What Is It All But Luminous Page 4

  What is it all but luminous?

  Tears blur the vision, sweet indecision

  to be or to curl up back in the womb.

  We had our room, four-o-six,

  your hair was more shiny brown.

  Who knew from Nixon and student protest?

  Toads like me, through a deprivation of stimuli,

  let in the aroma of autumn turning winter

  on the campus as if it were Art in New York.

  Breughel-touched….tefillin by the window,

  Ivy League Christmas Kingsmen Yule Log

  eggnog fire glow. And after glow?

  Do any of us ever realize life while we have it,

  eyes wet and radiant and with a shehecheyanu?

  Yes we do.

  love moves everything

  (why else do I sing?)

  all it touches is thus moved

  Three days of singing in Montserrat have passed.

  Eighty percent of my work has been done.

  Under a butternut tree,

  Ralph Vaughan Williams is playing.

  I am a plumb bar swaying,

  yielding to the inclination of the wind.

  Free to rotate, out on a limb,

  in a hammock shaped like a sideways “J,”

  and hung from a single cord,

  I lean toward autobiography.

  When the wind decides,

  it blows through the Theme by Thomas Tallis

  at the base of the tree,

  and changes the stereo on me.

  Having recorded Angel Clare, Breakaway, Watermark, Fate for Breakfast, Scissors Cut in the ’70s, I am in the British West Indies producing The Animals’ Christmas with Geoff Emerick at AIR Studios. Chartres cathedral is my metaphor.

  Now the side walls are going up.

  Piano, harp, and vibraphone, in repeating arpeggios,

  are as masonry—a field of articulated lines.

  Apertures left for a trumpet decree, a cor anglais.

  Strings and woodwinds finish the stone.

  Through the clerestory, children’s voices

  descend upon David’s City.

  Around the base, a donkey motif

  like a tom-tom frieze in low relief.

  Stained-glass windows, angel-drawn, arrive at the site.

  Echo and I are the colored light.

  Past striving, I continue to kick around.

  I’ve had career. I’ve been in love.

  Why persist?

  Another “digital delinquency” has stopped the mix

  for almost a week.

  Buttresses, stepped and stone-finished,

  lie on the ground about to fly.

  I hang with the masons while I think about my life

  …my father…Children!

  To complete my life?

  To give the trip as a gift?

  To not be the end to the branch

  of the tree of genes?

  What does it mean?

  I fought with my father just last week

  and could have pulled the whole house down,

  ripped the charade of family apart,

  tired of being misunderstood.

  But I called him later and patched it up.

  Just why did I call?

  For one of the Ten Commandments?

  For: Do unto others as you will have others do unto you?

  Or was it the genes we share?

  Could it be that the way we wonder is more alike

  than anyone else we know?

  ON AUGUST 17, 1986, MY FATHER DIED. JACOB ISRAEL, TRAVELING SALESMAN, ARDENTIST HEART OF ALL.

  Grand Central Station. Monarch Manufacturing. Leather bomber jackets on a road trip…Yonkers. June verdure. Train cadence. Morning at ten…Monday. The Hudson. To my brother Jerry. Green Palisades. Four long homers away. Twenty-five-story-high purple and brown stone cliffs…brownstone. The East Sixties…The Tappan Zee. My brother will come from Woodstock to Rhinecliff to meet me.

  Michelangelo’s Pietà

  All hail Henry Hudson’s “discovery,” and how nobody knew it before. Beauty increases above the bridge as it widens…Croton-Harmon, FDR. Billie. Glenn Miller. My father’s fedora. Bogie. Gable. Peck. There in his car, samples in back, adoring his kids in his mind. And leaving us behind. To drive beside the Bear Mountain Bridge. In ’45, with his third son born, his bliss must have known no bounds. Manhood’s decree. His legitimacy.

