BY JAN HAAG
POETRY
+
ESSAYS + MUSIC
+
TRAVEL +
FICTION
+
TEXTILE
ART
INTRODUCTION
+
HAAG'S BIO
33 OF THE 2001 POEMS
POSSESSION
#O1
02-12-01
Struggling to identify what's changed,
I realize that I may have done
what I'm going to do.
The knowledge grows.
Have I written my
last?
-- as, beyond Allan,
faith in love was lost,
as,
leaving Hollywood, I knew
my desire to make films suffered
killing,
so now, with memory's loss,
another giving up
of plans,
hopes, dreams, visions
a giving in
to the sway of
life:
moving on, no longer paying
attention to intentions. I'd
give up my
life sooner than be without
a writer's addiction.
What remains inexpressible, wordless, undescribed
is substanceless,
each,
moment a death to me.
PROCESS
#02
02-12-01
Struggling, as each old necessity
disappears delivering me to life,
nothing but
life, no goals, no exercise
of talent,
emptiness,
peering at beauty's endless void.
God created
all,
we're to indulge as spectators
only. Don't try to play
at creation. Just watch it! A prescription
for madness in the
human
pantheon. Sit still.
The Hindus have tried it
for
multiple eons,
in caves, forests, on mountains.
Yet, someone
built the temples,
carved the living rock into hallowed
monuments.
The central mystery of Bharat:
to do nothing.
Yet
all is done. Does
the workman agree?
Or does he sweat pleasurably?
PRECIOUS
#03
02-13-01
Struggling with the precious cargo
of reality as if unloading a ship
without cranes, nets or men --
looking into light,
seeing the
shimmer of silver
of tarnished gold
unable to say: "Wonderful
things."
Flailing with one's arms, minuscule
on the deck of a
ten-thousand-ton
vessel or in the hold
with the oil
attempting
to count the molecules
without words, numbers,
unable to construct
systems, languages.
Yes, the trees are beautiful,
the sunset,
alizarin crimson tarnished with copper,
but you have not seen
it,
read it
until scanned into language's words,
words hemmed in
the beginning was the word.
PRECISE
#04
02-13-01
Struggling to define the difference
between speech, language,
writing, alphabet and orthography.
I could write in Sanskrit
In
Sanskrit I
could write in Devanagari or
using Chinese pictographs,
Japanese konji, Cyrillic, English letters.
Struggling to define
the difference
between seeing the cloud touched mountain
whiteness
of Rainier, Tahoma and writing
a one-hundred
line
Qaisida or a sonnet
is to discuss
a kind of permanence
unknown
to snow, even to Cheops
or the meandering snake of the
Great
Wall -- seen from the moon.
Meditate. Can you
erase the
words from your
mind, can you
tell word from image, seeing.
PRESSURE
#05
02-13-01
Struggling to tell the precise
difference between writing '98 or '99
or
two-thousand-one, the larger exceeded by
the smaller
year,
squeezed into a concept, multiplied
by meanings,
enforced
by time and power, anger.
Struggling to remember there
are
other ways of counting, reckoning time, division,
even the
hours can differ,
the months can
shrink and grow by moons
or
with moon
disregarded or sun or stars.
No way to tell
difference
except by word systems, expressing the inexpressible.
How
do we know tree?
My tree is
different from your tree
or is
it?
Who grew that orchard tree?
PUSILLANIMITY
#06
02-14-01
Struggling to agree that desirelessness
is a desirable goal, not a want
of courage or vision, not
lack of spirit,
not mean-spirtedness
or a faint-heartedness,
not a fear
of living or a superstition
as hex against dying unexpectedly
caught out in the greed for
wanting
things, happiness, achievement, good fortune,
I am
cautious,
I tread lightly, breathing shallowly,
invoking the
Buddha,
bowing low, treading softly, pussyfooting.
I am not a
phoenix, I
will not rise from the piled ashes
of despair. There'll
be no
change of mind
after sixty. My death-bed
conversion
happened at sixteen
in knowing This Was It.
PUNCTILIOUS
#07
02-14-01
Struggling, constantly for exactness, strictness,
the observation of
forms, diminishment of chaos,
I have ridden the crest
of crimson
waves
washed in blood, trying, hoping,
salvaging each remnant
or
perceived order, perceived beatitude.
Struggling to know that
all
could be different, that different planes intersect
tangentially
through, across my despair,
I wake mornings
in joy, laugh lightly
toward
moonlight's faint shadows,
knowing that counting the
pulse
brings relief, to the accelerating
heart, that bathing
soothes body and mind,
that eating satisfies, looking
stimulates.
