GUY KETTELHACK
Bell Rings for Round One
Okay, enough. Stuff your
quandaries. Throw yourself into the fray.
Stick your chin out, take a punch and throw
one, tell your fears to fuck themselves. That
hunch you have that life is fatuous the way you're
living it? Well, you're right. Cut off your nose to spite your
face: put the baby and the bathwater on the stove to boil and
render them into unprecedented oil. Grieving isn't linear: neither is much else.
Blow up whatever's on your shelf: leap into the pit. For once in your cowering life,
face
it.
One Clam I knew
One clam I knew - in his long years from tender baby
to tough grandparent - abided an exasperating hell
of yearning to discard his shell - to shuck his calcium
and live more like a paramecium - free and soft and
trembling - ambiguously shooting through ineffability -
streaming like a dream - resembling jello more than stone.
Today I hear the echo of his moan - his sob: "Cut me
loose from all this gravity! I want to be a blob!" The cry
of him would break the hardest hearts. Unhinged by far
too many years of this, I finally cut him out and into parts
and threw him into a memorial soup. Alas he was by
this time less the floating cloud of goop he'd prayed to be
than - after all his struggling agony - inedibly more like
a piece of gristle. I sighed when I kerplopped the missile
of him from the pot into the trash. I wondered if the action
had been rash. But then I saw my sadness hadn't come
from dumping my clam chum into a chowdery smothering -
but that he'd never learned to love protective covering.
Picture of My Family, ca. 1953
To see us on the couch - my father like Clark
Gable on the right, next to somebody's suburban
lamp (not ours - we posed for this in someone
else's home) - traces of my mother paler here
than she'd have seemed had years of sun not
washed so many layers from the photograph like
foam - my brother so unconscionably young! -
and me in overall, a bright-child-blond - to see
us all at our inception - now, when I'm the only one
who's left - is odd. I am more baffled than bereft.
And gently ribbed by God. The photo leaves a hint,
perhaps from Him, of who'd go on. Despite the fact
that I'm so much smaller, I'm the only one in colour.
Postlude Sonnet
You live in countless specificities
large portions of my teeming jumbled brain
must surely, if not consciously, retain -
but all your tiny multiplicities -
now I see you've gone away somewhere -
drop into darkness in my baffled mind,
packed like enigmatic segments in a rind
of orange: inaccessible to thought or air -
if there - invisibly, like bursting juice.
Physically all dries when anybody dies -
slips from the grasp of living eyes.
We're solely, then, details in arcane code - use
of which depends on who's left living.
Your gifts depend on me to keep on giving.
Two Mornings After
I gave two cats a felt banana,
yellow phallus full of catnip:
they went wild at first -
unpersuadable that they could
ever slake a thirst they didn't
even know they had: ignoring
me for it. Next day they left
the thing alone: they'd had
their way: no more need
to chomp their cat-teeth
at that bit. But after sex,
or seeing Jackson Pollock's
art - or drinking up an August
New York sunset like a brew
I might have chugged down
in a speakeasy in prohibition:
illegitimate - delicious: well,
I'm stained, the craving and
the memory intensify - get
worse. Or better. Hard to tell
between a blessing and a curse.
On Seeing Jackson Pollock's
"No. 1, 1950" for the Thirty-fifth
(and First) Time
I'd seen the thing so many times before -
though never as I saw it yesterday: what
was it but a fraction of an acre of enamel
paint dripped this - and that - and whichway
everywhere across stretched canvas: gleeful
retribution by a two-year-old for all the No
he'd had to undergo? That was the wallop
I'd deduced was offered in the art of Pollock.
But this time Jackson hit me with a sucker
punch - slipped me a mickey of an acid trip
before he dug into my soul and beat it over
rocks 'til it was whole - then had me for his
lunch. Slowly creeping towards his vista,
then away, traversing it along its lateral sway -
diving into height and width and length as if
into the neural pathways of a god - I tasted
delicacy and strength too absolute not to
deliver absolution. Which must account for
the solution of salinity that crept involuntarily
from me: solving and dissolving boundaries
in thin seepages: apposite to all the streaks
that Jackson Pollock poured into this vast
internal space. In him, right here, innocence
becomes experience and turns to grace.
No wonder black and white and lavender
had stained my face. I knew that this was true:
the painting tells me what I have and want to do.