  Haul those sample cases. The strapped black plastic three-by-two lead valise. (Any bottles inside?) The river perceptibly narrows to five hundred feet across…then bridge—Poughkeepsie, a big name in my father’s life. Who was the buyer? Where was the hotel? Was there a girlfriend?…Was there another life?…Poughkeepsie. The war won. Great days for Brooklyn. Durocher, still a bum. It wasn’t just Furillo. It was Cox and Pafko and Gene Hermanski. And light was more golden then and hopeful, so fewer pollutants were in the air. We was robbed….The American way of letting money have its say…any way.

  I think, therefore I am.

  I feel, therefore I love.

  I yearn to tell my all,

  my everyone, to believe.

  Therefore I come to San Gimignano

  in the late afternoon on Christmas Eve.

  Believe in the heart’s insistence

  to rule throughout existence.

  Believe in the Buddha, Muhammad

  and Moses and in Christian prayer.

  Your faith, like that of the mason

  of a hill town in the darkening

  Middle Age air—put it there.

  Kathryn Ward Cermak, c. 1987

  When I’m away for a while I come home and see the obvious—those drapes need cleaning, this room is too dark, I’m lonely. Back from Montserrat in autumn ’85, I open my months of mail. There, a picture of actress Kathryn Luce, my future bride. Just back home alone and horny, I go to the phone.

  I wanna be like Jesus, draped across his mother’s lap

  Michelangelo’s masterpiece, the marble Pietà

  A figure of adoration to nuns, mothers, and lonely hearts

  Slim-hipped idol in a loincloth, sculpted body parts.

  The thrust of the trochanter, the Virgin Mary’s pride

  Stone’s holy answer, with erotic thrill denied.

  Hang me on the X’s, with Marley’s martyred fame

  And a skinny superhero’s frame.

  A: I’m afraid of you.

  K: You should be.

  A: You’re a power.

  K: It’s your karma to get me.

  A: You’re the other half of my disease.

  K: What’s that?

  A: The cure.

  Things are a little bit different—now when I go to the laundry basket, a pair of young woman’s underwear is in my whites. Deeper down, beyond other late nights, I come upon another girl’s underwear.

  So he always needed to fill up a room.

  He acted big—a kind of play.

  And I found it easy to give him his space,

  to ramble his way…and that’s all okay.

  Then he earned the spotlight—he was funny

  he was right, he was never uptight

  when I was around.

  I was a “BOUNCE,” a sort of wall

  and he of course had the ball.

  So I’m having a dinner with Paul last night, just the two of us, at his favorite restaurant in the Broadway theater area. I make a statement of fact about something. He quietly interjects, “Or so you claim.” He is amused by his own slightly competitive comment, and he tells me the recent story of his fondness for the phrase: He was in a taxi in Chicago. The driver pointed out the Sears Tower proudly as the tallest structure in the U.S. So Paul said, with a knowing tone, “Well, I don’t think it’s taller than the Empire State Building.” Driver: “Yes it really is.” Paul (quietly): “I don’t think so.” Driver: “No, the Sears is the tallest.” Paul (very quietly now): “Or so you claim.” Paul laughs—New York won’t be bested by
Chicago.

  Now Paul goes on to a new subject with, “Did I tell you this—you’ll be amused…” I cut him off with, “Let me be the judge of that.” I laugh at the obvious tease (parallelism). He says, a bit more soberly, “Okay, you’ll make the call.” He is not amused.

  WALKING AMERICA

  Davenport. The third of May. Six p.m. Minutes from the Mississippi. I stalk the epiphany. Spring waxes in apple-green trees, in this Hall of Fame of American streets. Two little boys “hello” at me. I point to the rising moon…faint and full.

  I too get weary and sick of tryin’…six feet from The River at high noon. I took a room at the Hotel Mississippi, downtown Davenport, and ate a pizza while the Lakers played Portland in the playoffs…fifteen hundred and forty-eight full moons ago Huck was rafting here. (And so were you and I.) (Or was Huck with Jim that night, have I recast a sentimental Twain?)

  Good pitch is simple honesty.

  Correcting pitch with PRO TOOLS

  is a simulated way.

  All of our days, the searching needs

  for unalloyed truth and beauty lead.

  Morality played to win is a

  plate of tin.

  I tried to write a poem to Kim

  but her image mesmerized my mind.

  Her blondness made me blind.

