A remembered poem for Clinton (Ikeolu) Terrell

 While meditating yesterday, I remembered I had written a poem about Ikeolu Terrell, whose death two or three years ago was recently made known to me. 

Ikeolu, born in 1950, was in the generation that fought the Vietnam War; he did not, perhaps because he went to Yale instead. (He grew up in South-Central LA and went to Yale with a cohort of African America men; they strongly suspect they were being "studied" by the authorities there.) But he traveled to Vietnam later in his life and was, for a brief time, married to a Vietnamese woman. 

The poem comes from the Albert Saijo section of the book. I'm happy to see the two of them together there, both in touch with greater worlds, and both so hurt, angered, and somehow enobled by this one.

My MUD Parcel Reading in Cincinnati (or, on zoom)

Aryanil Mukherjee and Pat Clifford kindly invited me to read in their series, which I did yesterday. A smattering of work from the present back to the mid-aughts: memory cards, honest sentences, and dementia blogs. Click below to watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fprk6CFQZi8

 

 

 

My new book from Equipage in Cambridge, UK

The editor is Rod Mengham, who can be found at menghamr@gmail.com
(I don't yet know even how much the book costs!)

Some of the poems can be found here, with thanks to Jerrold Shiroma:
http://durationpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/seedings-2_s-m-schultz.pdf

Equipage's website is here: https://equipagepress.weebly.com/

The cover art is by Tommy Hite: https://www.tommyhite.com/
If you open the book up to include the full cover, you get this: https://www.tommyhite.com/honolulu-social-realism

A publication

Jonathan Penton at unlikelystories has posted three of my memory cards on their site, from the Cloud of Unknowing series.

http://unlikelystories.org/content/so-i-encourage-you-accept-your-failure-and-embrace-the-word-whole

24 June 2017

When my father died, he called down the hallway to me, and I came back. (The nurse said I could still talk to him, so I whispered good-bye in my father's, though--being dead--he couldn't acknowledge me.)  My mother gave him my father's gold Rolex, the one he'd bought for $100 after the war; she sold him our grand piano. He did her taxes when she could no longer keep her accounts straight, and told me on the phone that she was doing well when she was not. There was a cashier at Safeway, he told me, who spoke over 10 languages. Sure enough, the man bagging my groceries talked to a woman in Korean. She laughed. When he and his wife came to see my mother in her Alzheimer's home for the last time (I asked them to come), he teased her with motions of his arms and questions she could not answer. He said he could spend hours there engaging with her who slumped against the arm rest, her eyes flat glass. When my mother died, he sent a brief note. When his wife died, he sent a longer one. She'd collapsed suddenly after a wonderful day together. When I saw his house had sold, I emailed him and got no answer. I googled his name. There was his mug, an address in Incarceration, Virginia. He had a number, a sentence, and a crime: aggravated sexual assault. Someone had failed to protect him. A year and a half after his arrest the house sold and movers took everything away, but none of the neighbors knew a damn thing.

--24 June 2017

15 June 2017

And other faculties change and fail. I fail, therefore I'm a white man in America; I conceal my weapon because I know the deep state leaks secrets. There's a cloud over this administration, pregnant with rain, and it's been seeded by the opposition, those who, according to the president's son, aren't even human. They call it my political rage, but I also beat my wife. To be “depressed about” suggests there's content to your illness, but content comes after forms, filling in its crevices like zeros a box score. There are no hits on this grid other than the shot that took down the second baseman. Our vocabulary did this to us, confounding a real game with an attempted massacre. The coin of the realm is metaphor rendered as fact. “He mowed him down on the base path.” My son has his video game turned up; I hear gun fire from below. PTSD is fantasy after fact, an imagined bear inciting terror because you once saw a real bear. As I child hiding under covers, I assumed all sirens came for me. I ask my son to turn his gun fire down.

