The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets - The Poet's Press

THINGS SAID ABOUT BRETT RUTHERFORD’S POETRY... 

Rutherford is first and foremost a storyteller. He writes poetry for an audience, one 

that he feels would come back to poetry if only there were poetry to come back to. 

—Radio Void 

Fantastic, rebellious poetry! — FactSheet 5 

Some of the most powerful poetry I’ve ever read. —Frank Belknap Long 

Real poetry! Wonderful! — Ray Bradbury 

The Rutherford poetry is a delight. I am in complete agreement with his comments 

on the state of poetry in America today, and pleased that he has chosen to go against 

the current. His work is his most eloquent argument. —Robert Bloch, author of 

Psycho and Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper. 

Equal parts Poe, Shelley, Lovecraft and Bradbury … composed with a firm sense of 

poetics and orchestrated with a respect for poetic tradition.…Though written in 

free verse, they scan with a rhythmic coherence, a dividend of precise word choices 

and the embedding of alliterative phrases in the line. —Stefan Dziemianowicz, 

Crypt of Cthulhu 

This prolific poet who celebrates H.P . Lovecraft and Poe has reached an assurance 

of craft and in mood… an extraordinary poet, a neo-romantic perhaps, but also Ovid 

blended with Virgil.—Home Planet News 

The High Priest of Providence’s ghoulie underground… — The Nice Paper 

Shudders aplenty here, poetically nuanced…ranges across the supernatural 

spectrum with the fervor of Poe and the aloofness of Lovecraft. —Paul DiFilippo, 

Asimov’s SF Magazine 

Be afraid. Be very afraid … Like Lovecraft, Rutherford integrates terrestrial terrors 

with a more sublime, or cosmic, dread. — Justin Wolff, The Providence Phoenix. 

(About Poems from Providence): Like Wordsworth’s Prelude, this great book might 

avail us of endless hours of poring at leisure, enriching us, and, yes, ennobling us…. 

Rutherford can be appallingly tender and appallingly sorrowful…he can be funny, 

very. He can be inspired by joy. He can be profound. This is marvelous heady rich 

stuff… —Dusty Dog Reviews 

A special validity and integrity…Rutherford writes about nature in ways in which 

comparatively few poets of today do — and clearly from first-hand experience and 

observation. —John Burnett Payne, Poets Fortnightly

Also by BRETT RUTHERFORD 

POETRY 

Songs of the I and Thou (1968) 

City Limits (1970) 

The Pumpkined Heart (1973) 

Anniversarium: The Autumn Poems (1984, 1986, 1996, 2005) 

Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems (1985, 1998, 2005) 

Thunderpuss: In Memoriam (1987) 

Prometheus on Fifth Avenue (1987) 

At Lovecraft’s Grave (1988) 

In Chill November (1990) 

Poems from Providence (1991) 

Twilight of the Dictators (with Pieter Vanderbeck) (1992) 

Knecht Ruprecht, or the Bad Boy’s Christmas (1992) 

PLAYS 

Night Gaunts: An Entertainment Based on the Life 

And Work of H.P . Lovecraft (1993, 2005) 

NOVELS 

Piper (with John Robertson) (1985) 

The Lost Children (1988) 

AS EDITOR/PUBLISHER 

May Eve: A Festival of Supernatural Poems (1975) 

Last Flowers: The Romance Poems of Edgar Allan Poe 

And Sarah Helen Whitman (1987, 2003) 

Matthew Gregory Lewis: Tales of Wonder (Annotated, 2010) 

Death and the Downs: The Poetry of Charles Hamilton Sorley 

(Annotated, 2010)

THE GODS AS THEY ARE, 

ON THEIR PLANETS 

Poems by 

BRETT RUTHERFORD

First Edition 2005 

Second Printing 2007 

Third Printing 2011 

Copyright © 2005 by Brett Rutherford 

All Rights Reserved 

ISBN 0-922558-14 

The author places this work in the Public Domain 

on January 1, 2025. 

Some of the poems in this book have appeared 

in the following magazines: 

The Rift, Ibid, Haunts, Poets Fortnightly, 

Weird Tales, Sensations Magazine, 

East Side Monthly, Just Add Water, 

and The Akashic Record of the Antarctic Astral Convention. 

Some of the poems are revisions or expansions of works that appeared 

in the books The Pumpkined Heart, Whippoorwill Road, 

Prometheus on Fifth Avenue, Songs of the I and Thou, 

and In Chill November. 

Cover art: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867): 

Jupiter and Thetis, 1811 (Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence) 

and NASA photo of the planet Jupiter. 

This is the 157th publication of 

THE POET’S PRESS 

279-1/2 Thayer Street / Providence, RI 02906 

www.poetspress.org 

This book is also available in Adobe Acrobat format.

PROLOGUE 

Prologue 11 

Between the Pages 11 

Entre Las Hojas 11 

Why Poetry? 12 

C O N T E N T S 

LIBER ANNIVERSARII: AUTUMN POEMS 

In Chill November 13 

The Fence 14 

To the Arc of the Sublime 16 

October Storm 1998 19 

Autumn Lyric 19 

Autumn (Alexander Pushkin, 1833) 20 

On Receiving A Gift of Books in Early October 23 

Autumn Sundays in Madison Square 24 

In Prague, A Tree of Many Colors 26 

September in Gotham 2001 27 

Runaways 30 

THE GODS AS THEY ARE, ON THEIR PLANETS 

Viking 31 

The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets 31 

When Worlds Collide 32 

Autumn on Mars 34 

Pluto Demoted 34 

POETICA LOVECRAFTIANA 

Maker of Monsters, Maker of Gods 36 

Dreaming of Ur-R’lyeh 37 

The Tree At Lovecraft’s Grave 40 

Under Lovecraft’s Grave 41 

Frank and Lyda 43 

THINGS SEEN IN GRAVEYARDS 

After the Storm 46 

Hart Island 46 

Night Walker 47 

An Exeter Vampire, 1799 48 

Graveyards I’d Like To See 50 

The Harvestman 52 

The Ear Mound Shrine, Kyoto 54 

Aceldema, the Field of Blood 56 

Mrs. Weeden, of Pawtucket 57

TWILIGHT OF THE DICTATORS 

The Exhumation of Goethe 58 

Winter Solstice 1989 60 

In the Streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg 61 

Stalin and Shostakovich 62 

The Piano Uprising 65 

HORRORS! 

The Anaconda Poems 69 

The Spiders 71 

Knecht Ruprecht, or The Bad Boy’s Christmas 71 

My Life As An Incubus 72 

Snofru the Mad 74 

The Waking Dream 75 

Poem Found on the Neck of a Deer 

Killed in the Black Forest, Germany 76 

No Mausoleum, Please! 79 

One Day’s News 80 

The Dead End 81 

Son of Dracula 81 

Hunchback Assistant Tells All 84 

Milkweed Seeds 95 

Hearing the Wendigo 95 

West of Arkham 96 

The Grim Reaper 96 

Salem 97 

THE PUMPKINED HEART 

Appalachian Idyll 98 

The Molester 98 

The Pines 99 

Midnight Water 100 

And Then We Got Used to the Atom Bomb… 101 

Grandmothers 102 

Fragments, Written at Twenty 102 

Tableaux from a Pennsylvania Village 103 

The Town Is Still Asleep 104 

Water Music I 104 

Spring Earth 105 

Spring Frost 105 

The Old Gravestones 106 

An Awesome Plummeting 107 

Irises 108 

At the Top of the World 109 

Water Music IV 110 

At the Wood’s Edge (Iroquois Ritual) 111 

Tillie 112 

Song of Youth 1967 112 

Out of Season 113 

Envoi 114

At the Verge of Spring 115 

Scraps 116 

The Tea Party 116 

Two, Going on Three 117 

The Outcast 119 

Watch Dog 120 

English Breakfast 120 

The Nosebleed 121 

A Wing of Time 122 

THE LITERARY LIFE 

Poetry Motels 126 

Regaining the Muse 126 

The Rivalry 126 

Poetry Readings 127 

Pathetique Symphony 128 

Deconstruction in Wisconsin 128 

Unemployed 129 

Dead Poets 130 

Who Can Be A Poet All the Time? 130 

Diagnosis of E.A. Poe 131 

Against the Writing of Sonnets 132 

Rhapsodomancy 132 

Of the Making of Books 132 

Finalists, Christian Ladies’ Poetry Society 134 

NOT A LOVE SONG, NO NEVER THAT! 

