Amidst Mirrors

Magwar and other stories

2010-10-27T16:52:00.007-04:00

Part one

Have you heard the story of Magwar?
I think his name is pronounced like Jaguar,
two syllables, but I digress,
and besides I never was one to pronounce
names correctly.

Magwar one day was watching TV
such is his lack to do,
and he saw on 60 minutes or FOX news
a special about Harvard, how it was
the best school, and this intrigued Magwar
so much so that he decided he would apply
to study there as an undergraduate.

Now the key to this entire story is to know
one simple thing about Magwar:
he is an idiot. You can also make her
a woman, the gender isn't important,
but his un-redeemable idiocy is,
and what's more, Magwar didn't know,
nor could ever understand his predicament.

As you, along with me, will imagine,
his application to Harvard was a mess.
The SAT and ACT scores alone would
of qualified Magwar for state-sponsored
sterilization; they were incredulously low,
lower than 400 (he must of misspelled his name),
and his essay, oh his essay, that brought
chuckles to the selection committee.
One fellow even brought it to an open mic
and read it aloud, not one in the crowd
could catch their breath from all the hooting
and howling that was had.

Well, obviously, Magwar's application
was on its way to the ignominious rejection pile,
as insulting as that may be to the other losers,
when another fellow, she had been among
the red-faced and the slightly buzzed
that prior and infamous evening,
mentioned what a gas it was,
how everyone there enjoyed themselves immensely,
and this caused a bit of a stir
and demands for another impromptu performance
and that's when something astonishing, even magical
happened in the committee lounge
among the haze of cigar smoke and afternoon cognac:
the genuine pleasure of humor.

After wiping away the tears the committee hatched
a plan worthy of Magwar's ingenious application.
Let us accept him, we will give him full honors,
place him among the best and the brightest
the world has to offer. Logistically,
this was a nightmare, and worthy
of a Nobel in economics
or complex system dynamics, I don't know,
because for this to work they had to get everyone
at Harvard in on the Joke. There was some hand-wringing,
and a little soul searching while on the loo for the Dean
considering the possible cruelty, but it was argued
this could only be for Magwar's benefit
and would help foster a sense of community
among the disparate freshmen while providing
everyone with a little relief that they weren't,
couldn't possibly be, the worst student at Harvard.

Magwar was given a full load, the psycho-
linguistics of Chaucer's middle English,
differential geometry of N-dimensional manifolds,
Ancient Greek chorus translation and performance,
post-Heideggerian discourse using modal logic,
theoretical Physics: a survey toward unified theory,
along with being steered toward the proper
extracurricular activities such as polity, journalism
at the Harvard Crimson, and an avant-garde
musical collaboration (invitation only),
careful to avoid keening Magwar's interest
in any sort of athletic excellence
worried that even the densest dunce
would manifestly acknowledge physical ineptitude.

In each of these pursuits Magwar gave
a stellar performance, far better than predicted,
far better professors thought than any fool
created by Shakespeare could of done,
such was the amount of levity, comedic gold,
sheer joy brought about by Magwar's
inglorious ability. Oh my heart aches
over the delectable ruminations.
The only difficulty during those heady years
were for those fortunate enough to witness
first-hand the occasional performance
or presentation of Magwar,
be it the live interview in the Starr auditorium,
“tell me Madam President, you look so beautiful [sic]?”
or when he took command of the Prof. M's blackboard
to demonstrate his two minute proof that NP=P,
it took all of one's might not to break out
with thunderous cackles during these momentous occasions.
And it is impossible to comprehend much less convey
the perfection, nay the Shantih, of Magwar's
Xanthias (in the original Greek), it took
one luscious coed to the hospital for asphyxiation
after hyperventilating, “the spiritual orgasm”
she said, afterwards, “Mary's divine insemination”,
an orgy of the Trinity, you get
but the shadow's shadow of the idea.

It was with increasing sadness and despair
that Magwar sailed, Captain-like, through his fourth year,
with many at a loss of how they could ever
go on living after Magwar's graduation
and departure. It was with one momentous
announcement right before Christmas break
when Magwar declared his intention
to continue his education
with graduate study in theoretical physics
(by far the greatest of his loves, and,
arguably, the muse of his greatest gifts,
ancient Greek theater notwithstanding)
that Harvard breathed a collective sigh
of relief, “why a PHD would take him 5 years!”,
“No, no, nothing less than 10 would be proper!”,
“Why stop there, he could lecture until the day
he dies!”, and so on ran the general discussions
among the students, faculty, and administration.

