JACK SCOTT

JACK SCOTT

MONOFILAMANIA

It is so hard to let go of love,

lovingly.

It sharks,

unpeels more gut more quickly

than reel or reeler ever lost

in all those years of lazy inches

in and out:

casting,

winding in and playing out,

hardly fishing, rarely catching

anything

from the deepness out of sight,

hardly ever losing . . .

anything.

Blisters lust into the greedy thumb.

Impatient,

sore,

the startled brake lets go.

It dives full length into the never,

finds the limit of its leash,

pounds against its half-round prison,

demands unknot

at end of end of rope -

Let go!

Got you, shrieks the reel and reeler

cranking in the give and take.

The line is taut,

the weight upon it heavy,

throbbing,

not docile,

numb,

and waiting . . .

. . .waiting for adrenaline:

explosion

against the angry, smoldering thumb.

Caught to catcher,

fish to fisher:

let me go!

It tries too hard to turn to something else: away.

Away and bottom still beyond the knot,

the creature climbs toward the light,

the something.

Easy,

free,

her leap, an alchemy:

silver unto gold.

Sun shining.

Sea smiling,

crinkled all about.

Sad,

slow motion

flight

of glints

and droplets,

arcs,

returns,

displaces,

splashes;

gone,

the yesses.

Million mile amnesia.

Buddha flashback:

a flash of tooth,

then placid lips close over any sign of youth . . .

. . . as if the fish had never been.

Gone?

-the fisher wonders:

gone?

gone forever?

Gone?

The line is limp

as if . . .

for all the years of it,

nothing at its other end.

A flash of recognition:

she leaps another time,

not knowing if what held her holds.

Silver fish scales golden ladder

a sunbeam at a time,

and all the rungs of memory -

so slow,

breaks air an instant.

The line has held

and as she leaps, it claims her,

a thunder clap.

Arrested in her flight,

and broken,

she drops deadweight into the bucket sea-

fish to air to gold to water,

too bad.

Of the gold,

an afterglow centered in the thumb.

Did it happen?

Was she really there?

Was I?

Air turns to air once more,

the fisherman to memory,

pig-a-back the job at hand,

because-

one slender monofilament insisting: no!

Monofilamania,

and memory, another plastic,

refusing to let go.

Another time:

Kite,

my pretty lovely,

so flying and so softly spun,

you seemed the air to me.

So high and free,

so very near the sun,

my tears dissolve the earth’s connection.

The line my hands are holding:

to limit freedom at its height,

impossible without restraint-

the line between us,

subtle and so gossamer.

There, it glinted,

there! So very real.

Real . . .

The hook is realer.

Tangerine transfusion from the fastened lip,

transfuse dilution

bleeds unreckoned into the larger blue.

The sea - as wide as weakness -

sucks the strength without a hunger.

Tired, the hooked,

and tiring even more,

the line grows stronger,

shortening toward the bobber boat.

I’ve got her, cries the fisherman,

orgasmic,

raping at dead weight,

dragging mystery toward the kitchen

-on his mind is steak.

Slaughter, separate from supper,

passion with a knife,

the knife . . .

. . . the knife is ready

held tight between the skinless thumb,

and vendetta fingers -

five Sicilian brothers

waiting for their sister to come home.

The other hand around the rod

is closing on the lover’s throat.

The rod’s erect,

the reel is angry.

Come, my dear, come, come.

She hears the music of the end,

the bowstring whine of gut

still lean and taut from her weight alone,

hears the rhythm of the reel

and tries to run once more

-provoking lust to snatch still harder-

but can’t . . .

. . . is free at last

of strength

surrendered with the last of blood:

quicksilver nearing zero-

and two dollars worth of ice.

Maiden fish,

(a virgin: never dead before)

betrayed and penetrated,

(it’s time now to give in, enjoy)

rests her weight upon the line,

sinks upward,

drowning,

unrebelling

toward the bottom of the boat.

