To thine own self be true

“Stars go out when actors die.”

More Henry than we ever knew,
your haunted blue eyes
looking skyward
from a father’s coalpit,
calling for forgiveness or fame
with an omnipotent voice.

Smile curled on cynic’s lips:
the failed cherubim.
Ever-hungry for spirits and song,
you took New York by storm
inverting mirrors to Hamlet’s soul
and made us weep to hear
your too too sullied flesh
melt and thaw unresolved
in a whorl of late night
carousing with buds and Liz.

Flushed with fever and wit,
you abdicated the playhouse throne
and found success
as hollow as Hollywood.
Pockmarked and stiff,
you sleep-walked through
a plethora of dire scripts,
mocking your right to rule
with a vigorous impotence.

Having at last to live
with your self–
a gaunt shadow of greatness
and unkind reflection.
Too late, you must have grieved,
like brother Dylan, the sun lost
in its dark inexorable flight.

……………………………………………………..

And then there are bad choices, as reflected in the famous and great, to wit Richard Burton. Burton played Henry VIII in Anne of a Thousand Days, one of the many dissolute parts that echoed his own decline. Born in Wales, he took up acting to avoid a future like his coal-miner father’s. Burton’s smile variously reflected his satisfaction with success initially and later a cynical smugness about film acting, which helped to pay for his and Elizabeth Taylor’s excessive lifestyle.

His New York stage performance as Hamlet was a significant achievement. I can remember being very moved by it when I listened to it on record in the late ’60s. To me, he seemed to peel layers off the character and role, he was that great an actor. At this time, though, he was starting to drink heavily which led to bad choices in roles and films. He knew he had been the greatest stage actor of his time and yet had sold out to Hollywood.

In the end, he was literally wasting away, though his voice remained memorable as always. Burton had a tremendous library, incidentally, and loved to read. He often quoted from Shakespeare and had a great love for his fellow countryman-poet Dylan Thomas, who similarly drank himself to death. (The last line alludes to “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” )Certainly, Burton knew very well he had squandered his talent and could not overcome the demons of his self-inflicted alcoholism.

I include this poem to demonstrate how we sometimes ‘do it to ourselves’ with our poor choices. This can sometimes result in tragedy and an unnecessary wasting of whatever talents we have.

ps/ My favorite Burton films remain: Anne of the Thousand Days, Becket, The Comedians, The Desert Rats, Equus,  Look Back in Anger, 1984, The Night of the Iguana, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Taming of the Shrew, The V.I.P.s, Where Eagles Dare, and Who`s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, He is the only actor I have ever been moved by to write about…

He quit the happy hour gang
checked his balance
and bought a house to fix.

At first he started slowly
and dozed the yard to mud,
left it fallow three years.

Then he built a taller fence
2 by 8 security, no gate intended
just eavestroughs to the lane.

Dumptrucks rusted on the driveway,
a bobcat sat out front:
play-things of a hoser-boy.

And then he tied the knot.
She said she hardly knew him,
but he had a schedule to meet.

Brought her home, his new-found bride
to his castle, moat, and dog.
And there he kept her very well.

…………………………………………………….

“Each man’s home is his castle.” An old saying, a conventional choice, and life lived via mythology and preferred images. Our lives are always limited and limiting in some ways. But methinks we sometimes really restrict our possibilities and choices, lamely settling for incredibly common scripts and cliches as in this poem. The last line belies whatever pseudo fairy tale happiness implicit here. Beware of the dog , indeed.

You throw down the pieces
of puzzle without thinking
& they all fall a certain way:
hands, attitudes, eyes, dreams.

Moira–it is useless
to explain such configuration
where no instructions
are ever given.

The way these two lovers fit
defies a marketing manager’s will
or secret game plan.
(Call this nature or a hunch.)

You could always separate them, I suppose,
but they’d always look too hungry
as if they belonged together
in some crazy autumn under the trees.

How wrong be they who try
to rend them–these pleasing shapes
that tease us today with
their promise of forever.