Yet one difficulty remained, for the premise
to continue, for Magwar to be
an outstanding, extraordinary, insurmountable
graduate student, he would have to be published widely,
and be invited to lecture far and wide,
which would require not just Harvard's involvement
but Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, etc,
which was nearly enough
to convince Harvard to give up
such a delightful dream-
what use is an inside joke
if everyone's in on it?
Besides, the inevitable Harvard
amour-propre was siring many doubtful
broodlings of the “they won't get it” variety,
along with many contrarian siblings;
however the eldest and strongest of these
little monsters is always the golden-child
optimism, better known as the can-do
can-doer, and
after exhibiting one youtube video
of Magwar's Xanthias with
the hyperventilating coed
the entire academic world was sold.

Work in Progress

2010-09-28T02:37:00.000-04:00

Sing Muse or I shall bleed

you dry, chained to a Brooklyn radiator

for the month of August.

It's hot here in a coffin

that's slightly burnt of which

we speculated was used,

mistakenly of course,

for cremation

(taken out soon enough to be reclaimed

for resale at a cheap steal),

but it's hot in a wooden box

and being drunk isn't helping me

sleep--I'm only more lonely;

we assumed, I think unspoken,

that they buried the body.

Get up, I'm drunk, get up

or it's time to vomit on the floor,

but get out and make it to the bathroom door.

Careful the roof overhead, the planks

of resting lumber, the theater garb,

and the found drywall all resting

on the mezzanine;

careful down stairs that could be called

a ladder, to their living room refuge

of junked sofas, carpets, reffuse, etc;

careful lumbering, that drunken gait

which feels a step behind my mind

(perhaps this is when we're carried

by angels);

careful not to vomit since I'm almost there

and I have had to swallow it before;

careful not to look but I see it

on the kitchen island

where something that is between me and it

squeezes my stomach, like a nearly empty

toothpaste tube, up to my throat

then lets go;

and careful sanctuary

over the toilet bowl:

I breathe slow, clumsy breaths.

“I'm sorry, but this writing sucks – this isn't how you actually think through the world is it?”

“At least in reflection it seems to run this way”

“And on line 25 you misspelled the word refuse”

“I know, but I wanted a more phonetic sound,

and I didn't want it to look the sound of re-fuse”

“I see.

Ok, I understand, but grammatically this is a list of nouns,

how could someone possibly imagine you're throwing in a verb?”

“But I'm not.”

“I know, that is the point I'm trying to make.”

“Isn't it interesting, refuse: re-fuse, ref-fuse, re-fuse(fuse together) and of course fuse explodes

into another litany of meanings.”

“God damn-it Rex this has nothing to do with anything!”

Leroy puts down the sheet of paper

and gives me a thick look of disgust

or pity from across the coffeeshop-table

with his baggy eyes.

We've grown sick of each other

as we've grown before

and repeated before and again,

but inbetween these spurts of spats

an affinity for something more,

that none of us seem to have,

keeps our company through these regularities

and it isn't that difficult—

indeed, this could be us flowing with the path of least resistance—

to love our philos.

“Arbitrariness is not an intention.”

“Why not? Can't I intend not to intend?”

“But you do and you don't,

and who can call it art if you have a system of line breaks

which you break repeatedly?

This is more simply called laziness.”

“Better laziness than artifice.”

“Whatever dude.”

“Perhaps there is a system by which these line breaks follow,

indeed it is a logical and mathematical certainly that some function,

or some transcendental number matches perfectly, perfectly,

isomorphicly it describes where each line break goes

will go, and I need not know it—perhaps I cannot—but

I am expressing it just as a computer

continues to circumscribe pi.”

“Now that is just sophistry. Bones dressed with fat. Where's the flesh beneath the skin?”

