The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
And A Love Song
(New and selected poetry from 1985-2007)
by Larry L. Dill
It is a suffering, to have a sea—
No care how blue—
Between your soul,
and you.
--Emily Dickinson
It’s a distillation you want to achieve.
You never get there but you never leave.
Poetry wants it to be simple and true.
But then you’re not poetry, now, are you.
--Larry L. Dill
Honky Hymn
Seems like only
an old worn out
white writer
would find anything
remarkable,
much less poetic,
about the Greensboro, North Carolina
bus station at 7 am.
It’s clean.
There’s a patio outside
to sit and drink coffee
on a cool, cloudless
summer morning.
Coffee out of a vending machine.
But coffee, none the less.
Hot and black.
I’m waiting on a Greyhound bus.
Most people here,
mostly black,
are out on the other side,
transferring from
one city bus to another,
most likely headed for
some dead end job
for meager pay
from a miserly master.
More than likely
a rich white man
or his drunken wife.
I never got very far
As a white man, myself.
The patio is quiet
and mostly deserted.
Maybe it’s the hour.
More likely it’s because
there is a white policeman
standing out here
to keep the bus station
from becoming anything
more than a bus station.
But then one
black man walks
through the patio,
No doubt on his way
to his dead end
job somewhere.
He has a bag that looks
like it might be his
lunch.
And he is singing
that old Sam Cooke
tune, “Workin’ on a
chain gang.” And
he has perfect pitch
and that perfect
black man blues voice
that every white
pop singer envies, and
every white man, really
ought to.
It’s a fatalistic voice.
Humble, angelic and proud
all at once.
You think to yourself,
If I had a voice
like that, I’d be rich.
But he’s probably just
thinking about going
down to see Mary Ann
tonight. Maybe singing
her a song to
soften up her heart.
I’ll be home before dark myself.
Maybe I’ll try that, too.
Greensboro, N.C.
June 21, 2007
Ambivalence
Looking out on the world the way you do,
as if it were somehow the subject
of a poem you were writing,
you change the names of things,
denying their ordinary meanings
in order to feel you have perspective.
It is a conjuring
and a dereliction.
A singer of songs is one thing,
a poet another.
The angry voices from below the line
mock your treachery.
Your hollow arches rise and fall
like children’s toys.
Even honest cynicism
sounds foolish in the face of famine.
The joys of love are best kept secret in the bed,
the imperfections of the body revised
in candle shadowed passion. But what of words?
The streets scream torture.
Everything we wear reminds us of the stolen lives.
How can you look at a beautiful woman
without feeling shame as well as longing?
Austin, Texas--1987
Searching for a place in the fold
he wanted the bad boy part:
talking dirty
and talking about the
bourgeois self-righteousness of art.
He pretended, like everyone else,
that life had a meaning he could understand.
Take away the journalism and the middle class
and just give me a woman with convoluted logic
and legs all the way up to her ass.
A cynicism solemn as sadness
follows after the spent rain.
A chorus of after-drops
dripping in the gutter
insisting on the pastness
of the past
with the precision
of Chinese water torture.
Like the trickling residue
of lovemaking,
something better came before,
some rightness we are unable to sustain.
Bitter irony inflicts even the moon.
It won’t stay lit.
And we are not cats.
We cannot sit…
without sorrow.
Bag Lady Syndrome
From the bottom of the pool,
Fixed stars govern a life.
--Sylvia Plath
Leaning over the pool,
squatting like a squaw,
she looked at her reflection,
her self worth hollow as the moon.
She had seen herself before
and before, in the plate glass corridor.
And the mannequins had laughed at her disguise.
She had killed them with her eyes.
Her changelessness resounded
like a rock sunk deeply in her soul.
She could not escape the grieving.
A woman in a house without windows.
At night. Surrounded by the fictions of her own light.
When she met a man
the small transparent wishes
of a lonely life
would spirit him away.
Design
These things can be said in many ways:
the “truths” we call them,
Prayers, really… wishes.
What we want we try to make other
people understand;
and we tell them we are half-way
to heaven and that they should see
the importance of that and help
with the driving home.
