Selected Poems of Edward Loomis

By Edward Loomis

Some of the free verse offered here was first published in Poems of a Cockroach (1970): this was a self-published pamphlet illustrated with drawings by Gerry Haggerty. EVERYMAN was made into a film with a rather dubious sound-track bringing the thing down. This book is a gathering of work of the last thirty years, and it is a selection, exactly. That might be its strong point. These poems are what I think of as my best stuff, and are offered as that.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 20, 2000
• ISBN: 9781462832194

Edward Loomis

"FRANK GOAD is a retired beach volleyball player, an artist manqué, a barely published writer, a marginal but occasionally successful progenitor of performance art, a very early and accidental dj, a runner-turned-jogger-turned-walker, and an occasional lightweight lifter. He lives in rented digs in Santa Barbara with his diffficult girlfriend and her lazy, sullen, lordly son, and gleans a living by making graphic designs on his computer. His pets have died." "EDWARD LOOMIS is a writer and audio artist, and a collaborator on the Goadian audio projects. His best known work is THE CHARCOAL HORSE, a novel, "A Kansas Girl," a story, and ADVICE TO THE LOVELORN, an audio tape. In recent years he has been working on a non-fiction book on Spain, and translating the poems of Rubén Darío and the brothers Machado."

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Copyright © 2000 by Edward Loomis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Aphrodite

Ode to Horace

Coffee

Relaxing

John Muir, a dithyramb

The Crucifixion

Dichtung und Wahrheit

Science and Poetry

The Common Lot

Contemplation

The Morning Walk, a sequence

New England

On a photograph of the

dying Apollinaire

For the Muse

Daily Life

The South Pacific

Southwest

Love

First Love

The Battlefield

A little waterfall in Refugio Canyon

Sex

Tragic Knowledge

Manila Bay

Tangerines

Spiritual affirmations

The Mothers

Cape Cod

At the home place, in Kansas

—It’s your language

The Tarot

Dawn

Summer-time

Psychologizing

Biographia Literaria

World War II, a sequence:

THE MAYO COUNTRY

(Sonora, Mexico)

Gossip

Diplomacy

S.T.D.

The Cat (with Frank Goad)

Mexico

Hope

Rubén Darío

Backyard garden

December mid-day

October heat wave

In the sunshine

Soldiers

War in the Pacific

2-10-93

8-2-93

Aphrodite

8-25-93

9-2-94

At the Millenium

4-3-98

PART TWO: LONG POEMS

The Marriage

THE ARCHIOLATOR

THE ARCHIOLATOR

UTOPIA

THE POEM OF LIFE

EVERYMAN

THE TEX-MEX ILIAD

THE BATTLE OF SAN JACINTO, THE TEX-MEX ILIAD

TO MY BROTHER RICHARD

Aphrodite

Girl walking with a limp: I

see her pregnant. She is smiling.

Girl in the restaurant bar. I notice her

thin back, and the bra-strap through the skimpy

fabric of the blouse: at first

her lover is startled at how vulnerable

her back is, and then gradually he sees it as

normal, even a little boring.

I foresee that each one of all of us

will own a kitchen chair one day.

For those two in particular

of course things will get

serious

(for the moment secure, youthful,

even if suffering like the Young Werther);

I imagine them reading;

it’s a newspaper.

And now I imagine

a sock on the floor, it is just so,

stained with her presence,

that once enjoyed

an artificial vacuum in a plastic container.

That was in a store: destiny

was not yet ready.

Now veritably she approaches,

in a green skirt.

Opens the door.

