On What is Proper

by Jim McCurry

One should enjoy flowers in the company of beauties, get drunk under
the moon in the company of charming friends, and enjoy the flight of
snow in the company of high-minded scholars.
--apocryphal, Chinese

Born, bored by conflict
taught by degrees to believe
we must contend, find
some purchase, gain

the edge, you put on
weight after weight,
heaving your poems
into the unappreciative air--

humming to your
uncertain heirs
a nondescript
Tin Pan tune.

"In the circumstances--,"
mysteriously reduced,
cane-hobbled, short
of wind, one-eyed,

in a guppy ambience
of grey duct tape
& tastes of metals,

Dost'ou still announce,
"I can out-write, out-fight,
out-fuck any So and So"?

Does the eye still
open to startling,
bottomless
starling iridescence?

Hast'ou learned to disinherit
the wee small voice?

Or dost'ou still measure
wrensong vibrato
by the lion's roar?

And hast'ou put on gloves,
entered the ring--by the
bye, did you ever invent
that goddamned fuckometer?

Thus do I interrogate myself.
The unresponsive I.

jim mc curry, b. 10-3-43 in hawthorne (los angeles) california,
has taught at carl sandburg college since 1980, in poetry & philosophy;
since recently going online, his links include Big City Lit, Cyber Oasis,
Drought, and Snow Monkey—ten poems in all, four of which now
appear at the websites of the first two zines just named.
His philosophical interests center on nonduality: especially maha ati,
dzogchen, or madhyamika. (David Loy's recent study, NONDUALITY,
is a convenient handle.) For example, "the man" includes Huang-po,
Yun-men, Dogen. The trouble with What Is Enlightenment is the
dubious assumption that we can think our way to enlightenment,
or that there is truly conscious evolution, 'progress,' rather than
recovery of primordial innocence/happiness. In this respect,
contrary to some of his best friends, actually, Jim is somewhat
skeptical of Andrew Cohen's work, and Ken Wilbur's—not to say
the work of Eckhart Tolle, let's say. The literary interests include
V. Woolf, B. Cendrars, Lydia Davis, Knut Hamsun, Carlos Drummond
de Andrade, Casares and Borges, Marquez, Neruda, William Carlos
Williams, Jack Collom. I think that's enough indication. O yes, Pessoa.
Jim has a granfalloon of masks, some of whom are becoming
heteronyms, mebbe: Baron Axel Angst, Ramadooly Foofoo, H. Pumphrey
Smogrove, and the most fully realized of all, Dogwag Bummerstead, PhD,
aka Old Dog.

email: jmccurry@csc.cc.il.us