We ratify our longings with religious fervor
Hoping not that God will hear our prayers so much as
that they will be channeled into the ears of
the poor penitent beside us.
We pray to each other for grace.
We see each other too often and under
such terrible circumstances not to recognize
the enormous mess we make of each other’s lives.
We beg forgiveness both because we need these
people and, due to the accidental imperatives of love,
because we know that they need us.
Existentialism Re-Examined
Given the hours as they pass,
our lives would pass for nothing.
But something else happens.
Inspired by each others passions,
moistened by our own sweaty dreams,
we are able somehow
To climb out of our skins
and sweep with sudden shifts like smoke
In other directions,
gaining for ourselves the character of spirit.
Thought does not so much become flesh
As flesh becomes thought.
And our thoughts weave new histories
Like mysterious baskets
afloat on an open sea.
Extreme Unction
I wanted to go to Zanzibar
to lie in a wordless night.
I wanted an African moon
to shed a blue-green African light.
I wanted the smell of cloves
dancing ghostlike through the trees.
I wanted drums and I wanted high seas.
I wanted the souls of animals
to fill my animal heart.
I wanted love and I wanted art.
I wanted an Arab woman
gently pouring Arab tea
and I wanted death to have to
catch its breath and sigh
before it seized me.
Fairy Tales
In Santa Claus and true love,
we never stop believing.
Granddad bought a two acre lot in Ft Worth when he was 62
and built a large garage to live in till he build his house.
When I was a child I played on the concrete outline
he had laid for the foundation of the house that never got built. I walked around the edges like a tightrope walker, arms outstretched for balance. Twenty years later we had a family reunion at Granddaddy’s house.
Grandmother was there and all the grown children
and the young grandchildren.
My dad and his brother and my cousin and I tore down the foundation for the house with sledge hammers
and made a nice grassy front yard.
Grandmother and Granddaddy accepted the
garage with two extra rooms built onto the side, as their final home.
They had, after all, according to my aunt, started out together in a tent.
Grandmother lived another 5 or 6 years and Granddaddy
another 5 or 6 beyond.
He was gardening when he fell and broke his hip at 93.
A month later he was dead.
He’d driven mule trains from Dallas to Santa Fe.
He moved his family from one tenant farm to another
in the blizzard of ’31. After the depression he found work as a carpenter.
He never stopped believing in his dreams.
And neither have I.
But occasionally I tear down some of my grander schemes
And just build another room onto the side of what I already know I have.
How a blind man be a painter?
He paint what he think he sees
What he get down on de paper
May not look at all like trees
But a blind man be a painter
More than any man wid eye
It ain’t de question bout his paintin’
It’s de tear de blind man cries.
I always wanted to talk with the women.
Naturally, when I was a young man,
I just assumed it was because I was always horny.
But now, as an old man,
I realize that horniness was only a part of it.
I realize that regardless of sexiness or beauty
I just prefer the company of women to men.
Perhaps an unfulfilled fixation on my mother?
Maybe.
But the truth is: I think I have always felt instinctively
that women have more to say about living
than men do.
I don’t know why I feel that way.
Maybe if I was a woman I would.
I bought an anthology of San Francisco poets at the Goodwill bookstore in Austin.
I hadn’t been to San Francisco yet, but I was in one of my San Francisco poet kind of moods and it seemed like San Francisco style poetic justice to be buying an eight year old copy of the “latest” San Francisco poetry that someone had donated to charity.
San Francisco poets seem to have this “scum of the earth” kind of nobility that I identify with when I’m feeling like the scum of the earth. I could imagine 3 or 4 of them showing up at my local Goodwill store eight years after publication to autograph my new used copy of their book.
“We came by car,” they would say, pointing outside to some piece of junk that looked like it wouldn’t make it across town, much less the country. One of them, the San Francisco poetess of my dreams.
“We have a message from the others, ‘Stay out of jail,’” they said in unison, “ ‘get laid when you can, and to thine own self be true.’”
