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1. “problematic”Friday, May 24, 2013 11:44 AM (continued)
   From: “edward mycue” mycueed@yahoo.com To: editor@amsterdamquarterly.nl
   SONG OF SAN FRANCISCO was in limbo for a long time and in development from 1987 on until it’s emergence 26 yrs later in 2012. In early days there were many poems and spread out to 100 pages and i got to view it as my ‘bridge’ in the sense of modeling it on hart crane’s swingline, going and walking over that bridge to brooklyn and feeling the human level of it.

   The times and my situation became grim, grimmer. Everything melted away while ten pieces more like hard bloodless stones remained by the mid-1990’s. But i kept looking and hoping for a return to fullness. I sent what i had to Paul Green at Spectacular Diseases Press in Peterborough, Cambs. England who in mid-90’s published my BECAUSE WE SPEAK THE SAME LANGUAGE. He offered to do it. He wanted a special cover (showing the usual San Francisco touristy highlights) from Richard Steger my lifePainterPartnerSpouse with whom i’d teamed on books and other publication areas since the early 1970’s. Richard never takes orders. And so that was the delay. In 2000 i sent the group of 10 to Paul Stangeland who published THE POETRY CONSPIRACY monthly calender with peoms in the San Diego area, and he put it in that. Meanwhile from time to time Paul Green and i continued to laxly correspond. Then around 2010 or 2011 with Paul Green hitting 69 and losing his job over there in the UK and getting ill, he wrote let’s do it. I wrote yes on a 1937 old vintage postcard of the san francisco bay with a sketch of what the east bay bridge was to look like and said YES. and let’s do it.

   he responded he wanted to use the card. i said it was some old thing from a used card bin with no source known. (i didn’t focus that it said in small print ‘san francisco queen city’ — funny that! and odd because it’s “cincinnati ohio” has always been called the ‘queen city’ — it’s where my mom lived in her teens).

   maybe the above could be #10. but i don’t think of this history as “problematic”. it just was a progress and pilgrimage in the sense of my life journey or is it more trajectory: it may never have been issued as a stand alone title. but i am happy it did.

   there have been 2 other books never published and plus a great pile of poems to be in an English anthology from the Shearsman Press in the 90’s (UK). There was a poet who was compiling it for them, Paul Buck. I heard from the publisher of Shearsman that project was just ended. But i never got my poems returned and this was at a time when things got so difficult for me and all i could do was just move on.

   i miss the shearsman project as much as the promised book from australia from paper castle mimeographs press (that had in 1979 published my longpoem 88 pages ROOT ROUTE RANGE THE SONG RETURNS there). I also miss the book publication from the now late Paul Foreman’s Thorpe Springs press in Austin,TX –SOMETHING INHERES IN THE MARIGOLD.)

   (HEY! THERE ARE A LOT OF “PAUL’S” IN THIS STORY I SEE.)

   © copyright Edward Mycue

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2. RUTH TAYLOR AGNES DELEHANT MYCUE

   Here is a poem from my mom written about oh I don’t know — about 1980 maybe– that I keep on a little stand in the form fine-lettered by the calligrapher Julia Herman commissioned by Jane Mycue in Santa Cruz. (Janey might recall when it was done.) Mom wrote under the name Ruth Taylor. Taylor is a family name from Erie, PA as her grandmother Beck (Rebecca McCrary) had married Robert Nicholas Taylor (called OREN from his initials and their common spoken sound from the “R.N.” that he used.) Those Taylors i am recalling were railroad men. Beck’s mom by the way was before she married her railroad man a Finn i’m recalling.  Anthony Ryan in Niagara Falls, Jane’s age, 70, now, and who is my aunt Jane Delehant Ryan’s 2nd son, has got all the information.
   Mom her mom’s first child had to stay in the hospital (St.Mary’s) for days after her mom went home and so the hospital filed the BIRTH certificate AS Ruth (the first name they knew) but put her middle name as her mom’s birth surname, ‘Taylor’.  And nowbody ever knew I guess because in that R.C. community mainly everyone went by the BAPSTISMceritiicate that was always used for any legal perpose there (even when mom and dad married).  It wasn’t revealed until mom and dad had to apply for a visa to go to Mexico City (dad had won best salesman nationwide of his company the Firestone subsidary ‘World Bestos” who made brake linings and clutch facings: this was in Dallas days early 1950’s were we’d moved in 1948). WHAT A SURPRISE MOM GOT and she was THRILLED, THRILLED at this. When she began to publish her poems and essays and stories and memories here an there (in the late 1970’s, mostly in senior citizen publications)(and I have some of them moldering away) (wonderful work, by the way) she used TAYLOR as her nom de plume/ writer’s name. (My mother was a beautiful woman who had the longest blackest hair and looked like the raging beauty Ava Gardner -sp ?– the actress: I was born when she was 22.)  Ed Mycue

   THE CLEAN & BEAUTIFUL “L” WORD                         (“I AM A LIBERAL”)
   Oh, I am a Liberal
   From the earliest recall
   Oh, I love that L word
   For me it tells it all:
    It stands for Love & Liberty
   For light, for Love or Labor,
    For Labor of Love
    It stands for Laughter
   Sweet song to my ears
   Sweet song of the Lark:
   Oh, I love the letter L
   I shall wear it proudly
   Emblazed bright upon my breast.
   Patrick Henry we salute you
   You said it all back then
   “Give me liberty or give me death”
   Oh, I love you letter L
   You stand for logic
   You stand for Liberation
   You stand for Love.
   The L word, it is Lovely
   It is Lively
   And it has a hopeful ring.

