Poems

Found in The Grammar of Science, chapter XXXI of “The Education of Henry Adams,”
is the news that Mr. Adams knew no more than a firefly, or a moth

about rays
or about race
or sex
or ennui
or a bar of music
or a pang of love
or a grain of musk
or of phosphorus
or conscience
or duty
or the force of Euclidian geometry
or non-Euclidian
or heat
or light
or osmosis
or electrolysis
or the magnet
or ether
or vis inertiae
or gravitation
or cohesion
or elasticity
or surface tension
or capillary attraction
or Brownian motion

or of some scores, or thousands, or millions of chemical attractions,
repulsions or indifferences which were busy within and without him and me, both.

Dave Read

One hundred ten years after Moby-Dick broke the surface of the inchoate, if not placid, American scene, another leviathan broke the surface of American somnambulance, making waves near the port of New York, which have yet to crest, five dozen years later.

Of all the literary links and/or melding metaphors available for an epistle addressed to Bob Dylan’s audience, Herman Melville/Moby-Dick seems suitable because Dylan’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech is loaded with 78 sentences about Moby-Dick, a new world record!

Also, because the public transformed Dylan into a veritable white whale, a thing great enough to support generations of barnacles right across the pecuniary spectrum, but especially in the book business and in the academy.

Not only that, but Bob Dylan channeled Herman Melville during an impromptu tête à tête with his erstwhile muse, Joan Baez. The exchange was recorded because it took place in the midst of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and is included in the movie based on it by Martin Scorsese.

Dylan and his traveling circus enjoy a rare day off in the Berkshire woods, between a double-header the previous day in Springfield and a show the next day in Vermont. They have the run of Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge in Becket, which happens to be a favorite haunt of Arlo Guthrie, who lives nearby and who had been invited to join the troupe for the Springfield shows.

In Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab is nearly blissed out – “as the morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh.”

“Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; THAT’S tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.”

The decidedly unschooled Bob Dylan also is near bliss, a decade and a half since he weighed the anchor of his mind in the shallow harbor of Hibbing, Minnesota, now early in the most storied tour in the annals of American popular music.

I attended the Springfield shows, and about twenty years later, I became friends with a guy who had been both neighbor and friend of Mama Frasca.* Not only did he attend the all-day party, but he was with Mama Frasca when Arlo called to make arrangements for the party.

Apparently, the name of Joan Baez came up during the conversation, because as my friend tells the story, when Mama Frasca hung up the phone, she was overcome with joy, “Joan Baez is coming, Joan Baez is coming.” So profound was Mama’s affection for the counter-culture chanteuse that, when she arrived decked-out in dungaree, Mama whisked her upstairs and gave her a pretty white dress to put on.

With the party in full-swing throughout the lodge and environs, Dylan and Baez have a moment alone together at the bar. The former lovers chide each other on their recent marriages:

“It really displeases me that you ran off and got married.”

“You got married first and didn’t tell me.”

“Yeah, but I married the woman I loved.”

“Yeah, that’s true – and I married the man I thought I loved.”

“See, that’s what thought has to do with it – thought will fuck you up!”

“You’re right, I agree with that.

“It’s heart, it’s not head.”

It is unlikely that Mr. Dylan, in the hemisemidemiquaver that precedes his reply, scanned memory for a stored phrase to use. There is a chance, however, that Revue poet Alan Ginsberg happened to be on Chapter 135 at that moment, as he recited from Moby-Dick all day, delighted to be within a dozen miles of Melville’s Arrowhead home, where the book was written.

My thesis is that great minds think alike – and not infrequently they think about the very nature of thought. For artists such as Melville and Dylan, it’s never enough to become masters of their craft; every sunrise illuminates a new horizon, and new horizons exert a force on them that we ordinary sailors are lucky just to read about, or listen to.

by Dave Read

p.s. “Oh! time was, as when the sunrise nobly spurred me…” Captain Ahab, chapter 37.
“New Morning,” Bob Dylan, LP #12

*Interview from the Rolling Thunder Revue party at Mama Frasca’s.

Still beside the massive plinth,
I stand below the lion at the foot of the
New York Public Library’s Fifth Avenue stairway.

With sun rays penetrating the canyon of commerce
for the last time this day, I appear in the focal point
of a smartphone camera aimed by a farmer’s wife from
the upper deck of a red bus during graduation weekend –

Destined now to tumble through time in the
photo collection of a family in the Midwest,
may God bless and keep us all.

Dave Read

So??? The young are dumb –
ain’t it always the case with
them so full of tomorrows?

Yeah, but today kids is way rude, too.

Dave Read

while the republican party reminds us
that only mental illness leads to the sort of
mass shootings best accomplished with assault weapons,

would anyone like to speculate about
the preference for assault weapons demonstrated
time and time again by the mentally ill?

h.a.m.

In the natural world,
knowledge wants to be known,
images want to be seen,
poems want to be read.

In the monetized world,
secrecy produces madness,
kids cruise online porn,
poets pursue money, instead.

h.a.m.

The poet stands
just far enough away
so patterns appear

But close enough to
hear money gurgle as
it clogs veins & arteries
wherever people collect

In numbers sufficient
to excite money –
cities, for instance.

h.a.m.

now that Blacks have accepted stewardship of poetry,
will the universe transfer the care and feeding of jazz
to the people who allowed poetry to wither and wane –
after a mere eight thousand years at the helm?

h.a.m.

as a colored person, who descends from
irish people, i wonder if Blacks intend
to keep jazz, now that they’ve they’ve been
handed the poetry franchise, by blue-eyed devils.

also, do Black poets look down their noses
at hip hop and rap, because there’s so much money
in it, no english-teacher rules, nor antecedents –
except for I Shall Be Free No. 10?

h.a.m.

Ed. note: Wether this oughtta be an epigraph is anybody’s guess: this above imagines Josh White’s Free and Equal Blues.

read by the author:

On the road to our meeting,
this day leaves a wake,
and much waste, since
the calendar struck one.

Although there’s money
in the manufacture of model
yesterdays and perfumes,
pictures, statues, and poems –

Take care not to confuse
the past you wish had been
with what is known only
to the presently entombed.

h.a.m.

today’s book business grinds axes,
but cares for your edification, too,
so long as it follows a path

(or strolls the lane – lanes are ‘in’ today,
not b/c of lois lane, a boyhood heartthrob,
but lane the way rachel says in primary season)

that bears enough data points for a marketing plan
to be engineered and honed by creative types
in the book business today.

h.a.m.

Having ordered a parade of his own,
Trump is transformed
from Putin’s Puppet,
to Kim’s Clone.

Now, we wonder …

Will he request bids
for a new pyramid,
or coldly evict, then
re-brand, Grant’s Tomb?

h.a.m.

By raising Barfing Brett
to a lifetime seat
on the Supreme Court,

Trump and his minions
make permanent their own
Porcelain Thrones.

h.a.m.

By the time an American
body asserts itself, sprouts
hair where bare was

And blood @ inopportune
times – blood and hair,
bound for evidence lockers, often

The American mind already
handled – ungloved – by one
loco parentis after another

Actual parents resume to make
bank, after all, baby stuff
so dear these days, dear

Grace Slick – tuneful and succinct.

h.a.m.

Then, yes, you are
your brother’s butler,

And your wardrobe
needs attention.

h.a.m.

apologies to Homer

rosy fingered dawn
who awoke with a start
to see a world upside down

upstairs wind blew the curtains

in awesome fluid patterns you’d
have to imagine millions of, they flapped
so mercilessly, like a slap to the face of job.

h.a.m.