SIMONE WEIL


You search
for a mystical union
in a church
finding God in communion
with "Love"
from the metaphysical poet
George Herbert
whom she read
we will know the truth
when in forgiving we join her
by living above
only after we are dead.

ZBIGNIEW HERBERT


No time for much truth
in your criminal era
of totalitarian nights
oppression was open
and shut
in your travel case
kept under your frightful
pale windowsill
there was a playful
flower of Mr. Cogito
you keep watering
in your less than
still life
your poetry saves us
from slaughter.

HONNEGER

Your music
Dance of the Dead
based on the poems
of Claudel,
rarely played or read
in symphony hall
or citadel.

HEIDEGGER

I am ash
in the sun
you dismiss us
like Hannah's caress
no longer yours
but you reach out
for Germany's
unclouded tongue
in the endless
betrayal hung out
at the many rail
of a once praying mantis
now only a skeleton
abandoning Jesus
and the Jews
in your Heraclitus' soul
which hurts
like only words may do,
choosing salutes
and invitations
you dine at this hour
on the finest wines
not hearing any cries
from other citizens
or colleagues
building your own statue
as Herculean power
like Nebuchadnezzar
having your stature
of a philosopher enhanced
without presumption
of your own Belteshazzar,
with a wine invitation
of high ranked consumption
to dine with the best,
taking the party card
of a National Socialist
with the assumption
and fisticuffs cause
with the brown shirted
comrades enjoying wine
with fascist gumption
even now with applause
in the ivy hedged halls
of the academic jaws.

BELY

Your "St. Petersburg"
in phantasmagoria
from poetry to prose
in your Gogol overcoat
a map ,notes and word
as Bolshevik messiahs rose
in a revolutionary vote
but quickly lost
in a Pharisaic world
as a visionary quote.

TSVETAEVA

Along the Neva
you weep
in a poet's struggle
wanting to love
as a flower to smuggle
out of a spice garden,
Marina Tsvetaeva
with a song out of sand
to recover a Russian land
never to forget God's favor
in a thousand hour pardon.

PASTERNAK

At a revolutionary storm
of workers and peasants
a poet recollects on the life
and death of Jesus
in his novel "Dr. Zhivago"
Boris Pasternak
assumes new forms
like Proteus' waves
on his own incandescence
over a bloody Baltic 
sea of snow.

COROT

Trying to locate
a Corot print,
"The Bridge at Narni"
for years
then at a yard sale
there it was
on a post card
with a letter in French
composed in haste
during the Occupation
captured with light
this tiny Corot
stays on my wall
wherever I go.

MONDRIAN

Subliminal creation
sets the tone to attraction,
light colors emerge
from your two dimensional
in an abstraction surge,
leading me in the museum
to the watery surface
on your dramatic canvas
in suspension of belief
for enigmatic shapes
in orange and black bars
to an interior bas relief.

DANDIES

Where are the dandies
of today
whom beauty beguiled
two centuries away,
with the randy tragedy
of Dorian Gray
whom poetry smiled on
in Oscar Wilde's play.

THE ELITE


For the elite
no one to wash
your feet,
these chattering classes
who make the news
at Davos and Cannes
just clank your glasses
for the new masses
life is to amuse
but don't look around
for those without shoes
or socks
are not to be found,
their world is so cool
unorthodox and small
they own it all,
and see the same folks
at tennis matches
or football,
with the same
T.V. personalities
at the games
these bloated blokes
looking like goats
who must be invited
even if they cheat
on their way over
by Fleet or Wall St,
so greet them as is due
with an encyclopedia
of the media's applause,
the elite, the very few.

  Gunter Grass

Whom the Stasi deceives
the Nazi achieves
in January 30, 1933,
the totalitarian turns
egalitarian in lives
as Aryan in archives,
still a spirit survives
and does not leave
in Germany few learn,
unwillingly no one believes.

JUDD

I walked miles to view
the plywood
boxes,metals
stacks
enamel,
forgetting the touch
of abdicated fate
accidental happenings
in fabricated mortality.

JOHNS

You emitted pop art
from your jacket paintings
and pocket brushwork
pulling down
the ready made flags
and orange scribbles on labels
from "Ale Cans"
demystified water colors
as life in black crayon 
having seen the put downs
from the machismo energy
of early abstract
expressionists
rise with the times,
you, Jasper watch the waves
with Hart on the cruise
liner Orizoba
in Passage,Diver,
Periscope
in your own conceptualism. 

STELLA


Black frieze
shape and format
on black war paint
dissolving memory
in Minimalist intention
when art rises
above declaration.

MONTALE


A leaf green tree
with a butterfly
affirming its accord
to nature's affirmation,
suspended life
at love's edge waters
words inside imagination
out of Dora Marcus's eyes. 

CAVAFY

Your pulsing voice
in the light shade
of night's horizon
flashes in one mirror
meant for images
ingeniously conquered
for undisclosed love
conquering your world.

OSCAR WILDE

Wit and humor
as a fever passed on
but admitted rumor
cost you the dawn.

