An Ode . . . For Jonathan Williams

An Ode (with Oboe and Smitten Tabor), for Jonathan Williams, Commemorating Our Failure to Locate Jelly Roll Morton’s Grave, Los Angeles, December 1977

“The picturesque is found whenever the ground is uneven”
– Roland Baffhes

1.

Morton

Salt

Pies

More towns

Mahler/tones    / Morton-tones

“Mort, there’s too much jazz.”

Catsup (simon)y

Moo-town (Heifer City)

More (S)ton(es)

No Tro(w)m(ah), mens sana, etc. Nicht Wurms.
No Mort

2.

Your liver slams in its niche:
kin to a spotted ray plummeting
off Santa Monica cove — its
last sting-tail flick
lashing a nude swimmer.

3.

Greasy spots on his cerecloth.
He’s lost all his fat, Babe.
Acids have shredded his broadcloth shorts.
The fat under his arms
is rendered into death-soap (yeah, he lye-eth
there amidst his meat-flake ashes)
sanitizes the stench, combustion worms.
Anal bacteria swim merrily
up sewage canals, for home:
colon, intensive, valve,
brittle-headed, copper pincer-worms.
His tie’s intact:
scat-knotted, liver-spotted,
wound around his vertebrae.

4.

“roll the apple away from the tomb, put an apple in the mouth of stinking J.R. Morton.”
– Lines adapted from Jonathan Williams’ “Emblems for the Little Dells, and Nooks, and Corners of Paradise.”

The apple’s not much of a Southern California fruit.
It won’t suit.
Bring a fig for Jelly Roll, a quince.
Drip guava juice on his eyes,
wet his gonads with kum-quat water.
An apple’s not
a Southern California fruit.

5. Stumbling over Uneven Ground

Jonathan,

Every step through drizzle, at dusk,

Ladled out the wrong stew. A

Lingam

You.

Rancid death-kum shot

Our, furring our tongues, and our watery

Lung

Lobes!

Maybe, metaphorically, we can go to bed with anybody.

Oxmoron churns this soaked pauper cemetery.

Rung bells and a Mormon choir chungs in the
eucalyptus trees.

Tuba Mirum. Dies Irae. Ubi Sunt?

O the forlorn grasses of graves!

Now, Morton’s churned his worms. Is he here? We
were told he was? Where is he?

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne As Agriculturist

1.

My first lesson in agriculture:
I went to see our cows foddered.

We have eight cows,
and the number is increased by a transcendental heifer
belonging to Miss Margaret Fuller.
She is very fractious, I believe,
and is apt to kick over the milk-pail.

I intend to convert myself into a milkmaid.
I shall perform my duty with fear and trembling.

2.

I did not milk the cows last night.

3.

Miss Fuller’s cow
hooks the other cows
and rules the herd.

The original Adam revives within me.

4.

I have milked a cow!

I would send you milk
only
it is mingled
with milk drawn forth
by the rest of the Brethren.

5.

The herd rebels against Miss Fuller’s
heifer, who takes refuge under our protection.

She is not an amiable cow
but has an intelligent face,
of a reflective character.

6.

After breakfast
Mr. Ripley
put a four-pronged instrument
into my hands
which he said
was a pitchfork.

We commenced a gallant attack
upon a pile of manure.

This office being concluded
and I having purified myself
I sit down to finish this letter.

Brook Farm: 1841

Mr. Thoreau

He is as ugly as sin,
long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with
uncouth and somewhat rustic, although
courteous manners. His ugliness,
of an honest and agreeable fashion,
becomes him much better than beauty.

He has repudiated all regular modes
of getting a living, and is inclined
to lead a sort of Indian life
among civilized men — an Indian life, I mean,
as respects the absence of
any systematic effort for a livelihood.

He is familiar with beast, fish, fowl
and reptile, and has tales of friendly passages
with these lower brethren of mortality.

Herb and flower, likewise, are his friends.
He is on intimate terms with the clouds.
He has more than a tincture of literature.

On the whole I find Mr. Thoreau
a healthy and wholesome man to know.

Hawthorne’s Daughter Una

She runs about the room
in her chemise — which does not
come down far enough
to serve as a fig-leaf.

Never were such contortions
and attitudinizings seen —
prostrating herself on all fours
and thrusting up her little bum,
as a spectacle to men and angels
being among the least grotesque.

Both Una and Julian have been the death
of many caterpillars.
But if they loved them less
they would have killed fewer.

