A Game of Sevens

The rain drifts in on murderous wings
flapping a game of sevens, flapping
in crêpe-paper tunes and tinfoil waltzes.

Persephone ducks under an awning. An old
man holds the lift. Cabs pass black as puddles.
The cables groan out their circular trip.

She shakes out her hair by the fireplace.
The kettle roils, an underground spring.
She shoulders her umbrella like a gun.

What we remember becomes us, when the lights
go out: a glance, a shiver. This time,
she promises herself, I will try to be happy.

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.”

Six is my favourite number. It is the number of years between my younger sister and me. It looks like the lovechild of zero and “C”. The only single digit that is divisible by two as well as three, it seems to encompass both even and odd with a swirling, round-bottomed equanimity.

This tadpole, half of a yin-yang symbol, is also the number for idealists. Six years ago today, I counted myself among them when our son was born. I was determined to be the ideal father to an ideal son. Three days, eight hours and forty minutes later, when the doctor pronounced him dead, that idealism shattered, not by twos and threes, but into innumerable pieces.

His death certificate reflects that he was never issued a US Social Security number. The boxes for “years of education” and “years in country” each contain a single zero. Other boxes: “white”, “male”, “never married” all increment statistical records somewhere. His occupation was listed as “infant”. I wonder how often that column gets a tick.

Recently, strolling through a nearby Victorian cemetery, I was struck by how many headstones were laid for infants and children. In the developed world, in modern times, losing a child is unexpected. I was told that what happened to my wife and me only affects one-in-one-thousand like us these days.

We are now living approximately 5,500 miles away from the Santa Barbara harbor where we scattered his ashes, and from the community that so lovingly supported us through the long, dark aftermath. (The only constant–change.) I miss them terribly.

In the heart of a London winter, in the middle of my life, I am facing down problems for which the answers are not numbers, but a way of life. Throughout the upheaval of the past six years, a few things have remained invincible in me. Among them: a need to make art, and a desire to give back.

Once again, I take this day to be grateful for my son’s short life, and the ways in which it has taught me about how to more courageously live my own.

Same-Day Return

What could I tell to the long twilight?
What would it ask of me?
The dusk is a keeper of secrets
placid as a frozen lake.

My muscles are rinsed with indigo,
my bones glow with a weak,
phosphorescent light.
The darkness can’t fully arrive.

Nothing will come of nothing, warned
the king. So I will speak again:
the moon pours down her tenderness
the city glows back in praise.

The skyline stretches its fingers,
reaching to the tips of the glove.
Even the trees are clambering,
black lightning sprung up from the ground.

Fortunately, owing to great variety, imagination, and craft, the evening was anything but a Vogon experience. I was pleased to read my own poem, “In Pieces”, after The Lewis Chessmen, alongside nearly a dozen others. Paul Bentley read a poem about the river Don; Lucy Sixsmith recalled her gap-year missionary work in a rehab clinic in Russia; Alastair McGlashan gave us a prayer translated from the Tamil; Joe Dresner wrestled with philosophy and Ashbery; Janet Sutherland introduced the disturbing and enigmatic Bone Monkey; Robert Chandler translated a Russian folk tale via Pushkin; Abi Curtis revisited Mrs. Beeton in light of her historical anxieties; Jacqueline Smith produced a ballad in Scots about an unlikely witch-hunter; David Punter introduced us to various founding characters of the city of Bristol; Jemma Borg read an insightful and associative prose-poem-come-essay on sleep, and Robert Vas Dias touched on the delights of the quotidian through the Korean Sijo form.

Long Poem Magazine creates an important opportunity, in a time of increasingly compressed information, for that “something longer” to thrive. Issue 7 is now available to order online.

Yesterday, with the help of an iPhone app, I propped my phone by the window for several hours and set it to take pictures six times per minute. I composited these images into video at 24 frames per second using Quicktime, then looped the clip back-and-forth, adjusted the colour, and added a panning and zooming effect using iMovie.