Now there's a moment here

difficult to describe

where a divergence of action

and thought occurs

simultaneously in the present-past, past-present

when in one, some sort of witty retort was made

(e.g.“we wear clothes to protect ourselves”)

which only upset matters further,

and in the other, a blankness of thought

when I wonder who said what,

and why (if it matters),

and more than the what or the why

is staring, like a horror-stricken mime,

at the pretension of a line.

“I can't keep doing this Rex: I am tired, it is 6am,

I have work in the morning, and we aren't accomplishing

anything by staying here.”

You're not looking at me when you say this,

or, more closely, I am guessing this

because I've stopped looking back,

to instead let my ear take in

your sound – the last vantage

unto the mood,

which let us in on the secret

that you're about to go home

any minute now.

We stare, somewhat empty-headed

and tired of course, at one another,

and it is the being-in of these silences

that I remember long after with pleasure.

Sometimes, and we could call it a moment of weakness,

I play with the serious make-believe

that I am all of you, you all me,

variations on the same theme

all played in the mind

of a Humean skeptic

and I suspect

the way out

is by faith

that this isn't true

like Indiana crossing an invisible bridge.

you know what I mean don't you?

I do.

“Let's have a cigarette.”

Outside, when it's the coldest

and the city is the most asleep

it can be with only its restless bowels

sweeping its gutters, clearing bags of garbage

from its sidewalks, I shudder between drags

in the false dawn and you stand, cross-legged,

speaking, as you do, loquaciously,

and we part, as usual, amiably.

Maybe we write what we miss most of all

(another allegory of the fall),

and you can miss what isn't true,

indeed, miss it more than anything real,

and when it seems that Hell is an easier creation than Heaven

it suggests one is likelier than the other.

Of course, to continue arguing with myself,

life, consciousness, otherness, what have you,

is a miracle, but one more credulous

than the alternative,

yet such a solution lingers,

as a bad taste would on the mind's palate,

with the afterthought that one answer

or other is one or another delusion

and it is more a question of which ones we share,

like which category: the living or the dead.

But the problem with skeptics is

they can never use the word is.

And failing to enact what is right is more the tragedy

than enacting what is wrong.

If perfect is the enemy of the good

then bad is an ally of the worst.

Certain questions don't have answers because they are bad questions.

And as exhaustion begins to cull my mind

and tie me down, metaphor

feels more to be

a metaballo

(to rhyme with hollow),

and I humor myself with the joking thought that

way back when

the first of us stood up and spoke

it was of how shameful we looked.

Invitation for a Journey

2010-06-22T23:14:00.000-04:00

Invitation for a Journey

For Annie

My child, my sister

think of the sweetness

of us residing out there

to love in leisure

to love … to die

inside the country that's you.

Where sunsets glisten

in nebulous skies

there my life is mesmerized—

how mysterious

your teacherous eyes

how through their tears they glitter.

Here: all is but order and beauty,

luxury, rest, and fatness.

Lustered furniture

polished by decades

would decorate our chateau,

exotic flowers

commingling

in ghostly scent of amber,

our ceilings vaulted,

our mirrors cavernous,

our great Western decadence,

all of this would speak

in ciphers of our love

in her warm and native tongue.

Here: all is but order and beauty,

luxury, rest, and fatness.

Look beyond the shore

cargoships which sleep

with daydreams of wandering

all to satiate

your slightest whim

they come from the furthest ends.

The sun is setting,

draping your valleys

your rivers, your whole city

hyacinth and gold,

and soon to slumber

tucks us under a warm gloam.

Here: all is but order and beauty,

luxury, rest, and fatness.

--Translation of L'invitation au Voyage by Baudelaire

2010-03-12T14:45:00.000-05:00

Visit

I went to see her,
she was living in Sicily
(if it can be called living).

She would wake up in the late afternoon

and reach for the empty bottle.

“Iacio!” Broken glass filled
her sandstone portico
(every morning I swept her shards).

“Water”, “Aqua”, “Voda”, “Mizu”, “Uisge”,
I learned many words for the stuff
she would chug a litter of
then spew up half.

Down steps of rusted iron, hand rails cut from the cliff,
down to see the sun goodbye
and bathe wrinkled skin in Mediterranean sea.
Gurgle, brush with brine.

On the warm evenings she would stay
near the firepit and slowly smoke,
smokes spiced with cloves, weed, other things;
whispering with the fire,
“Agni enfuego” (priest and martyr).
she loved smelling garlic burning
but ate it raw.

