The Burden

We haunt ourselves —

smiling in pictures clearly

sharper than the eye

can pinch the screen to see

that smile’s a scowl.

They are stronger than us

and more themselves, and free 

in that they are unburdened 

with having to live, no —

they already were.

It’s over. They cannot be

argued with, undone.

Worst of all, they know this

about themselves.

What are they looking at —

the dark of the lens.

Why should they smile

standing in a wilderness

without provision —

to say, I am content

in this moment belonging

to no one not me.

The burden isn’t

what we know 

they didn’t — no,

it’s all they won’t

let us forget.

Group Photo

They’ve rounded us up

on the gazebo stairs

for a group photo.

Smile now! the lady says

and I realize I’m not

exactly sure where it is

we should look — her face

in front of the cordgrass

or sky all around us turning

sepiatone with afternoon

light. Panic. Thank you!

and the rows of us

disperse at her signal.

She already took it.

Letzte Ausfahrt Bayreuth (Juli 2008)

Hühnerdrahtähnliches verhält

den Steinbruch am fernen

Autobahnrand — doch schießt

der Schössling zaundurch — seine

holzungsgeweihte zwei Meter

stochernd in die für den Himmel

unreife Luft eines Julimittags.

Eine braunweiße Unterrichtungstafel,

wie man so kennt. Wir stachen

am Ausfahrt zur Eremitage

im letzten Moment ab. Es war

ein gefährliches Manöver

zum Glück gelungen. Die Stadt

war uns uninteressant, mein Vater

und ich. Wir wollten uns eher

das ziellose Herumlatschen

ersparen, wie unlängst unsere

Erfahrung im Weimarer Zentrum.

Auf ein vor dem Dichterpaar

aufgenommenes Foto begreife ich

endlich wie peinlich eng

meine T-Shirts damals waren.

Im Passagiersitz notierte ich Anfänge

eines Gedichtes, das mehr als

ein Jahrzehnt später (und nach dem

Tod meines Vaters) dieses wurde —

entschlüpfte sogar die Sprache,

wie erst dem Stift wackelig

schreibend während der Fahrt,

übersetzt ins Deutsche.

Gestörte Züge — Staben, Ziffern —

Seismograf — ein Versuch kenntlich

Wörter zu bilden, wie Lenker in hand

mein Vater die A9 hochjagte.

Weiterblättern. Ein englisches Zitat

scheinbar aus dem Brochure

niedergeschrieben — A gem of rococo

pleasure gardens, diversely outfitted

with grottoes, a ruined theater, ancient tomb

and false cliff dubbed Parnassus.

It was here the prince played at living

a hermit’s life. Wir tauchten ein

in das lapsarische Bildnis

nur um etliche Prinzipien des Neo-

klassicismus zu kennzeichnen.

Schau wie diese nur grobe

Pompeijbrocken sind.

Unfertigkeit als Leitmotiv.

Die Büsten des bayerischen

Olymps bestrichen mit Blattgold.

Ihre Gesichter — berühmt —

und Brauen — krumgehauen.

Wir verbrachten nichtmal

30 Minuten vor dem Entschluss

Hey dad — let’s get out of here.

From the Archives : Action Flick (2015)

I'm feeling capable again. No, it's not that

the scales have fallen from my eyes

but that they themselves are as bricks

making the house a solid thing and not

just an alliance of the air with itself.

How seeing proves more lid than iris, 

more curtainfall than proscenium. 

How like the messiest butterknife known

to man the pathetic fallacy spreads

the preserves on toast and hand, equally.

How the weight of a jug of Tropicana

is nothing without the almost hairless arm

that will either succeed or fail in lifting it,

too puny to move most of the world

into and out of place. And so who's to say

a rampart is not foam, your body not pumice

or the billionaire nobody they want to be.

Let go and whether it’s you or the makings

of breakfast that float unmoored away —

like Morpheus does Neo in The Matrix

I want to ask you where you think

you are, where this is happening.

And then — does it matter?

De Flumina

Narrows where light

was slit above

and water sang

to itself carving way

down to floodplain

basins as long-necked

birds gathered to pluck

fish from the water

who never knew guilt

flushed to the deltas

with ditches leading off

to fields and other places

where maize grew

and mud hazardous

as mouths now leash

currents to the end

of land coursed through

out of sand opening

its sterility of lips

words spoken

At Whitman's Tomb (I)

This is a draft of the first part of a sequence I’m currently working on about Walt Whitman’s tomb in Camden - that is, the conditions of its conception and creation (present poem), his death and funeral, ending with my own experience visiting it in April 2015.

