The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets - The Poet's Press
The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets - The Poet's Press
The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets - The Poet's Press
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
THINGS SAID ABOUT BRETT RUTHERFORD’S POETRY...<br />
Rutherford is first and foremost a storyteller. He writes poetry for an audience, one<br />
that he feels would come back to poetry if only there were poetry to come back to.<br />
—Radio Void<br />
Fantastic, rebellious poetry! — FactSheet 5<br />
Some of the most powerful poetry I’ve ever read. —Frank Belknap Long<br />
Real poetry! Wonderful! — Ray Bradbury<br />
<strong>The</strong> Rutherford poetry is a delight. I am in complete agreement with his comments<br />
on the state of poetry in America today, and pleased that he has chosen to go against<br />
the current. His work is his most eloquent argument. —Robert Bloch, author of<br />
Psycho and Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.<br />
Equal parts Poe, Shelley, Lovecraft and Bradbury … composed with a firm sense of<br />
poetics and orchestrated with a respect for poetic tradition.…Though written in<br />
free verse, they scan with a rhythmic coherence, a dividend of precise word choices<br />
and the embedding of alliterative phrases in the line. —Stefan Dziemianowicz,<br />
Crypt of Cthulhu<br />
This prolific poet who celebrates H.P . Lovecraft and Poe has reached an assurance<br />
of craft and in mood… an extraordinary poet, a neo-romantic perhaps, but also Ovid<br />
blended with Virgil.—Home Planet News<br />
<strong>The</strong> High Priest of Providence’s ghoulie underground… — <strong>The</strong> Nice Paper<br />
Shudders aplenty here, poetically nuanced…ranges across the supernatural<br />
spectrum with the fervor of Poe and the aloofness of Lovecraft. —Paul DiFilippo,<br />
<strong>As</strong>imov’s SF Magazine<br />
Be afraid. Be very afraid … Like Lovecraft, Rutherford integrates terrestrial terrors<br />
with a more sublime, or cosmic, dread. — Justin Wolff, <strong>The</strong> Providence Phoenix.<br />
(About Poems from Providence): Like Wordsworth’s Prelude, this great book might<br />
avail us of endless hours of poring at leisure, enriching us, and, yes, ennobling us….<br />
Rutherford can be appallingly tender and appallingly sorrowful…he can be funny,<br />
very. He can be inspired by joy. He can be profound. This is marvelous heady rich<br />
stuff… —Dusty Dog Reviews<br />
A special validity and integrity…Rutherford writes about nature in ways in which<br />
comparatively few poets of today do — and clearly from first-hand experience and<br />
observation. —John Burnett Payne, Poets Fortnightly
Also by BRETT RUTHERFORD<br />
POETRY<br />
Songs of the I and Thou (1968)<br />
City Limits (1970)<br />
<strong>The</strong> Pumpkined Heart (1973)<br />
Anniversarium: <strong>The</strong> Autumn Poems (1984, 1986, 1996, 2005)<br />
Whippoorwill Road: <strong>The</strong> Supernatural Poems (1985, 1998, 2005)<br />
Thunderpuss: In Memoriam (1987)<br />
Prometheus on Fifth Avenue (1987)<br />
At Lovecraft’s Grave (1988)<br />
In Chill November (1990)<br />
Poems from Providence (1991)<br />
Twilight of the Dictators (with Pieter Vanderbeck) (1992)<br />
Knecht Ruprecht, or the Bad Boy’s Christmas (1992)<br />
PLAYS<br />
Night Gaunts: An Entertainment Based on the Life<br />
And Work of H.P . Lovecraft (1993, 2005)<br />
NOVELS<br />
Piper (with John Robertson) (1985)<br />
<strong>The</strong> Lost Children (1988)<br />
AS EDITOR/PUBLISHER<br />
May Eve: A Festival of Supernatural Poems (1975)<br />
Last Flowers: <strong>The</strong> Romance Poems of Edgar Allan Poe<br />
And Sarah Helen Whitman (1987, 2003)<br />
Matthew Gregory Lewis: Tales of Wonder (Annotated, 2010)<br />
Death and the Downs: <strong>The</strong> Poetry of Charles Hamilton Sorley<br />
(Annotated, 2010)
THE GODS AS THEY ARE,<br />
ON THEIR PLANETS<br />
Poems by<br />
BRETT RUTHERFORD
First Edition 2005<br />
Second Printing 2007<br />
Third Printing 2011<br />
Copyright © 2005 by Brett Rutherford<br />
All Rights Reserved<br />
ISBN 0-922558-14<br />
<strong>The</strong> author places this work in the Public Domain<br />
on January 1, 2025.<br />
Some of the poems in this book have appeared<br />
in the following magazines:<br />
<strong>The</strong> Rift, Ibid, Haunts, Poets Fortnightly,<br />
Weird Tales, Sensations Magazine,<br />
East Side Monthly, Just Add Water,<br />
and <strong>The</strong> Akashic Record of the Antarctic <strong>As</strong>tral Convention.<br />
Some of the poems are revisions or expansions of works that appeared<br />
in the books <strong>The</strong> Pumpkined Heart, Whippoorwill Road,<br />
Prometheus on Fifth Avenue, Songs of the I and Thou,<br />
and In Chill November.<br />
Cover art: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867):<br />
Jupiter and <strong>The</strong>tis, 1811 (Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence)<br />
and NASA photo of the planet Jupiter.<br />
This is the 157th publication of<br />
THE POET’S PRESS<br />
279-1/2 Thayer Street / Providence, RI 02906<br />
www.poetspress.org<br />
This book is also available in Adobe Acrobat format.
PROLOGUE<br />
Prologue 11<br />
Between the Pages 11<br />
Entre Las Hojas 11<br />
Why Poetry? 12<br />
C O N T E N T S<br />
LIBER ANNIVERSARII: AUTUMN POEMS<br />
In Chill November 13<br />
<strong>The</strong> Fence 14<br />
To the Arc of the Sublime 16<br />
October Storm 1998 19<br />
Autumn Lyric 19<br />
Autumn (Alexander Pushkin, 1833) 20<br />
<strong>On</strong> Receiving A Gift of Books in Early October 23<br />
Autumn Sundays in Madison Square 24<br />
In Prague, A Tree of Many Colors 26<br />
September in Gotham 2001 27<br />
Runaways 30<br />
THE GODS AS THEY ARE, ON THEIR PLANETS<br />
Viking 31<br />
<strong>The</strong> <strong>Gods</strong> <strong>As</strong> <strong>The</strong>y <strong>Are</strong>, <strong>On</strong> <strong>The</strong>ir <strong>Planets</strong> 31<br />
When Worlds Collide 32<br />
Autumn on Mars 34<br />
Pluto Demoted 34<br />
POETICA LOVECRAFTIANA<br />
Maker of Monsters, Maker of <strong>Gods</strong> 36<br />
Dreaming of Ur-R’lyeh 37<br />
<strong>The</strong> Tree At Lovecraft’s Grave 40<br />
Under Lovecraft’s Grave 41<br />
Frank and Lyda 43<br />
THINGS SEEN IN GRAVEYARDS<br />
After the Storm 46<br />
Hart Island 46<br />
Night Walker 47<br />
An Exeter Vampire, 1799 48<br />
Graveyards I’d Like To See 50<br />
<strong>The</strong> Harvestman 52<br />
<strong>The</strong> Ear Mound Shrine, Kyoto 54<br />
Aceldema, the Field of Blood 56<br />
Mrs. Weeden, of Pawtucket 57
TWILIGHT OF THE DICTATORS<br />
<strong>The</strong> Exhumation of Goethe 58<br />
Winter Solstice 1989 60<br />
In the Streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg 61<br />
Stalin and Shostakovich 62<br />
<strong>The</strong> Piano Uprising 65<br />
HORRORS!<br />
<strong>The</strong> Anaconda Poems 69<br />
<strong>The</strong> Spiders 71<br />
Knecht Ruprecht, or <strong>The</strong> Bad Boy’s Christmas 71<br />
My Life <strong>As</strong> An Incubus 72<br />
Snofru the Mad 74<br />
<strong>The</strong> Waking Dream 75<br />
Poem Found on the Neck of a Deer<br />
Killed in the Black Forest, Germany 76<br />
No Mausoleum, Please! 79<br />
<strong>On</strong>e Day’s News 80<br />
<strong>The</strong> Dead End 81<br />
Son of Dracula 81<br />
Hunchback <strong>As</strong>sistant Tells All 84<br />
Milkweed Seeds 95<br />
Hearing the Wendigo 95<br />
West of Arkham 96<br />
<strong>The</strong> Grim Reaper 96<br />
Salem 97<br />
THE PUMPKINED HEART<br />
Appalachian Idyll 98<br />
<strong>The</strong> Molester 98<br />
<strong>The</strong> Pines 99<br />
Midnight Water 100<br />
And <strong>The</strong>n We Got Used to the Atom Bomb… 101<br />
Grandmothers 102<br />
Fragments, Written at Twenty 102<br />
Tableaux from a Pennsylvania Village 103<br />
<strong>The</strong> Town Is Still <strong>As</strong>leep 104<br />
Water Music I 104<br />
Spring Earth 105<br />
Spring Frost 105<br />
<strong>The</strong> Old Gravestones 106<br />
An Awesome Plummeting 107<br />
Irises 108<br />
At the Top of the World 109<br />
Water Music IV 110<br />
At the Wood’s Edge (Iroquois Ritual) 111<br />
Tillie 112<br />
Song of Youth 1967 112<br />
Out of Season 113<br />
Envoi 114
At the Verge of Spring 115<br />
Scraps 116<br />
<strong>The</strong> Tea Party 116<br />
Two, Going on Three 117<br />
<strong>The</strong> Outcast 119<br />
Watch Dog 120<br />
English Breakfast 120<br />
<strong>The</strong> Nosebleed 121<br />
A Wing of Time 122<br />
THE LITERARY LIFE<br />
Poetry Motels 126<br />
Regaining the Muse 126<br />
<strong>The</strong> Rivalry 126<br />
Poetry Readings 127<br />
Pathetique Symphony 128<br />
Deconstruction in Wisconsin 128<br />
Unemployed 129<br />
Dead Poets 130<br />
Who Can Be A Poet All the Time? 130<br />
Diagnosis of E.A. Poe 131<br />
Against the Writing of Sonnets 132<br />
Rhapsodomancy 132<br />
Of the Making of Books 132<br />
Finalists, Christian Ladies’ Poetry Society 134<br />
NOT A LOVE SONG, NO NEVER THAT!<br />
<strong>The</strong> Shy <strong>On</strong>e 136<br />
<strong>The</strong> Company of Eagles 136<br />
Making Love in Unlikely Places 137<br />
Ode 15 137<br />
Ode 22: A Haunting 138<br />
Frontier 138<br />
Ode 14 139<br />
Contact 139<br />
Ode 8 140<br />
Not a Love Song, No, Never That! 141<br />
Light Years 143<br />
Ode 19: Loved <strong>On</strong>es 144<br />
Ode 20: Desert Song 144<br />
Renunciation 145<br />
Triptych 146<br />
<strong>The</strong> Watcher 149<br />
Summer Storm 149
HERE AT THE MILLENNIUM<br />
Children of Atlas 150<br />
First Snow 151<br />
Thanksgiving Thoughts 151<br />
Impromptu 152<br />
Dusk 153<br />
<strong>As</strong> Idols Fall in the Afghan Hills 153<br />
Six Christmas Verses 154<br />
<strong>The</strong> ‘Possum 155<br />
Twenty-Year New Yorker, After His Exile 155<br />
Revelations 157<br />
Arabesques on the State of Liberty 157<br />
Quack 159<br />
Boston Lunch Counter 159<br />
Gutenberg’s Helper 160<br />
Nemesis 161<br />
<strong>The</strong> Sterile Squash 161<br />
Vermont Images 162<br />
Dead Princess 163<br />
Cave Deum 163<br />
Dramatis Personae 164<br />
Articles of Faith 165<br />
From Salem Forward 165<br />
Miser 166<br />
Handicapped Game Preserve, West Virginia 167<br />
Housecleaning 167<br />
Lethe 168<br />
THE ISLES OF GREECE<br />
Prometheus on Fifth Avenue 169<br />
Promethean Epilogue 170<br />
Athena and Medusa 171<br />
Burnt Offering 172<br />
Dialogue 172<br />
Prometheus Chained 173<br />
<strong>The</strong> Death of Queen Jocasta 182
THE GODS AS THEY ARE,<br />
ON THEIR PLANETS
PROLOGUE<br />
A fountain pen<br />
a yellow legal pad<br />
a cup of tea, a symphony —<br />
these set the stage.<br />
<strong>The</strong> empty page is one<br />
of an infinity of silences.<br />
<strong>The</strong> pen is a loaded gun,<br />
cannoning lines and dots<br />
onto the whiteness.<br />
This page is but a clearing,<br />
the tablet a wilderness —<br />
guidelines are there,<br />
but they are not a map.<br />
Fall in — you’ll find<br />
no bottom, no sense<br />
of beginnings and endings.<br />
Wolves lurk within —<br />
no compass<br />
will help you navigate.<br />
You may slip on a comma,<br />
wind up alone and desolate<br />
because a colon misled you.<br />
Three dots will send you flying<br />
into a black-hole time warp.<br />
Here is danger. Poems<br />
may change you forever.<br />
I mean to change you forever.<br />
It is too late to turn back.<br />
I’ve got you, guest<br />
in my little book.<br />
I will not leave you behind.<br />
Here is my hand.<br />
Read on!<br />
BETWEEN THE PAGES<br />
All that I am is here,<br />
even if what I am<br />
eludes you.<br />
I am pressed here<br />
between these pages —<br />
petals and stamen,<br />
dust and pollen,<br />
veined leaf<br />
PROLOGUE<br />
What scent<br />
upon the yellowed page?<br />
Try sandalwood and pine,<br />
patchouli and mummy powder,<br />
singed moth,<br />
shadow of raptor wing,<br />
a raven’s passing,<br />
a flit of bat,<br />
a memory of lilacs.<br />
You read my lines,<br />
inhale me,<br />
repeating my words,<br />
my broken thoughts.<br />
I am on your lips,<br />
I fill the air<br />
with green tea tension,<br />
spark from your hair<br />
to the nearest conductor,<br />
then up and out the window.<br />
Sing me to sparrows!<br />
Teach the ravens<br />
my autumn madness!<br />
Recite to owls<br />
my midnight charms!<br />
ENTRE LAS HOJAS<br />
Todo lo que soy<br />
está aquí<br />
aunque lo que sea<br />
te eluda.<br />
Me aprieto aquí,<br />
entre estas páginas —<br />
petalo y estambre,<br />
polvo y polen,<br />
hoja venosa.<br />
¿Cuál es aquel aroma<br />
en la hoja amarillada?<br />
Supones sándalo y pino,<br />
patchouli y polvo de momia,<br />
polilla chamuscada,<br />
11
la sombra de ala de un águila,<br />
el paso de cuervo,<br />
los murciélagos volantes,<br />
una memoria de lilaces.<br />
Lees mis lineas.<br />
Me inhalas,<br />
repitiendo mis palabras,<br />
repitiendo mis ideas rotas.<br />
Sobre tus labios, nazco.<br />
Yo lleno el aire<br />
con la tensión de té verde.<br />
Me salto, una chispa, de tus cabellos<br />
al conductor más cercano.<br />
Entonces yo vuelo ascendente,<br />
y parto por la ventana.<br />
Cántame el poema<br />
a los gorriones!<br />
Enseñales a los cuervos<br />
mi locura otoñala!<br />
Recitales a los búhos<br />
mis encantos nocturnales!<br />
WHY POETRY?<br />
My book I write for all to see,<br />
of things as they are<br />
or wish them to be —<br />
no private thoughts concealed,<br />
bright words, not camouflage,<br />
spark gap to reader’s consciousness.<br />
My trees, although they stand<br />
for many things, are trees.<br />
<strong>The</strong> self herein<br />
though confessing little,<br />
expresses all,<br />
words hammered hard<br />
on the anvil reality.<br />
My wrinkled leaves<br />
go not to Heaven,<br />
that silent boneyard;<br />
they fall to earth instead,<br />
food for the common eye.<br />
12<br />
My books heap up unread,<br />
an obelisk, a spire<br />
of ink and cursive lettering,<br />
a pyramid of utterings,<br />
a shrine of sound.<br />
If these words please you,<br />
nameless reader,<br />
to whom I am a faceless voice,<br />
if but one stanza leaps afire<br />
and makes you sing it,<br />
then the heart-blood of my pen<br />
is worthy.<br />
What makes a poem great?<br />
It is great if it leaves you —<br />
as the earth always is<br />
when the first snow falls —<br />
astonished.
LIBER ANNIVERSARIII: AUTUMN POEMS<br />
IN CHILL NOVEMBER<br />
<strong>The</strong> leaves be red,<br />
<strong>The</strong> nuts be brown,<br />
<strong>The</strong>y hang so high<br />
<strong>The</strong>y will not fall down.<br />
—Elizabethan Round, Anon.<br />
<strong>The</strong> snow has come.<br />
<strong>The</strong> leaves have fallen.<br />
Long nights commit the chill<br />
low sun and flannel clouds cannot disperse.<br />
We walk the park, stripped now<br />
to mere schematics,<br />
vision drawn out to farther hills<br />
now that the forest is blanked<br />
like flesh turned glass on X-ray negative.<br />
<strong>The</strong>se woods are sham so near the solstice,<br />
play out a murder mystery of birch and maple.<br />
<strong>The</strong> riddle is who’s dead and who’s pretending?<br />
That witches’ elm with clinging broomsticks —<br />
is it deceased or somnolent?<br />
Which of these trees will never bloom again:<br />
A Lombardy poplar stripped by blight—<br />
A maple picked clean by gypsy moths—<br />
A thunder-blasted pedestal of ash—<br />
A moribund sycamore whose only life<br />
came in a few vain buds<br />
(growing like dead men’s hair and nails,<br />
slow to acknowledge the rot below)?<br />
<strong>The</strong> ground’s a color cacophony,<br />
alive, alive!<br />
the treeline a study in gray and brown.<br />
Now who can tell<br />
the bare tree from the dead,<br />
the thin man from the skeleton?<br />
Which denizens of wood lot shed these leaves?<br />
Which is a corpse? a zombie?<br />
Which one is but a vermin shell?<br />
Which treads the night on portable roots,<br />
festooned with bats,<br />
sinking its web of trailing vines<br />
into the veins of saplings?<br />
Which stalwart oaks will topple,<br />
which trunks cave in to termite nests?<br />
How can we tell the living from the dead?<br />
13
It’s just the month: November lies.<br />
October always tells the truth.<br />
You could no more fake<br />
the shedding of leaves<br />
than simulate a pulse in stone.<br />
<strong>On</strong>ly the living fall in love,<br />
only the living cry for joy,<br />
only the living relinquish that month<br />
in red and yellow shuddering!<br />
<strong>The</strong> pines,<br />
those steeple-capped Puritans,<br />
what price their ever-green?<br />
Scrooge trees, they hoard their summers,<br />
withhold their foliage,<br />
refuse to give the frost his due.<br />
Ah, they are prudent,<br />
Scotch pine and wily cedar,<br />
touch-me-not fir and hemlock.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y will live to a ripe old age<br />
(if you can call that living).<br />
Love! Burn! Sing! Crumble!<br />
Dance! Wind! Fall! Tumble!<br />
Into the wind-blown pyramid of leaves!<br />
Spin in a whirling dust-devil waltz!<br />
Leaf-pile! Treetops! Tramping on clouds!<br />
Weightless, flying, red-caped October!<br />
THE FENCE<br />
Town fathers, what have you done?<br />
Last night I returned<br />
(I vowed — I made the lake a promise)<br />
intending to tramp the lane of maples,<br />
read with my palms the weary tombstones,<br />
feast with my eyes the clouded lake,<br />
lean with a sigh on founder’s headstone,<br />
chatter my verses to turtles and fish,<br />
trace with my pen the day lily runes,<br />
the wild grape alphabet,<br />
the anagram of fallen branches,<br />
all in a carpet of mottled leaves.<br />
<strong>The</strong> mute trees were all assembled.<br />
<strong>The</strong> stones — a little more helterskelter<br />
than before,<br />
but more or less intact — still greeted me<br />
as ever with their Braille assertions.<br />
14
<strong>The</strong> lake, unbleached solemnity<br />
of gray, tipped up<br />
and out against its banks to meet me.<br />
All should have been as I left it.<br />
Heart sinks. <strong>The</strong> eye recoils.<br />
My joy becomes an orphanage<br />
at what I see:<br />
from gate to bank to bend<br />
of old peninsula,<br />
across the lot<br />
and back again,<br />
sunk into earth<br />
and seven feet high<br />
A CHAIN LINK FENCE!<br />
Town fathers, what have you done?<br />
Surely the dead do not require protection?<br />
Trees do not walk.<br />
<strong>The</strong> birds are not endangered.<br />
How have your grandsires sinned<br />
to be enclosed in a prison yard?<br />
<strong>As</strong> I walk in I shudder.<br />
It is a trap now.<br />
A cul-de-sac.<br />
I think of concentration camps.<br />
For years, art students painted here —<br />
I hear the click of camera shutters,<br />
the scratch of pens,<br />
the smooth pastel caress,<br />
taste the tongue lick of water color,<br />
inhale the night musk of oil paints.<br />
Poets and writers too,<br />
leaning on death stones,<br />
took ease and inspiration here,<br />
minds soaring to lake and sky.<br />
At dawn, a solitary fisherman<br />
could cast his line here.<br />
Some nights the ground would undulate<br />
with lovers<br />
(what harm? who now would take<br />
their joy between two fences?)<br />
<strong>The</strong> fence is everywhere! No angled view<br />
can exclude it. It checkerboards<br />
the lake, the sky, the treeline.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y tell me that vandals rampaged here,<br />
knocked over stones,<br />
15
tossed markers<br />
into the outraged waves.<br />
Whose adolescents did this,<br />
town fathers?<br />
Yours.<br />
Stunted by rock and stunned by drugs,<br />
they came to topple a few old slabs,<br />
struck them because they could not<br />
strike you.<br />
Let them summon their dusky Devil,<br />
rock lyric and comic and paperback,<br />
blue collar magic, dime store demons —<br />
they wait and wait,<br />
blood dripping from dead bird sacrifice<br />
until the heavy truth engages them:<br />
<strong>The</strong> dead are dead,<br />
magic is empty ritual,<br />
and stubborn Satan declines<br />
to answer a teen-age telegram.<br />
Fence in your children, not our stones!<br />
TO THE ARC OF THE SUBLIME<br />
In nights beneath the stars,<br />
sometimes alone — sometimes<br />
with one I loved<br />
(in futile or secret urgency) —<br />
I have outwaited<br />
the rise and fall of Scorpio,<br />
arc of its tail<br />
stinging the treetops.<br />
I have traced the inconstant moon,<br />
the indecisive Venus;<br />
feel more assured<br />
by the long, slow haul of Jupiter,<br />
the patient tread of Pluto<br />
(whom they pursue<br />
in their frigid outer orbits<br />
I cannot guess)<br />
Such solitude,<br />
millennia between<br />
the fly-bys of comets,<br />
perhaps is why<br />
they need so many moons,<br />
why rings of ice<br />
encircle them like loyal cats.<br />
16
It is lonely in space,<br />
far out<br />
where the sun is merely<br />
a star among stars.<br />
It is lonely in autumn.<br />
I sit in midnight woods.<br />
A trio of raccoons, foraging,<br />
come up to me,<br />
black mask eyes of the young ones<br />
interrogating the first cold night,<br />
the unaccustomed noisiness<br />
of bone rattle maple leaf<br />
beneath their paws.<br />
How can I tell them<br />
these trees will soon be skeletons,<br />
the pond as hard as glass,<br />
the nut and berry harvest over?<br />
<strong>The</strong>se two are young —<br />
they would not believe me.<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir mother rears up protectively,<br />
smells me, scents out<br />
the panic among the saplings,<br />
the smell of rust and tannin.<br />
We share a long stillness,<br />
a moment when consciousness<br />
is not a passive agency.<br />
Our sight invades the countryside,<br />
embracing everything —<br />
sleepers in beds in a concrete tower —<br />
earthworms entwining in humus rot —<br />
goes up and out through the limpid sky,<br />
streaming past moon —<br />
— moon’s lava’d seas —<br />
out, out, to the arc of the sublime,<br />
tracing the edge of great Antares,<br />
leaping to other galaxies unafraid.<br />
(Let space expand as though the worlds<br />
still feared their neighbors!<br />
Let miser stars implode,<br />
their dwarf hearts shriveling<br />
to cores of iron!)<br />
We are the scourge of entropy.<br />
We sing the one great note<br />
through which new being<br />
comes out of nothingness.<br />
17
Does it have meaning,<br />
this seed-shagged planet<br />
alive with eyes?<br />
Is earth the crucible,<br />
sandbox of angry gods,<br />
or is it the eye of all eyes,<br />
ear of all ears,<br />
the nerve through which the universe<br />
acquires self-knowledge?<br />
But these are weighty thoughts<br />
for man and mammal!<br />
We are but blood and minerals,<br />
upright for an instant,<br />
conscious for but a moment,<br />
a grainfall of cosmic hourglass.<br />
Yet I am not ephemeral:<br />
I freeze time,<br />
relive moments<br />
chronicle the centuries<br />
re-speak Shakespeare,<br />
beat out the staves of Mozart,<br />
read the same books<br />
my forebears knew<br />
make of old words<br />
my wordy pyramid.<br />
I am the one<br />
snapping the pictures of solar systems,<br />
sending myself<br />
an outside-in self-portrait.<br />
I send my name and signature<br />
on bottles spinning past Uranus.<br />
I am the one who asks, Is it worth it?<br />
I who hear the X-ray wind reply, It is!<br />
I am the one who would not stay in caves,<br />
I was discontent in the treetops.<br />
I wanted to be bird and whale and rocket.<br />
Ever, o ever more mortal now —<br />
— friends falling away like withered leaves —<br />
still I find joy in this subliminal shrine of autumn.<br />
My hand is full of fossil shells<br />
picked up from the lake shore rubble,<br />
scallops enduring with the same rock faith<br />
(its implicit minimum vocabulary):<br />
I live, and the increase of my consciousness<br />
is the span of my life.<br />
18
OCTOBER STORM 1998<br />
First night of the tenth month,<br />
a roaring storm hits town:<br />
thunder from every side,<br />
flash after cataclysmic flash<br />
of blue-white lightning.<br />
Transformers hum<br />
and tempt the storm-stab,<br />
birds hunch in branches,<br />
cats dash<br />
from one dry porch to another.<br />
A set of solitary car lights passes,<br />
distorted in sheets of rain,<br />
taillights at the corner<br />
like the haunted eyes<br />
of a carnivore<br />
who has just learned<br />
he is the last of his kind.<br />
A siren signals a distant fire.<br />
Lightning comes closer,<br />
closest I have known in years.<br />
I open the window,<br />
smell of ozone,<br />
watch as a nearby tree goes down,<br />
raked by the fingernails<br />
of a coal-black thunderhead.<br />
I hold the new jade stone<br />
on which a Chinese artisan<br />
has carved my nascent Mandarin name:<br />
Meng for the dream, the world<br />
in which all poets dwell —<br />
Ch’iu for the autumn, my chosen<br />
province and capital —<br />
Lei for the thunder<br />
of the mountain-striding storm.<br />
I am the Dream of Autumn Thunder,<br />
and this storm has called my name,<br />
marked the day of my arrival<br />
in the mysterious Middle Kingdom.<br />
AUTUMN LYRIC<br />
Autumn has come<br />
on splintered foot —<br />
there is no stealth<br />
in crackling leaves,<br />
no sweet perfume<br />
but apple rot,<br />
the humus smell,<br />
the acrid smoke<br />
of fireplace wood.<br />
Berries are dry,<br />
the summer pods<br />
untenanted.<br />
Cynic squirrel<br />
packs up his store —<br />
(where one would do,<br />
he buries two) —<br />
not seeds enough,<br />
he must have more!<br />
<strong>The</strong> birds have flown —<br />
they never learn<br />
how gray bark speaks<br />
of empty beaks —<br />
they chase the sun<br />
to tropic zone.<br />
Two walnuts hang<br />
on withered branch/<br />
inside each shell<br />
a sleeping eye/<br />
inside each eye<br />
the idea<br />
of spring to come.<br />
19
AUTUMN<br />
A Fragment by Alexander Pushkin, 1833<br />
A new English paraphrase<br />
“To the drowsy intellect, all things are possible…”<br />
Derzhavin<br />
I<br />
October! It comes at last. <strong>The</strong> grove shakes<br />
from naked boughs the last reluctant leaves.<br />
<strong>The</strong> road is iced with autumn’s chilling breath —<br />
I hear the brook behind the turning mill,<br />
but the pond is still; a neighbor with dogs<br />
tramps to the distant fields — his hounds disturb<br />
the peace of forest, his horse’s hoof-falls<br />
knock down and trample the winter wheat.<br />
II<br />
My season now! Spring is a bore to me.<br />
<strong>The</strong> dull thaw: mud everywhere thick and vile —<br />
Spring dizzies me, as my mind obsesses<br />
daydreaming, my blood in giddy ferment.<br />
Winter’s austerity is what I need,<br />
white snows beneath a whiter moon — what joy<br />
to glide airily in a speeding sleigh<br />
with one whose clasping fingers burn like fire!<br />
III<br />
<strong>The</strong> fun of it, skating steel-shod on ice,<br />
tracing a pattern on the river’s face!<br />
<strong>The</strong> air aglow with winter’s festivals!<br />
But even Winter palls — no one can love<br />
six months of snowfall — even the cave bear<br />
in his drowsy den would say “Enough, now!”<br />
Sleigh-rides with jolly youths grow tedious,<br />
and we grow quarrelsome cooped in all day.<br />
IV<br />
You, peach-fuzz Summer — you I could cherish,<br />
except for heat and dust, and biting flies.<br />
<strong>The</strong>se bring dullness. <strong>The</strong> sated heart wears down.<br />
Our inspiration is a dried-up creek.<br />
Iced tea is not enough; we turn to drink,<br />
we rue the Winter hag, whose funeral<br />
served up wine and blini. What little chill<br />
we get comes from the freezer, sweet and cold.<br />
We spoon out ices, and we think of snow.<br />
20
V<br />
No, the end of Autumn is not admired:<br />
But I, reader, will hear no ill of her;<br />
She is the unnoticed child, the wistful<br />
one, way down the line of gaudy sisters.<br />
Her quiet beauty is the one for me.<br />
Her bare-tree starkness, I frankly say<br />
makes Winter’s edge the finest time of all.<br />
I love her humbly and so silently<br />
that I alone, in leaf-fall, deserve her.<br />
VI<br />
How can I make you see, Spring-clad lovers?<br />
It is like loving a sickly maiden,<br />
doomed to a consumptive death, pale-skinned<br />
with that ivory pallor and passive gaze,<br />
too weak to hurl a reproach at this life.<br />
Even as her soul expires, her young lips<br />
curl up in a ghost of a febrile smile.<br />
She does not hear her grave being readied.<br />
Today she lives — she is gone tomorrow.<br />
VII<br />
Season of mournful pomp, you live for me!<br />
Your valedictory beauty, mine!<br />
(Or am I yours — tranced and captivated?)<br />
I love to watch as Nature’s dyes dim out,<br />
the forest full court in gold and purple,<br />
turned to paler shades in hoarfrost reaping.<br />
<strong>The</strong> noisy wind tells me its secrets, pale skies<br />
concealed by the billows of darkling clouds,<br />
holding the sun back, frostbite hovering,<br />
whispered threats of grizzled Winter — I hear you!<br />
VIII<br />
I bloom afresh each time the Autumn comes.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Russian cold is good for me, I think!<br />
<strong>The</strong> days’ routines regain their old relish.<br />
I sleep and eat in proper proportion.<br />
Desire awakes — and I am young again!<br />
My heart beats fast with rejuvenated<br />
blood — I’m full of life like a newly-fed<br />
Dracula — a lightning-jolted Frankenwell,<br />
anyway, you get my meaning, friend!<br />
21
IX<br />
Bring me my horse! <strong>The</strong> steppes are calling me!<br />
<strong>On</strong> his back, glad rider, I’ll thump and thud,<br />
fill the dale with my echoing thunder.<br />
His shining hooves strike sparks, his streaming mane<br />
repeats the wind like a Cossack’s banner.<br />
<strong>The</strong> bright ice creaks when we cross the river.<br />
But the days are so short! Already dark!<br />
I read my book in guttering hearth-light,<br />
nourishing immortal longings again.<br />
X<br />
And in the silence sweet I forget you<br />
(Sad to admit, but everyone and all<br />
seem not to be when I’m lulled by fancy.)<br />
Sit there — empty — wait for the Muse to come —<br />
I am troubled again with lyric fever.<br />
My soul shakes, it reverberates, it wants<br />
to burst the dam of reticence, I dream<br />
of how the verses I’ve not yet finished<br />
will pour down Time, cross into languages<br />
unknown to me, leap continents and seas,<br />
the children that my visions bore, upright<br />
complete and singing for all to hear them!<br />
Invisible throngs fill me — demon? Muse?<br />
ancestor poets? poets yet to come?—<br />
Take me! Fill my reveries! Make these songs!<br />
XI<br />
So I’ll say everything I meant to say.<br />
<strong>The</strong> brave thoughts have come — rhymes run to meet them<br />
on winged feet. My fingers reach for the pen,<br />
and the neglected pen says “Ink! And where’s<br />
that yellow tablet whose narrow green lines<br />
seem always to pull the right words downward?”<br />
Just wait — a little tea — just hold the pen —<br />
wait calmly and the verses will follow.<br />
Thus a still ship slumbers on a still sea.<br />
Hark: chimes! now all hands leap to the rigging.<br />
Exhale! the sails are filled with ideas,<br />
they belly in the wind — the groaning mast —<br />
the monster poem moves to deep water —<br />
the harbor far behind the foaming track.<br />
XII<br />
It sails, but where is this ship taking me?…<br />
22
ON RECEIVING A GIFT OF BOOKS<br />
IN EARLY OCTOBER<br />
for Barbara Girard<br />
<strong>The</strong> books are falling from the trees:<br />
<strong>The</strong> Birds of Swan Point Cemetery<br />
still forest green<br />
with wide-eyed saw-whet owl<br />
pleading for continued foliage,<br />
months more of fat brown mice<br />
before the meager winter comes.<br />
Here’s Fraser’s angry Wood King<br />
guarding his oak, his paranoia<br />
old as <strong>The</strong> Golden Bough,<br />
his staff and sword crossed,<br />
feet firm in the circle<br />
of abundant acorns<br />
not even the squirrels touch,<br />
fearing his wild words.<br />
Not well concealed,<br />
that oily Aegisthus<br />
woos married Clytemnestra<br />
amid the thinning sycamores.<br />
Troy is far off, the war is long.<br />
He’ll never come home, that<br />
ungrateful king, Agamemnon.<br />
Now here’s a well-used leaf,<br />
pock-holed already with frostbite,<br />
red with laughter on top,<br />
brown with wisdom beneath,<br />
I read at random:<br />
“War is so savage a thing<br />
that it rather befits beasts<br />
than men —”<br />
old friend Erasmus, your Praise of Folly.<br />
Here by the stately laurel<br />
falls a wreath, twined round<br />
with bands of gold, not far<br />
from the supple columns<br />
of the Athenaeum,<br />
and the voice I first heard<br />
in timeless tales of gods and heroes<br />
spins out Mythology as truth<br />
from the pen of Edith Hamilton —<br />
o welcome leaves<br />
from when the world was young.<br />
Pruned branches piled for an auto-da-fé<br />
sing and crackle:<br />
Here burns Voltaire,<br />
Candide and his beloved Cunegonde.<br />
Pangloss intones as flames roar up,<br />
of the best of all possible worlds.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Grand Inquisitor warms his hands,<br />
is not amused as pine cones<br />
volley down,<br />
needles of truth in evergreen pursuit,<br />
crows mocking<br />
as Trevor-Roper tells all<br />
in <strong>The</strong> European Witch-Craze.<br />
Some of this autumn fall is dangerous:<br />
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman<br />
a perennial leaf that will not wither,<br />
brave Mary Wollstonecraft’s<br />
appeal to higher reason,<br />
awaits its vindication still.<br />
And here’s A History of the Primates.<br />
<strong>Are</strong> men descended from hairy apes?<br />
Just ask a woman.<br />
Here’s Forster’s Maurice,<br />
a novel its author dared not publish,<br />
a brave, tormented book<br />
about a man who dared<br />
to be happy<br />
in his love for another man:<br />
I hold you, reticent English leaf,<br />
press you into my own heart’s book<br />
and will not let the earth<br />
consume you.<br />
And now the wind gusts out<br />
and upward,<br />
ah, too many leaves to count now:<br />
Jung and Proust,<br />
Lawrence and Leopardi,<br />
so many books unread<br />
so many leaves one upon another,<br />
mountains of you<br />
like toppled libraries,<br />
pyramids of poems to kick through<br />
and millions more still waiting<br />
to fall!<br />
23
AUTUMN SUNDAYS IN MADISON SQUARE<br />
Stately old sycamores, sentinel oaks,<br />
fan-leafed gingko and noble elm,<br />
year by year your patient quest for the sun<br />
has sheltered such madmen, squirrels,<br />
birds, bankers, derelicts and poets<br />
as needed a plot of peaceful<br />
respite from the making and sale of things.<br />
Poe lingered here in his penniless woe.<br />
Melville looked up at a whale cloud.<br />
Walt Whitman idled on the open lawn.<br />
(Sad now, the ground scratched nearly bare,<br />
Fenced off against the depredating dogs;<br />
the fountains dry, while standing pools<br />
leach up from old, sclerotic water mains.)<br />
Four chimes ring for unattended vespers,<br />
no one minding the arcane call,<br />
not the bronze orators exhorting us,<br />
not the rollicking hounds unleashed<br />
in the flea-infested gravel dog-run,<br />
not the grizzled men in boxes,<br />
so worn from the work of all-day begging<br />
they’re ready to sleep before the sun sets.<br />
A thousand pigeons clot the trees.<br />
<strong>The</strong> northwest park is spattered with guano,<br />
benches unusable, a birds’<br />
Calcutta, a ghetto a bloated squabs<br />
feasting on mounds of scattered crumbs,<br />
bird-drop stalagmites on every surface!<br />
Daily she comes here, the pigeon-lady,<br />
drab in her cloth coat and sneakers,<br />
sack full of bread crusts, and millet and rice,<br />
peanuts and seeds from who-knows-where.<br />
Still she stands, in the midst of offerings,<br />
until they light upon her shoulder,<br />
touching her fingertips, brushing her cheeks<br />
with their dusty, speckled wings, naming her<br />
name in their mating-call cooing,<br />
luring her up to lofty parapets,<br />
rooftop and ledge, nest precipice<br />
where, if she could fly, she would feed their young,<br />
guard their dove-bright sky dominion<br />
from hawks, the heedless crowds, the wrecking cranes.<br />
24
Across one fenced-in lawn the sparrows soar<br />
in V-formation back and forth,<br />
as though they meant in menacing vectors<br />
to enforce the no-dog zoning.<br />
Amid the uncut grass the squirrels’ heads<br />
bob up, vanish, then reappear<br />
as the endless search for nuts and lovers<br />
ascends its autumn apogee. But here<br />
the squirrels are thin and ragged,<br />
road-kill reanimated harvesters,<br />
tails curled like flattened question marks<br />
as every other morsel offered them<br />
is snatched by a beak or talon.<br />
Descending birds make calligraphic curves<br />
as branches twine in spiral chase of sun.<br />
Nothing is safe from scavenging —<br />
trash barrels tipped for aluminum cans,<br />
the ground beneath the benches combed<br />
for roach-ends the dealers crush and re-sell<br />
to law clerks and secretaries.<br />
Even the cast-off cigarettes are taken<br />
by derelicts and nicotinic birds.<br />
Certain my notes are tracking him,<br />
a storm-tossed schizophrenic darts away.<br />
Beside the World War’s monument<br />
(ah, naïve time, to conceive no second!)<br />
an <strong>As</strong>ian woman gardening<br />
adds green and blossom to the shady ground<br />
amid the place-names of trampled Belgium,<br />
forest and trench of invaded France.<br />
(Not her war, certainly, not her heroes,<br />
yet her soft blooms, as from a grave<br />
whisper the names of the now-dead warriors<br />
and sons who never come to read<br />
of Ypres, Argonne and the barbed-wire lines.)<br />
A welcome bookstall has opened its doors,<br />
as if to lure the passers-by<br />
to read, to dream, beneath the timeless elms —<br />
but who can sit, immersed in book,<br />
as suicidal leaves cascade, as hands<br />
shaking and thin, trade crumpled bills<br />
for bags of bliss in crystal, crack or powder?<br />
25
Is this the potter’s field of shattered dreams?<br />
<strong>The</strong> copper arm of Liberty<br />
once stood at the northern end of the square.<br />
<strong>The</strong> trees once soared. Now roots eat salt,<br />
brush against steam pipes and rusted cable,<br />
cowed by courthouse, statues frowning,<br />
Gothic and Renaissance insurance spires.<br />
<strong>On</strong>ly the branches, forgiving, forgetting,<br />
redeem this purgatory place.<br />
A Druid stillness draws here at dusk-time,<br />
squirrel and bird and runaway<br />
equally blessed as the hot-ash sunset<br />
gives way to the neon-lit night,<br />
city unsleeping beneath the unseen stars.<br />
IN PRAGUE, A TREE OF MANY COLORS<br />
for Jan Palach, Czech martyr,<br />
who set himself on fire January 16, 1969<br />
to protest the occupation of his country<br />
I am born, I am sown.<br />
I am screaming as the sun tropes me out of the earth.<br />
I am dragging in my tendrils the hopes of spring,<br />
I am pulled, exhorted into summer. <strong>The</strong> light<br />
deceives me with its deaths and resurrections.<br />
I must be straight. I must not believe<br />
the mocking sun and its revolutions.<br />
I must wait for the ultimate paradise,<br />
the world’s light redistributed for all.<br />
Much passes beneath my shadow:<br />
crowds press to marriages and funerals —<br />
the upright grooms go in,<br />
the silver-handled caskets come out,<br />
the church, the state, the people<br />
move on in soot and sorrow, day to day.<br />
Why do these people whisper always?<br />
Why do so many avert their eyes from me?<br />
Why does neighbor spy on his neighbor,<br />
reporting every oddity to the men in black?<br />
Why do I hear the rumble of thunder?<br />
Why does the symphony break off?<br />
Why have the women gone to the cellars?<br />
Soldiers and tanks are everywhere!<br />
<strong>The</strong> streets are full of Russians and Poles,<br />
26
Hungarians, Bulgarians, East Germans—<br />
all of East Europe has come to crush us!<br />
Men with fur hats speak swollen, Slavic words.<br />
Death is here. <strong>The</strong> smell of blood is here.<br />
My roots touch the entrails of the hastily buried.<br />
Anger is everywhere. I hold my leaves,<br />
make camouflage for lovers, conspirators.<br />
Students rip down the street signs<br />
and hide them in my upper boughs—<br />
the invaders drive in circles<br />
and cannot find their destinations.<br />
I open my bark for secret messages,<br />
encourage pigeons to carry the word<br />
of where is safe and who is betrayed.<br />
Here comes that student, Jan Palach,<br />
the ardent one, the solitary dreamer.<br />
He stuffs his coat with my fallen leaves,<br />
fills his cap, book bag and pockets with them.<br />
He is the icon of our unhappiness:<br />
he will open like a triptych of gold<br />
into a flame that will embarrass the sun.<br />
When he exfoliates in gasoline<br />
I am with him, burning, burning,<br />
leaf by dry leaf exploding for liberty.<br />
SEPTEMBER IN GOTHAM 2001<br />
This is New York, and fall<br />
has caught us unawares.<br />
From Palisade bus I view<br />
the gap-toothed skyline,<br />
a forest whose tallest trees<br />
are suddenly missing.<br />
In Gotham, they say,<br />
strange breezes from the south<br />
make certain elders remember<br />
downwind from the death camps.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is talk of stolen watches<br />
from shops beneath the rubble,<br />
the discovery daily<br />
of severed limbs.<br />
Month’s end, I walk all day in midtown,<br />
with shoppers determined<br />
to do something normal,<br />
eat Szechuan lunch, browse<br />
books, consider new software.<br />
27
Like many others around me,<br />
I pick things up from the counter,<br />
then put them back —<br />
everyday urges seem so trivial.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is not one note of music.<br />
People keep stopping<br />
to stare nervously<br />
at the Empire State,<br />
like frightened squirrels<br />
in the shadow<br />
of a threatened sequoia.<br />
<strong>The</strong> sycamores in Bryant Park<br />
beam back the sun,<br />
an interrupted medley<br />
of overhanging clouds<br />
that pause, then part,<br />
then scud away.<br />
Seedpods of honey locust fall,<br />
curl brown like overdone toast<br />
on the pavement,<br />
but the delicate leaves remain above,<br />
still adamant green.<br />
It is not till night,<br />
till I turn the corner on Lexington<br />
and spy the dark hunched shell<br />
of the Gramercy Park Armory,<br />
that I see the leaves of this autumn,<br />
its feuilles morts,<br />
taped to tree trunks, walls and windows,<br />
tied to a chain link fence,<br />
row on row to the end of seeing,<br />
flapping in rainstorm, tattered, tearing,<br />
soon to be ankle deep in the gutter —<br />
these album-leaves of anguish<br />
burst forth with human colors —<br />
faces brown and pink and salmon,<br />
oak and ash and ebony,<br />
the rainbow of human flesh,<br />
of eye-flash —<br />
visages still in their conquering twenties,<br />
snapshot in happy moments,<br />
embracing their brides,<br />
babies on knees,<br />
license, yearbook, graduation photos,<br />
smiling at beach or barbecue,<br />
28
ink fading or bleeding now<br />
in the sky’s abundant tearfall.<br />
In the language we use<br />
for the recovery of wayward pets,<br />
these posters beg the impossible:<br />
IF ANYONE HAS SEEN HER —<br />
MISSING — MISSING<br />
LEFT SHOULDER SCAR —<br />
A DOLPHIN TATTOO —<br />
MISSING — MISSING<br />
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?—<br />
MISSING — MISSING<br />
PLEASE FIND ME<br />
MISSING — MISSING<br />
WORLD TRADE CENTER<br />
—September 30, 2001, New York City<br />
29
RUNAWAYS<br />
I want to report a disappearance.<br />
No, not exactly, not a person.<br />
No, not a pet. Lost property?<br />
What’s missing isn’t mine to lose,<br />
but it has certainly vanished.<br />
<strong>The</strong> tree — the tree in front of my house<br />
is just plain gone.<br />
Just yesterday I raked the leaves,<br />
the first red flags of autumn.<br />
<strong>The</strong> maple was there. I touched it,<br />
traced with my hand its withered bark.<br />
Today it’s gone, root, branch and leaf.<br />
Just a hole in the pavement,<br />
a heap of soil, a trail of clotted soil<br />
down and around the corner.<br />
Nothing disturbed my sleep.<br />
No chain saw, crane or dynamite<br />
chewed, toppled or fragmented<br />
my splendid shade tree.<br />
I have no witnesses<br />
except the baffled squirrels,<br />
the homeless begging sparrows.<br />
My neighbors seem not to notice —<br />
they’re Mediterranean,<br />
prefer the sun and open space<br />
to my shady Druid grove.<br />
I’ll plant another tree, I guess,<br />
though I’ll be old before<br />
its boughs can shelter me.<br />
I wouldn’t have come —<br />
I would have borne the mystery alone —<br />
except that — how do I say it? —<br />
I think it’s happening all over.<br />
I notice trees. I walk the park,<br />
maintain a nodding acquaintance<br />
with birds,<br />
keep time by the blossoms,<br />
the fruit, the rainbow of flame<br />
when October exfoliates.<br />
This morning the park —<br />
I counted — I actually counted —<br />
is missing three maples, two sycamores,<br />
one each of elm and beech,<br />
crab apple, peach and sassafras.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re’s not a sign of violence:<br />
no broken trunks, no sawed-off limbs,<br />
no scorch of lightning.<br />
30<br />
Just holes in the ground,<br />
deep channels where roots withdrew,<br />
and where each tree had been,<br />
a trail of gravel, worms and soil<br />
out of the park,<br />
onto the pavement,<br />
then — nothing.<br />
Who’s taking them, you ask?<br />
You’re the policeman,<br />
the missing persons authority.<br />
I don’t think anyone’s taking them.<br />
I think they’re leaving us.<br />
Maybe they’re going north to Canada.<br />
Maybe they’ve had enough<br />
of crime and dirt and corruption.<br />
Maybe they’d like a little freedom,<br />
a little peace and quiet.<br />
You’d better investigate.<br />
Imagine our city if this goes on:<br />
Central Park a treeless dog run;<br />
Park Avenue and Fifth<br />
two blazing corridors<br />
of steam and sweat<br />
and screaming cabbies.<br />
What would we be without our trees?<br />
We brought them with us from Europe,<br />
our Johnny Appleseed inheritance.<br />
For every wilderness we leveled<br />
we came back planting, pruning,<br />
framing our starry vision<br />
with tamer treelines.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y civilize us, connect us<br />
to the earth and the seasons.<br />
Without them we are savages,<br />
wolf eating wolf on the pavement,<br />
a handshake of scorpions.<br />
Find them! Beg them to come back!<br />
<strong>As</strong>k them their terms!<br />
Get the mayor to negotiate!<br />
Promise them we’ll do better.<br />
We’ll clean the streets again,<br />
restore the parks and riverways.<br />
We’ll serenade the trees with Mozart,<br />
outlaw rap and raucous riveting.<br />
we’ll do whatever it takes!<br />
How could we go on without them,<br />
Leafless, treeless, barren and dead?
