THE the mad song MAD SONG A POEM MICHAEL

SCHIAVO1 the mad song copyright © michael schiavo, 2012 design & layout by blaze & stone

photo by michael schiavo (zuccotti park, october 17, 2011)

The Mad Song was composed September 10-17, 2006 in Johnson, Vermont and first published as a trade paperback in September, 2008.

Chapters have appeared in the following publications, sometimes in different form: CUE, Forklift, Ohio, Fou, Guernica, LIT, 1913: A Journal of Forms, No Tell Motel, The Normal School, and the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology. My eternal thanks to these editors for their encouragement and support.

To mark the one-year anniversary of the movement, this special occupy edition of The Mad Song is intended to be distributed for free, by any means necessary.

Dedicated to Stephen Boyer and Occupiers worldwide & to the memory of two great poets and friends, Morgan Lucas Schuldt & Paul Violi.

2 THE the mad song MAD SONG

MICHAEL

SCHIAVO3 the mad song

for my mother — & if for my mother then also for my father

4 the mad song

contents

1 of bedlam in its prairie pride 7

2 from a bright, civic borough i call to you 13

3 kansas is the same wherever you go 19

4 come, as the day shrieks its green 25

5 how often he considers indiana 31

6 might we lose ourselves, of a sudden, in january 37

7 like the stars we don’t credence 43

8 i can’t report the weather outside in the dark 49

9 if brokenhearted is better than bewildered 55

10 crossroads gather where none had before 61

11 she wears the shirt as if it were an orchid 67

12 all the doors are open and everything is empty 73

13 sometimes i dream about the grand coulee dam 79

afterword by douglas crase 85

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Of Bedlam in its prairie pride. Of the roach that winds between the stars, triumphal. Of well-water served in garnet goblets. Of crusted penknife sitting on the pillow in the crib. Of the foxy light July bestows. Of tightwad peace and spendthrift war. Of the ousted governor’s children, especially his eldest, and the way she swings her hips. Of notorious arts and how they make hoi polloi drunk. Of lauren-blue drifts and plumes. Of your vulcanized scent. Of nightly the oceanic barb I must remove from my heart. Of the bison and the owl. Of a country boy, not easy to know.

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I’ll recruit my army from the oldest religion. They in their carnival will be our liberty. O, but choir, but gas, but nail, and politician will not have it done. I’ll eat out their eyes before sunup. Declare the rooftops tarry and tally-ho the National Guard. The new of desire is slow fixed upon you. My throng rumbles blacker than theirs. And will be the fountain and the spring. What conference we hold with the heavenly tender. The heart is never wrong, though often mistaken. Don’t wait for night to fall, lover. Our campaign has yet to begin. Come find me in the fields with the Atlas of Pan.

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Had the bonfire not been there. Had the day been longer to whittle. Had you danced that way with me alone. Every love is a losing cause. But had the night moved us closer. And the reputation of men is cowardice. If I had been a woman like you.

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Of the coming rain. Of better hostilities toward incivility. Of a dusting broom. Of milk cows gone mad. Of fiery cities, fiery highways, leading to the doorway of more fire, endless fire. Of innumerable enumerations.

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My mother, when I was young, said many things. I can’t recall them but in love. If I said love would you recall me? Would you mark me as a man who loved even a little? I’ve destroyed much I hold dear. Into these clumsy, rampant hands you have fallen. I will try and not destroy you but with fire. Let us go, with speed or slow, north to that warmer world. And find the cabin where I once believed. And cozy ourselves for a better part. Wheel then my goddamn car to the fallen pines. Let it rust there for the next century. And the one after.

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From a bright, civic borough I call to you. Let us make room for more weddings. For pie to better the pork chops. Though her biscuits are still the best. Cast off these modern times. Yours is bridle, the old way of thinking. Enjoin, finally, the gazebo and gulch. And talk of the tiny things that make up a life. Loneliness, friend, ever lends an ear. The toilet we share, the towel hanging dry. Above us no authority. Nor below us fiefdoms nor slaves. Let love break what laws it break ’til every lover sleeping wake.

