Dave Sample

8/8/2019 Dave Sample

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Daves Big Theory

The Most Important Novel of the

21st Century*

Sample Chapters Karl Felsen 2010


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Daves Big Theory

The Most Important Novel of the

21st Century*

*Written in English by a white American male over 65 with Lithuanian Galician ancestry.Really a memoir cum personal essay with novelistic trappings and gewgaws. To be listed under

non-fiction and fiction in order to increase sales.


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Daves Big Theory

Introduction

He never got to the point, this uncle of mine, Dave the sometime scholar, Dave the reader

and writer, Dave the storyteller.

He died before he ever did what he was supposed to do, whatever that was, and, as his

favorite nephew, Im left holding the notebooks and manuscripts not knowing what Im

supposed to do with them. This ticks me off because I have my own life, and I dont see why I

should get sidetracked completing his.

I loved him and I loved his stories, but he was so fractured and disjointed (or is it lazy

and disorganized I dont know the exact right words He was the wordsmith), I dont see how

Im supposed to make sense out of what he never brought into focus. He spent his life, when he

wasnt taking out the trash or emptying the litter box, shouting to the deaf and dancing for the

blind. Hed ride his hobby horses down narrow country roads, only stopping when wool

gathering was an option.

I can hear him looking over my shoulder now Watch your diction, you asshole. So

youre proud of the fact you have a Ph.D. in English. Dont rub it in the readers faces. You

ever hear of fucking Hemmingway? KISS Keep it simple stupid. And you cant hear

someone looking over your shoulder unless theyre breathing very hard. You can use the words

sense or feel, but not hear. Correcting others was one of his favorite pastimes.

He used to go on trips with his equally eccentric no, adventuresome no, Quixotic ah

yes thats the right word, but do you capitalize it or not and will they get it anyway? Does


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anybody still read Cervantes, and is it an allusion that carries any meaning today? On the other

hand, it is the perfect word, so screw it. Talk about tilting at windmills. God, this is a thankless

task. Quixotic wife. They wandered America based on two of his hobby horses.

One was Civil War battlefields. He felt this conflict was the bloody forge that took the

pig iron of the Revolution and transformed it into the stainless steel of the modern nation.

(Jesus, will you watch the diction and your overblown metaphors. Pig iron is fine, but

stainless steel is bullshit. Therere a lot of stains on America and plenty of refining yet to be

done. You could have said crude steel and I wouldnt have bitched. That whole phrase

stainless steel of the modern nation is crap. And I dont like bloody forge. Go to the Catoctin

Mountains in Maryland and you can still see a real forge that was operating during the time of

the Civil War. They were so short on workmen that they actually hired some Southern soldiers

retreating from Gettysburg.)

OK, I got it. Simple, but at the same time, I dont think I can over emphasize the

importance you placed on the Civil War. Those rows and rows of books, tapes, maps and

brochures. The lectures and programs you went to like the one with Jeff Sharra at the New

York State Archives. Your worship of the Gettysburg Address and Garry Wills analysis of it.

As you put it, the Civil War turned us into the country the founding fathers intended to create.

Now can I get back to what I was saying whatever the hell that was?

Ah, yes, the trips. So the Civil war, its battlefields and museums was one routing

parameter. The other was worse. A woman who had worked with Dave gave him a gift of

Whos Buried in Grants Tomb, a good natured guide to Presidential last words and burial plots,

by Brian Lamb and the staff of C-SPAN. Dave loved it and decided to have his picture taken at

every Presidents gravesite. This often included Presidential libraries and homes, and sometimes


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led to twofer or threefer adventures. For example, the beautiful Hollywood Cemetery in

downtown Richmond was number one on his hit parade. Go in spring when the azaleas and

dogwoods are in bloom, and there is no place more beautiful and restful on earth, he would say.

You get two Presidents (Monroe and Tyler) within a stones throw of each other. And then there

are a whole slew of Confederate generals (some 18,000 Confederates are buried there) from

Henry Heth, to John Imboden, George Pickett, Fitzhugh Lee, and good old J.E.B. Stuart. And

last, but certainly not least, tucked away in a corner in a little subdivision of its own is Jeff Davis

with his daughter Winnie and wife, Varina, resting beside him. What Dave appreciated most

about this last one is looking up across the way from Davis tomb to see there is a big monument

that just has GRANT on it. Apparently it was a loyal Southerner (Thomas Grant, I believe),

but what tickled old Dave was that Davis would lay facing for all eternity a monument bearing

the name Grant. Only Lincoln would have made it more delicious.

Shit, Im lost again. Oh yeah, the trips. So dead Presidents and the Civil War were the

lodestars with everything weird or less traveled they could find sandwiched in between.

Ill never forget how thoroughly pissed he was at Gerald Ford for not dying sooner. He

planned his grand Midwestern Presidential graves trip for the fall of 2006. Having observed

Gerry Ford going in and out and back into the hospital in California, Dave calculated the end was

near and he could safely plan a grand tour. Along with Lincoln and Garfield, McKinley and the

Harrisons, Truman and Eisenhower, Coolidge and Harding, Hayes and Hoover, they could just

make a little jog up to Grand Rapids and be done with the entire middle of the country. But

Dave had misjudged Fords competitive spirit. Ford would undergo two more surgeries and

more hospital time just to beat out Ronald Reagans record as longest surviving ex-president.

Having claimed the record (without the use of steroids as far as we know), Gerry promptly gave


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up the ghost and died. But it was a few weeks after Dave and his wife had completed their trip.

Dave raged and moaned for weeks, Now, I have to go back to fucking Michigan, and he only

calmed down when he realized he could fit in Galena, Illinois on a trip to Michigan and do a

little U.S. Grant spelunking on the way.

He believed in being as efficient as possible on his crazy wanderings. He already had

much of his trip planned for when Jimmy Carter might choose to join his equal, Jehovah, and

depart this earth. Andersonville Prison and FDRs Warm Springs are not far from Plains,

Georgia, so visions of more Civil War and Presidential meanderings danced in his head. I guess

Ill have to make this trip for him.

