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THE BLUE GUITAR

Geneva to Paris

On a train, we fly into the night.

Where there should be a blanket, there is just this empty

space between us. We are falling now.

We are like postcards sent from the other side of the world.

Only Ghosts Enter Here

The hand that held the gun waves to us in the dark.

The hand that ended the man depopulated a world.

There is no need to erect new buildings only ghosts enter here.

This is a dead country illuminated by a white moon
on a winter night.

We buy a ticket and make our way to the cheap seats.

The departed are with us now here on the other side

of an open-air stadium.

We watch a laser light show. We see an angel suspended

above us on invisible wires.

The hand that held the gun waves to us in the dark.

The hand that ended the man depopulated a world.

(Nowhere Man) The Killing of John Lennon

Red lights flash, sirens blare, a blue

and white police cruiser flies across Manhattan.

Over his fallen and broken body,

John Lennon floats,

John Lennon

hovers.

His mind flashes back to when he was a boy

and a band played behind the wall of his garden.

Debilitated by paranoia and delusions,

Mark David Chapman harassed Hari Krishnas

and threatened

Scientologists.

He sent telegrams to Satan.

Outside his holding cell, he is fitted with a bullet proof vest.

“No fuck ups. No Oswalds.”

The police commander calls out.

We are buried beneath falling ashes.

We hear the tinkling keys of a piano.

We hear a voice.

Like a hummingbird, it feeds on flowers and honey.

Our minds flash back to when we were children

and a band played behind the wall of our garden.

John Lennon floats, John Lennon

hovers.

Aurora

Is that the humming of a god or a fallen angel that he hears?

There is so much white noise that it is deafening.

It comes in waves.

As he sits in the courtroom,

his hair dyed red and orange, his mind wanders.

He is not dreaming. He is wide awake.

He sees things no one else sees.

He heard sirens

wailing months before the killing.

He saw pools of blood at his feet.

He saw birds trapped in a cave with no way out.

(Schizophrenia is a diagnosis but not an explanation.)

A woman holds a white rose and prays for the dead,

others join her,

their heads bowed in sorrow.

A newborn baby is placed on his father's belly.

He does not know his child is there.

He is in a coma.

There is a bandage over his eye where the bullet

entered his brain.

A ventilator helps him breathe.

He does not know that twelve died

in the back of theater nine.

He does not know how the movie ended.

Is that the humming of a god or a fallen angel that we hear?

There is so much white noise that it is deafening.

It comes in waves.

Our minds wander. We are not dreaming.

We are wide awake.

We see things that no one should ever see.

The Blue Fairy

Pinocchio had blue eyes
but hers are green
and when opened wide
turn black.
She once had a three way
with Woody Allen and Mia Farrow
but is no fan of their movies.
She prefers John Barrymore and Greta Garbo.
She sleeps inside a mirror and is older than she looks.
She recalls
when Marilyn Monroe (in the guise of a blue fairy)
met Sylvia Plath
in a London flat.
Reluctantly, she sells stocks short.
She chats on message boards
using a photo of Ayn Rand as her avatar.
Her thoughts are like books taken from the library
and never returned.
She floats inside a bubble.
She fears oceans and elevators.
But it is the going down that she fears the most.
On Thursday, she wears a wedding veil.
On Sunday, she is widowed.
Pinocchio had blue eyes
but hers are green
and when opened wide
turn black.

George Washington On A White Horse

Apparitions line the White House walls,

portraits of presidents,

FDR, JFK and Jefferson,

George Washington on a white horse,

Reagan the first president elected after a divorce.

Trump and Clinton are there too,

one lied about an intern and a cigar,

another lied about Russian whores and a porn star.

False gods wear no shoes but walk among them,

their faces shine, their teeth glitter with radioactive smiles.

Apparitions are gathering on the border

where once we made land in the dark on an unknown shore.

We are sleepwalking now (often forgetting our dreams).

We cannot see beyond the looming mountain outside our door.

Apparitions line the White House walls,

portraits of presidents,

FDR, JFK and Jefferson,

George Washington on a white horse,

Reagan the first president elected after a divorce.

