November
Childhood desire turns life’s wheels,
these large hoops, propelling them with sticks
under the tall park elm trees. Movement of
wheels.
Everyone there is here now
within you and all of your
kin and all of your kith are here now and it will take a lifetime to
flower and to fly and to sail this sea of
thickening light.
Room-tone, mouth-feel, a reordering
of parts, rationing of emotions: I hear voices:
they live here now without forgetting the way
back under the surface of consciousness, the
bungled aspirations, of leprosy as a model,
and grim ire.
Life pushes, photography wins over
time, and over the mind a brown shale.
This is November.
EDWARD MYCUE, born Niagara Falls, New York, raised in Dallas, Texas. Earned a magna cum laude BA from North Texas State. Teaching Fellow at NTS, Lowell Fellow at Boston University, Intern at WGBH-TV Boston, Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Peace Corps Volunteer teaching in Ghana. Upon return to the US entered a period of intense Civil Rights (SCLC, URBAN LEAGUE, NAACP, naming a few from those days) activities & immersion in the counterculture & working for six years for the Dept. of Health, Education & Welfare in the 5-state Dallas southwest region office, then Washington, DC.
In late-sixties in Europe, worked in shipyards and warehouses in the Netherlands, harvested grapes and vegetables in southwest France, and delivered washing machines in West Berlin. Also tutored American writers in Elsinore, Denmark and immersed himself in London’s poetry ferment, and on June 1, 1970 moved to San Francisco. Joined the Gay Liberation Movement. Began working for Margrit Roma and Clarence Ricklefs’ The New Shakespeare Company-San Francisco.
Met painter Richard Steger on Memorial Day in 1971. Both joined literary/ artistic conversations in English and in translation, publishing poems in the explosion of small-circulation literary magazines and presses that provided the ground for a literary life. Ed was drawn by George Oppen into a writers’ group that met first in Lawrence and Justine Fixel’s living room that evolved into in Ed’s living room with poets Lennart Bruce, Laura Ulewicz, Jack Gilbert, Shirley Kaufman, Ray Carver, Josephine Miles, Nanos Valaoritis, Mort Marcus, William Dickey, Frances Mayes, Honor & Wayne Johnson, William Talcott, Adrianne Marcus, Jim & Eleanor Watson-Gove, Elizabeth Hurst, Jules Mann, Helen Sventitsky, Andrea Rubin, Carl Weiner, Sybil Wood, Marsha Campbell–and more now–over the last 41 years. First as a partner with Lawrence Fixel in founder/ proprietor/ publisher Dennis Koran’s Panjandrum Press, and later with his own Norton-Coker Press (with Laura Kennelly’s MRS JUNG book as first of dozens), Ed published with Richard Steger 19 issues of TOOK, a free magazine.
Since 1970, Ed’s published works in addition to poetry, criticism, essays, and stories have appeared in 2000 literary journals, magazines, zines, broadcasts, fliers, broadsides, and broadsheets. Publications (often with artwork by Richard Steger) include DAMAGE WITHIN THE COMMUNITY (Dennis Koran’s Panjandrum Press, San Francisco 1973); HER CHILDREN COMME HOME, TOO, Sceptre Press, England 1974); CHRONICLE (Mother’s Hen Press, San Francisco1974); ROOT ROUTE AND RANGE (Gary Elder’s Holmgangers Press, Alamo, CA 1976); ROOT ROUTE & RANGE THE SONG RETURNS a 88-page poem (Walter Billeter’s Paper Castle, Melbourne, Australia 1979). In the 1980’s: THE SINGING MAN MY FATHER GAVE ME (Anthony Rudolf’s Menard Press, London, England); THE TORN STAR (Larry Oberc’s Opposm Holler Tarot, Indiana), EDWARD (Michael McKinnon’s Primal Press, Boston, MA). NO ONE FOR FREE (SF,CA); GRATE COUNTRY (split chapbk w/Lainie Duro, Chicago); IDOLINO (SF,CA); NEXT YEARS’ WORDS (split chapbk w/Andy Lowry,Chicago); THE SINGING SURGEON (Colorado); 1990’s PINK GARDENS BROWN TREES (Bernard Hemensley’s Stingy Artist/Last Straw Press, Weymouth, England); BECAUSE WE SPEAK THE SAME LANGUAGE (Paul Green’s Spectacular Diseases Press, Peterborough, England); SPLIT, chapbook w/Jim Watson-Gove, Mycue’s half titled LIFE IS BUILT FROM THE INSIDE OUT. 2000 came NIGHTBOATS (Jim Watson-Gove’s Minotaur Editions, Oakland, CA ). Then, 2008, MINDWALKING: NEW & SELECTED POEMS 1937-2007 (Laura Beausoliel’s Philos Press, Lacey, WA ).