Sleep has restored
in addition to dreams,
terrors,
that promised disappearance,
at least for a day.
PRESCIENCE
#08
02-15-01
Struggling for prescience all through
life, wanting to know what will
happen
-- not too interested in what
is happening now.
A fear
based world ticks
off the possibilities,
the probabilities, the
calamities about
to, most likely to happen.
Then it ticks off
those less likely
to happen, and reviews all
predictions,
calculating percentages,
rechecking likelihoods, actuary tables,
statistical
reports, data analysis.
For attention paid to
today's
flow -- meandering, dull as life,
puttering, pottering,
slaving, stressing, clawing endlessly upward --
would undermine trust
in meaning.
trust, at least,
in the value of striving,
for
fulfilled prophecy
always deltas through meandering life.
POSSIBILITY
#09
02-15-01
Struggling, as one wakes from
clouds or layers or eons of
sleep,
into the desolate, blank greyness
of Seattle's hailing
in
the night, rainy morning,
humdrum seeming day,
one exits bed on
knees
stiff with the night's relaxation
and rest under the down
surrounding warmth's
sedation and drifting, elegant dreams,
drugged
by hyperbole
regarding life's great value, meaning,
peeing half
awake,
numbed by half remembered obligations,
stumbling askewly
clad into streets
littered by students and wind-created, burnable
branches,
taking a great gulp of
sea air, seagull's
screaming,
wheeling delight high/low
in the sky
-- birds in the chirping bush.
PROBABILITY
#10
02-16-01
Struggling with probability, I hope
not to survive the year. Vision
remains
steady. The other side beckons.
Through the
narrow
opening at the temple's end,
through the darkness
and
incense, the scented dampness,
through hall after hall,
mirrored
to reflect my fractal mind, the diminishment
and
repetition of pattern, spiraling
chaos, confusion partnered
with
deciphering the double helix,
fear's asp feasting
at my dry,
unnourished breast,
I sense light further on.
The mandala
will
dissolve. The corners, inhabited,
will eviscerate their plus-minus
meanings.
Hearing the call,
I will kneel, bow deeply,
worship
other civilizations,
new planes, paths to non-being.
PREDICTION
#11
02-16-01
Struggling with the night's accumulation
of snow, back in Lake Effect
time,
skirting the Sound's fragmented edge,
the weather
changes
putting predictability to sleep under
the snow
blanket
where warmth is in stillness.
My heart stands still.
I
read novels, write poems, groom orchids, consult
friends by
e-mail, walk miles,
buttocks hurting, bones
perceivable under the
coursing blood,
flesh, musculature, nerves.
The skin dries, itches,
loses
its sense of touch, smells.
The brain flickers like an
electrical misconnection.
Computers are surer, work better.
Their
toes, which
they do not have, don't
hurt or stub.
They stand foursquare, gray, humming.
POSTMORTEM
#12
02-16-01
Struggling, at curiosity's window again
and again. It has been
unobtrusively snowing
all night and continues --
silently.
Cascading past street
lamps, bringing bushes into
bloom
with white cotton,
flake lightly upon flake,
fluffy,
like the years, months, days,
unobtrusively, silently
accumulating toward centuries, geological periods.
What are we here
for?
To count rings?
Time's rings? God's laughter? Despair?
We
live in
the post-era: postmodern, postcolonial, postclassical,
postwar, postmeridian, postprandial, the postmistress.
As if
everything had happened before now
and we linger behind sweeping
up
debris. Posts
that once supported porches, balustrades,
foreign
stations, mail
now signify nothing new arrives.
PREMATURE
#13
02-18-01
Struggling to get over premature
expectations of excellence, perfection of any kind,
I watch the raggedy buds,
spring's wanton development
of weeds and new twigs.
Some grow some
die, some are whipped by
the wind into torn wisps,
some are frozen by snow after growth.
Nature doesn't cry, nor expect.
She goes on
with the sap rising, seedingly
breaking the soil.
Rivulets become streams of passion.
Watch for the meandering pattern,
love the bank's gouge changing the course
of the river, providing dirt
for the delta,
soil for the white narcissus,
the hyacinth's scent.
Demand patience, liberality, premature love.
PRESBYOPIA
#14
02-20-01
Struggling to return to my
own life, rhythm, food after a weekend
of house and pet sitting,
temptation which I
did not even try
to
resist or confront
giving into rest, reading,
I add this
morning's discovery:
furniture burns very well -- hot,
well-seasoned,
bright-flamed, well-dried, alley-found, one leg,
blond, polished, detached.
