___________________________________________________________________________
- FROM LIVERPOOL - EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE 2008 ___________________________________________________________________________
CAUGHT IN THE NET - FEATURED POET - WILLIAM HEYEN
Guest Editor - Dan Masterson
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William Heyen
- I'd entered gates & seen spires,
- walked Magdalen Bridge & looked down
- into marshes of historical emotion.
- I slept as guest at Saint Peter's
- where I wrote postcards & shivered.
- The insult struck me on High Street
- where, in a musty shop, I'd bought
- a deathbed edition of Walt's Leaves,
From The Beautiful Daughter
Introduction by Jim Bennett
Hello. Welcome to CITN 28. In this edition we present the work of an outstanding poet from the USA - William Heyen.
For this edition and for the next the next five issues Dan Masterson will be sitting in as guest editor, and making what I am sure will be shrewd and insightful comments on the poets and poetry presented. In addition to his academic work Dan runs a professional critiquing service which many poets both new and established have benefited from over the years. I have no reservations in recommending it. Details can be found at Dan's website - http://www.poetrymaster.com
Poetry Kit Magazine, this is a webzine which appears on the Poetry Kit site which can be found at - http://www.poetrykit.org/ We are seeking submissions of poetry, reviews, essays, articles and illustrations for that magazine. When submitting please ensure that the magazine title to which you are submitting is clearly marked in the subject line of any emails.
There are already over 2000 subscribers to CITN which is an email magazine so to keep this number growing please pass it on to your friends.
You can join the CITN at - http://pk-poetry-list.port5.com/ and following the links for Caught in the Net.
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CONTENTS
1 - COMMENTARY BY DAN MASTERSON
2 - SELECTIONS FROM BOOKS BY WILLIAM HEYEN
- 2a - THE HOST: Selected Poems 1965-1990 (Time Being Books, 1994)
2b - CRAZY HORSE IN STILLNESS (BOA Editions, 1996)
2c- THE ROPE (Mammoth Books, 2004)
2d- SHOAH TRAIN (Etruscan Press, 2004)
2e- THE CONFESSIONS OF DOC WILLIAMS (Etruscan Press in 2006)
- 3 - BIOGRAPHY
4 - Afterword
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You can purchase these books on-line through Amazon at Poetry Kit's Bookshop - http://www.poetrykit.org/howto.htm
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1 - EDITOR'S COMMENTARY BY DAN MASTERSON:
Commentary by Dan Masterson, Guest Editor
There are the razzle-dazzle poets we see scurrying about the marketplace where marquees blink their names, and then there are the quiet ones who dedicate themselves to working their craft away from the clutter and clamor, where only dappled sunlight and evening starlight flicker across their book-lined walls. This month's poet, William Heyen, far more monastic than monarchic, might well be tracked, if we were to involve ourselves in such matters, to the kin of John Donne and Robinson Jeffers, for there is a gentle spirituality and fierceness of spirit in the man. And the interior life of Wei Ying-wu (c. 737-792) comes to mind:
"It's snowing on Stone-Gate Mountain. We leave no tracks. Pine Valley's icy mists are thick with incense fragrance, and in the courtyard, cold birds descend on scraps of food. A tattered robe hangs in a tree. The old monk's gone now."
Toward the end of the twentieth century, Heyen wrote:
"Their light reached down the water
to a dark flame, a fish: it hovered
under the pads, the ponds held it
in its dim depths as though in amber."
It was W.S. Merwin, another of the more cloistered poets, who wrote: "The urgency and authenticity of William Heyen's voice are unmistakable, and the plain directness with which he presents his sense of the beauty of existence and the menace that overhangs it, and our share in them both. He speaks for the conscience of our time, and for what in our days is worth caring for."
In the twenty-five poems that follow, chosen by the poet himself, we are given a glimpse of what poetry can become when created by candlelight rather than klieg light. Ying-wu was correct: we leave no tracks, in snow or not. But these poems will. There is no "tattered robe" hanging in a tree; it covers the monk's shoulders as he writes on.
______________________________________________________________2a - THE HOST: Selected Poems 1965-1990 (Time Being Books, 1994)
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- The Return
- / will touch things and things and no more thoughts.
