Reading at the Telphone Bar, NYC, March 6th, 2006

Directions to the Telphone Bar.

[Banquet and Ascent to be read aloud.]

Tonight's selection will be two poems of opposite tenor. They tell weird interior tales of consciousness stretched to the uttermost. The references beyond the dome of one soul's feelings are erudite, scattershot. The thread of the feeling must be noticed, and followed, for these experiments in lyrical insistence to work. Once the thread has been caught, and pulled tight between you and me, here in this room, tonight, together we may strike a chord and hear the heavenly music which is always part of poetry's supposing.

The first poem, "Banquet," is a dark, devilish core of exploded poet. A withering inward glance at the toothless uselessness of poetry. How, when the thread's not grasped, or when the poet in too hot self-contemplation incinerates the thread before it can be grasped-- only the drama of the pyre can satisfy. As when Hamlet, at the close of his trials, drowns the disaster with a refreshing blood-bath. This is how a failure to communicate must end.

The second poem is, instead, a "loaded ode to limitlessness and light." It has some beatific banter, and some instructive couplets. This is what may arise, phoenixlike, from the auto-da-fe of the first poem. There are longish passages of scenery; the inner feeling has suffused the world in its hopeful glow. The goal of universal love is presented as a given, and the world itself must be the context for that love, today as every day. The soulful voice in the second poem, "Ascent," seeks to incite a response to the poet's coo and call.

Good luck to us all.

Gregg Glory
[Gregg G. Brown]

Banquet

Sick ink 
vomited belly up on the throw rug
as if I had forgiven it,

the swallowed ball 
of my poisonous poem, a loaded ode 
to limitlessness and light-

What trash!  
as if the sky- vapid and superior in its  imperial blues
didn't know how to bite!

Mistakes, mistakes! 
The pen's a miracle of mayhem, wild slips
of a wrist once slitted;

the bleeding, careering nib,
a molt of details in the schizophrenic flow:
my mangy life,

my frozen embryo 
carelessly cast from the shelf, unlidded 
and palely little.

The cornflower fists 
ache to begin, the watery lungs 
two skinned, amniotic fish.

A bonfire, a bonfire! 
Something huge and ruinous with real red in it! 
That's what goes, what really goes

with this stone decor, 
this face hung in a mirror slashed to tears. 
Heat, heat

anything to exhaust 
this caustic blank in my being, torn calendar--
Journals, drawn loves, alien lines

poems mouthed from poems 
--dead-weight papers pushed to a death heap
 a Jew harvest at Dachau-

Perfect things 
as final as a corpse, 
ashes to ashes.

The matchsticks itch 
to finish it.
Irritable Rubicon  

of lava, language vulcanized on language, 
I cross you languidly. 
I am nearly asleep 

in the oxygenless air. I am tired, tired, 
tired of curses, tired of cures
tired of the alphabet.

The wall, infinite sheet, 
turns intense as an oven, the nails  
must be melting...

And here I stand 
awash and exhausted, perfumed in the rolls  
of corpse-smoke, 

words burned to whorls. 
Too tired to live, to die, to anything 
kilned in skin.

Ascent

Awake, awake!
For all the dear bay's glistening
In uneven light still listening
For whatever of utterance
Soul's chrysolm beauty may glance
Into willing water's dark,
My sweet meaning the whole of my bark.
Set sail, set sail, my soul, set sail
Let no hindrance, no halt, avail:
For we are the sweet of the tree,
Blossom and bole, shoot and root we three,
Myself, my soul, and me.
Nor does the shaping heart forego
To lend its beat to our argot,
My spirit a crystalline keel,
Inspiration a motion wind feels
Lifting in blessing ascent
All some deeper sleep had blent
With nightmare chimeras now forgot
By all within my steady boat.

Every morning wayfarer
Whose light boat cannot tarry
But pushes on out of darkness
With whatever of best and best
In tangles of light impressed
Bossing golds on waves' breast,
Plies resistless to the crest!

All last night my heart had lain
Upon this boat and silver stream
Until all memory became
Like the memory of a dream;
And there true life began
Beneath night's stars swirled to one
Past the extinguishment of suns
When realer dream draws us on
To dream of all we may have been
And in heart's solace draws us on
In dreaming dream to dream again!

I my own bright soul create
Nor did this fascination make
To slave it to a universe
I, living, gaze on as a hearse.
My silver hand in dawn's lake
Dips, its own soul to take;
From this sweet enlivening
Come my symbols unquestioning:
Crown upon my crown rests cherishing,
The sword in my hand unperishing.

Do not dispraise the light
That, singing whatever's brightest,
Undoes the theft of night--
In soul-enchanting soliloquies
Enmansioning aerial ways
That we might thrive there all our days
In realms of spendless purity
Absent nations' perfidy
Heart to heart for sole surety;
This our pledge, this our guarantee
That all's well with humanity
Once these bleak constants, fear and dread,
Lay to light exposed, and dead,
The human plant may only mend,
Think to create, and speak to praise,
Throughout the endless paradise of days
--Touch to caress, or move to love,
As this thoughtless rhyme does prove.

And if all the world condemn
What all the heart commends
What matter, so that heart sail on
In self-discovery without bourne
Through mystic waters, blue and calm?
What does pleasure's grieving echo give
But light to dark-hearted lives?
O when the trembling hand may shiver
And some momentary joy deliver
To thought-locked face and brow
What passes from that hand to bless
In an unending tenderness
As paradise were with us even now?
Memory makes no bounty of the scorn
Dementia attempts to ripen on
In sold human hearts since we're born;
Whatever slender wing endeavors
Be communicant with the treasure
One heart may hold forever
Will find such wind in chambers there
Beyond conjoining woe or care
That they may sail infinity
In the air of that one heart's ease.
Pleasure alone may live within
The human bound of life given
As light within these waters:
Ungrieving, crystalline, faultless.

2/25/2006