VIKING<br />
THE GODS AS THEY ARE, ON THEIR PLANETS<br />
I did it.<br />
Who would have thought<br />
that such a hulk<br />
of rivets and scraps<br />
could cross a sea of space?<br />
You named me for voyagers,<br />
for men who ravaged harbor towns<br />
content with seizing<br />
their women and gold.<br />
Cool were the hands<br />
that made me. Few cheered<br />
when I embarked in flame.<br />
No one expects a golden bounty<br />
at the end of my crossing.<br />
A strange tide carried me<br />
weighted, then weightless,<br />
then tugged to ground again,<br />
devoid of passenger<br />
and pilotless,<br />
not even a goddess<br />
carved on my prow.<br />
Little was left of me<br />
when I touched down in sand.<br />
I did it,<br />
before the alien hordes you dreamt of<br />
could launch their fleet,<br />
I touched this desolate<br />
and long deserted ground.<br />
Well earned, the name<br />
you gave me. I dared<br />
your greatest dream and won.<br />
Salute me, my maker:<br />
I invaded Mars.<br />
THE GODS AS THEY ARE,<br />
ON THEIR PLANETS<br />
Thanks to intrepid Viking,<br />
the patient Voyager,<br />
Magellan’s fly-bys<br />
we know our gods and their planets<br />
in pockmarked intimacy<br />
as never the ancients knew them.<br />
<strong>The</strong> beauty of Venus is tarnished now.<br />
Her sallow, cratered visage,<br />
her veils of cloud an imposture.<br />
<strong>The</strong> hag fools no one<br />
with her stripper’s guile.<br />
Her touch would rend you<br />
with its flaming talons,<br />
her crack-lip kiss<br />
would scourge your face away.<br />
Her nipples spout<br />
sulfuric acid.<br />
If this is love, then howl alone and die.<br />
Where, Mars, is your warlike clamor?<br />
Your smoking steeds are chunks<br />
of rubble,<br />
Deimos and Phobos afraid<br />
of their shadows!<br />
How can you rage with your<br />
dry-ice hairpiece,<br />
your tideless, shipless, waterless seas,<br />
wheezing in your dismal atmosphere<br />
too weak to hold in oxygen?<br />
You are a skeleton in armor,<br />
a pyramid of swords,<br />
boneyard of useless causes,<br />
fighting words.<br />
Long have we feared you, <strong>Are</strong>s.<br />
Now ignorant armies clash for naught,<br />
steal empty victories<br />
for the vanity of chariots,<br />
the price of ooze,<br />
the pride of petty warlords,<br />
hollow in red planet’s retrograde.<br />
Your drum is dead.<br />
We have touched you<br />
with our robot hands,<br />
sifted your sands and found you<br />
lifeless.<br />
<strong>The</strong> light you cast on Troy<br />
and Carthage<br />
is not incarnadine with blood —<br />
rust is your sigil now, codger god!<br />
31
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE<br />
<strong>The</strong> photos from Hubble are unmistakable.<br />
<strong>The</strong> light that just now reaches us<br />
from hundreds of millions of years ago<br />
shows one great galaxy, grand as our own<br />
skewered by a vast invader,<br />
another swirling spiral,<br />
its equal with hundreds of billions of stars,<br />
two vast ripsaws of matter and energy<br />
flaming in perfect focus. <strong>As</strong>tronomers<br />
slap one another’s shoulders, mark spots<br />
where blue orbs signal the birth of stars,<br />
as suns collide and black holes suck nebulae<br />
into their bloated wormholes never satisfied.<br />
I see the photographs on newsprint, two<br />
red-orange disks the size of quarters.<br />
Around me they scream, “<strong>The</strong> millennium is coming!<br />
Two years until our computers won’t start!”<br />
Those interpenetrating galaxies get less concern<br />
than what kind of sex the President is getting.<br />
Did no one see what these pictures really mean?<br />
Alu marana echtho karani.<br />
For eons, the invading disk advanced —<br />
a thin ribbon at the peak of the heavens,<br />
then a cloud, then, at last, the juggernaut.<br />
For eons, the outer arms collided,<br />
and then the burning core where stars<br />
are numerous as grains of sand.<br />
It will go on for eons more.<br />
We shall all be dead, our sun expired,<br />
before the last picture reaches here.<br />
Does no one see the horror?<br />
Alu marana echtho karani.<br />
How flaming death rained down<br />
upon the lizard men of Kra’ath?<br />
How the peaceful Quer’hem, who spent<br />
ten thousand years on a poem<br />
saw all their fragile cities ruined,<br />
how their blue limbs burned<br />
as a great red star engulfed them?<br />
How the lonely and ancient monks<br />
in the basalt temples of Irlamadá<br />
refused to leave their ancestral home<br />
as it plunged into a methane giant?<br />
How the great race of starmen<br />
whose ships had spanned half a galaxy<br />
sped from one world to another —<br />
32
so many they saved! so many<br />
they never reached in time!<br />
And no one who watched<br />
the night sky’s cataclysm<br />
dared say a beneficent god<br />
had made this universe.<br />
Nameless forever now the tribes,<br />
clans, castles, walls and emperors,<br />
upon a hundred million worlds<br />
rich with life, but too young to know<br />
the meaning of the exploding sky —<br />
all they did and dreamt, for nothing!<br />
Out on the rim of one spiral arm,<br />
the one-eyed Chroniclers —<br />
a race whose fortune it was to survive —<br />
built a vast dome and projected there<br />
the stars that had been. <strong>The</strong>y sang and wept,<br />
struck gongs and sorrowful organ notes,<br />
as one by one they vanished again,<br />
like candles snuffed by a terrible hand.<br />
<strong>The</strong>se things, and more,<br />
have come to haunt my dreams now,<br />
and the certain knowledge, too,<br />
as the astronomers tell me,<br />
that the great Andromeda galaxy<br />
is heading towards us.<br />
It will come. It will come. It will come.<br />
Alu marana echtho karani.<br />
All is destroyed but memory.<br />
33
AUTUMN ON MARS<br />
for Ray Bradbury<br />
<strong>On</strong> Mars the black-trunked trees<br />
are dense<br />
with summer’s crimson foliage.<br />
When dry-ice autumn comes,<br />
the oaks singe sickly green.<br />
<strong>The</strong> land is a riot of airborne olive,<br />
chartreuse and verdigris,<br />
green fire against a pink<br />
and cloudless sky.<br />
<strong>The</strong> sour red apples go yellow sweet;<br />
the wind-blanched wheat<br />
forsakes its purple plumage;<br />
cornstalks are tied in indigo bundles;<br />
eyes flicker ghoulishly<br />
as candles are set<br />
in carved-out green gourds.<br />
Grandfathers warn their<br />
terrified children<br />
of the looming, ominous blue planet,<br />
roiled with thunderclouds<br />
and nuclear flashes,<br />
that warlike, funeral-colored Earth<br />
from which invaders would<br />
one day come,<br />
decked in the somber hues of death,<br />
withered and green like dead-pile leaves,<br />
armed to the hilt with terrible weapons.<br />
“I’ve seen them!” an elder asserts.<br />
“<strong>The</strong>y have two eyes,<br />
flat on their heads!”<br />
Eye stalks wiggle in disbelief.<br />
“<strong>The</strong>y walk on two legs,<br />
like broken sticks!”<br />
Multi-jointed leglets thump in derision.<br />
“<strong>The</strong>y speak in the animal octave,<br />
and they bark like krill-dogs.”<br />
<strong>The</strong> children shriek in red and purple.<br />
“No way, Old <strong>On</strong>e!<br />
Don’t make us think it!<br />
How can they talk without twinkling?”<br />
“<strong>The</strong>ir rockets go higher with every turn<br />
of our world around the life-star.<br />
Earthers will come, thick on the ground<br />
like our thousand-year mugworms.<br />
34<br />
<strong>The</strong>y will kill us,<br />
take our females captive,<br />
burn our egg domes,<br />
eat our aphidaries!”<br />
A fireball slashes the pink horizon.<br />
Two hundred eye-stalks follow the arc.<br />
“That might be one<br />
of their robots now!<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir probes are watching everywhere!”<br />
Now fifty Martian youngsters scream,<br />
shrieking in ultraviolet tones,<br />
crab legs scattering in every direction.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Old <strong>On</strong>es smile in five dimensions,<br />
sit down for a cup of hot grumulade<br />
and some well-earned peace and quiet.<br />
“It’s not nice to frighten<br />
the young ones,”<br />
the eldest muses, “but it wouldn’t be<br />
autumn<br />
without a little Halloween.”<br />
PLUTO DEMOTED<br />
No longer a planet, they say!<br />
Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth, Nine<br />
is now a nothing,<br />
a rock among rocks<br />
despite the tug of its companion,<br />
silent and airless Charon.<br />
Now you are a “mini-world,”<br />
an oversize asteroid<br />
tumbling in dustbelt<br />
so dark and distant<br />
our sun is but a blob<br />
of wavering starlight.<br />
World of death and darkness,<br />
methane, monoxide molting<br />
in every orbiting,<br />
shunned by the sun that made you,<br />
must you now be snubbed by man?<br />
How demote a planet<br />
so lustrous in history?<br />
It has its gods! It has its gods!<br />
Can they evict<br />
the Lord of the Dead
with just a say-so?<br />
What of the millions of souls<br />
whose home was Hades?<br />
What of beautiful Persephone<br />
who shuttles still<br />
on a high-speed comet<br />
for her six-month residency as mistress<br />
of the underworld?<br />
What of the heroes and philosophers,<br />
the shades of pagan times<br />
who teem those basalt cities<br />
warming the Plutonian night<br />
with odes and songs and serenades?<br />
<strong>Are</strong> they to be homeless vagabonds,<br />
slowed from their distant heartbeat<br />
to the stillness of absolute zero?<br />
****<br />
At first, it was “Planet X,”<br />
out there somewhere<br />
because Neptune wobbled,<br />
nodded its rings<br />
toward Death’s domain.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n a Kansas farm boy<br />
obsessed with the stars<br />
ground his own mirrors<br />
built his own telescope<br />
with car parts and farm equipment.<br />
Hailstones destroyed the farm crops.<br />
<strong>The</strong> telescope survived.<br />
<strong>The</strong> boy sent drawings<br />
of Mars and Jupiter<br />
to Lowell Observatory —<br />
Come work for us, they said.<br />
He hopped a train, had just enough<br />
cash for a one-way fare.<br />
And then, in monk-like hermitage<br />
he toiled at Flagstaff,<br />
comparing sky photographs,<br />
hundreds of thousands of stars,<br />
negative over negative to light,<br />
searching for celestial wanderers,<br />
planetoi, asteroids, comets<br />
that moved when everything else<br />
stood still in the cosmos.<br />
Clyde Tombaugh, twenty-four,<br />
surveyed a sky<br />
where fifteen million lights<br />
the brightness of Pluto twinkled<br />
but only one was Pluto.<br />
He found it.<br />
***<br />
<strong>The</strong>y sought him out<br />
in his retirement,<br />
those fellows<br />
from the Smithsonian,<br />
asked for his home-made instrument<br />
for their permanent collection.<br />
“Hell no,” he said,<br />
“I’m still using it.”<br />
***<br />
I would as soon<br />
forget Kansas as Pluto.<br />
Tell Tombaugh’s ghost<br />
his planet is not a planet!<br />
I can see the old man now,<br />
just off the death-barge<br />
he hopped from Charon,<br />
greeting the Lords of Acheron,<br />
that rusted tube of telescope<br />
under his arm,<br />
scouting a mountaintop<br />
for his next observatory.<br />
Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth, Nine!<br />
Change at your peril<br />
a thing once named!<br />
35
POETICA LOVECRAFTIANA<br />
MAKER OF MONSTERS, MAKER OF GODS<br />
Birthday Verses for Frank Belknap Long<br />
How cold the sphere where all the gods are dead,<br />
How grim the prospect when the end seems near!<br />
How few deny the soul in age’s bed,<br />
Not brave enough to risk another year<br />
Outside the soothing balm of Paradise.<br />
Yet who, I ask, brings you this message bright —<br />
God’s hooded broker or a devil wise<br />
In promise, slavering to steal the light<br />
Of your assumèd immortality?<br />
Beware these masked intruders, all of them!<br />
God’s hall and Satan’s hot locality<br />
<strong>Are</strong> only a sly imposter’s stratagem.<br />
O poet good and gray, have courage still.<br />
It matters not that gods retire or sleep.<br />
We are their makers, who fashion or kill<br />
as suits us, the gods of the air or deep.<br />
No matter that your hand some days is frail.<br />
That hand has summoned monsters and entwined<br />
<strong>The</strong> earth’s sublimest beauties in a tale.<br />
No matter that the falling years unwind<br />
<strong>The</strong> scroll or turn the pages dry and sère.<br />
Poe’s Bells and Gotham’s storied steeples seize<br />
Your spirit, soaring from Providence to here —<br />
To ancient barks adrift Aegean breeze —<br />
To Mars — to plains where gods and heroes dwell —<br />
To charnel pit where ghoul contends with rat —<br />
To limelit stage where vampire victims swell<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir last aortal ebb into a bat-<br />
Deep hunger’s all-consuming rage of red —<br />
To aliens serene at crystalline gates —<br />
Robots implacable — and demons dead<br />
Until some stumbling fool reanimates<br />
36
Hibernal horror with a taste for blood!<br />
What need of god’s incense and litanies<br />
When every twist of pen compels the mud<br />
To yield up dark, bat-winged epiphanies?<br />
Fear not. Walk on among them unafraid.<br />
Soul-snatching monsters are as dead as stone.<br />
Hell’s a blank corridor, its lord a shade.<br />
TERROR you did not fear to tread alone<br />
Shall buoy you up, with WONDER at its side.<br />
Lovecraft you called the kindest man you knew,<br />
Refused a priest the day before he died,<br />
Said he preferred a sky where Night Gaunts flew.<br />
That is not dead which leaps to poet’s eye,<br />
Where neither friends, nor gods, nor monsters die!<br />
DREAMING OF UR-R’LYEH<br />
1<br />
All roads lead north from this frozen city.<br />
Some days the errant sun cannot decide<br />
just where to raise its flaming orange head—<br />
instead it rises everywhere:<br />
four globes of light in an opalescent rainbow,<br />
taunting Antarctica with phantom light.<br />
And then for months the sun disk stays away,<br />
warming the tropics and leaving this land<br />
a block of cloud no star can penetrate<br />
with its thin shaft of consoling beacon.<br />
I walk the ruins of Ur-R’lyeh,*<br />
Earth’s oldest uninhabited city,<br />
a fair place before the world tipped downward,<br />
before the great blue harbors filled with ice.<br />
All other cities are copied memories,<br />
all other pyramids less perfectly formed,<br />
all other domes and temples childish toys<br />
beside what sleeps beneath this glacier.<br />
<strong>The</strong> things that lived and sang here were not men.<br />
Strange limbs they had, eye-stalks and bird-like beaks,<br />
sense organs that drank the ultraviolet,<br />
voices that clicked and trilled through twenty octaves.<br />
Yet sight and sound’s deep symmetries drove them,<br />
as in the human psyche, to Beauty’s thrall.<br />
37
2<br />
Lost penguins arrive here from time to time,<br />
stand hungry and hypnotized for days, as wind<br />
howls over the ancient air shaft openings,<br />
making the ice-locked plateau resonate.<br />
This is the anthem of Antarctic woe —<br />
thirteen deep notes in modal succession.<br />
In dream I come here often, walk solitaire<br />
upon the windswept basalt promenades,<br />
admire four suns through ruby windows,<br />
drink from dark obsidian goblets,<br />
discuss with the white/black avian sentinels<br />
the meaning of glyphs beyond translation.<br />
<strong>The</strong> wind’s mad organ relentlessly pipes,<br />
the depth of note conveying the shafts’ abyss,<br />
the unthinkable depths of crystalline city,<br />
carved into stone pre-Cambrian, the keeps<br />
where multi-limbed minions mined out<br />
the now-dead heat-taps to the core of the planet.<br />
<strong>The</strong> tones that should be random, repeat this song.<br />
Has anyone heard such music before?<br />
Perhaps we hear it everywhere, from bird to whale,<br />
as an unheard, underpinning harmony,<br />
the oldest earth enigma’s passacaglia.<br />
Bass line invisible beneath a string quartet<br />
(whose range is but a gnat-buzz against the cosmos),<br />
droning to Andes in Inca-harps electrified,<br />
mantric harmonies soaring above<br />
the haunting trill of Tibetan bowls,<br />
the echo that answers the mournful Pan pipe<br />
heard at the edge of a November wood,<br />
the solitary faun’s lamenting love call.<br />
3<br />
<strong>On</strong>ly a handful can pluck this dream, this song,<br />
as only a few can walk the rim of madness,<br />
gazing the surfaces dead before racial memory,<br />
touching without terror the things that came before,<br />
loving beyond mother-brother-breeding love<br />
the purely non-human,<br />
the vast, rich impersonal cloud of atoms electrified.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Song of Ur-R’lyeh may nest in nightmares,<br />
may hatch its egg in fever’s heat,<br />
may force a lover to break off loving,<br />
turn a sane world to a screaming asylum.<br />
Your third eye, third ear, third brain are growing —<br />
no stopping the eye-stalk, the throbbing heart,<br />
38
the new way of seeing things from impossible angles,<br />
hearing at last the cries of the distant stars,<br />
the impatience of ocean to swallow the moon,<br />
the yearning of magma to fertilize space.<br />
You touch an oak and know its history<br />
from taproot to sun-ache twig-tip.<br />
This song is fugue for the ego transcendent,<br />
calls you, as it calls all beautiful runaways,<br />
all mad, erotic hermits, all solitary climbers,<br />
to the City of <strong>On</strong>e<br />
beyond the City of Many.<br />
___________<br />
*H.P . Lovecraft placed the Cyclopean ruins of R’lyeh in the South Pacific, and<br />
probably was inspired, as was A. Merritt, by descriptions of the island of Ponape<br />
(Pohnpei) in the Caroline Islands, where more than 90 prehistoric stone structures were<br />
found underwater. Lovecraft later wrote his novel, “At the Mountains of Madness,”<br />
which placed an unnamed, pre-human civilization in Antarctica. We are dreaming,<br />
perhaps, of the same place, which I call Ur-R’lyeh.<br />
Lovecraft fans are always debating how to pronounce R’lyeh. It should be<br />
pronounced with the R’ as a sustained, trilled “r” and with “lyeh” as one syllable<br />
pronounced “lee—yeah” (the “yeah” like the “ye” in “yet.”) If you can’t pronounced it,<br />
you may be eaten upon your arrival there!<br />
39
THE TREE AT LOVECRAFT’S GRAVE<br />
This solemn spreading beech<br />
was once a perfect hemisphere<br />
of waxy red-green foliage.<br />
Now it is crippled and sere,<br />
scarred by the pruning<br />
of diseased limbs,<br />
trunk bared, a twisted bole<br />
in the form of a petrified heart.<br />
Its gnarled roots rake earth<br />
with a death-row desperation.<br />
Within another hollowed bole,<br />
(eye-socket for a Cyclops)<br />
malignant mushrooms proliferate,<br />
caps and stalks angled sunward.<br />
<strong>The</strong> schoolboy gashes<br />
where fans have carved initials<br />
(their own and HPL ’s)<br />
widen and blacken,<br />
the once-proud limbs<br />
tattooed with NECRONOMICON,<br />
HOWARD P . LOVECRAFT ’99,<br />
even a whole sentence<br />
about the primacy of fear,<br />
runes ruinous to a living monument.<br />
Still, the furry beech-nuts fall like hail<br />
to the delight of squirrels.<br />
Still, the hard brown kernels issue forth,<br />
each a perfect blueprint<br />
of a perfect tree —<br />
or have the roots, tasting the calcium<br />
of author’s bones, the humus rot<br />
of eye and brain and memory<br />
mutated the germ and flower anew<br />
so that these seeds transcend<br />
to sentience?<br />
Gather these nuts, then,<br />
and harvest them.<br />
First they must hibernate,<br />
for the beech remembers glaciers.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n they will germinate,<br />
pale tentacles in search<br />
of anchorage,<br />
until the red-green engine<br />
of stalk and leaf<br />
is ready to catapult<br />
into the sun-chase.<br />
40<br />
Will these trees move<br />
of their own accord?<br />
Will their root-claws crave blood<br />
and the iron-rich earth<br />
of a crumbling grave?<br />
Will the branches sway<br />
on windless nights?<br />
Will fox-fires and will o’ wisps<br />
paint impossible colors<br />
on bud-ends and blossoms?<br />
Will beech nuts burst<br />
to pale blue eyes<br />
insomniac astronomers<br />
with perfect vision,<br />
counting the Pleiades,<br />
numbering the galaxies.<br />
And will they speak<br />
the patient sonnets<br />
of their greater lifespans,<br />
the long-arced lines<br />
their waving branches beat?<br />
And somewhere within them,<br />
does he smile there,<br />
transmuted poet and dreamer<br />
subsumed into the eons?<br />
<strong>Are</strong> those his thoughts<br />
that make them tremble<br />
at every sunset,<br />
his elder gods they fear<br />
might swallow the sun<br />
as it tosses in darkness?<br />
Is he lord of their nightmares,<br />
giving them Dread,<br />
the obverse of the coin of Joy,<br />
Fear, the companion of Wonder?<br />
I regard the ailing tree,<br />
the modest gravestone.<br />
<strong>The</strong> tree will die. <strong>The</strong> rain<br />
will wipe the letters clean.<br />
<strong>On</strong>ly the whispered words,<br />
the lines the fingers trace<br />
from one yellowed book<br />
to another<br />
endure —
I hold the burst nuts in one hand,<br />
a book of Lovecraft’s tales<br />
in the other.<br />
I study the cloudless, blue,<br />
deceptive sky,<br />
the lie that conceals an infinity<br />
of screaming stars —<br />
Oh, these roots have read him,<br />
they have read him.<br />
UNDER LOVECRAFT’S GRAVE<br />
A little play for four voices, read at<br />
Lovecraft’s Grave, 2002<br />
i<br />
Listen! <strong>The</strong> worms, always.<br />
Millions of teeth,<br />
earth-moving cilia on pulsing tubes,<br />
the parting of soil, the tiny pop<br />
of subterrane surprise<br />
as a cavity opens<br />
the drip, drip, trickle, drip<br />
as rain water instantly rushes to fill it.<br />
A mole like a distant subway car,<br />
snuffling about for edible roots.<br />
<strong>The</strong> put-a-put sounds advancing,<br />
retreating —<br />
all the dead can hear of automobiles.<br />
<strong>The</strong> door-slams (count them!)<br />
of nearby visitors —<br />
clickedy-click high heels of the women,<br />
bump-thump of the men and the boys.<br />
That’s on the pavement —<br />
upon the lawn<br />
the sound of someone walking<br />
is always just so quiet<br />
that the dead are always imagining<br />
they hear it.<br />
Is that someone now? Is it night or day?<br />
What year is it, anyway?<br />
Beneath the earth, inside the casket,<br />
inside the shroud or winding cloth,<br />
even inside the mummified skin,<br />
the shriveled organs, inside the bones<br />
where the marrow is flaking to rust,<br />
even inside the brain,<br />
a desiccated thing<br />
no bigger than a walnut,<br />
consciousness clings.<br />
(How do I know? From the whispers<br />
I hear beneath the willow-weave,<br />
the message no wind<br />
alone could have invented.)<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir eyeless sight sees shades<br />
of blackness,<br />
their earless ears are perfect receivers<br />
for what their lipless mouths<br />
have to say.<br />
ii<br />
If you had taken more milk as a child,<br />
you might have lived to eighty, Howard.<br />
No one wants to be eighty, Mother —<br />
forty-seven was painful enough<br />
an age<br />
to come unnailed and fall apart —<br />
Does it still hurt?<br />
No, Mother,<br />
not since the autopsy, anyway.<br />
You just never listened.<br />
I should have kept<br />
you home more, I knew it.<br />
Now, Mother —<br />
But I couldn’t bear to look at you.<br />
That face! — how like your father’s.<br />
When you were off at school<br />
I could go out<br />
and face the world. But even so,<br />
the people on the streetcar knew —<br />
how they’d whisper —<br />
That’s Suzie Whipple Lovecraft,<br />
the one whose husband….<br />
the one with that hideous child…<br />
YOUR DADDY’S AT BUTLER,<br />
YOUR MOTHER, TOO.<br />
PRETTY SOON THEY’LL<br />
COME FOR YOU!<br />
My God, who was that?<br />
41
Some child three plots over, Mother.<br />
You know he does that when we<br />
raise our voices.<br />
THATS MY SON<br />
YOU’RE INSULTING!<br />
A LOVECRAFT FACE IS A<br />
DISTINCTION.<br />
Now see what you’ve done, Mother —<br />
You’ve awakened Father again!<br />
Lantern-jaw! Son of a traveling man!<br />
That freakish long face! Drawing monsters<br />
on every sidewalk! No good at games!<br />
<strong>The</strong> mothers would send me notes:<br />
Your Howard is not permitted to play<br />
with our Joshua. Our old cat Flavius<br />
will NOT come down from the tree,<br />
and something awful has taken root<br />
in the rhododendron garden.<br />
I will not have my children pronouncing<br />
Arabian spells and Egyptian curses<br />
at our Christian dinner table.<br />
That must have been all over town!<br />
Ah, my Arabian Nights!<br />
Playing at Grandfather Whipple’s house.<br />
GOOD! A HIGH SPIRITED LAD!<br />
TOO BAD I WASN’T THERE<br />
TO SEE YOU<br />
TO MANHOOD, HOWARD!<br />
SO MUCH I COULD HAVE<br />
TOLD YOU.<br />
SOME BOOKS YOUR MOTHER<br />
NEVER SAW…<br />
I found them, Father. <strong>The</strong>y were very …<br />
instructive.<br />
And I took them away! Such filth!<br />
And what a horrible turn he took.<br />
A mere nervous breakdown, Mother.<br />
We had to take him from school.<br />
<strong>The</strong> shame of his father’s death,<br />
mad at Butler; his grandfather’s death,<br />
42<br />
our move to the apartment<br />
where we had to share<br />
with common people.<br />
<strong>The</strong> shock of finding<br />
we had so little money.<br />
Somehow, Mother,<br />
none of us ever actually<br />
went out and worked: not you,<br />
not me, not the Aunties<br />
(let’s not disturb their sleep, please!)<br />
SEE, THE BOY HAS SPIRIT.<br />
SOMETHING YOU ALWAYS<br />
LACKED AS A WIFE —<br />
NO WARMTH, NO ANIMAL<br />
SPIRITS!<br />
It’s all animal with you, you madman!<br />
Mother, Father, enough!<br />
You’ve made your peace.<br />
You in your hospital bed, drooling,<br />
with that leering face,<br />
repeating obscenities,<br />
boasting about the women<br />
you had ruined!<br />
YOU WITH YOUR<br />
NIGHT GAUNTS<br />
STREAMING FROM<br />
THE CORNERS<br />
WITH NEEDLE FINGERS!<br />
I COULD NEVER TOUCH YOU,<br />
AND FINALLY NOT EVEN A<br />
SHADOW COULD!<br />
GO TO BALTIMORE, HOWARD!<br />
THERE’S A NEGRESS THERE<br />
WHO RUNS AN<br />
ESTABLISHMENT.<br />
ASK FOR THE DWARFS.<br />
THEY’RE SISTERS,<br />
AND ACROBATS.<br />
YOU CAN’T IMAGINE<br />
WHAT THEY DO!<br />
AH, BUT I SUPPOSE<br />
THEY’RE DEAD, NOW.
What’s that! Is that YOU touching me?<br />
NO, SUZIE, IT MUST BE —<br />
ONE OF THOSE WORMS,<br />
THE ONES WITH<br />
A THOUSAND LEGS.<br />
I know it’s you. I can’t bear it.<br />
YOUR DADDY’S AT BUTLER,<br />
YOUR MOTHER, TOO.<br />
PRETTY SOON THEY’LL<br />
COME FOR YOU!<br />
Howard, you promised me<br />
there would be no right angles<br />
anywhere in my casket.<br />
That’s right, Mother.<br />
I checked it myself.<br />
Everything is angled in some way.<br />
You are sure?<br />
Yes, Mother.<br />
I must be sure. <strong>The</strong>y come out<br />
of the corners, you know.<br />
Right angles are weak places<br />
through which they come and go<br />
from their cold and sunless world<br />
to feed in ours.<br />
First it’s a grazing<br />
against your cheekbone.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n one touches<br />
the small of your back.<br />
Razor-sharp talons,<br />
long, melon-shaped heads<br />
and no faces —<br />
No faces at all! I know, Mother,<br />
I invented them<br />
in my own nightmares!<br />
Real! they are real!<br />
Filthy things, like dust rags,<br />
ammonia on their breath<br />
and old blood —<br />
hovering, holding<br />
you down,<br />
touching,<br />
touching!<br />
WHY DIDN’T THEY BURY YOU<br />
AT BUTLER, ANYWAY?<br />
YOU ARE A TIRESOME WOMAN!<br />
You! freeloader! whose family<br />
plot is this anyway?<br />
Mother! Father! <strong>The</strong>re are people here!<br />
A dozen at least! Hear them!<br />
<strong>The</strong>re’s the poet, and that actor<br />
who imitates me! Pretty damn good!<br />
And all the others, too! <strong>The</strong>y’re back —<br />
I think it’s my birthday —<br />
Quiet, quiet! Listen to them! Listen!<br />
FRANK AND LYDA<br />
<strong>The</strong> last days of Frank Belknap Long,<br />
American horror writer<br />
Life was not kind<br />
at the last<br />
(hell,<br />
never had been)<br />
insult piled<br />
on illness,<br />
illusions shattered<br />
almost daily.<br />
His sheltered poems<br />
sang of Greece,<br />
of gods who, dead,<br />
were still more feeling<br />
than a drained<br />
and faded crucifix.<br />
His tales were gentle,<br />
though treading horror<br />
in Lovecraft’s shadow.<br />
Stooped now,<br />
his shabby gait<br />
so mournful,<br />
clothes so baggy<br />
that strangers<br />
handed him quarters.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y did not know<br />
43
those bony fingers<br />
wrote sonnets and tales,<br />
of the dusty trunk<br />
where his last unfinished novel<br />
awaited his renewed attention.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n came the stroke,<br />
cruel snap of synapse —<br />
week after week<br />
in St. Vincent’s.<br />
We had just met.<br />
We had talked of his poems,<br />
his Lovecraft memoir —<br />
his boisterous wife<br />
intruding everywhere<br />
with incoherent chatter<br />
of Chekhov plays,<br />
of Frank’s world fame,<br />
of her childhood<br />
among the Yiddish actors<br />
thrust from Russia<br />
fleeing the Tsar’s pogroms,<br />
to Shanghai<br />
to Canada to California.<br />
I liked them both.<br />
I called her charodeika,<br />
enchantress,<br />
she called me<br />
Britannica.<br />
We talked Tchaikovsky,<br />
Akhmatova and Pasternak.<br />
Now at St. Vincent’s<br />
Lyda’s mad wheelchair<br />
glides in the corridor<br />
as she pigeonholes doctors,<br />
nurses, orderlies,<br />
telling them all<br />
her Frankele is a famous author.<br />
He lapses in<br />
and out of memory,<br />
recites “<strong>The</strong> <strong>Gods</strong> <strong>Are</strong> Dead”<br />
to completion, cries out<br />
as Lyda maligns his hero,<br />
calling him Lousecraft.<br />
“Lovecraft! Lovecraft!” he shrieks<br />
44<br />
in the thinnest tenor, cracking.<br />
“He was the kindest man I knew!”<br />
Lyda goes on<br />
about her trip to Moscow,<br />
“You’ll see! <strong>The</strong>y know me there!<br />
<strong>The</strong>y haven’t forgotten my family!<br />
<strong>The</strong>y’re meeting me<br />
at the Aeroflot terminal.<br />
And I’ll come back<br />
and open my bookstore in Chelsea<br />
in that huge loft I’ve chosen.<br />
And Frank will be there,<br />
sign books for his fans every day.<br />
Ray Bradbury wrote,<br />
and Stephen King is sending us<br />
ten thousand dollars.”<br />
“My wife,” Frank tells me,<br />
“is an alcoholic,<br />
and a manic depressive.<br />
What can I do?”<br />
I visit Lyda at home,<br />
watch roaches crawl<br />
across discarded magazines.<br />
I argue with her<br />
as she opens the trunk,<br />
tries to throw out<br />
Frank’s manuscripts.<br />
I put the papers back,<br />
distract her with a pile of envelopes.<br />
“Let’s clean up this,” I say.<br />
We throw away bank statements.<br />
Decades of misery blink before me,<br />
whole years in which<br />
a mere three hundred dollars<br />
stood between him and the Reaper.<br />
Soon Frank is home,<br />
confined to his bed,<br />
then to a hobbling walker.<br />
Lyda throws parties,<br />
serves wine and cold cuts<br />
amid the thriving roaches.<br />
Her new dog wets<br />
Frank’s manuscripts.<br />
<strong>The</strong> kitchen sink<br />
is a mold terrarium,
feelers and tentacles<br />
amid the dishes.<br />
She announces her plans<br />
for Moscow and Tel Aviv,<br />
for her not-yet-started memoirs<br />
of the Yiddish theater<br />
as she swigs her vodka<br />
and sings Tchaikovsky<br />
in a bleary contralto.<br />
“Why did you marry me?”<br />
she hisses at Frank<br />
as an argument dies down.<br />
“My mother had just died,”<br />
Frank answers bluntly.<br />
“I didn’t know what to do.”<br />
She tells me in French<br />
how, despite her many lovers,<br />
she was still a virgin<br />
with her husband.<br />
“J’ai un problème sexuelle,” she says.<br />
She kneads the things<br />
that once were breasts.<br />
“We couldn’t do it.<br />
“His hernias got in the way.”<br />
<strong>On</strong>ce, Frank had been<br />
an armchair Bolshevik,<br />
led on by Lyda’s memories<br />
of the Jew-oppressing Tsar.<br />
Now I tell him<br />
of Lenin’s crimes,<br />
how the order went out<br />
to shoot anyone<br />
with hands uncallused.<br />
I call Lenin, as I often do,<br />
a filthy murderer.<br />
Now Lyda shouts,<br />
“Watch what you say!<br />
Watch what you say!”<br />
Frank’s 82<br />
and doesn’t know<br />
what Stalin did.<br />
I left one night<br />
amid the shrieking<br />
and screaming,<br />
just couldn’t go back<br />
rode home with a friend<br />
and found myself saying,<br />
“So this is how it ends<br />
for a famous horror writer.”<br />
My friend says,<br />
“So this is how it ends<br />
with a marriage.”<br />
* * *<br />
Death came, but not an end<br />
to the indignity —<br />
Frank’s body lay<br />
for months in the morgue,<br />
unclaimed, unspoken for<br />
while Lyda bided time,<br />
cashing the pitiful checks<br />
that came in his name.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n to a potter’s field<br />
where what he dreaded most —<br />
to mingle with the crowd,<br />
touched by their dirt<br />
and violence,<br />
alone without<br />
a woman’s caring touch —<br />
befell him,<br />
a frail ghost jostled<br />
by addicts and derelicts,<br />
mere revenants of animated meat.<br />
Soon Lyda passed.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n Frank was retrieved,<br />
his body moved<br />
to a distant family plot.<br />
Alone at last<br />
in the clear white light<br />
of blessed solitude.<br />
45
AFTER THE STORM<br />
THINGS SEEN IN GRAVEYARDS<br />
Dead night. I tramp the midnight lane<br />
of yews and mausoleums.<br />
<strong>The</strong> air resounds with muffled cries:<br />
a cat? a wailing ghost?<br />
a child abandoned, exposed<br />
to gusts and rain and fatal chill?<br />
I think of Roman fathers<br />
exposing their infants on hilltops —<br />
or, far more likely in this<br />
ignoble time, a furtive birth<br />
dumped from the back of a passing car.<br />
My eye expands into the moonless dark.<br />
I brush against the rain-filled leaves,<br />
push through the hedge<br />
until I find the source:<br />
on a mound where six markers<br />
neatly grew,<br />
a tree had crashed upon an infant’s grave.<br />
Sleep, sorry ghost,<br />
from your Indian awakening!<br />
Was it not here the Iroquois<br />
made secret pledges to moon and stars?<br />
Did they not tell of jumbled boneyards<br />
where felling trees brought back<br />
the dead —<br />
not whole, but with the jaws and tails<br />
of animals, were-things with fangs<br />
and claws and antlers, hoofed hands<br />
and legs attached at useless angles?<br />
Hence their horror of disturbing bones!<br />
Something ascends before me, a blur<br />
between the graveyard and the pines:<br />
I see the outspread wings of an owl,<br />
the twisted arc of its talons,<br />
but it regards me with a human face,<br />
a tiny death-head in a feather shroud,<br />
withered and wise and ravenous<br />
for the mother milk of the skies.<br />
46<br />
HART ISLAND<br />
Ferry cuts fog<br />
in Long Island Sound,<br />
baleful horn bellowing<br />
a midnight run<br />
unblessed by harbor lights,<br />
unknown to the sleeping millions<br />
convicts at the rails,<br />
guards behind them,<br />
dour-faced captain at the helm<br />
a face and a pipe<br />
and a dead-ahead glare,<br />
an empty gaze that asks no questions<br />
offers no advice<br />
A careful mooring,<br />
cables thicker than hanging noose<br />
bind ship to pier;<br />
pilings like pagan columns<br />
bind pier to Hart Island<br />
Convicts shuffle to the end of the dock,<br />
guards behind them with billy clubs<br />
hands tensed at holster.<br />
You fellas better behave now,<br />
the captain mutters,<br />
just do what you’re told.<br />
And no funny business,<br />
another voice warns,<br />
‘cause anything could happen to you here.<br />
<strong>The</strong> prisoners shiver at moonless<br />
expanse<br />
of blackened water,<br />
dead shell of Bronx one way,<br />
bedrooms of Queens the other;<br />
clap their hands, blow on their fingers<br />
to fight the chill.<br />
Guess you would freeze one speculates<br />
before you could get to shore.<br />
Just do what you’re told,<br />
the biggest con admonishes.
I been here before. Do what<br />
you’re told and then it’s over.<br />
Eager to earn<br />
the early release,<br />
willing to dig and lift and carry,<br />
they turn to the foreman.<br />
He points to the tarp<br />
that covers the cargo.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y lift the tiny oblong boxes,<br />
frail as balsa<br />
thin pine confining<br />
the swaddled contents.<br />
What’s in these things?<br />
one asks, taking on three<br />
stacked to his chin.<br />
Over there, is all the foreman says,<br />
pointing to mounds<br />
where a silent back hoe<br />
stands sentinel.<br />
<strong>The</strong>se be coffins, the older con explains.<br />
Baby coffins.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y lower the boxes<br />
into the waiting holes,<br />
read the tags attached to them:<br />
Baby Boy Franklin<br />
Carl Hernandez<br />
Unknown Baby Girl, Hispanic.<br />
<strong>The</strong> adult coffins are heavier,<br />
two men at least to carry each one.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y can joke about these:<br />
Heavy bastard, this Jose.<br />
Carla here, she musta wasted away.<br />
But no one speaks about the babies.<br />
<strong>The</strong> convicts’ eyes grow angry, then sad.<br />
Later the mounds will be toppled,<br />
the soil returned to the holes,<br />
flattened and tamped<br />
with a cursory blessing<br />
by an ecumenical chaplain.<br />
<strong>The</strong>se are the lonely dead,<br />
the snuffout of innocence:<br />
crack babies<br />
AIDS babies<br />
babies dead from drive-by bullets<br />
babies abandoned like unwanted kittens<br />
dumpster children<br />
No wonder this island cries in its sleep.<br />
NIGHT WALKER<br />
Still in her nightgown,<br />
the gaunt old woman,<br />
nearly a skeleton in satin,<br />
sleepwalked through lawns,<br />
onto a well-known path<br />
passing her mother’s grave,<br />
barefoot between the Civil War<br />
cannons,<br />
out the back gate,<br />
then down the slope to the river.<br />
Imagine her walk,<br />
oblivious to gravel,<br />
untouched by thorns,<br />
then over rail and tie<br />
without a splinter,<br />
then down the bank<br />
to the waiting waters!<br />
Cats she’d once fed<br />
watched from the dark<br />
of rhododendrons<br />
but did not go to her.<br />
I saw her, too,<br />
mute and astonished<br />
as she passed the monument<br />
where I recited Ulalume —<br />
<strong>The</strong> cold chill current<br />
did not awaken her,<br />
lifted her up from her wading.<br />
Weeds and crayfish<br />
merged with her streaming hair.<br />
She sank, her gown<br />
a luminescent ribbon.<br />
Her life dissolved<br />
in unseen bubbles.<br />
Who beckoned her?<br />
What star deluded her?<br />
What long-dead lover<br />
called from the mud<br />
of the river bottom?<br />
47
AN EXETER VAMPIRE, 1799<br />
She comes back, in the rain, at midnight.<br />
Her pale hand, not a branch, taps the glass.<br />
Her thin voice, poor Sarah Tillinghast<br />
whines and whimpers, chimes and summons you<br />
to walk in lightning and will’o wisp<br />
to the hallowed sward of the burial ground,<br />
to press your cheek against her limestone,<br />
to run your fingers on family name,<br />
to let the rain inundate your hair,<br />
wet your nightclothes to clammy chill,<br />
set your teeth chattering, your breath<br />
a tiny fog before you in the larger mist.<br />
You did not see her go before you,<br />
yet you knew she was coming here.<br />
Soon her dead hand will tap your shoulder.<br />
Averting your eyes, you bare your throat<br />
for her needful feeding, your heat, your<br />
heart’s blood erupting in her gullet.<br />
You will smell her decay, feel the worms<br />
as her moldy shroud rubs against you.<br />
Still you will nurse the undead sister,<br />
until her sharp incisors release you<br />
into a sobbing heap of tangled hair,<br />
your heart near stopped, your lungs exploding,<br />
wracked with a chill that crackles the bones.<br />
<strong>The</strong> rain will wash away the bloodstains.<br />
You will hide your no more virginal<br />
throat like a smiling lover’s secret.<br />
Two brothers have already perished —<br />
the night chill, anemia, swift fall<br />
to red and galloping consumption.<br />
Death took them a week apart, a month<br />
beyond Sarah’s first night-time calling.<br />
Honor Tillinghast, the stoic mother,<br />
sits in the log house by the ebbing fire,<br />
heating weak broth and johnny cakes.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e by one she has sewn up your shrouds—<br />
now she assembles yet another.<br />
She knows there is no peace on this earth,<br />
nor any rest in the turning grave.<br />
48
<strong>The</strong> storm ends, and birds predict the sun.<br />
Upstairs, in garret and gable dark,<br />
the children stir, weak and tubercular,<br />
coughing and fainting and praying for breath.<br />
<strong>The</strong> ones that suck by night are stronger<br />
than those they feed on, here where dead things<br />
sing their own epitaphs in moon-dance,<br />
and come back, in the rain, at midnight.<br />
_____<br />
Exeter, Rhode Island’s “vampire” case of 1799 ended with the exhumation and<br />
destruction of the corpse of Sarah Tillinghast after four siblings followed her in death by<br />
consumption. <strong>The</strong>y burned Sarah’s heart and reburied all the bodies.<br />
49
GRAVEYARDS I’D LIKE TO SEE<br />
1<br />
An animal cemetery<br />
with obelisks<br />
and stately groves<br />
of redwood.<br />
No mongrels here,<br />
no stones for Spot<br />
or Flossy,<br />
for parakeets or hamsters:<br />
<strong>The</strong>se stones are serious,<br />
basalt polished black,<br />
shiny as obsidian,<br />
noble as a Pharaoh’s monument,<br />
in honor of the Trilobite,<br />
the wheeling Pterodactyl,<br />
and up on the hill,<br />
a double-doored pyramidal<br />
mausoleum, ten stories high,<br />
housing a skeleton<br />
of the King of Kings,<br />
loudspeakers roaring<br />
the hunger calls,<br />
the territorial warnings,<br />
the mating imperative<br />
of Tyrannosaurus Rex.<br />
2<br />
Dead trees, parched grass,<br />
sinkhole and swamp<br />
surround the stepfathers’ graveyard,<br />
one tiny fence away<br />
from the witch-elm Aceldema<br />
where stepmothers’ ghosts<br />
rise from potters’ soil<br />
to screech their complaints.<br />
Crows flee the spot.<br />
<strong>The</strong> barren trees<br />
sprout fungoid terraces.<br />
<strong>The</strong> branches clot<br />
with drooping, rabid bats.<br />
All night, all day,<br />
the angry spirits<br />
mutter in vain.<br />
No one listens —<br />
50<br />
the scorned sons are free,<br />
the beaten daughters<br />
a thousand miles away.<br />
Dry earth cracks<br />
around the nameless markers,<br />
as sunken mounds<br />
are upthrust suddenly<br />
as though the earth<br />
would spit them out.<br />
3<br />
<strong>On</strong> a featureless plain,<br />
a potters’ field for bigots,<br />
a noisome heath<br />
where nothing grows,<br />
and feral cats<br />
gnaw desiccated rats.<br />
<strong>The</strong> weathered pine planks<br />
that serve for tombstones<br />
are spray-painted<br />
with ghetto epithets,<br />
rotten with termites,<br />
ringed with slime mold.<br />
<strong>The</strong> bone-dry yard<br />
is a place of nettles,<br />
skunk cabbage<br />
and poison ivy.<br />
Last home for famous<br />
TV evangelists,<br />
faith healers and con men,<br />
grasping politicos,<br />
hooded supremacists,<br />
grumpy class warriors,<br />
Mayflower lily,<br />
Panther and Klansman<br />
subsumed in stew<br />
by the tolerant earth,<br />
the undiscriminating<br />
worms.
4<br />
Somewhere in Europe —<br />
that boneyard<br />
of murderous ideologies —<br />
let’s have a solemn memorial<br />
for ideas whose time<br />
has come and gone —<br />
last resting place of isms<br />
and ologies,<br />
a place where splinter sects<br />
who slaughtered one another<br />
for their version of God<br />
lie head to head in silence.<br />
Crows come by the hundred,<br />
convene in the abundant oaks.<br />
<strong>The</strong> shrill debates are endless,<br />
committees and caucuses,<br />
congresses and parliaments.<br />
<strong>The</strong> ground is spattered<br />
with their philosophizing.<br />
And every one of them<br />
wants to rule the earth.<br />
Stones in a standing pool<br />
argue forever<br />
on the proper method of baptism.<br />
An empty chapel<br />
is alternately seized<br />
by ghosts of every sect<br />
who promptly banish all others.<br />
Two hillsides have hundreds<br />
of facing cannons<br />
not rusted not retired<br />
eternally on alert,<br />
cannonballs piled high,<br />
fuses and powder dry,<br />
ready to roar and thunder<br />
as the crows keep tally<br />
Catholic caw Huguenot<br />
Anglican caw caw Roman<br />
Christian caw caw caw Muslim<br />
Muslim caw caw caw caw Jew<br />
each shot resounds<br />
in boom and crow-cloud.<br />
Smoke settles,<br />
the senators return<br />
to the golden oaks,<br />
war without end.<br />
51
THE HARVESTMAN<br />
Day fell. <strong>The</strong> cooling sun careened and set,<br />
an orange flare behind the broiling hill.<br />
August is full upon the town, and yet<br />
the lakeside grove is desolate and still.<br />
No gravestones bear my surname here —<br />
(my forebears have vanished to scattered dust) —<br />
yet this is where I contemplate a bier,<br />
a monument, a poet’s shattered bust.<br />
This burial ground of proud and prudent Scot<br />
is now a blasted place of toppled stones,<br />
storm-blasted trunks and layered, fungal rot,<br />
tree ears and bell-shaped mushrooms white as bones.<br />
<strong>The</strong> ancient limestone markers, tumble-tossed,<br />
cast off like cards at the end of a game,<br />
speak of loves played and grand illusions lost,<br />
fragmented now to letters from a name,<br />
scrabbled by giants or angry, spiteful youth,<br />
treefall, or lightning’s vengeful, jabbing pen,<br />
first from surname pulled like a broken tooth,<br />
birth date from death, the where of it, the when<br />
now jumbled like a madman’s ransom note.<br />
Words carved in stone as certain history<br />
confound the reader now in jumbled quote,<br />
turning church’d facts to puzzled mystery.<br />
Upon an obelisk of limestone, cold<br />
with the chill of glacial remembering,<br />
beneath the wizened shade of maples, old<br />
with a century’s Novembering,<br />
a host of Harvestmen ride skitter-skit,<br />
legs tracing Braille of infant’s monument.<br />
Daddy-Long-Legs! sly arachnids, unfit<br />
for sunlight, silent raptors, demon-sent —<br />
Why do you writhe and twine those wiry limbs<br />
(too many to count as they crouch and leap)?<br />
Why herd like worshipers entranced by hymns,<br />
then fly like clerks with appointments to keep?<br />
52
<strong>On</strong>e moment you’re here in a skittering tide;<br />
then, as my shadow touches your eyes,<br />
you race to the obelisk’s other side,<br />
the way a tree’d squirrel is caught by surprise.<br />
We play out this Harvestman hide-and-seek,<br />
round and round the moss-fringed, ancient grave,<br />
‘til I can almost hear these monsters, meek<br />
and voiceless, moving in a song, a wave<br />
of primal hungering. Bad luck, cursed crops,<br />
they say, if you kill one. Better to dread<br />
their venomless fangs, their sinister drops<br />
from overhanging branch or dusty bed!<br />
What do they eat? What do those tiny eyes<br />
seek out and chase amid marble and slate?<br />
Leaf-litter bugs, dead things of any size,<br />
trapped beneath fangs and feeders (eight!)<br />
<strong>Are</strong> you the harvesters of suicides?<br />
Do the soul buds of babies appease you?<br />
Do you drink the tears of abandoned brides?<br />
Does the mist from rotting coffins please you?<br />
Your mouths are not for speaking, Harvestmen.<br />
Your secrets, like the truth behind the stones<br />
(how did they really die, and why, and when?)<br />
are told in your thousand-leg dance on bones.<br />
Night now. <strong>The</strong> knowing moon will rise and set,<br />
an umber globe behind the misty hill.<br />
Pregnant autumn is in the air, and yet<br />
the still-green grove is desolate and still.<br />
All night, ten thousand eyes are watching here,<br />
shepherds tending their ectoplasmic fold,<br />
forty thousand spider tendrils, fear<br />
incarnate, soul vampires, patient and old!<br />
Harvestman, Harvestman, whom do you seek?<br />
53
THE EAR MOUND SHRINE, KYOTO<br />
1<br />
Korea, 1597<br />
Too many heads, my lord!<br />
Too many heads!<br />
How to get home<br />
a hundred thousand<br />
of these Korean keepsakes?<br />
Our ships are laden with gold and silver,<br />
jade and ceramics,<br />
inlaid cabinets,<br />
silks and scrolls.<br />
If we leave them behind, my lord,<br />
the men will be furious.<br />
We have to prove the extent of our<br />
triumph.<br />
Our honor is at stake.<br />
We have burned their palaces,<br />
looted their pathetic little temples,<br />
turned all their mansions to ash,<br />
squeezed the last coins<br />
from the rural landlords,<br />
but we shall be seen<br />
as idle braggarts,<br />
robbers of tombs and empty houses,<br />
unless we pile the skulls<br />
at Toyotomi’s feet.<br />
What will the general say?<br />
<strong>The</strong> leader deliberates,<br />
talks with his captains<br />
of ballast and measures,<br />
the weight of captives,<br />
then calls his men<br />
to the hilltop tent.<br />
Cut off the ears,<br />
he tells them.<br />
We’ll give the general<br />
a mountain of ears.<br />
If ears are already missing,<br />
we’ll take the noses.<br />
<strong>As</strong> for the rotting heads —<br />
line them up<br />
along the sea-cliff.<br />
Let them face east,<br />
eyes wide,<br />
54<br />
mouths open<br />
in suitable terror,<br />
a warning to all<br />
of our superior power.<br />
Drink to the general —<br />
a thousand years<br />
to Toyotomi Hideyoshi!<br />
2<br />
Japan, 1598<br />
<strong>The</strong> ladies lounge<br />
in the treasure chamber.<br />
Look what Hideyoshi brought us!<br />
<strong>The</strong>y test the furniture,<br />
line up the vases —<br />
these for spring,<br />
these for autumn —<br />
chitter with laughter<br />
at pornographic scrolls.<br />
Do Korean women really do that?<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir fluttering robes<br />
and cherry-stained lips,<br />
their dancing fingers<br />
and playful eyes<br />
ignore the line of captives<br />
seated on wooden benches<br />
before the general’s chamber.<br />
More Koreans pass through daily —<br />
women for the taking<br />
for a life of kitchen labor,<br />
sad old scholars<br />
with mandarin whiskers<br />
destined to tutor<br />
the general’s nephews,<br />
rosy-cheeked boys<br />
for the monks<br />
and opera masters.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is another room<br />
that only Hideyoshi enters.<br />
What does he do<br />
in the “Chamber of Ears”?<br />
<strong>The</strong> servants say<br />
the smell is terrible,<br />
flies and rats everywhere.<br />
Not even burning camphor<br />
can mask its charnel aroma.
<strong>The</strong>y know he requisitioned urns,<br />
boxes and baskets of all dimensions;<br />
they know that thousands of ears<br />
are piled in pyramids<br />
from which they tumble daily,<br />
each fleshy nautilus tilted<br />
a different way.<br />
<strong>The</strong> general arranges them for hours –<br />
something not right<br />
about an inverted ear, he says.<br />
He thinks of sorting lefts and rights —<br />
what odds against<br />
the reuniting of ear lobes<br />
of just one victim?<br />
This has been going on for months.<br />
Not one of the concubines<br />
has gotten pregnant<br />
since the ears were delivered,<br />
and the soldiers rewarded.<br />
If this goes on, what of the dynasty?<br />
A servant tells the oldest wife:<br />
It can’t go on. He’ll tire of it.<br />
<strong>The</strong> ears are black and shrunken now<br />
like poison mushrooms.<br />
<strong>The</strong> general stops speaking<br />
to his subordinates, calls in<br />
a scribe to issue written orders.<br />
I am spied upon, he tells his minister.<br />
Toyotomi’s nights<br />
are not given to slumber.<br />
He spends three days<br />
in the Chamber of Ears,<br />
comes out white-haired<br />
and foaming at the mouth.<br />
Fever’s bed claims him.<br />
<strong>The</strong> ears, it seems,<br />
have been listening.<br />
<strong>The</strong> general has good ears, too.<br />
He knows that something fleshy<br />
fumbles about in there —<br />
and not a rat — one living ear,<br />
or a pair of them,<br />
among two hundred thousand dead ones,<br />
spying his words, his plans,<br />
waiting to fly on ghost wings<br />
to the Korean fleet,<br />
to tell Admiral Yi,<br />
his nemesis,<br />
of every weakness.<br />
Before he dies<br />
in a black-face fever,<br />
with trembling hands,<br />
throat choking<br />
as though pressed down<br />
by invisible stones,<br />
Toyotomi utters his final order:<br />
Bury the ears! All of them!<br />
Put a stone shrine above them.<br />
Guard the place. Let nothing escape.<br />
3<br />
<strong>The</strong> Ear Mound Shrine, Kyoto, 1998<br />
Caretaker, gardener,<br />
shrine attendant,<br />
one old man of eighty,<br />
sweeps up the cigarette butts<br />
a careless wind deposits<br />
at the base of the Ear Mound.<br />
A plaque commemorates<br />
the ancient invasion<br />
four hundred years ago,<br />
the massacre,<br />
the burial of Korean ears<br />
in hopes of atoning<br />
the angry spirits.<br />
It is silent here in Kyoto,<br />
the odd stillness of tree and stone,<br />
of the looming, stark monument —<br />
more than silent, I think.<br />
This place takes in sound.<br />
It is listening.<br />
It would hear a whisper,<br />
a wish in the subconscious.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is an annual ceremony, I am told,<br />
a burning of incense,<br />
a proper prayer.<br />
But is it heard across the water?<br />
Tenfold ten thousand ghosts<br />
gasp on the Korean seashore,<br />
waiting for apologies they cannot hear,<br />
scanning the east<br />
with doleful demon eyes,
ghost hands on their<br />
ever-bleeding cheeks,<br />
mouths open still.<br />
<strong>The</strong> place asks: Have you learned?<br />
Does life still sever life?<br />
Is the thread from sire to son<br />
to be left unbroken now?<br />
At dawn, the raked earth<br />
stirs around the monument.<br />
<strong>The</strong> tiny pebbles levitate,<br />
grooves, channels, wormholes<br />
into the ancient mound<br />
push out like tiny volcanoes.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n hordes of pink antennae<br />
burst out at the trumpeting sun.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e hundred thousand<br />
hatching butterflies!<br />
Clouds of pink and salmon,<br />
vermilion and cherry,<br />
spread their matched wings<br />
in endless mutation,<br />
whirlwind of cho-cho maidens,<br />
warrior moths,<br />
mandarin and concubine,<br />
scholar, musician – all butterflies,<br />
glyphs on their wings<br />
of all the ancient families,<br />
ascending on an updraft,<br />
cloud of every color<br />
heading westward,<br />
westward to sing<br />
to the ghosts who called them.<br />
ACELDEMA, THE FIELD OF BLOOD<br />
Why does the wind howl so?<br />
Why, in this holy land<br />
will neither Jew nor Christian<br />
bury their elders here?<br />
Why no flowers ever<br />
in this monochrome graveyard?<br />
This is cursed ground<br />
where nothing wholesome grows.<br />
Markers and monuments<br />
are toppled by earthquakes,<br />
56<br />
names weathered off by wind-sand,<br />
communal stones from plague times<br />
(mere icons of contagion)<br />
a potter’s field, rock sepulchres,<br />
dry hills honeycombed<br />
with doorless, nameless tombs.<br />
Here slaves and foreigners,<br />
assassinated strangers, whores<br />
and their discarded fetuses<br />
mingle their bones and dust.<br />
<strong>The</strong> twisted fig trees<br />
grew old and died<br />
a single olive tree<br />
leans on a wall,<br />
its black fruit withered,<br />
leaves yellow and black<br />
with leprous patches.<br />
Here a millennium of graves<br />
is untouched by robbers<br />
for even the lowest of thieves<br />
will not seek plunder here.<br />
Whatever is put here<br />
stays here, untouchable.<br />
<strong>The</strong> shadows at dusk<br />
skulk by like beggars,<br />
furtive penumbras<br />
fleeing to better darknesses.<br />
It is a ghostless place<br />
save for the owner’s spirit.<br />
If you would find a man<br />
and love him,<br />
as teacher, soul-mate, friend,<br />
and in one night,<br />
betray him,<br />
so, too, would your soul-poison<br />
envelop the land you bought —<br />
the place you gave away<br />
to everyone and no one,<br />
your charity to corpses,<br />
desolate Aceldema,<br />
deeded for thirty<br />
silver pieces, Judas!
MRS. WEEDEN, OF PAWTUCKET<br />
Someone exhumed<br />
in dead of night<br />
heart of Pawtucket,<br />
blank eyes of empty factories<br />
the only witnesses,<br />
exhumed Elizabeth Weeden<br />
dead eighty years now —<br />
ripped off the lid<br />
of her sarcophagus,<br />
lifted the coffin<br />
from a trough of water<br />
(What smells?<br />
what scraping beneath<br />
of clawed, albino rats?)<br />
came in a pickup,<br />
backed over tombstones,<br />
ripped up the shrubbery<br />
to get at her —<br />
but nothing went right<br />
for these amateur ghouls.<br />
<strong>The</strong> fine box shattered<br />
like so many matchsticks.<br />
<strong>The</strong> skull went one way —<br />
shroud tearing like spiderwebs<br />
as bones fell everywhere —<br />
not white in the starlight,<br />
not white in the beams<br />
of their furtive,<br />
terrified flashlights<br />
but black,<br />
digits and vertebrae,<br />
femur and rib-cage<br />
dark as the quill<br />
of a graveyard crow —<br />
<strong>The</strong>y fled with nothing.<br />
Next day I stand<br />
with a Pawtucket detective<br />
who asks me what sense<br />
I can make of this.<br />
I’m not sure.<br />
But last night was Lovecraft’s birthday.<br />
In his “Reanimator” tale<br />
a man named Ezra Weeden<br />
is the first revived from the dead,<br />
from the “essential salts” in his grave.<br />
Even in sunlight this tomb is hard to<br />
read.<br />
It says “E....ZA... WEEDEN.”<br />
A shard or two of bone remains,<br />
black on the stubborn green of lawn,<br />
and everywhere, in tatters,<br />
fragments of shroud appall the sun:<br />
the color is rust, and brick,<br />
persistence of blood, unclean,<br />
outlasting worm and tree-root,<br />
a color which, once seen,<br />
can never be forgotten.<br />
I do not want to see its like again.<br />
57
TWILIGHT OF THE DICTATORS<br />
THE EXHUMATION OF GOETHE<br />
Weimar, Germany, 1970<br />
By all means do this at night,<br />
while Weimar<br />
sleeps, while even those whose job<br />
it is to watch<br />
the watchers, sleep. In merciful dark,<br />
the third shift silence when<br />
the local electric plant<br />
shuts down for the Good of the State,<br />
take a cart — no, not a car,<br />
a hand-drawn cart —<br />
dampen its wheels so your journeys to,<br />
and from, and back<br />
to the foggy graveyard are soundless.<br />
Do not awaken the burghers!<br />
Here are the keys<br />
to the wrought-iron gates —<br />
mind you don’t rattle them.<br />
<strong>The</strong> crypt has been purposefully left unlocked.<br />
You need but draw the door.<br />
<strong>The</strong> cart will just squeeze through<br />
(Engineer Heinrich has measured everything!)<br />
Open the sarcophagus as quietly<br />
as possible.<br />
Watch the fingers! Don’t leave a mark<br />
on the hand-carved cover.<br />
Be sure it’s Goethe, the one with a “G.”<br />
We don’t want his crypt-mate Schiller<br />
(too many anti-People tendencies).<br />
Lift up the whole thing gently.<br />
<strong>The</strong> bones will want to fly apart.<br />
<strong>On</strong>ly the shroud, and some mummified meat<br />
keep him in the semblance of skeleton.<br />
Just scoop the whole thing up,<br />
and into the cart like a pancake.<br />
Here’s a bag for the skull. Don’t muss<br />
those ash-gray laurel leaves.<br />
We plan to coat them in polyester<br />
after we study that Aryan skull<br />
58
whose brain conceived of Faust,<br />
Egmont and sorrowful Werther.<br />
We’re going to wire the bones together,<br />
strip off that nasty flesh,<br />
maybe bleach him a little,<br />
make a respectable ghost of Goethe.<br />
Who knows, if he looks good enough,<br />
in a relined sarcophagus,<br />
we could put him on display.<br />
Come to Kulturstadt!<br />
See Goethe’s body!<br />
Even better than Lenin!<br />
(Can we say that?)<br />
We’ll pipe in lieder and opera.<br />
Tour guides will be dressed as Gretchen.<br />
Maybe a fun house<br />
with Mephistopheles,<br />
and sausages at Brander’s Inn.<br />
Ah! the cart is here! <strong>The</strong> bones,<br />
yes, the bones. Unfortunate, the odor.<br />
We can work on that.<br />
<strong>The</strong> colors, mein Gott,<br />
(excuse the expression)<br />
they will not please —<br />
over there, Klaus,<br />
if you’re going to be sick —<br />
It’s such a little skeleton —<br />
was he really so short?<br />
<strong>The</strong> books said he towered<br />
over his contemporaries.<br />
So much for the books!<br />
And the shroud — that color —<br />
not at all what we imagined.<br />
Perhaps the opera house<br />
could make a new one.<br />
No, the project is canceled.<br />
Poets are just too — flimsy.<br />
Next time let’s exhume a general,<br />
Bismarck, the Kaiser,<br />
someone with a sword and epaulets.<br />
Armor would be even better.<br />
<strong>The</strong> People want giants!<br />
59
WINTER SOLSTICE 1989<br />
December skies are ominous:<br />
gray walls of cloud<br />
obscure the universe.<br />
Even the sun is secretive,<br />
a burnished coin<br />
in miser’s pocket,<br />
a hooded monk,<br />
a bashful Cyclops<br />
now in, now out of snowstorm,<br />
avoiding the north like a criminal.<br />
Whoever thought that such a sun,<br />
such arctic windblasts,<br />
could herald liberation?<br />
Who knew what anthem<br />
the wind blasts bellowed,<br />
what symphony the arctic snows<br />
had scored on skytop?<br />
Joy, thou source of light immortal...<br />
Beethoven’s hymn<br />
and Schiller’s Ode<br />
played by an East/West orchestra,<br />
sung by a chorus<br />
eager to substitute<br />
Freiheit for Freude,<br />
a burst of happiness<br />
sparkling from Bernstein’s eyes<br />
as he conducts them.<br />
“Freiheit indeed,” he says,<br />
“and not a single bullet was fired!”<br />
Crowds fill the public squares,<br />
shake fists at balconies.<br />
In Hungary the People’s Party<br />
abolishes itself;<br />
wire cutters make souvenirs<br />
of barbed wire barriers.<br />
In East Berlin they planned to shoot<br />
protesters, crush their placards<br />
beneath the wheels of tanks:<br />
the generals depose the leaders.<br />
Dumbfounded border guards<br />
read orders to let all citizens through,<br />
protest to newsmen:<br />
“This means no jobs for us!”<br />
60<br />
Hole after hole, gate after gate,<br />
the hundred mile barricade shatters.<br />
Guard towers fall like dominoes.<br />
Two Germanies embrace and weep.<br />
Daughter of Elysium...<br />
In Prague, the workmen knock down<br />
a neon hammer and sickle<br />
from the local power plant.<br />
In Poland the workers remove<br />
the frowning bronze Lenin<br />
no longer managing<br />
his bankrupt shipyard.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Russians who once<br />
gave tanks to crush rebellion<br />
now tell the Czechs<br />
they’d better reform — and fast!<br />
<strong>The</strong> aged leaders of Belgrade,<br />
encrusted lords of Sofia,<br />
tremble and surrender rule<br />
to the astonished populace.<br />
In Bucharest they spit<br />
on portraits of Ceaucescu—<br />
whom but a month before<br />
they eulogized<br />
<strong>The</strong> Danube of Thought,<br />
Genius of the Carpathians.<br />
Soldiers begged<br />
for a place in the firing squad,<br />
loaded and fired<br />
before the order was even uttered.<br />
It takes three days<br />
at the blowtorch<br />
until the frowning monolith of Lenin<br />
the king of workers<br />
in his suit and vest<br />
dainty fingers<br />
that had lifted no tool<br />
toppled to the jeers<br />
of the crowd.<br />
A flatbed removes<br />
the humbled colossus,<br />
cheek to the ground,<br />
his exhortative gesture<br />
meaningless.
