1. About the Dead Man and Plastic Man

Patrick “Eel” O’Brian, the dead man has been following you.
Like you, he has reached beyond his corporeal origin, that turf of
sinkholes.
Like you, he was taught by the inmates of prisons and hospitals and
those at sea in their heads.
Like you, he thought he could jump out of his body to be free, but he
wised up.
He made his body more visible and familiar, more malleable, more
osmotic, more heady and base, more painful, and yes, more
plastic.
William James, writing past the threshold of consciousness, merely
entered the realm of plasticity.
Plastic Man is the model, he of the pop-out eyes and rubbery
shoulders, of the slingshot, of knots and bows, he the
ensemble of the self.
Surely James knew automatic writing was only the perpetual
morphing of a plastic consciousness.
Like this, like what you are reading, and seeing, and almost thinking.
A poem is about what is happening as you read it.

2. More About the Dead Man and Plastic Man

Patrick “Eel” O’Brian, you became the one who could reach for the
moon.
The one who could hold his beloved’s hand from afar.
You went straight.
We pictured the twisty road, the switchbacks of a life, the hard
breathing in the passes, the sweating and the thirst.
We believed in you for thousands of years before you arrived.
The lever and pulley were stopgaps, the wheel and screw were
expedient, we were on our way.
Later, the twisted stasis of the yogis, the whirl of the Sufis, the
immobility of the monk were precursors to a new self.
The dead man is your true progeny.
He is the new self that is many.
He is the self defined by more than shape.

—

Photo: Tom Jorgensen

Marvin Bell’s nineteenth book was the wartime collection, Mars Being Red (2007). His twentieth is a collaboration titled, 7 Poets, 4 Days, 1 Book, co-authored with poets from Hungary, Malta, Russia and Slovenia, as well as the U.S. Long a member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop faculty, he teaches now for the brief-residency MFA program based in Oregon at Pacific University. A song cycle, “The Animals,” commissioned by the composer David Gompper, premiered in October. A back-and-forth with the songwriter, Marvin Tate, appears in the current issue of Make. He is at work on a new book of “dead man” poems and a collaboration with the photographer, Nathan Lyons.

In between these clouds
coming together like hands and parting like ships,
she stands at a brook of beige leaves,
thinks of three friends who made
a monastery in the woods.

Stag moves through the hillside.
Everything, every tree falls in love with its neighbor.
It’s chaotic and messy — springtime    nothing to be done

Quick — Name three people who make you feel

pure
and special
and extraordinary.
Name them now —— go.

She arrives, sets down her luggage, and smiling, asks,
What kind of soul is mine?
And accepts whatever answer is given.           Jibes
and jealousy go right over her head,
used as she was
to living with them in the other house.
Like a mermaid learning to live on land, she explains
on the stairwell, I was blind as to who to trust.
(Though he loves her, he doesn’t believe her.  None of them do.)
Until

four years later

when she’s

“getting over” her little love affair, it occurs to her.  Comes rising up
like a lake of dark pain.  She begins to see.  Not just about him, but about the other   the                                                                                                                               first man

It was so beautiful, she writes.
He was beautiful but then  totally crazy.  And ugly  bitter
ugly.  Vile.

Crazy love.  We even looked like twins, people said.

But you know  even while it was happening and good, way out          there
I would leave him, inside I would leave, and go flying away
To the outside windowpane of some universe   eternally caught in the furies at Act Two

— and so but I cared, I did —
but I was also there,
barely hanging on
(I mean, I was there when Mother Mary said, “Go to the outer edge of your greatness”)

eternally rush-rush-missing my other-century companions so—
my broken down-on-their-luck bohemians, ragged soul brigade
I barely stopped to look for them anymore—
(it was the one thing I accepted as a constant in this life, my missing them)

And anyway with this wild wild wind raging shaking
the window pane and the universe
its curved howls banging.  Me
in coattails hanging on
and looking in             big-eyed

“The outer edge of your greatness,” she said.   I was there —

Then I wake up and say, Oh, it’s my own Spirit
scares me so.  My own Self.  I have been that mutable and reckless,
streakful and open too.
Like driving in his car the very first time, I knew.
I just knew.  Like magic, he’d showed up at my door.
He said things about dreams, but I already knew.    I knew about the Light.
He held disappointment — my twin
Of some kind — So
my reckless leaving into the Sea of Light.

Always, I knew:  That was the whole triumphant ordeal.

Now, remembering.
Now bleared with tears and love that just won’t go away — it exposes me —
Like a love for those beautiful cryptic ghosts who tell me they love me back

Reckless like stars of joy.
Need I be?

Three swallows just flew overhead.

—

Katayoon Zandvakili

Katayoon Zandvakili’s collection of poetry, Deer Table Legs, won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series prize, and the book’s title poem was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been anthologized — American Poetry: The Next Generation, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans, Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and The Poetry of Iranian Women — and published in journals such asLumina, caesura, Five Fingers Review, Rattapallax, Arte East, Private Photo Review, and narrativemagazine.com.

Katayoon has completed her novel, In the Lap of the Gods: My Eight-&-A-Half-Month Marriage to an Impostor, while working on a second volume of poetry, The Girl King Sings Songs of Epic Leaving, Red-Leafed Shame & Yellow Uprising, and the screenplaysWonderful Her and To Live As I Like: The Marie B. Story.

She is also a painter.

a rearview mirror
cracked /
shock of an ice-cube biting liquid

Heard the sound / didn’t know yet
where it was coming from

That mirror / gave up our ghosts

This fine clear summer morning / a line from Chekhov:
it would be strange not to forgive

(I in my body now alive)

All are human / give / forgive
drop the charges / let go / put away

Rage for the trusting
it would be strange not to say

Love? yes
in this lifted hand / behind
these eyes
upon you / now

©Adrienne Rich 2007

…it would be strange not to forgive: “Essentially all this is crude and meaningless…as an avalanche which involuntarily rolls down a mountain and overwhelms people. But when one listens to music, all this is: that some people lie in their graves and sleep, and that one woman is alive…and the avalanche seems no longer meaningless, since in nature everything has a meaning. And everything is forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive.” (Anton Chekhov, Themes, Thoughts, Notes and Fragments. Tr. L.S.Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf.)

—–

Photo: Lilian Kemp

Adrienne Rich’s most recent books of poetry are Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006 and The School Among the Ruins: 2000-2004. She edited Muriel Rukeyser’s Selected Poems for the Library of America. A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, appeared in April 2009. She is a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2006 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters among other honors. She lives in California.