<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=545816" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>At The Bar-Code Ranch</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">A stellar job in the bullpen <br>C.B.S. Baseball</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I lie in a converted garage, sun coming up<br>and the chuck-chuck of unfamiliar birds<br>from Lake Mizell.<br> The lamp grows ineffectual<br>under a skylight; the great world<br>washes in, humid, composed of small numbered parts.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Sometime after nine, the classical music station stops<br>for the landing of a space shuttle</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> a sonic boom<br>shakes the bungalow<br> and Vladomir Horowitz<br> is abruptly terminated.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yesterday, at New Smyrna, north of Canaveral:<br> knotted shoreline<br>looking out from a timbered interior<br>on the Atlantic;<br> driving inland on Local 40,<br>a two-lane, the Beach Boys on air,<br>to Winter Park, inches above the water table.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Today, flying north, from Florida’s eighty degrees<br>to Washington’s forty-something<br> a river far below<br>in South Carolina.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Salt-pork and black-eyed beans<br>“soul food” – and cheap – in D.C’s low<br> where U.S. presidents<br>fall like leaves . . .</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Consume and Die!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Wednesday<br> under the pines<br>looking out over the waters of Potomac<br> a torn Bush-Quayle poster in the grass<br>the morning after the election,<br>and down on Canal St<br>a bag of crushed Busch beer cans<br>reminds me that poetry exists.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Up at 3040 R St N.W.<br>where the leaf vacuum cleaners roam,<br>three cards from New York!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The sun descends <br>through Mt Pinatubo clouds,<br>its weird rays on Georgetown,<br>glass to the south,<br>Arlington’s tower blocks<br> Confederate and Republican (still).</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Meanwhile there is art to look at (Hirschorn Museum):<br>the hand, thrust forward,<br>of Ernst Barlach’s<br>streamlined (and sentimental)<br>“Begging Woman”<br>in which someone has placed a dime<br> – all it takes<br>to stitch up expressionism.<br> I liked better<br>the pieces by Balla<br> ‘Boccioni’s Fist’<br>and the nice little things<br>by Henri Laurens<br>their mild<br>three-dimensional cubism.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> A postcard from Sarah<br>features a moose, lettered CANADA,<br>though it’s from Australia<br> and the New York letters<br>(a room to stay in in Brooklyn!<br> drinks with some people.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The world, its streets, places, people<br> (a title<br>from Edwin Denby?<br> No, that was<br>‘Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Street’.<br>Maybe it was Larry Eigner?<br> I’ve no way of checking.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The Dewars and Gordon’s Gin bottles<br>sitting on a shelf in this basement<br>are huge, flagons almost, so very American:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The World and its Drinks</div><div style="margin:10px 0">(the comment August made<br>in England, up in the Peak District,<br>confronted with folk rituals:</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> “Where’s<br>the bar?”<br> a ritual enough.<br>Auden’s clock ticked towards martini time.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">My friends in their various places<br>bear with me<br> stretched out in a bedroom<br>which a door, cunningly concealed, separates<br>from the condo laundromat.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Our yuppie neighbours upstairs<br>dropp dumbells – I think – on the floorboards.<br>In this suburb, they say,<br>the Clinton/Gore voters are basement dwellers<br>like us,<br> light off to the south<br>through the claret ash<br> brighter as we tilt<br>away from the sun and the leaves fall</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> – that line about the world and its streets,<br>was it William Bronk?<br> the catalogue of American poets<br>not yet on autoshred<br> though who’ll be laureate<br>in the new administration?<br> (Ed Dorn once suggested<br>Robert Bly for Hubert Humphrey<br> as if poetry<br>were a parody of presidential style<br> (and now<br>somebody has put together an anthology<br>of “poems for men” . . .<br> (in Australia<br>we did that long ago: it was called<br>‘Poems of Spirit and Action’<br> – John Forbes<br>had it at school, still prefers it<br>to the ones with close-ups of flower stamens<br>opposite poems by William Carlos Williams.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> It was raining in the capital</div><div style="margin:10px 0">and radio heartbreak was on,<br> Respighi<br> “laugh or cry music”<br> as Terry McGrath<br> would have it.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I have ruined our landlord’s floor with oven cleaner</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> (photo: close-up: a container of oven cleaner)</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Tonight I eat with the lawyers<br>on Capitol Hill<br>while the President packs his clothes.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Actually, the Respighi<br>is developing more into laughter mode,<br> its overblown pictorialism.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> What’s this bit?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> A conga chain of<br> ex-presidents in bathrobes<br> enter a steaming sauna<br> flanked by unsmiling CIA types.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Cut to close-up of incumbent<br> (played by Frankie Howerd).