The Glass Boat Poems

(All four poems first appeared in Poem, Huntsville Literary Association, No. 86, 2001; and are also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Glass Boat (I)

Everyone told him he was crazy:

the boat’s own weight would shatter it in the harbor

or the first swell the size of a tall man

would break the bow as its face slid down the windward side.

If his glass boat survived long enough to catch

a large fish surely the thrashing strength of dying muscle

would smash the boat like a dinner plate flung into a fireplace.

That was thirty-one years ago.

Now he only fishes when the late afternoon sun

slides beneath the hull,

flooding the boat with a silver light.

On the voyage home he stares

through the glass bottom

at the darkening ocean,

the resting place of every drowned man.

The Glass Boat (II)

Standing on the deck, surrounded by dying fish and ocean,

he looks like a man walking on water.

Sunlight flattening across the bow confirms

it’s glass, not faith that he pilots to the harbor.

He once broke a leg; one foot on the deck,

the other on the dock as a swell lifted the boat.

Another fisherman set the injury in wooden planks

and newspapers wrapped with old netting.

For the next sixteen days he lived in a public house

above the fuel dock. His wife worked the boat.

The fish didn’t know the difference,

not even when she shoved her fingers in a mouth

to pull one from seaweed tangled on the propellers,

nor did the ocean looking through the glass bow

when she tied her long skirt around her waist

to keep fish guts from knotting the lace hem.

The Glass Boat (III)

The differences between the fog, an ocean

and a glass boat are indistinguishable.

A fisherman on an approaching boat could see

the weather and nothing else until he notices

the dark smudge in the gray. At first he believes

it’s the church at sea priests spoke of,

a soul’s life preserver rescuing it from the weight of flesh.

His belief is like candles stocked for stormy nights.

Coming closer, the glass boat becomes clear,

forcing the approaching boat to turn away.

The man in the glass boat just watches

steam from his coffee rise, pleased

by the way it becomes the weather.

The Glass Boat (IV)

The fisherman’s wife looks at the glass boat

from the dock and sees only the ocean’s

heave and sigh and calls it Grief.

The fisherman looks down at the glass deck

and sees only the vein-like currents and skeletons

knotted in sunken ships and calls it Faith.

Fish make names, too, names with long sounds,

familiar noises inside a shell or a hand

rubbing the three-day stubble on a tired face.

When fish look up at the glass boat they see heaven;

and hear its sound, net descending into ocean.

No seagulls follow it on the journey home,

just the foamy wake growing from the stern,

furrows of a freshly-plowed field.

Reading in Chinatown

I’m doing a reading along with four other people at the Jancar Gallery in Chinatown on August 14^th, 6 pm. The address is 961 Chung King Road. The other readers are Mike Alber, Karani Leslie, Ben Loory and Rachel Kann. If you come I promise not to be boring.

Poetry Worshops

As in most other workshops safety equipment is required; eye protection, asbestos gloves, hardhat, harder skin, and Xanax are just a few of the things that my syllabus suggests. The more serious you are about poetry the more important the suggestions. Poetry tourists* only need bring copies of their poem to hand out.

Everyone in a workshop falls into one of two categories: teacher or student. Teacher facilitates the conversation. Everyone else in the room is a student**. Though this title isn’t always appropriate. I’ve had accomplished poets in workshops. The conversation is the students’ poem. Again, the idea of appropriateness. What is a student poem? A poem that could improve through revision? What poem couldn’t?

In a workshop, the good poems hold their breath.
In a workshop, the weak poems have three eyes - one stares at its author, the second at the teacher, the third eye is always closed.

Are you writing to understand the world or yourself, I ask at the end of the workshop. A poetry workshop isn't therapy, I say at the beginning of the workshop. Before taking a poetry writing workshop a class in living a poetic life should be mandatory. No writing required, just reading, think and an appreciation for the world in every way. Whoever said "I want to live my life out loud" should write the syllabus.

Basically, my workshop runs like this. Student brings in a copy of a poem for everyone. Someone else reads the poem aloud. Have you ever heard your voice recorded? It always sounds different than coming from outside our head. Hearing your poems read by another person has the same effect. It sounds different. The group discusses the poem. The poet whose poem is being discussed is silent. When the poem is published and read by a stranger thousands of miles away the poet isn’t there to explain. We should hear what people think of our poems and how it affects them without our editorial. At the end of the conversation the poet is allowed to ask questions. But not many. I than offer some suggestions for revisions, and poets to read that I feel they might find inspiring.

In a workshop, most poems are narcissistic.

