, though, postmarked
DOYLESTOWN, OH APR 10 1968 AM.
I stare at it often, try to conjure whole the ashen contents
but nothing materializes except I can't make you happy.
She did make me happy: ecstatic! orgasmic! all fuzzy & delirious!
So I thought, What a strange thing for her to write. And not true.
Perhaps that's why I remember it still: the incongruity.

The winter quarter, like her hometown girl wait for me,
was long & cold & lonely: too long? too lonely?
too cold? her body, another body wanting,
unable to create (like two sticks rub heat) even a spark of warmth?
Twelve weeks apart...forever on a teenager's time scale:
a time of life when eight periods stretch eternal
and patience   prepubescent, squirming
is a virtue nearly nonexistent;
a time of life when social quacking
and feathered & crested conformity confirm self
within the flock's course & safety;
and hallway flirting, the note passed,
knees touching in basketball bleachers, confirm love.
Did her love, separated from love's object, unconfirmed,
just suddenly cool & burn out
like a single flare descending in a winter night's landscape?

I don't know: with several pieces hidden or missing,
Jean is a puzzle with no possible solution.
I only know the reality of love lost,
the reality of Jean gone, the reality of silence;
and only in dreams is reality revoked.

The Tullamore Dew is gone now too,
passed on a few minutes ago
not tragically:
the bottle lived well, if briefly.
I shed few tears
(knowing I'll witness a resurrection at the Supermarkt tomorrow).
With my lubrication gone, imagination & memory, rubbing reality,
begin to heat up. Friction flares what is, what was, what might have been;
there is a danger of burning...until Tom & Delmore
remind me that time is always time & time is unredeemable;
the past is inevitable.

Saved by poetic grace, I sip San Pellegrino & lime.
My mind slowly cools, goes blank.
The quartz glows nearly three, way past my bedtime.
I shelve Love & Fame
and stumble towards bed, perhaps to dream:

   "I've had some rare girls since, but Jean..."