MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH POETRY

jan van munster

Two years of reading difficult writing for an average high school graduate was my preparation for college. Out of the Navy, into school, I liked the English class the best, introducing poetry that was awfully interesting to a kid with no experience in poetry but Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Turns out, I'd recommend them for introductions. They speak in our language. I found a paperback of Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems in the first week of school. Back in my one-room attic apartment, after homework, I thought I'd read a few of the poems before sleep. No sleep happened. I could not stop reading, read them all and read them all again and again. All night long I lay in the bed, head propped on pillow, reading his poems. They spoke to me. I was in awe of what he was doing with the form. My knowledge of poetry was negligible beyond a few of the Beats. Jeffers was like the next step. I have beside me a small Modern Library, 1935 edition, of The Roan Stallion, Tamar And Other Poems, by Jeffers. Probably found it someplace for fifty cents. Just now read one of his poems selected randomly, Pelicans. Reading just one of his poems after not reading him in a very long time, I see the original attraction to his writing. I like the connections he makes and what he sees in what he's looking at. Thus began a lifetime affection for poetry. 

jan van munster

Several years of reading Twentieth Century American poetry, and poetry from Europe and Asia, I came to a place that when I want to read a poem or a few, I go to an anthology of Chinese poetry, Sunflower Splendor, from beginning to 1975, the date of publication, several translators.  This is my desert island book. Chinese poetry satisfies me like no other. My favorites were written over a millennium ago. Tu Fu lived from 712-770. Han Yu lived from 768 to 824. Han Yu wrote a long poem I've read many times, Southern Mountains. These are the mountains of southern China, semi-tropical. I'd like to show you the whole poem, though will pick a few lines:

          Winter comes with somber silence,

           Ice and snow sculpting in white jade.

           A new sun lights the summits

           Stretching heights and breadths millions of feet.

I've loved this anthology so much, I bought the hardback edition first, then the paperback edition, to save the hardback for later years and wear out the paperback along the way. 

jan van munster

Sunflower Splendor is such a treasure, I needed a shelf copy and a copy for use. I have four copies of the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching, different editions. Favorite is the one illustrated with ancient Chinese paintings. And there is John Berryman's book of poems, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, 1968, I keep near at hand. Sometimes I want to read a Berryman poem, pick it up, read one, savor it and go on. And from that same time, I recall devouring Robert Lowell's book of poems, Notebook 1967-68. It was in the same time as Norman Mailer's Armies Of The Night and Robert Bly's long poem, The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last, a poem of the American war in Vietnam. I'd heard Bly read it in person, bought a cassette tape of him reading it. Have read it again recently in his new and selected poems, Stealing Sugar From The Castle, released last year. Bly is another of the poets I pick up and read one or two and put it down. I read Bly an awful lot in the late Sixties, early Seventies. Haven't read him much at all since around 1980. Found his selected poems published, and like his later poems quite a lot better than the earlier poems. Not throwing off on the early ones, like Light Around The Body, not at all, but saying he's gone beyond in his maturity. 

jan van munster

I've picked up Louise Gluck's book of collected poems, Poems 1962-2012. Gluck I've followed since her first book of poems, Firstborn. I was glad to see her poems together in one volume. It's so thick, it's kind of intimidating, so much to pick from. I don't like to read poetry books front to back, unless it would be Lowell's, Notebook 67-68. I wanted to touch Louise Gluck's book to pick it up and open it. I let it fall open randomly and read the poem it opened to, Lullaby, p 299, from her book, The Wild Iris, a poem called Lullaby. I want to share three of the lines with you:

Twilight, then early evening. Fireflies

in the room, flickering here and there, here and there,

and summer's deep sweetness filling the open window. 

Reading the entire poem took my breath away. Her poems frequently take hold of me in such a way I inhale and exhale when it is finished, thinking, Where did that come from? It is the same feeling when I stand in front of Robert Motherwell's Elegy To The Spanish Republic, or Monet's water lilies. The kind of thing that makes me say to self, This is the real deal, this is art. I'm recalling a show I saw of Jaap Mooy's drawings by felt-tip black marker, every one of them an astonishment, black squiggles on white. Couldn't stop staring them, had to buy a copy of the paperback book of the show in the gift shop. Gluck's poems do for me what Jaap Mooy's simple drawings did, each one awe inspiring. 