Otherwise, a towel and hot bath
followed by curry cabbage soup,
or black rice with lentils,
or the vegetarian fare of the season.
Profane meat was eaten
under-cooked every lunar month,
a practice she knew was habit
but the repetition of slaughter
reminded her of slaughter.

I'm not, nor wasn't, a wide-eyed
acolyte, it was the second glass
of chianti that brought me there,
“Youth is a beast of fain oaths”,
“The Gods live alone”, it would go on
these phrases, her Sibyl sayings.

What is this old croon?
She refused to speak to me.

At night, where she lived,
there were no mirrors in the house.

She never said she was bored,
I sometimes was, but I am often bored,
(boring I'm told), it would bother me more
but I like it, like a guilty prisoner
serving penance.

She wasn't famous, not anymore,
she had been successful, had wealth to waste,
from translating the Latins, the Greeks,
she rarely spoke of the Greeks,
called them superficial
but I didn't believe her,
nor did I argue,
I don't think she believed herself.
It is the way of words, saying them,
like trying on outfits, finding if they suit you,
you or the occasion or anyone who's there
to notice.

“Piazza, ice cream.”
She meant chocolate
from Modica. Under pentice
I would smoke while it drizzled
deciding if I could leave
or if I could return to her.

Every night she threw out the contents
of the fridge it was my task to restock
like the invisible servant of Psyche
(Where was Apollo? Divorced, living alone
watching reality TV and reading cereal boxes.
I heard he never leaves his crumbling
Upper East Side penthouse, a delivery boy
brings him the list he leaves once a week).

Yeah, lonely people, forgotten Gods,
dismissed, derided, they didn't care
that was the trick, it sounds simple
and it's like my boredom, I don't care
If I'm bored or boring:
meaning, matter, significance
like pants which fall down without a belt
we make them fit.

She loved the beauty of sound
above all. It was sense, sense
before meaning, when done well
artfully, god like, translating
had broken her, bruised her heart
whimpered the brain, tossed the spirit
in the garbage can. She believed
this deeply but the world goes by
and she didn't care, so she said,
but really, can anyone say this
and have it fit without a belt?
I thought she could when I found her
living in the dark, demanding the trivial, and laughing
and crying and laughing at the bottom
of wine bottles, espresso cups,
mason jars of whiskey, empty boxes
for gloves, of grinders,
laughing at the empty bottom of it all,
she cared more than most.

An Alcoholic Albatross

2010-02-19T15:25:00.000-05:00

Me? What a waste of time I turned out
to be, lazy, I troll for drinks, you'll
buy me one won't you of course?

Yeah? For your troubles I'll tell ya a story
but don't worry this isn't a cautionary tale,
just anecdotes to whittle off the time.

There were many great, great parties
like at the Kevorkian, 17th-&-10th-ave,
we'd drink till sunrise seeking the last man
standing. One night after splitting a bottle
of Jack three ways, we knew the bartender,
if you're serious you gotta know the bartender,
but after the Jack, Damien, a queer hooligan,
was suggesting we quote famous lines of dead
poetry, if the two of us don't know who said it,
we drink, if we do, Damien drinks.
Stella is all for it but it's gotta be
tequila, and don't let the lady name
fool ya, she was a tough bitch,
twice the drinker I ever was,
mean too, I don't know how many times she got
her hands stained on another yahoo's blood.

Well, to be democratic, we rolled a die
to see who goes first, dice
are an inexpendable necessity to have on hand,
and Stella, who was first to go, gives us
something about a slanted ray of light,
Emily Dickinson it turns out.

What bullshit, that first shot burned like shitting
in a Mexican prison and then I'm up, and they kept shouting
at me to hurry up already or take another,
mocking mocking mocking, I gave 'em an old bird-cat routine,
but Damien right off yells Bukowski and I demanded
a lime to get the second one down, and as I'm gasping
for breath something Spanish or Italian or French came pouring
out of Damien's oversized maw. Stella guessed Baudelaire,
but I looked at him straight into his gut, trying to stand still,
Rilke! No, T.S. Eliot, you believe it, that bastard wrote
entire poems in French and here Damien trots
it out like a prize-winning show-pony,
but I accepted my shot without thinking, and decided
it was time
for a break

to piss and smoke.

