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Outlands & Inlands
ISBN: 0-916562-15-8 $7.95
Truck Press (David Wilk)
St Paul, MN 1978
Poems appeared originally in Tooth of Time Review (John Brand), Primer (Ron Wray), Llama's Almanac (Linda Parker), and Toothpick, Lisbon and the Orcas Islands (Michael Wiater)
Written from 1969-1973 on Mt. Desert Island and Cape Elizabeth, Maine, as well as in Plainfield, Vermont, these poems work the fabric of consciousness, ferreting out hope and possibility through perception of the observed world. The narrators of both the short prose and the poems all share a passionate belief in the transformative powers of the fluidity of language against all odds. And yet the darkness does impinge: people struggle against unimaginable odds, and they do not always win, sometimes darkness falls around them and there is nothing they can do. These are personal poems about being locked up in a house and a consciousness and isolated, about the struggle to live courageously and not give up on the simplest things.
Excerpts:
STOPPING LIVING COMING VERY GENTLY
When you are stopping living in your life
The stars walking out of your eyes onto a long plain
When living is letting go and the strings are
not tight enough any more
the vectors missing
O Derrida that's it that's what I've been missing
O Foucault O yes what I'm missing is an annal of my self-hatreds
At those times you write yourself into the ground
you write about everyone but yourself
and cover yourself over with leaves, which freeze
you marvel how the first person, learned so faithfully, so well
is so sadly inappropriate to the big world
You launch into the second because maybe it has some familiarity
without seeming so intimate
all your heroes are insubstantial
the real world fades away
you become a newspaper of the society's self-loathing
you spread bad feeling, apologize, but everyone's fallen asleep
THE POET'S METIER
What is my —
what you call it
my —
what can be described,
as, this poet
does this,
& that, this,
I'm a cat on a fence.
The fire horn blows.
Those who live around here
can tell where the fire is from listening.
Just like I'm not here,
geographically, never really
settled in here —
There's a skittering between my eyelids,
a sort of imbalance
only righted by walking
very carefully along the fence,
& then down another,
and another.
I cover whole cities that way,
fence by fence,
never touching wooden backporches,
never having to cross backyards,
so light in my cat step
I leave no tracks.
But I never know
where the fire is,
& my poetry to others
& my self
is not easily classified.
Is that a fatal weakness?
Does it mean that its
not really on,
like it freaks me
but no one else?
If I wear a long magenta skirt
& a complex necklace
& high button black boots
& push my long brown hair behind my ears
with a quick flick of my hand so my face
can be seen better,
will I put it over -
& no one will notice?
Instead of spending $48 on groceries,
could I buy myself
some really far out clothes?
I'd rather be a cat,
walking successive winding fences,
silent
& moonstruck.
ONE MORE TIME
She kept inviting him over. She had to import his body into her
livingroom always just one more time, to get a last glimpse. She kept
wanting to have dinner with him, and so they did, but he was a curious
mixture of passivity and aggression. She was beginning to understand
that two things were possible: one, either he spent all his aggression on
the college, where he fought giant campaigns with many soldiers and the
most brutal and intricate of weaponry and had no aggression left for his
personal life, or two, he didn't like her and never thought to call her.
But, of course, what she really wanted, was to be called, adored,
summoned. She wanted to be Helen to her Achilles, Cassandra to her
Agamemnon. She thought of herself as the mysterious sign bearer, who
knows things without having to be told, who walks around on the
ramparts, watching the battle from above and dropping signs, signals,
which only those most enlightened, like her Achilles, could see. But, of
course, he was really fighting, whereas she was not really walking
around on the ramparts, but home mending the children's things, where
she should have been, or practicing the piano. He thought he was
fighting for his life, because the college and his self had become One in a
non-mystical transformation.
He was, of course, an existentialist. When she was cocky and lively
he took it as being too strong, brittle, especially, bitchy. She has a whole
life going, which filed quietly out the door whenever he appeared, so
involved was she in him. And, in truth, she had always been this way,
had erased any trace of her personality when men were around. But she
was attracted, wasn't she, and so wasn't that worth it? What she
dreaded was getting in a fight with him, and so she dreamed of
mysterious .38's and .45's that showed up in hidden places, and that
one day he would shoot her absolutely dead. It would be worth dying
for, but what was it?
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