Closing in

I fear she sees herself
like a spider plant, or a cat,
I would have around for company,
But requiring the least of my attention.
Something warm to do cross words next too.
Someone to read with, seperate books
(Same room) but doesn't realize as I do, 
That this is in fact quality time,
And not just any warm body will suffice?
Or will it, eventually?
After time enough has past?
And novel eccentricities 
Plod inexorably toward
Mundane annoyances,
The piling on of grievances,
Have you been ignored?
Have I ignored you?
How ignoble of me,
To have done such an errant thing
When we could have been doing something else
To pass the time before we die,
Something equally meaningful;
Something equally meaningless.

5 Poems by Gary Snyder

One of my absolute favorites.

The Bus

Here's the first couple of pages of a story I'm working on:

There was a school bus in the woods. If you wanted to go there, you had to cross the wooden bridge at the end of the dead end street, over the canal that ran into the Delaware, and then stay to your left, walk up the ridge, which is what we called it. It ran between the land on the left that belonged to the high school, mostly, and on the right, a couple of houses and then a farm.

When you reached the curve in the ridge where the houses turned into the farm and the field that belonged to the school turned into just woods that belonged to someone (the farm, maybe, or the state), there was a break in the grass and brush, and if you turned into it, to the left, you walked down a path, and across the creek, which was usually dry enough to walk through, mostly. If it wasn't, there were stones to step carefully across, except for one summer when it was nearly waist high, and we went swimming in it. We called it our swimming hole except that it was just a tiny little space where the water was deeper and wider than usual, and probably full of run off from the farm. But we didn't think about that then.

Once you were across the brook, it was only a couple hundred feet to where the forest started, and the trail was as wide going into the forest as it was leaving the ridge, this fifteen foot swatch carved into the side of the mountain, gently sloping up, with electrical wires strung from posts in the middle, and space on either side for walking.

It wasn't far; you walked fifty, maybe a hundred feet up the gentle slope that in the catskills passes for a mountain, and looking through the trees to the right, the birches and white pines, the hemlocks--a clearing, surrounded perfectly by trees, you see the bus.

I remember the first time, I was with my parents on the hike. We saw the yellow streak of the bus in the clearing, the forest light full of motes and mites and pollen and whatever else streaming down through the trees, and with the sort of surreal combination of uncanny and quiet it might have been mistaken for fairy dust once upon a time. We broke the ring of trees and walked toward it, stepping over stumps and leaf rot, stepped around a fire pit, surrounded by large flat rocks that had been dragged there for sitting, over crushed bottles of whatever cheap beer was in vogue at the time, Bush probably, and at the far end, down the slope of the mountain, perpendicular to the ascending line it sat there.

There were no windows, anymore. Not by the time we got there, and no telling how long it had sat like that. The front of the bus was untouched, the yellow hood down, the engine presumably safe inside, rusted maybe, but otherwise undisturbed. The back doors, however had been torn out, wrenched away in fits of drunken reverie, party after party until finally they broke free, and were thrown down the mountain side, tumbling and crashing through the brush, coming to rest against a fallen trees.

No seats, either, except for the driver's. The rest had been taken out, one by one. Two of them stayed in the circle, and the rest were carried back down the trail, over the ridge and found new homes in basements where the foam filled cracked plastic absorbed the smell of stale beer and cigarettes and pot smoke year after year. I knew this because later I saw one, in my friend Ryan's basement. We were the same age, but he had an older brother Chris in the army and a Captain or something, 36. Chris had been part of the first group at the bus--probably led the rescue efforts, kept the best seat for himself, and when we were teenagers we would sit in that basement and add to the layers of beer and smoke every weekend and some weeknights.

That first time with my parents I was eight, maybe nine. My brother was seven. The dog was with us and my parents let her up into the back of the bus, sniffing around. I remember thinking she would find a body in there, near the driver's seat, or a body part, or something. I don't know how long we stayed, but it was creepy and even though I didn't say anything, my parents must have guessed because quickly they whistled for the dog to come back and she did, with nothing in her mouth, no severed hand or foot, and they put her back on the leash and we walked up the mountain, took one of the trails around, and came out near the highschool and walked back home to Elm street.

In the bed room we shared, there were two twin beds on opposite sides of the room, with two tables for lamps and two windows, and between the two windows, a dresser, and above the dresser a five point buck that had come with the house. We'd lived there since we were four, when my father decided he needed to get out of the city and how we ended up in Deposit, NY has always been a mystery to me, but he got offered a job as the head of the English Department at the high school and he took it and there we were. We were surrounded by hunters and fishers and truck drivers, but my father didn't do any of that except sometimes we would drive to the lake and on the way we would pick up a tub of night-crawlers from the bait and tackle shop and cast our little hook the squirmy brown things and cast off into the brown water and come home with a cooler full of sun fish that we'd gut and fry with butter.