September 2009, Jo-Anne Rosen’s Wordrunner Press of Petaluma, California issued online, Edward Mycue’s first Echapbook http://www.echapbook.com of 25 selected poems, I AM A FACT NOT A FICTION. A television program featuring Edward Mycue is on the internet and also here…
CATCHIT –MY DAMP FACE LOOKED PINK PAINTED OVER AND BLOTCHED in a old faded sepia snapshot — MY HAIR WAS SEVERELY BRUSHED
I had a young, firm face then.
And I would have been wide-eyed
waiting to catchit, whatever
‘it’ was, to catchit and take it
apart, to understand what the virus
life was presenting to me, me
who couldn’t then have seen myself
or my kind as a virus swarming
out of our planet attempting to
conquer and perhaps colonize stars.
Last week, early, I sat at my window
looking at the large, heavy cones
being attacked by huge awkward crows
disturbing all other life in that tree —
greedy things. I recall “Grammy”, warning
against following the crows before
you die, the way rodents do who pickup
what greedy crows’ have dropped. I have become a crow and though part of a system, I see in that grainy photograph that I am conscious with a bad conscience.
© Edward Mycue 17 SEPTEMBER 2015
I HEAR IN THE WIND SEPTEMBER
I hear in the wind long-gone voices
Who knew the language of flowers
Tasted the bitter root, hoped,
Placed stone upon stone, build
An order, blessed the wild beauty
Of this place. Can you hear
In the wind whispers, crusts
Of soul-insulted soul, scattered
Ages, decided, gone yellow, thin?
I hear in the wind those old sorrows
In new voices, undefeated desires,
And the muffled advent of something
I can only define as bright new angels.
Can you hear in the wind independent
People who never depart, have no time
For friends, who want to go and want
To stay and never decide in time?
I hear in the wind old phantoms
And the swirl of the released mustardstar
And the cry of innocence.
It is soon September I hear in the wind.
© EDWARD MYCUE, 3595 GEARY BLVD, APT 320, SAN FRANCISCO 94118
SUMMER’S OVER
Passages in melancholy
loss recess in dreams
that curl — a bannister or
a squirrel’s tail, squeaking,
shivering with possibility
for the right moment.
All the while dewy mornings,
wild blue skies where willow trees confront tiny blades, needles, stars, explosions
that are still, not night,
but light on light where
breath has many doors
mixing retrospect, apprehension
told, lost, found this morning.
Past and future is now,
no hands in stone.
© Edward Mycue
SUMMER HAS BEGUN
Past and future is now
mixing retrospect with apprehension
because breath has many doors
that are light on light.
Lost passages reside in dreams
curling the way a bannister curves
or even a squirrel’s tail
waiting for the right moment.
Dewey mornings– wild blue–
Wait, back to back, for freedom,
for control, for surrender
transforming for the right moment.
©Edward Mycue
A GREAT FINAL MUSIC
That words dream motion
makes life glorious
puts raw silk to silence
gives music tongue,
reveals in all the rainbow colors
how nature comes listening
to seed bursting,
to the prairie garnet and
desert chimney peridot,
leaving the wind behind.
Actions matter.
Thoughts matter.
All flow into
a great final music.
© Edward Mycue San Francisco 29 December 2014 for Serge Echeverria
A FIGHT FOR AIR by Edward Mycue
I. A Fight for Air
Towels soak in the sink
Roots crack, splinter
Each sound’s a stone screaming
successive millions
of mute islands
a secret care I keep folded
under my fingernail
dawn after dawn
The thrill is uneven The saliva curdles
Sunset climbs closely
to the fight for air.
II. Buried World
The Great River
plains desert
Red Rock Red River
Gulf of Mexico
deltas bayous hill country
conscribe an end and a beginning, leading
from these years this journey back
to nineteen sixty-one
Dallas: blotch concrete spread out on the plains.
We’d come to Texas thirteen years before
in a slope-back forties Ford.
I was eleven then.
We passed through Erie, Kentucky, Delta States
to arid, fissured land and bottomland and floods
to dying apple trees.
Then summertimes
and othertimes
Dad took us with him one by one
to get to know us
on his travels through his Southwest territory,
him talking brakelinings for a Firestone subsidiary
company that let him go not long before he died
in a chaos of fear
and pain he said was not like pain
but was pulling him apart.
III. Father
“We brought our children from New York
to take a better job.
My wife supported me.
Her hair turned white that first year.