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In the autumn of the new American. The eerie of your name beckons. Across the Mall, the ricochet, as with all astonishments. The farmer in his field is a banker underground. What November would be worth the shot? The Reverend Mister Edwards phoned me last night. Preached a dazzling drunken dry. “We are the epitome of the beauty—and the essence of the crime.” Ordinary fruit for extraordinary tongues. The redness of our lives is a good thing, not small. Never small. Gladness returns to the confidence man. We shun all sizes anyway.

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We are the illusory sunbeam. We burn down the laundry and shamble to the river. We itch for months, ready for your return. We run on for a long time. We destine. We jump a little rowboat to take us to her shore. We stare into the maw of Leviathan.

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Be my anxious moment. Only better. Raise a specter. Love is a hazardous chase down crowded streets. I dream my life in your vicinity. If a nunnery you go, I’ll become a priest.

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We baffle the monarchy of mules. We are neither firefly nor inferno. We examine his portrait in the post office. We shuffle to make you smile, motherfucker. We outlast the palace. We too climb the sycamore to grab the chubby raven. We court the mountaineer. We, in our element, cannot be halted. We are never in our element. We belie. We have milled through many nettles. We dispense our interior joy. We are not endowed with happiness, only the pursuit.

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Kansas is the same wherever you go. I look for a song. I’ve found to sing the cherry blossom blues. Just as troublesome as your ogle decrees. The common weird, the everyday strange. What dwells in the mire’s in the marvelous too. Bring here the candle ablaze. I’ll go back to the country and work. Whatever you do, come with me. We’ll walk the edge of the night-woods as the sun does its crimson verb. The sea is far off and close. It reminds me of you. As does everything.

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Can I, indeed, get a witness. Can the blesséd spike strike straighter the wood, son. Can hummingbird replace hyena. Can the mistletoe be moved more conspicuous. Can a potato be holy. Can five dozen asters be one aster. Can the horsemen pass their mares to glue. Can mastery of a thing make a servant. Can the blackberries accommodate the milk bottle. Can her feet mute the boulders, her mouth the airplane. Can brother hold sister in a new night. Can tomorrow be an eon baby. Can you go now please to the graveyard ghost.

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The best kind of crab legs are imitation crab legs. As a merkin is to the actor, so are we to each other. Heavy under gaslight. The whole of history plays in our chorus, a cappella and inverted. The way shadows slant between columns approaching from the west. The hills. The hills surrounding you.

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Can commerce be undone. Can we go back and forth across the earth. Can December ruin a miracle. Can fortune be weighed down. Can the stars then flee. Can you go to the ledge whence she bubbled and rose.

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Is it a whiteness whiter than the dark muscling. Baubles of an age we relented to, unwilling. A spark in your laugh. Your constant, unencumbered laughter. The assignments of the language hemming us in. The proper time and place for antiquity and exploration. Time, a green lion. The summing song of stars. Making us closer. Beginning something—setting up. A trial. A hope. The thing of beauty dropped over the hedge.

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Come, as the day shrieks its green. I will not see summer end without you. Bellow to the east so the mullahs might hear. What we do we shall do unto the blue. Might night be day, dreaming. The fittest mind is not a heart. But you are a world before the body’s time. A world we all very once knew. What softness encumbers me? What large little pleasure do I have at my side? If rain could not stop you, neither can the sun. Our days are too few to rest in the grove. Come take up with me and travel on foot to foolishness.

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But the cuckoo is a pretty bird. But marmalade on my buttered toast. But your legs, all away, on that side of the bed. But the downright horseshit of government officials. But the blue light is my baby. But down the mountain, falling. But today the war goes on. But ever since the world began. But hooray for the bumpkin who seldom finds love. But neither the minute nor the hour revealed. But cautiously, as with a rattlesnake. But the lamplight trimmed and burning. But my home is where you are.

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Slowly, as a morning should. Lumbering into the world, awaiting the first hoot. All day, my lemons stay unsqueezed. I love to see that evening sun go down. A beer or dozen, and you to the bed. Fate has found me, one finger off the cliff.

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But the getting-to-know. But sharp with the jibe. But I would finish that banana if I were you. But you know that, love, and do. But toward some tomorrow the devil is pointing us. But superstition is bunk. But your smile puts to shame the sugarcane.

