To tell the truth I'm kind of sad to be pulling all the elements of the great duckweed debate off Hoe N Tell and into its own patch. Seeing it come in a bit at a time, reading it upside down, the earlier posts later, a bit at a time over months as the debate developed, all that was great fun for me, and apparently for a few other hoers as well. But Hoe N Tell has to move on and it is swollen with duckweed -- it is taking oxygen from the fish for one thing -- so I'm moving it over here and putting it in chronolgical order instead of upside down order. I wonder if the collection will be as good as the collecting. I hope so, but nothing can undo the fun we had getting here either way.

preamble
the sycamore poems by Klyd..............................Reed's first shot.................Jan's mischief

Klyd innocently offers yet another Radnor Laker

1/24/99 South Lake Trail — High Bench

no sun — hillsides of naked
white oak, red oak and ash
with red gray brown smudge the light

but it is
still
light.
Across the lake
a tall
sycamore’s
white here and there

cracks that rouged light
showing
a holographic splash of dance
so fast
stillness is its only possible
representation.
Klyd

dramatic monologue from Mr.
Reed Richards!

Oh, Look, Sycamores!

Oh, look at this one, sycamores! Why would John
leave this in the album with no people in it?
Those slightly insane trees. See how they zig
and zag, as if they could elude wind and lightning.
Instead they trap the storm in a net of branches
and it rages and cries there all night long.
Think of how, when they hear winter call,
they tremble and drop their clothing
like a woman pre-empting her husband's drunken brutality.
Ah, but when ice comes, that's when
they tear themselves to pieces, sending big chunks
you'd think they couldn't live without
crashing to the ground,
like sacrifices to gods they fear but don't believe in.
No one would deny that ice is a ranking enemy,
terrible as fire and with a wider and steadier violence.
So such behavior from the sycamores might seem like
discretion, even valor, if they could lift their skirts,
step around themselves,
and tiptoe away. But they are trees, dammit! and cowards,
and they die all the little deaths of cowards,
and then go on standing next to their little corpses,
pretending not to notice.
But their hearts are fluttering. Even in summer
they turn cold when clouds gather.
They ought to be drawn with dotted lines.
One thing they're good for--showing you places in the sky
where you can imagine having taken a hammer and a wedge
and given it a crack to see what's on the other side,
and here it has bled pale and inconsequential
into the ground--no angels, no Buddhist flowers,
just a big dusty geriatric silence.
I worry I may never die.
After John left me a widow and the front-yard sycamore
a shabby orphan with no one to straighten its bed,
there was nothing for me but to smoke and complain all day
and weep all night in a net of sycamore shadows under the window.
I do it so very well--you might hear me on your side--
these little deaths--and smell the smoke
going rancid through the walls,
burning the dead parts of me I can't get rid of.
The living parts too, I hope.
Your lips tremble when you offer comfort. They should,
the words are bitter and rare to my ears and ought to be written
in lavendar ink or tears squeezed from aloes.
You might improve your vocabulary by forgetting them.
Living, even to take kindness,
is such a sorrow, how can you serve me,
except to be a stranger I can tell a secret to?
A sort of dotted line confession.
My life has not been blameless. The truth
would be no gift for my children,
and I couldn't have said it to anyone
while John was alive. He deserved
more faith than I gave him, but he
was too good to be made to suffer the truth.
Anyones arms would have been
less gentle than his.
You've not known me younger than eighty
and couldn't imagine me there,
or in anyone elses arms a long drive out of the city,
where no one would find us, near a lake, under sycamores.
Some day I hope you will hear that I am dead,
but first I give you my biography: When I went
to my cousins in 1918, the influenza epidemic,
I was too young to understand what an enormous thing
it was to lose ones parents. It was September.
A much more vivid event that month was
all the green balls dropping from the sycamores.
Toy globes of the world, gifts to children from nature,
you could break them apart into nothing but debris.
I remember my delight at the world falling down in play...

Reed Richards

from a general post -- Jan's first observation

Guys, look at the argument between Reed's Scyamore poem and Klyd's!! See what I mean?
Jan F.

from a general post by Jan

My question about the argument between Klyd's sycamore poem and Reed's was rhetorical of course. Rhetorically again I ask, you see it, don't you? In a way the series of new Radnor Lake poems Klyd has been posting are more ambitious as well as more modest - that word again - than his earlier Radnor Lake poems that I am familiar with. In both Ghost Trees and The Bass Flying nature is a wonderful inspiration for the spirit but it is also not enough. In those two chapbooks about a man's reaction to nature, he is always to some degree vexed as well as blessed by his effort to use it as spiritual food. In these new poems (with some exceptions) the effort is more audacious - to simply present nature. It is on this basis that Deb defended them, simply and correctly, when Klyd questioned them himself. In a poem like the one we have been calling "moon dripping forth" (Klyd's titles are useless for discussion) and in the one where shadow is lifted "like an
unnamed gem" we have two pleasures, the subtle one of admiring the quiet
virtuosity of the writing and the fuller one, a pleasure very near to getting a hit of nature itself. The sycamore poem is another - in some ways the most ambitious. . . . . . . I have to consider the two sycamore poems together. First, Klyd's. (I sure hope you guys scroll to the poems I am discussing to remind yourself of them before you read the discussions -- hell, I'm being bossy again!)

The random white on a sycamore will always draw something, if you cross your eyes, if you like Jackson Pollock, if giraffe's necks count (they do), a sycamore's white will always make a picture. Like the speaking character in Reed's poems says, "They ought to be drawn with dotted lines." Klyd sees the white parts on this particular tree on this particular day "showing / a holographic splash of dance / so fast / stillness is its only possible / representation." Like a sketch of Elvis with his knees shaking and arms flailing perhaps, except this is a still from a movie moving too fast to be "about" anything. It is, and I can't say why it evokes this to me but it does very clearly, the Heisenberg dance, the uncertainty of the locus of charges within atoms only theoretically could make a solid object empty and therefore capable of having something else pass through it at a certain moment, for the dance of atoms is too fast for such a moment to last long enough to be significant to our perception even, much less our action. There is a lot here, the echo of Zen Buddhism, a beautiful object "nailed" just as its beauty cuts through the oppressive light around it, and the great mystery of physical reality that it illustrates. Sigh. How beautiful. We got nature. We got virtuoso description. We got the mystery of reality.

But there's a whole world of people, cynical but by no means dumb, who say, we got bullshit! What good is it? Reed's speaker mocks our sentimental joy. "Oh, Look, Sycamores!" We don't credit her at first. She's a bitter old woman who thinks a tree's job is to grace her yard with no fuss about it. But as we read along we soon find ourselves in a thicket of human emotion, a fugue, as dense as Bach's "Musical Offering," of contradiction. She says of her husband, "Anyones arms would have been less gentle than his" but "husband" also evokes a woman dropping her clothing only to pre-empt brutality. She accuses the trees of cowardice, clearly a projection, but is she bragging that she was not a coward when she lifted her skirt, stepped around herself, "a long drive out of the city, / where no one would find us, near a lake, under sycamores," or is she regretting her cowardice for not confessing, or her cowardice for not leaving the husband for the lover. No doubt all of the above. She is not looking to report her cause aright, but to express her bitter regret, to pass the time while fearing she may never die. It's another grand poem by Reed, one that needs to be reread. How haunting the opening lines are the second reading through: "Oh, look at this one, sycamores! Why would John / leave this in the album with no people in it?" And it meets Klyd's poem head to head in these lines:
"One thing they're good for - showing you places in the sky
where you can imagine having taken a hammer and a wedge
and given it a crack to see what's on the other side,
and here it has bled pale and inconsequential
into the ground - no angels, no Buddhist flowers,
just a big dusty geriatric silence."
We have a basic argument here about what nature may show us from "the other side" - the account of motion within stillness (which occurs so often in
Klyd's poems) versus "a big dusty geriatric silence." Nothing could be better for Nashville poetry than such a battle unless it were that the battle is not a coincidence. If Reed's poem is a deliberate rebuttal to Klyd's, all the better. But the wonderful synchronicity that occurs so often in The Time Garden (this one and the big one) is working again in ways that cannot be deliberate. Scott's fragment is in a sense on Klyd's side, with the cosmos alive and fecund and over arching our sport, and Chance's poem presents the tragic view of man's condition, in a broader way, that Reed's character knows to be her truth.

second round -- the innocent nature poet swatted again!

Klyd brings yet another Radnor Laker:

Black Willow Pond 5/21/99

Write another poem
about this slu
I've called
Black Willow Pond?

There's no need to --
the pattern of duckweed's
inevitable
and if I haven't
captured the wonder of that yet,
I won't.

It's active,
the duckweed,
on the cellular level, interacting
with the warmth and the water, in there helping
mess with the color

but passive on the top where
the wind plays -- dabs of it as happy to rock westward
a whisk as it is to stay still as a spider.
The blue and white sky going at once proudly
toward twilight and gray toward rain, the water
does not hesitate to give it back skewed
with wind prints walking it and duckweed opaqueing over.

What is there

will make its impression.
The photographer shooting over my shoulder
will get the sky skewed a bit too, even if he is

using a film that tells in expensive adds
how it doesn't do that, and skew the lake's
skew of the slu too.

What is there will make its impression
whatever the medium. I cannot
develop enough skill with language to prevent
the medium showing thru
on the subject. The photographer
shooting over my shoulder's eye's exposed
in the sky and the water when he gets back his pictures
as surely as ponds features freckle the face of sky.
And you can tell what part of the duckweed's waver
is in my head and what is from my soul

Klyd

Reed: quick note on Klyd's last I think it is beautiful. Maybe the best yet. There's that awkwardness toward the end--"the photographer shooting over my shoulder's eye's exposed"--which, do I like it? Maybe so. It is definitely funny, which I know you intend it to be. I'm working on a general response to the duckweed poems. I hope you will think it is funny.
Reed Richards

mama,Reed's Doing it 2me again!