She was thirty-three, had borne us seven kids
in our hometown, Niagara Falls.
We fought and stayed together
pounding with our love.
I was thirty-six that year
nineteen forty-eight.
Our oldest son was twelve.
The baby was a year.”
IV. Rain
Starting
Caution
Stop
Signal
Passing
Being passed
My father seems beautiful
his geographical eyes a cage
of ocean dreams
who’ll never dream again
so stubborn, gentle, singing anytime
some snatch of song he’ll never sing again.
Nostrils flaring, lungs honking, at the end
he couldn’t hold his teeth
only wanted air Air
His food came back
I hear him say NO, No not pain I’m
falling
No steel,
green-painted, rented tank of oxygen could help
since death will come when cancer eats the brain.
It rained the day he died
and it rained again on burial day. Good Luck,
it’s angels’ tears, they say the Irish say.
The dog killed cat run off morphine soaking into sand.
Gigantic stones snakes apple trees his eyes.
V. Grave Song
End of night
melted
threw my heat in the fire
O my mama place in the white
it was too big for me
I wanted out out I got out
Go downstairs
say off wiz de light off wiz all de lights
up up up
up wiz de fire up wiz de fire
(say ‘UP’ with the fire)
I am afraid
of the door rats on the stairs miles
miles miles to the light and I can’t
say it
there’s only me
and and everybody
and that is no body nobody
but some thing
behind
Lock it! Lock it!
Go go downstairs
Run Run Run Run out out out
They are moving
Dark
is light Things in the air
Tie Ta Tie Ta
Tie Ta Tie Ta
people gone
Cows moo in the fields and are gone
It does not hold
Hums Hums Hums
Hung birds in bottles, eggs writhing like worms
and the fire burns.
VI. Little Lifetimes
Children crush crackers between stones
celebrating luck and joy
seeing with ears, breathing music from trees, flowering
in pure deliciousness
awakening graves, unarmed against the rain. In time — silence:
stoning sterile trees,
praying the dead will sleep between the swollen roots.
The wind rushes in saying hold my ground, carve
your own road — the design that develops.
Now a face begins to emerge seeking air
examining death to discover patterns
in the movements of little lifetimes.
© Edward Mycue
NOVEMBER (the longer, 3 page, version)
NOVEMBER BY Edward Mycue p. 1 of 3 pages
As in November when we plant
tulip, hyacinth and daffodil
(pointing
as old bonds grown dull
among mutable
imaginary satisfactions,
like those meiotic moments
in dreamed carts of hay)
those things remembered
trail, reflect
attractions.
The torpor brought
from the soft thocking
has gone and left us only us.
It is time and nothing waits.
It is soon and nothing waits.
It is late and nothing waits.
I hear in the wind long-gone voices
who knew the language of flowers
tasted the bitter root, hoped,
placed stone upon stone, built
an order, blessed the wild beauty
of this place. Can you hear
in the wind whispers, crusts
of soul-insulted soul, scattered
ages, decided, gone yellow, thin?
I hear in the wind those old sorrows
in new voices, undefeated desires,
and the muffled advent of something
I only define as bright, new angels.
Can you hear in the wind independent
people who never depart, have no time
for friends, who want to go and want
to stay and never decide in time?
I hear in the wind old phantoms
and the swirl of the released mustardstar
and the cry of innocence.
It is soon September.
NOVEMBER Edward Mycue page 2 of 3 pages
What was finished, celebrated is almost finished again. My life is your story.
Your story a submarine skin envelope holding my story in worlds, walls dividingmy story, your life. The where’s and when’s keep turning on a spinning plate half-dipping into the Pacific Ocean and we on this tilting/raked stage where great ships
foundered with their great sentences of life and death—unfinished symphonies for the future out there that is our audience and who’ve driven-in to watch thinking that they
today have cast-off the overcoat that stifled thought for us, not realizing that thought
was the marriage of these rocks of experience this broken glass these diamonds in
exciting shapes the rising sun fallen where the rainbows arch over beehives.
Ugly is just a sharp paradigm shift. Praise for a red tractor. Dancing for chump change. Death an epistemological rupture.
Between lust and first folly is misspoken weeping. Ice skater on the glass of love.
Apple hooking into taste as it pours from the roofs of mouths.
I’m hitched to a string,
the shape of a heart. If I pull it or yank it, it comes apart. My past fell apart, it fell on the
floor. Do nothing, be smart, you’ll hollow your heart. Go to the end, jump in, take a
swim around your island. You’ll learn that the noose comes from within.
