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Childhood escaped, with breadcrumbs

Go outdoors and play says my father around eight on Saturday mornings as he heads to work in the middle of the 1950s, when the brainchild of Philo Farnsworth and company was yet creeping, it delighted me to gallup into adventureland,

My stint at the Idiot Box enough for an episode or two of Hopalong Cassidy, following ten, fifteen minutes of test pattern mesmerization, accompanied by In The Hall of the Mountain King*, the original earworm, which teased me and tickled me and nearly blew

My Peter Pan mind fifty years later when I witnessed a most improbable mashup: Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, together with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, who play both the European

Classical version of Edvard Greig’s Peer Gynt Suite and its adaptation for jazz band by Duke Ellington, alternating movements back and forth the score of players led by Marsalis seated in the midst of the four score musicians under Ozawa’s invisible baton

At Tanglewood, on Mohican land in Massachusetts, two hundred miles from my boyhood home sited five blocks from the mouth of the river that was Main Street to Onondaga Fire-keepers twenty five miles upstream of Lake Ontario.

Ten years before shooing me outdoors, my father was busy shooting his way toward the coward Hitler, along with the best of his generation of Americans, and her allies, such as New Zealand, home of the politician who sneered “OK Boomer.”

Now, kids, what does your Saturday look like?

– Dave Read

*”In the Hall of the Mountain King” is a piece of orchestral music composed by Edvard Grieg in 1875 as incidental music for the sixth scene of act 2 in Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play Peer Gynt. It was originally part of Opus 23 but was later extracted as the final piece of Peer Gynt, Suite No. 1, Op. 46. (Source: Wikipedia.)

Filed Under: Boyhood, Poems

The Poetry of Henry Adams

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

Filed Under: Poems

Pivot of Spring

Molder of forsythia underfoot
signals the imminent breath
of lilac on a nearby bush.

It’s the pivot of Spring

in the Berkshires – a place
of pictures ever fading
into pictures ever fresh
.

Dave Read

“… what but picture-galleries are the marble halls of these same limestone hills? – galleries hung, month after month anew, with pictures ever fading into pictures ever fresh.” Herman Melville, Piazza Tales.

Filed Under: Berkshires, Epigrams, Poems

American Leviathans

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.

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Mama Frasca's Dream Away Lodge, Rolling Thunder Revue party, Nov. 1975. Ken Regan photo.
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Mama Frasca’s Dream Away Lodge, Rolling Thunder Revue party, Nov. 1975. Ken Regan photo.

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.

Filed Under: Poems

Big Apple Byte

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

Filed Under: Poems

The Saddest Thing

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

Filed Under: Poems

Group God

Why do so many groups get
so worked up over God,

who only works one-on-one
(it’s in the nature of the soul),

and who never gives life to groups,
but for the likes of Dionne Quintuplets?

h.a.m.

Filed Under: Epigrams, Poems

ill shooters

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.

Filed Under: Poems

Natural world monetized

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.

Filed Under: Poems

Capital poetry

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.

Filed Under: Poems

the deconstruction of critical race theory.

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.

Filed Under: Poems

separate but equal arts

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.

Filed Under: Poems

audi-o

read by the author:
https://readspoems.com/xyz/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/A-Refusal-to-Mourn.m4a

Filed Under: Poems

Spring, and All that de(con)struction

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.

Filed Under: Poems

I Love Lois Lane

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.

Filed Under: Poems

The Outer Borough Colonel, Old Bone Spur

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.

Filed Under: Poems

White House Plumbing

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.

Filed Under: Poems

Body and Soul C.I.S.

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.

Filed Under: Poems

If Christ is English

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

And your wardrobe
needs attention.

h.a.m.

Filed Under: Poems

13579@c

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.

Filed Under: Poems

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