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The world becomes you. It settles on your skin like the platinum turds of golden birds. It handcuffs you to the radiator. The best go away and never come back. They endeavor to make themselves air, the water, O mud. In most cases, they’ve succeeded enormously. Here’s the map. Here, a compass. Here: take with you this thimble of whiskey. At a certain point, the horse must be shot. Whether at the river’s edge or in the mountain town, here is the bullet. The gun you have to buy yourself. I’ve never been able to, and am trying not to learn.

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How often he considers Indiana. How doom might befall us ’cause an idiot. How rather we should take the 4:19. How you replace yourself with fables. How frogs were secreted amongst the strawberries. How a lonely day turns lovely when you I see. How there’s not one question mark ’mongst her punctuation. How pleased the man with watermelon in his mouth. How Wyatt Earp drew first. How noble of you, watching her undress. How many commandments broken for her. How many amendments passed. How I’ve missed her true and temperate moans.

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To whom can I speak today? A threshing wind is my heart. My dunes are boiling over. Wherefore goes my popcorn merriment? I too am an only child. This craving to be another human. On human terms. A revelation, with the clouds so low. To whom can I speak today? Who is now good is also evil. I have my smoke, and my pornography. I live in a room so small. I have to go outside to change my mind.

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A hollyhock splits a baby’s head, fresh delight. The jay’s a banjo on her birthday. My rider rings the party with barbwire, O bewitching. Moonlight clangs like daybreak down. Ten thousand stories upon the ten thousand told. Let go of the land if not for the odd.

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How the peaceful wallpaper surrounds us. How a hurdy-gurdy jolts. How the money changers never know their place. How enraptured am I with the inside of your elbow. How my people are a loud people. How easy the hand that burns the temple is broken. And how fast.

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Once more her delta fills. Glaciers move in measure, coughing so we notice. Different men at different times do horror. I have tried not to agree. Inch, if you might, impossibly near. Save the right time for the nighttime. Standing in my kitchen, looking far across the field. Not Gabriel could have shattered it with music. Could have made better music. There’s nothing in my mailbox but the blues. And I’m painted red. Everything above me invisible. I’ll take, every time, the lonesome over the miserable.

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Might we lose ourselves, of a sudden, in January. Might the genie be jimmied from his bottle. Might rain cause a greater grief than flame. Might credibility court motley. Might the bell be unrung. Might leisure be a virtue. Might Tuesday night arrive roaring. Might Daylight Saving Time reign. Might blue turn red turn gray. Might, in general, we be missing the point. Might judge mix with jury. Might tigers be put to purring. Might you return one more hour.

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My snake oil is the best. You find it countywide and strong. Any roadhouse serving roosters will sell a selection. You’ll reckon tomorrow. Tomorrow you’ll arise. I can’t sleep thinking of you. At dawn I’m wishing for dusk. I count the chickens in the yard and yawn. A tumble of peaches is all I see. And cream for miles around, you brash dawdling. What wider sky contains thee. You do believe me don’t you when I honey. Your walk can make this fearsome feeling flee.

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Might sparks erupt from the silo. Might the heavens crumble without me. Might that last outburst be shriven by the record. Might I search for you in dreams deferred. Might gulls reject the sea. Might the deal go down.

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From funk to fluttering to fume. From white fences surrounding dark towns. From not so far away. From a boxcar abandoned in the flood. From the first dew on your lily pad. From the way you look at me sometimes. From ancient I love thee, and from a future too.

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A twelve o’clock kind of thing, homesick and faulted. But greater than everyone else’s experience. We’ve got something to do with the whirlwind, my Maudlin. We glow like Chicago glows in June. Can one so in love properly judge. It’s nothing taught in home economics. Nothing like the pitchfork will do for us. Or the rooms we return to when rushes the thunder. The hand we hold. The day that rains ’til night. Clean already the pigpen. Set a deadline for return of your badge. Unmake me, mother, my dying bed.

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42 the mad song

Like the stars we don’t credence. Like my old Kentucky home. Like jackalopes and wintergreen. Like the rope swing, in the backyard, over there. Like Uncle Sam upbraided. Like that Bo Diddley beat. Like here she comes. Like rhythm, melody—undo me, my hymn. Like the man from Nantucket and his wife Virginia. Like bears in little cars as our ballet. Like finding a quarter when all you need is a dime. Like a whale, very much. Like the scarlet- red house on Blueberry Hill.

