Copyright © 2018 by Stanley Moss
Published by Seven Stories Press
SEVEN STORIES PRESS
140 Watts Street
New York, NY 10013
www.sevenstories.com
Distributed by Penguin Random House
Abandoned Poems is distributed
in the United Kingdom by Turnaround Ltd.
and worldwide by Penguin Random House.
ISBN: 978-1-60980-891-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-60980-892-1 (ebook)
Cover Photo: "Group of Heads"
by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes
Page 131 Photo: Stanley with two dogs, Margie and Honey;
Honey in profile and full face.
Abandoned Poems
Stanley Moss
Acknowledgments
Poetry Chicago, The New York Review Of Books, PN Review, The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Tikkun Magazine, Poetry London, Poem, Reflections: Yale Divinity, Harvard Review, The Yale Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Mānoa (University of Hawaii), The London Magazine.
Contents
Chaos
March 21, First Day of Spring
Good Morning
Listen
Silences
Get Out
A Found Poem
Early Crossing
After the Fall
The Sporting Life
Year of the Rooster
Motto
Street Music
Afterword for Howard Moss
House Wine
To My Unborn Friend
Beachcomber
After Athens
Lear’s Wife
Departing Flight
In the Swim
Solo
December 31, 2016
Andrzej Rapaczynski in a Coma
A Watercolor
Sob
Poem Without Clouds
Ode to the Scallop
Scars, Moon, and Old Stories
The Fall
The Day My Roll Top Desk Spoke to Me
How I Came to Meet the Fates
Suppose
Names
Sunny Day
Leave it for Now
June 21, 2017
Just Born
Glimpse
Todavía
By My Faith
Stern Stuff
Laughter
Healing
A Jingle
For John Ashbery, September Song
Ode to Holy Places
Blasphemy, or Not As You Like It
A Visit to Maui
The Long and Short of It
A Found Poem
Epithalamium for Geoffrey G. O'Brien and Hannah Zeavin
Letter to President Trump
The Eagle and the Frog
My Worm
Hasty Pudding
Provincial Letter
January 2nd, 2018
Yusef Komunyakaa
It's a Pity
Italy
Tra La
Beyond My Reach
Reputation
Happiness
Thou
Coat
All the World's a Page
Long Abandoned Poems and Apocrypha
Random
Wishing
A Touch
Forest Fires
Song of the Present
The Poem of Self
Marx Brothers in Moscow
Unbuntu
SM
A Visit to the Devil’s Museum in Kaunas
In the Adirondacks
Recitative
Taboo
The Bathers
Snake in a Basket of Groceries
Insomnia
I Choose
Postamble
Water Music
Pasture
ABANDONED POEMS
Un Poème n'est jamais fini, seulement abandoné.
—Paul Valéry
Dieu est le seul être qui, pour régner,
n'ait même pas besoin d'exister.
—Charles Baudelaire
Whatever their personal faith,
all poets, as such,
are polytheists.
—W.H. Auden
The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them;
and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.
—Isaiah 35:1
CHAOS
There are places for chaos on the page,
meaningful, apparent
confusion—temps en temps on the continent
does not mean “time to time” in Kent
or Greenwich. From stone through weeds and parchment,
through bad times, words made their way to the printed page.
Bibles now not just for those who go to worship by carriage,
but for those who pray with bare feet,
some washed, some smelling of stables and excrement.
I’m not sure the words “ocean” and “sea”
mean the same to you and me.
Ninety-five percent universal confusion,
dark matter was born with the legitimacy
of an onion, the roar of a lion.
I sit in the rumble seat of judgment,
I damn myself for entertainment,
for wasting time on hopeless entertainment.
I am guilty of snarling lines, Gordian
knots in my Shakespeare fishing reels.
I must untangle this because eels
have hearts like us. The enemy
is symmetry.
In the spring of content,
I trust glorious chaos. I smell in disorder
the outhouse of order.
I must have respect for what I kill and eat,
Jesus gave them loaves and fishes, not meat.
He added “Waste nothing you eat,”
he did not say “Waste is chaos made by me,
or my Father, one person who is three.”
Rebecca, at the well,
said “Drink. Water your camels.”
I swear, my hands each on a Bible,
the only evidence admissible is invisible.
At twenty, I was lost in the snow, a sleigh bell.