Late Summer City Couplets
You think the city summer's done
and then the sun
mucks up what tendrils of an ambient lucidity
you've struggled to retain by fostering humidity
(again) past sizzling into horrible -
defining the Intolerable:
no way a human being could accomodate
this howling drop into the hell of the Intemperate
that August in Manhattan causes
him or her: no pauses
in the roaring blast
of concrete oven: last
a block or two perhaps -
and it will feel like eighty laps
around a barren track -
streams like lava down your back -
persuing some unwanted prize:
as rotting fumes, dark fantasies arise
effulgently - depraved and smarmy
devils lure more devils out: an army
of the Id partakes of prickly sweat
and hopes for sticky blood: a threat
to sanity the beating beat
does nothing to abate: a sheet
of fouling perspiration turns you rancid -
hope corrodes in acid
and you learn the meaning -
panting in the street, and leaning
weakly on a stoop - of air
unbreathably condensed into despair:
the thick hot damp barrage
of it is no mirage -
and yet
you get
a wink from Lady Liberty's green eye
that tells you you would rather die -
despite all this - than move away.
New York's simply boiled up another day.
Intimate Effects
Caravaning over hill and valley
of his neck and chest and thighs and belly,
wondering at wanting so to stay -
goggle-eyed at finding I could
be awake and go so deep (to hell with sleep) -
and finding nothing in the way
of play: today - two mornings
after - I can taste the trace of some ridiculous
and beautiful and powerful
Divinity's wild laughter: precise
spontaneous eruption of Its balances and checks
redeeming everything It thought
It knew about the lunacies and mysteries of sex.
Rigmarole
Get the rigmarole in gear -
crank it up and twirl its sphere
so everything is chugging, squeaking
as it ought: disciplined - bespeaking
easy balanced expertise
all its matters of degrees
in hand and humming -
unimpeded in its plumbing -
testament to your desire
to keep the thing from catching fire
or freezing to a halt.
(Certainly won't be your fault
if it breaks down right now.)
You've covered all the how
and that and what and if of it -
would take an act of God to make it quit.
How strange, though, to reflect
how hard you've got to work, how circumspect
and vigilant you've got to be
to make the thing spin wobble-free.
Your soul requires assiduous employment
of your stuff and skill: that's its enjoyment.
Silhouette
Reminds me of someone,
can't think who.
Sense binds to memory -
some soft drag -
hand brushed skin: when? Did
I touch, was I
touched like this? Not a kiss -
a caress - as if
someone was crying. I feel like
I'm spying on
some undressed bit of a past: my
past? Some past.
(At last - someone in love touches
something that
matters.) I'm scattered today.
Should go for
a walk. Don't much want to talk.
Diversionary Tactics
Now, what to do with pent-up steam
that simple venting won't relieve:
more fire underneath, more water
boiling into air than I had had the faintest
notion could be there: too hot, this pot,
too full of scalding amplitude, too
sweltering. Metaphors are shelter:
but this particular one burns: all that
I can figure out is to decant a molten
Something from the center of me
through a spout of rhyme -away, away -
by turns. Staging interventions: that's
what writing poems is - to keep me
floating in the fizz, between clichés,
believing I can type my way into
a state of being free - between proverbial
agonies: the so-called Devil and
the Deep Blue Sea. I write I write I write -
to swerve from yet another unsolicited,
bewildering diversion: someone
confessed to me today, for reasons he
could not express, I fill him with aversion.
Depsite the Facts
Every moment is a leap into the dark -
it isn't black: it's back of that -
somewhere before invention.
Every time I think I know what's missing
I am wrong. Although I long, it's
not for anything I know about.
You are not the aim, although I thought
you were. We are hilariously
wrong, so funny we fall down.
So funny we Vesuviate. So funny we coin
verbs to do it justice. So funny
we forgot the joke. Yoke me to
the oxen in the sky the Romans saw instead
of bears in Ursa Major: beasts
that keep this whole regalia
turning, beasts of which someone decided
several stars, light years away
from us and from each other,
made a picture. Above invisibility we paint
in light, despite the facts,
whatever they may be.
"Are you in love with me?"
"We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest."
(Yeats, A Dialogue of Self & Soul)
Are you in love with me?
Why? Are you in love with me?
I am too new to know. I know that every time I
feel you near, my knees go weak.
The same with me.
Do you have knees?
What do you think I use to pray upon,
when I don't prey upon my fantasies of you?