You and Your Duckweed

Klyd, Alvin B. here. I know
you love your duckweed
because it’s in your poems,
so tell me please what is this
stuff in Centennial Park pond?
It hasn’t grown there before,
and now this year it’s all over,
filling up from the rocky edges
toward the middle. You could
almost walk on it,
and seeing the ducks
getting around in it somehow
makes you think of putting
your foot in the toilet, because
that is basically what a duck is --
a foot with feet, splish-splashing
in places you hate to imagine.
The crap in the pond
gives back the sky (to use your phrase)
as vomit (to use my own),
as leprosy, as the fermented basket
of a belly nine days dead and hanging over
the earth ready to spill its maggots.
Apocalypse should come first to
ducks and geese, experimentally,
you could say, and as warning to
the rest of us, and also because
they deserve it. They are
no smarter than people --
they make their choices and always
choose evil. Oh, I’ve seen them
doing all their sex in the water and
obstructing traffic on the road.
I wouldn’t mind an apocalypse
of gulls or crows raining their stuff
down on stupid people in cars who stop
and let those web-footed dummies
wander all over the road in front of them.
Don’t you know they won’t move
unless you do? They can get
out of the way or be sorry they didn’t.
Just like all the rest of us they
won’t repent until they see the face
of God -- if he won’t come to them,
why not send them to him? I’ll say
as a maybe that maybe the crap in the pond
is not poisonous. Me and Mary Mullen
survived it. We used to drive down
and swim across Salem Pond
every weekday afternoon and Saturday,
swim across through stuff like this
only not so dense. We thought
it was duck shit and made
desperate little vulgar jokes
while we waved it away
with our strokes or tried to push it
at each other without touching
it. I was embarrassed that she
swam stronger than I did
and always made it across
a couple of minutes ahead of me.
I’d stop and float and pretend
to be enjoying the sun that was
burning my retinas through my eyelids
or blinding me in glints off the ripples.
Or else I’d go under and look around --
about all there was was stringy plants
swaying and dipping in strange currents
like they were motioning you
toward them where they could
wrap around your wrists and ankles
and pull you down to sleep with them
on the rusty cans and broken glass
of their fuzzy gray beds. Also, I’ve
never been able to do something else
Mary was good at, which was dive,
in a way that didn’t hurt like hell.
She’s just up in the air
and then finger first in the water.
With me I’m talking about
belly-flops, which ducks do
with great aplomb and never go
half-conked out and struggling
and gasping out of the water,
but me, I think they’re killing,
and I stopped trying to do it years
ago and always go in feet first,
which is also pretty much like
a duck. We’d lie on the pier
and kid each other while I
caught my breath and then borrow
a canoe from the nice people
whose back yard came down to
the water and go paddling around
from one rocky end where the pond
went into a pipe under the road
and slowly drained, to the far
other end, which was deep and shady
and not so clotted and kids
used to swing out and drop in
from a knotted rope tied to a branch.
I went up to her end of the canoe
and surprised her with a kiss one time
and almost tipped us over lengthwise.
I met Billy Murphy there one day
when I went alone. He was
smoking weed among the ducks
and living in the back of Cheryl
Volz’s van, or rather converted
panel truck, full of her leather
handicrafts and tools and paints,
which Billy appropriated
for his own purposes, which were
to make everybody’s clothes he could
lay his hands on look like they’d
been attacked by an amateur
phantom hippie elf, by which time
they (the clothes) were his. Cheryl
was like this kind of science
book illustration of mitosis-at-a-
glance or a time chart of the history
of England or a sedimentation like a
bitten-in-half jaw breaker. First phase
good girl from Ohio, second hippie,
then handicrafts, then Jesus
freak, organic food, and a new top
layer of Seventh Day Adventist -- not to
mention she worked in the hospital as
a nurse’s aide to afford food and gas
and rent on her little motel room in
Springville. She used to
come to my house and play
a washboard or clap her hands while
I played guitar and we sang revival songs
and folkie stuff like ‘Will the Circle Be
Unbroken.’ I hope you can see by this that
I liked her a lot. An opinion or two she had
of me kept her arm’s length -- that I
wasn’t all that Christian for one thing,
and for the other let’s just say she
would Christ-like have compassion on
the sinner and hate the sin. It was a
conflict with her Christian concern that she
wasn’t all that sad to see the last of Billy
when I took him off her hands,
and neither in a way was I when I
took him to Los Angeles and left
him there through his own, as
they say, inadvertence. I
later learned that he got tagged
by a big batch of crude and murderous
angel dust. I heard from Romero, his ex-
brother-in-law, that they found him in
Watts near the corner where Romero used
to hang out, and he was on his knees with
his face pushed against the damp
scummy sewer grating where he’d
dropped the terrible thing he’d wanted
to smoke some more of to take him
even higher than he already was. I think
he took the blow that would have been
for me if we hadn’t gone to California,
that’s how much by then it looked like
he was wrecking my life (and my
clothes). These carnies who rode
down with us came to my
house and said, ‘Alvin B.,
Billy’s dead,’ and tried to
make me feel guilty about it,
but what was I supposed to do?
I can’t make anybody not do
anything. And I can’t wait around
for them to show up when I’ve got
to get back home and go to work. Anyway,
the real reason they came, I found out
after they were gone, was to steal this pocket-
watch my brother’s girlfriend gave me once.
Didn’t matter, didn’t work. It was
cheap and I was glad to see it
gone from the table where I left it.
So the joke was on them.
Other times Mary was mad
because I always could beat her wrestling.
Oh well, M.M., swimming is strength
and wrestling is balance -- you can’t
have everything, and the only
advantage I ever got from my
trunk being long and my legs short
and my center of gravity low
was that I beat you wrestling. Otherwise
I can’t keep up with anybody walking
and tend to bump my head, short as
I am, on the ceilings of compact cars,
and it explains a few other deficiencies,
but not as many as I wish it would so I
wouldn’t have to take the blame
for myself. It doesn’t explain how,
when M.M. fell in love with me
and I said I would marry her if I fell
in love with her too, it doesn’t
explain how I didn’t marry her,
and how, though I loved her, I went
to California with Billy, and how
her heart was broken and she married
someone else, who couldn’t have been
such a shithead as I was. Then
there was the time Jimmy Byrd,
who used to laugh at me for anything
(I know how we pretend to pick
our friends and end up taking what’s
available), and me went swimming in
our underwear in Utah Lake until
we were attacked by the color green,
some kind of mutated super-scum
from the unholy mating of sewage
with steel mill waste. It was like an old
horror movie with the invisible force
of the universe warning us
to stop being such a couple of goofballs.
We got out just ahead of the green but
people picnicking saw us in our
dripping, muddy underwear
and reached understandable (I suppose)
conclusions, and Jimmy said
I was an idiot for getting caught like that,
but he was one too, we both were
and so what? It was a hoot,
but we never repeated it, and he
got married and moved away and I
moved away too, and he died at 37
of a heart attack, and that’s part
of this story but it’s another story too.
Look back and count for me, please,
because I don’t have the heart to,
how many times this circle
is broken. Jimmy Byrd is dead,
and Billy Murphy is dead, and Mary,
with husband and kids and her heart,
I think, still a little sore, is
gone somewhere and the same
with Cheryl, and those rotten
carnies with my broken watch
are either dead or traveling around
setting up ferris wheels with their
blackened hands, and that’s
living as good as it comes.
Not to know what time it is except
when the sun goes up or comes down
is as good as meditation, and so what if
they are mean and ugly -- I say
hooray for them, and for those mean
and ugly ducks, all over the place,
like the stuff in the pond come out for
a stroll. Oh sure, guys still fish in there,
and people smart enough to fall in love
and get married still circle around
holding hands, and kids still throw things
in the water which is somewhere under
all that. But what kind of start are they
getting in life not knowing the look
of clear water, not knowing that in
a better world, an easier time, the water
generously gives their faces back
in enchanted wavery life-sized
photographs, like it does the sky world-sized,
just to make you laugh and wonder,
and that the scum does not conceal some
claw waiting to snatch them in, or the people
they love or think they love? I’ve got a great big
headache right now while I’m writing this
and have had no successes in my life.
Please tell me, Klyd, tell your friend
Alvin B., if you can with a clear
conscience, that it’s a government
conspiracy and a great big coverup,
that it's fate or some other euphemism
for who-the-hell-knows, and that it’s
not the duckweed.

Reed Richards

Klyd!on Reed's last: I love it and I'll get ya for it

so there! Klyd responds

Alvin B, I Wish I Could Say That

Alvin I know I told Reed to tell you
it’s not the duckweed, but that was, you know,
conversational banter. I know you asked seriously
and seriously I wish I could say that.
In point of fact the scum on that pond top
did not infect you — but in an absolute way
it is duckweed that’s yalls predicament. Sorry.

You yourself admitted the color green
attacked two of ya — it might as well
have covered the whole bunch the way
the moon sees it. You have me
at a disadvantage, Alvin, you being
a character in a poem and me
being a poet. Particularly since you’re
a character in someone else’s pome. Reed and I,
man to man, poet to poet, mind to mind, if we got

to trying to debate whether there’s splendor in the grass
as Wordsworth has it (I guess
I’d be on that side) or the stars prick the eyes
with ammoniac proverbs, in Hart Crane’s phrase,

we’d end up getting both too broad
and too narrow. I mean, we actually have
tried to have these conversations and they’re
half filled with “yeah sure, but”
and that don’t sing.

It’s all Jan’s fault. She egged him on to argue
with me and I end up in the position of bein’ called on
to defend the honor of duckweed when Reed
can just put words in your mouth to “burst my
balloon” like they say by having you say things
that aren’t as smart as Reed really is. That way
he can make it sound like simple sagacity to say
he don’t see what can’t be seen. But I see you, Alvin B,
there with your friend, you look an awful lot like Reed
standing up out of the green green all over. And I can tell you,

Alvin B, it is not the government. Sorry.

It’s not government but there is a coverup,
and it does go all the way to the top. See,
Reed gets to just make things up
and as the defender of duckweed I am bound to
the greatest veracity I am capable of.
God is his own coverup.
Don’t ask me why. It’s a mystery.

I do know to the moon you and Jimmy Byrd
would be hard to distinguish from duckweed even
without pond scum on you. It is the atmosphere,
the air and clouds around earth, the moon is most
in love with, and she peers into that in wonder.
Eventually she does notice — like I’d notice
where Linda’s eyes, when I dared look, go
from orange to green — the moon distinguishes
the opposition stroke of breathing and exhaust going on
together on both sides, the cycle of oxygen
and carbon dioxide, and in that way
distinguishes plants from animals, but to her
it looks more like maintenance of, than use of,
that atmosphere, and not even a maintenance so much as
a dance, and the interaction of sea and land in that
commotion complicates the issue utterly. This teases
and delights her.