Trump and Clinton are there too,

one lied about an intern and a cigar,

another lied about Russian whores and a porn star.

The Astronaut

The astronaut has been drugged. He sleeps

with his helmet off,

the particles of his brain altered

in the blue alchemy

of space.
His feet, arms, hands and legs
have become
unhinged

from his torso. He sends out signals,
coded transmissions,

that are difficult to read.

He mouths the words to a song

only the deaf can hear.

He makes a false confession

to his imaginary therapist
and then takes it all back
and holds fast
once again to the truth.

He reads the news.
He watches TV shows
broadcast from an alien planet
revolving around an alien sun.

There are others with him, hordes of them,
flocks of them, invisible now

but not so far away.
We know some of them.
They are not all forgotten.
We remember those that once
heard our voices
and looked into our eyes.

When will they parachute
back in
to our world
of air, land and ocean?
When will they come back to us?

Variations on the Man with the Blue Guitar

"The strings are cold on the blue guitar" Wallace Stevens

A boy blew out a tune on a toy whistle.

The moon heard it echo. The wind heard it cry.

The clouds changed its sound.

In another country, it fell from the sky.

Unnoticed, it fell to the ground.

There are words only heard in the dark.

There are stories only told to strangers.

We dance to radio signals warbling

in the air. We change our faces daily.

We turn the world over. We sleep when we can.

They wear masks of tin; they glitter in the sun.

Their rockets blaze; they build warheads by the ton.

They talk of peace, but it never comes.

A cloud descends, the lies resume.

Their minds are empty; their hearts are blank.

We walk and stumble along a darkened wall.

We hear a whistle. We hear a call.

But we can't be sure. There are so many before us,

so many bodies pushing and shoving,

hordes of them. We become confused. We fall.

The boy adored the blue guitar.

He made a kind of shrine.

He bathed in the light of that star.

The world glistened and shined.

He was born again when he heard the blue guitar.

They are flying drones way up high

(UFOs whiz around in the dark).

A robot pushes a button and lives vanish.

Out here in the white sands of the desert,

after the blast, the dead disembark.

At midnight, the world turned to stone;

and with it, the human head was reduced to bone.

The mountains turned purple; the sky turned gray.

Rivers and oceans froze, the land filled with snow.

The world went to sleep; the world turned to stone.

Architects silently put their tools away.

The shape of things had become an empty hole.

The boy feared his dreams might stop, his vision fade.

The boy feared he would turn to stone.

The boy feared he would be reduced to bone.

In his mind, the boy made a shadow box

of all the things he had known and seen.

He made a shadow box of violet, blue and green.

He remembered oceans, clouds and ponds.

He remembered all the things he had known and seen.

An X marked the houses of the dead.

Bloated bodies floated down Canal Street.

The Superdome was in total darkness.

The lights were out; there was no turning back.

The boy painted his fingernails black.

Folks waved white flags from rooftops.

The president did a flyover.

He kept his distance; his view was blurred.

Only Kafka could invent something so absurd.

A man went up into the clouds.

The man traversed an ocean for love.

He could have been an astronaut; he was so far gone.

He was lost in the air.

He whirled and tumbled and when he came down,

his wife was not there.

The man examined the clues.

The man had a bad case of the blues.

The man made a trip to the Pale Horse Tattoo

parlor. He wanted to commemorate

his years of clandestine service

in the company of shadows,

when Peter Lorre was his avatar and guide,

when the world was dark and blue.

The man heard the thunder roar.

The man was weary of war.

Children are gathering in the dark.

An idea forms and we begin to bloom,

almost invisibly but not quite.

Think of the resurrection as a kind

of second chance, as a kind of blossoming.

Some died by fire, some died in a blast.

Some vanished like a vapor, some died in a crash.

We let go of our secrets

but our voices seem strange.

We must move beyond this phantom feeling.

History has abandoned us.

The old-world fades but the ruins remain.

We breathe in its dust and it changes us.

We have no need of sleep.

We bloom like flowers in the night.

We know what it is like to shiver in the cold.

We know what it is like to stumble and fall.

