Letters v3 Man

7/30/2019 Letters v3 Man

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Jack Galmitz

Yet To Be Named Free Press

Stoke-on-Trent, England

2013


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LETTERS Jack Galmitz

Collection Copyright 2013 Yet To Be Named FreePress. Individual poems are copyright of Jack Galmitz and

are used with permission. All rights reserved.

Yet To Be Named Free Press

www.yettobenamedfreepress.org

ISBN-13: 978-1481198769

ISBN-10: 1481198769


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Foreword

Everyone's inner world is worked through by traveling thehistory of pioneers of modernism and that while

"perspective" is gained like in the distance of looking at an

oil painting, I've tried to achieve this end by concentrating

on the flat surface of language and painting and the

concrete music of the 20th C and its link to the music of

the poems.

Jack Galmitz, 2013

Letters is a difficult work but well worth the effort. Most

of the poems in the collection are not short-verse, but

within the longer pieces short extracts of gold dust can be

found, I'll leave you with this one:

I find you in the robin, in the stems of fishes,

In the face of statues of eminent citizens

And, when you die and assume another form,

I will recognize you and you will be for me all.

Brendan Slater, 2013


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For Those Who Listen To White Noise


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Jack Galmitz


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A bloodied dog

wrying on the floor between

two women praying


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Letters

Constellation

For the modern sky

Man in Bomb Vest


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The Hunter appears

the day disappears


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Letters


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Who Saw the Future

Europe lay in ruins.

The grand architecture of centuries

reduced to piles of rocks

where rats competed with people

for food, scavenging for what might do.

Many blamed technology, but one knew

it was barbarism that had caused this truth

and used technology as a ruse.

Into the formless marched an engineer,

composer, acoustician, Pierre Schaeffer,

the pioneer of concrete music (real music).

Unlike many in the rubble, Schaeffer did not

think a return to the classical would answer:

the classical was based on abstractions (musical notations)

produced as audible music: concrete music (which he

created)

begins from base phenomena and their sounds and after

abstracts them

into composition. He created more technology to achieve

this feat: sounds from magnetic tape, a tape recorder,

chromatic,

gramophones and others.

He mixed mediums-the sounds of trains, voices, pumping

motors,

water splashing in city fountains, children wailing, and

musical

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instruments, changed the tempos, the wave lengths, played

parts backwards,

made arrangements..

The other arts followed: found objects, assemblages,

collages, the disjunction

of poems and novels, the language of each art the

controller, if it could

be fairly said there was anyone or anything in control.

Letters


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Im in Melbourne

standing before the giant theremin

a rusted pyramid-shaped instrument

that plays music by movements in front

of it (open vents with a large antennae

atop and another one atop a cylindrical

version of itself not far off.)

Movement in front of one

antennae controls the pitch and movementin front of the other controls volume.

I watch a family running across it raising

the volume and beginning a symphony.

The mother hops in front and a low pitched

line is scored and just behind her husband joins

holding his daughter and the tempo rises like

a pianoforte. The son come and hops up and down

and a train passes and the theremin makes a riotous sound

as water played on a percussion of pebbles in a steel drum.

They keep it up for a hour until theyve produced a

memorable score.

Before I know it Im shouting Encore. Encore.

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So, Its Raining

Its raining. The water shapes the grass-

borrows its shape. From lenses

of light it grounds to the dark underground bed.

It makes you think. Whats to fear.

Death clarifies life. When you

cant see your hand in front of you remember

touching your mothers face, playing the clarinet,

striking with a bat, the trembling through your fingers

of a womans back, the warm brown of expanding nipples

of the

aureolas of a womans chest.

Where no light penetrates the ocean floor of sight

brightens up:

you recall the faces that meant. Your wife. Theimperfections

disappear. The sensual lips; the Han peoples cheekbones;

the yellow

of the Emperors gown and crown strangely bright as a

lantern being

carried in a garden night. Your father coming home after

work,

a cherub and a man. Friends like kittens feigning fights in

the grass.

When you cant hear the pounding silence brings you near:

The crowds riotous stadium chants, the whispers

overheard on the

dank streets, the moments of intimacy, simple words that

heard heal

and lighten you as andirons and flue. Even the curses are

cures

Letters


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in the sightless silent hole.

I watch the drops fall in the buckets, silent and treacherous

As the beast that loves you.

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Letters


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MASS

The mouth of the saxophone

is the belly of the player

the bones of the playerthe veins of the player

the feet feeling the earth

revert the vibrations

like an oscillator

you should see the waves

in the air, in the drinks

when Mass plays his bass

it's like the birth of a star,

a galaxy, the black hole

of a dying star being sucked into nothing

it's the streets of summer

the naked children running

under the shower of fire plugs openedscreeching with pleasure

the mothers upstairs in the rooms

like furnaces-the nights under covers

of cotton with men, husbands that make it

all right for a while

no thoughts of loss, of those missing

too soonthe rhythm is right and wild

like someone flying from the roof

to surrender.