Breath — breath like the earth has —

is what she longs for. She hears far better than she sees.
She’s almost all one big ear drum.
But if Max Roach and Ringo Starr and Terry Thomas
and Neal Peart are playing on the same night she assumes
they are playing together, together with the sound of planes
crossing the skies. And like in Scott’s poem, all rockabilly guitars
plugged in anywhere play on the big song she hears. And sounds
of our conversations, our celebrations, our commerce
by day and our loves and angers by night and grief at any hour
together with the seduction songs and territorial statements
of birds and animals slosh from one side of our globe down here
to the other like a tide with so much constancy she could have
no reason to suspect the sounds are not made by a continuing
presence instead of passing generations that arise and fall away.
There are musicians in the mountains of Tibet and Thailand
and Ecuador who play stringed instruments “straight to the moon.”
These guys and gals are a wild bunch whose music

is incomprehensible unless you listen to it
thru the night they’re playing in like you listen to bebop inside out
thru the rhythm section. Even then, until you hear the raunchiness
beyond the chaos you don’t quite get what’s going on and by that time
these pickers are likely to be so ecstatic they try to smash
the centuries old and precious instruments like Peter Townsend

a Richenbacher, and would, if their apprentices
weren’t on hand to restrain them. This factor
in earthsong helps the moon digest it
but teases her deeply too. Once in a blue moon,
on nights when several of them “happen to be”
all playing at once she thinks that she will break
into the dance of breath at any moment as her pleasure
and excitement and her yearning become frantic.

But my point is —
she doesn’t distinguish organisms by sight any better
than she distinguishes the distinct performances
in music. But, you know, Alvin B, (here I hitch
my belt up and look wise) sometimes

we don’t see the planet for the forests, and she
doesn’t have that problem, though problems she has, and
her failure to distinguish you and your friends from other varieties
of organic life has an accuracy to it. You guys as she sees you
are just part of “the slick,” as she sometimes thinks of it. Perhaps
her word is better translated, even, as “the slime.” She
doesn’t know that she is looking toward the sun really,
toward its power, that we — everything in the slick (or the slime,
to please Reed) is here because the sun needs a way to
arouse yearning and suspicion of reality within the moon and
for the moon to visually regard the sun directly would worse than blind her
so in her delusion it’s in our direction her yearning is aimed.
To put it another way, when the sun’s virtue strikes
the earth, the flowering that’s engendered, or the natures
of the independent parts that make up that slick,

is a result not just of what the mighty sun can evoke
from the materials of earth but also of what the moon
is capable of wanting from the sun. And the earth ...…

But I stray too far from your immediate
concerns. Yes, pond scum is the problem. Sorry.
The stuff in Centennial is a different sort, more noxious
in particulars to us, and to ducks, but it makes no difference.
The most benign form of vegetation nourished in water by light
doesn’t need to motion you toward it and wrap itself around
your wrists and ankles to pull you onto its soft gray beds,
doesn’t need a claw to snatch you under. Entirely passive, it’s
as good a sign of your doom, Alvin B, as you can ask for,
as good a pace car toward the checkered flag of death
as yall can afford with it being only a local racetrack. With duckweed
we sway in the moon’s pull. Where we are is simply

where duckweed is, in that slime, and everything
in this place will rock to death pretty quick
and most dissatisfied. Many will even over and over
have bought spurious guilt like your carney friends
tried to sell you. (What a good poem you are hero of!
Then you bless those carneys! They stole your watch for you!
And you say your life has had no successes!) We
are in another place of yearning than the moon
but not free of its tide. So there.

I hope your headache is better, Alvin B.
(No folks this Alvin is not the one in the Chipmunks.)
Say, I bet I saw your friend Sheryl Volz
in Henderson, Kentucky, one Sunday. She approached
Linda at a fast food place — her car had stopped running,
she was traveling, no service places open and obviously
not much money. How did she put it to Linda —
“Spirit told me you could help”? Spirit turned out to be right,
as I had just tuned up the Gordinni, and her VW engine
used the same distributor parts, same points, same rotor,
and the ones I had just taken out were so much newer
than the pitiful things she was coughing along on
she thought she had a new car when I put them in for her.
Oh yeah, she had leather crafts and tools in her van — gave me
a very nice belt without a buckle. Whether it was your friend
or not, this woman was like that, like you said, always taking on
a new layer of identity, you could tell just from talking to her
a short time even, while she was so excited about spirit
finding her good used points and a rotor for free, still ready
to enthuse about so many things, still eager to celebrate
a spate of hip ego adventures, and for all my liking her
and wanting to be the auto mechanic character
in her supernatural story — the way you stand
against irresponsible joy and call our attention
back to human suffering, like Che Guevarra, like Barabus,
Prometheus, in a poem by Reed Evan Richards — I saw
she was a little cluttered with solutions. Like every real thing
that happened to her, her ego saw it and said ‘I going to need that —
please take its name and file it with a narration,’ the way
the wound of revelation scabs over into religion. Looking back
I say she should have been peeling inward, striping away
dogma first and fashion until even the good girl at bottom
wanted to be broken like a shell around the kingdom of heaven
within her. Still, seek and you will find. How can one

seek the wrong way? if one is searching
mustn’t one by definition be searching in the wrong place
most of the time?

To seek the wrong way and to love the wrong way
is normal in the slick. Therefore common sense would say
the production of misplaced human yearning
is part of its purpose. But maybe the slick simply works better
as a whole when its parts are malfunctioning? God’s so tricky,
maybe it’s both; the way the exhaust of one kind of organic life
is the breath of the other, our yearning misleads us toward truth
and provides the moon diluted sips of sunshine.

The Judeo-Christian world
sees Potophar’s wife as a bitch, I mean the woman
who accused Joseph of rape when he refused
her adulterous advances, and had him imprisoned.
Only to the Sufis is she a hero — for her longing
impresses them. She had little chance of longing correctly.
I’m talking about your Mary now you know, her
still thinking the Great Love is lodged in a sinner boy
who left her. As for Jimmy Byrd, those who belittle their friends
for making the same mistakes they make are on course
for an early heart attack. It’s in the medical literature.
The timing’s triggered by how long it takes for their conviction
that they are not like that to wear off. And Billy Murphy,
for whose adventure you left Mary (yes,
since you asked I’ll help enumerate
the breaks in the circle) — Billy
reaching for the angel dust in the Los Angeles sewer
was reaching to transcend, to get higher. It’s incredulous
anyone would say that about so horrible a death,
isn’t it? Incredulous anyone could suggest god would credit
complete inversion of transcendence. Well,
all I am is a singing piece of the slime, who will add this —
all misguided longing on earth looks to the moon
of a night time like just another spot of her silver
wavering in puddle, pond or lake, or drug rippling
on a river, given shimmering back to her. She loves them.
She almost thinks she’s just about to breathe.

Listen, tell Reed
that in addition to sycamores and duckweed
I have a lot of poetry celebrating titties and
oral sex. Satirize that!
And now Alvin B,
that I’ve answered your question, may I
take some of your time to defend nature poets
and nature lovers in general from the possible
misconception we just go around ouing and ahing.
Maybe it’s not clear enough that we Radnor Lake regulars
scorn those who ask for the dead snapping turtles to be removed
so the stink will not disrupt the beauty. Oh we’ll go far enough away
from the corpse the force of the odor doesn’t physically
hurt the nose, but we know that smell is a dimension
of the wholeness there. I never see Black Willow Pond, that
beautiful place, without the knowledge that smell

is part of the scene.
And as a service
to tree huggers in general I give any nature poet
who wants to use it permission to add
this generic disclaimer without credit:
“When we say ‘how pretty!’
is it not clear we are saying ‘see here
where death and life play at tag?’”

Love and highest regard to Reed. Tell him
I whiff the garbage too but I expect next time
I see the moon in the water
I will still
shiver.
Klyd

Somebody stop us! warning Alvin B is still going on slandering pond scum -- stay tuned -- tomorrow or tomorrow or the next day the next episode in this essential debate will be posted and if that's not too much Scott will throw in the view of a truth seeking pagan on duck shit quite soon. nowhere but in the time garden I assure ye.

Tony D sez: WOW, the garden is VERY green!

Curtis Rose sez: [Klyd] Your 'pond scum' bears a much closer resemblance to music than th@ which i have hitherto thought of as pond scum.......

round 3

And now - with no further t do - Alvin answers

Wow, Klyd, Wow!

