David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
ROOMS
We enter rooms at our own risk. Empty rooms are abandoned pueblos Where the brother who died Before it was time Still greets us on the street.
Every day is a new day in light-filled rooms. And every night is new in attic rooms Where darkness scrunches in wedges above the eaves.
When she enters the room Smoke alarms go off. When he enters, a single hibiscus bloom Floating on its green sea Follows him like a little sister.
Entering, I see a black asterisk At the top corner of the window frame But ignore its signifying. Big as a squid’s eye, the spider Notes my every twitch.
One room invites me To take my clothes off. Another demands That I take up stilts to match the light. The last, with its shades drawn, says, “This is your last.”
Crouched like a Mayan glyph, I search the baseboard for the reference— A name, one note of explanation. David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
IN CONSTANT WEATHER BY RELIABLE LIGHT
No lake surface full of clouds in the office, But light at play in pixilated fields.
In the morning how quiet the desks, expectant. Unconcerned with our dreams, they respect ideas.
In the evening they let go, await our return. Inviting as a tennis court
Each supports the tedious Production of shots for a wondrous
Combination—work done In constant weather by reliable light.
I’ve seen a city of luminous figures Rise from the depths of a desk. I’ve heard
Arguments recurse and tumble, finally Obvious as polished stones.
Levitating above the desks, work Artificial and beautiful as an airfoil
Or the cat-track backhoe’s immense, tender Gesture unfurling a steely thought
Through crafty space, and I accept my fate— Love-slave of the human-made. David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
STOMP FOR A BLUESMAN #1
This kid skinny. He be upright. This boy blowin’ the blues harp like a bar fight.
This boy wire. This boy tight. This boy smackin’ the mouth organ till it bite.
Go down bass get up bright. This boy workin’ the coal face by match light.
He dig mine. This boy findin’ the red fist in my chest pit. This boy fine.
David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
HOW A POEM IN LOVE JUST FALLS APART
I want to give you this very poem very woven very built. I made it out of words and from the light at the crease of your cheek. Let it be your favorite scarf be dark
sweet chocolate. It’s fat-free. It’s got your arm hinged with my head in it when we lie spent, hand at my earlobe, turning your fingers out to graze. Did I mention you are my dictionary, my order my serendipity? Meaning is that crescent of hair listening, right now, at your ear. It is the curves & corners of your voice.
Come, sashay into this poem. Pick your way through the crowd of words. They’ve had a bit too much, I admit, rubbing and coupling everywhere.
Look around, shake things up the way you do, tossing out some tucking one here and there into your bra.
Go on, re-make my poem the way you do my vast audience of one. You give me a better view of the light wearing nothing but …
OK OK. I hear you. Screw this poem. Let’s go tongue some vowels. Come, give me your labials. We’ll go share liquids and bump a hard consonant. David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
PERSON UNDER CONTROL (PUC)
Moaning. Turned his head from left to right. War surrounds as if my fur on fire Lucky I am to live a dog’s life.
Unmuzzled, I lunged at his face as if I’d bite. His shit stank fear. They screamed it smelled of liar. Moaning. Turned his head from left to right
Blindfolded for a month, day and night Hands bound behind his back with wire. Lucky I am to live a dog’s life.
Panties pulled over his head white As his face yanked from the “water cure.” Moaning. Turned his head from left to right
And bit his IV tube in two from fright. Crying, his body twisted like a briar. Lucky I am to live a dog’s life.
