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Philip Brady
A Poem Including History: A
Selection from Robert Lunday's Coins
WHILE EDITING THE poetry for Artful
Dodge over the past four years I have had the opportunity to
introduce generous selections of writers whose work means a great deal
to me, including the late Milton Kessler, a legendary teacher from SUNY
Binghamton; Torild Wardenaer, the wildly magnificent Norwegian poet
whose prose poems, akin to Ekelof and Transtromer, I first encountered
in a writers colony in southern Spain; William Heyen, whose omnivorous
poetic engagement in world history has spanned decades and continents;
and novelist Robert Mooney, a guiding presence for so many writers,
including Christine Lincoln, who paid tribute to Mooney's teaching in
my interview with the two writers in Artful Dodge
43/44.
I am now delighted to present a selection from the
newest book by a poet whose life and work I have followed since we
first met at a Peace Corps training center in Bukavu, Zaire,
twenty-three years ago. Since then, Robert Lunday's career has
blossomed even beyond his early promise, when he seemed to be receiving
every fellowship in sight. The poems during those years appeared in Mad
Flights, where Lunday united personal biography and recent
American history to make a book of both lyric intensity and novelistic
breadth. In the late 1980's, Lunday moved to Japan with his wife and
infant boy, and we lost touch, though clues of his elusive presence in
many lives continued to surface. Then, in the proofs to my poem
"Lunday," a poem in which I traced Robert's mythic travails "that
curlique from Georgia, Soho / Zaire, Oregon, Houston, Palo Alto," the
publisher, whom I'd not met, scribbled a phone number in the margin
with the terse comment, "He's back." Never let it be said that "poetry
makes nothing happen."
In fact, there is a kind of poetry where
marginalia, flotsam, phone numbers, and yes, coins, are recognized not
only as material but as the genesis of form. It is this kind of poetry
Robert Lunday writes today. His work pays tribute to Pound's notion
that poems should "include" history-and not only history, but
meditation, fable, science, confession, philosophy, technology,
everything partaking of the power and fluidity of a form in process. Coins
as a single poem indeed reminds me of William
Matthew's famous description of a wave, "which is not water / strictly
speaking, but a force / that water welcomes and displays". Coins
welcomes and displays its world in a thrum of
sound and thought, and in doing so, stretches the bounds of what poetry
can accomplish.--Youngstown, Ohio, November 29, 2003
Robert Lunday
Coins [Excerpts]
Indian-head:
fusion of John Tree, Iron Tail, Two Moons;
flip-side bison, "Black Diamond"
of the New York Zoological Society-
"hump-backed, little tail encurved, head butting
against the rondure of
eternity"-
spark out of time.
When I was a boy,
you could find them in your pocket change-
Indian, bison, child,
elegies to the lost world.
Hobos used to carve it a different face:
usually the hobo's own, capped, bristled, sharing the profile, eye of
the
Indian:
currency at ground level, ear to the rail…
current flowing, carving its snake out of the raw physics-
in the roundhouse, a watchman flavors his glove with vinegar. The table
is covered in matchsticks and an unfinished hand.
"All thought is incarnate. It lives by the body and by the favor of
society."
A penny for your thoughts-
a nickel for your face.
O O O
Painters painted a flashing point between specific
and general. Likeness was a competence: of painter, but also of sitter.
Composure in the face and body becomes competence in oil-what can be
maintained materially, in the pre-cinema of oil, dissolved in its
liquid light, crated, closeted, shipped, stored, owned, bought and
sold, reproduced, hung here on the wall of a museum (the first
multiplex) where "culture" is the obverse of this dead person's facial
competence, and the reverse of my awed countenance: the "art," like the
organic hues of medieval stained glass, is somewhere between screen and
eye. It is in the air, hummingbird-sized, hovering, unaware of its cage.
"The image of the sun, oh parhelion, is only for a brief moment the
sun."
O O O
"In England Sir Francis Bacon was gathering his
facts like coins-any kind, from any place-you never know when an ugly
penny might be found stamped with a rare mint mark or distant date.
Meticulous observation, the natural history of everything. . . ."
O O O
"Perhaps a woman is only an abnormal man, and a
man an abnormal woman." Obverse, reverse. One the monster to the other.
Demonstrated how? You walk that way, I walk this. Sex a quick, fissured
sky: thunderclap. I am longitude to your latitude, warp to woof,
systole to diastole, etc., etc.
Sight is the result of disequilibrium. Matter, they say ("they,"
coiners of theory) arises, "matriculates," as a local condensation in
the matrix. Space is the mother, time is the father; in that field, the
wildflowers are a shout of color, the universe is observing itself.
Face is aptitude for preservation. Thus we have many, though one
centers the rest: flower over the heart, mask like the skin of water.
