The word “vinculum” means connection.  This book, written from the high hill of my age, is a life, and as a life, stresses what binds us not only to each other, but to nature, history, myth, family, the inevitable biology of the body, as well as to love—that connection of two into one that frees as it restricts.  Between the first and last poems—prologue and postlude—which serve as bookends arcing the whole, the poems in Vinculum flare out from “The Mythological Cod,” the central poem that serves as the book’s spine: a grab bag of religion, sex, humor, science, and history—rich with the generative mystery that feeds and informs the rest.  The careful reader will see connections all over the place, in each section’s introductory poem as well as in the use of certain repeated metaphors … all of them connections.

 

 

I don’t remember where I got that quote.  Surely I didn’t make it up: it’s too good.  But I believe it. For doesn’t science deal with finding factual truth?  What the universe is composed of?  How the brain works?  The chemical properties of matter?  DNA, black holes, bacteria, viruses, why Saturn gives out more light than it takes in from the sun, and on and on.  And to that extent doesn’t art go along with it, hand in hand like Jack and Jill, this searching for truth?  But science stops when it gets an answer and moves to other things, there being so many other things.  But art?  Ah no.  Art keeps digging that hole, finding more and more treasure.  How the quartz rock, labeled and categorized by the geologist, turns in the artist’s hand, reflecting myriads of light and memory.  Maybe art surpasses science because art is fed on truth plus imagination and the human capacity for sorrow.

 

About the “spiritual, ” I can’t say I know what that means.  As far as I’m concerned, that’s one of those words that floats out there on a bubble, while imagination, to me, that’s solid as the geologist’s  rock.

 

 

I was a New York City child, but spent much time in the country, and between the ages of seven and eleven, summers at the beach, which in those days was empty and wild—a child’s paradise.  In other words, I feel as much at home in a big city as I do in a field or forest or at the shore.  Too, I’ve traveled a lot. I once said I wanted to see the sun set over every river in the world.  I guess I won’t make that goal, but at least I’ve tried.  And poems?  They’re just hanging from the trees, all one has to do is reach up.  Well, now, that sounds simplistic, doesn’t it?  Especially for me who if I write one poem a month—and I write pretty steadily—that’s good.  In other words, I’m slow.  But I have a good memory, and whatever happens to me or happened and where is indelibly written in the brain with its attendant “setting.”  And thus everywhere I’ve been and whatever I’ve seen and experienced is one, all part of the poet’s grab bag.  All part of the now, the perennial present, and what’s “home.” That is to say, everything is connected (ergo Vinculum), and there is no “setting” completely separate from the self: the membrane between the outer world and the inner thin indeed.

 

 

Now that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?  In the twenty plus years that I was at the University of Indianapolis, I taught one course of creative writing a year, and that was only after many years at the school.  I taught Freshman Lit, the first half of American Lit, Modern Poetry, Contemporary Poetry, Mythology, Greek Drama, Honors, and, of course, Comp and Basic Writing.  Too, I don’t have an MFA; as a matter of fact I didn’t know what exactly that was, or indeed, except for the program at Iowa, where one could go to get one.  I began writing poetry seriously in my late thirties because I loved it, and it loved me.  I wrote alone, teaching myself every mistake I know.  It seemed to be a way, the only way, I could come close to what Kelly Cherry in Girl in a Library calls the reality of “things, their thingness, their being there.”  Thus I am in no position to answer your question about whether or not we would have been better off without the institutionalization of writing programs.  What counts is the writing, and for that, only time will tell.  I do wish, however, that students had read more, that Alexander Pope and John Keats weren’t perceived as foreign entities, and that Moby-Dick and Walden Pond were at least as familiar as Lady Gaga.

 

 

Of those already gone,

limped or carried across that

bump in the floor & vanished,

woven in the crowd the way

at Grand Central a certain set

of shoulders you’d know anywhere

disappears into the push & blurry

funnel of departure, I’ll not speak.