--17 June 2017 

10 June 2017

The first alteration speaks to us from the Rose Garden, promising transparency and--above all--safety. The only safety is that of exclusion; safety's pure, is cream that floats on milk, is hemmed in, is corral or coral reef. A mother's hand is barred cell held against sun-washed wall, territory of faults and callouses. I ought not talk more about my children's adoptions, for what I get back are narratives of loss and reunion. “He found his mother, in the end.” They're book-ends to what excludes me, the middling present-parent. Narratives are theory, but I'm all practice. I am family resemblance in a family that cannot resemble. Yet silence concedes the field to theory, mandates we hire ideas rather than persons, that we value origins not as history but as nature. “It's in the nature of the person,” James Comey says, but he doesn't invoke the nature we mean to preserve. Self-invention's a fine idea, so long as you have a mirror and a podium. When my son tries to get my goat, he sounds just like his dad. That's safe to say; I've always loved goats.

--10 June 2017

7 June 2017

When I say “darkness,” I mean absence of knowing. I followed the bulldozer's drone til I saw a gap in the forest, black mud bearing the impress of a wide tread, then a wisp of smoke, earth mover removing trees. Find the gap in thinking, a teacher writes, where you can, for a moment, be. But the gap in the forest doesn't denote rest, just earth jaw with teeth knocked out. The man in a silver car still lives parked beside I'iwi Road. The roof is lined with beer cans and bottles. They make a neat grid. Behind him, an old house breaks slowly down, absorbed by o'hia and hapu'u ferns, its brown beams snapped inward. His silver car is a filling, but the mouth bears no witness. Another car sits 50 feet past his, filled with black plastic trash bags. I was struck by the grandfather clock beside the door of the room where James Comey and the president had sat alone. Good night clock, good night constitution.

--7 June 2017

6 June 2017

Humility is seeing yourself as you really are. Meditation, I once read, has sometimes lead to breakdown. Its side effects are not noted on the box where I locate my meditation, pull it out and sit inside it, like a demented rat in a federally funded experiment. The leaker wrote an anti-Trump tweet, which proves everything. Beyond the fake news, he screams, we can hear the TRUTH; while there's no mirror in my meditation box, there are his tweets to navigate. Perhaps he sees himself as he really is, though not in his humility but in ours. I peer into his mirror to see how small I can become. Note how, in the bass line, McCartney actually plays in a different key, how this destabilizes the song. Perpetual modulation is like anxiety, though it's disciplined by the music box. The leaker's name is Reality, so I more than suspect we're all pilgrims at this point. Take the road least bombed, and open your arms to the child in Mosul who'd huddled beside her mother's corpse. There's more there than meets your mirror's eye.

--6 June 2017

5 June 2017

This discipline doesn't require brute strength, but joy. In order to forgive, the teacher tells us, you need to go back into the wound. Forgiveness has more to do with memory than with forgetting. If, in this forest, I recover my wounds, tie them in a bundle and leave them on the sweet soil beneath the ferns, and if, amid these birds in whose songs I infer (but cannot know) joy, then I can leave them to their composting. We remake ourselves in the image not of our attackers, but of our forgiveness of them, less image than the skittering sounds of these birds after a night's rain. We see evidence of the pig in wet soil, her rooting about near the tea plants. We hear coqui frogs, and we call to them with smart phones before consigning them to freezers or feeding them to the chickens. The wound is what we work on, tethered like a goat to a stick. The girl with a violent mother used to tiptoe into the kitchen to get herself bread and cheese. She'd tuck herself in bed, putting food in her mouth with one hand, stroking her own hair with the other. She murmured kind things to herself before she fell asleep. 