<strong>The</strong> workers chant<br />
no Internationale.<br />
His bronze should crack<br />
to hear their anthem today:<br />
No more Communists!<br />
No more<br />
Communists<br />
ever!<br />
<strong>The</strong> boot has lifted<br />
from the face of Europe<br />
IN THE STREETS OF MOSCOW<br />
AND ST. PETERSBURG<br />
Idol-smashing multitudes, I salute you!<br />
Cut off Lenin at the kneecaps,<br />
then lift his noos’d neck<br />
at the end of a wrecking crane.<br />
Topple Dzerzhinsky from the KGB<br />
he built.<br />
How imperious he looked in his<br />
bronze overcoat,<br />
now nothing but a tumbled derelict!<br />
Marx’s face is daubed with splotches,<br />
red paint, white paint —<br />
his imperium now reads<br />
WORKERS OF THE WORLD<br />
FORGIVE ME<br />
Prostitye menya...prostitye menya...<br />
<strong>The</strong> dying words of Boris Godounov!<br />
Do not stop at these beginnings,<br />
O Russians long suffering!<br />
Rip that mummy from Lenin’s tomb!<br />
Scatter the bones of Stalin to the dogs!<br />
What to do with all<br />
the toppled monoliths?<br />
Melt them down for bells!<br />
I hear new bells in Moscow tolling,<br />
Low the notes, melancholy<br />
the harmonies.<br />
Bells of iron, bells of bronze<br />
Bells of the sorrow of a million kulaks.<br />
Bells to shatter the walls of Lubyanka,<br />
topple the last towers of bitter Gulag.<br />
Ring them all in one great<br />
universal chord!<br />
Let the largest orchestra ever assembled<br />
play the Overture of 1812!<br />
Cannons bursting!<br />
Fireworks over the onion domes!<br />
Swing the clabbers!<br />
Lenin’s head is a church bell!<br />
Stalin’s a row of jolly carillons!<br />
<strong>The</strong> brow and beard of Marx intoning<br />
Glory! Glory! Slava! Slava!<br />
61
STALIN AND SHOSTAKOVICH<br />
It’s three in the morning and snowing in Moscow.<br />
<strong>The</strong> streets are dark — but here and there a light —<br />
a solitary bulb throws out its beacon:<br />
a yellow beam from Stalin’s workroom,<br />
steady when the Great Helmsman has an idea,<br />
tilted downward as he studies his lists,<br />
casting a shadow of his giant hand<br />
as fountain pen<br />
makes check marks next to offending names.<br />
Tomorrow those names and their owners<br />
will separate forever as People’s Enemies<br />
become “Former People.”<br />
<strong>The</strong> offices of Ministries are well lit, too —<br />
memos to write, conspiracies to ferret out,<br />
coffee to drain by the cup, by the gallon.<br />
(If Comrade Stalin can work all night,<br />
who dares to leave his tasks unfinished?)<br />
At the Lubyanka Jail, one basement window<br />
emits its light in slitted segments.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e could see —<br />
if anyone dared to press his face there —<br />
an arm with a truncheon — a mangled visage.<br />
Dim slots of light — a doorway — come on and off.<br />
Men in black coats are framed there.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n slashing beams and feral tail lights<br />
precede and follow the Black Marias.<br />
2<br />
<strong>The</strong> clock chimes four.<br />
Another lamp is burning, too —<br />
another hand makes nervous tick marks<br />
as Shostakovich blocks out chords and melodies.<br />
Even the vodka and cigarettes<br />
are quite forgotten as the climax approaches.<br />
Eyes blur with staves,<br />
sharps dance like angry snowflakes.<br />
He cannot concentrate.<br />
Half his brain is listening.<br />
Not to his inner Muses —<br />
not tonight,<br />
not any night this year —<br />
listening for the Black Marias.<br />
A car glides by — too slowly?<br />
Someone is running at the end of the block —<br />
why, at this hour?<br />
An interval of silence — too long, too quiet.<br />
A truck stops — how long<br />
until the doors swing wide<br />
and heavy-footed steps<br />
62
echo from the building fronts?<br />
A street lamp winks out; across<br />
the street a curtain parts,<br />
a candle moves once<br />
across a table —<br />
is it nothing— or a signal?<br />
He cannot go to the window and look.<br />
Watchers in raincoats<br />
dislike being spied upon.<br />
It’s never wise to stand in a window, anyway:<br />
rocks have been thrown<br />
by zealous members of the Communist Youth<br />
rocks with notes<br />
that read: SHOSTAKOVICH—PARASITE—<br />
FORMALIST!!!<br />
What if one of them took a gun to a nearby rooftop-?<br />
Open season on Formalist Anti-People Artists!<br />
His hands make notes in jagged gesture.<br />
Staccato—-staccato—-agitato—<br />
Attaca subito—<br />
Stalin condemned his last opera.<br />
What will he think of this symphony —<br />
its Mahleresque, giant orchestra,<br />
its jarring, piled-on harmonies,<br />
its bleak and withering quietudes?<br />
Will this, too, be a “muddle instead of music?”<br />
How can be help being himself?<br />
He writes not what he wants,<br />
but what he has to.<br />
He tries to be grand — it comes out bombast.<br />
Tries humor, only to ooze sarcasm.<br />
He has no smile that convinces —<br />
could a lobster smile<br />
while dangling over the cooking pot?<br />
He must put everything into this symphony.<br />
It may be his last, anyway.<br />
Ignoring the clock, he labors on.<br />
This page: the whimper of the beaten.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re: the shriek of the victims’ widows.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re: the whining voice of the apparatchik.<br />
This horn sounds a denunciation.<br />
This oboe betrays a friend for a dacha.<br />
This violin divorces its partner,<br />
disclosing her unacceptable class origins.<br />
A clarinet warns of rootless cosmopolitans.<br />
Let them guess what it’s all about!<br />
To hell with their need for uplift!<br />
Rub their faces in the ruin of Russia!<br />
Let them try their dialectic on this one!<br />
63
3<br />
Stalin works on. He sees the name<br />
of Shostakovich. A memo asks:<br />
Arrest and interrogate?<br />
“I like a tune,” he says to himself,<br />
“and now and then even a poem.”<br />
<strong>The</strong> chastised artists would come around.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y’d write their odes and symphonies<br />
to Russia and Comrade Stalin.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y’d do it willingly.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y’d trample one another for the privilege.<br />
No action at present, the dictator writes.<br />
4<br />
Done for the night, the weary composer<br />
dons coat and shoes, tiptoes<br />
out door to the unheated hall.<br />
Suitcase beside him, he curls up there<br />
between the elevator and the apartment door.<br />
Tries to sleep, tries not to listen<br />
to the spiderweb sounds of the dying night.<br />
<strong>The</strong> suitcase is packed for a long journey —<br />
a cold one.<br />
Better to wait in the corridor, he thinks;<br />
better not to wake his sleeping wife and son<br />
if this is the night that makes his life<br />
another unfinished symphony.<br />
64
THE PIANO UPRISING<br />
A Dream, from the Dark Years of Poland<br />
1<br />
Troops at the border; all weapons are confiscated.<br />
Advisors in place, an abundance of secret<br />
police. <strong>The</strong> informers are always willing.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Church, pretending everything, doing nothing,<br />
locked in the stasis of state against god,<br />
the people’s servitude a foregone conclusion.<br />
<strong>The</strong> men are drafted into the army.<br />
<strong>The</strong> miners and workers uneasily obey<br />
the order to stay at their critical jobs.<br />
<strong>The</strong> women wait in endless queues,<br />
their shawls and kerchiefs aligned<br />
like segments of an endless tapeworm<br />
kept at the edge of hunger.<br />
<strong>The</strong> meager stores can barely feed them.<br />
<strong>The</strong> cattle and chickens and eggs go East,<br />
get eaten by the well-fed army,<br />
leaving a handful of dwarfish cabbages,<br />
the ubiquitous potato, the accusing spaces<br />
of emptiness on the collective’s shelves.<br />
Women work in the steaming kitchens,<br />
coaxing soup from skeletons,<br />
bread from rye, a bottomless pot<br />
of cabbage ends and sausages. Somehow,<br />
everyone eats.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y put aside an extra helping<br />
for the buxom and blonde granddaughters.<br />
At night, or in slices of stolen afternoons,<br />
youthful and agile-fingered,<br />
girls master the dancing of eighty-eight steps,<br />
play on thousands of legal pianos —<br />
the old Mazurkas, the Waltzes, of Chopin.<br />
No one has thought to outlaw the instruments.<br />
<strong>As</strong> Nadia practices in Gdansk,<br />
Lidia plays grandmother’s spinet in Krakow.<br />
A school piano in Warsaw<br />
hums by itself in resonance.<br />
No one knows they play to one another,<br />
that the Polish girls have long ago ceased needing<br />
to guide imprinted keys in their etudes.<br />
No one suspects they are secret weapons,<br />
strings drawn taut,<br />
brass frames like crossbows.<br />
65
Determined and sinister, shining and black<br />
as coffins in a showroom,<br />
they bide their time rehearsing<br />
the Revolutionary Etude for the people,<br />
the Marche Funèbre for the martyrs,<br />
roulades of Paderewski held in reserve.<br />
<strong>The</strong> police think nothing of the white-haired tuner —<br />
he goes from home to home, adjusts,<br />
re-strings and tempers,<br />
adds unusual parts to the pedals.<br />
An abandoned piano factory springs to life,<br />
new models in crates on the loading docks,<br />
the shipping manifests immaculate.<br />
It seems that everyone is getting a piano.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Minister of Finance shrugs. <strong>The</strong> economy<br />
opens an eye and goes back to sleep.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Minister of Culture smiles:<br />
music without words is a harmless<br />
expression of the people’s art.<br />
2<br />
Nadia practices in Gdansk.<br />
In Krakow her grandmother’s<br />
piano is waiting.<br />
In Warsaw the instrument<br />
she studied on<br />
hides in a cellar<br />
(the piano underground).<br />
<strong>The</strong>n from a million radios<br />
a great C resounds,<br />
eight octaves thick,<br />
a Resurrexit of brass and wood,<br />
a rhapsody of unity,<br />
harmonics to the nth degree.<br />
Casters unlock, wheel guards<br />
are thrust aside.<br />
Grands roll through empty apartments,<br />
tiptoe impossibly<br />
down curving stairs.<br />
Spinets swerve out<br />
from alleyways.<br />
Baby grands dart<br />
from tree to tree,<br />
play cat and mouse<br />
with the traffic police.<br />
66
<strong>The</strong> sergeant leafs through<br />
reports of abandoned furniture,<br />
scratches his head in puzzlement.<br />
It is, of course, the piano rebellion.<br />
<strong>The</strong> pianos are coming:<br />
wheeled piano tanks<br />
death black, coffin-shaped,<br />
polished and retrofit<br />
with well-tuned armaments.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y all play Chopin in unison —<br />
the Military Polonaise.<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir lids drum open and shut like jaws,<br />
rolling on tractor tires, juggernauts<br />
rumbling bass notes, the r-r-r-rum-ta-tum<br />
of Polonaise audacity.<br />
<strong>The</strong> battle begins:<br />
Pianos crash from the rooftops.<br />
A phalanx of interlocked pianos<br />
take the field, sound boards locked<br />
in invincible wedges.<br />
Flying pianos buzz over the airport,<br />
their black and white teeth<br />
rat-tat-tat arpeggios,<br />
down with ease the clumsy MIG fighters.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y drive the generals into the sea.<br />
<strong>The</strong> troops desert,<br />
lock arms and dance<br />
into the countryside.<br />
File clerks toss documents from windows,<br />
topple file cabinets,<br />
pour chicken soup on bureaucrats,<br />
sing r-r-r-rum-ta-tumin in the hallways.<br />
Cornered in public squares<br />
the secret police deny everything,<br />
their crimes, their ranks, their names.<br />
In Warsaw the sweating minister<br />
of secret police and internal security<br />
shouts on his hot wire to Moscow:<br />
“Not royalists, stupid, royali, pianos!<br />
it’s an uprising of legions of pianos.<br />
Tell them — tell them the pianos are coming!”<br />
<strong>The</strong> connection is broken by a piano wire.<br />
67
Instruments re-gather in the countryside.<br />
Flying Becksteins invade Soviet airspace,<br />
lead missiles cat-and-mouse<br />
back to the planes that launched them.<br />
(Whoever thought a Hammerklavier<br />
could turn right angles at Mach 2?)<br />
<strong>The</strong> Polonaise goes on.<br />
Others conduct guerrilla war<br />
to the shifting beat of Mazurkas.<br />
Lithe and supple assassins<br />
hunt down the Russian advisors<br />
(those white enamel spinets,<br />
fast on their wheels,<br />
eager to leap from a third floor window<br />
to squash a fleeing foreigner!)<br />
Steinways roll through Warsaw,<br />
Polish flag on their sides,<br />
Bösendorfers to the rescue at Lidice,<br />
Baldwins at the border to reinforce them,<br />
Becksteins fight shoulder-to-shoulder<br />
with lowly domestic models.<br />
Antique pianos in square cases<br />
come apart at the joints but fight;<br />
half dozen harpsichords at the windows,<br />
watch wistfully.<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir quills fly out like arrows.<br />
A tiny virginal bursts its frame<br />
to whip a visiting professor of Marxism,<br />
draws blood with snapping steel wires.<br />
<strong>The</strong> highway is clogged with black Volgas.<br />
Battalions of Russians fall back in retreat.<br />
And this is but the start of it:<br />
<strong>As</strong> Anna practices in Leningrad,<br />
Irina plays grandmother’s spinet in Moscow.<br />
A school piano in Odessa<br />
hums by itself in resonance.<br />
68
THE ANACONDA POEMS<br />
1<br />
Some want to come back from death,<br />
reliving their human folly<br />
again and again,<br />
life after dreary life<br />
until they get it right,<br />
then slide down the chute<br />
to soulless oblivion.<br />
We who don’t care for perfection<br />
are doomed to come back as animals.<br />
Do we return<br />
according to our habits,<br />
the heaped accounts of karma,<br />
or can we choose?<br />
I choose,<br />
study the animal kingdom<br />
for the soul’s best condo,<br />
the leafiest turf,<br />
the longest return engagement.<br />
Choosing is hard for a hermit poet.<br />
No herd instinct for me,<br />
no hive or flock or pride<br />
if you please.<br />
Let me be something<br />
solitary yet strong,<br />
lordly and unapproachable.<br />
I search for incarnations<br />
on top of the food chain.<br />
I’ll eat<br />
but not be eaten<br />
hunt but elude the hunter.<br />
At last I find it —<br />
the giant anaconda.<br />
Female I’ll have to be —<br />
the males are nothing.<br />
Mother of all snakes,<br />
I’ll grow to thirty feet,<br />
spend all day lazing<br />
in the waters of the Amazon.<br />
Nights I’ll wait<br />
at the edge of the river,<br />
HORRORS!<br />
when deer and rabbit,<br />
panther and lemur<br />
come to drink.<br />
My fangs attach<br />
to whatever approaches;<br />
I throw throw my coils<br />
with amazing speed.<br />
<strong>The</strong> astonished prey<br />
immobile, breathless<br />
as I squeeze squeeze<br />
squeeze<br />
to heart-stop stillness.<br />
Compacted to sausage shape<br />
the still warm animals<br />
slide down my gullet,<br />
my inward turning teeth<br />
guiding them onwards.<br />
I have no enemies,<br />
swim unconcerned<br />
among piranha<br />
electric eels<br />
and crocodile caymans.<br />
Not even my prey<br />
seem to notice me<br />
as I mount skyward<br />
to the treetop banquet,<br />
my green and black camouflage<br />
matching the dappled forest.<br />
Parrots and toucans<br />
I eat like candy.<br />
<strong>On</strong>ly the monkeys fear me<br />
somersault screaming<br />
at the sight of me —<br />
Oh, and the hairless apes<br />
in the jungle villages:<br />
I need but show my tongue,<br />
my unblinking eye,<br />
to make them run away.<br />
Taking the sun<br />
on a bank a-burst<br />
with yellow blossoms<br />
I am a jasmine empress<br />
irresistible<br />
to the males of my species.<br />
69
I sense them coming,<br />
feel the grass parting,<br />
a dozen today<br />
twining about me.<br />
I turn with them,<br />
move toward mud.<br />
Hours we coil together —<br />
puny as they are it<br />
feels good everywhere —<br />
one of them will find the spot.<br />
2<br />
I stow away<br />
on an airplane’s cargo hold,<br />
emerge at La Guardia,<br />
hitch ride on a luggage rack<br />
through tunnel to Manhattan.<br />
I mean to eat my way around —<br />
a big green worm<br />
in the big green Apple!<br />
City Hall park has plenty of trees,<br />
pigeons abounding.<br />
I study the populace,<br />
learn how to move among them<br />
with camouflage and mimicry.<br />
This is going to be easy.<br />
I will have my fill of man-food.<br />
Homeless Anaconda<br />
a garbage bag<br />
unraveled to wrap me<br />
gets me a night<br />
in the city shelter<br />
(lots to eat<br />
but it needed washing)<br />
Hip-Hop Anaconda,<br />
plenty of room for me<br />
in those baggy pants.<br />
Ate well on 125th Street<br />
but had to spit out<br />
gold chains and a boom box.<br />
Transvestite Anaconda<br />
prowling the piers<br />
in matching alligator<br />
accessories. Honey<br />
I could just eat you alive.<br />
70<br />
An Anaconda Dowager<br />
draped in furs<br />
indulging my sweet<br />
incisors<br />
with the ladies<br />
at Rumpelmeyers.<br />
Roller Blade Anaconda<br />
knocking down doormen<br />
on Central Park South,<br />
scarfing up poodles<br />
at the curbside.<br />
Painted purple,<br />
welcomed as Barney,<br />
I am Day Care Anaconda,<br />
turning a jungle gym<br />
into my cafeteria<br />
(I really must start<br />
counting calories!)<br />
I’m unadorned as<br />
Bowery Anaconda —<br />
an hallucination —<br />
acquiring a taste<br />
for marinated men<br />
left out for the taking<br />
in cardboard boxes!<br />
<strong>The</strong> Anaconda Nun<br />
in her floppy habit<br />
waylays worshipers<br />
in the nave of St. Patrick’s.<br />
Irish O’Connor<br />
wouldn’t know a snake<br />
if he saw one.<br />
Now I am<br />
Steam Tunnel Anaconda<br />
need time to digest<br />
all my victims<br />
time to prepare<br />
for the progeny<br />
already swelling in my belly.<br />
I’ll winter here in warmth,<br />
no rent no taxes,<br />
won’t need a green card<br />
welfare or Medicaid
<strong>The</strong>y can’t zoo or jail me<br />
I have immunity<br />
endangered species status.<br />
When my seventy-five babies<br />
emerge from manhole covers<br />
on Easter morning<br />
on lower Fifth Avenue<br />
they’ll already be citizens —<br />
American Anacondas!<br />
THE SPIDERS<br />
Nature is not all birds and squirrels.<br />
Under your feet cruel orders thrive.<br />
Things you cannot dream of<br />
or should not dream of<br />
feed upon one another;<br />
things feed upon them,<br />
every predator a prey,<br />
every parasite sucked dry<br />
by some relentless nemesis.<br />
Look on your lawn —<br />
eight-legged priests in bloated ease<br />
tending their silken tapestries,<br />
a dark cathedral for arachnid gods.<br />
Watch how the chosen victims struggle,<br />
captured in weed-strung ziggurats,<br />
flyers downed, pedestrians waylaid,<br />
sailors shanghaied and paralyzed.<br />
This silken Karnak laced in dew<br />
that only glimmers in early morn<br />
before the sun erases it,<br />
what do these gleamings signify?<br />
Necropolis of wolf and garden spider,<br />
eating a billion souls and wanting more;<br />
male spiders blind in a frenzy of sex;<br />
black widow brides<br />
with hour glass bellies;<br />
egg sacs swelling with the death<br />
of the universe.<br />
Barn spider giants on sunlit stones.<br />
<strong>The</strong> skitter-skit of daddy long legs,<br />
insane horsemen of hunger’s apocalypse.<br />
A million spiders in your uncut lawn!<br />
Eight million legs, two million<br />
venom fangs!<br />
How many eyes? Some of them have<br />
more than two!<br />
<strong>The</strong>y never sleep! <strong>The</strong>y can live forever!<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir stomachs expand to any size!<br />
<strong>The</strong>y have been at it<br />
for a hundred million years!<br />
It is better not to think of them.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y do not want you to be<br />
aware of them.<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir webs are meant to be invisible.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y kill and eat and train<br />
their offspring silently.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re are more of them every year.<br />
Tear up this poem<br />
and do not think of them!<br />
KNECHT RUPRECHT, OR,<br />
THE BAD BOY’S CHRISTMAS<br />
Don’t even think of calling your<br />
mother or father.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y can’t hear you.<br />
No one can help you now.<br />
I came through the chimney<br />
in the form of a crow.<br />
You’re my first this Christmas.<br />
You’re a very special boy, you know.<br />
You’ve been bad,<br />
bad every day,<br />
dreamt every night<br />
of the next day’s evil.<br />
It takes a lot of knack<br />
to give others misery<br />
for three hundred and sixty<br />
consecutive days!<br />
How many boys have you beaten?<br />
How many small animals killed?<br />
Half the pets in this town<br />
have scars from meeting you.<br />
Am I Santa Claus? Cack, ack, ack!<br />
Do I look like Santa, you little shit?<br />
Look at my bare-bone skull,<br />
my eyes like black jelly,<br />
my tattered shroud.<br />
My name is Ruprecht,<br />
Knecht Ruprecht.<br />
I’m Santa’s cousin! Cack, ack, ack!<br />
Stop squirming and listen —<br />
(of course I’m hurting you!)<br />
I have a lot of visits to make.<br />
71
My coffin is moored to your chimney.<br />
My vultures are freezing their beaks off.<br />
But as I said, you’re special<br />
You’re my number one boy.<br />
When you grow up,<br />
you’re going to be a noxious skinhead,<br />
maybe a famous assassin.<br />
Your teachers are already afraid of you.<br />
In a year or two you’ll discover girls,<br />
a whole new dimension<br />
of cruelty and pleasure.<br />
s<br />
Now let’s get down to business.<br />
Let me get my bag here.<br />
Presents? Presents! Cack, ack, ack!<br />
See these things? <strong>The</strong>y’re old,<br />
old as the Inquisition,<br />
make dental instruments look like toys.<br />
No, nothing much, no permanent harm.<br />
I’ll take a few of your teeth,<br />
then I’ll put them back.<br />
This is going to hurt. <strong>The</strong>re —<br />
the clamp is in place.<br />
Let’s see — where to plug in<br />
those electrodes?<br />
Oh, now, don’t whimper and<br />
pray to God!<br />
<strong>As</strong> if you ever believed in God!<br />
Cack, ack, ack!<br />
I know every tender place<br />
in a boy’s body.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re, that’s fine! My, look at the blood!<br />
Look at the blood! Look at the blood!<br />
You’ll be good from now on?<br />
That’s a laugh.<br />
Am I doing this to teach you a lesson?<br />
I am the Punisher. I do this<br />
because I enjoy it! I am just like you!<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is nothing you can do!<br />
I can make a minute of pain<br />
seem like a year!<br />
No one will ever believe you!<br />
Worse yet, you cannot change.<br />
Tomorrow you will be more hateful<br />
than ever.<br />
72<br />
<strong>The</strong> world will wish you had<br />
never been born.<br />
Well now, our time is up.<br />
Sorry for the mess.<br />
Tell your mother you had a nosebleed.<br />
Your father is giving you<br />
a hunting knife<br />
for which I’m sure you’ll have a<br />
thousand uses.<br />
Just let me lick those tears<br />
from your cheeks.<br />
I love the taste of children’s tears.<br />
My, it’s late! Time to fly!<br />
Cack, ack, ack!<br />
I’ll be back next Christmas Eve!<br />
_______<br />
Knecht Ruprecht, from German folklore,<br />
is St. Nicholas’ evil twin, who punishes bad children.<br />
MY LIFE AS AN INCUBUS<br />
1<br />
<strong>On</strong>e iron-black night of summoning<br />
I found and tried a book of spells<br />
(low Dutch and loathsome Latin<br />
ciphering, peppered with Hebrew,<br />
dotted with phrases in Coptic Greek).<br />
It was rubbish, I muttered —<br />
an alchemist’s meatloaf —<br />
the stupefying nonsense of Kabbala —<br />
Yet there he stood — a hoary demon,<br />
now in, now out of surrounding mist.<br />
He wavered, he groaned, his<br />
half-blind eyes avoiding me —<br />
he would not stay unless I spoke,<br />
would not obey<br />
till seal and sigil bound him.<br />
I read the name<br />
that charms the Furies,<br />
invoked the tone,<br />
wordless, that gods incarnate
must heed, the chord<br />
that binds eidolons to the chains<br />
of matter.<br />
<strong>The</strong> demon smiled, then.<br />
What would you have, or be? he asked.<br />
I am a thing of books and fancies,<br />
ill-versed in animal passions.<br />
<strong>The</strong> world of joy has passed me by.<br />
I want—<br />
Your youth returned? he shrugged.<br />
A simple thing! A lover or two—<br />
A legion of girls or boys<br />
Enslaved to your newfound beauty?<br />
I am no Faust! I answered.<br />
My soul’s no petty thing<br />
to trade for a common morsel,<br />
a Gretchen, a bone-dry Helen, no!<br />
I want to be that which<br />
no one refuses —<br />
a being of night whom none can resist —<br />
unsought yet irresistible —<br />
then tender lover when love is needed,<br />
the forceful one when force<br />
is secretly desired.<br />
An incubus! he marveled.<br />
Incubus/ succubus! I would be both.<br />
Make me the world’s nocturnal visitor,<br />
winged, strong and passionate,<br />
invisible and cruel.<br />
Men have sought such companions,<br />
the devil extemporized,<br />
yet none have sought to be<br />
the thing that pleasured them.<br />
I’ll give you two to own,<br />
a good diversion<br />
from your moldy books.<br />
Enough of books!<br />
<strong>The</strong>y brought me thee,<br />
shape-shifting broker of souls,<br />
gave me the power to ask no end<br />
of favor from the Stygian realm.<br />
Make me a prodigy of wantonness!<br />
Both incubus and succubus?<br />
Either at will. I want to play<br />
these mammal passions to the hilt.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re lay the coins you must accept<br />
(<strong>The</strong> devil scowled at the false tokens),<br />
<strong>The</strong>re are the bounds of Pentagram<br />
I can erase and set you free...<br />
He raised his hand to stop my words.<br />
Enough, enough, my sorcerer:<br />
I see I must serve, and well,<br />
or you will summon me for worse.<br />
Be then, what you will.<br />
I render you unseen, unseeable,<br />
unloved yet irresistible—<br />
He muttered here Plutonian spells<br />
that I half-heard, half-felt<br />
as my prolonging limbs caught fire<br />
and wings splayed out my spine.<br />
Oh, I am beautiful,<br />
enormous, strong!<br />
Now up and out — the night is mine!<br />
So many calls to make:<br />
the list is long!<br />
2<br />
Incubus, male god<br />
with overarching lust —<br />
Succubus, a female hunger<br />
as big as the moon,<br />
I rise yin-yang, contrary mist,<br />
across the silty river, trail steeple tops.<br />
I wing above a Midnight Mass,<br />
mock hushed and kneeling choristers<br />
with Orphic songs<br />
of unappeasable desire.<br />
<strong>The</strong> buzzing litanies pass me by,<br />
scatter like gnats beneath my pinions.<br />
Through walls and windows<br />
I hear too well<br />
the human longing held in reserve,<br />
trapped in music and television<br />
monotone.<br />
This psychic babble does not<br />
distract me.<br />
73
I spot the easy prey, hear sighs<br />
from open windows, youths<br />
self-pleasuring, dreams arcing<br />
to climax.<br />
I squeeze into a shuttered room.<br />
Your room —<br />
you of all on earth I have chosen.<br />
You’re reading poetry, your dream<br />
an abstract reverie. <strong>The</strong> way I want it:<br />
passion where passion is most denied.<br />
I am there; the corner unreached<br />
by lamplight<br />
can barely conceal my massive outline,<br />
the silhouette that ought<br />
to make you scream.<br />
You drop the book. You nod<br />
into slumber.<br />
My talon-fingered shadow extends<br />
to you,<br />
until my darkness covers you,<br />
breath matching your breath,<br />
heartbeat in unison,<br />
hands cupped in hands.<br />
Amazing! I can undress you<br />
with wish forms!<br />
Cloth parts, the buttons explode —<br />
you are naked.<br />
My subtle tongue explores you,<br />
tastes salt<br />
from the cup of your palm.<br />
I follow the pulse<br />
from wrist into brain and I am there<br />
with purple flowers<br />
mechanical bees,<br />
a magellanic cloud<br />
of jasmine and light/<br />
you turn in your sleep, we tumble,<br />
my imperceptible hands guide hips<br />
and legs to a full-length embrace<br />
where/<br />
festive domes coalesce<br />
from amethyst,<br />
the sound of horns<br />
cracks frozen air,<br />
a field of quartz<br />
gleams gold in sun/<br />
74<br />
encircling me with arms<br />
you gasp; the tremors that drain<br />
your flesh and your sunburst skull<br />
into me, conclude and quell<br />
into heavy sleep/<br />
I drift off languidly,<br />
gorged with the seed of a race<br />
of dreams.<br />
SNOFRU THE MAD<br />
With a name like Snofru 1<br />
you’d better be good<br />
as a Pharaoh,<br />
as a survivor.<br />
Would the gods laugh, he wondered,<br />
when his weighing time came up —<br />
his heart against a feather<br />
on the fatal balance —<br />
would tittering among them<br />
make his recitation falter?<br />
A careful planner,<br />
he lays four boats in his pyramid,<br />
one pointed in each direction —<br />
he’d launch all four<br />
so his soul could elude<br />
the Eater of the Dead.<br />
Grave robbers? He’d baffle them,<br />
build three great pyramids<br />
for Snofru the Pharaoh —<br />
hang the cost!<br />
He’d bury an imposter<br />
in each sarcophagus.<br />
<strong>The</strong> gods alone would know<br />
his final resting place,<br />
a well-appointed tomb<br />
whose architect he’d strangled.<br />
<strong>As</strong> for his Queen Hetephras,<br />
dead these three years now,<br />
he left her innards<br />
in an alabaster jar,<br />
yet carried her mummy away.<br />
Nights, he unwound her wrappings,<br />
kissed her natron-scented lips,<br />
caressed her sewn-up belly,
then carefully restored<br />
her royal bandages,<br />
her mask and jewels.<br />
His courtiers avoid him,<br />
smell death despite<br />
the unguents and incense.<br />
An impudent general<br />
eyes his daughter.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is talk, there is talk.<br />
He will neither make war, or peace,<br />
turns back ambassadors<br />
as he spends his days divining<br />
how to turn his eye-blink life<br />
into the gods’ eternity.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e night he slips away.<br />
<strong>The</strong> upstart will assume his name,<br />
bed his black-eyed daughter,<br />
inherit his unused pyramid —<br />
the better to advance his stratagem.<br />
With pride and pomp<br />
he circled his name 2<br />
on a hundred monuments,<br />
but he is far from Memphis now,<br />
speaks to his servants<br />
in but a whisper.<br />
Soon he will join Hetephras.<br />
His journey ended at the judging hall<br />
he’d watch as the proud<br />
were judged and eaten,<br />
then take his place, unsandaled,<br />
plain as the commonest slave,<br />
at the table of the gods.<br />
_________<br />
1. Snofru or Snefru was Pharaoh in the Fourth<br />
Dynasty and the immediate predecessor of Khufu<br />
(Cheops), builder of the Great Pyramid.<br />
Historians are baffled as to why Snofru built<br />
himself three separate pyramids.<br />
2. Snofru was the first Pharaoh to enclose his<br />
name in a cartouche.<br />
THE WAKING DREAM<br />
Tonight it comes to me, rolls off<br />
the rounded moon that fatted<br />
all week with premonition,<br />
drops in a brownish haze<br />
a frozen thunderclap of thought,<br />
a distillation of drums, a bell<br />
anticipating alarm. It comes!<br />
Telegraphy on bristling hairs—<br />
no need to send a thunderstorm<br />
to tap it out on hills or burn<br />
the message on the trunks of trees —<br />
I hear it! I taste<br />
the spice of ashes on my tongue<br />
before my mouth can say it,<br />
a thought as bitter as cyanide.<br />
Ripe with your fate the earth<br />
bears it like fruit: the rain<br />
that hangs its hair on clouds<br />
withholds the whispered secret —<br />
You woke me from dreaming<br />
into a deeper dream.<br />
Your face appeared<br />
inside my skull<br />
pleading for a neck to fasten to,<br />
your beauty reduced<br />
to fingertips of wind on spine,<br />
dressing itself in rags<br />
of others’ memories.<br />
Long I remembered you,<br />
then fought to forget you.<br />
I walled you away; brick<br />
by brick I lost you,<br />
stopped seeing you<br />
mortared in other faces.<br />
Now how little I know!<br />
How tall were you, anyway?<br />
How old? What shade was that<br />
within your irises?<br />
What really pleased you?<br />
Your profile is pressed<br />
into my seabed,<br />
yet it is one pale fish<br />
you search me for,<br />
crying out telepathically,<br />
75
preceding thunderstorm<br />
in rasp of air,<br />
dropping a thread<br />
to anchor us<br />
against awakening —<br />
I open my eyes.<br />
I almost see you.<br />
Yet which is real? You,<br />
semitransparent above me —<br />
or the doused lamp<br />
beyond the bowl of wings?<br />
You, almost perceptible again,<br />
or the hole inside the sun<br />
to which my outer dream<br />
still plummets?<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is perception<br />
unbearable to know or name —<br />
foreknowledge that fills<br />
the sky with its<br />
concavity, takes root<br />
between my waking<br />
and your invasion.<br />
Have you called to me<br />
because our past<br />
still joins us?<br />
Or is your spirit<br />
vagrant now,<br />
drifting from bed to bed,<br />
seeking a shelter?<br />
while on your own cold sheets<br />
who broadcasts dreams —<br />
you,<br />
or the mouthless, earless<br />
socketless Lover<br />
who seizes your breathing —<br />
Death?<br />
76<br />
POEM FOUND ON THE NECK<br />
OF A DEER KILLED<br />
IN THE BLACK FOREST, GERMANY<br />
1<br />
“We’ve met before,”<br />
he smiled, all teeth<br />
and grin, dark hair<br />
upon the back of his hand,<br />
eyebrows<br />
that nearly joined,<br />
a sense of tension<br />
in every muscle<br />
poised. We leaned<br />
into the sun on his balcony.<br />
“I don’t think so,”<br />
I started to say,<br />
but his assuredness<br />
unnerved me.<br />
“Down there,”<br />
he pointed to the forest,<br />
wave on wave of fir and ash<br />
surrounding his castle.<br />
“When you were something else,<br />
we met, I’m confident.”<br />
A serving tray was proffered.<br />
He took a skewered tidbit,<br />
inhaled the scent of broiled lamb.<br />
I chose a celery stick.<br />
“Herr Baron,” I told him,<br />
“I’m quite a stranger here.”<br />
“And yet I’m sure of it.”<br />
<strong>The</strong> bitten lamb bled<br />
upon his lower lip.<br />
“A prior life?” I jested.<br />
“You don’t look the type<br />
to fall for reincarnation.”<br />
He didn’t blink.<br />
“<strong>The</strong>re’s only one life, I grant,<br />
but one can go on<br />
for many years.”<br />
“You can’t be over thirty.”
“I watched the army of Bonaparte<br />
from this very balcony.”<br />
I thought: madman.<br />
He caught it, hurled<br />
it back with a laugh.<br />
He touched the scarred place<br />
on my shoulder,<br />
that tender, five-lobed<br />
birthmark I hate,<br />
as if he saw it<br />
through my jacket.<br />
“You came for your poetry,<br />
so I feed you a little madness.<br />
You’ll indulge me, I hope,<br />
by staying a week<br />
to browse our books.<br />
My wife is a fine cellist—”<br />
He pointed within,<br />
where the quartet assembled<br />
for the afternoon’s concert.<br />
“I’ll warrant the Grosse Fugue<br />
is an ugly thing.”<br />
“Beethoven’s worst mood,<br />
I agreed. “He dares you to listen.”<br />
“Wait till you hear what she makes of it.<br />
And you must stay till Sunday next.<br />
We’ll play Mozart,<br />
and the moon will be full.”<br />
I froze. “<strong>The</strong> moon?”<br />
“That’s what connects us,<br />
isn’t it?”<br />
I sat in silence<br />
as the quartet struggled<br />
with Ludwig’s mad fugue.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Baroness was fierce,<br />
struck sparks with her bow,<br />
leaned back<br />
as though giving birth<br />
to her cello.<br />
Her yellow-green eyes<br />
looked past the music,<br />
beamed at the Baron<br />
and, at moments,<br />
locked on mine.<br />
She looked pleased<br />
at my astonishment.<br />
2<br />
When all the guests departed,<br />
I stayed. <strong>The</strong> books,<br />
occult and classic,<br />
consumed me. <strong>The</strong>y kindly sent<br />
my meals into the library.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Baron came and went,<br />
the Baroness and I<br />
talked Mozart, Bach and Handel.<br />
Days passed.<br />
<strong>The</strong> quartet’s Mozart<br />
was fine Vienna pastry,<br />
mannered and elegant<br />
where the deaf Titan<br />
had thundered his counterpoint.<br />
At last the moon came up.<br />
My turret room,<br />
at the top of a winding stair<br />
was solitude itself,<br />
still as a monk’s cell.<br />
I walked to the courtyard,<br />
paused at the gateway,<br />
a winding path on the side<br />
that led to the forest below.<br />
I heard a distant waterfall.<br />
All were asleep. <strong>The</strong>y would not know<br />
if tonight — this night when sleep<br />
was unthinkable — I tramped<br />
till dawn in the out-of-doors.<br />
3<br />
<strong>The</strong> deer that a full moon lures<br />
to leaves and spangled fruit<br />
awakes in me<br />
this summer night.<br />
In innocence of fawn<br />
I want to taste moss,<br />
the bite of berries tinged<br />
with green; exult in wind<br />
that bears the scent<br />
77
of pine and hemlock boughs,<br />
an elder wind I must have known<br />
before I woke as a man.<br />
My clothes come off.<br />
I roll them up, tuck them<br />
in a crevice between two rocks,<br />
crouch naked<br />
as startled flesh adapts to air,<br />
then rise. I am one with night.<br />
Moon’s eye does not accuse me.<br />
It rolls in a cloud<br />
that lids it black, to haze,<br />
and then to amber again.<br />
Blood flows to neck, to knob<br />
of undeveloped antlery.<br />
This moment I know my destiny.<br />
I writhe in suppleness of fur,<br />
clack hoof on stone,<br />
hands gone,<br />
two legs now four,<br />
strength and speed<br />
if I but learn<br />
to use them.<br />
4<br />
<strong>The</strong> memory is fresh.<br />
I never rejoined the herd<br />
that wintered south<br />
with the slanting sun.<br />
I waited here,<br />
oblivious to shapes<br />
that stalked me,<br />
lulled by the moon,<br />
oblivious to tread<br />
of the padded feet<br />
concealed in the roar<br />
of the cataract.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y were upon me,<br />
rending and tearing.<br />
I toppled in terror,<br />
felt fang at my throat,<br />
my entrails ripped<br />
as claw and snout—<br />
triumphant wolf-howl<br />
as the moon ran red.<br />
78<br />
I opened my eyes.<br />
as the vision ended.<br />
I was man again,<br />
I was at the place<br />
below the falls<br />
where waters calmed.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Baron’s castle<br />
loomed high above me,<br />
a crenellated silhouette<br />
the moon was grazing now—<br />
how had I come so far?<br />
Had I run in my dream,<br />
run as a deer can run,<br />
bounding through trees<br />
and over boulders?<br />
My shoes were gone!<br />
I had come all this way<br />
without a bruise or pain.<br />
5<br />
What am I now?<br />
Can I wish-form<br />
myself into an animal,<br />
climb back to the castle,<br />
resume my rational,<br />
unmagical self<br />
before the moon has set?<br />
Or will I run,<br />
a naked, bleeding fool<br />
across the courtyard<br />
in full view of the servants<br />
as the sun rises?<br />
I close my eyes,<br />
beg the moon’s mercy:<br />
return me to my starting place.<br />
I feel it happening again,<br />
that strange pulsation<br />
of skin to fur—<br />
and stop myself<br />
in tingling terror<br />
as padding feet<br />
draw near—<br />
two pair of eyes<br />
regard me,<br />
great dog-like things<br />
with lowered heads,
jaws open<br />
and slavering—<br />
one leaps<br />
and has me by the shoulder,<br />
claws raking flesh away.<br />
He rolls me over.<br />
<strong>The</strong> she-wolf on my belly<br />
tears at me,<br />
her muzzle inside me,<br />
gorging on my venison.<br />
Our destiny complete,<br />
we merge. She-wolf<br />
becomes the Baroness,<br />
he-wolf the Baron.<br />
We all resume two-leggedness<br />
in wane of moon.<br />
6<br />
<strong>As</strong> my host had said,<br />
Were-things never die.<br />
We just go on.<br />
I limp to a cave,<br />
where I fold in<br />
my coiled intestines,<br />
lick the ripped tendons,<br />
stuff clay into my ruined throat.<br />
I will spend the winter healing,<br />
flee Germany, start over.<br />
Or is it my destiny<br />
to be caught and eaten,<br />
caught and eaten,<br />
an eternity of prey<br />
for these eternal hunters?<br />
This time I will not forget.<br />
I write this poem on tree bark,<br />
carry it always with me<br />
in a leather pouch,<br />
burn it in my memory.<br />
I am not the moon’s prisoner.<br />
NO MAUSOLEUM, PLEASE!<br />
It’s addressed to “Occupant,”<br />
this personal letter<br />
that opens with<br />
Does the thought<br />
of underground burial<br />
disturb you?<br />
Should it?<br />
Your mausoleum,<br />
clean as a shopping mall,<br />
dulled to white glove<br />
cleanliness,<br />
Lysol and lilac scent,<br />
invites me to sterile<br />
decomposition,<br />
a place where my rot<br />
will offend no one<br />
a place where the<br />
—ahem!—<br />
elements<br />
will never intrude.<br />
My friends will be grateful<br />
for multiplex viewing rooms<br />
the day of my interment:<br />
Now Showing: Rutherford,<br />
Matinee 2, Features at 8 and 10.<br />
Thanks to the strains of Mantovani,<br />
their ears will not be hurt<br />
by coffin lid hammering,<br />
clod fall<br />
of filthy soil.<br />
No one gets wet or muddy.<br />
Who needs a box<br />
secured against the elements?<br />
Indoors, an urn will do.<br />
No one can see<br />
behind the marble slab<br />
if I’m encased in Plexiglas,<br />
stuffed into Tupperware,<br />
or neatly cataloged<br />
in office jiffy bags.<br />
Who needs a stone,<br />
a monument,<br />
statue or obelisk,<br />
subject to weathering<br />
79
and lewd graffiti,<br />
risking neglect in weed field,<br />
when they can etch my name,<br />
my tombward tangent of years<br />
in crisp Helvetica,<br />
when I can have my numbered niche<br />
where visitors can sit<br />
(yes, sit!)<br />
upon a cushioned stool.<br />
<strong>The</strong> sound track pipes in<br />
Autumn Leaves<br />
while they remember me,<br />
swap recipes,<br />
brag about their computers.<br />
No flowers to buy! No weeds to tend!<br />
See you again next year!<br />
Here is my will and testament:<br />
I want to lie in the cold, cold ground.<br />
Embalm me if you must, but leave<br />
the rest of me intact.<br />
A plain pine box will do.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n come and read me your poetry.<br />
Read one of mine<br />
if it pleases you.<br />
Leave trinkets and flowers,<br />
plant shrubs and vines,<br />
send riot root down<br />
to sweeten me.<br />
Let fall an ice cream cone,<br />
strawberry melting,<br />
vanilla veining down.<br />
Return at night for solitude.<br />
Make love across my coffin bed.<br />
Even if no one comes<br />
I’ll have the rainfall,<br />
the cooling frost,<br />
the pulse of never-tiring worms,<br />
influx of iron and silica,<br />
outpour of carbon and calcium<br />
until I am the elements,<br />
until the weed you crush,<br />
the soil you tread,<br />
the air you breathe,<br />
the stone you cup<br />
in palm of hand<br />
are all from me,<br />
the poet in the cold, cold ground.<br />
80<br />
ONE DAY’S NEWS<br />
from <strong>The</strong> Jersey Journal,<br />
Nov. 21, 1995<br />
Five years before millennium<br />
and here is one day’s news:<br />
An Oklahoma teen<br />
is chained in a well house,<br />
burned with an iron,<br />
scalded with bleach,<br />
shocked with high voltage.<br />
Give back the money!<br />
his tormenters scream.<br />
He didn’t take<br />
his mother’s<br />
drug dealing treasury,<br />
but she won’t hear it.<br />
Beat him! she tells her husband.<br />
Well-oiled gears<br />
crave Aztec offerings.<br />
An escalator rips off<br />
three tiny toes<br />
from the three-year-old girl<br />
on the New York subway.<br />
A leaf shredder sucks<br />
park worker’s hand<br />
into the chopping blades<br />
in maple-red Hoboken.<br />
A head and a leg<br />
wash up in Newark.<br />
Cops say they match<br />
a torso found<br />
in an unmarked suitcase.<br />
Thieves shoot cabbies<br />
in back of the head,<br />
then strip off their socks<br />
to get their money.<br />
Wanting a baby,<br />
an Illinois woman<br />
kills her pregnant rival,<br />
cuts open her abdomen<br />
with a pair of scissors<br />
to deliver a boy.<br />
She flees the scene,<br />
but not before<br />
she slashes the throats<br />
of the woman’s other children.
At jail, she says<br />
“So what’s the problem?<br />
Just why am I being charged?”<br />
Down in San Juan<br />
the livestock are killed<br />
by chupacabras,<br />
goatsucker vampire<br />
that drinks the blood<br />
and eats the innards.<br />
Two cats, five goats<br />
and twenty parakeets<br />
already murdered,<br />
the baffled police admit.<br />
Sufficient to one day<br />
is the evil thereof.<br />
THE DEAD END<br />
Far west, beyond the numbered avenues,<br />
there is a street,<br />
accessed by a curious courtyard,<br />
a peopled lane<br />
where lost on a moonlit but foggy night<br />
you seem to know the passers-by.<br />
House numbers seem too high,<br />
the street signs are illegible<br />
but you feel recognized, and safe.<br />
Each casual stroller,<br />
each idling window shopper<br />
seems known to you.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y, for their part, impart a smile,<br />
an instant’s head-nod,<br />
yet still pretend they do not know you.<br />
And then it comes to you—<br />
the vague acquaintances,<br />
childhood friends you moved away from,<br />
once met and nearly forgotten lovers,<br />
all of whom suddenly—or so they said—<br />
just up and died.<br />
You never saw a body.<br />
<strong>The</strong> service was over before you heard.<br />
<strong>The</strong> players reshuffled and life went on.<br />
You never quite believed it, of course,<br />
and now you have the proof:<br />
they all just moved<br />
to this brick-lined street,<br />
took up new names and furtive jobs<br />
caretaker, night watchman<br />
lobster shift foremen<br />
invisible cook in the diner kitchen<br />
night workers in office towers<br />
unlisted phone, anonymous<br />
in nameless lodgings.<br />
I found the street once, then lost it.<br />
I’ve never managed to find it again,<br />
can’t help but wonder<br />
about those houses —<br />
brownstones and bricks<br />
and a high-rise tower —<br />
whose windows were those<br />
whose curtains parted,<br />
whose astonished eyes saw me<br />
and pulled away?<br />
Wish I could go up and read<br />
the nameplates,<br />
knock on a certain door or two,<br />
resume an interrupted dialogue,<br />
give or receive an embrace<br />
I’m sorry I never shared.<br />
But all too soon<br />
I’ll be there anyway,<br />
an anagram, a pseudonym,<br />
a permanent resident<br />
of Incognito Village<br />
SON OF DRACULA<br />
I was the pale boy with spindly arms<br />
the undernourished bookworm<br />
dressed in baggy hand-me-downs<br />
(plaid shirts my father<br />
wouldn’t wear,<br />
cut down and sewn by my mother),<br />
old shoes in tatters, squinting all day<br />
for need of glasses that<br />
no one would buy.<br />
I was eight, at last, when they said<br />
I could cross the line<br />
to the adult part of the library<br />
those dusty classic shelves<br />
which no one ever seemed to touch.<br />
I raced down the aisles,<br />
to G for Goethe and Faust<br />
reached up for Frankenstein<br />
at Shelley, Mary<br />
81
(not pausing at Percy Bysshe!)<br />
then trembled at lower S<br />
to find my most desired,<br />
most dreamt-of —<br />
Bram Stoker’s Dracula.<br />
This was the door to years of dreams,<br />
and waking dreams of dreams.<br />
I lay there nights,<br />
the air from an open window chilling me,<br />
waiting for the bat,<br />
the creeping mist,<br />
the leaping wolf<br />
the caped, lean stranger.<br />
Lulled by the lap of curtains, the false<br />
sharp scuttle of scraping leaves,<br />
I knew the night as the dead<br />
must know it,<br />
waiting in caskets, dressed<br />
in clothes that no one living<br />
could afford to wear.<br />
<strong>The</strong> river town of blackened steeples,<br />
vile taverns and shingled miseries<br />
had no appeal to Dracula.<br />
Why would he come<br />
when we could offer no castle,<br />
no Carfax Abbey, no teeming streets<br />
from which to pluck a victim?<br />
My life — it seemed so<br />
unimportant then —<br />
lay waiting for its sudden terminus,<br />
its sleep and summoning to an Undead<br />
sundown. How grand it would have been<br />
to rise as the adopted son of Dracula!<br />
I saw it all:<br />
how no one would come to my grave<br />
to see my casket covered with loam.<br />
My mother and her loutish husband<br />
would drink the day away<br />
at the Moose Club;<br />
my brother would sell my books<br />
to buy new baseball cards;<br />
my teachers’ minds slate clean<br />
forgetting me as they forgot all<br />
who passed beneath<br />
and out their teaching.<br />
82<br />
No one would hear the summoning<br />
as my new father called me:<br />
Nosferatu! Arise! Arise! Nosferatu!<br />
And I would rise,<br />
slide out of soil<br />
like a snake from its hollow.<br />
He would touch my torn throat.<br />
<strong>The</strong> wound would vanish.<br />
He would teach me the art of flight,<br />
the rules of the hunt<br />
the secret of survival.<br />
I would not linger<br />
in this town for long.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e friend, perhaps,<br />
I’d make into a pale companion,<br />
another my slave, to serve<br />
my daytime needs<br />
(guarding my coffin,<br />
disposing of blood-drained<br />
bodies) —<br />
as for the rest<br />
of this forsaken hive of humankind,<br />
I wouldn’t deign to drink its blood,<br />
the dregs of Europe<br />
We would move on<br />
to the cities.<br />
<strong>The</strong> pale aristocrat and his thin son<br />
attending the Opera, the Symphony,<br />
mingling at Charity Balls,<br />
Robin to his Batman,<br />
cape shadowing cape,<br />
fang for fang his equal soon<br />
at choosing whose life<br />
deserved abbreviation.<br />
A fine house we’d have<br />
a private crypt below<br />
the best marbles<br />
the finest silk, mahogany, brass<br />
for the coffin fittings<br />
Our Undead mansion above<br />
filled to the brim with books<br />
and music...<br />
I waited, I waited —<br />
He never arrived.