Wow, Klyd, Alvin B. here again, and, I mean,
wow! I’m sitting watching t.v. and wondering
what I can ever say after all of the gorgeousness
of what you’ve said (leaving aside that you
think I’m not so smart). Whether I agree
or disagree with your views, I’m putting
muddy shoes on an awful pretty coffee table,
and if I find even one little wormhole
on the underside, it’s going to be
my fault for saying so. Anyway, I
don’t see any wormholes, but as you say,
I’m not that smart. Which is why I’m
sitting here after Springer’s gone off, and still
don’t know how or even whether to reply. I get
nothing from Reed. All he says (and if it’s
to wind me up and get me going, it’s
a pitiful job), is to tell you that he doesn’t mean
to disregard your man-in-the-moon
metaphysics (I guess I know what he means
by that), but he doesn’t know what
to say about it. I think I’ll have something to say,
though it may just prove how poorly I catch on.
But so you see, you’re wrong about Reed writing me;
I’m writing him — with his permission, of course.
Anyway, it’s more complicated than you think
if you think I’m just a cut-out he can hide behind and
shoot his sorry little arrows at your duckweed. I’m
a real guy. And how do I know it? Why, because
I’m sitting here writing this. How do you know
you’re real? You have my word for it (for whatever
you think it’s worth) that I am not making up
the things I am telling you about my life. I can’t
help thinking it’s unfair of you to think
I would make stuff up to prove a point,
just because none of this could really happen
in a world where duckweed is good.
If you see Reed behind me lobbing his droopy
little spitwads, you have my permission,
even encouragement (as if you needed it)
to tell him for yourself to get lost.
I’d do it, but I think I’m the one who’s lost,
and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. Like you say,
‘I don’t see what can’t be seen,’ and I go around
fairly convinced that at least anybody else
gets enough glimpses of what’s purely
invisible to me to put some kind of puzzle
together. All these invisible forces — invisible in a way
that somehow standing on the moon instead of
jumping in the pond makes it easier to see.
Plants and animals, period. Breathing in, breathing
out. Period. So when you’re thinking that big,
what’s the difference between duckshit and humans
when we both are floating? What are Mary and me
more or less than the ducks (to put it less crudely)?
What are me and Jimmy Byrd more or less than the
waterlilies, and what are our snores when we sleep
more or less than the sounds the waterlilies make
when they close just after dusk with a surprising sound
halfway between a duck’s quack and a clap
of thunder? But even that way, why shouldn’t the lily
still mind about being strangled by some imposter green
that the moon can’t do anything about but smile?
If the moon’s serene view were even possible to
anyone besides Neil Armstrong, should I want it?
The idea kind of reminds me of that song Bette
Midler butchered (excuse me for saying so, but
no one ever hit number one singing flatter than
she does) — but if everything looks cool from a distance,
that doesn’t mean everything is cool. Where is that moon
going to go when nothing is left to orbit? Orbiting
might look like love, but it reminds me more
of codependency. I think floating in the pond right in the
shit and hating the shit and loving Mary is better than
standing on the moon. Thinking there is some difference
between her and duckshit is better than being
an idea like Nature that folks can place in a remote
location and then say that like God it is all at once
good and indifferent. Sure, I’d rather live with duck-
shit than with some people I know, I’d rather
open my mouth and eat duckshit than swallow what
some people do or have to say, including myself
when I go and treat people the way I do sometimes,
like Mary standing and crying in the parking lot
of where she works because she knows
the next time we see each other on the other
side of Billy and California we won’t touch
each other more than just to shake hands
or give each other a sad friendly hug. If you want
to say there’s no difference between people and
duckshit and you want to use me as proof, then you’ve
got a real point. Oh crap, what was I starting out to say?
Oh yeah, first off, that I hope it was clear enough
that I was clowning somewhat about ducks and geese —
though if I wanted proof what I said was true,
I could tell the story about one psychotic rapist thug
whose feather-bare face was all lumpy red bill
and whose body was the same sorry gravity-ward
pile of dirty flesh that you see with constant
masturbators and middle-aged crackheads.
He used to go around fucking all the other ducks,
male and female — just come up behind them in the water,
grab their neck with his bill and do his thing. I think
the powers that handle these affairs finally put him
out of everyone else’s misery. What a loser. But no,
that was one guy, and the real truth is I like waterfowl —
all birds, in fact — and have since I was small —
memorized them, had the flashcards, the Audubon
Society books where you had to stick the pictures
on the squares. I wanted to be a bird and secretly
had wings when I walked home from school
with the other kids, who, sadly for them,
couldn’t fly. Even now, whenever I go home for
Christmas, I like going to Tracy Aviary in Liberty Park
even more than hugging my mom and teasing my nieces,
I like the flamingos and owls and swans and whatnot.
Nothing is prettier, nothing more like an angel,
though you can’t see it in a bird zoo, than a
pelican flying. Jimmy Byrd and me used to
see them down at Utah Lake seeming to find
their way around the slime. The rest of nature is cool
to a point, and I would say that point is where
the best of beauty is outrun by the worst of ugly (and
it always is). The victory photo at the other end
is Jimmy’s mouth filled with mold, worms
weaving themselves into gloves for Billy’s bones,
me lying down between Jimmy and Billy and getting
a wider and wider grin like I was the man in the moon
and I was ready for my closeup. Okay, cows and corn
die for me, and I die for maggots. The fact that this
is not unfair is an ugly fact. When I can help it
in little ways that probably don’t even matter,
I step out of that circle. I bet you do too. Just a
couple of days ago, I swerved around a turtle that
was trying to cross the interstate. Drove off feeling
bad for her, not because of anything you said,
though I had just the day before read your poem,
but for the turtle’s own sake, a creature that wanted
to get somewhere and stay alive, same as me,
which was exactly the reason I couldn’t pull over and
go back and help her get wherever she was going.
Showing that however hard you try to avoid the slime,
you’re always in it. I guess you mean that too.
But I’m starting to think, as I think about it (yes,
sometimes I think), that you’re trying
to have it two ways that don’t fit when you say on the
one hand that nature is this one thing, this ‘slick,’
that doesn’t tell the difference between me and
the bacteria on a booger, and then on the other hand
you say there is justice in nature and that Jimmy Byrd
died for a weakness of the spirit and not
of the organs of the body. You couldn’t say that
about an amoebae. But if nature is coming down from the moon
and counting up sins, then nature has to know
who is capable of sinning, and it’s not the ducks and geese.
Well, I’m a dumb guy, I’m Alvin B., what do I know?
I’m sure I’ve misread you word by word. But I
think you’ve misread me — or at least I didn’t tell you enough
for you to understand — about Jimmy Byrd. If I wanted
to go into it there are much worse things I could tell you —
I think I have, in fact, once or twice on the phone —
but the thing is he loved me just enough for none of that
to matter. To demonstrate, I'll take your man in the moon
and put him closer down so he won't miss anything important
--in a tree, say--and put it this way: the man in the tree
wouldn’t have killed Jimmy for being a jerk, because he also
heard Jimmy bragging on me to his family and other friends,
and saying that I was one real smart guy and fun to kid with
and that I would go far, and the man in the tree heard those
family and other friends tell me what Jimmy told them.
When Jimmy died just about the first thing his mom did,
though we (Jimmy and me) hadn’t seen or talked to each
other in years, was send his little sister to tell my mom
so my mom could tell me, seeing how I was living
out of town and out of state by then. If it was the man
in the tree that killed him, I bet he was sorry he did it
after he saw that. But it wasn’t the man in the tree if nature
is just, and if it was the man in the tree, then nature
is bad because it is bad to be cruel, and worse
to kill than to belittle. If there is justice,
who is going to give the man in the tree what he
deserves? He had an ex-wife and two little girls,
for heck sake. But what do I know? I’m just
dumb Alvin B. Giving you your due though, Klyd
(and I haven’t come anywhere near giving you the praise
and respect you deserve for your beautiful and amazing
poem), it brought tears in my eyes what you said
about Billy. it’s as hard as with Jimmy
to remember much good to say about him, except that
he never belittled me, was good-looking, had good weed,
and I loved him, I’m pretty sure, the same time I loved
Mary. that’s not much to say about anybody, least of all
that I loved him. On the bad side I could paint a picture that
has him landing in jail for getting high and trying to punch
a cop and not even thanking me when I paid his fine
(twenty-five dollars). Continuing on the bad side I could tell
how on the trip down to L.A. in the middle of the night
him and the carnies started sucking orange spray paint
out of plastic bags, getting it all over some of my clothes
that he hadn’t already ruined by painting, and then
they got up their own carnival by taking the front wheel
off my bike (we were in a station wagon), putting
sparklers in the spokes, lighting them and spinning
the wheel and madly laughing laughing laughing. It must
have been the intervention of the man in the tree
that the highway patrol, Ponch and John,
didn’t spy us (we were on a major interstate)
and put us all in jail. But bad stories usually
don’t have happy endings — they just have either
bad endings or escapes. You know what happened
to Billy. We got to Los Angeles and it seemed
he wanted to spend the whole time taking us around
to friends and relatives in Pasadena and Watts and
Compton — places that even those dirty-handed,
paint-sucking carnies were scared to death of.
So I handed Billy my bike and said to meet me
at Romero’s house in nine days. I told the carnies
to get lost too. Oh Klyd, on the face of it
Billy was a super colossal waste of time. But you —
you’ve found the one good thing, the thing that makes
me understand why I never wanted to forget
that I loved him. It was for Billy’s own sake,
but also who am I not to love somebody god loves?
If I can love strays like what he was (though it
was for Billy’s own sake I loved him), maybe
it will make God love me too. Which I guess he does,
because people say so — not the people on the two for
ten dollars prayer supermarket on t.v. — they don’t know
anything but sales — but my mom says so —
Walk with your hand in the hand of God, she’s been
telling me for years. She says he loves me. I say
if she says so it must be true, but I still don’t feel it,
only sometimes, like you, when I stop and look
at something so amazing (maybe duckweed, maybe
Billy, maybe something else) that you could never
think your way to the end of it. I reach for Billy,
Billy reaches for the angels in the sewer — in the end
he’s so down he’s up, and if those angels take him
(like you say they did), and if I can grab on just to the
hem at the bottom of his jeans, then up I go, and the
wild ride that started the day I met him goes on
forever! Whoopee! Look at me, getting sentimental
and loving it! But almost every storyteller has two hands,
and my other one holds the weight of being at least
half sure that those carnies were right when they came
to my apartment and told me that I put Billy where he was
and let him die. I mean, I did wait an extra day for him
but in the end had to hurry home in order not to lose
my job. Where was he? Whatever the carnies said
couldn’t be counted on as anything but legend.
Romero thought he was probably in jail. it’s not like
he couldn’t have got a ride back if he’d tried. But he’d
have had to try, and there he was in L.A. with no
easy way to leave and with my bike and a big craving
to get high and a knowledge that whatever he wanted
was more easily come by where he was than where
I was. I told you before how it was killing me
to know him. Jesus says to walk the extra mile,
and that’s always one more mile than
however many you’ve just walked. Jesus says,
Greater love hath no man than that he lay down
his life for his friends, or something like that.
that’s plural, but you know Billy was crazy enough
for four or five. I might have saved his life and only
lost a job. If I’d died I be dead without his blood on
my hands. But it’s not the natural thing to do
to step out of the slime and do these things. it’s
natural to die but not to be in a hurry to do it, like
Billy was. I stayed an extra day, you might say
I swerved for him, but I did not put myself in danger
by stopping my car and getting out and helping him
across the interstate. I saved myself, but I didn’t do
my spirit any good, same as when I kept mum about
loving Mary. What did I save myself for?

What do you have to say about all this, Klyd? What
can you tell your stupid friend Alvin B. that will
sort it all out? Your view doesn’t come naturally to me.
Meditation supports it, but does experience? It looks
good in a lyric, but what about in a story? Maybe
your experience with the Cheryl Volz you met
shows that we just live in different universes.
What you say sounds exactly like her, but what I got
was an angel I couldn’t live up to, while Billy
was finding his way to the angels by going the
other way. And there I was, like the song says,
stuck in the middle without wings. Did your Cheryl
have blood-copper-red hair, dazzling in the sunlight?
Even if she did, there must have been for several years
until old age or respectability or evolution overran them,
thousands of hippie girls like her driving around
in vans wherever the spirit took them, and thousands
of pelicans are still flying like Viking ships in the air
over the foreboding green slime that when they come
to settle is going to rise up to take them.