Besides bagging a whole shitload of Presidential graves, homes and libraries, Daves

Midwestern trip tickled him for another reason. Beginning with Lincoln, and continuing with

men like Garfield and Hayes and Grant and McKinley, it became obvious how historically the

energy and dynamism, and hence the leadership, of America had shifted from the East to the

frontier of the Midwest. Right on up to Hoover, Truman and Eisenhower, you could make and

define yourself in the newly settled middle of the country. Chicago, St. Louis, Springfield and

Cleveland must have been something a hundred and fifty years ago.

Contemplating the big historical picture didnt keep Dave from rooting around in the

silliest pop phenomena. On the Midwest trip, this included a stop at the future birthplace of

Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise in Riverside, Iowa (a granite marker in some

guys backyard), and the Colonel Sanders Museum at the KFC corporate headquarters in

Louisville (maybe he had a thing for military rank). Heading to Lincolns boyhood home, they

added Santa Claus, Indiana to the itinerary after watching the Colbert Report in the motel the

night before. Colbert actually got local adults to argue before a national audience whether they


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For Dave, the old romantic statements I have to write, or I have to paint, were true in

a way their utterers never envisioned. It wasnt just a personal addiction or a noble calling; it

was in their genes. For the sake of the species, they had to paint, sculpt, write, make music, etc.

It was coded in their genes, and not for personal fulfillment (although it could provide that) or for

spiritual reasons (although maybe the genes made it seem that way), but for utilitarian biological

reasons. He crudely put it as, Art justifies our going on. It gets the human race through the

night.

For Dave, when Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, in

1864, or Coleridge wrote his earlier poem of the same title, unbeknownst to them, it was not A

Defense of Ones Life, but rather, by biological imperative, The Justification for Our Life. Is

that Apologia Pro Vitae Nostra? I dont know from Latin reflexive pronouns. Im not sure

even Dave would have known.

So when Dave wrote a story or personal essay or memoir, he had it in his head he was

apologizing for all of us, the entire freaking human race. In his mind, he couldnt help it. He

believed he was genetically engineered to do what he had to do.

I just realized, I havent said a word about what Dave looked like. Im not sure it

matters. He looked a lot different at different times of his life. As a child he was short with no

beard and sandy red hair. But then he grew to be extremely tall, his red hair turned to light

brown, and he grew a beard in sophomore year of college and never took it off for the rest of his

life. In similar fashion, he was extremely thin when a child. His father, a doctor, made him take

an appetite enhancer a half hour before dinner so that he might put meat on his bones. After

college, he stayed at about 190 for ten years and then started gradually putting on weight. He

almost hit 300 at one point, and set about to reverse this trend by working out. He did drop some


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weight, but mostly he just put on muscle, ending up a pretty solid 270. He had a tendency to

scare small children and short women in the grocery store. Trampling was not as absurd of a

fear as you might think. In later years, he started to lose hair on top, his sideburns turned gray,

and his beard, if he didnt color it, turned snow white.

But do physical attributes really tell us much about someone? I guess they can in some

cases, but in Daves case, there was nothing extraordinary except his size. And he enjoyed being

huge because it usually meant nobody gave him any crap.

His quirks were more telling than his physical attributes. I remember he hated digital

clocks. Time does not come in discrete lumps. Its not suddenly one minute later. He loved

the sweep of the old second hand on the round face clocks in the front of every classroom when

he was growing up. Nothing gave a better sense of eternity. Around and around forever in a

continuous path. You were connected to the past and the future through that unbroken sweep. A

high school teacher warned him that digital clocks would change how people thought about time

and history, and he obsessed about it the rest of his life. He feared for all humanity and that

digital clocks would blind people to the big picture, and seduce them into picturing everything

in tiny, unrelated segments. Now some are arguing that the abbreviated, instant nature of the

internet is doing the same thing (Is Google Making Us Stoopid? The Atlantic, July/August

2008).

His concern for digital humanity was touching, but does that carry the essence of how his

life was genetically engineered for mankinds survival? I dont know. Im really out of my

depth here. I dont know exactly where he was going with the Big Theory.

On the one hand, I know Dave wanted to replace religion and spiritualism with a

biological imperative, but where would that lead. If we have no choice but to do as our genes


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have directed us for the survival of the species, why is survival the imperative? Why is it headed

in the direction it is. Is anything other than chemistry behind it? And why should chemistry and

biology have direction and impart values?

At the same time, it was easy to see religion as a biologically engineered construct to help

push the species ever forward. Do it for Gods approval. Do it to be rewarded here or in the

afterlife. Do it to become immortal and defeat death. Genes recognize good motivators and

secure them in our DNA.

Dave, who was an altar boy and very pious when young, felt religion as practiced by man

was a brilliantly silly mechanism. All you had to do was read the latest weekly child abuse news

item to put the human construct of God in its proper place. Each toddler found dead after having

been shaken, scalded, bitten, beaten and sodomized with an OCedar broom handle by a loving

parent pretty much put the notion of a benevolent or guiding master spirit out of serious

contention. At the same time, it was too bleak for most humans to just go on for the sake of

going on. So they invented faith.

Surprisingly, Dave didnt have any problem with faith. If you needed to believe in a

purpose other than just going on to allow you to keep going on, whats the harm. You could be

right; you could be wrong, but if it gets you to go on, it has done its job. No, Daves problem

was when faith was tarted up with Jesus, Yahweh, Vishnu, or Mohamed. To Dave, these

personifications represented the greatest sin, if there were something like sin. The level of hubris

and pride necessary to suggest that whatever larger purpose there might be out there would

present himself (yes, apparently divine purpose has gender) in a way that mere mortals can

decipher his every thought and intent is beyond ludicrous. Yet each religion knows what God


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thinks, knows what God wants, and can intercede with God on my behalf. To lessen and demean

any final purpose with such trivial human superiority was indeed sinful in Daves eyes.

So I dont know where Dave wants me to go with this. I dont know what he has to

defend or apologize for, or how this might help the species go on. I guess Ill just lay it out and

let you decide if there is any wisdom or value in his life and thoughts.

And so Ill start with his childhood, his years in Wellsville, New York.


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Chapter One - Wellsville, New York

Rural Eden?

