#329

Henry on LSD was Henry indeed

pounds shillings pence, made a mountaining landscape

His foes were Parker green

All his relatives danced in shameless air

Coke came from his nose     The Vatican was a grape

the baby’s animals tear

Blue flew the parents through the humid dusk,

they can’t arrange for the yellow collections of shells

whimper near the city centre

He told a dirty story, angry & brusque,

He ate black-eyed peas since there was nothing else

He looked everywhere for his mentor

His mentor found was black & ripe, a floater,

we’ll thread the eyes, argued the oldest one,

& bury it at sea

To get rid of the shroud put on Full the motor,

just a little hump, sink it in the rising sun,

abominable & impenetrable Henry.

The poem begins, “Henry on LDS was Henry indeed” and it ends with the line “abominable & impenetrable Henry.” This brackets the poem nicely, because in between, it’s quite a daunting challenge to make sense of the thing, a psychedelic, impenetrable set of almost totally obscure—but colorful!—allusions. “LSD” and “impenetrable” form the operative motif so far. Dream? Drug hallucination? Who can tell? Doesn’t matter. They take us to analogous realms, so don’t be so damn fastidious. Anyway, the trick here for today will be to see if there’s anything at all to be culled from this randomized amalgamation of what looks for all the world like a collection of words. Or is it drug-induced conglomeration, sensible only to the drug-altered mentation of a stoned hipster? They used to have light shows in theaters back in the 70s, where they’d blast Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd tapes and flash colored lights around on a screen in sync with the music. I never understood it. It shaded for me way over toward the utterly pointless and boring end of the entertainment spectrum—unless, of course, you had a spleef (spot of pot on a leaf) burning and were totally baked, and then it was for sure groovy.

First stanza: There are veiled allusions to domestic life and life situations, all observed through a drug-induced scrim draped between here and some parallel universe: Some money came in, still foes around everywhere (writing is competitive, remember), his relatives are dancing because, flush with money for a moment, he’s feeling less shamed. (Money has that kind of power, it has to be admitted.) More drugs, “The Vatican is a grape”—squash it and it squirts. No bureaucratic religious mind control active today! And then, the baby’s plush toys on a table, sentimentally weeping, because she’s a little girl and she’s innocent and the love even a tripping schmuck feels for his little girls is helpless and pure.

Second spasm…er…stanza: An invocation of the parents, always present in anyone’s brain trip, flying—dead like ghosts—through the blue dusk of an ebbing, sun-setting end. Randomized images collected from his day follow—whimpering, dirty stories, black-eyed peas (whatever…) then an intro to the heart of the matter:

Third stanza: The mentor. Yeats? Perhaps. We’re still in Ireland after all, and the memory of William Butler Yeats hovers always over everything: quivering tea cup lifted gingerly to drawn lips, deep hacking cough, papery, unhealthy skin, thin dry hair, and B. lit his cigarette for him. One of the defining moments of his life. But, Yeats died, sweet as his work was, the man died, and here comes his body figuratively floating out to sea, blackened and horrible. The fishermen who find him—practical non-dreamy characters, poetical in their understanding of cod and mackerel but otherwise rather prosaic, hard-working fellows—sink him in the sunset.

Ah, it’s a beautiful image, for all the macabre overtones. We have to figuratively dream-kill our mentors if we’re to grow up, don’t we? That’s just how it is. Henry, freed of his reticence by sleep or a powerful liberating substance, takes the step. So sinks Modernism into the horizon of a blue sunset under a calm sea. As a result, I was born into a world of chaos. So be it. The chaos is vaster than me. Bring it on.