PEANUTS, CRUMBS, AND CUMIN

A mouse squeezes into himself to get
behind a wall (the crack is small
between the part that's always dark and
a humming thing in which they keep things cold)

Each with a dollop of imported cheese,
six glue traps are lined against the border
where stove-top meets refrigerator: man's
no-mice-land, which he must cross to get in.

The mouse would rather live in a field, even
where a falling cloud turns out to be a hawk,
but there's none here, God's pidgin' maws
and skyscrapers. Do fellow mammals help?

His very distant cousin went to bed
hoping he'd wake to panicked shrieks--
For six mornings now all he gets
are "cumin seeds"--the rodent's gifts

upon the counter-top. Can't a penthouse
spare overfed cats' and overfed owners'
peanuts with a skinny mouse? Crumbs
keep him alive. This is called charity.

CREDO IN DEUM SED EXPECTO NULLAM?

Even when celebrated by a bored priest,
the mass, I'm told, is beautiful;
its center is sacrifice. Not like
an old man's reluctant giving up
but someone slaughtered in his prime
willingly, for us. So beautiful

it hurts--but doesn't help at all.
After the rite, the priest disrobes,
watches TV. The church is empty;
everyone, unredeemed and dim,
continues to light candles despite
cancer, despite scandals--why not?

Great inner fiction is always real.
Though Alpha and Omega is a myth and
entropy replaces God in the middle--
The latter is a hidden string, while
the former seems to stretch beyond
what even the inner eye sees--

Still, great inner music is realer:
Listening to Missa in Angustiis
by Haydn, I lose myself including
head-doubts, fears and injured faith--
Then that lonely trinity, silence,
entropy and I, return. When will I turn?

ZERO

is a practical abstraction--
Voids happen only in ourselves.
Maharshi had as much as a dead king--

We needed a concept to sum up our sums.
Our depths and debts are very different;
an inch above skyscrapers, almost nothing

doesn't stop real space from seething--
Its lack is Mozart on a cosmic scale;
ours is more traumatic than exploding suns.

How many light-years of Zero does chance need
to make another universe? There you go again,
smug and humming Wittgenstein-deniers,

I repeat: there are no outer voids.
Zero was a practical invention.
Even an intergalactic abyss is

almost empty. Too bad our recent history
comes closer. We have a new word for which space
is too much; there was more compassion between stars.

THE LAST TWO POEMS FROM INDIA

18. SISTER WIGBERTA

Are there rulers to smack hands in Heaven?
Her faith said yes, yet she had doubts about cosmic injustice
but not about her calling: corporal punishment

That's why I'm here. We begged Christ to send her
to a back room in San Francisco, dressed
in a G string, pasties and chains--

Why should My children waste prayer-time on that,
since that's what I've already done?
No no no that's not what happened:

she went on to excoriate knuckles for years;
I went to business school and became
CEO of a huge unconcern--

No need for envy. Inside
I'm still an ant on a snowball in hell
with Sister Wigberta on skis.

19. WRITTEN ON THE WAY HOME

I might be broken, even shattered,
yet even shards that cannot reassemble
have, beyond entropy, one consolation:
the piece that can't be swept away;
nobody, not even God,
can trash what I actually am.

The difference between you and me
is that you, you lucky bastard,
are so strongly rooted in illusion
you imagine yourself lord of creation
and almost are--With the right equipment
you might soon found a new nation on Mars
and forget, till the next catastrophe,
you aren't immortal, but, like me,
glass underfoot, returning to sand.

No need to fear--
That innermost piece reflects every image
since the beginning--
Separation hurts; what doesn't?
Scission, what do you have to confess?
I guess I could have been a little bit better at self-realization.
(You excel at understatement)
Another: plain truths are so sad.
Just once let me feel my original face,
the uncreated countenance of--
Why are you laughing? Who's laughing?
I get it;
I'm laughing, too.

EIGHT MORE POEMS FROM INDIA, WITH A MIRACULOUS ADDENDUM

9. TELL ME, SIMONE WEIL,

To be "a crippled no one"
doesn't exclude happiness?

It depends on where you got your cane.
Youth demanded caviar;

yet there's no shame for Lazarus
to dine on crumbs from God.

A satisfied belly
resurrects all--except you?

I have my doubts:
self-pity is inverse ambtion;

pride the obverse of despair.
Beggars aren't always losers:

just a little hint of butter
on a piece of mouldy bread

--That's my lot--Poison from Midas, yet
God's almost nothing is manna enough--

Sin thought life was privately unfair;
now I dine on air.