BRUNO SCHULZ

You sketched human
language drawn
from a skeptical pencil
of favorable wit
by a boy
in Cinnamon shops
breathless for creativity
until fascism stops you
when still life has a permit.

SEBALD

Landscapes as photos
gone in picturesque archives
what shipwreck of lives
came up from the pit
escaping the snapshots
from Dives to the poor
backed by witnesses
to uncover Jesus' crucifixion
and more
as in Mattis Grunewald's
paintings haunting us,
until we cannot look back
to capture memory
of an enlightened sun.

J.D. SALINGER

Rabbi of cool words
obsessed with Oona
Charlie Chaplin's wife,
frightfully bent on
being a recluse
in death and life.

HENRY JAMES

Because every moment
letter, phrase had to please
aesthetically like Flaubert
as the monk St. Anthony
in the maelstrom mirage
and image of the desert,
how grateful of a long life
gleaming in an oasis
for one love that stirred
him to distraction
more than another words
from a sculptor of satisfaction.

NORMAN MAILER

In the late stage
of venture
and crony capitalism
you advertised for yourself
as you imagined life
a punch drunk
and Judy T.V. show
with you fighting away
in a match
with an invisible opponent
in a high rent
three ring circus maximus
and you disguised
as a hefty dark Spartacus
or hiding from Jesus
as a galley slave
playing Ben Hur
were it not for the trailer
in your self promotion
on T.V. shows advertising
after shave lotion,
you would have lost
out in the last round,
but having found your soul
in the Deer Park
you become lost
in blaring headlights
headlines and highlights
for American success
as a sweet cheating succubus
threw women under the bus
in a different form of life
and loveless deceit,
discussing with me
the plays on words
on T.S. Eliot's
"The Cocktail Party"
after your lecture
on your own adventures,
"If you have a fear
of men or women
and you are fighting it,
kid, just get rid of it
give them a jib or jab
on the concrete slab"
"If you have a fear of heights
let's go on the roof together
and face your fear,
and he proceeded
up the stairs
with all the adolescent
green motion he could elicit,
I shutting myself in the back
of the lecture hall,
having about heard it all.

HUGO CLAUS

Collaborators
in death of neighbors
sent away to death
and hard labors,
for any Dutch uncle
a few guilders
is worth the price
of another Anne Frank
so bill us
and take it to the bank.

BELLOW

A dangling mensch
wants to off a giant
building in Chicago
hauling its cargo
of optimistic goods
to mask his identity
for a better one,
Saul seeking to be
a spirit
beyond his flesh
Peter paying Paul
for the business
and busyness 
of "American Life"
seen in a lobby
of a bigger than life
passing regular
hour jobs and Jobs
meeting at luncheon
in hotels with good company
at a man's manifest destiny
to accompany fate, value,
shares to share marginally
in words and worlds
of war, class suffering
and envy making it seem
absurd and madness
is a daily existence routine
if not for the gift
of a poet's prophecies
who reflects on the steps
of the university
lounging at the art
of fiction
with Arnold's sense
of Greek thought
and Hebraic scholarship
in his imagined faculty
and Capital if only
to exchange letters,
ideas,dissatsfaction,
confession, depression,
at the scrivener's trade,
a myth maker 
word painter
and his brother's keeper
since Cain and Caliban
ran away
from themselves.

SAMUEL BECKETT

Recitations,
solioqueys,
Derrida philosophy
Descartes cant,
recollections
imperfections
divestment
strip search
French style,
thought,
and cliche
word play,
glints of genius
in language focus
characters mimic death
in Nietzschean diction
dialogues energy
linguistic hocus
bonding on Heidegger's
being as the locus
of your fiction.

MIRO'S "CHICAGO"

So will the mesh,
steel wire intertwined
in unpremeditated
dreaming of Catalonia
becoming your memory
on invoiced canvas
motioning reality in exile
leisurely foreign bodies
in concrete bronze
having its celestial change
transfigured in city blocks
of earth's transfigured
memory and destination
now recalled by you
"The sun and the Moon
One Star" in whitened motion
of sensation and gesture.

SCIENCE AS FICTION

Science as fiction
took off
when the daily planet
of Superman
carried the populism's
popularity chase
and critic run predictions
of its prisms of novel scarcity
became literally out of space
landed in many offices
of the human race.

LIVING IN


You spent the day
in the guest room
reading Pessoa
and the Noh plays
of Ernest Fenolossa
pounding the cold earth
with soundings of Joyce
of what was the Twenties'
high passion voice,
the high art language
and a once fashionable choice.

BACON ON FREUD

Angel of light's heaviness
backed by enlightened demons
in a gormandized crunch
touched up by high art
devouring us from darkness
colored in imperative motifs
painted on a protean canvas
in a parting portrait
from chivalry and rivalry
in a middle aged compassion
as Matisse/ Picasso
Turner/ Constable
their psycho sexual patinas
exposes us beyond any image
or flat field of orthoscopic
proportional representation,
a retrospective tone and time
of sophisticated genius
at our democratic dimension
and age of accessible depth
with a sworn brush of empathy.