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On You(Tube)

Morton Feldmans Crippled Symmetry

one-and-a-half hours long

just four notes played over

sometimes at different speeds,

timbre, duration, different instrument playing a note

touching notes on flute, percussion, celesta,

you want to touch.

The boy in the glee club has a beautiful

voice and face; he stands with two others

of equal grace. The auditorium is packed.

His mother and father are there and proud.

His voice is touching. You want to reach out.

And his face.

But not so the man. Something happens

to us all. Its not something to blame.

Letters


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Unadorned

How naked and cold

words look in the snow

without protection from the wind

whipping white and brim

(I feel a sorrow all my own)

not even a stenciled abode

a weather-worn board to protect

the unadorned word(protruding from the snow

like stiff twigs-their black bones

unbroken, non-atoned.)

I hold my breath to not add

frozen moisture of my own.

What do they say in contrast

To the penetrating white-nothing special

just shape and height and irregular lines

that might draw an artist to this site.

I would light a fire and set them ablaze

If I thought it would bring them comfort.

But, alas, theyre like cattle that roamed green hills

and now are wrapped in freezers.

Letters


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741 hz

741 hz (of the Solfeggio frequencies)

calms. I listen and am soothed.

The music is accompanied by a video

of interlacing, transparent pyramids

(purple) turning within and through. The

Gregorian chanting helps- it makes me feel

part of a community of sense.

An hour. The pyramids open doors and shut them.Contrary to law, two things in the same space-time.

Its like a river of fireflies

wending its way over reeds

by the railroad tracks.

In the end you awake

to where you are: unplanned buildings,

paint scrawl, shouts of tough men screaming maricone.

A gray-haired clerk on the subway in frayed collar and

sleeves

with a box-cutter in his pocket that he exhibits with ease.

Its home.

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Letters

The old womans

porous bonesthe Zen gardens

porous stones


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If I Knew Who

If I knew who you were

we could converse on a subject

we chose. As it is, Im a man

in isolation in a white room marking

in lines the days Ive been locked up alone.

Its between the poem and the reader

that the poem lives, otherwise its a simulacrum.

I dont mean Id write to please,but I would be influenced and unashamed of it.

If you had lost a spouse, I wouldnt say time passes,

but I might observe the orange leaves crackling underfoot

and recall their young green tender shoots and their

smoothness.

If you had recently married, I wouldnt write an

epithalamium,

but I might write about the pear tree blossoms lining Fifth

Avenue. You know, were here together:

look at that ant struggling with a leaf five times its size

to bring it to the colony so it can survive.

Letters


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Two Sparrows

Entangled. Fighting or mating

its hard to tell in the sunshine

on Main Street in Farmingdale

when two sparrows, one atop

the other are grappling with passion.

I know they chatter, have disputes,

but when I leaned down closer to look

I was surprised that such small birdsfought with such ardor, with all it took.

I put my foot near them to frighten

the aggressor, but he kept pecking the other

as if I was nothing. I could see the loser hadnt

the energy to hop or fly away. He was finished.

(I wanted to cry).

They say God knows when every sparrow falls.

I thought maybe thats what Im here for.

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Letters


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Word Painting I

In their brief manifesto,

Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko & Adolph Gottlieb

(in 1943) asserted the world of imagination is violently

opposed

to common sense, that they were for flat forms because

they destroy illusion and reveal truth-

much like poetry, painting with words,

where it is understood that the medium is two-dimensionaland bears no real relation to deception and a real world.

My wife and I took a boat trip down the Seine. You can

see

to its samd its so clean. Pariss many prominent buildings

were displayed: Notre Dame Cathedral (with a view of the

flying buttresses),the Eiffel Tower, the Musee du Louvre, Pont Neuf (a 16th

Century bridge),

Grand Palais, and on the steps of the quays it seemed all

Parisians were lying

in the sun that day.

Remember, none of this refers to structures of sense,dimension, texture, time

or the romance of it all.

It is 14 pt. New Times Roman.

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I would know you

I would know you anywhere:

Buying dry black mushrooms

In Shanghai knelt on the floor,

Your face sharp as a sword;

Or looking for a stray thought lost

In the clouds that tore through

The gorge from which you were born:

All waterfall and all;Amongst crowds that formed in Times Square

On V.J. Day to celebrate the end of the war,

Your face would be by me informed;

And if you were a man steeped in crowds

On Bombays streets to catch a trolley-car,

Would you be by me in love reborn.

Funny. When you are there across

The table or resting in a chair,

I think nothing of it. Its so familiar,

As clear as a crystal bowl of apples and pears.

But, when Im gone into the runningon the streets of our city,

I find you in the robin, in the stems of fishes,

In the face of statues of eminent citizens

And, when you die and assume another form,

I will recognize you and you will be for me all.

Letters


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Weather Report

I exclude the news

never read a paper

I just go outside

to know the weather

Now, its fall

(forever)

I can tell because

children wont make way for me(an old man of weathers)

as we approach (on the street) each other

Yet, I like the yellowing

burning brown

(the exposure of lignin to sunlight and air)

in old historical documents

& in golden locust trees

(with their drying fruit)

that shaken make music

like guiros.