My brother and I were terrified of that deer head. Maybe if we'd grown up there, really, or maybe if Dad knew the first thing about hunting or shooting a gun it would have been different, but every night we went to bed terrified that it would come down off that wall and take it's revenge for getting put up there in the first place, and it wouldn't matter that we hadn't put it there because it was a deer and it would just go for the easiest people it could find, which would be me and my brother, sleeping below him.

We made a pact never to leave the room with out backs to the deer, and it was always best if we could leave together. So we would wrap ourselves in blankets to look like high priests, and back out through the doorway together, nodding our heads and bowing at the waist, and with our hands held prostrate in front of us, we would say, "ahso, ahso, ahso," three times, and that would placate the Buck for the day and let us sleep in peace one more night.

After the bus, we started to associate the deer with the bus and it was even worse, and we kept going on hikes with Mom and Dad and the dog, but we wouldn't go anywhere near that bus. I think we figured that somehow the deer had been hit by the bus and gotten it stuck there somehow and the driver left the bus and took the deer and stuck its head up on the wall like some sort of voodoo protection that it would never happen again. So we kept backing out of the room, bowing and muttering, until we were probably a little too old to do it, until a year or two after we should have known better, but before we were ever old enough to get invited to one of the yellow bus parties.

Thoughts and requests

The little thing at the top of the page says, "poem a week at least," and that was my intention anyway, but I've managed to be disciplined enough to write nearly every day and post almost as frequently. Mostly rough drafts, and then edits, keeping the first draft in the comment section to track my progress.

My manuscript is in a form where I'm finally just editing it, deciding which of my "darlings" to kill, as a friend once put it. I think about Sylvia Plath and the revolving collection she carried around for years, her albatross, finally published as Collosus after countless additions and subtractions and dozens of names.

I'm trying to decide what to do with myself. Amidst a flood of conflicting information about what it means to be a writer these days, with print in its death throes, and MFA programs spitting out graduates and who go on to create yet more MFA programs...

I'm ambivalent about so much, but I want this venue to be my workshop, and that's the request:
comment. follow. criticize. be brutal. scathe me.

I can take it, and learn and edit, and grow.

Maybe there's room for at least one writer to make it outside the program.  I refuse to be a hobbyist.

Thanksgiving

Sometimes, at night, I put on a bandanna, to keep the hair out of my eyes. It's getting long in the front, and I think I look like Justin Beiber. It gets in my tea when I'm drinking it, and hangs in front of me when I'm eating cereal, so little flecks of milk get into the tips of my bangs. Once, at a concert, the music was too loud, and I didn't have any ear plugs, so I chewed a stick of gum until the flavor went out of it, and split it in half, formed two little balls of gum, stuck them in my ears to keep them from ringing the next morning. But my hair stuck to the gum, and I kept picking at it, wishing it would go away and wondering if anyone could tell it was there, and so I took the gum out and stuck it under the seat at the theater, and figured a little tinnitus was better then a lot of gum in my hair.

I could wear a hat, but I think the bandanna makes me look like David Foster Wallace, and I like that about it. My girlfriend doesn't know who he is, but that's ok--she's a scientist, and I'm an artist, and we keep each grounded. She reigns me in when I tend towards the solipsism that Wallace had warned of, and I try to get her to let go a little bit when she gets scared about what's going to happen after grad school.

That's about as ironic as the bandanna, and any comparison to DFW, because fuck if I know what I'm going to do with my life, and I'm terrified all the time.

Most of us are. We sat in my girlfriend's parent's living room and smoked and talked about our lives and what we were doing with them, and the machine that we were feeding, with little bits of our soul, day after day, so that people with money we can't even begin to fathom can accesorize their toddler's bathroom with brass knobs and silver trinkets and catered holiday parties for their fancy parents and their fancy friends and their fancy co-workers.

There were four of us. One was over the east coast entirely. My girlfriend and I were over the city. The fourth didn't know quite what she wanted but it wasn't this. What did we do? It's not like it was advertising, or finance, or law or medicine--nothing like that. Those are the kind of jobs that might suck the life out of you, a little bit, but at least you could count on a "return on investment."

I wanted to make that kind of money. I daydreamed about it, and there was a yearning, as long as I can remember, to have those brass-fixtured doorknobs and toilet fixtures, to have a view of central park from the top of a building, to come home to an impeccably kept house, to a staff and a wife that didn't have to work but could sit on boards of various charities, to have dinner on the table by eight and to summer somewhere ending in a "ton." I've always been honest about that.

