Bill Mayer

Five Poems from

A TRUCE WITH FANTASY

 

 

AFTER, OR BEFORE

 

The boat moves swiftly but gently through the still water.

I am on it, watching with little attention the slow swells

the boat makes. There is no land in sight, but this is not an ocean.

I am being taken away but have no idea where or why.

All I know is the sound of water and the faint breeze

that smells like jasmine or lilac.

Whoever else is on this boat stays out of sight,

or perhaps it is just that I don’t care and will meet

any companions I have with quiet equanimity.

 

I realized this winter that there was no paradise,

that my sadness was as close to it as I could get.

Who would wish an emperor’s palace

when the soft water makes a faint sound

and the sky is immense with distant clouds,

fire-red from the low sun?

Who would care so much to smash the living world

and all its tenderness just to find, what?

a pure life, a dream? a construction? It is madness.

 

Better, I think, to watch the molecules drift apart,

form new allegiances.

Because the dead know what we are thinking;

they are spending eternity perfecting themselves,

the thing we would try to do in time,

always, floating on this water,

moving from being the observer of beauty

to the thing itself. I can see it happening.

I brush my hand in the cool water.

It is better than a balm.

I remember the chapparel smell, hiking

on the east side of the mountain,

the sun making oil on the leaves

as we hunted for the one flower

that grew here and only here,

and only at this time of year.

No one could explain this.

No one knew the reason beyond

the reason. It was intoxicating

and that’s all that mattered,

that and simply watching

the last green of the flowing grasses

before the real heat began.

 

Someone had collected God knows how many rocks

and placed them in a single line across the playa

of Panamint Valley. I couldn’t see the end,

just one black volcanic stone after another,

stretching into a model of eternity.

We stopped the car, looked at that perfectly straight line,

on both sides of the road and wondered

who could have done it and how.

Not why. That was perfectly obvious.

The rocks were heavy and from a place some distance away.

Someone must have filled a large truck with them,

and slowly carried each rock into the white distance.

Maybe done at night. But not in Summer.

Certainly before the valley had become a National Park.

It lasted a year or two, and then, naturally,

or more likely, deliberately, the rocks

were scattered, or just removed.

These days, when I drive by, I can’t decide

whether I want them back or not. But I keep looking.

 

 

 

NOT A CRITICISM

 

Don’t you want to fall in love again?

the old man asked me, almost pleading.

No, I said, wrestling with myself,

I am trying to better the love I have,

not find a new mystery.

For falling in love is ignorance revealed,

the delight of physical pleasure

mixed with the unknown.

Which is not what I care about,

nor barely the beginning of what I do.

It depends whether you think

having your life is a personal matter only,

or a stream in which you are a part.

 

 

 

TRANSFORMATIONS

 

Death is never an option, only an error.

– Ted Hughes Tales from Ovid – Myrrha

 

1)

 

It must have seemed to the elderly man that he was running

when the car struck him. So much violence to the body,

so quickly,

and he so still.

I looked up in wonder when my parents spoke.

What did it mean they threw a sheet over him?

What was blood to me, a stain in the middle of the road

that moved from scarlet,

to red,

to rust, to dark.

 

2)

 

When the two doctors gathered around my mother

to tell her she was dying,

she nodded yes, she understood,

but after a few minutes,

pretended they were just going to take her home,

which, in fact we did.

When I'm walking again,

she said to me firmly,

will you teach me how to cook salmon the way you do?

 

3)

 

The monks were talking, high up above the cliff,

catching their breaths and trying to figure out

where to build the monastery,

when the young servant following appeared below them

carrying water on the narrow path,

and slipped,

and fell eight hundred feet out of sight to the rocks below.

The horrified monks were then astonished, fifteen minutes later,

to see him struggling back up the cliff, the pitchers unbroken

and water-filled. It is said angels caught him as he fell,

and placed him gently on the lower path,

so that he must walk up again, in wonder.

The story says,

similarly,

that when the authorities finally tired of Paul

and his obnoxious ranting,

they beheaded him,

only to discover sweet milk flowed out of his body.

 

4)

 

Perhaps I will learn to be grateful,

hear the amsel singing as I walk among the trees

in the gathering mist.

The horses are disturbed by the quiet.

Their breath makes spirits in the chill morning air.

They are impatient to be going, snorting and pawing the ground.

The aspen are beginning to turn and the clear, sharp air

drives through the ponderosa while I get ready.

 

 

 

SIEGMUND IN THE DESERT WITHOUT PROTECTION

 

1

 

Tony said it must have been fear

that made me want to go back early.

We had been in the dunes almost a week.

No one had come by. Only once had we seen, miles away,

a campfire at night. Someone was out there, had come over

the rocky pass to the north, and camped. Gone the next day

even though I panned the area over and over with my binoculars.

Maybe, in the silence, when there was only desert, wind,

and the occasional bird, gray and faint, calling

distantly out by the rocks before the sun came up,

maybe I realized just how empty I was.

And, after photographing every day pictures

which I laughingly described as photographs of nothing,

it began to be real, that nothingness, and the knowledge

it was all I had. That’s when I wanted to go.