Arms trussed behind his body, hung from a height, Kicked, kneed, punched. They never tire. Moaning. Turned his head from left to right. Lucky I am to live a dog’s life. David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
LONE AND LEVEL
… eye drawn farther by farther into seeing without filling this dry sweet sea
la pampa distance like thought’s thought tugs the narrow compass look out far
pupil of the plain where real unreels continuing its infinite polishing of the shine while sky looks on helplessly the fragrance of eucalyptus pretends to be California
the furnace wind blowing for 1000 miles across indifferent land takes available air hostage the hammer sun keeps on banging this anvil plain “abstraction approaching form and suddenly denying” evidence la pampa proof of flat earth and astral plane threatened when a tree arrives which could be a school girl or boy on the horizon
near disappearing as if it were the point a tree anchoring the plain so clouds can’t carry it off or file of trees ripping a seam between the sky and the plain
but here everywhere is everywhere here the plain point among empty points that the vanishing point vanishes like an absent guide here where exile is impossible
glare taking the pupil away in the way of reflection the sun sucks up land tense from pulling the horizon wire taut eon on eon so the violent sun can step like an artist
across the deepest surface of the world swallowing itself like the word nada empty plain brims with meaning here where the eye learns there’s no work to do
imagine distance from distance the world farther out while eyes sink in deep and flies
come from a 1000 miles carrying one small purpose on their extra legs buzzing about
their job of work and allies the birds in flight across this “infinite yawn” who suddenly self-conscious land and walk on a surface that commands all where to stand how to move over traceless level trees marched off the edge of the earth and the athlete sun swaying across from another country through vision to a murmuring always mourning behind the silence of never diminishing distance from distance where human talk wanders mocked by the birds strutting the Great Level proven best for digesting
David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
space where absence finds itself face to face with absence one cannot think a lonelier thing cannot convince oneself of thought how to say with the bubble-eye of a spirit
level “I am” the “I” dissolving into the ranging unreal plane without desire bird curses like saws ripping into sheet metal binding tearing binding tearing until they level
the imagination peoples who from 1000 miles bedded on ancient plain settling and who came after could see clearly to kill settle then in the distance next who killed
settling killing settling the Great Level under sun performance one sees the approached and the approaching universe happen to us intersecting this plane where I am not here
in the here of it the where of it denying itself away perspective rays lancing by me
as I back away step by step back away from that imposter dot on the horizon
out this gape mouth of space its lone incline to known estancia I’m not alone while games continue polo ponies setting up a shot on the level annoyed their riders ignore it croquet players on arrogant lawn which saddles the pampas laughing embracing unaware of dogs flushing a hare and giving chase their legs out far lunging like rapiers through expanse with every space slice nearing their quarry who accelerates at will knowing he can outrun death but still it’s difficult to keep the spirit level for no one has seen the boy as if he walked out on the plain and walked and walked and I am not here denying what play keeps at bay at the near school the ex-rugby player teaching Shakespeare saying as bird curses tilt “you cannot imagine how hard it was when they came to my class and flashed a badge and took the boy out and no one has seen him no one since” the pampas polishing distance a pulse of ponies in the open field flinging themselves like a girl tossing her chestnut hair delighting in their bodies taking my body in their eye as they whip out far and race in deep and the horizon goes slack and the sun tumbles on us and then we settle … David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
FAMILIAR, A RIDDLE
How I’ve envied you giving yourself into the hands of trees
bending the bough as tenderly as a girl from her bath
leaping the void to a place proffered to you alone. Ground bound
I long to flit above the duff of dead through leaf whisper
never touching earth, dance branch to branch and flicker my fur pennant like a flame on the limb lanes giving me to twig tips that dip like witching lift me out of shadow. To grasp with your hands invisible paths, tirelessly trying the sky. David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
SACRED BOOKS
for Andrew Scrimgeour
In the night-study my books converse quietly, A 1000 tongues so subtle their words slip between The electron pulse of my nerves and impulse to longing.
The loneliness of books is different than ours Because we live our lives between the pages. The book of the white whale does suffice in our darkness.
Best that students now don’t know the tale Of Isaac, the cold hike, the Bowie knife In our beloved father’s hand, the lamb
Looking on with affectionate bewilderment. In a shop window stands a pillar of glued books. Elegantly shut forever, they bear our sorrows.
We are woven by the winter’s tale. A book beckons us into its house of infinite digression. A seed suddenly sprung up, swallowing our body, our city.
The sacred books have fits of melancholy Because they have ceased being books, become coins. Opening a book to the light is to open my wings. David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
SERMON ON A TEXT FROM THE BOOK OF FATAL COURAGE
Irony corrodes the words of the preacher and the prophet. Iron rusts. The poet’s dry-stone wall locks its rocks in light. Time gives the stones to the city for its watchtower.
All the priests and politicians attend the cornerstone ceremony where they praise their own Will savor Fate but Chance shouts from the crowd, “Don’t take anything for granite.” David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
EMPTYING THE ARTIST’S STUDIO
— for Jacob Landau, 1917-2001
So he chose a dome Because it echoes an embracing sky boundless as the skull Of giant Ymir, more Than man to the Norse but not quite God? Or Memory of the giant Dürer whose avid eye, daily, polished a skull?
The movers could give a shit, Say it looks like a spaceship or planetarium, The truth. Its concave space Could be the artist’s eye where invisible light projects a universe. “Tensegrity” (so claimed Bucky for geodesics) matched a mind that lived its labor In the tension envelope A curve made of planes. At his drawing table, the artist sways With a line’s integrity, Charming the snake-brain coiled on the floor of his cranium Till it rises up In grace through mental space continuous sinew of ink Weaving from our tragic Warp memorable form, lifting into the calvaria where It looks out, looked upon.