The whore! I see her in the water!

She gave me quite a fight.

The captain, ready with the gaff,

the lover, in his rented swivel chair,

seize her from the water.

The maiden’s heartbeat

is faint and futile as a final cry of rape.

Her breath is fear, yet sounds like passion

at the very end.

Her swoon is now complete.

Her swain is prickled with his heat.

His blood pounds within his thumb.

He gloats,

is left alone with her.

He ponders . . .

. . . while he does,

she pales and sheds her rainbow.

Her eyes turn glassy from the air,

and death.

She’s turned to meat.

He lusts at memory for a moment,

then dries the little sweat

and goes forward for a beer,

and band aids.

The captain’s seen it all before,

surgically removes the hook

and tidies up the gear.

He and the mate carry her to the ice

and lay her out within the cold.

The mate disinfects the deck

with sea water and a stiff brush.

Returning with his second beer,

a badge of gauze and Vaseline upon his thumb,

the lover is confused.

The deck, shipshape,

so bare

of scales and blood

it all might not have happened.

Then there would be hope.

The mate calls him to the ice chest

for the viewing,

opens it . .

I’ve lost her. There she is.

The smell . . . it must wash off !

Time to go home.

The sea is empty.

It is over.

Done.

My thumb!

Jack Scott

®COPYRIGHT 1974. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

FROM POEMYSTIC.COM

ENTROPY

A young stone,

one of many children of an old boulder,

spawn of older mountain,

now down upon its knees-

bald and manifold . . .

Young stone,

bearing remnant wrinkle tracery of birth

and at least one fragment manuscript

of an excellent map of home,

lies abed in stream

growing algaebeard in waterfeast,

moss in waterfamine.

It rains.

It rains upon the rains.

Rains fall upon the flood,

are gargled by the earth.

Sky floods upon ground floods;

sky has more to shed than earth can neatly hold.

The stone moves.

Stripped naked once again,

clean cut and round,

then dizzy, as if head

instead of merely head sized.

Bodiless tumbler tumbles,

lodges,

leaps,

cavorts tagalong with sea drawn kin,

past reluctant monoliths,

more slowly mountain pushed

for the moment,

pulled more down and on.

The roar below the flood

a symphony of touching, moving things

many many more than many,

billiards and billiards and billiards -

taps

for the dying father behind,

obedient to the insistent mother below

calling them home once more

as sand

as time itself coursing down the hourglass,

with water as its only answer,

gravity its throat,

and no one there to hear.

There are waterfalls where water tiptoed,

now taking giant steps

on escalators gone amok:

rivulets,

threads, ribbons, ropes and trickles,

drips and leaks and spurts,

streamlets,

gushes,

tunnels,

rocklocked, mosslipped pools and puddles,

now torrents -

all

permutations flowing without error,

without flaw,

engineered and executed

one way with the water,

one way only-

down.

The young stone -

spinning, nearly swimming -

leaps with the wildness of the water,

but not to air -

there is none,

not even in the air.

It is water’s reign upon the earth,

obeying only gravity.

Stone spins out

as far as down,

strikes a larger, harder stone,

barely chipping it;

the tumbler splits and rolls no more.

When the flood has gone,

and the brown has left the water,

when the stream and pools

are reasonable once more,

I come to fish,

or not to fish,

to wade among the smooth young stones . . .

and razor rocks!

Blood streaming down the sole of my bare foot,

hurts my eye at first

more than the rest of me.

The pain is rattlesnake:

having struck it winds itself again

and waits.

Chills come,

as I look to see what I have lost,

which no one else had ever seen before.

As I saw Rome once,

unexpected,

and never once again,

in a tiny ancient onyx bust -

in stone a woman

so lovely that in touching her

she haunted me with her foreverness . . .

If she were that to me -

her flesh in onyx in my hand,

her eyes to my adoring eyes -

so did indeed the rest of Rome exist

and I knew it in that moment

in the museum with my friend.

