Tuesday, January 23, 2018
A Russion Series, 1: All Change at Zima Junction
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction
Changes lives; nineteen becomes twenty-one
With hardly a pause for twenty and then
Everyone asks you questions you can’t answer
And then they say you’ve changed, and ignore you
The small-town brief-case politician still
Enthroned as if she were a committee
And asks you what are you doing back here
And then you go away, on a different train:
Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction
1 Yevtuskenko: Selected Poems. Penguin,1962
An Apology
I have never visited Russia. I can’t read or speak Russian. Everything in this series is as authentically Russian as a liter of vodka bottled in, oh, Baytown, Texas. Still, I hope you enjoy this dream-pilgrimage.
I never meant to write poems about Russia, but then I never meant to read Russian literature. The United States Navy was parsimonious in its pay to enlisted men in the 1960s, so the base library and the San Diego Public Library were my free entertainment (as was riding up and down the glass elevator at the Hotel El Cortez, and walking the city and Balboa Park with shipmates), and in illo tempore I happened upon a Modern Library edition of Chekhov’s short stories.
Although Tolkien, McKuen, and other English-language authors have always been my favorites (or favourites), I also found that Russian authors (in translation, of course) also have so much to teach the young and reassure the old. Despite seventy years of horror under Communism, Russia never lost the Faith and never lost her love for literature, literature that shapes chaos into meaning. In so many ways Russia is a witness to the world.
The first book I bought upon returning home from Viet-Nam was the Penguin Modern European Poets paperback edition of Yevtushenko: Selected Poems. That 75-cent paperback from a bookstall in the airport in San Francisco is beside me on the desk as I write.
At this point the convention is to write that Yevtushenko changed my life forever, gave me an epiphany, and blah, blah, blah. He didn’t. If one’s life changes every time one reads a new author or hears a remarkable speaker or sees a great film, then was there a life to begin with?
But Yevtushenko, Solzhenitsyn, Ahkmatova, Pasternak, Chekhov, and others came to be life-long friends. And since one writes about friends, I wrote about them too, and one day realized, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, that there might be a book in it.
mhall46184@aol.com
All Change at Zima Junction
For Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1932-2017
Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction
Changes lives; nineteen becomes twenty-one
With hardly a pause for twenty and then
Everyone asks you questions you can’t answer
And then they say you’ve changed, and ignore you
The small-town brief-case politician still
Enthroned as if she were a committee
And asks you what are you doing back here
And then you go away, on a different train:
Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction
“I went, and I am still going.” 1
1 Yevtuskenko: Selected Poems. Penguin,1962
An Apology
I have never visited Russia. I can’t read or speak Russian. Everything in this series is as authentically Russian as a liter of vodka bottled in, oh, Baytown, Texas. Still, I hope you enjoy this dream-pilgrimage.
I never meant to write poems about Russia, but then I never meant to read Russian literature. The United States Navy was parsimonious in its pay to enlisted men in the 1960s, so the base library and the San Diego Public Library were my free entertainment (as was riding up and down the glass elevator at the Hotel El Cortez, and walking the city and Balboa Park with shipmates), and in illo tempore I happened upon a Modern Library edition of Chekhov’s short stories.
Although Tolkien, McKuen, and other English-language authors have always been my favorites (or favourites), I also found that Russian authors (in translation, of course) also have so much to teach the young and reassure the old. Despite seventy years of horror under Communism, Russia never lost the Faith and never lost her love for literature, literature that shapes chaos into meaning. In so many ways Russia is a witness to the world.
The first book I bought upon returning home from Viet-Nam was the Penguin Modern European Poets paperback edition of Yevtushenko: Selected Poems. That 75-cent paperback from a bookstall in the airport in San Francisco is beside me on the desk as I write.
At this point the convention is to write that Yevtushenko changed my life forever, gave me an epiphany, and blah, blah, blah. He didn’t. If one’s life changes every time one reads a new author or hears a remarkable speaker or sees a great film, then was there a life to begin with?
But Yevtushenko, Solzhenitsyn, Ahkmatova, Pasternak, Chekhov, and others came to be life-long friends. And since one writes about friends, I wrote about them too, and one day realized, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, that there might be a book in it.
Monday, January 22, 2018
"Gov't Shutdown Risks an Undetected Asteroid Strike" - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
(I write this as a haiku since, apparently, we have little time left…)
mhall46184@aol.com
“Gov’t Shutdown Risks an Undetected Asteroid Strike”
-news item
(I write this as a haiku since, apparently, we have little time left…)
Still, we conclude that
If an asteroid strikes us
We will detect it
Sunday, January 21, 2018
That Old "When I was in Graduate School" Thing...