10. THE POET

At first you don't notice
something is missing, like
a spider with six legs.

Scurries with the best of them,
makes a proper web;
yet she's deficient:

partly a predator,
partly a fly, this
thing is so odd

faith chastises God:
why create misfits
with venom and wings?

11. FLAT SHARP AND NATURAL

I play scales on the piano
as well as I climb Jacob's ladder:
technically, spiritually,
my place is the bottom rung.

Yet when I really practice
Mozart and humility,
that most discriminating of all listeners
hears me in absolute silence

and, though I'm bad, is not displeased.
One music serves, the other soars,
and even a leper can reach God with both--
That's what I know; and that's what I believe.

12. THE SUPREME COMMANDER OF ANTS
ALSO CONTROLS YOU

To negotiate this field
where food is scarce
and peace even scacer,
you must follow orders

(even if you claim
you're free as birds,
which of course aren't free)
life obeys necessity

beetle to king--
Wizards and veils
are pure fictions.
You are one, too;

genes have invented
what helps them survive:
am, self. No matter,
follow your sham.

13. YOU'RE A MESS

You're a mess. Greed and
anger let you forget;
rage at the world;
spite overcomes it.

This has been our catechism
for over 10,000 years.
This is one exit, yet
life has many cages;

we choose our cells and
the worst one is this:
worship yourself and
praise God with your lips.

14. FAST FAITH

Jeeza will pleasya,
yet Wicca is quicka.

15. SEPARATION SONG

I am consciousness;
I was created by genes
somewhere around A.D.
minus two million and six.

Since then I've painted
wild horses and shamans,
and upside down churches
by thoughts called Chagall.

O I give up,
says the duck.
I am a dog
says the fox;

I am too fat
says the mantis;
hardy alive, says the virus,
I'm almost nothing at all.

I have created
Beethoven and Hitler,
Pablo Picasso and icing--
Peace, Laura Riding:

"The wind suffers from blowing;
the earth suffers from turning;
the sun suffers from burning,
and I from a living name."

O I give up,
says the duck.
I am a dog
says the fox;

I am too fat
says the mantis;
hardly alive, says the virus,
I'm almost nothing at all.

16. AT THE CUSP OF OLD AGE

To pass the time before she calls the ambulance
I shall write poems for several years.

I imagine they'll come to get me
just after I've mastered the simplest Bach prelude

(the one on your cell phone in C)
--if I'm unlucky that will take decades--

In clean white coats these professional
strangers will tell her I'm sorry,

It's too late to help him
(This I've known for over sixty years)

Until then, Mozart, Bach, Shakespeare and
fucking up trying to make others happy;

"a crippled no one" passing time. They're here!
Still writing? They'll just have to wait.


ADDENDUM: THE MIRACLE

My brother-in-law's
aunt is a saint--no kidding;
she was canonized in 2008,
the first Indian, ever.

She apparently didn't say much,
suffered a lot, taking
on the ills of others
and dying young from cancer.

"Did she ever do a miracle
for you?" "Yes, once."
We're eating at breakfast
nul puttu with coconut milk;

it is delicious.
"When I was young,(Aunty
had just died) while
shopping in a dusty village

just beyond Trivandrum,
I became very thirsty--
Amma forgot to take water--
Alphonsa Aunty, I begged,

please help me now--
At that moment a coconut
fell from a tree overhead!"
Don't say a word,

doubting Thomas--
You don't believe in miracles
yet you believe in God;
what kind of logic is that?

"Since then I have no doubts."
The Dawkins in me now
chooses not to analyze;
I, too, shopping for miracles

beneath God's indifferent sun,
had become very dry.
Who cares how it happened?
Thirst's gone.

EIGHT POEMS FROM INDIA

1. DOOMED GARDEN

Innocenter poppy
hopelessly in love

briefly turns spectacular--
Light is different, though

Mayfly thinks he'll live forever--
O plaster Mother of God,

pity us! Secularer mantis,
negotiate a rose.


2. WHAT DO YOU EXPECT

(Pity in a grasshopper;
compassion in a frog;
mercy in a mockingbird;
agape in a shark?

No; not even saints perceive
justice in a cabbage)
Disinterested kindness;
You--in an ape like me?