I remember lying in bed with an ex-girlfriend, one of those times when we were trying to be intimate, her prying things out of me that didn't want prying, and I reluctantly offered, "well I do have class issues," and she looked at me and almost laughed before saying, "Hon, you have a Great Gatsby tattoo. I know you have class issues.

But we weren't there, none of us. I had one friend, maybe, that was almost there, but he was as stuck and miserable and perplexed as the rest of us, said it was a means to an end, that at least he could travel, but dammit if he didn't make it to the gym every night, the simmering resentment of long dinners with clients, of ties and blazers and wool pants and starched shirts and cocktail after cocktail, well he'd literally explode. He didn't even enjoy drinking anymore--the only time he drank was to win the trust and faith of anxious millionaires.

For all we cared about we did, we might as well be making widgets and sprockets, but we longed for a hula hoop that might set us free. Anything, really, anything at all.

We sat together, close, on the big soft red couch, with blankets, and the big soft red leather chair, and the paisley recliner, with crystal glasses brought out for the occasion, some nice pinot, some sparkling cider. One of us was knitting, and talking about how work was literally killing her. I shared the story about the time I ended up in the hospital, cellulitis of the knee brought on by too much work and not enough sleep.

I had just watched a documentary on Woodstock -- then and now, and when I closed my eyes, I could see Yasgur's farm, and the pond, the rolling hills in the distance and the second growth forest, and imagine a little house and two little offices, and a garden, where we could live and work and play.

Nora, sitting next to me, knitting, wanted to move to California.

Sheila thought we should all go into business together--just all pick up and move, and I don't know, buy some land, and she and Nora could run a hardware store, and of course Lee and I could cook for everyone (have you tasted her key lime pie? It's incredible; it literally convinced me to marry her). It sounded a lot like the Hog Farm Commune but it was probably just because I was stoned still, and had just seen a film about it.

I said I couldn't really see myself leaving the east coast. Aren't family and friends important? It was the day after Thanksgiving, and I was feeling grateful to have had my family and Lee's family at one big long table and all of the talking was a group effort and as much as her mother and my uncle could get on my nerves on occasion, they were family and wasn't it nice to be a part of, to contribute in small ways and big ways?

Sheila said that if we just went, maybe our families would follow us. And I closed my eyes and there were the red woods, and the ancient first growth forests, moss over everything, ever green, and soft trails not like the rocky trails of new england, and the constant drizzle that if you thought of it in a certain way seemed to feed everything, all the time.

But New England, and my sense of place--I was born here. Can you imagine? Lee's mother grew up on the west coast, and she grew up on the east coast, and there is nothing that will ever change that fact for them--do we really want out children to have a completely different frame of reference, a shared set of childhood memories we'll never ever be connected to?

Whatever we do, we need to work for ourselves, I said, on our terms. There was a general nodding of heads, Nora knitting next to me, Sheila curled up in the chair across, Lee blowing out the candles on the mantle that had burnt down over the last hour or two. Something that means something.

I'm leaving my job in a month or so. And I'm terrified, because sometimes it seems like a certain level of financial stability is the most important thing there is. But I've been reading and writing and thinking about reading and writing, and if making less money means there's more room for that, then I'll be that much happier, and I'll have that much more energy to give and I don't know, I'm crossing my fingers and maybe it'll be ok?

Nora nodded, her scarf was twice the length it had been when we sat down and she agreed that the happiest of our friends was the one who wasn't making much money, but doing the projects that he was interested in and sooner or later he'd probably be light years ahead of all of us because he got such an early start.

Are we that old? We are. The children that we knew when we were in high school, that seemed so much younger then are graduating college. Our friends are getting married. I'm getting married. And soon we'll be thirty, and when someone says they haven't talked to so and so in years, I can conceive of that, as much as I can conceive of not talking to so and so for as many more years, or seeing him briefly but not again, and losing touch over time, ten, twenty years from now, when maybe, finally, we'll be doing something that feels right.

It was getting on one thirty. Nora got up to leave. Her coat was on, the yarn in her bag, we hugged goodbye. We walked Sheila to the guest bedroom and Lee and I brushed our teeth together in the bathroom, washed our faces and crawled into bed. We slept through the night and into the morning, woke at ten to coffee and toaster waffles, a new day.

That evening, I walked my parent's dog, through the fallen brown leaves of the park, listening to them rustle over my boots as we walked. The trees were empty finally. It's almost December. It wasn't dark just yet, but would be soon, and the conviction of the night before was almost lost, but turning the corner I held the leash and smiled, remembering that once, the night before, I knew I had everything I wanted, and in that moment I still did, and would again.