On an island
in the Bay—tears, anger, snot, spit; born, unborn: love, pre-intentionalist, is a soft
sunrise. Twitching. A covenant drifting. The dead are among us. Tactile interface of
memory: the dead are a lifetime buried in every moment. Baghdad heart, brick-red, done
in the antique style of rooted standards, outlaw blues, kiss of troubles. Is it worth it? In
the crosswalk on Oak Street near Gough (rimes with cough) where the red and dusky
San Francisco night before the dark looks upward for birds flying south from Canada the
earth is a body of interconnectedness. Life’s a daily scavenger hunt as the helicopter pushing air down lifts and the shiny lacquer of a left-out lawnmower partners seven little
boy and girl pirates at the toy red plastic barn offering evening-pardon from bay wharf
to a barn owl with tufted ears north over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sonoma County and Bartlett pears, Gravenstein apples, Blue Lake green beans, new squash. Memories to come lemon green of the young dad in sandals on a bike with his kid laughing. Their
names are Joe and Julian who’s lost sandal, blowsy as jimson weed, was found again.
Clemency, concord, representation of peace. Although in this old book the one of our lives everyday has a scream in it, mental garbage but not every syllable for misery. The
bacteria of emotions are domed spires, sample rooms and surrogate rumors that saunter, propagate invective, treasure, warning saddling ships of joy on angry hooves.
Strange shapes appear, macular degeneration, summer youth play-out, bumpkin, yokels, book clerks, truck drivers, anxiety to alienation, old chestnuts, aggregations of barnacles
force allusions, disassemble adolescent abstractions flipside to windows on hell with
bell-bottomed deep passages, bright chambers. Pulpy earth curdles its muscle dandling
rose red morning. Ethics reason a new bed, authorized desire, enzymes’ unction for the day’s comma is the crossover moment that says: “Take me, give me, send me away.” A
NOVEMBER EDWARD MYCUE PAGE 3 OF 3 PAGES
Mexican mango with champagne flesh light as a feather fluttering like ash once awkward and now terrible. We are fish in a net where roses of soot silt down into a lake of sleep. A woman came up to the edge. Pilgrims knelt to each other. Fiction can’t erase the teeth marks. Salmon pink, a slice of tomato, annihilated rendezvous-silkiness. Picnic. Drip pan. An unknown subtext beckons tumult in lavender flames. Enchantment: a dark speaking through a megaphone to this woman who bites her hair and code-breaking the gates of dreams that quench beauty red as blood, soft as cream. Light is amber, lantern-lit, catenulated halos drifting over riptides toward dawn gloaming. Surf is a pale tan woman, a green silver surging, a blue yellow renunciation. “Wkhah” “Wkhah” says the wind in the mind. This is action’s rose with green streaks of diagonal light igniting the garden in Tumbletown. Stardust a diminishing gusher of milk as it pinkens becomes a slight wicker coracle. The scar of full daylight has you crawl some days and boil each third. The old Queen Grandmother rages. Baby hummingbirds long for the cap and cowl
of a trumpet bloom. Slippery bridge this silver fire and blueberry cream: these are lost lessons and an inner journey where deer in a protected park flood the experiment’s unity.
Slowly. Glow. Earth jimjams a jungle under diamond skies as long-nailed dogs cut bark, tree rats scurry in canopies and ungrounded creation sticks hard red grease into fault lines, a welter of cherry-wood, linen, grass. Then rain. Guts erupt with reason, choices, the trigger of harmony, of Edens envisioned, never actualized, echoing gunk, churning and gurgling hope.
Memories, notes, glints, glances, baroque voices that carry love, sorrow, dancing images into the evenings of tall reeds that stand in moving waters sinking with the waters into the soil absorbed, evaporated to crust to dust that under later rains give over to damp earth ripening with memories that come from whatever life will press upward for the death ship for new sowing.
Telephone call then a summary a sea change, something more masochistic than divine.
Playground happenings, pals, thin, tough, jittering with velocity, high horses: they are scattered and buoyed by discipline, some say a high art whose escutcheon has low pay.
The wheel is round and childhood desire turns life’s wheels, these large hoops, propelling them with sticks under the tall park elm trees. Movement of wheels.
Everyone there is here now within you and all of your kin and all of your kith are here now and it will take a lifetime to flower and to fly and to sail this sea of thickening light. Room-tone, mouth-feel, a reordering of parts, rationing of emotions: I hear voices: they live here now without forgetting the way back under the surface of consciousness, the bungled aspirations, of leprosy as a model, and grim ire. Life pushes, photography wins over time, and over the mind a brown shale. This is November.