    © Ruth Taylor (Delehant Mycue) 1915-1997 NIAGARA FALLS, NY – PALO ALTO, CA

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3. In 1960 I came up for more graduate study from North Texas State in Denton to Boston University as a Lowell Fellow as an intern at WGBH-TV then the New England Television station on the M.I.T. campus in Cambridge just over the Charles River from Boston on Massachusetts Avenue above a former roller rind and as Louis Lyons’ assistant on his twoice weekly 14:28 minutes and seconds programs of news, profiles, special subjects.

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4. WE 2* ARE HANGING-IN SINGING THESE MORNINGS TO THE MOON
   Since we have learned that not every time
   are beliefs of our own absolute convictions
   though I must say echoing Jackie Gleason’s 1950’s HONEYMOONERS 1950’S TV series utterances of “What a disgusting development” have come to now
   knowing now Richard with me’ll be safer, at home
   together, dealing groans each everyday ourselves.
   All we –he and I now too –desire is to have someone, maybe you, help us reorient to that we knew so well. 

   © Copyright Edward Mycue, May 30, 2023 Tuesday

   *Richard Steger & Edward Mycue, together since 1971’s memorial day weekend Sunday in San Francisco CA

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5. Review: Amsterdam Quarterly by Bryan Monte, Editor 2013 Spring (Edward Mycue)
   “….
   BM: I think your poem, “Time is a Worn Thread”, which was published in AQ4, especially reflects your ars poetica.
   “poetry” is an odd and restricting term.
   marianne moore (“i too detest it … but find in it … a place for the genuine.”)
   william carlos williams (“men die every day for want of what is found there ….”)
   avoid and don’t censor with the corset of “poetry.” just write.
   grow into technique, your own vocabulary.
   fight.
   bang out your stuff.
   operate simply.
   (pulse).
   get a move on.
   time is a worn thread.
   BM: You’ve published nine major poetry books in 40 years. What has been your favourite book, both in its content and its realization?
   EM: That has never happened though it was partly achieved in 1973 with Damage Within the Community through Richard Steger’s artwork and vision for the book, Dennis Koran’s publishing and editing skills, typography imagined by master printer Martin Ilian, and myself exercising a discipline learned from Lawrence Fixel, George Oppen, Ann Stanford and Josephine Miles.
   BM: What was one of your most problematic books?
   EM: Song of San Francisco. It was in limbo for 26 years, from 1987 to 2012. In the early days there were many poems and it spread out over 100 pages. I got to view it as my “Bridge” in the sense of modelling it on Hart Crane’s swing line. Then, the times and my situation became grimmer. Everything melted away while ten pieces, more like hard, bloodless stones, remained by the mid-1990s. I sent it to Paul Green of Spectacular Diseases Press in Peterborough, Cambridge, England, who in the mid-90s published my chapbook, Because We Speak the Same Language. He offered to do it, but he wanted a special cover showing the usual San Francisco touristy highlights. I asked Richard Steger my painter, partner, spouse with whom I’ve teamed on books since the early ‘70s. Richard, however, never takes orders. And so that was a delay.
   In 2000, I sent the group of ten to Paul Strangeland who published the Poetry Conspiracy monthly calendar with poems in the San Diego area, and he put them in that.
   Then around 2010 or ’11 with Paul Green hitting 69 and losing his job there over in the UK and getting old, he wrote: “Let’s do it.” I responded: “Yes, let’s do it” on a 1937 postcard of the San Francisco Bay with a sketch of what the Bay Bridge was to look like. He responded that he wanted to use that card (on the cover). I didn’t see that it said in small print “San Francisco Queen City”—funny that! And odd because it’s Cincinnati, Ohio that has always been called the Queen City—that’s where my mom lived in her teens.
   BM: We’ve just talked about your last book, let’s talk about the two that preceded it—Mindwalking, 1937-2007 (2008) I Am A Fact Not A Fiction (2009). I’m curious, how did you choose 61 poems from your hundreds if not thousands of poems that you’ve written for Mindwalking?
   EM: Laura Beusoleil, the book’s publisher from Philos Press, chose the poems. I sent up fistfuls/manila envelopes of copies of poems to her that I raked up—at least a couple of hundreds. She wanted to choose, and that was just fine. When she decided, she asked me if I had others I wanted to include and she chose the order. I chose the title. And Richard chose the cover painting.
   BM: Well, it’s a very impressive collection, a poetic, biographical retrospective of your life from your birth to 2007. Do you have any poems in this book that are particular favourites?
   EM: “A Fight For Air” in six parts covering four pages in Mindwalking is part of my history beginning with a road trip from Niagara Falls to Dallas when I was eleven and ends when I’m 24. It also includes a speech, as if from a play, by my dad, a dream, and a summation. “San Francisco Bridge” describes what I saw on a hill in Oakland looking back over to San Francisco on a day trip. And “Always” is a meditation in the form of a psychological autobiography, written in one, formless exhalation.
   BM: Your next book was a little bit different, your first e-book. What was your experience publishing it online?
   EM: It was a nice experience because again I was among friends I respected, even loved. Jo-Anne Rosen asked me to do it. She had seen the zillions of my poems. Laura Beausoleil shuttled down from Lacey, Washington near Olympia (where she was the Olympia poet laureate) to help Jo-Anne. We knew each other also. Laura was admired by Larry Fixel and had done some work for him. I’ve known Laura since early 1970’s and she is a fine poet, grand storywriter, and artist of collages (we used them at Panjandrum Press for the readings series fliers and posters.)
   Jo-Anne had wanted to establish a literary publishing arm to her enterprise (she had a commercial design business producing books, pamphlets, and fliers). I was to be her first in her literary choices where the writer didn’t have to pay. She chose 25 poems. I okayed it. She suggested the title, I Am A Fact Not A Fiction, from one of the poems.
   BM: Would you like to publish another e-book in the future?
   EM: Yes, I would like to have another.
   BM: How did you come up with the sections of this e-book: “War/Peace”; “Life/Time/Memory”; “Histories”?
   EM: Jo-Anne divided the book into three parts and she named them. She also already had images of Richard’s work and she and he decided the one to use for the cover.