But our eyes were opened. We heard the call.

We followed the light of a distant star.

We heard the sound of the blue guitar.

A boy blew out a tune on a toy whistle.

The moon heard it echo. Constellations heard it cry.

On another planet, it fell from the sky.

The clouds changed its sound.

Unnoticed, it fell to the ground.

There are words only heard in the dark.

There are stories only told to strangers.

We dance to radio signals warbling in the air.

We fly by the light of a nameless star.

We dance to the sound of the blue guitar.

After Reading a Review of “The Sacrifice” by Joyce Carol Oates

Out here in the undiscovered dark,

I hear the voice of a phantom.

(Or is it the voice of a lost relative

calling out from the other side

of an invisible hill?)

Across town, cameras flash

as a minister holds a press conference

in the vestibule of a church.

He drinks from the poisoned water of his own ego.

His finger points away from himself.

More children are dying every day.

Bombs continue to fall

while the world sleeps.

No one controls this cloud we ride on.

No one knows how to get off.

Higdon Ferry Road

On Higdon Ferry Road, I float beyond

the red warning lights of a dark country,

their beacons blinking on and off,

and then vanishing.
I hover above the hospital where my father died.
Here my body has become obsolete,
vaporized and dispersed like a distant echo.
Below this blurred world my father’s body
rests in a silver urn,
his limbs no longer hanging feebly from his torso,
his skin, blood and bones, the hinges

of his shoulders,

knees and elbows burned to powder and ash,

clavicle to breast, a box to clouds.

Will flowers bloom in this fog or will they wilt?
When I was a boy, between talk of sex and baseball,
I heard rumors of a coming air invasion
from Russia. I was afraid.
I watched the sky. Lightning flashed.

Thunder rumbled. I saw airplanes
coming out of the clouds. I hid in a garage.
During the Korean War, my dad
was a radar operator in Alaska; he too
looked for air invaders from Russia.

Often, he worked the night shift
and slept when he could.

My mother often dreams my father
is in the room with us.
She says his presence has begun to fade,
not like a ghost but more like a blip on a radar screen,

an echo, blinking on and off,

and then vanishing.
She hands me a box of his clothes.
I put them on and so he moves (and so he grows
and so I wake
and so I see and so he walks and so he breathes).

Plato Takes Notes

They would never understand, she tells herself.

She could have been a revolutionary. She could have been

Homecoming Queen.

Punk girl, she poses in a bikini for a fanzine.

She shows off her latest tattoo.

In front of the camera, the pain diminishes, but the whirring blades

in her head spin unceasingly.

There is no pill that will fix her.

The stars hang crooked in this universe.

They twinkle, they glitter.

Facts are toxic for true believers.

The propaganda machine is always on.

It has wings. It is made up of nightmares and dreams.
Conspiracy theories abound.

The lie detector in the other room

measures feelings but not truth.

Socrates suffers from dementia while Plato takes notes.

9/11

and now, a second and improbable plane, a blip on FAA radar,
United Flight 175, approaches and then plunges

into the south tower of the World Trade Center,

igniting into orange and red flames

while bodies fall and then tumble like stunt doubles

into the empty but televised air.

The Missing

An egret whirls into the wind,

and then turns and folds in upon itself and lands

beneath a cloud of water;

while in the distance,

airplanes at the edge of thunder

murmur and echo

like the thin mirrors of the ego,

glittering and lost, and I shudder

in the dark and consider

the dead (and all of their voices),

an unwavering remembrance,

a delicate descent.

Death Rides in on a White Horse

An electric eye opens. It watches us while we sleep.

It opens doors and windows and lets the others in.

We hear them, their voices echoing throughout the house.

We can’t quite understand what it is they are saying.

A one-eyed fat man reads from a book of tarot cards

and a crystal ball.

He looks into the meaning of things.

He sees the towers fall.

He sees flashes of a burning world.

The fool remains but no one is laughing.

Death rides in on a white horse.

The talking heads have all gone home.

Satellites bounce signals into outer space.

Who can hear us? Who will save us from ourselves?