Picasso warmed himself with
paintings
one Paris winter,
I have tried manuscripts
eons
ago. Now I save everything,
each word, thought, e-mail, as if rescuing
civilization from time's oblivion. In
the larger scheme
of things, will one million
words equal a
skyscraper, a shack -- a tree?
PRUDENCE
#15
02-20-01
Struggling to keep one's mind
free from the future, free from turning
plums to prunes, the smooth
to sweet, dried
wrinkles, satiating
one's self with
now, what's next
may elude even the vigilant.
One can eat too fast,
too much, diurnally, meal by meal,
stuffing
all one's future into one
medium-sized, succulent
bite
and choking, red-faced, vomiting, pleading
to rewind
film.
One thought was real, important.
Time expands in all
nine
directions. Temptations record their hopes in flesh,
fear
prefers words, but can
scream, if necessary.
Sightless in the
presence of daffodils
burn your paintings,
scour rust from your eyes.
PURLIEU
#16
02-21-01
Struggling, living in the outlying
district of the city, keeping my
mind
from the future, suffocating hope,
subsisting through
eons
on the crumbs of criminals,
watching geological upheavals,
I
doubt mankind's crowning-glorihood claims.
Only a sadistic God
could
invent a human template and its problems,
Only an Alzheimer's
afflicted God
could create nature's
laws, nature's beauty and
set
a crazed humanity
to husband it to destruction.
Only a
God with no
authority whatsoever could allow man's wild dance
of
pride, greed, hate, blind
torment of his
fellow creatures.
Naturally, this crazed,
purlieu-destroying creature invented
an insane, amused, amusing God.
PURSUANCE
#17
02-21-01
Struggling to remain insightful, upright
on my path through the
entangling forest,
to choose this and not
that -- or hatred,
I
walk with soft shoes
balanced on toes
bleeding with effort and
despair.
Shooed out of the womb
without instruction, nursed by
parents as ignorant
as I, too, have remained,
I walk along
the
shores breathing cold wind,
feeding swooping seagulls,
listening to
my heart beat.
I don't hear the heartbeat
of the seagulls, I
forget my plans,
my hopes, I forget to
feed myself. Food
has
turned to money. Gold
has no succulence.
Even seagulls won't eat it.
PURITY
#18
02-21-01
Struggling against adopting futilities from
the past, struggling
against tracing the past
over the future's dim glow
struggling to
breathe --
where is the path beside
the daffodil stream?
Does the
hyacinth still bloom?
Breathe pure gasoline, hydrocarbons,
sniff
radon, monitor your arrhythmia, read your
electroencephalogram.
Form habits for the new
world. Rip apart
the magnolia blossom to study
its sexual parts.
Count the
dancing molecules on
the pin's head where, now,
even angel's
fear to tread. Quantify, analyze,
forget the dagger sticking
through
your heart, note
its alloy, count its metals,
count it
friend.
Enjoy its pure, unmixed lethality.
PLENIPOTENTIARY
#19
02-22-01
Struggling, I tiptoe the earth,
invested with full authority and
diplomatic powers
to transact my singular life,
to breathe,
eat
sleep, stew -- endlessly begging God
to take
some
responsibility. But its like asking
your painting to
speak, like
kissing the lips of your carving -- hoping
she'll smile
-- like fingering your
poem, hoping word
combinations, rhymes might
stir enlightenment
into your anxiety-ridden
body or mind. And
you?
You straddle an abstract margin,
neither flesh nor spirit,
neither synapses, pulse
beat, nor prana, dithering, never
a
commitment -- a
worthless viceroy, a wretched provincial
governor,
observing raging
colonies, obsequious, disunited, deaf -- mute.
PREPAID
#20
02-22-01
Struggling to prepay -- as it
says on the voucher -- the ticket to
heaven,
nirvana, paradise, eternal bliss, knowing
at your age
bliss is not the answer,
never was. It
will never be enough
to
compensate for the war implanted
in the human heart, by
man's God,
himself. Oblivion might do, might
make up for
the
heat and the cold,
the satiety and
the hunger, the hatred
and
what passes for love. Beliefs
created by the gasping,
grasping, slime-warm heart,
pulsing, unoccupied, susceptible to
flashing
eyes, helplessness, winsomely
curved lips, outstretched
hands, tears.
Bland they seem
on the page, prepaid, overdue.
PONDER
#21
02-23-01
Struggling with lightness, I ponder.
I was wrong, the word is
weighty
even though it conjures yew
gardens in trimmed,
touristed
English castles. On loan
from France and
Latin -- whatever country
that might
be -- it shied right -- or
left -- into nounhood,
took on weighty matters,
thence reflected the reflective
pond
between trimmed borders
low plants, primroses and
crocuses.