   BM: Do you think your poetry is becoming more self-reflective or do you see yourself moving outward with your poetry or are you doing both? In I Am A Fact Not A Fiction, for example, in “My Policeman,” you write about a man you knew in your 20s (I assume), who later killed himself in his 30s that you wrote about 30+ years later. In “Tale of Outlaws in the Commons” you retell your experience in the Peace Corps in the early 1960s.
   EM: I don’t know about the self-reflection. Maybe. I’m old enough that that could be a natural development. But I am a storyteller in my poems usually with a language I have to make because most models aren’t adequate to my ‘story.’
   BM: Let’s talk now about your last book again. What inspired you to write the series of poems or “Song Cycle” as Sean Carey refers to them in the introduction refers to them in Song of San Francisco?
   EM: I wonder. I started the Song of San Francisco poems as a group: one day it began and one day, years later, it stopped. I didn’t have a title then. But the clouds of knowing were there. It started, then stopped.
   BM: Did the AIDS epidemic inspire this cycle and/or something else? I say this because you tackle the big question, the meaning of life in your first poem, “The Song of Cities Like Viruses.” I will quote it in its entirety.
   is survival about leaving a message of what works
   accruing gradually out of a pool of variations
   because up to now evolution has no message call waiting.
   Do you see yourself as a survivor?
   EM: It was a hard time. Yes, these were the AIDS years. As if they were book-ended by this and that other side of the world. I don’t see myself (as) a survivor, but I am here.
   BM: What is your writing discipline like? How and when do you write? Do you write only when you feel inspired or do you follow a schedule? How often do you send work out to be published?
   EM: I am always writing, even in exhausted reveries. I am better especially nowadays in the mornings. I write little parts often and gather them up when sometimes I get this energy too. Other times I am writing and there is a space and I hear parts of previously written pieces that seem to fit as if these themes went back in for further viewing from some other perspective. I write all the time.
   BM: How often do you send work out to be published?
   EM: I used to send poems out often, very often, and if as usual, they were returned, then I just sent them out again. I made mistakes on what I sent to magazines and strange how they took it. So I began to feel what a mag said it wanted wasn’t what they might take. So it I got that I just didn’t care what I sent to WHOM. The ‘whom’ wasn’t important to me – only what I sent was important because I had no belief in editors except just a few special ones. But some periods of hard work on poems and successes I felt, there would be a poem that seemed to come whole effortlessly and be good in a way that I could see its completeness and quality but not in a way that it was my effort and my poem.
   I don’t have compulsions to scale a schedule ladder. I have sent out poems this last month (May 2013) five times. But in March, I only sent out once and maybe in January once.
   BM: Some of your correspondence and publications were recently acquired and are being archived by Yale. How did that happen?
   EM: Yale, through a middleman broker at Bolerium Books on Mission Street near 17th Street, took 110 boxes (some really big and crammed) and 10 more packages of odd and oversized objects including tubes and posters and artwork. I didn’t catalog things. I had to move, was disabled, and at the point of putting them all in a dumpster or two. A lot of stuff did go that way.
   BM: What was in those boxes? What did they take?
   EM: I am not sure what they have. About 7,000 books, mostly pamphlets, and slim volumes that I cared about I gave away to Friends of the San Francisco Library, to numerous little bookstores, and to thrift stores such as Out of the Closet, the Salvation Army, etc. I’d valued them as a collection of the five decades of writers I felt part of even when I didn’t care for their work. But they were from my time.
   What went to Yale of mine was most of the 2,000 zine and mags and papers I’d published in, and this huge/jinormous group of rejection slips and letters. And all sorts of letters and stuff and I don’t know what else (I can’t pull up a visual picture). It was a trip that took a year and the local weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, took this material to hold (as I couldn’t take it with me to where I was moving and I couldn’t find the money to store the stuff). The Bay Guardian had favorably reviewed my first book in 1973, Damage Within The Community, and from time to time published my poems, usually in the spots where advertising hadn’t been sold and thus, were so small you had to look really hard even when you knew a piece was supposed to be there.
   Plus my sister, Margo, had been with the New Shakespeare Company—San Francisco and the San Francisco Mime Troupe after teaching at Santa Clara University in the 1960’s. (See how lucky I was.) Bolerium Books knew me from years before with my Wobbly friends and marginal political friends I was palsy with. So Yale, the rare book and MSS library part called the Beinecke, bought my stuff.
   BM: Why do you think Yale was so interested in your particular collection?
   EM: They used to do all the right-wing capitalist stuff and hadn’t taken any real people’s stuff and thus I lucked out because of the big hole they had. Plus, I was seen as some sort of old fag, maybe an überfag, since I was in the early gay liberation movement 40 plus years before and because before that I’d cut my teeth on the Civil Rights Movement causes and activities and that got me blackballed in some southwestern states when I worked for a federal government agency back when the world was just as bad but better camouflaged.
   BM: What is your current project? What are you working on?
   EM: My current project I began several months ago. It’s called Vanishing Point. It actually began two years ago when one of Richard’s nieces, who is in her late 20’s and a striving graphic designer, asked if I could send her something to use as a project. Then she changed jobs, etc., and hasn’t asked for more and I just got the oars and have kept going. After that I want to resurrect some poems that keep coming into my mind and haven’t been published in any book.
   BM: Thank you for your time, Ed
   EM: You’re welcome. “
   ◦
   ◦ Poetry

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6. Aging and Colette

   Colette begins THE BLUE LANTERN*
   “We should not be unreasonably perturbed when our precious senses become dulled with age.