Outside, I still remember this clearly,
the rain had gone from drizzle to mist,
and all the other drunkards were out
clumsily rolling down the streets,
like pinballs scarred to knock anything too hard,
when one smelly bastard, swooning, grabbed hold
of me like I was his life jacket on the high seas.
I pulled him up, and as we're swaying a bit
he looked at me, I looked at him, and he kissed me,
a buoy smacking itself with its rusted bell.
Fuck him, I wanted to fall down a hole
and drown in my own crap.

When I had gotten back it had surely turned
into a shitstorm, those two had a private round and
she's arguing that he's gotta know the sonnet number,
since Shakespeare wrote so many god damn words,
but he tells her she wouldn't know it even if he did tell her
which got her wet 'n angry, funny it took a fag to get her horny.

After much shouting and a little shoving, good foreplay in my book,
they agree to each write the number down and check the net real quick.

I never seen her sorer, like she's been through anal,
but her 53 wasn't his 73, and those birds don't keep singing,
although I tell ya, I hear songbirds in Winter all the time.

We reroll and Damien's back up, Stella tells him English only,
and he just smiles with his sinister snake-lips, and goes
on and on - till we shout him down - about how we're eating whale
and that, if you believe it, was some Chinaman, writing in English.
I still remember (and not much else) the yellow filth of that shot going
down, ugh.

Oh
I tell ya, I must of vomited out my heart that night.

An early Spring from a late Fall

2010-02-18T12:41:00.002-05:00

Bread crumbs on moistened fingertip
she licks the salty earth (to taste).

The seasoned snow will continue to fall
and soften corners wishing for silence.

and since Dawn's arrival her warmth
is warm, as fashions thus are worn.

Forget in expurgated surfaces,
renew dead chicken-manured flowerbeds,
await the coming on of ovulums.

Despite the nipping cold, outside
our homes the moon hides then blazes
for those who chance a weirder game
of reading ampersands as lore.

I never made-believe the unreal world -
such stuffs were sprung from earliest concords
and still-standing writwords - you ever see
the same clear-water glades or modern turf,
but diff'rence speaks with thoughtless tones and heat.

Out of Habit

2010-02-12T18:01:00.015-05:00

   They tie down his arms
and legs and one, with knees pressing
on his chest, grips a handspan below
his elbow and steadies the pinion
a thumbs length from his wrist
and the other stands, eyes fixed,
and in one goodly strike
   pierces the wood
as you would
   a railroad tie.

I Sit in an Empty Orphanage

2010-02-12T17:57:00.000-05:00

We used to laugh all together
and Betsy would feedst us
porridge, oatmeal, and vegetable stews,
but then people came and took away our fun;
mostly the girls were first
to go away,
then the boys best at tag and ball,
last Bobby left, quiet and smart,
and only Betsy stayed and kept my company,
but less often (she had other places to be).
She once said if it weren’t for my eyes
I could of left too,
but that’s okay: I like it here –
the rooms are big and mysterious
with their silences and everything goes
as slow as the sunlight.
With all the old laughter gone unheard
just me at the supper table
over an empty bowl, smyling.

I've been trying to imagine Penelope's tapestry for years

2010-02-12T17:32:00.001-05:00

I've been trying to imagine Penelope's tapestry for years

wondering what she was weaving only to disassemble

if it was the same or different each time

if the threads became frayed and worn

after years on the loom.

I wonder if it will take me as many years to imagine

as it took her to finish.

What scene is depicted, always thinking in images,

a friend suggested it is geometric, a self-same pattern,

a fractal, to look the same at any size,

an elegant description that explains the suitors ignorance

coming from a mathematician

but, I think those men didn't notice because they didn't care

and that she worked with her form in mind,

using the chance to rub specks of thread together

until she wasn't forced to draw her image in lines

but was free, with only points to guide her hands,

to create.

I doubt it ever was really meant

to be a burial shroud, it is much too large

and the material is thick and coarse,

made from canvas instead of silk,

that she knew exactly how she wanted it seen --

billowing above the deck, attached to a seasoned mast,

shimmering along with the seas and boundless skies.