Nuit Blanche

The portrait of a man in electric blue,

a torso actually,

hangs there on the wall.

and further down

the depiction of an electric chair

dangles in pink, red and violet pastels.

Oh, how the shadows cry,

the voices of the dead.

And turning now we realize too late

that we have passed through

an opened door

into a forgotten room

where no one ever sleeps

and no one ever leaves.

With Our Eyes Closed

Darkness descends without a sound on the wings

of an invisible horse.

No one knows his name, this stranger in love

with his own shadow.

We are walking backwards now with our eyes closed.

We have nowhere else to go.

Oceans & Technology

Out here in this country of unending sleep,

I inherit horses in winter

and blowing hands;

above the clouds, and the televisions of L.A.

(where once a blue whore danced on a powdered mask),

a woman is broadcast on air,

a former debutante manipulated by plastic surgeons

and ultimately disposed of by parapsychologists

in the Pentagon.

Out here in the shadow of a paradox,

I huddle in wonder, decomposed but undiminished

while a hundred warplanes

fly over toxic foam (oceans and technology),

breast implants found hidden in the hospital gown

of a surrogate mother.

A Masked Man

On top a white stallion the Lone Ranger descends,

a masked man,
debilitated and unrehearsed.

What is it that I want to say but ultimately cannot say?
I have become nothing,
a ghost deprogrammed and on parole.

I walk out into the shadows of televised snow,
televised desolation, blue trauma by a descending sky,
man of blankness, man of sighs.

TelePrompTer

HOLD US IN A HUMAN TELECAST

TOP STARS AND BLANK EXITS

WITH TELEVANGELISTS ON SATELLITES

AND UNREMEMBERED HEROES ON BLONDES

THE WATER COMES IN

WE UNDERSTAND

IT HAS COME THROUGH THE WIND

AND THE CLOUDS

HOOKERS BY BLEACH

WHITE WIGS AND U.S. WARHEADS

BILLOWING ON BYLINES WORLDWIDE

BLANKET US UNMASKED

X TELEPATHS ON TOPLESS HOUSEBOATS

THIS IS OUR ULTIMATE BUYER

PARACHUTES BY ULTRA LIGHTS

HOLOGRAMS BY FOAM

White Orchids & Death

After watching a movie about a woman
in a sanitarium
obsessed with white orchids and death,
I think about the girl at the pool

and all that she said.
She spoke about her father

lost in the mountains

of Wyoming,
wandering beneath

white peaks of heavenly snow;

and she spoke of her two sisters,

and her mother and all of her love.

Ghosts in Winter

What do I care about Prozac and depression, price controls

and the unemployment rate (blue voices in a dark room),

while a lost girl wades through drifts and drifts of Minnesota snow

and apparitions huddle high above the frozen river?

Narcissus

Narcissus declares his death a hoax.

He sleeps in a cave far underground.

He refuses to look at himself in the mirror now

as he puts his wings on backwards

in a darkened corner.

He has not forgotten how everything

once bloomed in the world above him

before the fall.

He does not speak.

He lost his voice long ago in the void.

He paints stars on the ceiling by candlelight

and imagines ocean waves

and billowing sails

and harbors filled with faces other than his own.

Night Poem

White stars and a white moon,

snow geese

in a flying V formation cross a blue sky.

I could become as transparent as the wind

and dance

to the beat of a toy drum

and leave all my belongings behind.

I could talk back to the darkness

but would I be heard?

White stars and a white moon,

snow geese in a flying V formation

cross a blue sky.

A Blue Christmas

Matt Lauer moves into an empty house

without walls or windows

and fills it with rumors and tabloid headlines.

He looks into a dark mirror and does not speak.

Blackbirds perch in the trees outside

and squawk and chatter amongst themselves.

A TV anchor sits in front of a map

of the United States highlighted in blue

as Brian Ross falsely reports that Michael Flynn

agrees to testify that candidate Trump

directed Flynn to make contact

with the Russians.

Charles Manson dies.

His son opens a GoFundMe account

to pay for the funeral expenses.

A war criminal poisons himself in court.

Wisdom shines and never fades

but not here and not now.

