by Gerald Grow

No one in his right mind would resurrect unpublished poems from 30 or 40 years ago, comment on them, put them together with cartoons drawn in the same period, and publish them. So, from around 1970, here are mine! Reading Anglo-Saxon in graduate school, immersed in Milton, struggling with Ovid in Latin, I thought I'd burst if I could not occasionally pour forth something creative and, preferably, silly. The Leifiad is from that period. (The poem appears in a separate window when you click the title.)  I'm embarrassed that I wrote some of these things, but I love the exuberant melancholic who wrote them. --Gerald Grow, 2008

 

 

 

A Poem about Ecology

- against defoliation

- against war

- for insects

- and for people like you

 

and also about the two springs in New Haven, Conn.,

that I caught a dozen yellow-plated hornets

each morning in a drinking glass

(sometimes standing unstung naked still

trusting from sleep) and turned them loose

in the direction of that humming stump

of copper beech (and only then would you

come out of the locked bathroom and

breathe free enough to eat breakfast):

(here's the poem):

Bee,

 

be.

 

-- Gerald Grow (1967)

 

When I was a young man, I had no skin. Everything I experienced took me apart and put me back together in a different way, if it put me back together at all.  I often felt like a shattered egg, a peeled eel. Caravans of semis packed with chickens drove right through me. (Leaving me nothing but a cloud of feathers.)  To compensate for being scattered across the landscape by every glint of sunlight, I used my brains to engineer an identity, where at least I could come in out of the rain. That identity would work for a while, then become stifling, then break down, and I'd build it back again.  The first few times that identity fell apart were really scary. I thought I'd die. But after a while, going to pieces came to seem commonplace.  Drawing cartoons helped honor such feelings while putting them into some perspective. In the early 1970s, I grew from being a laid-off teacher to an internationally unrecognized cartoonist. You can see that with the cartoons, I was working through many of the same themes found in the poetry, sometimes in a contrarian mode.  Having no skin even had advantages. I kept rediscovering magical things everybody else had long ago decided were ordinary. (That still happens: Look through the bottom of a glass as you drink from it!)  One year I volunteerd as a companion at a mental hospital, where each week I spent an afternoon with a smart, sweet, miserable schizophrenic. She taught me that, no matter how scattered I became, compared to her I was an amateur.  Later I met a dear poet who could not put herself back together when her shell broke and she had to make periodic retreats into hospitalization. I was by comparison ordinary and even normal. Still, it took almost 20 more years to develop enough center to have a self to give, and an ego to give up (but that's another story).  This is what some love poems looked like when I was that  ancient young man:

    When Are Apart We

I you much very love,

I to that spring you said;

A-were and sky stars-bove,

A-were and trials time-head.

To you lovlier than are me,

Be, before winter last-fore,

When other each saw first we,

And to of joy height-soared.

Ac-tan for years ces-quain,

We but friends passing were;
Or you said later-dained,

To each heart other’s stir

Te I in summer sang adoro,

When played your hair, on sun

And the whirled ’round sand below

The I cared for most one.

We the sun blazing chased,

We the moon stay-to pleaded;

Time through summer raced:

It not delight our heeded.

In a times hundred fall

I, I you so love said,

With-and my soul; heart all

A-dark lay winter-head

Harsh winter’s was the cold,

All worst our ig-doubts-niting;

How could love grow, our old

By its own way lighting?

I you much very love,

I to this spring you said;

A-were and sky stars-bove,

A-were and life time-head.

                   --Gerald Grow

 

---

 

requium for the

 

 

any

there are many

millions will do

all the same

a

 

none of this or that

always a

anonymous a

collective a

indefinite, indistinguishable a

common, statistical, computerized a

a word, a man, a time, a place

a life

 

vote for a

uncommitted, flexible a

a solution to the's and thisses

to I and Thou

a general against specifics

 

keep your old the's

they will become collector's

 

none but the

none but the

none but the

-- Gerald Grow (1967)

 

 

---

Good Morning!

At first I thought it was the light:
The sweetgum tree pronounced its
        Orange syllables
        To the blue
        (that must be why)
            Sky.
Surprise:
    From my old pine bookcase:
        Whirlpools dancing
            Down the grain
        To wake me out of thinking
            I knew it
        Just because I'd stopped looking.