jan van munster himself

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SNOWBIRDS, DONKEYS AND PABLO NERUDA

snowbird

Odd snowy day. The day began above freezing by a degree or two. I gave the donkeys their morning carrots and what was left of the hay, just enough to get them started. Backed down the hill to the barn, stacked three bales of hay in the trunk and took them to the donkey feeding station. Rolled them down the hill to Jack braying, donkeys at the fence smelling the hay, excited, something to eat, gave Jenny a swatch of it by hand to chew on while I placed the bales and threw some over the fence. Covered the bales with the blue tarp and came to the house. Tiny snowflakes floated on the air telling me it is a good time to have fresh hay ready to go. Snow came down lightly an hour later. Caterpillar came in the house with snow flake speckling her back and tail. Donkey backs turned white. The donkeys went to their den to watch the snow fall. Snow covered the ground lightly, maybe an eighth of an inch. Snowbirds hop about, pick up the morning's seeds, intermingled with a sparrow, a cardinal female, a cardinal male, chickadees, nuthatches, titmice. The sun came out for a short time, enough to melt the snow outside the shadows. Donkeys returned to grazing hay. Sun went away and snowfall resumed, though less than before until it faded to sunlight again. Cloud drifted over the sun again, the donkeys graze, snowbirds hop and peck. I took video camera to the door, stood in the doorway until the birds came back that scattered when I opened the door. I was getting some still pictures of snowbirds scratching and pecking, and decided to pick one bird and make a brief video. The wind chimes rang a moment from a Takemitsu score. I put it on facebook earlier today. 

snowbird

The floor has turned cold again. So nice it was to have a floor that did not freeze my feet for a week. Cold floor is back for at least the next week. Saturday night/Sunday morning, zero is forecast. The wind is flowing from the west today, so I project it will blow from the west Saturday night. The donkey den's opening is to the east, and the house will block the wind from the donkey den a little. They will be cozy sleeping side by side, the wind's turbulence flowing over and around them. It will be one of those annual nights, the coldest night of the year with wind out of the west cutting straight through the house like the wall is made of lattice. The kerosene heater will never stop. I checked the tank earlier in case it might need a delivery today or tomorrow. It has more than enough to make it through this next cold spell. The guys working the trucks will be busy these cold days. I don't want to run out. I'm not worried about the cold night. It's not the first time. I'll keep feet up off the floor as much as possible. Sleep. It's time to take some grain to the donkeys. They will need the nutrition for the cold night. May throw them some more hay, enough to get them started in the morning before I rise. Done. I dressed up for zero and laughed at self going out the door. Glad I did. Thermometer said 23. With wind, it was blustery. Jack gets so excited for the grain, he brays when I step out the door. He knows what time of day it is. Finished with the bray, he squeals and grunts a pitiful groan of desperation. I and Jack already know Jenny is first or we both better look out. I carried the container up the fence to Jenny's place. Jack groaning and squealing beside Jenny until time for the pour; Jack knows to step back or he might be swallowing some teeth. He walked beside me the other side of the fence. His nostrils pulled the scent of the grain like vacuum hoses inhaling the aroma of his favorite treat. 

jack

Jenny finished her grain and moved to the new hay tossed over the fence. Seeing her at the hay, just now, surprised me. Usually, when she finishes her grain first, she runs Jack away from his and finishes it for him. Jenny is not a donkey to predict from one day to the next. She expresses her feelings without inhibition. Jack does not show what he is feeling like Jenny does. They seem like Mike Tyson and Beyonce together. Jenny likes a rough man and Jack likes a fine lady. It took Jack six months to learn how to conquer Jenny. The day he took her down, took her will, she fell in love. It was overnight, from one day to the next. She turned her Alpha status over to him and settled down into a gentle, loving partner. They graze the hay side by side. Jack took a step toward the remains of Jenny's grain. Jenny darted in front of him and went to the grain she'd left unfinished. Now she has gone to the remains of Jack's grain pile. He doesn't care. In summer I give them the grain every three days. Cold winter I give them their grain every day. It keeps them warm at night and gives Jenny some nutrition for her incubating baby. Jenny has stepped over to Jack's mound of hay, pushing Jack out of the way. He went to Jenny's hay. Jenny ran him off from her hay. Jack went to pick up remains of his grain pile. Jack took a walk to the den, perhaps to stand out of the wind for a while, belly full, in the gloaming. Jenny went to their den from nibbling Jack's leftovers. Time to settle in for a cold winter night. I'm over concern for the donkeys on cold nights. Marsha told me the equines that tough it out through winters are healthier. I believe it. I think of donkeys in the Andes.