JUAN GRIS

Pulsation in a cubist
that all art is alternative
monochromatic, complicit
subversive,downsized
and up to maneuvers
in harmonic arcades,
Juan Gris,
you reinvigorate us
in your human abstracts
and retell us
in geometric figurines
you are in language
a poet in coloration,
constructing your profiles
with the stature
of our loneliness,
recollected yet spontaneous,
between myth and time,
discovering in stone
a reality
that ellipsis which move us
with imagery's juxtapositions
to the structural murals
of our century's insight
as in your homage to Picasso
reconnects to shape our survival.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS' DESIRE


Everything I experienced
on stage as an adolescent
knowing the poet is within
making you alive
in the acts of shattered lives.

ARTHUR MILLER


Visiting Salem
in totalitarian courtrooms
of political witchraft
from clever metaphysical
fascist magicians
by a dock of political clocks
loaded from every country's gods
to shipped drowned victims
knowing a century's betrayal
for what is capable and culpable
at the logos of an unholy grail
eyes an involuntary bottomless pit.

HAROLD PINTER

Sophisticated malice
in a flash and flesh
tattooed in your acts
staged for a painful nexus
of lights out from
a writer and director
unconsoled by your century
seeking for recognition.

EDWIN ALBEE

Never muted
in a moving space
of language's cheek
as in motion and emotions
in your plays on words.

WARHOL'S ACHIEVEMENT

Your entitled cosmos
in your raised eyelashes
are brushed away
by a condescending philanthropy
of turning objects around
for the hungry flower children
looking for any place, a space
hustled for your Factory,
all barrier displays fall down
by novice art forms
shock us trans nationally
with a co- opting intelligence
in a kind of unmuzzled
experimental free rental
of unsatisfied cavalcade
making you feel awakened,
yet falling for free entertainment
post the pimps and dealers
of an imprecating bourgeois Kultur
coming into impolite company
boxed in and outside
by the spoiled commercialism
of a novel invention as risks
in film, sex, uncritical thinking,
to remake an ageist surrealism
into a nihilist convention
liberated was, in itself
Warhol's second cultural revolution,
the first being his unique
children's drawings.

LOTRINGER'S NOVA CONVENTION

Counter culture
Nova Convention
at Columbia,
hungering for change
in those wild revolutionary days
of the flesh and pot
wishing for liberation
made from a body
of pop surreal culture,
John Cage showed up
Patti Smith,
Ginsberg offered a kiss
Burroughs a puff
and Zappa his laughter
yet even in high semiotics
you never forgot
those early days of hiding
in the fascist abyss.

JEAN STAROBINSKI'S INK DREAMS

With the snap and stamp
of historical fate
"Staro" in the shadows
investigates our melancholy
dropping ink dreams
within a doctor of the mind,
your hurting face and intellect
opens to a celluloid century
with grey screens
onto the totalitarian smoke
with every breath
of defecated air
from grave digging fascism,
you escaped from Hades,
unlike Benjamin
by a moment in time
turning an orchestral timpani
of musical notes
into a life time echo
and epoch of peace
keeping your innocence
like Rousseau,
playing the kettledrum
and piano of warning
for our post war aeon.

JUAN GELMAN'S NIGHT

Exiled,alone, Sephardic,
like some of my family
in the Argentine
your voice pure
in your original
and adoptive tongues
never forgetting
the social justice
of the prophetic voice
or David's songs.

JUAN RAMON JIMENEZ
 (1881-1958)


Uneasy time
for a suffering surrrealist
in a consciousness
of exiled betrayal
only the silence of your eyes
in the orphaned age
of death squads
harbors your memory
in all of us.

GUILLEN'S TOMORROW

The clock appeals
to Guillen's tomorrow
his words a language
leaving us an alembic life
in mass absences of silence
when reaction rose
for a speechless time
in the Thirties,
even the rain has erased
a dialogue with himself
inscribed and absorbed
an era's revolutionary poet
he has not forgotten
to arrange the lodging
for a visiting stranger,
Guillen's shadow
will be alongside those lovers
of the Spanish tongue
whom the sea and earth
has enlightened in their exile
not far from your shore
for a welcoming solidarity
on your child's library wall.

ALBERTI'S ANGELS


Losing nothing
on a raw wounded
city day
in Madrid, Paris
or the Argentine
the rain debates
with itself
your motioning eyes
moist against the shade
of a park bench
the sea shines
a distance from
across the plain
holding out wings
of a bird.

YVES BONNEFOY'S CHANCE

Yves Bonnefoy's
one game of chance
at the inn
his hand trembles
out the window sill
closing out the cold
once lodged with flowers
by the snow fields
admitting to the sun
his shell shocked hour
of rising at the form
by the sea waves to him
along the boulevard
dodging the kisses
of warmth on the fireplace,
logs seeing the archery
signs of the old nobility
on restless future targets
by a chess board
of bishop and pawns
to transform all the puzzles
as he close his eyes
the water plants expand.

