On Buson's Portrait of Basho

Old grinner,
what's under your sky blue cap?
Not haiku!

(Note: Though in this image the cap is not "sky blue", in the original it is.)

Balthus' La Patience

Balthus' La Patience

The drawn curtain and striped wallpaper
are an improbable contrast of commonplaces
while curtain and skirt converse
in the same green fabric
with black and rhyming folds
in a room where the Persian carpet
lies at the same skewed angle as the curtain
and seems to have white socks
when others are present
and thick books lie atop the wastebasket
where they belong
beneath a fancy copper box
hurriedly but not recently inspected
and an unlit taper and skinny deco pillow
point one at the bars of the wallpaper
and the pinned-up curtain
and the other at the girl's smooth sweater
which is orange also
and the closest thing to us
that player of patience
bent entirely too far forward
to be thinking about the game
and not herself as well
which is what patience is all about
in such a room.

The Night Cafe

What's lost? A game of billiards: a ball
struck a ball, two rails, and another ball kissed,
then money changed hands. The loser stares
at the chalk-smeared bed where his future sleeps.

Two men rub their ears, hunched beneath vague hats;
elbows banging the table, they wait for booze.
A man with a glass weeps, seated near lovers;
when his rum is served the murdering will begin.

Green, red, and yellow-odor, texture, light
we encounter every day; but what are these
walls painted blood, floor and ceiling tinctured bile?
Let's all go mad sniffing the glow of gas lamps.

The Scream

I

Such a twilight
has no history,
nor would this nobody
rigid in the clutch
of his own two hands
in front of a sky
no longer his sky.
Two men walking away
are too nonchalant
to have seen his face
and stopped; therefore,
it must have looked
different than now.
Did he see fear
in their faces
or the fear
they saw in his?
The bridge rail
and the black river
connect all three
like testimony
and conspire
to convince them.

II

A red dusk
is sunlit pollution,
so it is not sick
churning colors
and nauseous chaos
of sand and sky
writhing in the same
two dimensions
that move,
because these
are all too real.
Not like that mouth,
that woeful oval.
As the vanishing point
is absent
from the painting,
from that mouth
no word flies,
nor any sound at all.

The Undone Thing

My body's naked decay
illuminates a room of mirrors,

themselves reflections, years
compressed into a backward look.

That was flat bone, that, my eye,
that, hard skin, sharp spine.

As number shapes itself,
a man gradually freezes

into the markless prism
of each day: One. Attention!

Two. Prayer! Three. Reach out!
Thus, the count approximates me.

The caliper and the scale
exact a shade of difference

between mole and carcinoma-
sensations bought and sold:

a faceless, Ernstian torso,
odalisque sans ottoman,

beckons like blue oblivion;
afloat in a dusty tearpool

with feathers, stone, and pigment
peeled from unsized canvas,

she is the life of reclining truth,
with plump breasts pointing up.

The seductions of flounder
stall when fins touch glass;

untentacled jellyfish loom
out of the clouds of sand

the moment our quotidian fate,
the miracle of food, descends.

Rodin's Beaudelaire

In the late 80's, I visited the wonderful I. M. Pei-designed museum of art at Indiana University in Bloomington and wrote this poem a few days later.



Rodin's Baudelaire

The walls are bone white,
corners obtuse angles
leading the curious visitor
from the heart of the room.

Depicted atrocities hang
by wires on golden hooks.
A noseless black face
dreams its perfect teeth.

Metal faces bent
to bulge bone and eye
exaggerate anatomy
to misshape outworn words.

From the ceiling, red
thread-wound slinkies
suspend, sprung by a man's
time spent winding.

Naked plaster Venus
starts from her washstand
confusing me for a puzzled
god in her angled mirror.

Rubber-tube-pierced
acrylic globes float
in blood-flecked oil
slowly filling each tube.

A mounted knight droops
in despair counseled
by a thick-lipped goat
skittering on the butt of his lance.

Numbers and dismembered
limbs flung across
a rectangular blank answers
faith with intimation.

At the center of all this,
the upturned face of a man
seen, from the right side,
earnestly seeking

what he hasn't made up
his mind about already,
upper lip a smooth
half-smile of vision,

from the left side, a sinner's
mask, dimpled where
two lips meet
tenderly in half-kiss,

then, face on, its
conflicts less resolved
than invisible, its mouth
a poem of pursed silence.

Thus confronted, I
place cold hands
upon that cold upturned
seeker's ghost made

black metal, my
thumbs on its pitted irises,
fingers in its ears, press
our foreheads together.