jenny

Found an article in a Harpers magazine about Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. It inspired me to go the the shelf and pick up his book, Residence on Earth (Residencia en la tierra), translated by Donald D Walsh, 1973, to experience some Neruda poems again. I've come to a place I like to read one poem at a time. More than one is too much. I read poetry with more comprehension now than the last time I opened a Neruda book. Morning is a good time, donkeys fed, cat and birds fed, coffee made, half hour or an hour before time for morning visit with Carole on the phone. We talk at least an hour each morning. This morning I read a Neruda poem, something like starting the day with a creative visualization, Ode With a Lament, a mountain stream of lush images. An excerpt:

          I have only fingernails to give you,
          or eyelashes, or melted pianos,
          or dreams that come spurting from my heart,
          dusty dreams that run like black horsemen,
          dreams filled with velocities and misfortunes. 

This is the second of seven verses, a sample of his surrealist imagery, dusty dreams that run like black horsemen. Melted pianos, Salvador Dali comes to mind. Neruda's mind was a mountain stream running into a river, into the sea and beyond, of interwoven images boiling up from his subconscious. Also dipping into Robert Bly's selected poems, Stealing Sugar From The Castle. Bly has reached the potential he promised in his early books. His anti-war poem, Teeth-Mother Naked At Last, was powerful then, in the time of the war and the poem's first publication, and it's powerful now. It does not seem to me to have dated one week. Fill in the blank, the American war of the decade on the poor people of the world. I even feel like the poem is more beautiful now, with distance, than it was then in its rawness.  

snowbird

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ROBERT BLY POETRY AND BANJO PICKIN

emilie brzezinski

I've been reading a fair amount of poetry the last several months. It started when I bought Louise Gluck's Collected Poems last year. It waits in a stack beside my reading / movie viewing chair beside my reading lamp, a floor lamp that is a half inch chrome pipe from floor to lamp and shade. I like a simple lamp. Louise Gluck inspired me to take John Berryman's, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, off the shelf to read a poem whenever the notion strikes. Bought a new book of poems by Bill Nixon, Brazen Throats, that concern Vietnam war. Then I brought down from the shelf Robert Lowell, then Robert Bly, May Swenson, Gregory Orr, Greg Kuzma and George Seferis, one at a time over a period of weeks. I went ahead and bought Robert Bly's new Selected Poems, Stealing Sugar From the Castle. These others I like an awful lot, but Bly satisfies what I want from a poem. That's not absolute. Like John Berryman's book, Love and Fame, takes my breath from first page to last. I feel in sync with Robert Bly's flow somehow. It's been at least twenty years, even more, since I've dipped into my poetry books. I read Bly in the past, in the decade of the 70s. I probably read more of him than any of the others of the post WW2 American poets. His book, Light Around The Body, satisfies me immensely. Bly wrote an anti-war poem of Vietnam called The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last. It is ten verses and eight pages. It's powerful. I heard Bly read it at a reading in 1975 or 76, College of Charleston. He read it powerfully, dramatically, loud without bombast, furious, making his statement on war in poetry. Poetry and pop songs that deal with politics die at the moment the political issue is over. Political poems date as quickly as fashions. I have a cassette tape of Bly reading Teeth-Mother. I played some of it for my old Regular Baptist preacher friend, Millard Pruitt, some time in the 1980s. He listened closely and said, "Who is that, Buck Shaw?" Shaw is a preacher in the county. I had to laugh inside. If Bly knew an old Appalachian preacher in the old way took hearing him read Teeth-Mother for an old-timey hillbilly preacher, Bly would love it. Giving it some thought, I imagine he'd be happy with the likeness. It fit. Bly was preaching, speaking dramatically with rhythmic emphases, the way the old-timers preached.

 

emilie brzezinski

 

Bly gets down and dirty in Teeth-Mother like the great anti-war song of the time by the Fugs, Kill For Peace. It went farther than any of the other anti-war songs of the time. Bly in Teeth-Mother does not tiptoe over modest sensibilities. He puts you in the fighter pilot's seat dropping napalm on a village. He puts you inside the grass hut when it explodes. He takes us on a flight roaring over jungle and rectangular fields driven by jet engines. The opening three lines:

 

 Massive engines lift beautifully from the deck.