Pictures on boxlids and finished puzzles
seldom look the same.
But in their construction what joy
and desire, as fated,
the necessary pieces converge!

(note: Moira is a Greek word for fate.)

…………………………………………………………………………..

A poem, ironically, about how there are sometimes no choices. That’s just the way it is. That is how things are meant to be. All that is possible is for things to flow and happen; nothing anyone can do–even others–will prevent what seems fated to be from occurring. The assertion of process over choice.

The grumpy queue shortened.
‘No fat,’ decreed the matron
in front of me.
‘No whip,’ cried her friend.

‘Next,’ and a barrista`s
what`s-your-pleasure look.
‘Latte,’ I asked
and settled for a tall.

(Oh the way she pulled
the nozzle down
and wiped it clean
left no doubt she knew
how to handle a customer,
brisk and business-like.)

‘Do you want foam?’
she whispered, pumping
as I pondered her performance
and Sigmund Freud–
Would he have had his grandé?

‘How come men don`t serve?`
I naughtily ventured.
She smirked and shot back
‘They don`t keep things clean.’
‘Ah,’ I said, suppressing a grin
and stirred my poem to go.

……………………………………………………….

Another context poem in which the Freudian contextful language and actions overwhelm the least imaginative wordsmith. Something of a study of the sexes and their respective psychologies and bents. This familiar context and the language exchanges of this particular visit were obviously too much of a writing window to resist.

Incidentally, relative to this theme thread, contexts have their own language and encourage you to think and talk a certain way. I would say that context, as much as, if not more than process, influences our language acquisition and, by extension (bad pun), thinking.

As much as social conditions or environments (such as poverty, lack of modern conveniences, etc.) might affect our future possibilities, contextual language does, too. If you need to see how unfun or deadening contextual language can get, just read a bank contract, lawyer’s will, government document, or an ‘easy-to-follow’ instruction sheet. One more poem on context to follow…

Outside, the office exiles
like restless puffins
kick at the butt-strewn ground
anxious for that precious
first (in)hale, sacred blue
(ex)hale of warm smoke.

Human chimneys of white
fashion a camaraderie
built of matchsticks
& lighter fluid
comparing notes on carton specials
& first times caught by dads.
Throaty phlegm reswallowed
they discuss the decline
of justice & Western civilization.

Nicotine lepers forced out
butt not out really–dead
right in their own minds.
In snow-covered alleys and lean-tos
they compose bold speeches
for the great comeback
& plot revenge
on all of those who don’t.

……………………………………………………………………………………..

Some of my best friends once were teachers who smoked. The first smoking bylaws arrived in the ’80s and gradually it became harder to smoke indoors, then near workplaces and now just about any public place. Having said all that and looking back, I can’t say I sort of blame smokers for being resentful. ironically, they have truly become lepers of our society.

The poem is, of course, an absurd, extreme ‘study’ of a given specific context–the smokers’ world. I visited it now and then and even took a drag or two, and poetically, absorbed–along with the smoke–the gist of the sensibility and arguments, and so forth. I will just add that to write about or know a context takes observation skills, empathy, imagination, and sometimes a sense of humor.  

Nineteenth-century figures
walk beside a river basin.
Some carry umbrellas
and discuss the French weather.

Three or four strollers
sit down on the bankside
watching sailboats:
parasol ladies onshore.

What could they know of
world war, AIDS, or acid rain
under trees that cast
shadows on afternoon grass?

A small barge glides                                                                                                         toward an arched bridge.
You stand distracted
a moment in the gallery

fusing with light
strokes of soft blue paint
Monet’s view stiller now
than your own digital time.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………

A poem about contexts, now and then. A poster of this painting hung on my study wall over my desk through the ’80s, when this poem was written.  I almost wrote “than your own, in digital time” for the last line, thinking “than your own [view]”. Certainly our own contemporary views and sensibilities have been altered/fractured by our digital media, culture, and world. A wholly different paradigm from even the twentieth century, never mind the nineteenth.