The Shy One 136 

The Company of Eagles 136 

Making Love in Unlikely Places 137 

Ode 15 137 

Ode 22: A Haunting 138 

Frontier 138 

Ode 14 139 

Contact 139 

Ode 8 140 

Not a Love Song, No, Never That! 141 

Light Years 143 

Ode 19: Loved Ones 144 

Ode 20: Desert Song 144 

Renunciation 145 

Triptych 146 

The Watcher 149 

Summer Storm 149

HERE AT THE MILLENNIUM 

Children of Atlas 150 

First Snow 151 

Thanksgiving Thoughts 151 

Impromptu 152 

Dusk 153 

As Idols Fall in the Afghan Hills 153 

Six Christmas Verses 154 

The ‘Possum 155 

Twenty-Year New Yorker, After His Exile 155 

Revelations 157 

Arabesques on the State of Liberty 157 

Quack 159 

Boston Lunch Counter 159 

Gutenberg’s Helper 160 

Nemesis 161 

The Sterile Squash 161 

Vermont Images 162 

Dead Princess 163 

Cave Deum 163 

Dramatis Personae 164 

Articles of Faith 165 

From Salem Forward 165 

Miser 166 

Handicapped Game Preserve, West Virginia 167 

Housecleaning 167 

Lethe 168 

THE ISLES OF GREECE 

Prometheus on Fifth Avenue 169 

Promethean Epilogue 170 

Athena and Medusa 171 

Burnt Offering 172 

Dialogue 172 

Prometheus Chained 173 

The Death of Queen Jocasta 182


ON THEIR PLANETS

PROLOGUE 

A fountain pen 

a yellow legal pad 

a cup of tea, a symphony — 

these set the stage. 

The empty page is one 

of an infinity of silences. 

The pen is a loaded gun, 

cannoning lines and dots 

onto the whiteness. 

This page is but a clearing, 

the tablet a wilderness — 

guidelines are there, 

but they are not a map. 

Fall in — you’ll find 

no bottom, no sense 

of beginnings and endings. 

Wolves lurk within — 

no compass 

will help you navigate. 

You may slip on a comma, 

wind up alone and desolate 

because a colon misled you. 

Three dots will send you flying 

into a black-hole time warp. 

Here is danger. Poems 

may change you forever. 

I mean to change you forever. 

It is too late to turn back. 

I’ve got you, guest 

in my little book. 

I will not leave you behind. 

Here is my hand. 

Read on! 

BETWEEN THE PAGES 

All that I am is here, 

even if what I am 

eludes you. 

I am pressed here 

between these pages — 

petals and stamen, 

dust and pollen, 

veined leaf 

PROLOGUE 

What scent 

upon the yellowed page? 

Try sandalwood and pine, 

patchouli and mummy powder, 

singed moth, 

shadow of raptor wing, 

a raven’s passing, 

a flit of bat, 

a memory of lilacs. 

You read my lines, 

inhale me, 

repeating my words, 

my broken thoughts. 

I am on your lips, 

I fill the air 

with green tea tension, 

spark from your hair 

to the nearest conductor, 

then up and out the window. 

Sing me to sparrows! 

Teach the ravens 

my autumn madness! 

Recite to owls 

my midnight charms! 

ENTRE LAS HOJAS 

Todo lo que soy 

está aquí 

aunque lo que sea 

te eluda. 

Me aprieto aquí, 

entre estas páginas — 

petalo y estambre, 

polvo y polen, 

hoja venosa. 

¿Cuál es aquel aroma 

en la hoja amarillada? 

Supones sándalo y pino, 

patchouli y polvo de momia, 

polilla chamuscada, 

11

la sombra de ala de un águila, 

el paso de cuervo, 

los murciélagos volantes, 

una memoria de lilaces. 

Lees mis lineas. 

Me inhalas, 

repitiendo mis palabras, 

repitiendo mis ideas rotas. 

Sobre tus labios, nazco. 

Yo lleno el aire 

con la tensión de té verde. 

Me salto, una chispa, de tus cabellos 

al conductor más cercano. 

Entonces yo vuelo ascendente, 

y parto por la ventana. 

Cántame el poema 

a los gorriones! 

Enseñales a los cuervos 

mi locura otoñala! 

Recitales a los búhos 

mis encantos nocturnales! 

WHY POETRY? 

My book I write for all to see, 

of things as they are 

or wish them to be — 

no private thoughts concealed, 

bright words, not camouflage, 

spark gap to reader’s consciousness. 

My trees, although they stand 

for many things, are trees. 

The self herein 

though confessing little, 

expresses all, 

words hammered hard 

on the anvil reality. 

My wrinkled leaves 

go not to Heaven, 

that silent boneyard; 

they fall to earth instead, 

food for the common eye. 

12 

My books heap up unread, 

an obelisk, a spire 

of ink and cursive lettering, 

a pyramid of utterings, 

a shrine of sound. 

If these words please you, 

nameless reader, 

to whom I am a faceless voice, 

if but one stanza leaps afire 

and makes you sing it, 

then the heart-blood of my pen 

is worthy. 

What makes a poem great? 

It is great if it leaves you — 

as the earth always is 

when the first snow falls — 

astonished.

LIBER ANNIVERSARIII: AUTUMN POEMS 

IN CHILL NOVEMBER 

The leaves be red, 

The nuts be brown, 

They hang so high 

They will not fall down. 

—Elizabethan Round, Anon. 

The snow has come. 

The leaves have fallen. 

Long nights commit the chill 

low sun and flannel clouds cannot disperse. 

We walk the park, stripped now 

to mere schematics, 

vision drawn out to farther hills 

now that the forest is blanked 

like flesh turned glass on X-ray negative. 

These woods are sham so near the solstice, 

play out a murder mystery of birch and maple. 

The riddle is who’s dead and who’s pretending? 

That witches’ elm with clinging broomsticks — 

is it deceased or somnolent? 

Which of these trees will never bloom again: 

A Lombardy poplar stripped by blight— 

A maple picked clean by gypsy moths— 

A thunder-blasted pedestal of ash— 

A moribund sycamore whose only life 

came in a few vain buds 

(growing like dead men’s hair and nails, 

slow to acknowledge the rot below)? 

The ground’s a color cacophony, 

alive, alive! 

the treeline a study in gray and brown. 

Now who can tell 

the bare tree from the dead, 

the thin man from the skeleton? 

Which denizens of wood lot shed these leaves? 

Which is a corpse? a zombie? 

Which one is but a vermin shell? 

Which treads the night on portable roots, 

festooned with bats, 

sinking its web of trailing vines 

into the veins of saplings? 

Which stalwart oaks will topple, 

which trunks cave in to termite nests? 

How can we tell the living from the dead? 

13

It’s just the month: November lies. 

October always tells the truth. 

You could no more fake 

the shedding of leaves 

than simulate a pulse in stone. 

Only the living fall in love, 

only the living cry for joy, 

only the living relinquish that month 

in red and yellow shuddering! 

The pines, 

those steeple-capped Puritans, 

what price their ever-green? 

Scrooge trees, they hoard their summers, 

withhold their foliage, 

refuse to give the frost his due. 

Ah, they are prudent, 

Scotch pine and wily cedar, 

touch-me-not fir and hemlock. 

They will live to a ripe old age 

(if you can call that living). 

Love! Burn! Sing! Crumble! 

Dance! Wind! Fall! Tumble! 

Into the wind-blown pyramid of leaves! 

Spin in a whirling dust-devil waltz! 

Leaf-pile! Treetops! Tramping on clouds! 

Weightless, flying, red-caped October! 

THE FENCE 

Town fathers, what have you done? 

Last night I returned 

(I vowed — I made the lake a promise) 

intending to tramp the lane of maples, 

read with my palms the weary tombstones, 

feast with my eyes the clouded lake, 

lean with a sigh on founder’s headstone, 

chatter my verses to turtles and fish, 

trace with my pen the day lily runes, 

the wild grape alphabet, 

the anagram of fallen branches, 

all in a carpet of mottled leaves. 