   I say ‘we’, but I am the text of my own sermon. My chief concern is lest I should mistake the true nature of a condition which has come upon me gradually. 

   It can be given a name: it keeps me in a state of vigilance, of uncertainty, ready to accept whatever may fall to my lot.  The prospect gives rise to little that is reassuring, but I have no choice.”
    
   Confucius said: “Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes.”
   “But his many failures read less as mischance than as apprenticeship.” Josephine Miles “For Magistrates”, Collected Poems 1930-1983)

   *(1950, trans Roger Senhouse 1963)

   ____________________________________________________________-
   © Copyright Edward Mycue

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7. ENIGMAS ANCHORED

   Such circumstances
   and life’s floating bridge
   holds an orchestra
   unanchored
   as Maria Callas soprano
   minus cokebottle glasses
   swoops curved stairs as
   on a nail
   the gossamer scarf snags.
   She survives the tryout.
   Yet does anyone recall
   the years told?
   You think they were ok
   yesterday, but how today?

   © Copyright Edward Mycue June 13 2023 Tuesday 8:35am

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8. CRUISESHIP BUSSES

   Curtains riding, victims living, sledding along a floating longing, drifting, twilight

   Cruiseship busses ferrying upperpaid elite tech workers along back wharfside corridors

   Brings back unfinished symphonies and a sea change under consciousness rotting

   Memories pressing up to thickening light oozing when the moon sees world end.
    
   © Copyright Edward Mycue   

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9. Is “writ on water” more accurate than “kleenex”?

   The latter ‘degrades’ but writing on water seems to hint of possible pollution.

   Our mini eco-air cooler (‘swamp box’ we called it in the dry lands) now has an ionizer to improve air quality by charging air particles with a negative charge attracting dirty particles (dander, dust, pollen, cigarette smoke) “until they become so heavy that they simply fall to the ground” — better air with your cooler air.

   Apply this to literature, to story to lyric to the written word of any kind.

   William Butler Yeats suggested: going as far as you can,

   W. H. Auden declared literature makes nothing happen,

   Wallace Stevens wanted SOMETHING (something) to happen,

   D.H. Lawrence expiation.

   Miss Moore, in “Marriage”, speaks of
   “This institution,/
   perhaps one should say enterprise/
   out of respect for which/
   one says one need not change one’s mind/
   about a thing one has believed in,/
   requiring public promises; of one’s intention….”

   She would have, if she could have just lived-on,
   a comedy routine about literalism
   but still finding somethings genuine in what doesn’t last.

   Since her time visual artists, have made paintings by erasing
   other painter’s paintings.

   Reviewers remind LOOKERS of how erasures of poems happen:
   through MISREADINGS — this BEING, usually,
   thus often not intentional,
   BUT more often because the reviewers THEY want to be the literary stars
   ignoring WHO IS THE BRIDE.

   INSTEAD poets are the brides and they marry their public by sharing
   their poetic diction & their visions
   (which are not analytic by nature, and yet still primitive & FROM THE HEART.
   NOT THE HEAD except sometimes maybe for sure)
   .
   © Copyright Edward Mycue

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10. TECHNICOLOR CRISP
    POEMS BY EDWARD MYCUE

    1. EMERALD — 10 POEMS
    2. LAPIS LAZULI — 6 POEMS
    3. CORAL — 8 POEMS
    4. MATTER
    5. SMEARING MURALS
    6. STRANGE HEART OF SAN FRANCISCO

    © CopyrightEdward Mycue MYCUEED@YAHOO.COM

    note bene: in the wings awaiting flight

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11. (415) 387-2471 mycueed@yahoo.com
    EMERALD–MY LIFE
    EMERALDS ARE GREEN: THEY MEAN HOPE, LIFE, SPRING. THEY CONTAIN INCLUSIONS THAT ARE OLDER THAN ROCK ITSELF.
    RAGNAROK – DEATH OF THE GODS
    THE WONDER OF IT ALL
    A NIGHT OF BLISS
    I AM A FACT NOT A FICTION
    RUMBLE SEAT PIERCE-ARROW
    EVERYTHING FOR ME AT 16 CAN SEEM BEAUTIFUL
    AFTER J
    HOME
    CONDITION
    GREAT MATTER
    IN ALL THE RAINBOW COLORS
    © EDWARD MYCUE 19 February 2015

    RAGNAROK – DEATH OF THE GODS
    The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The friend of my enemy is my enemy. The friend of my friend is my friend (unless that friend is a friend of the friend of my enemy). The feud of my family is a breach in the friendship of my blood. My blood is my enemy. This the edge of my world and how rotten is the tooth of my despair. Does peace have a pulse for peace? Does our world have a hope? I read seas are rising, glaciers disappearing, crops failing. When 30 years ago I asked great aunt Antonia Bellone how then she felt, she said “disgusted” (memento mori, rewound.) In San Francisco every wave in the Pacific Ocean here at Land’s End, where great ships foundered, brings back unfinished symphonies: the future is ugly, sharp paradigm shifts, earth jimjams a jungle, diamond skies, sea change, playground happenings, tree rats scurrying into the canopies, everyone here is there under the surface of consciousness along with all the bungled aspirations, mischances, mistakes, errors, crimes completing apprenticeships, and over the mind a brown shale –roomtone, mouthfeel, reordering parts, rationing emotions. Ripening memories pressing upward, stardust a diminishing gusher, thickening light a sea scar.
    © Edward Mycue mycueed@yahoo.com
    THE WONDER OF IT ALL
    EMPORIUM:
    Is everything equal
    To anything?
    I never almost
    find the shirts I want.
     