The Night Batman Died We Talked

The night Batman died, we talked.

You told me that the boulder

that stood between us had been removed

and had left a hole

in your world and you fell in.

The shadow of an ogre blotted out the sky.

Long ago, I found you sitting

in Saint Paul’s

in front of the statue of Saint Therese.

You said you were cold

after marching in the streets of Paris

against the war in Iraq.

After that, you gave me a small,

blank notebook.

I scribble in it and fill it with words, incantations

and prayers. Batman has put away his indigo mask.

I have put away mine.

The ogre is gone.

JFK

Even before I learned

to stand or walk without some help,

I was already able to decipher the paradoxical truth

of the televised image—that the images

were an illusion.

Ghosts. Snowy pictures that talked.

Faces and pictures I eventually could control

and manipulate with the turn of a dial,

a surrogate memory where whole generations

were consigned to a cathode ray tube;

a world where images were transposed

into myth, and I could become a companion

to the likes of Lois Lane, Clark Kent,

Hercules and the Lone Ranger.

The rain had stopped,

so, the bubble top was removed.

The president beamed and waved to the crowds.

The first lady, a princess, in a pink wool suit

and matching pink pill box hat, smiled.

Together they floated down Elm Street

in a midnight blue Lincoln Continental,

a carriage for a handsome prince

and his bride.

Mountain climbers call the top of a mountain,

the death zone.

Unknown to anyone in the crowd,

the presidential limousine invisibly

passed into that zone.

Jackie tried to turn back, but it was too late.

Soon after, the rumors began.

There was talk of Castro, the CIA and the mob.

Vietnam was engulfed in flames.

RFK and Martin Luther King were shot down.

Images of the dead were broadcast nightly.

The TV was full of ghosts,

but it wasn't a fantasy, it wasn't a myth.

It began with the death of a prince

and his widow in a blood stained, pink suit.

They are still with us.

It is going on now.

We see her, we see him, transfigured,

ascending into the clouds.

Some Sense Their Presence

Some sense their presence;

their radiance,
luminous in the dark.
Others know their faults,

their imperfections,

but this makes them
all the more attractive,

all the more
accessible.

I cast my eyes on long poems
from books that fall apart
in my hands.

I leap from one stanza to another

as I descend.

So many answers
to unknown questions,

so many poems
that never end.

I Spy

In the darkness, he rises like a moonlit shadow.

He imagines himself a king.

He tells himself this is what a man is,

this is what a man does. He teaches, but not this.

The pills make the woman his subject, his concubine.

She offers no resistance.

Words begin to form in fragments but drift away.

She forgets how to speak.

She cannot move.

When we played, I Spy, I played Bill Cosby’s part.

I assumed my dark-skinned playmate

(whose ancestors came from Africa on slave ships)

would take the role.

But he insisted on playing the debonair spy.

I would be the funny sidekick.

Watching TV, looking at the pictures

in Playboy magazine,

we learned how to become dinosaurs

but not men.

Anna Nicole Smith in TV Heaven

The flashbulbs are so much brighter here.

After all, this is the land of laugh tracks,

big screen TVs and Cadillacs,

where games shows are broadcast twenty-four hours

a day and everyone is a winner. The thousand-pound man

and the five-hundred-pound mom, can Doctor Phil save them?

Her bodyguard said her eyes were fixed and dilated.

The coroner ruled that a combination of pills

and chloral hydrate killed her.

Rumor has it that Andy Warhol

has already commissioned her portrait.

But Einstein wants nothing to do with it.

We open ourselves up to darkness but not to love.

Our heads are getting bigger everyday

while our legs are shrinking from disuse.

Did OJ commit armed robbery in Las Vegas?

Do flying saucers really exist? Can America be saved?

Stay tuned.

All Our Own

I am baffled by the fix of her blue eyes and the subtle way

she clings to me in shades of gray.

I sense there is something missing in each of us,

a kind of faith that we cannot fathom

or rather a kind of trust we think we will never know

even now as we fall into an emptiness all our own.

Will James

Sunday, December 1, 2019

Selected Poems 1988-2020 Will James