--5 June 2017

4 June 2017

You know that stones are hard. The dying octopus comes apart, her white flesh tailing off, arms waving apart from her brain and mouth. At meditation I sit beside an older Vietnamese woman, her make-up neat, her breathing hard. She never expected her stepmother to ask forgiveness. She was good to her children, especially her own. The Vietnamese woman misses her stepmother. Afterwards she says that when she writes she tries to get her nouns and verbs to agree. Another woman calls out the word “if,” as in, “if I have hurt you.” If the other knows if to be true, then if is a dodge. That's true, the teacher says. It's complicated, she adds. Go back into the hurt before you forgive. I add my name and email to the list at the door and return to my loop. I'd get closer, but there's no road or GPS for that.

Volcano

--4 June 2017

30 May 2017

“'Love your neighbor.'” His last words: “tell everyone on the train I love them.” An unanticipated but well attended death. A woman took her shirt off to wrap him in and prayed. Down a narrow street at a bus stop a man named Christian swigged a beer, yelled profanities at the cops; the man who'd chased him down called him “cocksucker,” demanded the cops shoot him. “He stabbed them in front of children,” he kept saying, as if it were children that were the problem, not the knife or his intent. Muttered something about meth. For one agitated moment, Jeremy Christian is all the lost men of America, screaming his hatred as he paces the bus stop's narrow perimeter. He's wearing sneakers and shorts. We can't see him well from this distance, but who's to say we ever could. He's every last blocked desire, every last casting of blame, every last lost hope for agency this culture has to withhold. His mother can't believe he'd do such a thing. He was a nice man.

--30 May 2017

29 May 2017

Think what you want of this nothingness. On a walk with my dog, I counted my steps. Never got past three cuz she sniffs. It's her forensic investigation of the grass, occasional downspout or bulldog. For want of this nothingness he replaces “integritas” with “Trump” on a stolen family seal. In China, if you possess the seal, you're in charge. Trump follows others in a golf cart rather than walk with them. Our prepositions of the day are: with, in, for, of. All that's left are orders and insistence. Do this, do that, but don't consider it nothing. Build a wall around the sink-hole: Earth mouth hungers for your need. The president's excruciating want is our nutrition. Arrested on a DUI, the golfer graces my screen with his puffy eyes. He wrecked his body pretending to be a Navy Seal. #FakeNews is the enemy, Trump tweets. I am Tiger Woods.

--29 May 2017

28 May 2017

So I encourage you—bow eagerly to love. A soccer dad in black knee brace kicks his son in the leg, yelling something about a hammer. Ask if the perpetrator is much bigger than you are, if you're in a confined space when you confront someone who spews racism, think about instability and escape routes. Think before you love, CNN advises us. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing was anonymous. He advises me to bow, but I do not. I walk by the man in the Bulls shirt as his son's eyes fill with tears. A coach speaks to his team nearby, says he turned girls down because he didn't like their parents' attitudes. On my way back, I stop to tell him of the coincidence. The president tweets about fake news. As Williams writes, some men die for lack of the real stuff. Others see it, walking past. A young man with full beard is dead in Portland, along with an older man, the one who must have said, “You don't talk to girls that way.” His name was Best.

--28 May 2017

25 May 2017

Feel not merely who you are but that you are. She wove a multi-colored shawl as biography of Anna Akhmatova, enclosed a key in the decorated box. Who we are is clothing. There's a frog on Camus's motorcycle, and it's hurtling toward a tree at excessive speed. Frog, too, feels the problem of existence, albeit without memory or prospect. Only Basho could render the SPLAT well on the page, but that incident at the tree solves the problem of identity (frog) vs. (sentient) being only insofar as it illustrates its end. A green stain means nothing unless you know its history, but history means little unless you know what it means to sit beside the pond and croak at lilies. The pond's water is also green, but only imitates substance while it drifts. The frog jumps in, we remember. But we cannot remember frog.