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
“When I was in graduate school when I
Was at Oxford when I was working on
My doctorate at the Sorbonne when I
Was on my fellowship when I was hiking
The Andes on my gap year learning from
The Colorful Natives when I received
The Something-Something Prize for Young Poets
From The Oppressed Grant Recipients’ Front…”
One notices that
Literary articles never begin with
“When I was busting my knuckles on the drilling rig…”
mhall46184@aol.com
“When I was in Graduate School…”
“When I was in graduate school when I
Was at Oxford when I was working on
My doctorate at the Sorbonne when I
Was on my fellowship when I was hiking
The Andes on my gap year learning from
The Colorful Natives when I received
The Something-Something Prize for Young Poets
From The Oppressed Grant Recipients’ Front…”
One notices that
Literary articles never begin with
“When I was busting my knuckles on the drilling rig…”
Saturday, January 20, 2018
The Poets Have Been Remarkably Silent on the Subject of Firewood - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
“…’on back…’on back…’on back…WHOA! Kill the motor.”
Leaning on the side of a pickup truck
Remembering the arcana of youth
On the farm: White Mule gloves, axe, splitting maul
Red oak, white oak, live oak, pine knot kindling
Three of us loading wood in the cloudy-cold
With practiced skill setting ranks of good oak
From the tailgate forward, settling the tires
Loading, unloading, stacking, and burning:
This winter’s firewood will warm us four times
mhall46184@aol.com
The Poets Have Been Remarkably Silent on the Subject of Firewood
(as Chesterton did not say)
“…’on back…’on back…’on back…WHOA! Kill the motor.”
Leaning on the side of a pickup truck
Remembering the arcana of youth
On the farm: White Mule gloves, axe, splitting maul
Red oak, white oak, live oak, pine knot kindling
Three of us loading wood in the cloudy-cold
With practiced skill setting ranks of good oak
From the tailgate forward, settling the tires
Loading, unloading, stacking, and burning:
This winter’s firewood will warm us four times
Friday, January 19, 2018
We're All Icons Now - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
Is there anything left that isn’t iconic?
Each sports hero, actress, and tummy-tonic
Now let The People say “iconic”
Each recipe and coffee colonic
And every writer said to be Byronic
And let the reviewer chant “iconic”
Famous lovers, erotic or platonic
Mountains and islands, and plates tectonic
And let The Newsies type “iconic”
Animals natural or bionic
All weather systems, calm or cyclonic
And let Mr. Meteor cry “iconic!”
Every magazine is stuffed with “iconic”
Which any Byzantine would find ironic
And let the Romans cry “three dimensions!”
Wait...dimensions…declensions…these don’t rhyme with iconic…
Oh, and don’t forget that for every reviewer every writer weaves that same old layered tapestry of…something or other
And when you go home tonight just be sure to hug your children
mhall46184@aol.com
We’re All Icons Now
Is there anything left that isn’t iconic?
Each sports hero, actress, and tummy-tonic
Now let The People say “iconic”
Each recipe and coffee colonic
And every writer said to be Byronic
And let the reviewer chant “iconic”
Famous lovers, erotic or platonic
Mountains and islands, and plates tectonic
And let The Newsies type “iconic”
Animals natural or bionic
All weather systems, calm or cyclonic
And let Mr. Meteor cry “iconic!”
Every magazine is stuffed with “iconic”
Which any Byzantine would find ironic
And let the Romans cry “three dimensions!”
Wait...dimensions…declensions…these don’t rhyme with iconic…
Oh, and don’t forget that for every reviewer every writer weaves that same old layered tapestry of…something or other
And when you go home tonight just be sure to hug your children
Thursday, January 18, 2018
This is not August - column re winter, snow, cardinals, burst pipes...
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
As my MawMaw, of happy memory, used to say, the weather has been “airish.”
In yet another example of the settled science (cough) of global warming the temperatures dropped ‘way below freezing last week and, because there was a little bit of snow the newsies again and again filled time and space with vain repetitions of the tiresome and false “winter wonderland.”
Those who wake up on a 15-degree morning to discover a burst water line do not wax poetic about winter wonderlands.
One does not imagine that linemen, road crews, tow truck operators, police, fire, ambulance services, and others have ever alluded to working ten or more hours a day in freezing rain / sleet / hail as any sort of winter wonderland experience.
Because snow is uncommon here, the first flakes falling and swirling in eddies are fascinating. The cliché is that no two snowflakes are alike, but they seem to be, cold fluffs “that fall on my nose and eyelashes” (The Sound of Mucous) and look exactly alike, differing only in size.