BRODSKY'S NIGHT MEMORY

A hair sleeps
on your chest
as you wipe away
an itch of loneliness
in the Gulag's exile
reinventing the silence
without any act of shame
near your unburied soul
in the historical company
of generations here
in mad wintry mornings
suffocating as snowfalls
trickle in a nightmare
below your frozen room
with an unease
of predatory ants
on your chest
you have mirrored
short breaths
wishing for
a one word poem
to explain your exile
for a future malediction
a dread of night memory
until your untimely death.

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

Grateful for you
conversing
in the icy silence
after the fires
are briefly put out,
may a whirlwind
of consummate flame
in horizontal letters
resolve our wounds
when every poem
is a memoir
in our silvered century.

ANAIS NIN

A painful rotogravure
in a drifting era
memoirs shaded
against a light photo
of faced down times.                                                                                                                       

EMILY DICKINSON


Q and A
in a relative path
of understanding
yet equivocal
as a puzzled memory
in your everyday ribbons
a miraculous fortune
of unconquerable voices
in the temperate zone.

WALLACE STEVENS

Language abandoned
on green keys,
lost lines sleep
in your ripened pupils,
on a parched nap
eyesore from a new lexicon
yet filled with leaves
in your letters margins
burnished and turning
out of your shutters
trying to lack shadows.

HA-LEVY

Visionary glimpse from exile
against oppression,
body of a living spirit
covered with ashen dust
on a banished voice
wishing for oranges
to carry on
your animated fate
slain for who you are
in a desolate journey home.

BEN NICHOLSON


Recast as casement
in the abstract
a straw man
of history
you saw the uncoiled dots
and remodeled objects
remolding our tangled
spacial universe
of rebuilding of a world.

BARNETT NEWMAN

Silence before
the immigrant souls
from the pale
now at your stations
of the cross
bled by fascist armies
tortured and startled
at Auschwitz to the Gulag
by those who were taught
in school to choose life
blued to death.

HIKMET

Not so the fingers open
when the imprisoned flesh
from days of torture
holds out and onto a future
rope.

ARTAUD

Fiend of language
in the albatross
of loss and chaos
among a friendless stage
of collapse.

YEHUDA AMICHAI

Swaying flame
from exiled survivors,
anonymously mute
you console history
for the unthinking,
a short pause among
the jaws of Job
from lawyers frosted cause
over an elongated clause
in a desert silence
not blinded by meaning
in the synagogue syllables
of fiery language.

GEOFFREY HILL

Trembling from a historical
predicate of forces
Anglo-American
disenfranchised by language
riding out the media
on two bloodshot changed horses
closed in from the Apocalypse
with schizophrenic's voices
heard whispering in the corridors
sleep walking in the university's
lounges of now dissonant
fashionable aunts and uncles
hiding their once Chamberlain
umbrellas in the homecoming 
of fascism for personalism
brushes you by
with the perigean conceit
of a metaphysical arcade
you do not doubt the metaphor
giving you a heart ache
for our time's space of nihilism,
less you embrace the pain
of the tetragrammaton
in the last ninth circle
holding onto the metaphor
but watching your back
like Lot among the chosen.

CELAN

Only history's exhausted
tongue's waits on
the trampled
jack boots
for after the flood
of the antibody time
an oven bird
from dry land
sprouts its mesomorphic
green skeleton far from oceans
and continents
to inhibit and exhibit
on the cloaca of straw mats
its true naturalized testimony
and after the face saving
deniers of a collapsed age
with its own fossilized gods
(after Alfred Toynbee
and Rosenberg) cults
evaporate from a laparotomy
of language walls crumble
on so called Kultur's CULTURE
by advanced mad men
having had their antisemitic
racist rants exposed 347632
times time as in a carnival
or Circus Maximus
at deliberate exhibits portrayed
by spiritism's magicians
in ossified seances
of human abandonment
behind European galleries
and galleys earth bound for death
factotums and factories
of lost souls in tangled plots,
your voice is unrelenting
for cold red eyes half opened.

JOHN ASHBERY


Words unfrozen
in a lexicon's legacy
when a grim conned love
in a consummate hit list
took us over
with distracted patinas
in a shirtless hunger
from painful desolation
in a century's mangroves
opened up voided short circuits
of electrocuted observers
when our era is abandoned
for art's new found consciousness
exposed in a fast moving
expository of deconstruction
when seminars are held
for past future neo Platonic bans
that the chilling Republic
hands out forty year old diplomas
and new aged dioramas
sculptured in a cultured
Dionysian canvas.

MARK DI SUVERO

Existential vitality
incarnated in stone
in half- tones
of integrated object
d'art as sighting
modernity.

SVEVO

Not believed
except by James Joyce
in Trieste
with a language's ways
of reality's demolition 
of Zeno's myth.

FERNANDO PESSOA


Words assimilated
in a Cabbalistic chain
waking deep nights
of a hidden origin
from the erasure
of a posture of diction
and contradiction.

GABRIELA MISTRAL 1889-1957

Alembic voice
from alpha and omega
stitched from words
the stone a distance
from the still waters
by beds of new buds
as purple orchards rise
fleeing the loneliness
of earth's innocence
in a quicksand of nature
over heights of the earth's
unsealed as Solomon's song
on high holidays
or Tenebrae
your sorrowful voyage
reaches out in volumes
of poetic perfume
incarnated to a myth's
opacity in your language's
mysterious communion
into a synagogue
of words as lovely tercet
chimes of stars has scattered
your winds of our unquiet.