Each egg breaks its own way:
    One stringy, gliding in the shell,
    One neat as a plump lady
        Plopping after opera
        To say, "And would you take some tea?"
Scramble together -- eggs, milk, salt,
        Left-over tuna
        Sweetgum leaves
        Pine grain
        Autumn light.
    Something that was killing me
        Evaporated
            Last night.
    Something that was separate
        Scrambled
            In my smooth
            Pine eggs.

I have never seen a plate before.
        While I am looking
        At this bell-ring circle
            Scooped out of space,
Someone comes downstairs:
        Light lights
        A candle-cheek I know:
        You! You live here too!
        I'm having a
            Love affair
        With
            You!
Even the eggshells glow.
    In this light,
        Everything
        Is
    New.
 

In the late 1960s, I was on a solitary drive through Northern California and at the point of fatigue where I begin to read signs backward, when I noticed that the town of Ukiah, backward, spells haiku! Later at a campground, I resolved to write a haiku commemorating this palindrome. Having Milton in my blood, I first wondered if I could write an epic poem about the meaning of life, in haiku form. Fortunately, I soon saw the wisdom of abandoning that project. That left this poem -- partly an exploration (in the second stanza) of how many perspectives I could layer into 17 syllables (three: the poet, the woman riding by, the horse), partly an effort to crank haiku up to macho volume, but mostly just a record of how a young man's perfectly sound solitude fizzled into loneliness because a woman happened to ride by, and he couldn't stop thinking of her. That is, I couldn't.

 

Ukiah Haiku

 

 

In the saddle, she

rolls her hips like a lover.

The horse knows her thighs.

 

Saddle-thighs, I all

men look at me want (clipclop)

only (clipclop) you.

 

Spreads. Sighs. Fiddleferns.

Hoof-loam silence. Lover, when?

Clouds behind his eyes.

 

Circle-arching hawk

sweeps (sparrows) looking, looking:

sky-curved lizard's eye.

 

Roar beyond silence.

Face in the pool. Who am I?

Skimming. Choice of stones.

 

Fly-fuck bzzzzz. Bent hairs.

A panther on my arm. (Whhhhh!)

The feel of absence.

 

Silver-soaked needles.

Light drips: no sleep, no sleep. Here

listening to the moon.

 

Listening to the moon.

Stallioned star-sweat sheens the sky.

Rest alone, my thighs.

--Gerald Grow

   

At the time of Round Thoughts in a Square Dome, it seemed to me that nothing could be said without something else being said at the same time that explained it or contradicted it or showed it in a different perspective. It was a kaleidoscopic time. I often listened to Bach fugues and late Beethoven quartets -- and I experimented with language where meaning came not only by sequence but also by layering and by the thematic packing of significance into certain words and images. I fumbled for ways to write about things I would never understand. In the manner of a single young English teacher, you might hear me arguing with T.S. Eliot, worshipping at the feet of Yeats, regretting I ever read Wallace Stevens, eating and sleeping Milton, giving a buck to a panhandler who looks like William Blake, proposing to Emily Dickinson every morning, cinching up Cervantes' saddle, and hounding Shakespeare to go to the pub. I was lonely in the best of company. As I look back on this period, I think I was in part grappling with visual thinking (with its simultaneity and multiplicity of meanings -- thank you, Marc Chagall), writing (which analyzes experience into ideas that can be opened like a succession of petals on a rose-thought), and music (whose little hollow notes are so huge that no amount of feeling can fill them). All three modes of thought were as real to me as breathing. Writing a dissertation on Shakespeare's tragedies and Milton's Paradise Lost, I learned to see how the West developed the myth of the Fall into a way of organizing a vast amount of thought about what it is like to have a mind that contemplates what it is like to live in a body on this earth. Or as a body: Not to be able to distinguish which things we know and which we project. Creating concepts that divide, diminish, and torment us. Always wondering how we won our twoness. Inspired and distressed by thoughts that smell of immortality. Forever longing to be whole, as if we had been whole once in the distant past, and would be whole again, sometime, somewhere -- if only... And yet this tragedy is not only our condition but also our strength, even our salvation, and perhaps the comedy we were born to play in. The myth of the Fall is a sequential, narrative (horizontal) way of talking about something that is non-sequential, simultaneous (vertical), and changing. (I think that is a paraphrase of Joseph Campbell.) And so I tried to draw and write things that were nonsequential, multiple, simultaneous, and changing. Given the times, this was a fairly harmless hobby. Such considerations underlay the following effort at a poem from December 1970, which I filed away, knowing that nobody (not even I) would ever want to read it. Re-reading the poem more than 35 years later, I decided it deserved better, and it is now posted on the internet where billions of people have the opportunity not to read it. While I was revisiting the poem, one word called out to be changed (No, I won't tell which). Otherwise, this is the original. If you do read the poem linked below, don't try to figure it out. Just listen to how the themes dance with one another, separate, and, inexplicably, resolve, like a piece of music (if you know it, think Beethoven's Opus 130 Quartet). If something doesn't work for you, just ignore it. Incidentally, the interlude titled "The Case of the Schizophrenic Fox" is part of the larger poem, not the beginning of a different poem. Read through that part to the end. This poem will open in a separate window. (falls)