Reed Richards

Christopher Allen Waldrop
back "with reservations"

Klyd, various reasons but especially the line "God is his own coverup," which is one of those fascinating phrases that is entirely comprehensible even though my mind can't wrap even one-thousandth of the way around it, have compelled me to comment on your poem. I'm afraid I'm not as regular a reader as I would like to be, so I haven't been able to follow the full argument between you and Alvin B. and, by extension, Reed, so I had to read your poem completely out of context. Despite that, I found it amazingly lucid and dense and powerful, as though it were a whole and not only a part. Actually I read over the direct addresses and references to previous talks as Creeley-esque lines, although without Creeley's sometimes annoying spareness.

Anyway, I'm letting my fingers run away with me here. Being a little more spare would probably be a good thing for me. Apart from my usurpation of the findrinny contest, I haven't been a contributor here, but I have listened in when I had the time, and have always regretted having to leave. I'm definitely going to have to drop in more often.

Scott knows what Muse to tend to and when to so here he sings of duckweed 2!!

What a lot of exegesis about duckweed. I mean my god the stuff is not only active on a celluar level but is a darn good muse. Of course that witty Radio Reed caused a lot of snickers when he passed on the words of Alvin B. But then comes Klyd, not to be outdone, shines a light at it. And the humor though sometimes secondary to the subject of duckweed, should in both cases be published at other places so people can see the sort of radical thinking that happens at hoe-n-tell then what they otta know or do is get someone to scrape that damn stuff off the pond at Centennial Park, it looks like it might start breeding some kind of creature from the black lagoon. The ducks won’t have anything to do with it -- they swim around trying get the worms off people’s fish hook, the same ones that actually believe there are fish in that fetid piece of (duckweed). Just imagine how my virgin mother Athena feels about her reflecting pond being scum ugly because of those scummy ducks and their little fertilizing pellets that they think go away just because it’s water, and no human can see down there where their little turds stink up the pond and grow----duckweed. But what about that Black Willow Pond, which I’m not certain which pond it is, but I’m certain that it is home to some kind of creature of the BLACK lagoon. I mean it has to be there cause of the duckweed, and what black willow was ever seen there? Maybe it fell in and the branches are what Klyd calls duckweed but Alvin B. knows it’s real, after all he good as sez it’s poison, and are there turtles innnit? What the heck do they know about Black Willows? All they do is go around snagging toes of unlikely swimmers and making more turtles, they must be bad as rabbits, are the damned starlings who wait several days of eating bread you throw out then wang they let it flow right on top of your car. Obviously there are worse evils than duckweed. It like that dern comic, who says he’s known for pulling very large pieces of furniture from his a-- --. It’s just duck crap that makes duckweed. Ask any swan they’ll tell you.
Obviously I overstated my stay, But remember every thing has it’s say, and that includes duckweed, Alvin, and Klyd. Scott

from short post by Klyd

Watch out -- I'm still trying to justify the ways of duckweed to Alvin and am deep into the next and let us hope my final installment.

cut some slack Aldo is back!
I have a question for a few other people, namely Debbie and Jo Anne and a few others. I'm missing your voices from the Time Garden and wonder if the silence is the sound of your pique that Klyd and Reed have become exceptionally long-winded. I've read their long, interesting and occasionally funny poems two or three times with great enjoyment but can find no reason why you should find yourselves silenced or pushed aside by them, as if the last word goes to the one who won't shut up. I mean, they both stretch logic and structure nearly to the breaking point, especially Reed. In fact, I enjoy how he does that several times and then uses narrative to bring it back around to firmer ground. But it also suggests that he is flying by the seat of his pants, meaning nothing he has to say should worry anyone. If you tried to break his argument down into syllogisms, you'd probably find problems everywhere, and you would probably find much fewer problems, looking at things logically, in Klyd's poem (we're still waiting for the second one). Interestingly, this doesn't make one more likely to be right than the other. I know a guy who argues quite logically in a poem using X's and Y's that homosexuality can't exist. To which the only reasonable response is that you can't make truth out of logic unless you start with truth. Truth is nature, and it starts with reasonable rules of observation, and it is what those rules are that is open to debate. That is where, undoubtedly, Klyd's and Reed's argument really begins and ends. But anybody with any sense of reasonable rules of observation, or with any sense that observation is a value at all (as opposed to wishful thinking or prejudice), has to agree that all the logic in the world can't prove that something doesn't exist that demonstrably does exist. Come one, Debbie, come on, Jo Anne, write me a poem about nature, write the kind of poem my XY friend hasn't matured to an understanding of yet, the kind that begins with the understanding that nature is there and is a mystery. You've done it before, and Klyd and Reed have done it, but it is time for you again, because, to be honest, a steady diet of Klyd and Reed, even with the humorous interjections of Scott (who does a wild and fascinating job of reprising themes from the other two without exactly revealing his own feelings [if I'm reading him right]), is low in certain essential vitamins that only you can provide.

Your friend,
Aldo Ramirez

from a quick post by Deborah Pitts: Aldo, You read the silence, on my part, wrong - my friend. I've still got my head in the well looking for more from the muse. A poem from the perspective of a duck is called for here (with the ongoing duckweed debate) but the muse has yet to quack.

Klyd's turn

You, Alvin or Reed, Whoever

I’m offended by this man in the moon shit!
What size fancy is that?! You think
Neil Armstrong can tell you anything
for standing up there and looking back,
anything except how important a part of this beautiful ball
we’re on the atmosphere around it is, how visibly
it overlays us like we’re on, or rather within,
a transparent jellyfish that swallowed a pretty marble—
no, a pretty bowling ball— not knowing it was
indigestible? So “earth” is not the third rock from the sun
but that rock plus atmosphere. Neil Armstrong
was born to die and have his heart stomped while alive
like the rest of us.
I don’t quaff my nectar from a thimble!
It’s no man in the moon I speak of— that’s not loony
nearly large enuff — I give you full fledged crazy— I
present the yearning of the moon herself
without precedent of children’s rimes. And believe me

it is not “serene”—
oh the serene man in the moon tra la
thinks our world is A world where duckweed is Good tra la—

But you are not interested in the moon. In pain instead.

Hey! I like Reed’s “Wow, Klyd, Wow” a lot.
Rather I like the poetry between the arguments, the bricks
of narrative and image, but I’m pissed, at first anyway,
at the mortar between them, those pieces of argument which

I feel, and feel disappointed to feel, inattentive

to my dancing
positions.
“Nature is good?” Did
I ever use the word “nature”
in my poems
much at all before this debate we’re in?
I’d be surprised.
“Good”? “Good” is
a teen aged girl saving herself for
her Sunday school teacher. There
is no goodness in the slick. I am defender now
of the proposition—
“nature” is “good”?

Well, of course I do
like the wild, that layer of organic life
“below”
humanity, that level in some senses, from some
points of view, a bit lower than a little lower
than the angels. I do marvel at life standing forth
in myriad form, graceful or snouty, walking
water around in skins and lifting it up, standing
it still in stalks, inland all over, like the ocean had invented it all
as stratagems to invade dirt’s territory. I do grin
at ragweed and dragonflies and shudder when turtles fuck
face to face slow bopping in the water fit together
like a puzzle the color of bark that’s solved into something
like a living fishing bobber, snapping powerful jaws
of threat when love nudges into hurt a touch.

You may be dumb, Alvin, but I don’t know nearly
as much about ugly as you. To me ‘ugly’
has to be around
to set up ‘pretty.’ And I get fascinated by ugly
pretty easy. And your image of ugly triumphant
with you joining Jimmy and Billy in the dirt as bug food—
that’s just resources of ‘nature’ ill arranged
from our temporary point of view. One time I saw
a country preacher rudely whack a coffin and yell
at the startled congregation, “your loved one
is not in there!” He was right, I feel sure.
And Jimmy Byrd and Dante agree with me,

I think. I think I’ll go see here in a minute,
but even I admit that Reed, or Bukofsky, saying
‘how can someone write about trees
when people treat people like they do?’
can bring an ‘amen’ from me too. And you

may be a dumb sorta guy Alvin B but
I see what you mean about you writing Reed—
he read “Wow Klyd Wow” at Radio Cafe
the other night— yes we had Radio Reed at
Radio Cafe— and there are distinct bits of Reedness
in that poem that could only happen in your voice, Alvin,

and good readers and listeners all over music city
are learning that bits of Reedness are collectible
so whatever dumbness you have serves well. For example,
I decided it was a good move spelling ‘impostor’
as “imposter” but to tell the truth I didn’t catch it
till I put the pome on spell checker, and then
I admired how Reed used spelling in his characterization

of you and of course I identified with Reed as one of
the ‘smart’ ones at your expense. You’re right—
it’s more complicated than I thought. That’s how fragile
feelings of human superiority really are,
yet they freeze into place so solidly they don’t
even need the support of argument, unconscious
assumption holds them in place like a nonweightbearing
wall no one thought to knock thru and open a useless
alcove into a great open view of living room
with all the nice art on the wall— the picture of Dante
in particular with Vergil fading below and Beatrice
beckoning from above and above her the white swirling
of angels that become white spots marking the sides
of the huge pneumatic tube that goes up to god when the bank is open.

I’m sure your pain and Mary’s, all you guys,’ is
as real as Neil Armstrong’s and mine. And that’s
very real, I tell ya. Let us build now those pains
a tabernacle. I’ll bring beer and lemonade and a
hammer and we’ll put the name of everybody who ever hurt
really bad and has a right to be mad at duckweed
and a little impatient with the poets who love it

on a wall like a big ole long Vietnam memorial.
It will be longer than the great wall of china
and try our resources infinitely but in a world
like this, tra la, with duckweed being good and all

we can do it! and maybe that
will make us
see
something—

something about this place
this slick we share with duckweed. Your pain
is real but it is not yours. It is kind of
communal property. We exchange it
like trained seals passing a beach ball, or like
a piece of Tupperware that goes home
with different members of the family
after almost every picnic. At least
I think that’s part of what I saw . . I mean
I’m going to see… . ‘Scuse me,
I’m getting ahead of the story. But if you want
to insist your pain is your very own
then it is.

Do I really say
‘there is justice in nature’? Where
do I say that?
At a glance you can see
there is no justice in nature. A body
would have to go
outside of time
to have any chance
of finding nature just.
Here,
I’ll do that for you.
Just for you Alvin B I’ll go look-see
if
little birds get to eat cats eventually
and kittens
get to eat owls and so on
where trumpet of the lord sound and time be no more.