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Like the sun’s leaving light along an arbored sky. Like the bathtub filled with catkins. Like Johnny Reb gone John the Conqueror. Like Denver to Honolulu on Independence Day. Like hard times at my door. Like billboards plastered by steeplejacks. Like a globe, once black. Like accidents of the most conspicuous. Like rising up early. Like lying down, O constant one. Like the dramatic movement of snails. Like cleaning the mirror to see well a window. Like all music but not as of some nostalgia.

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Not a dupe. Not a daily life at all. Not the violence. Not the man you’re looking for. Not a practiced sincerity. Not rhyme nor reason nor ridiculous conclusion. Not a new notion, just a great one.

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Like Christmas and Thanksgiving. Like I promised on your deathbed what I would do. Like the look you gave the living. Like your child who is willful. Like a stutter in the syllable. Like you.

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Not Walt Whitman nor Woody Guthrie. Not an expensive suit with coonskin cap. Not eagle talons tight ’round the salmon. Not sunflowers spangled. Not the emergence of a larger shadow. Not brick, wood, straw, nor sand—and not plastic neither. Not the gross accomplishment of stooges. Not England nor New England nor the nah-nah. Not I. Not ever abandoned by those who love her best. Not a petty phrase. Not just fireworks. Not endowed with happiness, only the pursuit.

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I can’t report the weather outside in the dark. Your body will grant me such light in the dark. Lady, take this lemon, and squeeze to your pleasing. Let the muscle of rind flame out white in the dark. The glass ever fills when your tongue goes forth. Now up the stairs— at once—our flight in the dark. This stillness in the stillness, I would not ask you disturb. You descend to the bed. I go all giddy to your height in the dark. The tragedy of love is not knowing it’s come—but—Holy!—how your gestures requite in the dark. My fingers trace your thighs and I write in the dark: You are the Wine—I, the Drinker. One so drunken and dumb. One so uphearted with your Nature and Might in the dark.

49 the mad song

As your tales of nautical adventure prove. As the robin comes a-tweeting in the new yellow. As bowls of black cherries impel the righteous groove. As loneliest is the hour after you leave. As with all fires, this one will smolder. As your employer, Mr. President. As the pilgrim nears the site, each step slower. As the baker gives up her finest bread. As the desert unrolls its endless. As I’m going down the road, feeling bad. As words so plain and true. As to demand their assent. As far as I can tell, yes and yes and infinite yes.

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The sea can’t stretch as far as you. You eclipse it with your crudeness, fuller and more fierce. You’re its blue, its green, and the whitecaps rolling. You enfold the waves that enfold the ship. The sea is a grain in front of you, woman. You build a better percentage of me to be part. You fill more my blood than its destitute salt.

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As dark the western countryside at ending of the day. As never she come with beating drum to bed where true love lay. As Friday is a funeral and Saturday a bride. As Sunday’s best is put to test when love my lover hides. As the baby’s in the manger, and the books are in the black. As in pouring rain the mystery train took my truest down the track.

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The wind, and only that, is your answer. Not even a trusty oak under which to weep. For her return I’d gladly burn from pharaoh to a flea. I’m comforted no more by birch beer, nor chowder. The loving things are falling away. Take a walk, alone, in the gloomy gold. Certainty is a gamble. I will hunt you far, fair Boston to San Francisco Bay. Bridge and tunnel impede me. Am burdened by the sky, and worn. Do not ask me how—leave the why alone. It’s worthless to argue or understand the sea. All my god is gone.

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If brokenhearted is better than bewildered. If you hear the chariots pulling us westward. If a waterfowl is praiseworthy. If every man, dear lady, told you the truth. If bereft of endeavor and the will to rise. If I but had my Tanglewood days. If a black cat crossed my path. If city life was more than stepping ’round shit. If precious are bacon and costume jewelry. If Texarkana were Tenochtitlán. If she woke up next to me, one morning, in May. If the wild encroached. If I was a mole in the ground.

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Hogs are led to the swamp and slaughtered. An imagined heaven watches over us. We behave the ritual like it’s got a plan. As moose might march upon the vacant highway. The heart bleeds with the nose. She escapes, as she escapes, escapes everyone. O Air, immensely. When learned in love, you find the sun colder. My hoodoo will outdo the hoodwink. Don your morning gown, magnificent contradict. The senator arrives. She refuses history’s jazz. While she admires your body, she would rather not see its faith and praise.