Chaos is not a “sometime thing,”
its face and back are turned to and from us,
what I cannot see is beautiful, or an isthmus
that connects almost nothing to almost nothing—
the great unless, either/or.
I grab on to metaphor,
uncertainty, dark matter, gravity specific.
The motto I nail to my door:
the Devil generalizes, angels are specific.
Chaos makes me merry,
string or rose-by-any-other-rose theory,
romance of the rose,
roses that go with any other flower,
from Devil’s paintbrush to huckleberry.
From fertile Chaos sprang Eros and Night:
Chaos danced first with Eros, then jealous Night.
Time carries a scythe, women and men sound the hour.
I model for myself, I pose in north light.
With helpers, his stevedore brothers, Hypnos
and Thanatos, Charon still poles his familiar ferry
across the Styx to an island where skeletons dance.
Einstein's romance with certainty is quite merry,
he said, “I too believe in appearance,”
he didn’t think Old One plays dice, takes chances.
You bet your bottom dollar the universe
rhymes with another universe like verse.
Yeats, Herrick, and Herbert would like that.
To them, I lift my hat.
Delphic chaos is wise,
metaphoric thinking multiplies
bunches of grapes, by tripod, by butterflies.
Chaos is endless longing—
God’s pussycat.
In Prague, Mozart knew a starling
who sang his piano concerto all along,
except for one note he always got wrong.
MARCH 21, FIRST DAY OF SPRING
Twenty inches of snow on the ground,
I saw a swallow with a blade of dry grass
begin to build a nest on my porch
and a gutter, where he or she nests every year.
Welcome, welcome! What can I do to help?
I’ll stay in my warm house, get out of your way,
I’ll watch out for raccoons, and eagles.
I leave apples on the porch, seeds in a bucket.
Where have you been all winter?
I know Welsh swallows winter in Egypt.
It makes me shudder to think you fly south
from the Catskills to the Andes.
The important thing is you’re back.
Suddenly I am in the arms of spring.
I love you but don’t know if you’re a mother
or a father bird. I feel safe with you here.
I think I’ll write the Times: better your nest
than a flock of aircraft carriers in the harbor.
GOOD MORNING
1
From the ship of life I see
walls, ports, fences,
barrels, orbits, the containing.
I feign no hypothesis.
Talk to me about years remaining,
talk to me about wear and tear.
Ptolemy accounted for planetary orbits
viewed from earth, by adding epicycles,
epicycles to epicycles. In his world
planets performed the loop-the-loop,
which became a child’s game,
given up for smart phone warfare.
Today, 11:30 a.m., I don’t believe
“all time is eternally present.”
I walk door to door,
the Universe appears and will disappear,
finally end with hunger,
no light or darkness left.
2
When I was 17, a seaman,
I learned death was not a bookend.
I saw friends’ bodies, half-afloat, half-sinking
off the bloody Atlantic shelf.
I would not eat bloody bread.
On duty, I accused an anti-Catholic,
anti-Black officer of sedition.
I sang, “Trust thou in the Lord.”
I did not trust Him,
I was establishing my heart.
At liberty, I scribbled near Asylum Street,
“Timothy was right”:
the love of money is the root of all evil.
Out to sea, I asked where are the dorsal fins
going when I first read Gerard Manley Hopkins,
I was thrown against a bulkhead: I saw
him, her, formal and informal you, we, they in russet clad
swim every day in the English Channel or China seas—
while ice-cutting poetry word by word
makes its way at five beat, ten knots
to Soviet Murmansk, then reverses course
south to and through no one’s Antarctic.
A song nobody sings outside my window:
You are my sea of loneliness,
sure as the sky is sometimes blue, I and you,
temporary pronouns, in the country and in the towns,
all past, present, and future—old wives’ tales,
last words, personal, particular, concrete.
All architecture is finally dust.
On the ship of life, I have a hammock, not a berth.
I swing with the ocean, forward, halfway back,
then forward again,
thousands of miles of breakers, green and blue,
mountains of choirs and soloists, prosody
of the oceans, the meter and free forms, translations,
lyric communion.
3
Despite the parallel lines of the Psalms,
Einstein proved parallel lines, like tram tracks
in Zurich, eventually meet. His time and space
versus Henri Bergson’s “No certainty,
probability, duration, Claude Debussy.”
