POETRY BYJOESPH DUEMER
TALKING TO GHOSTS
For Ronald Johnson
I am sorry you did not
live to see
the century dissolve
& the work of language we are pleased to call
the millennium fssst out
like a cigarette tipped
into a beer bottle, or a star.
You didnÕt mean
to be a teacher, but you got the job & we hardly
understood you.
You knew Blake & understood
his systems
not like a scholar
with an armload of dictionaries--though you loved dictionaries--
but as a believer, which
is to say an apostate
for you had your own
elaborate system of belief in language--the boat
we fill with provisions
& in which we set ourselves
adrift. The map is not
the territory
though the map itself can be an object of desire.
We talked one afternoon
about the war--Westmoreland had raised a village
named Ben Suc that morning
(while we had been listening to music)
tucked in a bend of the
Saigon River & it was you who noted
for my benefit
that the Vietnamese word for River is song; such
correspondences
donÕt mean a thing, we know--& I learned this year
it is pronounced
more like psalm. You would have loved that fact
as a minute particular.
What infuriated you was the inept use of metaphor
recorded in the papers.
I wonÕt repeat the stupid phrases in your poem . . .
It is a country where people
talk to ghosts & for that
reason has less fear
of history than we have here where we are anxious
to keep what we have.
A recent map suggests the
village of Ben Suc
is still there
in the bend of the river despite the best efforts of
our language to end it.
MAGICAL THINKING:
WHAT COUNTS AS EVIDENCE
"Our duty is to
think, not to dream."
-Van Gogh
When the police &
prosecutors couldn't
find any evidence
that the man they had
in custody for the crime
of raping & murdering
the little girl, they put
down in their notes
that he had told them
a dream with details
"only the killer could know"
& thus moved into
the realm of the biblical.
Where did the meaning
of Pharaoh's dreams reside
when he told them
to his servant Joseph?
In whose mind?
They were making
a claim about knowledge
& were thus philosophers
though later accounts
call into question the relation
between their sworn
sentences & what we are
pleased to call the facts
of the case & whose existence--
however contingent--
is presumed to be a quality
of the world external
to the policemen's selves.
They were bad philosophers
even if they were good
storytellers. That is where
language enters the picture.
They had a story they
liked & were reluctant
to give up. And so they
said it was a dream
which is the kind of story
no one can argue with
because dreams come
to us-we do not call them
which is what gives
them their power
to enlighten & confuse
the facts, by which we mean
those things that lie outside
our selves. Those
important things insisting
we are not dreaming
but living here, now.
Joseph Duemer lives
with his wife Carole and four dogs in South Colton, New York.
He has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is an Associate
Professor
of Humanities at Clarkson University, where he teaches creative writing,
literature, and humanities. He has more publications to his name
than we have bytes in our hard drive, and is poetry editor of
The Wallace Stevens Journal
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