Wellsville was a puzzle for Dave. It was rural 8,000 people and the biggest town in the

county. People left their doors unlocked. Still do. It was safe and nourishing. But as he grew

up, he witnessed the cracks in the crystal. Cancer still struck there. Babies could die. There was

poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction, perhaps better hidden in some ways, but there nonetheless.

There was domestic violence, child abuse, fatal car accidents, divorce, adultery, abortion, mental

illness, and all the other plagues of modern life.

On the other hand, there were the woods behind his house full of daily adventures

hunting salamanders and crayfish (called crabs in Allegany County), building lean-tos, gathering

beechnuts, wintergreen and spearmint, trapping rabbits, discovering fossils along the Girl Scout

Creek, picking raspberries. There were streams and rivers teeming with trout. There was the

best corn he would ever taste in his life. At the end of winter, there were maple trees to tap and

syrup, maple cream and maple sugar to make. There was the full goodness of the earth, both

natural beauty and bounty. There was a marvelous large light-filled library with cork floors,

children reading hours, an arrowhead collection, and all sorts of special events. There was one

movie house with a single screen which was plenty. For kids, besides school, there were paper

routes, scouts, little league baseball, midget league football, church, and most of all just being

outdoors to fill the day with activities. Later on, there would be sock hops, drum and bugle

corps, dating, hunting, fishing and finally driving to claim priorities on time.


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But as he grew up, Dave also got a closer peek at the dark side. His father, the doctor,

was also the county coroner. Dave started to accompany his father to late night calls of all sorts

and for distant summonses. Later he started driving, saving his aging father this task.

What struck him immediately was suicide. There was a hell of a lot of suicide for such a

sparsely populated area. His first suicide call stayed etched in his mind for the rest of his life.

It was a modest hillside home next to a little lake, more of a pond than a lake. A young woman

had taken a moonlight swim, returned to the house, taken off her swimming suit, reclined on her

bed, put a shotgun in her mouth and pulled the trigger. The State Police were on the scene as

Dave and his father rolled up. Dave stayed outside as his father went in to survey the body and

the situation. After about twenty minutes, his father came outside and said, Do you want to

come inside and see this?

Dave had never seen a body except retail at a funeral parlor. He immediately was

confused and terrified. Am I brave enough to look? What if I faint in front of the State

Troopers? Blood started rushing to his head. He knew he was flushed and his scalp tingled.

Please dont let me faint, he pleaded to the night as he went in. And then he saw her.

He had never seen an adult naked woman in the flesh. And there she was tan,

beautifully proportioned, and so very naked. He was embarrassed to be staring with his father

and a State Trooper standing there. His father began to explain what they had hypothesized as a

timeline and the series of actions before the womans last, but Daves hearing was impaired. All

sound was muffled as all the blood vessels in his head were swollen and pounding. He tried to

breathe deliberately and naturally. He knew he was close to passing out. At the same time, he

was drawn to the womans face which wasnt there any more. Her head was a big ragged bloody

C where her face had been. To Dave, it seemed that her head, her wound, was frozen in one


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beauty and death entwined again. Why didnt the youth and beauty outmatch or outwit death?

And by this time, Dave no longer worried about fainting or puking. He had become a practiced

observer like his father and the Troopers.

Suicide calls got to be fairly routine and prosaic. Rifles to the chest, handguns to the

head, and the good old shotgun in the mouth. Daves observations began to expand. One older

woman (clothed) did a job much like the young woman at the lake (Allegany County women in

the old days were definitely tougher than their national counterparts, preferring firearms to

pills.). The body was crumpled on the bed, but a good bit of her head was embedded in the

white ceiling. Dave could see bits of her crinkly back and gray hair pinned against the white

canvass with lead pellets, along with bits of brain and skin. Looking up, Daves recurring

thought was, Who the hell cleans up this sort of shit? Who scrapes brain and hair and skin from

the ceiling? Who washes it off and repaints it? I mean, Christ, are they in the yellow pages?

Under what? How do you find them?

Not as profound as the dance between beauty and death, but worth a few moments of

reflection. Is there a career in death sanitation? How do they introduce themselves at a party?

Do those companies on TV offering restoration services after a flood, fire or other emergency,

also erase the final screams of suicides?

Coroner calls, other than suicide, could be traumatic as well. A teenage girl burnt to a

contorted cinder had a haunting scream and death over youth and beauty quality all its own.

There was always a scream. Death saw to that. But at times there was macabre humor as well.

At one scene Dave was glad that he decided not to get out of the car after driving his father. It

involved a 50-year old man who had been dead for three days. He died of natural causes, a heart

attack, but with the bizarre precipitator of having a vacuum cleaner nozzle attached to his penis.


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When told this on the drive home, Dave kidded his father with the potential commercial

exploitation possibilities. Dad, was it a Hoover, Electrolux, what? Imagine the testimonial

possibilities. Guaranteed to outlast you. Or, maybe something along Timexs Takes a licking

and keeps on ticking tagline.

It wasnt just the unvoiced screams of self-inflicted death that shattered the idyllic

silence. One time on vacation from graduate school, Dave ran into an old grade school classmate

who had returned home to teach at a school in an even more rural outlying town. She recounted

that her biggest frustration was the length of time it had taken her to get the school district to

intervene in the case of a student of hers being sexually abused by her father. This guy has

fucked all of his five children boys, girls it doesnt matter to him. And the school has known

about it for years. Dave wondered why this hadnt been one of the coroner calls? Here at last

was a good and noble use for a shotgun. Evil lives and beauty dies.

But you would be wrong to think that Dave soured on his rustic beginnings. He loved the

warmth, the closeness to nature, the quiet beauty all around him. He wrote poems about

Wellsville, and though a bit romantic, they accurately reflected Daves feelings for his rural

nesting place.

He left me all of his poetry, and I dont know what to do with it. He used to tell me that

poetry was dead, but then again hed recite Tennysons Ulysses to me from memory and say

now theres (emphasizing the theres) a reason to go on living. So current poetry was dead, but

poetry of the past still goes on living, and, in fact, could give Dave a reason for living. Now how

do I make sense of that?