They pull out a canvas taller than a man, its blank expanse As they continue pulling, Such endless field of whiteness unto blindness, as they pull, Silently, hand over hand drawing it out that they must, exhausted, Stop. They ask for water.
Beethoven’s death mask stares from a shelf, Grave mouth set Like the wiry kid who shoulders a steel cabinet of flat files, Its prints alive in darkness Charting our “forever unmanageable condition.” Old record albums stand At attention. Engraved plates wait On the bench, insomniac Inky souls as restless in their ravines as the late String quartets of his God Bedded in their vinyl valleys. The nervy lines of the dead Live to fire desire, Mapping the Incognita of our brain. Here dwell dragons.
[break] David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
Where the meat world Meets the mineral on the border where in & out are equivocal In the vaultarium, Encephalarium, O cranoodio where the artist Noodled for years in the desert His blind pencil snouting into whiteness unto limestone Into the blank unknown, Even unto vision, O in mineral light Leaving behind a line Quivery with life as Strad gut Tough as Ludwig’s tune.
Mirror of Lascaux, Where manganese and charcoal blown through the bone of a bird Limn the absent print Of a human hand, they find present his trace on the table—graphite lines Without parts that wind In and out of light until it is possessed. A single female curve Made of single breath Startles them like the dart of a bat at dusk. They catch her figured body In the act of hungering To know itself. Their body feels along its edge of skin. They break. The old straw boss Who directs this moving symphony, cueing the out And in the heartspurts Of the final emptying, raises a crayoned drawing like a flag: “This is your brain on paint.” A plastic skull between Goya’s Desastres and Posada’s Calaveras smiles.
They carry out the last soul-sinews as though they were songs in the night. The kid stops, bent By the sweep of feeling on the cheek of a litho stone. Or He can’t lift the slab. The movers team and heave the damnstone together. It goes out.
They recall themselves Returning for the final drawing and enter the cave To grapple and drag out A dragon line—witness to a killer, his blade raised in an old tale. Everyone unprepared, For a Cain protected by the Sky-God His head bare as a skull Turned toward us, eyes saying that we can do nothing.
David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
SECULAR PRAYER for David Massey
The face of pain you’ve scaled for years, flesh wedged into cracks past retreat.
Summit raises summit, locks up oxygen.
Cloud hardens to escarpment, land escaping on all quarters, dead stars arriving late.
Frigid wind thins your view.
O sharpest scarp, let, I beg, this life, through pain keep its name, just as light come through black emptiness, yet light.
David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
THE ACHIEVEMENT OF NIGHT
Look into the eyes of the small animals To see the seeds of night that feed our lives. Who knows whether having lived on this earth matters.
Let us pare stories from our fragrant world With night’s obsidian knife, so we can pay it The attention it deserves. The hollow bone
Of the vulture, after millennia, gives up its night-music, And black at last, cave black becomes a color. Just look at Lazarus come back, wordless.
Tonight steps heavily through the woods. And night finds ways through day, the fragile ant The hard Apache tear, never leaving us.
When will the dead blossoms and skeletal crosses That guard the murder curves of country roads Cease insisting that our world’s a cemetery?
Mice have mastered the attic night. And we Have achieved the nocturne, its agitating bewilderment, For night collects our things and locks her door. David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
IT IS AN EASY THING
to take my body for granted, which is health. It is an easy thing to laugh and sing when I live in a house honeyed with sunlight and have a job, born a fashionable color into a country between necessary wars. It is an easy thing when I stand on land that broke off Pangea and migrated to a temperate latitude. When I’ve inherited expanded metaphors for the world—my body is cousin to the crow, great-grand something to the sauropsids and many greats back to grass, for example. And I live perched on the thin-as-paint, topmost layer of time’s tower on a planet between Ice Ages and Great Dyings, in a golden epoch—after the stars spewed my atoms but before observing our planetary system collapse.
So, it is an easy thing to believe with those cosmologists and theologians that the world was made for me. It is an easy thing, living in a window of choice— mall-walker in a nation of shelves in the age of iPod that holds in memory more than the library at Alexandria and serves whatever whenever I select. It is an easy thing, free of need to feed my kids from the Food Pantry, to believe. Free of fear that soldiers will appear in the mall force my kids to kill my wife or have their hands chopped off, it is an easy thing to believe that the cosmos selected us— uniquely the observers of their own observing— in order to be. [break] David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
But it is not so with me. It is not so. Holding in our hands another Great Dying, by the slow or the sudden heat, I observe a random scatter of crows on the grass who glisten black with laughter, listening to the universe on “Shuffle.” David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
OBSIDIAN CONSIDERED AS AN OBJECT OF AFFECTION
The disk folds earth back like black flaps of skin in the California orchard.