I'm not sure I know you're real. Do you sweat?
Abundantly.
Would I know you were in bed with me?
Forgive me, darling, for my laugh. If you only
knew the half...
...of what?
of every night. Haven't you experienced my
tongue upon your...
I don't sleep well. I'm distracted.
Parentheses protract us into an attenuated mist -
What the hell does that mean?
It's a prologue to a kiss.
Which never happens?
Not so far, the kiss that matters, no.
Do you ever leave me? Are you always here?
So it seems. What is your fear? That I will stay
or go?
I don't know.
Tell me what to do.
Just lie next to me.
Is that all?
For now, that's all.
Nova
In the explosion of the nova of a moment
all is present and accounted for: see?
The natural condition of the Universe is ecstasy.
But then crawling little egos rear their pesky
little mammal heads - survey detritus of the stars:
investigate the wreckage of the dead -
scurrying through fossil shreds of ancient
happiness, worrying themselves into an existential
dread. "What can it mean? What shall we do?"
Nervous mice and shrews convene to talk about
extinction and morality, the pros and cons of God.
While somewhere in a distant galaxy,
new transcendent dinosaurs stew up a batch
of glory and through glory each one roars
and plays and plods - until the stars can't hold
their joy again - and everybody shoots his wad.
To Capture You
We've got this secret,
you and I.
As you read this line
you travel through my ear
down to my spine: I make you
mine precisely for the time I've
caught you in my poem's
soul nad bones: I work on you
like birds flit round a trunk:
brush slight breezes with
their wings upon your face,
replace for just the moment that
you're with me your inconstancy.
Poems are spider webs laced over
branches, catching the unwary
with their diamond dew. Oh,
the things I wouldn't do
to capture you.
Speaking in Tongue
Decode me if you dare, fair reader
(you know who you are, I think):
drink deeply of this glass of poem
(Ha - I'll show 'em. Or do they know
already?) I'll kiss - next time - with
hand obliquely steadying a cheek
to make it last. I once believed I was
a sneak - uniquely suited to the task
of obfuscating entertainingly so no one
got the joke - 'til later. In fact, I'm told,
my magic is fool's gold: DUH-inducing
bait - transparent as this poem-glass
is clear: what I hold dear is only too
repellently fobbed off as if it weren't
obvious is what I am: nakedness
wrapped in Saran. There must be
some more efficacious way. So easy
to detect! why is love so hard to say?
The Virtuosity of Some Gay Men's Bodies
Craft something honed
to such incontrovertibility
it's fetishized: let sleekness
cover any hint of weakness.
Liszt and Paganini
similarly played and filtered
virtuosity through sieves
like this: pumped up like
Schwarzenegger, crashed
testosteroned tone-blasts,
finger prickles sizzling
their fickle jaded lady
audiences into a swoon -
reminds me of a tune
I swallowed too a couple
nights ago: frozen music
of a man so muscular
his arm around me felt like
heavy scaffolding protecting
a cathedral. What sanctuary
hides inside? Amazing,
the way some gay men
reside within their blinding
armor, high and dry in
brilliant shells! By contrast,
I'm all leaks and spills.
If I Had My Druthers (And I Do)
I sit like this: erect, my hands placed softly on
my knees, my eyes at forty-five oblique degrees
aimed at the floor. There's always some iota of
a speck upon the rug on which to train my gaze,
into whose tiny being I'm entreated to pour
all my thought. No notion's good or bad, I'm taught:
usher it in, then let it breeze away - allowing breath
to come and go into and out the nose - my tongue
tucked gently up behind my upper teeth: an optimally
distracting way to play, imagining I'm free of all
the stuff that makes me me. I've often thought before
that if I had my druthers (and I do) I'd fabricate
unending ways to smother each unnerving point
of view and voice inside my mind - whatever in
the scene before my actual and inner eye and ear
flew by to fowl things up. Now, with soft abruptness,
I'm enjoined to shoo them out instead - concatenating
notions in my head! - and sweep, make way, for some
new liberation: the aim, I'm told, of meditation. But
now I wonder if to usher out is just as obfuscating
as to hide within. So, since I have my druthers (and I do),
I think, today, I'll hang onto my chaos and befuddlement:
it seems to me there's glory in it. All the melee of my
longings, dreams: today I think I'll try to tolerate the
whole unwieldy mess - and find and tell the story in it.
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