</div><div style="margin:10px 0">T-shirted in this basement<br> (photo: T-shirt)<br>I feel no need to go out. It’s 46 degrees.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But I do (go out)<br>across mean streets to the Law Center<br>and thence, a restaurant,<br>where a loud tool of the employers<br>down one end of the table<br>seems suddenly like a kid<br>arguing over a football.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Autumn so vivid<br>the stars and stripes washed out<br>against the yellow.<br> I cross Dumbarton Bridge<br>toward Dupont Circle,<br> Rock Creek Parkway below<br>only weeks from icing up,<br> black branches over the creek.<br>At Dupont, leave exposed film,<br>walk down Massachusetts and K<br> to the Greyhound terminal<br>and further, to Union Station<br>taking in the character some guy said<br>this city lacks.<br> K St past Thomas Circle grows funky,<br>urban wreckage round the bus terminal.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Subway to Farragut North, and on<br>up Connecticut to pick up photos<br> (photo: photos)</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In the afternoon, sweep leaves<br>off the back porch (a screen door<br>slams!).<br> The sky darkens,<br>branches, parts of buildings<br> picked out by light.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">The photographs, taken months back<br>seem ancient:<br> Manchester late summer,<br>Dentdale, Durham,<br>faces of<br>Jonathan, Tom, Roy,<br>Joyce, Tony and Ric<br>(Hadrian’s Wall, its hill forts built to<br> prefabricated plans,<br>gates opening onto nowhere;<br>moss on the rocks at Godrevy;<br>outcrops on the gritstone edge, Winster . . .</div><div style="margin:10px 0">One summer displaced since<br>by the tail of another.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">When things go wrong<br> the Ginsberg line (in Philip Whalen)<br>about “severance pay”<br> i.e. “there wasn’t much<br>severance pay in that”<br> seems to apply<br>in instalments, to life here<br>in this capital<br>where everything has its hidden cost<br>(Rosemary’s clothes<br>dry-cleaned and dismembered;<br> upstairs<br>a pre-adolescent party:<br> 10 year olds</div><div style="margin:10px 0">with their own fax machines<br>and probably more than a notion of litigation.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">At 4 a.m. there is peace to read<br>about the Wobbly strikes in Paterson N.J.<br>but later the yuppies stomp above our heads again<br>so that I feel like shouting<br> “stop drinking coffee”</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Hal Roach is dead<br> – the man who put<br>Laurel and Hardy together, incredibly still alive<br>till just now.<br> He lived to see movies become boring.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And my father<br> dressed for Shakespeare, circa 1920,<br>on the cover of my first book;<br>the backdrop: dry grass,<br>weathered grey trunks up the hill;<br>an impossible country I try to picture segments of<br>in detail</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> lose them soon enough.<br>There is no plot<br> unlike Coronation Street<br>“better than real life and only<br>ninety minutes a week” (Jonathan Williams)</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">The morning cold and clear<br>after rumoured flurries.<br> I remember some 19th century painting<br>of Washington under snow (by Eastman Johnson?)<br>sentimental in ‘de ole plantation’ mode</div><div style="margin:10px 0">– cold air that makes the head to hurt<br>though the sky is bright over Oak Hill Cemetery,<br>the beggars more assertive on the lips of escalators. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Fifty-one auto license plates spell out<br>the preamble to the constitution of the United States<br>at the Smithsonian,<br> and Frank O’Hara looks out<br>from a Larry Rivers painting, very present<br>here amid the art he loved<br> a memorial to him<br>by Grace Hartigan<br> “Grace to be born<br>and live as variously as possible . . .”<br> – words which could be attributed<br>to (the Rev.) Howard Finster<br> his fountains issuing from faucets,<br>a river of blood just that<br> though the source<br>may be a cut finger<br> and plenty more “just folks”<br>whom circumstance and vision worked through<br>so that they figured how art could be done<br>(as I write now on Rosemary’s sleeping shoulder<br>arranging a table to jot in haste though not to disturb)</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> – something happens<br>that you walk away from<br>as you walk away from your own history</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> my father: the cover of a book<br> my mother: a gold ring</div><div style="margin:10px 0">enigmatic, unsequenced<br>for plot or rhetoric,<br> more interesting<br>when decontextualized than as ‘psychology’<br>(the t.v. character last night<br>who went to analysis because<br>her mother and father hadn’t given her a hard time).</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Anything can be fixed here (even poetry)<br>though nobody wants to do it anymore<br>(fix things that is, not write poetry,<br>everybody wants to do that).</div><div style="margin:10px 0">We work our way (walk away) through breakfast cereals<br>(freedom of choice!)<br> and I like the ad<br>where a guy in surgical outfit<br>on an emergency ward set, says<br> “I’m not really a doctor, but . . .”</div><div style="margin:10px 0">(days after the election<br>the new president appears in a soap opera<br> as a plot device.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I pour myself a gin,<br>listen to Earl Bostic – Coltrane’s mentor –<br>thinking I have patched the drafty cracks<br>so that Washington’s night will be kept out of this condo<br>and wondering how to duplicate<br>the American ‘r’ and ‘a’<br>so that cab drivers will get our address right<br>and my name will be spelled correctly<br> by petty officials.