The mute trees were all assembled. 

The stones — a little more helterskelter 

than before, 

but more or less intact — still greeted me 

as ever with their Braille assertions. 

14

The lake, unbleached solemnity 

of gray, tipped up 

and out against its banks to meet me. 

All should have been as I left it. 

Heart sinks. The eye recoils. 

My joy becomes an orphanage 

at what I see: 

from gate to bank to bend 

of old peninsula, 

across the lot 

and back again, 

sunk into earth 

and seven feet high 

A CHAIN LINK FENCE! 

Town fathers, what have you done? 

Surely the dead do not require protection? 

Trees do not walk. 

The birds are not endangered. 

How have your grandsires sinned 

to be enclosed in a prison yard? 

As I walk in I shudder. 

It is a trap now. 

A cul-de-sac. 

I think of concentration camps. 

For years, art students painted here — 

I hear the click of camera shutters, 

the scratch of pens, 

the smooth pastel caress, 

taste the tongue lick of water color, 

inhale the night musk of oil paints. 

Poets and writers too, 

leaning on death stones, 

took ease and inspiration here, 

minds soaring to lake and sky. 

At dawn, a solitary fisherman 

could cast his line here. 

Some nights the ground would undulate 

with lovers 

(what harm? who now would take 

their joy between two fences?) 

The fence is everywhere! No angled view 

can exclude it. It checkerboards 

the lake, the sky, the treeline. 

They tell me that vandals rampaged here, 

knocked over stones, 

15

tossed markers 

into the outraged waves. 

Whose adolescents did this, 

town fathers? 

Yours. 

Stunted by rock and stunned by drugs, 

they came to topple a few old slabs, 

struck them because they could not 

strike you. 

Let them summon their dusky Devil, 

rock lyric and comic and paperback, 

blue collar magic, dime store demons — 

they wait and wait, 

blood dripping from dead bird sacrifice 

until the heavy truth engages them: 

The dead are dead, 

magic is empty ritual, 

and stubborn Satan declines 

to answer a teen-age telegram. 

Fence in your children, not our stones! 

TO THE ARC OF THE SUBLIME 

In nights beneath the stars, 

sometimes alone — sometimes 

with one I loved 

(in futile or secret urgency) — 

I have outwaited 

the rise and fall of Scorpio, 

arc of its tail 

stinging the treetops. 

I have traced the inconstant moon, 

the indecisive Venus; 

feel more assured 

by the long, slow haul of Jupiter, 

the patient tread of Pluto 

(whom they pursue 

in their frigid outer orbits 

I cannot guess) 

Such solitude, 

millennia between 

the fly-bys of comets, 

perhaps is why 

they need so many moons, 

why rings of ice 

encircle them like loyal cats. 

16

It is lonely in space, 

far out 

where the sun is merely 

a star among stars. 

It is lonely in autumn. 

I sit in midnight woods. 

A trio of raccoons, foraging, 

come up to me, 

black mask eyes of the young ones 

interrogating the first cold night, 

the unaccustomed noisiness 

of bone rattle maple leaf 

beneath their paws. 

How can I tell them 

these trees will soon be skeletons, 

the pond as hard as glass, 

the nut and berry harvest over? 

These two are young — 

they would not believe me. 

Their mother rears up protectively, 

smells me, scents out 

the panic among the saplings, 

the smell of rust and tannin. 

We share a long stillness, 

a moment when consciousness 

is not a passive agency. 

Our sight invades the countryside, 

embracing everything — 

sleepers in beds in a concrete tower — 

earthworms entwining in humus rot — 

goes up and out through the limpid sky, 

streaming past moon — 

— moon’s lava’d seas — 

out, out, to the arc of the sublime, 

tracing the edge of great Antares, 

leaping to other galaxies unafraid. 

(Let space expand as though the worlds 

still feared their neighbors! 

Let miser stars implode, 

their dwarf hearts shriveling 

to cores of iron!) 

We are the scourge of entropy. 

We sing the one great note 

through which new being 

comes out of nothingness. 

17

Does it have meaning, 

this seed-shagged planet 

alive with eyes? 

Is earth the crucible, 

sandbox of angry gods, 

or is it the eye of all eyes, 

ear of all ears, 

the nerve through which the universe 

acquires self-knowledge? 

But these are weighty thoughts 

for man and mammal! 

We are but blood and minerals, 

upright for an instant, 

conscious for but a moment, 

a grainfall of cosmic hourglass. 

Yet I am not ephemeral: 

I freeze time, 

relive moments 

chronicle the centuries 

re-speak Shakespeare, 

beat out the staves of Mozart, 

read the same books 

my forebears knew 

make of old words 

my wordy pyramid. 

I am the one 

snapping the pictures of solar systems, 

sending myself 

an outside-in self-portrait. 

I send my name and signature 

on bottles spinning past Uranus. 

I am the one who asks, Is it worth it? 

I who hear the X-ray wind reply, It is! 

I am the one who would not stay in caves, 

I was discontent in the treetops. 

I wanted to be bird and whale and rocket. 

Ever, o ever more mortal now — 

— friends falling away like withered leaves — 

still I find joy in this subliminal shrine of autumn. 

My hand is full of fossil shells 

picked up from the lake shore rubble, 

scallops enduring with the same rock faith 

(its implicit minimum vocabulary): 

I live, and the increase of my consciousness 

is the span of my life. 

18

OCTOBER STORM 1998 

First night of the tenth month, 

a roaring storm hits town: 

thunder from every side, 

flash after cataclysmic flash 

of blue-white lightning. 

Transformers hum 

and tempt the storm-stab, 

birds hunch in branches, 

cats dash 

from one dry porch to another. 

A set of solitary car lights passes, 

distorted in sheets of rain, 

taillights at the corner 

like the haunted eyes 

of a carnivore 

who has just learned 

he is the last of his kind. 

A siren signals a distant fire. 

Lightning comes closer, 

closest I have known in years. 

I open the window, 

smell of ozone, 

watch as a nearby tree goes down, 

raked by the fingernails 

of a coal-black thunderhead. 

I hold the new jade stone 

on which a Chinese artisan 

has carved my nascent Mandarin name: 

Meng for the dream, the world 

in which all poets dwell — 

Ch’iu for the autumn, my chosen 

province and capital — 

Lei for the thunder 

of the mountain-striding storm. 

I am the Dream of Autumn Thunder, 

and this storm has called my name, 

marked the day of my arrival 

in the mysterious Middle Kingdom. 

AUTUMN LYRIC 

Autumn has come 

on splintered foot — 

there is no stealth 

in crackling leaves, 

no sweet perfume 

but apple rot, 

the humus smell, 

the acrid smoke 

of fireplace wood. 

Berries are dry, 

the summer pods 

untenanted. 

Cynic squirrel 

packs up his store — 

(where one would do, 

he buries two) — 

not seeds enough, 

he must have more! 

The birds have flown — 

they never learn 

how gray bark speaks 

of empty beaks — 

they chase the sun 

to tropic zone. 

Two walnuts hang 

on withered branch/ 

inside each shell 

a sleeping eye/ 

inside each eye 

the idea 

of spring to come. 

19

AUTUMN 

A Fragment by Alexander Pushkin, 1833 

A new English paraphrase 

“To the drowsy intellect, all things are possible…” 

Derzhavin 

I 

October! It comes at last. The grove shakes 

from naked boughs the last reluctant leaves. 

The road is iced with autumn’s chilling breath — 

I hear the brook behind the turning mill, 

but the pond is still; a neighbor with dogs 

tramps to the distant fields — his hounds disturb 

the peace of forest, his horse’s hoof-falls 

knock down and trample the winter wheat. 

II 

My season now! Spring is a bore to me. 

The dull thaw: mud everywhere thick and vile — 

Spring dizzies me, as my mind obsesses 

daydreaming, my blood in giddy ferment. 

Winter’s austerity is what I need, 

white snows beneath a whiter moon — what joy 

to glide airily in a speeding sleigh 

with one whose clasping fingers burn like fire! 

III 

The fun of it, skating steel-shod on ice, 

tracing a pattern on the river’s face! 

The air aglow with winter’s festivals! 

But even Winter palls — no one can love 

six months of snowfall — even the cave bear 

in his drowsy den would say “Enough, now!” 