Know the transvestites. They weave through the supermarket, with their
breasts that have not yet grown pear-like. The beauty of the
transvestites is typed rather than written, stepped rather than
flurried, their hips lack the cursive run of a woman's, their eyes are
oddly Egyptian. We are fortunate, though, to have their hero-carpentry
of gender, buccaneering girls with boy-swords holstered back towards
the nether-hole.
Some people have quotation marks instead of halos; the transvestites
quote each other quoting women, and the supermarket is filled with the
sound of their Egyptian eyes. (The exergue says "man"; but the face
value is woman.)
O O O
bu, ryo, shu, oban,
tael, mace, candareen,
ecu, ceitel, cent, centavo, centime,
denarius, sarrazinos, ducat, florin. . .
"Poetry is a certain whole
of which only fragments are required."
There was no money in the desert that day
but the face of Moses, shining. . .
O O O
Saccades, jetons, polka dots, leptons, brockages,
cowries, pearls, cows' eyes, floaters, lozenges, tiles, bottle caps,
cameos. . .
Newton, by authority of the King, confiscated certain stamping-mills of
button-makers imported from the continent-
machines which, he ascertained, might be turned to
the counterfeiting of coins.
O O O
Tilled below, tolled above, toiling all the while
in between:
Zeros, Oh's, vortices, blind spots, wax seals broken, black coins.
Bagatine, cecchine, gazet, knetall, moccinigo,
portague, silverling, stiver;
a chip, floating in the puddle;
a rain of woodchips, a spew of them,
from the mill;
sparks, afterglows, cysts, mucus, roses
of blood, the ulcer.
O O O
Expression is a turning in and out of things, a
churning of surface, oscillation of message and messenger.
Body to face, face to profile, profile to
silhouette, silhouette to nose: the main stamp of a man is there, in
his cartilage. Push yourself down to the bare fact, and you will fit in
any palm.
O O O
So much flesh and blood,
alabaster, ghost-white stone,
dust of a dry road:
Nike is most beautiful at the moment
when she hesitates
her white hand beautiful as a command
rests against the air
but her wings tremble
She sees a soldier set to die; desires to kiss his
cheek, but stays, to keep
the boy at battle.
Hesitation coins the moment:
a lyric, orb-shaped, the soldier's name-
the hand holds it,
but the lips refuse it.
The currency of boys is to keep on dying.
The "nation" is a womb of death:
this boy must be found
with an open breast
closed eyes
and the acid obol of his country
under his numb tongue
-coin for Charon's palm, if the soul is to be
ferried over; or it will wander aimlessly.
Many a coin has not been properly planted under
the tongue. I see spirits crossing the street, furtive looks left and
right, hands in pockets, digging for coins. When I see money on the
sidewalk, I leave it. Sometimes the tokens to hell rain from the sky;
sometimes when you close your eyes, they're just there.
"Worn-out coins, talents, Cistercians, ducats, Rhine thalers, are like
old demons where the same eternal potentiality of good and evil is
lurking. . .
passion concentrated in a small piece of metal
that is similar to the passion of love or a call leading to the peaks
of a human career, but also under the ax of the executioner…"
The Hemitartemorion, smallest of the Greek coins,
smaller than the centavo, small inside the early-morning shadow of its
name, often swallowed inadvertently. . . .
O O O
We woke up one day and all the weaponry was gone.
Nothing in the armories, silos, factories,
barracks, gun racks, holsters; everything gone.
The President got on the phone to our Allies;
fishing and hedging, he sensed they'd suffered the same effect. (One
must take care: allies with an edge might be enemies.)
Perennial foes, neutrals, rogue states, nations in
need of "regime change" buzzed and banged at the screen door: but it
was clear their stingers were bent, their fists empty, their venom as
thin as our own.
The blank and level battlefield was not cause for
relief; rather, terror among the formerly terrible was boundless. What
was one to focus one's fear on? The guns were gone; soldiers, hunters,
high schoolers, criminals, cops, all disarmed.
The Joint Chiefs were all out of joint. In the War
Room, they pondered. One general flicked at his lighter, but even the
cigarette lighters were useless. Another officer pulled out a book of
matches; matchsticks, at least, ignited and burned.
This was progress: everyone smoked. They collected
all the matches they could, stacked them, counted them, discussed ways
to improve their efficiency. They looked at the big pile of matches on
the table before them: what could one do with a million, billion
matches? How many matches would fit into a B-1 bomber? They scrounged
everywhere for more matches, they hoarded them; they looked at the
piles of matches all around the room, they smoked, and they worked on
the problem, day and night, night and day.
O O O
The field: it might be a space of seeing that
fits within the "moment" (if your head were on a coin, the horizon
would be the rim of the coin, and time the coin spinning). The field
might be the pursuit of one object, purl of desire through memory, and
the field flips from dark to light to dark, day to night to day. . .
still, the field keeps its shape; you are always the center of the
field. The field might be a space large enough, also small enough, such
that if you dropped your last coin somewhere in its weeds, within the
day you would find it. Start:
O O O
Back and forth, back and forth: boustrophedon,
like the first writing, "path of the ox." Weave your own and the
mirror-world into one: have both sides of your coin at once.