A small boy follows the wound, looking for obsidians.
Scuffling & settling about him, the crows too attracted by that glassy, jet glint.
The boy clambers over mountainous furrows leaving the morning behind persists into the afternoon's cauldron.
For miles he trudges with his scarf of crows undistracted by the smell of crushed vetch looking for the clean, shell fracture—
the fragment of a bright, black night.
Lying awake, the boy thinks perhaps in the morning he will plant that obsidian
gleaming on his dresser in the room's darkness.
Perhaps not, as he rises again to run his fingers over its vitreous surface feel the fracture waves rippling his arm.
Even small boys know volcanic glass lives a different life from redwood.
He questions whether it is a black seed of fire
that he must return to the orchard or keep for his own healing.
He remembers stories of Gallinomero who crossed the orchard before him carrying sacred obsidian five hundred miles.
[break]
David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
How did it come to be believed? What of its obsession? questions for his parents, for a grown boy.
About love in his room there is no doubt.
He finds himself within an impossible glass mountain under a black sun in a black sky traveling with hand to forehead, shading his eyes
among those perfect, intolerably black scarps. David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
STONE-SONG Fragments From A Japanese Treatise Written On Paper Fragile As Thought
Fascicle I 1 On Rigorous Training in Philosophy and Poetry
Discriminating Divers spring waters, she now
May bow before tea.
2 The Sage’s Warning Against the Pimps of Tradition
Space of the cat’s yawn.
Learn the barbed tongue. Then get out.
Abalone sky.
3 High Definition, or a Violation of the Law of Excluded Middle
He sees the sun rise Here, every day, someplace else
On Sunrise Channel.
4 On the Fiction of Causality
The rooster beside The cabin clearing his throat.
The sun refuses.
5 The Metaphysical Pressure of Fable, or The Origins of Religion
On my desk, Iceland Spar—the sun-stone. Opposite, Amber—moon-catcher.
6 On the Relation of the Physical and the Metaphysical
Take a word, place it Next to a word, make it rub Up on another. David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
7 The Unknowable
Firs singing in wind, Acapella birds at dawn. How do the stones sound?
8 On the Relation of the State of California Mind and Nature
How do the live-oaks Grazing light on the gold slopes Bear the weight of eyes?
9 On the Relation of Fact to Truth
Dirt road. A bear track. None leads to it, none away. As if fact were truth.
Fascicle II 1 Commentary on the Universe and Our Place in It
Mammoth clouds drifting … Collide like bull elephants.
And only silence.
2 California: First Course in Cosmology
The harbor runner Tilts her face to the sky, yes All four corners—light.
3 On the Impossibility of Living so That One Can Always Tell the Truth
White wine and truffles. A man stares from the sidewalk.
Shadow gnaws the moon.
David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
4 On the Possibility of Knowing the Inner Life of Another
My thoughts are racing Each other, maybe racing Yours like hummingbirds.
5 The Pathos of Things: A Short Course in Aesthetics
Agree with the sea, Its power, indifference, Carve a surfer’s curve.
6 The Unavoidable Self-Referential Paradox
Making a poem.
Lugging a piano up To the mountain top.
7 Conjecture on the Unknowable
Cascading ages Of water. Glaciers recede.
Listen! The stone-song.
8 On Being Implicated in All Things
Spring. Torture regime.
If we could hear the fierce green, Cities would go mad.
9 How to Live
You need to decide What is life. I’ll wait. Good, now
You must change your mind.
David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
THE INNER ROOM
A California song, A prophecy and indirection a thought impalpable to breathe as air, … A murmuring fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky, … — Whitman
1.
I wake to words and light. Her words Would walk through walls, tiptoe down The hall and rock outside my door. Breathing. Breathing. Some mornings leave Her redwood-paneled closet, stand Like trees around my bed. Or pierce Her ceiling, gather in our attic, Dry as the Mojave, waiting For the fog to burn off, light strike The sky-crystal. On her knees Among suspended clothes like ghosts, As if her sisters, lost so many Years ago, returned, she points Her steepled hands toward the blue Infinite receiving. She Releases words like birds, each Keen on its mission—to deliver A scroll as tightly rolled as a bud In the orchard; or soar, red-tail flashing, Peak, and plummet, snap the jack’s Neck like a twig. The emptying Herself day after day every morning, faithful as a scholar, She calls, “Waiting on the Lord,” The taking from within the weight Of shadow that the day will be Light. So “when you pray go into Your inner room and shut the door, Address in secret” who is hidden— One who requires the perpetual Refreshment of words. David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
Her murmuring From clay that spins around its dark Center on her wheel. Her rocking In the dank potting shed of bent Labor to let her vessel speak Renewal. It is the breathing after Hidden things. Her bending toward From the inner room like a flicker’s scritchings In our shingled wall or wagglings On the floor of a hive or groanings of stones In Cazadero Creek. Her words From secret places of the earth Out what’s hidden—omni-present As gods who stand among the redwoods, Their crowns in clouds of green and mist.
