Jack Foley
AT EIGHTY
at eighty I have left
a long paper trail
despite a late start
how many books
17 of poetry alone
but there are others
and they are sometimes
rather long
it's a complex life I've led
a life of dreams
and commentary
Freud, Jung, Heidegger
my guides
to say nothing of Cole Porter,
Lorenz Hart, Noël Coward, Laurel & Hardy,
Johnny Mercer, Bernard Shaw, Delmore Schwartz,
George M. Cohan, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Thomas Wolfe, The Indians' Book,
Hannah Arendt, Gertrude Stein, "Germs' Choice," Jean Toomer, Fred Astaire,
Dante, Virgil, Milton, Hammett, Waugh, Groucho Marx, Spicer, Lao Tsu,
Olson, Duncan, Jess, dear Larry Eigner, Langston Hughes, Hitchcock, Abel Gance,
Pound, Eliot, Bashō, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sandburg, Williams, The Beatles, Les Paul,
Muddy Waters, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Cocteau, McClure, Dylan Thomas, Whitman, Grahn, Beckett, Baldwin, Kerouac, Shelley, Thomas Gray, Lorca, Melville, Poe, Elinor Wylie,
Ted Joans, Frost, Brecht, Yeats, Paul de Man, Charles Ives, Lou Harrison, Rilke, Gershwin, Purcell, Dickinson, Emerson, a man on the street whose name I don't remember, so many others.
I don't believe
in "coming of age" as in
"a coming of age story"
I don't believe in linear development
but rather in a vast, circling, endless
consciousness in which new things
are constantly added but which
is more chaotic than anything else and goes
as my friend James Broughton said,
"beautifully nowhere."
We are a vastness
that pretends to be finite.
80 Flowers is a book
by Louis Zukofsky
who did not live to be eighty.
His book, and the marvelous title,
outlived him.
I will take the title
on August 9, 2020
and feel the flowering of my age.
Thank you, wonderful Zukofsky
whom an ignorant, famous poet
once insisted was "terrible, just terrible."
Imagination
flowers at eighty
in perhaps a way that it did not
when I was young.
These years, these memories,
these fictions
fly from me as I stay
at the center of an ocean
in which I tread water
until the perhaps benevolent
darkness
calls to me and says,
"Come"--not home, just
"Come."
*
THE DICTIONARY
He spent his life
In the compilation of a dictionary
This dictionary was an endlessly incomplete
Record of everything he had said
And everything that had been said to him
And every thought he had had
And everything he had read and seen
It was all words nothing but vowels and consonants
Words seen words spoken words he had dreamed
On endless nights when his thoughts turned
Restlessly half forgotten
Words
It was a book and not
A book his word for it was poetry
But really it was nothing but a dictionary
The words that had clung to him as he lived
Among flowers and trees and cities and people
And air and rain and grief and joy and
The sudden understanding
That all words led out of themselves
.
Into nothing into the way reality
Was present to the endless fountain of his mind.
FALLING
what do the old fear?
falling
yesterday--the thirteenth!--
I fell
heavily
onto my front lawn
the wind knocked out of me
a little time passed
while I determined
how I might move
my weight
so that Sangye and my cane
could help me arise
above me
the indifferent sky
watched my beached
whale imitation
finally
the cane
and Sangye
succeeded
in getting me up
sore back muscles
attest my folly
we are thrown,
said Heidegger
brilliantly,
into the world
perhaps at times
we simply
fall
face to the ground
in pain
and the task is to consider
various possible strategies
to rise
again