No Frigate Like a Book
Charles Johnson
Introduction by Ron Bombardi
Copyright Charles Johnson 2011
Published by Los Publications at Smashwords
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CONTENTS
Walking through
Oaxaca
Sketches of Mexico
Sitting in Miraflores
Desde
Miraflores
Sunset below the Tropic of Cancer
The politics of
personal pronouns
La politique des pronoms personnels
La guerra
de los pronombres
On
diaspora: a visit to Teotihuacan
Study in
chance
Homer
An Entry from Byron’s Journal
Brief thoughts
on “Street Car”
Part III: Urban views and innerlandscapes
A night in New
York City
Une nuit à NYC
Argia
Argus
Double
recessive
Listening to music at F. Scott's in Nashville
Modern
love
Oedipus goes on a date (and the morning after)
Watching
traffic in Manhattan
A bad faith morning
Looking down: another
week in NYC
Part IV: Letters of Ryno to Hermangarde
Part V: Essays: Raid Kills Bugs Dead: an exile’s critique of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”
INTRODUCTION
I smile when you suggest that I delay “to publish” —— that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin ——
--Emily Dickinson to T.W. Higginson, 7 June 1862
She was right—there is no Frigate like a Book, no distances that song cannot traverse, for likewise, no inkling of the human heart can remain forever voiceless, if the business of poets is inquiry, not inquisition. Charles Johnson proves this maxim with vigor and grace; wise and unhurried by the allure of recognition and reception, his constant business is investigation—relentlessly to turn the stones beneath whose solid mass lie the amorphous sands we call our loves and fears, our dreams and aspirations, the heights and depths to which only souls can travel.
Johnson is stranger to neither frigates nor books, and to question the world with him in verse is to pursue circumference, to fathom the whole in its smallest parts. These are songs of experience; they can crush you into epiphany. But there are in Johnson’s poetical peregrinations moments of innocent insouciance too. From the hot streets of Oaxaca at noon to the cold sands of Riyadh at midnight, his poems step out like mirrors; they do not tell us where to go, but remind us, casually, gently, of who we are, and who we may become.
Odi et amo, said Catullus, though we cannot know why we do. But as surely as tongues find toothaches, Johnson wants at least to know how. That is why his poems ring true; because for all their artifice—the melodic woof and weave of their fabrication, the careful fitting of form to function that they embody—they are in the end the songs of simple hearts beset by their own turbulence. They have been a long time in the making, these songs. Finally they are published here together, the ship complete: peer out from between the masts, and you will not spy exotic lands, teaming with strange, indigenous noises; only yourself, now new and strange in the glass. She was right—there is no Frigate like a Book, so mariners, set sail.
-Ron Bombardi
27 July 2011
No Frigate Like a Book
μέγα βιβλίον μέγα κακόν
mega biblion, mega kakon
-- Callimachus
Part I: Hispanic inflections
Walking through Oaxaca
I
fear the tyranny
of tiny things:
the rut that creeps
up on
you like a wrinkle--
the job, the chores, the rent--
wearing
away the mountain
of hope and dreams
we all stand on
in our
youth.
Will
he ever write that book?
She never did go to Paris.
Since
we take
only what we've
lived to our graves,
I don't want to
leave
this life as empty-handed
as I entered.
Sketches of Mexico
“In Mexico your wishes have a dream quality.”—William S. Burroughs (Junky)
During long hot afternoons in Mexico, the tired shadows of the day stretch out below the sun to finally rest in the darkness of night. Here, hours are measured not by seconds or minutes but by the expanse of shade that offers protection from the sun. The unabated heat punishes all: the sinner, the saint, and the atheist--equally. It's as though William Butler Yeats had the noon day sun of Mexico in mind when he wrote the line: "A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun." Ultimately, every living thing is able to find asylum in the shade; perhaps the alchemy of the Mexican sun changes even the base metals of the soul into gold.
Like the shifting landscape of the human heart, Mexico changes under the light of the moon. When the shadow of night eclipses the light of the setting sun, the gates of sleep are unbarred to drown the world in dreams. The only time some people experience happiness is in those twilight moments between sleep and life: when the wandering islands of fantasy appear and disappear, capriciously, in that fog of half-consciousness--burned off by the morning light. Somehow dreams seem so real, so powerful, so possible in Mexico. While anywhere else I've been, they just seem like the transient smoke of a smothered soul buried under the ashes of failure.