Originally ponderous, it
became, pleasant, light,
summertime thought,
a witticism, a poeticism standing
beside
the cool lake of doing nothing,
rejecting puritanically a spirited
heritage
but I, willing,
to give it grace, love
consider it
meditation.
Let others weigh the world.
PONDEROUS
#22
02-23-01
Struggling with pre-lecture, wandering, inattention
last night, I held
a human brain
in my hand, a cerebellum,
a spinal cord.
The
cord was limp, ugly,
an old squashed
snake. Parts of the
cerebellum
were like Middle-Eastern filo dough,
slightly fanned,
browned, spoiled. Whole brain, separate
cerebellum were as if made
of wet play-dough,
clay-colored, heavy. "Surely the brain
is
mostly hollow
passages," I said to the woman.
"Yes, this is
preserved." Even
through the used, translucent, gelid, plastic glove,
as the putrid-looking former-tissue touched
my hand, a
life-flash was! -- a receding star --
instantly was gone.
The lecture -- about Addiction -- began.
PERISTALSIS
#23
02-23-01
Struggling with body and soul,
I want what Vikram says not only
to
be beautiful, but true:
ascension at Borobodur,
from stories to
solid stone
nothingness -- Angkor's towers
in the sunset,
root-grasped, crumbling
monumental, awesome; Ajanta's caves
excavated
to house a low humming, meditative nothingness;
activity,
bronzed kings, golden gods,
celestial maidens created
to enhance
this world-illusion, somethingness.
Breathe, be gone.
Wisdom is
emptier than air.
Constructed elaborations fill the time
between
being and not being with "...involuntary
muscular movements of
hollow organs..."*
propelled onward through
elaborate iconography,
intricate codings, Sufic
whirlings, a single
pillar pierces the sky. Ascend.
*Collier's New Century Dictionary, 1933, p. 1285
POLYPRAGMATIC
#24
02-23-01
Struggling with polypragmatic brains, polyphyletic
bodies, polyphonous
souls, visionary grids, patterns intoxicated
with meaning, escaping
from sleep,
soup and shit,
humans fly high above Amazon
forests, the Himalayas'
grinding rage, the warming ocean.
Soon not a single thing
will have escaped their probing,
meddlesome attention.
Mysteries evaporate and relate us
to the
worm.
Nothing erases nostalgia, poignancy, longing
for cartographic
certainty,
the officiousness, effrontery, arrogance,
presumption,
the impudent boldness to invent
more unused words
to explain the world.
A poet's singular goal might
be to use
up
neglected words, tuck them
into the crevasses
created by Kampuchea's land-mined past.
POLYGENY
#25
02-23-01
Struggling -- which I could probably
sacrifice if I believed in a
polygenious
past. If I could believe,
I were not
one thing,
but many, not
of one descent
but a heterogeneous, non-matching,
chaos
of interbreeding, conflicted animals. Perhaps,
too, if
I were polygenic, with purring
from cats, barking from
dogs,
blood-lust from lions,
speed-lust from the long-legged
cheetahs,
gentleness from dolphins,
I'd have more sympathy, kill
less, share Gaia, share sky
and moon, land and vegetables,
manage love
for my fellow humans, compassionately
feed them as
well as whales, owls, tortoises
-- all endangered species --
who, like humans, lack morals.
PYRAMID
#26
02-24-01
Struggling to contain the world,
the whole world... Early on we were
taught about the pyramids, Egypt,
certain things, not
others.
The Western World, not
the Hindu, Islamic,
Tibetan, Chinese worlds,
not Buddha.
We were taught we Caucasians
were the human world,
cultured, civilized, others
were savages, even builders of
colossal American mounds
were savages. We detonated their
worlds
to prove
it. Only awesome remains survive:
pyramids of Hindu,
Khmer, Aztec,
Inca, Assyrian. India kept no contemporary note
of
sword-swinging Alexander's claimed conquest --
a mere gnat
to brush
aside, ubiquitously occupied,
as they were,
with their own omniscient destiny.
PYRE
#27
02-24-01
Struggling with images that float
like smoke from pyres along the
Ganges,
from crumbling silt-covered rock ghats,
from darkness,
ash,
wetness, filth, fragrance, excremental odors
that fill
the
night and the sun-rising dawn,
I long to be reunited
with
the soul I mislaid across the
river, ocean, west, in India.
