To close the week I’ll post Ginsberg’s poem Hospital Window, written in response to the last battle of the Vietnam War, mourning futile deaths in a futile war.

Here is the Wiki summary of the Mayaguez Crisis:

The Mayaguez incident took place between Kampuchea and the United States from May 12–15, 1975, less than a month after the Khmer Rouge took control of the capital Phnom Penh ousting the U.S. backed Khmer Republic. It was the last official battle of the Vietnam War. The names of the Americans killed, as well as those of three U.S. Marines who were left behind on the island of Koh Tangafter the battle and were subsequently executed by the Khmer Rouge, are the last names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The merchant ship’s crew, whose seizure at sea had prompted the U.S. attack, had been released in good health, unknown to the U.S. Marines or the U.S. command of the operation before they attacked. Nevertheless, the Marines boarded and recaptured the ship anchored offshore a Cambodian island, finding it empty

In response to the poem, I have been working over the last weeks on sketching still lives with bridges, looking from the inside out to a world where crossings lead us in all kinds of directions, challenged by longing and choices. The Brooklyn Bridge (above), part of the poem below, is among them.

Hospital Window

At gauzy dusk, thin haze like cigarette smoke 
ribbons past Chrysler Building’s silver fins 
tapering delicately needletopped, Empire State’s 
taller antenna filmed milky lit amid blocks 
black and white apartmenting veil’d sky over Manhattan, 
offices new built dark glassed in blueish heaven–The East 
50’s & 60’s covered with castles & watertowers, seven storied 
tar-topped house-banks over York Avenue, late may-green trees 
surrounding Rockefellers’ blue domed medical arbor– 
Geodesic science at the waters edge–Cars running up 
East River Drive, & parked at N.Y. Hospital’s oval door 
where perfect tulips flower the health of a thousand sick souls 
trembling inside hospital rooms. Triboro bridge steel-spiked 
penthouse orange roofs, sunset tinges the river and in a few 
Bronx windows, some magnesium vapor brilliances’re 
spotted five floors above E 59th St under grey painted bridge 
trestles. Way downstream along the river, as Monet saw Thames 
100 years ago, Con Edison smokestacks 14th street, 
& Brooklyn Bridge’s skeined dim in modern mists– 
Pipes sticking up to sky nine smokestacks huge visible– 
U.N. Building hangs under an orange crane, & red lights on 
vertical avenues below the trees turn green at the nod 

of a skull with a mild nerve ache. Dim dharma, I return 
to this spectacle after weeks of poisoned lassitude, my thighs 
belly chest & arms covered with poxied welts, 
head pains fading back of the neck, right eyebrow cheek 
mouth paralyzed–from taking the wrong medicine, sweated 
too much in the forehead helpless, covered my rage from 
gorge to prostate with grinding jaw and tightening anus 
not released the weeping scream of horror at robot Mayaguez 
World self ton billions metal grief unloaded 
Pnom Penh to Nakon Thanom, Santiago & Tehran. 
Fresh warm breeze in the window, day’s release 
from pain, cars float downside the bridge trestle 
and uncounted building-wall windows multiplied a mile 
deep into ash-delicate sky beguile 
my empty mind. A seagull passes alone wings 
spread silent over roofs.

May 20, 1975 Mayaguez Crisis 
Allen Ginsberg

Music today:Three Manhattan Bridges….https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw5L_orYl8I

Poems to Read is an Anthology edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz, the folks who gave us the Favorite Poem Project.  It is one of my go-to readers of poetry for three reasons:

• I like everything Pinsky touches.
• The poems are often introduced with short comments by those who suggested them, providing welcome guidance to understanding and interpretation.
• The 7 chapters are loosely sorted by topic, some 30 or so poems each, allowing us to pick something relevant for the mood you’re in or the thing you’re thinking about.

This gives you the idea:

Chapter 1: There was a child went forth

Chapter 2: Either whom to love or how

Chapter 3: The forgetful kingdom of death

Chapter 4: In durance soundly caged

Chapter 5: Curled around these images

Chapter 6: Alive with many separate meanings

Chapter 7: I made my song a coat

I’ll be surprised if one of these did not draw your immediate curiosity.

And if you have avoided poetry for one reason or another, here is a primer of why you should give it (another) a try:

https://press.princeton.edu/titles/7329.html  

It is a small volume in which the former Poet Laureate argues that poetry is an inescapably democratic art form.

I grabbed a reading of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens for your pleasure.  I created montages for each stanza of this favorite poem, with a marble standing in for the bird, exhibited at Blackfish Gallery some years back. Images displayed here in the order of the stanzas.

I was sent a famous poem yesterday that was entirely new to me. Nor was I particularly familiar with the poet other than plain name recognition. I’ll get to the poem in a minute. I was much more interested in my friend’s writing that accompanied his introduction to Delmore Schwartz: “Our bodies are such strange and astonishing and sometimes burdensome companions.”

To view one’s body as a companion rather than integral part of self creates a glorious distance. It relegates responsibility for unfriendly or destructive behavior by that very body when it refuses to function properly, to an entity that can be dealt with like all other external entities – with irritation, anger, dismay or fearfulness. Once you define “companion” as a separate other, you  no longer have to retreat to that horrid place where you feel a part of you is betraying all other parts of you and you are fighting yourself if you rage against that betrayal.

Of course, you then run into the next problem: if body is companion, is soul as well? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander and so forth? (Distracting aside: that proverb always struck me as a weird gender reversal – if the idea is that women should have the same privileges as men shouldn’t be the gander named first? Oh well.) If both of these basic constituents of what we perceive to be self are external components, then where is the very core?  Of course variants of that question have remained unanswered through millennia of philosophical searches, psychological research and now neuroscience’s attempts to join the chorus of seekers. We won’t solve that mystery today.

Here is the poem:

And here is a fascinating review article that explains numerous different perspectives to be intuited from the verses above, beyond the issue of the “withness of the body.” In addition to giving a short overview of Schwartz’s life – too bitter, too needy, too self-destructive, too pre-occupied with seeking fame, too short – it explains how poems can stand in for the poet’s demands, the audience’s complicity, the writer’s self justification, his somewhat hidden plea for forgiveness and our power to provide it, or our gullibility of being lured into it by simply being hooked on the beauty of the language. It’s a worthwhile read.

That Inescapable Animal

Luckily there is great news for bodies: researchers have created a device that can be implanted under cancer patients’ skin to act as a “cell catcher.” It shows great promise in slowing down metastatic disease.

“The scaffold is designed to mimic the environment in other organs before cancer cells migrate there. The scaffold attracts the body’s immune cells, and the immune cells draw in the cancer cells. This then limits the immune cells from heading to the lung, liver or brain, where breast cancer commonly spreads.”

 https://news.engin.umich.edu/2016/09/implantable-decoy-could-limit-cancer/

Now let’s invent some decoy for the soul that catches self-defeating thoughts before they migrate!

Since I have no ready images of a bear of a body, I figured we’ll change perspective and focus on a bit of flitting-about soul. These dragonflies were all photographed yesterday in the heat of the middle of the day  – getting myself out to the river was definitely worth it.