my dead friend Philip

I like most of my dead friend Philip's writing.

I especially love my ancient copy of On Bear's Head which has been owned by numerous others before me and bears sign of their hard use.

I like the fluid stains and the gum wrappers and the phone numbers and the sad notes written late at night when they were alone with the poems in this copy.

It makes me self-conscious and determined not to be a ghost in this book.

I have not made a single mark or stain or desperate note long after midnight.

I might have put a few watermarks on the thing in the tub.

Philips thinks my persnicketyness in this regard is funny, and that I am being a snob towards death.

That's what he said anyway.

Philip, I like reading what you were writing when I was in the womb, and when I was born, and when I was a week old, etc....because you dated everything so obsessively.

You were entering interesting spiritual terrain when I was born. You were writing a lot about babies then too which makes me laugh.

I think you look like Arthur C. Clarke.

You also have that weird English thing going on, which is odd in an American. But not an affectation.

Certainly your poetry has nothing to do with English verse. You were a W.C.W. man.

And then your poetry often has nothing whatsoever to do with poetry.

Oh, Philip, why couldn't you have written Dianetics and founded Scientology?

Then it would have been a cool book and a cool quasi-religion.

But you would have probably written Diuretics and founded Shyontology.

That's how you say it after you have a stroke and all your Thetans are fucked up: "Shyontology." Or how Sean Connery would say it, if he ever converted.

Philip, I especially like your book The Winter.

There is such a liberation in that freezing book. Over and over the images are of everything in the world destroyed, removed, annihilated, and over and over there is joy. And acknowledgement of misery. That too.

It is a mixing bowl.

You were in Japan. You were seeing like you never saw before.

I will type a few of your poems to feel closer to them.


     Above the Shrine


I found what I didn't expect to find, great stone stairway leads to
Vacant lot hilltop where the wind blows and I can see
     the mountains
Rocks & weeds & tin cans: anything historical has long been gone
Just dirt again, flowering bushes, dwarf bamboo.
There might have been a grand palace here, imperial villa
Boy with a pair of beautiful Manchu lion dogs now

          13:vii:66


Philip, an obtuse or snarky reader might ask, "What is the difference, really, between this poem and 'Ozymandias?'"

I would say: everything, basically.

But especially it is the revelation that comes out of that last word in that last sentence, if you have read the poem with your right soul.

It's not an aporia there. Not really.

The word now is the perfect note sounded in perfect silence. The one John Cage couldn't get in the anechoic chamber. You didn't know you were entering the perfect silence until you noted its existence with the sounding of that note.

You were there. The perfect silence exists. Put a bumper sticker on your car to memorialize the trip.

But that note!

It unfolds suddenly and contains everything.

He fools you into thinking this is another Vanitas poem. It isn't.

It's the opposite of that.

A liberation.



     Poem


Like a bird
Falls from
Indifferent
Air   Sky
Blunders    yells
Among tangled
Branches
Thoughtless
Dirty
Crooked feet


     8.xii:66



And Philip, I adore you for writing this poem. Can I have this for my epitaph?


     To Henrik Ibsen


This world is not
The world I want
Is Heaven
& I see
There's more of them

    *

I've seen most of this world is ocean
I know if I had all I wanted from it
There'd still not be enough
Someone would be lonely hungry toothache
All this world with a red ribbon on it
Not enough
Nor several hells heavens planets
Universal non-skid perfection systems

Where's my eternity papers?
Get me the Great Boyg on the phone.
Connect me with the Button Moulder right away.


     3:i:67


You wrote that on my first birthday. Thank you. For my death poem. LOL.

Maybe I just want LOL on my tombstone.

I'm sure somebody's already done that.

It's hard to say something original and keep the illusion now that Google exists.

Before you couldn't check to see if someone else threw the weird dice that way.


My favorite tombstone just says "JE DOIS."

It's some anonymous stone somewhere in some scrubby, overgrown cemetery in France I think.


That person had a sense of humor.



I like the handwritten poems with the big alarming words...I like how you drew APE TANGLE FRIGHT....



And I love this poem muchly too...handwritten where you wrote...

PET
SHOP

     DEAD BIRDS
AND LIVE ONES
LOCKED IN THE SAME
   CAGE AGAINST THE
   WINDOW.



Selah, Philip.


D.P.W.: Oh whatever. Is it a Thursday again? Do you people still have Thursdays? What does "MWUHAHA" mean? Is it a beverage? I'm joking, I'm joking. You've such a fucking rickshaw mind sometimes, Bill. Get over myself.