I suppose we long for other times and other places and therein lies the charm, fascination, and romance of dreaming and much of the romantic arts. The twentieth century references in the middle were purposely jarring and foreshadow the shift to the modern viewer in stanza 4–a visitor to an art gallery who has imaginatively entered Monet’s world in the context of the electronic age, an age which is faster moving than the relatively sedentary pace of the Impressionists’ period, when there was or seemed to be more time, leisure, and fewer modern anxieties and large crises that mark our ‘brave new world’.

As mentioned, this is a poem of contexts. Even “you” the reader and gallery visitor are or become a “moment in the gallery”, as in you are, briefly, a “moment”, as much as the figures in the painting, or the people that inspired the painting’s figures. Viewed a certain way, we are all in a sense (a series of) passing moments or contexts in our various individual lives. Contexts, then, are forever present and changing, and–as I remarked earlier in another entry–can be viewed or perspectived from multiple viewpoints.

Our lives and any moments or situations you care to name are simply a combination and interaction of three things: process, context, and choice. Life and its many episodes consisting of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months is nothing more than a process, a long series of never-ending moments that unfold in a person’s life. We talk of life process whether we are describing a man, a pelican, a tree, or the ocean. Process can be applied as a concept to many things: the history of a nation, a procedure such as a medical operation, or a stage in one’s life such as adolescence.

Context is simply the situation one finds oneself in whether one is a child in a day-care centre, a career woman encountering a “glass ceiling” in the work world, or a group of oppressed people within a repressive political regime. Context can be personal, social, political, religious, medical (as in the case of having an illness or condition), and so forth. Context is what we, as individuals, are presented with at any given moment, what we find ourselves in. Sometimes the context is familiar, as in waking up in the morning and making our breakfast. Sometimes it is unfamiliar or unstructured, as in when a concert-goer finds himself being pushed to the front of the stage by an enthusiastic crowd. All contexts frequently require response and choice, especially in the face of obstacles or crisis.

Confronted with the never-ending flow of our days and process, and the fact of similarly morphing contexts, we have but one way to respond—via choice. Some Existentialists suggested that the important thing in life was the fact of personal choice. Victor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who wrote movingly of World War II concentration camp experiences, said much the same thing about those personal choices we will into being, especially in contexts of conflict and crisis.

To a large extent, our choices finally define us, whether they are ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ If you want to understand others, consider their choices and decisions. What do they choose to do? How have they chosen to live their lives? What other choices might they make or have made? And what, then, of our own choices? How and why do we choose as we do? What do those choices say about us, our values, and beliefs, and the unique individuals we all are? Understanding our choices can move us forward in our lives. As novelist George Eliot once said, “The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.”

……………………………………………………………

Context is an element we often have to consider to avoid making snap judgements or judging on appearance alone. Choice is something people don’t realize they can have, even in very limited or limiting situations. Frankl writes of how choices of attitudes benefiting the inner lives of prisoners of concentration camps made it possible for prisoners to endure their suffering and to survive. They made positive choices rather than letting themselves fall easy victims to the awful and horrifying contexts they were in.

Our lives can be viewed as a long process made up of various smaller processes–events and episodes, some unfolding in minutes, others in hours or days, still others in months or years. We can all learn from process, especially once we accept it is the way life unfolds, not just for humans, but animals, plants, societies, nations, and history. If life is basically a common process of lifelong learning, one has to assume that growth can be a real possibility, something that can inform and direct our lives forward, step by step.

Once you become aware that choices matter and that you can choose much of how you live or view your life, then the possibility of what Maslow called self-actualization becomes a real possibility. Put another way, you can make or create your life. Attitude is a key factor in whatever process or context you may find yourself. In that sense, indeed, whether you view the proverbial glass as half-full or half-empty will affect how you manage or deal with problems, crises, and change. As I stated in an earlier selection “The Living Poem”, “you make it up.” In Hamlet’s words, “there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” (There is something implicit in his comment also about the role of imagination in both thinking and attitude.)

From where you stand
beside the road,
you can almost see
the house. Fence slats
bow to you & paint
curls upon itself~
a mockery of maintenance.