That year I had a night-long nosebleed,<br />
as though my Undead half<br />
had bitten me,<br />
drinking from within. I woke in white<br />
of hospital bed, my veins refreshed<br />
with the hot blood of strangers.<br />
Tombstones gleamed across the hill,<br />
lit up all night in hellish red<br />
from the never-sleeping iron furnaces.<br />
Leaves danced<br />
before the wardroom windows,<br />
blew out and up to a vampire moon.<br />
I watched it turn from copper<br />
to crimson,<br />
its bloating fall to treeline,<br />
its deliberate feeding<br />
on corpuscles of oak and maple,<br />
one baleful eye unblinking.<br />
A nurse brought in a tiny radio<br />
<strong>On</strong>e hour a night of symphony<br />
was all the beauty this city<br />
could endure—<br />
I held it close to my ear, heard Berlioz’<br />
Fantastic Symphony: the gallows march,<br />
the artist’s Undead resurrection<br />
amid the Witches’ Sabbath —<br />
my resurrection. I asked for paper.<br />
<strong>The</strong> pen leaped forth<br />
and suddenly I knew<br />
that I had been transformed.<br />
I was a being of Night, I was Undead<br />
since all around me were Unalive.<br />
I saw what they could not see,<br />
walked realms of night and solitude<br />
where law and rule<br />
and custom crumbled.<br />
I was a poet.<br />
I would feed on Beauty for blood,<br />
I would make wings of words,<br />
I would shun the Cross<br />
of complacency.<br />
A cape would trail behind me always.<br />
83
HUNCHBACK ASSISTANT TELLS ALL<br />
1<br />
My dear Mrs. Shelley —<br />
won’t do — she’s neither ‘mine’ nor dear<br />
To Mary —<br />
sounds like a dedication<br />
when nothing of that sort’s intended<br />
Madame<br />
so cool, polite and very French,<br />
that will do.<br />
Madame —<br />
No doubt you suspect, if you have not heard<br />
of the sensation caused by your romance,<br />
newly translated to our Alpine tongues.<br />
Neither the French nor the German booksellers<br />
can keep enough of Frankenstein,<br />
or <strong>The</strong> Modern Prometheus.<br />
<strong>The</strong> bookbinders are up all night<br />
preparing the slender volumes<br />
for the fainting sight of the ladies.<br />
Nothing else is spoken of, and little else read<br />
at our little University.<br />
I have studied your book, Madame Shelley,<br />
and being more intimate than you<br />
— or anyone else yet living —<br />
with the facts in the case of Frankenstein,<br />
I must hasten to write you,<br />
that you might correct the grievous oversight<br />
of omitting my role—my pivotal role<br />
in the great endeavors,<br />
the tragic conflagration.<br />
I am Fritz,<br />
poor old one-eyed, limping Fritz<br />
the hump-backed,<br />
unbaptised son of a priest and a nun,<br />
a throwaway<br />
raised by gypsies.<br />
I will spare you nothing,<br />
for only the sum of what I am<br />
can justify what I was<br />
to Victor, his bride and his monster.<br />
2<br />
You never mention me, Mrs. Shelley,<br />
but I was there from the start.<br />
I saw him at the medical school.<br />
I always went to the dissections<br />
(I have, you see, insatiable interest<br />
in human anatomy.)<br />
84
I loved to watch those perfect bodies,<br />
naked and cold,<br />
white as marble statues,<br />
opened and disassembled<br />
by the knowing hands of the surgeons.<br />
I took my pad and crayon with me,<br />
drew every line and contour—<br />
the man’s bold lines,<br />
the woman’s curved exterior—<br />
the coiled horrors within,<br />
the entrails unraveling,<br />
the mysteries of the ensorcelled brain!<br />
<strong>The</strong>n suddenly I noticed him.<br />
His jet-black hair, eyebrows of Jove,<br />
his burning eyes intent upon the scalpel and saw,<br />
absorbing each surgical thrust.<br />
I saw him and knew,<br />
knew from the start as one soul knows another,<br />
that he perceived beyond life and death.<br />
He saw me drawing, and nodded, and smiled.<br />
From that day forward I drew only him,<br />
intent no more upon the surgery,<br />
I sought to capture the fire of his pupils,<br />
the furrow on his brow<br />
as some doubt troubled him,<br />
the gesture his hand made<br />
when his mind made one<br />
great thought from two<br />
of a professor’s ideas.<br />
Cupping a handful of gelatin,<br />
gray and convoluted,<br />
the lecturer shrugged and dropped it,<br />
“Is this the seat of knowledge?—this organ?—<br />
Is this the soul writ here in nerves and ganglia?<br />
No one knows.”<br />
<strong>The</strong> orbs of Frankenstein replied<br />
“I am the one who will know.”<br />
Hunched in the darkest nook<br />
of the students’ wine cellars<br />
I heard him complain,<br />
“It’s not enough to watch<br />
those well-rehearsed dissections.<br />
If only I had a cadaver —<br />
one of my own —<br />
I must know the inner workings of life!”<br />
85
How could I bear to hear him suffer,<br />
he who should want nothing?<br />
That night I robbed a mausoleum—<br />
a rich man’s grave easy to plunder,<br />
a simple job of claw and crowbar,<br />
a lumpy sack and a handcart.<br />
I dumped the sack before his door and knocked.<br />
He came in nightshirt, candle in hand,<br />
looked down at me in startlement.<br />
“For you,” I said. “Your own<br />
c—-c——ca—-cadaver,” I stammered.<br />
He did not seem surprised. He took<br />
one end of the heavy burden, let me<br />
come in with the rest of it.<br />
“It’s very fresh,” I assured him.<br />
“He was only interred just yesterday.”<br />
I waited. He stared at me.<br />
“How much do you want?” he asked.<br />
“Oh, nothing!” I answered.<br />
“You must want something for this!”<br />
“I want...I want.” I could not say it.<br />
“Tell me.” He looked a little kind, then.<br />
I think he understood.<br />
“I want to serve you,” I told him.<br />
“Serve you...always.”<br />
3<br />
We worked on happily —<br />
my shovel and cart,<br />
his saw and scalpel.<br />
We found a more remote<br />
and spacious laboratory,<br />
paid for with gold<br />
(how I laughed<br />
as I melted each crucifix,<br />
stripped village churches<br />
of their gilded adornments!)<br />
I turned the wheels<br />
that made small lightning<br />
leap over the ceiling vault.<br />
I bellowed the gas<br />
that lightning condensed<br />
into the glowing elixir<br />
that made life scream<br />
into inanimate matter.<br />
Our workroom was madhouse—<br />
old vellum books and amulets<br />
86
heaped up with bones of animals,<br />
crystal and astrolabe,<br />
the surgeon’s shining tools,<br />
the charnel pit<br />
of amputated limbs.<br />
In madness we succeeded.<br />
We howled<br />
as tissues dead or rotting<br />
quivered and multiplied,<br />
as hands flew off<br />
in every direction,<br />
eyes rolled<br />
and irises dilated<br />
in lidless horror,<br />
brains roiled<br />
in their captive tanks,<br />
their spine stems twitching<br />
with inexpressible longings.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n we threw all<br />
into a vat of acid.<br />
“<strong>The</strong>se are but preludes,”<br />
he confided to me.<br />
“What next?” I asked.<br />
“Shall we raise the dead?”<br />
“No, Fritz, I have no use<br />
for the rotting dead. Most men<br />
are little more than animated meat,<br />
unfit for the one life given them.<br />
“We shall make a being new,<br />
a manufactured man.”<br />
So raptured was he,<br />
that saying this,<br />
he fell down senseless.<br />
I put him in bed,<br />
undressed his senseless form,<br />
stroked the white limbs<br />
no scalpel had scarred,<br />
then limped to my corner<br />
where I slept like a dog,<br />
like some great hound<br />
who had found his god.<br />
87
4<br />
<strong>The</strong>n she came — Elizabeth.<br />
At first I hated her.<br />
Her finery mocked me, her manners<br />
impeccable, her accent just so.<br />
Though he had never mentioned her,<br />
they were betrothed, in love<br />
since childhood, it seems.<br />
Daily she came for tea,<br />
tried to win me over<br />
with pastries and gingerbread,<br />
plied Victor for news<br />
of his abandoned studies.<br />
<strong>As</strong> one upon another<br />
each Ingolstadt don<br />
came up for our mockery<br />
(except our idol Waldman)<br />
her awe increased.<br />
I liked her laughter,<br />
the way blond hair exploded<br />
when she threw off her bonnet,<br />
the Alpine sky in her eyes.<br />
Yet I hated to watch<br />
her chaste little kisses<br />
that fell on Victor’s blushing cheeks,<br />
they way their hands<br />
would find each other.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e day we were alone.<br />
I had to make excuses<br />
while Victor dissected<br />
a youthful suicide<br />
we’d fished from a stream,<br />
his copy of Werther<br />
still in his pocket.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n she told me<br />
she was an orphan too,<br />
her name not Frankenstein<br />
like those who raised her<br />
as Victor’s “cousin,”<br />
but Lavenza.<br />
Frau Frankenstein had found her,<br />
one of five babies in a hovel,<br />
kept by peasants<br />
to whom she’d be<br />
a careworn Cinderella.<br />
88
She was a fairy child,<br />
raised by the Frankensteins<br />
on music and poetry.<br />
She knew nothing of what we did.<br />
<strong>The</strong> sight of blood, the surgeon’s saw<br />
would fill her with horror.<br />
How could she hope to companion<br />
this man who walked with gods?<br />
And then it happened.<br />
She touched me.<br />
A passing thing, really.<br />
A piece of gingerbread<br />
from palm to palm,<br />
but then she lingered,<br />
pressed fingers against<br />
my inner palm.<br />
“You are so loyal to Victor,”<br />
she said,<br />
“so you shall be dear to me.”<br />
She never flinched<br />
at my twisted visage.<br />
Her eyes saw past<br />
the hump and its shadow.<br />
Dear to her! Dear to her!<br />
That night I scaled<br />
the boarding house wall,<br />
watched from a tree<br />
as she undressed,<br />
then drank some warm milk<br />
at her bedside.<br />
I watched in slice of moonlight,<br />
her breasts and bosom<br />
in lonely heaving,<br />
her legs this way and that.<br />
Had Victor ever lain with her?<br />
Might I, “dear friend?”<br />
Next night the milk<br />
was tinged with laudanum.<br />
I crept beneath<br />
her silken beddings,<br />
buried my face<br />
in her virgin globes—<br />
oh, I was light upon her,<br />
like the fairies she dreamt of.<br />
<strong>On</strong>ce she cried out,<br />
“Oh, Victor!”<br />
89
I stole away,<br />
the scent of her golden nape,<br />
those wondrous nipples<br />
with me always.<br />
5<br />
Next night more laudanum<br />
was in Victor’s red wine,<br />
cheap vintage we bought<br />
to celebrate the surgery<br />
by which the suicide’s heart<br />
now beat in a headless torso.<br />
I carried him to bed,<br />
removed the blood-stained smock,<br />
sponged off his fevered brow,<br />
watched him in candlelight<br />
as his features softened,<br />
his eyelids fluttering<br />
in pulse of dream-state.<br />
I lay beside him,<br />
touching, oh! everywhere.<br />
Twice he cried out;<br />
once, he held me<br />
without awakening.<br />
I crept away in bliss,<br />
mad as a moth in a lamp shop.<br />
Now, when they talk of marriage<br />
it is a happy thought.<br />
I can be wed to both of them<br />
as long as the laudanum holds out.<br />
6<br />
Damn the chemist! <strong>The</strong> sleeping draught<br />
wore off at the worst of times.<br />
<strong>The</strong> master knows all. He woke from his sleep<br />
as I perched at the foot of his bed.<br />
My nakedness repelled him. He hurled<br />
me out of his window into a haycart,<br />
damned me, warned me never<br />
to return to my room in the cellar.<br />
What could I do? To whom could I go?<br />
I took a whip from the half-wrecked cart,<br />
climbed up the stairs to the empty laboratory.<br />
He would need me when he ascended.<br />
A storm was coming soon. <strong>The</strong> lifeless shell<br />
up there was nearly ready for animation.<br />
I would hand him the whip.<br />
90
I’d beg him to punish me, hurt me,<br />
but let me stay for the great work.<br />
I wanted to see his eyes<br />
as his being stood before him,<br />
hear his cry of god-defying blasphemy<br />
as man took control,<br />
and named the day of dead’s arising.<br />
7<br />
My god and punisher returned.<br />
He found the whip, and used it.<br />
For days I lay not moving,<br />
my lacerating flesh alive,<br />
my blood congealing<br />
to the scabs I was proud to wear,<br />
the stripes of his forgiveness.<br />
He sent me out on a sacred quest:<br />
a pair of kidneys but hours dead,<br />
a male, with “everything intact.”<br />
I understood what was needed.<br />
<strong>As</strong> I prowled the street for drunkards<br />
I conceived a monstrous jest.<br />
Our being must be superlative,<br />
and I knew just the man.<br />
Jean-Christophe Weiss was the talk<br />
of every student in the beer hall.<br />
He boasted of his conquests,<br />
how women fainted<br />
beneath his exertions.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Ingolstadt brothel would not admit him<br />
unless he paid a triple rate.<br />
Mothers warned daughters to turn away<br />
when his languid gaze caught them.<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir faces reddened as he shopped the stalls,<br />
one hand on an apple or a load of bread,<br />
the other lifting a veil, or a skirt.<br />
It was said that certain widows<br />
happily opened their doors to him.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e night he leaped from the balcony<br />
of the nunnery of St. Genevieve’s<br />
and what happened there<br />
not one of the sisters would tell.<br />
I did not wait long to find him.<br />
Like me, he knew how<br />
to evade the curfew.<br />
I caught him emerging<br />
from a certain garden gate<br />
91
(a house with three comely daughters).<br />
<strong>On</strong>e blow to the head<br />
with my crowbar,<br />
then into the sack he went.)<br />
<strong>The</strong> surgery was flawless.<br />
<strong>On</strong>ce more I watched<br />
as disconnected tissues,<br />
loose veins and nerves<br />
like roots from a flowerpot<br />
quivered, electrified,<br />
sought one another<br />
like amorous eels<br />
and connected,<br />
how the rent flesh closed<br />
beneath the sutures:<br />
weeks of healing<br />
completed in minutes!<br />
If Victor recognized<br />
the organs’ donor,<br />
he never showed it.<br />
I know he looked<br />
again and again<br />
as our perfect being’s<br />
perfect manhood<br />
rose and fell<br />
rose and fell,<br />
as vein and synapse<br />
made their connections.<br />
“Cover him!”<br />
he said at last.<br />
“My God,<br />
what a monster!”<br />
8<br />
“<strong>The</strong> kites, Fritz! <strong>The</strong> kites!”<br />
With these words all<br />
was forgiven — he needed me.<br />
<strong>The</strong> howling storm raged.<br />
Day became night as roiling thunderheads<br />
collided like contending Titans,<br />
black rams butt-heading the Alps<br />
and one another.<br />
<strong>The</strong> rain came down<br />
in undulating sheets, blown<br />
this way, that way.<br />
Right over us, two airborne lakes<br />
92
smashed one upon another’s cheek<br />
and fell, exploding. Roulades<br />
of thunder echoed everywhere.<br />
Streams became torrents, meres rose<br />
and swallowed astonished sheep and cattle.<br />
<strong>As</strong> every shutter in Ingolstadt<br />
clamped shut, we knew the day<br />
was ours. No one would see<br />
the sloping roof of our old mill tower<br />
slide open to the elements,<br />
or how the scaffolding rose up,<br />
and I within it, high as the steeples.<br />
From safe within my insulated cage<br />
I unfurled the kites on their copper wires.<br />
Up they went, hurled eastward,<br />
then back again in gales contrary,<br />
till they soared taut and defiant,<br />
o’er-arching the blackened granite hill<br />
whose woods surrounded our workplace.<br />
I did not fear the lightning.<br />
I sang to it, danced it down.<br />
“Strike! Strike!” I screamed.<br />
“Come now, ye flames of Heaven!<br />
Waste not your energy<br />
on those pitiful pines.<br />
I am the bait,<br />
so come for me —<br />
I am King of the Gargoyles —<br />
I am deformity incarnate —<br />
blasphemer since infancy —<br />
robber of graves and churches —<br />
rapist and fornicator!”<br />
I was the spider, the wires<br />
my webs to lure God down.<br />
It came! I howled<br />
as the great light jabbed toward me,<br />
reveled in the thunder’s drum,<br />
exulting as the kites survived<br />
lash after lash, boom upon boom.<br />
Blue, green and amber sparks<br />
spun, danced and plummeted.<br />
I could not see below,<br />
but I knew what was happening:<br />
how Victor captured it all below<br />
in those vast and hungry capacitors,<br />
how the hot wires sparked and smoked<br />
as the current transferred<br />
93
to the vat of green elixir<br />
in which our creature bathed —<br />
how all its flesh, unable to die<br />
(and yet thus far without the will<br />
to live) would join the ranks of creation.<br />
How long I played there,<br />
tempting with soliloquies<br />
the angry sky,<br />
how long the kites<br />
drew power downward<br />
till they fell in tatters<br />
I cannot tell.<br />
I was deafened and nearly blind<br />
when the master drew me down.<br />
He led me to my corner,<br />
said I would see in a while.<br />
My ears already made out<br />
the master’s song of victory<br />
as he cried out “It’s alive!<br />
It’s alive!”<br />
He robbed the gods<br />
of more than fire or gold —<br />
my master, Frankenstein,<br />
the modern Prometheus!<br />
94
MILKWEED SEEDS<br />
<strong>The</strong> air is full of milkweed seeds —<br />
they fly, they light, they fly again —<br />
they cling to leaf, to cat-tail,<br />
dog fur and hedgehog quill.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y burst out of pods<br />
like wizened hags,<br />
white hair pluming on witch winds.<br />
Do not be fooled<br />
by their innocent pallor:<br />
the sour milk sac that ejected them<br />
is made of gossip, spite and discord.<br />
Pluck this weed once, two take its place,<br />
roots deep in the core of malice.<br />
Cousin to carrion flower<br />
and pitcher plants<br />
they fall on sleepers who toss in misery,<br />
engendering boils and bleeding sores.<br />
<strong>The</strong>se are no playful sprites<br />
of summer —<br />
they go to make more of their kind —<br />
and if one rides through an open window<br />
it can get with child<br />
an unsuspecting virgin,<br />
who, dying, gives birth to a murderer.<br />
Just give them a wind<br />
that’s upward and outward<br />
and they’re off to the mountains<br />
to worship the goat-head eminence,<br />
pale lord of the unscalable crag,<br />
Evil as white as blasted bone,<br />
his corn-silk hair in dreadlocks,<br />
his fangs a black obsidian<br />
sharp as scalpels,<br />
his mockery complete<br />
as every dust mote sings his praises.<br />
Do not trust white, winged<br />
and ascending to heaven!<br />
Beware, amid the bursting flowers,<br />
the sinister pod!<br />
HEARING THE WENDIGO<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is a place<br />
where the winds meet howling<br />
cold nights in frozen forest<br />
snapping the tree trunks<br />
in haste for their reunion.<br />
Gone is the summer they brooded in,<br />
gone their autumn awakening.<br />
Now at last they slide off glaciers,<br />
sail the spreading ice floes,<br />
hitch a ride with winter.<br />
Great bears retreat and slumber,<br />
owls flee<br />
and whippoorwills shudder.<br />
Whole herds of caribou<br />
stampede on the tundra.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Indian nods and averts his eyes.<br />
<strong>On</strong>ly brave Orion watches<br />
as icy vectors collide in air.<br />
Trees break like tent poles,<br />
earth sunders to craters<br />
beneath the giant foot stamps.<br />
Birds rise to whirlwind updraft<br />
and come down bones and feathers.<br />
I have not seen the Wendigo —<br />
the wind’s collective consciousness,<br />
id proud and hammer-fisted —<br />
to see is to be plucked<br />
into the very eye of madness.<br />
Yet I have felt its upward urge<br />
like hands beneath my shoulders,<br />
lifting and beckoning.<br />
It says, You dream of flying?<br />
<strong>The</strong>n fly with me!<br />
I answer No,<br />
not with your hungry eye above me,<br />
not with those teeth<br />
like roaring chain saws,<br />
not with those pile-driving footsteps —<br />
I too avert my eyes<br />
against the thing that summons me.<br />
Screaming, the airborne smiter<br />
rips off the tops of conifers,<br />
crushes a row of power line towers,<br />
peppers the hillside with saurian tracks,<br />
95
then leaps straight up at the Dog Star<br />
as though its anger<br />
could crack the cosmos<br />
as though the sky bowl were not infinite,<br />
and wind alone could touch the stars<br />
and eat them.<br />
WEST OF ARKHAM<br />
West of Arkham, the hills rise wild<br />
where alder groves are still uncut.<br />
<strong>The</strong> hawk can spy the boulders piled<br />
by savages till stones abut<br />
their brothers in a gapless wall,<br />
the stern geometry within<br />
an unknown god’s abandoned hall,<br />
altars oblivious to Sin.<br />
Pillars of gneiss, hand-hewn and still<br />
(their bones are now dust<br />
who made them!)<br />
waiting for one with book and skill<br />
to find the eon-spanning gem<br />
whose mere exposure to the stars —<br />
upon the utterance of chants —<br />
will break a god’s confining bars<br />
and sunder men like scattered ants.<br />
Chaos will come, and I its priest<br />
will be, if I can mouth the rite,<br />
voice not man yet more than a beast,<br />
mere words that can a planet smite!<br />
I will be lord of this great palace,<br />
while down below, in veining rivers red,<br />
the Old <strong>On</strong>es shall sport,<br />
and slay for malice,<br />
till those who mocked me<br />
are eyeless and dead.<br />
96<br />
THE GRIM REAPER<br />
paraphrase of an old German Folksong,<br />
“Es ist ein Schnitter, heisst der Tod”<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is a Reaper and his name<br />
is Death,<br />
and though he kills, he kills for God,<br />
and though his blade is sharpest of all<br />
he stands at the wheel and whets it,<br />
and when he is ready<br />
we must be ready, too.<br />
O fair little flower, beware!<br />
No matter what is green today,<br />
the Reaper’s scythe will mow away.<br />
His blade never misses<br />
the noble Narcissus,<br />
down from its plinth<br />
the lovely Hyacinth,<br />
the T urk’s Cap lilies fall —<br />
harvested, all!,<br />
the meadows’ roses dear<br />
now toppled and sère.<br />
O fair little sister, beware!<br />
Will he take everything<br />
in sidelong swing<br />
of the blood-edged scythe?<br />
While tulips are falling,<br />
speedwell flying, blue tops<br />
into a bluer sky,<br />
silver-fringed bluebells crying,<br />
doomed phlox not gold enough<br />
to ransom its beauty<br />
against the swish, swish<br />
of the Harvester.<br />
O fair little brother, beware!
But now I defy you, Death!<br />
Your holocaust night<br />
gives way to dawn.<br />
I stand amid the scythe-cut lawn<br />
and scorn your reaping.<br />
Pass by! pass by!<br />
(But if you turn, and your red eye<br />
turns back to seize me suddenly,<br />
then mow me! take me away to be<br />
the newest bloom in Death’s<br />
dark flower pot,<br />
a blossoming of interrupted thought,<br />
deprived, yes! of pen and speech,<br />
and power,<br />
but still I would defy you: no flower<br />
of all earth’s millions is the last!)<br />
Be happy, my fair ones! Live on!<br />
SALEM<br />
At Salem<br />
the burying ground<br />
is a garden of stones,<br />
an orchard of oaks.<br />
Acorns burst to grow,<br />
tombstones erase<br />
their shallow tattoos,<br />
becoming anonymous—<br />
Death’s heads<br />
and angel wings,<br />
bad poems<br />
consumed by moss,<br />
the promise of Heaven<br />
like Confederate money.<br />
Still there is some<br />
justice — an oak trunk<br />
engulfs the stone<br />
of a solemn Puritan,<br />
roots clinging like<br />
rabid dogs.<br />
He doomed the innocent<br />
as witches and wizards,<br />
to infamy and hanging,<br />
to a farmyard burial<br />
in family shame.<br />
Imagine this —<br />
his grave invaded<br />
by inexorable roots,<br />
the frail box split,<br />
his gradual awakening<br />
as vampire tendrils<br />
invade his ears,<br />
his mouth, his nostrils,<br />
the circling of taproot<br />
to snap his neck,<br />
his arms and legs<br />
broken and useless.<br />
Doomed to immortal<br />
consciousness<br />
(the Life Eternal!),<br />
nerves and ganglia<br />
a web of pain receptors/<br />
An old woman<br />
condemned him to this.<br />
She spoke the words<br />
on a Candlemas midnight,<br />
took from the hanging tree<br />
where her mother’s mother<br />
died innocent,<br />
the patient acorn of revenge.<br />
She wrote his name on it,<br />
pushed it with thumb<br />
into the loam of his grave,<br />
traced runes in blood<br />
upon his stone,<br />
danced the wild dance<br />
of his resurrection —<br />
sang things that the wizened<br />
old ladies of Salem never knew<br />
as there were no witches<br />
in Salem<br />
then.<br />
97
APPALACHIAN IDYLL<br />
I have seen it:<br />
the slantbrow horror of the hills<br />
the runt church hatred<br />
the pyramid of ignorance<br />
the wild eye of moonmalt killers<br />
trigger poised, the gaping despair<br />
of the women from chickenfeed dawn<br />
to mattress-thump midnight.<br />
<strong>The</strong> eyes of the children are eggs<br />
dream-snatched and scrambled,<br />
guttering lights of intelligence.<br />
<strong>The</strong> idyll image is flawed: weeds,<br />
hills clotted with battered shacks.<br />
a firetrap barn,<br />
a wrecked-car planter,<br />
a thicket of corn,<br />
a rusted mailbox.<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir cookie-cutter faces<br />
are all alike—<br />
hoe-broken wives and hardhand<br />
boys, the spark of will<br />
wet-snuffed by beatings<br />
and Bible water.<br />
Father begets daughters<br />
upon his daughter;<br />
brother has sister;<br />
a visiting niece<br />
is passed from bed to bed.<br />
Children of uncertain fathers<br />
are swapped from house to house,<br />
Cinderella to stepmothers<br />
who rage with butcher knives.<br />
Saturday they go to town,<br />
smelling of hay and manure,<br />
buy lard and flour and cooking oil,<br />
wind up at roadside taverns,<br />
drinking till pleas of<br />
Daddy let’s go home<br />
98<br />
THE PUMPKINED HEART<br />
irk them into the wobbly ride<br />
down single lane highways<br />
to the tar-paper house,<br />
the chicken coop, the night<br />
of burning, ignorant stars...<br />
<strong>The</strong> sleep of reason breeds<br />
the hill people.<br />
THE MOLESTER<br />
<strong>The</strong>re was a chill place<br />
amid the heat and brambles,<br />
past blackberry hedge,<br />
a place where acrid fumes<br />
and coke oven smoke<br />
could never intrude —<br />
a spring-house, a covered well,<br />
a cobwebbed corner<br />
of pumps and pipes.<br />
<strong>The</strong> door creaked open<br />
to admit me. Here<br />
I could sit in solitude,<br />
pretend there was another door<br />
to a treasure cave,<br />
a golden city,<br />
a waiting spaceship.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e day a man was there.<br />
I sat beside him<br />
on the cold stone lip<br />
of the gurgling well.<br />
His whispered words<br />
were barely louder<br />
than the distant trucks,<br />
the chirring cicadas.<br />
His name was Eric,<br />
a young man, yet<br />
bigger than my father.<br />
He asked about my mother,<br />
how pretty she was,<br />
too bad she’s already married;<br />
I told him about my<br />
first-grade teacher,<br />
the friends
I would see again<br />
in second grade in the fall.<br />
I brought him cookies.<br />
He taught me things.<br />
<strong>On</strong>ce, I touched<br />
the soft blond beard<br />
that glazed his cheekbones.<br />
I could tell him anything.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e day in the car<br />
I mentioned Eric.<br />
“That’s all he talks about,”<br />
my mother explained.<br />
“That’s his friend,<br />
his imaginary<br />
playmate out back.”<br />
My father grew angry.<br />
At home, they shouted<br />
and sent me upstairs.<br />
Cars came, men tramped<br />
into the house and the cellar.<br />
I heard many dogs barking,<br />
my mother’s voice answering<br />
no to someone’s many questions.<br />
<strong>The</strong> spring-house was locked.<br />
I stayed indoors<br />
all summer.<br />
I never mentioned Eric again.<br />
No one ever asked me anything.<br />
Years later I heard<br />
of men who slept<br />
in the nearby foothills,<br />
setting up camp<br />
in abandoned ovens —<br />
draft dodgers and hoboes<br />
who skulked and begged<br />
by the roadside.<br />
Years after that I remembered him —<br />
a kind voice in the darkness,<br />
the trusting man to whom I said<br />
“I’ll never tell ... I promise.”<br />
THE PINES<br />
Grandmother Butler<br />
grew up with the pines<br />
that dotted her acres.<br />
Her father<br />
first planted them,<br />
edging the house,<br />
the gravel drive,<br />
the property line.<br />
She watched her daughter<br />
who once could leap<br />
the saplings<br />
grow tall and straight.<br />
Her parents are gone now,<br />
her husband vanished,<br />
her daughters grown and married.<br />
She sits on the porch<br />
and communes with the trees.<br />
Some skirt the house —<br />
she walks soft needle loam<br />
to her raspberry patch.<br />
Squirrels are there in the branches.<br />
Black snakes steal eggs<br />
from the hapless robins.<br />
Jays and crows,<br />
cardinals and tanagers<br />
live tier by tier<br />
in their sheltered nests.<br />
Each season a song —<br />
bird twitter spring,<br />
storm hum summer,<br />
cone-drop in autumn,<br />
the groan of trunks<br />
in snapping winter.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y are an orchestra<br />
eternally in tune,<br />
black pyramids at night<br />
against the burning stars,<br />
a comforting wall<br />
against the whippoorwills,<br />
the mountain lions,<br />
the howling winds.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e winter day<br />
she’s digging down<br />
to the dregs of her coal pile,<br />
99
filling a pail for the stove,<br />
when a great truck<br />
lumbers in,<br />
piled high with coal.<br />
Two men follow<br />
in a long black car,<br />
tell her they’ll dump<br />
as much as she needs —<br />
enough to last her<br />
through widow’s winter,<br />
all the way to April.<br />
She hesitates.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y mention her neighbors,<br />
Wingroves and Sweeneys,<br />
Ulleries and Dempseys.<br />
She lets them dump the coal.<br />
All they want is a signed receipt,<br />
oh, and they’d like<br />
to trim a few trees<br />
for the nearby sawmill.<br />
She hesitates again —<br />
they mumble some words<br />
about another delivery<br />
next winter.<br />
She signs.<br />
Hard winter sets in.<br />
<strong>The</strong> ziggurat of coal<br />
diminishes to sludge,<br />
black dust in melting puddles.<br />
She goes off in spring<br />
to visit her daughters,<br />
hold their new babies.<br />
When she comes back<br />
the pines are gone,<br />
all of them<br />
reduced to stumps,<br />
except the two<br />
that sheltered the porch,<br />
her acres exposed<br />
to passing cars.<br />
All night the animals<br />
scream in the forest.<br />
Homeless squirrels,<br />
nestless sparrows,<br />
100<br />
hysterical robins,<br />
even the prowling wind<br />
with nothing to rub against,<br />
makes angry vectors<br />
among the boulders.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n she finds the paper<br />
in the kitchen cupboard,<br />
reads with her glasses<br />
the fine print over her signature.<br />
Far off, the ripsaws mock her<br />
as she reads and repeats<br />
what she gave to the strangers —<br />
not just once but forever —<br />
like a contract<br />
with a rapist,<br />
her rights, her<br />
timber rights.<br />
MIDNIGHT WATER<br />
Things told<br />
to frighten children:<br />
never drink water<br />
at the stroke of midnight —<br />
you’ll choke,<br />
fall dead of a heart attack —<br />
this happened to one<br />
of your many cousins.<br />
We lay awake<br />
at grandmother’s house,<br />
no one going to the kitchen,<br />
no one lifting<br />
the dented tin cup,<br />
the old enamel dipper.<br />
Even if midnight waters<br />
didn’t kill —<br />
in the dark<br />
a bug might be there,<br />
a hairy caterpillar,<br />
a centipede sipping,<br />
ready to be swallowed,<br />
or a chunk of moss<br />
from the cold spring,<br />
floating unseen in the bucket,
sliding like slug<br />
into the dipper.<br />
Pitch-black nights<br />
the grandpa clock<br />
ticked and chimed<br />
above the wheezes and snores,<br />
the whippoorwills calling,<br />
waiting like you<br />
for the pre-dawn hours,<br />
the safe water.<br />
AND THEN WE GOT USED TO THE<br />
ATOM BOMB…<br />
We thought the world would end soon.<br />
We huddled for omens: nightly<br />
the television spoke disaster —<br />
sat by a faux-log fireplace<br />
that burned but was not consumed<br />
with pipe-smoking professors<br />
whose worst-case scenarios<br />
high-altitude detonation<br />
firestorms hyperheated steam<br />
plutonium half-life millennia<br />
of runaway mutation<br />
universal death, sudden only<br />
for a minority,<br />
but for the majority<br />
a slow torture of disease<br />
and disintegration*<br />
filled our waking dreams.<br />
<strong>The</strong> men who know the most<br />
are the most gloomy.*<br />
Somehow their worried wives<br />
afraid to bring more children<br />
into a nuclear winter<br />
saw their way to garden and cook,<br />
raise their soon-to-be-cindered<br />
boys as though, somehow,<br />
it would all come out in the end —<br />
an explosion of blond energy<br />
played all around us,<br />
model airplanes aloft,<br />
their bomb-bays open —<br />
in their world, pilots returned,<br />
bombs were recovered<br />
from the carpet pile,<br />
the cat’s fur,<br />
reloaded, re-used<br />
on enemies who never perished.<br />
We listened to Bertrand Russell,<br />
on a well-played record,<br />
reading his latest warning,<br />
co-signed that fateful year<br />
by Einstein on his death-bed.<br />
“First we had the atom bomb,”<br />
the Englishman intoned —<br />
—the plastic airplane darts again —<br />
“and then we got used<br />
to the atom bomb,<br />
and so we developed<br />
the hydrogen bomb.”<br />
—an even bigger bomber model<br />
descends from tiny hands —<br />
Shall we put an end to the human race<br />
or shall mankind renounce war?*<br />
and an ice-cream truck melted<br />
somewhere in Japan in midtune,<br />
while children<br />
with rising sun nickels<br />
danced into chrysanthemum<br />
fireballs —<br />
It is too late, he said,<br />
to be invoking god —<br />
the god of bullet holes<br />
and amputated stumps<br />
and useless dead.<br />
It is too late, he said,<br />
to be waving flags —<br />
what color blood and honor?<br />
which side of civil war,<br />
101
holy war, muddled<br />
ideology, can claim us?<br />
So Russell and Einstein say,<br />
as simple as sunlight,<br />
Remember your humanity<br />
and forget the rest.*<br />
I came to tears upon those words —<br />
the danger all too real<br />
that these small boys<br />
would be bombed — or bombers.<br />
Strange, they are grown now.<br />
<strong>The</strong> world did not explode,<br />
but not for lack<br />
of military effort.<br />
GRANDMOTHERS<br />
Grandmothers know<br />
the things we have no names for:<br />
the blood of birth,<br />
the severing<br />
of umbilicus,<br />
how to lay out<br />
a corpse in the parlor,<br />
how to wring a hen’s neck<br />
with one sure gesture,<br />
how to swing a sure stick<br />
to kill a copperhead,<br />
how to turn memories<br />
into a comfort quilt,<br />
forgiving what’s past<br />
with the patience of boulders.<br />
When the men talk darkly<br />
of war and disaster,<br />
they wisely digress<br />
“That rainy spring<br />
we had so many berries —<br />
was it ’forty-eight, or nine? —<br />
I think this year will be like it.”<br />
102<br />
FRAGMENTS, WRITTEN AT TWENTY<br />
1<br />
Who shall celebrate<br />
what no one has sung since Walt,<br />
that crazy lover,<br />
took Death in his arms?<br />
Who shall take the whole of life/death<br />
flesh/skeleton, birth/decay,<br />
remembrance/forgetfulness?<br />
Who shall love this barbed wire planet,<br />
these scrambling apes<br />
who dream like gods<br />
and slay like panthers?<br />
2<br />
We are the bandits of being,<br />
heroes on borrowed time<br />
oblivious to Death<br />
because we rob him blind<br />
with every flaring sunrise.<br />
Days do not end<br />
though earth spins on beneath us.<br />
<strong>The</strong>se are the days of youth,<br />
and only what we win now<br />
can be kept.<br />
Stand now at the crest of your days.<br />
Of all that befell you yesterday<br />
you are the proud negation.<br />
You have taken pain — do not inflict it.<br />
You have been scorned —<br />
turn not your back<br />
on battered genius.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y taught you lies — undo the lies.<br />
Your family denied you — find friends<br />
and love them never failing.<br />
Fate made you as you are —<br />
be the cause of all that follows.<br />
Make no complaint against the universe,<br />
for not a door in the starry waste<br />
is closed to you.<br />
Earth, hear my newly minted credo.<br />
I fling my torch into the heavens.<br />
I will add to the fire that made me<br />
a laurel wreath around the sun.<br />
I make a new song<br />
to astonish the planets.
TABLEAUX FROM A PENNSYLVANIA<br />
VILLAGE<br />
1<br />
Spotlit to the last,<br />
the thunderheads recede<br />
southeast, in sunset red,<br />
like hoary-headed thespians<br />
unwilling to exeunt<br />
without a proper flourish.<br />
Inside the clouds<br />
the stubborn lightning<br />
flashes, as if another act<br />
of Hamlet or Lear<br />
required its luminance.<br />
<strong>The</strong> last of day,<br />
trailing the curtain of eventide<br />
rolls off the storm’s advance<br />
into the night’s<br />
dark amphitheatre.<br />
2<br />
<strong>The</strong> Bats At Dusk<br />
See them now,<br />
in their new-bird pride!<br />
<strong>The</strong> bats — presumptuous mice —<br />
take wing, up on a twilit wind,<br />
down into a gnat-rich dusk.<br />
<strong>As</strong> ducks float south<br />
the backs of white mallards<br />
turn like the final page<br />
of a silk-lined novel,<br />
flap shut in sun gem’s fall<br />
from weeping willow tapestry.<br />
From the bridge I eye their<br />
cooling retreat<br />
passive in downstream current,<br />
while celebrant fledermice<br />
beat on at the stars.<br />
3<br />
At the Lake Shore<br />
Old men give the orders;<br />
young men march and die;<br />
the dead lie in their graves<br />
and dream of returning.<br />
<strong>The</strong> maples have built a palisade,<br />
gray warriors stiff at the lake edge.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y bend their grave green heads,<br />
brush shaggy seeds at the water’s verge<br />
cast like orphans into the battlefield.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y argue on tactics,<br />
give orders to saplings,<br />
shake in a windy tumult<br />
of arthritic limbs.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y are the generals, the Lake<br />
their blind old nemesis.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y have contained him<br />
for a thousand years.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e day they know they will cover<br />
and absorb him.<br />
His Majesty the Lake must be content<br />
to weave millennial plots,<br />
gnawing on pebbles,<br />
feeding on creeks and rainfall,<br />
tolerating a man-made dam<br />
that deepened him.<br />
He dreams of expanding his border,<br />
goes nowhere,<br />
weaves decadent breakers<br />
against the shore,<br />
hunched in the kettle the glaciers<br />
carved him.<br />
He frightens no one, looks<br />
to a mystic cloud<br />
for auguries, sleeps afternoons,<br />
interrogates the fish and flotsam,<br />
tries to read the Braille of rain drops,<br />
traces the ice cracks in dead of winter.<br />
No one betrays the army’s secrets.<br />
Now it is spring. <strong>The</strong> officers conspire,<br />
summon from sun and dew<br />
a seedling explosion.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y raise a line of green colossi:<br />
rusty, belligerent day lily dragons<br />
issue their challenge to cowardly waves.<br />
Others are drafted, too: spies creep<br />
toward the water in a bed of moss.<br />
Fern leaves unfurl in flagrant banner.<br />
Foot soldier mushrooms<br />
pop up everywhere.<br />
Roots furrow underground,<br />
touch hands and hold.<br />
103
<strong>On</strong>e sleepless night the King makes fog,<br />
clouding the warriors’<br />
senses in fairy mist.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n comes the rain —<br />
an equinoctial deluge.<br />
A night of rain — a day —<br />
a night again.<br />
Waves pound against the stony edges,<br />
muscles renewed<br />
and tendons vivified,<br />
he roars like an ocean, spews tidal spray.<br />
<strong>The</strong> army breaks, then mends,<br />
then holds.<br />
Where roots had lost the soil<br />
to cling to,<br />
the tree falls willingly<br />
to make a barricade<br />
of leaf and limb and sundered trunk.<br />
Where water attempts to break the land,<br />
a rope tough vine, a wild-rose thorn,<br />
a dead tree pike shaft punctures him.<br />
Howling and humbled the King retreats.<br />
His waves recede to mirror stillness.<br />
At dawn the silver orb of Venus<br />
looks down and sees herself;<br />
bird echoes bird; each cloud<br />
his symmetric brother.<br />
<strong>The</strong> tangle of flora begins to heal itself.<br />
Who won? Look at the lake edge now,<br />
see that parade line pluming there,<br />
as day lilies burn against the light!<br />
4<br />
Stormy Day in Spring<br />
No one goes out on these cloudy days.<br />
<strong>The</strong> forest is empty. A willow tree<br />
burns in first green, vibrant<br />
against a red-gray skillet of clouds.<br />
Was green ever greener than this?<br />
This is the secret hue of spring,<br />
saved for the rainy-day elite!<br />
<strong>The</strong>y are all indoors<br />
with damp umbrellas,<br />
their soggy shoes drying,<br />
while I am here on the stream bed<br />
alone as though their world had ended.<br />
Give me this brooding, north-born sky,<br />
the ardent chill of this windy noon —<br />
give me a little sun — a beam or two<br />
to slice the scudding rain clouds.<br />
104<br />
Splash rainbows on the canopy<br />
of gray and brown and emerald.<br />
Give me this — there is nothing<br />
sweeter<br />
than this encompassing embrace!<br />
To be a man, alive, alone<br />
surrounded by willows<br />
and senseless rain,<br />
to be at the apex of consciousness —<br />
to feel the very pulse of life evolving —<br />
green! green and alive upon the world!<br />
THE TOWN IS STILL ASLEEP<br />
<strong>The</strong> town is still asleep.<br />
<strong>The</strong> sky is pale with quickening light.<br />
Quenched, the long night of stars<br />
swirls under the earth, but one,<br />
that silver planet Venus, holds<br />
over the ice-haired lawns<br />
a vernal promise: that love is not lost.<br />
Walk through the streets<br />
with birds and the clatter-clack<br />
of streetlights as they change;<br />
feel a tremble as the chill of night<br />
dies in a sunburst from the trees.<br />
Witness the signs of entropy:<br />
a vacant house whose owner died;<br />
a fallen elm; an abscess in the line<br />
of shops; a broken pane. It will<br />
all change. Unlike the fixed bright stars<br />
the homes are not immutable. I hold<br />
my book, which is all I may carry away:<br />
which reads that love will come again.<br />
WATER MUSIC 1<br />
You flow. You do not understand.<br />
<strong>The</strong> spring has eked you<br />
out of the earth.<br />
You fell from the storm,<br />
you barely coalesced<br />
before the journey began.<br />
A gust of wind from a cloud’s dead eye<br />
blew you onto the clay of the north.<br />
You roll downhill, impelled by gravity,<br />
jostled by roots, inhaling minerals,
fall to a pond, where spawn of frogs<br />
grope in the eye of batrachian sun.<br />
At the end — a hesitant stream.<br />
<strong>The</strong> grass barely parts in your path.<br />
By noon, you have come to the lake,<br />
your flow anonymous, your voice<br />
a cancellation of wave forms.<br />
You fear you are the plaything<br />
of the world,<br />
toy of a god<br />
whose cruelty is your solitude.<br />
You flow, you do not understand.<br />
You cannot feel your strength,<br />
your shoulders against a dam,<br />
your spirit overtopping barriers.<br />
You are insensible of reeds, of rust,<br />
the thrust of fish, the wear of shore,<br />
the notes you leave on agate.<br />
Do you know you are incompressible —<br />
that steel would split<br />
before it would compact you,<br />
that your ice can rend the hull of a ship?<br />
Do you know you are the stuff<br />
of comets,<br />
emblazoned by sunlight,<br />
your tail as long as the gap<br />
between planets?<br />
Do you know you are going South?<br />
How far you have come you<br />
cannot comprehend.<br />
You do not know who awaits you!<br />
SPRING EARTH<br />
Somewhere it is always spring —<br />
here, too, perhaps<br />
within these barren trees.<br />
<strong>The</strong> thought, the idée fixe<br />
the twig to be<br />
outlasts the snowstorms.<br />
Its double helix symphony<br />
sleeps on in xylem,<br />
unravels in sequestered leaves.<br />
Some seeds refuse to sprout<br />
until a winter has seasoned them<br />
(wise monarchs outlive<br />
their enemies).<br />
Earth thaws.<br />
Tendrils reach out<br />
beneath me.<br />
Seed’s urge unjackets me,<br />
soaks me to root in run<br />
through falling rain.<br />
I taste the sky:<br />
lime and raw iron,<br />
phosphorus and calcium,<br />
inhale the animal sweetness of air,<br />
soak up the sunlight,<br />
open a cotyledon eye,<br />
banish the frost<br />
in bacchanalian riot.<br />
It is time! It is time!<br />
SPRING FROST<br />
Weep not for the lilacs,<br />
the withered oak,<br />
the cherry blossoms<br />
burned by night frost<br />
this millennial May,<br />
for the aborted pear,<br />
magnolia buds shivering,<br />
shoots shocked,<br />
seeds warned<br />
to wait<br />
for another warming.<br />
Life somehow goes on<br />
after false promises.<br />
<strong>The</strong> young replace<br />
the immolated ones.<br />
We forget<br />
there ever was a winter.<br />
Trees lured by sun<br />
reached out with tentative<br />
green-tipped fingers.<br />
It was a spring<br />
of fool’s gold<br />
and false truffles,<br />
snakes shuffling back<br />
into the earth’s<br />
eye sockets.<br />
No right to life<br />
for the aborted seeds.<br />
This is how Nature<br />
sorts the strong.<br />
105
THE OLD GRAVESTONES<br />
Names last, dates fade, deeds disappear.<br />
Try if you will to read these stones —<br />
earth clots around inscriptions,<br />
moss rubs like moist eraser.<br />
Even in best light you cannot read<br />
their rhymes of what heavens they earned<br />
or paid that others should think so.<br />
Stonemason’s script rubs down to worm-lines,<br />
elegant esses and effs are mere wrinkles.<br />
Would anyone know if the stones were swapped,<br />
if pious spinster’s stone became confused<br />
with an outcast wench’s marker,<br />
if brides and grooms and stillborn babes<br />
exchanged their names and families,<br />
half-breed with minister,<br />
hermit with midwife?<br />
What a terrible stew at Resurrection<br />
if these stones were needed,<br />
carried like credit cards<br />
to the last communion!<br />
Even the wind, and windborne waters,<br />
shorn of the lake and incontinent clouds<br />
work bald forgetfulness in granite.<br />
Easy to read BORN.<br />
Born is everywhere.<br />
Born as we all are,<br />
but when is gradually erased.<br />
Zeros and eights and nines<br />
curve into shallow depressions,<br />
sevens and ones to cuneiform,<br />
thin lines and gashes.<br />
Easy to read DIED<br />
but isn’t that obvious?<br />
Death dates and Aetat ages<br />
wink out in wind-rub.<br />
A few are blank,<br />
carved and waiting<br />
for sleepers who never came.<br />
(Fought in a war —<br />
no body was found —<br />
went to the city —<br />
ran for a freight train —<br />
or just plain never died?)<br />
106
Names. <strong>The</strong> names linger.<br />
Eye leaps from letter to letter,<br />
fills in the biblical<br />
and well-known names.<br />
<strong>The</strong> sculpted angels are armless now,<br />
the willow tree stones are toppled,<br />
others were reinstalled<br />
on broken pediments<br />
with bolts and metal braces.<br />
Do they toss in their sleep?<br />
Do stones fly up<br />
like lumpy pillows,<br />
tilt down<br />
to shade unhappy eyes?<br />
I too would turn<br />
if line by line<br />
and page by page<br />
the universe erased me!<br />
AN AWESOME PLUMMETING<br />
Just when I think I’ve seen it all:<br />
counted the branches too many times,<br />
worn down the leafless sky with stares<br />
at the pregnant north; just when the metaphors<br />
for leaves go bald — that’s when a granite bell<br />
sprouts like a mushroom from the hill<br />
to mark a grave I’ve never seen before.<br />
Do skeletal hands below still clasp<br />
a useless hand-pull? Did frugal relatives<br />
ignore his request for a working alarm,<br />
doing the sensible Scottish thing<br />
with this clapperless, toneless thing of stone?<br />
Just when the measured snowflakes look alike<br />
and I come here haunted by Tchaikovsky’s muse,<br />
an awesome plummeting occurs —<br />
the shadows, first, spew gray upon the snow banks,<br />
then fans of whiter whiteness settle down<br />
upon the astonished wilderness of gray-green lake.<br />
Just moments ago Prince Siegfried drowned<br />
in the arms of the transformed swan,<br />
just moments since the despairing harmonies<br />
sent me fleeing into the barren trees,<br />
now half a thousand swans arrive,<br />
bobbing serene as never ballerina danced,<br />
still and majestic, curved necks<br />
an endless armada of question marks.<br />
107
Did they hear, through my chimney,<br />
the cataclysmic ends of the swans of the mere?<br />
<strong>Are</strong> they fleeing some Rothbart enchanter?<br />
Or does this pilgrimage follow Swan Lake everywhere?<br />
<strong>The</strong> swans are mute. <strong>The</strong>y have no answer.<br />
Soon they will arrow up in near silence,<br />
vanish in low-hanging feathery clouds,<br />
lake water resonating one great chord,<br />
the oboe, the harp, the tremulous strings.<br />
IRISES<br />
Before a certain bridge I cross each night —<br />
my eyes are bent downward so as to miss<br />
who does or doesn’t come to that window —<br />
I study a cottage’s garden plot.<br />
I have never known who lives here,<br />
but have grown to know that militant line<br />
of soldier irises in purple plumes,<br />
their wind-rumpled hoods on defiant spear-ends,<br />
the constant bulbs as certain as sunrise.<br />
By day the flowers welcomed visitors —<br />
hived bees and humming, brazen dragonflies,<br />
by day they shamed the variable sky.<br />
(By day I see that your windows darken<br />
concealing your presence or your absence.<br />
<strong>On</strong>ly your door mouth, opening and closing,<br />
admitting and ejecting visitors,<br />
confirms to me that you are tenant still.<br />
Your lovers’ faces smite me with smiling;<br />
if they’re dejected I take small hope.)<br />
<strong>On</strong> moonless nights I man the silent bridge,<br />
brood on the madness of water lilies<br />
that choke up the swelling, algae’d outlet.<br />
I peer over the dam-edge precipice<br />
at the shallow, tamed creek bed far below.<br />
<strong>The</strong> irises are there like sentinels,<br />
dark eyes a-watch beneath those still petals,<br />
the hidden golden stamens scolding me,<br />
the patient bulbs oblivious to love,<br />
serene as Buddhas, requiring nothing.<br />
Within your casements a galaxy stirs,<br />
a sphere of light in a candle centered,<br />
then other spheres, then moving silhouettes.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e is your cameo, then you are lit.<br />
Moving to music now, your arms might close<br />
around another’s neck. Your visitor eclipses you,<br />
108
his night enfolding you,<br />
your ivory breast his evening star,<br />
his your heartbeat till morning’s dim crescent.<br />
(O double Venus, which of you is true?)<br />
I turn back to my sleeping irises,<br />
black blooms in owl-watch, consoling friars.<br />
All day you give me eyes-alms blossoming;<br />
all night you silently companion me,<br />
never mocking this madness of loving,<br />
dying of perfect beauty, and alone.<br />
AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD<br />
<strong>The</strong> mountain is not the object of climbing.<br />
Nor does the act of climbing suffice.<br />
To climb is to achieve the height<br />
from which, alone,<br />
you can describe the overarching beauty<br />
of a curved horizon filled with summits.<br />
It is not the triumph of reaching a top,<br />
but the sudden, dizzying knowledge<br />
that what you scale is but a hair<br />
on the bristled beard of the cosmos.<br />
See now the range of upthrust pyramids<br />
on which you perch, a giddy rider<br />
on the hump of a thousand mile camel,<br />
a spec on the Andes’ anaconda.<br />
Blue peaks, pure snow, kingdom-encompassing<br />
rainbows, stark shadows as lambent sun<br />
inks fold on fold of airbrush color<br />
upon the distant ranks of staggered hills —<br />
all this you spy, and something more:<br />
upon each mountaintop<br />
the form of another climber,<br />
your brother who stands, regards you,<br />
eye to eye your equal.<br />
Or sometimes you see the spike and banner<br />
where an explorer has come and gone —<br />
sometimes a peak is vacant, but, lo!<br />
a figure is scaling upward towards it.<br />
Your rock is narrow, the way<br />
so difficult that none may follow you.<br />
Is it the same for each who struggle<br />
out of the shadows into the sun?<br />
109
You cannot turn back, belong no more<br />
to the settled valleys,<br />
where they see only your shadow<br />
and fear it.<br />
Down there, they hone<br />
their knives and swords,<br />
covet their neighbors’ acres.<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir cannons spark<br />
this way that way<br />
in the distant gorges,<br />
their river-hugging cities<br />
engulfed in flames<br />
as each invades the other.<br />
<strong>The</strong> gods and their mountains<br />
look down in scorn.<br />
WATER MUSIC IV<br />
To be is to have been with these waters; to be<br />
is to have roots in bleeding earth,<br />
from mud, that oozing formless mother squeezed,<br />
is to have known the longest path downhill —<br />
falling, fierce drops from the blistering clouds —<br />
or to be born as dew in pre-dawn light<br />
or to come as crystal. solemn in frost.<br />
or to spring from the rocks’ deep airless streams,<br />
chill child of the darkness, full of tumult.’<br />
To be is to flow, formed and yet formless,<br />
bubbling with atoms’ singing bravado,<br />
proud of a charge, an affinite valence,<br />
a molecule’s journey defying death,<br />
reflecting yet fleeing the sun’s hot lamp,<br />
alive yet buoying the leaves of decay,<br />
carving trails everywhere, here mingling,<br />
there feeding hungry roots, there wearing down<br />
some arrogant hillside, toppling its trees —<br />
to move with a certainty of purpose,<br />
knowing the land is shaped by tireless ions.<br />
To be, however small, yet know yourself<br />
the sine qua non of spring and summer!<br />
To leap, however deceived, to hot air<br />
into the trap of a motionless pool<br />
over the brink of a cataract, down<br />
to the inky depths of an ocean trench, —<br />
all are the same to you, no place an end,<br />
at home alike in gill and gullet, one<br />
110
with even the loneliness of glaciers —<br />
To know your destiny, the truth of your being,<br />
borne from the source by your own charge.<br />
To know is to reach by any means<br />
an end which no other essence compels;<br />
to be, and to leave where you pass<br />
your subtle fingerprint upon the hardest stone.<br />
AT THE WOOD’S EDGE<br />
(A translation into verse of “Okayondoghsera Yondennase: Oghentonh<br />
Karighwateghwenh," from the Iroquois Ancient Rites of the Condoling Council:<br />
Preliminary Ceremony)<br />
My son, I am surprised to hear your voice<br />
come through the forest to this open place.<br />
You come with troubled mind, through obstacles.<br />
You passed, my son, the grounds where fathers met,<br />
whose hands we all depended on. How then<br />
come you in ease? You tread the paths<br />
our forebears cut, you all but see the smoke<br />
from where they passed their pipes. Can you<br />
be calm when you have wept along the way?<br />
Great thanks, therefore, that you arrive unhurt.<br />
Now let us smoke the clay pipe together.<br />
We know that all around us enemies<br />
each think, “We will not let them meet!”<br />
Here, thorny ways that bar — there, falling trees —<br />
in shadowed glades, the beasts that wait to slay.<br />
Either by these you might have perished,<br />
my son. <strong>The</strong> sudden floods destroy; dark nights<br />
the vengeful hatchet waits outside the house;<br />
invisible disease is always near.<br />
(Each day our mortal foes are wasting us!)<br />
Great thanks, therefore, that you arrive unhurt.<br />
What great lament if any had died there<br />
along the way, and running words had come,<br />
“Yonder lie bodies, of those who were chiefs!”<br />
We, who come to mourn another, would cry,<br />
“What happened, my son? — Why do you not come?”<br />
In time of peace or peril we do this —<br />
ancestors made the custom, demanding:<br />
Here they must kindle a ritual fire,<br />
here, in the light, at the edge of the woods,<br />
condole with each other in chosen words.<br />
111
TILLIE<br />
Steel-town Tillie<br />
was my first bag lady.<br />
<strong>As</strong> a child I trailed her,<br />
just out of reach<br />
of the miasma of sour milk<br />
and spoiled meat.<br />
She stopped before the five-and-dime<br />
to comb her thinning hair,<br />
mouse brown now streaked<br />
with yellow-white<br />
no manner of primping<br />
could beautify.<br />
She had a Hepburn face,<br />
high cheekbones.<br />
She’d stop in every doorway<br />
to see herself mirrored<br />
and re-arrange her scarf.<br />
Dogs sniffed the oily stains<br />
that marked her bundles and rags.<br />
Starving birds pecked<br />
at the trail of crumbs,<br />
burst buttons and candy wraps,<br />
the lengths of multi-colored thread<br />
that dropped through her<br />
bottomless pockets.<br />
Don’t ask her age, how many<br />
winters she’d tramped the streets —<br />
how many weddings and funerals<br />
she’d watched, like the uninvited fairy<br />
from the shadowed, latter-most pew.<br />
(She had a wedding once.<br />
Days later, her husband abandoned her.)<br />
She’d talk, if you ask,<br />
of her house on the hill —<br />
new furniture just in,<br />
painting in progress,<br />
wallpaper sample books<br />
thumbed through.<br />
She doubled back<br />
when no one watched<br />
to the abandoned car<br />
by the railroad tracks,<br />
112<br />
where she slept,<br />
cradling her packages<br />
like swaddled infants.<br />
Year by year<br />
she was gaunter, thinner.<br />
Finally, they cornered her,<br />
shoved her screaming<br />
into an ambulance.<br />
Word spread around town<br />
of an abscess gone wild,<br />
a hole in Tillie’s neck<br />
where everything she drank<br />
gushed out as from<br />
a cartoon bullet hole.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y paused in the taverns,<br />
in the vomit-scented Moose Hall<br />
with litanies of “Tillie, poor Tillie!”<br />
<strong>On</strong> side streets,<br />
her shadow shambled without her,<br />
frail as a moth wing,<br />
picked apart by moonlight,<br />
scattered by cicadas,<br />
waiting to reassemble<br />
if she returned<br />
to her appointed rounds.<br />
song of youth (1967)<br />
have you stood wordless with an anthem<br />
no notes can sing?<br />
the forest at dawn, the stars at<br />
midnight,<br />
the thunderclap’s echo<br />
create the lyrics and sing my song.<br />
have you run naked<br />
through woods in the rain,<br />
brushed clean by leaf-cup fingers,<br />
lay languid on a boulder<br />
moonbathing drunk<br />
with the white rays’ beaming?<br />
the wayward wolf,<br />
the cliff with its weathered face<br />
its beard of clinging trees,<br />
stand with me.<br />
have you known where
the fires of creation arise,<br />
the lid-lift of cranium<br />
as thought explodes<br />
like newborn galaxies —<br />
or do you feed the fire<br />
and never see the flame?<br />
Your/my I-thing are the same.<br />
have you said I am I,<br />
a solitary entity,<br />
treating alone with the universe<br />
and knowing it,<br />
and seeing yourself a speck in the<br />
cosmos,<br />
still laughed and said, it is good,<br />
this joy of oneness?<br />
or do you hide from you<br />
your temple and tomb<br />
from whom there is no escaping?<br />
will you die for god,<br />
a nullity,<br />
a madman’s playmate,<br />
psychotic city stomper,<br />
hungry for offerings?<br />
or will you live<br />
because in a world<br />
abandoned by idols<br />
Aristotle lived,<br />
Beethoven lived,<br />
Shakespeare lived,<br />
or will you, sorry carpenter,<br />
sell nails and cross to your own<br />
assassins?<br />
temples, I topple you —<br />
churches, I scatter your gold —<br />
priests, I drive you out —<br />
cross and altar I cast into the sea.<br />
let every man find his<br />
third eye beaming,<br />
his account with the spirits overflowing,<br />
his eyes bright and his hands clasped<br />
in the joyous handshake and greeting<br />
that only the free can grant to the free.<br />
stand in the clean sun:<br />
invent and speak<br />
your newfound name<br />
free of clan and parentage.<br />
be the one among many,<br />
one even among the solitary ones.<br />
still, we are brothers:<br />
my I-thing and your you-thing I-thing<br />
are the same.<br />
1967/rev. 1996<br />
OUT OF SEASON<br />
All over? Hardly!<br />
Those red leaves are not gone:<br />
they are under the snow,<br />
protecting the gentle grass.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y will go brown,<br />
wear paper thin,<br />
veined like the hands<br />
of tiny mummies.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y will endure the ice,<br />
as I do,<br />
remember the night<br />
when you lay upon them,<br />
remember that moon,<br />
umber, carnivorous,<br />
that called them down<br />
to garland your hair —<br />
my curse is memory,<br />
and not to stop loving<br />
the moment of your surrender,<br />
writing your name<br />
on these thousand banners<br />
of blazing maple,<br />
while you have already<br />
forgotten mine.<br />
113
ENVOI<br />
Edinboro Lake, Pennsylvania 1969<br />
Goodnight my starlit cup of lake,<br />
my sky-enclosing kettle of stones,<br />
my graveyard grass where long<br />
before dawn I watch the waves,<br />
as eaten galaxies implode and shatter,<br />
as near Arcturus plummets under,<br />
gone in black ripples into the inky depth<br />
of the lake from which no light escapes.<br />
Not even Venus can penetrate beneath,<br />
not stars as vast as red Antares —<br />
with but a blink the mere<br />
consumes them.<br />
Tree branches arc in ardent circles<br />
around the muffled street lamps.<br />
<strong>The</strong> leaves all lean toward Polaris,<br />
but get no messages from vacant space.<br />
<strong>The</strong> maples here are Chekhov women,<br />
immobile yet convoluted, their spires<br />
a-twist in their outward yearning.<br />
Now the fog comes trailing in,<br />
lapping the lake mist into its tresses,<br />
weaving the stinging fronds of frost<br />
it will leave as winter’s prophecy.<br />
<strong>The</strong> last canoes have long withdrawn<br />
(fish hang inert like tea bags, sleeping,<br />
and fishermen lay in quilted dreams).<br />
<strong>The</strong> frogs are falling silent,<br />
the huddled ducks have vanished,<br />
the paper-thin fluttering of bats<br />
shuts down as the moon descends<br />
behind the trees and chimney tops.<br />
Here is the heart of life’s memory,<br />
in stillness so fine<br />
a spider would dread disturbing it,<br />
and here, as I bid<br />
this haunted place my farewell benediction,<br />
I join the ghosts of yesterdays<br />
(Oh, many myselves are walking here,<br />
weeping and laughing<br />
by the old high fence,<br />
114
in and upon the sleeping lake,<br />
myself in a hundred moonlit crossings,<br />
myself on the ice as I ventured out<br />
to hear winter’s ominous timpani,<br />
its gusts that drove me back<br />
to the shore)<br />
Tonight I make another ghost, my last.<br />
Stars will not sing so well where I go,<br />
nor waves reveal the cosmos singing<br />
in a hard place of steel and glass.<br />
Goodnight, my lake-lit cup of stars,<br />
my stone-embracing kettle of sky,<br />
my dawn-wet grass where lapping waves<br />
sing solemnly to crumbling graves,<br />
my youth, my heart,<br />
my first-found home.<br />
AT THE VERGE OF SPRING<br />
When the snow, which veiled the slumber of lakes<br />
withdraws in mist, and when speckled earth<br />
is damp with leaves’ regenerative breath,<br />
I return, as I must, where the willows<br />
raise up their green, rebellious banners<br />
against the looming Canadian clouds.<br />
When the fog, which hailed the warming of earth<br />
raises its skirt over spring-swollen streams,<br />
I come with books in the fold of my arm,<br />
regard how white violets kiss the sun.<br />
Gone are the months of frozen endurance<br />
and dreaming of love through the trackless stars.<br />
Now earth unburdens its hoarded harvest.<br />
Things stir in ice-numbed crevices, seeds crack,<br />
a million legs quiver in webbed cocoons,<br />
gelid eyes open in buried eggs,<br />
and the tightly wound fern, a universe<br />
of foliage wound into a fractaled fist<br />
tenses, as do the nuclear maples,<br />
the bacchanalian twist of grapevine,<br />
the never-retiring undulant grass,<br />
the cannonade of peeping crocuses —<br />
all are waiting for a signal to explode.<br />
Veni, veni Creator Spiritus.<br />
115
SCRAPS<br />
It is a trust.<br />
A box for each of you<br />
sits on my shelf,<br />
opened from time<br />
to time to add,<br />
subtract, refine<br />
your stored essence.<br />
Some are trinkets,<br />
a souvenir of youth,<br />
a lost moment<br />
in an aging house,<br />
an empty setting<br />
for a lost sapphire,<br />
a frayed ribbon<br />
from a forgotten gift.<br />
Still I keep them,<br />
a row of tiny<br />
sepulchers<br />
among my rarest books.<br />
<strong>On</strong> rainy days<br />
I rearrange them.<br />
In dark of winter<br />
when a friend<br />
becomes a former<br />
friend, a new box<br />
joins its brethren.<br />
It is a trust,<br />
this little mausoleum<br />
of lost souls,<br />
young hopes<br />
and broken promises.<br />
Inside the box<br />
your better moments wait<br />
unentangled,<br />
kneeling to no one,<br />
man or god.<br />
You are in there<br />
as I saw and loved you,<br />
a sunburst on canvas,<br />
a day lily cantata,<br />
an ardent poem,<br />
your hands<br />
amid the clay,<br />
your tapered fingers<br />
arced in arpeggios.<br />
116<br />
I will keep them.<br />
Though you are not<br />
what you were then,<br />
though life has clogged<br />
your arteries with grief<br />
and demons taunt you,<br />
I will keep them.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e autumn day<br />
you may return<br />
in quest of dreams,<br />
in need of fire,<br />
that spark of self<br />
that nearly died.<br />
THE TEA PARTY<br />
New neighbor girls have settled in.<br />
We hear the squeals and screams,<br />
the mother calls and father scoldings<br />
through the open windows.<br />
An angry hedge divides us in back,<br />
though our houses lean together,<br />
shingles and sagging porches<br />
almost blending, identical<br />
weeds abuzz with bumblebees.<br />
<strong>The</strong> low-slung church<br />
of solemn Mennonites<br />
sits glum and silent<br />
across the street.<br />
<strong>The</strong> girls’ names are Faith and Abby,<br />
my mother tells me,<br />
ten and seven in stiff blue dresses.<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir parents never speak to us.<br />
Just up the hill, behind a fence,<br />
white-washed and cedar-lined,<br />
Charlene and Marilyn,<br />
the Jewish girls<br />
live in the great brick house<br />
(anything brick<br />
is a mansion to us).<br />
I play canasta with Marilyn (my age),<br />
learn to admire her parents,<br />
watch as they light<br />
the Chanukah candles,<br />
move among them summers<br />
as hundreds congregate<br />
at their swimming pool.