- Robinson Jeffers
My boat slowed on the still water,- stopped in a thatch of lilies.
- The moon leaned over the white lilies.
- I waited for a sign, and stared
- at the hooded water. On the far shore
- brush broke, a deer broke cover.
- I waited for a sign, and waited.
- The moon lit the lilies to candles.
- Their light reached down the water
- to a dark flame, a fish: it hovered
- under the pads, the pond held it
- in its dim depths as though in amber.
- Green, still, balanced in its own life,
- breathing small breaths of light, this
- was the world's oldest wonder, the arrow
- of thought, the branch that all words break
- against, the deep fire, the pure poise of an
- object, the pond's presence, the pike.
- Redwings
- Maybe you've noticed that around here
- red-winged blackbirds aren't rare,
- but aren't seen often, either, and then, at distance,
- banking away from roads as we pass.
- But one morning, I saw a hundred,
- more, feeding on seed I'd scattered
- under a line of pines planted
- more than a hundred years before.
- Almost at rest, their feathers folded close,
- only yellow wingbars
- break their black bodies. But when, as they did,
- all at once, they lifted, that red . . .
- I've tried for a long time, and maybe should,
- to tell you how the disembodied redwings
- flared and vanished.
- I've lost them in every telling.
- So much for me. I could die now, anyway.
- Could you? We will close our eyes
- and rest, in case the blackbirds, in slow motion,
- assume again the flames they are, and rise.
- ________________________________________________________________
- Poem Touching the Gestapo
- Behind the apparently iron front of Teutonic organization, there
- was a sort of willed chaos.
- Edward Crankshaw
- The system of administration [at Auschwitz] was completely
- without logic. It was stupefying to see how little the orders
- which followed one another had in common. This was only
- partly due to negligence.
- Olga Lengyel
- You now, you in the next century, and the next,
- hear what you'll almost remember,
- see into photos where he still stands, Himmler;
- whose round and puffy face concealed visions,
- cortege of the condemned winding toward Birkenau,
- and how to preserve Jews' heads in hermetically sealed tins,
- der Ritter, knight, treuer Heinrich,
- visions of death's head returning in Reich's light,
- the Aryan skull ascending the misformed skull of the beast,
- the Jew, Gypsy, lunatic, Slav, syphilitic, homosexual,
- ravens and wolves, the Blood Flag, composer Wagner
- whose heart went out to frogs, who, like Martin Luther,
- wanted to drive Jews "like mad dogs out of the land,"
- Heydrich dead but given Lidice,
- Mengele injecting dye into Jewish eyes
- 1st das die deutsche Kultur?
- this vomit at last this last
- cleansing and an end to it,
- if it is possible, if I will it now,
- Lebensborn stud farms, Rassenschande, Protocols of
- the Elders of Zion, SS dancing in nuns' clothes,
- Otto Ohlendorf, who left his Berlin desk to command
- Einsatsgruppe D and roam the East killing
- one million undesirables in less than two years' time
- lamenting the mental strain on his men,
- the stench of inadequate graves,
- corpses that fouled themselves in the gas vans,
- graves rupturing, backs, backs of heads, limbs
- above ground as they are here, if I will it now,
- the day-in, day-out shootings of Jews, some attractive,
- brave, even intelligent, but to be dealt with
- in strict military order, not like at Treblinka where
- gas chambers were too small, and converted gas vans' engines
- sometimes wouldn't start, the thousands already
- packed into the showers for history,
- their hands up so more would fit, and smaller children
- thrown in at the space left at the top,
- and we knew they were all dead, said Hoess of Auschwitz,
- when the screaming stopped,
- Endlosung, Edelweiss, Lebensraum, Musselen, Cyklon B,
- "and his large blue eyes like stars," as Goebbels wrote,
- and the Fuehrer's films of conspirators on meathooks,
- we cannot keep it all, an end to it,
- visions of loyal Heinrich, what engineer Grabe saw at Dubno,
- he and two postmen allowed to watch, the vans arriving,
- a father holding his boy and pointing to that sky,
- explaining something, when the SS shouted and counted off
- twenty more or less and pushed them behind the earth mound,
- Stahlhelm, Horst Wessel, Goering in a toga at Karinhalle,
- redbeard Barbarossa rising,
- that father and son, and the sister remembered by Grabe
- as pointing to herself, slim girl with black hair,
- and saying, "twenty-three years old,"
- as Grabe behind the mound saw a tremendous grave,
- the holy orders of the SS, Lorelei, the Reichstag fire,
- Befehl ist Befehl, Anne Frank in Belsen, jackboots, Krupp,
- bodies wedged together tightly on top of one another,
- some still moving, lifting arms to show life,
- the pit two-thirds full, maybe a thousand dead,
- the German who did the shooting sitting at the edge,
- his gun on his knees, and he's smoking a cigarette,
- as more naked victims descend steps cut in the pit's clay,
- clamber over the heads of those already dead there,
- and lay themselves down. Grabe heard some speak
- in low voice . . , listen . . .