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Letters

Charnel house, my house

Concrete floor, stale air

Unpainted walls for years

t.v. light on me

& my bones on the chair


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On a Collage

When we awoke & realized we were not alone we were

more alone.

They there was an age when we lived without considering

things

, and then we could see that the stems of plants and trees

were like our spines, the spewing waterfall the moisture on

our lips, the grass, the moss and shrubs our hairy arms,

legs, sexual parts.

With this knowledge we learned to make a teepee that hadno flat lines and the wind would not bring it down, lodges,

and even pagodas, and now we build towering buildings

of glass and steel that reflect the sky, the clouds,

sometimes birds scurrying home, we made blankets,

clothes, fences for animals, mostly horses, and in the end

borders.

It comes to this: a line divides. Nothing remains in the

middle, everything is on either side.

The line that joins two points, the line that makes creation,

the line that draws resemblances is also that which makes

conflict and strife: while two things unlike are potentially

joined, there is an upper and under where there is a line

and with movement of the two come the ten thousandthings. Theres no way around it.

So, while we know that a human is like us, we begin to

practice distinction: African scarification used distinct

symbols for different tribes, and American Indians used

paint on their faces and ponies to make them something

other than human, fierce, the mask of a god.

Yet, the rifles that shot lead in a straight line lead to the

Trail of Tears, reservations, loss of traditions, alcoholism,

and the snapping of the soul of nature to those who still

lived in it as in the sacred.

Letters


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I Fell From the Sky

by the railroad tracks

lucky for me

there was a car chassis

and landed in the reeds

to sleep in (such ease)

I could see

that curve aheadwhere the trains

disappear

into the green

of another year

lucky for me

I fell from the sky

Its lonely there

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Letters


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I'm Walking Without

Im walking without direction. Am I lost? Only if I am

going someplace. Im not. Ive lived my life like this. Do

I recommend it? I do not. Ive learned a lot. Gradationsof the smallest degree. How grass differs from earth.

Concrete. Cobblestone. Ice that is safe. Ice that is not.

When a mans dangling arms are dangerous. When not.

When I walk my body my Achilles tendons hurt. When

my body leads its soft. I know where they unload

carcasses of skinned goats. I know where young men play

basketball. Handball. To take off their shirts. I know the

sounds of rain on canvas awnings. I know the sounds of

rain on aluminum awnings. I know where the homeless

hang out. I know the graffiti artists. I know where to buy

the cheapest cigarette lighters. I know the sound of rain on

the peak of my cap. I know the worn smooth surfaces of

manholes and where they were made. I know which fruitstands have fluorescent lights flickering. I know the men

who deliver live fish from trucks to the Chinese markets

and the heaviness of their rubber aprons and boots. I know

where I can get comidas chinos y latinos. Im not very

smart. I know where to find black market cigarettes in

New York. I know which way is north by the growth of

moss on the trees. I used to be as handsome as RudolphValentino and I know what its like to have to prove your

whole life you are manly. Now, no one looks at me. Ive

become the shape and color of a brick faade, the sky, a

window with merchandise, a parked car, anything you

want. I bought a piece of chalk and wrote a poem on a

wall: She was due the doctors delivered a red balloon. Im

walking without direction. If youre following me stop.Turn away. Get lost yourself.

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I Write

I write tossing a ball in the air-

I do not mention where, when,

as its still happening by tense,

nor the force or speed or the wind

or the gravitational pull or the orbit

of the earth or sun, constants we know-

and I wonder if it remains a phrase or has it become

something else.

I write Caution: Cotents Hot-

So it is no longer a legal warning,

no longer a referent, bereft?

I write it to no one, including myself:

it is not an internal conversation,

no kind of exchange

just words on the page

with or without meaning?

I write Cardinal Par Avion

From viewing a stamp-

It seems right - cardinals

are in flight and air mail is in flight

and it recalls our ancestral past when birds

carried messages back and forth, here to there.

It even has humor, if you look hard enough.

Is it a phrase? Does it have to rise to be otherwise.

When do words pass from usage, from sounds

and ideas to poems and their unimportance?

Letters


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So, What Do You Do

think of this

blue

after

noon

a canarys belly

carved in

the bark

of a treeit may

have been night

and the young

couldnt let go

they

were two sides

of an Indian head

coin

thats how it started

the rest you knew

they could only flyat best in the blood u bloom of the boot

to the clouds

dreamt by no churchnder the bridge

in the west

ern

hemisphere

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Letters


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Work Backwards

The line moves on.

Each man with a tray

The beard hairs turn gray.

Sentenced without a trial

for a crime unnamed.

I cant complain.

Its a trade:

the fields of winter grain,the white churches in the rain,

the stone angels trumpets at the graves,

the bindweed climbing fenced chains.

Be silent! Theres holiness.

Words cannot reproduce any real thing.

Be a Trappist monk. Work. Hoe.

Harvest. Eat. Pray without words.

Sleep. Sleep.

Work backwards

Before you were given the role to name.

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