Sleigh-rides with jolly youths grow tedious, 

and we grow quarrelsome cooped in all day. 

IV 

You, peach-fuzz Summer — you I could cherish, 

except for heat and dust, and biting flies. 

These bring dullness. The sated heart wears down. 

Our inspiration is a dried-up creek. 

Iced tea is not enough; we turn to drink, 

we rue the Winter hag, whose funeral 

served up wine and blini. What little chill 

we get comes from the freezer, sweet and cold. 

We spoon out ices, and we think of snow. 

20

V 

No, the end of Autumn is not admired: 

But I, reader, will hear no ill of her; 

She is the unnoticed child, the wistful 

one, way down the line of gaudy sisters. 

Her quiet beauty is the one for me. 

Her bare-tree starkness, I frankly say 

makes Winter’s edge the finest time of all. 

I love her humbly and so silently 

that I alone, in leaf-fall, deserve her. 

VI 

How can I make you see, Spring-clad lovers? 

It is like loving a sickly maiden, 

doomed to a consumptive death, pale-skinned 

with that ivory pallor and passive gaze, 

too weak to hurl a reproach at this life. 

Even as her soul expires, her young lips 

curl up in a ghost of a febrile smile. 

She does not hear her grave being readied. 

Today she lives — she is gone tomorrow. 

VII 

Season of mournful pomp, you live for me! 

Your valedictory beauty, mine! 

(Or am I yours — tranced and captivated?) 

I love to watch as Nature’s dyes dim out, 

the forest full court in gold and purple, 

turned to paler shades in hoarfrost reaping. 

The noisy wind tells me its secrets, pale skies 

concealed by the billows of darkling clouds, 

holding the sun back, frostbite hovering, 

whispered threats of grizzled Winter — I hear you! 

VIII 

I bloom afresh each time the Autumn comes. 

The Russian cold is good for me, I think! 

The days’ routines regain their old relish. 

I sleep and eat in proper proportion. 

Desire awakes — and I am young again! 

My heart beats fast with rejuvenated 

blood — I’m full of life like a newly-fed 

Dracula — a lightning-jolted Frankenwell, 

anyway, you get my meaning, friend! 

21

IX 

Bring me my horse! The steppes are calling me! 

On his back, glad rider, I’ll thump and thud, 

fill the dale with my echoing thunder. 

His shining hooves strike sparks, his streaming mane 

repeats the wind like a Cossack’s banner. 

The bright ice creaks when we cross the river. 

But the days are so short! Already dark! 

I read my book in guttering hearth-light, 

nourishing immortal longings again. 

X 

And in the silence sweet I forget you 

(Sad to admit, but everyone and all 

seem not to be when I’m lulled by fancy.) 

Sit there — empty — wait for the Muse to come — 

I am troubled again with lyric fever. 

My soul shakes, it reverberates, it wants 

to burst the dam of reticence, I dream 

of how the verses I’ve not yet finished 

will pour down Time, cross into languages 

unknown to me, leap continents and seas, 

the children that my visions bore, upright 

complete and singing for all to hear them! 

Invisible throngs fill me — demon? Muse? 

ancestor poets? poets yet to come?— 

Take me! Fill my reveries! Make these songs! 

XI 

So I’ll say everything I meant to say. 

The brave thoughts have come — rhymes run to meet them 

on winged feet. My fingers reach for the pen, 

and the neglected pen says “Ink! And where’s 

that yellow tablet whose narrow green lines 

seem always to pull the right words downward?” 

Just wait — a little tea — just hold the pen — 

wait calmly and the verses will follow. 

Thus a still ship slumbers on a still sea. 

Hark: chimes! now all hands leap to the rigging. 

Exhale! the sails are filled with ideas, 

they belly in the wind — the groaning mast — 

the monster poem moves to deep water — 

the harbor far behind the foaming track. 

XII 

It sails, but where is this ship taking me?… 

22

ON RECEIVING A GIFT OF BOOKS 

IN EARLY OCTOBER 

for Barbara Girard 

The books are falling from the trees: 

The Birds of Swan Point Cemetery 

still forest green 

with wide-eyed saw-whet owl 

pleading for continued foliage, 

months more of fat brown mice 

before the meager winter comes. 

Here’s Fraser’s angry Wood King 

guarding his oak, his paranoia 

old as The Golden Bough, 

his staff and sword crossed, 

feet firm in the circle 

of abundant acorns 

not even the squirrels touch, 

fearing his wild words. 

Not well concealed, 

that oily Aegisthus 

woos married Clytemnestra 

amid the thinning sycamores. 

Troy is far off, the war is long. 

He’ll never come home, that 

ungrateful king, Agamemnon. 

Now here’s a well-used leaf, 

pock-holed already with frostbite, 

red with laughter on top, 

brown with wisdom beneath, 

I read at random: 

“War is so savage a thing 

that it rather befits beasts 

than men —” 

old friend Erasmus, your Praise of Folly. 

Here by the stately laurel 

falls a wreath, twined round 

with bands of gold, not far 

from the supple columns 

of the Athenaeum, 

and the voice I first heard 

in timeless tales of gods and heroes 

spins out Mythology as truth 

from the pen of Edith Hamilton — 

o welcome leaves 

from when the world was young. 

Pruned branches piled for an auto-da-fé 

sing and crackle: 

Here burns Voltaire, 

Candide and his beloved Cunegonde. 

Pangloss intones as flames roar up, 

of the best of all possible worlds. 

The Grand Inquisitor warms his hands, 

is not amused as pine cones 

volley down, 

needles of truth in evergreen pursuit, 

crows mocking 

as Trevor-Roper tells all 

in The European Witch-Craze. 

Some of this autumn fall is dangerous: 

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 

a perennial leaf that will not wither, 

brave Mary Wollstonecraft’s 

appeal to higher reason, 

awaits its vindication still. 

And here’s A History of the Primates. 

Are men descended from hairy apes? 

Just ask a woman. 

Here’s Forster’s Maurice, 

a novel its author dared not publish, 

a brave, tormented book 

about a man who dared 

to be happy 

in his love for another man: 

I hold you, reticent English leaf, 

press you into my own heart’s book 

and will not let the earth 

consume you. 

And now the wind gusts out 

and upward, 

ah, too many leaves to count now: 

Jung and Proust, 

Lawrence and Leopardi, 

so many books unread 

so many leaves one upon another, 

mountains of you 

like toppled libraries, 

pyramids of poems to kick through 

and millions more still waiting 

to fall! 

23

AUTUMN SUNDAYS IN MADISON SQUARE 

Stately old sycamores, sentinel oaks, 

fan-leafed gingko and noble elm, 

year by year your patient quest for the sun 

has sheltered such madmen, squirrels, 

birds, bankers, derelicts and poets 

as needed a plot of peaceful 

respite from the making and sale of things. 

Poe lingered here in his penniless woe. 

Melville looked up at a whale cloud. 

Walt Whitman idled on the open lawn. 

(Sad now, the ground scratched nearly bare, 

Fenced off against the depredating dogs; 

the fountains dry, while standing pools 

leach up from old, sclerotic water mains.) 

Four chimes ring for unattended vespers, 

no one minding the arcane call, 

not the bronze orators exhorting us, 

not the rollicking hounds unleashed 

in the flea-infested gravel dog-run, 

not the grizzled men in boxes, 

so worn from the work of all-day begging 

they’re ready to sleep before the sun sets. 

A thousand pigeons clot the trees. 

The northwest park is spattered with guano, 

benches unusable, a birds’ 

Calcutta, a ghetto a bloated squabs 

feasting on mounds of scattered crumbs, 

bird-drop stalagmites on every surface! 

Daily she comes here, the pigeon-lady, 

drab in her cloth coat and sneakers, 

sack full of bread crusts, and millet and rice, 

peanuts and seeds from who-knows-where. 

Still she stands, in the midst of offerings, 

until they light upon her shoulder, 

touching her fingertips, brushing her cheeks 

with their dusty, speckled wings, naming her 

name in their mating-call cooing, 

luring her up to lofty parapets, 

rooftop and ledge, nest precipice 

where, if she could fly, she would feed their young, 

guard their dove-bright sky dominion 

from hawks, the heedless crowds, the wrecking cranes. 