Valerie and I collaborated this morning on some accompanying words and music, combining it all together into another film-poem.

Upon Arrival

Longing dabbles in shadows
as the day doubles back,

offering honey and vinegar,
wine to the already drunk.

Memory, that bricklayer, stirs
its slush with a trowel.

Glazed squares shriek their re-
flected light. It is never enough.

Crevices hoard the darkness,
and hiss: never enough.

We rub against newsprint
until our thumbs go black.

Steam chafes against its pane of sky.
We can never go back.

Piece Work

Winter, and the loom
of the sky has been
picked to wire.

Light etches its memories
through the long strands
of twilight.
We inhabit
the shell of the world,
and carry it gently.

It carries us too,
the echoing stairwell,
the empty glass aflame.

Look what I have brought–
sand from a bullet-pocked
beach, ribbon from a dead
girl’s hair.
It reaches
through shadow play, gesture,
the conspiring laughter
of birds strung high overhead.

We dwell here, suspended
in ether, vibrating
the strands of the web.

“How can I tell what I think ’till I see what I say?”

Once again, I have taken a look over the past year, and selected one post from each month that stood out in some way.

January: The Fifth Year

Today, I said goodbye two our two-year-old Australian nephew, not sure when we will see him again. As we near the sixth anniversary of our son’s birth and death, I realise how far we have come, not only geographically, but psychologically as well. Passing the fifth year was a milestone for us.

February: Human Shade

In February, my debut short collection Human Shade was published by Lost Horse Press in America. It was extremely heartening to see so many orders arrive in such a short time. I brought a few copies with me to England.

March: London Calling

In March, we made the decision to move to London. Having lived my entire life in California, I had no idea just what a leap this would be for me.

April: Adieu, America

In April, I said goodbye to America, but not to being an American. In fact, living here, I have never felt so American as I do now. My father also bid me farewell in a very special way.

May: Through the Looking Glass

In May, we arrived with just our suitcases. We had one week to find a place to live before the start of my new job. After the whirlwind subsided, I began to feel like Alice, down the rabbit hole in a world that only superficially resembled the one I had known.

June: Notes on Contemporary British Poetry

In June, I began to take advantage of my circumstances by way of comparative Anglo-American poetics. So began an effort to overcome what I have deemed “poetic culture shock“–and come to understand the subtle differences between British and American poetry.

July: Discovering an Artistic Ancestor

In July, I discovered a remarkable book by another poet named Peake, which had a profound effect on me.

August: The Nature of Peace

In August, the London riots exploded not far from our home while we were on holiday in Wales with my parents. The contrast prompted this meditation.

September: An American Werewolf in London

In September, I began to put my finger on the sense of otherness that had been haunting me, and let myself howl a bit at the moon.

October: “On Being Straight (A Thought Experiment)“

I wrote this piece in October, and within a short span of time my “thought experiment” turning the tables on identity politics had received over 95,000 views on StumbleUpon, and been republished in The Good Men Project.

November: “The Invisible Father“

A colleague’s casual remark set off this mini-essay for The Good Men Project about the being a father without a child.

December: “British Matches“

In December, Aperçus Quarterly published this short poem, inspired by the warning label on a pack of matches. Along with comparative Anglo-American poetics, I seem to be studying semiotic estrangement–the effect of “everyday” signs and symbols on a cultural outsider.

It has been a remarkable year. Wishing peace to you and yours in 2012!

Having recently moved to North London and joined the Highgate Poets, I seized the opportunity to help them put up their new website soon after being accepted into the group. What took weeks of custom programming to create the content management system for the Ojai Poetry Festival only took a matter of hours this time, owing to advances in the WordPress blog software.

Thanks also to a host of software plugins, the site not only features member news, but has a calendar of events, newsletter, integration with the group’s Twitter account, and much more. Going forward, options for selling anthologies on the site or enriching the list of members with more detail is just clicks away.

