THE SCRIPTURE OF LOVE (by Vincent Ferrini, sent to Thomas Lowe Taylor)

Me and Charles Olson

Vincent Ferrini

**************

for Tom Taylor & Karen Johnson

(Who convinced me to overcome my
resistance to writing out
my relationship with Charles Olson
or others will put their own
spin on this History)


Mercury
&
Gold
do
not
wet
the
hands
nor
snakes

************

The Secrets of Love
(My encounters with Charles Olson)

Charles Olson had insight and foresight
when he met me in Gloucester,
the territory of his major Opus--
In Lynn Library he read all my books and especially
No Smoke about the life and times of the Shoe Workers
of Lynn during the Great Depression,
he saw immediately that I had clear vision about
the fate of the people of the city I grew up in
who would lose their jobs and become wards of the failure
of the Profit System, the ups and downs
of the Free Market,
he saw how I told the people what they could do,
but the people were powerless,
He saw me in Gloucester, a poet of two cities
Shoes and Fishes
when he saw a weak link in my work with 4 Winds
a magazine of new writings
he hit me from all the angles of his acute arsenal
a hate settled under his literaryh armor,
amore went out the window as mist
we continued our friendship
in spite of that judgment in Eternity,
I loved him and learned from his attack
as another lesson from a mountain authority--
authorities being my Opponent
all forms of it coming from teachers primarily
forcing me to grow up--

He had a huge influence upon the poets of
his generation, and mine,
they followed the dictates of the Master Scribe--
The attempt to diminish me last for
18 years, when I hungered to Sing,
which I could not do while he was alive,
I feared another attack in the annals of the immortals--
I was knocked outside the pale--

It was a time for me to get involved in the Life and Times of Fish City
and I did,
in 1979 I published Know Fish,
my key would be

The Theory of Poetry
The air is an organic farm
for the practitioners of Paradise

The First book was the Lady of Misbegotten Voyages
Meanwhile Charles is still very much alive in Gloucester
And in Literature

His acolytes took his judgment of Ferrini as Gospel
But I continued with Know Fish in 7 books--
Few paid attention

Olson had to get me out of Gloucester forever,
Yet while he was still here in the flesh
I ate with his family and friends at his Skylight tenement--
He knew he could trust me and he did
because one time, when he saw me in dumps of low mood
he said, 'Vincent your time will come'
I drove him and Betty and Charles Peter to the South Station
Betty was against going, and decided under the pressurew
of his Alp in the last five minutes to go with him
it was against her will and we knew it--
What happened is literary history--
I knew and Mary Shore knew
that his time on the planet was drawing to a close--

George Butterick edited and selected a collection of
my poems in 1976, and his introduction placed me
in the local and national canon

George was intimate with us both and he once said
about Maximus, that 'He is right and so are you'

When I read his Collected Poems edited and assembled by George
I read the book I was prepared by George that it contained a long
poem about me Ferrini-I
I read it three times and could not dope it out,
I picked out the Dictionary of Mythology, and it clarified eulogy
it came on as an elegy, and there it was, the original
friend who saw me as I am and taught me the lesson
he was compelled to administer,
he has passed that state of love/hate,
because he knew I would write about our beloved City
after he was gone,
few poets I have met are familiar with that Ferrini-1
won,
he was out of the region freed of feelings that cloud the mind
Following my words closely, his prescience came through
for both of us--

One day Ralph Maud editor of the Minutes of the Charles Olson
society sent me a letter from the Chjarles Olson Papers at
the University of Connecticut, Misc. Notes & Fragments
undated,

Inscription for Vincent
My dear Vincent:
I've done my duty
-and now I'm free
(wow, what will I do?)
love,
Charles


The dead living to this hour
The stink in my gut of rotten matter
I have not digested
that I had threatened his position in Gloucester,
he too was insecure in spite of his constant show of Power
his fear that
I could become Gloucester poet of its heart

When I have a project on my shoulders
I do it
but this work of Charley O and me
was and is still buried in my solar plexus
and roosting and not getting enough air
to breathe it out
itching and irritations attacking me
which I feared letting loose
that even in Death he could attack me another time
in another Eternity
that he saw my weakness I inherited from my childhood
and youth,
rejection by teachers, not being good enouth
in his eyes not good enough,
having failed my tasks and family,

my tendencies to blame my self first
and not another
that's been the law of my living,
others first me second
he was on my back
till now
and after I read this from Ferrini-1

'Freud who did not know the Germans were

officialdom--and did not therefore properly

interpret dream. Co-kings, Hines-Orpheus and

Dewsnap Ferrini. Dewsnap means impartial

beauty. We rule, beyond the mares hooves.'