Most beginning poets write poems that contain too much information. So do experienced poets. Most beginning poets use too many words. Ditto for experienced poets.

Perhaps the most important thing a workshop offers is a reason to write a poem. That sentence might be better without the word perhaps. How long should a poet remain in workshops? Until they no longer need a reason to write a poem.

A sense of community. Poetic fellowship. No one should be alone in the world. At the end of a workshop semester the women in the group decided to meet on a regular basis to share poems and camaraderie. They excluded the men. Not fair.

Another workshop transformed into an informal group called “Purgamentum Auris,” Latin for rubber ear or so they tell me. The name is based on a poem I wrote***. I’m flattered.

Students have written poems in my workshops that I wish I wrote. I often learn from them. Their enthusiasm is contagious. There are people who have been in my workshops that I am grateful for their presence. I hope they know who they are. I don’t need to be in a workshop to keep me writing poems. But I do need poets in my life.


* A poetry tourist is someone with no real interest in improving their poems and will never write a poem after the workshop ends.
** I once had a student bring her therapist to class. She had trouble being in groups. The other students thought she was a friend auditing the class. Of course, I couldn’t resist calling on her.
*** Ex Cathedra

What no one knows about me
is that my left ear is made of rubber.
The original was lost in an accident
when I was nineteen. As Dr. Gorlick
sewed it to side of my head
he said it needed to be replaced
every eleven years to appear to age
along with my face. Vanity compels me
to replace it every thirteen.
A rubber ear isn’t as uncommon as you think.
One president and two movie stars had a rubber ear.
The actors appeared together in a movie
without knowing about the other’s prosthesis.
Each morning I apply a lotion to the ear
so the rubber doesn’t discolor. Cell by cell,
the body replaces itself every seven years.
It’s simple science. I laid on my side
as Dr. Gorlick sewed. A nurse held the ear in position.
Lidocaine and something I don’t remember
prevented me from feeling the blood
run down my neck and cheek.
But I could taste it and began to spit.
The nurse put gauze pads
between my lips and apologized.
Things like this happen all the time.
Someone bleeds, someone apologizes.

Reading Tonight

I'm reading at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program 17th Annual Publication Party tonight, 7:00pm – 9:30pm (Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:30pm) It's at the Skirball Cultural Center is located at 2701 North Sepulveda Blvd., just off the 405 Freeway and Mulholland Drive.

Night

Night

In 1889 it snowed twenty-three times in Cleveland, Ohio, and each time only at night. Yet newspaper articles from that year make no mention of this. One hundred years later, 1989, it snowed exactly twenty-three times in Cleveland, and again, only at night. Professor Beth Wingate, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, wrote in a scientific paper, “the author unfortunately is unlikely to be alive in 2089, but if in that year it snows twenty-three times in Cleveland and only at night, this will be a phenomena not a coincidence.” Where science ends faith begins. This never changes, and is the reason most ghosts are seen in the dark.

The Democracy

The Democracy

The election is finally here. Once and for all, it will be decided which pencils will be legal, the softer lead number four or the hard number two. The count stands at 763 for the soft and 879 for hard. If the number fours become illegal I’ll move to a place where the smudge of a word won’t make a man a criminal. I can’t understand why some prefer to write words barely dark enough to be read. This is the same way we decided the size of napkins in cafes, and learned to drink without spilling, not even a drop.

Gatherings

I'm in Denver for AWP 2010. I thought it was spring but it's snowing outside. Something uncommon for a man from Los Angeles to see on an April morning. What do you call a gathering of poets? A stanza would be a good answer. I haven't written anything for Ironomgery for months. It's time to gather the words and see what they say. Soon.

The Man in the Vat of Honey

(First appeared in Press, Issue 2, Fall 1996; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Man in the Vat of Honey

The nurse sat in the waiting room writing

to her sister. In a small and glorious handwriting

she wrote that she hadn’t yet found a husband

among the injured men; and she was disappointed,

a sailor she liked drowned when his ship broke apart

in heavy winds. His body was now held

in a tall vat of honey behind the clinic. This was the way

corpses were kept during monsoons when the ground

was too thick with water for burials. She imagined him

sticky-sweet and folded at the bottom of the vat

as he might have looked on the ocean floor before his body,

released of fear and breath, ascended. She once sat

with her ear against the vat, hoping to hear what the dead say

to themselves, waiting as she would wait for the ground to dry.

But the only sounds were from alley cats stretched

across the lid, their coarse tongues licking the dried honey.