- before the shooting, the twitching, the spurting blood,
- competition for the highest extermination counts,
- flesh sometimes splashed on field reports,
- seldom time even to save skulls with perfect teeth
- for perfect paperweights,
- his will be done, and kill them, something deeper dying,
- but kill them, cognac and nightmares but kill them,
- Eichmann's "units," the visions, the trenches
- angled with ditches to drain off the human fat,
- the twins and dwarfs, the dissidents aus Nacht und Nebel,
- Professor Dr. Hans Kramer of the University of Munster
- who stood on a platform to channel new arrivals
- gas chamber, forced labor, gas chamber and later,
- in special action, saw live women and children thrown into pits
- and soaked with gasoline and set on fire
- Kramer, a doctor, who kept a diary filled with
- "excellent lunch: tomato soup, half a hen with
- potatoes and red cabbage, sweets and marvelous vanilla ice,"
- while trains kept coming, families with
- photograph albums falling out of the cars, the books
- of the camps and prisons, the albums imprinting the air,
- as here, we close our eyes, and the rain falling from photos
- onto the earth, dried in the sun and raining again,
- no way to them now but this way, willed chaos,
- visions deeper in time than even the graves of the murdered
- daughter who tells us her age,
- in the round face of the man with glasses and weak chin,
- Himmler, Geheime Staats Polizei, twisting his snake ring,
as now the millions approach, these trucks arriving with more,- these trains arriving with more, from Prinz Albrecht Strasse,
- from the mental strain on Ohlendorf's men,
- from the ravine at Babi Yar, from the future,
- from the pond at Auschwitz and the clouds of ash,
- from numberless mass graves where Xian prayer and Kaddish
- now slow into undersong, O Deutschland, my soul, this soil
- resettled forever here, remembered, poem touching the Gestapo,
- the families, the children, the visions,
- the visions . . .
- ______________________________________________________________
- The Candle
- It would do me no good to travel to Auschwitz.
- It would do the dead no good, nor anyone else any good.
- It would do me no good to kneel there,
- me nor anyone else alive or dead any good, any good at all.
I've heard that in one oven a votive candle- whispers its flame. When I close my eyes,
- I can see and feel that candle, its pitch aura,
- its tongues of pitch luminescence licking the oven's recesses.
- A survivor, forty years later, crawled up into an oven and lay down.
- What of his heart? Could it keep pumping its own pitch light
- here where God's human darkness grew darkest?
- Whoever you were, please grant me dispensation.
- Rudolf Hess praised the efficiency of these ovens.
- It would do me no good to travel to Auschwitz, to kneel or lie down.
- It would do me or God or anyone else alive or dead,
- or anyone else neither alive nor dead no good, no good at all.
- The survivor did crawl back out of the oven.
- He took his heart with him, didn't he not, it kept beating.
- He left his heart in the oven, and it keeps beating, black-black,
- black-black, the candle of the camps.
- Eyes closed, staring up into this, eyebeams of pitch luminescence,
- and the pulse of it, the heart, the candle you and I,
- haven't we not, have met him, the one who lay himself down there
- where the Nazis had missed some, welcome, welcome home. . .
- We have spoken the candle heart of the camps.
- It does the dead no good, nor us any good, doesn't it not,
- but it keeps, black-black, its watch of pitch light,
- and will. Any good at all. Wouldn't we not? The candle.