<strong>The</strong>ir mother loves opera,<br />
but not, she says,<br />
not Wagner.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e August day,<br />
an invitation comes,<br />
crayon on tablet paper,<br />
for tea with Faith and Abby.<br />
My mother says, Be nice and go.<br />
I sit in their yard<br />
with toy furniture.<br />
<strong>The</strong> doll whose daddy<br />
I’m pretending to be<br />
has one arm missing.<br />
<strong>The</strong> tea, which is licorice<br />
dissolved in warm water,<br />
is served in tiny cups,<br />
tarnished aluminum,<br />
from a tiny aluminum teapot.<br />
I want to gag<br />
from the taste of it,<br />
but I sip on and ask for more.<br />
Now Faith addresses me.<br />
“I’ll dress the baby<br />
and we shall take her to church."<br />
“Oh, we don’t go to church,”<br />
I told my newfound Mrs.<br />
“Never, ever?”<br />
“Not even once?”<br />
I shook my head—<br />
I’ve never set foot inside a church.<br />
“That’s just what Daddy told us!”<br />
Abby exclaimed. “You’ll go to Hell!”<br />
“You’ll go to Hell and be damned!”<br />
they chanted,<br />
“You’ll go to hell and be damned!”<br />
“What else does your Daddy say?”<br />
I asked them. “He says<br />
you’ll go to Hell and be damned,<br />
because you’re atheists and heathens.”<br />
Faith looked fierce,<br />
She poured more tea<br />
and made me take it,<br />
as if it were holy water,<br />
as if I would drink<br />
baptism by stealth.<br />
She raised her cup daintily,<br />
glanced and nodded<br />
at the fence and the cedars.<br />
“Charlene and Marilyn<br />
will go to Hell, too,<br />
right to the bottom<br />
of the flaming pit,<br />
because they’re Jews<br />
and murdered Jesus.<br />
Would you like ice cream now?”<br />
TWO, GOING ON THREE<br />
We moved a lot.<br />
Each neighbor hill and hollow<br />
distinctly named:<br />
Gibson Terrace<br />
post-war bungalows<br />
stuck together,<br />
laundry hanging<br />
on wooden accordions<br />
shirts and pants billowing<br />
in the tiny yard<br />
I could walk now<br />
so I did —<br />
wind spun me around —<br />
it rained —<br />
the houses looked alike —<br />
a kind girl brought me home<br />
to a spanking<br />
* * *<br />
I won’t eat eggs<br />
hate the yolks<br />
that look like eyes<br />
117
my mother seats me<br />
outside in sunlight<br />
says eat those eggs<br />
eat them for daddy<br />
the sun behind her<br />
a yellow orb,<br />
spoon poised<br />
to feed me<br />
my birthday comes<br />
and Christmas —<br />
I make a row<br />
of tiny trucks and cars<br />
from the tinseled tree<br />
back into the kitchen<br />
where bacon sizzles<br />
and the eggs,<br />
scrambled,<br />
no longer terrify<br />
* * *<br />
Everson<br />
behind a roller rink<br />
whose music and clatter<br />
keep everyone awake<br />
all night the lights<br />
burn through the slats<br />
of the venetian blinds<br />
I sit in my crib<br />
and see the spiders spinning.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y make their webs,<br />
catch tiny moths and flies,<br />
make little white mummies.<br />
one night they find me.<br />
I cringe in a corner<br />
as hairy legs cross<br />
the lighted stripes on my sheet<br />
I scream for mommy<br />
she comes in<br />
doesn’t see them<br />
doesn’t believe me<br />
tucks me in tight<br />
back they come<br />
from beneath the crib —<br />
118<br />
others drop down<br />
on silk parachutes —<br />
I am still and silent<br />
as they move about,<br />
weblines crossing<br />
in the light above me.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n I see one<br />
at the edge of my vision<br />
one left another right<br />
<strong>The</strong>y sensed me<br />
sensing them<br />
so they have come for me<br />
A tiny voice says<br />
No one will come<br />
No one will hear you<br />
We can do anything.<br />
by morning my face<br />
is covered with spider kisses,<br />
I am potato head swollen<br />
rushed to a doctor<br />
for witch hazel ointments<br />
My mother learns<br />
a lesson in dusting<br />
* * *<br />
I dream of flying<br />
free in the air<br />
all the way up into clouds.<br />
Night after night<br />
I learn to levitate<br />
right off my bed<br />
up to the ceiling<br />
then out of the house<br />
and over hill and valley.<br />
I tell my mother<br />
how easy it is to fly.<br />
She points to the zenith<br />
and shows me an airplane.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n she draws a picture,<br />
shows me wings<br />
and spinning propellers.<br />
if you put your hand out,<br />
she tells me,<br />
the propellers would chop them off,
then cut the rest of you up,<br />
just like a meat slicer.<br />
now in my dreams<br />
I fly over cloud tops,<br />
but always an airplane chases me<br />
closer closer<br />
I look back at my feet:<br />
razor propellers are closing in.<br />
I see the pilot’s<br />
cap and goggles.<br />
I fall I<br />
wake up screaming.<br />
Now when daytime airplanes come<br />
I run to the house<br />
cover my ears against<br />
the meat grinder engines.<br />
* * *<br />
after my bath<br />
the afternoon paper<br />
fills me with questions.<br />
how do those symbols<br />
turn into words you speak?<br />
what is that thing<br />
in the picture?<br />
that’s a tank, my mother says.<br />
it’s like a car,<br />
but rolls on those rubber treads,<br />
see — they go round and round<br />
just like this rubber band<br />
around my fingers.<br />
what’s underneath? I ask.<br />
if a tank ran over you<br />
what would happen?<br />
it would pull you inside,<br />
she told me. Yes,<br />
when a tank gets you,<br />
it pulls you in and chops you up.<br />
she wants to get a vacuum cleaner.<br />
it works just like a tank:<br />
things go inside<br />
and are never seen again.<br />
I think I want to live with grandma.<br />
THE OUTCAST<br />
<strong>The</strong> boy is not like<br />
the others.<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir bikes ascend the hill,<br />
storm down like whirlwinds.<br />
He always walks, their wheels<br />
a dervish dance<br />
whose physics baffle him.<br />
He passes the practice field,<br />
hopes no one will notice him<br />
as he carries his books<br />
on the way to the library<br />
(they don’t wear glasses,<br />
don’t read anything<br />
between June and August).<br />
He has no idea<br />
what their cries mean,<br />
why it matters<br />
that a ball goes<br />
this way<br />
that way.<br />
When they let him come,<br />
he runs with some older boys,<br />
over a fence he can barely scale,<br />
watching for dogs that bite,<br />
to the forbidden<br />
apple tree.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y climb to reach<br />
the great red ones.<br />
From high above<br />
they taunt him,<br />
dare him to join them<br />
at the sky-scream treetop.<br />
He stands below.<br />
Climbing a tree<br />
is one of many things<br />
he’s not allowed to do.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y talk about baseball<br />
and BB guns,<br />
the cars they’ll drive<br />
when they’re old enough,<br />
the names of girls<br />
whose breasts have swollen.<br />
119
He reaches up<br />
for the lower branch<br />
takes unripe apples,<br />
unmarred by bird or worm.<br />
Walking alone,<br />
he sees a daytime moon,<br />
wonders how Earth<br />
might look from its craters.<br />
He goes home to his comics,<br />
to the attic room<br />
where aliens and monsters<br />
plan universal mayhem.<br />
Don’t eat those apples,<br />
his mother warns him.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y’ll give you a stomach ache.<br />
I like them, he says.<br />
Green apples taste better.<br />
WATCH DOG<br />
<strong>The</strong> thing that had been a puppy once,<br />
running at heels,<br />
delight of the kitchen, carried<br />
like an infant despite<br />
its dubious parentage,<br />
welcomed on laps in the living room,<br />
stretched out for the petting hand,<br />
was now that skeletal hound<br />
on stilt-like legs,<br />
a yellow-eyed, encrusted cur<br />
at the end of a chain,<br />
in a cloud of hopping fleas<br />
by his little death-camp house.<br />
He ate his designated scraps.<br />
He howled as the moon<br />
rotated in its own imprisonment.<br />
He barked dutifully at cars,<br />
at interloping rabbits,<br />
at the free dogs standing<br />
at the forest’s edge.<br />
I was four when he licked my cheek —<br />
thirteen, when I thought:<br />
Death cannot come soon enough<br />
to close his eyes.<br />
120<br />
ENGLISH BREAKFAST<br />
i<br />
Grandmother died yesterday,<br />
a little girl tells me at breakfast,<br />
and Mommy says we’ll inherit something.<br />
How English, I think.<br />
<strong>The</strong> teapot hides<br />
in a quilted cozy.<br />
<strong>The</strong> sugar is cubed,<br />
the silver spoons polished<br />
by the Irish maid.<br />
Not one pinched face at this table<br />
can extrude a tear.<br />
ii<br />
<strong>On</strong> the street, a moving truck<br />
is engorged with furniture.<br />
Its double-doors close.<br />
A thin, pale woman<br />
looks back at the T udor<br />
house, the round hill,<br />
the enclosing oaks.<br />
I suppose I shall miss it,<br />
she tells her husband.<br />
It had too many rooms, anyway.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y drive off. <strong>The</strong> house<br />
settles and sighs audibly.<br />
A branch falls<br />
from an embarrassed maple.<br />
iii<br />
My father, whom<br />
I have not seen in thirty years,<br />
tells me of his memories:<br />
Your grandfather took me out<br />
for a beer once.<br />
I was twenty-six<br />
and in the army.<br />
It’s the only time<br />
he ever really talked to me.<br />
When I write, I call him “Old <strong>On</strong>e.”<br />
He signs his letters,<br />
“Don.”
THE NOSEBLEED<br />
1968<br />
Dizzy and bloodless I am wheeled<br />
into the emergency room. Nosebleed<br />
for hour on hour has left me senseless.<br />
This is a very Catholic hospital.<br />
A nurse with clipboard demands my name.<br />
She looks with scorn at my hair and beads.<br />
“Bet you don’t have no job?” she sneers.<br />
“I’m a student. At Edinboro.”<br />
“Drugs!” she says. “<strong>The</strong>y’re in here<br />
alla time.”<br />
“Nosebleed,” I say.<br />
“I don’t use drugs.”<br />
Nosebleed, she writes,<br />
as I choke on clotted upheave.<br />
“What’s your religion?”<br />
“None.”<br />
“I gotta put something here.”<br />
“Say atheist.”<br />
“Well, that’s a first.<br />
I don’t know how to spell that.”<br />
“A—T—H—E—I—S—T.”<br />
“You could be dyin’ here<br />
an’ you wanna say atheist?”<br />
“You want me to lie on my deathbed?”<br />
She snorts. “I should put down Protestant.”<br />
<strong>The</strong>y wheel me in. I’m in and out<br />
of consciousness. Later I wake<br />
in a deserted wardroom. I want to know<br />
how long I’ve been here, how much I lost.<br />
I find the cord and buzzer<br />
that says it will summon a nurse.<br />
I hear a distant bell ringing,<br />
hear voices at the nurses’ station.<br />
Words fly to me like startled birds<br />
“Appendicitis”<br />
“Babies”<br />
“Pneumonia”<br />
then “<strong>The</strong> hippie in 15-B”<br />
A male voice laughs. “We’ll make up<br />
something special for that one.”<br />
I ring the bell again. No one responds.<br />
121
I wake again at mid-day.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y wheel in food on a cart.<br />
A plate is put before me —<br />
amorphous meat, a glistening heap<br />
of masked potatoes, some soggy greens.<br />
I take a spoon of potatoes<br />
wondering real or instant,<br />
bite down on razor shards of glass,<br />
put hand to mouth and see blood streaming.<br />
Rip tube from face spitting rush<br />
for the bathroom<br />
rinse rinse spit rinse<br />
swabbing the blood with a towel<br />
tongue bleeding gums bleeding<br />
dressed myself hastily<br />
left there no one stopped me<br />
walking walking hitch-hiking southward<br />
glad I never swallowed<br />
my special hippie atheist breakfast.<br />
A WING OF TIME<br />
This village street will always split me —<br />
half in the gray-fringed present,<br />
half quarked away in time<br />
from dull today to that brilliant<br />
yesterday — a day I am not yet<br />
twenty and the maples seem shorter,<br />
the houses whiter, the sky<br />
a bluer blue through eyes unclouded.<br />
I stand before a dingy storefront.<br />
Back then it was a dress shop<br />
with but a single mannequin.<br />
Next to it was Gorman’s<br />
steamy laundromat<br />
churning students’ underwear and towels,<br />
a nickel-dime-quarter juggernaut<br />
accumulating lint and buttons.<br />
Above the laundry, beyond that rotting<br />
window frame, was my first apartment.<br />
Was it fifteen dollars a month I paid<br />
for two converted office rooms,<br />
a hallway bathroom and shower?<br />
<strong>Are</strong> those the same curtains still,<br />
tattered and colorless as I found them<br />
and left them? <strong>The</strong> same glass,<br />
122
certainly, through which I watched<br />
the leaf-fall, lightning, snowstorm,<br />
the neon light of the Hotel Bar<br />
(no one under twenty-one admitted!)<br />
I see the pale green painted wall<br />
not changed in grudging landlord years.<br />
I climb the narrow stairs, pass down<br />
the beer-corroded corridor to my door,<br />
whose frosted glass was once gold-leafed<br />
with some insurance agent’s name.<br />
Do I do this? <strong>Are</strong> my hands, nervous,<br />
solid enough to knock, or am I dreaming?<br />
My tap on the glass is real enough.<br />
A thin blond woman answers, puzzled.<br />
I tell her I lived here as a student,<br />
oh, many years ago.<br />
Could I just stand here a moment,<br />
look out her window at the village green? —<br />
where someone, in unintended irony,<br />
has placed the town’s own name<br />
in giant wooden letters,<br />
as though the inhabitants<br />
needed to be reminded,<br />
the traveler admonished.<br />
A wave of heat rolls through the trees outside.<br />
Were it a wing of Time, whose darker side<br />
enfolds the past, what memories appear?<br />
I see the vanished store whose wooden frame<br />
extends into the square, a blur of green<br />
as sycamores sawed down or thunderstruck<br />
burst back to view. A sigh of life unfurls,<br />
the lake regains its water lily bloom,<br />
long-dead sparrows rebuild forgotten nests,<br />
and on the street, departed friends go by —<br />
Squat Bertha goes to get her mail. Next door,<br />
her restaurant slides to its bankruptcy,<br />
unpaid employees and a sheriff’s sale.<br />
I heard her scold her harried waitresses<br />
for wasting moldy pie. Do it like this! —<br />
a sweep of knife across the furry crust —<br />
now serve it with a smile! Above her store,<br />
she had her quart of beer, remembering<br />
the brothel she ran in her Erie days.<br />
123
<strong>The</strong> men in her rooms are boarders, students.<br />
Deans and professors eat at her table.<br />
Head high, she’s almost respectable now.<br />
I see four shadows in the alleyway —<br />
three high school boys and a retarded girl.<br />
She goes there often. <strong>The</strong>y catch her there,<br />
against the wall their prying hands adept<br />
at raising her skirt, stealing quick pleasure.<br />
After the shadows mingle, pressed on brick,<br />
sneakered feet scatter in every direction.<br />
Outside the bar, the college boys loitering<br />
swoon as Jamie and her sketchpad pass them.<br />
Her tied-back hair jet black, her almond eyes<br />
Eurasian orbs of challenge and surrender.<br />
Her breasts move through their dreams<br />
like wrecking cranes.<br />
Her siren silhouette, voice-song, Muse-call,<br />
perfect things, untouchably sufficient.<br />
It was enough that she existed here.<br />
Now others pass: a student prince who died<br />
in megalo-brainfire tumor madness;<br />
the tragic bronchial artist coughing,<br />
imagining consumption’s early death;<br />
one, two, a half dozen for Vietnam,<br />
whose jungles would cripple or kill them<br />
(one whose body was never found, looks up<br />
as though his ghost and my vision had locked);<br />
my best friends, the mad and sad ones, strolling<br />
on by as though I still awaited them —<br />
the best of their time, the dreamer drop-outs,<br />
acid, depression, poverty and war<br />
cutting its swath through my generation.<br />
In this interval a hundred have passed,<br />
known and unknown, the loved and the yearned-for,<br />
all of them still before their beginnings,<br />
not drinking the poison of compromise,<br />
not marrying lies, not yet denying visions,<br />
not using youth to engender monsters.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y do not see my future looking down,<br />
not one of them seems coarse or mediocre.<br />
And there, impossibly, I see myself,<br />
a younger form, approach.<br />
He has a funny, bouncing walk.<br />
His eyes are wide with poems.<br />
124
He enters through the door below,<br />
his footsteps sure upon the stair.<br />
I turn, I face the darkened hall.<br />
I will hide until he has passed.<br />
He walks toward his future,<br />
I, my memories. Which of us has<br />
the better bargain, I do not know.<br />
I think he was very foolish<br />
to linger here,<br />
as I was foolish to return.<br />
Yet this is what I learned:<br />
I always thought others the meteors,<br />
racing on by, too hot to touch,<br />
never quite seen or palpable.<br />
I thought the world a-spin<br />
away and beneath my grasp,<br />
yet here it sits, slow in its orbit<br />
as a banana slug.<br />
And now I understand it:<br />
I was the meteor. I am the meteor.<br />
I blaze through. Eyes grow wide,<br />
then I am gone. Nothing remains<br />
of me but these etched words.<br />
125
POETRY MOTELS<br />
A Helms amendment<br />
to the arts budget<br />
surprises everyone:<br />
a Poetry Lodge<br />
in every major city!<br />
<strong>The</strong> artist’s rendering<br />
is out of Beowulf:<br />
a great mead hall<br />
where bards convene,<br />
drink tankards of ale,<br />
pot after pot<br />
of exotic tea.<br />
Poets do readings<br />
around the clock.<br />
Yet something’s wrong<br />
with this T udor palace.<br />
Feet stick to the carpet.<br />
Wallpaper grabs you<br />
like vampire Velcro.<br />
Sit once on a bench<br />
and you cannot stand.<br />
A giant eye glares<br />
through the leaded glass.<br />
<strong>The</strong> senator intones:<br />
Poets check in,<br />
but they don’t check out.<br />
REGAINING THE MUSE<br />
Silent this voice for more than a year!<br />
My head now bowed with other laurels,<br />
I am back to poetry and its finer lyre.<br />
Time and this book alone<br />
shall tell if I am stronger now —<br />
or if the shining, word-wise daemon,<br />
whose gaze and beckoning<br />
I shunned and spurned<br />
like the advances of a rasping crone,<br />
shall now return to guide my pen.<br />
126<br />
THE LITERARY LIFE<br />
Muse! come to the window I deck<br />
as of old<br />
with that solitary flame<br />
that you alone can see!<br />
Here the paper, here the pale blue lines,<br />
the furrows I plow again<br />
with fountain pen;<br />
bones, rock & root the silences<br />
I move away to plant a newer crop:<br />
sonnets to scrape the bellies of clouds,<br />
elegies whose solemn tears<br />
tap roots into the strata of dinosaurs,<br />
lyric sprouts that will contain<br />
whole languages.<br />
Beware my harvest, for dragon’s teeth<br />
lurk in the words I plant today!<br />
<strong>The</strong> Muse will take me back.<br />
Have I not given everything<br />
to consecrate myself to her? Like all<br />
who serve poetry I gave my youth,<br />
heedless of age’s hunger and need.<br />
I gave her blood, though she in turn<br />
could never give me bread! Look at me:<br />
the scribbling thing I am,<br />
addict of adverb and adjective,<br />
drunkard of Orphic utterance,<br />
I am what she made me.<br />
THE RIVALRY<br />
You have him now.<br />
You call me on the phone to gloat,<br />
to read me back the very poems<br />
I might have written<br />
if he had stayed with me.<br />
He’s fickle, though.<br />
Whole nights he’ll keep you<br />
there, the candle lit,<br />
the ink point dipped and dried<br />
and dipped again,<br />
awaiting the turn of the knob,<br />
the press of hands<br />
upon your shoulders,<br />
the soothing tenor that says<br />
“Go on, I know you can<br />
do it!” <strong>The</strong> chaste kiss
that pulls the chosen words<br />
to the tip of your tongue,<br />
the fingertips<br />
upon the small of your back<br />
that make the pen move faster,<br />
the fury in the feather bed<br />
as you hold him<br />
and the Remington pounds on<br />
in unassisted typing.<br />
He can leave you<br />
speechless, wordless,<br />
worn to a stump and steaming,<br />
with only half the words<br />
that galloped through you<br />
caught in your exhausted diary.<br />
He’ll stay<br />
until the wine is gone,<br />
until the coda of the Ninth,<br />
with luck<br />
until advance or royalty<br />
replenishes the fridge,<br />
but he is not yours<br />
any more than he is mine.<br />
He has a little book.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is a list.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is always a name<br />
about to fall from his lips<br />
as he has his way with you,<br />
a name with too many<br />
syllables, or too few.<br />
While I pretend to sleep<br />
he reads my manuscripts.<br />
Sometimes he laughs,<br />
sometimes he reads aloud.<br />
(<strong>On</strong>e poem he tucked<br />
into his Levi’s,<br />
and I cannot find a copy.)<br />
He has your name and mine.<br />
He knows just when to call us.<br />
I’m a little relieved<br />
to know he is with you,<br />
to know where he is at all.<br />
Tell him, if he gets restless,<br />
that I am thinking of him,<br />
and I’ll return the favor.<br />
Maybe we’ll both write hundreds<br />
of poems this year,<br />
sharing this slim, blond, bearded<br />
lover, keeping him earthbound,<br />
wearing him down to domestic,<br />
that unreliable Muse.<br />
POETRY READINGS<br />
are like that:<br />
your exit solitary<br />
as your arrival<br />
not to be fooled<br />
by the promiscuous heap<br />
of coats at the door,<br />
or the applause<br />
which scarcely conceals<br />
the shuffle of chairs<br />
and notebook leaves;<br />
or those obsidian eyes<br />
that beam back everything<br />
one says, fit neither<br />
for sight nor selfreflection.<br />
Sometimes you leave<br />
with but the taste<br />
of one great poem<br />
lingering —<br />
sometimes it was yours<br />
to give.<br />
Like that,<br />
you say, yet I have<br />
hope for more than that,<br />
for poems more bronze<br />
than potato chip, epics<br />
more fire than glutamate,<br />
lyrics more subtle<br />
than sweeteners,<br />
hungry, pit bull verse<br />
anaconda twining<br />
piranha bite<br />
nerve end and ganglia.<br />
127
Instead you tell me<br />
I’m doomed to hear<br />
a reading of limericks,<br />
some office memoranda<br />
and passionate bills<br />
of lading; perhaps<br />
some neolithic chants<br />
recited by chanellers<br />
for the dead;<br />
the angry howl<br />
of class struggle —<br />
my poems, I say, want touched,<br />
bristling with verbs, tongued<br />
with significant commas,<br />
lonely, they do not sleep<br />
well alone, resent<br />
an audience of one.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y turn in their bed,<br />
accuse me<br />
when I come home<br />
like that.<br />
PATHETIQUE SYMPHONY<br />
We come to the windows<br />
on rainy nights.<br />
Dogs bay behind us.<br />
We press our hands and faces<br />
against the panes.<br />
<strong>The</strong> waltz beyond the curtains<br />
lures women and men<br />
to brazen whirl,<br />
hands so daring and confident,<br />
slim waists turning,<br />
strong legs keeping time.<br />
We hear the beat<br />
but not the melody,<br />
we see the figures<br />
but not their visages,<br />
barred by lace and lock,<br />
senses numbed by leaded glass,<br />
by the storm behind us.<br />
Do they know we are watching?<br />
<strong>The</strong> servants pass by,<br />
trays heaped with wines and sweets.<br />
No one comes to the curtain,<br />
128<br />
no lady, alarmed, cries out<br />
and points toward us,<br />
no one observes<br />
our hunchback silhouettes<br />
in lightning fire.<br />
No carriage came to take us.<br />
But then, we do not dance.<br />
We are in rags — the beggar’s children,<br />
half breeds and excommunicants.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y dance to threes,<br />
we only hear five/four in thunder time,<br />
lopsided beat of the lame man’s waltz.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e day we’ll sing at their misfortunes.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e night we’ll dance<br />
upon their graves.<br />
DECONSTRUCTION IN WISCONSIN<br />
He is the perfect critic.<br />
He brings his subjects home,<br />
bribes them with promises of glory.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n he drugs and dissects them,<br />
fries their biceps in a skillet,<br />
stews their livers,<br />
eats their hearts.<br />
<strong>The</strong> dull knife was chosen for cruelty.<br />
<strong>The</strong> victim should hear as well as feel<br />
his flesh being riven,<br />
veins torn with rip saws.<br />
He has ruined seventeen authors,<br />
still working on his doctorate!<br />
He is not fastidious:<br />
torsos of sonnets in the ‘fridge,<br />
a headless novel beneath the bed,<br />
fragments of verse in maggoty array<br />
upon the chairs and tables.<br />
His victims’ intentions,<br />
their very will to life,<br />
can only make him smile.<br />
He knows better.<br />
His is the discerning eye.<br />
He is here to deconstruct.<br />
Attend his lectures and he’ll<br />
reveal the secret:<br />
Literature is meat.
UNEMPLOYED<br />
to the Modern Language <strong>As</strong>sociation<br />
A Muse, disheartened, walks the streets these days,<br />
not in accustomed neighborhoods, no longer visiting<br />
the solitary lamplit room, the airy loft or garret.<br />
Her diadem is shattered, her tresses shorn.<br />
Her robes trail in the gutter. <strong>On</strong>e of her sandals is torn.<br />
Gnawing a stale roll she tells the counterman,<br />
“It wasn’t always like this, you know.<br />
I was somebody. No one I favored<br />
was ever quite the same again. Poems and symphonies<br />
have been named for me.” He shrugs,<br />
refills the pitiful spinster’s cup.<br />
She eyes her soiled bundles, piled by the door —<br />
all she owns — a wand, a sheaf of paper (blank),<br />
a music score with empty staves,<br />
an artist’s pad uncharcoaled,<br />
a wad of amorphous clay.<br />
“So what?” another diner jibes.<br />
“We all got troubles. <strong>The</strong> banks have closed.<br />
<strong>The</strong> crooks have looted everything.<br />
Even when you get a job,<br />
the goddamned government takes half<br />
of everything!”<br />
She sips her coffee silently. Alone of all<br />
the downtown derelicts she’s bankrupt by decree.<br />
Over and over she reads the wadded clipping<br />
from the English professors’ convention,<br />
where it was solemnly declared:<br />
CREATIVE GENIUS DOES NOT EXIST.<br />
She doesn’t know where to sleep tonight —<br />
the library porch with the pigeons?<br />
the stairwell next to the museum?<br />
the alley behind the college bookstore?<br />
Or perhaps, if this goes on,<br />
the shallow depth of the tar-black river?<br />
129
DEAD POETS<br />
thirteen thousand lady poets<br />
Poe said<br />
gave all their verse away —<br />
no wonder he starved!<br />
too many poets,<br />
that’s the problem!<br />
too many living<br />
poets,<br />
not enough glory fodder<br />
to feed us!<br />
what’s a poet to do?<br />
Become a Dead Poet!<br />
It’s a guaranteed path<br />
to glory, fame and immortality!<br />
<strong>The</strong>re’s the Memorial Reading.<br />
Your friends will come.<br />
Writers who barely knew you<br />
pen verse in your honor.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n you appear<br />
in the best anthologies —<br />
something about closed brackets<br />
around your years<br />
seems to appeal to editors.<br />
Critics discover you<br />
(they never feed on anything living)<br />
repeat your words<br />
and have their way with your meaning —<br />
no one cries rape<br />
when words are ravished —<br />
It matters little that your neighbors<br />
have forgotten you —<br />
already the next tenant<br />
shops for oven cleaner/<br />
new tools in the garage/<br />
oblivious traffic hums on the bridge/<br />
It does not count<br />
that everyone you slept with<br />
is bedding down<br />
with the worst surviving haikuists,<br />
that even your best beloved<br />
has put your books in the cellar —<br />
130<br />
what’s temporal fame<br />
when someone can write<br />
a doctoral thesis<br />
on your use of caesura,<br />
your bittersweet alliteration?<br />
So do it quick —<br />
perish and publish!<br />
WHO CAN BE A POET<br />
ALL THE TIME?<br />
Who can be a poet all the time?<br />
<strong>The</strong> sons of rich fathers,<br />
remittance men —<br />
spinster heiresses with hyacinth hair,<br />
filling long sheets with<br />
delicate verse —<br />
the wrinkled don retired at last<br />
to his monument of sonnets —<br />
the very young — the truly mad —<br />
the Muse-possessed<br />
(not just visited, inhabited<br />
by the poem-urge) —<br />
But for the rest of us,<br />
being a poet<br />
is at best an illusion,<br />
at worst a vice.<br />
A thing of glory, certainly;<br />
honor or profit?<br />
not in this age!<br />
We migrant poets must distill<br />
into a hundred poems,<br />
the brandy of their thousands,<br />
lift up our frail mimosa leaves<br />
beneath their skyconsuming<br />
oaks.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y are at it, day and night.<br />
<strong>The</strong> mail truck groans<br />
with their outgoing manuscripts.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y teach this stuff.<br />
Honest to God, they are paid to do it!<br />
<strong>The</strong>y sniff at one<br />
another’s résumés.<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir blurbs adorn<br />
each other’s jackets.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y are weighed down with medals.
<strong>The</strong> rest of us must steal these hours,<br />
scrawl debtors’ ink<br />
on dime-store paper,<br />
consort with the Muse<br />
as though adulterous,<br />
secret as those frenzies<br />
in the alleys of Sodom<br />
between the angels<br />
and the damned.<br />
In the anvil world we live in<br />
we are impractical, slothful,<br />
lounging for adjectives<br />
when we should be “working,”<br />
shouting our newfound lines<br />
against the surf,<br />
to the dead in graveyards,<br />
to the astonished grackles<br />
on our window ledge —<br />
absolutely useless, this<br />
non-commercial, anti-<br />
Puritan ethic obsession —<br />
Except that for these moments<br />
we would nothing trade,<br />
knowing that those who follow us<br />
would forfeit fortunes<br />
for such a poetic seizure,<br />
for a mouthful of words.<br />
DIAGNOSIS OF E.A. POE<br />
Poe, rabid? Never!<br />
A doctor avers<br />
from a yellow medical chart<br />
that Edgar died<br />
in Baltimore,<br />
not in the drunk<br />
delirium<br />
of the election night gutter,<br />
not walked like a zombie<br />
from poll to tavern,<br />
tavern to poll,<br />
signing ballots in shaking hand<br />
as Edgar Montresor<br />
and Allan Pym,<br />
Hop-Frog De La Poer<br />
and Edgardo Prospero—<br />
no, not this,<br />
but a terminal case<br />
of rabies.<br />
<strong>The</strong> question is<br />
what bit him?<br />
Was it a fleeting bat,<br />
a crouching wolf<br />
in some graveyard,<br />
a foaming-mouth hound<br />
at the tavern door,<br />
a squirrel<br />
he reached out to feed,<br />
ungrateful!<br />
Or out of the inky night<br />
did a red-eyed raven<br />
descend, raking its claws,<br />
its unforgiving beak<br />
across his forehead?<br />
Poe, rabid? Never!<br />
He was immune, I say!<br />
He had the scars<br />
of wounds long healed —<br />
the pestilential bite<br />
of the critics,<br />
of his Judas Reverend<br />
Griswold,<br />
the lamprey fangs<br />
of New York lady poets.<br />
_____________<br />
Note: After Poe was driven out of New York<br />
society by squabbling admirers, and after the<br />
New York poetesses interfered in his<br />
courtship of Sarah Helen Whitman, a<br />
Providence poet and eligible widow, Poe<br />
disowned them all, writing, “I shall forever<br />
shun the pestilential society of lady poets.”<br />
131
AGAINST THE WRITING<br />
OF SONNETS*<br />
This is a concentration camp for words.<br />
Barbed wire is twisted every other beat,<br />
Five steps to posts where perch<br />
the sickly birds<br />
Who caw and mock the drum<br />
of marching feet.<br />
Say there is order here, that granite Will<br />
Can herd our random, halting thoughts<br />
to rhyme;<br />
Say, if you dare, that you would<br />
rather kill<br />
<strong>The</strong> genius than reveal the tyrant’s<br />
crime;<br />
How you prefer the ordered life to one<br />
Where Chaos and the subtle spark of fire<br />
Might topple gods with but<br />
a phrase begun<br />
And uttered freely with an untuned lyre.<br />
Sing hard, and let the prison pillars fall,<br />
Crushing our captors, guards —<br />
and Muses—all!<br />
______<br />
* William Carlos Williams rejected the sonnet<br />
as a “fascist” form.<br />
RHAPSODOMANCY<br />
At loss for inspiration I turn<br />
to my Occult Encyclopedia,<br />
open the book at random<br />
to see what curious lore<br />
I might deem worthy<br />
of a passing verse.<br />
Maybe a curse,<br />
a spell, an oracle or two…<br />
<strong>The</strong> book falls open<br />
somewhere at “R,”<br />
I let my finger<br />
(the oracular one)<br />
fly out to the left<br />
until it touches.<br />
I look and read.<br />
“Rhapsodomancy,” it says,<br />
132<br />
“Divination by means<br />
of opening the works<br />
of a poet at hazard<br />
and reading the verse<br />
which first presents itself<br />
oracularly.”<br />
I laugh.<br />
So poets don’t need<br />
advice on magic.<br />
We are magic.<br />
OF THE MAKING OF BOOKS<br />
1973<br />
What is it about ink<br />
poised over virgin paper<br />
if pen, a word at a time,<br />
why not a press,<br />
page upon page repeating?<br />
Plate, blanket, roller,<br />
compressor, roller, sucker, gripper<br />
(the guts of unromantic offset<br />
supplanting Gutenberg)<br />
the lift and thrust of the sheet<br />
no hand has touched,<br />
the slurring commingle<br />
of ink and water in foaming fountain<br />
till stanza follows stanza<br />
canto and chapter —<br />
sheaves to be folded and sewn<br />
into a hundred books,<br />
five hundred books!<br />
I call it making paper babies,<br />
my dingy loft on Sixth Avenue<br />
a hatching hive of chapbooks.<br />
I sat on the fire escape<br />
outside my soot-grime windows.<br />
<strong>The</strong> moon has long since set,<br />
street dark in cast-iron canyons.<br />
It is insufferable August —<br />
I want to sleep in coolness —<br />
the press churns on behind me,<br />
the infeed pile diminishing,<br />
the finished sheets descending.
I know its sound like a heartbeat,<br />
just how long I can linger<br />
before the ink needs tending.<br />
I watch the late-night drifters below:<br />
rag pickers and winos and psychopaths,<br />
a junkie laden with burglar tools<br />
eyeing each storefront,<br />
some swearing brawlers<br />
from the lesbian cycle bar<br />
around the corner,<br />
the blur of cabs with<br />
rolled-down windows,<br />
blear-eyed drivers barreling<br />
in homeward trucks,<br />
the dilatory patrol car<br />
beaming the doorways<br />
for sleeping bums<br />
or a glimpse of frenzied sodomy.<br />
Inside, I empty the paper bins.<br />
It is three a.m. I can still print<br />
another signature, wait out<br />
the early dawn on the fire escape.<br />
I cannot sleep anyway.<br />
Sometimes it seems I work<br />
for the machine.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re has been little profit in this,<br />
yet everywhere I go in this rusted city<br />
poets are gathering.<br />
A multitude of hands lift up<br />
these books.<br />
In chorus they chant<br />
Just off the press<br />
My latest<br />
Please buy one<br />
1996<br />
<strong>The</strong> cast-iron street is floodlit now<br />
the columns as white as marble<br />
bed bath and book and clothing stores<br />
draw thousands here. I always pause<br />
to look up at the forgotten loft<br />
where I began my consummate folly.<br />
I have dragged this book madness<br />
two decades now. My closets explode<br />
with unsold volumes,<br />
projects half bound<br />
and then abandoned, the beached whale<br />
guillotine cutter in my bedroom.<br />
<strong>The</strong> poets I published are dying off:<br />
the Village Sibyl Barbara Holland gone,<br />
now Emilie Glen, my poetry mother.<br />
I hear it said at her memorial<br />
that these things mattered after all,<br />
that little books are voyagers,<br />
bottle messages into indifferent seas,<br />
rockets to the future.<br />
In this world of too many books,<br />
so much bad verse and rotten prose,<br />
it is hard to believe it.<br />
Yet it was thus with Poe,<br />
Whitman and Dickinson.<br />
Barbara haunts Morton Street,<br />
and Emilie, Barrow.<br />
<strong>On</strong>ly their books wing onwards,<br />
perching on brownstone rooftops,<br />
flapping their shiny covers,<br />
ready to plunge when least expected,<br />
open to that page,<br />
that singular poem,<br />
that line with its magic<br />
in words that stay.<br />
133
FINALISTS — CHRISTIAN LADIES’<br />
POETRY SOCIETY COMPETITION.<br />
MARCH TOPIC: “BABIES”<br />
I. INFANT BREATH<br />
Dictated by Maudlin Carroll<br />
(Note to self: Must win this!<br />
What to write about babies?<br />
Cute? Dead? Fetuses?<br />
No, no, sick babies!)<br />
O baby pink and soft,<br />
O Heaven’s gift,<br />
so feeble at my bosom<br />
(can I say bosom?)<br />
wheezing and crying.<br />
You cannot sleep<br />
for God the Father<br />
who sees & knows all<br />
has given you asthma.<br />
Your every breath<br />
is a gagging Golgotha.<br />
How can this be?<br />
Is it something<br />
the parents did?<br />
Did Satan creep in<br />
to the nursery?<br />
Out, Satan! Out, Demons!<br />
Mistress Maudlin on her knees here.<br />
I may be only a babysitter,<br />
but I’m better than medicine.<br />
Throw those pills away!<br />
Open a channel! Open a channel!<br />
I hold the baby against me.<br />
It’s wheezing, wheezing.<br />
I pray, squeeze,<br />
pray<br />
squeeze<br />
(Note to self:<br />
look up correct Saints to evoke<br />
from Catholic Enyclopedia)<br />
Oh, thank you, Lord.<br />
134<br />
<strong>The</strong> baby is quiet now.<br />
Completely quiet.<br />
Hardly breathing.<br />
Not … breathing.<br />
Oh dear, what have I done?<br />
(Note to self: don’t send this<br />
to the Christian Ladies’<br />
Baby Contest)<br />
(Note to self: burn this.)<br />
****<br />
II<br />
MY BABY<br />
by Chastity Mugwich<br />
See my baby.<br />
It’s sicker than yours.<br />
No fault of mine,<br />
no crime passed on.<br />
Clean I am,<br />
washed by the Lamb<br />
of all trace<br />
of Original Sin<br />
(no ring of crime<br />
around this collar!)<br />
Your baby is plain,<br />
its sickness vulgar.<br />
<strong>As</strong>thma! Poppycock!<br />
Look at my baby.<br />
His tiny hands are bleeding,<br />
holes in his ankles<br />
the size of penny nails.<br />
Of course he’s crying!<br />
look at that gash<br />
in his torso!<br />
Lift his ringlets now<br />
and see the perfect circle<br />
of never-healing<br />
little thorn pricks.<br />
My baby is special, you see.<br />
He has the holy sickness,<br />
Stigmata!<br />
******
III<br />
MY LITTLE ANGEL<br />
Name withheld by request<br />
My baby doesn’t cry.<br />
Look how he beams.<br />
See that glow<br />
above his forehead.<br />
It’s not the sun:<br />
it follows him day and night.<br />
See these presents:<br />
mountains of toys,<br />
fragrant spices,<br />
gold bars and platinum<br />
from his trio of godfathers.<br />
Say what you want.<br />
Make fun of me,<br />
unwed mother.<br />
You’ll all be sorry<br />
when my little boy<br />
splits the earth<br />
like a walnut<br />
and all the dead pop up.<br />
Laugh all you want<br />
at my food stamp life.<br />
I hear you whispering<br />
as I nurse my little one.<br />
I know you’re watching<br />
in the silence beyond<br />
those pillow-covered walls.<br />
I’ll never tell,<br />
I’ll never tell<br />
Who the father was.<br />
135
THE SHY ONE<br />
NOT A LOVE SONG, NO, NEVER THAT!<br />
What use to tell you now —<br />
you’ve held these poems in your hand<br />
like objects made for someone else —<br />
that your mahogany eyes<br />
inspired these orphaned odes?<br />
I polished them<br />
that you might see yourself,<br />
transformed<br />
in coat of myth<br />
within their glassy hearts,<br />
to no avail.<br />
Our dialogue descends<br />
to means of gravity:<br />
this ode I’ll wrap<br />
around a meteor.<br />
Perhaps when you wake<br />
to find my verse<br />
has cratered your lawn,<br />
perhaps when the hole<br />
in your roof gapes out<br />
upon the streaking Leonids<br />
of my passion,<br />
you might perceive,<br />
at last,<br />
a personal intent<br />
to my art.<br />
THE COMPANY OF EAGLES<br />
Your promises loom ahead of me,<br />
the swelling egg of them<br />
ready to burst<br />
at the nudge of a clock.<br />
<strong>The</strong> phone wire, door chime<br />
repeat expectant silences,<br />
anticipate your wingbeats.<br />
Your promise<br />
of an intimate visit,<br />
the just the two of us<br />
136<br />
at the corner of your beak —<br />
what will come of it?<br />
Those predator eggs you guard<br />
may come between us,<br />
and if they hatch,<br />
what then of dinner and wine<br />
and candlelight?<br />
Will the eaglets shrug<br />
at my proffered feast,<br />
go off instead<br />
to some mountain eyrie<br />
to preen and pick their feathers clean?<br />
Or will they just pose<br />
by the dining room door,<br />
sip tea with their beaks,<br />
stamping a tango<br />
on my harpsichord?<br />
Will they stay for the night,<br />
make nests of my furniture,<br />
pick my wallet clean for stuffing?<br />
Will they be satisfied with poems?<br />
If all the flock, unlettered,<br />
go streaming away<br />
when the lights are dimmed,<br />
will you remain<br />
to hear me out,<br />
to loan me your wingspan,<br />
your shadow, your mute<br />
but overarching company?<br />
Perhaps your icon is false,<br />
your place on flag and coin,<br />
seal and warplane<br />
not merited.<br />
Bird-killing bird,<br />
rabbit hunter,<br />
assassin of squirrels,<br />
sneak thief of cub and pup<br />
and kitten —<br />
what kind of country<br />
picks a raptor bandit<br />
for its emblem, anyway?