Henri vs. Albert: uncertainty versus certainty
with no up and down, no right and left before
and after. All time eternally present, tonal
and atonal. Parallel lines meet—
just look down the railroad tracks
toward the horizon, Igor Stravinsky. Firebirds.
There is no dark lady of the bawdy planets.
I refuse to live in places out there
without a sun, East or West—without a stage.
Backstage, made up, facing my mirror,
being and acting. The play’s the thing:
The sexual Universe has his menstrual.
The lonely universe attracted by a beauty
pulls another universe into bed,
knows what black holes are made for.
The unripeness and unreadiness all.
Can the truth be triangles, circles,
a universal romance?
The word, the meaning of Another,
becomes every part of speech, re-Babeled languages.
I hear, I do not see, the play.
I think the planets are God’s castanets.
He is a flamenco dancer, Creation, dark song.
Every fingernail a star, I have my hands full:
a half moon is a relic, fires are sometimes frozen.
I wear a worm, a ring around my finger.
The way I tell time: I sell time by the dozen,
12 noons and 12 midnight eggs.
You can eat time scrambled, hard-boiled,
as an omelet or soufflé Grand Marnier.
* * *
This poem is a blind actress walking in town
without a dog or cane. Blind poetry makes
right guesses, before and after.
She walks in beauty like the morning,
crosses the street
without tripping, wishes Good Morning
to strangers. She can tell where she is
by their replies or silences.
She smiles at lampposts and trees,
speaks to them as if they were listeners.
We are on good terms, often speak.
She does not see the blackness in the dark.
Sometimes she can see blinding light,
beside her two thieves, Day and Night.
LISTEN
No night, no dawn, inside the earth, there were
flaming oceans without a center, nothing was born.
Above the tideless breakers, firefalls,
ageless fires that had no English name,
made their way to the sublime,
flaming gardens, flowers of good and evil—
never seen colors that were intimate,
changing red rock blooming ochre fires,
no clouds. The sky was earth.
Rivers unprisoned themselves, firestars, volcanoes
broke out into icy virgin waters, creating
the first living things: two cells, invisible threads,
with needs, a holy collision. Call them desires,
wants, necessities, a need for another.
A stone thrown up needs to come down,
darling multiplicities.
First one cell and then the other came to be from fires
into glacial waters, swam a little,
licked to life the color ochre off the rocks.
Were there flowers of good before flowers of evil?
There were human voices before there was writing,
the most
beautiful instrument a woman,
man or singing child. To hear the written word,
I read aloud, “What is love? ‘tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter.”
Idle reader, the secret is to listen.
I did not hear the first fires enter the icy waters—
they once made a daylily, a flower of good.
I favor the fleurs du mal quartier in the woods.
I cup my hand over my ear.
SILENCES
Good morning, electorate.
We are on good speaking terms
but do not speak, which means
we must be self-reliant,
there are many matters at hand.
We’re not close enough to know each other’s
good news, bad news, private matters.
There are silent streets off public gardens
for intimacy and come-what-mays.
There is library silence and deadly silence
that is a private matter.
There is happiness written in white
and silent writings, meters overheard.
Silent are the voices I no longer hear—
after the first word spoken I’d recognize who’s there.
There is a playwright’s staging called “business,”
silent instructions without dialogue,
and the silence that says, “none of your business,”
but I have an office, a religion,
that holds me responsible for everything.
I hardly lift a finger to stop the slaughtering.
It’s a little like putting a nickel or a dime
in a cup and writing this against death,
raking leaves against the changing seasons.
My memory is like the first sound picture,
The Jazz Singer. I am screening:
it must have been October, 1927,
I remember skipping along Liberty Avenue,
before I learned to dance, I sang,
“Hoover in the ashcan, Smith in the White House.”
Later in Catalonia I danced the Sardana—
with its opening and closing circles
that made free and equal the young and old,
while the soulful tenora, a revolutionary woodwind,
played the dance forbidden by Generalissimo Franco.
Further back again toward first silences—
alone in the Charleville of my den,
I smoked Rimbaud’s clay pipe,
I thought “I will never die.”
I’m simply telling the impossible truth
that made my later studies more difficult.
When I first shaved my fake oxtail beard
invented by Cervantes, I fought back