Upon the fresh cleft stone that slashed me

where the blood it let from me

flows onto its crystal clotting,

upon its regularity there is a seam,

a mate to the slash it made in me

the size and shape of my fresh wound

as if my foot and it had once been one

then sundered.

Upon that mirrored gash

where the blood it took from me

clots dark upon its fractured grayness

there is a seam running diagonally

the size and shape of my fresh wound,

more the color of my clotting blood

a moment past

than garnet,

more the hue of my flowing blood

than ribbons or a flag

In my pain there is a thrill

of familial recognition.

Rome passes,

one leaf of many,

time stripping bare the tree of eons.

I sit, faint and swiftly bleeding,

alone beside my wound’s companion.

now freshened with its borrowed blood,

the low west sun upon it . . .

darkening . . .

I touch it with my foot

to see if it’s still flowing.

Smooth,

smoother than the stone around it,

yet sticky moist,

and cold,

throbbing, it pulses,

as I’m getting lost in time

and further from the dimming day.

The stone’s wound -

it’s guest?

. . .or prisoner?

Should I honor its sanctuary?

Or set it free?

These token tools I carry

would break upon it;

with harder tools from home,

what would I be freeing

by dismemberment?

As I touch it with my hand

there is no seam

between the stone and our wound.

It is all one of a piece

older than any city I ever knew the name of,

yet here . . .

with me.

No way to take the whole thing home;

my brother is too heavy

for this limping man.

No way I’d really want to:

put it on the mantel,

in a case,

into the basement.

That is entropy.

Some things are meant to be

just where you find them.

The years have flown,

the day is swiftly fleeing,

and I with it

albeit at a hobble,

a Sphinx at twilight.

I will return each noon

to visit

until it goes away,

or I do.

I hate to see mountains come to their knees.

Young Rome was my limit in time

when my onyx woman beckoned,

showed me the way to come with her

away from the museum

where she was serving time,

and I was killing it.

Certainly I went with her;

she could not come to me.

Whose blood, congealed,

has mixed with mine,

congealed?

I am become blood brother

to an ancient dying mountain

and am suddenly very tired.

How far in time can I now go

to see older brother young,

crowned with laurel,

regal,

tall,

enormous?

Mountain has come to me -

not far,

as the trout swims . . .

Stars that died as mountain was born

beamed out their epitaphs,

which we have not read yet.

Mountain has come to me.

How far can I go to mountain?

JACK SCOTT

 ®COPYRIGHT 1972. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

FROM POEMYSTIC.COM

NOTE OR NOTES ON THE WASTELAND

A large tree fell in the forest. No one was there to hear it fall. We know it fell, because

its massive carcass lies there still mouldering. Was there no sound when it fell because there was no one there to hear?

There was one more element to the occurrence. The tree struck a deaf idiot wandering through the wood, crushing him to death. Was there still sound, or no sound, no one else hearing, not hearing? Was there something like the sound of a tree crashing in the mind of the victim as he was struck down?

The following note or notes

was found in the victim’s pocket.

The paper was yellow with age

and wrinkled with much carrying.

“There is an awful Void, and that Void is Shit.

Out of misery, company.

Out of company, more misery.

Words, words! I am mobbed by words.

Bombarded, not by random missiles missing,

but by words well aimed, homing true.

It’s over - dead, not dead.

With my nails, I dig it up once more, it’s dead again,

then once more not dead.”

The contagion of poetry with age. I have caught from what made me merely uncomfortable what now sickens me with life. I have caught not what I will die from, but what I must live with. I am alive with the maggots of other life, not mine, which are now all that moves of me.

(But there is still a me!), I say quietly. I say I am not all maggots

and the dung of less fertile insects, that distant life of other on me.

I, Tiresias, queer old man with wrinkled dugs,

perceive the scene, and foretell the rest.

I, too await the unexpected guest

and, queer no more, I age with zest.

