OLIVER RICE
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CONTENTS And? 4 Haunts of the Collective Subconscious 5 Hello, Freud 6 John Henry Allenby 7 Or Comes a Knowing Sensual as Blood 8 Author Notes 9 iii
And? The triumph of poetry, said Wallace Stevens, is to obscure and reveal the heart of things almost successfully. The pity of Bubba, her cousin, says Amanda, is that the heart of things is withheld from him. The triumph. The pity. Oliver Rice 4
Haunts of the Collective Subconscious Selves disguised as common persons, alone in their heads, fully eroticized, bearing documents and bargains, advance through the foreground, facets of actuality glinting in the available light, into their own distances, peering out of the quotidian as if things intelligible have been decided, some whose stories are suspect, present fading into past seeping into present, whose alter egos lack courage, some who cannot keep the possible waiting, some who squint at the their discontents, inventing perversions, wrong to others, everything being implicated with everything. Oliver Rice 5
Hello, Freud Among the charges to the neurons, they say, is the perpetual attendance upon memory, the quantity and quality of its data intaking, evaluating, assigning, enhancing, revising, comparing, alerting the network as appropriate. This must be devitalizing. Dreaming, then, may be their recreation. Oliver Rice 6
John Henry Allenby I forget. I may have conversed with metropolitan men, with aborigines who ate missionaries in 1956, with a tailor s dummy facing the moon. I may have consulted eye-witness accounts or traveled immense distances on a schooner. Such rumors among the nomads, the refugees! What psychodramas in Cairo s alleys! The trees are reviving where the British bombed the Burmese plains. How time equivocates in its convictions. I believe I have said, I must have said, the great thing is to configure a portable world, a gestalt without eccentric localisms, valid in Florence or Calcutta. In Berlin in 1919, Anita Berger danced the coitus. I see an image of myself in a mural of the Buddhist hell. History and myth must not be confused. How contrary, thus, one might declare, is Montaigne in his reclusive tower, is Petrarch in solitude at Vaucluse, is Beckett, secluded, manic at the cottage by Ussy. As if one did not already, in the I Ching, in the Etruscan tombs, in the crevices of modernity, feel the dark agendas of the mind. So are some faces metaphysically bruised. Still, I am street smart in Babylon. Oliver Rice 7
Or Comes a Knowing Sensual as Blood They brought her into the studio, the ancient diva, given Earth, given the probabilities, hobbling on a cane with a curved handle, giggling, rolling her eyes, eroticized by the sun and the moon, seated her in an armchair with a high back, trained the lights and the cinecameras on her, mortal candors obscurely stirring, and turned on her recording of Vise d Arte from her prime, fables of grandeur loitering in the DNA. Oliver Rice 8
Author Notes Oliver Rice s poems appear widely in journals and anthologies in the United States and abroad. Creekwalker released an interview with him in January, 2010. His book of poems, On Consenting to Be a Man, is published by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. His chapbook, Afterthoughts, Siestas, and his recording of his Institute for Higher Study appeared in Mudlark in December, 2010. Oliver Rice on the Web www.creekwalker.com/oliver-rice-poet.html Oliver Rice 9