Just like the man who waits
for a lambent night so that he might read
beneath a slow moon light –
Euripides, Thucydides,
Asklepios – determined
is our clown as he cuts through the Valley
of Hades with a surgeon’s clamp
and scalpel.
[And] there he sees a stream give
its life’s last to a cauterized tree; he
sees his shadow remedied
in the blindness of the sun; he
sees a pinecone raise its
fist to repudiate pugnacious
petrifaction; he sees the wind trip
and scrape its knee and he
balms it as it howls. [But] when
the swallow breaks its wing and the rabbit
chokes on the same subverted
string, he plucks them of their feathers
and their skin and bakes them
in the dust for dinner. After ten
years in the Valley of Hades,
there’s no need for surgeons.
Just like the man who burns
his books at night so that by this
light he might write his own – Euripides,
Thucydides, Asklepios –
our clown seeks to be remembered.
On rocks of vitriolic
time, he learns to scratch the questions of his
life with clamp and scalpel.
Note: there is also a video poem
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdx8qKG5_ds
Valley of Death
Cat's Got Soul
cloy and let the yellow yellow spin spin
mask: mighty Tess demands
a play. Bring on the tubular
pounce: flounce per purple flounce,
let the fitful pen cap ritual bounce,
bounce, bounce. Me teethies want gnaw gnaw;
Me clawsies a paw paw.
A cat’s a cat –
but think the cat thinking rat rat
and make the thinking cat think otherwise,
uncatty. Then let flies,
stains on curtains, and the purrrrsuit
of French fries elicit
no less knowledge than the lines, dashes, and
dots of mathematics.
Wake, wake, Bigger, Bigger
Me. Stop counting and food Tess. Let clang clang
gold ingots of goobler
crunch, else Me digger dig… Look Look!
Finding, is found, residing
here, the kitchen counter frontier, hiding
a sniff sniff of crumble to feed
Me needy needy need.
A cat’s a cat –
but think the cat thinking just what
supper is, and make the rubber band one
more branch, twig, or undone
shoe string, in some indigestible
philosophy: to be
no more, and no less, than the right to refuse
to not always not eat.
Stop, stop! Unfurl! Uncurl!
And let Little Little You smell embrace
the shifting wonder world
of inner outer space. Now Me
see dark and Me see plain,
see where goes what goes in rest and restrain.
It’s time time was untimed untamed.
Tess sleep again.
A cat’s a cat –
but think it dreams The Rubaiyat,
and think it dreams its reoccurrence, the feline
incarnate. Then of nine
lives, how many tinkers, tailors,
soldiers and sailors, re-
main re-membered in that brain re-living
life as bourgeoisie?
Tess and I are separate
stanzas coupled and uncoupled through an
implement of rhetoric.
Like her ears, her eyes, her fur, cute
calculations filtered
in and out by profit seeking breeders,
in thinking Tess thinking I must
unthink she is most
unnaturally man-
made and for my benefit. And
yet, my too much willing forgetfulness
permits her her presence
so she might demonstrate in this
poem her godless instinct
to teach me of soul. Tess blinks and agrees:
Me lick lick Me stink stink.
Cats Got Soul
Bionote
For twenty-two years aivars taught English and Economics at Ursula Franklin Academy, in Toronto. Before that, he hustled: he taught English in Japan and the Soviet Union. In between hustles, he moonlit as an unlicensed cabbie for the Toronto International Festival of Authors. His passengers included these seven Nobel prize winners: Seamus Heaney, William Golding, Nadine Gordimer, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro. He also had breakfast with New York heavyweights Susan Sontag and Grace Paley. With Susan Sontag he talked baseball. With Ms.Paley, she told him a story about making her husband jealous by describing a man who turned out to be her husband. Recent publications are Thinking Is Hard: a thousand and one fox tales (https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0D442S82K) and Behind the Wall (https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1738750957).
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