He would lecture me on why poetry was dead. He claimed that poetry began as rhythmic

speech meant to pass on important stories, explain why we should persevere or go on, and to


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show off skills that would attract the ladies. This became embedded in our genes and ended up

early on producing epic poetry (the stories and why to go on) and love poetry (the mate and why

to go on). But modern poetry has wandered so far away from rhythmic speech and so far away

from the early uses for that rhythmic speech that in no longer appeals to anything genetically

innate in us. It has become a dry intellectual exercise (kind of like abstract expressionism or

conceptual art) that only appeals to the mind and thus only to a tiny tribe of egg heads.

If you have any doubts, Dave would say, look at the popularity of Rap music. This is

rhythmic speech that plays on the origin of poetry, and the masses love it and innately recognize

it as something that speaks directly to them.

Come to think of it, all of his poetry was done while he was young. I think he gave up on

it when he was older and had time to write. Much of his stuff seems to be connected to either

youth or Wellsville which may be saying the same thing two different ways.


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Chapter Two

Songs to the Deaf

As near as I can tell, Dave wrote all his poetry before he was 25. At one time I think he

envisioned himself as a poet and that writing would be his lifes work. The potential for poetry

to communicate in useful and powerful ways seemed at least remotely possible. School children

were still drilled in memorizing poems (Joyce Kilmers Trees a perennial favorite), and most

magazines and newspapers still printed poems. Young lovers still wrote poems to each other.

High school and college students still read Shakespeare. And even the beat generation had

Ferlinghetti and later Ginsberg.

Dave wasnt entirely oblivious to the death throes of poetry. I detect several recurring

themes in his poems. Most are what you would expect and extremely straightforward: the sheer

exuberance of youth, young love, and the role of poetry and elders in the passing down of

knowledge. Later on he gets more complicated with death challenging youth and the desire to

continue, to go on. Death challenges love, and death challenges whether poetry can still be of

any help in helping us make it through the night.

A year or so after Dave graduated from college, at the invitation of an old professor, he

went out to Asilomar California for the California Writers Conference. Noted poet Paul Engle

was the poet in residence (the Paul Engle that Sylvia Plath spoke so highly of). After reading

the poems that had been submitted for the conference, Engle took Dave aside. Very bluntly he

said, There are two poets at this conference, and youre one of them. He then said, I want

you to get your poems together, do the revisions we discuss, and enter the Yale Young Poets

Award competition.


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directly engaged with society, they were an important temporal glue that joined the past with the

future.

Now poetry tends to be about the individual, the poet him or herself, alone and outside of

society. Poetry is now a vestigial language, a useless organ kind of like the appendix. People

are vaguely aware it is there, but no one knows or cares what its purpose is. Its a buggy whip

factory with a few old faithful retainers still hand crafting cowhide whips for the mule drivers

towing barges along the long-abandoned Erie Canal. Some want to modernize the factory and

bring in machinery to produce 8-track tapes.

So on to Daves poetry which still had a glimmer of life when it was written.

I mentioned different themes that recur, and one is the simple exuberance of youth. I like

this one for capturing that feeling.

Salad Days

I picked the day,Gathered tree and rock

A grain of sandDrop of sea

Served it freshAnd ate it all myself.

Simple, but I like it. It doesnt matter that the term salad days was already an

archaic term for youth when Dave wrote this. It works without the pun. But then again, since

people still read poetry from previous centuries, I think Dave expected that readers would know

the term from previous exposure in other poems.

Come to think of it, this fits with Daves later theory about the death of poetry.

When people stopped being steeped in the poetry of the past, the modern poet lost an historic

vocabulary. No longer could the poet expect the reader to be familiar with Milton, Shakespeare,


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and Tennyson, or Homer and Virgil for that matter. So allusions and references, together with

centuries ofmind-crafted vocabulary, became unavailable for use.

Still, I like the exuberance of this short poem. Young people discovering the

world are selfish and rushed. Old people savor the world. They know they are checking out

soon. Youth gobbles everything up almost indiscriminately with the attention span of a

nanosecond. Thats the way it has always been and always will be. The poem has to be short.

Another short poem has that same youthful exuberance:

I Love to Laugh

I love to laugh, love, and liftMy eyes to suns before unseen,Let my hair turn, tangle, and toss

In the sun-sifted wind,Let my feet find some wondering way

Among, between, or in the many mazes,Let myself feel, find, and feed

Till I am made whole and more.

Two other Wellsville poems illustrate Daves fascination with the tribal transference of

knowledge from one generation to the next. For him, there were two means of intergenerational

communication of tribal truths: poetry and the village elders.

The Widow Paddock

Yes sir, I found him in that very chairYou're sittin in;All hunched over.I called Doc Thompson,But he was already gone.He went just like that.While I was out in the kitchenMaking one of those maple sugar-frosted cakesYou like so much.

Fifty-two years we'd been married;It'd of been fifty-five years come May;But there he was right in that very chair.


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Mr. Sample down the streetDied that same week;He used to come visit quite often.My nephew, Ralph, died that year too.We had a green Christmas the year before;

Well, like they say "GreenC

hristmas, full graveyard.Yes sir, right in that very chair.

Paul Engle wanted Dave to lose the last line of this poem, but Dave declined. He said it

wasnt so much that the phrase nicely bracketed the poem, but rather that it was truer to the way

old women in Western New York spoke and told stories. They repeated for punctuation

purposes, a kind of reemphasis of what they were telling you was so, was the truth.

Another example:

On Being Instructed in the Genealogies of the Families of WellsvilleNew York by an Old Woman of My Acquaintance

I think there were two. . .A tall one. . . .Well, maybe there was onlyNo. No. Two.Yes, Im quite sure,One married a Simmons girl,Some problem with one of the children. . .Diabetes or heart or something.I think it was a Simmons girl. . .Yes, Yes. Two. I remember now,But I forget their names.

The recitation of relationships by old women used to fascinate Dave. Often he had no

idea who the hell they were talking about. But greet an old woman on the sidewalk heading

down the hill on a nice summers day in Wellsville, and a half an hour later you would possess a

wealth of information on births, deaths, marriages, graduations, business adventures, new jobs,

new arrivals in town, illnesses, and how it used to be (almost always better than it was now).


