Before I read, I'd like to say that Gene Frumkin and I are
going to dedicate our poetry reading to you, of course,
who were nice enough to come here tonight.
But also to Loujon Press of Tucson,
which is run by Jon Webb and his wife, Gypsy Lou.
And I'm sure you know, they published The Outsider,
the national literary magazine.
They also have published very fine hand bound,
hand assembled works by Henry Miller and others.
And in a flood about three weeks ago or so,
they had much of their materials destroyed by water.
And in the spirit of this type of editor,
they're going to be out in time for the double issue
of The Outsider.
And this kind of catastrophe, plus a coupling
of major surgery, both of them in and out of the hospital,
kind of an indomitable spirit, and nothing
is going to stop them.
We'd like to dedicate the reading to them.
I'm going to spring something on you
tonight, a new poem, which I haven't done before
and which I'm still working on.
It's called "Teufelsdreck."
Excuse me while I--
I'll start off with a drink, I think.
"Teufelsdreck" in the epigraph states,
written after being asked by my wife
to purchase her a laughing Airedale.
And I think this might need explanation at this point.
Teufelsdreck I stole from Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle.
And in German, it means devil's dung.
I've been reading the book for a couple of weeks
and at that same time, about halfway through it,
my wife asked me to purchase her a laughing Airedale,
which is rather strange.
I got to think about it in conjunction
with the idea of Teufelsdreck, the kind
of fictitious German idealist, his attempt to work his way up
from an attempted suicide up transcendental letter
to his belief in life again.
And I find a kind of parallel between his predicament, which
is also Carlyle's predicament, the predicament we
have of contemporary society.
And so this poem is an anti-military poem.
It's an anti-war poem.
It's a kind of anti-mythology and anti-ideology
as such type of poem.
And when I blame Teufelsdreck, I'm
blaming him as perhaps in a way Thoreau blamed and made
a confrontation with the tax man who came for him.
You can't fight against a government, a nebulous term.
You can't go to Washington and bang
on the doors at the White House.
And so I blame Teufelsdreck and a kind of naturalistic world
in which god doesn't seem to appear to us.
I will blame a kind of ideological man.
He should become the symbol of the ideology.
There are other themes running through here, I should say.
The use of symbolism of the light and the dark
where we have a blind girl in there who is perhaps parallel
to us, who in a kind of blindness
must either reject the political leaders we have
or approve of them.
And I find in this type of election year
that we're again voting for the lesser of two evils.
This is my statement on how you feel.
We're voting again for the lesser of two evils
as at least I did back in '64.
Bob Truly, a couple of weeks ago at a poetry reading,
wanted to know if George Washington were the lesser
of two evils in his day.
And we are surely faced with this situation now.
The incidents that are here--
I'm not going to read it as a five part meditative
poem that is broken down.
I won't read the numbers, but it is--
on hearing it, you can't tell what the structure is.
I mentioned I'm still working on the thing,
and I don't know how the final structure will work out.
But it is meant to be a five part meditative poem.
I've been studying Donne lately, and I
like the way in which poems are dealing with a topic.
And they break it up with a kind of meditation per day.
We're not going to handle it that way.
I'll try to get through it tonight.
"Teufelsdreck," written after being
asked by my wife to purchase her a laughing Airedale.
"Teufelsdreck, old devil's dung, Diogenes by first name,
rambling the marketplace in broad daylight
with a lantern flung before all faces,
searching the honest man.
Two legged fatherless mammal, devil's dung filthy creature
at both opening.
You said it yourself.
You could have gone to bedlam or written satanic poems
or blown your brains out with a gun.
This life leaves us little else.
I've seen a dogfish balloon been exploded with a knife prick
to the cheers of children, a cat strung up,
burning flesh and gasoline before a hobo's sexual fear.
A girl of 12, her flesh fried, stewed, pot-boiled,
and eaten by the hired man.
In court, he insisted that she died a virgin.
Dog, poor dog, weary.
We assume the animal, but even the monkey who laughs
only seems to an imitation.
No dog can screw up the face and chuckle in the throat.
To laugh like dark men in woods on winter nights,
catching the sound on the wind to say, laugh,
rattle the throat.
Devil's dung, spirit and dung, only men can murder and laugh."
The laughter that I'm talking about in this poem
is a specific kind of laughter.
Obviously, all laughter is not perverse.
But I'm talking about the specific kind in the way
that Hawthorne uses it, the way that the devil is symbolized
by the terrible laughter because he is damned man.
It is this kind of perverse laugh that the animal can't
perform obviously, not only because of physiology,
but because they don't have the mind capable of thinking
of perverse acts and then performing them
and then laughing about it.
So this is the quality of laughter
that is mentioned here in the poem.
"In a willow-laced grotto, a procession
of brown serge monks, pitter pat, pitter pat to the grave,
carting an Italian monk who never laughed.
He renounced the devil beneath the itch
of hair shirt, the last [? sew ?]
around the gut so tight, they slit the ingrown flesh
to cleave the rope.
The belly laugh would not fly into the mouth.
He kept himself insulated against the movement of flesh,
thirsting for the depth of a woman.
Devil's dung, old nature lover, we
fling off both flesh and the sole
with a desperate lunge for the grave.
Sing, sing, brothers and carry each
in hand a taper to a loom in the light to the July afternoon
at 100 degrees in the garden.
Below the surface of their chanting, I swam, breath
breaking, deep toward heaven, the other way, to wished off
coins in the well, while goldfish rubbed me gently
as a touch of a summer girl pours awake
and throbbing for years to come beyond the size
of that Catholic wishing well, of pennies,
dimes, quarters, halves staring up presidential and huge
in the clear spring-fed waters.