2.
Hands weeping in the driest cell, Words drip and form a single rivulet Finding its way across the foursquare floor, Clutch themselves like aching to themselves Word by word, and seep beneath the door Down the shadow hall into the orchard Taking on that longing of the apples, Making a companion of the fog, Meandering beyond the manzanita Break until they are the rain and river Flowing to the coast. My ear an ocean
I wake. I will divine the voices of noise. A scarlet spray of fuchsia flinging itself To touch the cloudless sky? Or La Llorona Sobbing by the river for her children? Or irridescent shrieks of hummingbirds Whirling our house? They know its center, Winging their vectors of nectar and the sun. Alberca overflowing, promising The roses irrigation, searching out Yellow Shiloh plum, persimmon, peach?
[break]
David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
I fail. I feel the rhythms—supplication, Lamentation, most of all the upward Yearning, the waiting on another world. Or words that merely sound my mother’s body? Her long waiting like a long receiving, Her long wading in the Lord perhaps A dying. It’s dangerous to overhear Adults—I am the coyote that we saw By Lone Pine Road, picket ears on point, His body wound around itself to uncoil Back into the scrub oak. Terrifying Melodic loving. Can such pure entreaty,
Gentle mother, bent among the giants, Force your hope into the universe?
3.
Crazed glaze and cobalt Streaks of purifying Hell kiln heat, The poetry of pots. Trusting their desires In your refiner’s fire— “They are the earth and water They are fire and air”— Your patience traps the sun Like crystals in a geode. Words of inner summer, Your poetry ascends. Blake, of course, is right “Prayer is the Study of Art” In your tender, tinder closet At the heart of the house, A narrow retort of freedom Concentrating words To diamonds. And you use Them to cut dark to see The Mayacamas close Across the valley where Your words ignite and tongues Of fire lash the northwest Face of St. Helena,
[no break] David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
Roar through Yellow-Jacket Ranch and Calistoga, Torch Agua Caliente. Smell of fractured light Left in the chaparral. Blood-red sundisk risen Behind your beggar hands That speak like rising smoke— Dawn runes seen All the way to Bodega. Prayer is the study of fear In that inner room Private as pain. Yet claim Within your hollow the whole Promise of the secret And hear a weary foot On the veranda step. Your smoke-eater stands Parched, strangely new, Wearing a mask of ash As if a minstrel husband. The meadowlark enkindles. You hear your heart. You hear Bee-hum hope Spoken over orchards From blossoming apple-mind Where song is alchemy Your body an alembic Like the guitar’s where timbres Of a whole orchestra Concentrate their embers. Kneeling, you lift your face To the smoke-hole—circle Of the angel with six wings Trembling in the willful Current of your praying Yourself into yourself. David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
4.
Kneeling in the dust at twilight, A boy folds his hands and whistles
Night after night. A breath of wind Stirs the apple tree beside him.
It shivers as if waiting, its inner Limbs giving up their shadows, air
Expectant while he whistles, waiting, For the quail’s distant, answering whistle.
His is a pleading and a praising Along a thread of air. The boy
Believes in winesaps and acacia And morning glories that unfurl
Their inner tendrils, whispering Along the dew-damp ground at dawn.
And in his waking dream the boy Hears that distant answering voice
Like a wind playing his mother’s body, Voice exaggerated as fuchsias
Their “tiny chimes” forcing the doors Of our inner room by fierce indirection.
What he hears insists like will, Smells like quartz. No enmity
Between stone and air in prayer Among the world’s vertical speech—
Skrittering of quail through brambles, Skelping coyotes in the hills
Hiss of the welder’s nick of light His knees bent, head bowed to work.
(Mother, I wake. So let me sing For you, because I cannot pray.) David Sten Herrstrom P.O.Box 219, Roosevelt, NJ 08555
Waiting on The Refiner, breathing, What regrets in your inner room?
What arrowheads of aspiration, Stinging the sky? What exhalations
Like gritos of the gypsy pickers After folding their wings for the night
That linger in the apple limbs? The edges of their high thin songs
Waiting on the light and breathing Like steel strings or a honed blade.
Your giant voice. I hear your life But I cannot recall your words.