- ___________________________________________________________
- Matrix
- When I was a boy,
- I found a mutilated turtle
- emerging from mud.
- Something, when it was young,
- had broken its shell
- almost in half,
- but the shell,
- as though welded with glossy solder,
- had mended;
- something had chewed
- its back legs to the joints,
- but its stumps were hard.
- How did you survive,
- I asked it,
- but it was mute, still half adream
- from its winter sleep.
- I spoke to it,
- warmed it in my boy's hands,
- but it boxed itself up. . . .
- For some time
- after her mastectomy,
- weeks of hospital and chemotherapy,
- my wife woke toward me
- in slow spirals,
- as though from ether,
- unsure of where we were
- or how we'd live
- in our new matrix
- of scar and fear.
- But it was April, again.
- In windows before us,
- as we changed her dressings,
- the days rained, and warmed.
- One morning, I pressed my lips
- to her chest until, at last,
- she believed,
- and opened up to me,
- our answers so slow to come
- that came.
______________________________________________________________
2b- CRAZY HORSE IN STILLNESS (BOA Editions, 1996)
______________________________________________________________
- The American Civil War
- The blood & piss
- & the lock of hair sent home
- with a white rose, & gangrenous
- suppurations, breeches filled with the dead's shit,
- & the lock of Ramseur's hair Custer sent home
- to his enemy's beloved wife who had just birthed
- their first child,
- a daughter,
- a lock of hair & a white rose,
- & Custer at Appomattox as Colonel Newhall sketched him,
- "Custer of the golden locks, his broad sombrero
- turned up from his bronzed face, crimson cravat floating
- over his shoulders, gold galore
- spangling his jacket sleeves,
- a pistol in his boot,
- gangling spurs on his heels, a ponderous Claymore
- swinging at his sidea wild daredevil of a General,"
- in front of thousands of blue-clad troops,
- ordering his band to play
- "Battle Hymn of the Republic,"
- & then he sees General Robert E. Lee
- stepping down the McLean House steps, majestic
- in one historian's words, "radiating a solemn grandeur
- with his trim silver-white beard and noble stature,
- immaculately garbed
- in an untrimmed gray
- full-dress uniform buttoned
to the throat, his ornaments a beautifully embroidered- red-and -yellow sash, gold spurs, gold-sheathed sword,
- his hands encased in glowing white gauntlets"
- &, since this is
- the American Civil War
- preserved in annals of roses
& dysentery & punctured lungs & brain-splattered- blinded faces & written in perfume on lavender-
- scented billets-doux carried over the moonlit killing fields,
- Custer, as General Grant
- tips his shabby fedora
- to salute Lee, & the rebel
- raises his gray immaculate brim respectfully,
- murmurs to his bandmaster that word, you know the word
- above all, not death, not love, not flag, not futility,
- not honor, not stupidity, not slavery,
- not delusion, not beauty, not union
- or secession, but one word
- comprised of these & more, & the bandmaster signals,
- that word's sound fills peaceful Virginia countryside,
- I wish I was in Dixie: / Hoorah! hoorah! I In Dixieland
- I'll take my stand,
- To live and die in
- Dixie . . .
- & in these woods ravens glut themselves on viscera,
- beetles roll balls of dung through caged hearts twined
- with music & roses in the shattered starlight ecstasy
- of Dixie where we take our stand,
- to live & die
- in Dixie. . .
- __________________________________________________
- The Steadying
- Where we are, & at what speed: I know
- we're spinning 14 miles a minute around the axis
- of the earth; 1080 miles a minute in orbit
- around our sun; 700 miles a second
- straight out toward the constellation Virgo,
- & now Custer is charging maybe a half-
- mile a minute into an Indian village; but
- from many eye-witnesses we know
- Crazy Horse dismounted to fire his gun.
- He steadied himself, & did not waste ammo.
Where we are, & at what speed: I saw- on display at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.,
- the black boots & tophat Lincoln wore that night;
- at Auschwitz, a pile of thousands of eyeglasses also
- behind glass to slow their disintegration;
- in a Toronto museum, ancient mummies, ditto;
- in Waikiki, some glittering duds once worn by Elvis; but
- from many eye-witnesses we know
- Crazy Horse dismounted to fire his gun.