24

Across one fenced-in lawn the sparrows soar 

in V-formation back and forth, 

as though they meant in menacing vectors 

to enforce the no-dog zoning. 

Amid the uncut grass the squirrels’ heads 

bob up, vanish, then reappear 

as the endless search for nuts and lovers 

ascends its autumn apogee. But here 

the squirrels are thin and ragged, 

road-kill reanimated harvesters, 

tails curled like flattened question marks 

as every other morsel offered them 

is snatched by a beak or talon. 

Descending birds make calligraphic curves 

as branches twine in spiral chase of sun. 

Nothing is safe from scavenging — 

trash barrels tipped for aluminum cans, 

the ground beneath the benches combed 

for roach-ends the dealers crush and re-sell 

to law clerks and secretaries. 

Even the cast-off cigarettes are taken 

by derelicts and nicotinic birds. 

Certain my notes are tracking him, 

a storm-tossed schizophrenic darts away. 

Beside the World War’s monument 

(ah, naïve time, to conceive no second!) 

an Asian woman gardening 

adds green and blossom to the shady ground 

amid the place-names of trampled Belgium, 

forest and trench of invaded France. 

(Not her war, certainly, not her heroes, 

yet her soft blooms, as from a grave 

whisper the names of the now-dead warriors 

and sons who never come to read 

of Ypres, Argonne and the barbed-wire lines.) 

A welcome bookstall has opened its doors, 

as if to lure the passers-by 

to read, to dream, beneath the timeless elms — 

but who can sit, immersed in book, 

as suicidal leaves cascade, as hands 

shaking and thin, trade crumpled bills 

for bags of bliss in crystal, crack or powder? 

25

Is this the potter’s field of shattered dreams? 

The copper arm of Liberty 

once stood at the northern end of the square. 

The trees once soared. Now roots eat salt, 

brush against steam pipes and rusted cable, 

cowed by courthouse, statues frowning, 

Gothic and Renaissance insurance spires. 

Only the branches, forgiving, forgetting, 

redeem this purgatory place. 

A Druid stillness draws here at dusk-time, 

squirrel and bird and runaway 

equally blessed as the hot-ash sunset 

gives way to the neon-lit night, 

city unsleeping beneath the unseen stars. 

IN PRAGUE, A TREE OF MANY COLORS 

for Jan Palach, Czech martyr, 

who set himself on fire January 16, 1969 

to protest the occupation of his country 

I am born, I am sown. 

I am screaming as the sun tropes me out of the earth. 

I am dragging in my tendrils the hopes of spring, 

I am pulled, exhorted into summer. The light 

deceives me with its deaths and resurrections. 

I must be straight. I must not believe 

the mocking sun and its revolutions. 

I must wait for the ultimate paradise, 

the world’s light redistributed for all. 

Much passes beneath my shadow: 

crowds press to marriages and funerals — 

the upright grooms go in, 

the silver-handled caskets come out, 

the church, the state, the people 

move on in soot and sorrow, day to day. 

Why do these people whisper always? 

Why do so many avert their eyes from me? 

Why does neighbor spy on his neighbor, 

reporting every oddity to the men in black? 

Why do I hear the rumble of thunder? 

Why does the symphony break off? 

Why have the women gone to the cellars? 

Soldiers and tanks are everywhere! 

The streets are full of Russians and Poles, 

26

Hungarians, Bulgarians, East Germans— 

all of East Europe has come to crush us! 

Men with fur hats speak swollen, Slavic words. 

Death is here. The smell of blood is here. 

My roots touch the entrails of the hastily buried. 

Anger is everywhere. I hold my leaves, 

make camouflage for lovers, conspirators. 

Students rip down the street signs 

and hide them in my upper boughs— 

the invaders drive in circles 

and cannot find their destinations. 

I open my bark for secret messages, 

encourage pigeons to carry the word 

of where is safe and who is betrayed. 

Here comes that student, Jan Palach, 

the ardent one, the solitary dreamer. 

He stuffs his coat with my fallen leaves, 

fills his cap, book bag and pockets with them. 

He is the icon of our unhappiness: 

he will open like a triptych of gold 

into a flame that will embarrass the sun. 

When he exfoliates in gasoline 

I am with him, burning, burning, 

leaf by dry leaf exploding for liberty. 

SEPTEMBER IN GOTHAM 2001 

This is New York, and fall 

has caught us unawares. 

From Palisade bus I view 

the gap-toothed skyline, 

a forest whose tallest trees 

are suddenly missing. 

In Gotham, they say, 

strange breezes from the south 

make certain elders remember 

downwind from the death camps. 

There is talk of stolen watches 

from shops beneath the rubble, 

the discovery daily 

of severed limbs. 

Month’s end, I walk all day in midtown, 

with shoppers determined 

to do something normal, 

eat Szechuan lunch, browse 

books, consider new software. 

27

Like many others around me, 

I pick things up from the counter, 

then put them back — 

everyday urges seem so trivial. 

There is not one note of music. 

People keep stopping 

to stare nervously 

at the Empire State, 

like frightened squirrels 

in the shadow 

of a threatened sequoia. 

The sycamores in Bryant Park 

beam back the sun, 

an interrupted medley 

of overhanging clouds 

that pause, then part, 

then scud away. 

Seedpods of honey locust fall, 

curl brown like overdone toast 

on the pavement, 

but the delicate leaves remain above, 

still adamant green. 

It is not till night, 

till I turn the corner on Lexington 

and spy the dark hunched shell 

of the Gramercy Park Armory, 

that I see the leaves of this autumn, 

its feuilles morts, 

taped to tree trunks, walls and windows, 

tied to a chain link fence, 

row on row to the end of seeing, 

flapping in rainstorm, tattered, tearing, 

soon to be ankle deep in the gutter — 

these album-leaves of anguish 

burst forth with human colors — 

faces brown and pink and salmon, 

oak and ash and ebony, 

the rainbow of human flesh, 

of eye-flash — 

visages still in their conquering twenties, 

snapshot in happy moments, 

embracing their brides, 

babies on knees, 

license, yearbook, graduation photos, 

smiling at beach or barbecue, 

28

ink fading or bleeding now 

in the sky’s abundant tearfall. 

In the language we use 

for the recovery of wayward pets, 

these posters beg the impossible: 

IF ANYONE HAS SEEN HER — 

MISSING — MISSING 

LEFT SHOULDER SCAR — 

A DOLPHIN TATTOO — 


HAVE YOU SEEN ME?— 


PLEASE FIND ME 


WORLD TRADE CENTER 

—September 30, 2001, New York City 

29

RUNAWAYS 

I want to report a disappearance. 

No, not exactly, not a person. 

No, not a pet. Lost property? 

What’s missing isn’t mine to lose, 

but it has certainly vanished. 

The tree — the tree in front of my house 

is just plain gone. 

Just yesterday I raked the leaves, 

the first red flags of autumn. 

The maple was there. I touched it, 

traced with my hand its withered bark. 

Today it’s gone, root, branch and leaf. 

Just a hole in the pavement, 

a heap of soil, a trail of clotted soil 

down and around the corner. 

Nothing disturbed my sleep. 

No chain saw, crane or dynamite 

chewed, toppled or fragmented 

my splendid shade tree. 

I have no witnesses 

except the baffled squirrels, 

the homeless begging sparrows. 

My neighbors seem not to notice — 

they’re Mediterranean, 

prefer the sun and open space 

to my shady Druid grove. 

I’ll plant another tree, I guess, 

though I’ll be old before 

its boughs can shelter me. 

I wouldn’t have come — 

I would have borne the mystery alone — 

except that — how do I say it? — 

I think it’s happening all over. 

I notice trees. I walk the park, 

maintain a nodding acquaintance 

with birds, 

keep time by the blossoms, 

the fruit, the rainbow of flame 

when October exfoliates. 

This morning the park — 

I counted — I actually counted — 

is missing three maples, two sycamores, 

one each of elm and beech, 

crab apple, peach and sassafras. 

There’s not a sign of violence: 

no broken trunks, no sawed-off limbs, 

no scorch of lightning. 

30 

Just holes in the ground, 

deep channels where roots withdrew, 

and where each tree had been, 

a trail of gravel, worms and soil 

out of the park, 

onto the pavement, 

then — nothing. 