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The snow falls with raspy promise. Outside, the battlefield awaits its lord. Many freedoms haunt. The landscape sanctifies me if I tramp it or no. We go out and go out and the weather is ever lavender. She holds not victory in her hand, neither bamboozle. Of all the golden birds, desire is the loudest.

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If even the iron is melted. If I built a swimming pool, yours would be the first toes in. If this piece of rock was dear enough. If, after all is done, you think of me. If yes, then no. If silence is golden, I’m taking the bronze.

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A beguiling time beguiled. O wearisome world. Fat birds came and we squandered them. They sawed heavy drags into our headboards. They notched the night with kazoos. We couldn’t say it the same so we sang. We found instead our camaraderie in the goriness of spring. All manure and mud bubbling. And there were large fields back then, with larger birds? And I never took you once to lie down. Never once in that whole agreeable summer. Where confusion was nothing new. And we loved not knowing.

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Crossroads gather where none have before. The rain that isn’t rain falls down. How poor an investment, these scarecrows, this brilliancy. Fear is the thief’s only weapon. I would sleep by you for a thousand years. And a thousand more. We all want next to that pretty red dress. But what makes a mountain does not a man. Make much we can, camerado, of whiskey, wine, and beer. We can’t do our last do very too slow. The gutbucket plays hard for you, and how. Thus and so the autumn begins. The unteachable emotion arrives, eagering you to try again.

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He mourns the restoration of particulars. He combs out his beard the beaks of myriad giant squid. He sports a turkey feather behind each ear. He ignores the maelstrom. He fiddles the soaking sphere. He, of the careless maroon. He dwells in the instinct of his duty. He is the perfect evening. He amuses all but never one. He asks how you are for he wants to know. He never met a man he very liked. He is suspected of being a scoundrel. He would rather keep company with women, adored.

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Ah, but that’s nothing to the birds. They know the muck and dreamland the same. Wary, their breadcrumb philosophy, they evade the witch. How they have done, through the ages, still starving. O ducks that neither want for us, nor intelligence, nor grace. But only water, and water, and water.

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He bequeaths himself to nothing so new. He’s always three eggs short of an omelet. He hoes the lonesome road, waiting for a horn. He has been—and will be—the drudgery escaped. He only opens the door on Halloween. He bores his enemies with talk of beauty. He struts the way nature intended.

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Like the frosting of a lion’s mane. Or the curvature on the apple, delayed and dappled. Put on your nightshirt. Come to the house the darker days avoid. I’ll reveille the stars to guide you, too soon twilight. The mansion on the hill, perpetual. The cottage near the creek as well. If I’d found you sooner than death. But let regret play its own accordion soft. The night’s arriving. Something not like waves. Come with me again to the grottoes we inhabited. Make of me something perplexing and calm.

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She wears the shirt as if it were an orchid. She, in the unlikely place. She repeats the phantom tomes. She lets the haphazard, and the significant. She stops in the square and alarms the pigeons. She, of the incarnadine. My own heart’s Ohio, her. She is gorgeous of twilight, the maiden sure. She suffers the ancestors of quiet. She shakes the breakdown, then remembers her glory. Grand of spirit, she answers. She does not lessen the greenhouse to a whim. She braves me.

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She come from Old Avalon to the handsome valley. She got the smoky steed and a wiry frame. The milkmaid indeed. How is she only now pitching the pails over me? And the summer leave so quickly with a ruby thump? My questions are never answered, only perpetuated by the cinema, ubi sunt. So any bantam in the barnyard is envious of the harbor lights, the tweedledee of flower-broken rock. Curling herself in a shady glen, she sleeps until she sleeps. I am, and her dreamer. The day was a blue beyond. We see it ever still. The towers rise in the fury of moving on. And the world is alone at last.

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Let it all come down. Let everything fall where she comes from. Trust me in the troubles that are coming, are to come. I’ve seen the revels before us. Only I can understand the pigeons on the overpass. The crinkled paper, the lord and lass. The average song of the average man.

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She, of our pumpkin-picking appointments. She, of industry. She, in just the achieved smoothness. She, braver than even you, soldier. She, slipping from filigree. She, into the part of life that listens harder.