3. VERY DISTANT COUSINS,

Maggots, on a windowsill
or in forgotten cheese,
I have come to join you now;

it has been my ambition
to metamorphosize
into something different;

why not to a fly?
Spider-and-a-human being
isn't better off:

caught in my own web
with too much venom
to accept my cross--

One day I'll have wings?
Larvae cannot writhe
in spoiled cheese forever--

I'll be a happy insect
innocently circling trash
much as I do now

but without shame and guilt.
Silly maggot, all is one,
recluse spider, fly.

4. YUM YUM

She moves her hand
from chest to mouth
repeatedly--

This means she wants tea.
Sometimes she does this
while saying, "Yum Yum"--

This means she's hungry.
Today we gave her
an opened box of

Suriya frosting,
nul puttu and clothes.
She might be 65, who knows?

50 plus or 70.
She is very bent and small;
I'm told she has

drunkards for sons, and
daughters beaten by
others' drunkard sons--

(My wife and I have visited
family in Chennai
twelve times since 1976--

They used to have a boy
about twelve years old
who lived with them;

Santishan washed and swept and cooked
and slept on the kitchen floor.
Later, he went mad.

Tamil sevants
have it somewhat better now--
That's progress, I suppose.)

Right now, Yum Yum's washing dishes;
After that, I watch her
disappear into a gaggle

of joggers in Reeboks.
A man talks with his broker
on a mobile--She slips;

her package falls in front of him.
He shouts and kicks it to the side,
as if she were a cow.


5. MY SOAP'S NAME IS VIDYA

My toothbrsh, Calhoun;
my mouthwash is
anonymous
during dry monsoons,
otherwise he's Roger.

What shall I be called?
Hieronymus the Poetaster,
the Master of Silence
from Beethoven Mu?
I call my self Treasure.

Please, says Hank Wall,
be quiet, be quiet,
be quiet, be quiet,
no one is no one
and no one is all.


6. GOA HAIKU

A woman of great beauty
passes by a fountain;
water flows.


7. THE SENSECENT GURU

I have had a hard life;
I wouldn't recommend it.
Yet, bent and frail at ninety-five,
I still don't want to end it.

Listen--if you're young and strong
and want to check out early:
compared to nothing, nothing's wrong
and even hell's gate's pearly.


8. I'M DONE

I'm shoveling anger,
a life-winter's snow.
Before all is ice,

frozen rage, Ego's
deep desires, go--
My path is clear. I'm done.

