The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Bill Van Buskirk serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2025.
SURF MUSIC
To be alive!
Not the carcass but the spark
I know this is crudely put but
If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?
Gregory Orr
Crackling bonfires burn for us up and down the beach.
These strange blazing tongues flex and stretch up toward
an infinite indifference that kills them at the height
of their telling. What are they trying to say?
Out there, words turn foreign and fantastic:
black holes, anti-matter, a universe running
away from itself. When is a light year? Where?
Words break like dried sticks against this immensity,
and we can’t think our way to space
where spark snaps into darkness.
Down here our fire’s burned out almost. We stare
at how the coals contain their flames—
liquid, flickering, shifting, shadowed—
embers holding fast to what consumes them.
In a breath from out of midnight, this fierce union
of death and beauty flares to lick the faces
of the future—sons and daughters of my hosts—
doe-eyed, dumb as oxen around their parents
but dry kindling for starlight.
Like an old grandpa I wrap myself in sweats and blankets,
grow still and fantastic, begin my little wearing away
into a hollow self—empty, happy, echoing all that’s lost
and unremembered as constellations careen overhead
and eternal codes, older than dreaming, explode out
to the edge of here where imagination gutters into night.
These sons and daughters—soon they’ll slip away
from us into the muscular current of their own stories;
even now they wander into moonlit surf
where old gods mutter just out of earshot
and lifetimes burst into myth—
molten, drifting, faster than time.Is this what living is?
Tinderbox bodies, starlight’s transit, conflagrations
fed with whatever comes to hand?
Is this what dying is?
And to know all this in a lucky moment!
Time, space, mythos rippling just beyond will…
It is so still out here!
It is so still out here!
It was summer of 1991. My wife, Gael Mathews, had just died of cancer at age 35. As a way of staying close to her, I spent that summer on the west coast where she grew up and went to college. In being with her family and friends, I could, in a way that is hard to explain, stay in touch with her. This intimacy was especially strong one night in the middle of July, when a group of about twenty friends and family went to Avila beach near San Luis Obispo. The poem tries to capture the essence of that evening when it seemed that earth, air, fire, water, the living and the dead were together in one choir, singing. The epigraph is by Gregory Orr, an arch-celebrant of beauty-at-the-edge-of-life-and-death. What music is he talking about? It’s not clear, can’t quite be heard. It’s as if the poet hears it but we can’t. He invites us into it anyway. He invites us to dance.
Crackling bonfires burn for us up and down the beach: The first thing that occurs to me when I remember that night is the line of bonfires along the beach. The image isn’t just visual, but aural too. I imagined a chorus of sea, stars, and wind echoing a hymn to our ancestral dead—that vast world that Gael had passed into. So, how to bring that line of bonfires into the poem? What was their music? Is there a word that might capture their contribution to the oratorio? I experimented with a number of verbs before I hit on “crackling”—the kind of music given out by burning wood—a roaring that a bonfire might make if one were quiet enough to hear it.
These strange blazing tongues flex and stretch up toward /an infinite indifference that kills them at the height/of their telling: What are they trying to say?: I imagined the bonfires as part of an ardent choir, willing its song to reach—what? Where? Heaven? Not exactly. Not on this night. The deity these flames sing to is a universe indifferent to their song. Indifference and incredible vastness merge into an alien presence (mysterious and dangerous at once). It’s as if they sing to millennia of ancestral lineage reaching back to a time before speech. But how can we join the choir? Sing to all this vastness? We have to try, even if our language is totally inadequate. I think the bonfire-tongues mirror our own longing to belong in this universe, to find our song in it, to be ennobled by it.
Out there, words turn foreign and fantastic: /black holes, anti-matter, a universe running/away from itself. When is a light year? Where? /Words break like dried sticks against this immensity,/and we can’t think our way to space /where spark snaps into darkness: the poem starts with the sheer difficulty of the project. To name this space in the terms of our daily speech, to find a connection to it in words, is clearly impossible. Try as we might, the universe defies our attempts to name it, to address it. The very words we use are suffused with paradox. It’s as if the grand display does violence to the very language we would use to speak of it. Time and space themselves are confounded, and we are left with images that defy our imaginations. This universe, so vast, we so small—how can we find a place in it?