--25 May 2017

[to be published by Bill Lavender]

23 May 2017

Embrace the word whole. “Ze hole in ze text,” Herr Iser intoned, circa 1985. That's where we fall in like babies in a well, before we ascend into the headline, which rests at the top. Tails you find the bottom, where wisdom is before it kills you. Of course you think about suicide, he said, because you're trying to prevent it. I just added the “w” to make the pun complete; the hole had had a hole, albeit without a sound. Being of sound mind, I think out loud, muttering mantras on the plane (“we are experiencing turbulence, do not be worried,” said the Chinese voice, too often to prevent it). Can a canned voice console? Will our robots help us through our griefs, whether of beloved uncles or disappointing friends? Should we can our own words, like blood or peaches? The White House website advocated “peach” in the Middle East. I remember someone put a large leaf over the letters “im,” so that only “peach” turned its skin toward Kahekili traffic. The pun in German is with sex; the word whole is where we're headed.

--23 May 2017

21 May 2017

In contemplation, direction as we know it ceases to exist. We only travel in one direction, my friend tells me, and it's toward dying. What the direction is, the map doesn't show, nor does the map's voice tell us, sprouting from the phone. The metaphor of roots takes root, but seems to mean less and less, when going out's the same as coming in. Shanghai's doors illustrate a leap from one economy to the next; even those that are boarded up (corruption!) retain their numbers. The difference between horizontal and vertical housing is only quantified as direction, not as value. A Buddhist temple sits surrounded by shopping mall neon, though its golden roof tells another story. Twenty minutes before we landed, the video screens showed us how to do tai chi in our seats. To land is to float over marshes and acres of new apartment blocks and a river that would prove full of plastic and the city whose history is one of opium and banks. We pulled up to the as-yet-to-be-completed terminal, then bused to the extant one that took us in. My office is where friendships go to die, though our good uncle died at home, well after the airline refused him oxygen. Something's happening in our culture, a friend says, and we're all going back.

--21 May 2017

17 April 2017

That clever display of wit won't increase your devotion. De- does not denote undoing, unless undoing falls on amnesiac ground. When I told my daughter what I wanted to do to the girl who broke her brother's heart, she said, “Mom, you shouldn't even think that!” Devotee of dew. De-volution's not the opposite of re-, though shards of it can be found beside the chain link fence. A newsman was arrested in front of Trump Tower, because they own the street. What I got paid to march I measure in my sun-burned skin. Her debauch was a white dress she was too young to assume. The pleasures of risk expressed at the expense of his feeling. Desire's not kind. What I say can't matter; it's all pantomime. Sit outside his door. Reach for his hand. Muss his hair. Ask him what he'll do this summer. (Aways use the future tense.) Turn on the car's a.c. Walk him around the block. To be mother is to follow with a broom, to gather in the dust, apply to your forehead, then lick it from your finger.

--16 April 2017, Easter

25 August 2016

“The eyes are windows.” This changes, among other things, the way we understand houses. The form invites you to fill it in: scrap of conversation, memory, aphorism. An Internal Recollection Service for the soul. It depends where on google earth you stop, whether in space or at street view, where a neighbor walks his Golden Retriever. The book about HM is mostly about the doctor who erased his memories. It has no footnotes. The house without a basement shuts out the colonizing ants, those who eat the family dog when he strays, or a scientist when he asks too many questions. They enter through the mouth, the anus, and the ear; theirs is a fantastic voyage through caves and tunnels and liver. After a 6.2 earthquake, only the clock tower in the Italian village stands. Before the quake it read 10:20, afterwards, 1:40. 

--25 August 2016

[Zwicky, #77]

18 August 2016

To be transparent is not to vanish. As a child, I was given a clear plastic woman. Inside her were hard liver, colon, heart, and lungs; I pulled her apart from head to foot and took her organs out, then replaced them, snapping her body shut. She was all organs; there was no plastic mind to let her look back at my skin. Omran, age five, sits on a plastic orange chair at the back of an ambulance; he wears the dust of ancient Aleppo on his freshly cut hair, and he fidgets. He's a window in a house of windows. Unable to respond to this world, the Muselmanner packed up their eyes and left. The eye's transparencies cannot sustain so much. They close by staying fixed.

--18 August 2016

[Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, 260]