Some Lines I Typed on an old Dell

This is the first poem I am posting on this blog. I hope to post short poems here somewhat regularly. I don’t want to do this because I am a poet, as I fail miserably in that regard, but more as an expression of what I think American poetry is lacking. I instantly apologize for the presumptuousness of that sentence, but let me explain what I mean. Poetry in the United States has become a very academic art form. Poetry has no place in the popular American consciousness and everyday speech. I blame this largely on the clichéd perception of the poet as an endlessly near-suicidal and perpetually dark/disturbed loner artist. The idea that poetry comes only from these eccentric (and fictional) characters makes it easily dismissible as out of reach or worse yet, out of touch. Throughout history the great poets have been common folk figures such as peasants, soldiers, workers, musicians, mothers, brothers, wives, and husbands. We have to remember that poetry has been carried in the oral tradition for millennia; it is only recently that we put it in books that sit on dusty university library shelves.
My mission is to write some short poems and include a brief sketch of my time and place as I came up with the lines. They will be unpolished and likely of quite poor quality, but I hope to show that poetry can be a natural human response to existence rather than the rarified territory of some depressed unrelatable loner.

I was in my car with my dog driving down Kelly Drive here in Philly. For those unfamiliar with the area, it is a very windy road along the Schuylkill River that runs from the Art Museum all the way to the northwest corner of the city. I was thinking of a review I had read the day before of Terry Eagleton’s (Marxist literary theorist) newest book, “Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.” Just as I was thinking of this I rounded the curve that usually brings the skyscrapers of Center City into view. However, anyone who has been here in the last few days can tell you that clouds and rain have been a constant companion lately. I couldn’t even see the giant squared-off behemoth that is the Comcast building. So as I thought about the way in which our most logical endeavor (science) is still preempted by all sorts of assumptions, and our concept of God is so dependent upon an infinite number of constructions, traditions, dogmas, and prejudices I made the connection between this frustrating subjectivity and the clouds that were blocking my view. Mix that with any number of ideas I have encountered in recent years from professors, philosophers, music, and a Rabbi at a synagogue where I was a janitor for awhile and out came these lines:

A face, place, or vapor?
The dark clouds of my ignorance
sit low and thick that the newly pointed grass is obscured.
But as buds are but lumps on a spring branch,
the plumb line is but perception
My mind has only my eyes,
And my eyes only vision.
What can I see beyond this illusionist’s fog?
The great beacon of the beyond,
or perhaps its emptiness?
Even I fail as point of reference.
As the boatman’s fog obscures
lantern light, marrow and soul.

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