     HELEN FRANKENTHALER
     WINTER HUNT, 1958

     At the moment
     birdsong vocalizes
     is what a vision
     mingled with a black
     savor does not distance
     us in your space
     from being creation
     in art's starry reality
     at the human edge
     of time.

(Aime Cesiare, in memory)

Departure

Certain history
fails the stars
dialectically
the language
perforates
our capture
in pure spirit
recalling the islands
from a voice
liberated
in time's resitance
which cannot decompose
unfolding on twin seas.

ROTHKO

Nameless in a motage
of iron gray days
no longer filial
in your asphyxiated room
irradiated from alembic signs
on unsigned canvas letters
apparitions,flashbacks
in an Orphic underground
of untouchable recriminations
following a pillory
of patchy swings
in ocular mood music.

RAISSA MARITAIN

Raissa,
needing again to hear your voice
at Repunzel's suffering places
during the Second World war,
Raissa gathering words
as a tribulation rises as incense
from a high tower,
Raissa like Repunzel
letting down her hair
to an enraged earth,
but I am by the French mountains
of resistance
to listen by the ashes
at a philosopher's stone,
your voice from sacred wells
of pure language still lives
on the green laurel foliage
between a few grave petals,
if you ask me
life is always double crossed
by agape love.

CAVALLON'S INITIAL DRAWING
For #95

Colors in meshes
juxtaposed in combination
unravels by silent arrangement
in a sharp pencil
absorbed into your space
unfolding paint becoming ours
as we walk away
we are dazzled for another
knowing gaze
the indivisible abstraction
which becomes our still life
in progress

GIACOMETTI'S DEATH

January 11, 1966

No light obscured
or distance not shared
full of stone and rubble
in a world of trouble
you emerge shining
unscathed on your own
in the space you clear
by silent rocks on loan.

Nakian

You never forget history
or myth in your gallery
as Venus may embarass
a future
Lucrece, Juno or Minerva
or in the Judgment of Paris
Caesar,Hecuba or Gorky,
for those of us whom in art 
we live and die
in series of "The Europa"
or themes on Hiroshima
is your abstract expressionist cry.

MAHLER'SECOND 

You cannot play Mahler
his Symphony no. 2
in your relaxed parlor
with nothing else to do
for "The Resurrection"
is a pass over to heaven
for Gentile, Christian and Jew,
not a time for a confection
a bit of lemon
or even unleavened bread
won't due,
but a chorus of creation
from all ashes and loss
rises us to cross over
with music of salvation
for the forgiving and loving
the living and the dead.

"TO FELLINI" BY GUSTON

Cinematic meshes
of black and monochrome
in "The White Sheik"
and "I Vitelloni " to eternities
of my matinee double feature
adrift in darkness
at my favorite art theater
projecting a camera obscura
after school, escaping
to the savor of the museum
in a lecture room on Guston
seen in a different light. 

PASOLINI 'S WOUND


Half of your death
withers from rumor
of unarmed tremors
an exile on earth
anarchic in spirit man
riddled in a breath
undercover and film
in pulse of consciousness
resembling the justice
in others,
dispossessed in black
and white,
at the ending,
violently subdued.

DAVE SMITH'S "MEDALS OF DISHONOR"

Ash dead voices
encrusted for history
thrown overboard
in a silence conferring art
alone shares solitude
of anxiety's errant
existence engaged
from instincts of resistance
in liquid faces of atrophy.

DANTE'S ILLUSTRATIONS

Ruminations of chained
darkness transfigured
in pools of light
weighed down
in dissociated self pity
outlasting time
and you, Robert R.
in your assemblege
subject us to a psyche
of our middle ages.

DEGAS AND VALERY

The ruse and muse
of painter and poet
haphazardly fall
in together as guests
at table
by motioning the favor
of satirical flow
as festive gadflies
catch their images
in printed moments
drawn to spill
the night language colors
in blush and brush.

BAUDELAIRE'S "FAVORS OF THE MOON"


Early reading
when myth is missing
there is no poem
or painting recompensed
as in Pollock's "Moon Woman"
in a redressed worn
space of time
when paint and language
turn its canvas head and page
to each vagabond's caprice
and land into a student's lap
as paroxysms and phantasms
head first.

PIERRE REVERDY
(1889- 1960)

The sea remains
ephemeral as words
traduced during
a soccer game,
watching space age
moments as montage
or five shells in a net
from day break
fishermen reaching out
on the shore
a morning drifts by
to open air sun rays
interweaving at
a grey shore distance
as half promised light.

  NUMBER 29

glass shards
shells, wires
of Pollock's time,
like Cornell's
"Medici Slot Machine"
objects shift
the mustache
on Duchamp's
"Mona Lisa"
the unmending
remains in silence
of subversive wisdom
advancing our reabsorbed
light of hours at the museum
riddled by the risk takers.