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Dave sensed he was taking part in a ritual, but he wasnt sure what it was about or why it

existed.

Come to think of it, young Dave was pretty clueless about a lot of things, and only

vaguely sensed the import of various occurrences. Love was no exception.

To Twos

1 + 1 = 2 and there is no 2Except, of course, in imaginary systems.Twos are made up of onesYet they cant be rooted or divided,Or divided they cant be twos but two ones,And two ones can rarely be added together

Without making a twoEspecially in the real number system.And so it is with her and me,An imaginary two of real onesPerhaps to become a real twoOf imaginary ones.

Paul Engle particularly liked this poem and its playful math puzzle and imagery, but

Dave did not share his enthusiasm. He felt it was far too cerebral and bordered on the cute more

than the serious. Dave expressed the exact same sentiments in a much more down to earth poem:

To Amy

We only touch for seconds,Momentary sparks of meaning,Flashes on understanding,Struggling like pioneersWith flint and tinder.Delicate wispsWith the promise of fire,Slight beginningsWith the promise of light and warmth;Kindling quickly consumedUnless fed with new fuel.For now,We only touch for seconds;For now, it is enough,But not for long.


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I tend to agree with Dave. Although I dont think this second poem is wholly successful

and the pioneer image may be a bit strained, I like this more direct, honest approach at

questioning how love flares up. In a poem more about sex than love, Dave ties together his

youthful innocence and zeal, the setting of Wellsville, and his first tentative explorations of love

all in a humorous, frothy confection that brings a smile of joyful remembrance.

I Never Knew

I guess I always had trouble figuring out adults;Kids always do.One thing I could never understand was adult likings.Take food. Caviar, too salty;

But all I heard was, You must cultivate a taste for it.Gin and tonics the lime, the gin much too bitter.Plain vanilla ice cream with at most a cherry on top.Where were the rivers of chocolate syrup slowly flowingOver a rock bed of peanuts. . . then maybe a cherry.They even liked Christmas cookies plain; no inch ofFrosting, sugar crystals, and burning candy hearts.And whenever they ate, they smoked,The men with their big cigars, women with their cigarettes.They never tried to explain to me; I guess I was too young.

Then last summer I was standing by the peanut mans stand;He had popcorn (always with extra butter) and cotton candy.The smells around his little stand captured the breeze.Thats why when I saw some golden cotton candy hangingIn the air, I figured it must of come from his stand;But he never made gold cotton candy, yellow yes,But never gold, and it was shining.I tasted. . . good, so good;But there was more;A lime scent drew me lower,There was lime mixed with body gin, so intoxicating,Bitter yes, but so, so good,And then to complement the bitternessA sweet scent drew me to cool vanilla mouth and cherry lip.I kneaded naked dough, baked over a open fire,And tasted.And then I understood.I never knew they ate and drank and smokedBecause they could not have cotton candy


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All the time.

For all his eagerness and bravado, sex and love seems to have not gone smoothly for

Dave. Theres a confusion and frustration that sets in:

Dream

Silver zipperedfleshly nylonedcurve of salty sweatscentI want

Deeply satinedfreely loosed

elastic touchof softI want

Tamely wantonmusky pressof youI want

Airy thoughtednimbled nothingmyth ofwhat I wantI have.

Some of the same images of the previous poem, but this time in abbreviated amorphous

form and with a disappointing outcome. The confusing, questioning connection between sex and

love continues:

She Seemed So YoungShe seemed so young,But really only a few years younger than myself;That would make her nineteen;But she made me feel like such an old manTo be the first to chap her lips from kissing.

And her eyes, childs eyes, that seemed to gaze in meAnd through me;


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Her baby cheeks and thin golden hair,The clutch of an about to be abandoned child,Yet the warmth of a woman,And her eyes again with their questions.

Dont look at me.I go to confession only in a darkened box;Dont ask me such questions.Kiss me again with your never quite again so soft lips;And do not worry about the difference in our ages,For I may soon grow younger,And you will soon be older.

This confusion about love continues but starts to look to poetry for some answers,

meeting with no success:

Whats This Wine

Whats this wine they speak of,These poet lovers?What are these mirror eyes, these pools, deep wells?What is this incense to smellAnd these red gems to kiss?What are these transported soulsDivinely mixed?

I have felt the rub of flesh,And tasted salt of tears and sweat;I have known the moist of deep meetingOf hard and soft,I have joyed with herIn all we wereAnd all we came to be,What more could any two have done?

And yet still I ask,What is this wine they speak of?

There are a number of echoes of his earlier love/sex poems with the tastes of sex, the

mystery of two becoming one, but this time he refers back to the poetry of the 16th, 17

thand 18

th

centuries. He basically asks, What the hell were those guys writing about? Hes done the

whole love bit, but he has never been transported the way Shakespeare or Donne were. Has he


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missed something or was all that passion back then just dishonest romantic posturing? Can love

be truly intoxicating, even spiritual, or is the salty rub of flesh the honest reality? Can a lovers

eyes truly be windows on the soul, or is there no mathematical or romantic trick to make one out

of two? He asks these questions in this poem, and answers definitely in a later one:

Modern Love(And as it Always Was)

Since poetry of love is not allowed,Ill write of painThat always lurks behind the love.For what is love but something to be lost,Else never grasped or understood.

The poems of it never do define,Nor song or painting approximate,Analysis is cold and dumb;The only knowerThe ragged soul that seeks its other halfIn half a hope to make a breathing whole.

By now, in a totally self-contradictory way, he uses a poem to dismiss artistic attempts

(including poetry) to explain love. The concept of loss enters, and, in fact, he claims love can

only be fully appreciated after it has ended, I suppose when you are no longer intoxicated.

Modern psychology has also been added and dismissed. But perhaps what strikes me the most is

the reduction of his earlier mathematical formula. Before we had two ones uniting in some sort

of magical, undividable two. Now we have two halves, and ragged, non-mathematical halves at

that, having only a 50-50 chance of uniting in a breathing whole.