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In returning to the bittersweet village, he too was smiling. The scrapyard of knowing. The amorous dell. Her command to park in the new garage, canopied by willows. O the occasion and the place, the unkempt. Something in the how of it. A riddle of complaining oak. Hang me, love, in the dark lights of wild inheritance. We look as we once were, yes. Up now in our room with so much tinder and green. I would crawl a million miles to see that cotton. Come on in the old barn. Come injured, curious, immodest, tremendous.

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All the doors are open and everything is empty. My valentine said it to me one dawn. Honey day will come to crawl. Our office is how you left it, hardly immaculate. The rooms bunch up and slant. How the grayness of autumn never comes here now. There’s no grayness left to become of, to mourn and hullabaloo. This here is the speckled fire we abhor. She is the mistress of drum-taps. The cobwebs pulse in the evening breeze. They are growing to the vine. Because we know the things we don’t. And the shadow that slangs under moonlit leaves.

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Bring me the crown of Queen Mab. Bring a legion of tall women from New Jersey. Bring the heavy currency to fit such a purse. Bring her water like gasoline. Bring any Martha I might marry. Bring bullets, leave the rifle. Bring red corn and blue lobsters. Bring an extra pair of boots for the retreat. Bring sawhorse and gargoyle. Bring to the Rose Garden the machines that will fight in place of our children. Bring that farm girl and sit her firmly here. Bring a bucket of boll weevils to the panty raid. Bring me some news when you return from paradise.

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How the men in white suits have shorn the grass to the morning paper. Geese, suspect creatures, funereal music. Sunrise creaks the mountain door. The path is excellent. The trees weigh down the breeze. The hermit leaves his hall and begins to run.

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Bring the juice of twelve thousand lemons. Bring rosy fog that swears across the drumlins. Bring your gorgeous hoedown. Bring, O bring, such sweat to my thighs, O do. Bring the very moccasins I lost. Bring low the pure puritanical. Bring back the day before she died.

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Any other me is a shadowy or. Consumed by the chronic music of life. Too ensorcelled to notice a great thing in glory. Make merry with the fife and drum. Reel me right, and rough. I’ll roll you over slow. Don’t you fret of the charcoal skyline. Your breasts have nothing to worry about. Your lips, your thighs, your hips, your eyes. I can muster only silence, more sufficient sometimes. I’m going back to where I’ve come. The birds then, when they sang, meant. It’s not ever like it used to be.

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Sometimes I dream about the Grand Coulee Dam. Some should know better the silence. Some of the people all of the time. Some grand statements make for epic blunders. Some flatlander, some Los Angeleno. Some take simplicity for sincerity. Some alibi, huh? Some believe you a brute. Some go like molasses to the saints. Someone can replace you, congressman. Some won’t abide. Some skepticism bears a torch. Some of these days.

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All’s a peppermint bubble bath. All you need to understand you never will. All of us come from somewhere else. All salaries will be paid in peanuts. All sympathy melts away. All fall down. All the trombones in Old New Orleans. All we want is her bosom for a pillow. All hail, all hail. All you remain delivered. All the way to Grant’s Tomb. All my days left, in this brass bed. All I want is you.

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All our faith resides in language. All hellos incite goodbyes. All about the dice. All of the people some of the time. After all, pleasure descends from trespass. All: that is what I’m for. All the friends I ever had are gone.

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All we leave is a salty trail. All the live long day. All luck confirms is chaos. All monuments converge in your kiss. All I can say is. All of the above.

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Some sugar in my bowl. Some tidy girl with a dirty mind. Some silken tent in a piebald meadow. Some southerly wind. Somehow the joke got trampled. Some discouraging word. Somewhere someone is doing it better. “Some damned fool idealistic crusade like your father.” Some just go like a do-si-do. Some rabbits don’t fit into a hat. Some black flag, hoisted half-ass. Some slim chance you remember me at all. Some rebel, some citizen, some sage.