 Wings appear over the trees, wings with eight hundred rivets.

 

 Engines burning a thousand gallons of gasoline a minute sweep over

          the huts with dirt floors.

 

 

This reading of the Teeth-Mother, half a century after the war that in Vietnam now is called the American War, the poem has not dated one minute. The war is historical by now, but Bly's poem has immediacy that brings it into the present moment, now, as we speak. I feel in the presence of important writing. After thumbing through the pages when the book arrived, stopping at short verses for brief previews, I went to The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last the first time sitting down with it. Read it three times so far. I love its rhythms. The words make their own rhythms. It has a good flow for reading aloud in a small auditorium, Bly a poet who draws a good-sized audience in the university world. He gives a good reading. Poets, who tend to be inward people, often don't like giving readings, and many are boring in the delivery. Bly holds the audience attention as a stage performer whose performance is talking, like a preacher. In the time I witnessed him reading he wore a big serape all the time. I took it for a stage prop, like musicians in bands have their stage shirts, that is in bands where they wear shirts. The serape gave color and pizzazz to his plain Minnesota protestant person. I don't know, but imagine he came up in Scandinavian Protestantism, in his case Norwegian. The preacher I grew up influenced by was Swedish from Minnesota. He was so hard core the Southern Baptist Association would not accept him though he tried every year to get in. He was zealous.

emilie brzezinski

Robert Bly's poems excite me in a way similar to how good lyrics in a pop song can excite me, like the Rolling Stones', Wild Horses or Brown Sugar, or like Jane's Addiction's Mountain Song and Pigs In Zen. Just now went to YouTube to hear Mountain Song. I'm remembering seeing the band in 1991 on their last tour, and what an ecstatic experience it was hearing them at concert volume, the guitars, the vocals. I've taken a moment to read about a dozen of Bly's poems picked randomly. In one way, his writing is natural with a smooth flow, and in another way, he goes into the subconscious dreamscape within using the "magical realism" of Latin American writers unto seeming obscurity. Example from a poem found opening the book randomly, The Sympathies of the Long Married:

          Let's not drive the wild angels from our door.
          Maybe the mad fields of grain will move.
          Maybe the troubled rocks will learn to walk.

He takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary, as does Henry Miller in his prose in a different way, his own way. The present moment is full of associations from the past, from our deepest feelings to our deepest mind that includes insights from the higher self. I feel like Bly's poems start as an attempt to reach the higher self, a line at a time, a step at a time, he finds his way and enters a new world of understanding that includes the soul's understanding. Having this review of a poet I admired almost half a century ago, I'm finding subconscious influence of what I've learned from Robert Bly is at work unconsciously in my own writing, in my thinking, same as I found reviewing Henry Miller's writing. I had no idea how much Miller influenced my thinking and writing. Miller helped me to pay attention to the people around me, to appreciate each person's unique place at the center of the universe. I suspect Bly acted as a guide for me in his approach to a poem, in his search for the higher self within, to include the dream as reality, the same as looking out the window, seeing a donkey switching its tail and grazing, even to appreciate that which I otherwise might not. Bly's poems can be a discouragement to a young poet in the same way the banjo picking by Fred Cockerham can make a young banjo hopeful say, I'll never be able to do that no matter how much I practice or how long I live. Bly, like Cockerham, makes it seem so simple even a beginner could do it. But when you pay close attention to what he's doing, it can be like listening to a high school senior's valedictory talk to a second grader, over the head and unimaginably complex. For some, it becomes a goal. For others, it can be discouraging, not allowing that Fred Cockerham was once a beginner, too, learning his first chords and figuring out how to hold the strings down to make them ring and not go thud.