It was in a letter dated Sept. 29th, 1890

and addressed to your dear friend

and executor, Mr. Bucke: a drawing

done in blue crayon on a loose scrap

of paper fingertipped off the carpet

next to your rocking chair, folded

haphazardly and tapped down into

the envelope right after drawing it.

Like a house pictured in the mind

of a child, your dwelling reduced

here to its most basic form. A roof

and two supporting walls, a door

to enter with your name above

saw-toothed tidings of the ground —

the famous signature that betrays

the surrounding text as written

by your hand, the ink having run

on the too soft and porous paper.

From the Archives : Marlboro Men (2009)

Smile and see

the parenthetic creases

exhaled through, deep and cool —

this cowboy’s shadow-buried eyes

and rough noose that rounds the steer’s

gape and gleaming neck.

Wincing in leather, jeans and flannel,

the first guy is under a road sign

(one cigarette of the mind

against the flow)

as golden roasted bald

eagles flame out and the wind

is made ensign, hot and pregnant

with tumbleweed blown down

desert smokey

to the snake’s den.

Another dude just chills, leans

and ashes on the canyon’s tongue,

spits into its pitted ribbing.

To thread the grain of it, the dead

desert hand (a photographer’s) bows

the plates simmer violet and horizon.

High noon all-the-prettier for its negative.

The last one is out there lassoing

from atop his saddle-stacked stallion

with severe frontier thumb

all that fallow dreamage, riding down

dust roads from corral and ranch

to kneel and knead some clods of loam

cool to the touch after sundown,

stuck in a compadre’s pockets.

Smoke-rise and a day’s slow drone out.

Cactus hands reach for the sky.

From the Archives : Les Miz (2016)

It seems everybody has an opinion

they have defined in relation

to the Revolution. Still some sing

the chorus upon barricades

to the chagrin of that audience

belonging to an entirely different

production scheduled to begin

taping on a soundstage next door

not quite contemporary, or even

considerably before our big scene

when the first shot shot is shot

and the day is wrapped for those

who were lucky to have died.

Now things have quieted down

for the dear friends we’ll never meet.

Friends — no matter what they will

have pointed at us, done with and to us,

what now we feel shall be revealed

as matters immaterial of long ago

and the times will roll over us

in their greater sleep, to fashion

of our lives history, to remake

our homes glamorous flats

of pilots, ace debonaires

with prudence enough

to know when to quit

the hopeless conflict

and go nurse those 

dry martinis they

left sweating

at the bar.

Ars Poetica

You have never wanted

for words. Like flintstones,

strike them together. Like this.

Like bright bowls invaded

by flies too soon before

the apples could be enjoyed

as anything more than

decoration. Missed a spot

where it began. White mouth

of the mush. It is forbidden.

Pick it all up and flies alight

for the mash of garlic

and breadcrumbs clogging

the drain. Take Windex

and spray it in the trash

just to be safe. Here, like this.

De Usu

Picture a garden shed

full of rakes and shovels —

rusted steel, wooden hilts

cracked along the grain.

Broken, stupid things.

It’s hard to believe that

these were once of use

in men’s hands. But look —

their nobs are smooth.

There’s no need to.

Woodlawn

As I sit at my grandmother’s grave,

my mother pulling weeds from the lavender

and my grandfather in the collapsible

Coleman chair next to me, his liver failing,

I watch as an ant struggles to climb

the polished granite of the headstone.

It keeps falling off, then tirelessly

tries to climb right back up

as though its life depended

on reaching the top.

The Oak Tree (July 2018)

Two years are etched on arrows

pointing to rings in the cross-section

of a 100-year-old oak. An arrow bearing

the year 2011 gestures towards the bark

at the trunk’s edge where the year

2000 is nailed about two inches away.

The years don’t proceed evenly

down to a center, as one might think

they would. Rather, the rings distort

as they circle the trunk, evening

as they near the bark and take on

the tree’s outer shape. Dark patches,

black welters mark the marrow

of the wood, where sap still bleeds

from cracks six years after it was felled.

Judging by how much space is left

between the years and the center

where the rings are so dense I can

no longer discern one from the other

it seems inescapable, that I imagine

the wood as a kind of map of time

contracting towards its center

as bathwater rounds a drain.

I scratch at a spot roughly where

I was born, then trace further inward

the births of my mother, my father.