AT POLLOCK'S BLUE POLES

Altered prolific hues
in fluent ambience
searching these passages
of a student handbook of art
with restless calligraphy
of antecedent gestures
immersed arrangements
in unschooled chiaroscuro
as scrolled ink dreams
of aspired fugal atonality
washes into light's supposition
and scales instantly shaded
crisscross current climates
neither recognized or apologized
to nature's temperaments
slowly changing related space
transformed into our time
into patinas' innovations absorbed
as yellow booked automatism
from assimilated understudies
who today watch a web modulated
by string theory's abnegation
expecting metaphorical science
to reason all our abstractions
by ambiguous interior imagery
forged by formulaic answers
in unsigned metallic language
when even local color resonates
but cannot resolve in a canvas
all subjective honed questions.

STRAVINSKY PIANO SONATA


Railing metamorphosis
of the apprehensive keys
half hunted pages
of the sublime
trembling hands
on the piano
fully in space and spate
of a dispersed tone
long sought consciosness
in rekindled memory.

LEOPOLD MOZART

Payments of love
cannot dislocate notes
to an unconquered genius
in unique moods shadows
gestures of century's wonder
in solitude albums
when a sanctum forms
beyond effortless
yet elevated breath
of legends, scenes, farces
from communicating themes
escaping a doubtless score
of vignettes as metamorphosis
remade in divine disclosure.

SOUTINE PAINTING


We could not get away
from the green visibility
of your attainable paintings
on silent mornings
from venerable gardens
of trusted grasslands
from high hills
stunned by the dolor
of tall dunes
shivering from patinas
of your own hunger
without calculation
into listening to birdsong
breathing in the dazzle
of music envoys of spring
in windy breaths
of vocative echoes.

AT VIA MALA

When the flooding sun
is your only friend
from blinded whirlings
as you walked
many kilometers
by city buildings
when haphazard fate
from escaping shadows
dazzled the ripened dawn
you paint in loneliness
distracted by the past
in the likeness of walls
and you as a guest of nature.

ONE ANGEL OF KLEE

A moment in time
when your lava colors
a century of ash,
an eye lid opens
the canvas and draws
on a volcanic century
from unguarded bodies
and one angel of Klee
escapes history
with underground signs
from a brushing incognito
of solo recognition. 

MAX ERNST

In the delerium
from a reprobate rain
under the port bridge
of a New York harbor
an exiled painter and poet
under the longitude
of a transparent wind
will transform colors
into disguised patina
and words into sounds
in a life's runaway time
of political invisibility.

MONDRIAN'S REVISION

Absorbed by screens
in the city loft
brushes by the ripe orange
of bloodshot eyes
at random echoes
when living art draws out
a post war work by hands
to accompany outlines
of a visionaries discovery
on a luminous symmetry
sensing the ironic space
of fluid mythologies
and spheres of lost time.

SOLITUDE AT DAWN
(for Goran Sonnevi)

Before blackbirds
spy you writing
in a corner deck
shadows and wings
enlighten your sleep
with the sparkle
of the sea's landscape's
forgetfulness no longer
covers the nest's burial
or a gesture of words
no longer shivers
in the snow's transformation
but a morning of reason
is dispersed by a breeze,
your first fire glows
in the earth's center
survives war's abyss
with words of a peace sign
over your many colored coat.

LASSITUDE
(for Osip Mandelstam
in Memoriam)

Enough of weariness
with floodlights
to pierce our shadows
against the sun
when the Neva waters
rise out of our shades
of uprootedness
exile our poets
smashing heavy icons
of winter's prey
pockets our ironies
from our generation's psyche
to embrace loss
in an absence of lives
from our scars
letting lethargy
spill over and wave on
intertwined myths
of historical animation
in memory, nature, love
we, like thunderous Mars
turn our words
into red wreaths
at graveside.

AN ALBERT MARQUET'S POSTER


A painting aflame
with its fiery brush
waves at Trouville
near shadows of birds
outside exiled streets
the sky wind tranforms
a landscape's view
in a river of deafened blue
shutters rise from the harbor
in an insomnia morning
embodying the canvas.

C.H. SISSON
(1912-2003)

You know our planet's news
all the terrible acts
done in silence
in the underground shadows
seen against
this century's mad sky,
taking off the manacles
of the damned
on playground of bullies
swept away
by the arresting fire
of those long hours
in dust
and the sweat of missions,
despite hunger's atrocities
we are still astonished
by your word joy.

KAFKA'S SISTER


They came early morning
she had taken a bath
and her luggage was ready
for the train
she was not known
like her brother
who also preferred
anonymity and silence
soon she will be
merely a number
among the countless
but in frenzied lights
of the destination
the stars want to acknowledge her
and listen to her voice
when an eye opens
on the world.

JAMES JOYCE'S TIME

I am blank and attic bound
there is paper beside me
like wings.

Knowing the sun high drawn
resembles myself
skeptical and unreasonable.

These unexpected ebony showers
answering silence
and a split second praise.

Competing over the blackbird
your attention
on the windowsill.

