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Friday, 12 June 2009

Currently
Some Ether: Poems
By Nick Flynn
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Good Lord! Jack Gilbert is the man. I just feel like I'm starting to live. Read Eggers' screenplay Away We Go, and calmed the hilarity down with some Nick Flynn. About to go into work and make my seven an hour, but the happiness means much more. I mean I don't think I'll be doing this forever, but for now my brothers here need me. Shit, I need them. I can't any longer pretend like that the silence from God is anything but a bullhorn. Sean, Josh, and Jason are playing Flower, and it's kind of the greatest thing I've experienced today, maybe ever. Jason said, "I hope this is like Heaven, and we are the flowers." Zing! It's storming outside, my yards a flood plain, the ashes are sifting around in the mud and I feel like curling up on the couch again tonight with Acts and Mr. Bazan. Love is all around.
more Jack:
"The Spirit and the Soul"
It should have been the family that lasted.
Should have been my sister and my peasant mother.
But it was not. They were the affection,
not the journey. It could have been my father,
but he died too soon. Gelmetti and Gregg
and Nogami lasted. It was the newness of me,
and the newness after that, and newness again.
It was the important love and the serious lust.
It was Pittsburgh that lasted. The iron and fog
and sooty brick houses. Not Aunt Mince and Pearl,
but the black-and-white winters with their girth
and geological length of cold. Streets ripped
apart by ice and emerging like wounded beasts when
the snow finally left in April. Freight trains
with their steam locomotives working at night.
Summers the size of crusades. When I was a boy,
I saw downtown a large camera standing in front
of the William Pitt Hotel or pointed at Kaufmann's
Department Store. Usually around midnight,
but the people still going by. The camera set
slow enough that cars and people left no trace.
The crowds in Rome and Tokyo and Manhattan
did not last. But the empty streets of Perugia,
my two bowls of bean soup on Kos, and Pimpaporn
Charionpanith lasted. The plain nakedness of Anna
in Denmark remains in me forever. The wet lilacs
on Highland Avenue when I was fourteen. Carrying
Michiko dead in my arms. It is not about the spirit.
The spirit dances, comes and goes. But the soul
is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon lodged
under the ribs. What lasted is what the soul ate.
The way a child knows the world by putting it
part by part into his mouth. As I tried to gnaw
my way into the Lord, working to put my heart
against that heart. Lying in the wheat at night,
letting the rain after all the dry months have me.

what honesty! Here's to the unknown...
Dean
Currently
The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992
By Jack Gilbert
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Brush the Dust off your feet, keep walking!

I've been reading a lot of the Bible lately and it's kind of unbelievable how in the beginning the disciples suck at loving and understanding Jesus. Maybe it's that they don't understand loving one another, that the poor and the broken get it first, they need a savior. It's kind of important, especially for Peter, when Jesus tells him to go out into the deep, the dark mystery of his heart to find love with the symbol of his wealth and status, a boatload of fish. Yet, he tells him to throw it back. Maybe it's just that I'm not ready for this whole poetry thing, maybe I'm supposed to throw it back for awhile, loosen the knot it has on my heart and love my brothers. Tell them the things that I keep inside. I mean, the disciples don't even believe Jesus is the right kind of guy for the job. That he's a blood and guts kind of sword swinger, even when he's rising into heaven. They're looking up and asking him to restore the kingdom when it's all around them, inside them. If it's that simple, yet so hard, to be able to love someone no matter how big of a fuck up they are, then I think there's hope somewhere. And I've always kind of thought that Paul's thorn is his human side, how he's the worst of all, but an instrument of grace. Let the coats sit at his feet then went on a rampage to try to kill off what was already starting to make a change inside him. I mean reading this stuff again is definately helping me with a poem, the time i went home, my grandfather's testament is sitting in the foyer next to some dried flowers, there's dust on it, but there's still life left in those words. I've spent the entire night alone reading by candlelight and listening to pedro the lion. I've been thinking how I want that kind of image like Nick Flynn says about his mom, sitting in the car, (the smoke looks creamy!) and she's with a lover that's not his birth father, but until then I'll sing along to Be Thou My Vision. I thought I didn't know the words anymore, but I closed my eyes and they just kind of came to me.
Here's something from my man, Jack Gilbert:

"The Great Fires"
Love is apart from all things
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
What is not love provokes it.
What is not love quenches it.
Love lays hold of everything we know.
The passions which are called love
also change everything to a newness
at first. Passion is clearly the path
but does not bring us to love.
It opens the castle of our spirit
so that we might find the love which is
a mystery hidden there.
Love is one of many great fires.
Passion is a fire made of many woods,
each of which gives off its special odor
so we can know the many kinds
that are not love. Passion is the paper
and twigs that kindle the flames
but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes
because it tries to be love.
Love is eaten away by appetite.
Love does not last, but it is different
from the passions that do not last.
Love lasts by not lasting.
Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.

Bam!
-the Dean