 Link to Poem: Round Thoughts in a Square Dome

 

 

   To Put a Man in an Ape’s Hide

                      or

Variations on “Exist, Pursued by a Bear”


Levity is the soul of wit.
Thesis the way the world ends.

(By Jupiter!) And thou knowest not
    “…family as the social unit?” she asked.

(By the sun and moon!) Thou knowest not
that thou art wretched  “Shut up,” I said.

And pitiable (By the Horse-Head Nebula!)
    “…nucleic acids?” she asked.

And poor (By Andromeda!) “Shut up,” I said.
And blind (By NGC-5128!) “Shut up and kiss me!”
And naked (Damn your I’s!)

Madonna nobis pacem (earth)
Avoirdupois Rex (air)
Every ounce a king! (and firewater)

Walkyrie eleison (A pax o’ye!)

‘S a waking dream, John, a waking dream.

                            --Gerald Grow

I suppose nobody will believe this, but the poems that follow -- though they are about real things -- were also somewhat academic variations on themes by Yeats (with a bit of Blake), rasped out on electric guitar instead of caressed by a Celtic lyre. Some of these poems are the only work I wrote in that particular voice. That's what it is like not to have one voice, but to have the voice that is only the loudest (or quietest) of a scattering of voices, or the last one standing when astonishment has flattened the rest.

If You Ain't Fucked an Angel

 

If you ain't fucked an angel,
you ain't missed much. But
there is one funny thing.
They hang out in the sky
in soft flimsy clouds, pacing the air,
laying around in the sun and rain--
you know, just staying angels
(that's a full-time job).

But when you cheat your way up there
in your best clothes and manners,
your hair combed and your breath all sweet,
flowers in your hand and your language clean,
you find they receive you shyly,
blush, make little jokes,
take out a parasol like you was just going out for a walk.

Then, in some secret corner out of God's eye,
they rip off everything--feathers flying,
light beating madly,
and throw themselves all over you.
And you fuck them into--earth--
--grass--sun--
smooth pebbles by the shore, a handful of soil
from the bottom rotten compost of old weeds and manure,
into apples in sunlight, beech-leaves, pine pollen
blown golden in the rim of lakes
--till it's over.

Then they withdraw--full and bored--
climb wearily to the staring clouds and empty sky,
and reassemble themselves coldly to perfection.

--Gerald Grow, around 1970


 

Angel-Face

 

What is it they want, these men?
Again and again they come to me
dissatisfied. I do what I can.

Because they like my hair long and blonde
it is long and blonde.
I mother the one who always cries,
hold him just so on my breast
and stroke his hair, and sing a little.
Some court me -- with flowers and candy
and love-poems to their Angel-Face (isn't that sweet?)

Others screw me -- in their different ways.
Some afraid, going limp on entry;
some bold and nervous -- sleepless the rest of the night;
some high, babbling about explosions of light,
with bad rhythm and a puny come.

For a few it's rape. I lie still and let them.
I don't mind -- not really.
But still they go away staring at spectres.
I suppose I am what they want me to be.
Not much else.