THE BOHEMIAN GIRL

I am not sure if this little essay will mean anything to those who are not "d"un certain age," but it just might. The subject is rather sad, at least nostalgic: the passage of time, the passage of something inside us--and soon, everything--the passage of us. This came to me in a very direct, and emotional way when I heard, last night, a performance of Balfe's (once) famous aria, "I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls," from his (once) famous opera, "Bohemian Girl," which had its debut in London in 1843. This particular performance was from a movie of--who would have guessed it? Laurel and Hardy. Not one of their best, "Bohemian Girl" was made in 1936, and follows the plot of the opera with some zany inserts. (This indicates how popular the song was as late as 1936. Laurel and Hardy made another opera adaption, Fra Diavolo, based on an opera by Auber--who, like, Balfe, is forgotten today.)
It is a very personal song for me. My grandmother, Ella Dorsett, died in 1944, the year before I was born. I know liitle more than three things about her: she was very, very poor; she was very, very obese; and Balfe's aria was her very favorite piece of music in the world. She was simple, and uneducated--how did she get to know an aria from an English opera written a century previous to hers? I think I know. When I was young, there was an abandoned theatre two blocks away from me--who could imagine a theatre ever being in the outskirts of my very working-class home town, Jersey City? But there it was. I was a bit of a "gamin" in those days--I was about ten at the time when we and a few other street kids used to break into the building and explore it. This was my very first view of a stage, albeit a stage in ruins. I remember staring at it, fascinated. Later, I knew enough about history to realize that this was a stage that had been used in the vaudeville days, probably from early in the century to the 1940s, I'm not sure. I have no doubt that Balfe's song was performed on that stage and all over the country during that period, it was that popular. (It was a hit among the so-called "low brows" and "high brows"--an example of the latter is a mention of it in Joyce's "The Dubliners.") My grandmother probably first heard it in a music hall in Hoboken, where she was born. My father worked in a music hall in Hoboken when he was a teenager, so he probably heard it there too.
I don't know if I love or hate the song--yes, I do, my feeling is more close to love. It is a very catchy tune, one that can easily become what Germans call an "Ohrwurn," that is, an earworm, something that has the ability to bore into the brain and repeat itself over and over again. This music can drive you crazy! It is unabashedly sentimental, over the top enough to invite parody--and I did indeed sing to myself a parody of this song when I was a young teenager. ("...I could boast of a highly incestral name; but the thing, you dodos, which pleased me most, was that you drove my mother insane, that you drove that poor shady old lady insane...etc." My friend Brian--where is he now after half a century?-- invented an even racier version, as teenagers will. Spike Jones would have had fun with this music.) It is a song that is both beautiful and ridiculous, and that is precisely the point. It is not great enough to transcend the times when it was written and the century of popularity that followed. It is, we must admit, kitschy. That's precisely why I find it so very moving; it sometimes can, like it did last night, move me to tears.(I don't have the best ear, but, after hearing it last night, I went directly to the piano and got everything right. It is that simple.)
Have you ever read Guy de Maupassant's short story, "The Minuet?" That and Sherwood Anderson's "The Egg" are among my very favorites. In the French story, the narrator watches an elderly couple dance a minuet. They were darlings of the French court once, a court that long since ceased to exist. They are old, decrepit, and their movements are now clumsy. Their dance, the minuet, has been completely out of fashion for decades. The people of Maupassant's day laughed at it. Inside the old folks are still living in the ancien regime; inside they still might feel some of the glory of those days--but they are a wreck of what they once were. They evoke pity. Suddenly the narrator sees what time does to us: the once strong building decays, collapses; the rubble is removed and absolutely nothing is left. The narrator is deeply moved by this old couple; traces of great beauty still remain. The narrator states that he has been a soldier and has seen young men die horrifically; yet, nothing has filled him with such terror as this poignant dance. He sees in a flash what is going to happen to him, to all of us.
"I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marle Halls," evokes such feelings in me. I was born just after this song became a curiosity, after being a major hit for over a century. As I wrote, part of me still finds this music beautiful; no doubt anyone born after me--at least those who are musically discriminating, including the other part of me--finds the song ridiculous.
Bach was forgotten. The next generation abandoned counterpoint and found his works crabbed and stuffy. When Mendelssohn reintroduced him to the larger public, around the time Balfe wrote his opera, Bach's star rose in the cultural heavens and has remained one of first magnitude ever since. The problem with Balfe is that the music is charming, but far from immortal.
Balfe was extremely popular in his day, especially in England, France and Italy. These days he is just about completely forgotten.
Much of what is beloved by a generation does not stand the test of time. (And, of course, some things that do stand the test of time were ignored by the generation in which they arose.) I realize that much of what formed me in the 1940s and 1950s is passing away forever. All right I'll say it: the young do not understand.And perhaps they shouldn't. Most of us think we are somehow precious, but, like the song, we are does not transcend our time. What we think is important might be deemed by the next generation to be quite kitschy and maudlin. We will be completely forgotten. Those of us who are old are dancing that tragic--and tragically comical--minuet, and will very soon be nothing but dust.
But let's not go too far with the tragedy, Thomas. You, like many people of your generation, are active to a degree that was unthinkable during Balfe's time. You dance, you play music, write poems and take delight in your lovely wife, son, family and friends. You've made it, Mr. Lucky! Lucky! Lucky!! Doomed nevertheless.


Addendum: A review of the recording of this song available on YouTube. Joan Sutherland's is the best. Yes, she is one of the past century's divas, but not always one of my favorites. Sometimes her approach strikes me as a bit too "warbly"--too precious. And her Italian diction was so consonant-less that I found it difficult to understand--I always make it a point to understand the words of operas. Here, her extraordinary technique and phrasing is amazing, even breathtaking. A marvelous performance! Jessye Norman, larger than life, always reminds me of a great African queen, even a deity. She does not embellish the second stanza of the song, as Joan Sutherland effectively does. All in all, this is a rather too self-conscious performance, even though her voice is exquisite. A singer named Sissel, unfamiliar to me, gives a folksy rendition, accompanied by some updating chords that Balfe never wrote. This is quite proper, since this melody was popular with both classical and non-classical music fans. It is sweet. Sutherland's rendition is by far the best musically, but I find the version by someone named Sumi Jo the most moving in the sense of the subject of my essay. She is someone in her fifties--and looks it-- dressed as someone in her twenties or thirties. Her voice is sweet and expressive too. Her version is the most evocative of that poor old couple dancing the minuet.

And, as another addendum, here is a recording of me playing this beautiful song on the piano:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or4PgO6MtII