I get in these San Francisco moods about every time a woman leaves me or I drive one away. Seems like about 15 years had passed since I’d been fixin’ to go to San Francisco and start being a poet. But then I’d get mixed up with a woman and …well…
There was a time when I would have had the energy to go. But the war got me and marriage got me and children got me and graduate school got me and God knows, alcohol got me good. I flunked every test. But like a fool I kept trying…keep on trying. Like a fool I keep planning my assault on San Francisco the way my grandmother planned her funeral.
Ego seems to be a key word out there in San Francisco. At least according to my eight year old guide book. My ego is like a pile of doady wood. “Nerves” my mother would say.
“Not enough exercise,” my San Francisco poetess says as she leads me into the fitting room at Goodwill and steps out of her jeans (she’s really from Lubbock). “You need nourishment,” she whispers.
No fool like an old fool
You know,
I’m trying to maintain relationships.
Males and females.
Sex is great if you can get it.
But far more important is just friendship.
You see it slipping away
all through your life.
It starts out as a kind of burden
when you are young.
But then, with time, you realize
that nothing, really, is more important.
You just get cantankerous and
independent in your old age.
And then you get lonely.
Everybody else’s opinions
seem so tepid compared to yours, you think.
So ill informed.
But still you miss everybody.
Sometimes, in desperation,
you just want to say,
I didn’t mean anything I said.
I was a fool.
Mirage
The desert winds
burn and push against the desert sand.
My mind is seen to waste away,
never much more than a sorrowful song
to break the silence.
When I looked at you,
and you at me,
the shame was given over
and received like little gifts,
the longings borne directly by the eyes,
the sins forgiven in advance.
But what you see is not exactly
what you get, you see.
I didn’t get you.
I could have understood you better
by your breathing and your skin.
But the failure
keeps me going
like a disembodied heart.
Another night alone with the lonely stars,
Your face before me
clearly out of reach.
Another chance
to teach myself to sing.
New York Blues
I wanted to be all things to all men
and especially to all women.
Stretching myself thin
I haven’t really done much good at all.
Mostly life’s been lost in the tick of time.
The stage is a room without the discipline of walls;
and the audiences go home to their rooms that have them;
and the poet for all seasons
is always closing down another show,
peeling away in his private cell
the caked illusions of his arrogations;
and his powers of instrumentation
are always fading in the darkening hall.
I wanted to be worshipped.
But even God could not have held you in his arms
the way I did.
And for all I’ve lost, I’ve gained
too much to remember.
Someday I’ll go back to the desert
and lord my lines over the lizards and the snakes
and line my memories with you
and pray as I always do
for a curtain of rain.
--New York City, 1989
Pathetic Fallacy
Reality is only the beginning.
--Wallace Stevens
Clamoring with scientific
and spiritual sensibilities
we condescend now
to the arbitrary stoicism of trees,
silent in their knowing.
We try to reach back to their beginnings
and ours
when we were equals in innocence.
Where did we go wrong?
Turning against them like madmen
chopping away at our own roots.
We know now how the leaves make green
and we can make marine corps green ourselves.
Did the trees teach us to go to war?
Is engagement a storming away from standing still?
Or do the leaves in their falling
sing our fate in singing theirs—
a collaboration with the wind—
the sad, sad songs of ending—
the self-fulfilling prophets at the edges of our fields of vision.
Are trees the ragged mourners of our passing?
Or merely mothers making music while we sleep.
Rip Van Winkle Returns in search of a meaningful correspondent
Maybe it’s because you live
near the center of an ancient city
I once called home,
Or because you remind me
of a young girl I once knew
who wooed me with mysterious wisdom.
Maybe it’s because I’ve lived so long
in the desert of my mind,
hoarding my narrow words like water,
that you come to me like rain.
I feel so helpless to speak to you, Naomi.
Helpless the way the stones you talk to
must feel,
the way your walls must feel
behind the photographs,
the way your own dreams must feel
as they wash over you
in an ocean of indecipherable meanings.
Maybe it’s as you say,
“Some moments we have spent
our whole lives walking towards.”
I will not shrink from this moment
though its grandeur defies me.