- He steadied himself, & did not waste ammo.
- Where we are, & at what speed: I remember,
- in Montana, a tumbleweed striking the back of my knees;
- when I was a boy, a flock of blackbirds & starlings
- beating past Nesconset for the whole morning;
- at Westminster Abbey, in the stone corner, a poet's rose
- for just a second drinking a streak of snow;
- cattlecars of redwoods vowelling to gotham in my dream; but
- from many eye-witnesses we know
- Crazy Horse dismounted to fire his gun.
- He steadied himself, & did not waste ammo.
- _________________________________________________________
- Legend
- What did it signify, then, that as the 1200 men
- of the 7th Cavalry Regiment set out
- in a two-mile column from Fort Abraham Lincoln
- in mists of that early May morning,
- they beheld a mirage: themselves in the sky,
- there they were, wavery but clear where
- some had before seen sylvan landscapes,
- or lakes, or huge fish that once swam here? . . .
- But now the soldiers themselves were caravan,
- but bodiless, each man or horse or wagon in a kind
- of trance. Even when Custer halted the column,
- they all moved in apparitional undulation,
- staying but going, undetermined, willful, in spelled
- passage so beautiful, so biblical,
- but more: as though they'd been here before,
- as though they'd be here forever; but, no, as though
the column in all that vast language of sky- had only marked time, for them, for synchrony,
- as though that legend awaiting them,
- already written, could, as it were, continue.
- ______________________________________________________
- The Tooth
- After the beheading, they found
- the one gold tooth in Custer's mouth.
- They propped open his jaws,
- cut away his upper lip,
- & looked into the tooth in firelight.
- It was like a small television
- tuned to the news, & a white man
- in a white suit was already
- stepping down onto the moon.
- _______________________________________________
- Desert Moths
- Over the Vegas strip I see the clouds you saw,
- Crazy Horse, black in a depth of blue so deep
- you felt the world was eyeawake, asleep
- & saw you. Last evening, I & other gamblers
- brushed through a thousand moths enraptured
- by the pheromones of neon. At the huge cowboy,
- one touched my lips & fell, then fluttered up again,
- ecstatic in the midst of others. In this way
- the dead still visit us as dust, as vision.
______________________________________________________________
2c- THE ROPE (Mammoth Books, 2004)
______________________________________________________________
- The Beautiful Daughter
- Skinhead leaned out of a truck, & spat.
- Oxford autumn, 1982. Sputum on my cheek.
- He & the driver laughed, & burned rubber.
- I'm not even Asian, Hispanic, or black.
- I'd entered gates & seen spires,
- walked Magdalen Bridge & looked down
- into marshes of historical emotion.
- I slept as guest at Saint Peter's
- where I wrote postcards & shivered.
- The insult struck me on High Street
- where, in a musty shop, I'd bought
- a deathbed edition of Walt's Leaves,
- from which, that evening at the festival,
- I read "Song of the Open Road."
- The book had been punctured
- halfway through with an accidental
- packing-crate spike, or maybe purposeful
- icepick, or I couldn't have afforded it.
- Four pounds for this transcendental bible
- if I'd bought a gun instead, I'd have killed
- skinhead in a second.... (In Tom Brown at Oxford,
- Tom asks himself, "How was it he could not keep
- the spirit within him alive and warm?"
- for me, derisive laughter answered)...
- The next morning at Pitt Rivers Museum
- I memorized a Blackfeet history of creation,
- charcoal & berry dyes on buffalo skin.
- I appeared somewhere in its margins,
among cavalry & cannon, a white world's arrival- & to come, circling the beautiful daughter,
- the earth, & ritual dance, & slaughter,
- & the sun, & maize, & stars streaming....
- ____________________________________________________-
Longhouse
- A seventeen-year-old Onondaga County boy admitted that he
- & a younger friend
- had been drinking, had jumped a fence at the village pond
- to attack a Mute Swan,
- Obie, who met them to defend his nesting mate.
- The boys killed him,
- left his head on steps at the entrance of the police station.
- In court,
- they confessed they'd tortured & stabbed Obie repeatedly,
- then broken his legs....