You, Rodin, read
the gallery thoughts of one
who is also the imprint
of thumbs in clay warm

with vigorous kneading; is
this the last exhaustion,
chapel of tortured beauty
prefiguring death?

I look, the guard
still gone, rap
the skull with my knuckles.
Rap again that ringing.

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

Most of us have read or been obliged to read, by a high school English teacher or college professor, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Many have read the indelible story collection Dubliners. Hardly any of us have got past the first few chapters of Ulysses, let alone the entire book (even if it was crowned No. 1 in Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best Novels back in 2003). But who among us has the intellectual fortitude (or masochistic compulsion) to get through all 628 pages of Joyce’s nearly impenetrable, nay, opaque final work, Finnegans Wake?

Don’t worry, I have no intention of suggesting you read a book I’ve never read myself, but there is a case to be made for everyone reading just the first chapter (the first 29 pages) of this work of fiction like no other.

I won’t try to tell you what it’s about because I couldn’t. I’ll let the scholars synopsize the unsynopsizable. The “story” seems utterly beside the point, at least to me. Finnegans Wake is an attempt to replicate dream in the form of language. To squeeze between two covers every trick, technique, and figure of speech in the English language — synecdoche, euphemism, metonymy, synesthesia, and the pun (especially!) to name only a few — into the creation of a linguistic equivalent of the hypnagogic state we all drift through on the verge of sleep. The portmanteau word is the coin of its realm, and the double (triple, quadruple, sextuple!) entendre is what it purchases for the reader. For example:

He addle liddle phifie Annie ugged the little craythur. Wither hayre in honds tuck up your part inher. Oftwhile balbulous, mithre ahead, with goodly trowel in grasp and ivoroiled overalls which he habitacularly fondseed, like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth he would caligulate by multiplicables the altitude and malltitude until he seesaw by neatlight of the liquor wheretwin ‘twas born, his roundhead staple of other days to rise in undress maisonry upstanded (joygrantit!), a waalworth of a skyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly, erigenating from next to nothing and celescalating the himals and all, heirarchitectitiptitoploftical, with a burning bush abob off its baubletop and with larrons o’toolers clittering up and tumbles a’buckets clottering down.

Over the years I’ve read this passage dozens of times and still have only a vague notion of what it’s “about,” but it never fails to make me smile (in no small part because of its bawdy nature, I confess). Or this:

What then agentlike brought about that tragoady thundersday this municipal sin business? Our cubehouse still rocks as earwitness to the thunder of his arafatas but we hear also through successive ages that shabby choruysh of unkalified muzzlenimiissilehims that would blackguardise the whitestone ever hurtleturtled out of heaven. Stay us wherefore in our search for tighteousness, O Sustainer, what time we rise and when we take up to toothmick and before we lump down upown our leatherbed and in the night at the fading of the stars! For a nod to the nabir is better than wink to the wabsanti.

Wink, indeed. (If you have small children, try to get them to say “muzzlenimissilehims” or “heirarchitectitiptitoploftical” from the first example. My grown daughters still remember them!)

Probably the most descriptive word for this language is “poetry.” It’s certainly closer to poetry than prose, and its pleasures are more in the language than any narrative we could chisel out from beneath the words. And, here, I go out on a limb. It seems to me that the poetry in the first chapter is more compelling than in later chapters (at least those I’ve read), except perhaps for the famous (relatively) Anna Livia Plurabelle section. Here are a few lines quoted at random from later in the book:

But now, talking of hayastdanars and wolkingology and how our seaborn isle came into exestuance, (the explutor, his three adesiters and the two pantellarias) that reminds me about the manausteriums of the poor Marcus of Lyons and poor Johnny, the patrician, and what do you think of the four of us and there they were now, listening right enough, the four saltwater widowers, and all they could remembore, long long ago in the olden times Momonian, throw darker hour sorrows, the princest day, when Fair Gargrate waited Swede Villem, and Lally in the rain, with the plank prints, now extincts, after the wreak of Wormans’ Noe, the barmaisigheds, when my heart knew no care,…

Maybe it’s just me, but where the first two passages seem prism-like, the latter just seems cloudy — Joyce muttering to himself. I offer the comparison simply as further rationale (my own and only mine, for sure) why it’s okay to read just the first chapter, instead of the whole book.

While just a little of Finnegans Wake goes a long way, you shouldn’t deprive yourself of the experience. Because that’s what it is, an experience sui generis.



Other recommended works: Stephen Hero (an early draft of the Portrait), Exiles (a play), and "The Dead" (the long concluding story in Dubliners).