  So I calmly sought to find the subtle

  honest feelings that I have for her inside

  …I don’t get her. What is she?

  Lemon meringue?

  She’s a hellcat. Is that what I need?

  Her identity lies in her loves.

  The love of man and woman as one

  is first of all with her…m m m

  Kathryn and Arthur (Kim and Artie), c. 1986

  How many books of the writers I read:

  9 Balzac

  8 Tolstoy, Dickens, Proust

  7 Twain, Henry James

  6 Flaubert, Rousseau, Plato, Rhys

  5 Hardy, Dostoevsky, Freud, Joyce, Austen

  4 Eliot, Nabokov, Goethe, Woolf, Salinger, Barzun, Roth, Gay, McEvedy

  3 Thackeray, Chekhov, Wilder, Defoe, Kissinger, Mann, Faulkner, Hemingway, Voltaire, Jung, A. J. P. Taylor, Fielding, Wharton, Kant, Trollope, Mead, Butler, Bellow, Ikeda, Ouspensky, Fisher, Mailer, Wodehouse, Heidegger, Tom Wolfe, Graves

  I was born to fuck the girls of the Junior League.

  I know they’re Wellesley women now with equestrian

  intrigue. But they want their Daddy’s spanking

  one more time.

  A fox in her underwear’s worth the hunt.

  To part

  the pearls and penetrate that neoclassic front

  and play the only jazz on the upper east side.

  We are what we eat, not the things of words

  We’re made of the meat of the wings of birds

  WHAT’S IT LIKE TO BE A FILM ACTOR?

  I made Carnal Knowledge for Mike Nichols in ’71 and Bad Timing for Nicolas Roeg at the end of the ’70s as Laurie died. With the first we worked mostly in Vancouver. A driver would bring Nicholson and me to the set in the morning. There, in the backseat, Jack and I would run lines, then sing “Fire and Rain” to be in harmony as performers. I played the innocent. In Bad Timing, shot mostly in Vienna, Harvey Keitel was investigating why my lover, Theresa Russell, had tried to take her life (but did not succeed, while Laurie in New York succeeded with doing just that). I was Alex Linden, working at NATO, a man of mystery. At the end of a day’s shoot, Jack and I stood on the deck in the fine mist, naked outside the pool, into the Canadian sunset. We played a lot of Cat Stevens. But in London, with Bad Timing, the day ended with the learning of the next two, three, or four pages of the script in the bathtub atop the Portobello Hotel. Theresa was across the hall having an affair with the director. I was intense—memorization, all the different spins that could be put into the lines. Psychoanalysis.

  Suppose they served horsemeat when we ordered Big Macs

  And for every shepherd’s pie they baked a dog.

  What we won’t eat is our wont and our custom;

  What we consume is our trust.

  Thus the London restaurant chain of GARFUNKELS

  I drifted north on the first day off to look at the Londoners,

  air up the ailerons, track the topography, feel England

  rise from the Thames. Marylebone Station, Wellington Road,

  noon at the ridge of North End Way….

  A particular type of Romantic will praise the Hampstead Heath—

  those who love the upland view, those few of you with eyes

  that roam over the St. Paul dome to Byzantium.

  I carry on down the northern slope.

  View is lost, all guiding signs are gone, but one—

  high above the heath, beneath a cloudy day, two lines askew

  converge for you in skywriting. What does it mean?

  The Byzantine beyond the Adriatic art?

  O poor heart. You are lost. Earth eludes.

  You are left with skyward moorings.

  Does anyone notice the faint aroma of slowly decaying flesh? I’m depressed. All is vanity. Where is meaning? We are eating and excreting organisms. We’re led by maître d’s. We rest our Western Civilization on plumbing…the plumbers are here behind me in the kitchen. “A nipple broke off,” the super says of the pipes above the soffit. Six recessed lights have become showerheads. I am weeping within for want of procreation. Suddenly the first snow falls. Like The Animals’ Christmas cover, spotted in white, fat flakes are filling the window. Why does the national deficit haunt me? We live on borrowed time. Why does all the dumbness hurt me?…I piss. The plumbing’s turned off. I leave it. I am trying to mix music and commerce and it’s killing me. I feel the failure of proper promotion of The Animals’ Christmas and now that it is the eleventh of December, I conclude I’m not wanted that much by The Company….

