MUSIC: Pharrell Williams, "Happy" (2014)

I know, 
I know, 
I can't help it.
Dance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6Sxv-sUYtM

MUSIC: Bobby McFerrin, "Don't Worry, Be Happy" (1986)

You know you want to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8gJZClPGCw

POEM: "At Losar"

At Losar

                         for Patterson

It’s a test in moderation
I’ve got a date with Spring
with some Shanghai poets
plum trees & new blossoms
some are pink some are white
the Famous Poet tells us
it's the new emblem of China
young Charlotte introduces me
we all read a couple of poems
Minnow reads one that invokes
Li Bai then he mocks himself
Sexy Girl reads most seriously
Actress can dance hers beautifully
kids are scattered beneath the trees
they sway like little lotus roots
Imei says poetry isn't a profession
and for once I hold my tongue
I read a poem about frustration
a hundred photos are taken
I wear your soft red scarf
when this sun stops the rain
and shines for just an hour
people say they love you.

© 2014 Rob Schackne

A Cees Nooteboom Poem

Trixy


Desolate species, humans.
Everything needs to be conquered,
a thousand Buddhas can’t reverse the stream,
the stone in the middle remains unpolished.

The teachings of the titmouse.
What’s that supposed to mean?
Minus ten and it’s been working all day,
searching the hedge for a morsel.

In the distance I see the world,
in the corner, behind that car,
deeply passionate music
sweeps the litter into a heap.

It’s here alone or more.
Woe to those who have the most words.
They’re up to their knees in night,
their book of faces full of names
and mould.

In the stable thirteen goats are born.
Trixy barks at a shadow of white.


(2012) Tr. David Colmer

A Patty Seyburn Poem

The Alphabetizer Speaks


I have my reasons

have never known starvation nor plenitude
and unless the order of the world
changes, I won’t.
If the order of the world changes, I will
disappear, the way some vowels
elide into their word-bodies
or an individual blade recedes
into a field each season.

Will my daughter carry on this way?
I cannot yet tell her qualities—
if she prefers scale to chance, sequence to random.
And this may mean nothing.
I find chaos theory appealing, and eavesdrop on talk
of black holes, chasms, any abyss
that fetters sense. I relish
the desultory in many matters,
am slovenly, a slacker, a slave to caprice.
Except with the letters.

There is such thing as a calling
though I cannot speak for prophets or martyrs.
I have been summoned
by people of stature and the low-stationed,
comrade and debutante alike.
My eyes suffer, and my hands, my back.

I am my profession. It is no whim.
I do not want the world a certain way.
The world is that way, and I am a vehicle
on the road of nomenclature. I tend the road.

In my dream, all events coterminous—
no linear narrative, preceding or next.
The odd vignette, lone scene, an image
in isolation, no neighbors.
Then I awaken and pace
my thin balcony, calculating
how much of me waits above, how much
lives below, and I pose
the question of balance. My name
cues the turn home.

(2004)

A Gottfried Benn Poem

This is Bad


Someone hands you an English thriller,
highly recommended.
You don’t read English

You’ve worked up a thirst
for something you can’t afford.

You have deep insights,
brand new, and they sound
like an academic glossing Holderlin.

You hear the waves at night
ramping against the shore
and you think: that’s what waves do.

Worse: you’re asked out
when at home you get better coffee,
silence, and you don’t expect to be amused.

Awful: not to die in summer
under a bright sky
when the rich dirt
falls easily from the shovel.


Ca. 1950 (Tr. Harvey Shapiro)

POEM: "Jenny Ducati"

Jenny Ducati

                             
Riding her electric bicycle
in Siberian winter wind
delivering food to Apt. 309
graceful tall and gentle
she dreams of a red Ducati
(bitter brings you nothing)
leaning low on the curves
black suit gleaming helmet
burning high on the crest of hills
perfect weightless moment
sometimes she even races.

                                      Shanghai (Year of the Snake)

© 2014 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Goodbye LV"

Goodbye LV

               They do not know how one pays–those abroad do not know.
               They do not know what one buys, and at what price.
                              
               Czesław Miłosz (1953)


Suppose I just pitch it
over the side...like that
beyond the floating curtains
past the toys on the table

Mustard seeds of grace
which everless we don't see
(all the foolish deviations
taking a long beating)

Buddha smoking something
congrats it looks like a joint
his argument is sustainable
but his method alas is extreme

I watch the wearied ones
down their rows of grease
gathering up their secrets
of a hundred traces of life

The queues are getting longer
starbucks is open for Miles Davis
vulture peak flies in from India
enlightenment is a foot away

Mid-autumn festival is over
unsold full-moon half-moon off
I don't know where China is
baby I live here in China.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Stories"

Stories


All the stories that it tells
Shaking a common umbrella out
The slant of his head the hand
Shook so badly after the accident
That would not let go the bed
Where the best of them was made

A man waiting to cross the road
Sees his eyes glance up the sky
Where someone waited for him once
Who now is part of another heaven
A tree three sweet birds a rainbow
Where the grass is much greener stop

A toddler already festooned with
Red balloons goes after just one more
Learning the measure of passion
A mother who ignores his noises
Ignored her own once upon a time
Now makes up stories in her head

He sits down as oddly as he will
His body whispers things to him
About the door the table the glasses
When the fire jumped across their line
And they heard the Devil’s fierce music
And they were very lucky to get out.