Who’s taking them, you ask? 

You’re the policeman, 

the missing persons authority. 

I don’t think anyone’s taking them. 

I think they’re leaving us. 

Maybe they’re going north to Canada. 

Maybe they’ve had enough 

of crime and dirt and corruption. 

Maybe they’d like a little freedom, 

a little peace and quiet. 

You’d better investigate. 

Imagine our city if this goes on: 

Central Park a treeless dog run; 

Park Avenue and Fifth 

two blazing corridors 

of steam and sweat 

and screaming cabbies. 

What would we be without our trees? 

We brought them with us from Europe, 

our Johnny Appleseed inheritance. 

For every wilderness we leveled 

we came back planting, pruning, 

framing our starry vision 

with tamer treelines. 

They civilize us, connect us 

to the earth and the seasons. 

Without them we are savages, 

wolf eating wolf on the pavement, 

a handshake of scorpions. 

Find them! Beg them to come back! 

Ask them their terms! 

Get the mayor to negotiate! 

Promise them we’ll do better. 

We’ll clean the streets again, 

restore the parks and riverways. 

We’ll serenade the trees with Mozart, 

outlaw rap and raucous riveting. 

we’ll do whatever it takes! 

How could we go on without them, 

Leafless, treeless, barren and dead?

VIKING 

THE GODS AS THEY ARE, ON THEIR PLANETS 

I did it. 

Who would have thought 

that such a hulk 

of rivets and scraps 

could cross a sea of space? 

You named me for voyagers, 

for men who ravaged harbor towns 

content with seizing 

their women and gold. 

Cool were the hands 

that made me. Few cheered 

when I embarked in flame. 

No one expects a golden bounty 

at the end of my crossing. 

A strange tide carried me 

weighted, then weightless, 

then tugged to ground again, 

devoid of passenger 

and pilotless, 

not even a goddess 

carved on my prow. 

Little was left of me 

when I touched down in sand. 

I did it, 

before the alien hordes you dreamt of 

could launch their fleet, 

I touched this desolate 

and long deserted ground. 

Well earned, the name 

you gave me. I dared 

your greatest dream and won. 

Salute me, my maker: 

I invaded Mars. 



Thanks to intrepid Viking, 

the patient Voyager, 

Magellan’s fly-bys 

we know our gods and their planets 

in pockmarked intimacy 

as never the ancients knew them. 

The beauty of Venus is tarnished now. 

Her sallow, cratered visage, 

her veils of cloud an imposture. 

The hag fools no one 

with her stripper’s guile. 

Her touch would rend you 

with its flaming talons, 

her crack-lip kiss 

would scourge your face away. 

Her nipples spout 

sulfuric acid. 

If this is love, then howl alone and die. 

Where, Mars, is your warlike clamor? 

Your smoking steeds are chunks 

of rubble, 

Deimos and Phobos afraid 

of their shadows! 

How can you rage with your 

dry-ice hairpiece, 

your tideless, shipless, waterless seas, 

wheezing in your dismal atmosphere 

too weak to hold in oxygen? 

You are a skeleton in armor, 

a pyramid of swords, 

boneyard of useless causes, 

fighting words. 

Long have we feared you, Ares. 

Now ignorant armies clash for naught, 

steal empty victories 

for the vanity of chariots, 

the price of ooze, 

the pride of petty warlords, 

hollow in red planet’s retrograde. 

Your drum is dead. 

We have touched you 

with our robot hands, 

sifted your sands and found you 

lifeless. 

The light you cast on Troy 

and Carthage 

is not incarnadine with blood — 

rust is your sigil now, codger god! 

31

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE 

The photos from Hubble are unmistakable. 

The light that just now reaches us 

from hundreds of millions of years ago 

shows one great galaxy, grand as our own 

skewered by a vast invader, 

another swirling spiral, 

its equal with hundreds of billions of stars, 

two vast ripsaws of matter and energy 

flaming in perfect focus. Astronomers 

slap one another’s shoulders, mark spots 

where blue orbs signal the birth of stars, 

as suns collide and black holes suck nebulae 

into their bloated wormholes never satisfied. 

I see the photographs on newsprint, two 

red-orange disks the size of quarters. 

Around me they scream, “The millennium is coming! 

Two years until our computers won’t start!” 

Those interpenetrating galaxies get less concern 

than what kind of sex the President is getting. 

Did no one see what these pictures really mean? 

Alu marana echtho karani. 

For eons, the invading disk advanced — 

a thin ribbon at the peak of the heavens, 

then a cloud, then, at last, the juggernaut. 

For eons, the outer arms collided, 

and then the burning core where stars 

are numerous as grains of sand. 

It will go on for eons more. 

We shall all be dead, our sun expired, 

before the last picture reaches here. 

Does no one see the horror? 


How flaming death rained down 

upon the lizard men of Kra’ath? 

How the peaceful Quer’hem, who spent 

ten thousand years on a poem 

saw all their fragile cities ruined, 

how their blue limbs burned 

as a great red star engulfed them? 

How the lonely and ancient monks 

in the basalt temples of Irlamadá 

refused to leave their ancestral home 

as it plunged into a methane giant? 

How the great race of starmen 

whose ships had spanned half a galaxy 

sped from one world to another — 

32

so many they saved! so many 

they never reached in time! 

And no one who watched 

the night sky’s cataclysm 

dared say a beneficent god 

had made this universe. 

Nameless forever now the tribes, 

clans, castles, walls and emperors, 

upon a hundred million worlds 

rich with life, but too young to know 

the meaning of the exploding sky — 

all they did and dreamt, for nothing! 

Out on the rim of one spiral arm, 

the one-eyed Chroniclers — 

a race whose fortune it was to survive — 

built a vast dome and projected there 

the stars that had been. They sang and wept, 

struck gongs and sorrowful organ notes, 

as one by one they vanished again, 

like candles snuffed by a terrible hand. 

These things, and more, 

have come to haunt my dreams now, 

and the certain knowledge, too, 

as the astronomers tell me, 

that the great Andromeda galaxy 

is heading towards us. 

It will come. It will come. It will come. 


All is destroyed but memory. 

33

AUTUMN ON MARS 

for Ray Bradbury 

On Mars the black-trunked trees 

are dense 

with summer’s crimson foliage. 

When dry-ice autumn comes, 

the oaks singe sickly green. 

The land is a riot of airborne olive, 

chartreuse and verdigris, 

green fire against a pink 

and cloudless sky. 

The sour red apples go yellow sweet; 

the wind-blanched wheat 

forsakes its purple plumage; 

cornstalks are tied in indigo bundles; 

eyes flicker ghoulishly 

as candles are set 

in carved-out green gourds. 

Grandfathers warn their 

terrified children 

of the looming, ominous blue planet, 

roiled with thunderclouds 

and nuclear flashes, 

that warlike, funeral-colored Earth 

from which invaders would 

one day come, 

decked in the somber hues of death, 

withered and green like dead-pile leaves, 

armed to the hilt with terrible weapons. 

“I’ve seen them!” an elder asserts. 

“They have two eyes, 

flat on their heads!” 

Eye stalks wiggle in disbelief. 

“They walk on two legs, 

like broken sticks!” 

Multi-jointed leglets thump in derision. 

“They speak in the animal octave, 

and they bark like krill-dogs.” 

The children shriek in red and purple. 

“No way, Old One! 

Don’t make us think it! 

How can they talk without twinkling?” 

“Their rockets go higher with every turn 

of our world around the life-star. 

Earthers will come, thick on the ground 

like our thousand-year mugworms. 

34 

They will kill us, 

take our females captive, 

burn our egg domes, 

eat our aphidaries!” 

A fireball slashes the pink horizon. 

Two hundred eye-stalks follow the arc. 

“That might be one 

of their robots now! 

Their probes are watching everywhere!” 

Now fifty Martian youngsters scream, 

shrieking in ultraviolet tones, 

crab legs scattering in every direction. 

The Old Ones smile in five dimensions, 

sit down for a cup of hot grumulade 

and some well-earned peace and quiet. 

“It’s not nice to frighten 

the young ones,” 

the eldest muses, “but it wouldn’t be 

autumn 

without a little Halloween.” 

