BOB DEAN'S AERIALIST: A RESPONSE

 

The Aerialist might not be performing but the tunnel rat certainly was...

Amidst the petaled words, blooming language, the images that steal time and dare you to reclaim it, there's a patina of heartbreak throbbing between each line...well, not exactly each line, pero me entiendes, verdad?

There’s enough not-quite-faded ventricle splatter in Bob’s five-part gem, The Aerialist Will Not be performing, to leave a trail any experienced love traveler can follow. Case in point (pardon me while I butcher Bob’s layout), in Steps, you can creep up on, “…today as I pack the half of us which is mine one last time and forever…how your steps led one way and mine another…” Sorry, you’ll have to read the entire piece yourself if you want to sup that nectar.

And follow the trail far enough and you’ll run into the landmark, “…walking with you a bit down the road until we come to that hostel known as the Parting of the Ways…” which you can find in The One the Brothers Grimm Left Out, the piece that closes out Part Two. Yeah, sometimes you can see/hear/feel/ an artery pulsing red.

And while you’re traveling down, down where aerialists seldom tread, don’t be surprised to somersault into some nostalgia…not a gently sorrowful nostalgia, but one with grit and defiance, wielding a sarcasm stiletto that slices the throat of today's world with a rusty vengeance.

Like in Let us find a city which opens Part Four, in which you’ll discover, “…we are people and we want to be moved without flexing an emotion. Give us Alexa, Siri, Uber…Let us grow fat and lazy…let us have cocktail guests who will worship at the reliquaries [Whaaaat?] of pristine ellipticals and always-on 75” LED UHD 4K oracles.” Booyah! Can ya say, “Booyah” in response to poetry? I just did, so I guess you can.

Nope, that ain’t all. You can paste on a plastic smile when you’re braced by “…we are happy here in the nirvana of industry, the heaven of high tech, the holiest of holies of high finance…” and so on. No wistful pining that!

And then, there’s just straight up fun. Like in Trinity, which people in their 30s might not get because…well…there’s a PHONE BOOTH in it for criminy’s sake! And you gotta love a poem with phone booths and “I don’t know from Nasdaq…” and “...I’m left holding only the red-hot night in my hand.” Well at least I gotta love it.

Ok, seriously now, from where I sit, The Aerialist… is a work primarily for the “cultured,” for the well-read. Classical musicians of European ilk, visual artists in the same vein with bulky shoulders of work swoop in grandly for cameos, mythical figures erupt from Olympus and slither through escape hatches from Hades.

Quick! Before you grab your android-iphone who is Sisyphus? Flying Dutchman ring a bell? And Bruegel, a Dutchman who may not have flown but his painting surely soared before humans knew they had wings. And speaking of wings, I can’t remember if Icarus brought Daedalus along, but he didn’t escape these pages.

And how about dropping some Latin into the mix? Can you live without a little “Lignum vitae” in your world? And I suppose it is quite appropriate to trip over Ovid in this collection that flies higher—and of course lower— than any aerialist ever could.

Ok, so if you’re not the well-read, MFA, Ph.D. type—someone like me in other words, you’re gonna need a Google chaser to help you savor and swallow the vintage single-malt nature of Bob Dean’s Aerialist.

If you are the kind of individual who has a monster bookshelf in the background of all your Zoom appearances…AND you’ve read at least half if not most or all of those esteemed volumes on your wall, you’re going to be as happy as a sus scrofa in excrementum.

Don’t get me wrong though. There’s plenty in Bob’s work for us regular Joes and Janes without much English Lit, Latin or art history western style gumming up our commonality. I mean, cruising through Ripple Effect (a Haibun)—which I haven’t looked up yet…on purpose—I had to pull out my pen and underline, “The elderly couple holding hands while pedaling the bike machines want more time before one hand or the other goes empty.” Ya don’t need a bunch a books on a shelf to get that! And surely you’ve seen, maybe even felt, a “broken heart of a face.”

For all the caviar, polo, and fencing you’ll encounter there’s plenty of hotdogs, peanuts, and boxing as well…ok, maybe not plenty, but enough to remind you that Bob’s from Kansas and Texas, turf about as far as you can get from Rue des Martyrs as you’ll humbly come across in Still Life with Roman Noir.

Listen, can you truly appreciate poetry and not get a little bit giddy over “watching the bone-bags of what-could-have-beens swirl down the gutter?” I guess you can. And I’m not too old for vague memories to help me get, “The bricks blush still remembering the heat of us in the night.”

Yeeaaa. Not only does Robert Dean, Jr. know how to open and close a poem, he sure as bleep knows how to open and close out a section. No, the aerialist might not be performing, but I’m glad Bob is, or he might not have written Leaving Dallas (After the Reading), which closes out Part Three, and we—I should probably say “I”— would have missed out big time on this tooth-snapping nugget!

Bottom line? Even though the Aerialist Will Not Be Performing, chances are good that the tunnel rat has saved the show with its fearless digging into the dirt of life!