Unconcealment allows concealment. What appears in the field one way
suppresses alternate views. One thing has an indeterminate number of
faces; coins might seem to add up to precise amounts, to transcend
their glitter and jingle as they transmute into the sift and fold of
bills; but "coins" do not add up. They "accumulate," they "arrive."
They button the moment here on the dresser, there on the bookcase. Some
moments are bridges to other moments-spans to the hour of accounting,
"day of reckoning" which is every day-coins in the jar.
O O O
At seventeen I moved to Manhattan: bus ride
overnight on I-95, Port Authority early morning, room and a job by
evening:
God loves the idiots, and gives them a head start
sometimes.
I remember walking out at dusk the next night,
into the park, past the chess players, prayers and doomsayers, dope
sellers, scholars, and gawkers. This first day of independence: more
good and evil than I had ever known, a short sprint all around from
where I stood.
Under the Washington Arch, a man in black walked a
tightrope six feet high amidst a ring of onlookers: torches in the air,
and the persistences of flame-tongues falling like coins into a place
behind my eyes. His eyes were pin-pricks; when he got down from his
rope, he was the size of a child, but loomed in mute dominion high as
the arch.
This was the Frenchman who'd walked the sky
between the Towers; when I went to my first day at work I walked
beneath them, felt the tightrope treacherous and flat to the ground, my
whole life shock-blue and towering above. (I thought I could fall all
the way back to Carolina. The towers are gone, my hair shows gray, and
the sky there has three thousand shades of blue if you close your eyes.)
When the wire-walker got down, he looked around at
us all, sensed my newness-fear and awe like phosphor all around me. He
reached behind my ear and drew a Kennedy half-dollar from where the
torch-flames must have coalesced. He held it high above my head, as if
the magic were mine, ours, everyone's; maybe the rest had seen it a
hundred times before, but they cheered, as I remember, everyone, for
this half-dollar of magic in the Frenchman's hand, in its brief
dominion above us all.
O O O
The dissection of spirit would discover a hoard
of coins; most of them small, fish scales, easily swallowed by children.
O O O
God hoards; the poet collects.
O O O
(The Invention of the
Pre-Cinema)
Major James Bell, First-Sight Phenomena;
remarks on a pair of coins from the reign of Boadicea, queen of Britain:
It is of a slightly convex, or
dish-shaped form, bearing on the concave side a rudely-executed horse,
with a well-formed chariot wheel, and various rings, as well as small
crosses, or stars, and balls, indicative, most probably, of the value
of the coin; and on the convex side the word ODVOC, thus wanting the
initial B; while, singularly enough, the only other extant coin of
Boadicea's days, which is preserved in the British Museum, bears only
BODVO, there not being sufficient space on the surface of either coin
to admit the entire name.
The two coins, in their own time, blinking. Two
eyes of equal value, oscillating-equal only while the chariot's wheel
kept turning, somewhere outside the coin's concavity (odd shape-as if
made for the cupped palm, the Queen's name buttoning the pulse).
Blinking left, blinking right: two coins, two hands.
In the mind they flip over and over, a cloud of
motion arises, eyes blink life. Theater of memory: a thousand facets
in, toward a single center, where the light will never reach.
This is one of a thousand births of the cinema: the name of the Queen
extends beyond the frame: backward on one coin, forward on the next, a
flicker, beyond all frame.
O O O
The skull is cervix of the moment.
The minute fits in us like a quarter the esophagus.
The half-minute, a carbuncular breath. . .
The second is inside the inside: seconds are what
amaze when you dash the larger coins on to the ground, shatterings of
wokenness. They are worth exactly their shimmer as they fall away;
nothing more.
A pearl is a mind of the moment. Emblem of the
glow between everything and nearly nothing. There is no "nothing"
because the hand always has itself, and the eye, itself.
"I was created to measure a certain moment of
duration." The old homeless man etched my face onto a nickel, and I
paid him a quarter. It took him fifteen minutes to finish; he spoke as
he worked, a multitude of observations…
when he finished, I was someone else. But I paid
him anyway.
O O O
They say ("they") the body's gross is worth
$23.16 in current value: boil the corpse down to its chemicals, and
we're all small change.
O O O
When I swam the lake at Kivu, it felt like
falling, dusk seeping into my hair; the tilapia puckered dimes on the
surface, mouths breaking air, feeding on insects; and rain drops
piercing, wind lacerating waves.
I was as small as a rain drop, my body agreed with
the depths and grayed into it. God bent down and picked me up with the
same mild luck of a walker plucking a shiny dime from the street.
Saved from drowning: corner-turning of the mortal
coil. Fishermen in their brown pirogue, laughing sunlight as they laid
me in their nets; fishermen going out, returning, fishermen who
couldn't swim, but labored on the waves like walkers on water. . . .
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