Indian Hill

The road curved ahead
in the dark,
coming back to Indian Hill
after Thanksgiving night.
Comanche, Mohawk, etc.
Cul de sac after cul de sac
grand white homes,
raised over the last thirty years,
strange approximation--
bearing no relation to anything Indian
that I can make out.

There are more popping up;
you can see them in the morning,
drives leading into the hills,
undeveloped plots with names
to set the stage for the settlers to come.

Driving back,
in the dark,
I watch winter trees
indistinguishable finally
as witches brooms
from their summer counterparts,
they line the road,
decimated by telephone posts
strung wire to wire
leaning in for a kiss
across the yellow line of the curving road,
suburban gallows,
sagging weight drawing them to the edge,
the dark before the final turn.

We sleep in
and wake to pots of coffee ready
and three days of local papers,
full from thanksgiving stuffing,
our new family stuffed
in to Indian Hill
and in the last aching moments before we wake
the image lingers:

of golden cowbells,
filled with sand,
dull clanking falling on silent ears.
Irreverent thuds,
with no resonance,
and no cries for more.
Charles Imbelli
11.26.2010

Sylvia

Sylvia Plath,
I went in for Ariel
(which I had owned at one point,
from the Strand, a four dollar copy
same as The Wasteland which I’d
bought around the same time).
The copy in stock was hardcover, glossy,
but there next to it were your collected works,
1956-1963,
poems you’d written right up until that final cold February
just days before my birthday that you stuck your head in the oven.

You were thirty.
You had two children.
Your husband left you for another woman
because you couldn’t fix yourself
and when she couldn’t fix herself
he didn’t leave but she went out
in a similar manner,
no doubt inspired by the precedent you’d set.

I try to calculate how may poems you wrote
between twenty six and thirty one
and how many I’ve written up to now
and how they’d stack up
and wonder about my failure of imagination
desperate for images less literal,
trying to build a mythology to stand the test of time,
the classroom analysis,
worthy of footnotes.

I wonder at the backhanded compliments I’ve received over the years:
from Devon, “Chris could cook circles around you,
but he’s unreliable. I need someone I can count on.”

Ted Hughes said Sylvia never scrapped a poem once written.
She approached her writing with an artisan dedication--
if she couldn’t make a table, she’d settle for a chair,
an ottoman, an end table. Sylvia Plath?

What does that leave me?
Poems like whittled spoons for stirring beans over camp fires?
Bent brass door handles fitted over the steel drum body of a bullet smoker?
Glued together mugs full of pencils and wooden beads,
an old triumph badge and bent safety pins?

I might as well stick my head in an oven at that rate.
Just to see, of course--they’re all electric anyway,
but it’s my ego that keeps me from the full go--
is there any dignified way to go out?
Chicken legs at obscene angles half in half out the oven door?
The crushing splay of rushing pavement and the gawking crowds?
The liquid evacuation following the kicked out chair?
The choking blue, the foaming mouth, the aspiration of vomit?

No, no,
I won’t be convinced,
just stick to silly little love songs,
free form literalism
and call it a hobby.
Nevermind.
A drop in the ocean
with no room for more.

racebrook 2010

racebrook 2010

Foot fall, amor fati
Eternal recurrence
Aware with each footfall,
Out of step and time,
Occurring infinite moments
Removed from this arrow

This place this forest floor,
Those other forest floors,
Look: it's a door,
Look: it's a door,
(same as before,
Same as before)

She held my hand,
Led me through,
Concrete touch
On the edge of something
On the edge of everything

Endless rooms
Windows
The green outside
Saying, "the green outside,"
Look: it's a tree
Look: it's a tree
Look: it's a tree

Memory. Noun.
Thoughts related to things past.
Subjective finite remnants of events
Always present often ignored
But alive now in everything we touch
In everything we see
In every thing
Judge and jury
Awakening,
Gradually,
Awakening,
Forever--

Amor fati,
Let us remember this
Remember this too.

Charles Imbelli
2010

The fight (Means of Escape)

Deep sea oil rig worker, train engineer.
Dishwasher or Plongeur (America or France).
Nightwatchmen, janitor or bucaneer,
Alaskan Bush Pilot. Killer (freelance).
Army, Navy, Air Force or the reserves:
grunt, cadet, flyboy, jarhead, deckhand
(The Afghan theater would require the most of my nerve).
Anything to avoid a life perceived as bland.
Lumberjack, clearcutting the great Northwest,
like Gary Snyder, American Zen,
working poet, Man’s man, both at their best,
all of these things could be within my ken --
The morning after, bus windows slicked with rain,
I long for all these ways to flee, in vain.