MAKING LOVE IN UNLIKELY PLACES<br />
the places<br />
have not changed:<br />
our deerwatch tree<br />
the tombstone seats<br />
that sheltered us<br />
the nightpew darkness<br />
of candled church<br />
where we once loved<br />
the same birds nest,<br />
the same dead sleep,<br />
the same god promises<br />
his immanence.<br />
you always asked<br />
why here?<br />
because our loving<br />
carved an anchorhold:<br />
I undress you forever<br />
beneath this tree<br />
press you lake-wet<br />
against this stone<br />
drop sacrilegious kisses<br />
in our pew-length fall.<br />
It never ends<br />
because the place endures.<br />
ODE 15<br />
1<br />
Another year,<br />
the sun resembles itself<br />
but does not fool the trees<br />
who shun its cool imposture.<br />
Buds open reluctantly,<br />
their slanted eyes askew<br />
with annual doubts.<br />
It is never the same,<br />
each lap of light a ghost<br />
of former springs, each ray<br />
a waning monument<br />
from where a darkling star<br />
gluts space<br />
with ever diminishing mass.<br />
<strong>The</strong> universe forgets itself—<br />
an idiot sun implodes<br />
into a fathomless mouth,<br />
both feaster and food<br />
adjourning to nothingness<br />
at the event horizon.<br />
<strong>The</strong> earth spins blindly on.<br />
2<br />
I have not lost you.<br />
Your disassembled eye<br />
rides in another’s skull today.<br />
Your disconnected arm<br />
hooks onto mine at dusk.<br />
Tonight before I sleep<br />
your mouth surprises me.<br />
It is better this way—<br />
each bit of you a ghost<br />
returning on an X-ray wind.<br />
Each day an icy shard of you<br />
drops off some glacial height<br />
onto an unsuspecting face,<br />
as though the gods that made you,<br />
singular, had tried to make another.<br />
<strong>The</strong> universe deceives itself.<br />
Though ardent spring explodes<br />
upon the feathered fields,<br />
it is a new spring, slate clean,<br />
the past — if there is a past —<br />
amnesia’d in wormhole transit<br />
to the fiercely blazing present.<br />
I wait in solitude. If ghosts<br />
present themselves, they’ll rage<br />
because they cannot say their names.<br />
If phantom faces seem to be yours,<br />
I love them for the lie they speak<br />
of being you.<br />
137
ODE 22: A HAUNTING<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is a time —<br />
the unseen interlude<br />
between the twelve-top<br />
and the descending one<br />
(the dark-side moon<br />
of the clock face) —<br />
in which you await me.<br />
<strong>The</strong> painted stars<br />
upon that vault of heaven<br />
can neither set<br />
nor circle the Pole Star.<br />
<strong>The</strong> trees<br />
on that horizon<br />
have turned resplendent gold,<br />
but no leaves fall<br />
upon the perfect polygons<br />
of paving stones.<br />
<strong>The</strong> moon<br />
hangs full in copper hues<br />
a permanent sphere<br />
no longer dieting<br />
in giddy cycles.<br />
<strong>The</strong> night<br />
bears warming breezes<br />
but no hint of dawn.<br />
You are there<br />
like the sleeping stones,<br />
the eternal dead,<br />
the ever-refilling<br />
sea —<br />
I cannot join you.<br />
Not for me<br />
your geologic stillness,<br />
your celestial patience.<br />
My clock<br />
ascends to midnight,<br />
tumbles to dawn.<br />
I do not count the heartbeat<br />
between dimensions,<br />
never taste water<br />
at the cusp of poison,<br />
never permit silence<br />
to reveal your breathing.<br />
138<br />
It is enough<br />
that you are there,<br />
a ghost in my synapses,<br />
psychokinetic<br />
within the pendulum,<br />
a spring that never relaxes.<br />
You are my bottle imp<br />
of unsought kisses,<br />
a jinn from whom<br />
I make no wishes.<br />
<strong>As</strong>leep,<br />
I am beyond your<br />
eye-blink affections,<br />
your mercury promises.<br />
Your name<br />
is not the one I call;<br />
your immaterial hand<br />
is not the one I touch;<br />
your form is not<br />
the pressing thing<br />
that pins me to the bed<br />
as I hear the chimes<br />
and count thirteen.<br />
FRONTIER<br />
Frontier is defined<br />
as that which beyond<br />
which is irrevocable danger:<br />
eternal dusk<br />
beyond the clearing of forest,<br />
the padding wolf,<br />
the lurking Savage/<br />
a book of white pages<br />
where no pen has gone,<br />
dune after dune<br />
unstained by ink/<br />
the distance between us:<br />
our hands have not yet touched<br />
and hesitate as though<br />
some killing amperage<br />
lurked in opposing poles/
the terror of first buttons,<br />
of touching turned explorer,<br />
of the point beyond play<br />
where fiercer passions lie/<br />
frontier at last is seen<br />
as where you cannot go forward<br />
without becoming citizen<br />
of my dark kingdom,<br />
and where I cannot<br />
return without some victory —<br />
a champagn’d kiss,<br />
a falling together,<br />
a storm-lit moment<br />
of sky-impaling joy.<br />
Or is it our doom to stand,<br />
each at our wall,<br />
because you wait for some divinity<br />
to raise you up to lofty love?<br />
How long until you learn at last<br />
that gods were never men,<br />
nor mortals divine?<br />
ODE 14<br />
You think you are alone.<br />
I watch your hands<br />
flash white<br />
at turn of page,<br />
follow your eyes<br />
from line to line.<br />
Hands do not blush,<br />
the reading eye<br />
cannot avert,<br />
the mind<br />
does not suspect<br />
my omnipresence.<br />
Counting the beat<br />
your fingers trace<br />
these lines.<br />
You even whisper them<br />
as though my ear<br />
were intimate.<br />
You never suspect<br />
I dream of you,<br />
touch back<br />
your outreached consciousness,<br />
concealed like boy in shrubbery,<br />
lover in moonlit garden,<br />
writing a serenade<br />
anonymous,<br />
stalking this poem,<br />
alert between letters,<br />
casting my net from stanzas<br />
to catch you.<br />
CONTACT<br />
I know we said we’d never —<br />
but for a moment today<br />
we passed a foot apart<br />
on the angry pavement,<br />
sun in your eyes,<br />
the snow in mine.<br />
<strong>The</strong> edges of our shadows touched,<br />
an overlap of gray penumbras.<br />
My shadow dips down to page<br />
with its own pen.<br />
It gets there first,<br />
mocks my writing<br />
with invisible ink,<br />
writes words<br />
in a nearly forgotten tongue —<br />
O nuit cendré,<br />
sous l’ombre de la lune—<br />
la où un spectre resuscité<br />
se chante,<br />
son sang enteint d’une rouille noire,<br />
son oeil Cyclope,<br />
comme un abime d’onyx...<br />
_______<br />
Translation: O ashen night<br />
beneath the shadow of the moon—<br />
where a risen ghost<br />
sings to itself<br />
its blood a black rust<br />
its Cyclops eye<br />
like an abyss of onyx...<br />
139
ODE 8<br />
What I would say to you is not in words.<br />
Lips move to speak it but fall to silence.<br />
Your name poised there on my inhaling breath<br />
Refuses to go out again exhaled.<br />
You passed, and did not know I called to you!<br />
What matters your name suspended in air,<br />
when you could speak to me in flush of neck,<br />
in blood’s rampaging beat, in arching back,<br />
in thrust and out of quickly tautened thighs?<br />
You comprehend my eyes when they blurt out<br />
what I would seize, and what surrender.<br />
My thoughts have burned your flesh, my ardent will<br />
has rent the wall, the room, the barricade<br />
of cloth between us. Give me but one touch,<br />
one chance to change the no upon your lips<br />
to the animal yes within your limbs!<br />
Your arms reply to unsaid sentences,<br />
your soul comes forth from lonely catacombs<br />
to join with me. We are a rhapsody<br />
of fingers dancing, hair entwining, legs<br />
in a quilt of crab and spider quivering,<br />
until a flash of lightning consummate<br />
thunders and flares to pass between us.<br />
Who gave? Who took? Whose seed is where?<br />
Make we a child? a poem? a demon of air?<br />
What I would say to you is not contained in words,<br />
though I must be content to live in them.<br />
This hollow rib-cage symphony of one,<br />
unpartnered dance of single skeleton,<br />
is how my melancholy half calls out,<br />
summons in silence what no words can dare!<br />
140
NOT A LOVE SONG, NO, NEVER THAT!<br />
1<br />
At last I have found you,<br />
but you do not know you are found.<br />
We dance a circle;<br />
you move as though you know the step —<br />
you do not know the melody.<br />
Each turn centrifugal pushes us out<br />
from the center where all<br />
must finally touch.<br />
You make no gesture to hold me,<br />
but every parting says Come back.<br />
If my eyes speak truth, the midnight hunger,<br />
you pretend not to see it.<br />
It is, perhaps, your kindness not to.<br />
Like a sparrow I take my shreds of encouragement,<br />
make them a pillow in the shape of your torso,<br />
an incomplete reflection<br />
a shattered Greek marble<br />
that I embrace before sleeping.<br />
I resolve never to tell you,<br />
unless by chance you read this,<br />
how you have companion’d my dreams,<br />
how I would trade the touch of your fingertips<br />
for an empire of another’s kisses.<br />
I shall be impossible to dislodge<br />
from my seeming friendship. My roots<br />
are deeper than I can let you know.<br />
I can endure your silence, your absence even.<br />
I can make airy transcendence of all<br />
except your ultimate refusal.<br />
Ah, that I delay! That is my stratagem!<br />
You must never suspect that I love you!<br />
2<br />
Expecting you’d never love me<br />
I had no stratagem. Defenseless I lay<br />
like tree refusing a hurricane,<br />
bending to its airy thrust,<br />
enduring in silence its hammerfist.<br />
And thus you came, uprooting me<br />
from sense and reason.<br />
I was upright, impossible to touch<br />
except in formal ways<br />
(so much in a handshake, a hand<br />
lightly laid upon shoulder).<br />
Now I am horizontal, pinned<br />
beneath your will,<br />
your arms my sky, your breath<br />
the outer limits of my cosmos.<br />
141
Lightning erupts<br />
between our fingertips,<br />
empires expire<br />
before our tongue-filled kiss<br />
exhausts itself.<br />
<strong>The</strong> secret I kept is no secret.<br />
You had read between the lines.<br />
<strong>The</strong> reconstructed gods, perhaps,<br />
came to your dreams and said<br />
the things I dared not tell you.<br />
I pull you down toward me —<br />
it is as though I embrace a world —<br />
fierce with eagles and ruby’d heart —<br />
pulsing with rivers subterranean —<br />
At last you have found me.<br />
I did not know I was found.<br />
3<br />
This night I have bound you.<br />
Soundless you lay in your moonlit bed.<br />
<strong>The</strong> dancing is finished now,<br />
the candles guttered, the incense dead.<br />
<strong>The</strong> symphony of contested wills,<br />
the tug-of-war and centrifuge<br />
led to the touch that kills.<br />
Your terrified screams revolt me —<br />
your shudder when I touch you tenderly<br />
slaps me as magnet fields repelling —<br />
but still your eyes say Stay!<br />
You push my overarching frame<br />
yet hold your strength at bay.<br />
Your midnight hunger is for pain,<br />
for pleasure taken at your body’s cost.<br />
It is my kindness to refrain<br />
from seeking the false coin of your consent.<br />
My eagle talons shred your breast —<br />
You gasp and bleed and call for more—<br />
I’ll wing you up into my eyrie nest,<br />
Embed my beak in your aortal core.<br />
Though you’re alive and wishing death,<br />
I will dismember and reassemble you<br />
within my house of broken idols —<br />
god busts, fragments of athletes,<br />
storm-tossed remains of graveyard angels.<br />
You love this violence<br />
but never tell me so,<br />
unless by chance I read it<br />
142
when I invade and spy your dreams.<br />
I was with the incubus, the succubus,<br />
the Cossack, the Nubian<br />
the Grand Inquisitor,<br />
the sailors, the motorcyclists,<br />
the Roman legions<br />
who peopled your moist and passive nocturnes.<br />
<strong>The</strong>irs was an empire of lust,<br />
mine the throne.<br />
I am the Emperor twice deified —<br />
already dead<br />
and thus impossible to kill.<br />
You cannot dislodge my iron embrace,<br />
my root has entered you.<br />
You can endure my motions, my molten fire:<br />
you may even grow to like them.<br />
But that I delay! That is my stratagem.<br />
Now my unwelcome face is all you see.<br />
I am the thing you loathe, that loves you —<br />
the hunchback, the phantom, the night-bred bat,<br />
the child the mother scorned, the father beat,<br />
a thing the grave refused, condemned<br />
to stalk the shadows of your undead sleep.<br />
You must never divulge that you love me.<br />
LIGHT YEARS<br />
Love someone, cold star,<br />
that I may someday hear of it.<br />
Love anyone, blink out<br />
if you must to black hole suicide<br />
to prove the depth of your feeling.<br />
Go nova! Fill up the galaxy<br />
with the news of your passion.<br />
Make our sun blush<br />
to see the blaze of your triumph.<br />
Be not like me, a sullen star,<br />
a white dwarf, dwindling,<br />
a tremulant pulsar,<br />
bypassed by all<br />
in this expanding<br />
universe.<br />
143
ODE 19: LOVED ONES<br />
Loved ones, the early dawn’s<br />
illusion-loves<br />
seem still the finest<br />
though rippled dead<br />
in the sea of years<br />
Loved ones<br />
for whom mere sight<br />
was swooning,<br />
words full<br />
of double, triple meaning,<br />
eternal prospects,<br />
each falling into<br />
and out of<br />
as certain and final<br />
as the death of dinosaurs.<br />
Loved ones<br />
afloat a haunted lake —<br />
desperate trees,<br />
bone-dry bird nests<br />
a brambled heart<br />
wintering on promises,<br />
utopias delayed<br />
in permafrost,<br />
star-speckled night<br />
nerved with nebulas.<br />
Yearning was more<br />
than having,<br />
as every elm tree<br />
leaned with me<br />
toward the absent beloved.<br />
Loved ones<br />
outgrew those student days,<br />
subsumed to normalcy,<br />
sank like a stone to suicide,<br />
took up the faith.<br />
<strong>The</strong> stars I named for my beloved<br />
shrug off their brightness, shamed<br />
at their worldly outcome.<br />
Pursue the Beloved,<br />
a Sufi advises me.<br />
It seems I hurled them skyward —<br />
Andromeda and Venus,<br />
Mars and Ganymede—<br />
I am too fixed a star,<br />
my orbit limited<br />
144<br />
(evading black holes<br />
of death & depression,<br />
wobbling a little<br />
when some new planet approaches)<br />
Loved ones<br />
escaped me:<br />
the more they changed<br />
the more immutable<br />
the past became,<br />
as what they were<br />
and what I am<br />
danced endlessly<br />
in Autumn air.<br />
ODE 20: DESERT SONG<br />
To you, who in the West<br />
sift sand and sorrow<br />
in the shadow of scorpions —<br />
I send you Spring.<br />
Your swollen sun<br />
has seared the desert,<br />
parched the throat songless —<br />
the rap of rattlesnakes,<br />
drum of earthquake,<br />
suffice for sonnets —<br />
Your brittle wind<br />
comes cloudless<br />
bearing a hostile clarity.<br />
It is a place<br />
where nothing much happens<br />
except by stealth,<br />
like the subtle growth of cacti.<br />
A semblance of love<br />
rolls by in sagebrush,<br />
a furtive kiss<br />
like a coyote in the scrub,<br />
your heartbeat alone<br />
in ghost town stillness.<br />
Turquoise and silver<br />
are sky and water<br />
petrified, fit wealth<br />
for mummified warriors,<br />
hammered and joined
so that no flood<br />
or thunderbolt<br />
can break their geologic calm.<br />
Come back<br />
to the enveloping East —<br />
our hanging gardens still<br />
bloom and blossom —<br />
to hills where rain clouds linger,<br />
where symphonies spring<br />
like astonished ferns<br />
from every stream bed.<br />
Leave to the desert<br />
its golden nuggets,<br />
its neolithic defeats,<br />
its meteor-scarred wastes.<br />
I send you this sprig of lilac,<br />
this magnolia explosion,<br />
this weeping willow branch,<br />
this bloom of carnelian cherry.<br />
RENUNCIATION<br />
I rose at dawn, looked down upon<br />
the length of you asleep there,<br />
moon-like, your naked back<br />
curved down<br />
to slightest waist, the white of you<br />
more luminous than silk, and softer.<br />
I lay back down beside you then,<br />
cupping the curve of you against<br />
my sleepless breathing. Your stillness,<br />
a pearl’s perfection in the shell —<br />
did it ignore, or take me in?<br />
Was my entwined embrace your wish,<br />
or a thing you merely endured<br />
below the threshold of wakefulness?<br />
It was too real — not real enough! —<br />
this summer night — this thing you said<br />
you always wanted, yet withheld,<br />
a consummation I wished too,<br />
yet kept at bay like a tiger.<br />
Now one night’s storm has sated us.<br />
It was the grape — not you —<br />
that spoke.<br />
By the time you said you loved me<br />
it did not matter who I was —<br />
only that I was there, and willing.<br />
***<br />
Riding the southward bus, I watch<br />
the gray New England towns go by.<br />
I gaze as things become themselves,<br />
emerging from mist and darkness:<br />
these are not trees, but power poles,<br />
clouds are not blankets or curtains,<br />
but mere conflations of vapor.<br />
I lean my cheek against the chill<br />
of glass. I could be no one now,<br />
a cipher in a rattling morning bus,<br />
going from nowhere to nowhere,<br />
eating my lunch without thinking,<br />
ignoring my fellow passengers,<br />
hollow as a serial murderer.<br />
My hands that touched you<br />
now want to hide from me.<br />
<strong>The</strong> day draws on, and still<br />
these brickwork towns are all alike.<br />
Which one do you live in, anyway?<br />
What color are those eyes of yours?<br />
What bridges, streams and rotting mills<br />
are yours, what sunsets<br />
and diving crows,<br />
what steeples penetrating your view?<br />
Is every spinster shutter yours,<br />
are yours the hands<br />
drawing those shades to darkness?<br />
<strong>Are</strong> these drear trees the same<br />
sad troop that line your garden?<br />
<strong>The</strong> rancor of my leaving you<br />
pursues me thus like an ash cloud.<br />
Tall buildings loom, New York<br />
a tombstone row of granite, glass.<br />
It must be five o’clock — by now<br />
you’ve read the letter<br />
I propped upon your table top.<br />
I close my eyes. It rains<br />
inside my face.<br />
145
TRIPTYCH<br />
i<br />
Eros,<br />
you are a child no more:<br />
you have grown ripe for mouths to taste,<br />
tongued tender neck to shoulder line<br />
breast taut and sloping down where firm<br />
yet yielding to a poet’s fingers<br />
what dragons beneath the belly<br />
in longing flesh awakening!<br />
I set my eyes upon you now<br />
in your statue-perfect moment —<br />
ah, winged-foot kouros, do not move!<br />
Beneath your sandaled tread the earth<br />
indents and hardens, hungry clay.<br />
You swim the sea, delight the waves<br />
foam-white with arm- and legstrokes bold;<br />
when you turn back, the ebbing tide<br />
tugs out and downward, desperate,<br />
like a disappointed lover.<br />
Sea beasts thrust up green tentacles,<br />
amazed at your beauty, craving<br />
the hoarded air in your rib cage.<br />
Your vanished body, diving, mocks me.<br />
You cannot drown! <strong>The</strong> gods have much<br />
to utter through your vocal chords!<br />
A lifeguard zephyr transports you<br />
above, beyond the crashing surf.<br />
Eyes closed, you ride on mist and cloud,<br />
immobile as marble, your hair<br />
a boreal banner of gold<br />
across the blind, astonished sky.<br />
You do not see the eyes that watch you,<br />
do not acknowledge worshipers;<br />
your youth an uncrossable chasm.<br />
I hesitate to speak, my hand<br />
in greeting grasps you too lightly.<br />
You flee the seven-hilled city.<br />
I watch from a bench on the summit<br />
as you hurtle down Angel Street.<br />
Long I linger, long I watch for you<br />
as you turn down the twisted lanes.<br />
But you are always departing —<br />
your future is too much my past.<br />
146
You are too beautiful to touch,<br />
almost too beautiful to live<br />
in our tawdry and tarnished world,<br />
unbearable Phoebus, a searing star!<br />
2<br />
Philia,<br />
more rare than lust, more lasting,<br />
desiring all and yet beyond desire;<br />
the unseen walker-beside of dreamers,<br />
first ear to my poem, fresh from the pen.<br />
You are the comforter of solitudes,<br />
the perfect thou in silent communion.<br />
For you the bread is baked, the teapot full,<br />
the door unlocked, the sleeping place secure.<br />
If you come for a day, or forever,<br />
it is the same to me — what’s mine is yours.<br />
I swear I shall not pass a day with you<br />
unless it be filled with astonishing things.<br />
At night, the room you sleep in breathes with me,<br />
the darkness between us webbed with moonlight,<br />
cicadas heralding my dreamless sleep.<br />
Scarce half a dozen times I’ve met you now,<br />
soul mate and artist and fellow outsider.<br />
How many leagues we two together walked,<br />
how many ancient stones deciphered! Worlds<br />
turned within us as we riddled science;<br />
with thought alone we toppled cathedrals,<br />
lived in all ages and nations at once,<br />
counted as friends the poets and sages.<br />
(<strong>The</strong>se the mingled streams, the parting rivers,<br />
the memories that are always with me,<br />
friendship true in a world without honor,<br />
with brothers who choose us, and whom we choose.)<br />
3<br />
Agape,<br />
rarest and last of all the affections<br />
you are the solace of the spurned,<br />
of those who cannot trade<br />
in beauty’s coinage,<br />
the vestal hope of those<br />
whose love outlives the body —<br />
you are love’s eidolon.<br />
You are the stillness preceding dawn,<br />
the hush that follows the thunderclap:<br />
you are lord of all benevolent silences.<br />
147
Even the unremembered hermit<br />
can find your silken threads each morn,<br />
dropped like fine ash from the burning stars.<br />
Where you recite your enigmatic verse<br />
tribe, shade and totem slip away,<br />
and all become ensoul’d in one great heart.<br />
ii<br />
My beloved is three-faced,<br />
triptych in unity.<br />
Approached, he hesitates<br />
to give his name.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e name is not enough.<br />
Lust is too quickly slaked<br />
to hold him long, the vows<br />
of hollow fellowship too soon betrayed.<br />
No one suspects the aspirant god<br />
in his bones, defying weight,<br />
yearning toward the zenith.<br />
Am I to be your lover,<br />
brother,<br />
fellow spirit?<br />
Is my yearning for hair and bones?<br />
For hearth and soul mate?<br />
For winged companions to Olympus?<br />
I do not know,<br />
cannot define<br />
my troubled and troubling affections.<br />
And as for him,<br />
Adonis, Atys, Adonai,<br />
who knows what he means<br />
by being beautiful?<br />
148
THE WATCHER<br />
<strong>The</strong> love that does not touch,<br />
that makes no penetration,<br />
requires no mirror back to verify<br />
that what is real is real.<br />
This love excels all lovers.<br />
<strong>The</strong> unmailed letter superior<br />
to the letter returned unread,<br />
the passion that leaves the eye<br />
as a gift to beauty.<br />
Love thus, in secret, and love again.<br />
Enlarge the heart<br />
(O it has many chambers!)<br />
If the loved one be as oblivious<br />
as a fieldstone,<br />
so be it! Moss clings, sun warms,<br />
water wears down —<br />
there are many ways<br />
to make love to granite.<br />
You say the love you give<br />
is not returned to you?<br />
Leave to the bankers<br />
the keeping of balances,<br />
the squeezing out<br />
of interest.<br />
Love is returned, somehow,<br />
in the ease of future loving,<br />
the cavalcade of youth<br />
pressing on by<br />
as you watch from the café window,<br />
marveling there is so much in you<br />
beaming back at them,<br />
so many qualities and curves,<br />
neck napes and striding legs,<br />
sungold, raven black & pumpkin hair,<br />
and the gemstone eyes<br />
of onyx, turquoise, emerald and hazel —<br />
what would they be<br />
if you were not there to love them?<br />
what coal mine darkness<br />
would they walk in,<br />
if we did not spark them<br />
with our admiration?<br />
Be not jealous of touching.<br />
Does not the air,<br />
thick with the ghosts<br />
of the world’s love cries<br />
press down upon you?<br />
Do not the star lamps<br />
warm you? Does not the tide<br />
crash out your name<br />
upon the lonely cliffs?<br />
Without desire, the universe<br />
would cool to neutrons;<br />
the whirligig of being<br />
would slow to a stop.<br />
So storm out! radiate<br />
your unsought affections,<br />
the passing poet, taking nothing,<br />
giving all.<br />
SUMMER STORM<br />
I am standing in the rain.<br />
<strong>The</strong> summer cloudburst<br />
clots the sky, soaks me<br />
as I stand in the unmown grass<br />
behind the summer cottage.<br />
<strong>The</strong> clapboards, streaked and shining,<br />
reflect the corrugated bolts<br />
of jabbing lightning. I stay<br />
until the rain-lash wears me down.<br />
I have left your easy sleep,<br />
your clutching arms,<br />
in the attic that quakes<br />
with thunder and wind,<br />
air like lost bats against the panes.<br />
I lay down rain-wet beside you.<br />
<strong>The</strong> candle is guttering,<br />
exchanges flashes<br />
with the expiring tempest.<br />
In me, a furnace burns<br />
within a heart of brass.<br />
In reason’s engine<br />
there is no rain now.<br />
I watch you turn and toss.<br />
I try to feel nothing.<br />
To think that you love me<br />
is hubris anyway.<br />
All of your nights are sudden storms.<br />
149
CHILDREN OF ATLAS<br />
HERE AT THE MILLENNIUM<br />
Out of my sloth and sorrow I am called to write<br />
a hymn to struggle in the name of Mars.<br />
What does life want but more life?<br />
a shield, but a sword to clash against it?<br />
<strong>The</strong>se cold winds brace us: we are of the North.<br />
I am the herald of a war-like spirit.<br />
Why are so many babies being born,<br />
if not to lean<br />
their shoulders against the weight of planet,<br />
defying its old inertia, its downhill entropy,<br />
to lift, strain upward and onward,<br />
to make a path to the very stars.<br />
Beat, drums, a march of rising beyond—<br />
we shall not fall into the flame.<br />
<strong>The</strong> pit has not been made to contain us.<br />
We shall take hold of this mighty sphere<br />
with force of will—and peals of laughter.<br />
We are the owners and drivers—not slaves—<br />
not tenants to tremble and bend the knee—<br />
we are of the earth entirely,<br />
capped in clouds and rooted in iron,<br />
not apart from Nature<br />
(not even the basest thing we do<br />
comes from anywhere but Nature).<br />
We are the destiny of carbon’s unfolding.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e man spends seven years on a symphony;<br />
one waits with a knife in an alley.<br />
(Somehow, both are the same—<br />
somehow, very different.)<br />
We are all the children of Atlas.<br />
We need only a burden big enough,<br />
a sphere our own and a place to push it.<br />
To the old in heart, the death-fearing,<br />
the envious and self-defeating<br />
we have one message and one only:<br />
Stand back! Make room! We are coming!<br />
150
FIRST SNOW<br />
i<br />
Dwarf roses, faded, leafless,<br />
twisted branches gray and brown,<br />
intricately overlaid<br />
with pristine snow, pyramidal<br />
tracings of every line and arc<br />
in flakes of falling crystal.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is not a breath of wind<br />
to disturb this perfect canvas.<br />
Suspended within<br />
the latticework<br />
a thousand rose hips burn<br />
like sour radishes<br />
or petrified cherries,<br />
a memory of blushes<br />
and blood-flushed passion<br />
caught unawares by winter.<br />
ii<br />
An hour later, I pass again.<br />
<strong>The</strong> snow’s calligraphy<br />
is still untouched by wind.<br />
Rose hips still beam<br />
their ruddy messages.<br />
<strong>The</strong> sun has slid<br />
across the ice-sky<br />
to its low-slung zenith<br />
and one hundred<br />
astonished roses<br />
have opened their petals —<br />
dying as fast<br />
as they unfurl,<br />
their wilting edges burned<br />
by unkind frost,<br />
virgin Juliets<br />
no sooner born<br />
than entombed.<br />
<strong>The</strong> suicidal blooms<br />
lean to the sun, pleading<br />
their disbelief of darkness,<br />
the impossibility<br />
of sudden perishing.<br />
Love comes unbidden thus,<br />
as the capricious rose.<br />
THANKSGIVING THOUGHTS<br />
i<br />
Although base Nature made us<br />
and will have its way,<br />
we bow our heads in thankfulness<br />
that we do not live in a universe<br />
where all the food is gray.<br />
ii<br />
Just halfway through<br />
the holiday repast,<br />
the room explodes<br />
in fisticuffs,<br />
drawn knives<br />
and a pool of blood<br />
on the dining room floor.<br />
That’s how Thanksgiving ends,<br />
as every hostess knows,<br />
if too small a bird provokes<br />
an insufficiency of stuffing.<br />
iii<br />
Sixth place at table<br />
reserved for Squanto’s ghost.<br />
Over the steaming corn,<br />
turkey and gravy,<br />
cranberry red<br />
he utters the words<br />
his people would one day rue:<br />
“Welcome, Englishmen!”<br />
iv<br />
Apocryphal feast<br />
we learn about<br />
as we droop<br />
from sauce and stuffing:<br />
An immense turkey<br />
stuffed with a duck entire,<br />
its swollen cavity<br />
crammed with a hen,<br />
into whose bosom<br />
three pigeons,<br />
stuffed with quail,<br />
each tiny quail<br />
engulfing one minute<br />
hummingbird.<br />
151
<strong>As</strong> we walk home,<br />
wine-warmed and down<br />
in our vigilance,<br />
will some vast hand<br />
sweep downwards<br />
from the kettle-black sky —<br />
and after a suitable<br />
cleaning and marinade,<br />
will we be stuffed<br />
in turn inside<br />
some vast and whale-like<br />
cavity, waiting to bake<br />
slowly and tenderly for those<br />
who know Earth<br />
as <strong>The</strong> Food Planet?<br />
IMPROMPTU<br />
after a painting by Riva Leviten<br />
<strong>The</strong>re are things the hands remember,<br />
things we could do in darkness,<br />
things that come back as fresh<br />
as childhood.<br />
Round, round, ready, write!<br />
the teacher chanted<br />
as our tiny thumbs fumbled<br />
to balance the ink pens.<br />
Pages of ovals and calligraphic lines<br />
on blue-lined tablets,<br />
all hands in unison<br />
as the steel-nibbed fountain pens<br />
flew like determined birds<br />
between the line above<br />
and the line below.<br />
Nervous at blackboards<br />
we stood with chalk,<br />
elbows and arms everywhere —<br />
Round, round, ready, write! —<br />
making large the magic letters<br />
that opened books and history.<br />
<strong>The</strong> hands remember after all.<br />
Pick up a pen,<br />
and the arm still traces<br />
the early morning drill<br />
of militant Palmer<br />
152<br />
who wanted every Christian boy<br />
and girl to race<br />
across a page as fast as a typewriter.<br />
No sloth in those fingers!<br />
No deviation from those capitals!<br />
Elide those letters into a graceful form!<br />
<strong>The</strong> hands remember,<br />
though the mind forgets<br />
each improvised or memorized<br />
note once played on a piano.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e year I practiced<br />
in midnight classrooms,<br />
in an unlit organ loft<br />
until my hands could play the notes<br />
without my eyes’ assistance.<br />
If I play for a day,<br />
last year’s music roulades up;<br />
for a week, and a decade<br />
of music is back — from where?<br />
***<br />
<strong>The</strong> mind remembers —<br />
vast Plato’s cave<br />
with a tiny door.<br />
What stuff gets in —<br />
flitting about<br />
the greater darkness?<br />
<strong>The</strong> words we read<br />
are all there,<br />
so too the music our ears<br />
embrace and echo<br />
in nautilus of nerve cells.<br />
Somehow the things<br />
we shouldn’t know<br />
stay in there, too:<br />
forgotten cruelties<br />
wiped clean<br />
on the external slate,<br />
the fluttering bats<br />
of a lifetime<br />
of migraines,<br />
the counting house<br />
of unforgiveness,<br />
and the darkness<br />
in which we dream,<br />
the void preceding<br />
then following<br />
our desperate years.
***<br />
Hands wash themselves<br />
in midnight,<br />
begin to vanish,<br />
take forms<br />
of fluttering half angels.<br />
Yet they are stamped<br />
with trembling music,<br />
tattooed with staves<br />
they’ll twitch to remember<br />
even if amputated.<br />
<strong>The</strong> old mind<br />
peers out its upper door<br />
into the too-bright<br />
universe,<br />
beckoned again<br />
by those vowels<br />
inscribed on slate,<br />
the voice of a long-dead<br />
teacher intoning<br />
Round, round,<br />
ready, write!<br />
DUSK<br />
Red-purple dusk<br />
streaked with a bridge of clouds<br />
mirrors itself in placid waters<br />
(sea viewed from rushing train).<br />
Our hemispheres between —<br />
an unlit earth of willows<br />
and treetops, wired poles<br />
and slanted steeples —<br />
lies like a dream in black cotton.<br />
Full tree and bare tree<br />
stand side by side<br />
in the violet blaze,<br />
one a fulsome silhouette of youth,<br />
the other a waning skeleton<br />
X-rayed by sunset.<br />
Streetlights blink on,<br />
shatter this tensed moment<br />
when two immensities poise<br />
like cupped hands<br />
to cancel the earth.<br />
Now one by one the edison flares<br />
spark on in darkened windows.<br />
Dusk brings on fear,<br />
sun’s death<br />
and greater darkness.<br />
We huddle, dine, deluded,<br />
in our dim circles of finite light,<br />
while the night sky opens its irises<br />
into the orbs of watching wolves.<br />
AS IDOLS FALL IN THE AFGHAN<br />
HILLS<br />
What to do?<br />
What to do?<br />
Mail a Mullah<br />
a thousand portraits<br />
of Bodhisattvas.<br />
Airdrop a hundred<br />
thousand little Buddhas<br />
on tiny parachutes<br />
onto the streets<br />
of Kabul.<br />
Mate giant Japanese<br />
Buddhas with Godzilla,<br />
send their offspring<br />
to the Afghan Hills<br />
to sit serene<br />
in lotus pose<br />
(but watch their fire-breath<br />
melt Taliban tanks<br />
and send the soldiers<br />
shrieking!)<br />
Sky-write<br />
LORD BUDDHA<br />
from border to border<br />
in every known language.<br />
Or wait for Karma<br />
to burn the burners,<br />
shatter the shatterers,<br />
silence the mouths<br />
of the speakers of law?<br />
153
(No time, no time<br />
as the dynamite explodes<br />
a Buddha head<br />
from fifteen hundred<br />
years ago.)<br />
Let Allah, Buddha<br />
Christ and Brahma<br />
rage like comets,<br />
moth fluttering<br />
around the Man Sun.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e vanity makes them,<br />
A greater vanity destroys them.<br />
Yet a child with hands in clay,<br />
in the mud by the riverside<br />
will make a new god<br />
with broad shoulders<br />
far-seeing eyes,<br />
a forgiving visage,<br />
a palm extended<br />
for the benediction<br />
of unbearable Beauty.<br />
This parched land<br />
needs its memories,<br />
its slender share<br />
of human fairness,<br />
against the dark night<br />
of goats and dynamite.<br />
SIX CHRISTMAS VERSES<br />
CHRISTMAS DINNER<br />
Spoiled meat and green potatoes,<br />
Sour milk and black tomatoes,<br />
All mixed in with something found<br />
Sprouting from a graveyard mound.<br />
Don’t eat Grandma’s mushroom stew,<br />
If you know what’s good for you!<br />
THE CHRISTMAS TREE<br />
Fall to the carpet! Cover your head!<br />
Go up the stairs and keep to your bed!<br />
<strong>The</strong>re’ll be no presents for us to see —<br />
<strong>The</strong>re’s a rabid bat in the Christmas tree!<br />
154<br />
A DECEMBER CUSTOM<br />
When Sarah wanted the men to kiss her,<br />
She stood just where they<br />
couldn’t miss her.<br />
She took them all beneath the door —<br />
Yet none of them came back for more.<br />
<strong>The</strong> moral’s plain — it only figures —<br />
<strong>The</strong> mistletoe was full of chiggers.<br />
OUR HUNTING FATHERS<br />
<strong>The</strong> snow was white, the snow was red,<br />
When hunters shot the reindeer dead.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y tossed the sleigh into the lake.<br />
Hoping to hide their worst mistake,<br />
<strong>The</strong>y torched the old fart<br />
in his crimson suit,<br />
Opened his bags and divided the loot<br />
JINGLE BELLS<br />
Carolers came to the end of the lane<br />
(<strong>The</strong>y thought they’d cheer<br />
the widower Miller).<br />
If only they’d known<br />
the old man was insane,<br />
Dreaming the dreams of a serial killer.<br />
He asked them in for some<br />
Christmas cheer,<br />
Plied them with candy<br />
and soda and beer.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y stayed and they laughed<br />
till they almost cried,<br />
<strong>The</strong>n choking on poison<br />
they promptly died.<br />
APPALACHIAN MARY<br />
O wonder of wonders! O day so lucky!<br />
<strong>The</strong> Virgin Mary will visit Kentucky!<br />
I hear an angel crying, “Hark!<br />
See Mary’s face in that twisted bark!”<br />
“No—there she is!—and I’m no fool—<br />
See her eyes in the swimming pool!”<br />
“No, here! No, here! Come see it,<br />
please—<br />
Her folded hands in this<br />
moldy cheese!”<br />
“T-shirts! T-shirts! Buy souvenirs<br />
Before the apparition disappears!”
THE ‘POSSUM<br />
Opossum along the refectory wall<br />
licks the underside of discarded meat wrappers,<br />
thin snout just fitting the oblong hole<br />
in a tipped beer can —<br />
it has a furtive, mustache kind of life,<br />
darting from shrub to shrub in lamplight.<br />
It has a wife somewhere that barely tolerates it,<br />
pink-skinned offspring it is too stingy to feed.<br />
Its best game is to be pathetic and inoffensive,<br />
to play dead, to feign an empty wallet,<br />
to always arrive at the cusp of dinnertime,<br />
to sidle up to one with those colorless eyes.<br />
He’s not quite bold enough to beg,<br />
too timid to steal the rat’s larder,<br />
content with grubs and offal that come easily.<br />
He makes his home in a steam-pipe cellar<br />
where other albino night things dominate.<br />
He is the lowest of the low, for even they<br />
cannot quite think of what they should call him.<br />
TWENTY-YEAR NEW YORKER, AFTER HIS EXILE<br />
Though I thought I had shed it,<br />
this city has grown on me,<br />
my head-top soaring<br />
amid the clouds<br />
fingers outstretched<br />
toward the harbor goddess.<br />
I am all of it —<br />
luster and greed,<br />
poet and dreamer,<br />
Helmsley and Trump<br />
lording it over the slums of Lorca,<br />
twin baby carriages<br />
with baby investment bankers<br />
scooting past squatter punks<br />
pierced and tattooed in rage,<br />
the towers clean and classic<br />
for an Age of Silver,<br />
the canyons squalid and smoking<br />
with phosphorescent agony.<br />
I can be all and celebrate all,<br />
make my inkwell of the things<br />
you dare not think of:<br />
the crumbling infraworld<br />
of steam pipes that, bursting,<br />
cook office workers like lobsters,<br />
155
the rivets and spikes that loosen<br />
beneath the wheels of the subway,<br />
the furtive shadow<br />
that gives itself in doorways<br />
to random takers.<br />
This is Atlantis, Babel, Gomorrah and Tyre,<br />
<strong>The</strong> Temple of Dendur, Tyrannosaur,<br />
Ming, Ch’ing and Tang ceramic<br />
Carnegie Hall, the Opera, the Symphony,<br />
the thunder thump of 1812 in the Park<br />
<strong>The</strong> nights of undulating ecstasy<br />
sparking still in a hundred thousand eyes<br />
in the city that will not sleep<br />
and will not surrender its secret yearnings,<br />
the pagan embrace of gods in underwear<br />
towering over neon flesh amphitheatre<br />
Times Square unsquaring America<br />
into Dionysian dervish naked dancing.<br />
I am the weed lot strewn with mattress springs,<br />
the chaste fountains of Lincoln Center,<br />
the pride of the library lions on Fifth Avenue.<br />
long-legged Athena strides here in the sunlight—<br />
behind her, a crack Medusa beckoning.<br />
Forward or backward? Where will this city go?<br />
Where its inhabitants?<br />
Jack hammers and dynamite<br />
remake my countenance,<br />
revise my profile.<br />
I am always fleeing this city to save my soul.<br />
I am always coming back<br />
to make it anew in marble.<br />
156
REVELATIONS<br />
as out of the burning bush<br />
the meteor’s heart<br />
the hieroglyph<br />
the tablet<br />
spoke god<br />
it said<br />
I am the sum of all that is<br />
I have never<br />
written a book<br />
dictated a law<br />
taken a wife<br />
sired son or angel.<br />
I do not answer plea or prayer.<br />
love whom you may.<br />
eat what you must.<br />
the planet is yours,<br />
stars too<br />
if you can reach them<br />
but neither out<br />
nor inward seek me.<br />
I am not at the Pole Star<br />
turning orbs mechanical.<br />
I have no wish to visit your dreams.<br />
I am and will be a mystery,<br />
the riddle between zero and unity.<br />
How could death bring you to me<br />
when you cannot discern me now?<br />
Go, now, and tell your brethren<br />
that god’s wish<br />
is to be left alone.<br />
I have spoken<br />
and will not speak<br />
again.<br />
ARABESQUES ON THE STATUE<br />
OF LIBERTY<br />
1<br />
Bad Dingo rides<br />
the Staten Island ferry<br />
dusk till dawn,<br />
clinging to rail<br />
nestling an all-night<br />
tumescence,<br />
hard at the sight<br />
of the robed lady,<br />
vast,<br />
unapproachable.<br />
He’s stalking her,<br />
biding his time.<br />
Some night<br />
there’d be a fog,<br />
a power failure.<br />
He’d come up behind her,<br />
prodding the small<br />
of her spine<br />
with his imperious knife,<br />
jostling her bronze buttocks<br />
with his ardent flesh prod.<br />
She’d drop the tablet;<br />
the torch would sputter.<br />
He’d push her off her pedestal.<br />
Bad Dingo would give it to her good<br />
the way he did to all the white ladies<br />
in parks and stairways<br />
and subway cars.<br />
This would be the rape of all rapes,<br />
the pinnacle of his career,<br />
the ultimate boast<br />
“See that toppled goddess<br />
in the harbor —<br />
she ain’t so proud now<br />
since someone had her,<br />
made her moan.<br />
Bad Dingo had her,<br />
stuck it to the Statue,<br />
white lady Liberty!”<br />
157
2<br />
In Chinatown,<br />
Mrs. Wang mounts<br />
a quiet rebellion<br />
against the ways of the elders:<br />
She has done all<br />
her mother has asked her:<br />
married the boy<br />
the stars ordained,<br />
bore sons and daughters<br />
in regular order<br />
burned joss and incense<br />
at every altar<br />
sending ghost gold and peaches,<br />
phantom cars and televisions<br />
Hong Kong Hell dollars<br />
to the teeming, greedy dead.<br />
Now her husband travels,<br />
has mistresses, won’t talk<br />
about his gambling.<br />
Her children are gone<br />
married to foreign devils.<br />
Her round-eyed grandchildren<br />
won’t learn Mandarin,<br />
won’t send joss riches<br />
to her when she is dead.<br />
Now she becomes a whirlwind:<br />
She sells her jade and porcelain,<br />
cleans out her savings account,<br />
buys an airline ticket<br />
for San Francisco —<br />
from there, who knows?<br />
She pawns the statuette<br />
of pearly white Kuan-Yin,<br />
the Goddess of Mercy<br />
whose only blessing<br />
was endless childbirth<br />
and washing and ironing.<br />
<strong>On</strong> a whim she buys another<br />
to take its place at her bedside:<br />
a foot-high Statue of Liberty<br />
with batteries and glowing torch<br />
she leaves it for her husband,<br />
her wedding ring<br />
on its spiky crown<br />
158<br />
3<br />
Today two New York titans<br />
switch places:<br />
A grumpy Green Liberty<br />
strides up Fifth Avenue,<br />
crushing pedestrians in verdigris.<br />
Her sandaled feet<br />
send buses flying,<br />
kiosks shattering.<br />
Her great head turns<br />
among the office towers.<br />
She reaches in,<br />
pulls screaming executives<br />
through razor edge panes,<br />
undresses them<br />
with her copper fingers,<br />
discards them to the pavement<br />
twenty stories below.<br />
<strong>The</strong> man she wants<br />
is not among them. He’s got<br />
to be blond, and a screamer,<br />
a yielding but unwilling male<br />
under her stern metallic nails.<br />
Uptown, she finds him:<br />
a curly-haired messenger,<br />
cups him in her palm,<br />
drops her tablet,<br />
rolls up her sleeves<br />
and starts the painful ascent<br />
of the Empire State Building.<br />
Downtown<br />
on Liberty Island<br />
King Kong wields a torch,<br />
incinerating all passing freighters,<br />
capsizing the passenger ships.<br />
He hurls great boulders skyward,<br />
picking off airplanes one by one.<br />
He is guarding the harbor now.<br />
He is a real American<br />
and he knows his business:<br />
Stay out.<br />
Go home.<br />
No foreigners<br />
allowed.
QUACK<br />
No wonder you’re depressed<br />
with all those demons in you.<br />
Just take this pill<br />
stare into the light<br />
till you’re very sleepy<br />
very sleepy<br />
very . . .<br />
<strong>The</strong> Devil’s there,<br />
(I knew it!)<br />
got his talons in you<br />
ever since the funeral<br />
you don’t remember<br />
when you went face down<br />
into an open grave<br />
Another demon got in<br />
when your daddy raped you<br />
on your seventh birthday<br />
(of course you can’t remember<br />
but you will)<br />
you have three bad sisters<br />
all sharing your psyche<br />
each taking a turn<br />
at making your life a ruin<br />
(your mother aborted them<br />
so their souls moved in<br />
to be near you)<br />
This is going to take<br />
one hell of an exorcism.<br />
Last session I discovered<br />
an animal possession—<br />
no, nothing awful,<br />
a harmless duck<br />
who never migrated<br />
when death took him,<br />
but we’ll have to evict him<br />
down to the last feather.<br />
Good thing you have insurance.<br />
Those Angels chattering<br />
in Aramaic<br />
are quite a nuisance<br />
when you talk in your sleep,<br />
came in when the nuns<br />
did that awful thing to you<br />
you say you can’t remember.<br />
We’ll need a specialist<br />
to clear them out.<br />
Don’t even consider suicide.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re’s so much more<br />
you need to remember:<br />
the Montana Satanists,<br />
the livestock orgies,<br />
your uncles’ lewdness,<br />
that early miscarriage<br />
you keep on repressing.<br />
I count a hundred<br />
and twenty inside you.<br />
Ten dozen personalities,<br />
all of them neurotic.<br />
You’re one for the journals,<br />
more characters together<br />
than all of Dostoyevsky.<br />
Sign here, and here, and here.<br />
Use each of your names—<br />
that’s S-A-T-A-N,<br />
an “x” for the duck will do.<br />
<strong>As</strong>ide from the drugs<br />
and the hypnotic sessions<br />
we’ll have group therapy<br />
to iron things out<br />
among the lot of you.<br />
(Blue Cross alone<br />
will spring for a hundred thousand.<br />
God, I love psychiatry!)<br />
BOSTON LUNCH COUNTER<br />
<strong>The</strong> chili has no beans.<br />
<strong>The</strong> salad has no greens.<br />
<strong>The</strong> pumpkin’s rotten.<br />
<strong>The</strong> chef’s forgotten<br />
how to make chicken tarragon,<br />
and to wash<br />
after using the john.<br />
<strong>The</strong> flies are delighted.<br />
Two rats have been sighted.<br />
(That’s bad, for you see,<br />
there used to be three!)<br />
159
GUTENBERG’S HELPER<br />
<strong>On</strong> the rediscovery of the<br />
formula for cleaning types and<br />
presses, c. 1456*<br />
Johannes Gutenberg, my master<br />
would vouch for me, were he<br />
alive to honor my telling.<br />
I saw the first white sheets,<br />
limp and virginal,<br />
pressed wet against the type,<br />
those brooding Latin letters<br />
bound in like bees<br />
in a leaden hive.<br />
I watched them turn<br />
the patient screw<br />
that wedded the inked form<br />
to the hand-made paper,<br />
then peel away the miracle—<br />
God’s Bible in pristine text,<br />
a monk’s month of lettering<br />
passed off in the blink of an eye.<br />
Hard work it was:<br />
hundreds of letters and pairs of letters<br />
to pick and sort and reassemble;<br />
the thrill of firing the furnace,<br />
casting the molten lead<br />
to a’s and e’s and æ’s.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y called him a madman,<br />
impractical, a dreamer,<br />
but when we finished,<br />
from alpha of Genesis<br />
to omega of Revelations,<br />
a song and a cheer burst forth<br />
from the humble shop in Mainz.<br />
You will not find my name<br />
in the annals of the printing art.<br />
I was the merest boy,<br />
not an apprentice, even.<br />
I was not paid a pfennig,<br />
but there is something of me<br />
in every page of Gutenberg.<br />
Ink, like blood, is thicker than water.<br />
Old type must shed its black<br />
or red ink scab<br />
before another page<br />
can be assembled.<br />
160<br />
So I was there<br />
to make the great Elixir,<br />
the secret noxious solvent<br />
to clean the type<br />
and the inking balls.<br />
I was Wasser Johann,<br />
he of the great bladder.<br />
Free beer they gave me,<br />
a barrel of ale<br />
at my disposal.<br />
Daily my personal springs<br />
replenished the reservoir<br />
of pungent fluid.<br />
I was the flood<br />
overtaking Noah;<br />
an ague overcame me<br />
to turn my Nile<br />
Mosaic red;<br />
I screamed one day<br />
as my kidneys parted<br />
for the passage of Israel;<br />
mine the waters<br />
of Babylon, of Nineveh.<br />
I’m a modest man, really!<br />
It’s not too much to say<br />
there’d be no Gutenberg<br />
without his Wasser Johann!<br />
_____________________<br />
“Preparation of the leather so it would accept<br />
ink required the skin to be soaked in urine and<br />
squeezed out a number of times. … After a day’s<br />
printing, the leather was removed from the balls<br />
and soaked overnight in urine to keep it supple.<br />
Washing up the type after the form was printed<br />
also relied on the ever-present yellow liquid,<br />
creating a latrine-like stench in early print shops<br />
that one can only imagine must have helped<br />
keep the secret of the ‘black arts’ secret.”<br />
—Randy Silverman, “<strong>The</strong> Origin of Printer’s<br />
Ink,” Graphic Arts Journal, April 1994.
NEMESIS<br />
i<br />
If you are Cobra,<br />
King of Death,<br />
then I am Mongoose.<br />
Slither away!<br />
If you are Lion,<br />
slaying all,<br />
I am the Jackal<br />
who steals your prey.<br />
ii<br />
If you are Danger,<br />
stealing sleep,<br />
I am Pleasure,<br />
there till dawn.<br />
If you are Martyr,<br />
killing for God,<br />
I am the Ifrit<br />
who leads you on.<br />
iii<br />
If all your Ends<br />
are justified,<br />
I am the Means.<br />
Ignore the blood.<br />
If you are Noah,<br />
saving beasts,<br />
forget the people.<br />
I am the Flood.<br />
iv<br />
If you are Lot’s wife,<br />
looking back,<br />
I am Sodom,<br />
still calling you.<br />
If you are Caesar,<br />
dead in Rome,<br />
I, Queen of Egypt,<br />
am weeping, too.<br />
THE STERILE SQUASH<br />
<strong>On</strong>e glance from Mrs. Trog<br />
and my porch vine withers!<br />
This hump-back widow<br />
has the evil eye for sure.<br />
She has no time<br />
to change a light bulb,<br />
but can linger here to stare<br />
at the florid blossoms<br />
of the squash I’ve nurtured,<br />
spilling from pot<br />
across the porch rail,<br />
clinging to cracks<br />
in the paved-over yard.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e by one she darts them<br />
with her steel-gray orbs,<br />
her kerchief twitching<br />
over her rigid coif.<br />
<strong>The</strong> fat orange blossoms<br />
quiver with fear,<br />
the florid leaves<br />
brown at the edges.<br />
<strong>The</strong>se vines will be spinsters, now.<br />
No bees will come and play here;<br />
only winged wasps<br />
like nattering nuns<br />
will hover, warning away<br />
all pollinating visitors.<br />
Sunlight! slant away!<br />
Nor’easter! bring on<br />
the rotting microbes.<br />
This garden is cursed!<br />
A block away,<br />
in her darkened house,<br />
my landlady drinks tea,<br />
smiles at a dusty vase<br />
of plastic roses,<br />
beside the urn<br />
of unremembered ashes.<br />
161
VERMONT IMAGES<br />
for Don and Laura<br />
1<br />
<strong>The</strong> trees are everywhere,<br />
straight as arrows.<br />
<strong>The</strong> rocks abound,<br />
sharp-edged for tomahawks,<br />
or smooth for grindstones.<br />
<strong>The</strong> sky is screaming<br />
with warrior clouds.<br />
How sad to see<br />
the abject Abenaki<br />
joined by their blond<br />
half-children,<br />
dancing a pow-wow<br />
in a college gymnasium,<br />
unseen by sun<br />
and cloud and badger,<br />
ringed by vendors<br />
of New Age regalia.<br />
Do I see angry Manitous<br />
at the wood’s edge,<br />
turning their backs<br />
on this shabby magic?<br />
2<br />
<strong>The</strong> year has expired<br />
on the mountain slopes.<br />
Blueberry bush<br />
with mottled leaves,<br />
unclaimed fruit<br />
blue-back and shriveled.<br />
A solitary grasshopper<br />
poised on a branch<br />
outliving his welcome<br />
as frost approaches.<br />
Whose woods these are —<br />
black cherry and beech,<br />
white pine and alder —<br />
Frost’s poems posted<br />
where paths converge —<br />
lines to read aloud and ponder —<br />
as the trees mark their places,<br />
reseed their tribes.<br />
162<br />
Trunks trooped like ranks<br />
of opposing armies,<br />
ready to flag<br />
in crimson, yellow,<br />
or green-brown camouflage.<br />
We are peaceable,<br />
preferring tree-bark solitude<br />
to the world’s wars —<br />
but look! seed bullets fly<br />
at rival mountains —<br />
squirrels scavenging<br />
the hand grenade pine cones.<br />
Seed pods fly parachute<br />
into the helpless valley.<br />
Every seed covets<br />
the empty upland pasture,<br />
life against life<br />
for a little space,<br />
a piece of sun,<br />
a root in the rocky soil.<br />
3<br />
Black crows descend<br />
upon a field of pumpkins,<br />
claws down on frostfringed<br />
globes,<br />
then corveaux rampant<br />
on golden orbs,<br />
right claws raised,<br />
right wings extended<br />
flock falling everywhere,<br />
yet each upon<br />
his chosen fruit<br />
assumes the same<br />
athletic pose.<br />
Is this the way of Wotan?<br />
Will they go off in threes,<br />
in perfect formation,<br />
swift as a dream,<br />
a premonition,<br />
casting their shadows<br />
upon the doomed,<br />
a flying scythe<br />
hastening with names<br />
to the Lord of the Dead
three ravens fly<br />
for every death, they say,<br />
their caws identical<br />
to rip a soul<br />
from its casing<br />
(like seeds they crave<br />
at the heart of pumpkins).<br />
4<br />
Mist-shrouded mountains.<br />
Alders,<br />
upland pastures with<br />
stubbles of harvested cornfields.<br />
Birch skeletons<br />
on the dark slopes,<br />
inverted white thunderbolts<br />
as though the earth<br />
would chide the sky<br />
for its acid rain weeping.<br />
Mist rises like steam<br />
from pastures,<br />
yesterday’s sun-heat<br />
hoarded by wheat root,<br />
reluctant radiant<br />
this rocky ground.<br />
Tiny red leaves of maple –<br />
explosive love letters<br />
inscribed at night<br />
like Tatiana’s declaration<br />
to haughty <strong>On</strong>egin.<br />
<strong>The</strong> missives are everywhere.<br />
<strong>The</strong> trees are expiring<br />
in their adolescent<br />
passion.<br />
Letters unread,<br />
mocked by the wind,<br />
crisping to unintelligible<br />
wrinkles as winter comes.<br />
How the earth<br />
and all its tenants<br />
yearn for embracing —<br />
for a harvest this once,<br />
without reaping<br />
for an October that lingers<br />
till springtime,<br />
banishing in pumpkin splendor<br />
the sad, drear days of solstice.<br />
DEAD PRINCESS<br />
Not huntress, but hunted<br />
Not chasing the antler’d stag<br />
but run down like the fallow doe<br />
Not arrows, but flashbulb quivers<br />
fell you, hands reach<br />
to seize your garlands,<br />
tear some trophy<br />
from your dying.<br />
Not princess, and not yet goddess —<br />
Your temple a marble tomb,<br />
an island inaccessible.<br />
Gamekeepers cross<br />
in a humble rowboat,<br />
leave flowers for you<br />
as at an altar<br />
London becomes a pagan festival,<br />
where every living flower is cut<br />
and laid amid tears & sobbing<br />
as if to affirm in desiccation<br />
that all must die,<br />
that bloom once cut<br />
is never resurrected,<br />
no matter how many requiems.<br />
Proud state that claimed permit<br />
from Jove<br />
to trample the far horizon<br />
calls now for this mere mortal<br />
to be sublimed at once to temples:<br />
grave and grove and mourning day,<br />
sacred to Diana.<br />
CAVE DEUM<br />
For once, dyslexia is truth.<br />
<strong>The</strong> letters dance<br />
and re-arrange<br />
to make mundane<br />
and seldom-heeded messages<br />
an egg-hatch of deeper meaning.<br />
CURB YOUR GOD!<br />
the sidewalk placard urges<br />
(I look in the gutter<br />
for feathers or angel hair.)<br />
163
THIS BUILDING PATROLLED<br />
BY VICIOUS GUARD GOD!<br />
Icon of Doberman<br />
red-eyed and drooling<br />
on a wooden sign.<br />
BEWARE OF GOD<br />
the windows scream out<br />
behind geranium pots,<br />
crisscross of burglar gates,<br />
a holy muzzle waiting<br />
for the hapless intruder.<br />
A little mercy, at least, in<br />
NO GODS ALLOWED<br />
(EXCEPT FOR SEEING-EYE GODS)<br />
BY ORDER OF NYC<br />
HEALTH DEPT.<br />
A god chases a cat,<br />
another god barks,<br />
while yet another genuflects<br />
to anoint a hydrant.<br />
What revelations emerge!<br />
See how the citizens<br />
dragged by their leashes<br />
walk round and round,<br />
pulled by a howling caprice,<br />
a quadruped perspective,<br />
losing the tug of war,<br />
always back home<br />
with the same god they left with.<br />
Some use their gods<br />
to fend off strangers,<br />
some train their gods<br />
to fetch or kill.<br />
I see it now,<br />
the truth made plain.<br />
Oh, my Dog, how can I tell them?<br />
164<br />
DRAMATIS PERSONAE<br />
Shakespeare’s Gay Bar<br />
on Christopher Street—<br />
now there’s a roster of royalty!<br />
That dark one, brooding, military,<br />
wins sympathy with his battle scar,<br />
then smothers his lovers with a pillow.<br />
Richard the Second’s been had<br />
by absolutely everyone,<br />
a poor, limp, passive thing.<br />
Richard the Third is into dungeons.<br />
Young Hal hangs out with Falstaff,<br />
a chubby chaser.<br />
Old Hal is a pompous bore,<br />
gives speeches while inspecting<br />
the troops.<br />
Old Henry the Eighth<br />
had dozens of lovers<br />
(one hot season,<br />
then off with their heads!)<br />
<strong>The</strong>re’s poor old Lear<br />
in his long underwear —<br />
the Fool is always with him.<br />
That’s Danish Hamlet playing pool,<br />
loon-crazy and going on<br />
about his mother.<br />
Titus Andronicus works in the kitchen<br />
and does a mean stew.<br />
Gloomy Macbeth, counting his change,<br />
thinks the bartender has cheated him.<br />
That spot-lit table aglow with gems,<br />
false breasts and curls<br />
and boy/girl charms<br />
is throne tonight to Cleopatra,<br />
black-eyed and shrill and sharp<br />
as an asp,<br />
waiting for Caesar, Mark Antony<br />
or any Italian worth dying for.<br />
Take your pick. <strong>The</strong>y know their lines.<br />
You need not seek an audience—<br />
just be one.
ARTICLES OF FAITH<br />
Things are in the saddle<br />
And ride Mankind.<br />
—Emerson<br />
I will tell you of<br />
a man, a horse, and a journey.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re are as many ways of telling it<br />
as there are pearls in the sea.<br />
***<br />
<strong>The</strong> man lets go the reins.<br />
<strong>The</strong> horse knows the way.<br />
<strong>The</strong> end of the journey is predetermined.<br />
***<br />
<strong>The</strong> rider is mad<br />
<strong>The</strong> horse is a fool.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y see the cliff, but cannot stop.<br />
***<br />
<strong>The</strong> horse thinks,<br />
<strong>The</strong>re once was a man<br />
who chose this journey,<br />
but now he is dead.<br />
I can go where I please,<br />
but I choose to follow his footsteps.<br />
***<br />
<strong>The</strong> man thinks <strong>The</strong> horse thinks<br />
there is no horse there is no man<br />
No journey, either,<br />
since neither starting point<br />
nor end exists.<br />
***<br />
<strong>The</strong> horse sees a mare,<br />
the man a maiden.<br />
In summer meadow frolicking<br />
the journey is forgotten.<br />
***<br />
Spurs bite, whips sting:<br />
the rider shows no mercy.<br />
<strong>The</strong> famished horse<br />
plods on.<br />
Water has been promised,<br />
and a mountain of oats,<br />
someday, at the end of the journey.<br />
***<br />
Fearful Fearful<br />
that the horse that the man<br />
will choose another<br />
rider horse<br />
he<br />
shoots tramples<br />
his companion.<br />
Alone in the desert now,<br />
he has defended his honor,<br />
fulfilled the Commandments.<br />
***<br />
<strong>The</strong> man sees <strong>The</strong> horse sees<br />
some good in<br />
the horse. the man.<br />
He asks the other:<br />
Did you decree this journey?<br />
What if there is no point<br />
except the journeying?<br />
What if we have<br />
already arrived?<br />
FROM SALEM FORWARD<br />
for Matthew<br />
how the daughters turned<br />
against the midwives<br />
whose wrinkled hands<br />
had swaddled them,<br />
denouncing them<br />
as Satan’s mistresses<br />
how the five-year-olds<br />
squirmed on the video,<br />
prompted and prodded<br />
until they told of teachers<br />
who flew through the air,<br />
led them through tunnels,<br />
touched them<br />
down there<br />
how a mother intoned:<br />
and your daddy beat you<br />
daddy beat you<br />
165
eat you<br />
beat<br />
as the day approached<br />
for the custody battle<br />
until the coin of the realm<br />
among the Salem girls,<br />
tot and prosecutor,<br />
mother and child<br />
becomes the adder’s kiss<br />
and what never was<br />
becomes what is.<br />
How long does it take<br />
for a lie to be unremembered?<br />
Some Pilgrim girls confessed<br />
to the pious fraud,<br />
shunned, unwed,<br />
to die unshriven.<br />
Brainwashed children<br />
will scream their way<br />
from nightmare to dawn,<br />
a world without horns<br />
and dark penetrations.<br />
<strong>The</strong> son will judge the mother<br />
and walk to his father’s side.<br />
166<br />
MISER<br />
An hour has passed since I saw it.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re. In the middle of the floor.<br />
Gleaming beside the coffee table.<br />
Right below the soda and wine.<br />
Why doesn’t anyone see it?<br />
Back and forth they go.<br />
Talking, reading their poems.<br />
<strong>The</strong> men. <strong>The</strong> women.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y fill their glasses, tumble ice.<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir merry eyes are everywhere<br />
except that place on the carpet.<br />
What’s wrong with them?<br />
Don’t they know the value of money?<br />
A whole quarter. Just lying there!<br />
Four of them make a dollar.<br />
Pick up twenty —<br />
that’s a five dollar bill.<br />
Forty make ten dollars. <strong>The</strong>re!<br />
Another one just passed it by.<br />
Oh! under a shoe now. Out again.<br />
So bright. Why can’t they see it?<br />
My glass is empty now.<br />
Not too soon to be thirsty again,<br />
especially when it’s free.<br />
I could just walk over.<br />
Bend down to the table.<br />
Fill the glass. Take the ice.<br />
Put the glass down for a moment.<br />
That’s it. I’m doing it.<br />
Ice first, but not too much.<br />
You get more to drink<br />
with less ice.<br />
Now take a breath.<br />
That’s it. I’m doing it.<br />
Reach down. Take the quarter.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re! <strong>On</strong>e smooth motion,<br />
into the palm, into the pocket.<br />
I did it. I got it.<br />
No one saw.<br />
Twelve in the room<br />
and no one said<br />
Hey, that’s mine.<br />
A whole quarter.<br />
My lucky day.
HANDICAPPED GAME PRESERVE,<br />
WEST VIRGINIA<br />
Deep in the brush<br />
an undulating torso<br />
in a red plaid hunting jacket<br />
pauses, a halfformed<br />
hand<br />
thrusts knife<br />
into a groundhog.<br />
<strong>The</strong> prey is small,<br />
the blood<br />
a demitasse of crimson,<br />
the tiny heart,<br />
fast lungs palpitating,<br />
astonished eyes<br />
reflecting the hunter’s<br />
thalidomide smile.<br />
A half-mile in,<br />
another hunter waits,<br />
warm in his cap,<br />
his leather Harley jacket.<br />
He has come a long way<br />
for a man in a wheelchair —<br />
not even motorized —<br />
came the hard way<br />
up an incline,<br />
through the trees.<br />
If he waits quietly,<br />
a deer will come,<br />
a squirrel will stop<br />
within his cross-hairs.<br />
His wheels are locked,<br />
but still the gunshots<br />
may topple him.<br />
he doesn’t mind the challenge,<br />
can call for help<br />
on the cellular phone.<br />
He’ll never track<br />
the things he shoots,<br />
nor take a deer<br />
home for the freezer.<br />
That’s not the point.<br />
He hates the fleet deer,<br />
the nimble squirrel,<br />
the agile raccoon.<br />
Make four legs three!<br />
Maim them!<br />
Make them limp!<br />
Fill the forest with<br />
scarred, stumped animals!<br />
HOUSECLEANING<br />
Three empty sparrow nests inside<br />
my air conditioner!<br />
Like something out of Breughel,<br />
beaks and claws protruding<br />
from the louvre vents,<br />
straw everywhere & eggshells,<br />
feathers and down and wing-dust<br />
(no wonder I wheezed and sneezed<br />
all summer!)<br />
How proud they must have been<br />
of their impregnable shelter,<br />
battleship gray,<br />
out of the hawk’s eye,<br />
beyond the talon snap<br />
of the fiercest raptor.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y have raised their young<br />
and gone, flown free<br />
among the lindens and sycamores,<br />
chirping defiance at my landlady<br />
who long ago chopped<br />
her rowans and flowering pears,<br />
paved over her garden front.<br />
“Trees no good,” says Mrs. Trog.<br />
“Plant trees and you get birds.<br />
Birds and squirrels. No good.<br />
No good.”<br />
Last night I dreamt of moving<br />
to a Tarzan tree-house,<br />
cool and lush amid the vines,<br />
birdsong everywhere,<br />
squirrels welcome.<br />
We pay our rent with acorns<br />
and our house grows bigger,<br />
wider with each passing year.<br />
167
LETHE<br />
Deliver the fruit of the garden of Lethe!<br />
White horse of sleep at home<br />
in his stable,<br />
mane of coca and hemp leaves,<br />
wreathed in poppies, breathing a cloud<br />
of Hypnos’ hashish, feeding on hay<br />
mixed with ergot and mushroom brew.<br />
White horse of sleep<br />
draws a black coach through city streets,<br />
pauses in alleyways,<br />
lingers at school yards.<br />
Bags and vials, syringes and pipes<br />
scatter like toys as the occupant<br />
lures with promises of instant joy.<br />
Boys fight for the offered prizes.<br />
Mothers shake fists from fire escapes<br />
as the white horse passes.<br />
<strong>On</strong> curbs, on broken bench,<br />
in frame of rotted door,<br />
the sleepers have fallen.<br />
Others fan out to sell their treasures.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is never enough.<br />
Someone must always pay,<br />
even here where no one has money,<br />
or someone must die.<br />
White horse pulling<br />
a great stone Juggernaut,<br />
iron wheels burred<br />
with shattered bones<br />
grindstone steam roller<br />
making lithography of skin,<br />
cheekbones and brows,<br />
limb and arm of backbone<br />
spread out like a map,<br />
dreamers’ lives snuffed<br />
as though they had never<br />
been.<br />
168<br />
<strong>The</strong> mothers’ sons<br />
are crimson smears on the sidewalk.<br />
Mica glints mockingly<br />
as blood dries to flaking rust.<br />
At the fashionable club<br />
the white stretch limos<br />
arrive and depart,<br />
arrive and depart.<br />
A movie star falls to the pavement,<br />
dead of an overdose<br />
at twenty-two.<br />
Inside, the revelers<br />
compare the merits<br />
of various white powders.<br />
No Juggernaut comes for them.<br />
<strong>The</strong> white limo doubles<br />
as a hearse when necessary.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y are politically correct,<br />
vegetarian, even.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y are supporting<br />
the produce<br />
of the endangered rain forest.<br />
Nothing could possibly hurt them.