Ordinary Melodrama

Ordinary Melodrama

The woman squeezing cantaloupes
with her fingertips is searching
for the beginning of her bloodstream.
Her days pivot around single incidents.
Egg falls from a fork and leaves
a yellow stain that resembles
The Shroud of Turin. About that
she is certain, her father took her
to see it when she was young.
She buys a clock for the bedroom.
The dog is put to sleep.
She wraps his body in a sheet.
This is what she does with the past.
The woman’s husband is a surgeon,
deaf in the left ear. Occasionally,
he opens the coliseum of her
chest to inspect the heart
for the pain inside the pain.

Leaving

Someone important stood on a stage at a writers' conference and said people become writers in order to leave something behind. There was a time I believed that. Now I'm more of the mind that people become writers to have somewhere to go.

You leave a word on a page. You leave an impression. You take your leave. But where do you take it?

There are always more reasons for leaving then staying. I’m about to leave a job I’ve had for thirteen years. No, this isn’t a journal entry. This isn’t important enough for that, at least not yet. Everyone eventually leaves. I want to say it’s easy. It’s not. It’s almost winter. I drove home in a U-Haul van with eleven boxes in the back. I left my office empty. I left my parking spot empty. When I stepped out of the elevator that, too, was empty.

The history of leaving is synonymous with the history of premonition. It basically works like this, you believe something is going to happen and it makes you want to stay, or it makes you want to leave. Somewhere in the bible doesn’t it say gather your past and go forth? It should. We spend more time thinking of the past than the future. Most poems are written in the past tense.

You leave evidence. You leave well enough alone. You leave a trail. But where did you go?

I attempted to find evidence proving that travel was invented to accommodate leaving more than going. I found arguments for both points of view. That does little for my thesis. But leaving requires honesty. Going, on the other hand, requires hope.

When smoke leaves fire, which one is more sad, the smoke or the fire? The same question applies to a poem and a poet. Leaving can turn any day into a grave. Everything I learned about leaving I learned from women. One woman told me it take courage to leave. Another said it takes courage to stay.

This is how you write a poem, by leaving things behind. A novel is different. You write that by putting things together. You can’t leave your memories, probably why poetry is more about leaving. The poetic act of creation is an attempt to undo something. When that’s not possible, we leave.

Reading at Bergamot Station

I'm doing a poetry reading with Richard Garcia and Katherine Williams at the Frank Pictures Gallery in Bergmot Station on Thursday, Dec 17th, 7:45. I'll hope you'll drop in. I promise not to be boring.

Dedication

Dedication

My father was dedicated to his work.

No one painted more perfect dots

on dice or better understood their language.

One black dot is the doorknob death uses to enter.

Two are a man’s fists behind his back.

Three, a man and woman with a child.

Four explains a tragedy. Five is a parade of

desperate women in snow. Six, an orchestra of ants

performing the symphony of human emotion.

All of this on a single die? I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “the world is a small place.”

First appeared in The Black Warrior Review, University of Alabama, Vol. 25 No. 2, Spring/Summer 1999; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.

Inspiration

Inspiration is for amateurs*. You make a decision to be a poet, writer, artist, what-not, and then you do the work.

I was in the checkout line at the supermarket**. The checkout girl told me she wrote a short story. I offered encouragement and suggested she write more. “No, no,” she was adamant, “I’m not like you and never feel inspired.” Inspiration has nothing to do with it.

Perhaps I’m the odd man out. Perhaps I’m the only poet who isn’t inspired. I love reading poems and scribbling them in notebooks. Love thinking long and hard about poetic possibilities. Love testing the limits of language. And I would love for an inspiring moment to move my pen. But it doesn’t. Do great basketball players only launch themselves at the net, spring above others to dunk a basket because they’re inspired? Poetry is work. Work you – hopefully – love. So you do it.

I have to back-peddle just a little.

When I first became a copywriter I read many books about writing, the best of them was The Writer’s Art by James J. Kilpatrick. Somewhere in the book he said that the best writers were poets; no one pays more attention to writing then a poet. To me, back then, poetry was rhyming thoughts about love and flowers. Nothing an ex-paratrooper sort of man would be interested in. Kilpatrick suggested that if you want to be a great writer you should take a poetry class, even if you never wrote a poem after the class, your prose would be better for it.

Then someone died. Someone always dies. A poet died and they read some of his poems on the radio. They didn’t rhyme. They said he was a poet! Something was wrong.