- The swan's head lay at the station's entrance
- for several hours
- before discovery that morning. During those hours, Obie's eyes,
- open or closed,
- absorbed the last signals of starlight, & whatever birdcalls
- tinged their cells,
- as dawn awakened this village once part of the Iroquois longhouse
- where two of our teenagers
- climbed a fence to torture & decapitate a winged creature, then
- left its head here.
- ____________________________________________
- Wish
- In my dream, my car is an aquarium.
- I'm on the hood, prone, looking in,
- wondering how I could ever drive again.
- It's evening, my interior lit with tropical fish
- & desire for a new life. I didn't know
- I was this tired. I place my forehead
- against windshield, close my eyes, & wish
- for you know what. In the beginning, friend,
- each word was a dreaming plant or animal
- until our traffic changed everything, but something
- seems to be happening for the better, now,
- if only it's not too late. I fall asleep
- against this glass until I wake, a few
- guppies & angels convulsing in the drying soul
- of the world until our ecstasy, &/or our end.
- ____________________________________________________
- Beauty
- She told me that during the Second World War
- she'd found herself on a Pacific island.
- One hot morning, walking forest patched out
- by bombs and Seabee dozers, she came upon
- the corpse of an enemy soldier. Apparently,
some days before, after a near concussion,- he'd crawled from his hole, and died there.
- Now, she tasted a fruit-sweet putrescence in summer air.
- But what she needed to tell me, what needed her
- to tell this story, what happened to her
- was that the maggots swilling in the soldier's face
- were golden, a beautiful browngold glistening.
- When she saw them, her heart unclenched. She knew,
- despite everything she'd witnessed, she could,
- possibly, be happy again.
- ____________________________________________
- Blackbird Spring
- Mid-morning, walking ocean shoreline,
- I found a hundred blackbirds
- frozen in ice,
- only their heads protruding,
- black eyes open,
- gleaming, most of their sharp beaks still
- scissoring in mid-whistle.
Feeding, they'd been caught- in sea-spray, must be
- all males, up north early,
- scarlet epaulettes aflame
- a few inches under. I chipped
- one bird loose with a stone,
- held it in gloved hands
under the rising sun until,- until I realized, until I realized
- nothing I hadn't known.
- The tide retreated & would return.
- Within the austere territories
- these would have filled with belligerence
- & song, spring had begun.
______________________________________________________________
- 2d- SHOAH TRAIN (Etruscan Press, 2004)
______________________________________________________________
- The Annunciation
- Munich's Odeonplatz, August 2, 1914.
- Stone lions stare out across the square.
- In the crowd of thousands
- a photograph exists
- one young man appears in a state of ecstasy,
- mouth agape, eyes wide
- & slashed with light,
- as though, in these moments, a divine destiny
- were being revealed to him:
- in Mein Kampf he'd write,
- "Those hours appeared like redemption
- from the troubling moods of my youth,
- and I am not ashamed to say that,
- overwhelmed by passionate enthusiasm,
- I had fallen on my knees and thanked Heaven
- out of my overflowing heart
- for granting me the immense fortune
- of being allowed to live in those times."...
- We close our eyes: disembodied,
- chorus of witness, we float down
- into that photograph,
- surround the one riven:
- he falls to his knees: we know
- what is next, & next:
- we look up to heaven in supplication,
- but know, now, we are helpless
- in this roar of light.
- ___________________________________________
- Schnapps
- Reports in Dresden, November 1944,
- of mass murders of Jews in the East.
- The troops had to be issued schnapps.
- Some had committed suicide, some before
- & some after their special actions.
It's time now, isn't it, for us to drink?- One schnapps for this memory,
- & one for this; one for you, one for poetry,
- one for me, & so on. Our nostrils detect anise,
- our heads begin to drown in sweetness....
- Tell me a story, a story of long before
- when tresses swam in Germany's golden rivers
- & heroes paused at the shore on their steeds
- in legends before the slaughter of innocents.
- We will forget. We will click glasses.
- ____________________________________________
- The Bear
- Was alone, was carrying her bear with her.
- Was alone, was carrying her bear with her.
- Was alone, was carrying her bear with her,
- bear to counsel, comfort, & protect her.