© 2014 Rob Schackne

Otto Dix, "Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden" (1926); POEM: "Portrait Of A Jailed Man"

Portrait Of A Jailed Man


Too sudden into a dirty cell
(The charge was separatism)
Tea leaves that blinded him
Left to recant the sunshine

Hands blooded on sharp work
If sleep comes he dare not wake
When Death comes he will sleep
Bullied and pushed by dreams

Last night the girl came again
Dressed for a painted festival
She led him to the river bank
(The charge was dereliction)

In the coolness she stood quiet
And she pointed to the sunset
At how he was disappearing
And what was leaving him forever

Shoved into the muddy river
He raised a shining dagger
He plunged the self-portrait in
The river rolled by as it always did

The picture was unchanging
(The charge was cooperation)
His heart would not stop beating
It was unconscionable neglect

The prisoner awoke in sweat

In faith or in fear trembling
In a language that wasn’t clear
(The charge was extreme poverty)

He remembers the villagers
Sighing for the big day one day
And sitting down with informers
Who swore they'd never tell.

© 2004/2015 Rob Schackne

PHOTO: Spring Tundra

POEM: "Freedom without order does not exist"

Freedom Without Order Does Not Exist


Hell is hands without feet
Order, order, I want to order

Freedom is there taking a nap
Lord it all went hell for leather

Fools the same as you and me
Hell is balls without a band

A sunset for once the autistic see
5 years since you were translated

Some jungle shit but wait a bit
The monkeys, they all come down.


© 2014 Rob Schackne

POEM: "1-2-3 Roswell"

1-2-3 Roswell
                           
                              for Felix Baumgartner


I don’t really know you
or the variety of ways
any of us can fall falling
or really any more than
that thing about the angels
up by the recurve of earth
forgetting this quiet abyss
in a speed of dark descent
just there seconds ago boom
telling so small from above
blue sky clouds white cells
long field watching your step
balloon helmet pressure suit
one of the other ends of a long day
faced with a blank of possibility
like going into the snowy night.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

POEM: "You Don't Hear a Silent Invocation"

You Don't Hear a Silent Invocation 

I.  Midnight

Sinkhole cave-in water
in flame gas darkness
between wall and hope
the railway incidental
maybe an angel guard
two flags a red & blue
a quick decision then
I raise a glass tonight
to the invisible good
two minutes before
the mud month ends
on this water snake year
most grateful I imagine
things that didn't happen.


II.  3 A.M.

Yet the world works
the winds slamming
midnight ruckus
on protuberant tins
sheets and awnings
howling whistling
the winds are gusting
they speak so swirly
words that sound like
causative derivative
ad hominem inter alia
verum casus fortuitus
the hope & shit of sorrows
the bang of everything
not nailed down.


© 2013 Rob Schackne

A Katie Peterson Poem

Denying Everything


Because it is a pearly evening
I am sitting in the window reading
a book I have read before.
Branches emphasize
their heft and sway over their shadows.
Some kind of extra firmament,
an ear over the earth’s ear,
extra, as language is to prayer.
Narratives of elsewhere: in the eye
inside my eye that vision makes when you tell it to
when you shut your eyes so hard they hurt
you get more vista and less twist
of road, and then you’re looking
at a valley you named yourself
and irrigated yourself,
full of bitterroot, magnolia in the clefts
of rock, sage, at last a harvest—
a desert that belongs to you–

The trick to renunciation is starting now.
The secret of detachment
is having already given up,
a transcript of speech whose cadences are lost,
the human need for a body to fill in
all your body’s deficiencies, those clefts and dents
already given up, the narrative of a life
completely altered in the retrospect
that knowledge brings and so discredited
the point of memory utterly lost.
That piece of land has always been
suitable for a house. That nest has never
been ready for eight baby birds
who, top-heavy, frightened their own branch
and home and scared themselves
completely and remarkably away.

Do you hear that? It’s the wind
negotiating the spine of one leaf
it cannot decide whether to raise
a fragment of an inch.
Duncan writes as a reader
struggles with a strong sentence, I struggle
at certain unmistakable times
with what’s furtive and most right.
When people marry they finish their names.
I am still listening for mine
to begin. My spine
wants a bicycle to order its work, a red
bicycle, a hill into a heart
of a city that holds something I want.