Not good enough, and now an equal--

Truman Nelson said that "when the Revolution comes
you will be up against the wall facing the firing squad"

A rigid Marxist, little did I feel that deep inside me I carried
an incipient anger against each ostracism
and the itch and the irritations attacking myself since I can't get back
at them

The lie that I sold out the followers believed in
that stuck in my vessels of blood

During my childhood I hated Poetry
It was another Armor of Authority

So he killed me in his Letter 5, and with Ferrini-1 brought me
back to life in his death

Ralph coming to visit me needing guides
to show visitors what the names mean, where they, and what for
educating the tourists
I told him
Olson turns over in his grave

Ralph, Gloucester is bigger than Olson, Ferrini,
Blackburn, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Joe Garland

The fisherpeople, Ralph, they are all ways here in one form or
nother

Did you read Ferrini-1 in his Collected Poems, and he hesitatied,
I got the book out and read the quoted section,

Gloucester Ralph, the city, its people and its problems and how
the sense of community is alive and thriving,
they are the poems in action!

You have to read Olson from the angle where I am
Get the Universities into the community,
Show the citizens the power that is sleeping inside
them,
forget the seminar for Olson
Check Wellspring, for an example,
Check the kids in schools writing poetry just for the fun
of it, and the smell of fame for the moment,
forget the Fortune part of it,
Get the sacholars shoveling the shit and the garbage society
is bogged down in

Maud walked out as though he'd been hit by a
a Gloucester hurricane

Olson told me the time he went to Lynn
to study me and he went to a barbershop to savor Lynn
and the barber called him a Monster-- ?????????? Monster
He went back again to the same shop and came to pay my respecks
with that handshake he crushed all the bones in his fist--


To hear Charley talk was an education in itself
and how O gloried in it
doing all the talking and at home around his kitchen table
Betty listened rarely said a word,
when he bragged about his prowess I raised my eyes to her
standing behind and and she shook her head

While I was living with my family
in the cottage next to the Fairview Inn
Helen Stein gave me her
1929 Self Portrait--
one of outstanding works
I hung it on the Wall of the living room
when it drew too much attention
I rehung it on the wall
upstairs where I slept
I forget to take it with me
when I left and divorced Peg
I asked for it
and was told they knew nothing about it
Peg and the children had forgotten
my feeling still is
that it was destroyed
because Peg felt I was having an affair
with Helen
which I was not,
I have missed that inquiring face
sister to Picasso's earlier
Self portraits
I still miss it
which I see hanging
on the wall in my brain's study

The written word is divided like society and persons by the dead
matter and miracles & the lost between them

That time he drew spirit blood, when he wrote

the mind Ferrini
is as much of a labor
as to lift an arm
flawlessly

I made picture frames customers would leave their works of art
for me to enhance them and bring them alerted.

Then I came across that bisness of the arm in a sentence by WB
Yeats,

The Word carries the weight of a whale and both are ephemeral

Yet his command of Mythology fed my appetite
for the flesh of wisdom

Charley envied Ginsberg his international fame,
ensnared between the few and the many
one or the other rarely both

Birth is by words--

I, too, was made for wirds
and the sound of them bvacked them up
That contain the realities of the physical and
mystical worlds
words that change the directions of history
the personal lives of people
transforming political governments

Words are real magicians participating where you
least expect them

the little souls dying to stick me
into their boxes, lock it fast
and throwing the key away

the desperate need their have to get me
out of this back to back civil war
down the centuries of galactic lostness

He was seduced by the feminine intuitive
and feared it

He was jealous of their influence
upon my creative life
He saw me under their coital pull
the deep undertow currents of the Ocean
as when the daughter of Gloria Parsons
gave me the ashes in a plastic bag
approaching Good Harbor Beach
the low tide waters
that Sunday afternoon
and no one around

as I cut the bag with my thumbnail
and heaped a handful of her
& here comes Gloria infinite sands to join you
here comes Gloria windful of skies
here comes gloria
ours of Day Night
and her eldest daughter asked me
'how old are you?'
I said I am still in the world's womb
'I understand'
& Charles keeping a record
in the closet of his mind in the Hereafter

