from Carmen Perpetuum: Notes on Rhythm, Voice, and Light
From a talk delivered at Colorado State University: The Creative Writing Series, February 19th, 2026.
This is a talk about
vortices. It’s about flowing water. It’s about a boy and his father alone on a
hilltop, where they encounter an immense blue light. It’s about the death of
the father many years later. It’s about the poem as a form made of intersecting
vortices of sound, light, voice, and song, a mixture of impulses that appear in
ink with life expanding before and beyond the marked page. Think of received
stories and compressed layers of memory. Think of warm days under heavy oaks,
and narrow interior blinds. Think of violence and thrills in a Hollywood
western. Think of the journey of dying inside a wider swath of deathless breath
conveyed across generations, in moments alone in a coffee shop reading a book
of poems, absorbed, astonished, even bored.
Think of a song in the absence of voice. Think of soft denim and worn cotton shirts. Think of a boat motoring slowly to a pier, revolving layers of water turning faster. Think of dim light in a room with the sound of breath and extreme wide shots of Monument Valley. It is a dissonant moment where the matter-of-fact process of dying involves an intensive overlapping of narratives. A story of a man with a gun and glint in his eye. A man as white as Melville’s whale.
To see what appears, a self-contained region in a larger rhythm. It’s not separate from me, but is liquid, and it bubbles or froths with sound and light. It’s not a fishing trip. It’s not a visitation of light. It’s not peace for any kind of otherness. A man, a former Confederate soldier, walks to the doorway entrance to embrace a woman. It’s 1956, so the sand is toxic, and Navajo actors pretend to be Comanche. It’s 1979 on a limestone hill in Central Texas, and the cabin receives the night air under the constellation of Orion. It’s 1982, and the father drives his family through Wolf Creek Pass, not far from the Beaver Creek Massacre, 1885. The vortex has a rhythm of its own. It is a rhythmic pulsation.
I dissolved the little pill in a Dixie cup. He did not at first want to take Lorazepam or Haloperidol. He did not at first want the morphine sulfate that came with the hospice comfort pack also containing Atropine, Compazine, and Dulcolax. But finally, he accepted the Dixie cup and closed his eyes. Then he slept.
~
The room was moving rapidly, and
outside oak leaves flashed quickly and scarily.
We sat in a nineteen seventies-era
Ford camper, going hard into sky-
clouds dense with atmospheric convulsion.
Close your eyes, I said. What do you see?
He did so, my father, for a moment,
sitting in his recliner. What do you see?
It’s spooky, he said, eyes wild passing
through the room, the day, light, sounds, all the things
gathered in lifetime collision to now.
We were in a hunting lodge in Texas
bedding down for the night when he said, What’s that?
A blue light through the window enveloped us.
~
Joan Copjec observes that “while officially we moderns are committed to the notion of our own mortality, we nevertheless harbor the secret, inarticulable conviction that we are not mortal.” She goes on to describe certain views of posterity as a kind of “knowledge drive” embedded in the symbiosis of the individual and a larger historical collective. For Sigmund Freud, the problem was “to explain how thought manages to escape compulsion and inhibition, or to explain how it escapes being a mere symptom of its historical conditions.”
~
Walked outside one afternoon
yellow light on grass,
on fig leaves.
I looked at the fence-line
behind outcropping limestone
beds of Turk’s
cap. An anole’s
pale throat pulsed
in heat under leaves,
shadows moving
alive on me. Damp linens
draped on the patio.
Morphine, liquid blue,
dried under my nails.
~
One morning in May, my father died. My mother and I found him after a hard night. The oxygen concentrator continued to move air through a tube toward his nose but his body was still. I texted my brothers and they arrived soon after. I had not thought to shut off the oxygen. I sat instead with my mother in the morning that had brightened quickly. I made us coffee. Brad came and switched the machine off. Then Alan arrived and we spent some time remembering our father. I called the hospice nurse. She pronounced Dorsey dead at eleven. She suggested the name of a crematorium, and we made the call to have his body taken. I took Frances upstairs, and she wept.
The week he died, a lunar eclipse
in Scorpio. I pulled the Death card
with freak astrological preciseness,
entering Mercury’s lyric domain.
Built a little death boat, and so placed
the hull in sensuous tempos of Taurus.
It had been woven with grass and reeds
and his T-shirts, bits of denim, old
fishing line. An air compressor inflated
the craft, so it sailed closer and with great speed
to an insensible body that had
born him, a child, into wonderment.
~
Poetic form enlivens the entrance of language and desire, where the performance of potentially boundless meanings confronts necessary limitations. The body, for one, in its biological precariousness, would, after Charles Olson, well-known for his positioning of corporeality in poetry, exist as an individual limit of breath, perception, cognition, and, sensation. For Robert Duncan, poetry was understood as a threshold. He was concerned with “the ways in which we come into a place where there’s an interface. Receiving and sending, hearing and sounding…we imitate with the sounds of our mouth speaking, because the universe speaks to us.”