It is a pleasure to be associated with such a fine group of poets, actively writing and publishing in the UK, and remarkable to see how open source software such as WordPress makes setting up a dynamic website easier all the time.

Enjoy.

The open reading portion of the evening was just as eclectic as those I had attended in California. The flavour, though, was different. Two older gentlemen sang folk songs a cappella. Themes of opera, atheism, and of course anti-war sentiment peppered the poems from the floor. David Floyd promoted his new pamphlet entitled “Protest.” The walls were lined with ink drawings depicting the horrors associated with capitalist greed for oil. And at the back table, a periodical called Peace News replaced what had typically been promoted at Torriano House–The Daily Worker.

The featured poets themselves took up less directly political themes. Sarah Doyle read several ekphrastic poems inspired by Pre-Raphaelite paintings, each carefully tuned to musical perfection within the constraints of metre and rhyme. She ended with a humorous poem that amplified clever, self-deprecating moments with sucker-punch-timed rhymes. Ruth Ingram read translations from French and German, as well a her own work steeped in keen observation and a quirky turn of thought.

Dennis Evans read short, personally meaningful poems full of plain speech and local knowledge. Diana Bishop, former reader-in-residence at Keats House, read poems with the beautiful diction and expert timing of a trained BBC radio presenter. Her work focused on childhood fears, drawing out the music of language with an easy and subtle relationship to both free verse and form.

Though I miss the longstanding friendships and easy camaraderie of my former California poetry haunts, both the poet and the anthropologist in me came away from the evening galvanised. I look forward to swapping poems with group members in our meeting next month, and continuing to find my way in the eccentric and historically-rich London poetry scene.

In response to the recent news that my wife’s health condition had worsened, a coworker kindly offered to babysit. “You must have mistaken me for someone else in the office,” I replied, “We don’t have kids.” Being a considerate person, I expected her to respond to my email as others had before–with apologies, saying she meant no offense. But the next part of her message took me by surprise. She said something to the effect that I seemed grounded and settled, and that this is a quality she often admires in dads.

As a child, I always thought invisibility was the best possible super power. To be able to see and know what is going on, without being seen yourself, was something I craved. So much so that I still am taken aback when others share insights about me that they have gained from observation. But the idea that I was behaving in a visibly father-like way struck me as both poignant and profound.

The death of our infant son, and our subsequent inability to have another child, cast me into not only grief, but a longing to understand what my life is about.

Continue reading the full article online at The Good Men Project…

But a vitriolic rant was not the poem that came out. Although I mentioned this experience in my commencement speech at my MFA graduation later that year, I did not read the poem. In the groundswell of Occupy movements, stretching from Wall Street to my own alma mater, now somehow seemed like an appropriate time to share this piece. It came out of my own private protest, years ago, in the hours before sunrise.

Blessing the Bankers

“…one of the principal Chinese curses heaped upon an enemy is, ‘May you live in an interesting age.’”

— Frederic R. Coudert

They are still out there, the stars, commanding
more depth than ever. The light from Venus

seems closer than is safe, more luminous
than a bad idea ablaze in an innocent mind.

But what is innocent? We think, at first, a baby,
upon whose face the weather moves in bursts,

who has not discovered volume control
and empties his bellowed lungs with wailing.

Here, too, in the dusk of life, we wail.
We thought the good times would never end,

forgot the dams were built against bursting,
how terrible the water, still and black.

We troubled no-one with our dreaming.
The surface of the sky went on with changes.

The blessings laid by our mothers on our foreheads—
let this one live a simple life, uncomplicated—

catch fire beneath the weak-but-omnipresent moon.
Let this one be a banker, made of bricks.

Even the tear-down crews are out of work, must find
something else to pull against, at home.

It is winter still, though it feels like spring.
The newspapers print ads for filing bankruptcy—

such a word, the rupture of banking, which means
to pile up, as along the edge of a river—banks

to guard against the overspill, the rebel wave,
the slow rising water, seeking the floodplain.

Gather that child into your arms, the one
you hoped was owed a simple life. The waters rise.