Ode to Horace

Standing

the morning-star

sticking to my fingertips

cool pavement smell

a page from the dictionary

print still black and smoking

Fresh aromas of the river dawn

Coffee

She drank so much coffee, it was said about my mother—

coffee—the inside of your own cup—a drink of your vitals—I

look in at a conscientious person who is also a clever man, and

the same thing is watching me from the mirror—the attempt at

order—well, both sinks in the kitchen need attention, and there

are some small objects on the living room carpet—Faust—a Chris-

tian gentleman, but not a careful man—various pretensions

cooped up with a spectacle lens that has a scratch on it, and

some useful notions. Restful naps on remote Sunday afternoons

when the mind is drinking deep—all that virtue asleep at last,

undone—Five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon—it is quiet—it is

often quiet—now and then you might hear a burst of laughter, or

somebody practising the piano—it is temporary, a program, dis-

solves into the next scene very amiably—you feel like a king,

though there is no title on the door, the phone is unlisted, the

celebrity is local—you want always the best for yourself and for

others, furnished in black walnut—a pretty white cup, on a sau-

cer—snow-white napkins—virginity, disorder, sorrow.

Relaxing

Principles glimmer on the verge of perception like

one range of mountains seen above the profile of another

the self is listening

while in all things the trtiumph of number and pattern

is the element of survival

as the sense of bodily movement drops away

in the feel of life more generally occurring, its

noumena manifesting like the rose its

whiteness, fragrance, and charitable disposition

a superfluity of passion throbbing through the universe

John Muir, a dithyramb

After first snow, the Indian Summer.

It is his best season. The dry streams

await the storms and the driving snow.

The mountaineer, warned by the cautious birds,

stays on—plans a climb, enjoyingly.

His bright humanistic fantasies

include the scarlet twig, the purple bough.

Soon there will come the storms—and meanwhile

onward to Ritter, on to the heights,

where the rock gives good footholds, while yet

some danger there is—it is quite steep,

and is abrupt, is smooth. Repeated

effort finds no footing—suddenly

stopped, he comes upon his first real fear,

as mind is smoky, blurred—in his fear,

another self emerges. Energy

forth-blazes with Edenic sharpness.

After first snow, the summer sharpens.

The Crucifixion

The plan is that

a mere idea

converges with its humble means,

in agony, and brings itself to pass.

Dichtung und Wahrheit

The mind intends itself, and will contrive

to dazzle the feeling heart

with something of its careful art,

not what we have not, but rather

the normal, gorgeous, actual weather,

in strophe, counter-strophe, and turn,

catastrophe and bleak return;

in shade by day which in the night

comes wave by wave into the sight,

the image and its surround

in perfect light and perfect sound,

coherent thought, and fading dreams,

obsessive, intense, imperfect schemes,

whatever comes to mind—and then,

whatever subtly fails, as when

in dreams the problem vaguely dies

—the cliff grows flat before your eyes,

and mind and body, by surprise,

are going on, merely alive.

Science and Poetry

The soul of calculation, science lives

beyond its means—it spends what comes to mind:

the doctor brow inscrutably adorns

the thought that stays and makes its way; changes,

reforms, confounds—ruthlessly makes a step

of what had been a mere gleam of light.

The poet stands apart from all but mind,

and mind accepts this flawed intensity:

the jagged human traces on the graph—

erratic and meandering—the data run

finding a way, persisting, going on,

the person dizzy in abysses unlimited.

The Common Lot

You seem astonished, shocked, or dazed;

and in a post-heroic phase,

you raise your head and have a fate,

astounded or numb, or amazed.

Contemplation

After a while,

the wind goes away;

the mind is like a pond,

when the wind goes away,

and the earth

is still

and then the mind

also is still

The Morning Walk, a sequence

November and December

1

I am ghosting the morning with my presence:

Lo, the solitary surfer

beseeching the wave

the lagoon like a mirror in a closed room

seemingly black—

on closer inspection, green and a mobbly brown:

near the beach, I observe two runners going by

and I notice the rough stuttering of thigh muscles—

I had begun my walk with the pale mauve fog-borders

and the red sun-track becoming a white-gold blazing glare

2

Bird cries

ring the shore

the trees stand up into the mist

toward the mountains

away off in the gloom

is the row of eucalyptus trees on the hill

and the hill rising up as a wall

in the greyness—I am walking along a path

defined by bicycle tracks and cat shit, abstractedly

continuing beyond this point,

suddenly I arrive,

footsteps echoing up the walk to my own front door

3

A boat is immobilized out there, with lights

it seems set in stone;