- Arrived with a thousand other children
- given toys to keep them quiet.
- Was alone, was carrying her bear with her.
- Was alone, was carrying her bear with her.
- In the gas, her bear clawed free of her.
- In the gas, her bear clawed free of her.
- She held her bear as tightly as she could,
- but in the gas her bear clawed free of her.
- The mind & heart of her bear are wool.
- The mind & heart of her bear are wool.
- Its eyes black & shiny as tiny mirrors,
- her bear is stuffed with wool.
- Was alone, was carrying her bear with her,
- its eyes black & shiny as tiny mirrors,
- its heart wool, its mind wool.
- Was alone, was carrying her bear with her.
- ___________________________________________
- The Berries
- Translucent red berries shine
- from honeysuckle branches rising
- above my windowsill. I'm reading
- of a camp commandant playing
- cards with Jewish women
- before sending them to the gas van.
- I picture him just whiling away the time,
- until it's time.
- This spring again, everything is in memoriam,
- berries are drops of lungblood
- floating in the breath of one
- who was and/or wasn't there with them,
- their God. One woman holds
- a winning hand, we see her grimacing
- up at him, at Him. Everything
- hovers in place. I keep reading,
- the commandant hears the distinctive rumbling
- of the idling truck, & checks his watch.
- He's enjoyed them, these women. Schade, it's a pity
- he'll need to break in new ones,
- most of whom won't know the game or be
- competent, in their own turn,
- to shuffle, to deal. He returns her smile.
- He checks his watch again.
- _______________________________________________
- Catbird
- Another thick book of testimonies
- I knew I could not remember them all.
- It was as though the survivors
- were moving past me in a line,
- & I were choosing among them:
- that way to oblivion, this way
- into a poem with my rhythmic baton.
- But this spring morning a catbird sang
- outside my door while I was reading,
while Rabbi Solomon H. remembered his son,- a nine-year-old who had,
- Solomon tells us,
- half the book of Psalms by heart.
- When he was taken to be murdered,
- he was saying the Psalms from memory.
- Just before being gassed, the boy said,
- "I am still going to pray to God.
- Maybe at the last moment we will still be saved,'
- & I looked up,
- &, as catbirds will, this one
- kept singing like crazy, its song
- losing track of its beginning,
- never the melodies of final meanings,
- but going on as though nothing
- within its own singing
- could ever not remember
- everything.
______________________________________________________________
- 2e - THE CONFESSIONS OF DOC WILLIAMS (Etruscan Press in 2006)
______________________________________________________________
- The Tower
- In England at the Tower,
- I stood with others & heard
- that we could see, if we looked closely,
- bits of bone in certain outer walls
- persons had been hanged, or beheaded,
- left to compost for years,
- then their useful remains crushed
- into a rich mortar....
- This history transpired
- hundreds of years before I stood there
- decades ago. The guide said
- you could see this better
- when the sun shone, which wasn't often,
- but as I stared at the wet walls,
- white shards already seemed foretold
- between my quatrains, here. Until then,
- I didn't know what I felt, exactly,
- if you know what I mean.
- Memory fills the future with poetry.
- Long live these watery walls of bone.
- ____________________________________________________________________________
- The Colony
- I'm in darkness, 10th floor, Central Park West.
- Streaks of city light on this page, bullion from El Dorado.
- Chapman murdered Lennon next door. Widow Ono still lives there
- across from her strawberry fields forever.
- Almost midnight, rain gusting against my window.
- Over there, lights come on, go off, shadowy figures appear,
- vanish. In a few minutes, I remember, it will be spring. The whole city
- seems to be weeping
- for the English boy who sang love until love twisted
- to kill him. On, off, the cells lit, then dark. Now, a single
- chamber blooms red, awash with flowers, as though ants had dragged
- millions of red petals through a tunnel.
____________________________________________________________________
- The Streetcar: August 6, 1945
- For several hours just after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima,
- a professional photographer,
- Yoshito Matsushige, wandered the city, taking five pictures,
- not taking many others,
- as when he walked up to & looked inside a streetcar jammed
- with dead passengers.
- "They were all in normal positions," Yoshito said, "holding
- onto straps, sitting
- "or standing still, just as they were before the bomb went off.