What you see vanishing, another day,
long durations of time spent thoughtlessly
going and doing. In a quiet instant
nothing. A breeze. Ceiling fan. Gone
voices. A slow reduction of vital
organs. Can’t you swallow?
The vortex, complete in itself,
moves at variable rates,
slow outside, fast inside.
Day becomes night, and repeats. Spectacle
senses accelerate an anxious coming
collusion with the not here. The nowhere.
A misplaced, transformed distension beyond
or into, thwarted or welcomed, new again.
Those long days of Dorsey’s dying. Brad or Alan would arrive separately or together, depending on the needs of the day. We drank beer. Sat with him. Or spent time taking care of the yard. The problem began with his falling. Unable to stand, Mom would call one of us. And on some days, he would try to get up out of his recliner, and often fall. Hospice nurses came weekly to bathe him, to check his needs. We worked to settle his hallucinations, to make passing more comfortable. It was dreamlike that spring, days blurring. For his eighty-fifth birthday, a favorite—strawberry cake. And a long, tough night. I remember him, childlike, reduced to bare movement. Caught by the limitations of his body, he entered a coil-like movement. A stick, circling in a vortex, constantly points in the same direction.
How to read the man? He sleeps, and doesn’t.
When he doesn’t, his wild eyes wager
attention. You catch an absent gaze.
Go to him. Offer anodyne and time
to re-settle. Moves his fingers to his mouth.
Lifts a thumb. So, raise the hospice bed a nudge.
Then sit with his breathing. Black arms. Decay
of organs and hope, and time goes away
slowly. I am his little demi-god
of dispensation and relief. Gurgling
in his throat. My mother nods out and up.
New rhythms learned against worn patterns.
I like the dream-space. Wish we’d had it more
without the pain and history of men.
Robin Blaser, in “Image-Nation I (the fold,” writes
In the passage of us, our bodies as nation, an interior language populates the imaginary. How you hear or see what you hear or see, from where you are.
~
A rift in things makes tense
a ghost flickering drive. Thought’s liquid
breadth of body fades into close edges.
Eyes closed, chest up and out, then collapsing.
Vision at the crossroads of eternity,
that suction center, yet so biological,
insistent. And in the spiral of memory
now I recall not his dying,
not myself held between thought and image,
but a web. A darkness of the room.
My father. His hands making pecking-
like motions in spaces beyond him.
My mother. Possessed by a half-light we shared.
Our main point of connection was through films we watched together on Grit TV, a cable channel that featured the Hollywood Western genre. The Comancheros.The Searchers. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And also, there were long afternoons of sixties-era television westerns, Gunsmoke with James Arness and Bonanza with Michael Landon. The serials blurred into a heap of images. As though the Angel of History observed with great embarrassment the petty conflicts of white settlement enacted in Hollywood lots.
In a poem for Robin Blaser, Joanne Kyger writes,
It is the “parallel world of reflection” that lyric energy releases through its formal interfaces. Or, as James Schuyler put it,
Ovid’s carmen perpetuum, continuous song, suggests the self’s limitation to body, persona, social mask, can be opened into a more revealed “I” that punctures time in lyric crossings. Robert Creeley draws attention to Ovid’s metamorphosis in his Foreword to Robin Blaser’s The Holy Forest. “Put it that one is to be somewhere in this transforming, accumulating poetry,” he says, “not simply be led to a conclusion, but be taken by just such a magical carmen perpetuum to all the image-nations of this remarkable, revivifying world.”
Take words into a breaking, and breathe.
Morning cicadas and crickets
stitch the sounds of day. And all the days
continue across a ghostly disturbance,
a psychic field that’s a poem
where I encounter sky.
Do you see how in words an interior
music amplifies
overlapping time?
Cut open the past.
Out it spills into banal routines
so unexpectedly. Years in a life.
A poem, a person.
“The elegy,” says Peter Gizzi, “allows me to explore the significant awareness of periodicity as a measure of the world, the periodicity of a life form, of one’s own life, of others.” He takes this further, situating the periodicity of a single existence in a larger scale of what he sees in grief as a form of grace. “As hard as it is to take in the grim condition of the present world,” he continues, “or to care-take and lose beloved people in life, there is also a gift, a grace to deepen one’s relationship to the world, an opportunity to learn about the world and oneself. The elegy is a dynamic form to explore these hard realities. Grace is a gift that’s given to you, it’s a donation from the unknown. It is without an author.”
In writing this account
I seek
porous boundaries.
