Finished works
Tim Fitzmaurice
I want to type up my
poems what I have of them in whatever form I have. I think that I need to work
on this every day for an hour or so. I do not give enough time to this effort. I am afraid that the work will be lost if I do
not pay better attention. I also think that I can use this to find my way into
the meaning of writing in my life. I have not published very much. I have not
had the urge very often. I have not found the process enjoyable of submitting
for publication. Maybe I found myself more concerned about other things,
teaching, politics life in general. My poetry and prose works have been left to
find their own way.
I
have read many times in many different circumstances. I think that satisfied my
urge well enough to make me feel competent and part of the community of writers
in my area. I have not found that poetry is very widely read and enjoyed anyway
and I have not been much moved by the demonstration of work that is swallowed
in small journals and neglected books. I think poetry should be able to do
something; it does not do much the way it currently presented in this culture.
But I am perhaps wrong in my attitude.
Anyway
I am going to spend some time putting my work out there some how. I may make this
into an online publication of material, that friends can read and find some
paths into how I think and how people of my generation and experience thought.
It might be of some use.
Sleek Occasions
My world seems to have been
the wreck of what is thrown
against the glass of being.
It was in a small ice cream store
with dozens standing around,
warm afternoon, a weekend,
the lines long and full of children
sucked to the ice cream. Their parents.
and I was near the counter, maybe 16,
a small boy spinning, whirling
in his world of safety,
Before he crashed suddenly
through the picture window
--and we went with him--
falling across a ledge of glass teeth,
which was
the mouth of hell.
In my first and only act of heroism,
while thousands froze, I lifted him
from the glass.
They watched as if he were an angel
resting on razor blades.
This is a thing that is often done
by thoughtless birds.
TALK OF DEMOCRACY
Maybe I need to talk about democracy like Whitman
something with a capital D
something that does not exist except in
the dream life of American naïfs.
Democracy is the rule by people
with no qualifications—not
landowners, not slaveoweners, not 4/5s of a man,
not only men, not a wealthy man,
not an elite, not an oligarch,
not a Plutarch or a monarch. Someone with only a
passport and no felonies.
Maybe that’s where my poetry comes from.
From speculation about how power works and
well maybe it is even true of my poems about a bird
or about a possum or about an eyelash.
They were always about democracy about
well some people make noise
and some people make sounds and every sound
is a beseeching … please hear me. No not just hear
… listen to me
…. please
1.
LOOKING BACK @ EURYDICE
9/30-11/13/75
The snows near Hetch-Hetchy were deep
that year: Easy to become lost
amid ruined granite walls. The warm air
of the valley was rushing into our
faces, tangling my brown, her golden hair,
burning our faces like a blast furnace.
I cd’ve had more faith, at least
in my own abilities to move.
I didn’t have to reach into her pumping chest
to examine the functioning of
her bloodless heart.
She’s not lost that electricity
to earth by being found there.
she can smile, still.
Never underestimate the glance of a transformer,
touching eyes like wires.
She cd’ve kept her cold hand on
my neck as I led her
thru misty canyons.
It was necessary to scan her
to see if she followed trustingly or
hesitated.
The spider spins her
antique
lace veils
her eyes.
The white moths plant
winged
babies
in her
tousled hair
grown
brown.
The thought of her skin takes me
back now to cold places.
The poem seems so cold so calculated now. Trying so hard to
be a poem. I know that it had something to say about my sense that I wanted to
transplant a poetic language to my life. But it has so much of the Greek gods
in it. Such a mistake. But understandable. Orpheus and the plot was as much
borrowed from Jean Cocteau’s film ORPHEE as it was from any reading I did. But it is all part of trying to invent
yourself as a poet. I made a decision not to throw away my early work to let
everything stand no matter how much it bothered me. I needed Cocteau to pry
myself out of my ordinary mind. I used him again in the opera OPIUM.
INSIDE THE LOCKED GALLERY
(1975)
a light
dust
filters through
the mail slot
(unreadable) clicking of
hammer,
the artist
disassembles the exhibit
tangled hanging
wires grab
at his ankles
as he steps f
rom the lad
der
silence
sounding
an absentminded whistle
while
carefully
polishing a
thumb
print from
the glass
empty space
a place to dance
I put my ear to the door
now the medieval bears perch
on chairs
with barely tolerant
eyes.
I like the thumbprint
concrete thing. It has a sense of style.
SATURDAY AFTERNOON (9/13/1975)
this road breathes
and its some wonder
that I can stand here
wrapped in breeze,
passing close about me
catching at my knees
in a swirl carrying scents—
a caravan across an arid land
to some lone destined
from some pearly and flesh market
roaming gently, penetrating rumors,
finding the deprived, willing consumers.
SATURDAY MORNING
Metal gray dogs leaping.
I
looking over corrugated patched fence
at the clowns bobbing vicious,
as if to gulp air above
the barbed wire.
They
could escape. They know attack
and sensuous circlingrubbing against
one another.
Their faces, as they appear and disappear,
are almost serene
philosophers peering across the void.
I can feel the beat
poet feeling that was in my mind. I like the second one the bobbing heads of
the dogs seems like something worthwhile.
DADDY IS DYING
(11/12/75)
Daddy was dying.
My husband and I
invited my uncle Father
Paddy to stay with us.
The night before Paddy was drunk and came down
stairs—you know—dissolved.
I told him,
‘Daddy is dying!’
Well he told me to
switch off the vacuum
cleaner and he wd go
immediately to the hospital
(his shirt didn’t have a collar)
he was putting on his shoes
(polished by someone else probably)
and then asked for a piece
of cotton. ‘I only have the piece
I used to wipe off my make-up.’