But you know it's interesting --
you're the second one this week who's turned over
half-way through and masturbated.

--Gerald Grow, around 1970

 

 

Raphael

 

Raphael, you alone have been

consistently my friend.

Many an afternoon have I sat

at your feathered feet and heard

truth, old tales, the mystery of things

unseen. Your words burn in my brain

like lenses, straightening the snags,

spotting the significant detail,

ecthing similarities, welding a world

out of tangles and old shoes.

 

Still, one thing bothers me.

 

On the summer solstice,

as I observed Antares

flickering from the wings of Actias luna

and sniffed the ozone in the heavy air,

 

how is it that I could not

tell you from the Fiend?

-- Gerald Grow (1967)

 

 

Food-Bat

 

There is a cave you don't want to know about -- in your belly.
A wet wind chills it like the wind of death.
I sleep there. Feed the food-bat, and I will not wake.

 

Slow, thick, almost-stopped drips form
teeth on the roof and floor of my home, my prison-hole,
where I hang. Feed the food-bat, and I will not wake.

 

Full, I fill the hollow, warm the slick walls with my soft
silky-spread fur, hold it open with my heartbeat
as I sleep. Feed the food-bat, and I will not wake.

 

No food? -- A tiny flutter questions everything you do.
A shadow smarts your eye. And you might hear the howl
begin, deep underground, like wind, and echo out
in spasms of sound that shake you, kick you from the inside, hit
so hard you double over gasping -- but -- hold on, hold on --
quickly, feed the food-bat! -- before the cave crumbles in
and you collapse into the clawed wings waiting to roll you
-- poor beetle, flying with your shell up -- to my yawning mouth.

 

But I sleep now. Feed the food-bat, and I may not wake.

--Gerald Grow


 

 

Shell

I never thought much of the poetry I wrote. It was easy for me to see the brilliance of others' work and the flaws of my own. Indeed, few of them were what I'd consider poems. They were more like  tools, shovels I used to dig my way out of some hole I found myself in. Poems were my Prozac.  If I got out of the hole, the poem served its purpose, like ranting in a diary no one will ever read. And so I filed the poem away or just let it evaporate. In a fit of poetizing, a few I even burned. By moonlight, no less. (Poetic conventions are hard to overcome.)  The two dolphin poems that follow were part of years of learning to face depression, and life, instead of running away from them both. "Dolphins" is about going through and coming out the other side. But nothing is always easy: "Searching for the Dolphins" (at the same link) is about the times that approach didn't work. Link to poem: Dolphins.

 

 

The Barking of a Dog

 

Dark freezing dawn.
I listen to the barking of a dog
Dead twenty years.

--Gerald Grow

 

 

Snake

 

When an insect splatters on the windshield
all you get is juice.
Who would ever think a snake
had insides enough
to spill out on the asphalt?

 

I have insides enough like his
to back up over the still-living head
before the scavengers start on him.

 

(I want to dump his guts
into that bastard's lap who stopped
just to run him down.)

 

I peel him off the pavement
by what's left of a tail
and lay him out gently in the grass.

 

COME ON, BUZZARDS!
Here's your snake.

--Gerald Grow

 

 

Mosquitoes

 

Mosquitoes have such delicate bodies.
Their snouts bend.
They like to sit on 4 legs, even 5,
with the other one or two curled out behind
like eyelashes.

 

Some have white knuckles.

 

Their ringed bellies make them look like
skinny hunchbacked bees.

 

Bats are supposed to eat mosquitoes;
but I climbed over the mouth of a cave in Nevada
and craned around till I could see
the Mexican Free-Tailed bats sheathed in the crevices--
and it's true, I saw it with my own eyes:
Mosquitoes feed on bats!

 

When they are serious about you,
they spread out all eight points
and come at you like a star.

--Gerald Grow

Gerald as the young man who wrote these poems and drew these pictures, on a hot but cheerful afternoon at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, near San Francisco, 1969.

---

     Notes for an Argument


I want to remember a few things first.

You, rolling that tiny little girl
up, over your shoulders, around,
and down to the giggling ground.

How full you get
dreaming about your clinic, friends,
future babies,
healing with a lighter touch, loving your man.