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Earl Bostic and Bill Doggett:<br>sounds that would ‘invoke’ (if I were Robert Duncan)<br>instead ‘remind’ me of Ken Bolton,<br>now probably waking up in Adelaide,<br>even this moment cleaning his teeth,<br>a thought balloon above his head<br>(‘thot balloon’ Duncan would say,<br>the figure of Ken rising through the poem<br>like the Corn God . . .</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As in ‘One Night in Washington’,<br> the record where Charlie Parker<br>played the wrong tune over an unaccustomed backup<br>and they had to figure out what he was doing<br>– the pianist slightly haywire, feeling for tempo and key<br>as Parker doubles up, oblivious,<br>knowing where he’s going</div><div style="margin:10px 0">so ‘The Poem’<br> leaves behind<br>any notion of what its Arnoldian simile<br>is about<br> – just one manner of<br>jumpin in the Capital<br>(better than jogging in the capital<br>though less characteristic I guess –</div><div style="margin:10px 0">and waves to its friends on another shore,<br>dancers, buildings and drinks in the street.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Down on Rock Creek’s tributary<br>a maze of branches, leaves, undergrowth;<br>advanced puzzle in which I make out<br>the figure of a young woman sketching,<br>and further, a man, stripped to the waist,<br>washing shirts in the rivulet.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Halfway up the slope to Safeways<br>a concrete divan, shaped for Mme Recamier;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">the human figures, characters escaped from paintings<br>like the ones in the background of ‘Dejuner sur l’herbe’<br>which seem to occupy a different dimension<br>– even these rustic details of L’Enfant’s city<br>suggest French analogues<br> though up the hill<br>Washington Cathedral – twentieth century gothic<br>with elevators and climate control<br>suggests a big nothing<br> at least that<br>only a nation of fundamentalists and show-biz types<br>could put a gothic cathedral on a hill top.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I move about through these environs<br>grasping colour and light<br>as the capital slides into winter,<br>warm air chilling after three,<br>darkness by five<br> ham hocks over gas<br>simmering</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> a gold ring<br> the cover of a book</div><div style="margin:10px 0">It’s time for drinks and music<br> (no photos)<br>‘Autumn in New York’ or<br>‘Moonlight in Vermont’?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> ‘Dumbarton Oaks’!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">– where Igor Stravinsky stayed,<br>only a block away,<br> gardens laid out<br>for pleasure, all seasons.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Veterans’ Day:<br> Glover Park<br>a leaf impasto underfoot for miles;<br>the grey tree trunks producing an effect of haze.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">From The Palisades an old railroad bridge, boarded up,<br>cuts over Canal Street to the towpath,<br>pairs of mallards on the waterway.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> A man (veteran?)<br>with bedroll and sixpack<br>asks if I’m a local.<br>Sorry, you’re 12,000 miles off.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Return from the drizzle to a call from Vermont<br> for Rosemary.<br>Take a message<br>or try to<br> – our landlord<br>collects pens that don’t work<br>and places them all in jars near the telephone.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">(according to John Tranter it was Martin Johnston who said<br>‘If you want to communicate, use the telephone’,<br>but Martin probably got the line from John Forbes<br>– and he was quoting Frank O’Hara at the time.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I’m a spook on the bus through Shaw,<br>wreckage still from 1968,<br>gentility bordering the ghetto<br>with window boxes and fresh paint<br>up on Le Droit Park.<br> In Howard University’s<br>African collection, a small gold chameleon<br>illustrates the limits of personal power,<br>‘changing its colour to suit what it sees,<br>not what is hidden in the box’;</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> an Akan ceremonial vessel<br>shows Picasso even stole his doves from Ghana.<br>But Africa has come back<br>I think, to reclaim its own images<br>as Romaire Bearden, his art<br>at the American Museum.<br> Africa! Lorca<br>and Vachel Lindsay loved you<br>but you go further,<br> a chameleon<br>in the box,<br> not my personification of a continent.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I walk back on Columbia, a break in the drizzle,<br>to the border at 14th St<br> where signs become Spanish.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Turbulences cross the map,<br>snow falls in the panhandle of Texas.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">This morning Classical 104FM<br>advertises a book (illustrated)<br>of poems by Robert Frost<br>that<br> “makes profound truths<br>really accessible<br> in a language<br>everybody can understand”</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Out on the street<br>Latinos with air compressors on their backs<br>blow the dead leaves away.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> <br>Poet's Note: Washington D.C. November 1992</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Laurence+James+Duggan">Laurence James Duggan</a><div class=q> <img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share"> <script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=545816" data-title="At The Bar-Code Ranch de Laurence James Duggan" data-description="A stellar job in the bullpen C.B.S. Baseball I lie in a converted garage, sun coming up and the chuck-chuck of unfamiliar birds from Lake Mizell. The lamp grows ineffectual under a skylight; the great world washes in, humid, composed of small..."></div> </div> </div>

solid border dashed border dotted border double border groove border ridge border inset border outset border no border blue green red purple cyan gold silver black