Down here our fire’s burned out almost. We stare/at how the coals contain their flames: This is where the earth befriends us. The bonfires, extinguishing themselves, mirror both our personal fates and the astral fires which will burn out over eons (Google says that our sun will “burn out” in about five billion years). In staring at the coals as they soften and lose their boundaries, we see something of ourselves—we too are bodies holding form and flame. Just as our dead have lost their bodily form, so also the suns will burn out. I tried to reflect this in the line—liquid, flickering, shifting, shadowed—words that merge at the level of rhyme and assonance. Thus, the great irony: life shapes us and consumes us. Yet we hold fast for something called “dear life.” Can we find a tentative form in what we love?
In a breath from out of midnight, this fierce union/of death and beauty flares to lick the faces/ of the future—sons and daughters of my hosts—/doe-eyed, dumb as oxen around their parents/ but dry kindling for starlight. At this point the poem moves away from the cosmic to embrace our heirs. Several of the people in our little group—Gael’s relatives and friends—have adolescent children who are present in the scene. Through them, our fragile humanity is brought into the poem’s frame. The flames, that illuminate and obliterate at once, flare to lick their faces. These sons and daughters, who are already beginning to leave us, will inherit the same spark, the same fire that births our tenuous kinship with the mysterious heat of stars.
Like an old grandpa I wrap myself in sweats and blankets, /grow still and fantastic, begin my wearing away/ into a hollow self—empty, happy, echoing all that’s lost/and unremembered as constellations careen overhead/ and eternal codes older than dreaming explode out/to the edge of here, where imagination gutters into night: At this point I put myself in the picture. At age 45, I was probably the oldest person in the group, certainly a lot older than the sons and daughters. I was happy to be there: old, empty and still, to let all the vastness of the evening, and its poem, come to me. I am blessed by it. I recognize the infinitesimal speck I am becoming, a transfiguration that’s beyond my understanding. Yet I am conscious of the energy it engenders. I am alive, in the cosmic spark of all that is “lost and unremembered.” These “eternal codes,” are intimate with me—so far beyond anything I can imagine yet so present in the fading here-and-now. I breathe and pulse in them. I am alive. The constellations “careen.” They are wild and uncontained, incalculable and uncontrolled. Yet they are also intimate—the stuff of dream and image. Their careenings and explodings are happening in us—here and now where imagination gutters (like a flame being quenched?) into night.
These sons and daughters—soon they’ll slip away /from us into the muscular current of their own stories;/even now they wander into moonlit surf/where old gods murmur just out of earshot/and lifetimes explode into myth—molten, drifting faster than time: The sons and daughters return to the poem, but only to complete their separation from us. They are claimed by the same “muscular currents” that long ago claimed us. They are coming into their own stories, dramas in which we’ll play small parts, that will “explode into myths.”
Is this what living is? /Tinderbox bodies, starlight’s transit,/ conflagrations fed with whatever comes to hand?/Is this what dying is? The poem is now rounding into its conclusion. It is a hymn to the mystery and vastness of a universe in which the poet is an intimate participant—ignorant yet aware, infinitesimal yet glowing with starlight. He would join, if only in imagination, the stars in their transit across the night sky; he would feed those fires with whatever fuels he can find on this earth—physical, psychological, astrological, cultural. It is the essence of this participation that it leaves him with two questions: Is this what living is? Is this what dying is?
And to know all this in a lucky moment! /Time, space, mythos rippling just beyond will…/It is so still out here! /It is so still out here!: To know all this, which is in so many ways beyond knowing, is indeed a lucky moment! To sense a universe on the move beyond our wisdom and our will, and to be alive in it! The last line repeats itself, and in this repetition, it intensifies the vast urgency of the poem. This, the poem’s last echo, creates a great void from which the its voice echoes.
Bill Van Buskirk’s poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, The Paterson Literary Review, The Mad Poets’ Review and many others. His chapbook, Everything that’s Fragile is Important, received honorable mention in the Jesse Bryce Niles Chapbook contest sponsored by the Comstock Review (2007). His book, This Wild Joy that Thrills Outside the Law, won the Joie de vivre contest sponsored by the Mad Poets’ Review. (2010). His latest book is The Poet’s Pocket Guide to Steady Employment (2023).