PROMETHEUS ON FIFTH AVENUE<br />
<strong>On</strong>e kind of hero draws no veils,<br />
no fainting ladies, hides not<br />
in St. Patrick’s, binds no virgins<br />
to their rosaries,<br />
shuns candles and goes naked<br />
down Fifth Avenue.<br />
Bronze fleshed, he walks<br />
unnoticed, sees the morning<br />
flush of fire on windows half-mile high,<br />
ignored by cold-eyed men,<br />
oblivious girls, the passing eyes in<br />
buses bent on headlines, paperbacks.<br />
At the peak of mob-time, he stops.<br />
He and the sun flash gold together.<br />
THE ISLES OF GREECE<br />
Here’s Rockefeller Center.<br />
Above a pagan tree a-lit with lights,<br />
atop an ice rink decked with world-flags<br />
he is astonished to see himself.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e gleaming statue rises, words<br />
in stone to celebrate Prometheus<br />
are carved behind/<br />
Two gaudy spinsters<br />
cross the plaza, way to Mass. <strong>On</strong>e frowns<br />
at the sculpture’s nakedness, its leap<br />
from earth to challenge the heavens.<br />
“I think it’s not heroic at all,<br />
why put that nude and vulgar carving<br />
right over our beautiful Christmas tree?<br />
I mean, if it’s a god, isn’t a god<br />
supposed to suffer?”<br />
“He has always been there, my dear,”<br />
the platinum harpy rejoined,<br />
“That’s Saint Prome-something.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y nailed him good, right onto a rock,<br />
left him for birds in the sun.”<br />
“How dreadful!<br />
<strong>The</strong>n he died?”<br />
“I think he suffered a very long time.”<br />
“Why, why?”<br />
“Why?”<br />
“Why did he?<br />
169
What did he do?”<br />
“He died for someone’s<br />
sins, I’m sure. Just like Jesus. I read it all<br />
in <strong>The</strong> Book of Saints, with the Sisters.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re’s just no other way to be a hero.”<br />
“Saint Prome? Saint Prome? I think it’s<br />
coming back to me now, Matilda.<br />
I think they named an orphan’s home or —”<br />
fled the place, flew on a swift wind<br />
to Caucasus, climbed the purple mountain,<br />
stood high on a snowcap, blasted by wind,<br />
greeted the deathless vengeance of Zeus, hurled<br />
himself from cliff to cliff, rose unwounded,<br />
cursed, crying the wrath of the last hero.<br />
PROMETHEAN EPILOGUE<br />
Feast worthy of Titans!<br />
Put on the cauldron!<br />
Stoke the flames!<br />
<strong>On</strong>ions! Potatoes! Yams and bread!<br />
Invite the guests<br />
to the hall of Prometheus.<br />
We’re having<br />
vulture with stuffing!<br />
Come, tear its breast —<br />
there’s always more —<br />
a hundred years of rending<br />
for every year it tore at me,<br />
drumsticks unending,<br />
a cornucopia of gizzards.<br />
<strong>The</strong> bird shall feed a legion,<br />
and a legion’s heirs.<br />
I’ll even sell its flesh to mortals,<br />
unknown nuggets of poultry,<br />
dropped by the ton<br />
under the golden arch<br />
of sweet revenge.<br />
170<br />
Running, he
ATHENA AND MEDUSA<br />
She may be wise, that owl-eyed<br />
Athena, but she’s Greek<br />
and steeped in spite. Her wrath<br />
against Medusa just has no end.<br />
It’s not enough to have<br />
the Gorgon’s never-dying head<br />
(thank you, brave Perseus!)<br />
stuck to her shield,<br />
not enough to make her watch<br />
(she who so adores male beauty)<br />
as handsome warriors petrify<br />
on seeing her serpentwreathed<br />
visage<br />
not enough<br />
that her parched lips thirst,<br />
her black tongue<br />
aches for nourishment,<br />
while wine and victuals<br />
pass through her mouth<br />
into a sodden heap<br />
at neck-base<br />
not enough that the name<br />
Gorgon<br />
makes women shudder<br />
and men avert their eyes<br />
lest the thing they crave,<br />
hard upon soft,<br />
becomes the stillness<br />
of rigor mortis,<br />
an eternity of marble<br />
not enough that mind<br />
should suffer:<br />
she’s shipped Medusa’s body,<br />
pure as alabaster,<br />
(no hint of monster about her<br />
from dusk till dawn)<br />
to a brothel in Smyrna<br />
where drunken sailors,<br />
for a few spare drachmas<br />
pile into a dark room<br />
to hump a headless maiden<br />
not enough that midwives<br />
come annually<br />
to deliver up her monsters —<br />
winged things with T urkish<br />
eyebrows, egg-shell<br />
objects that only Harpies<br />
would dare to hatch<br />
Oh! not enough! and all for spite,<br />
for that day she found Poseidon,<br />
long-limbed and sleek<br />
entwined in the Gorgona’s arms,<br />
in the dark confines<br />
of Athena’s temple —<br />
buttocks and legs and bellies<br />
spread on her very altar!<br />
(Is there no place the gods will not go<br />
to have their way with a woman?)<br />
She could not punish<br />
her father’s brother-god,<br />
but she seized Medusa,<br />
twisted her golden, braided hair<br />
into a gnarl of hissing serpents,<br />
cursed her with the petrifying glare,<br />
wild eyed, leering, black-tongued —<br />
her body goddess-fair by night,<br />
by day a winged monstrosity,<br />
rough skinned with<br />
overlapping scales,<br />
arms ending in razor talons.<br />
Go to some island unknown to me,<br />
Athena cursed her,<br />
Go hide your shame and pray<br />
I forget you.<br />
Conceal yourself in sea caves,<br />
or sink-hole chasms where sunlight<br />
will not reveal you to men or gods.<br />
For this, her wounded vanity,<br />
five thousand years at least<br />
Medusa paid, and pays, her debt<br />
to Wisdom’s darker side,<br />
implacable and cruel.<br />
171
BURNT OFFERING<br />
Anakreon, to Harmodius:<br />
About that letter, the fervent one,<br />
the one you hinted you’d sell when I die,<br />
mocking its shaking autograph,<br />
intimating the scandal —<br />
I know your threat is false.<br />
Last night in my sleep I saw<br />
your hands on a crumpled scroll,<br />
the thrust toward a sputtering lamp,<br />
the tiny screams as my words,<br />
my awesome and unrepeatable vows,<br />
my praise of your unworthy beauty,<br />
collapsed and withered<br />
in a blue-green flame.<br />
You brushed the ashes from your<br />
gentle arms —<br />
they scattered, mingled with dust motes,<br />
rode a moonbeam in a moment’s leap<br />
toward ghosthood, then dissipated.<br />
This time, no Phoenix rose.<br />
He who burns love letters<br />
offends the <strong>Gods</strong>.<br />
You dare undo my holy madness<br />
with little papyrus hecatombs?<br />
<strong>The</strong>y will sting you, my salamander<br />
syllables.<br />
Try and love anyone now!<br />
Your sunken cheeks<br />
and pale complexion will<br />
drive him away.<br />
All will know you are pursued<br />
and haunted.<br />
You will wish you had kept<br />
the living scroll<br />
when you see how Love,<br />
an ash-faced Fury,<br />
comes back from Acheron,<br />
hungry, and needful, and unforgiving.<br />
172<br />
DIALOGUE<br />
Harmodius to Anakreon:<br />
Your latest scroll’s unread,<br />
the seal’s unbroken, too.<br />
I send my servant hag<br />
to hurl it through your window.<br />
(How passers-by will laugh<br />
to see a withered crone<br />
scaling your garden wall —<br />
they’ll say Anakreon<br />
now plunders graves<br />
as well as cradles.)<br />
Shamed now perhaps,<br />
you’ll stop those ardent letters.<br />
Don’t put me in your poems.<br />
Don’t ask me to read them,<br />
don’t pay to have them sung<br />
at your next banqueting.<br />
You’re nothing but trouble for me.<br />
You could be my uncle,<br />
my father, even —<br />
so no more loving glances, ever!<br />
Anakreon to Harmodius:<br />
Cupid’s bent arrows cannot return.<br />
Cruel one, our secret is out.<br />
My passion is over<br />
before its egg could hatch.<br />
I did not name you, or confess it.<br />
You did not mind my admiration,<br />
you did not mind my poems, even.<br />
Now that your brass-faced vanity<br />
refuses me and scorns my gifts,<br />
I am not bound by modesty.<br />
Henceforth I wear the badge of love<br />
not in the heart-held lining<br />
but on the sleeve for all to see.<br />
Let people judge who is the baser fool:<br />
I, the unloved lover, or you,<br />
the worthless object of a great Desire!
PROMETHEUS CHAINED<br />
after a painting by Riva Leviten<br />
to be read with Beethoven’s Prometheus Variations, Op 35<br />
(sections of the poem alternating with the Variations)<br />
1<br />
<strong>The</strong> gods did not do this blasphemous thing:<br />
the Titan banished to the mountain heights,<br />
draped in iron chains to a platform of oak,<br />
eyes closed, a shadowed hulk unseeing, hunched<br />
like an animal in some hunter’s cruel trap —<br />
this deed was not the grim command of Zeus,<br />
Poseidon did not stir from ocean trench;<br />
Mars did not polish his shield, nor Athena hers.<br />
Blame not jealous Hera, nor Vulcan’s forge,<br />
despite the dark treachery of metal work.<br />
2<br />
<strong>The</strong>y did this. <strong>The</strong>y put him here.<br />
Those little creatures with the monkey eyes,<br />
the ones with all those fingers fluttering.<br />
Someone said he made them from lumps of clay.<br />
Prometheus didn’t. He found them scampering<br />
from tree to cavern to waterhole,<br />
a fornicating horde of unformed talents,<br />
flea-bitten, screeching, night-chilled,<br />
terrified of lion, wolf and vulture.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y ate whatever the earth provided<br />
or whatever dead thing no jackal touched.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y sang as they shared their pitiful raw feasts.<br />
3<br />
Some mornings one of them did not awaken.<br />
Some mornings an infant stopped breathing.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y ate their dead silently<br />
so the vultures would not get them.<br />
Those were the days they did not sing.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y walked about silently<br />
gnawing on bones whose shapes<br />
disturbed them.<br />
4<br />
<strong>The</strong> solitary Titan,<br />
outcast among the gods<br />
and last of his kind,<br />
sat quietly and watched them.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y took him for part<br />
of the landscape, a hillock,<br />
173
a man-shaped terrain<br />
in whose shadow they rested.<br />
He watched their women,<br />
their young at play,<br />
their ritual matings<br />
en masse beneath the moonlight.<br />
<strong>The</strong> songs they sang<br />
the skin drum rhythming —<br />
the struggle toward harmony<br />
pleased him.<br />
5<br />
Prometheus considered the gods—<br />
their arrogance, amours, wars and jealousies,<br />
the way they fought for dominance —<br />
no room for Titans in their universe! —<br />
and he had thought:<br />
there is as much god in these monkey-things<br />
as there is monkeyness among the gods.<br />
And so the great idea had come to him.<br />
6<br />
Cursed be the day he conceived of it!<br />
Whatever was he thinking?<br />
He made himself visible to all of them.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e morning the sheltering hill<br />
bent down, and opened its two<br />
great blue eyes,<br />
forming a face and two extended hands,<br />
bridging their language of grunts and nouns<br />
with the pure Attic of Olympus.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y ran screaming. He waited.<br />
He called them back in mother words,<br />
fatherly admonitions. He shook an oak<br />
until the acorns covered the ground.<br />
He pulled up edible tubers, found fruit,<br />
laid forth the bounty of things<br />
it was safe to eat.<br />
<strong>On</strong>e by one, they came. <strong>The</strong>y tasted,<br />
ate and slept as he gently taught them<br />
what of the earth was wholesome<br />
and what dark herbs belonged<br />
in Pluto’s garden.<br />
174
He showed them the seed, and the seedling,<br />
and the furrow, and the harvest watch,<br />
and the sweet sunrise of waving grain.<br />
7<br />
If he had left it there,<br />
they would have been but farming apes.<br />
But oh, no, he could not bear their hunger,<br />
their night fears, their mindless worship<br />
of sun and moon and lights in the sky.<br />
So he took one boy aside,<br />
taught him all the words of the gods,<br />
and showed him how to make a fire.<br />
But what is fire for? the stripling asked,<br />
trembling at the torch he held.<br />
Prometheus answered:<br />
That which cannot be eaten<br />
fire transforms into food.<br />
<strong>The</strong> beast you now fear<br />
will fear you when it sees the flame.<br />
<strong>The</strong> other secrets, you will discover.<br />
8<br />
<strong>The</strong> memory turns to gall<br />
as the Titan shifts in his chains.<br />
Fire he gave them forged those chains.<br />
Fire he gave them melted the tar<br />
with which they blacked his bronzed limbs.<br />
Now they are spewing oil<br />
from Pluto’s kingdom;<br />
they mine heavy metals<br />
that even Vulcan will not touch.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y will ascend the mountain soon<br />
with gasoline, and napalm,<br />
or something ominous<br />
they call a “thermonuclear device”<br />
to dispose of him once and for all.<br />
Presumptuous monkeys!<br />
they claim they have pried apart<br />
the indivisible atom!<br />
9<br />
Weekly, the humans’ Grand Inquisitor<br />
comes to call on Prometheus,<br />
a little man in self-important robes,<br />
like a portable black thunderstorm.<br />
175
His hawk-face is blue with ague.<br />
(Pestilence is everywhere in their cities now.)<br />
He comes to inspect and tighten the chains.<br />
He will make his report to the Ministry,<br />
and assure the Faithful<br />
that the blaspheming Titan<br />
will soon be no threat —<br />
after the final solution, that is.<br />
10<br />
<strong>The</strong> Titan ignores the blue-faced visitor.<br />
He knows him well, but will not deign<br />
to lift an eyelid for such a devious gnat.<br />
This is the one who came for wisdom,<br />
asked who the gods were and how they came to be.<br />
Prometheus mistook him<br />
for a fellow seeker.<br />
He asked how the gods as the Titan knew them<br />
meshed with the gods the monkey-men<br />
had recently invented.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Titan revealed<br />
his own discovered truth:<br />
that the gods are fools and rogues.<br />
That they are only gods because bigger,<br />
stronger, and older than others. That Titans<br />
had come earlier and been defeated<br />
(all but one!). And before the Titans,<br />
others, world-spanning, time-defying<br />
entities who hurled whole galaxies<br />
at one another in eons-long struggles —<br />
insect gods, reptile gods, unspeakable beings<br />
with tentacles and eye-stalks, leaping<br />
from space to space and age to age,<br />
and behind all gods the crawling Chaos,<br />
which only the great I am of life-force<br />
prevents from devouring it all —<br />
He revealed this, and more —<br />
of thirty-two so-called creations<br />
that rescued life from nothingness —<br />
and every one followed<br />
by a madhouse of life,<br />
striving up from mud to the stars.<br />
176
11<br />
When the human repeated<br />
the Titan’s theogeny<br />
to his assembled ministers<br />
they shouted Blasphemy! Blasphemy!<br />
<strong>The</strong>y came from all over —<br />
the learned men<br />
whose fathers he had taught to read —<br />
they recited proofs<br />
in a language but recently forgotten<br />
that their own god — a monkey-Zeus —<br />
had made the earth just recently,<br />
and only for the use of monkeys —<br />
especially for the monkeys<br />
who believed in monkey-Zeus.<br />
(All others were to be put to death,<br />
or made to serve in silence.)<br />
12<br />
An eagle arrives,<br />
lights on the Titan’s<br />
massive forearm.<br />
Prometheus laughs bitterly.<br />
“That old device again?<br />
Fine for abducting boys.<br />
Or have you come to add feathers<br />
to my indignity?”<br />
<strong>The</strong> eagle says nothing.<br />
Its glacier eyes pierce him.<br />
He tries in vain<br />
to throw off the raptor.<br />
“So, Zeus, you come to gloat!<br />
Acorn-eater,<br />
Cronus’s vomit-ball —<br />
go back to Rhea’s nipples,<br />
or hide behind Hera.”<br />
“Proud to the last,”<br />
the eagle finally responds<br />
in a parody of god-voice.<br />
“Did I not warn you<br />
about the human kind?”<br />
“I see your hand in this,”<br />
Prometheus replies,<br />
“filling their little minds<br />
with holy madness.<br />
I taught them the way of knowledge.”<br />
177
“We scarcely noticed them,”<br />
the eagle insists,<br />
“until their arrogant prayers<br />
polluted the atmosphere.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y have a plaything god<br />
who forbids other gods<br />
their proper commerce.”<br />
“<strong>The</strong>y have gone mad,”<br />
Prometheus conjectures.<br />
“<strong>The</strong>ir little monkey-god<br />
was bad enough<br />
with his orangutan beard<br />
and stone tablets.<br />
“Now, according to some,<br />
he found a virgin,<br />
begot a son on her,<br />
sent the son down<br />
to teach the humans.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y killed him.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n they felt sorry<br />
and decided he rose<br />
from the dead.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n the son promised<br />
to bring them all back<br />
if they worshipped him —<br />
“<strong>The</strong>re goes Hades!”<br />
Zeus laughs.<br />
“Each time the little<br />
Inquisitor comes,<br />
the story has changed,”<br />
Prometheus complains.<br />
“Finally they called me<br />
to make peace among them.<br />
I went, down there<br />
where their great stone towers<br />
follow both rivers<br />
to the sea.<br />
I heard them. I drank<br />
their new-pressed wine<br />
(good as yours on Olympus, too!)<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir sermons made me sleepy,<br />
or so I thought.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y had drugged my wine!<br />
“Days later I woke<br />
to this prison of chains.<br />
178
<strong>The</strong>n came the tar —<br />
they hauled it by the truckload.<br />
Three times they have tried<br />
to burn me to cinders.<br />
Three times my Mother the Earth<br />
has healed me.”<br />
13<br />
“Should we open Tartarus,”<br />
I wonder?”<br />
old Zeus proposes.<br />
“<strong>On</strong>e swipe of a berserker Titan,<br />
your elder, snake-footed brother,<br />
and their cities would topple.<br />
Or we could send Poseidon’s Kraaken –<br />
a million nightmare tentacles<br />
and one consuming beak<br />
with appetite enough<br />
to consume their species —“<br />
“No!” says Prometheus.<br />
“Much as I hate some of them,<br />
the best of them are better than us.<br />
No! listen, or swoop below and look!<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir towers gleam in the sunrise.<br />
Bridges, aqueducts, fountains and spires,<br />
women in jeweled splendor,<br />
boys in the glory of their summer games,<br />
the poets, the orchestra of viols,<br />
flutes and trumpets. For every word<br />
I taught them they invented twenty.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y can stride the planet,<br />
take the stars.<br />
I want to see<br />
what they do next.”<br />
14<br />
Swirling black clouds<br />
cascade from nearby mountain ranges,<br />
a storm of discord, woe, suspicion,<br />
a hurricane of malice and pestilence,<br />
a bee-swarm of lies, boils and tumors,<br />
wing-dust of a generation of Harpies.<br />
He sees it hovering —<br />
he knows that only he<br />
stands between it and the city —<br />
179
hag-things with multi-jointed<br />
spindle legs, splayed knees,<br />
elbows and ankles<br />
at insane angles,<br />
broom down<br />
with their companion rooks<br />
to hurl their curses at the earth.<br />
This is Pandora’s cloud,<br />
a convocation of evils<br />
all destined to make misery<br />
of so short a life,<br />
pain-edge creeping<br />
just past the prime,<br />
making old age<br />
deaf, blind and crippled.<br />
No wonder the poor creatures<br />
go mad in droves!<br />
Zeus knows the cloud —<br />
he fluttered down<br />
from out its fore-wind.<br />
“Let’s see how god-like they’ll be,”<br />
he taunts the Titan,<br />
“when their flesh erupts in boils,<br />
when they watch their young wither,<br />
and their parents revert to infancy.”<br />
15<br />
“You cannot help them,”<br />
the Olympian boasts.<br />
“<strong>The</strong>ir little lives are like fireflies.<br />
And now their higher wisdom<br />
tells them to kill you!”<br />
“A long list of gods<br />
has tried to kill me,”<br />
Prometheus replies.<br />
“I am the last Titan<br />
now that poor Atlas<br />
has lain down petrified.<br />
Perhaps my race is run,<br />
but I have not yet tired of it.<br />
Can you say as much,<br />
you moth-eaten god?<br />
180
16<br />
<strong>As</strong> the eagle flies off<br />
to the comforts of Olympus,<br />
the promise of apples<br />
that grant eternal life,<br />
Prometheus hurls<br />
his final taunt.<br />
“<strong>The</strong>y’ll learn the truth<br />
that will empty your temples.<br />
Aphrodite’s wrinkles<br />
will crack her marble likeness.<br />
Apollo and Mars, Hephaestus,<br />
Poseidon will all be the stock<br />
of laughing school-boys.<br />
“I go to cinders and funeral smoke,<br />
but I take all of you with me,<br />
household gods of a dead race!<br />
“<strong>The</strong>re were no gods.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re are no gods.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re are only<br />
monsters.”<br />
181
THE DEATH OF QUEEN JOCASTA:<br />
A NEW SCENE FOR SOPHOCLES’ OEDIPUS REX<br />
SCENE: <strong>The</strong> Royal Bedchamber in <strong>The</strong>bes. A bed with bedclothes and pillows at center<br />
stage. <strong>The</strong> Chorus of Old Women enter individually from the edges of the stage and meet at<br />
the front and center of the stage.<br />
WOMAN 1<br />
I did not think to find you here today.<br />
Your house was dark. <strong>The</strong> plague is everywhere.<br />
WOMAN 2<br />
Apollo —or Hekate — has spared us,<br />
sister, but all around us dead are piled<br />
in doorways or stacked like logs for burning.<br />
Here comes my brother’s wife. Thank Zeus you are<br />
still among the living! What news bring you?<br />
WOMAN 3<br />
We are called to the palace. Death is not there,<br />
but worse than Death. Chasing his oracles,<br />
and running from oracles past, our king,<br />
sharp-witted Oedipus who beat the Sphinx,<br />
has brought down horrors on <strong>The</strong>bes.<br />
CHORUS<br />
We knew it!<br />
Cursed is our city with plague and starving.<br />
Help us, sisters, to bring an end to it!<br />
WOMAN 1<br />
Shepherds and farmers come not to market.<br />
<strong>The</strong> fisherman, spying our funerals,<br />
the columns of smoke and the circling vultures,<br />
avoid us and sell their catch in Athens.<br />
WOMAN 2<br />
Disaster begins in the royal house,<br />
and all the people are doomed to suffer.<br />
WOMAN 3<br />
But why are we summoned? Keep to our homes,<br />
I say, until the Lord of Death passes!<br />
CHORUS<br />
Cursed is our city with plague and starving.<br />
Help us, sisters, to put an end to it!<br />
WOMAN 1<br />
Listen! Oedipus stands stunned. <strong>The</strong> murder<br />
of old King Laius is now unraveled.<br />
182
<strong>The</strong> blight of unsolved crime brought us the plague<br />
as punishment from the angry Furies.<br />
<strong>The</strong> killer of the old king … is the King,<br />
who came a stranger to our grieving <strong>The</strong>bes<br />
and wed the widowed Queen Jocasta.<br />
WOMAN 2<br />
But Oedipus and she are happily wed,<br />
blessed by the gods with four inheritors.<br />
WOMAN 3<br />
<strong>The</strong> sorry history of King Laius<br />
has been told and retold by the gossips.<br />
But Oedipus killing Laius — not that!<br />
WOMAN 2<br />
So the gods knew the truth, and did nothing?<br />
WOMAN 3<br />
Have not many kings killed those before them?<br />
Greece is full of tyrants, ripe for plucking.<br />
WOMAN 1<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is more, sisters! Laius was hunting.<br />
His escort knocked young Oedipus aside<br />
to make way for the king’s passage. In rage,<br />
possessed by fury he could not explain,<br />
Oedipus took sword and killed them all! All!<br />
He never knew from their rustic attire<br />
he had killed the king of <strong>The</strong>bes! <strong>The</strong> gods knew,<br />
fermenting their vengeance like vinegar.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n Oedipus, saving the <strong>The</strong>bans once<br />
and for all from the dreaded Sphinx,<br />
came to us. Shrouded Jocasta he took,<br />
these twenty years our king, and her husband,<br />
these years he lay with his victim’s widow.<br />
But here it is, Sisters: horror piles deep<br />
on horror in this world, this serpents’ nest:<br />
Know now that killing Laius, Oedipus …<br />
has …slain… his… father. And marrying her —<br />
WOMAN 3<br />
Laius, the father of Oedipus! <strong>The</strong>n…<br />
CHORUS<br />
Cursed is our city with plague and starving!<br />
183
WOMAN 2<br />
Jocasta is wed to her cast-off son,<br />
the baby King Laius hurled from a cliff:<br />
the one of whom the oracles warned him,<br />
the king-killing son, wedding his mother!<br />
CHORUS<br />
Help us sisters, to bring an end to it.<br />
We bow to you as eldest among us.<br />
WOMAN 1<br />
(looking from edge of stage)<br />
<strong>The</strong>y stand in horror within the palace:<br />
Oedipus, Creon, nobles, messengers.<br />
News spreads like a bee-hum outside the walls.<br />
<strong>The</strong> sky is red with shame, the sea pauses<br />
as though the very waves would shun the wharves.<br />
WOMAN 2<br />
<strong>On</strong>ly Queen Jocasta is moving — look here!<br />
Her long robe flutters amid the columns.<br />
She comes! Her face is a mask of horror.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Chorus withdraws to the edges of the stage and turn their backs to the center of the stage.<br />
Enter Queen Jocasta, in disarray, her hair flying all about her, her robe disheveled. She<br />
hurls herself onto the bed at the center of the stage and tears at the bedclothes in fury and<br />
shame. She howls. <strong>The</strong> Chorus of Old Women emerges from the shadows and surrounds her.<br />
CHORUS<br />
Jocasta, Queen, Look up and attend us!<br />
JOCASTA<br />
What? All of you here? Old women of <strong>The</strong>bes!<br />
I did not ask for your counsel today.<br />
How dare you intrude on my day of grief!<br />
WOMAN 1<br />
We have come, as is our right, to question.<br />
WOMAN 2<br />
Who is your son, and who your husband now?<br />
WOMAN 3<br />
And what will you do to placate the gods?<br />
JOCASTA<br />
I am just come from the court, from Creon,<br />
my brother, and Oedipus, my — but how<br />
can you be here already to taunt me?<br />
184
CHORUS<br />
Faster than falcons flies the bird of woe.<br />
We watch and listen.<br />
WOMAN 1<br />
WOMAN 2<br />
We who never sleep.<br />
WOMAN 3<br />
We who guard the morals of the city.<br />
CHORUS<br />
Sacred to Hera and us, is marriage.<br />
Bound we are all to the proper customs,<br />
without which men are beasts, and women, whores.<br />
WOMAN 1<br />
Jocasta, you are Queen, we the Elders.<br />
You are bound to speak, and to speak truly,<br />
by the laws of <strong>The</strong>bes and our sisterhood.<br />
Did not you dance with us on the mountain,<br />
in those old rites no man may see, and live?<br />
<strong>Are</strong> you not sworn to hear us, as always?<br />
Consort of Laius, what was your duty?<br />
JOCASTA<br />
To Laius, nothing! You are women. What bond<br />
can woman have to her son’s murderer?<br />
He took my first-born child. By the oracle<br />
driven, he cast the healthy infant boy<br />
I know not where. Some cliff or cavern.<br />
Strong cords bound his ankles together<br />
so the helpless babe could not elude<br />
the lion, the wolf, the high-soaring eagle.<br />
I thought him a tiny bleached skeleton<br />
lying in some dark ravine, forgotten.<br />
No grave, no stone, the very memory<br />
erased as though I had never borne him!<br />
WOMAN 1<br />
Yet he lived. He grew. He came to your bed.<br />
JOCASTA<br />
How dare you accuse me now of knowing<br />
what no one could have known of Oedipus?<br />
CHORUS<br />
How like you he looks! We guessed it! We knew!<br />
185
WOMAN 1<br />
Did you not see the stranger limping in,<br />
when god-proud he saved the city and took<br />
in a mere few days your fresh widow’s shrouds,<br />
and made of them your second bridal veil?<br />
Where was your decency, Queen Jocasta?<br />
JOCASTA<br />
You hypocrites, you ate at my table!<br />
Woman to woman I tell you this thing:<br />
I knew King Laius dead, and wished him dead,<br />
and I would have kissed the hand that killed him.<br />
(She stops with horror at what she has just said.)<br />
<strong>The</strong> gods ensorcel us — they make us speak,<br />
until our words convict us of murder,<br />
yet we did not kill — of lust, when never<br />
a thought of anything but solitude<br />
was what we wanted — and now of this thing<br />
that no one could have imagined to be!<br />
If I am bound to speak the truth, then hear!<br />
I did not care to find the thieves who killed him.<br />
I rejoiced in a murderer’s murder.<br />
In all the latter years of our marriage<br />
I made the choice we all have right to make:<br />
to bear the heartless man no children more.<br />
I gave him death for death. Ointments I had<br />
from Hekate’s sisters, ground by moonlight.<br />
You — you were the one who secured them!<br />
(Woman 3 turns her head away in denial.)<br />
You!<br />
Some bitter herbs to resist his seed,<br />
and some I used to expel his daughters,<br />
his sons, his shriveled progeny I dropped<br />
into a hole at the back of the garden.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y are still there. I do not regret them.<br />
I wanted the line of Laius to end<br />
with him —his death ended my misery.<br />
WOMAN 2<br />
So hasty a bond to the unknown youth<br />
was unbecoming a widow. Laius<br />
was bad, for you and for all the kingdom,<br />
but you betrayed our women’s dignity<br />
to grovel at the feet of a stripling!<br />
186
JOCASTA<br />
Did I choose him? Chaste on my throne, all veiled<br />
in widow’s raiment I sat to greet him.<br />
<strong>The</strong>bes could not have a mere woman above it.<br />
I all but gave in to Creon’s ruling,<br />
but many there were who did not trust him.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y used me, just as they used Oedipus.<br />
<strong>The</strong> council of men made up the marriage.<br />
In three days I was wed to the hero.<br />
Where were you, old women, to speak for me?<br />
You saw me, a queen in name, a plaything<br />
for politics and the exchange of crowns.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re you sat at my second wedding feast,<br />
your lewd eyes all over my groom’s young face,<br />
your gossips’ fingers subtracting his age<br />
from mine and laughing at my supposèd luck.<br />
WOMAN3<br />
Did you never guess and dread the whole truth?<br />
Speak now, Jocasta, to save your own life!<br />
JOCASTA<br />
<strong>The</strong> truth need never fear the light of day.<br />
In premonitions only did I know it.<br />
Waking the first morn in sun-rays, I spied<br />
the hard scars upon his naked ankles.<br />
He said he had always been thus. I shook<br />
from head to foot in dread and denial,<br />
and then the young man made love to me, my<br />
shudders of fear gave way to deep desire,<br />
and I vowed to never think it again.<br />
Such bliss could only come with gods’ consent.<br />
WOMAN2<br />
And you never again suspected him?<br />
JOCASTA<br />
<strong>On</strong>ce I called him “my boy,” and he fled me.<br />
So we came to better bed-time names:<br />
“Old man,” he was, and I his “little girl.”<br />
And if I knew, within my secret heart<br />
he was my son, it was my joy to love,<br />
to bind him near me thus, as blood to blood.<br />
He chose me. He wanted me. He loved me.<br />
If you believe in gods, this was their work.<br />
No man was ever more Aphrodite’s slave,<br />
nor any wife more awed by Hyperion,<br />
for yes, to me, he was the sun and moon.<br />
187
CHORUS<br />
Taken in crime, they always cry, “Love, love, love!”<br />
Taken in sin, “It was too dark to see!”<br />
WOMAN1<br />
You have all but confessed it. You knew him!<br />
How could you bear his children, monster queen?<br />
WOMAN2<br />
Will you lie and wait for your grandson, too?<br />
JOCASTA<br />
With joy and dread I bore him those children.<br />
Is it not thus with any woman? And<br />
when I was shown Antigone’s visage<br />
wrapped in the royal swaddling cloth that morn<br />
I said, “<strong>The</strong> gods sleep. This is no monster.”<br />
CHORUS<br />
Lowest of women, you profane the gods!<br />
JOCASTA<br />
Look at my children, all four of them, look<br />
at the eyes and brow of Eteocles<br />
my son, our son, the son of Oedipus!<br />
Watch Polynices, our other fair son<br />
slay the fleet deer with a single arrow.<br />
Look at my fair Antigone and say<br />
that the gods have cursed us. Ismene, too,<br />
our youngest daughter, and our dearest pearl.<br />
How could the gods have blessed us in this guise<br />
if they intended to blast and destroy?<br />
WOMAN 3<br />
Unnatural woman! <strong>The</strong> gods look down<br />
and scorn you. Furies will hound your children<br />
until they rot as unburied exiles,<br />
unwelcome in any Attic-tongued city.<br />
Dare you say we are unpunished in <strong>The</strong>bes<br />
when the streets are clogged with the dying?<br />
JOCASTA<br />
I am not an unnatural woman.<br />
I yearn and love and bleed like all of you.<br />
Do not believe those lying oracles.<br />
188
WOMAN3<br />
Your life is forfeit, Jocasta! Hera<br />
has spoken from her dread throne. Hearthstones crack<br />
and ovens eject their bread unheated,<br />
nor brides nor grooms can consummate their vows,<br />
nor even may the dead be buried, incense<br />
falls down and fails to go up to heaven<br />
so long as your marriage bed stains the earth.<br />
JOCASTA<br />
Get out of here! I curse you, hateful crones!<br />
CHORUS<br />
Your life is forfeit, Jocasta! Yield it!<br />
I am my children’s mother!<br />
JOCASTA<br />
WOMAN2<br />
A vile womb<br />
through which generations pass to and fro<br />
like the open gates to the marketplace!<br />
Now they’ll all cry “<strong>The</strong>bes! <strong>The</strong> Incest City,<br />
Where father and daughter, mother and son,<br />
brother and sister all sleep in one bed!”<br />
CHORUS<br />
Your life is forfeit, Jocasta! Yield it!<br />
JOCASTA<br />
Never! Your gods are a fraud. I hate them,<br />
as I hate your hypocritical ways.<br />
WOMAN1<br />
(aside to WOMAN 2)<br />
She neither repents nor dignifies death<br />
by taking timely exit upon this world.<br />
Hand me the rope and I’ll do it myself!<br />
WOMAN2<br />
(aside to WOMAN 1)<br />
Here, knot it well. We’ll let her hang from there,<br />
where that great beam runs over the ceiling.<br />
JOCASTA<br />
Get back, you childless crones! What right have you<br />
to judge a queen with four bright promises<br />
for a thousand years of glory for <strong>The</strong>bes?<br />
189
CHORUS<br />
We speak no more. Our hands will silence you.<br />
(<strong>The</strong>y close in around Jocasta. <strong>The</strong>ir robes conceal her.)<br />
WOMAN1<br />
(to WOMAN 2)<br />
Send word to Creon that Jocasta died,<br />
alone, an honorable suicide.<br />
190<br />
WOMAN2 runs from the stage.<br />
F I N I S
WHAT IS A POEM, ANYWAY?<br />
Poets are notorious for coming up with<br />
mani f est os and pron ouncem ents. Eve ryone<br />
has a powerful opini on that what he<br />
writes, and what his friends write, makes<br />
up the real poetry, and what eve ryone else<br />
does is not poetry.<br />
I’ve made some pretty strong pronouncem<br />
ents mys elf about the ragged-right-margin,<br />
confessional babble<br />
that has posed as poe try — a wheezing old<br />
man with a walker who still calls himself<br />
“avant garde.” I’ve also railed against the<br />
primitivist strains in poe try — rock lyrics,<br />
rap, and much of “slam” poe try is just<br />
spewing, often by people who have read<br />
no poetry.<br />
Well, what is poe try to me? It is a form<br />
of writing, sometimes narrative, sometimes<br />
merely descript ive, that has a paraphrasable<br />
meani ng, and employs poe tic<br />
devices such as rhythm, alliteration, consonance,<br />
rhyme, or assonance. Poetry is<br />
aware of what has been written bef ore; it<br />
builds on earlier poets (which is why a depressed<br />
teena ger at an open mike is almost<br />
never a poet.) Above all, poetry is<br />
imagin at ive — it taps into myth, symb ol,<br />
and magic, and uses ima gery to conv ey and<br />
reinforce its message. <strong>The</strong> final ingredient<br />
is that the lang uage its elf must be beaut iful,<br />
imaginative, striking.<br />
Good poets first acquire the craft to<br />
write in established forms, and, later, the<br />
skills to break the rules. Even so-called<br />
“free verse,” when it is worthy, employs<br />
some of the traditional dev ices, often in<br />
subt le and shifti ng ways, but there<br />
nonetheless.<br />
To rhyme or not to rhyme? I avoided it<br />
for most of my life in my own work, even<br />
though I love my Rom ant ic poe ts and my<br />
Poe. Rhyme is a dilemma, precisely because<br />
it is diff ic ult to do something with it<br />
that has not been done many times bef ore.<br />
Alm ost anyt hing can be said in rhymed<br />
verse, but all verses are not necessarily poems.<br />
Greeti ng card verse and most song<br />
lyri cs may be poems “by the book,” but<br />
they are not good poems.<br />
ABOUT THE POEMS<br />
<strong>The</strong>re is another level to poetry, and<br />
this is the part that cann ot be taught.<br />
<strong>The</strong> “born” poets acquire their craft<br />
early on, and then turn the details over to<br />
their subc ons cious. <strong>The</strong>y gain the ability<br />
— not all the time but when they are<br />
“tuned in” — to write long stretches of<br />
highly poli shed poetry almost as if dictated<br />
to. It’s eit her a form of ins ani ty, or<br />
it’s ins pir at ion. This is what poe ts pray<br />
for — and we sanct ify it by calli ng it the<br />
visi t ation of the Muse. <strong>The</strong> Muse-inspired<br />
is the Bardic voice, in which the<br />
power of creation seizes the poet and<br />
takes him places he never expected to go.<br />
<strong>The</strong> experience of writi ng, and of<br />
readi ng, this kind of poe try is like havi ng<br />
the top of your head lifted off. This is the<br />
poetry I live to write, and to read. My belief<br />
in this will exp lain my imp at ience<br />
with poe ts who aim too low, and who<br />
seem to have a deficiency of psychic energy<br />
and imagination.<br />
When a poet of this sort has the misfortune<br />
to be a religious fanatic, he writes<br />
holy scriptures and founds religions. It is<br />
a sad fact that good poe try red eems us,<br />
but the poems of rel ig ious fan ati cs lead to<br />
wars of conquest and extermination.<br />
Plato may have been right to be suspicious<br />
of poe ts.<br />
Perh aps one of the reas ons that saner<br />
poets cling to the idea of the Muse or<br />
spirit guide — think of Dante guided by<br />
Virg il through Hell — is that this view of<br />
things keeps us in our place. <strong>As</strong> poets, we<br />
may be privileged to env is ion things that<br />
ordinary mortals do not, but we are still<br />
ordinary mortals, and the Muse only<br />
grants us glimpses of higher things.<br />
Havi ng said that, and dared to put<br />
mys elf, from time to time, in the League<br />
of Super-Poets, I hast en to add that all<br />
esthetic definitions are man-made, and<br />
are unique to a culture. Everyt hing I say<br />
about poe try might be nons ense to a poet<br />
in ano ther time and place. What Chin ese<br />
poets in the Ming or Sung Dynasties considered<br />
to be their craft is very, very dif-<br />
191
ferent from what we do. Poets in Greek,<br />
Latin, Arabic or Japa n ese, anc ient or modern,<br />
likewise do what they do with radically<br />
different conceptions of what makes<br />
a good poem. I can only say what is true for<br />
me within the lite ra ry trad it ion that I am<br />
part of. And I add that I have read, or tried<br />
to read, many other modern poets’<br />
manifestos or statem ents about poetics,<br />
and I find most of them incoh erent, not to<br />
mention intolerant of any other view of<br />
poetics.<br />
I am sayi ng this just to exp lain a litt le<br />
of why I write and how I write. Although I<br />
have taken pleasure in writi ng a few poems<br />
with a form al struct ure, it is usua lly a<br />
challenge I set for myself, not something<br />
done out of a feeling of nec essity. Most of<br />
my poems are improvisations. Iambic pentamet<br />
er com es naturally to me and I oft en<br />
comp ose in it witho ut thinking; other<br />
times I consciously use short lines and<br />
seek to use rhythm and repet ition to hold<br />
a piece together. Sometimes there is a<br />
forml ess, prose-like “reci t at ive” or<br />
warm-up exercise, before the truly poetic<br />
pass ages kick in.<br />
A few poems took me years to finish.<br />
Somet imes I had to wait for the “Muse<br />
mom ent” that gave me the right rhythm<br />
and opening line. Other times I have written<br />
an ent ire long, unp lanned poe m in<br />
one unbroken stretch, as though possessed.<br />
In alm ost eve ryt hing I write, I ant ici -<br />
pate a voice speaki ng or reading the lines,<br />
and a list ener, rather than a page reader.<br />
For this reason I strive for lucidity. Even if<br />
the idea I am conveying is complex, I want<br />
to convey it in lang uage the listener will<br />
grasp. I reg ard a written poem as a script<br />
for oral reading, so I do not play visual<br />
games with typ ogr ap hy. If my lang uage<br />
seems unu sua lly restrained in this age of<br />
vulg arity, it is because I respect my reader.<br />
In this ent ire book, sex and mayh em<br />
abound, but there is only a single four-letter<br />
word.<br />
Respect for the reader takes another<br />
form, too: don’t speak unless you have<br />
something to say. <strong>The</strong> “dear diary” school<br />
of poetry is not for me, because most writers<br />
lead boring lives. We are not, most of<br />
us, fighti ng bulls, dodgi ng bull ets in bat-<br />
192<br />
tle, or exploring Antarctic wastes. Poets<br />
who sit around reading poetry, and reading<br />
mind-numbi ng books of criti c ism, are<br />
goi ng to have very little to say that anyone<br />
wants to hear. Most of my own reading<br />
is in history, science, the classics,<br />
philosophy and, of course, my favori te<br />
genre, horror. Homer picked the Trojan<br />
War to write about bec ause it was the<br />
most imp ort ant thing he could find. I<br />
write about coll idi ng gala xi es and rel igious<br />
fanatics blowing up Buddhas and<br />
office towe rs because these things are important.<br />
Repeatedly, I have had people come<br />
up to me aft er poe try readi ngs and say,<br />
“I’m so rel ieved and so surp rised. I understood<br />
what you were saying. Why<br />
don’t other poets do that?” Why, indeed?<br />
I say this, not in boast but in chall enge to<br />
the next generation of poets. I am tired of<br />
watchi ng people squirm in their seats<br />
duri ng the readi ng of avant garde nonsense,<br />
and blami ng thems elves for their inabili<br />
ty to make sense of it. Trust your<br />
judgm ent, reader. If you smell a skunk, it<br />
probably is a skunk.<br />
ABOUT THE POEMS<br />
Why explain anything? Some poets<br />
take pride in baff ling their reade rs, and<br />
ensuring that criti cs will have fodder for<br />
their mast er’s thes es. I like to add these<br />
brief notes to my books, in which I say<br />
what I might say in a live poe try readi ng,<br />
by way of explaining why or how something<br />
came to be writt en. Somet imes I<br />
feel that an audience needs to have certain<br />
terms or mythological characters explained.<br />
Since I have many readers who<br />
are not poe ts — the gods be thanked! — I<br />
do indeed get notes of thanks from readers,<br />
saying that these back-of-the-book<br />
comments made the difference between<br />
puzz lem ent and pleas ure. So I cont inue<br />
on my perverse way, having my say. I will<br />
try to be brief.<br />
BETWEEN THE PAGES was written<br />
as a prel ude to my Anniversarius cyc le<br />
of aut umn poe ms. Its ima ges are a good<br />
preview of my weird Gothic-Romantic<br />
perspective. <strong>The</strong> poem is followed by<br />
ENTRE LAS HOJAS, my Spani sh ver-
sion of the same poem. I am seized with<br />
the desire to be a hemispheric poet, so I expect<br />
to do more transl at ions into Spani sh.<br />
I welcome and celeb rate the joining of cultures<br />
that is now occ urr ing — we pasty<br />
pale Ang los need some Latin passion.<br />
LIBER ANNIVERSARII<br />
IN CHILL NOVEMBER came from<br />
the simp le obs erv at ion that late in the season<br />
when all the leaves have fallen, you<br />
cannot distinguish (especially from afar), a<br />
living tree from a dead one. <strong>The</strong> idea of<br />
dead trees lurki ng in a living forest like<br />
zombies or the Undead intrigued me. At<br />
the end, though, is affirmation.<br />
In THE FENCE, I return to my favorite<br />
old count ry graveyard in Northwest<br />
Pennsylvania and discover, to my esthetic<br />
alarm, that a rust ic 18th cent ury gravey ard<br />
at the edge of a calm lake has been completely<br />
wrapped in a chain link fence. An<br />
unf ort un ate dev elo pm ent for a place<br />
whose natural beauty I have celeb rated for<br />
more than two dec ades!<br />
Aft er an autumn even ing in the woods<br />
in Rhode Isl and, I found mys elf writi ng<br />
TO THE ARC OF THE SUBLIME,<br />
which incorporates, in its cosmic musings,<br />
some lines from one of my earliest poems.<br />
I wrote this in the 1996 edition of<br />
Anniversarium: “<strong>The</strong> poem brings me full<br />
circ le to who I am tod ay, standing firmly<br />
on the strange rock of who I was at twenty.<br />
Alt hough I am cert ain to use some of the<br />
same themes and ima ges again, I have<br />
grown cert ain that, with this poem, the integral<br />
work called Anniversarium has at last<br />
been completed — more than 22 years after<br />
its inc ept ion.”<br />
I was wrong. Alt hough this poem is a<br />
summation of my transcendental outlook,<br />
I was to write more autumn poems. In the<br />
forthc omi ng new edit ion of Anniversarium,<br />
I div ide the old and new poe ms into “Ring<br />
1” and “Ring 2.” This poem ends Ring 1.<br />
When I wrote OCTOBER STORM<br />
1998, I was imm ersi ng mys elf once again<br />
in Chinese opera and lite ra ture, and I had<br />
rec ently acquired my Chinese nom de<br />
plume. <strong>The</strong> ferocious thunderstorm that<br />
rocked New Jersey that month — the<br />
most vio l ent I have ever experienced —<br />
yielded these not-at-all exa gg era ted images.<br />
<strong>On</strong> a magi c al level, if you named<br />
yourself “Dream of Autumn Thund er,”<br />
you get what you ask for.<br />
Somehow I had never read Pushkin’s<br />
immort al and unfini shed poem of 1833,<br />
AUTUMN, until recently. It hit me like a<br />
thund erb olt. Pushkin and I are poe tic<br />
brothe rs, and I have had Russ ian gloom<br />
und er my skin since I was sixt een. I can<br />
remember teaching myself the Cyrillic alphab<br />
et so that I could sing Russ ian folk<br />
songs and opera, and I dev oured all the<br />
standard Russian classics in translation.<br />
But this poem is spec ial, bec ause it inhabi<br />
ts the same world as my own aut umn<br />
poems. At first, I decided to leave the<br />
poem alone, bec ause it has been exquisitely<br />
translated, preserving its beautiful<br />
rhyme and meter. But finally, I decided<br />
to render the poem in my own style, and<br />
here and there the Muse possessed me to<br />
add a few lines, all in the spirit of the<br />
poem, of course. I found, in Stanza 8, that<br />
Pushkin employed some kind of word<br />
plays that seems imp oss ib le to transl ate,<br />
and here all the transl at ors seem to stumble.<br />
My sol ut ion was to make up my own<br />
abruptly-interrupted whimsy. I used<br />
Drac ula and Frank ens tein in them because<br />
I wanted somet hing that my<br />
friends would ins tantly recognize as<br />
“Rutherford perverse quirks,” and the<br />
sudden interruption is the equivalent of<br />
my stopping when everyone rolls their<br />
eyes as if to say, “<strong>The</strong>re he goes again!” I<br />
have said more than the usual few words<br />
here because some people have strong<br />
feelings about translations being literal. I<br />
believe that brother and sister poets<br />
must be free to adapt one another in their<br />
own manner.<br />
ON RECEIVING A GIFT OF<br />
BOOKS IN EARLY OCTOBER —- This<br />
is an exercise. I received a big box of gift<br />
books from my friend Barbara Girard, and<br />
I let them tumble onto the floor. <strong>The</strong><br />
poem is an instant improvisation based<br />
on peeki ng at the books at random.<br />
193
AUTUMN SUNDAYS IN MAD-<br />
ISON SQUARE PARK took some years to<br />
write. I lived near the square in the 1970s<br />
and worked near it in the 1990s, so it is a<br />
place deeply rooted in my consciousness<br />
of Manhattan. I inv ented a new metr ic<br />
form for this poem — don’t ask me to give<br />
it a name — to avoid having it all in standard<br />
iambic pentamet er. I used journal<br />
notes with vivid descriptions of the park,<br />
its trees, ani m als and hum an deni z ens, to<br />
try to sum up the feeli ngs the place<br />
evoked. Since I wrote the poem, the park<br />
has been completely renov ated, so the decrepit<br />
conditions described here no longer<br />
exi st. This is now a piece of Manhattan<br />
history.<br />
IN PRAGUE, A TREE OF MANY<br />
COLORS belongs here as an aut umn<br />
poem, but it is act ua lly part of my “Twilight<br />
of the Dictators” cycle, too. I first<br />
wrote this poem in 1970, when the events<br />
portrayed in it — the students’ defiance of<br />
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia —<br />
were still in the news. But my style then<br />
was not up to the chall enge, and this poem<br />
lang uished for many years unt il I did some<br />
res earch on the inv as ion and the act ual details<br />
of Jan Palach’s death.<br />
<strong>The</strong> openi ng stanza is a litt le abs tract.<br />
Here I have the tree in the square speaking,<br />
and it is mocki ng the Marxi st jarg on of<br />
the time. This swiftly passes on into the<br />
act ual narrative.<br />
SEPTEMBER IN GOTHAM 2001.<br />
<strong>The</strong> destruction of the World Trade Center<br />
is imp oss ib le for me to write about<br />
without almost tot ally losi ng all emot ional<br />
control. Since I spent two decades of my<br />
life in and around New York City, the attack<br />
on New York is personal. I arrived in<br />
the city in the last week of September for<br />
a book publ ishi ng party for Annette Hayn,<br />
and I stayed at a hot el on East 31st Street.<br />
<strong>The</strong> Armory, a few blocks away, had been a<br />
command center for some of the World<br />
Trade Center rescue efforts, and the walls<br />
of the building and all the fences for<br />
blocks around were covered with flye rs<br />
showi ng the faces and names of vict ims,<br />
with pleas from family and loved ones,<br />
“Find Me,” “Missing,” “Have You Seen<br />
194<br />
Me?” New Yorkers were standing in front<br />
of these poste rs, weepi ng unc ont roll ab ly.<br />
My poem is a small att empt to describe<br />
just that limi ted view of the tragedy.<br />
<strong>The</strong> posters were disintegrating in<br />
rain and wind, and were becoming the fall<br />
leaves of 2001. More than this, I cannot<br />
bring myself to write.<br />
THE GODS AS THEY ARE,<br />
ON THEIR PLANETS<br />
VIKING is my tribute to the pion eering<br />
space probe to Mars. Havi ng the<br />
space probe speak for itself was fun, ending<br />
in the ironic revers al of H.G. Wells’<br />
War of the Worlds.<br />
THE GODS AS THEY ARE, ON<br />
THEIR PLANETS plays modern astronomy<br />
against Greek mythology. We now<br />
know that the planet Ven us is blist eri ng<br />
hot, with an acid atm os phere, and that<br />
Mars is a cold, dry, rust-colo red desert.<br />
This poem cont rasts these facts with the<br />
two gods of the same name, Ven us/Aphrodite<br />
and Mars/<strong>Are</strong>s.<br />
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE was<br />
provoked by hearing a poet of religious<br />
bent trott ing out the old “arg um ent by<br />
design” to prove the existence of God.<br />
Such a perfect universe as ours, so the argument<br />
goes, could only be created by<br />
God. I had just recently seen the NASA<br />
photographs of distant, colliding galaxies,<br />
and I ment ioned this as my reb utt al, saying,<br />
“If you lived in one of those gala xies,<br />
you wouldn’t believe nature was designed<br />
by God.” For days after this convers<br />
at ion, I cont inu ed to think about the<br />
NASA phot os, which I had seen in <strong>The</strong><br />
New York Times. <strong>The</strong>n I began to dream<br />
about them, and this poem rapi dly came<br />
to pass. <strong>The</strong> line “alu marana echtho<br />
karani,” transl ated at the end of the<br />
poem, is in an imagi n ary lang uage from<br />
one of the dist ant plane ts. <strong>The</strong> poem’s title,<br />
of course, refers to Philip Wylie’s famous<br />
screenp lay and novel.<br />
A shorter version of AUTUMN ON<br />
MARS was writt en several years back and<br />
counted as part of the ongoing<br />
Anniversarium ser ies. I made it long er and<br />
elabo r ated on the anato my of the imagi -
nary Mart ians, with a wave of the tent ac le<br />
to Ray Bradbury (whose Mart ians were<br />
admittedly far more hum ano id). But no<br />
one can say “Mars” and “Halloween” in<br />
the same breath witho ut evoki ng the Master<br />
of <strong>The</strong> Martian Chronicles.<br />
PLUTO DEMOTED was writt en<br />
when it was suddenly ann ounced that the<br />
planet Pluto, in some ast rono m ers’ opinions,<br />
was too small and insignificant to be<br />
called a planet, and should just be a numbered<br />
object out in the cold depths of<br />
space. I had long wanted to write a poem<br />
of tribute to Clyde Tombaugh, who discove<br />
red the planet in a stroke of alm ost incredible<br />
good fortune, and this seemed<br />
the time. <strong>The</strong> name “Yuggoth” was used<br />
by H.P . Lovecraft to describe the ninth<br />
planet bef ore it had been discove red and<br />
named.<br />
POETICA LOVECRAFTIANA<br />
I moved to Providence partially as a result<br />
of a lite ra ry pilgrima ge I made to see<br />
the homes and haunts of horror writer<br />
H.P . Lovecraft. But unt il I moved here, I<br />
wrote nothing about him, even though his<br />
stories were a powerful influence on my<br />
adolescence. My poems about Lovecraft<br />
are scatt ered througho ut all my books, and<br />
in the published edit ion of Night Gaunts,<br />
my biographical play. This book contains<br />
the newer pieces. Needless to say, these<br />
poems will give more pleasure to fans and<br />
readers of Lovecraft than to those not famili<br />
ar with his biz arre and ast oni shi ng<br />
work. (I hast en to add that I am not influenced<br />
by Lovecraft’s mostly horrid verse.)<br />
MAKER OF MONSTERS, MAKER<br />
OF GODS was a birthd ay poem for emi -<br />
nent American horror writer Frank<br />
Belknap Long. I met Frank Long when I<br />
was asked to cond uct a telev is ion int erview<br />
with him about his ment or, H.P .<br />
Lovecraft. We became friends — I only regret<br />
meeti ng him so close to his dec line<br />
and dem ise. We had been neighb ors in<br />
Chelsea almost two decades earlier, but<br />
had never met.<br />
DREAMING OF UR-R’LYEH has<br />
strange ori g ins. I was inv ited by Pet er<br />
Lamborn Wils on to cont ribu te to an “<strong>As</strong>tral<br />
Convent ion” in Antarctica. <strong>The</strong><br />
premi se was that all the part ici p ants<br />
would think or dream about Antarctica simultaneously,<br />
and submit whatever they<br />
wrote as a result for publication. <strong>The</strong> resulting<br />
book should, alone, be convincing<br />
evi dence that there is presently no telepathic<br />
power in the human psyche. People<br />
saw and env is ioned exa ctly what they<br />
were inclined to see, principally sex,<br />
drugs and anarc hy. My own “waking<br />
dream” was inf luenced by Poe and<br />
Lovecraft, spec ifi c ally Lovecraft’s Antarctic<br />
novel, At the Mount ains of Madness. I<br />
had also read a book about Shackleton’s<br />
Antarctic expedition, from which I obtained<br />
the descriptions I used of solar and<br />
atmospheric conditions. <strong>The</strong>re are many<br />
things about this poem, cons ide ra bly expanded<br />
since its first publ ic at ion, that I<br />
still can’t exp lain. I won’t try.<br />
In THE TREE AT LOVECRAFT’S<br />
GRAVE, the lordly spreadi ng beech tree<br />
at HPL ’s burial site is the cent er of att ention.<br />
This poem has now joined the small<br />
collection of ceremonial pieces performed<br />
occasionally at HPL ’s grave.<br />
UNDER LOVECRAFT’S GRAVE.<br />
HPL is buri ed next to his parents in<br />
Swan Point Ceme t ery in Providence, a<br />
spot visi ted annua lly by hund reds of the<br />
aut hor’s fans. This poem, act ua lly a<br />
mini-drama, is writt en to be read aloud<br />
by four or more voices, with change of typography<br />
giving the cues. We hear<br />
Lovecraft, his mother, his fat her, and a<br />
dead child, all speaking from ins ide their<br />
coffins. In the first part, an above-ground<br />
narr at or sets the stage.<br />
FRANK AND LYDA is a highly condensed<br />
account of my strange friendship<br />
with Frank Belknap Long and his tormented<br />
wife, Lyda Arco Long. Alt hough<br />
Frank and I had splend id conv ers ations,<br />
and I came to app reciate his poetry and<br />
the gent le spirit of his short stor ies, everything<br />
was overshadowed by his wife’s<br />
advanced ment al illn ess. A sad endi ng for<br />
a fine writer.<br />
195
I hesitated for a while before writing<br />
this poem. Have I been cruel to poor<br />
Lyda? <strong>The</strong> outr ag eous things she said and<br />
did were rep eated for anyone who set foot<br />
in the Long house. Lyda was alw ays “on<br />
stage.” And so, she still is.<br />
THINGS SEEN IN GRAVEYARDS<br />
Over the years I have written dozens of<br />
poe ms that use ceme t eri es as their settings,<br />
from count ry gravey ards to vast garden<br />
cemeteries like Mt. Auburn or<br />
Greenwood or Swan Point. Sooner or later<br />
I will publ ish them all as a book. This book<br />
includes some newer entries in this series,<br />
along with a few older ones revised.<br />
AFTER THE STORM takes us back<br />
to Edinboro, Pennsylvania where, in a<br />
more modern graveyard, I heard an unearthly<br />
waili ng. <strong>The</strong> ideas for this poem<br />
come from studies of Iroquois lore. Among<br />
their bel iefs was the charming not ion that<br />
chopping down a tree over old bones<br />
would bring dead ani mals back to life.<br />
A newspaper account of a prison work<br />
det ail sent to an isl and burial ground in<br />
New York harbor prompted the poem,<br />
HART ISLAND. It is not a fant asy.<br />
In NIGHT WALKER, I witn essed an<br />
eld erly lady sleepw alking, and only found<br />
out two days later that she had walked into<br />
the nearby river and drowned.<br />
New Engl and vamp ire lore is thin, but<br />
the Exeter, Rhode Island case of 1799 has<br />
poig nant det ails. <strong>The</strong> idea of dead fami ly<br />
members coming back for brothers and<br />
sist ers is common to many cult ures, and is<br />
proba bly based on an att empt to exp lain<br />
why many memb ers of the same fami ly<br />
died one after another. Before Pasteur’s<br />
conception of bacteria as a cause of disease,<br />
such cases seemed to be God’s work,<br />
or the Devil’s. AN EXETER VAMPIRE,<br />
1799, is writt en mostly in lines of nine syllab<br />
les. I felt, someh ow, that this evoked<br />
the feeli ng of pass ivi ty among the<br />
Tillinghast children.<br />
196<br />
GRAVEYARDS I’D LIKE TO SEE is<br />
another variant of my ongoing series, this<br />
time with more sat iri c al int ent.<br />
I started THE HARVESTMAN several<br />
years before it fin ally spun its web to<br />
completion. It’s a very formal poem, taking<br />
its cues from Grey’s “Elegy in a Country<br />
Churchy ard.” Harvestman is the<br />
Briti sh name for the opiolid creature, spider-like<br />
but not a spid er, that we call the<br />
Daddy-Long-Legs.<br />
I read about THE EAR MOUND IN<br />
KYOTO, and a ceremony commemorating<br />
the 400th anniversary of the burial of<br />
the ears from 100,000 slain or mut il ated<br />
Kor eans. <strong>The</strong> poem is fanciful in detail<br />
but accurate in history. <strong>The</strong> ears were<br />
taken, and the warl ord Toyotomi<br />
Hideyoshi (actually a great hero of feudal<br />
Jap an) did die suddenly just a year aft er<br />
the ears were brought to him as trop hies.<br />
Jap an still ref uses to ret urn the ears;<br />
hence this poem.<br />
I read about the deso l ate burial<br />
ground of ACELDEMA, THE FIELD<br />
OF BLOOD some years ago, and saw a<br />
chance to tell its hist ory. Readi ng this<br />
poem aloud to those unf am ili ar with the<br />
name is very effective.<br />
When I specu l ated publ icly about a<br />
possible Lovecraft-cult connection to a<br />
Rhode Island grave desecration, a<br />
Pawtucket police detective invited me to<br />
the scene of the crime. This is related in<br />
MRS. WEEDEN, OF PAWTUCKET.<br />
TWILIGHT OF THE DICTATORS<br />
<strong>The</strong> poem, THE EXHUMATION<br />
OF GOETHE, is based on a det ailed<br />
newspaper account of the “maceration”<br />
of Goethe’s skelet on by the East German<br />
gove rnm ent in 1970, in an att empt to<br />
turn the great poet’s remains into a tourist<br />
att ract ion, like the mummy in Len in’s<br />
tomb. Most of the details here are factual.<br />
WINTER SOLSTICE 1989 cele -<br />
brates the incredible events following<br />
the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. <strong>The</strong>
concert referred to in the poem was given<br />
by Leonard Bernstein, conducting an orchest<br />
ra of mus ic ians from East and West.<br />
In the great final chorus, the German word<br />
for joy (freude) was rep laced by the word<br />
for freedom (freiheit.) I was then, and remain<br />
now, ast oni shed at the lack of jub il ation<br />
in the West over this remarka ble<br />
series of events. We should have been<br />
dancing in the streets.<br />
IN THE STREETS OF MOSCOW<br />
AND ST. PETERSBURG is another celebrat<br />
ion, noting the amazing ima ges of<br />
statues of Len in and Stalin bei ng toppled.<br />
A world-wide broadcast of a concert featuring<br />
the 1812 Overt ure, with brill iant fireworks<br />
over the onion domes, reinforced<br />
the idea that a new age had come. I am<br />
sorry that Russia is troubled once more,<br />
and that gangs ters and strongm en have replaced<br />
the party bosses, but I hold conf idence<br />
that things will get better, even if<br />
takes another revolution.<br />
STALIN AND SHOSTAKOVICH is<br />
based on Russ ian hist ory and known biographi<br />
c al facts about Russ ian mus ic al giant<br />
Dmitri Shostakovich. This is an<br />
att empt to port ray a time and place, and<br />
Shostakovich’s state of mind as he composed<br />
his Fourth Symphony, one of the<br />
toweri ng musical works of the century just<br />
ended. <strong>The</strong> symphony was never performed<br />
during Stalin’s lifet ime.<br />
THE PIANO UPRISING – I had a<br />
dream, back in the dark days when Poland<br />
was still firmly under Soviet control, of all<br />
the pia nos comi ng to life and driving out<br />
the Russ ians. And all to the mus ic of Chopin,<br />
Poland’s great exile composer. I outlined<br />
this poem in the 1970s, and at least<br />
three times I att empted to write it, yet<br />
never found the right voice, the right line<br />
length. By the time I finally found the key<br />
— the rhythm of the Polon aise — Pol and<br />
was well on its way to shaki ng off the Russian<br />
yoke and its own cripp ling dictatorship.<br />
I hope this fant asy pleases<br />
nonetheless.<br />
HORRORS!<br />
THE ANACONDA POEMS was inspired<br />
by reading, in the Science Section<br />
of <strong>The</strong> New York Times, about the sex life of<br />
the gia nt ana c onda, the world’s large st<br />
snake. <strong>The</strong> speaking voice of this poem is<br />
very much like that of my dear friend<br />
Emilie Glen, whose passi ng was in my<br />
mind as I wrote the poem. I think of it as<br />
a poem she would have written. Emilie<br />
was a vor acious reader of natural history<br />
and it permeated her work.<br />
THE SPIDERS was a tidbit in my<br />
early book, <strong>The</strong> Pumpkined Heart, merely a<br />
nature observation about spider webs on<br />
an early morning lawn. This exp ans ion<br />
puts spid ers in cont ext as<br />
worse-than-vampires. <strong>As</strong> my uncle Bela<br />
says, “<strong>The</strong> vamp ire drinks the blood. But<br />
the spid er! the spid er drinks ... everything!”<br />
My friends Pieter Vanderbeck<br />
and Robert Dodge contributed to the<br />
arachnophobia of my househ old with<br />
their lur id tales of New Engl and barn spiders.<br />
John Crompton’s informative book,<br />
<strong>The</strong> Spider, was also an inspir at ion.<br />
KNECHT RUPRECHT, OR THE<br />
BAD BOY’S CHRISTMAS — While<br />
reading over some piano music by Robe rt<br />
Schumann, I came across a piece about<br />
Knecht Ruprecht, the dark companion of<br />
Santa Claus who puni shes bad child ren. I<br />
invented all the imagery surrounding<br />
him, tryi ng for a Brothe rs Grimm atm osphere.<br />
<strong>The</strong> piece turned out to be a very<br />
effective actor’s monologue, and it is one<br />
of my perenn ial hits at readi ngs.<br />
MY LIFE AS AN INCUBUS is an expans<br />
ion of a shorter poem, a fant asy about<br />
becoming a gender-shifting incubus/succubus.<br />
Aft er a rereadi ng of<br />
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, I added the<br />
opening section detailing my bargain<br />
with Mephi st ophe l es. This, too, is a<br />
strong piece for performance, and I recall<br />
one eeerie party at which I read this, with<br />
three Gothic maidens kneeling around<br />
me with flickering candles.<br />
197
SNOFRU THE MAD was based on<br />
readi ng about the Phar aoh’s life and times<br />
in Gardiner’s Hist ory of Anc ient Egypt.<br />
Snofru, or Snefru, was Pharaoh in the<br />
Fourth Dynasty and the immediate<br />
predecessor of Khufu (Cheops), builder of<br />
the Great Pyramid. Historians are baffled<br />
as to why Snofru built himself four<br />
separate pyramids. Snofru was also the<br />
first Pharaoh to enclose his name in a<br />
cartouche, the round-cornered rectangle<br />
that has ever since enclosed a Pharaoh’s<br />
name.<br />
When Gard iner noted the “unpala table”<br />
thought that Snofru had built four<br />
pyramids, the whole idea of this poem<br />
sprang forth in my mind, completely<br />
formed. <strong>The</strong> historical details in the poem<br />
are correct, but I have invented the mad<br />
Phar aoh’s reas oni ng.<br />
THE WAKING DREAM was written<br />
just aft er the prem on it ion of the death of a<br />
loved one. <strong>The</strong> premonition turned out to<br />
be false, but the vis ion was an int ense one:<br />
a dise mb odi ed spirit, waki ng me from a<br />
sound sleep, all but crying out: “Remember<br />
me! Remember me! What did I look<br />
like? What did I mean to you? Quickly,<br />
quickly, or I am lost!” <strong>The</strong>n, the sense of<br />
the Loved <strong>On</strong>e’s spirit diss ip ati ng,<br />
becoming nothing.<br />
POEM FOUND ON THE NECK OF<br />
A DEER KILLED IN THE BLACK<br />
FOREST, GERMANY (originally titled<br />
“Reunion”) is my contribution to werewolf<br />
lore. It is much expanded from the<br />
original version, with a substantial plot<br />
change. In the early edition of Whippoorwill<br />
Road, my protago n ist was the host and<br />
the werewolf the guest. It didn’t read<br />
well, and making the werewolf the host<br />
also allowed me to add the Baroness werewolf<br />
as well. I wrote the first version after<br />
enj oyi ng Jack Veasey’s very aff ecti ng litt le<br />
werewolf poem, “Handful of Hair.”<br />
NO MAUSOLEUM, PLEASE is a satire<br />
that was prompted, exa ctly as the<br />
poem says, by the rec eipt of a direct-mail<br />
flyer promoting clean, modern,<br />
above-ground burial. I regard those<br />
above-ground places as twisted and unn at-<br />
198<br />
ural, kind of a Horn & Hardart automat<br />
with corpses stuffed in the food bins. No<br />
thank you!<br />
ONE DAY’S NEWS shows that the<br />
real horrors are all around us. We hardly<br />
have to inv ent them.<br />
THE DEAD END is based on a<br />
dream — a not unc omm on dream of being<br />
among those who are dead, in a<br />
strange zone where they have taken up<br />
residence.<br />
SON OF DRACULA was originally a<br />
very short poem in the Anniversarium cycle<br />
of Autumn poe ms — a rem embrance<br />
of a childhood fascination with Dracula,<br />
an adol escent nosebleed, and a brief Octob<br />
er hospit al stay in which I saw a graveyard<br />
on a nearby hills ide, lit up by steel<br />
mill furnaces. A revision turned it into<br />
something more profound — a very specific<br />
memoir of childhood angst in the<br />
coal towns of Penns ylv an ia, and, at the<br />
end, my reb irth as a poet. This is also one<br />
of the first poems in which I tapped into<br />
my childhood for material.<br />
Horrors! HUNCHBACK ASSIS-<br />
TANT TELLS ALL! Des pite all my<br />
years of watching horror films, I had never<br />
writt en a Frank ens tein poem. This long<br />
cyc le of poems, which will almost certainly<br />
have a sequel, comes entirely from<br />
the world of the great Univers al horror<br />
films of the 1930s and 1940s.<br />
Mary Shelley never gave Dr. Frankenstein<br />
a hunchb ack ass ist ant, so I let Fritz<br />
the hunchback set the record straight.<br />
And since we are in the tabloid era, this is<br />
a hunchback whose sex life (real or imagined)<br />
has quite a few surp rises in store for<br />
the unwary reader.<br />
<strong>The</strong> crea tion scenes, involvi ng not<br />
only electricity but an animating elixir,<br />
will strike a chord for those who have read<br />
Lovecraft’s tale, “Herb ert West,<br />
Reanimator.”<br />
<strong>The</strong> hunchback’s proclamations during<br />
the storm scene indic ate he has absorbed<br />
not only Mary Shelley, but a little<br />
of her friend Lord Byron as well.