As Clarice Lispector
in Água Viva locates
a future measure.
The pitch and pattern
of improvised music
mark the ever forthcoming
“life seen by life…
curves that intersect
in fine black lines.”
Think of a song in the absence of voice. Think of soft denim and worn cotton shirts. Think of a boat motoring slowly to a pier, revolving layers of water turning faster. Think of dim light in a room with the sound of breath and extreme wide shots of Monument Valley. It is a dissonant moment where the matter-of-fact process of dying involves an intensive overlapping of narratives. A story of a man with a gun and glint in his eye. A man as white as Melville’s whale.
To see what appears, a self-contained region in a larger rhythm. It’s not separate from me, but is liquid, and it bubbles or froths with sound and light. It’s not a fishing trip. It’s not a visitation of light. It’s not peace for any kind of otherness. A man, a former Confederate soldier, walks to the doorway entrance to embrace a woman. It’s 1956, so the sand is toxic, and Navajo actors pretend to be Comanche. It’s 1979 on a limestone hill in Central Texas, and the cabin receives the night air under the constellation of Orion. It’s 1982, and the father drives his family through Wolf Creek Pass, not far from the Beaver Creek Massacre, 1885. The vortex has a rhythm of its own. It is a rhythmic pulsation.
~
I dissolved the little pill in a Dixie cup. He did not at first want to take Lorazepam or Haloperidol. He did not at first want the morphine sulfate that came with the hospice comfort pack also containing Atropine, Compazine, and Dulcolax. But finally, he accepted the Dixie cup and closed his eyes. Then he slept.
~
The room was moving rapidly, and
outside oak leaves flashed quickly and scarily.
We sat in a nineteen seventies-era
Ford camper, going hard into sky-
clouds dense with atmospheric convulsion.
Close your eyes, I said. What do you see?
He did so, my father, for a moment,
sitting in his recliner. What do you see?
It’s spooky, he said, eyes wild passing
through the room, the day, light, sounds, all the things
gathered in lifetime collision to now.
We were in a hunting lodge in Texas
bedding down for the night when he said, What’s that?
A blue light through the window enveloped us.
~
Joan Copjec observes that “while officially we moderns are committed to the notion of our own mortality, we nevertheless harbor the secret, inarticulable conviction that we are not mortal.” She goes on to describe certain views of posterity as a kind of “knowledge drive” embedded in the symbiosis of the individual and a larger historical collective. For Sigmund Freud, the problem was “to explain how thought manages to escape compulsion and inhibition, or to explain how it escapes being a mere symptom of its historical conditions.”
~
Walked outside one afternoon
yellow light on grass,
on fig leaves.
I looked at the fence-line
behind outcropping limestone
beds of Turk’s
cap. An anole’s
pale throat pulsed
in heat under leaves,
shadows moving
alive on me. Damp linens
draped on the patio.
Morphine, liquid blue,
dried under my nails.
~
One morning in May, my father died. My mother and I found him after a hard night. The oxygen concentrator continued to move air through a tube toward his nose but his body was still. I texted my brothers and they arrived soon after. I had not thought to shut off the oxygen. I sat instead with my mother in the morning that had brightened quickly. I made us coffee. Brad came and switched the machine off. Then Alan arrived and we spent some time remembering our father. I called the hospice nurse. She pronounced Dorsey dead at eleven. She suggested the name of a crematorium, and we made the call to have his body taken. I took Frances upstairs, and she wept.
~
The week he died, a lunar eclipse
in Scorpio. I pulled the Death card
with freak astrological preciseness,
entering Mercury’s lyric domain.
Built a little death boat, and so placed
the hull in sensuous tempos of Taurus.
It had been woven with grass and reeds
and his T-shirts, bits of denim, old
fishing line. An air compressor inflated
the craft, so it sailed closer and with great speed
to an insensible body that had
born him, a child, into wonderment.
~
Poetic form enlivens the entrance of language and desire, where the performance of potentially boundless meanings confronts necessary limitations. The body, for one, in its biological precariousness, would, after Charles Olson, well-known for his positioning of corporeality in poetry, exist as an individual limit of breath, perception, cognition, and, sensation. For Robert Duncan, poetry was understood as a threshold. He was concerned with “the ways in which we come into a place where there’s an interface. Receiving and sending, hearing and sounding…we imitate with the sounds of our mouth speaking, because the universe speaks to us.”
~
What you see vanishing, another day,
long durations of time spent thoughtlessly
going and doing. In a quiet instant
nothing. A breeze. Ceiling fan. Gone
voices. A slow reduction of vital
organs. Can’t you swallow?
The vortex, complete in itself,
moves at variable rates,
slow outside, fast inside.