  But I make this new album I privately cherish, and now I must sing through it all—through the death of Jacob Israel, the loss of Laurie Bird, the TV ad for Graceland, the perfect Christmas gift, the triumph of politics I ain’t got, through baldness and bad brotherhood, thousands of librettos left out at the factory, streams coming down in the kitchen behind me through pipes I share with Mr. Tisch below. I go to sing the purple plum, the midnight blue, the forest green.

  AFTER CHERNOBYL I WATCHED US ALL SLIP INTO THE ACCEPTANCE OF A NUCLEAR-TAINTED WORLD. MAY 1986.

  Ames in the afternoon. The worst of all possible nuclear catastrophes has happened. I drive across Iowa, heading for Omaha, keeping an eye on the northwest sky. It’s a small world after. Radioactivity is all a hype now only ZZ Top can groove.

  With my mother in Israel, c. 1983

  With my father in Israel, c. 1983

  I killed a bird at Altamont, just at the start of The Lark Ascending—southeast Kansas. It never figured the wind to be so strong. It struggled across my hellish aisle and failed SMACK into my windshield, above the radio dial. It rolled, stunned or killed, on the blacktop. Down from sixty-five, I backed up to have a look.

  A bird friend was there in attendance. It stood in the other lane, keeping its distance…violas enter from the slain bird as she lay on her side…then I was alone with her, slayer and prayer, pray-er and prey…I coulda been Dean under credits in Rebel Without a Cause. Going down with Darwin, I touched her gossamer wing.

  WHITHER THE PEOPLE WHO ARE MOVED AWAY WHEN A SCHOOL EXPANDS?

  Mostly it’s sports that drove those old families out. Arenas of epic proportions. (I’ll be playing them.) Alumni donations. Limping students….Under a tent off the side of the ballpark (Huskers—Oklahoma in the top of the first) beneath concrete bleachers, rows A to triple Z for the football games, are fifteen masseurs. The U. of N. track lies near in the noon sun. Trucks for the ETV Network are here (“E” for education). Under a hundred fifty fingers practiced in dislocations, the track and field boys lie in wait.

  On leave from the army at Annecy, the young Frenchm
an

  boards the train at Aix-les-Bains.

  He enters the compartment where I sit alone

  with the poems of James Joyce.

  My Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire, sits on the chair between us.

  He is going home to Marseille,

  with the conquering air of the “distingué.”

  His way becomes my route.

  The importance of blue jeans when they’re medium blue,

  slightly big, and a little puckered from starch.

  (VALENCE) He wears a black leather jacket over a black-and-white-

  checked flannel shirt. I read the Ballad of a Soldier,

  Alyosha, on his lips compelling empathy like Julien Sorel.

  He is adorable.

  Now he stands to stow his bag on the shelf above

  across from us….

  Why wouldn’t the Lord love me

  even as I am transfixed by his ass?

  Ask me to tie his shoe now as a game—

  and give all my love in a swoon of shame.

  Most of all I’m nonplussed by where my heart has taken me. Headless author, I see myself embarrassed and askance.

  But hear the heart’s information. Wear your choices affectionately. Make it embraceable, dance in the vastness of your own inner grace.

  August 4, 2009. Soon I will come to Hoisington, deep in the heart of Kansas in August under the sun beautiful air not yet noon. If this rectangle state were an envelope, then I paid the postage, I’ve come to where you address the name….I am accompli, I’ve been to sea. Now rolling bands of plains accompany me. The broad sweep, violas play with bows long drawn with celli maroon in harmony.

  Sweet land of liberty, I stand amid—I am Whitman’s kid. I am Prometheus bound to be bicoastal. From spring to remains I sing in my chains….I am Avi Garman-Singer, Avraham to some, my father Jacob Israel sold garments. (He broke his back upon it, but that’s a Willy Loman sonnet.)