Free in the rattling mold

I shrink as I grow old.

All I know of space and time

is what is left

when filled with ancient rhyme.

Tough shit, Eliot.

Though shit, world.

Through shit, people.

If there are no words, there are no people.

If there are no people, there is no world.

Go home, Eliot.

Tough Shit, you have no home except in words.

You sonofabitch. If I knew where your words had been, I would have robbed you of them before they grew and married (what’d you get married for if you didn’t want children?)

and spawned the many sighs and silences, and died silently with them within me instead of

of them. Poison the well! There is no water.

Slough, you meat of you, dead Eliot! Essence that hast never been. (or never wert)

(or something) Believe, ye who cannot. Believe and be free to write or withhold The Wasteland.

No one is using the land. It is the waste land.

No one admits he knows how to use the land. It is still the waste land.

It is the People who do not use (and say they do, and can’t) the land.

It is still, nevertheless, the waste land of wasted people.

We are waiting, we say self-consciously:

To use the water,

To use the land,

To hold the wetness,

To build the sand,

To smell the sweetness,

To breathe the freshness,

To touch the pulse,

To quicken the hand,

To hear . . .

to hear . . .

We are waiting to hear:

that we need,

what we need,

who we need,

when we need,

why we need,

and where we will fill the need.

We are thirsty for all of this.

(drip drop)

We are waiting to hear

(I think drip drop)

how to drink,

(dripdrop)

and what to drink,

(drop drop)

and the rest . . .

(drop)

YOU KNOW !!!

(but there is still no water)

My thirst creates a Trinity:

Myself, whom I cannot know,

Yourself, whom I cannot touch,

And the mirage who walks always beside you.

The strength of my thirst creates the wasteland. (Where is my England in it?) And deafens me.

April is the cruelest date.

(I am born in April, too.)

Equally January and July.

(When lilacs fade, I start to die.)

Till crocus is the longest wait.

(Before I die, I start to hate.)

April is the cruelest, true,

when endless resurrection’s due.

Is boredom the waste? (It fills the land.)

Orderliness? (It fills the boredom.)

Orderly boredom? (It fills us.)

The boredom of order? (up,)

The orderly boredom of bored orderliness? (up to here)

Or the symptom (merely?) of the waiting

for the Word from the Void

and the solution (the only?)

to what to fill the waiting with?

(to hear.)

My nerves are bad tonight.

(Who was that corpse I saw you plant last Spring?)

(That was no corpse, that was my life.)

My nerves are growing worse.

(Will it bloom this year?)

(And next and next and next and next and next and next

until my end of next.)

Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak!

What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

I never know what you are thinking. Think!

Or is it that I never hear? Listen!

Hurry up, please, it’s Time.

Yes, bad. Stay with me.

A sudden frost disturbs my bed of stony rubbish.

Let’s drink coffee after and talk for an hour.

In the mountains you feel free

twit twit twit

Mountains of rock without water

where one can neither stand nor lie nor sit.

My nerves are bad tonight.

There is not silence in the mountains,

nor even solitude.

And the dry stone gives no sound of water.

I thought . . .

I thought in the mountains you felt free.

I never know what I am thinking.

(I have heard the key

turn in the door once and turn once only.

We think of the key, each in his prison,

hers’n in hers’n, and his’n in his’n.)

The boat responds daily

to controlling hands

Fishing , with the arid plain behind me . . .

If there were the sound of water only

If there were only the sound of water

If there were the sound, only, of water.

If there were the sound of only water.

But there is no water.

Burning burning burning burning

Oh, Lord, I fuckest

burning

jug jug jug jug jug jug

twit twit twit

drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

- - - But who is that on the other side of you?

Then spoke the thunder:

Da

I do not fear death by water

Waiting, wasting,

I fear only

Jug, Jug

to my dirty senseless ears.”

JACK SCOTT

®COPYRIGHT 1966. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

FROM POEMYSTIC.COM