Okay— I’m back. They dumped
me back out for trying to pack up and bring out some
conceptual communal singing— I was with
Dante Alighieri and dante (dl) graham and a mess of poets
thick as leaves around Black Willow Pond in July going at it
like crickets but everyone heard each other and added
collaborative augmentation without a beginning. Everything fit
together naturally as rain sharing the surface of a lake.
You can’t bring any of that singing out, like you
can’t bring plants out of the smokies. My aunt Vina Lea,
strictest old Church of Christ moralist in the world,
was arrested once for trying to take some home to her yard.
All I did was try to prepare some way to remember just one
little part of it but they could tell it was me slowing them down some
trying to do that. Elizabeth the First was there. I don’t
think she’s ugly anymore. She reminded me of Cheryl and
I thought she looked at me in a puzzled way like she was
trying to remember who I was or was confused
that I didn’t nod at her or something.

It’s very hard
to report back to you
all I saw, or how I saw. For one thing

out of time they talk in rime.
I don’t know why but I will try
merely to tell you, not
sell you, what

I saw there that was pertinent to our fuss here.
I’ll try to tell you as hard as I had to try to see

to see any shape there— everything was clear
in varied degree—
where you see everything thru everything
it’s hard to make out
anything

and color and motion
seem to be
all that’s there
it’s everything everywhere

but the motion seemed always to have just stopped
the other shoe never dropped —
the potential to move threateningly apparent—
colors draw my eyes around, my rowing eyes
be movement’s parent—

tho everything is still everywhere and nothing never moved at all
when you look toward a new spot it seems to
have just backed up
to cancel some scamper or have risen to cancel some fall

much like it needed
to, to not to get caught moving, and perfectly succeeded.
Reed, or Alvin, whoever I’m answering here, if Dante
had not been there, had not hailed me,
I’d a
never seen the people— “us”
I would not have heard Jimmy Byrd,
pouring over your every word,
cuss,
where you said he died of failure of his organs not his heart,
‘damn Alvin you are talking back to poetry in prose, in that part’

but it was because he was so into it, so much on your side,
enjoyed it so much where you did sting Klyd.
Everywhere you hit a good lick
he’s glow. Where his sick-
ness and his death came along in your song
doesn’t seem to bother him larger
than 3 cubic centimeters
of the color that bother
takes there. I kept trying to remember
I was there to learn about justice in nature
but where I looked at plants and animals my eyes kept
riding on over to the plant and animal in us, in people, via the overlap.

Well, I saw
Billy double.
He is
after all in trouble
for the trouble
he caused — Billy is.

How Dante tried to tell me to look into, and out of, the place—

‘place’ — ok — let’s call it ‘place’—

he reminded me
Ouspensky,
whose presentation of Gurdieff’s organization
of the ray of creation is a source of inspiration
the muse abused
for me to inform yall on the moods of the moon
in my last turn — O. said one June
humans don’t have the brain power to conceive a lie
about the state of man in metatime:
the idea of heaven and hell — not a total lie
of reincarnation — not a total lie
of infinite recurrence — not a total lie
the materialist — that we dissipate to nothing — not a total lie
of purgatory — not a total lie.
I told Dante I have a friend who says Ouspensky is a liar.
He said “that’s cute. Are you gonna try or
we gonna have to ask you to kindly leave Dante’s Mind Booth.

“Where we can’t conceive a total lie we certainly can’t total truth.”

It’s been a long time
since I read Purgatory and the Inferno
but I remember thinking
in a way everybody
is where they want to be
His characters
do not want the pain of
being what
they think they are but
they want so much to be what they think they are they
pay the pain almost on purpose like it’s
an option price on a personality —
if in aforesaid contingency period said personality become real
close the deal
kind of thing. Like what’s his name, Francesca’s lover
who would rather float unanchored forever than not have loved her.
Well, like me, willing to, for decades
of failure to find readers, take the shame
since it flows automatically from my insistence
I categorize with those who do find fame.
All the way to the very bottom where the devil defeated rebel
says I may be frozen in pain and terror but I got my pacifier
to gnaw— I the beast strong enough even in my prison stable
to keep the ‘almighty’ unable
to god it over a universe where duckweed is good.
Wait, I’ve mixed Milton with Dante maybe. You understood
I did that on purpose to underscore the conceptual communal singing.
Right? It was nice Dante thought to bring in
two Nashville boys, Hank Williams and Robert Hayden.
But they were there as much for Billy
as for me. “It’s just silly,”

Hank says, “the way

“he sits right
in sight
of his freedom
frozen in a gray
crust of the feeling
that came over him just after
he whiffed what that Los Angeles sewer
served him. Course it was silly
while we did it too.” Billy was duckweed soggy
all over with, among others,’ Alvin, your memory.
Hank just looking toward him helped us “see” that clearly.
Alvin B, the memory slime was thick, a kind of paste
to increase the poison angel dust death could baste
him with to dig him deeper deathward and have him taste
continual panic of dying— in illusion— rather than feel
the real
new opportunities that come from being dead.
At least that’s what Hank said.

“And you can see clear as everything identity routes
diminishing painward out of his pain. You could call it
reincarnation if by moving his attention
he choose to enliven
this route out”—
Hank pointed at a scenario that has Mary
lead you, Alvin, off to California away from Billy—
“or that one there”— he points where you pull Mary
away from Billy— you get Billy’s guilt this time on you
but nokey’s heaped on you too.
“You could call it reincarnation,”
here Bob Hayden has taken up the explanation,
“if he enter the time garden again to live out either loop
of that knot’s tedious
untying.”
But he was not slightly willing
to consider
he could
unstiffen
and be any of manywheres other
than caught in horror
for that
would mean
he wasn’t him.
For him to unfreeze,
to flow
to prove the theorem
he must feel
all the pain he caused anyone,
you Alvin,
and Mary, someone called ‘Peal,’
(do you know Peal?), the carney boys— they do hurt—
even Cheryl some, many people
you probably knew nothing about—
to entertain the concept he can take that route
he
must see
he is not in essence
the pretty
and chosen one

whose sexy might lures love’s sweetness, all day,
where it seems to him to belong, his way.

That Mary should ever lure you
from him
seems honestly as implausible to him
as Satan defeating Elohim
is
in reality
and those two be not even in the same jar of theography.

“Call it purgatory
while he sits and learns how all our story
is made one huge multiform, dreadful flower
by the way we be each other. Call it hell
while he lets it jell
in place.”

“Boys,” I said, “Dante said
there was no duration in this place —
no past no present no future barely a now
even and not a trace
of then or before,
not one minute more
.
anywhere. He made such a big deal about
how back in time we talk a lot

of ‘when the end
shall come’
when there can be no when
out side time, not even a first little one
to get timeless started. Like the old koan
says, you can’t get there from here.”
“Maybe this will help make it clear—
like on the wall of death — as it’s
boldly advertised at the fair — when a motorcycle rider
rides up on the side of a wall inside a cylinder,
his wheels, like time, always tangent to the wall, eternity,
tho he keeps thinking he rides
toward eternity
some place out in front of him.” “If it’s like that

“someway or other
how can you guys try to help Billy go from one state to another?”
Bob said, “at this station,
all motion is of attention and attention
enlivens. Rubbing attention on the infinite could be
brings to that point is.
We try to help him fan his
attention at a more favorable ember.”
“Which consolidates our own progress as our sorrows do wither.”

I see it better now trying to tell you how it was than I did there. Or I can put it in our terms here because I was getting so acclimatized I didn’t need to ‘understand’ there. It’s like a web site— you follow links to get to different pages but the pages are there waiting before you click. Something like that. Looking back I see they were not so much assigned to Billy or to me— tho they were to some degree assigned to each other — it was just that the effort they needed to make was a support to Billy’s thawing and my “seeing.” But Bob did say, or at least I heard— “helping you see is the same effort here as helping Billy be somewhere else he already is. What you think of as the singing here at poets pond is the same effort, the same signal storm the same message calm. Look that way,” Bob’s eyes pointed, “there— you and Linda with a red head in a Captain D’s parking lot.”

Several things I didn’t tell you, Alvin, about
Cheryl. I do think
that was the girl. Certainly she was like you say
‘a hippie girl with blood-copper-red hair, dazzling
in the sunlight’ but I didn’t say
how
when I was
adjusting the points gap, putting
the feeler gauge in,
screw driver in mouth while my hand
stabilized the set screw, looking
at Linda to swap a mysterious knowing smile,

I had a feeling, a feeling the size of the sky, a
feeling that came from the sky, a feeling something

of the sky
saw us and said or someway conveyed
‘there
they are.’ I always said,
when I told about this— not very often
of course— that Linda and I
and this woman we would see only once
were infinitely connected and something
from beyond, some group, some committee of, well,
not angels exactly, but something there

had been looking for us
and spotted us finally.
And another thing, when I first saw
her, Cheryl, I understood the sly
look on Linda’s face when she came home
and told me to get my tools
and come with her— for Linda knew,
knows, what redheads do to me, knew
by then what some had done with me. So
when, still in her church clothes, she
led me off to help a strange woman with a broken
down car she was taking me
to a treat and a tease, taking herself
into jealous anger and mirth. And that smile

just before the sky saw us, that smile cloaked and highlit with
her own guilt half in shadow half in light, that smile
catching me flustered by Cheryl’s beauty and happy I got to
play mechanic, maybe that month reflecting she was glad
I loved her more even than redheads maybe wishing I didn’t so she could be
free of me— probably both—
certainly both—

that was a full smile.
But what I saw when Bob first pointed had the three of us hidden
among auras of pain a thousand times our size. Three
tornadoes of human exhaling and breathing each other. Wasn’t
I couldn’t see us, was that I saw too many, too much, us.
Then I listened to the singing. Then there we were—
the parking lot, the copper hair, the feeler gauge,
that smile.

It was the part of that wide song I most wanted to bring out,
mostly the bit about Linda’s smile. I leaned so hard toward it
Hank had to grab me to keep me from falling into my past
which would have caused they said serious technical problems.

That was when they asked me to leave.

Another thing— you accuse me of wanting to have things
two ways and you kind of imply
I defend not only duckweed but god.
I know you didn’t directly accuse me of defending god
you just said by saying nature is just— which I didn’t say—
I have it two ways like people who say god
is both good and indifferent. And by god tho I’ll have it
way more than two ways before I’m thru, I’m surprised
to feel a need to deny it and as I frame my denial surprised
to sigh and see it’s kinda true— I do defend god. I fight
having a mentality trained by movies to
lead to a happy ending but
sometimes that’s what I do — no, always that
is the cast of my mind. Dante
said not to worry about it— that’s why
the divine comedy is called that, because it did not
like grand drama end in general death but in a vision
of our higher home, so it lacks the dignity of tragedy,
ends like something goofy with everything happily resolved
like a cosmic Midsummer Night’s Dream or episode
of I Love Lucy.