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84 the mad song

afterword by douglas crase

This supercollider of a poem, The Mad Song by Michael Schiavo, appears at first glance to have returned a universe of fractured aphorisms. It has produced, in other words, exactly the results you might expect if it were possible to load the familiar expressions of civic wisdom, fashion, and popular belief like protons into a giant accelerator ring and hurl them in opposite directions to collide at nearly the speed of light. The ensuing shower of particles—the verbal omegas, taus, and upsilons—would resemble the bursts that have been recorded in the stanzaic paragraphs of this poem. Measured separately, the particles have the bite of epigrams. Taken together, they lope with the erotic generosity that proceeds from all the best unions of high and

85 theafterword mad song demotic culture. They represent in shards the “bittersweet village,” as Schiavo will call it, a structure one might democratically imply or reassemble from “the scrapyard of knowing” and “the amorous dell.” Or perhaps not. The English poet W. H. Auden maintained there was no such thing as a democratic aphorism because an aphorism could never be written in a democratic style. Its wisdom was by nature aristocratic and any writer that pretended otherwise was a coward and hypocrite. Of course, if this were true, it should make us suspicious of aphorism and not democracy. Americans, at least, might answer from the example of their literature that wisdom comes rather from a common store, that the writer retrieves it for others who could as easily gain it for themselves if they, too, had been afforded the preparations for the trip. This was, in fact, a perspective shared

86 theafterword mad song by the more encouraging American poets and it was formulated to perfection by Gertrude Stein, who thus countered Auden beforehand with an aphorism of her own. “The important thing,” wrote Stein, “is that you must have deep down as the deepest thing in you a sense of equality.” The proposition, we remember, was supposed to be self-evident. So it’s more than satisfying—it’s a relief—to discover the same radical sympathy ennobling The Mad Song and ready in a new form to be passed forward once again. One wants to believe that American poetry will always have room, like the Fourteenth Amendment, to expand toward voices that faithfully call on it. There will be servile justices, of poetry as of law, who try to restrict the franchise. But the logic of the literature is against them, and the great principle returns to extend its formal and experimental reach. In this latest

87 theafterword mad song instance, as it unfolds on the following pages, an alert prosodist will see that our poet has conceived his poem in the form of a flag. Unless we’re totally nuts, it scans as a flag. Why else the thirteen sections like thirteen stripes or the original stars? And why otherwise five stanzas per section like the points of a star? Granted, it isn’t the flag on your lapel or the one over the ballpark, and it’s certainly not the shock- and-awe prop they station in ranks behind the candidate on the platform. It’s the radical pennant within: a constituent of perception and organization as intimately registered as any of the metrical drumbeats and prosodies to which, by this poem, it is now formally compared. On the other hand, my scansion could be madness itself, as I’m all too aware. Years ago, having explained to an analyst how depressing it is to feel day by day the diminishment of our national prospects and liberties, I was gently

88 theafterword mad song informed that it is considered a personality disorder for the boundaries to be so fragilely perceived between the nation and the self. The analyst, however, was not a product of these United States. He had not internalized Whitman and wasn’t schooled in the heart— as the author of The Mad Song clearly must be—by that Emerson who observed once of the Union that the crime of dissolving it would diminish the importance of every person that lived. Because of its form, The Mad Song is sure to be labeled a prose poem. The label functions customarily as a polite denial. There are clever definitions that compare prose with poetry and attempt to dodge the snobbery by blurring the distinction. But a more useful approach might be borrowed from the ever-helpful Stein, who preserved the distinction in a way that illustrates why The Mad Song is poetry through

89 theafterword mad song and through, and not some cousin of the art. Prose, Stein pointed out, is an affair of verbs, adverbs, prepositions, and articles; poetry is an affair of the noun. By this, she meant to indicate that prose describes while poetry renames. Likening the poet to a lover, she had reasoned as a good pragmatist not from the prosody but from the behavior that makes a poem. “Anybody knows,” she wrote, “how anybody calls out the name of anybody one loves.” The problem, as anybody also knows, is that the name may prove inadequate to the passion, too soon get stale, be rendered ineffective or insupportable. And that’s just people. Imagine if your anybody encompassed the nation itself, democracy, the environment, or even the flag. In a time when rumor and perjury arrived as if from the infected air, when evil, having escaped its bottle, perverted your own name as well as the one you loved, who could bear to recite

