All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky. 

I like to think
     (right now please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms. 

I like to think
     (it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Richard Brautigan
1967

Two Creatures

The last time I looked, the dog was lying
on the freshly cut grass
but now she has moved under the picnic table.

I wonder what causes her to shift
from one place to another,
to get up for no apparent reason from her spot

by the stove, scratch one ear,
then relocate, slumping down
on the other side of the room by the big window

or I will see her hop onto the couch to nap
then later find her down
on the Turkish carpet, her nose in the fringe.

The moon rolls across the night sky
and stops to peer down at the earth,
and the dog rolls through these rooms

and onto the lawn, pausing here and there
to sleep or to stare up at me, head in her paws,
to consider the scentless pen in my hand

or the open book on my lap.
And because her eyes always follow me,
she must wonder, too why

I shift from place to place,
from the couch to the sink
or the pencil sharpener on the wall--

two creatures bound by wonderment
though unlike her, I have never once worried
after letting her out the back door

that she would take off in the car
and leave me to die
behind the solid locked doors of this house.

by Billy Collins
horoscopes for the dead

James Joyce

James Joyce

He was stupid
He didn't know as much as me
I'd rather throw dead batteries at cows than read him
Everything was going fine before he came along
He started the Civil War
He tried to get the French involved, but they wouldn't listen
They filled him up with desserts
He talked about all the great boxers that came from Ireland
Like he trained them or something
Then he started reading some of his stuff
Right as we told him to get lost
He brought up the potato famine
We said "Your potatoes are plenty good"
"Deal with it"
"Work it out somehow"
Then he said "America must adopt the metric system,
it's much more logical"
We said "No ! We like our rulers, go away"
Thomas Jefferson said you always get the rulers you deserve

Knoxvill: Summer 1915

     We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.  It was a little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solidly lower middle class, with one or two juts apiece on either wide of that.  The houses corresponded: middle-sized gracefully fretted wood houses built in the late nineties and early nineteen hundreds, with small front and side and more spacious back yards, and trees in the yards, and porches.  These were soft wooded trees, poplars, tulip trees, cottonwoods.  There were fences around one or two of the houses, but mainly the yards ran into each other with only now and then a low hedge that wasn't doing very well.  There were few good friends among the grown people, and they were not poor enough for the other sort of intimate acquaintance, but everyone nodded and spoke, and even might talk short times, trivially, and at the two extremes of the general or the particular, and ordinarily nextdoor neighbors talked quite a bit when they happened to run into each other, and never paid calls.  The men were mostly small businessmen, one or two very modestly executives, one or two worked with their hands, most of them clerical, and most of them between thirty and forty-five.
     But it is of these evenings, I speak.
     Supper was at six and was over by half past.  There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell; and the carbon lamps lifted at the corners were on in the light, and the locusts were started, and the fire flies were out, and a few frogs were flopping in the dewy grass, by the time the fathers and the children came out.  The children ran out first hell bent and yelling those names by which they were known; then the fathers sank out leisurely in crossed suspenders, their collars removed and their necks looking tall and shy.  The mother stayed back in the kitchen washing and drying, putting things away, recrossing their traceless footsteps like the lifetime journeys of bees, measuring out the dry cocoa for breakfast.  When they came out they had taken off their aprons and their skirts were dampened and they sat in rockers on their porches quietly.
     It is not of the games children play in the evening that I want to speak now, it is of a contemporaneous atmosphere that has little to do with them: that of the fathers of families, each in his space of lawn, his shirt fishlike pale in the unnatural light and his face nearly anonymous, hosing their lawns.  The hoses were attached at the spigots that stood out of the brick foundations of the houses.  The nozzles were variously set but usually so there was a long sweet stream of spray, the nozzle wet in the hand, the water trickling the right forearm and the peeled-back cuff, and the water whishing out a  long loose and low-curved cone, and so gentle a sound.  First an insane noise of violence in the nozzle, then the still irregular sound of the adjustment, then the smoothing into steadiness and a pitch as accurately tuned to the size and style of stream as any violin.  So many qualities of sound out of one hose: so many choral differences out of those several hoses that were in earshot.  Out of any one hose the almost dead silence of the release, and the short still arch of the separate big drops, silent as a held breath, and the only noise the flattering noise on leaves and the slapped grass at the fall of each big drop.  That, and the intense hiss with the intense stream; that, and that same intensity not growing less but growing more quiet and delicate with the turn of the nozzle, up to that extreme tender whisper when the water was just a wide bell of film.  Chiefly, though, the hoses were set much alike, in a compromise between distance and tenderness of spray, (and quite surely a sense of art behind this compromise, and a quiet deep joy, too real to recognized itself), and the sounds therefore were pitched much alike; pointed by the snorting start of a new hose; decorated by some man playful with the  nozzle; left empty, like God by the sparrow's fall, when any single one of them desists: and all, though near alike, of various pitch; and in this unison.  These sweet pale streamings in the light lift out of their pallors and their voices all together, mothers hushing their children, the hushing naturally prolonged, the men gentle and silent and each snail-like withdrawn into the quietude of what he singly is doing, the urination of huge children stood loosely military against an invisible wall, and gentle happy and peaceful, tasting the mean goodness of their living like the last of their supper in their mouths; while the locusts carry on this noise of hoses on their much higher and sharper key.  The noise of the locust is dry, and it seems not to be rasped or vibrated but urged from him as if through a small orifice by a breath that can never give out.  Also there is never one locust but an illusion of at least a thousand.  The noise of each locust is pitched in some classic locust range of which none of them varies more than two full tones: and yet you seem to hear each locust discrete from all the rest and there is a long, slow, pulse in their noise, like the scarcely defined arch of a long and high set bridge.  They are all around in every tree, so that the noise seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, from the whole shell heaven, shivering in your flesh and teasing your eardrums, the boldest of all the sounds of night.  And yet it is habitual to summer nights, and is of the great order of noises, like the noises of the sea and of the blood her precocious grandchild, which you realize you are hearing only when you catch yourself listening.  Meantime from low in the dark, just outside the swaying horizons of the hoses, conveying always grass in the damp of dew and its strong green-black smear of smell, the regular yet spaced noises of the crickets, each a sweet cold silver noise threenoted, like the slipping each time of the three matched links of a small chain.
     But the men by now, one by one, have silenced their hoses and drained and coiled them.  Now only two, and now only one, is left, and you see only ghostlike shirt with the sleeve garters, and sober mystery of his mild face like the lifted face of large cattle enquiring of your presence in a pitchdark pool of meadow; and now he too is gone; and it has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds hung havens, hangars.  People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt; a loud auto; a quiet auto; people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber.  A street car raising its iron moan; stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints forgone: forgotten.  Now is the night one blue dew.


Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, has
        coiled the hose.
Low on the length of lawns, a trailing of fire who breathes.
Content, silver, like peeps of light, each cricket makes his
        comment over and over in the drowned grass.
A cold toad thumpily flounders.
Within the edges of damp shadows of side yards are hovering
        children nearly sick with joy of fear, who watch the
        unguarding of a telephone pole.
Around white carbon corner lamps bugs of all sizes are lifted
        elliptic, solar systems.  Big hardshells bruise themselves,
        assailant: he is fallen on his back, legs squiggling.
Parents on porches: rock and rock: From damp strings morn-
        ing glories: hang their ancient faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at
        once enchants my eardrums.


On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts.  We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there.  First we were sitting up, then one of us lay  down, and then we all lay down, on our stomachs, or on our sides, or on our backs, and they have kept on talking.  They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all.  The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near.  All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds.  One is an artist, he is living at home.  One is a musician, she is living at home.  One is my mother who is good to me.  One is my father who is good to me.  By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.  May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.
     After a little I am taken in and put to bed.  Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

by James Agee

Romantic Moment

After seeing the documentary we walk down Canyon Road,

Into the plaza of art galleries and high end clothing stores

Where the mock orange is fragrant in the summer light
And the smooth adobe walls glow fleshlike in the dark.

It is just our second date, and we sit down on a bench,
Holding hands, not looking at each other,

And if I were a bull penguin right now I would lean over
And vomit softly into the mouth of my beloved

And if I were a peacock I’d flex my gluteal muscles to
Erect and spread the quills of my cinemax tail.

If she were a female walkingstick bug she might
Insert her hypodermic probiscus directly into my neck

And inject me with a rich hormonal sedative
Before attaching her egg sac to my thoracic undercarriage,

And if I were a young chimpanzee I would break off a nearby treelimb
And smash all the windows in the plaza jewelry stores.

And if she was a Brazilian leopardfrog she would wrap her impressive
Tongue three times around my right thigh and

Pummel me softly against the surface of our pond
And I would know her feelings were sincere.

Instead we sit awhile in silence, until
She remarks that in the relative context of tortoises and igunanas,

Human males seem to be actually rather expressive
And I say that female crocodiles really don’t receive

Enough credit for their gentleness,
Then she suggests that it is time for us to go

To get some ice cream cones and eat them.


by Tony Hoagland

Art Resonance

The poetry that I like resonates with me internally. That word "resonate", crystallizes the ineffable effect art can have on me. It's that "it just feels right" feeling when you see a painting, photograph, sculpture, or hear a poem, prose passage, or music that hits you in your gut. It is particularly strange and noticeable when the image or sound seems to bypass your intellect. When the effect is something other than the meaning of the words, lyrics, or specific content of the image. It is an appreciation of the abstract.


For me, art complements moods. I am more likely to like a particular kind of art depending on my general mood at the time and the environment that I am in. I select music to reflect my mood or sometimes the music I hear can change my mood. I may want to see and hear different types of things depending on whether I am outdoors or indoors; whether I am at work or a party; whether it is dinner or breakfast; etc.


I've read about the acquisition of language and music in the brains of infants and how it can lay down neural patterns reflective of the culture and environment around us. I've always felt that my appreciation of the cadence of Robert Frost's poetry was due to my New England upbringing.

My early education

My poetry education was terrible. I would like to generalize and say that poetry education in all American middle class schools in the 60's and 70's was terrible but . . . I don't know. The culture that I absorbed at that time instilled in me that poetry was something that rhymed. Children's nursery rhymes come to mind. And later maybe I realized music lyrics were poetry. As I got into high school then poetry became writing that was "difficult" and often written in archaic language.


I remember 9th grade English class. We had an assignment to memorize a short poem and a long poem to recite in class a few weeks later. Being an over achiever, I chose the longest short poem and the longest long poem (The Raven). I remember memorizing them line by line as I walked to and from the bus stop. On the day we were to recite our assignments the class was pounded into submission by the repetition of other students who recited the same two shortest poems. My selections were a welcome relief and the teacher was beaming when I recited each poem flawlessly (in my mind). 9th grade. That was the end of my poetry education.


No one ever told me what poetry was supposed to do.


Somewhere, along the way, some of it stuck with me for reasons I couldn't have articulated. Standing in line buying books for my first semester in college I saw a complete works of Robert Frost. A paperback. I bought it and during the following years I would dip into it randomly. That edition wore out with use and now I have a hardcover edition.