The concept of loss seems to grow in his poetry, sometimes even connecting love

with the ultimate loss of death:

Its Not Long Since She Went Off

Its not long since she went offAnd died without my consent.Oh, she went away with my blessing;


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She had found what we call true love.That was well and good,And I was happy for her;As much as one could be

Seeing as how I had lost her.And I knew she was dying.But fact and foreknowledgeAre so far apart.I suppose I will never forgive herFor the wound she has opened upWithin me.

I saw her, touched her young body and mind,And all the time it was nothingnessQuickly drawing awayC

ausing a rift in me never to be healed.You see, she told me. . . by accidentConfided in me,And from that time onWhen I crushed her beauty to meI held death;I took my pleasure, my joy, with death,And would gladly do so again,And will gladly do so again;Yet, now, I will always have her knowledgeNo matter whom I hold. . . .Her awesome knowledge, her love, her beauty,She left so much to me,But like her, I was quickly drawing away.

No. I suppose I will never forgive herFor dying.

Dave would never tell me who this woman was. He would only say, She didnt die, you

know. She went on to become a lawyer, a very successful entertainment lawyer out in

California. Dave would never explain the misunderstanding hell, misunderstanding? he

thought she was dying. Hed just laugh. He said he knew of two friends who called off

weddings when old girlfriends called with stories of terminal cancer and a desperate need for last


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minute comfort. He said it didnt matter. Dave insisted that even if the dying was fake, the

concept of us all being in the grip of death no matter how alive was the basic human truth.

I have to chuckle, because later in life, he used to love slipping in the phrase, Life will

be the death of all of us, into all sorts of conversations. I guess its true, but the humorous way

Dave said it took all the sting out of it. Somehow he grew to accept loss as he aged.

Perhaps my favorite love poem of Daves -- I take that back -- Im not sure it is a love

poem, but it combines the concepts of love, loss and poetry in one short piece:

To Emily Dickinson

My life has never stopped before,Merely stumbled once or twice,As soon the pain was measured outResumed its walk again.

But being wise by yearsAnd fallen fresh with loss,Ill take a cowards rest awhileTil loneliness compels.

It figures that Dave would salute Emily Dickinson. One of his favorite poets, she knew

about loss. How far Daves youth has progressed. Now, instead of seizing the day, embracing

love and life, he hides like a coward, and only seeks love when the pain of loneliness finally

outweighs the pain of loss in his memory. A very similar journey happened with his view of

poetry.

In a poem Paul Engle was also very partial to, Dave kind of summed up his journey into

adulthood:

The Skeleton Man

The skeleton man, he was not always so;Once a flesh and blood boy from a flesh and blood townWhere the poet says he sang his didnt and danced his did,Slept his days and sunned his nights,


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Loved his love and feared his fright,And growing his grew, passed into school.

He read his Jean-Paul Camus and Lord Byron Blake,And studied the great Aristophocles

Treatise on Demockery.He no longer sang his didnt or sunned his nights,Loved his love and feared his fright,But knowing his knew, passed out of school.

Then the half youth became a wish and myth spirit,The long-haired, serious, comical kind,And with poetry wretched in meter and rhymeAnnounced a mission of love; andPlucking his instrument, preparing to singThought that God was his g(uitar) string.

And though deaths far away, though still very young,They call him the happy skeleton,For he thinks a smile and wears a grim,Knowing well what he has lost,And hoping what hell never win.

OK, a little self-indulgent, but I love the way he refers to Wellsville as a flesh and blood

town. He disparages his own poetry, but once again he does it in a poem. He now connects

death and loss to life and youth. He has obviously lost the innocence and exuberance of

Wellsville, and has real doubts whether he will ever see validation as a poet.

I detect this suspicion that life is as much about death and loss as love and achievement

not only very early in his poetry, but if you can believe the following poem, very early in his

youth.

Elms Arent Climbn Trees

Elms arent climbn trees, you know,And so they dont mean much to me,But this one had a family of Baltimore orioles;So when the men working for the villageCame to cut down our elm with their power saws,I ran out to watch.


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They said it had Dutch Elm disease.

It did have a lot of dead limbs,And not half as many leaves as it used to;Besides the starlings were chasing the orioles away,

So I suppose it had to go.The village man was nice.He had a limp. And he knew my father,So I suppose he didnt mind me asking questions.He told me that the roots deep in the ground stretch outJust as far as the longest branch sticks in the air.It made me think about that poem in school,You know, the one about a tree being a personLifting its hands to God.Its funny to think that as much as

We lift ourselves up and go up in the air,We gotta be stuck in the groundAnd covered over with dirt and everything.

What a marvelous antidote to the sugary claptrap of Joyce Kilmer. This kid rings true.

He has some marvelous youthful priorities as to what makes which trees valuable, and he has

some simple basic observations and questions. Kind of like, Hey, Mr. Kilmer why didnt you

tell me about Dutch Elm disease and death, and why didnt you tell me that as much as we can

soar, we human have to be mired in dirt and darkness? This has the charm of the flesh and

blood town of Wellsville along with the growing awareness of loss and the first seeds of the type

of questioning that leads to knowledge and truth.

In a very different poem with an older voice, this same mixing of the charm of Wellsville

with the questioning of loss and death shows up:

Ponchs Calendar

To most people he was just Ponch,Bald headed, fat, and full of war stories,But he was always Adolph to us(His given but hidden name)For whom he always had butterscotch candy andAfter we grew up, ten-cent White Owls;


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But Adolph or Ponch or whoever he wasDied last year.

The calendars printed for his grocery storeAs ads, with color pictures of

Western New York winter, spring, summer, fall,And Ponchs Red & White Store inBig red letters under each photoKept him alive for awhile But I threw out most of Adolph or Ponch or whoever he wasOn December 31st.

Dave told me that he wished he had saved Ponchs calendar. He knew it would be futile,

and it certainly would get tossed when he died, if not before. But with almost anger in his voice

he told me that such a warm, jolly life-force as Ponch should never be allowed to be forgotten.

Headstones, yellowing obituaries, aging photographs, none of it stops someone from being

forgotten. I thought Id write a poem and see how Sisyphus felt, Dave volunteered with the

anger gone and a smile returning.