90 theafterword mad song the foundational name? The answer, as Stein concluded and Schiavo will demonstrate, is to recite the name over and over, try new ways of reciting it, in the fervent desire to reinvent its effect. Poetry thus defined is not description, it’s metonymy. Perhaps my scanning The Mad Song as a metonymy of the flag was not so disordered after all. Schiavo does seek to restore and the solution he adopts is the one of alternative recitation. Necessity would be the muse, therefore, of his inventively varied diction, which evokes in the course of this poem Stein herself, Star Wars and Shakespeare, Bob Dylan and Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and Wilco, Robert Johnson, Harry Smith, Moby-Dick, Thomas Jefferson, and more. The presence of Jefferson, as the stylist of the Declaration of Independence, is diagnostic: the Declaration, too, was a cry of unrequited love.

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It expressed for the colonists their aggrieved love of country and baffled frustration at being denied its protection and liberties. Indeed, the abiding pain of broken trust that animates the Declaration is distant only in time from the emotion we ourselves may feel when forced to watch silently as a justice of the Supreme Court offers on television another sophistical brief for trashing the Bill of Rights, or when we wake after a holiday to learn the executive has sneaked out a new finding to permit strip mining in Yosemite or asbestos in oatmeal. The familiar perfidies may explain why the temper of a mad song appealed to Schiavo in the first place. The anonymous, seventeenth- century verses ascribed to Tom of Bedlam (i.e., a deranged indigent, scorned in love, who is turned out of the asylum and must beg for sustenance) convey an adaptive mix of hurt, anger, pride, resilient affection, sarcasm, and

92 theafterword mad song sullen lucidity which could hardly be better attuned to the plight of the average citizen rendered invisible by a banal, condescending oppression. Schiavo’s saving insight was to import that intensely personal sense of betrayal from the mad song into the vastly impersonal optimism of his native romantic pragmatism. If it seems an unlikely combination he has nonetheless effected it seamlessly, and his own Mad Song is simultaneously sobering, heartening, and pertinent as a result. The grand current of American poetry has never fully accommodated the disabling deficit its readers would sustain when betrayed by their own country. There were outcries, Democratic Vistas and Howl, whose places in the tradition remain unsettled. And yet poetry, no less than political society, needs to recognize the measure of its injury in order to continue as a credible agent of cultural transmission.

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Schiavo’s prosodic achievement, which arrives here with a spontaneous authority that may be harder won than he knows, resizes the necessary wisdom to a lyrical dimension that still doesn’t impede the exercise of what can only be called a transcendental citizenship. His refusal to be diminished by the country—the refusal to let the country diminish itself—is ultimately a kind of devotion. One thinks naturally of Hart Crane. But we might also recall the original instance of a patriot’s adopting the persona of a mad Tom of Bedlam. This was Edgar, the betrayed heir of Gloucester in King Lear. Outlawed, hunted, but arguably the sanest character in the play, Edgar chooses to wait out his fate in disguise and is notable for not fleeing, plotting, or collapsing in despair. Imitating a madman, he preserves the abused fragments of society as they come into his charge (in the person principally of his blinded father) until the transition can be made

94 theafterword mad song from anarchy to a legitimate, albeit damaged, peace. It claims much for poetry, though not more than anyone should demand, to observe that poetry in a similar disguise may likewise further a transition. “Let go of the land,” writes Schiavo in a haunting, aphoristic line that goes on to signal conditionally why this shouldn’t be our wish at all. “Let go of the land if not for the odd.” By preserving the fragments of the civic litany that came into his care, by reciting them in a metrical coalition that seeks to reinvent their effect, Schiavo has created in The Mad Song a metonymy for the requited citizenship one might have enjoyed in a country that loved its citizens as much as they love it.

originally published as the foreword to the 2008 trade paperback edition

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michael schiavo was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1976. Educated at the University of Connecticut and the Bennington College Writing Seminars, he is the author of chapbooks from Forklift Ink and H_NGM_N Books, as well as translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Virgil’s Eclogues, and the Dao De Jing. He lives in North Bennington, Vermont.

— douglas crase is a MacArthur Fellow and the author of The Revisionist, winner of the Witter Bynner Prize in Poetry, AMERIFIL.TXT, a commonplace book, and Both: A Portrait in Two Parts, a memoir of the botanist Rupert Barneby and aesthete Dwight Ripley. He lives in New York City and Pennsylvania.

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