PLUTO DEMOTED 

No longer a planet, they say! 

Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth, Nine 

is now a nothing, 

a rock among rocks 

despite the tug of its companion, 

silent and airless Charon. 

Now you are a “mini-world,” 

an oversize asteroid 

tumbling in dustbelt 

so dark and distant 

our sun is but a blob 

of wavering starlight. 

World of death and darkness, 

methane, monoxide molting 

in every orbiting, 

shunned by the sun that made you, 

must you now be snubbed by man? 

How demote a planet 

so lustrous in history? 

It has its gods! It has its gods! 

Can they evict 

the Lord of the Dead

with just a say-so? 

What of the millions of souls 

whose home was Hades? 

What of beautiful Persephone 

who shuttles still 

on a high-speed comet 

for her six-month residency as mistress 

of the underworld? 

What of the heroes and philosophers, 

the shades of pagan times 

who teem those basalt cities 

warming the Plutonian night 

with odes and songs and serenades? 

Are they to be homeless vagabonds, 

slowed from their distant heartbeat 

to the stillness of absolute zero? 

**** 

At first, it was “Planet X,” 

out there somewhere 

because Neptune wobbled, 

nodded its rings 

toward Death’s domain. 

Then a Kansas farm boy 

obsessed with the stars 

ground his own mirrors 

built his own telescope 

with car parts and farm equipment. 

Hailstones destroyed the farm crops. 

The telescope survived. 

The boy sent drawings 

of Mars and Jupiter 

to Lowell Observatory — 

Come work for us, they said. 

He hopped a train, had just enough 

cash for a one-way fare. 

And then, in monk-like hermitage 

he toiled at Flagstaff, 

comparing sky photographs, 

hundreds of thousands of stars, 

negative over negative to light, 

searching for celestial wanderers, 

planetoi, asteroids, comets 

that moved when everything else 

stood still in the cosmos. 

Clyde Tombaugh, twenty-four, 

surveyed a sky 

where fifteen million lights 

the brightness of Pluto twinkled 

but only one was Pluto. 

He found it. 

*** 

They sought him out 

in his retirement, 

those fellows 

from the Smithsonian, 

asked for his home-made instrument 

for their permanent collection. 

“Hell no,” he said, 

“I’m still using it.” 

*** 

I would as soon 

forget Kansas as Pluto. 

Tell Tombaugh’s ghost 

his planet is not a planet! 

I can see the old man now, 

just off the death-barge 

he hopped from Charon, 

greeting the Lords of Acheron, 

that rusted tube of telescope 

under his arm, 

scouting a mountaintop 

for his next observatory. 

Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth, Nine! 

Change at your peril 

a thing once named! 

35


MAKER OF MONSTERS, MAKER OF GODS 

Birthday Verses for Frank Belknap Long 

How cold the sphere where all the gods are dead, 

How grim the prospect when the end seems near! 

How few deny the soul in age’s bed, 

Not brave enough to risk another year 

Outside the soothing balm of Paradise. 

Yet who, I ask, brings you this message bright — 

God’s hooded broker or a devil wise 

In promise, slavering to steal the light 

Of your assumèd immortality? 

Beware these masked intruders, all of them! 

God’s hall and Satan’s hot locality 

Are only a sly imposter’s stratagem. 

O poet good and gray, have courage still. 

It matters not that gods retire or sleep. 

We are their makers, who fashion or kill 

as suits us, the gods of the air or deep. 

No matter that your hand some days is frail. 

That hand has summoned monsters and entwined 

The earth’s sublimest beauties in a tale. 

No matter that the falling years unwind 

The scroll or turn the pages dry and sère. 

Poe’s Bells and Gotham’s storied steeples seize 

Your spirit, soaring from Providence to here — 

To ancient barks adrift Aegean breeze — 

To Mars — to plains where gods and heroes dwell — 

To charnel pit where ghoul contends with rat — 

To limelit stage where vampire victims swell 

Their last aortal ebb into a bat- 

Deep hunger’s all-consuming rage of red — 

To aliens serene at crystalline gates — 

Robots implacable — and demons dead 

Until some stumbling fool reanimates 

36

Hibernal horror with a taste for blood! 

What need of god’s incense and litanies 

When every twist of pen compels the mud 

To yield up dark, bat-winged epiphanies? 

Fear not. Walk on among them unafraid. 

Soul-snatching monsters are as dead as stone. 

Hell’s a blank corridor, its lord a shade. 

TERROR you did not fear to tread alone 

Shall buoy you up, with WONDER at its side. 

Lovecraft you called the kindest man you knew, 

Refused a priest the day before he died, 

Said he preferred a sky where Night Gaunts flew. 

That is not dead which leaps to poet’s eye, 

Where neither friends, nor gods, nor monsters die! 

DREAMING OF UR-R’LYEH 

1 

All roads lead north from this frozen city. 

Some days the errant sun cannot decide 

just where to raise its flaming orange head— 

instead it rises everywhere: 

four globes of light in an opalescent rainbow, 

taunting Antarctica with phantom light. 

And then for months the sun disk stays away, 

warming the tropics and leaving this land 

a block of cloud no star can penetrate 

with its thin shaft of consoling beacon. 

I walk the ruins of Ur-R’lyeh,* 

Earth’s oldest uninhabited city, 

a fair place before the world tipped downward, 

before the great blue harbors filled with ice. 

All other cities are copied memories, 

all other pyramids less perfectly formed, 

all other domes and temples childish toys 

beside what sleeps beneath this glacier. 

The things that lived and sang here were not men. 

Strange limbs they had, eye-stalks and bird-like beaks, 

sense organs that drank the ultraviolet, 

voices that clicked and trilled through twenty octaves. 

Yet sight and sound’s deep symmetries drove them, 

as in the human psyche, to Beauty’s thrall. 

37

2 

Lost penguins arrive here from time to time, 

stand hungry and hypnotized for days, as wind 

howls over the ancient air shaft openings, 

making the ice-locked plateau resonate. 

This is the anthem of Antarctic woe — 

thirteen deep notes in modal succession. 

In dream I come here often, walk solitaire 

upon the windswept basalt promenades, 

admire four suns through ruby windows, 

drink from dark obsidian goblets, 

discuss with the white/black avian sentinels 

the meaning of glyphs beyond translation. 

The wind’s mad organ relentlessly pipes, 

the depth of note conveying the shafts’ abyss, 

the unthinkable depths of crystalline city, 

carved into stone pre-Cambrian, the keeps 

where multi-limbed minions mined out 

the now-dead heat-taps to the core of the planet. 

The tones that should be random, repeat this song. 

Has anyone heard such music before? 

Perhaps we hear it everywhere, from bird to whale, 

as an unheard, underpinning harmony, 

the oldest earth enigma’s passacaglia. 

Bass line invisible beneath a string quartet 

(whose range is but a gnat-buzz against the cosmos), 

droning to Andes in Inca-harps electrified, 

mantric harmonies soaring above 

the haunting trill of Tibetan bowls, 

the echo that answers the mournful Pan pipe 

heard at the edge of a November wood, 

the solitary faun’s lamenting love call. 

3 

Only a handful can pluck this dream, this song, 

as only a few can walk the rim of madness, 

gazing the surfaces dead before racial memory, 

touching without terror the things that came before, 

loving beyond mother-brother-breeding love 

the purely non-human, 

the vast, rich impersonal cloud of atoms electrified. 

The Song of Ur-R’lyeh may nest in nightmares, 

may hatch its egg in fever’s heat, 

may force a lover to break off loving, 

turn a sane world to a screaming asylum. 

Your third eye, third ear, third brain are growing — 

no stopping the eye-stalk, the throbbing heart, 

38

the new way of seeing things from impossible angles, 

hearing at last the cries of the distant stars, 

the impatience of ocean to swallow the moon, 

the yearning of magma to fertilize space. 

You touch an oak and know its history 

from taproot to sun-ache twig-tip. 

This song is fugue for the ego transcendent, 

calls you, as it calls all beautiful runaways, 

all mad, erotic hermits, all solitary climbers, 

to the City of One 

beyond the City of Many. 