There aren’t enough rings to hold

the births of their own parents

but that are compacted in the dark

of the heartwood, smooth and hard

as stone. It’s unclear why the oak was

cut down — whether it was diseased

or too old, or even if it could still be

standing, growing with our lives below

the bark. Or am I only able to know

myself apart — the tree as being

there, its rotting cross-section

propped-up in front of me

that I might see when

we were once alive. 

From the Archives : Whitmania (2014)

First edition of Leaves of Grass, self-published by Walt Whitman in 1855. I originally wrote this poem in German sometime around 2010 or '11 as part of a larger series, and then translated it into English in 2014. The series in question was a kind of exercise in playing with language, and that can still be seen at some places in the English translation. Beyond that, the original poem was inspired by reading about a legend of sorts that Walt Whitman, pacing on the sand of Wallabout Bay in his youth, once found a femur bone sticking out of the sand (I have not been able to find any mention of this "legend" anywhere since). Nevertheless, Wallabout Bay (which is now occupied by the Brooklyn Naval Yard) was where several British prison ships had laid anchor during the Revolutionary War after their occupation of the region around New York City. The conditions on the ships were brutal, and up to over 10,000 Revolutionary soldiers are thought to have perished in captivity on the ships. Their bodies were simply thrown overboard, and it was a common occurrence to find human remains washed ashore on the lower banks of the East River well up until the end of the 19th Century. These remains are kept in an ossuary housed beneath the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn. Since I could not establish the veracity of the legend as it stuck in my memory, I decided to make the reference in the first line a little more ambiguous, but it seems to me now that I've made a composite figure of Hart Crane and Walt Whitman. Currently, I'm contemplating whether this poem should be expanded, or form the motivating crux of a new poem sequence regarding those two figures. 

Bones of mates gone overboard he found youthlong

woven at surf's end, sown and sticking out of the sand

like barnacled rods, the clefs of songs as yet unsung

Wallabout Bayside of the holy ship-broken East River.

Grass pokes and earth spills from the words of the title

pressed into the binding, spared the poet's name

with nothing but the creased rot of leather to cover

the pages that sadly touch each other, unable to sleep.

Our reading is a yellowing no campanion will comfort

as we dig our way down. As we bury and tuck ourselves in.

From the Archives : Homo Heidelbergensis (2008)

Heidelberger Schloss, Carl Rottmann (1815). This poem is an outtake from my book - it was once part of a trio of poems that explored growing up in and around Heidelberg that I've since broken up into individual pieces. This is the weakest and most embarrassing of those three (though I tend to find the majority of my poems embarrassing) - the focus on the 'I' of the speaker strikes my ear as a little too cloying, the phrasing too treacly. First written in April 2008, I rewrote the poem extensively in 2017. See multiple versions below.

Years I slept, wound and fused at the core of the nautilus. I dreamt

of the soil. My breath was methane, exhaled from cracks and cuffed

upon the Jura. Years split stone and shell. I woke up. I remember only

to forget. The ferns petrified in the cliff, the oak groves long axe-felled.

Columns of spotlight that spilled downward through the beechwood

ocean-heavy. Cloud knights and movies never made, spied in the sky.

Gaiberg : a village between forest and field, where the mountain slopes

down to the loamlands and ridge-hemmed fringes of what would prove 

Memory with its grey-blue of distance. Growing up, I could see no end

to that haze expanse, but barely make out the ruined citadel of Dilsberg

and glean a truth of distant places home becomes. To expect no return

for the endlessness of youth's quest. Home : besieged in your absence,

burned down, built over. Part of a new empire. And whatever remains

familiar is just cloyingly still there, trim like some pensioner’s garden plot

stuffed between the bypass soundbarriers and the fenced-off railyards

that, like the Neckar, would kidnap me in their current — take me away

across the plain. Years planted in the Rhinebed, running the rift country

yet another valley reeking of onion and gasworks, the other side fading

like a range of cloudbank. Mirage or mirror, never there to begin with.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Years you slept — wound fused at the core of the nautilus. Of the soil

you dreamt. Your breath was methane, exhaled from cracks and cuffed

on the Jura. Years split stone and shell awake to forget. Whisper ferns

in the cliff, groves long axe-felled. Clothes the child you’re told you are

wears in pictures, folded in landfills to dress you again. Spotlights drown

the canopy, spill columns ocean-heavy. Beams of movies never made

in the sky. Cloud knights, sagas of defeat. Gaiberg — its ridge sloping

down to the loamlands. A view proving memory in grey-blue of distance

the childe mistook for haze. There’s no end to where roads go defining

borderlands of shining meadows where squires kneel to pick dandelions.