The Yellow Bird

Come, come, I said
as it flung its yellow self
against a window.

I urged it towards a door.
But it persisted
flying low across the floor.

It thumped against a glass
and stunned itself.
It flopped against the ceiling.
I chased it reeling

down a hallway. I opened doors.
He sensed the air but flew
against the circular light
above the door, clung
to the casement, clung to
hanging glass lamps
and cried affrighted
as I neared, flapping my handkerchief.

At last he sank
throbbing on the carpet.

I sought to grab him,
but up he flew, low, then through
the door, into the sunshine.

I was ludicrous, standing there.

Yes, a dull pain in my chest,
flutters now,
and moves and flaps
through my heart’s chambers.

Hawthorne And The Chimney Swallows

I am sitting near the window.
A sudden twittering in the fireplace.

Three chimney swallows
have washed down, nest and all,
in the storm. Three young ones
cling against a jamb.
They clamor widemouthed,
short and eager frightened sounds.

I look around.

Our cat has eaten the parents,
feathers and heads on the carpet.

With cotton wool
I arrange a basket,
soak bread in milk
and force their mouths ajar.

I hang the basket out the window.
Two birds fly away.
I feed the weak bird.
He gulps each third piece of bread.
The rest crumbles into the nest.
He shuts his eyes.

I crush his head
between my thumb and forefinger.

Connections: In the English Lake District;  A Suite of Poems for Douglas Oliver

Prelude

It is / the light
that astounds us
that creates the valleys
jewels, the green plush
mountain cataracts and streams,
that transforms bracken
into shades of heather,
as streaming clouds rush
through the dales
and weep, weep
upon these lakes.

Notice

“The best place to be during a thunderstorm is in a large metal or metal-frame building … Flying a kite in a thunderstorm is an invitation to getting electrocuted.”
– National Geographical School Bulletin (May 1, 1967), p. 453.

Storm

We race up the mountain,
huddle against
the green slate-slab fence
as rain
whistles into snow
as lightning
flails brash connections,
thunder disjoints the bones,
synovial fluids fall
into whitish treacle
icing the sheep fields,
soaking thighs and knees
congealing in our shoes.

“What’s here?”
Ducats of sheep’s dung.
“And there?”
Marsh slugs; hornless, black
white and slime and suet.
“And there?”
Seedling firs.
(The high fence
we can’t climb over
protects them).
Shiver and wait.
Separate! A bolt. A flash.

And who would find us here
claws burned to the fencewire,
jaws frozen open
smoked-salmon hued.

Motif

“But is a picture of spring the essential creation, the expressive form itself, or do [Swinburne’s] references to grass and flowers and rain and birdsong serve a different semblance? What is the motif?”
– Susanne K. Langer, in Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures (New York, 1957), p. 158.

Fox Blood

The keepers
lead the hounds to the van,
and urge them in,
the dispirited hounds.

The fox has escaped again,
flicked his heart,
has eluded them —

in the gelatinous dark
panting his eyes as black
as mouse eyes
immediately after
the trap springs
stunning, bulging them.
The hunt rides on.

Diary

Even in inclement weather Wordsworth would compose poems, writing them down on crag faces with scraps of shale. His sister Dorothy, or his wife Mary, followed after, copying them off on to foolscap, or into notebooks. Wordsworth’s attachment to the district, to its hills, rocks, crags, flowers, fishes, leaves and sheep was curiously feminine.
– Author’s journal walking tour (May 6,1967, with Douglas Oliver).

Domestic Scene

Dorothy shells peas
hangs out the washing
gives coins
to beggars at her door
elicits stories
before she permits them more,
suffers headaches; works hard
in the garden in the sun
observes William fishing
wonders what form his new poem will take —
a simple annal of the poor?
or, better, scraps of his past life,
wild strawberries in a bowl,
before windiness crumbles perceptions
into philosophy:

“William stayed behind me.
I threw him the cloak out of the window
The moon overcast.
He came in sleepy and hurried to bed.
I carried him his bread and butter.”

…With Rapture Thrills

These lakes are for the mind.
One leaps towards them
from eminences above them —
Winderemere, Coniston,
Thirlmere, Derwent Water.

Sheep, small urine-colored yaks,
feed, nibble and romp,
spots of anchorage
for the enamored eye.

Adrift
savoring these lakes
one ignores
the daffodils, the fritillaries,
the finches skittering past.
One neglects the churchyard
where great and small lie . . .

the heart leaps up.