emilie brzezinski

I'm thinking of young Cheyanne, just turned seven, holding her first banjo looking for how to make the chords she could remember with her left hand, striking the strings and they go thud. It didn't matter. It was the first time her fingers had touched tuned banjo strings. Just that it made a sound delighted her. Of course, the adult impulse is to say you have to hold the strings down tight to make them ring, you don't hit the strings like that, you do it like this, giving instruction: I know more than you do. I said to myself, This is the first time she's ever held it, leave her alone, let her teach herself; that's how it's really done. I let go of my ridiculous mind and joined Cheyanne in her delight that she made the banjo say something. Didn't matter what, just let it say whatever it had to say. I feel an impulse to play for her Alice Gerrard singing, I'm goin around this world, I'm a banjo pickin girl, goin around this world, baby mine. But I don't want her to hear advanced banjo pickin yet, don't want to discourage her before she starts. That's for later when she finds the music. I want her own fascination to be her guide. Holding it, making sound with it, brings her light to the surface and makes her glow. It seems a deep inner need like she knew the banjo from a lifetime past. I'm recalling a time my banjo pickin friend Jr Maxwell told a guy who came to him asking Jr to teach him bluegrass banjo. Jr said, "If you can't figure it out for yourself, you don't want to play." I'm not going to hold Cheyanne to that, or anything. Will only encourage, not push. In my own writing as art form, not holding "art form" as something lofty, but everyday life, I am following the way of the mountain musician. It's not about money. It's about fun, having fun. It's not called playing because it's work. It's about going with your own style, what works for you, because it's fun. It's about playing better all the time, steps at a time, reaching for the best you can make it every time. It's called playing by ear. The ear tells the fingers what to do. There comes a time in the mastery of making music that mind leaves altogether, leaves an open passageway between ear and fingers. That's when the music flows. Writing the daily blog is my own form of banjo pickin, setting the music in motion and flowing with it. The most fun I have in any day is the day's writing. It's play. I listen to the rhythm as I write, and even sometimes leave mind in the writing. My own personal search is for a balance between head and heart, in the writing as well as in the living, to honor the feminine as well as the masculine, allow them to dance. Thank you, Robert Bly, and thank you, Henry Miller, for pointing the way for me to follow my own path, not somebody else's.

emilie brzezinski

 

 

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FAREWELL TO POETRY

jack

It's the middle of the day, the sun is out, temperature up to 50 with some wind that has a bitter edge. The calves are lying on the ground in the sunlight and the donkeys are standing quietly in the sun. I went to bed for a nap, but it didn't happen. Rather than fidget and wait, I got up. Don't have a will to do anything but sit and write to you. I'd like to sit with a book of Louise Gluck poems, but not enough. I saw recently that Robert Bly has a new book of selected poems published last year. I have his earlier books and some of the smaller books. Light Around the Body is the last book of his poems I have. He has published several since then. I put it on my wish list at amazon, a reminder for the future. There came a time I discovered Chinese poetry and Rilke. From then on, the Chinese poets were so totally satisfying I didn't care to read anything else when I wanted to see poetry. And Rilke was unlike anything else. In that time of my life I was interested in writing poetry, published some, came to the mountains with intent to write poems of the mountains. But when I came to the mountains everything changed. My desert island book is Sunflower Splendor, an anthology of Chinese poetry from beginning to mid 20th Century. With it, and the Tao te Ching, I could live minimally without need for other books. Titles start coming to mind I'd like to take along, the poems of John Berryman. Doesn't matter. It's not going to happen. I have my own private desert island library right here. I am curious now to see what Robert Bly has been doing over the last 40 or so years.

 

jack

 

Robert Bly, without knowing it, helped me make the decision to move to the mountains. He came to Charleston to give a reading and a talk, either late 1975 or early 76. I fell into the oppotunity to be his chauffer, pick him up before a reading and drive him to it, get him to where he needed to be on time. Between stops, we talked a good bit. I was wanting to get out of the city. I told him how I was so disappointed by American cities I wanted out. No cultural life, just television. I was thinking living rurally would be less wilderness than a city. Rural life has just television too, so it's the same cultural desert, just less objectionable than the smog of urban busyness. He affirmed my thinking. He agreed that the cities have little to nothing to offer the artist. Rural living has nothing to offer either, but it's a better way to live, not so crowded. I've liked Bly's boldness in his verse. I have appreciated his approach to the political poem. American poets were shy to go with the political poem for good reasons, like they are immediately dated. Bly's trick was to make them in such a way they have their place and time, are universal too. His poem about the Viet Nam war, The Teeth Mother Naked At Last, is quite a powerful piece of writing. Bly made a cassette tape of himself reading it. I played it for an old-time preacher friend, Millard Pruitt. He said, "Who is that? Buck Shaw?" Buck Shaw was a man we knew who preached from time to time, maybe what they call a lay preacher, meaning he's not "called" to preach, but feels it enough to stand in the pulpit now and again. I had not heard Bly's reading of the poem in that light. It cracked me up hearing Robert Bly in the pulpit. I cracked up too, because if I'd mentioned Bly was a liberal, preacher Pruitt could not have listened to it. He hated communist Jane Fonda. One afternoon I dropped in to visit, the tv was on, a movie. In the mountains, it is etiquette to leave the tv on when you have company, they might want to watch it too. I saw Jane Fonda in the movie. I said, "There's Jane Fonda." He turned it off.

