Hail & Farewell

Many thanks go to Wendy Battin for seeing us through
May. At the wheel for June is Frank Parker.

¡Buen viaje, Frank.!

Donkey Muse 2, and farewell

So the Muse is Beatrice. The Muse is a donkey. Not the beloved person but the beloved beast, intransigent. The beloved is wholly human, or wholly cat or ocean. The Muse is form and the struggle to incarnate. Think of the souls in the Bardo, desperate to be born: you want to tell them, "No, don't. Not those parents. Not that time or place." As if any time or place is kinder than another. Blake's Thel knew it. But here we are, the rest of us, in bodies ourselves, needing to make bodies for the ghosts inside us. The chune in the head or the jar in Tennessee, its doesn't matter, as long as you get it out of the head, as long as you find a hill to set it on. Even pneumonia, that fogged my mind so much the only body I could give it was a cage of rhyme.

It's the end of May, so I pass the wheel to the next Trucker, having covered so few miles myself. Perhaps it's the beginning of Might or Shall, some other month less tentative than this one.

May you all be happy and free.

The Donkey Muse, part 1

Beso the Donkey, by Richard Jarrette (Michigan State U. Press, 2010)

It was said of Cezanne

that he could look at things like a dog

("Cezanne and Beso")

It would be easy to say too much about this spare book, to quote and quote until the dance dissolved in notation. All you really need to know is this, from the title poem:

You could almost believe that a rock

to eat, dust to drink,

are all that he needs.

You would be more wrong

than the one who named him Beso

thinking that the kiss he gave

for a sliver of apple

was love.

This is the donkey muse: his name spoken in every title of 71 poems, a beast made of words whose weather is Sappho and Pound, Merwin and Rilke. Each rain or wind that touches him gives him more stubborn body, delineates four hooves, scarred haunches, his unknowable being. I want to tell what happens when "Beso Stomps," or how he is Pavarotti--not how you think--and Abraham Lincoln, but better to read Jarrette's book whole. He's answered my questions about the Muse, for the moment at least:

I set my chessmen on the ocean

replacing each one as it sinks.

I have many.

--"The Real Beso"

Cruel

that these posts are upside down, but can't be read bottom to top.

Cruel

The muse who breaks one egg in every carton.

The muse of sore hip and morning limp.

The muse of Beso the Donkey, whose song is coming,

and of the onion sandwich, may they sing off

key or on, for nothing is worth saying and the nothing is.

Ill and Well

Beware of dissipating your powers; strive constantly to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but is sure to repent of every ill-judged outlay.
-- Goethe

Viruses, bugs, age, grief, broken bones, all insults to work, but we agree to be insulted, yes? No ego, no insult. Let it go. The muse of daily life who pays the taxes, the muse of distraction, the muse of sleepless nights, the muse of dulled mind: new temples for each. The muse of pink pollen painting the streets. The muse of taking the cat to the vet. The muse of surrender. The muse of energy wasted and the muse that fills the void. A modest temple for each, made of driftwood and broken railroad ties.

Muse according to Google

Recovering, browsing.

“The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend is immortal” Twain

“Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,- a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse”

Thoreau

Skiing on Parnassus--the billboard It is Greece, after all, and I have drunk from their spring, which has been provided with taps for the thirsty tourist poets. I lined up with the students and I took my swig. Too easy, the expensive parkas of Europe schussing down the body of myth the Muse of course fixates on that odd word "skiing," those two 'i's so wrong and inecapable. Ski-ing. Ski...ing. Parnassus won't do, a word with unbearable baggage. --me "The Earth would die if the sun stopped kissing her." —Hafiz

Walking Pneumonia

The sun is dim, despite

its being full and bright,

and does not touch the skin.

Know the body burns within.

Know the body is a cage

age catches mind in. Arms

around the body, just imagine.

Wendy Battin takes the wheel

Happy May Day. I've never driven a truck before, so be prepared for swerves.

I'm at odds with my Muse, so have finally met it. I've never thought much of the concept before. Apart from the gender nonsense comitted in its name, Muse has always been projection. Sometimes it's seemed just shorthand for the beloved, or for the ideal reader. I have both, but they fill their own spaces completely and don't speak through me. I might write to them, but not from them. It's only now, many decades into the work, that the Muse makes itself known as something other, by derailing my intentions again and again. I can't call it him or her, I can't put name or face to it. It's that "chune in the head," as Pound had it via Yeats:

"what the Celts call a "chune" in his head, and that the words "go into it," or when they don't "go into it" they "stick out and worry him."

(E.P.'s review of _Prufrock_ in Poetry, 1917)

It lets me know at every turn that the book I thought I'd written is not the book. It undoes every careful thought with song. It had its way with me so thoroughly that I never thought of it in my first books. It was there or not. But now I'm ready to muse on it, will be speaking of other poets' muses and my own, and invite you to muse along for my May on Truck. Say where you sing from.