Worship the sun,
suryanamaskara,* stand on Kashi's steps,
bathe in light,
pluck Siva's hair from my
tongue. These I
ask for
in one lifetime. I have no other,
no time. Impatience
runs deep.
Belief trickles, as
sand through an hourglass, runs
out, runs away,
fails to incinerate empty
glass.
*Adoration of [bowing to] the sun, Sanskrit-English Dictionary,
Monier-Williams, p. 1243
PITY
#28
02-25-01
Struggling with pity, prithee, struggle
with me. Inform the wind, for
no
one hears my spiraling song.
The bird sings
a single note,
silence, note,
a bus passes,
silence, prithee pity me, for
I
am part of earth
packed down, packed in, parceled, purchased,
poisoned,
bargained into marketable, profit-sharing shape.
Prithee,
pity me
cried the worm, the bird,
bearing eon's habits.
Go where?
Do what? Space
is dark, cold, uninhabitable. Only
on earth is
green, grass and seed.
I pray thee, pity me.
We dreamed
awhile
and then awoke to space
dark, cold, lifeless
acceleration through a black hole.
PONDICHERY
#29
02-25-01
Struggling to visualize Pondichery on
India's east coast, my
imagination fails blankly.
Having seen a little of
this earth, I
cannot envision a lot. Having
glimpsed something, I
sometimes
can feel dust from
ages, eons and other parts
of earth puff up
between my toes.
When my feet hurt, I
tell them they
have been
many places. Peace
be with them.
Pain is not so bad
a lot.
Let them pleasure
themselves ploughing the dew of wet grass,
let
them tingle with pinkness
in ponds reflecting
cherry blossoms:
white, pink, fallen
near dragonflies skimming
the reflective waters of oblivion.
PILLAGE
#30
02-25-01
Struggling to pillage my brain,
strip it, rape it, plunder it
of
booty gained under false pretenses,
faking interest,
faking
love, faking a vivid belief
in progress, parlance
on
parquetry's ancient, scuffed flooring.
A mosaic, a pillory
fastening
head and hands, stocks for the feet,
but how do you fetter
the slithering mind?
There are vistas of endlessness
across the
bones
of the dry desert mountains.
But there is no weather
inside the head, no temperature, the mind
disdains climate,
credibility, plays cacophony
against its own
longing for an ice
cave
a single thought,
stasis, the stillness of death.
POTTERY
#31
02-25-01
Struggling with the Hindu image
of pottery: the water inside the
cup
and outside the cup, identical.
My whimpering roar
merging
with the ocean's roar.
What to do
with the body, earth's
excrescence?
Clay, earth, ashes having lept
from the fire of
incarnation, how do
you cool it down? Slosh
it with water,
soak
it in sea brine
pyre it, jar
it. Imagine stuffing Mama
into
a pottery jar! Building mounds,
tombs, pyramids, leaving
drugged kids to freeze
in the Andes. We've tried
it all.
Raise
your cup, drink your coffee.
chew a betel
for thou and thee. Merge.
PAKAR
#32
02-25-01
Struggling with the mind to
make it remember that the raga's
identifying
phrase is the pakar: repeated
notes. Notes
repeated,
caught, pulsing through the raga's
minutes, hours, days.
I
must remember this, I
must know it, use it
as metaphor, icon,
pattern, bird-cry, song, peculiarity;
embroider it in red,
embroider
it in blue;
map it, trace it, sustain
it, call
it
up from soundlessness, silence, nothingness;
let it wander
through my
heart, my ears, my throat, kiss my
finger tips, that I,
too,
may strum Nada
Brahma, the language of God,
in
my
plain
life, my unremarkable homelessness, pain.
PANCHAMA
#33
02-25-01
Struggling with the conceptual fifth,
panchama, based on the
cuckoo's spring cry,
PA, soon to come, defining
one's last
spring.
Already the buds burst through
cold ground, purple,
yellow and gold. Panchama often
dominates the drone. It
is
always shuddh, pure, never sharped, tivra, never
flatted, komal, fifth in ascension.
fourth in descent.
In India the cuckoo is
the koil, death,
sex, the
central axis: too
rich in meaning to remember,
too omnipotent
to forget. Divide the thirty-three
million gods by five -- still
too many to
remember, count, fear. This particular
33 is about
P. Don't struggle with five.
More of The 2001 Poems
Copyright © 2002 Jan Haag
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jhaag@janhaag.com or jhaag@u.washington.edu
BY JAN HAAG
POETRY
+
MUSIC +
ESSAYS
+ TRAVEL +
FICTION
+
TEXTILE
ART
INTRODUCTION
+
HAAG'S BIO