<strong>The</strong> reference to Werther in the poem<br />
is to Goethe’s <strong>The</strong> Sorrows of Young Werther,<br />
a book which provoked a number of adolescent<br />
suicides.<br />
MILKWEED SEEDS started out as a<br />
little, wispy, nature poem. A trifle, which I<br />
have now turned into a new myt hology.<br />
HEARING THE WENDIGO is about<br />
the legendary wind elemental supposedly<br />
known to all the American Indians from<br />
the Great Plains to Huds on Bay. Ever<br />
since Algernon Blackwood wrote about<br />
the Wendigo in his short story set in the<br />
Can ad ian woods, it has bec ome the stuff<br />
of campf ire stor ies and late-night ghost<br />
sessions, almost endlessly embellished<br />
upon. Everyone who tells a Wendigo story<br />
adds somet hing to it. Duri ng my coll ege<br />
years in Pennsylvania, my friends and I<br />
revelled in inventi ng new twists and details<br />
about this inv isi b le, smiti ng monster.<br />
WEST OF ARKHAM is a Lovecraftian<br />
poem. <strong>The</strong> opening line is an echo<br />
of the opening of HPL ’s “<strong>The</strong> Colour Out<br />
of Space.”<br />
THE GRIM REAPER is based on an<br />
old German folksong which was set as a<br />
chor al piece by Brahms. <strong>The</strong> origi nal German<br />
of this folksong was set by Brahms in<br />
his German Folksongs for Four-Part Choir.<br />
This parap hrase changes the origi n al’s<br />
rather conventional “die and go to<br />
Heaven” ending, and I chose to end each<br />
stanza with a diff ere nt line rather than retaining<br />
the original refrain, “Beware, fair<br />
little flower!” <strong>The</strong> original song verse uses<br />
this ref rain three times, and then “Be<br />
happy, fair little flower!” at the end.<br />
SALEM is based on seeing a tree<br />
whose roots were wrapped around a gravestone<br />
in Salem, Massachusetts.<br />
THE PUMPKINED HEART<br />
<strong>The</strong> phrase “<strong>The</strong> Pumpkined Heart”<br />
des cribes the lands cape of my nat ive<br />
Penns ylv an ia, and was the tit le of my third<br />
chapbook. <strong>The</strong>se thirty-odd poems are<br />
about my childhood in App alachia, my college<br />
years in Northwestern Pennsylvania<br />
(Edinboro with its beaut if ul litt le glacial<br />
lake), and my early years in New York.<br />
I did not start writing about my<br />
childhood until just a few years ago. I<br />
don’t care much for “memoir” unless the<br />
events remembered serve a higher<br />
purpose.<br />
APPALACHIAN IDYLL comes from<br />
memories of the countryside around my<br />
great-grandparents’ house outside of<br />
Scottdale, Pennsylvania. My mat ern al<br />
great grandmother had sold moonshine<br />
during the Depression, and her house<br />
was a four-room structure covered with<br />
tarpaper. I spent some summers there. I<br />
remember driving past it some years ago<br />
with some friends, and seeing, with a<br />
sense of vague horror, the even smaller,<br />
one-room house in which my<br />
grandparents lived, and where my<br />
mother was born. “That’s not a house,”<br />
said a young boy in the car, “that’s a tool<br />
shed!”<br />
THE MOLESTER is fiction. And it<br />
is fact. I suddenly remembered having an<br />
“imaginary playmate,” and was struck by<br />
the abruptness with which that activity<br />
ended. I filled in the rest in this invented<br />
poem. <strong>The</strong> more I embellished it, the<br />
truer it seemed – or was I really<br />
remembering?It was only aft er I started<br />
working on the poem that I heard the stories<br />
about draft dodge rs and other runaways<br />
hiding around the coke ove ns. It<br />
makes a good tale, and makes one question<br />
the stand ard ass umpt ions. What<br />
would be the outcome of this story today?<br />
Would the boy be hypnotized and interrog<br />
ated into making up bizarre confessions?<br />
Would the young man in the spring<br />
house be sent away for life, unable to<br />
prove that “somet hing” did not happ en? I<br />
like the ambiguity which this poem<br />
leaves with the reader.<br />
My great-grandmother, the former<br />
moonshine seller, died when I was ten or<br />
eleven. I have vivid memories of visiting<br />
her, and hearing about her Alsatian<br />
forebears. She was tricked into signing<br />
away her timber rights, which I recount<br />
in THE PINES. I changed the story a<br />
199
little. She was long dead when they came<br />
to cut the trees, and it was my<br />
grandmother (her daughter) who came<br />
home one day and found the trees cut<br />
down.<br />
In MIDNIGHT WATER, I rem ember<br />
childhood summ ers in the woods of Pennsylv<br />
an ia, and the odd things we were told<br />
to keep us from roami ng around at night.<br />
Since the house was surrounded with a<br />
blanket of enveloping insects, mountain<br />
lions and bears, it was not such a bad idea<br />
to stay in bed unt il dawn.<br />
AND THEN WE GOT USED TO<br />
THE ATOM BOMB. <strong>On</strong>e of the Edinboro<br />
coll ege professors whose house was a gatheri<br />
ng place for the stud ent int ell ect ua ls<br />
was Norm an Lee. It was at his home, surrounded<br />
by his children (if I am remembering<br />
correctly), that I heard a recording<br />
of Bertrand Russ ell’s powe rf ul ant iw ar<br />
speeches. An early version of this poem<br />
was in my first chapb ook, Songs of the I and<br />
Thou, but it was not very precise. I went<br />
back to the source documents and added<br />
mater ial to make this poem comp reh ens ible<br />
to tod ay’s reader. I think it gives a little<br />
glimpse into how terrified we all were<br />
in the late 1960s. Lines in itali cs and<br />
marked * are exact quotes from the Russell-Eins<br />
tein Mani f esto of July 9, 1955.<br />
GRANDMOTHERS is based partly<br />
on my grandmother Florence, who could<br />
behead a chicken, kill a copperhead, and<br />
pick morel mushrooms in the woods. Is<br />
there anything in world better than a<br />
grandmother’s home-baked bread?<br />
FRAGMENTS, WRITTEN AT<br />
TWENTY is made up of several journal<br />
entries from my college days, and from my<br />
half-year stay in San Francisco in 1967.<br />
<strong>The</strong>y are infused with the spirit of Shelley<br />
and Whitman. <strong>The</strong>se lines are my<br />
declaration of intent to “make a new song<br />
to astonish the planets.”<br />
TABLEAUX FROM A PENN-<br />
SYLVANIA VILLAGE comes from journal<br />
notes, impressions of the seasons, the flora<br />
and the fauna of northwestern<br />
200<br />
Pennsylvania. A mere description,<br />
startling or beautiful as the experience<br />
might be, does not always translate into a<br />
poem. I keep these notes and turn back<br />
to them, and, sometimes, many years<br />
later, I realize that a certain thing seen is<br />
right for a poem I am working on. “At the<br />
Lake Shore” is the most ambitious in this<br />
little set. <strong>The</strong>re is an intensity about<br />
nature in places where the warm season is<br />
short, and when you know that the<br />
ground you live on was scoured by<br />
glaciers, you gain a sense of how nature<br />
works over millennia to make the<br />
landscape what it is.<br />
If water had a consciousness and<br />
needed a pep talk, WATER MUSIC I<br />
would be it. Although I wasn’t thinking<br />
about it, it is certainly an anthem for all of<br />
us born in the Aquarian age. WATER<br />
MUSIC IV , later in the book, is an<br />
extension of the same idea. (In case you<br />
wondered, Water Music II and III exist<br />
only as journal notes, not yet written.<br />
Maybe someday.)<br />
SPRING EARTH is almost 20 years<br />
old, and SPRING FROST was written<br />
just after the turn of the millennium,<br />
when a savage May frost nipped a lot of<br />
trees in the bud. I thought they made an<br />
intriguing juxtaposition.<br />
THE OLD GRAVESTONES could<br />
have been part of the “Things Seen in<br />
Graveyards” cycle, but I have kept it<br />
apart. Again the setting is Pennsylvania,<br />
although it could just as well be New<br />
England, with its tasty old graveyards.<br />
<strong>The</strong> graveyard at Edinboro, when last I<br />
saw it, was a mad jumble of broken<br />
stones. Many older stones had been so<br />
worn that the inscriptions were almost<br />
illegible, and this provoked the whimsy<br />
of this poem — what if we had to carry<br />
our gravestones like little calling cards to<br />
the Resurrection?<br />
AN AWESOME PLUMMETING<br />
recounts one of those co-incidences that<br />
happens to poets. Just minutes after I<br />
finished listening to Swan Lake in the<br />
dead of winter, I walked to our little lake,
just in time to witness five hundred<br />
migrating swans descend onto the water<br />
for a brief visit.<br />
THE IRISES is a poem of obs ess ive<br />
love, a topic of great import to gloomy adolescents.<br />
Many will reco gnize themselves<br />
in this poem of brooding, passive, hopeless,<br />
jealo us affection.<br />
AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD<br />
came out of a prose-poem pass age in a letter<br />
I wrote to my friend Tom Fitzpatrick.<br />
Fort un ately I kept a copy, sensi ng that<br />
this wanted to be a frees tandi ng poem. Its<br />
mess age to other arti sts — that they are<br />
not alone — is a vit al one.<br />
AT THE WOOD’S EDGE is a transl ation/adaptation<br />
from the <strong>On</strong>ondaga. I<br />
spent my childh ood on Pennsylv an ia lands<br />
soaked with the blood of the French and<br />
Ind ian War (the Ameri c an branch of the<br />
Seven Years’ War). <strong>As</strong> a res ult of this history,<br />
there were no Indians to be seen. My<br />
father’s grandmother apparently threw<br />
the fami ly – and perh aps the whole town –<br />
into turmoil when she let it be known,<br />
when she was quite elderly, that she was<br />
an Ind ian. Although I have traced the genealogy<br />
back to her parents, and found one<br />
dist ant cousin who spoke of a fami ly photo<br />
with “a young girl in Ind ian braids who<br />
doesn’t look like the others, and we wondered<br />
who she was,” I cannot prove or disprove<br />
my great-grandmother’s assertion.<br />
Native American children were taken<br />
from their families; Indian people were<br />
driven out of New York State and Pennsylvan<br />
ia, to Ohio and later to Kans as; farm<br />
families could and did adopt child ren so as<br />
to have extra hands to work. No one<br />
knows. Nonet hel ess, growi ng up with the<br />
whispered legend that “your grandmother<br />
was an Ind ian” had its eff ect on my imagi -<br />
nation. When I arrived in Edinboro, which<br />
had been a fest iv al grounds for the ext inct<br />
Erie Indians, I grew even more interested<br />
in Iroquois lore. That led to me render the<br />
openi ng pass ages of the Iro q uois Fun eral<br />
Rite into blank verse. It is a passage of<br />
tremendous dignity, almost classical in its<br />
nobility and restraint.<br />
I spent my high-school years in a sad,<br />
depressed town, and one of the few<br />
things I care to rem emb er about it is told<br />
in TILLIE. Years aft er leavi ng the place,<br />
I heard this tale of Tillie’s downf all.<br />
<strong>The</strong> all-lower-case title of “song of<br />
youth (1967)” shows that I was still under<br />
the influence of “modern” poets. I<br />
still like this poem, with its Beat inf lection<br />
and its word-play. It’s one of only a<br />
handful of college-boy poems I would<br />
still want anyo ne to see.<br />
Like the ope ra farewells that go on<br />
and on, ENVOI has been much revised.<br />
<strong>The</strong> probl em is that I said goodb ye to a<br />
place, and kept returning. Now that a decade<br />
or more separates each of my visits<br />
to Edinboro lake, I was able to rev ise this<br />
poem with a sense of fin ali ty. It’s also easier<br />
now to accept the fact that one place<br />
does represent “my youth, my heart, my<br />
first-found home.”<br />
AT THE VERGE OF SPRING was<br />
being revised as I was listening to<br />
Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, with its<br />
setting of the ninth-century hymn, Veni<br />
Creator Spiritus (Come, creator spirit). <strong>As</strong><br />
I listened, and wrote, the descriptions of<br />
unfolding spring became more explosive,<br />
and as the Mahler chorus burst into its<br />
greatest crescendo, I found myself<br />
writing the Latin words on the page. I<br />
remembered too, that Lucretius begins<br />
his great De Rerum Naturum with a hymn<br />
to Venus, as the force behind the earth’s<br />
regeneration in spring. So when I use<br />
these Latin words, it is in the fullest<br />
pagan sense.<br />
SCRAPS is a personal poem I kept<br />
locked away for many years. It is my<br />
memorial for all the young artist friends<br />
who drifted off to drugs, suicide, or<br />
simply to marriage and babies.<br />
THE TEA PARTY takes place when I<br />
was in the third grade, and I had little<br />
girls on both sides of me — two Jewish<br />
girls in the big house next door, and two<br />
Fundamentalist Christian girls in the<br />
ramshackle house on the other side. <strong>The</strong><br />
201
memory of licorice-flavored water, served<br />
in tiny aluminum cups, still makes me gag.<br />
TWO, GOING ON THREE was an attempt<br />
to rel ate my earliest memor ies. I<br />
can remember my second birthday, and<br />
this poem includes many of the concrete<br />
memories, including being attacked by<br />
spiders. My mother, with her fear of machines,<br />
also makes her first sini st er appearance<br />
in my poems here.<br />
THE OUTCAST pretty acc ur ately<br />
describes my childhood. I did not go to<br />
church, learn to swim, ride a bicyc le, join<br />
the Boy Scouts, or do much anything else<br />
that other boys did. I wasn ’t all owed.<br />
WATCH DOG could have been one<br />
dog, or two successive dogs, that lived out<br />
their mise ra ble days at my grandp are nts’<br />
house. For the sake of drama I made it a<br />
single dog.<br />
ENGLISH BREAKFAST is about how<br />
emotionally repressed we English are.<br />
Even generations removed from the<br />
mother country, we just can’t emote.<br />
THE NOSEBLEED is a true acc ount.<br />
Peop le today would find it hard to believe<br />
how divided our country was during the<br />
Vietn am War, and how much hat red there<br />
was tow ard “hipp ies” among the rednecks.<br />
<strong>As</strong> an ado l esc ent, I was aff licted with occ asional<br />
noseb leeds which could turn<br />
life-threatening. <strong>On</strong>ce, I lost two and half<br />
pints of blood. So this was ser io us busin ess<br />
that took me to St.Vinc ent’s Hosp it al in<br />
Erie. I still bel ieve that I narrowly esc aped<br />
death at the hands of some dem ented<br />
kitchen worker. Friends and teachers did<br />
not believe me when I tried to rec ount my<br />
story, and I left for New York City shortly<br />
thereafter. I never told the story again until<br />
I wrote the poem. It may be OK now to<br />
look like a hipp ie, but our presidents and<br />
many other elected officials still publicly<br />
declare that you can’t be a decent<br />
American if you’re an atheist.<br />
I put A WING OF TIME on the shelf<br />
for a long time. It seemed self-ind ulg ent,<br />
just a memo ir of a time and place, even if it<br />
did have some happy language in it. I<br />
202<br />
wanted the poem to succeed, but I<br />
wanted it to have a meaning. It only came<br />
to me a few days ago, and I was able, at<br />
last, to write the fin al stanza. <strong>The</strong> poem<br />
suff ered from narc iss ism, sol ips ism, even<br />
– the feeling that the poet is the center,<br />
watchi ng peop le and places pass by. In<br />
rea li ty, I am the one passi ng. I haunt the<br />
place more than it haunts me. It is not<br />
writi ng poe ms about me — I, in motion<br />
and on the way from one eternity to another,<br />
am hurt ling by and writi ng about<br />
it. I am the meteor.<br />
THE LITERARY LIFE<br />
Like most poe ts, I am guilty, guilty,<br />
guilty, of writi ng poe ms about — writi ng<br />
poe ms. It’s irr es isti ble, the more so because<br />
the process of writing remains mysterious<br />
even to us. Fiction writers can<br />
have good days and bad days, but can<br />
write and write and write. Poets have to<br />
wait. I thought it would be a good idea to<br />
put all these types of poe ms tog ether: the<br />
Muse comp laints, the shop talk, the digs<br />
at critics. So the poems here are fodder<br />
for writers, and fun for those who spend a<br />
lot of time thinki ng and readi ng about<br />
writers. For everyone else, maybe, a<br />
pass-me-by.<br />
POETRY MOTELS is a risky poem.<br />
People get it today, since Jesse Helms is<br />
still remembered as a nemesis of the arts,<br />
and since “<strong>The</strong> roaches check in, but<br />
they don’t check out” is still remembered<br />
as an ad slogan for Roach Motels. A few<br />
years from now, this won’t be funny and<br />
it will need footnotes. Sigh.<br />
REGAINING THE MUSE was<br />
written after a long hiatus of depression,<br />
during which I wrote no poems. In fact, it<br />
seemed futile to be a poet. It is in some<br />
ways, tongue-in-cheek, since the Muse is<br />
chided for making me poor. I am rich in<br />
poems; I am poor because I have no<br />
money.<br />
THE RIVALRY provoked a stern<br />
disapproval from poet Ree Dragonette.<br />
She read an early draft and replied<br />
huffily, “Whoever heard of a male Muse?”<br />
I wrote this poem for my friend and
fellow poet Claudia Dobkins, and our<br />
respective sexual orientations made the<br />
poem make perfect sense. And it is a nice<br />
twist ending for those who don’t see it<br />
coming.<br />
POETRY READINGS expresses a<br />
lifetime of disappointment coming home<br />
from poetry readings “like that” —<br />
frustrated because there was nothing<br />
worth hearing. Luckily there were times,<br />
especially New York in the 1970s, when<br />
the poetry scene was vibrant and magical.<br />
We were out every night at readings, and<br />
we wrote poems back and forth. I am glad I<br />
saw New York when that was still possib le.<br />
PATHETIQUE SYMPHONY der ives<br />
from two different sources. When I hear<br />
the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s<br />
Pathetique Symphony, I hear a fractured,<br />
mela nc holy waltz, as though the dance rs<br />
are seen by outs ide rs who cann ot take<br />
part. <strong>The</strong> composer writes his mus ic in 5/4<br />
time, so it is not a waltz at all. And when I<br />
hear this mus ic, I alw ays think of young<br />
Heathcliff and Cat hy in Wuthering Heights,<br />
sneaki ng onto the grounds of the Linton<br />
home, watchi ng a party and its dance rs<br />
through the wind ows as the dogs adv ance<br />
to att ack them. From this I made my<br />
poem, which moves on to become an anthem<br />
for all “outsiders.”<br />
DECONSTRUCTION IN WIS-<br />
CONSIN was written while a lot of people<br />
were making fools of themselves writing<br />
articles usi ng (or abusing) this approach to<br />
literature. I decided that Jeffrey Dahmer,<br />
the serial killer, was a perfect symbol for<br />
the Decon- structionist. Dahmer, for<br />
those who don’t read about such things,<br />
brought home young men for sex, drugged<br />
them, killed them, disassembled their<br />
bodies in various ways, and stored body<br />
parts in his refrigerator for later dining.<br />
UNEMPLOYED is another little dig<br />
at Modern Literary <strong>The</strong>ory. <strong>The</strong> headline<br />
“Creative genius does not exist” managed<br />
to escape from an MLA convention and<br />
found its way into the general press, where<br />
said statement, and literary theorists,<br />
were much mocked. I thought of my<br />
Muse, and wondered how she would fare<br />
in a world which no longer believed that<br />
there were “special” people who created<br />
great art. It’s also ironic that eve ryo ne in<br />
aca d em ia wants to be the rec ipi e nt of a<br />
“genius award.”<br />
DEAD POETS covers one of the<br />
perennial ironies of being a poet. I know I<br />
will be world-famous fifty years from<br />
now. I have watched few brief flurries of<br />
interest around a few poets immediately<br />
after their deaths, including other poets<br />
who scarcely knew them trying to elbow<br />
into memorial readings.<br />
WHO CAN BE A POET ALL OF<br />
THE TIME? was a disg usted rea ct ion to<br />
seeing, in succession, a good dozen mediocre<br />
poetry books, all of whose authors<br />
wrote blurbs praising one another as great<br />
poets. Dana Gioia summed up this state<br />
of things very well in his ess ay and book,<br />
Can Poetry Matter? Things will rem ain<br />
rott en in poetry-land as long as these<br />
folks jam the books helves with their<br />
mostly uni nt ere sti ng writi ngs. I grit my<br />
teeth when I sit in a audie nce made up of<br />
eag er-to-be-publ ished poe ts, and watch<br />
them all app laudi ng a cel ebr ity poet who<br />
spent 45 minutes reading unintelligible<br />
balon ey. No wonder so many people hate<br />
poetry.<br />
DIAGNOSIS OF E.A. POE is my reaction<br />
to a newspaper account in which a<br />
learned physician “solved” the mystery of<br />
Poe’s death, claiming the poet died of rabies.<br />
I had been readi ng a good deal about<br />
Poe’s last year, so this is my sard onic take<br />
on the good doctor’s claim, with apologies<br />
in adv ance to “lady poets.”<br />
RHAPSODOMANCY is ano ther of<br />
those “coincidences,” of the sort that<br />
happ ens to poe ts. We ask for it.<br />
OF THE MAKING OF BOOKS was<br />
written when I found an aband oned attempt<br />
to describe, in verse, my days running<br />
<strong>The</strong> Poet’s <strong>Press</strong> in New York City. I<br />
countered this with a present-day ref lection,<br />
rea li zi ng that the litt le books I produced<br />
did ind eed mean somet hing. I<br />
203
have had dep ressed periods when I gave it<br />
all up, but I alw ays crept back when I<br />
found poets worth publ ishi ng.<br />
In FINALISTS — CHRISTIAN<br />
LADIES’ POETRY SOCIETY COM-<br />
PETITION, I poke fun at a gagg le of<br />
born-again poets who infest various poetry<br />
circles. Some of them claim they channel<br />
their poems directly from God. This<br />
wouldn ’t be so awful if they had any talent,<br />
but it seems that the Christ ian god<br />
only dictates truly bad poe try. In this<br />
poem, I have three rel igious poets submitting<br />
to a cont est with the topic of “babies.”<br />
Maybe this is a litt le cruel, but at<br />
heart I do not view these people as simple<br />
and hone st as they seem. Some even steal<br />
their bad poe ms from alr eady-publ ished<br />
books of bad rel ig ious poe ms. All my life<br />
experience tells me that self-professed<br />
holy people are often con artists. Note:<br />
the words with overs trikes through them<br />
are intentional.<br />
NOT A LOVE SONG,<br />
NO, NEVER THAT!<br />
Very few of the poe ms in this sect ion of<br />
the book have ever seen print before. I<br />
have held them close to me. <strong>The</strong>y rev eal<br />
litt le, since my “love poe ms” are alm ost always<br />
about wanti ng and alm ost never<br />
about having. I have led a largely soli t ary<br />
life. But I guess it is “now or never” to put<br />
these poe ms out there, and among them<br />
are several of my favori te children, however<br />
painful the birthing. Over the years I<br />
wrote many little poems of yearning that I<br />
simp ly called “Odes,” writi ng them, numberi<br />
ng them, tucki ng them away.<br />
I use a lot of astronomy in my love poems.<br />
I should really stop, but this is a “conceit”<br />
that works well for me, and suits our<br />
age well. Aft er all, we are the first people<br />
on earth to know what our outer planets<br />
look like. In THE SHY ONE, I sent a<br />
meteor to get the loved one’s attention.<br />
ODE 15 is full of references to black holes<br />
and you’ll need to know how they work to<br />
make sense of the poem. CONTACT uses<br />
a concept I picked up in astronomy, the<br />
penu mb ra, to describe two shado ws<br />
204<br />
touching when the poet passes the loved<br />
one. LIGHT YEARS urges the loved one<br />
to become a sup ernova. In ODE 19 repeats<br />
the astronomical references in its<br />
next-to-last stanza. I read a lot of scie nce<br />
fict ion as a kid, and I was one of those<br />
chemistry set kinds in junior high who<br />
made stink bombs and blew things up. So<br />
it is no aff ect ation for me to fall in love<br />
and use Newtonian physics to describe<br />
the magn it ude of my aff ect ion, and how<br />
far and how fast people have run away<br />
from me.<br />
NOT A LOVE SONG, NO, NEVER<br />
THAT! is not really about any spec ific<br />
pers ons or events. It started as an exp eri -<br />
ment in writi ng. I wrote the first sect ion<br />
from the point of view of the Lover, who<br />
has found his ideal, but has sworn never<br />
to reveal his perhaps-unwelcome affection.<br />
<strong>The</strong> poem is free in form with no advance<br />
planned structure. <strong>The</strong>n I set out<br />
to write the second part, mirroring and<br />
rev ersi ng the ima ges from the first part,<br />
and this time from the point of view of<br />
the Beloved. So I used part one as a map<br />
to write part two. <strong>The</strong>n, for the third<br />
part, I went to part one, and imi t ated it in<br />
the same ord er, and this time the point of<br />
view is <strong>The</strong> Monster. <strong>The</strong> Mons ter gets<br />
the better of it, and once he is speaking,<br />
he gets carried away, and has more lines<br />
than the othe rs. I did not plan it that way;<br />
it just happened. You can psychoa nalyze<br />
this if you wish.<br />
RENUNCIATION was writt en several<br />
times, and as it is fact ual, it lacks astrono<br />
my or mons ters. It is just me, as a<br />
young man, regretting a journey I made in<br />
purs uit of an obs ess ive folly. Actua lly, it is<br />
a seq uel, some years later, to “<strong>The</strong><br />
Irises.” This is a bitt er poem, but it has<br />
lines in it that make me want to keep it.<br />
It is not kind to me, or to the other, who<br />
hadn ’t the slighte st ink ling of the depth<br />
or viol ence of my emotions. It was all in<br />
my head, and it burned away in the great<br />
storm of this poem.<br />
TRIPTYCH is the most pers onal of<br />
all my poe ms to date, and it also took the
longest to write. I have re-written it from<br />
top to bottom at least three times. Three<br />
different people would see themselves in<br />
this poem if they cared to read it, but this<br />
does not matter to the reader. This poem<br />
says eve ryt hing I have to say about Love in<br />
the abs tract. <strong>The</strong> Greeks knew best, and<br />
had three different words for Love. No<br />
one has seen the final version of this poem<br />
— unt il now.<br />
THE WATCHER is a rec ent poem.<br />
My friend Hal Hamilton introduced me to<br />
the term “flaneur,” which is a Par is ian<br />
word describing one who delights in walking<br />
around, or sitting in cafes in order to<br />
watch all the passi ng beaut ies. I take great<br />
del ight in sitt ing outd oors on Thayer<br />
Street, enjoying all the splendors of college-age<br />
youth passi ng by. This is my ode<br />
to these vis ual del ights — there are living<br />
things out there as beaut if ul as Greek<br />
statues.<br />
SUMMER STORM is from way, way<br />
back – a summ er night in Pennsylv an ia<br />
when I lived in an att ic garr et.<br />
HERE AT THE MILLENNIUM<br />
CHILDREN OF ATLAS is my anthem<br />
against angst. Walt Whitm an looks<br />
over my shoulder and nuzz les his beard<br />
against me, whisp eri ng, “You tell them!” I<br />
see the hum an adv ent ure as only beg inning.<br />
When the sun goes sup ern ova, when<br />
the Andromeda galaxy collides with ours,<br />
we must be somew here else.<br />
FIRST SNOW has a most mundane orig<br />
in — a walk past the tiny roses bushes<br />
that line the parki ng lot of my loc al sup ermark<br />
et. <strong>The</strong> sudd en bloomi ng of the roses<br />
amid the snow, timed so that the passi ng<br />
poet would see them before and after, was<br />
another of those serendipities of the<br />
Muse. <strong>The</strong> last two lines just leaped into<br />
place.<br />
When I first met the arti st Riva<br />
Leviten, she took me to the Providence<br />
Art Club and showed me a splend id encaust<br />
ic work that was hangi ng there in a<br />
group exh ibit. “What do you make of it?”<br />
she asked. I surprised her by extemporiz-<br />
ing the essence of this poem,<br />
IMPROMPTU, and the next day I presented<br />
her with the poem. We have been<br />
great friends ever since. You don’t really<br />
need to see the work to appreciate the<br />
poem, but the two together would be dynamic.<br />
Unfortunately, Riva has misplaced<br />
the work in her gallery/storeroom<br />
of thousands of works. If it ever turns up,<br />
I shall get a photo of it and place it on my<br />
website.<br />
DUSK was seen from a train hurtling<br />
(or should I say, creeping) south from<br />
Provi dence to New York City.<br />
AS IDOLS FALL IN THE AF-<br />
GHAN HILLS was my spont aneo us reaction<br />
to the horrific actions of the<br />
Taliban in Afg hani s tan, who des troyed<br />
the world-fam ous gia nt statu es of Buddha.<br />
Of course, this was only a prel ude to<br />
what would follow.<br />
SIX CHRISTMAS VERSES are doggerel,<br />
writt en to fill out the Christmas<br />
booklet that originally centered around<br />
my Knecht Ruprecht poem. I hope it is<br />
not my fate to be remembered only for<br />
these wicked verses.<br />
THE ‘POSSUM was seen one summer<br />
might, creepi ng along the wall of the<br />
Brown University Refectory.<br />
I moved back to New York City in the<br />
early 1990s, tempted by an int rigui ng<br />
publishi ng job. In TWENTY-YEAR<br />
NEW YORKER, AFTER HIS EXILE, my<br />
emotions of homecoming are expressed. I<br />
suppose I will alw ays be a New Yorker.<br />
In REVELATIONS, I say eve ryt hing<br />
I have to say to people who think they<br />
know what God wants. I know what God<br />
wants — he told me.<br />
ARABESQUES ON THE STATUE<br />
OF LIBERTY centers around New York’s<br />
only actual goddess-figure, one I take<br />
very seriously. I delight in seeing all those<br />
Statue of Libe rty mini at ures bei ng sold<br />
to touri sts. I get weepy when I take the<br />
205
Staten Isl and Ferry and get to pass close<br />
by Liberty Island. <strong>On</strong>e day on the ferry I<br />
saw a man standi ng alone at the raili ng,<br />
stari ng at the Statue with an int ense express<br />
ion of hat red. That stayed with me.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n, a few days later, I was in Chin atown,<br />
and I saw an ele g ant Chin ese matron<br />
rushing down Canal Street, carrying<br />
one of those miniature Statues of Libe rty.<br />
Just a few hours later I was at the Empire<br />
State Buildi ng, thinking about King<br />
Kong’s tort uo us climb up the side of the<br />
skyscraper. <strong>The</strong>se images all fell together<br />
in this poem.<br />
QUACK is based on a news acc ount of<br />
a therapist who was prosec uted for fraud,<br />
pretty much as described in the poem. He<br />
had a patient with multiple personalities –<br />
dozens of them – and he charged the insurer<br />
for group thera py for all the personalities,<br />
which inc luded dem ons and animals.<br />
From the tales I have heard, psyc hia try has<br />
to be one of the most debased of all<br />
professions today.<br />
NEMESIS is a new poe tic form. I invite<br />
other poets to write “nemeses” of<br />
their own. In each stanza, the last two<br />
lines must be the “neme s is” of the first<br />
two, and the last line of stanza 2 must<br />
rhyme with the last line of Stanza 1. I<br />
wrote four of these, but there could be any<br />
numb er of them strung together. Any<br />
takers?<br />
THE STERILE SQUASH is one of<br />
several poems featuring “Mrs. Trog,” my<br />
former landlady in New Jers ey. She is actually<br />
a composite of the worst features of<br />
a mother-daught er duo.<br />
VERMONT IMAGES is ano ther creation<br />
from journal notes, this time recapping<br />
my first trip to Burlington, Vermont,<br />
and to some of the haunts of Robe rt Frost.<br />
My hosts, Don and Laura Merit, also took<br />
me to a pow-wow (my first) of the Abenaki<br />
Ind ians, which I found dep ressi ng since it<br />
was held ins ide a gymn as ium. <strong>The</strong> fourth<br />
sect ion is my rea ct ion to the upl and pastures<br />
and ald er fore sts through which we<br />
walked, reading excerpts of Robert Frost<br />
poems which were posted on signs along<br />
the way.<br />
206<br />
DEAD PRINCESS is, of course, Princess<br />
Dia na, and my pag an nat ure responded<br />
to seeing the outpouring of<br />
Briti sh emot ion (there isn ’t much of that<br />
in the univ erse!), the vast hecat ombs of<br />
flowers, and her very classical final resting<br />
place). She got eve rything except a<br />
new cons tell at ion.<br />
CAVE DEUM (Bew are of God) is a<br />
playf ul piece, starti ng with a litt le dyslexia<br />
and poki ng fun at organized rel igion,<br />
my favorite opponent. People<br />
somet imes ask me why I’m so tough on<br />
rel ig ion, and I alw ays ans wer that my<br />
Druid ancestors were burned at the<br />
stake.<br />
DRAMATIS PERSONAE was written,<br />
yea, many years ago. I never go into<br />
bars of any kind, but I peeked in a window<br />
one day and thought I saw at least<br />
four Shakespeare characters inside,<br />
drinking beer and looking exceedingly<br />
gloomy. So there you are.<br />
ARTICLES OF FAITH is my only<br />
grown-up poem in which typographic<br />
means are employed to break up the text<br />
into para ll el streams. I don’t know how<br />
one person would read it out loud, so I<br />
don’t int end to purs ue this line much further.<br />
I’ve had people send me “conc rete<br />
poems” over the years with words every-which-way<br />
on the page. I asked one<br />
poet, “What am I supposed to do, stand<br />
on my head or do somersaults while I read<br />
this?” He never spoke to me again.<br />
FROM SALEM FORWARD is yet another<br />
commentary on the psychological<br />
abuse of children by pare nts, and the<br />
ways in which “truth” can be manu f actured.<br />
<strong>The</strong> app alli ng poem tit led HAN-<br />
DICAPPED GAME PRESERVE is based<br />
on a newspaper report. I don’t make<br />
these things up — there’s actua lly a place<br />
where men in wheelchairs can hunt,<br />
maim and kill ani m als.<br />
HOUSECLEANING com es from my<br />
house in Weehawken, New Jersey, whose<br />
owners had paved over the front garden
and removed the trees. Mrs. Trog makes<br />
another appearance.<br />
I was never a very successful “hippie,”<br />
since I think taki ng drugs is stupid.<br />
Like everyone else in my generation, I<br />
dabb led, and was uni mp ressed — if someone<br />
thinks that watchi ng mult ic olored diamonds<br />
bleedi ng down a wall is “altered<br />
cons ciousn ess” and a gatew ay to wisd om, I<br />
pity them. Duri ng my Haight-<strong>As</strong>hbury<br />
days, I foll owed my own path, and drugs<br />
were really not part of it.<br />
LETHE was an old piece in which I<br />
used the ima ge of the Jugg ern aut, which<br />
crushes people like a steamroller. It concentrated<br />
on showing how the poor are the<br />
real vict ims of drugs. I left the poem and<br />
did nothi ng with it, and then I reali zed<br />
that I had to count er this with somet hing<br />
about the arr og ance and stup idi ty of the<br />
“beaut iful peop le” and their drug cult ure,<br />
which has much to do with why so many<br />
people think drugs are wonderful. <strong>The</strong><br />
outr ag eous and needl ess drug death of the<br />
tale nted and beaut if ul young act or River<br />
Phoenix (who had the public persona of a<br />
squeaky-clean vegetarian) finally gave me<br />
the point of reference for the end of the<br />
poem.<br />
When I give readi ngs and talk about<br />
poe try, I am sometimes asked whether<br />
drinking “helped” Poe or Dylan Thomas,<br />
and whether drugs “helped” Coleridge<br />
and the Beats. You only have to look at the<br />
burned-out wrecks that these arti sts became<br />
to rea li ze that their (our) loss is what<br />
they might have done had they stayed at<br />
the peak of their powers and lived full<br />
lives. Cons ciousn ess — esp ec ially the<br />
poet’s cons ciousn ess — is all we have and<br />
all we need. Imagination provides the rest.<br />
That, plus a cup of good tea.<br />
THE ISLES OF GREECE<br />
PROMETHEUS ON FIFTH AVE-<br />
NUE was writt en back in 1970, and it<br />
used to be one of my “warhorse” poems at<br />
readi ngs. I had not looked at it in years,<br />
and then rea li zed that it should comp anion<br />
the other two Prometheus-themed poems<br />
in this book. Rev isi ti ng the poem, I<br />
disc overed it was far less luc id than I had<br />
remembered, so I have revised it. <strong>The</strong><br />
poem is based on the cont rast bet ween<br />
the Art Deco statue of Prom et heus at<br />
Rockefeller Plaza (the 1933 work of<br />
sculpt or Paul Manship), and, just a block<br />
away, the blackened pile of St. Patrick’s<br />
cathedral. (Yes, I know it’s been cleaned,<br />
but it was soot-black when I wrote the<br />
poem and for many years therea fter.)<br />
<strong>The</strong> des ign of Rockefeller Cent er,<br />
with its bas-rel iefs of Greek gods, alw ays<br />
symbolized for me the true spirit of 20 th<br />
century New York. St. Patrick’s always<br />
repr es ented to me the worst of mankind’s<br />
rep ress ive heri t age. I sought in the<br />
poem to counter one world-view against<br />
the other. Man is not a sacr if ic ial ani m al,<br />
and a god, as an ext ens ion of man’s quali -<br />
ties, is even less so. Prom et heus is the<br />
antithesis of Jesus, and I am proud to call<br />
him my inspiration.<br />
In PROMETHEAN EPILOGUE,<br />
the libe ra ted Prom et heus gets a litt le revenge<br />
on the vulture who had so long tormented<br />
him.<br />
ATHENA AND MEDUSA gives the<br />
little-known background of how the hideous<br />
Gorg ons came to be serpent-headed<br />
mons ters. <strong>The</strong>re’s a moral to it all, too —<br />
it is not given that those who are smarter<br />
are also blessed with kindn ess and emp athy.<br />
Who is the worse monster in this<br />
story?<br />
<strong>The</strong>se two shorter poems, BURNT<br />
OFFERING and DIALOGUE are part of<br />
a small set of imagi n ary poe ms bet ween<br />
the tormented Greek poet Anakreon and<br />
the beautiful young Harmodius. A<br />
glimpse into ano ther world.<br />
PROMETHEUS CHAINED was inspired,<br />
in a flash, by looki ng at a tiny<br />
painting by Riva Leviten. This mini at ure<br />
shows a hunched figure, blackened, covered<br />
with chains. Bel ow him is what appears<br />
to be the skyline of city. Above him,<br />
mena ci ng clouds swirl, with hag-like<br />
creatures flying in storm-clouds. Next to<br />
the hulki ng, imp riso ned Tit an is a tiny<br />
figure in a hooded robe, his face a hideous<br />
blue, looking ever so much like a malevo -<br />
207
lent monk. <strong>On</strong> the prisoner’s breast is<br />
what appears to be an eagle.<br />
My friend Riva says she has no idea<br />
what the painti ng means. What I have just<br />
described above may or may not be there –<br />
it’s a very abs tract work and some of these<br />
det ails could be just rand om turns of the<br />
brush. But the mom ent I saw the painti ng,<br />
I said, “Riva, this is the story of Prom etheus,<br />
only it’s a new version. Prometheus<br />
has not been made capt ive by Zeus. <strong>The</strong><br />
hum ans have bet rayed him, chained him<br />
up, cove red him with tar. <strong>The</strong>y mean to<br />
kill him. Zeus has come, in the form of an<br />
eag le, to gloat.”<br />
I went home, and wrote this poem.<br />
When I saw that it had many disc rete<br />
parts, it occurred to me that it could be<br />
read aloud with mus ic al interludes, and<br />
the Beethoven Prometheus Variations came<br />
to mind. I have not yet had a chance to<br />
have the poem performed with the music,<br />
so I am not sure how well it will go, but my<br />
ins tincts tell me it will be a good fit. This<br />
is a very important poem for me, and it<br />
sums up some of my late st thoughts about<br />
myth, and what we can do with myth.<br />
THE DEATH OF JOCASTA had a<br />
fasc in ati ng ori g in. In a class I was taki ng<br />
last year on Modern Critical <strong>The</strong>ory with<br />
Prof. Tamara Bolotow at Univ ers ity of<br />
Rhode Isl and, a class assignment consisted<br />
of writi ng a brief ess ay on any play in<br />
our anthology, using our choice of critical<br />
theories. I chose Oedipus Rex by Sophocles,<br />
and, not sati sf ied with the abrupt offs tage<br />
suicide of Queen Jocasta, I decided to<br />
write a feminist essay on how Sophocles<br />
treated this tragic woman who does the<br />
“proper” thing, killing herself when she<br />
discove rs she has been married to her own<br />
son for twenty years. I slept on the project,<br />
and when I awoke in the morning to write<br />
the ess ay, I said aloud, “Jocasta did not kill<br />
208<br />
herself!” I opened the computer, intending<br />
to write my ess ay, and instead wrote a<br />
complete new scene in blank verse, “<strong>The</strong><br />
Death of Jocasta,” in which she tells her<br />
side of the story. <strong>The</strong> ending was ine vi table,<br />
but I was surp rised when the fin al,<br />
rhymed couplet just landed on the page.<br />
This scene, with Greek chorus, was<br />
given a staged readi ng in April 2004 at<br />
Brown Univ ers ity by <strong>The</strong> Writer’s Circle.<br />
A number of audience members mistook<br />
it for a new transl at ion of a lost scene by<br />
Sophoc les. <strong>The</strong> dedicated work of the actresses<br />
helped me to refine the scene and<br />
work out some lines that were less than<br />
clear. Thanks are due to Rose Pearson,<br />
founder of <strong>The</strong> Writers’ Circle, for selecting<br />
the play.<br />
Since this book appeared in print in<br />
early 2005, more than 15,000 copies of its<br />
elect ronic (PDF) version have been<br />
downloaded by readers all over the world.<br />
I am del ighted that my works can now<br />
reach an international audience at no cost<br />
to the reader. It is lonely in the poet's corner,<br />
however, so I do app reciate communications<br />
from readers (other than serial<br />
killers, of course). Send fan mail, money,<br />
or indecent offers via snail mail to the address<br />
on the copyright page, or send me<br />
e-mail at<br />
brett@poetspress.org<br />
I am also delighted to rec eive transl ations<br />
of my works into fore ign lang uages,<br />
and will be del ighted to post them to <strong>The</strong><br />
<strong>Poet's</strong> <strong>Press</strong> website.