He said get it so I
did.
Well I asked him,
‘What d’you wanna use this for anyway?’
‘Anoint him.’
‘What?’
‘You know wipe off the oil.’
‘You can’t! I won’t let you!’
Well we had a big
fight; I was surprised
at myself; he finally left
and took the cotton.
When he got back I saw
the poor man was a
wreck
really
shaken.
Daddy didn’t die
for a month
after that.
I was told this story
by a waitress at the steak house where I worked and wrote it down pretty much
as she told it to me. But I took some liberties.
THE INSPECTION (11/12/75)
The architect took one final
walk through the Garden-
Arms Apts.
Before the sun rose
before the tenants came
demanding some space
in which to raise children.
It was early Sunday
morning in the stillness
of the untouched beige
walls and unrubbed bannisters.
All-surveying transoms
locked shut, but trans-
parent.
†he architect was not hopeful.
He saw tears under the stairs
and fierce garbled shouts
galloped through the light
-less halls.
The bldg. was finished,
not perfect,
but it was built
to specifications.
My tendency to
parable. But it has that punchline bit of humor that I got from Richard Wright
and others like Corso. It should be noted hat the swarm of poem thing is not
unusual for me. So 11/12/75 was a day of
poems. I had others and many days of no poems.
THE GUY WHO TALKED LIKE BOGART
To live in the same house with him
lighting his endless cigarettes.
His words speak soft violence.
His wife hung
on his arm.
She wasn’t beautiful, not becoming
the heroine;
and she burled his eggs.
And after fifteen years
her awestruck jaw was frozen.
He still never spoke above a whisper:
”Pass the butter, Sweetheart.”
Open doors for him
just to hear him mumble
“Thank you.”
Buy his insurance
without thinking,
hypnotized by his voice.
I saw this man in the
restaurant one evening and knew I had to write this down and it is based on a real
person, who talked and looked like Bogie. He and his wife were regulars.
HANDS
Shall we continue to
the conflict?
No, first the arrangement of incidentals.
Serenity.
The pressure points cushioned doilies.
antimacassars
(there is no better word for those
enlarged snowflakes of fabric
which through the years settled
on her life, scattered on the high places.
The plateaus of an overstuffed chair
of a velvet brown covered to disguise any stain.
she cushioned the humped headrest
which stood at a height unreachable
by any giant, except perhaps father.
I only sank into the receptive softness.
It seems that chairs were modeled on mothers
or what a other should be and
so I became secure an alert for invaders.)
The woman was a piano teacher,
with a piano teacher’s house and a piano teacher’s
past. a warm place, warm by accident of anachronism.
This woman had built an atmosphere of orderliness
which now stood a cluttered monument to the theory of
relativity.
The house had a heart
like most houses haunted
but this one was not,
except by a living ghost
that levitated knick-knacks
and dusted gently
and rattled the chain to turn off
the now useless porch light:
no one was coming in late.
Keeping the electric train in operating condition under the
bed
which was so high it would be any child’s challenge
to climb and seemed an arc necessitating
the child’s expulsion, not a butte or a terrace,
but a difficult perch without permanent foothold.
The woman kept the bed well-made
and each day she changed the enticing linen.
The heart of this house was in the
short hall, little more than an artery
where in was kept a display:
pictures, portraits …
portraits of hands in various frames
under polished glass.
The hall was too narrow.
You couldn’t stand back and swallow.
each had to be studied
with close intimacy, meticulous care.
And thus proudly she led me through
from hand to hand, each with its attitude.
some posed carefully poised
some carelessly clipped from newspaper
now faded and minute.
Such was the fervor of her vision.
All famous by association.
At first she had only the
musicians, the virtuosi:
the venerable Rubinstein, Casals;
whose hands covered their faces
or displayed them.
And on such mutualism, they had determined
to survive, like lichen hands.
The shaper Rodin, the autographed Menuhin
(whom she had touched)
Then the presidents and prime ministers,
the emergent women. All faceless dexterity
betraying tactile capabilities
without guile
defenseless before an old woman’s
discernment.
The pictures were old now,
most of them, the most recent,
having been cut from newspapers
and magazines in futile attempts
at continuation.
Placed in wooden frames now
with the least amount of gilt
trim. There are no hands
like there were hands,
before the face became an emblem
before the face surpassed hands
and arms.
The making parts
slender and sensitive
are become vestigial as earlobes.
Who will the woman of hands
pass her gallery to?
Shall we continue to … ?
I would like to
rewrite this piece because it has a good heart. I visited this woman’s house
just down the block from West Valley Community College I was going to. She was
in her sixties or beyond. She played piano and taught it. She was during the
forties a singer with Chico Marx’s band. His piano hands were on the wall as
well.
DIARYTIC 1/23/1975
Trying to avoid implication
I found this poem in
an old notebook in a box and ready to be dumped. It seems to be from 1987.
Some Trees
Even if they live a hundred
or a thousand years.
It will not be forever
and they will die.
The trees.
You could cut them
and count the years
and reckon up a life.
Each ring will be a winter,
a little death,
and you could estimate a life.
I’ve had some winters too.
But no rings
and my bark has gotten
unmistakably softer.
When those trees have stood
their years, they will be cut
or perhaps fall.
Let’s hope someone will let them
fall somewhere near the spot
they stood. But they will die.
What they have, isn’t even
a hint of what’s possible.
I might rewrite the
ending. But it is interesting to see how I put this together years ago. It is very controlled, not as
slippery in the enjambments.
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