Undated 1983:
She’s very good at capturing the mystic cloud which surrounds the simplest of situations. And I dreamt, following her with lines of my own emphasis. Genuinely influenced and changed–better for it, remembering. Giving variegated meaning to incidents, my life richer for it. Only influenced (and more) by her manner of telling a story. The mystic fabric which surrounds all things–a fresh meaning, an interpretation of animated motioning.
Patricia was there and was a central figure. She and some affection and new acceptance of me. Her receiving some new input I believe.
Let’s find out in a grass night with stars.
Sleep to find out.
Find out by swimming.
Ask somebody simply and note their answer.
She is stupendous and still shining.
It makes things better.
You won’t regret.
Because she admired you, you accepted her.
It didn’t take long for her to, but why a football player, and what is the meaning of her telling me he was her ex-boyfriend and how could she keep his picture on her wall?
[Generous and delicate]
Be sensible and sensitive and pursue the prize.
Be gentle and generous, be liberal with your genius.
Surely paintings help your dreams.
Multifarious variety
Just turns of speech.
Study. Plan. Mark time with work(s).
I’ve seen enough of you to know
Felt enough to sow your field blue
Are you experienced?
And have you ever been experienced?
Well I have.
He says you’re not mad. Balance your brain in shades of blue. Do silver glue and step on a shadow to know that I can, you can, we can too.
Extracts and appropriations. I see a wisdom in you. I have to acknowledge. Red bubble. Sea.
There’s more that I could no so there’s more that could be dun why you saw an end to that and you changed your name and face to suit the scrappy moment if you came to call me Ken I could dance with you the same.
A poem based on found words:
The Honorary Secretary of Guernsey was a fizgig offshoot
He lashed rockers with imminent serology in the shieling
He said “press-press” roughly on the rosette field
He slowly stacked salt in sublingual confrontation
His tufted speech was a mark of syllable technology.
The prestigitator created flimsy lacto-optic plosion
The corona dehisce disposed of the drought kwashiorkor
All we could get in the pouch were sallow glockenspiel utensils
I phoned with science fiction and anaphora spades
And in the heat and unrest I was spurred to coat my jibbah with meringue.
It’s windy cold in the courtyard
I lost Dave’s radio there, nestled against a plant.
There’s a co-op there. I don’t know what it’s for.
It rains in Spain but mainly on the plain.
I am having a very difficult time. There is all work before me, but it’s not easy. Is there a fountain of energy somewhere ready below the surface? Will things take a turn for the better? I dwell in words, language is my home, I inhabit symbols. But work for me leaves me no play. Rest I get at night sleeping but beyond that is work and more work.
I do not stop discovering secrets about me that have lain hidden, and it suspends my ability to produce the kinds of poems I had been producing. For Zarathustra, poets are liars, and I have adopted this position against myself. I think I have been weaving lies. Only when each word is difficult to place and figure do I feel that there is feeling there. I must be crying over the words.
My flight has been cancelled. I am compelled to walk. Each step is thick with difficulty. Now we have a tense compaction of phrasing. Now there is the slow pace. And with it the liar vanishes.
There is sludge to the roofs of everyone. No one is exempt from family horrors and terrors. I am part of this with every man. Work is hard. Walking is thick. I can’t keep my eyes open.
If I have a desk before me, I can make it, and I do. It’s amazing that I’m becoming a man. I have not stopped writing since I started and I take this all in pace.
If I can continue–this is first. If I maintain that this difficulty now is worth something beyond what I’ve ever thought of difficulty, then I can continue. You can see that I want to continue. Work for a man of letters is this work. Writing is practice for a writer.
I remember that ridiculous lady. She came out of the room to go to the toilet. The toilet had no seat and it was dirty and smelled.
How comes this imaginative tiredness as I write? Where fall I with it? My nervous memory prevents me from being fully involved with the matter at hand. It is that which keeps me awake. I am alive by such stretches.
Sheets of a new kind of paper with a clipboard–a purse, good pens. Conrad’s novels and stories. Saving / Job / Part time or full but temporary.
torque tension turning
Strange restless sounds all night, and what I heard as “I hate you” coming up from below with a rattle of the pipes. [her drunk now of course & always heavy wonderful sounds from above (loud sounds) which I still will forget--for I cannot be hemmed by her & she should see what she has forsaken as a lesson (if we are going to on any level about it at all) [Just to show, there are real losses in the world.]]