I was wrong. Instead of what I was expecting, the poems struck me as beautifully written***, powerful short stories. I immediately flashed back to the Kilpatrick book, the best writers were poets. Right then and there# I decided I would take, suffer, a poetry class to make me a better advertising writer##. The following day I drove to Westwood and enrolled in a poetry class at UCLA Extension.

Austin Strauss was the instructor. Every Thursday night we met in the basement of a church on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. The first night Strauss read us The Death of Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell and Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane by Etheridge Knight. The world stopped. I swear it did.

I had found something to devote my life to. Or it might be more accurate to say something to devote my life to found me. Of course, it sounds corny. But it’s true.

Perhaps it’s fair to say that inspiration found me that night.

There are forces at work in the world that cannot be explained. Science and religion argue about some of them. Poetry tends to steer clear of this argument.

Though my original point was that I don’t believe in inspiration I suspect the previous does suggest that on that night in a church basement in Beverly Hills I was inspired.

An artist must live an inspired life.

Opening yours eyes in the morning, that’s inspiring.

Live fully engaged with the world. "A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. " Wallace Stevens said that.

*Not that I’m suggesting that there really is anything like a “professional” poet. Most poets make living as teachers. Yes, I know Billy Collins probably make a lot of money from his books. And while I’m on the subject, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, W.S. Merwin and a few others do so. Though all of them, with the exception of Merwin where college professors.** I lived just down the street for a dozen years, had been in there probably three times before and knew many of the employees. If I remember correctly, I went to dinner with this woman previous to this conversation.

*** Though back then I would probably have not used the word “beautiful” to describe writing.

# I remember exactly where I was when I made the decision, I was in my car driving north on Laurel Canyon Blvd in Studio City, California, on my way home from work. I was listening to NPR as I always did, and still do.

## By the way, I am a better, in fact, great ad writer for it.

Death Obscura, a new book.

I'm thrilled to announce that Sarabande Books is publishing, Death Obscura, my second full-length collection of poems in the fall of 2010.

In the Apartment Above the Butcher Shop

(First appeared Fine Madness, Issue 26, 2001, pg 34. And is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

In the Apartment Above the Butcher Shop

My mother washed dishes in the bathtub

then bathed me and my brother,

set us on the sofa to watch television.

Black and white washed over us.

At the end of each show Mother sat with us

pointing out good people always win in the end.

By the time I was eight I could hear the difference

between a cleaver chopping a flank of beef, leg of lamb

or the thin ear of a pig. You have to be

a butcher’s son to know why this is important.

My father worked for the butcher,

hanging pigs in the window.

Steel hooks through their cut throats.

Mouths open as if they had one more thing to say.

The headless chickens in the cold

box were always gone by noon, an hour earlier

Father wrapped two chickens in wax paper and newspaper,

put them aside until Mother brought his coffee.

My mother shouted

don’t track blood through the kitchen,

when she heard us come up the stairs.

Outside, shadows quietly battled

for control of the streets

-- a sound often mistaken for wind

dragging newspaper along the sidewalk,

a sound we wouldn’t identify for years.

The Woman Not Wearing A Hat

(First appeared in American Poetry Review, Vol. 33/No. 1, Jan/Feb 2004 pg 31; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

The Woman Not Wearing A Hat

For two dollars you could run

your hands through her hair.

That’s what the cardboard sign

between her hands said.

A hat at her feet collected the money.

Wind pushing against her hair forced it to sway.

I dropped my two dollars in and grabbed

the hair at the back of her neck.

I closed my eyes; she closed hers.

(I don’t recall whose eyes closed first.)

It was the middle of the afternoon.

Perspiration dampened her hair.

I could feel people looking at me.

For years I told people I only did it

so she didn’t feel like she was taking charity.

That’s not exactly true,

for years I wouldn’t tell anyone.

I ran my hand to the top of her head,

turned and left before she opened her eyes.

There’s no telling what a man is willing to pay for.

Macrocephalus

(From The Soup of Something Missing.)

Macrocephalus

After my dog was killed by a car

my parents gave me a baby sperm whale.

In a small wooden boat,

father on one oar, mother on the other,

we rowed past the swells.

The only sound was the oars’ monotonous

work followed by the sigh

of the ocean pushed behind.

When it passed beneath

mother shouted “there, there”

and pointed at the large dark shape.

Father took photos with an old Instamatic.

On the way back to shore,

the only thing spoken

was by mother who asked

if I named it and I had.