Day becomes night, and repeats. Spectacle
senses accelerate an anxious coming
collusion with the not here. The nowhere.
A misplaced, transformed distension beyond
or into, thwarted or welcomed, new again.
~
Those long days of Dorsey’s dying. Brad or Alan would arrive separately or together, depending on the needs of the day. We drank beer. Sat with him. Or spent time taking care of the yard. The problem began with his falling. Unable to stand, Mom would call one of us. And on some days, he would try to get up out of his recliner, and often fall. Hospice nurses came weekly to bathe him, to check his needs. We worked to settle his hallucinations, to make passing more comfortable. It was dreamlike that spring, days blurring. For his eighty-fifth birthday, a favorite—strawberry cake. And a long, tough night. I remember him, childlike, reduced to bare movement. Caught by the limitations of his body, he entered a coil-like movement. A stick, circling in a vortex, constantly points in the same direction.
~
How to read the man? He sleeps, and doesn’t.
When he doesn’t, his wild eyes wager
attention. You catch an absent gaze.
Go to him. Offer anodyne and time
to re-settle. Moves his fingers to his mouth.
Lifts a thumb. So, raise the hospice bed a nudge.
Then sit with his breathing. Black arms. Decay
of organs and hope, and time goes away
slowly. I am his little demi-god
of dispensation and relief. Gurgling
in his throat. My mother nods out and up.
New rhythms learned against worn patterns.
I like the dream-space. Wish we’d had it more
without the pain and history of men.
~
Robin Blaser, in “Image-Nation I (the fold,” writes
the participation is broken
fished from a sky of fire
the fiery lake pouring itself
to reach here
the matter of language caught
in the fact so that we
meet in paradise in such
times, the I consumes itself.
In the passage of us, our bodies as nation, an interior language populates the imaginary. How you hear or see what you hear or see, from where you are.
~
A rift in things makes tense
a ghost flickering drive. Thought’s liquid
breadth of body fades into close edges.
Eyes closed, chest up and out, then collapsing.
Vision at the crossroads of eternity,
that suction center, yet so biological,
insistent. And in the spiral of memory
now I recall not his dying,
not myself held between thought and image,
but a web. A darkness of the room.
My father. His hands making pecking-
like motions in spaces beyond him.
My mother. Possessed by a half-light we shared.
~
Our main point of connection was through films we watched together on Grit TV, a cable channel that featured the Hollywood Western genre. The Comancheros.The Searchers. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And also, there were long afternoons of sixties-era television westerns, Gunsmoke with James Arness and Bonanza with Michael Landon. The serials blurred into a heap of images. As though the Angel of History observed with great embarrassment the petty conflicts of white settlement enacted in Hollywood lots.
~
In a poem for Robin Blaser, Joanne Kyger writes,
we perceive multiple
identities when you sing so beautifully the shifting
clouds You are not alone in this world
not a lone is this world
not a lone a parallel world of reflection.
It is the “parallel world of reflection” that lyric energy releases through its formal interfaces. Or, as James Schuyler put it,
where light falls
where shade falls
pressing
pulling.
~
Ovid’s carmen perpetuum, continuous song, suggests the self’s limitation to body, persona, social mask, can be opened into a more revealed “I” that punctures time in lyric crossings. Robert Creeley draws attention to Ovid’s metamorphosis in his Foreword to Robin Blaser’s The Holy Forest. “Put it that one is to be somewhere in this transforming, accumulating poetry,” he says, “not simply be led to a conclusion, but be taken by just such a magical carmen perpetuum to all the image-nations of this remarkable, revivifying world.”
~
Take words into a breaking, and breathe.
Morning cicadas and crickets
stitch the sounds of day. And all the days
continue across a ghostly disturbance,
a psychic field that’s a poem
where I encounter sky.
Do you see how in words an interior
music amplifies
overlapping time?
Cut open the past.
Out it spills into banal routines
so unexpectedly. Years in a life.
A poem, a person.
~
“The elegy,” says Peter Gizzi, “allows me to explore the significant awareness of periodicity as a measure of the world, the periodicity of a life form, of one’s own life, of others.” He takes this further, situating the periodicity of a single existence in a larger scale of what he sees in grief as a form of grace. “As hard as it is to take in the grim condition of the present world,” he continues, “or to care-take and lose beloved people in life, there is also a gift, a grace to deepen one’s relationship to the world, an opportunity to learn about the world and oneself. The elegy is a dynamic form to explore these hard realities. Grace is a gift that’s given to you, it’s a donation from the unknown. It is without an author.”
~
In writing this account
I seek
porous boundaries.
As Clarice Lispector
in Água Viva locates
a future measure.
The pitch and pattern
of improvised music
mark the ever forthcoming
“life seen by life…
curves that intersect
in fine black lines.”