    TRILLION TOGETHER:
    THE BILLIONARE
    POLITICAL BOSSES
    TRY TO OWN THE
    SUN AND THE WIND. 
    GIVE ME A TRUST FUND, SANTA:
    The poor lobby with no campaign
    contributions for food stamps.
    The rich lobby for incentives for
    tax-free development and grants.
    © Edward Mycue

    A NIGHT OF BLISS – 2 QUEER RIMESTHE LOVE OF GUYS
    1.
    I’m here I’m queer
    And sure I’ve felt some fear
    Because I don’t fit in
    And what I do others have called sin
    But last night after gloaming
    I drank a beer and later
    I had wine & then I lay my head
    On my spouse’s bed
    Where I slept until the morning
    When morning came I woke up fresh
    And took him in my arms
    And we sampled joys in the day light
    That is the love of guys.
    2. A DISCOVERED COUNTRY
    A night of bliss began with your kiss
    And forty-three years later
    Still today we always pray
    We’ll remain until a crater
    Will welcome us
    When our ashes are cashed
    And our river of life is stilled
    We thank our Creator
    Who our River Keeper was
    And kept our banks secure.
    Up on the mountains
    Where the streams begin
    And the water starts-out pure
    There’s a light that showers
    Two guys like us
    And protects us with its power.
    © Edward Mycue

    I AM A FACT NOT A FICTION
    I am a fact, not a fiction
    a rite, not a ritual
    a progression, not a procedure
    a song, not a schedule
    I am in my life and I live it
    –partake it, enjoy it, wonder at it

    I’m green leaves aquiver
    red clouds aflutter
    whacky as Christopher Smart
    talking to cats
    and alone in dark forests
    in short pants

    I am Niagara River crashing
    over the Falls
    cascading through the gorge
    to the Devil’s Hole
    sweeping into the last Great Lake
    –Erie to Ontario—
    surging into the great Lawrence
    into my mother Atlantic

    rising forward & into the clouds
    into hurricanes
    I cut with the knife of the times
    out onto the rocks
    the Cape of Good Hope to India
    South China Sea
    sieving through Oceana’s islands
    Pacific kingdoms
    up past Galapagos north home shore
    Mission Rock
    San Francisco and my love’s bed
    I am a fact not a fiction.
    © Edward Mycue

     
        RUMBLE SEAT PIERCE-ARROW
    Lately, when i have dreamed of HOME what appears is that river bottom cabin where 2 men lived and took my brothers and me out in their boat fishing and just seeing the shore life as my
    father jack kicked back reclining at shore dreaming baseball.
    Back to that time and of the Pierce-Arrow with the rumble seat trunk where we rode free to the sky: cars and with dogs in them cars with the rumble seats the mid 1940′s that were old even
    then and guys back from World War II who had them and we
    loved them, ducking down into the space inside when windy or cold or you were afraid –or my dad or and the guys were a bit worried. We bounced over potholes, roots, humps heading down
    to the river and their cabin, some tributary of our Niagara
    River. I remember those two guys who lived down there after, back from the war, and the one who’d had a leg off used to grab me to haul me over these ditches and trees, the blond hunk
    with the missing leg but some replacement (and I think now it
    was my first crush on a guy) in his 20′s who my dad used to play baseball with and the other guy my my dad’s buddy from their boy scout days or from the Tuscarora reservation near Niagara.
    Lately, when I have dreamed of home what appears is the rumble seat.
    © Edward Mycue

                       EVERYTHING FOR ME AT 16 CAN SEEM BEAUTIFUL
    Art Lund sang Joey from THE MOST HAPPY FELLOW (‘in the whole Napa Valley’– from Frank Loesser’s musical of Sidney Kingsley’s depression-era play THEY KNEW WHAT THE WANTED ),  Vaughn Monroe deeptoned  Mona Lisa;  Nat King Cole, had his easy way with Nature Boy.  Then it’s Ebb Tide, The Unchained Melody (‘Time goes by so slowly/and time can do so much….), & Teresa Brewer wailing: Let me go/let me go/Let Me Go, Lover ./Let me be/set me free/from your spell.’ [—oh, yeh. yeh, yeh.]   My brother David’s absolute favorite:  Perez Prado’s (It’s) Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White (‘when you’re in love’—That must have been his Joanie Parker song.).  [I was sixteen that summer working as old  Mr. Flanagan’s helper at the Campfire Girls’ camp, south of Dallas, on a ridge above the Big Brothers’ camp below, where my best friend Frank ‘Nicky’ Knickerbocker worked–his mother got us our jobs.]  Spin to Perry Como singing No Other Love (have I/only my love for you,/only the dream we knew,/into the night I cry/hurry home, come home to me,/set me free/ free from doubt/ and free/ from longing.– from Rogers & Hammerstein’s  ME AND JULIET).  Now switch into ‘It’s always like this/I worry and wonder,/your lips may be near/ but where is your heart?’ (The Song From Moulin Rouge).  After that is Shake Rattle & Roll (‘You wear those thin dresses/and the sun come shining through./I didn’t know honey all that belonged to you.’ Adults were shocked at those lines, yet we were not so lascivious as they were I think.)  Now skirl/ swoon to Vic Damone crooning Eternally the soaring theme of Charlie Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT movie [By the end of  that summer  of nineteen fifty-three I thought I loved Ellie the Campfire Girls’ summer-camp cook’s boy friend also from her North Carolina college a football hunk working in that Big Brother camp in that valley below]:  “though the stars may cease to shine/my love shall always be/forever true and loving you / eternally.”  My youth now seems a good earth original  today so achingly beautiful. Great grandmother Jane Kennedy Delehant  had often intoned “Backward, oh backward/ o time in thy flight/ make me a child again/ just for tonight.”  Night!  So now in this time/ over tim I think it, write, say it now recalling that summer I was 16.                                                                                                                                                              © © Edward Mycue   
         