I’m grave enough. But now

that the world tips for me

toward that end in earnest,

& if in a line we must, I opt

for the ticket line in New York’s

Times Square, where each day

a quarter million pair of feet

cross the X that marks that spot:

the angry, the calm, the silver-

haired, the striped, the polka-

dotted, the prodigal, the priest—

washed clean in that ocean of

shoe leather. Quirks & cruelties

aside, conventions of dress—

what do they matter? Only

the walking soles, the myriad

right foot, left, of soles, & me

in their midst standing in line

for the angels in golden cages

dispensing tickets. Oh to be

inside the heart of New York

again, now & as it was that day

under the billboard of blowing

smoke rings no one’s left

to remember, down the street

from Toffenetti’s restaurant

where Sylvia, laughing, bumped

her bottom down the long curved

stairway as if sliding the chute

at Coney Island, that day when all

the world was fourteen & lampposts

bent their necks to watch over us

being it was spring & every pair

of shoes bore an immortal child.

 

 

 

Today Judge Judy is sad.

Not angry, satiric, outraged,

or beside herself.  But sad.

The case before her: a couple

married nine years, followed

by an eleven-year separation.

No divorce.  Too busy

spying, vandalizing, dragging

each other to court to sue

or countersue.  The law’s

delight: they cannot stay away

from each other.

Judge Judy

totals the years.  Twenty, half

life. Judge Judy is teaching

addition.  The Mister coughs.

The wife presses her mouth

into an iron line.

Judge Judy

fingers her gavel.  She wants

this case over.  These two can

add as well as she, and logic

is a flimsy rope to burden

the drowned.  She persists.

She needs this couple to know

she understands.  She needs us

to know she understands, for

by virtue of her little lace collar,

she is still a woman and privy

to the pickle flesh is heir to.

She taps into a well of patience

she has little of, planes the edge

of her voice to a kind of kindness:

as if to say, pick up the thread

of who you were prior to this

Gordian snarl, for surely, before

the gavel bangs and the hammering

commercials start, she could cast

on the screen of their imagination

the emerald city of marital order

and good sense.  But how much

can one do?

Judge Judy, don’t

be sad.  No one could slip a piece

of paper between these two.

They will leave your courtroom

and go on with their lives, just as

you advised, for bitterness is

their life—the sock they chew,

the sour they suck, the agent

pooling at the mouth’s bottom

enough saliva to swallow down

one more insult big as a sofa.

It is the pit of the fruit worked

in the mouth after the sweetness

goes: their life’s sialogogue,

round stone of the apricot, hard

as a heart.  Suck on that

long enough and the stone

strips to its seed: prussic acid:

amygdalin, otherwise known

as cyanide.

Arithmetic lesson #2:

if ten apricot seeds can kill a child,

how many will it take to kill love?

 

Too many to count.  I learned that

at my mother’s knee—she

who dished it out as well as took it.

your father and I made love? So much

for my limp logic.  At her knee

I learned it, Judge Judy, her arthritic

knee, trembling to manipulate the

walker.  Her ninety-five-year-old knee.

 

 

 

An airplane’s black box

is really orange.  Orange—

and that’s not the only fib

we’ve been fed.  Venus,

that bauble, that wishing star

and proxy for the blue fairy,

rages hot enough to melt lead.

Today, I am full of facts.

I collect them.  Once I knew

a man who collected nails,

railroad nails, and nailed them

to a board and bored you

with their makes and dates.

His wife cooked.  She was

Italian and rolled her eyes.

He must have had hundreds.

Maybe they’re called bolts.

He could recognize a bolt

from forty paces. That’s

how many steps apart two

hotheads take in a duel.

Forty paces.  Each counts

twenty, turns, and boom. I

don’t know if she kept a gun

in the pantry behind the pasta.

Her specialty?  Artichokes,

speared swordfish on a plank

with stuffed zucchini, fried.

She’d bang her pots and wear

orange, bam, hot enough to

melt lead.  Orange, the color

of the jump suits worn in

San Quentin.  A good cook.

Lucky you, invited over for

Sunday dinner.  Bring a gift,

a bauble in a black box, some-

thing she’d wish for, get a real

bang out of each time he starts

hammering about the nails.