As the snow accumulates it softens the contours of everything, and bounces the available alight around so nicely that it seems almost to be a light source itself. The dark winter woods gradually become light winter woods, and somehow quieter.
During freezes the squirrels and birds work the feeders, which need frequent re-fillings (hint – chicken scratch from the feed store is much less expensive than designated bird seed, and the critters are just as fat and sassy on their proletarian diet). The cardinals especially stand out in winter.
In cold weather the neatly stacked firewood from three summers of carefully saving trimmed limbs as neat billets descends further every day. Turning over the bottom course means turning hibernating frogs and worms and fierce-looking horned beetles out of their winter homes. One trusts that they simply grumble a bit and then dig deeper and resume their sleep.
After a day or so, when the sun reappears, the barometer aspires to higher things and the air seems to harden, the snow is like that last guest, the one who won’t go away. Ice melting from the roof drips musically from the icicles and to the ground, and road surfaces steam as the dark asphalt converts sunlight into heat through radiationless transition (and let the people say “Thermodynamics”).
The aging snow lurks along fencerows, the bases of trees, and dark corners, seeming to withdraw into itself. It is not pretty anymore, and hangs around for days until one afternoon you realize that, like your firewood, it is all gone.
Just as the parental complaint that “Your room looks like it was hit by a hurricane!” is not necessarily a metaphor in August, “It’s freezing in here!” is not necessarily a metaphor in January.
And this is not August!
Mhall46184@aol.com
This is not August
As my MawMaw, of happy memory, used to say, the weather has been “airish.”
In yet another example of the settled science (cough) of global warming the temperatures dropped ‘way below freezing last week and, because there was a little bit of snow the newsies again and again filled time and space with vain repetitions of the tiresome and false “winter wonderland.”
Those who wake up on a 15-degree morning to discover a burst water line do not wax poetic about winter wonderlands.
One does not imagine that linemen, road crews, tow truck operators, police, fire, ambulance services, and others have ever alluded to working ten or more hours a day in freezing rain / sleet / hail as any sort of winter wonderland experience.
Because snow is uncommon here, the first flakes falling and swirling in eddies are fascinating. The cliché is that no two snowflakes are alike, but they seem to be, cold fluffs “that fall on my nose and eyelashes” (The Sound of Mucous) and look exactly alike, differing only in size.
As the snow accumulates it softens the contours of everything, and bounces the available alight around so nicely that it seems almost to be a light source itself. The dark winter woods gradually become light winter woods, and somehow quieter.
During freezes the squirrels and birds work the feeders, which need frequent re-fillings (hint – chicken scratch from the feed store is much less expensive than designated bird seed, and the critters are just as fat and sassy on their proletarian diet). The cardinals especially stand out in winter.
In cold weather the neatly stacked firewood from three summers of carefully saving trimmed limbs as neat billets descends further every day. Turning over the bottom course means turning hibernating frogs and worms and fierce-looking horned beetles out of their winter homes. One trusts that they simply grumble a bit and then dig deeper and resume their sleep.
After a day or so, when the sun reappears, the barometer aspires to higher things and the air seems to harden, the snow is like that last guest, the one who won’t go away. Ice melting from the roof drips musically from the icicles and to the ground, and road surfaces steam as the dark asphalt converts sunlight into heat through radiationless transition (and let the people say “Thermodynamics”).
The aging snow lurks along fencerows, the bases of trees, and dark corners, seeming to withdraw into itself. It is not pretty anymore, and hangs around for days until one afternoon you realize that, like your firewood, it is all gone.
Just as the parental complaint that “Your room looks like it was hit by a hurricane!” is not necessarily a metaphor in August, “It’s freezing in here!” is not necessarily a metaphor in January.
And this is not August!