Franco!

I wasn't sure what to write this morning. The coffee is on and I'm waiting for breakfast to warm up. It was tempting enough to keep reading the NY Times, but I felt like I had to push something out and on the ancient advice of poets everywhere, when nothing comes to mind, revert to form. And so, my first effort in many many years at a (sort of) sonnet.

Note--second draft a bit closer syllabically to a proper sonnet. Not quite iambic pentameter, but close enough for 2010.

Can James Franco possibly be for real?

This man, enrolled in masters classes who

maintains an acting job with equal zeal

and manages to write a novel too?

New York Magazine asked the question once

but pages in there wasn’t much to say.

Classmates would attest these were not mere stunts,

besides which, what of these roles he picks to play?

Subversion: seems to be the key--not one:

writer, artist, scholar, celebrity--

but something of all, and something of none;

that aspiration, of noble quality.

Remember the renaissance, that time before,

when success at one did not preclude success at more?

sundries

the orchid on the table is dying;

shriveled leaves curling back into itself.

someone could have changed the water,

but there were other things to attend to:

the dishes in the sink, for instance.

the hairball in the middle of the bedroom.

visiting friends in the country,

and wondering at the lack of clutter in their homes.

"they have more space," i said.

and i meant it then, but now wonder.

we could have that space, if we wanted it.

but there is a pushing against,

and the space between

can not be filled.

things are crowded out,

little things--

the pile of clothes at the foot of our bed,

the flower, curled and dry on the table.

longing to be filled,

we push towards each other,

only to be repelled

by the space between.

the orchid on the table is dying.

who will take care of it this time?

Charles Imbelli

2010

The Search/Starting Over

please ignore the double spacing between certain stanzas--it's blogger; not me.


Part One: The Search

I’ve written it before,
but can’t remember where--
the constant nightmare.
Call it anxiety?
Or vision?
There’s writing everywhere:
on flash drives,
on a variety of websites,
in a shelf full of notebooks,
in a brown accordion folder
that’s torn at the seems,
top and bottom
so when I reach up for it,
pull it out from its shelf,
pictures and poems
invariably fall over me,
covering the floor.

this poem is two poems:
the anxious search for missing words
(the discs of poems from twelve to twenty
that i rescued from a powder blue storage unit
flew east with and lost at my parent’s house,
some of which are on the internet,
some in notebooks,
some in a filing cabinet no doubt
down a dark empty hallway
at the pratt institute
where i was accepted but never went
and still others lost forever
and maybe for good reason).


the other poem,
the one i’d meant to write--
about this vision
or nightmare,
or whatever you’ll call it.

what you might call it,
if you were a diagnostician
is
post traumatic stress disorder.
the clumsiness of those words,
they catch in your mouth,
your heavy tongue struggling to spit them out.
i was there yes,
but we were all there.

most days it feels like 
what's always been,
even before that day.




Part Two: Starting Over


this poem is nothing like
that obsessive search.


in this poem,
i’m riding my bike,
or walking.


it’s late fall.
cold. crisp.
the sun is shining brighter than bright
beating down really.

sometimes it’s in a car,
the windows rolled up,
the air turned off
and the heat of the sun
magnified through the windows
as I sit in the passenger seat
and angle my head to look at the vast blue
above the speeding car.



there is so little to see in 
this blue mix above us,
i’m told is mostly nitrogen,
an inert gas,
split only by the crack of lightening
to feed plants
and charge the soul.


what little oxygen there is,
we breathe slowly,
in and out,
and in and out,
and in.


and suddenly
in that vast empty blue
a plane in the periphery
catching up
to plain sight
and the contrail behind it
stretching for seeming miles.

at the center of my vision,
in car, on bike or foot,
the plane stops,
there at the center.

everything stops,
but i’m watching it unfold,
and for seconds that seem like minutes
that seem like unending forevers,
it hangs there,
mid air,
its contrail,
its vapor trail
behind it,
the sky still blue and empty.

and then:
we begin again,
all of us,
sudden movement,
the shock of what was seen,
the plain falls straight down,
this sudden change of trajectory
unlike anything that’s come before,
an awful right angle forming with the
curved earth below,
this sleek tube suddenly no more than
rock or bird-shot goose,
a bowling ball
or a feather.
a dropping pin,
silently, inevitably
meeting the hard earth below.
an explosion of fire.


and where once time stood still
now only the rush of what next?

Charles Imbelli

2010