The pattern of the air around that leaf
is like someone tracing my ribcage
with his index finger
and then walking away.
Who can blame us for wanting other worlds,
but shall we take them,
or let them come to us? Is the spirit just an ear
more like a mouth
that bites the air and turns it into blood?

A voice in the next room goes to sleep.
Sleep moves in the branches of the oak
become a rootless mass
unsung by skeleton or name or height.
My friend who says
she does not believe in Paradise
believes in rest: I believe that,
or more likely I like to think of her,
the way she held my name in her small mouth,
as she held her own name. I like to think of anyone
who on a night like this
would reach towards my ribcage
and trace it delicately and walk away.


(2013)

POEM: "Winter Tourism In Ningxia"

Winter Tourism in Ningxia


Today I believe we’re all on the road to Heaven
Toward the cold blue mountains of Helan Shan
And me in the steam of three fragrant beauties

Our taxi driver’s nervous about this conversation
He’s claiming the horizon is always straight ahead
And we can never presume what we should not see

Still, we keep our own private counsels warm
Since it is 20 below in the sun with our hats on
Under the old great shadows of these quiet peaks

The trees are heavy beside a silent frozen river
Petroglyphs possibly ascribing the valley rocks
(I wonder whether I should describe this ice)

Love, I see the gracious Earth-Mother around us
Her fertile and ferocious aspect observing the Tao
While I climb the rocks and I remember how I’m still here

Yesterday among the 1000-year-old Xia beehive tombs
When you say you once clambered atop the steepest one
I see my own last fall, I contend that your own wasn’t possible

Fang pao, hen hao shua – moonlit Gunpowder Night
From the hotel window with our guns aimed at the sky walls
We salute those infant stars for this love and this New Year

Later then I think of my old battles on the faces of cliffs
Finally these narrow Chinese beds and your hot body
Fighting for the gentle certainties of our brief lives.


© 2004/2015 Rob Schackne

PHOTO: Hine, "Construction Worker At The Empire State Building, 1931" / POEM: "Our Man Is Long Dead"

Lewis Wickes Hine, Construction worker at the Empire State Building, 1931

Our Man Is Long Dead


Our man is long dead, but not
by his own hand or carelessness
just the ordinary accretion of time
and the unnatural play of events
we'll only guess at. Our own lives
which seem such a solid fantasy
remind us what to shy away from
avoid the heights, rabid dogs, people
who act too strange, bad jobs, the shakes
unsafe food, poisoned air, the dangers
we must not embrace -- we are smart
we know our long list very well.


© 2014 Rob Schackne

A Jynne Dilling Martin Poem

"What Endures And What Does Not?"


Soon this ship will be crushed in a polar storm; below deck,
pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica are read aloud,

shredded and used to light pipes. A century later
the preservationist draining antique food tins

sneaks a taste of raspberry jam. That night he’ll dream
he digs out a tomb on a glacier filled with bay leaves

still fragrant and green. The emperor penguin egg
tucked warm in the explorer’s pocket is delivered intact

to the receptionist desk at the Royal Geographic Society;
the robbery victim nestles a stone between his feet

and rocks back and forth at the bottom of the world.
Enough seal blubber can keep a single lamp burning

for a thousand years; enough knowledge exists to fill
twenty thousand encyclopedia pages. Lost friends

return to us in dreams, but come morning we can’t recall
what they wanted. Snakes, Snell’s law, Snowblind

curl up into hazy tobacco smoke. The amphipods
in test tubes begin to faint from next century’s

simulated heat; falling leaves fill the air of our dreams.
The biologist drills a hole in the sea snail’s shell

and slides a miniature stethoscope inside, listens
for the heartbeat: it’s beating, still beating, still beating.

(2013)

PHOTO: Roman Signer, "House with Rockets" (1981) Photo Emil Grubenmann / POEM: "House With Rockets"

House With Rockets


Time obviates
time cannot tell
moves like a finger
now at 12 noon
I am 2 days before
wondering if ever 
she'll stay the night
tomorrow is asking
if the moon is full 
sitting in the corner
thousand conversations 
for years like a stove
rattles into a window
house with rockets.


© 2014 Rob Schackne

A Joseph Brodsky Poem

1 January 1965

The Wise Men will unlearn your name.
Above your head no star will flame.
One weary sound will be the same—
the hoarse roar of the gale.
The shadows fall from your tired eyes
as your lone bedside candle dies,
for here the calendar breeds nights
till stores of candles fail.

What prompts this melancholy key?
A long familiar melody.
It sounds again. So let it be.
Let it sound from this night.
Let it sound in my hour of death—
as gratefulness of eyes and lips
for that which somtimes makes us lift
our gaze to the far sky.

You glare in silence at the wall.
Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all.
It's clear that you are now too old
to trust in good Saint Nick;
that it's too late for miracles.
—But suddenly, lifting your eyes
to heaven's light, you realize:
your life is a sheer gift.


(2001)