Hell's Hell

(First appeared in Doubletake Magazine, Issue 8, Spring 1997, pg. 56; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)

Hell's Hell

A waitress clears away the midday plates.
The skinny cook sweats and scrapes grease off the grill,
stopping only for a drink of cold water.
The bottom corner of the restaurant’s window is broken.
The owner’s been meaning to replace the cardboard patch
with new glass since it broke last year.
The three remaining customers ask for more beer.
They’re talking about robbing the beauty supply store, or the bank

next to it, or the bridal salon, pharmacy or bakery.
Together they have enough money
to buy a gun and some bullets.
This isn’t the first afternoon they made such plans.
Back in December they had the same
conversation as they wiped their bowls
of potato soup with chunks of bread.
But today, again, nothing happens.

Wind pushes against the cardboard patch.
It swings as if on a hinge.
A passing woman leans against the window,
curves a hand at the side of her face to block the sun
and looks inside. She sees the waitress, three customers,
but not the cook who went out back to relieve himself.
The waitress briefly stares at the woman's black silhouette.
Only a moment in hell's hell could be like this.

Titles

Poems without titles are like anonymous people. Example, there’s a tall man with long, gray hair standing at the checkout register in the supermarket. You say to yourself, “there’s a tall man with long gray hair standing in line at the checkout register in the supermarket.” Not much there. But if the person has a name, title, everything changes. The example continues, you see the same man but in this version you know his name. You say to yourself. “there’s George Washington standing at the checkout register in the supermarket.” A million ideas are swirling around in your head. Knowing person’s title changes everything. Poems should have titles. “Untitled” is not a title.

Titles in a poem can also function like background music in a movie, atmosphere and tone. The article The adds nobility to a title, and if not nobility then a certain amount of importance.

Titles are a struggle, at least for me. Sometimes I go to a list of interesting words and read the definitions searching for one that might work as a title. The word should aptly describe the emotional, not literal, content of the poem.

René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist often employed and interesting titling strategy for his paintings. He would invite friends for dinner. After eating and a couple of bottles of wine he would invite suggestions for names for a newly completed painting. “The Empire of Lights.” “Threatening Weather.” “The Discover of Fire.” “The Voice of Space.” His titles are poems. I’ve used one as starting point for a poem* and titled it after the painting.

I’m one of the few poets who doesn’t read much Wallace Stevens. This is my diplomatic way of saying I’m not big on his poems. Perhaps I should read him again. I’m getting off the subject. Titles. Stevens was another one great with titles. “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”

Haikus are titles. On my to-do list is write a poem using an ancient haiku as the title. And a poem that is shorter than its title? Why not.

The title of this book says much about my philosophy on titles. Ironmongery.
Titles are poems.


* The Magician's Accomplice

after Magritte

A copper tube hangs from nothing
and hides everything above the shoulders.
Chicken wire surrounds her pale naked body.
Six feet across the stage
her blond hair rises from another tube.
The brown curtain is amazed.
Only the polished wood floor saw
the way her lipstick smudged the cuff of his shirt
as he pressed the soft gag against her mouth,
the way the velvet ropes held her,
the way stage lights smiled
on the curve of the blade.
Mountains sit in the audience
wearing hats made of clouds.

The magician bows.
The accomplice drags the body
through the alley, all the while dreaming
of pulling riddles out of eyes.
The magician dreams of being cut in half
or flying from a black hat past
the ropes that raise mirrors over the city.
The accomplice wants to learn
the magical qualities of murder,
how anyone with a knife in hand
can be a temporary god.

The Argonaut Years

The Argonaut Years

I

She dreamed she pulled her face from my lips
and they tore off, clung to her cheek
like leeches which she immediately ripped from her face.
Embarrassed by the unintended meanness
of the gesture she put them in the palm of my hand
to have them sewn back at a later time.
As she told me the dream
I finished brushing my teeth, spit the last
of the toothpaste and water into the sink.
I was an argonaut in her life, but didn’t mind,
love makes explorers of us all.
The neighbor’s cat left gifts at her door.
On the sidewalk, a broken piano
abandoned three days. A man
walking by stopped to play.
When does the decay set in?

II

This is when the decay sets in.
I wiped the toothpaste from my face
and kissed her but she pulled her face from my lips
and they tore off, clung to her cheek
like leeches which she immediately ripped from her face.
Embarrassed by the unintended meanness
of the gesture she put them in the palm of my hand
to have them sewn back at a later time.
I held a towel to my bloody face,
wrapped the lips in napkins.
It will be years before she forgives me,
years more before I learn what for.
She returned to bed, sat upright,
her knees pulled to her chest.
Her hands, she waited
until I was gone before washing.