-30-
When We Flew Among the Stars - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
When we were children we lay in the grass
And counted the stars, but only up to
A hundred or so, because we got lost
But not out there in space, right here in space
For space had fallen here, all around us
Oh, don’t you remember? We were among
The stars, flying wildly through the silences
Beyond all time, beyond all sense of self
We almost found the secrets of Creation -
And then our mothers told us to come inside
mhall46184@aol.com
When We Flew Among the Stars
When we were children we lay in the grass
And counted the stars, but only up to
A hundred or so, because we got lost
But not out there in space, right here in space
For space had fallen here, all around us
Oh, don’t you remember? We were among
The stars, flying wildly through the silences
Beyond all time, beyond all sense of self
We almost found the secrets of Creation -
And then our mothers told us to come inside
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Neo-Post-Colonial Artificial Intelligence Deconstructed - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
All intelligence is artificial
We do not huddle in burrows, issuing forth
Only to chase down other living things
Beat them to death, drink their blood, and eat them
We moderns huddle in cubes above the ground
With indoor plumbing through pipes that sometimes freeze
While we are gazing, searching for lost truths
In glowing screens made in slave-labor camps
And we have stopped slaughtering other creatures -
We have machines to do that for us now
mhall46184@aol.com
Neo-Post-Colonial Artificial Intelligence Deconstructed
All intelligence is artificial
We do not huddle in burrows, issuing forth
Only to chase down other living things
Beat them to death, drink their blood, and eat them
We moderns huddle in cubes above the ground
With indoor plumbing through pipes that sometimes freeze
While we are gazing, searching for lost truths
In glowing screens made in slave-labor camps
And we have stopped slaughtering other creatures -
We have machines to do that for us now
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Little Plastic Army Men in Action on a Snow Day - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
If I were a boy
I’d range my toy soldiers before the fire
Vast armies of plastic in green and grey
With the cannon blasting the enemy -
A glorious victory again today!
If I were a boy
I’d eat my morning cereal with Robin Hood
Propped up in his Whitman book before me
Its pages open to an England where
Every day is summer, green upon the lea
If I were a boy
My mother would remind me, to my sorrow
That I have a ‘rithmetic test tomorrow
mhall46184@aol.com
Little Plastic Army Men in Action on a Snow Day
If I were a boy
I’d range my toy soldiers before the fire
Vast armies of plastic in green and grey
With the cannon blasting the enemy -
A glorious victory again today!
If I were a boy
I’d eat my morning cereal with Robin Hood
Propped up in his Whitman book before me
Its pages open to an England where
Every day is summer, green upon the lea
If I were a boy
My mother would remind me, to my sorrow
That I have a ‘rithmetic test tomorrow
Monday, January 15, 2018
About that False Alarm in Hawaii... - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
Flare light
Flare bright
First flare I see tonight
I wish I may
I wish I might
Not be blown to death tonight
Subtle beep
Subtle beep
‘wakening me from my sleep -
Oh, no! I’m going to die!
Not meeeeeee! Don’t wanna fry!
It’s all about ME – boo-hoo!
Poor ME! Poor ME! I’m gonna SUE!
mhall46184@aol.com
I. From a Vietnamese / Cambodian / Egyptian / Israeli / Lebanese /
Sudanese / Syrian / Afghan Child’s Garden of Verses
Flare light
Flare bright
First flare I see tonight
I wish I may
I wish I might
Not be blown to death tonight
II. From an American Man’s Twooter of Self-Pity
Subtle beep
Subtle beep
‘wakening me from my sleep -
Oh, no! I’m going to die!
Not meeeeeee! Don’t wanna fry!
It’s all about ME – boo-hoo!
Poor ME! Poor ME! I’m gonna SUE!
Sunday, January 14, 2018
A Take Away from the Take Away Steak Fingers - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
King Henry II: Forks?
Thomas Becket: Yes, from Florence. New little invention. It's for pronging meat and carrying it to the mouth. It saves
you dirtying your fingers.
King Henry II: But then you dirty the fork.
Thomas Becket: Yes, but it's washable.
King Henry II: So are your fingers. I don't see the point.
Encapsulated in bivalves of foam
As bottom feeders in the fast-food chain
Small fragments of a poor dead cow, chopped, shaped
And formed into cow fingers that are not
For it behooves the diner thus to know
That cows haven’t any fingers at all
But the dear diner does, and digitally
Renders the cow fingers as nutrition
And that is all there is about cow fingers -
Not a topic on which the gourmet lingers
mhall46184@aol.com
A Take Away from the Take Away Steak Fingers
King Henry II: Forks?
Thomas Becket: Yes, from Florence. New little invention. It's for pronging meat and carrying it to the mouth. It saves
you dirtying your fingers.
King Henry II: But then you dirty the fork.
Thomas Becket: Yes, but it's washable.
King Henry II: So are your fingers. I don't see the point.
-Becket, 1964
Encapsulated in bivalves of foam
As bottom feeders in the fast-food chain
Small fragments of a poor dead cow, chopped, shaped
And formed into cow fingers that are not
For it behooves the diner thus to know
That cows haven’t any fingers at all
But the dear diner does, and digitally
Renders the cow fingers as nutrition
And that is all there is about cow fingers -
Not a topic on which the gourmet lingers
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