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BLUE GUIDE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................xiILoveknot (Flagrantis speculum veneris).....................3MRI: A Trance..............................................4Spirare: Evening at Point Dume.............................8Paradise Cove..............................................10Helen's Zen................................................11"Harmonie du Soir".........................................12Tidepools: La Jolla........................................14IISfakian Variations.........................................19IIISalle Archaque: An Afterbeat..............................29Ghazal: Of Names...........................................30Los Angeles Fractals.......................................31IVValedictionsCharles Gullans (1929 -1993)...............................43Joseph Riddel (1931-1992)..................................44Doris Curran (1932-2000)...................................45Lorna Roberts (1942-2001)..................................46Robert Lowell (1917-1977)..................................47To Fall....................................................48Kerouacky..................................................49Across the BarJumbo's Clown Room.........................................51Polo Lounge................................................53Lunaria....................................................54Shutters...................................................55Numbers....................................................56Variations on Ovid.........................................58VInkles, Shreds & Scales....................................63VIBlue Guide.................................................81

Chapter One

MRI: A Trance For my daughter So there I am at Tower Imaging (Imaging ... Yes, yes: I'm aging!), Drugged against the claustrophobia- O heart, O troubled heart-a live shell Of myself, levered into the bridal Chamber at last, so to speak. And I have left my metal- My watch and coins, my pen, my keys, My belt and zippered slacks-and donned a gown And though scared stiff been slid condemned As a condomed Phallus into a pulsing place, Where I lie listening through earphones To KKJZ-FM, Playing just then the Bill Holman Quintet Playing "Out of This World."

* * * Under the broadcast music, another's din: Percussive, pneumatic, Dionysian, Pounding in and out and in in some Code of its own, in some remorseless Morse, The pictures of my favorite feelings' quarters. We're looking at the plumbing, the PVC, And something called the Bundle of Hiss. We're eavesdropping on the heart's tick-talk, Enthusiastic tachycardia. I don't know how to phrase this synaesthetic cling. It's not at all clear what is happening, Or when. We're loading every riff with ore, Maybe. Or waiting to explode. Or maybe make A broken consort's music of these fears. * * * Now, as foretold, we go through several "phases- Or movements." Although I am motionless. Sedately terrified. My life aflow Behind closed eyes, I flatly fail Not to remember all these years ago, So long before you squeezed into our world, Crawling the passageway to Cheops' penetralia To find-nothing. A lidless sarcophagus, Emptier than a skull's eyeholes. * * * During the break between the Five That Thrive And Sweets and Trane, I hear cicadas, An eerie ostinato Making the breezy music of a Cretan olive Tickle the ear, until I pick up your great-grandpa's Blowhumming through his tissue-covered comb, As we drive by neat rows of winter wheat back home. And off in that past's future I make out The lonesome cricket who sits in, jams in, One evening in the Sunset Canyon Center In Westwood, California, So thrilled to find his finely calibrated Kind so finely celebrated, As William Merwin reads his poem called "Black Jewel." And now I hear some ice cubes, all whiskeyed up, Tinkling under Erroll Garner's right hand- Or is it my father's, as he sits listening To "Blue Lou" and "Misty" on a 78, Smoke unfurling from the other hand's brown Raleigh, And waiting for that last high note, pure as a tuning fork's. * * * Or say that one right now, right there, could pluck A single string of a Cycladic harp In front of the Temple of Athena Nike, Itself harplike by moonlight That night of the eclipse, When all around me calcined marble and bedrock, Polished by centuries of pilgrims' soles, Slippery as ice, black and white as tramped- through snow refrozen years back in Wisconsin, Shone up from underfoot Back at the moon, its maria like smog-eaten pits On a tumbled drum that Earth's dark swallowed As it must (The Emerald Tablet: "As above, So below") minute by minute. Minute By minute now the tranquillizer ebbs, And to my aging, still sublunar ear the tone Finally struck is just a smidgin sharp. It pricks this bubble, although another one Will one day lift and lovely drift me off (With all the trances, travels, and travails That, leaving you, I've imagined leaving you, Ravels and ravelings, recordings, The broken string Of my rebab, my suk Arabic, my taxi Greek Somehow restrung to sound in scheme and skein Notes that float across the bars)

Like something you chased yesterday across the lawn ... Today is not that day, and so they pull me out.

Spirare: Evening At Point Dume

Its origin's unknowable, But since in it one spirit leaves yet cleaves Unto another, perhaps the Proto-Indo-European, Itself perhaps a kind of verbal smoke ring Uttered with a glottal stop, Meant ghost and breath at once. Then it would be as though we were to find "Aphorism" and "horizon" rhizomatous, Sprung from some Ur-word meaning definition, And in the process to eliminate Limits between The flatly said and flatly seen And to illuminate by its black light Impossible conversations, As of sea and sky, In a kind of pastel spindrift or sfumato. As though to see how "diligence" bled into "elegance." As though to say "precocious" ripened merrily to "apricot" And deliquesced to "drupe," Or "stranger" once implied both host and guest (The former's home a hostile hostel Providing bread and fruit and rest) And rhymed with "ghost." As though to think that reddish, ashen, and blue-black All lived in "livid," one whole sunset And perfect plum of a word. As though, dear Helen, there were a surd, A tiny slice of P-I-E That meant indistinguishably To shine, to flash, to burn And in its flaming out, the shedding of its light, Limned "bleak" and "blaze" alike, And "blond" and "blink" and "blind"- Though never, ever "bland"- As well as "blank" and "black" and "blue" between. Or a flower to offer you: "Ghost's breath." Almost a spirea, like meadowsweet, Or hardhack, or bridal wreath....