    AFAFTER J

    That first time, he called H on a snowy night
    asked H to come to his apartment for drinks with
    him and his mother.
    H wound up spending the night.
    J’s roommate was another policeman away then. 
    H lay down on the roommate’s mattress. 
    Soon J was
    calling him over to his where he asked if H kissed.
    They became more intimate and asked if H 69’d. 
    Then
    “brown me” he said squirming over. But the next
    week he accused H of turning him queer, beat H.
    H was not naïve: left Amarillo within the week.
    J found H’d gotten a job as a reporter in Dallas and
    came to the copy desk at the Times Herald alternately
    saying he loved H and threatening H. H moved again. 

    One day, years later, that old roommate phoned H in
    Boston and told him J had shot himself leaving H’s
    telephone number on a note asking that H be called. 

    J was 33, Arnie said, was a Korean War vet and had
    gotten a B.A. at North Texas in Denton on the G.I.Bill.
    Arnie said he didn’t know what J’s demons were. 
    J was his best man at the wedding:
    Arnie and Maris named their first son, Jay, after him.
    Arnie said J had been fired from the Police Department

    for excessive violence in arrests, a questioned stakeout,
    but mainly because of his drunkenness. Through those years
    he’d mentioned H and kept the photo of the three
    everywhere he lived on the nightstand next to the bed.
    Arnie asked would H like it. He said: “Keep it for Jay”.
    © Edward Mycue  23 X 2014
       hHOME 
    Many of us could never go home
    even when we had not left it. 
    Home is a windsong in our hearts. 
    These hearts have exploded,
    repositioned themselves, ending
    as much the mends themselves
    as the remaindered hearts.  
    This then is ‘home’. 
    © Edward Mycue  
            CONDITION
    You don’t need contrition
    for a condition.
    Maybe an explanation
    will do.
    Maybe it’s an act–
    not a crime.
    You don’t need permission
    to seek sublime.
    It’s the condition.
    Don’t ask vindication.
    Brighten the dark.
    No negatives first.
    Follow your thirst.
    Trust intuition.
    It’s the condition.
    © Edward Mycue
    GREAT MATTER
    I went to Ghana in 1961 in the first Peace Corps group to go abroad,
    landing in Accra,
    end of August, via Dakar, Senegal and The Azores from Washington DC
    where President John F. Kennedy met us in the Rose Garden,
    then was photographed with each of us at his Oval Office desk.
    Fifty of us, twenties to thirties, a charmed generation trusting progress
    and a basic goodness of all persons.
    All the while there seemed to be a stranger within me,
    an intruder who was not me, yet part of me, who swallowed as I drank
    and who’d die when I’d die.
    Our ‘strangers’ are sharpie fine-pointed pens who write us,
    life forces leading, lifting us through our nights.
    Who /what this is baffles me. It’s not mythic. It is here now. We pass from history.
    This life force continues.
    We’re stewards, mechanics, actors, helpers. Actions matter, thoughts matter.
    All flow into this great final matter.

    We believed in progress, in the basic goodness of all persons.
    There was a stranger inside of me, an intruder, who was not me,
    yet part of me
    who swallowed as I drank:
    I’ve lived as if he’ll die when I die.
    I now begin to see that our ‘strangers’
    within us are the sharpie fine pointed pens
    we thought “we” wrote with, but really are the life force,
    forces who lead, encourage, lift us through our nights.
    What this is baffles me. This is not mythic.
    It is here now. We pass out of history. This life force continues.
    While we live we are stewards, mechanics, actors, helpers
    We matter, our actions matter, our thoughts matter.
    In our end all our beginnings are organized into this great matter.
    IN ALL THE RAINBOW COLORS 
    Most everyone here
    Thinks the world of it.
    Yet here is not the world.
    That atlas speaks other climes.

    Here’s mind’s province.
    Beyond here worlds have
    No cause looking back, now.
    Out there becomes then a here.
                    
    From personal to political to spires,
    Further and higher to travel.
    What was here then, there, remains.
    Here, now, resting time, still we seek.
    Beyond circles is twisting, continuing.
    Turning what was then back, forward,
    Here returns, but not here’s beginning.
     
    That words dream motion
    makes life glorious
    puts raw silk to silence
    gives music tongue
    reveals nature becomes
    the prairie garnet and
    peridot leaving the wind
    behind.
    In all the rainbow colors.
     
    © Copyright   Edward Mycue 26 MAY 2015
     

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12. CORAL: 9 FIERALINGUE POEMS: EDWARD MYCUE
    The Early Grape 
    We are the early grape
    flat, dry, and cloudy.
    The time is short,
    but some days never end.
    There is no joyous lake.
    There is no incantation
    that can bend the moment back
    into the patterns we may see too late.