The ways you shine
from dancing, batik,
running with your arms spread
through the house, astonished,
singing.

Horseback riding in Yosemite.
Camping out.
Then, the bed, with sheets.

Wrestling with you, holding back,
and suddenly it takes everything I've got
to hold on,
and I don't know about winning any more,
just our movement, weight, the sudden floor.

And the surprise of being here
in the same place with you.
Improbable two.

Before we blunder into
what's been going wrong --
I'm real glad you're you.

Once we get started,
there's no knowing then.

If we're unlucky,
one of us will win.

--Gerald Grow

Apology

I'm so sorry.
Please accept my apology.
I mistook me for somebody else!

As I've grown older, I've become more aphoristic, and I've come to understand that aphorisms are not ways of enunciating eternal truths. They are, instead, ways of stating positions held by various voices inside me. When you don't have the truth, the next best thing is to have several really good positions to triangulate against. We are always somewhere in between the survey markers. (See? That's an aphorism!)

 

There Are No Words

 

There are no words

for anything

important.

 

You must

reinvent the language

if you want to say it

once.

-- Gerald Grow

 

 

 

A Found Poem

 

After taking me to see the graves of some ancestors who are buried in a tiny plot in the pinewoods bordering a south Georgia farm, my Aunt said:

 

People did what they knew how to do.

They were no different from me and you.

They thought the world revolved around them, too.

 

 

My old friend Satti said that the Indian mystical poet Kabir was full of delight and play and surprise -- and not the sonorous and solemn orthodoc he has been elevated to. So, for fun, we tried to render a few of Kabir's poems in a way that suggests that delight. Here is my favorite from that collaboration.

Oh my Ranting Heart

--Freely translated from Kabir--

Oh, the rant, the babble, of my gibblegabble heart!

How you do shovel out the words!

 

This old beggar knows what's sewn in his seams.

Why should I brag? Why look? Why even squeeze it?

 

When food was scarce, we weighed every morsel -- twice.

Now, who bothers with scales?

 

Would a swan--cleaving the diamond of a mountain lake--

want her old mudholes back to flop around in?

 

Heaven holds every hair. Why do you work so hard

to comb the beard of your world?

 

It's right here. You're right here. You, friend, are it!

Now, what is it you're looking for?

 

Kabir will tell you. Listen:

 

Taking one last look at my last sesame-seed,
I saw this whole dead Nothing of a universe

wink at me.

-- Gerald Grow and Satti Khanna (1977) 

The Face of Orion

 

These lines survived from a translation Satti, Brian, and I made of a ghazal by the Urdu poet, Ghalib:

 

Orion lured my love. When I drew close to kiss,

his face vanished in a random field

of stars.

 

 

As I looked for ways to dramatize an unforgettable moment that required less than one second to take place -- to take a snapshot in words -- I realized I was writing a grateful footnote to Wordsworth, who taught us how to do that, and how to do it simply.

 

Butterflies in the Mud

In dry seasons, butterflies gather
Wherever there is water. Sometimes you find
Dozens of them on a river bank, on the sides
Of a ditch, in a watered garden,
Probing the moist earth
With their questioning tongues.

I was driving through South Georgia
In such a season. The sky glared, empty.
For miles, corn stood
Burning in the fields. Pines yellowed
And hung on. Plants died by the millions,
Shrivelled into shredded paper, dead wings.

The road curved out of a pine forest
And opened onto pasture land. There were no cows
In the browning fields. Long lines
Of fence posts marked off
Empty spaces of parched earth.

I passed a pen with a single pig in it.
He was tall, lean, and red. He stood erect
Like a watchdog, his front feet planted
In a circle of mud, his back feet
As solidly on the ground as any statue.

A curl of tail sprang off him like “Hel-LO!”
Hairs around his ears caught light
And glowed. He radiated a sheer,
Gorgeous vitality that seemed to pulse him
Outward with a shout of “PIG!”

All around his head
There was a cloud of yellow butterflies.

The drawing of a pig dancing came later, around the time of my mid-life Rembrandt project, when I felt solid enough that rising on my toes was exhilerating instead of scary.

Orion

In this broken place,
we learn to be whole.