GREEN LIME TREES
( Anna Akhmatova,in memoriam)


Missing the green lime trees
of your imagination
the spring is empty
except for the clouds
exploding around you.

Four hours silent
after an ill tempered nap,
the leaves shiver
you wake by noonday
alive in a frenzied
breath

Shine always
in the sun, Anna
renew the frozen Neva
take the grayest sky
and turn into shadowless light.


From Poetica 2
Snark PUBLISHING ,IL
2006 available from the author

MANDELSTAM'S  REPOSE

A wind from pines
where you sleep
in terse silence
good angels run over
the Siberian snow.

BLACK SKY
(for Vladislov Khodasevich)

Black sky has secrets today
whispers and flutters
in the wind and snow
a downpour of chords and words.

Bicycle in hand by gravestones
a boy touches birch, pine, ash
white flakes on his hand
March is frozen in memory.


From Poetica 2, 2006
Snark Publishing,IL.
available through the author

KHLEBNIKOV'S CENTURY

On a daybed
you tell fate
to bullet-bite
after all,
life is Russian roulette.

Writing in a black book
without advice
of gambling notes
the rope or wedding ring
nothing to shame the secret police
or capital punishment
is only a matter of address.

Rising early
on vodka and borscht
in liquid's silence
a gun goes crazy
next revolving door,
what ambient motives
for the reading public
to judge.

YANNIS RITSOS


Matriculating by the sea
mind racing to childhood
over pale countryside horses
with a city hunger
on an island of exiles
hours pass by the sails
hearing shouts
for a soccer match
your sneakers are bloody
by imperishable walls
the colonel's shirt is nameless,
but not for long.

BAUDELAIRE'S LAMENT

Days grow fatigued
extended by forgetfulness
stumbled on silence
from knothole shadows
with undelivered kisses
on an web of letters
except for the Delacroix
at your fire's shrouded eye
answering the dark
against the window wall
with jolts of moonlight
on crabbed night streets.

YEHUDA AMICHAI
(IN MEMORIAM)

Peace cannot hide you
second guessing
a random body of branches
blinded by an embrace
of the full moon
on nature's drawn initials
over a juniper tree
under lunar landscapes
announcing harbingers
of summer's night music
circling a ripened nature
you, Yehuda losing yourself
lost in nascent fields
of orange groves
branching into memory
making the sea open
for your friend of first fire
from an abandoned last light
leaning against a well
in the water hole desert
erasing your absence.

Poetry minds its own visionary patterns, enlarged by greater atmospheres.

History, like poetry, always has a parenthesis from a global scribe.

Freud, a mystic rationalist; Einstein, a rational mystic; Nietzsche, an
irrational mystic.

Gogol tried to burn his own novel credulity for God.

The bifocals of the sciences see details only in perspective.

Wisdom needs a healthy eye to witness near and far.

The brain is portal to the soul; the body immortalizes the brainchild's soul.

Sleep washes through the solvency of our dream lives.

Lapidary epigrams feed our timeless epigraphs.

Our past counterparts echo from distant cultures, art colonies, and our future infrastructures.

THE NEPHEW

I, Jean Nadeau, was born in the time of Vichy, my literary father and pianist mother taken away to Drancy, and then to the camps. A Great-Aunt Sophia and my Uncle Marcel took me in briefly, then to a Catholic family, who sent me to an Oxford professor, James Mountain, who arranged for my education with a tutor Raymond Farr.

Fortunately, Raymond spoke French and German as we read novels by Flaubert, Proust, Goethe and Mann. My life had its own elective affinities. After the war Sophia and Marcel visited me and left me a legacy. That was the last of my family ties. They soon passed on, embittered by history.

I would go on day trips with James to Oxford. I began to study on the piano and violin giving recitals at lovely homes in my formative years.

"The exposure, Jean, will help you develop, and Raymond will see to that you have the best teachers of the Russian or Italian music methods."

"Thank you James. It's good to have a pal in you. But I'm only with adults."

"That was Sophia's wish and you are already an adult."

"Childhood is only preparation work."

"Why only work?"

"Raymond saw you writing your diary on Friday."

"I write my maxims, private thoughts, stories and am composing an opera called "The Tutor." I have already shown an outline to Raymond's friend Pollini at Covent Garden."

"I am glad you two get along well. My physical condition keeps me from being as active for your training as I would like."

In five years, James would be gone, but Jean inherits the house. Raymond takes me to Paris and we walk by the Seine.

"Perhaps we should live here and I could take early classes at the   Sorbonne."

"That can be arranged with an interview."

"I never want to lose your friendship, Ray."
 
"It's yours for the asking or the taking."

"I have written the opera "The Tutor" in French."

"Is it about me?"
 
"Us. Pollini has helped me through correspondence and will arrive in two weeks for my presentation."

Soon "The Tutor" is performed in Paris and in New York to rave reviews. Pollini becomes Jean's manager and arranger. Raymond wants to be a tutor for life. Old letters from Jean's parents arrive from a lawyer, telling him of their love for him.