Whether you be Ariel or the Angel of Death
I will look at you through these gold-rimmed
eyes we share, these matching magic spectacles
we wear like locks that take two keys to open.
The poetry of ordinary life
Wanting for words
we work at each other
like sap weeping through
the solid flesh of trees.
Power plows us like a saw
making boards
breaking up the truth
leaving only the stubborn miracle
of passion
to heal the wreckage of
our ill-fated dreams.
There are the sensations of the heart
like the sense of being safe when listening to the rain.
And there are longings that like the rain seem right.
A girl on a bicycle, poncho-ed and swift
is coming toward me.
She is like the rain. I can see her through the window.
And when I see her in my room, she smiles,
her poncho dripping on my floor.
“It’s wet out there,” she says, delighted as a child.
“It’s wet in here.” I say as I undress her.
And she becomes my house
and I in her
can hear the rain outside and feel secure.
Requiem
I could be dead for your records. You could remember me as having died somewhere on the way back home. You could remember something like that you had saved my life once, only to have it slip between your fingers. You could suffer a brief sadness for an old friend gone and then the I of those days when you used to know me would be (if I could control your memory) a memory something like an unforgettable story you once read and are fond of referring to when meditating on the meaning of your life.
Such a dream is possible here at this end, for you were always, besides being real, imaginary figures in my heaven: parents it was a pleasure to please. I had high hopes for you. Your very natures intrigued me. I was so sure that we were the central figures of our own era that I could have written the introduction to the history of us without having read the book.
But somewhere along the way we let each other down. It was all necessary I have no doubt. Drowning souls cannot very well be expected to save someone else just because they are in the same sea. Still I’m sure you feel like you gave more to me than you received. And all the while I had more than you to give and no excuse for not giving it. You, it seems, were losing your souls while I was merely losing my mind.
Life has a way of looking slightly out of proportion like a distorted mirror. The whole idea of a balanced friendship is as silly as a seaman’s prayer. We go to sea for adventure. Balance we find only within our selves. Sea sickness sends us scurrying for shore. The sea itself remains forever a memory of love: passionate, terrifying and beautiful.
Even when the lost are never again found.
--Austin, 1985
Lullaby
Nervous cat that I am
wanting a woman to pet me
I play in my secret hideaway
and wait.
I can feel the injustice
like an ugly slap or
a slammed door echoing its finality.
Tonight the pain is nearly gone
as sounds at night are nearly gone.
Late they are stretched thin in the mist
and sag and weep like sap.
Go to sleep.
A deep sleep is best.
And a silence that befits a man of honor.
The god of new beginnings
Sometimes you feel yourself
on the verge of a new beginning.
Not ordinary new experience
but a new direction in your life.
Since you don’t believe in the supernatural
nor in peripatetic spirits,
from where does such prophesy originate?
Obviously, your mind, or more specifically,
Its imaginative subcontractors are
are working 24/7 to pull you
out of your morass.
But who hired these guys?
You don’t remember doing it, do you?
--Waynesville, NC, 2005
Never Too Soon
I once loved a woman
I made her my wife
We had a lotta joy
We had a lotta strife
We walked in the sunshine
We walked beneath the moon
We had some little babies
It was not a minute too soon
You can live in the country
You can live in town
We tried it all
Lord, how we moved around
We built a log cabin
Out of cedar and pine
It didn’t look like much
But it suited us just fine
We put in a garden
Raised a goat or two
We had a cow, a pig and chickens
And a little pony, too
Well, we sold that log cabin
And moved back to town
Moma raised the children
While I just drifted around
Now those little children
Are grown up and gone
Moma’s raisin’ flowers
And I’m writin’ songs
You can live in the country
Or you can live in town
You can find your happiness
If you just look around
You can walk in the sunshine
You can walk beneath the moon
You can fall in love
And it’ll never be too soon.
--Austin, June, 2007
Sightings:
Ralph Nader on Michael Moore and "Sicko"
"Coming Soon": Jessica Dill's TheVeganVixen.com
Complete Site Index
larrydill@newhopejournal.com
www.newhopejournal.com
copyright 2007 by Larry L. Dill