Overhead
tall spreading trees
threaten sun. Strange
you never understood
what time might do
to plans & seeds.

Cracks in the walk
meander like veins
toward a wooden door.
Open it. Step inside.
Enter the house.

Brush by leaves
& buds that
cover the air
with unremembered names.
Pass calendars & mirrors
that conceal the holes
& smears of yesterday.

A rabble of books
throng aching shelves
with the wisdom of dust.
Photographs on a table.
Who are these faces?
These prisoners
in gilt-edged pose.

In the final room of all
there is an unmade bed.
A pair of glasses
stand upright
on the dresser.

Listen. You can almost
kiss the silence.
Clocks whirr–a heart beats
as slowly time
engulfs the house.

Leave the house.
It’s best that way.
People have grown old
& died here.
Children once laughed
& laughing took
their voices, left for good.
Left to live in
other rooms
of other houses
glimpsed by roadways
through tall spreading trees.

……………………………………………………………

(Written on a warm Sunday afternoon in the ’80s at my wife’s family’s house, while they all had gone for a fall walk. I believe the poem pretty much wrote itself in the time they were gone. I walked around the quiet house and imagined the above. Solitude sometimes automatically invokes the writing mood or impulse for me. I had been reading James Dickey’s poetry and had used some of his work in a school poetry anthology I had written and edited. “Inside the River” was one of his that stood out. I guess you could say I wrote “Inside the House.”)

Both presence and non-presence are simultaneously quite palpable in this poem. The house itself seemed veritably alive with a character and presence all its own, which I tried to capture. On the other hand, it wasn’t hard to imagine non-presence since the family was absent and, one day in the future, the various people would be gone for permanently. I guess you could call this imminent or palpable non-presence there for the imagining.

The next poem explores the fragility of simultaneous presence and non-presence a little further. Something I have long carried with me after reading the poetry and imagery of Dylan Thomas and W.H. Auden. I will only add that such perspectives have given me greater sense and appreciation of the ephemeralness of life experience and the importance of appreciating any luck, success, goodness, beauty, and love in my life.

-1-

Sparrows chirp
and pluck at scraps
of empty gutters

-2-                                                                                                                                             An old man leans
on a rake
and contemplates
the dead spring lawn

-3-

Two lovers pass by
their care-less laughter
rising from the lane
as they disappear
from view

-4-

Oblivious are they all:
to the cunning cat
that stalks its prey,
the shadow lurking
by an old man’s garage,
and the slow steady ticking
of two lover’s watches

…………………………………………………………………………

But presence if a multi-perspectived state. In the above selection (written in the early ’70s), the various characters’ presences are not the only ones in each of their respective scenes or contexts. There are other presences that they are unaware of which the reader/viewer/poet can see in a larger frame, context, and perspective. This illustrates that there are multiple-perspectived, microcosmic-macrocosmic aspects to presence, and, in, fact, many presences or levels of presence.

Awareness of the presence of self, others, and alternate ways of looking at a situation undoubtedly creates a wider, larger understanding of what presence is beyond the here-and-now moment of one or more than one (e.g.,”canvas”) individual. I will just add that imagination plays a key role in whatever observation skills and perspicaciousness.

grey november sky
park benches etched in snow

wind strokes the last robin’s wing
breath warm & then gone

like a memory
lovers lost in each other’s eyes

we walk beside the river
& dream of hibernation

…………………………………………………………..

It goes without saying that there are ‘nice’ and warm aspects to much of presence, perhaps most observably in love. Presence and our sense of it comes through imagery and images. In such moments of being there is connection and perhaps identification as in when two become one. (Is there a higher individual freedom than the freedom of two- –the two freeing themselves and one other –along with the individual freedom experienced by each of the two?)

Presence, of course, is mainly or maximally experienced in-person in the moment. The experience of presence likewise has a timelessness about it, blending past (“memory”), present, and future (“hibernation”). When we talk of presence, we speak of the sublime and most connective moments.