Dilsberg — ruined citadel, distant as home becomes expecting no return

from quest of youth. Besieged in your errance, scorched earth overbuilt

as the provincial seat to another, a new empire. And whatever remains

familiar is just cloyingly still there. Trim like some pensioner’s garden plot

sanely tucked between the bypass soundbarriers and fenced-off railyards

that, like the Neckar, would kidnap with their current — take you away

across the plain. Years planted in the Rhinebed, running this rift country

yet another valley reeking of onion and gasworks, the other side fading

like a range of cloudbank. Mirage or mirror — never there to begin with.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Years you slept — wound fused at the core of the nautilus. Of the soil

you dreamt your breath was methane — exhaled from cracks and cuffed

on the Jura. Years split stone and shell awake to forget — whisperferns

in the cliff, groves long axe-felled. Clothes the child you’re told you are

wears in pictures, folded in landfills to dress you again. Spotlights drown

the canopy, spill columns ocean-heavy — beams of movies never made,

sagas of defeat starring knights of cloud. Gaiberg — its playground sloping

down to the loamlands. A view proving memory in grey-blue of distance

the childe mistook for haze. There’s no end to where roads go on defining

borderlands of shining meadows where squires kneel to pick dandelions.

Dilsberg — ruined citadel, distant as home becomes expecting no return

from quest of youth. Besieged in your errance, scorched earth overbuilt

as the provincial seat to another — a new empire. And whatever remains

familiar is just cloyingly still there. Trim like some pensioner’s garden plot

sanely tucked between the bypass soundbarriers and fenced-off railyards

that, like the Neckar, would kidnap with their current — take you away

across the plain. Years planted in the Rhinebed, running this rift country

yet another valley reeking of onion and gasworks, the other side fading

like a range of cloudbank. Mirage or mirror — never there to begin with.

Fernando Pessoa's "35 Sonnets" (1918)

One of two works self-published in 1918, Pessoa wrote these sonnets in English very much under the influence of Shakespeare (and Hopkins, by the looks of it). He sent his collection to several British journals to be reviewed, where one critic in the Times Literary Supplement noted that Pessoa's "command of English is less remarkable than his knowledge of Elizabethan English." As I first encountered a PDF of the book in 2012, I was left a little bewildered. How was this, and Pessoa's other verso inglês, not more widely known and read? These poems are right up there with his major work - and even within an oeuvre defined by its strangeness, its otherness, these poems are doing something really quite weird.

It's also the admittedly amateurish or "outsider" quality of some of the poems that renders those sharp turns of phrase all the more cutting, as what's profound becomes uncanny. Much like when I read the Book of Disquiet, I can never not imagine my reading as if I were picking loose leaf pages at random out of a discarded steamer trunk, the paper as sallow as those of the book scanned here below - reading words that, even though they are passing through my mind as I read them, and even though I and many others are aware of Fernando Pessoa and Alberto Caeiro and Alvero de Campos and his other personas, that the oblivion these words issue from outweighs my awareness, that pushes back and struggles against my reading as a kind of magnetic pull towards wanting to be forgotten. I mean, I can admit it - I often forget about Pessoa and his work, he slips my mind. I rediscover him on my book shelf. Here is the oblivion that everything which is past is part of, that it all becomes, to put the body in nobody - that we will never know how these words came to us, they just are. Closed between the covers of a book, or suspended in code that is only rendered as text whenever our browsing calls it into being. Or they are found, these words and works, a bizarre and random instantiation of what was only previously imaginable - not imagined, but what was possible to have been imagined. One can easily invoke the legend of Kafka here, too, though what's so uniquely troubling with Pessoa is how we get the inner life of a man who not only has disappeared, but who never was in the first place. There's a certain sensation that emanates from Pessoa's writing, an aversion at its subtlest and a horror at its most acute, which is felt in relation to the givenness of what others always seem to point to as the "facts of life" - the things and ways of the world, the world as a world itself, and our being in it, a part of it. That things are real, that they are - an absurdity, the knowledge of which goads from the page and infects and corrodes the knower. Not to go too much further on this silly tangent, but reading Pessoa reminds me of how literally everything that's everything is made up - which does not mean the same as make believe. For what point do we inhabit, from which we can believe? It is as though I often graze some infinitely unsettling realization that I just barely, luckily, avoid having. This is particularly the case with the Book of Disquiet, but I get the same vague sense of vertigo reading these sonnets - which in their own way enhance this uneasiness precisely because they themselves, the poems, are so rarely read.