- Except that all
- "leaned in the same directionaway from the blast. And all
- were burned black,
- "a reddish black, and they were stiff." Yoshito put one foot
- up on the streetcar,
- raised & focused his camera, fingered the shutter, but
- did not take the picture....
- This streetcar with its stiff reddish-black & leaning passengers
- now travels our city,
- stops & starts at crossings for our relentless traffic. Behind
- the dutiful driver,
- no one is going shopping or visiting old parents or working figures
- on an abacus
- or remembering a poem by an ancient master. We must not question
- or detain them, must not
- stop this streetcar with our ideas in order to accept or understand,
- or to take their picture.
________________________________________________
- The New American Poetry
- It is the poetry of the privileged class.
- It inherits portfolios.
- It was born in the Ivy League, & inbred there.
- Its parents filled its homes with bubbling Bach, silver & crystal brightnesses
- for its surfaces.
- It does not hear the cheap & natural music of the cow.
- Its vases hold gold-stemmed roses, not ponds with logs
- from which turtles descend at our approach,
- neckfold leeches shining like black droplets of blood.
- It swallows Paris & Athens, tracks its genes to the Armory Show.
- It waits by parlor coffins, applies rouge to Poe & Beau Brummell.
- Its father is Gertrude Stein, not Whitman, who despises it,
- though it will not admit it.
- Old women with children do not live in it.
- It does not harvest thought, or associate with farmers.
- It does not serve in the army, or follow a story.
- Inviolate, buttressed by its own skyhook aesthetics,
- it revels in skewed cubes,
- elliptical appositions.
- Ultramarine critics praise it, wash their hands of subject matter.
- It is tar-baby minus the baby, minus the tar.
- Its city is not the city of pavement or taxis, business or bums.
- It dwells on absence & illusion, mirrors refulgent flames.
- Deer that browse beneath its branches starve.
- Its emotions do not arise from sensible objects.
- It passes rocks as though they were clouds.
- It does not flood out its muskrats.
- It sustains itself on paperweight petals.
- It does not define, catalog, testify, or witness.
- It holds models before the young of skilliul evasion,
- withering heartlessness.
- It lifts only its own weight for exercise, does not body-block,
- or break up double plays,
- or countenance scar tissue.
- It flails in the foam, but has no body & cannot drown, or swim.
- In his afterlife, Rimbaud smuggles it along infected rivers.
- (1984)
_________________________________________________________
- Slow Burn
- Listening to David Bowie while
- looking up outside my window red-
- winged blackbirds streaking from beneath
- as though hearing him slow burn, slow burn
- revealing spring
- honeysuckle bursting clouds racing slow
burn, burn these vivid days since- September when the two towers when
- arterial city & Townshend's guitar
- the ears of our eyes redwings Bowie's
- slow burn marsh reeds swaying
- blackbirds crying out warning flaring
- do not forget never not forgetting
- in this awe of ours black sheen & blood con
- gealed in dust & bone slow slow burn burn
_________________________________________________________________________
3 - Biography
William Heyen was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940. He is Professor of English and Poet in Residence Emeritus at the State University of New York at Brockport, his undergraduate alma mater. A former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany, he has won awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, Poetry magazine, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and other fellowships and awards.
He is the editor of American Poets in 1976 and The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets and September 11 2001: American Writers Respond.His work has appeared in over 300 periodicals including Poetry, American Poetry Review, New Yorker, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Ontario Review, and in over 200 anthologies.
His books include Pterodactyl Rose: Poems of Ecology, The Host: Selected Poems 1965-1990, Erika: Poems of the Holocaust and Ribbons: The Gulf War from Time Being Books; Pig Notes and Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry and Crazy Horse in Stillness, published by BOA Editions, Ltd., was awarded the 1997 National Small Press Book Award for Poetry; Shoah Train: Poems, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, from Etruscan Press, and The Rope: Poems, The Hummingbird Corporation: Stories, and Home: Autobiographies, Etc. from MAMMOTH Books. Carnegie-Mellon University Press has recently released his first book, Depth of Field (LSU P, 1970) in its Classic Contemporaries Series.
_________________________________________________________________________
4 - Afterword
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