I try not
to defend god for a lot of reasons— I’m
too puny for it. Also it’s tricky. On the face of things,
god kills a lot of babies. And everyone
sooner or later knows the truth of those lines of Aesculus
that John Kennedy loved, where it says it is best
not to be born, and if ye got to be born then just dipped
in this light and snatched out quick is best. God makes us
come here— the gift of being— how does one defend
such sadism. That’s the greatest mystery of duckweed—
why must it be here— along with us? That cliché. That’s where
I sit beside it endlessly and write it a hundred poems.

I already explained that it’s here along with you and me
and Neil Armstrong and the rest of the slick to fool the moon
into the hope she will breathe eventually— which hope she needs
to make it happen, as she will— but, Alvin,
or Reed or whoever, you say that doesn’t matter to us and as one of us
you have the authority to say so. So the question remains.
What need has god to drop his life quiver all the way down
to this gross water? Why doesn’t he want to stop creation
a couple rounds higher so we don’t have to be here?

But there’s another side. While I was
over there looking back over here
I saw hordes of souls longing to take on
these space suits — I shd say these time suits — our bodies
so they could leap into this light, the only place
some things get settled. They wonder how we can forget
how it shines here, for they see it that way looking in.
With them I watched a bored woman on her porch
on Shelby avenue — she was sitting by a man that
from the beginning of time she’s needed to have by her
and in her, and she apparently did not see the shining, of the man,
the sky, of the Maple in her yard, named Rainslaker
as it told us, of the smudges on the porch columns shining where
the man, a mechanic, wiped his hands— gray smudges that rimed
with small spots of rain gray in the bottom of the white clouds
above, bored amongst all that shining. And turned down
14th, my eyes did, that bright morning and saw my friend
Curtis Rose on a stool at Radio Cafe waiting for breakfast
and reading Anne Bradstreet, laughing so hard at her poem
people were looking to see if he were all right. I don’t know
why god needs us here but such things help me be grateful to pay
the huge price to assist him slime up the earth rock since sheHe wants to.
I call life good

when I have a cold one in my hand and my boys
are around and I’m grilling the flesh of animals. At those times
I’m quite aware that life’s goodness will pass into pain and out again
over and over and that phasing is part of what I’m calling good
but beyond any doubt pain will again get so strong
I’ll wonder again how I could have said so.

I call life good. But good is only part
of what I’d call god. Wilt thou put Leviathan in a goldfish bowl
and tell her be good, man in the tree? What god is
has a trillion times more fizz than goodness has— and a
billion times more swagger — swatting worlds
away, guarding the sparrow — writing the debit down
every wanton thought we have and having holy sex with herhimself
all day — indifferent — numbering the hairs of our heads — life and death dealer.
Your man in the tree, he’s the good one. And you
just made him up. You or Reed, whoever.

I guess by now you see it doesn’t bother me to be accused
of having it two ways— that god is both good
and indifferent— that shehe is just and flings death
arbitrarily down along with endless love and mercy. It’s no way
to navigate within time and space but to the mind untwyneing
truth and fiction I say aim above paradox
the only sign of truth is contradiction.

The exciting thing about god is that big boy in the long run
is on your side, for a song you need to hear, since
you have to be, to not just be but to rise, she has established
to sing out forever awaiting your ear. ringing everywhere.
You say you do not feel herHis love
but you will. God is good looking, has good weed.
HeShe will charm ye
sooner or later. Thanks again, Alvin,

for showing us the pelicans
and for reminding me of Cheryl’s hair.

_____________________
notes:

The bit about ocean’s stratagems was probably suggested by reading, Maybe it was somewhere in Loren Eisley.

The mixed pronoun for the deity is not an effort to be politically correct but accurate. I agree with anyone — patriarchist or whoever — who says you can’t just arbitrarily change something for fashion. But god is above the duality of sex. Some in recognition of this call god “it,” but to me it is pre-sexual-division and god is post-sexual division; that is why I use heShe and such. S/he is the most economical.

Reed's new Alvin Poem (not directly about Duckweed but when has that ever stopped e publication?)

You Fuckin’ Quit Your Job

Klyd, Alvin B. again, and there was a time I lived
for three years in part of an old brick house
across from the train yards
in the south part of a town
in a desert valley out West, if you can follow all that.
You tell people you lived near the trains,
and they say it must have been dreadful.
But people who live near trains know
that it's not dreadful to lie in bed
and hear those big couplings and uncouplings,
the intimacies and regrets of trains, like, somehow,
the magnified sounds of your own cells
or confirmation that dreams come out of the spaces
that surround you. They go on,
and so do the others that don't stop,
and go on down along the line of dark foothills,
crying sometimes like dogs at the moon or the lunar gleams of snow
in the mountaintops, and pulling you with them deeper into the night.
I live near trains as often as I can, they're better
than beer and as good as weed for making you sleep
deep and long. The whole three years I lived in that house
I didn't have a phone and never missed it
except when I had to walk or drive
to the 7-11 on Saturday morning and call
my mom, and this one other time I'm going to
tell you about. The couple next to me in the house
were from Nevada, and Teri the wife had not much chest,
maybe a streamlined adaptation to the Nevada wind,
and a deep enough voice so that for a long time
I didn't know if she was a man or a woman.
It must have been all that sand and dust in her home state
that made her voice like someone scratching the bottom
of a bucket and maybe some liquor and a lot of tobacco,
though I never had any reason to think she was
bad off like a lush, though her smoking and Skip’s
did come through the walls and make the place
smell like the apartment next to a casino sometimes. And if she
wasn't bad off that way, she was bad off other ways.
She was bad off with Skip. He was bad off too.
He was something else, and a musician to boot,
so there you go. It wasn't my job or my habit to
investigate my neighbors, though the walls
might have been gauze for as well as they blocked sound.
Whenever I heard voices I turned up the t.v.
or the record player and stayed away from
what might be going on next door.
But this one morning after I got back
from calling my mom there was a diamond-jubilee-Fourth-
of-July-call-in-the-National-Guards kind of ruckus.
It seems it started with the dog, the noise did,
an idiotic little half-Pomeranian half-who-knows
named Harvey. I thought they were killing him,
though I didn't want them to, even if I hated him for
his noise and for always trying to bite me whenever I came close,
but no they were trying to kill each other
it turned out. And Harvey was barking at them like a referee,
and sometimes he screamed, which meant, I guess,
something someone had thrown had landed on or near him.
It was some heavy stuff too, like ashtrays,
loud stuff like kitchen utensils, big stuff
like people. And funnily at first there weren't any voices,
and when the voices came from the rubble of sounds there
weren't any words, just voices desperate and angry and bitter.
And finally the flying and falling objects stopped
flying and falling, and Harvey stopped barking
and what was left was someone sobbing--
not the why-don't-you-put-your-arm-around-me kind of sob
but the nothing-can-ever-comfort-me-anymore kind
from so deep inside and so committed to sorrow
that it uses the whole body, the whole room,
as a sounding board, meaning inside and outside
are equally torn apart. It was Skip crying too hard
to say anything, crying like a sailor if sailors cry,
crying the quiet out of every corner and drawer,
and coming from a crew-cut bruiser with
a cruel, short beard it was kind of sad,
or, if you wanted to imagine it coming from a man
deep inside a gorilla suit in a phony jungle movie,
it was kind of funny -- because it sounded
like that too. But when the words came,
you couldn't laugh any more, not for years anyway,
after you were sure they both survived to take
their problems to other partners. Since it happened
years ago, feel free to laugh now. Just imagine
the Spielberg camera pulling away to a god’s-eye view
the way it did to reveal the hilarity of that poor
woman Oprah Winfrey defending herself and getting beat up
in the snow. Or imagine me trapped in a house like
I was snowbound with no back door to get away,
and no phone to call the cops. Imagine me
hearing all this and wishing I could fly out the roof
like Steven Spielberg and pretend it was all
a dream, pretend I could hear the things I heard
and still be an innocent bystander. Skip,
without calming down, roared through the roar of
his crying, ‘It was your fault this time! I'm getting
out of here! You go ahead and stay!’ Teri said,
‘I don't care anymore! Either you go or I’ll go!
I've had enough!’ ‘Enough of what?’ he said.
‘You fuckin’ quit your fuckin’ job to piss me off,
and you were asking for it! How much
do you think I've got to take from you?’
‘Like I was asking for it last night and all those
other times!’she said. ‘Who’s taking it
from who, Skip? You're crazy! you're insane!
I'm getting away from you.’
‘Last night?! Nothing happened last night!’
‘What is grabbing my arm called? Nothing happened?’
‘Sure I grabbed you, and nothing happened.
I controlled it. You screamed at me to let go,
and I did. And then you run off and sit
in the bathroom and it takes you a fuckin’
half hour to calm down.’ ‘I was avoiding confrontation,’
she said. ‘The only thing you’ve got is violence, that’s
how mature you are. you're the one who needed time
to calm down.’ She’s kind of crying this whole time too,
but Skip is still the one who’s really sobbing.
Even through the long...speech should I call it? song?...
that came next the words were full of those
syncopated catches and whispers and preacher-grunts
up and down the scale. The punctuation, I mean the rests,
was him sniffing the tears and mucus back up his nose
with great effort, and swallowing. I mean, he was
talking through a lot of water and mud.
‘You were avoiding confrontation?! What was I doing?
I let go of you! I controlled myself!
You didn't get hurt that time! I avoided
confrontation but you had to drag it out clear to now
because you didn't have enough! I'm the one
that's making the effort! If things don't work out it's your
fault, you bitch, because I'm doing my part!
It took you half an hour to get control of yourself,
and how long did it take me? I let you go instantly!
And then this morning you have to fuckin' quit your job.
Why am I the only one that puts any effort into
keeping us together? I put forth the effort,’ he sobbed.
‘I control myself, and what do you do? You don't
put any effort into controlling yourself, and you go
and fuckin' quit your job! And look what you get for it,
look what you made me do!’ She said, ‘I don't care
about the eye. I'm just leaving. That’s all I can do.’
And they both cried loud and long, I bet because
they loved each other. He finally stopped a little after she did,
and his voice turned calm -- not cold but calm -- and
he said, ‘You deserved it. You brought
it on yourself, because you know me, and you
meant for it to happen.’ ‘I don't care about the eye,’
she said. ‘I did it ‘cause you shit on ‘he said. ‘I
control myself and try to make things work, and you
shit on me in return. you're supposed to be my wife,
but that's not going to make any difference
if you shit on me.’ ‘I shit on you!’ she shouted.
He shouted back,’ I’ll do the same to anyone
who shits on me!’ She said, ‘Two years
is a long enough time for you to learn how
to deal with yourself.’ ‘What was last night?!
I let go! I should have hurt you -- I mean could have --
but I didn't. Oh why do I have to go through
the same thing with you every weekend?!’
It occurred to me while he renewed his great big
weeping that I usually go somewhere else
Saturday mornings after calling my mom, and that
I must make a point of continuing to do that
in the future. I was surprised that John and Linda,
the couple below me, hadn't told me about these fights.
They were retarded and had nowhere to go
and no way to get there, except John pushing Linda,
complaining Linda, up and down the block in her
wheelchair, and her whining with every lurch
that the bumps in the sidewalk hurt her legs,
and it's his fault, so, being mainly stuck at home,
they were nosey as hell. Skip had taken
to wearing a camouflage cap and sunglasses
in the hot weather and looked like
a mercenary soldier, aggressive and hard-bitten,
though I knew his face without the glasses was
a little bit pouty and defensive and his eyes
were weak and small. Not to say he wouldn't have been
handsome to some with his hostile black beard and crewcut--
heck, some people like Doberman pinschers and you can't
stop them. But what would you do if you were really good-looking
and were from Nevada? you'd get out of there, of
course, but you'd probably go to California,
not Utah. And Teri, even flat-chested, was striking
in the same harsh way the wind in Nevada blows sand
in your eyes, the same harsh way the mountains out there
stand like serrated knife blades, sienna and treeless and burning
against the sky. I hated to think of her with a bruised-up
eye, but I couldn't think of anything I could do to save her
from it. One Christmas I picked the best Christmas card
out of the cards I bought and put it in their mailbox with
‘Merry Christmas from Alvin B., your neighbor next door’
on it. I waited for theirs to me, but it didn't come.
Another time, close to my birthday a knock came on
the door and I opened it and saw Teri holding a package
for me wrapped in birthday wrapping paper. I was
touched and said, ‘How did you know...Ó but she
cut in and said, ‘Alvin B., your dad asked us to give you this’
He’d driven down from Salt Lake and missed me.
Couldn’t have phoned ahead because I had no phone.
I heard her laughing after I closed the door.
Skip said, ‘There’s only one chance to save this, and that is
if you call them up right now and tell them you are not
quitting your job.’ He wept mournfully.
He said, ‘The problem isn't me, it's you. you're the one
with the temper and you don't even recognize it. you're
the one that can't control yourself. you're going to have
to admit that you have a temper and then learn
how to control it.’ Klyd, back me up on this.
He wasn't exactly right and he wasn't exactly wrong.
But my stars even John and Linda could have thought up
something smarter to say than that.
What he was was completely funny. I had to
move away from the wall and put my hands over
my ears not to hear more that would make me
laugh out loud. In the end it was all
so pathetic. Funny Skip and poor Teri and the stupid
dog Harvey. What am I going to do when you
all pound each other into fluff and feathers?
I needed to piss. In the bathroom I heard
Skip in his bathroom vomiting. The sound
turned my stomach until I had to vomit too.
It made me Skip for a minute, Klyd. They guy
was a jerk who used his fists on his wife,
and there's no excuse, but appreciate, please,
what agony and turmoil he had inside him,
what sorrow for his own kind of madness
and for what he put his wife through. What tortured
plains and fell passes the trains carried him to at night,
or, if they made him peaceful, I'm glad. I couldn't
throw up in the bathroom where he'd probably
hear me and know he'd had an audience, an echo-self
on the other side of the wall. So I went in the kitchen
and threw up in the sink all over the dirty dishes.