© Copyright EDWARD MYCUE 30 June 30, 2015
EDWARD MYCUE
APT 320, 3595 GEARY BLVD.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94118 TELEPHONE 1 (415) 387-2471
LOST
Comparisons analogies opposites contrasts
similarities differences metaphors reverses
obverses contrasts analogies similes likes:
“I always felt I was standing on shifting sand…”
Narratives of abandonment & disappearance
human overuse of critical resources
climate change exhaustion tipping points
secrets, evasion, closure, disclosure, withholding, silences, dissembling,
denials, turning a blind eye, truth, lies, turning your back on the truth
Patterns of behavior, protocols, routines, rote, etc
systems, procedures, menus, plans, priorities, repetition
hold your horses, you know your onions, get a little heads-up here
through-put, you are never able/allowed to purge your archives
affronted, aggrieved, petulant stare, two birds with one stony stare
what does it all add-up to you may well ask!
Paths lead up, down. Day is not east. It is west. All’s traffic. In these necessary hours, one man lifts his arms, stretching ready, signaling flame crimson. A long shadow adds you. The green you adds “with” and all through the night, love, bending everything.
So if the numbers inquire, tell them we are the ones, they are ones, I am one and you are one– — awe-filled, and not some kind of a robotic turned-brain knob.
When the numbers inquire, tell me you are one and that I am your one even as We truckle, burnished, roan now, in submarine confusion, swollen, last guest happy saying life’s the insult (even when not).
So when the numbers inquire, tell how differing drummers relive, repeat lessons of pilgrimage, malaise, the hungering decline of allegiances, how to fill a numb center and to reshape the line so you don’t get lost.
© Copyright Edward Mycue 28 September 2017 for my sister Marguerite Mycue on her double seven birthday
THE NIGHT THE PHOENIX BURNED
All that noisy night the phoenix flamed
crackling embers into singeing song
scorching fog, fuchsia, western laurel tree.
razing memories of my flower years,
smoke clouding what passes, these keys of flesh,
time the phoenix entered the sun dance
fragmenting, shattering, grinding-down
my tired half-dreams of a failed dream,
scooping from that mist of muffled bones
one frail and fragrant puff of finished fuse.
Fleeing, finding stars, sky, sirens screaming,
years turn, hope spins again into morning,
so what could never end might yet still come again.
© Copyright Edward Mycue
“WHEN THE BRANCHES OF PEACH TREES BEND
AND A BLUE HAZE COVERS BLUEBERRY PATCHES,
THAT’S SUMMER SIGNALING THAT IT’S TIME TO MAKE COBBLERS.”
(from page 246 of COOKING FOR COMPANY, BY THE FOOD EDITORS OF FARM JOURNAL, DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC., GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK 1968, EDITED BY NELL B. NICHOLS, Field Farm Editor)
(Excerpted by Edward Mycue, July 8, 2019, Monday, from the library in the 6th floor Celestial Suite community room of the Coronet in San Francisco, CA on Geary at Arguello Avenue
for Agnes Mycue & Michael McGaha of Claremont, CA in their homestead with the carved eagle tree trunk in front and their paradise garden in back full of fruits, flowers and vegetables and for their home team there and in North Texas/ Dallas)
THE TAPESTRY I WOVE AND I am NOW SINKing BACK INTO WEAVING INTO THE TESTIMONY OF MY WRITING LIFE THESE ODD INCLUSIONS IN VITAMIN “M” (“M” BEING FOR “minus”) THAT END UP IN THE TAPESTRY YOU SINK BACK INTO AND LIKE A PENELOPE YOU HAVE SPENT ALL THIS LIFETIME WEAVING AND UNWEAVING AS YOU WAIT FOR THE RETURN OF SOME LORD CALLED ULYSSES and
yes I know it looks odd, yet really it’s simply putting the words together that made it seem that there are diamonds in dark valleys of broken glass when the milky luminous moonstone abalone moons make their ways into the deep and dark narrow alley lanes as you sleep, but by now so many movements, so-called –isms in my writing life have blown in through the open windows of my word kitchen that the kitten in my mind’s corner in the basket under the old gas stove’s bouncing from surrealisms to symbolism and the post-avant-garde’s a canker even often cantankerous jungle-jingler with yens for villanelles and, rhymes, rondos, haikus and with deep koans inside.
Once I’d considered (reveried) memorizing many sacred books from the Koran, the Bible –old & new– plus the Book of the Dead, the Kalevala, the I Ching( — that one seeming “sacred” during hippie days in San Francisco in the ark on Haight & Masonic streets). It has all come to seem like hitting speed-bumps that smell of pheromone breakdowns leaving pawprints on parchment and that this finally is the tapestry I wove and I now sink back into.
© Copyright Edward Mycue 10/March/2019