O Memory help us dig

jLong ago I was fearing he'd rob me of Mirandum
& He, that Betty would leaved him
for me

Mind and Organs in an unspoken contest

follwoing my Love Poems
He came to the hospital where Mary was recovering
from a Hysterectomy
and tossed her the O'Ryan Poems
tjhe Bosky girl (check)
Grist for his lines

Letter 5 was a rape of my Psyche

And he said that Letter was 'the best
Poem by Maximus'

We rule in Eternity
safe away from the divine lips
and their power upon us
as they still have
against my 'too organic' nature being
cholly oceanic

how deep does this force go

the 'mares' hooves

Peg's Mother's
who came to live with for her last years
taking over trhe family and the household
& the children
Peg going along as I did
and her brother Holdfast in charge
in front and behind
the detective and hundrysleuth
the status Quo
the Harvard Mathmetician and the handyman


Plagued by itchings & irritations
the Doctors gave me statistical diagnosis
So I go to Susan for covering the whole skin
and underneath
for the undigested emotional contents
hear healing hands cure
the organs
are pleased and understand
hearing holy hands
her powerful fists untensing them
pushing out the poisons
the long time rotten matter stinking
the Sacred Temple

And this Lady, between us, Susan bringing
Another Kundalini

I

cannot

reach

my

secret

self

as

you *

do

balancing

the

spur

of

my

spirit

organs

with

your

knowing

touchings

of

wholeness
of

my

power


The
Lotus
Of
This
Earth
As
The
7
charkas
in
tune
is
the
linchpin


in
the
Heaven
You
Resurrect



Peg's mother surreptitiously took over my house and family
with her son, Status Quack--

The first crack in the community of the principal unit
the overshoes of the Mare trampling on the fintage of
deligt-
'The seer, Polyeidus commanded by Minos of
Crete to restore his dead son, Glaucus, to
life, the child having died from falling
into a vat of honey. Polyeidus saw a snake
approaching the dead child, killed the snake.
Another snake appeared and seeing its mate
dead went away and teturned with an herb
which restored the dead snake to life.
Polyeidus used the same herb on the dead
child and broght it back to life.'
tered
Olson slaugh/me and brought the Herb of Poesia as the
tart medicine to heal together the lost pieces of
my Anima--

Parts kept apart by the acolytes of Maximus, and the history
of Teachercrystalizing a Judgement stopped in cement minds--

19 years arrested by the Media of Poetry--

I saw the Sun rise in one of Betty's paintings, and the
ominous cloud on break of day--

The contest of the Verse Warriors, the troubadors of
the ritual sacrifice, swordplay men revel in--

On the August watercolor morning of Good Harbor Beach

There's a battle between Paul
& Vincent
for Sandy's attentions
& I don't relish it
Sandy desires both
On her terms of equilibrium
but it cannot be on the basis of a Contest
If Paul says He & Vincent
are soulmates
Then he has to practice
relaxed tension
Competition is insecurity
& I will have none of it
We are Devotees of Beauty

Sandy represents that combination
of impartiality to human experiences
& we both love her for that
but Contest is immaturity
If we can share her equally
we have it made
& she also--
Furthermore Sandy is happily married
& there's no way either of us
can possess her
possession being passe
& the route to suffering

My senses told me
that Sandy was displeased
to be in the middle of these
2 unicorns

Paul is in Europe seeking the celestial Enclosure
the Crown on his Uni-Horn

Sandy is Queen of the Beach--

Women's masculine mind crystal clear
& Men's feminine gut in a bullshit mind

between High and Low poetry--
a logjam
reezing the Harbor

The dead child dead in another's brain as the story
escaping the responsibility of the consequence

till the story is told
& gone into the archives

You hit it with your pre/cision Charley O
Talking is poetry
as all those who never writing done
so busy are they living it

And you lived and robbed yourself of the 10 years
you crave to get the other Opus done--
But it was finished as you knew it
in that letter to Vincent you never sent--

The Man at the Wheel is a still life living poem--
and Fitz Hugh Lane on his hill his eyes peel
for the next horizons
and Blackburn's dory a skeleton ribbed
and only the hands, the fingers clench on the oars

Ah the scholars who dont dig deep enough
The gravewriters
the tombstones enamoured

all because your judgement hit a Wall
and the followers hitting their heads and the brain juices
leaking down and leaving crevices