I feel like I'm crammed with knowledge I have to record--and will, if only I can get some zip. Also music--there's lots of music in me, none what I can believe is too original or good, but--yow--I wish I had a piano to try some of it out on, or good musical composition software and a computer it would work on. I may soon go from being badly in debt to being outrageously badly in debt to buy a new computer, one dedicated to Paint Shop.

Which reminds me that absolutely nothing has yet come of what I thought was going to be a career boost--the blogging for Schoolwide and the sending of a copy of my A StrayngeBook to a company I thought would go for it. Of course, that was only two weeks ago. Still. . . .

One of my latest vagrant thoughts was about my critical mastery of certain poems. It suddenly occurred to me that, like many critics, I was a world-class specialist in those poems. Amusingly, all of them are very small poems. In my first high mood about the thought, I wondered if I might not be the best critic of dozens of poems. After reality greyed me saner, I still thought I might be the best critic of something like ten small poems. The first would be "lighght." Also "The Red Wheelbarrow," several poems by Cummings, "old pond" (in English), "In a Station of the Metro," others . . . No, I don't expect many, if any, to agree with me.

I'm not counting all the poems I feel I'm a first-rate critic of that I must be the world's best critic of merely because of lack of competition, particularly visual poems, and any poem by John M. Bennett I've had time to study and write about.

I don't feel I'm being boastful. I think anyone who seriously follows the vocation of poetry critic must be better than anyone else on a poem or two of length, or more shorter poems.

The Season of Phantasmal Peace

Then all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill --
the net rising soundless at night, the birds' cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.

COMMENT: nice picture fancied up for us but essentially silly. With meaningless high-mysticality like the oundless cries. What's going on, I want to know. Am I a Philistine?

And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in the silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
COMMENT: Oh, those awful human beings, blind and deaf to what the wonderful birds have taken time off from killing bugs and worms and each other to tell them, if anyone could sanely show how this net has anything to do with peace except from the assertion of the poet that it does.                                            it was the light
that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven's cawing,
the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
COMMENT: Aw, how nice. below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
COMMENT: Yeah, you gotta watch them betrayals of falling suns. and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.

COMMENT: Nothing like a gnostic paradox to prove one is Truly Meaningful. -- Derek Walcott. The Fortunate Traveller. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981.

They only rise a few feet into the air, but they all do so at the same time,
these garbage men of America's deuce-dim cities and towns.
And their farts are of many colors and long-lasting,
propelling them languidly through the street-glare and horns
the morning is huddling away from. The long-invisible
poetry of commerce's bug-proud idea-less edifices glitters briefly
each time one of the garbagemen shivers in and through it, but
the few people entering the dawn ignore it as the garbagemen spindle
into Dempster Dumpsters, singing autumnal songs
in the language of cocker spaniels, poodles, beagles
and spiders that cathedral into the limpid politics
that the multi-hued farts have now become.
Quietly, the dumpsters begin to lift into the scotch-tape sky.
Simultaneously, all the nations of the world edify into the deepest heart of a peace
that will last the entire three millenia it will take for the dumpsters
to reach the blueberry south of the next morning,
by way of Waco, Texas.

Oaktrees' and African-American executives' attention ripens into that peace, solidifying it,
and chrysanthemum-festooned lambs, humming back to the previous April, liquify it.
Housewives, free at last, billow out of their kitchen-windows
with spray-bottles aglow with found children's knowledge of rainbows
eradicating all possibility of bacterial contamination
                                                                            while all the world's guns
marry each other, as do the world's knives, each same with same,
for division has been exiled to the armpits of the now-smiling garbagemen
constantly bursting up from their dumpsters and returning
with each July-Fourth-resplendent explosion of their bowels.
The oaks' and the executives' attention draws highways out of the marriages
that no one sees or hears but which nonetheless somehow play banjos. It
is holy in a way nothing ever before has been holy, the harmony awakened thusly
through the cities and towns and into the countryside.
The oceans inhale it, and convert it to revivals of Fiddler on the Roof,
with all the parts played by milkmen from the thirties,
and cheese of many countries, both rural and industrial.
The rivers worship it into revivals of Hair, housecats taking all the roles,
and the lakes and ponds, sagacious with dragonflies,
slowly make it into laws flavoring the rights of dandelions.