Patty is angry with me hate of me because she is not happy and I am to blame because of the way I choose to conduct myself offensive to her ridiculing her (but she of course not half adequate for me and never was, has no just cause to blame me) though feelings are irrational–are guided by deeper pulses and more obscure facts and bits of information–it could be that she took me back after I touched / was with Sue that I hurt her there–jealous of what now has, that I am with her so but she had no room for me–gave me little–was preoccupied & locked into her avenues of belief / sense of self clogging up her sense of the world // maybe seeing much–certainly feeling much that she cannot tell–that with Hans for instance–me breaking into that (another reason to hate me) her having now to reconcile what she has been feeling deeply with what she consciously denied.
John (in his limited view) makes the two sided distinction between “good girl” and “bad girl” choosing sex to be the discriminating factor. A prejudice which I think he is losing.
Chastity with regard to beautiful, wonderful, life-giving, pulsing, dynamic expression of lotus-petal flesh inter-folding is nothing but itself, not virtue nor vice, expresses preference
chastity of mind on the other hand,
that sense of purpose & the idea
of the right thing & going fully on it
(according to G.M.Hopkins) is another story
I have prepared long with language to think on any subject.
Another I hear her (P)–
only joyous when drunk–a really knotted sexuality.
I love my woman–who is a woman–tremendous
dark like Siva and wet like a river
cool like the moon and bright and bouncy
sunbeams irritated and delighted, looking
and skipping from an angel’s wing or
a twinkling star belt.
look to life and outer circumstance
and return to write from your own heart
I love Italy–but not for every soul who lives or has lived there (although I like to look upon everyone that I can). She gives me good reasons.
Swift steps lift, catch drifts of snow
lie dregged, drawn out by gutter and rain
drain
“Whiter
than the crust
left by the tide,
we are stung by the hurled sand
and the broken shells.”
H.D. crisp and blue, terse and beautiful
among the ancient stones, by the gray fast-moving
river, counting the stones of the broken bridge
counting her way to Delphi, along the steep
and pebbly path, observing purple and red
wildflowers, feeling the color of the sky,
imagining athletes and traders, messengers and
kings, in the thousand year spread
of Olympia and Byzantium, pushing
scarlet webs drifting upward in a sacrificial
current bathing voyages with memory
and psychic stone, corresponding bush
and seed. I will gather her up
in my imagination.
In the blue haze of the hills, starry down
and soft at intervals, our pet dog barked
and let loose a steam of moist air, by
the pitch pine recesses, the ancient argument
of a stone avenue proceeded restlessly
from our tired limbs, all aware of
no life but slow, nearly frozen sap
in the trees, and the colors and shapes
of our own vision–voices interminable
and craft carved into the packed snow,
treetops tinged with violet where they,
dark green, met the sky
Light is giving its last glimmer
to the icicles they are frozen
stoic (stolid) and prong downward
pierce the air demonstrate frigidity
prints mark out on the snow
where somebody tramped
I can picture them going there
in blue jeans, solidly hair frozen
and ears cold laughing inside
form a smile looking at one
thing–the snow at their feet
engulfed icicles–and growing
rigidly protrusive enigmatically
curled like the last blazing tail
of a meteor from some enormous
and as yet indefinable meaning
succored across the centuries
fur-brazen and warm–heart
lingering fascination scarring what
is already most sacred and spontaneous.
Red sky blow blue rains my way
Wave distances and dark clouds away
In the splinter of your nightmare
You walk down the long stiff road, pebbles and shadows
Down the black road, reconciled with the fir trees
With the apple blossoms, slices and diamonds of ice
You paddle along the moist and threaded river,
Demanding dream and the pool, the pull of response.
She bit her lip thinking happiness
With delicacy lifted her voice like music
Patterns on a rain-stained sheet
She let her hair down slowly
Thinking this is the way
Wondering what?
Doing nothing in the afternoon
Caring nothing for the fearful tune
Of this night’s shadow
And we shall revive you.