So deep and pumping, lungs held before the horrible vision
as god's eyes scanned the garden and saw
the stations of the cross cut in the agony of each rock
and a boy swimming down heavy beneath the bronze virgin
turning green.
This was the offering in reverse,
to take god's money and his wishes back.
$2.00, old Teufelsdreck. $3.50 for a new pump air gun to shoot
a share of songbirds.
I surface with the holy loot and dripped a trail
through the woods and sat stiff-faced scared by the banks
of the Merrimack, gun and air and birds,
bleeding robins fall, and hand touch the throbbing side
found death and terror there.
Teufelsdreck, absentee landlord, you
stole beside my bed to whisper the wrong prayers those winter
nights when the fluorescent Jesus hid his skeleton
behind my bed board, about death and dogs that never
laugh to imitate the way men kill.
This is the wish that money could not buy.
As I moved onto flesh and a woman's game,
finding the movement within her, and she running blood red
pleading that all the womanhood stoppered,
she laughed at the defense against the suffering
her body would bloom at our beginning, at our end.
And goldfish swam in the corners of her green eyes
turning bronze.
But later, someone else swam upstream
to swell her womb with child.
Children are starving in dark Africa.
Napalm falls over the Orient.
Under the Capitol dome, the sacrosanct speak sacrosanct.
Old lover I just remembered, I did not see goldfish
in the corners of your eyes.
It was a death of death I saw.
Love and feeling died like a cancerous dog.
No dog shall lift his shaggy head in the full light of day
and laugh at the wheel of sun.
Rene Char, callous poet from Jersey,
who believe in the power of beauty to right all wrong,
you said it.
We shall surpass the pitiful dumb beasts
or be humbled by their innocence.
Whose child shall die like a dog in Biafra [INAUDIBLE]
by Chicago?
Somewhat out of life, hung, drying skeletons dance
in a medium of shadow beyond straightforward sight.
We are all rooted in dust, out of time.
In Boston beneath the willows, the swan boats of the common
are entered like hammocks of repose.
The children languidly wave.
We wave.
Up front, tots tilt nicely as if crossing
the still waters of Lethe.
Blind child, I sat to you in the swan boat basket
and tell you to test the water if you
must believe all we tell you.
The captain continues to pump the treadmill as you flounder
five feet off our shore.
This is no mythic swan that takes you across unsure water.
Far off or rumbling in the manger
as the kid kicks in his mother's womb,
the god is loosed in howling past the offertory
and the wine.
Blind girl, you live your asleep in the nave of darkness, waking
hours and eclipse of love for the repository of truth
as tabernacle the mea culpas with a key.
Child, when you shut your ears, your room,
against the harness of this dark,
we will rejoice your closing up as soul and body
die in each other's arms.
If they cannot preach against, we will mourn.
We are the pawns and the gods demise,
dumb animals like army dogs who deliver battle messages
and die, the jaws blown open, intestines hanging.
This is a suit of clothes men wear, the uniform with arms
stripes we are asked to die for, old devil's dung.
On a hill of childhood, a framed log cabin floor large enough
to hide five from the plans of elders against intruders,
a two pound coffee can filled with dog dung, piss,
rotten eggs, set with pride before the August sun.
Each day we sniffed the brew to find our own worst enemy as we
puked our guts on that hill.
And when it grew inhuman, we buried the can
amid ceremony and prayer.
Tonight north of here, atomic bombs blistered the hill
and wait to be discharged by the elders of state who have not
learned to empty their guts of all the hate
to save either the grotto or the world.
Cousin Richard, I write to your memory and fear your soul
is absent tonight.
We are locked in on this planet by the absentee landlord,
idealist with eyes on the stars and your feet in the well.
Teufelsdreck, there was only a fire-eaten valley
the other side of the promised mountain.
Cousin Richard, you studied the military radar
and watched each wormy blip up here
and explode like a heartbeat.
In practice, the misplaced grenade
blew your organs into light.
They searched with cocky pails and put
you back together again, for nothing
could touch your mustering out.
The soldiers fired well-oiled guns at something
I fail to see.
God, did they wound you or your son?
In the flag folded for auntie, does each star
depict a son fragmented by war games in sunny Carolina?
Are 10 per star?
Are 20?
Cousin, your dog tag hangs a shrine in the front parlor.
We return from the grave, high altitude and fast,
moving where no birds dare fly this far inland from Boston.
This is to be a smooth flight.
The captain has promised his best.
Dressed in blue with a golden eagle, he does not pray, too.
He makes you believe this is a Sunday drive with solid ground
beneath.
Then why the fastened belts drifting our ship
toward an old wreckage.
I look through the portal, but can scarcely
see the goldfish, the silver coin, the green eyes.
It is just occurred to me that this planet is to be condemned.
I peer out, but no god stirs.
Teufelsdreck, you laugh the final laugh
and whisper that the oil has been
extinguished in the lantern.
The honest man in the marketplace,
if he ever wrestled in his bones,
lies bleached white in his grave beyond our garden of shadows.
Brother Francis, your serge uniform molded,
your stations of the cross stand like compass points
flickering out one by one.
Forgive me if I fail to swim down
heavy to the font of silver to steal the father's
wealth for murder's sake.
I can almost spy the ground where
dogs bay at the moon to hint that the way up
is the way down.
But this is our winged tomb, pressurized
against the elements, stocked with someone else's
fruits and meat and liquor.
We must fly high and fast beyond ourselves.
We must eat our own flesh, drink our own blood,
and be whole again beyond all eternity and mumbo jumbo.
I want off this side of the bar."