 

2

 

I watched the train as it lumbered out of the Gare du Nord

and wondered what I would do without her.

We would meet, I hoped, in a couple of weeks in Beaune,

but I thought I might lose her to Germany once she had returned,

not knowing whether I could manage in France alone,

too afraid to go into the Boulangerie to order a baguette,

thinking the world might crush me, leave me

helpless, a man unable to speak.

I feared the great world outside was just as hostile

as the indifferent wilderness.

I could find no ease in either.

 

3

 

We found the cabin at the end of a rugged dirt road

at the head of a canyon. There was still snow

on the protected north-facing slopes. There were a few piñon pines

by the dry stream bed, otherwise just mesquite, and gray bitterbrush.

Behind, the mountains, bare and silent, cut off the view.

No one lived in the cabin, and it wasn’t locked.

It was clean, had a wood burning stove on one side,

a mattress on the other, and a small table in front of the one window

that looked down the canyon to the distant valley thirty miles away.

You could write in the book on the table, or cook,

using the few utensils that had been left in the kitchen area.

What must it be like living there?

I would have liked to stay, with my small kerosene lamp

and a decent supply of food, watching the light in its steady progress

across the valley, talking to no one, watching, being quiet,

finding the spring up the canyon behind the cabin

and fetching enough water to manage;

listening to the occasional birds which believed that,

in this vast and empty landscape a mate could be found,

listening, without expectation yet attentive, without hope

but nonetheless prepared for that one particular pattern of sound

that meant there was a purpose,

a god that watched over these proceedings, guided, leant meaning

to the huge space that otherwise, in spite of its beauty, said only

I am empty, I am alone.

Thinking that when Hunding came and his sword

entered my body and the last thing I saw was not Wotan grieving,

rather the pervious desert, accepting my blood as it flowed

through my hands into the dry soil, drinking me to renew itself,

taking my body as part of itself, until I learned at last

there was no difference, there was only sun, eyes,

and the breathing that contained all the sorrow in the world.

 

 

 

GOING HOME

 

We meet at the roadside cafe and I sit facing the window.

The cars go by and the donut shop across the road is busy

with unhealthy-looking people going in and out.

We are the only ones here, except for the cook and owner.

My cousin and I talk about the old times.

He is older and knows more about my family than I do.

 

Is it really true that my mother and grandmother

broke into my great uncle’s office the night he died,

and took what they thought was valuable,

because they knew they would be left out of the will,

fairly or unfairly? My cousin describes all this

without passion and with sympathy for these dead people.

 

His hair is white, mine, mysteriously, not.

We are the last of our family. The food here is good,

the atmosphere warm. It has an old feel about it,

and the owner refills our cups and talks with us.

I love his loud Hawaiian shirt, and the fact

that he will sometimes trade food for wine.

It is like the past in Los Angeles,

where we knew everyone, and everyone had a secret,

and they all lied, and the world was orderly and secure.

 

 

 

Bill Mayer was born and raised in Los Angeles. He received his BA and MA from San Francisco State University, studying with Jack Gilbert, Stan Rice, William Dickey and Nanos Valaoritis. In the late '60s, he was invited to join a poetry workshop with Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Larry Felson, George Stanley, Bill Anderson, Wilbur Wood, and others. The workshop persists to this day with some of its original participants.

 

Mayer has published 5 books of poetry: Longing, (Pangaea, 1992), The Uncertainty Principle (Omnidawn, 2001), the chapbook, The Deleted Family (Paroikia, 2004), Articulate Matter (Paroikia, 2012), and recently A Truce With Fantasy, (Kelsay Books, Aldrich Press, 2015). Poems have also appeared in a number of magazines: Caterpiller, Ironwood, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Montana Gothic, Five Fingers Review, Red Rock Review, Paris Atlantic, Poetry Flash, Alimentum, Omniverse, Danse Macabre (an online magazine) and Visions International, among others. He was included in an anthology of American poets who have lived in Greece, Kindled Terraces, edited by Donald Schofield (Truman State University Press, 2004).

 

Grace Schulman wrote about Articulate Matter: “The best of these poems are transcendent, bringing the sacred into common life. ‘The Arrival of Hermes’ is sublime. Others I find powerful here are ‘The Conversation,’ ‘Frogs on the Border’, ‘Days of 1966, Whittier,’ ‘The Shape of the Soul,’ ‘The Dream.’ I like, too, the tone. This work is genuine.”

 

Joseph Stroud wrote about A Truce With Fantasy: Bill Mayer is writing some of the most powerful, intelligent, and serious poems of any poet I’ve been reading in the last few years.

 

Mayer is also a professional photographer who has exhibited at the Mythos Gallery in Berkeley as well as working with Tony Keppelman on Hummingbirds, a photographic essay published by Little-Brown. He is as well an importer of German and Austrian wines. He has spent extended time in Vermont, England, Greece, Hawaii, Monterey, Germany, France, Italy, and Austria, and presently lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Jane McKinne-Mayer, who teaches art history at the California College of the Arts.