    Wait for tomorrow?
    Tomorrow never comes.
    Wait for tomorrow?
    Tomorrow never comes.

    Three’s a crowd.
    The spunky one’s the cream in your coffee.
    I know  I know  we said.
    That’s the thing!
    Do it.  Do it now.

    Early wine is flat, dry, and cloudy
    and some days never end.
    There is no joyous lake.
    There is no incantation
    that can bend the moment back
    into patterns we have seen too late. 
    © Edward Mycue

    A FIGHT FOR AIR 
    I. A Fight for Air
    Towels soak in the sink
    Roots crack, splinter
    Each sound’s a stone screaming
    successive millions
    of mute islands
    a secret care I keep folded
    under my fingernail
    dawn after dawn
    The thrill is uneven The saliva curdles
    Sunset climbs closely
    to the fight for air.

    II. Buried World
    The Great River
    plains desert
    Red Rock Red River
    Gulf of Mexico
    deltas bayous hill country
    conscribe an end and a beginning, leading
    from these years this journey back
    to nineteen sixty-one
    Dallas: blotch concrete spread out on the plains.
    We’d come to Texas thirteen years before
    in a slope-back forties Ford.
    I was eleven then.
    We passed through Erie, Kentucky, Delta States
    to arid, fissured land and bottomland and floods
    to dying apple trees.
    Then summertimes
    and othertimes
    Dad took us with him one by one
    to get to know us
    on his travels through his Southwest territory,
    him talking brakelinings for a Firestone subsidiary
    company that let him go not long before he died
    in a chaos of fear
    and pain he said was not like pain
    but was pulling him apart.

    III. Father
    “We brought our children from New York
    to take a better job.
    My wife supported me.
    Her hair turned white that first year.
    She was thirty-three, had borne us seven kids
    in our hometown, Niagara Falls. 
    We fought and stayed together
    pounding with our love.
    I was thirty-six that year
    nineteen forty-eight.
    Our oldest son was twelve.
    The baby was a year.”

    IV. Rain
    Starting
    Caution
    Stop
    Signal
    Passing
    Being passed
    My father seems beautiful
    his geographical eyes a cage
    of ocean dreams
    who’ll never dream again
    so stubborn, gentle, singing anytime
    some snatch of song he’ll never sing again.

    Nostrils flaring, lungs honking, at the end
    he couldn’t hold his teeth
    only wanted air Air
    His food came back
    I hear him say NO, No not pain I’m
    falling
    No steel,
    green-painted, rented tank of oxygen could help
    since death will come when cancer eats the brain.
    It rained the day he died
    and it rained again on burial day. Good Luck,
    it’s angels’ tears, they say the Irish say.
    The dog killed cat run off morphine soaking into sand.
    Gigantic stones snakes apple trees his eyes.
    V. Grave Song
    End of night
    melted
    threw my heat in the fire
    O my mama place in the white
    it was too big for me
    I wanted out out I got out
    Go downstairs
    say off wiz de light off wiz all de lights
    up up up
    up wiz de fire up wiz de fire
    (say ‘UP’ with the fire)
    I am afraid
    of the door rats on the stairs miles
    miles miles to the light and I can’t
    say it
    there’s only me
    and and everybody
    and that is no body nobody
    but some thing
    behind
    Lock it! Lock it!
    Go go downstairs
    Run Run Run Run out out out
    They are moving
    Dark
    is light Things in the air
    Tie Ta Tie Ta
    Tie Ta Tie Ta
    people gone
    Cows moo in the fields and are gone
    It does not hold
    Hums Hums Hums
    Hung birds in bottles, eggs writhing like worms
    and the fire burns.

    VI. Little Lifetimes
    Children crush crackers between stones
    celebrating luck and joy
    seeing with ears, breathing music from trees, flowering
    in pure deliciousness
    awakening graves, unarmed against the rain. In time — silence:
    stoning sterile trees,
    praying the dead will sleep between the swollen roots.
    The wind rushes in saying hold my ground, carve
    your own road — the design that develops.

    Now a face begins to emerge seeking air
    examining death to discover patterns
    in the movements of little lifetimes.  
    © Edward Mycue
    I AM A FACT NOT A FICTION 
    I am a fact, not a fiction
    a rite, not a ritual
    a progression, not a procedure
    a song, not a schedule
    I am in my life and I live it
    –partake it, enjoy it, wonder at it

    I’m green leaves aquiver
    red clouds aflutter
    whacky as Christopher Smart
    talking to cats
    and alone in dark forests
    in short pants

    I am Niagara River crashing
    over the Falls
    cascading through the gorge
    to the Devil’s Hole
    sweeping into the last Great Lake
    –Erie to Ontario—
    surging into the great Lawrence
    into my mother Atlantic

    rising forward & into the clouds
    into hurricanes
    I cut with the knife of the times
    out onto the rocks
    the Cape of Good Hope to India
    South China Sea
    sieving through Oceana’s islands
    Pacific kingdoms
    up past Galapagos north home shore
    Mission Rock
    San Francisco and my love’s bed
    I am a fact not a fiction. 
    © Edward Mycue
    THE KNOT

    The pivoting puzzle
                                      locks and unlocks,
    signals
                or turns, and opens,
                                                  explains,
    answers,
                    winds-up-the slack,  
                                                     centers
    the music,
                      regulates the pitch,
                                                      raises
    the courage;
                         it nerves you up
                                                     as you
    struggle
                  a low island in the reef
                                                        waters
    opening
                    a door
                                 under the garden  in
    surrender saying:
                                  “Use me,
                                                    I am your key.”