She stole a sideward glance, penetrating nothing; shaping her distraction. This other one here, with attention and fear, pierced the cloud with a shadow, the purple cloud in the scarlet shadow (which could have been) stolen with the goods, loaded with the whole pack of tricks, governed by:
echoing-cleansing sensually-satisfying truth-determining
wonder
rapt quilt of silence perceptual release
tremor tremble
brush touch
stiffen
enjoy
languish fade leap
leapingly lopping the lobes off the birches
brazenly breaking the gruff hedge on hold
characteristically conforming to the chaos
that comes with no direction.
Lawrence sends silver chords of impulse to bear on the winding vine of suggestive air which ripples in columns through vision through space–a creamy explosion of pastels in the solution of feeling that fills a place, Sunset for example:
“There is a band of dull gold in the west, and say what you like
again and again some god of evening leans out of it
and shares being with me, silkily
all of twilight.”
The defensive posturing gives his assertions moral appeal–make clear that this is a matter of sensibility–challenge you to get involved personally–does not allow you to ignore it, gives his picture a context of struggle. ‘again and again’ institutes the image in duration ’some’ god of evening’ blends the suggestion gently into the reader more willing to admit ’some god’ than ‘a god’ and much more than ‘the god’ ‘leans out of it’ gives this god the corporeal function of extension, toward connection with the speaker of the poem in ’shares being with me’ wrapping up in the tone of the sleepy & dreamy ‘dull gold’ there is ’silkily/all of twilight.’ ‘t’ closing the poem.
I must protest the dull roast of the mind that seems to steam so readily from all the fixtures of this modern world. Each generation has had its own struggles, I am sure,–and ours are accorded the status they are just because they are ours.
In my own tone trust the russet sheen
of a fixed moon through branching trees
(The length of the line is everything about
the breath, attention, & penetration of its author)
Punctuation included.
In the rush of autumn he forgot that he had not felt spring. It had meant nothing to him. He had wanted it to mean something, he tried to make it, but it didn’t.
Spring for him lay chiefly in the plants that grew in the walls and the flowers which appeared, violet and yellow, under the large oak tree in the garden he frequented, and on banks before houses all along each street he walked down. The river sank to its proper level. and punting could begin, even in the rain (which could hardly be prevented).
Spring was extended in England,
because of the cool moist air
and because of the profusion
of cloud in the sky.
It came to him as he
ascended stairs to the
street, in the British
faces he noted and considered
the women and the sex they
were proud of showing, their
piercing eyes which took him off
guard and which even sometimes hurt
The sky screeched out high and wide in torn shards, gray blue and dirty white over the moors. Battling gods of sunset and rain declared themselves pierced and cryptic, and wind and darkness finally came.
The Swiss girl was blonde and full-breasted. She smiled and was sensitive and looked for some assertive energy in the young man, some confident power, perhaps of moving desire which would make him woo and even succeed with her that night at the hostel. Her brother was getting on her nerves, was a threat, was many things which she did not realize, and this guy was solid, though thin, had the look of one who had seen the sky out there, and who could impart the same storm to her static, but receptive field of feeling and sensuality. She was feeling desire for him, and wanted him to feel the same for her.
He sat steadily, all day long in the hot shadows, looking out over the busy square, watching people pass, as they did continuously from morning to evening, and longer than that if he cared to wait. It was a mystery to him that no one ever stopped to talk with him, for he was sure that if someone-anyone–did he would have something quite important to say and that he could listen to anything important that a person would say his way. No one did. He was a lonely man. He knew it for a long time, even when he was a boy and used to come to this very square to buy a newspaper and a soda at the stand that always used to be at the corner directly across from the one on which he was situated. He was lonely then, he didn’t come with anyone, and didn’t leave with anyone, he just watched one thing or other, and sometimes a person or many people, without penetrating into any of the communication that he really desired.
Indian Library, Oxford
Doing as much as you can and seeing for yourself
Cloak-huddled ritual
effigy mysterious
Rinse in the ringing bells
little tinkling
let rose petals fall
pour more incense on
how much we owe to the old effigies
the guardian of the gate stands and waits
the beautiful goddess has beautiful woman breasts
there is dancing and support swaying to the beauty
elephants and elbows and bowls
crowns and flowers and necklaces
excited to a new world of form–Indian, in an International City.
–KJM 1983
Journal