I never realized how closely Daves poetry and his life developed completely in tandem

with the same questions, doubts, bravado, fears, enthusiasms and resignation rising and blending

into what would be the person I knew fully formed as an adult. Sometimes he could be

downright melodramatic:

The Clippings on the Wall

Ive put clippings on you,Photographs, and English prints,An old map of the Mar del Nort,Two originals one by my motherAnd one by a California artist,A special No Parking signFor Lyndon Johnsons inauguration,And even a ludicrous stickerAdvertising May Day in Los Banos;Ive piled stacks of books against you,My books, all in an attempt to make youMy walls but still you just stare.


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And if I cannot make evenYour Lilliputian area mineBy covering your sterile brownish-pinkWith my mementoes,How shall I seize the universe,

Which surely I was bornTo place my clippings upon.

Dave had a great idea and a good start. His very specific catalogue of the feeble efforts

we make to project ourselves, our egos, our personalities onto our surroundings works well. But

then this poem begins to go south when he stops describing and starts philosophically whining.

Hes got a point. Its very hard to develop a recognizable, comfortable sense of self, let along

make a mark in the world. OK, but show us in your imagery; dont clobber us with your petulant

complaint. In a much more successful poem, Dave tackles a closely related theme, but now

seems at peace with the lifelong struggle to assert yourself.

The Tipping of the Tea

One, more definitely, I,Sits in a room,More particularly, my room,Surrounded by walls,More precisely, four walls,And tips his cup of tea;Not to drink, you understand,But just to pass time,The time I have in abundance,My life, in other words.Tea comes right to theEdge of the cup before spilling,But, of course, you already knew that.Spilling, of course, it stains.

I suppose one shouldnt playWith his tea in such a fashion,But having drunk a cup of childhood,Sufficient amounts of school, pimplesPabulum, poems, peas, and parents,In particular, nothing that is


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Come, it will not take long.But I said I could not go,For even as a child I knew,Happiness is never given,Seldom won, and never kept.

Or he could use impressionistic colors and poetic dabs of mixed senses to explore the

same theme:The Colors of My Life

Orange glows the soundOf years not yet ash,Soft blows the blueOf eyes not yet found,Warm grows the red

Of dreams not yet dreamed,While silent is the paleOf a life never whole.

Or he could use realism and true colors:

Reflection

I saw the motley ghost of time last night,Dingy grays of barroom walls,Pale foam flecks and jaundiced ale,Ratty blacks and sickly blues,Retch spattered bile of too much wine,Faded haze of cigarettes,Tired dark and worn out light.Absent,The bright pastels of life;Locked away.Saved for all the blazing thoughtsOf what I might have done.

Or he could combine all of these in a straightforwardly titled poem:

Upon Leaving Youth

There was no river Styx or lake of fireWhen I saw hell the other day;A what-difference-does-it-make skyFogged against the window


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Muffling sounds that cant be heard,As I looked for what cant be seen,And tried to touch what wasnt there;And feared I never wasAnd am not now

And may not ever be.These are all interesting and decent poems, but I think his best work was when he went at

things obliquely and didnt announce so directly what he was doing. Dave could be a bit preachy

and too philosophical. Heres a great example where less is more:

I Killed a Toad Today

I killed a toad today;

I didnt mean to,But there he wasCut to rotary pieces before I ever saw him.Baby toad legs and eyesScattered all over hell.

Why sorrow for a toad thatEats flies and pisses on your hand?Perhaps just because toads eat fliesAnd not each other,And piss on strangers only out of instinctive fear,Not after thinking it over.

Who would have thought that the simple boyhood task of mowing the lawn could have

provided Dave a chance to reflect on what he was learning about life as he grew up.

Dave deployed a similar varied arsenal when he addressed poetry and his growing

awareness that it was fading in its ability to make a difference. He loved it, but felt more and

more it was drifting from any relevance. He could approach this humorously and historically:

The Sphinx

The Sphinx had a riddle,Answerable once in lofty Greek hexameter;Now we merely say:Man,


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Sired, mired, tired.

In an earlier version of this poem, Dave had put something clever about after so many

heroic but incestuous coupling. Clever yes, but Im glad he took it out. This way the shrinkage

of our poetry is immediately and physically evident. For a seemingly different tack in saying the

same thing, take a look at this one that is full of 17th

century words and concepts. But you can

substitute the Greek hexameter for the equally no longer read Miltonic poetry, and, minus the

humor, really have the same poem.

Miltonic Musings

Musing late in somber mood,Over the loss of woodnotes wild,Over the loss of primrose paleNature pied and freshets wideOne feels only melancholy.

We have no king, no court, no God,No universe of magic spheres;And yet we know that we are right;The crystal spheres did never chime,And king and tyrant were equal names.

These things are gone and good;But why also has left our verse?Our pens are surgeons blades gone dull,We only cut who mean to mendAnd make a wound we would have healed;And we, least of all, comprehendOr know the reason why.

But I notice one thing that Dave couldnt dismiss or disguise when he was young and in

his poem-writing phase. No matter how much he sensed that poetry was dying or at least

enfeebled and headed in the wrong direction, he held out hope for it. Sometimes its a weak or

forlorn hope, but its there nonetheless. It could be cute and cerebral:


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I love how the poet becomes a loud, taunting child at the end of the poem. It is rather

obvious too that Dave has come to link childhood and poetry together. It suggests that there will

be no poetry for the modern adult. But at least Dave will try to defy what is happening.

In another humorous poem about youth and poetry and the loss of potency in the modern

world, Dave turned to a modern poet.

To e. e. cummings in a Dejected Moo

At times my lifereminds me of a miscarrying cow;Painful bloody laborresulting in a half-formed fetus

that has to be yanked outwith a hook and chainand thrown away;A total loss for heifer, calf, and farm.

Like the old farmer says,Thats what you get for usingartificial insemination.I guess only a few old farmers, bulls, and poetsStill know how to hump a cow.

Even if you dont know cummings poem that explains how to hump a cow, you still

get the sense that while the secrets of poetic procreation are being lost, there are a few poets left

who are true to the old ways. In a final poem, whose final line is a bit too melodramatic for my

tastes, you get Daves final withering hope that poetry may be of some service. In the end, I

think the title says it all, and points to the impossibility of Dave sustaining the illusion of being a

poet.

