by John (Jack) Clarke

I met old Benny Goodman at the Blue Note in Chicago.
He was a prick. Pissing with Terry Gibbs, vibraphonist
that night, 1950, he opened. Berryman [David?} man
of self. Nothing new in Swing after 1937 Duke had said,
that popular black Chevy year wrappin’ it up, bass drum
Gene Krupa never did “swing” (Berry thought him the best
later fired “Big Sal” Catlett, the “Goodman Ray” didn’t work 1941)
tho Papa Jo did credit his tom-toms on “Sing Sing Sing”
then at bar’s end Red Norvo switches to vibes and the sextet
took off again (weren’t lying back as Lionel Hampton in 1936)
but by then night-time television had killed the remote
hotel pick-ups though I pulled in that Hotel Roosevelt
from New Orleans, though of course, the Count, the Duke
and the Earl, real royalty of survival, all but the King.

June 16, 1991 Saturday

by John (Jack) Clarke

“ … listen to the sounds of the day as though chords of eternity.” —Karl Kraus

“Even the jazzy present has this virtue, that low as it is, it is a prediction of a new order of knowing.” —W.C. Williams

At last the chaos that comes of exalted harmony
the antipodes rush in to subsume all gender,
and the reticule of the years advances equally
or else the transitional (excuse of the present)
disorder overwhelms us with its squandering of evil
bourgeois autonomy entering its own postponement
the Baconian goose seen to be the old statutes
as the unreal end, the heaven of itself and its
unreal despair come together to make the chords of
the day out of old flood mud of the eternal Nile
whose initial impulse is brand new, thus affording
invariant hieroglyphs always under exegesis until
love begets chaos once more (analogy of coming war)
and we, old Tartareans, are equal to this new order.

Sept 1^st 1986

by John (Jack) Clarke

More than not being absent is the absent,
but why should the other bear the burden
alone? Are we so afraid of the truant officer
that we don’t even imagine such a thing for
ourselves, taking our persistent presence so for granted?
How should I go as far from my mother as she
from me, that we may meet again in another
orbit equidistant from the central velleity?
She recedes as I fall more and more into
the world she never entered, never hunted
for me so made sure it never existed, stood
at the door, the guardian of this side, hard
as nails against the psychosis of substitution,
the false absence that brings death to bear you

finished end
of September ‘86

by Alice Notley

     rubies, remember? you had to
     bleed awhile, then you
  were changing and I’m changing how I
speak the gorgeous horrible suffering became —
   after humiliation of not knowing how
   to behave in your groups … the
      rubies finally spoke and
     told me who I was, in the forest
   that was myself, Chaos the never
 quite formed often ostracized, some-
times salaciously stroked by the salient
 near the castle battlements
   and keen-eyed malicious mynah birds.
 But I knew I was everyone’s “heart” since
I felt not what you said was to be felt.
   Perhaps I don’t feel. In my language
The Old, I pretend to be you so you might
   listen. But I now know I only feel the
emotion of being your holder, the grave
    and light the one who travels in place.
Saying the same as a sign that I am
being. The beautiful memory that befits
the one who has no shape or credo but, being,
repeats being. You shouldn’t have scorned or spurned me
since it is impossible to rid oneself of what there is only.
   You keep asking for hope — you mean a formula
  of words, for a board game or tale — you must
     be in a tale! … Forget it forfeit your fatedness
and lose familiarity with fortune, known forms, and fallow fields of
   friction, of wars you mostly watch, when you watch
along the wayside of the wounded limping

and the dead with substances flowing amid
      flowers I think I could descend to despise
     you but … I busy myself with lifting up
the dead to hold and hand to their ones gone before.
    Come to this same place you can attain
  now without blood. Do not despise me again
    for you will be sore to see that you
eventually
enter through a small hole with stalagmites
  and stalactites of blood ruby, the great hall
   where you’ve always been anyway —
   you will there find the song to sing of welcome
     to my new self — Can you forget your old one?
     Can you forget it Can you forget about fairness
   and futility, humanity and humility — I who am memory
       will help you forget everything but being here.