When performing his opera in Warsaw Jean goes to pay tribute to his parents. There, Jean meets Anna, a pianist who too lost her family and quickly become friends, and eventually they tour together.

The comedy of life is often lived upon a tragic stage and the tragedy of life is often acted out upon a comedic stage.

Probity is the poetry of prose.

Myth dreams while reason sleeps.

Masks reveal more than they reveal or conceal.

Genius is infinity in a finite focus thinking generically.

Genius is the ability's achievement of perfection's impossibility.

Poets are born for solitude; prophets, for persecution.

Poetry draws us in brush strokes of color, form and textures.

For a play write the sleeping senses wake in a theater of dreams.

A genius at work is a child at play.

Childhood is life's paradigm.

Repetition is the leverage of time.

Poetry is quickened by the very pulse of life.

A poet dies daily except to words in absence. The religious die daily
to the world in omnipresence.
 
The mind's light travels at the speed of sight.

Love's gravitas is a space both terrestrial and celestial as our gravity.

Harmony sanitizes a sense of darkness from the logic of the loveless.

Tenderness seeks a personal sobriety and finds a universal compass of compassion.

Those locked out appreciate the value of a key.

We resist the temptations of others for the unguarded virtues found only in ourselves.

As rainbow colors to the colorblind is as a kaleidoscope to the unseen light.

Compression is the human dynamic of expression.

Music has the timbre of the beloved's voice.

Our nature is a paradox of animal magnetism and human sentience.

Infinity moves our wheels of perfect tuning and turning.

The teleology of our existence shares a finality of love.  

Perfection will eye to reflect in a future pupil's insight.

If we do not write, draw or paint its elements will compose in another.

The mind does not mind to think.

Paranoia is the maddest form of loneliness.

Cube is the substance of a square; circle is the shadow of a sphere.

Tools of thought may rule more than schools of thought.

Those objects converge from the same source flow.

Life's solution are found in absolution or in the absolute.

TWO SPANISH POETS:
SALINAS AND HERNANDEZ

The warmth
of your foreign body
in the duende
without maps
on a long journey
from one night city
to a neon boundary
in a cafe at noonday,
a traveler among
the unknown miracles
of mysterious survival,
only street poets
hungry for love,
guided by the sea,
wind and rain may fathom
and you, Pedro Salinas,
promised nothing
by the world,
gave to us your own


MIGUEL'S PASSING
(for Miguel Hernandez, 1910-1942)

Solitude still stains
the prison walls,
and you, Miguel,
wasting away
on sleepless coverlets
untreated for T.B.,
damned only
for burning love songs
and resistance
to a century's wounds
the opens the sun
which trapped you
under lemon trees at noon
in mutable images
only now recovered.

MOVIE BRATS

a novella by B.Z. Niditch


PRELUDE

I, Victor Nitkin, am an orphan born to genius. My parents left Leningad during its revolutionary metamorphosis from St. Petersburg, fleeing first to Warsaw, then to Weimar Germany.

My mother was a concert pianist and my PhD father wrote articles on "humanism" until Jews became out of fashion in the National Socialist era. So, between Bolshevism and fascism I was born and then borne away to the New World. My mother and father were lost to the camps in which I was conceived only to be displaced.

Adopted by my mother's three starstruck sisters, formerly from the pale of Russia, I am brought to Boston mid-century. Stalin and McCarthy's voices booms in the capital of the West. With one ear listening to the radio broadcast, I eat an orange and try not to day dream about the atom's mushroom cloud.

I do not realize that "genius" is a commodity in the New World. My own talent is relentlessly musical playing "The Moonlight Sonata" while other children toy with "Twinkle, Twinkle,Little Star."


Chapter One

OUR VICTOR'S DEBUT

I live on Commonwealth Avenue where young couples wheel their new baby carriages on green lawns and the Boston Terriers are holding football practice. On the baby grand, I am vigorously practicing Chopin and Beethoven etudes. Eugene Goldensohn, my only friend from Latin School has been invited over for my recital. Aunt Vera calls him the "prol soul" and refuses to understand our friendship. Vera considers herself my stage mother and keeps her vigilant eye on my melodious career. What can I do about it. Just about the same as my circumcision.

What am I being groomed for,anyway. It sounds momentous,almost
miraculous! Aunt Vera wants me to play in the Hollywood Bowl, that Hollywood is better than the Borscht Belt, but is it really American success? I am going to realize it is Hollywood which forms us in its own image and likeness, vasts more of us and governs us.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

In this novella, B.Z. Niditch takes a serio-comic look at the tumultuous world of Hollywood and beyond during an era of political, sexual and religious uprisings.

Meet Victor Nitkin, progeny of a concert pianist and humanist father; his Leftist friend Eugene, his stage mother Aunt Vera; and the ever present movie director Slobodkin, who documents Victor's story.

A playwright and poet, as well as short story writer and novelist,
B.Z. Niditch brings his distinctive vision and style to a work that
is sure to entertain and provoke. Critics have compared B.Z.'s absurdist fiction to the Russian Daniil Kharms.

MOVIE BRATS, published  in 2002 by Four-Sep publishers, is available from the author.