Alvin B.

Christopher Allen Waldrop — "Gentlemen, Please"

Three Posts On The Great Duckweed Debate
1
I’ve been turning over in my head for some time now exactly how to comment on both Alvin B’s latest shot, coming to us by way of Reed, and Klyd’s reply. First of all, I love Reed’s poem, but I find it hard to place it in the Great Duckweed Debate. In the context of Klyd’s reply, the debate has moved on to more interesting territory, specifically the question of the man in the moon or the man in the room next door. I’ll address Klyd’s poem first, even though it’s an answer, simply because it seems to carry this theme, whereas Reed’s, wonderful as it is, seems to stand alone.

In the first section, especially when he says, "Neil Armstrong/ was born to die and have his heart stomped while alive/ like the rest of us," I feel like I’m being punched in the face repeatedly by someone on drugs. This does sound like the voice of a man in the moon, albeit one who is "full fledged crazy." Then he comes down from his high position, stopping along the way to address the nature of nature. When he says, "To me `ugly’/has to be around/ to set up `pretty’" he seems to have taken on a Baudelairean tone that is both earthy and elevated. As things progress, he descends further, apologizing to Alvin B for having "identified with Reed as one of/the `smart’ ones at your expense." His thoughts in this stanza are simply amazing, moving from a mental wall that could be knocked down to another wall that holds a "picture of Dante." It really becomes astounding when he transforms the angels into "white spots marking the sides/of the huge pneumatic tube that goes up to god when the bank is open", a reminder that ascensions like Dante’s, even though possible, can only take place in selected times. In the early morning, in the late evening, and on holidays, we’re earthbound.

He then returns to pain, communal pain, and says, "Let us build now those pains/a tabernacle." I don’t know whether Klyd had this specifically in mind, but this reminded me of the story of the rabbi who stood at the door of an empty temple and said, "I cannot go in, for the temple is full. Your prayers have not been spoken from the heart, and they crowd the temple. Only prayers spoken from the heart can ascend to heaven." Limitations of time and cyber-space prevent me from going any further. I’ll have to save my comments on Reed’s poem for another post, assuming this one can even be posted. But I do want to mention that the final lines --
"what I got
was an angel I couldn’t live up to, while Billy
was finding his way to the angels by going the
other way. And there I was, like the song says,
stuck in the middle without wings" --

as in much of the poem, remind me of how good it is to be here in the crowded temple, so to speak. Maybe this is what the man in the moon has learned by descending among us: that, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, and always painful, it’s more fun mucking around in the duckweed than staring down from the moon.

2
The whole argument seems to be condensed into this one issue of whether we have wings that control our flights and descents, or whether we’re just stuck somewhere in the middle.
3
In getting us to the brick house where he once lived for three years, Alvin B seems to cover as much distance as there is between Earth and the moon. I hope I didn’t suggest in my earlier comments that Klyd was beginning from a morally superior position and then descended to a more communal one. Actually I think his trip was more about how anyone who ascends must eventually descend, and how descent can be just as enlightening as ascension.

Alvin B’s journey seems more horizontal, a clattering train ride rather than the physical and mental stress of a rocketship. He begins with those trains, with beautiful meanderings that make me want to go buy a house near train tracks, to "hear those big couplings and uncouplings,/ the intimacies and regrets of trains." This connection to a strange, dreamy world beyond is interesting at the beginning of this poem, and takes on greater significance when Alvin B tells us that he "didn’t have a phone and never missed it", that, apart from the once-a-week phone call home, his later Christmas card to his neighbors, which is never reciprocated or acknowledged, and the package delivery, Alvin B is cut off from the world, merely a voyeuristic observer, or listener, through the wall. His removal from the fight by both the wall and the fact that he is in no way emotionally tied to his neighbors, makes what’s going on over there at first sound funny. Skip’s crying sounds like "a man/deep inside a gorilla suit in a phony jungle movie," and, with the further removal of time, the whole situation becomes as ridiculous as "Oprah Winfrey defending herself and getting beat up in the snow." Ironically, we’ve moved from a vague reference that could be taken from several movies, to a more specific one.

In contrast to all this fighting, all the threat of leaving, then, comes John and Linda, the retarded couple downstairs who only get out when John pushes "Linda,/complaining Linda, up and down the block in her/ wheelchair, and her whining with every lurch/that the bumps in the sidewalk hurt her legs, and it’s his fault." John is responsible for Linda’s suffering; Teri is responsible for Skip’s suffering, and Alvin B is positioned somewhere in the middle listening to both, unable to do anything about either. Unable, that is, until the end, when he hears Skip vomiting, and for a moment becomes him. Throughout the poem, Alvin B has dropped hints of empathy, for Linda, for John, for Teri, and even for the annoying dog Harvey. That he, the observer, the one who judges and even silently laughs at the people around him, could become the lowliest of these creatures, the wife-beating jerk, suggests that there is hope. In asking for sympathy for Skip, Alvin, his "echo-self", asks that the same sympathy be given to him.

Finally I arrive at the moment when Alvin B throws up all over his dirty dishes. This image is so powerful, and it’s baffled me, but maybe I’m only baffled because I don’t want to accept what it conveys: sympathizing with Skip, or with anyone, accomplishes nothing. Or it reverses and intensifies damage that’s already been
done.

Christopher Allen Waldrop

verse note from Curtis Rose

my head is still steaming
from my
just now visit to the
Time Garden
first time i been there in quite awhile.....
& what a Garden it is.......
been plying myself with cheap wine
pepper crackers & cheese
as a reward to myself
for giving away another 8 hours, 30 minutes
not counting drive time&gas
to some dinosaur-life-sucker-machine
but
to come home
to my own cave, find a space of
TIME
not cluttered up by a
thousand other
grabbers
& loose myself
in You & Alvin (& Reed)
((& a cast of others))
& find myself laughing @
Anne Bradstreet
all over again

Curtis Rose

Reed on Curtis'

It is so nice to be complimented in a poem as nice as Curtis's. If he wouldn't mind my saying so, I wouldn't be surprised, whenever I talk to him, if he were to open his mouth and a flower were to fall out, in spite of the cheap wine and pepper crackers. Metaphorically speaking, it often happens when he writes. Purple Poet, I don't know that I deserve the mention, but otherwise every word is perfect.

Reed

Reed says I can have the last word but not the last word I had above. So there may be one more round. In fact I've written my last poem for the debate, no matter what Reed may say this will answer it! And it's short! But yall got to wait on Reed.