At any rate, to me this slender chapbook is a kind of conservatory greenhouse full of overgrown ferns, orchids and corpse flowers stuck somewhere on a run-down East Midlands country estate. Pessoa practices upon English what was so often exacted upon the spoils of British colonialism: he exoticizes it. Moreover, the effect these sonnets achieve is one of rendering English - or, more narrowly, the idiom of the Elizabethan sonnet - foreign to (and yet more strangely) itself. 

Being Sick

To weather being

sick is like running

headfirst through

hours, not minding

(in fact desiring)

the waste of time

as you lift and kick

your toes upturned

to stomp down stalks

of knee-high grass

ahead, not minding

your step like you

would normally,

anxious to get

to the other side

without getting

any more bugs

on you than

you have to.

The Mole

I bury myself, dig my head

and hands into the firmament

of dirt above me, plucking

at the stars of my limits

like dresser knobs,

like strings. 

Arrhythmia

To have no future

but what was curtained

as occlusion, a skipped beat

the heart dropped into

like a button does

the buttonhole. Shutters

are shut in accordance

with their purpose, to blind

the meadow’s view and leave

you there, seeing nothing

but slats. That you may close

your eyes and find sleep

another field, truer

for never having been

a field at all. Impossible

to lead your life, leaving

all doors unopened

on whatever you are

destined to ruin

just by being

yourself.

From the Archives : Likeness of K. (2012)

Daguerreotypic the matter of meaning

that is deflection   

                         cauterized of skin of passed light

focusing the din of antique realia

forced still

                              just staring back at you

                    perhaps a little stupidly

And other photos that in a flash coerced your ownership

                    cohering you on a line’s length

the framed circumference of a day

Your print and detoured detail

                              the foundations strewn

     before you — and again

                         withal today’s deposition — walled-in

and automatic

the edification of being totally and without delay

     projected on collapseable screens

                                        and power-pointed

or breathing into chill air

     a rote synthesis

But each grain zapped alit resolute

               in place of revelation

                               acast a space group making up

     the trait defects veered of imagery

     the latticed parameter and scenerio latitude

                         such latencies slurred in salt and silver

               you suffered to body

                    Though I can't tell

                    any of this

               looking at you in sallowed gravure

                         hung now on some wall

     not you as you sit struggled still and look past

               interpenetrating violet orbs and yellow rings

               that suffuse and pierce the outlines

                         of a reflection you see

deep in the iris of the lucent lens

     extending from a hole in the wooden faceboard

                                             and what is it like you wonder

inside the hood where the Photographer

stands hunched over

          totally hidden from the sight of the world

                              and what does it withhold

and where are you

But still never your chamfered mind

                    because every moth-loved cravat

and shoeless spats of yours in fact truly is

                                   such a lurid seismograph

               or crumpled thaumatrope

and that is at any rate

enough to stoke the engine with at least

                    of the atoms continuing their sitcoms

complete with applause cues for no hands

and sempiternal sequents cut-out

               from some laterna magica vaster

than the wakes you could perform with your body

          such as your dreams and whose wetness

               bled-out listlessly of your lungs

and got up and played in the playground world

that always seemed to perforate right there in front of you

                              tattooing the pigskin of your sight

                         for it was painful to watch

So, there you are

dressed-up in your life

                                             that seems now

                                                  a posture

but even if the scene were

                    staged — by the Photographer devised

                    in his studio, the world a canvas scenery

                                        painted in gaudy color

flat and suspended

behind you

                    and you yourself — an actor

                                        just playing your part

                                   sitting with friends in a cutout

                                   prop monoplane

                    flying over the great capitals

                    of the sepia-sunken XIX Century

Even so — the photograph exposes nothing

                                                       but outlines

that registered

                         impassable against

                    the transparency of the glass

     The truth of the act

                                        was left to you

                              a weight you couldn’t even feel

on your skin

as you undressed later that night                                           

                    and went

                         to sleep

The Act of Discovery

There is a point where

human history gets

dirty, conflated

with layers of earth

walked up and down

like stories in a house.

Where memory bottoms

out into the mud

of a Gondwanian river-

bed that’s long been

(in the gap since Man-

hattan was but Moroccan

sandflats) translated

into stone, and all that

fell into its filament

is kept there, part of

it for eternity — or until

some grad student

chisels this thing (say,

a tooth or finger bone)

back into existence

and boom — a species

is deduced, a piece

of what was is

invented as if for the first

time all over again.

For what is known, a noun

unsinks from the soil.

The human mind

possessed by what was

before it-

self.