#250

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I just went back to DS 4, “Filling her compact & delicious body with chicken paprika,” etc., remembering, “only the fact of her husband & four other people / kept me from springing on her.” Don’t know what she would have thought about that, but that doesn’t matter. DS 4 is one of the best-known Dream Songs, and the point of it is that what the narrator would do isn’t what’s at issue. It’s what he’s thinking, the unabashed lust and desire as the new postmodern poetry’s newly permissible subject matter, more or less taboo up to that moment just because this new iteration of lust is so naked, as it were, so exhibitionistic. It’s not carpe diem, “seize the day,” the ancient formalization of a man saying to a woman, c’mon already! Come to bed, my darling. Life is short, and that potential moment of happiness in my life will be wasted if you don’t hurry up and c’mon already… In the guy’s defense of carpe diem, women, many of them, don’t necessarily hate or resent or even mind being seduced. So I’ve heard. So there’s that. And it works the other way around, too, though you didn’t hear about that quite as much in the old days, all that double standard business and the like. It’s all about sex at any rate, in all its infinite permutations.

B. writes about sex all the time, but he’s so much more internalized about it than carpe diem, which is directed outward. C’mon already… But in these later Dream Songs, rather than carpe diem, or the narrator’s internalized fantasies, we’re getting into what we might call in dies abscesserit poems—rather than “seize the day” it’s “the day is past”. This one is about a memory, of a woman he had been with, or perhaps the generalized, collective women he had been with. The opening, jumping right in with a stress and no capitals: “sád sights. A crumpled, empty cigarette pack. / An empty bottle. Hey: an empty girl. / Fill 'er up, pal.” Fill her up. It’s just wrong on so many levels, except for the baldness of it, which is all that really matters and why it’s there. I’ve heard the same thing said a thousand different ways in my life, so pretending to be shocked would be nothing more than a dumbass pose. But it’s the used up, in dies abcesserit quality of the images that sets the tone. For a smoker, tapping that first cig out of the new pack is a pleasure. It’s great when you crack open that bourbon bottle and pour out a couple fingers and see all that’s left to come. It’s like the first days of June with summer stretching out for months ahead. But late September eventually always gets here—hot, hay-feverish, the leaves that are falling not passing through the glorious color waiting a month down the road, rather simply dead and crisp and dying and gone. Crumpled. Empty. There is no fresh summer, just the last uncomfortable dregs of empty, polluted heat, swarming with mosquitoes, before the new season takes over. The second stanza is not entirely clear, but it adds up to a further-back reminiscence about what led to the empty bottles and crumpled cigarette packs—sex, in other words. This line, “(while sunsets rose in the clothes of the field of God),” looks like a fairly coded, obscure reference to a woman’s body and the awaiting pleasures therein as she’s being undressed. The third stanza descends into a crass metaphor for sex that B. drew on once before, but there’s no doubt about what it means: “I fit the holster.” Right straight to that moment of penetration, with the implied phallus-as-gun reference, but being “holstered” its danger is de-emphasized. But what follows is very intense, and what the poem, and clearly, the poet’s sexual appetite is all about: It’s about a life-or-death intensity that is acted out sexually. “I was not sight seein’. / I loved her and she killed me. That be so. / I killed her all too.” In spite of the violence of the image and the language, it’s not about violence per se, I don’t think. I don’t even think there is a particular “her” in mind, it’s more a reflection on aggregate past sexual experience, and a spending of youth and vigor. In the case of drugs or alcohol, the addiction saps the body and the body’s vigor. B. writes about this all the time. It was his lot in life, his severe alcoholism chosen or inflicted, whichever it was. Do other addictions sap physical or spiritual vitality as well? Addictions to gambling, adrenaline rushes, violence, sex? I can’t say from experience, but why not? The guy in the wingsuit who flew through a hole in a mountain—it flirts with death so closely, but he’s not doing it to risk death, he’s doing it to trigger the rush of living through it. He believes he’ll accomplish it, and he prepares and he does. After something like that, though, if that’s where your head’s at, what could possibly come next? Eventually these people kill themselves if they don’t put a stop to the dynamic that has them do this thing that is so obviously suicidal to the rest of us not so addicted to the adrenaline rush.

Well, it’s true that sex itself doesn’t kill like an attempt at a wingsuit flight through a cave that is just a few inches off. Doesn’t have to. But he claims it does in this poem. If he’s right, death doesn’t come as a splattering against a mountainside. It’s a different kind of slow spiritual strangulation, because he’s not approaching sex as a meeting of the heart mind and body with a woman, it’s not about love, not about giving, it’s about a taking of experience and thrill and a taking of lust-relief. That’s a drain, and eventually your bottle empties, the cigarette pack crumbles, and there you are, thinking back on it all just before you shoot yourself or jump off a bridge. “The ability of sleep leaves you forever”—you bet, and “sleep” is not about sleeping here, it’s about conquesting, that other thing that goes on all the time in beds that isn’t one bit about rest. Once you can’t sleep, you never sleep again. That day is past. In dies abcesserit.