Diary

From Dorothy’s entries on the woodgathering excursions of her brother and the servants one concludes that the astonishing neatness of the Lake District, even the remotest reaches, dates from their industriousness.

Above Ullswater

These are the most
unanthropomorphic
mountains,
despite the christenings.
Old Man is not old man to me.
He is slate and granite.
And Skiddaw there, can you
equate him with a face,
or a titan, a broken angel?
Frightened, in a stolen boat
Wordsworth met his conscience here,
in these rocks, an abstract doom, human.

The pathetic fallacy rarely works.
These mountains are sheer grit
congealed, adorned with trees
and rock, eons of rain,
drizzle, patter, patter,
runneling.

Coniston Water

“Coniston Lake a fine mixture of the aweful & the pleasing Simple … it is beyond all the other lakes perfectly intelligible — Conceive a crescent of Hills, or rather a crescent hill, enfolding the first mile of water / this hill of various height & various outline, but no where high / above this hill at the head of the Lake, but chiefly somewhat to the Left of it (as you ascend the lake) high mountains of a remarkable sternness & simplicity, one-colored, as seen at a distance, & darkcolored / its boldest parts are first, the Bell and the Scrow, two black Peaks, perfectly breast-shaped & lying abreast of each other, the whole Bosom of a Brobdignag Negress.”
– Coleridge’s Notebooks, August 1802.

In Memory Of Donald Campbell

Coniston Water: In Memory of the English Speed-Boat Racer Donald Campbell, Who Died There

1.

I had caught
a piece of Donald Campbell’s jaw
in Coniston Water.

The lake, calm, seemed firm enough
for walking upon,
weighted and still.
Skeletal fingers in the silt
had drawn the surface water taut.

But on retrieving it with a stick
I saw that it was part of a ram.
Touched with bracken
mountains rise like camels
about to be broken
over Coniston Water.

The rain is icy,
shoots channels
forming streams and waterfalls.
The lake is cinders fallen.

I imagined the spray
as Bluebird III burst aloft
that January day,
jet engine propelling her away
3000 miles per hour
dropped
over the lake.

And I saw his kodakpicture (’34)
standing with his father
facing Windermere,
fantastic speed dream already there
irritating the gum line
of a forward tooth.
Career. Father to blond son.
Record to be broken.
Son to father.

2.

Now,
citizens declare
that divers found his helmet
with his head intact.
British newsmen joke:
“Can the water, Campbell soup!”
The search goes on,
transpires in smoke.
The press is dumb
silent on skull
jawbone, femur, thumb.

Stunned by the rocketing
fish quiver (the lake is deep)
their throats brush leaves
decaying, turning infinitesimally
to mulch. Fish hover,
may never ascend again,
may never spawn.

That morning
when his helmet clicked shut,
he knew, they say,

that he had struck his fatal hour
(fine trial run), felt
in his spine, the earlier chill
of hearing that his father was dead,
in his own boat.

Is daring suicide?
Is it degree that matters,
swaggering before the skeletons
of others pushing
while doing the same?
To live is to stand with ankles bare
and tendons bare.

The skull guards the brain,
the ribcage the lungs and wheezing heart.

Enter a street,
drop hand to lake water,
cast a stone, collect the mail,
lift fork or knife to mouth,
press tongue to incisor —
rehearse for suicide!

A diamond has its price, its fire.
A witch squeezes a toad to her dug,
begs it suck — as dogs chew
on one another, calves gouge
other calves, and women naturally
abuse their children.

The fact of wanting to live
assumes a desire to die.

O, Campbell,
drifting, wavering
where there are no plants
lice, scum,
where tinted scraps
of Bluebird shake, grate
soundless, roll, turn, and roll . . .
wait, wait.

Dusk

Twilight
s o f t l y
through the elms
concealed shapes of
boulders, rooks in the trees,
as we (seen from the back)
pause to learn
to speak again
from the depths
shot with haze drifting in, bounding stream,
animal scream.

Coda

One is nearly restored here:
“O Beautiful Place!”
all of the clanking
of spoons on tables,
“Dear Mary, William.
The horse is come . . .
so I must give over.”
rattle of exhaust pipe,
civilian air-raid screams
“William is eating his broth.
I must prepare to go.”
Snorts and needlings,
broken thermos bottles.
“The swallows, I must
leave them, the well,
the garden, the roses, all.”
— these and more,
like butter under jam,
appear then disappear.
“Dear Creatures!!”
Bread scraps float on calm water
are siphoned off by swans.

“Well, I must go. Farewell.”