jack says, got an eye on you

To get through my second winter in the mountains with a modicum of income, I found a job in the library at a "school" for the wayward kids of alcoholic suburban middle-class parents. It was a money hole for the Presbyterian church to throw money into. They put an old preacher they'd set out to pasture in charge of it, president. About thirty kids, a secretary and a kitchen staff, about ten teachers. They didn't give the kids any slack. Get in trouble, they kick you out. That way they got your non-refundable money and they don't have to fool with you. The energy of the place was in the dead zone. The library amounted to a room full of books people had given the school for the library rather than throw them away. Readers Digest condensed NY Times best-sellers, and popular novels from years past. Essentially, there was nothing useful about the library, but for a place for the kids to hang out. I had no actual work to do, so I busied myself making posters for the kids, individually, with a child's stamp set of alphabet and ink pad. The posters I made were poems by Chinese poet, Han Shan, from his book of one hundred poems, Cold Mountain. He was a Buddhist monk of a Taoist leaning. I picked poems that were fairly straight forward, yet had some mystery in them. I was giving them something to put on their dorm room walls that might inspire thinking about its meaning. The kids loved them. It took a little while, but eventually I made a poster for every one of them. They liked that they got it and it was still a little bit beyond their understanding, just enough to make them curious to search for it. One of the teachers, a YAP, Young American Poet, came into the library one day while I was making a poster. Having heard I was doing something quasi-educational with the kids that might need overseeing, he was sent by the other teachers to see what I was doing, something to do with poetry, something they didn't know anything about and didn't aim to. Ridiculously authoritative, he asked which translation I was using. I said, "Burton Watson." He said, "The Gary Snyder translation is better." I kept to myself, No it's not. I didn't want to argue about something so subjective.

jenny up close

I mention this guy, because he was the one whose influence put the brakes on my pursuit of poetry. He came to the school some weeks after I did. I thought, O Wow, somebody I can talk with about writing, feeling like he was a Godsend. Turned out he drew attention to himself as a beer drinker. He strutted and talked about himself in very impressive terms, his publications, etc. I'd seen his style so many times among other YAPs I'd met, it made me question my own motivations. I saw him chasing a style that was mainstream at the moment, new, the latest. I found him fake in every way. I found his writing fake. I looked at him and thought: this is what I want for myself? He was already a little bit into that world I was heading into. My peeps into that world showed me a lot of people with his particular self-conscious style. I told myself I would never write again until it needed writing so badly it wrote itself. I felt like making a farewell gesture to my own attempts at poetry I had begun to suspect as false in myself. I picked up a National Geographic and randomly cut out two paragraphs, cut out each word from the paragraphs, put the words from each paragraph in separate bowls. I picked up the words, one at a time, wetting the tip of my finger and touching the pile. I wrote down the words that came up in the order I picked them up. I typed each one into a poem form, very loose with words strewn about as if I felt they had meaning, and put them in YAP's mail slot with a note, "I wanted you to see my new poems." He never acknowledged seeing them and never spoke to me again. I don't know if he "made it" as a name in American poetry, because I forgot his name. I believe in retrospect he was indeed a Godsend. The gesture with nonsense poems was my statement to him that I took him for a fraud. It was kinda mean, especially since he got it. Though what he got only helped him see me a dumber asshole than he already thought. Like the nerd's tshirt said, Keeps Em Away.  

jack says, bye

 

 

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RIDERLESS HORSES BY ROBERT BLY

horses in the snow

               RIDERLESS HORSES

     An owl on the dark waters

     And so many torches smoking

     By mossy stone

     And horses that are seen riderless on moonlit

     nights

     A candle that flutters as a black hand

     Reaches out

     All of these mean

     A man with coins on his eyes

     The vast waters

     The cry of seagulls

                          ---Robert Bly

     from The Light Around The Body, 1967

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