Whispers to the Deaf

Im asked why poets write of beauty or its lack,Always rosebuds, daffodils, or gossamer candy cotton skies,Otherwise, gnarled hands, twisted trees,Death.


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Perhaps because they have and lack;Carefully twisted, beautifully gnarled, untouchedWell pruned souls,Clearly confused,And knowing they must shout

Deafening whispers,Whispers to the deaf,Or die.


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Chapter Three

The Dream Game

Im not sure exactly how it fits in or how what influenced what, but at the same time

Dave was writing his poetry, he was developing something he called the dream game.

Not really a dream or a vision. More of a mental toy, a catnip filled cloth mouse that

seized his thoughts as he drifted off to sleep or lay awake some mornings before getting out of

bed. Dave couldnt remember when it started. His best guess was in or soon after college.

In the beginning the thoughts were always about Hiroshima. Later he would try

Nagasaki because he liked the name and knew so little about it.

The game began with Hiroshima and pondering what individuals were doing before the

bomb went off. A nanosecond before incineration, what were the individuals of Hiroshima

thinking or doing? He soon dropped what they were thinking. It didnt seem worthwhile

pursuing who was happy or sad, who had just laughed. It eventually settled on what they were

actually doing.

Dave rejected any romantic action as too maudlin and simplistic. He didnt want to think

about anyone writing a poem, making love, or giving birth. He preferred everyday actions, the

more mundane the better. He worked it out over time. He eventually settled on shining shoes

and washing cars, although occasionally some other form of cleaning or even cooking might

show up unexpectedly in his thoughts.

Perfecting the game took years. Dave never bothered to research Hiroshima. He didnt

even know what time of day the bomb hit. Nevertheless, historical accuracy played a major

contradictory role in the game. While he was uninterested in the big picture, he could luxuriate


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for sleepy minutes on whether they wore shoes in Hiroshima, and, if so, whether shoe polish

would have been available in wartime. The same with the washing of cars. Were there many

cars? Would water and soap have been rationed? Or, were cars, water, and soap still available to

the wealthy, and so should he envision a servant as the car washer? Yes, a servant was better. He

was serious about these details, but there was never a need to answer his questions or verify his

vision.

Similarly, over years he perfected the internal timing of his dreams. In the early days, the

Hiroshima actors could be at any stage of performing their polishing or washing. Later on, they

could not be in the midst of any chore. They had to have just completed the act. Daves mind

insisted on this completion even though the act was trivial.

I could never figure out this last complication. Obviously, his mind meant it to be ironic

completion just before the unexpected big violent completion but wouldnt irony have been

better served by a noble, grand or beautiful act? Maybe polishing your shoes takes more faith in

the future than painting a painting or making love. Im not sure what Daves mind was telling

him.

I do know from his notebooks that he fleshed his dream out with early experiences from

his own childhood. He grew up in the atomic age, and there were regular duck and cover drills

at school or practice evacuations to the bomb shelter basement. The black and yellow fallout

shelter signs were evident of the most substantial buildings in the town. Dave had even surveyed

the basement at home, stocking jugs of water and items to cover the basement windows with

when the attack came.

Very late in life, Daves semi consciousness found itself able to incorporate newer

catastrophes into the game. The tsunami at Banda Aceh became a nighttime visitor. Initially,


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Dave actually met Joyce Carol Oates once. He was surprised she was petit, very thin and

dressed all in black. She was so small but she had such a volcano inside of her. Dave talked to

her about the fork and about the similarity in some of her violent rape and murder scenes. Dave

asked where all that explosive, unexpected violence came from. Oates answered that she wasnt

sure but that you have to get what you most fear in your dreams out. Its the only way to deal

with it. That black clad pixie knew more about natural born killers than Quentin Tarantino could

hope to know.

Dave didnt tell her about his game, but he realized her writing was just a more

sophisticated and public version of it. How the near nightly game affected Daves personality I

dont know. I think it made him both more and less serious at the same time. Its kind of like

the dark humor in John Irvings novels. You can engage in life with your whole being. Just be

aware that the Undertoad is waiting to silently, unexpectedly drag you under and there is

absolutely nothing you can do about it. Its like all those 17th

Century Dutch and Flemish

paintings of food. Amidst the bounty theres always a deaths head hiding or a bit of rot

beginning on the meat or fruit. Memento mori, the wheel of fate, were supposed to direct

your attention to god. Oates and Irving are in a long tradition. Its just that god isnt in the

picture anymore.

Dave was working on incorporating the Haitian earthquake into his nightly voyage when

he died. He was toying with a number of scenarios.

As with Banda Ache, he went a little too absurdist at the start. The day before the quake

he had watched a PBS report on Haiti, focusing on Haitis emerging textile and clothing

industry, and saying that for the first time in Haitis modern history, there was a sense of hope in


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the country. Investors and jobs from all over the world were pouring in and this basket case of

the Caribbean had it last and best hope to climb out of poverty and failure.

Since the PBS report featured a young woman at a sewing machine in one of Haitis new

factories, Dave, at first, cleverly decided that they were making socks. After the quake, the

tsunami of amputations caused sock orders to drop by half, so the girl was making a sock that

would never be sold.

But then reality (?) or something akin to historical accuracy entered the discussion. First,

the factory was probably destroyed. Second no one had money to buy socks in Haiti either

before or after the quake. Undoubtedly, 99 percent of sock production, if there had ever been

any, was intended for export to places where amputations were not taking place on a wholesale

level.

This took days of sorting out and evaluating, and after eventually rejecting sock

production, Dave settled on someone repairing a small crack in a wall. The spackling had just

dried and been sanded in expectation of painting.

Oddly enough the dream game didnt result in despair although it easily could have.

Instead, it cautioned Dave that there were unknowable, unstoppable, unreasoning random forces

out there that can end life, destroy possessions, and erase accomplishments. Your job is to

humbly go on in the face of all this knowing that your efforts, your life may all be for naught, but

that this is the part millions of years of adaptation and evolving biology have prepared you for.

You may get squashed like a bug on lifes windshield, but together will find ways to keep going

on.

So Dave looked for something beyond poetry to provide his meaningful contribution to

going on.


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Dave Sample