    ©Edward Mycue                                                for     JAMES VEVEA
    FISHBOWL

    The fish pass each other in the street, drifting, as
    an abstract creative force.

    Art will save nothing, absolutely.
    (The soul of a family?)

    In silence
    sculling up rivers
    fathoming
    diversions
    plowing
    a state of mind, which
    will not count the hour,
    hideous
    black pearls
    appear
    wallowing
    in a round bowl
    like eyes
    bulging in the head of a tattered
    man my father greatly admires.

    But his anger is alarming.

    We live together there, all of us, constantly quarreling.

    Patience.

    Art will save nothing.

    In our glass prison
    we build splendid nests.

    © Edward Mycue

    THE HERO’S JOURNEY HERE             
    I Most everyone here
    Thinks the world of it.
    Yet here is not the world.
    That atlas speaks other climes.

    Here’s mind’s province.
    Beyond here worlds have
    No cause looking back, now
    Out there becomes then a here.
                     II
    You went east as earth turned west.
    From personal to political to spires,
    Further and higher you’ve traveled.
    What was here then, there, remains.

    Here, now, resting time, still you seek.
    Beyond circles is twisting, continuing.
    Turning what was then back, forward,
    Here returns, but not here’s beginning.

    © Edward Mycue                                    For Joseph Duemer
    I HEAR IN THE WIND
     
    I hear in the wind long-gone voices
    that knew the language of flowers
    tasted the bitter root, hoped,
    placed stone upon stone, built
    an order, blessed the wild beauty
    of this place.
    ————————————————————————————————————
    Can you hear
    in the wind whispers, crusts
    of soul-insulted soul, scattered
    ages, decided, gone yellow, thin?
    ———————————————————————————————————————
    I hear in the wind those old sorrows
    in new voices, undefeated desires,
    and the muffled advent of something I can only define
    as bright, new angels.
    ————————————————————————————————————-
    Can you hear in the wind independent people
    who never depart,
    have no time for friends,
    who want to go and want
    to stay and never decide in time?
    ———————————————————————————————————————–
    I hear in the wind old phantoms
    and the swirl of the released mustardstar
    and the cry of innocence.
    It will soon be September. 
     
    © Edward Mycue
    of  Winter
    After it is ripe, time is banished. Root
    did not eat down. Nuclear swords, dialectic
    knots hang over candidates for Alexander’s

    shoes, stare-into futures for accidents from

    yesterday’s tapestry. Rot eats down, seasons
    scatter. And we read in them, fraying. Black
    mirrors, white minutes manure to loam. Meat

    is absurd. “Of” is “from’s” motive; “what”

    is “why’s” dance. Ideas, nuclear ripe, coral
    mouthed, are blind windows. Now sit in judgment
    on the past and out of that dark doorway, remember
    now is not elsewhere, we are not ‘there’ and

    do not know an elsewhere. Now, ‘here’ is. Other

    : there where we are not. I do not know other
    than this. Other than this is not now. Now
     
    the sky begins to split open. Now sit, judge. 
    © Edward Mycue
    AMANDA
    WAS A FISHSELLER FROM KERTEMINDE.
    SHE LOVED A SAILOR. HE LOVED HER.  THEY
    WERE HAPPY TOGETHER. BUT SHE WENT TO
    COPENHAGEN.  THERE SHE MET
    STUDENTS, MEDICAL STUDENTS. SHE FELL
    INTO TROUBLES. SO SHE COULD NEVER GO BACK
    TO KERTEMINDE. 
    © Copyright Edward Mycue

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13. AL MOLINA’S TRUMPET, AT SEVEN MILE HOUSE
    A WAKE AND MEMORY, FROM A LAST CENTURY

    Dear friends come back, listen to Al Molina’s trumpet,
    to San Francisco’s bay edge, to a way station since 1853,
    still there (a jazz center now, Al and his quartet Tuesdays
    and the Dogpatch crew Sunday) where a pony express stopped

    watered, fed, stayed keeping safe nights the Seven Mile House
    along Bayshore Road on the east flank of San Francisco Bay
    this a windswept empty road at San Francisco’s southeast
    end where nowadays Brisbane begins at Geneva Avenue

    and going north from there seven miles to the Ferry Building
    and then at Mission Street hook west a mile to San Francisco Mint
    where Wells-Fargo stagecoaches would deliver precious payloads
    having earlier first pawed, paused or stayed at Seven Mile House

    delivered mail, exchanged passengers, rested exhausted horses and setting-out once again into night or dawn hooves pounding.

    (C) Copyright Edward Mycue 29 VI 23

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14. POET-HISTORIANS APPEAR TO BE A CONTRADICTION CATEGORY
    Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history
    for poetry expresses the universal,
    and history only the particular
    …Aristotle

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15. Bob Hanamura, who would have been 100, this recent last
    April 23 would remind me about the cardinal directions:
    –he had become blind and that may have shaped him–
    Bob lived on our hall around the corner just past the
    laundry room and we lived across from it, and you
    had to pass Bob’s single room apartment to get to
    the elevator and he died in January 2020 before
    Covid started. Pneumonia was later told us. I
    held him as he coughed and hacked that day.
    Even then he was a proud, elegant person
    not wanting to mess and make trouble.

    So as for being a person, I could say Bob was the great recent influence
    on me, and maybe Richard Steger as well in his way, developing myself.

    © Copyright Edward Mycue August 14, 2023 Monday 7:45AM & for Paul Kagawa his godson

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