striding along—at the point I feel debonair,

and the boat is close now, rocking on the swell

suddenly there are sunrise effects,

I begin to welcome the idea of warmth;

toward the end,

my voice feels dry from disuse, I have been wallowing in soli-

tude,

selfhood, feeling of being sustained

—all through the morning hours

the prevailing winds were blowing heavily, up a few thousand

feet

there’s been an invasion of cool air

with the mild specific touch of ocean air, of the

remote Pacific, of its pastures and gardens

3

The sun-track is orange

—on the way back,

my path below the dune

on the landward side, the

sound of surf is muffled

5

There are the clustered drops at the end

of every needle in the little pine suddenly before me—

(I had seen water splash in the dust of the trail)

at the beginning, there seemed to be only birds—

a little scattering of black dots out to sea, tossing up and down

then some gulls, overhead; at the point,

I turn to see the birds are rushing me

streaking the air with their small vividness

—evidently the fodder has moved westward, they’re all

going that way, gulls and pelicans, vast Vs of pelicans

or down on the water floating in the midst of their poem

6

Empathy with birds, I see their dead and dying—beside the

lagoon road, shattered wings, gallant little head

& scattering of black feathers

at the laurel which yesterday was fragrant with morning dew,

I encounter a brown gull—sheltering under a tree

now emerges hunched over like an old man’s shoulder blades

under the overcoat, wincing just perceptibly downward

(for this may be the blow)

thence careful and slow makes a route along the path, away from

me,

then turns at right angles to the path, and squats; I sit with

the bird in the path and find in presence the spirit world—

here just a few steps along the path from the cormorant tree

and the gaunt black

birds waiting all night for the sun;

a few minutes before, I had witnessed the white-tailed kite’s

plunge for the victim,

raying into some tender body in the cool grasses of the meadow,

or crouched under a flowering tree, and suddenly

I find the dark figures in the lagoon-prospect to be unpleasantly

distinct, and the glittery silver surface of the water

as it were converging on me, a hint of gloom emerges, disap-

pears,

now it’s broad daylight, the sun has made itself at home every-

where

7

Presence of the sea, presence of the shore

the sea is old mother death, of course

the land,

the moon behind the palm tree,

the cormorant in the sun,

sunlight in a sycamore tree;

mother death wants you to come away with her, of course

she murmurs and whispers this

in the spirit world last night (perhaps a dream)

the spirits had substance, they were

eaten and hollowed

8. Santana conditions

The soft warm wind is momentarily loud in the palm trees

I look out at the sea from the bluff, it is

in general a silver plaque fretted with black shadows

for the rest, a few dark zones, squalls—and a low surf

what I am hearing is a black sound of tangled

and cancelled low frequencies

with thematic displays in slightly higher registers

as the waves break at the shore in

bubbles of darkened silver

The blue sky with horn-like moon in its crown

is bordered by lush hazes of lemon yellow, orange, mauve

9

Uppermost among themes is the faintly coolish

Santana wind—

the sun is low,

it is late in the year

for such mild weather and securely I notice

that the dry, swept-through air gives to the edges of my shadow

a very crisp impermanence:

there he stands for twenty feet, the gingerbread man:

as I go toward home with the sun at my back,

he fumbles on ahead unerringly

10. The morning high tide

Close to it; a small surf breaking against a low sand-ledge,

puddles of foam in the back-wash, coiled, ropy white

the birds are more intimate than usual, this misty morning

I walk with pleasure in the sandy dirt of the path

on the island, my feet enjoy it

here and there I notice sub-paths going off into the bushes,

when I trace them out they lead to lovers’ burrows,

never very formal—imagination

wanders a little way before letting go

New England

A soft and rainy outlook, turning harsh,

gives way to pearly tones of ice and haze,

as a cold mist stills in the hush.

The day is colder now, it is as though

in mild realities of mist and snow,

the mind departs in pleasure, and in the flow

epic uncertainties gather, and grow.

On a photograph of the

dying Apollinaire

Neither slim nor yet quite stout,

knowing what it’s all about,

what he wants is what he gets

—though his boredom soon