___________ 

*H.P . Lovecraft placed the Cyclopean ruins of R’lyeh in the South Pacific, and 

probably was inspired, as was A. Merritt, by descriptions of the island of Ponape 

(Pohnpei) in the Caroline Islands, where more than 90 prehistoric stone structures were 

found underwater. Lovecraft later wrote his novel, “At the Mountains of Madness,” 

which placed an unnamed, pre-human civilization in Antarctica. We are dreaming, 

perhaps, of the same place, which I call Ur-R’lyeh. 

Lovecraft fans are always debating how to pronounce R’lyeh. It should be 

pronounced with the R’ as a sustained, trilled “r” and with “lyeh” as one syllable 

pronounced “lee—yeah” (the “yeah” like the “ye” in “yet.”) If you can’t pronounced it, 

you may be eaten upon your arrival there! 

39

THE TREE AT LOVECRAFT’S GRAVE 

This solemn spreading beech 

was once a perfect hemisphere 

of waxy red-green foliage. 

Now it is crippled and sere, 

scarred by the pruning 

of diseased limbs, 

trunk bared, a twisted bole 

in the form of a petrified heart. 

Its gnarled roots rake earth 

with a death-row desperation. 

Within another hollowed bole, 

(eye-socket for a Cyclops) 

malignant mushrooms proliferate, 

caps and stalks angled sunward. 

The schoolboy gashes 

where fans have carved initials 

(their own and HPL ’s) 

widen and blacken, 

the once-proud limbs 

tattooed with NECRONOMICON, 

HOWARD P . LOVECRAFT ’99, 

even a whole sentence 

about the primacy of fear, 

runes ruinous to a living monument. 

Still, the furry beech-nuts fall like hail 

to the delight of squirrels. 

Still, the hard brown kernels issue forth, 

each a perfect blueprint 

of a perfect tree — 

or have the roots, tasting the calcium 

of author’s bones, the humus rot 

of eye and brain and memory 

mutated the germ and flower anew 

so that these seeds transcend 

to sentience? 

Gather these nuts, then, 

and harvest them. 

First they must hibernate, 

for the beech remembers glaciers. 

Then they will germinate, 

pale tentacles in search 

of anchorage, 

until the red-green engine 

of stalk and leaf 

is ready to catapult 

into the sun-chase. 

40 

Will these trees move 

of their own accord? 

Will their root-claws crave blood 

and the iron-rich earth 

of a crumbling grave? 

Will the branches sway 

on windless nights? 

Will fox-fires and will o’ wisps 

paint impossible colors 

on bud-ends and blossoms? 

Will beech nuts burst 

to pale blue eyes 

insomniac astronomers 

with perfect vision, 

counting the Pleiades, 

numbering the galaxies. 

And will they speak 

the patient sonnets 

of their greater lifespans, 

the long-arced lines 

their waving branches beat? 

And somewhere within them, 

does he smile there, 

transmuted poet and dreamer 

subsumed into the eons? 

Are those his thoughts 

that make them tremble 

at every sunset, 

his elder gods they fear 

might swallow the sun 

as it tosses in darkness? 

Is he lord of their nightmares, 

giving them Dread, 

the obverse of the coin of Joy, 

Fear, the companion of Wonder? 

I regard the ailing tree, 

the modest gravestone. 

The tree will die. The rain 

will wipe the letters clean. 

Only the whispered words, 

the lines the fingers trace 

from one yellowed book 

to another 

endure —

I hold the burst nuts in one hand, 

a book of Lovecraft’s tales 

in the other. 

I study the cloudless, blue, 

deceptive sky, 

the lie that conceals an infinity 

of screaming stars — 

Oh, these roots have read him, 

they have read him. 

UNDER LOVECRAFT’S GRAVE 

A little play for four voices, read at 

Lovecraft’s Grave, 2002 

i 

Listen! The worms, always. 

Millions of teeth, 

earth-moving cilia on pulsing tubes, 

the parting of soil, the tiny pop 

of subterrane surprise 

as a cavity opens 

the drip, drip, trickle, drip 

as rain water instantly rushes to fill it. 

A mole like a distant subway car, 

snuffling about for edible roots. 

The put-a-put sounds advancing, 

retreating — 

all the dead can hear of automobiles. 

The door-slams (count them!) 

of nearby visitors — 

clickedy-click high heels of the women, 

bump-thump of the men and the boys. 

That’s on the pavement — 

upon the lawn 

the sound of someone walking 

is always just so quiet 

that the dead are always imagining 

they hear it. 

Is that someone now? Is it night or day? 

What year is it, anyway? 

Beneath the earth, inside the casket, 

inside the shroud or winding cloth, 

even inside the mummified skin, 

the shriveled organs, inside the bones 

where the marrow is flaking to rust, 

even inside the brain, 

a desiccated thing 

no bigger than a walnut, 

consciousness clings. 

(How do I know? From the whispers 

I hear beneath the willow-weave, 

the message no wind 

alone could have invented.) 

Their eyeless sight sees shades 

of blackness, 

their earless ears are perfect receivers 

for what their lipless mouths 

have to say. 

ii 

If you had taken more milk as a child, 

you might have lived to eighty, Howard. 

No one wants to be eighty, Mother — 

forty-seven was painful enough 

an age 

to come unnailed and fall apart — 

Does it still hurt? 

No, Mother, 

not since the autopsy, anyway. 

You just never listened. 

I should have kept 

you home more, I knew it. 

Now, Mother — 

But I couldn’t bear to look at you. 

That face! — how like your father’s. 

When you were off at school 

I could go out 

and face the world. But even so, 

the people on the streetcar knew — 

how they’d whisper — 

That’s Suzie Whipple Lovecraft, 

the one whose husband…. 

the one with that hideous child… 

YOUR DADDY’S AT BUTLER, 

YOUR MOTHER, TOO. 

PRETTY SOON THEY’LL 

COME FOR YOU! 

My God, who was that? 

41

Some child three plots over, Mother. 

You know he does that when we 

raise our voices. 

THATS MY SON 

YOU’RE INSULTING! 

A LOVECRAFT FACE IS A 

DISTINCTION. 

Now see what you’ve done, Mother — 

You’ve awakened Father again! 

Lantern-jaw! Son of a traveling man! 

That freakish long face! Drawing monsters 

on every sidewalk! No good at games! 

The mothers would send me notes: 

Your Howard is not permitted to play 

with our Joshua. Our old cat Flavius 

will NOT come down from the tree, 

and something awful has taken root 

in the rhododendron garden. 

I will not have my children pronouncing 

Arabian spells and Egyptian curses 

at our Christian dinner table. 

That must have been all over town! 

Ah, my Arabian Nights! 

Playing at Grandfather Whipple’s house. 

GOOD! A HIGH SPIRITED LAD! 

TOO BAD I WASN’T THERE 

TO SEE YOU 

TO MANHOOD, HOWARD! 

SO MUCH I COULD HAVE 

TOLD YOU. 

SOME BOOKS YOUR MOTHER 

NEVER SAW… 

I found them, Father. They were very … 

instructive. 

And I took them away! Such filth! 

And what a horrible turn he took. 

A mere nervous breakdown, Mother. 

We had to take him from school. 

The shame of his father’s death, 

mad at Butler; his grandfather’s death, 

42 

our move to the apartment 

where we had to share 

with common people. 

The shock of finding 

we had so little money. 

Somehow, Mother, 

none of us ever actually 

went out and worked: not you, 

not me, not the Aunties 

(let’s not disturb their sleep, please!) 

SEE, THE BOY HAS SPIRIT. 

SOMETHING YOU ALWAYS 

LACKED AS A WIFE — 

NO WARMTH, NO ANIMAL 

SPIRITS! 

It’s all animal with you, you madman! 

Mother, Father, enough! 

You’ve made your peace. 

You in your hospital bed, drooling, 

with that leering face, 

repeating obscenities, 

boasting about the women 

you had ruined! 

YOU WITH YOUR 

NIGHT GAUNTS 

STREAMING FROM 

THE CORNERS 

WITH NEEDLE FINGERS! 

I COULD NEVER TOUCH YOU, 

AND FINALLY NOT EVEN A 

SHADOW COULD! 

GO TO BALTIMORE, HOWARD! 

THERE’S A NEGRESS THERE 

WHO RUNS AN 

ESTABLISHMENT. 

ASK FOR THE DWARFS. 

THEY’RE SISTERS, 

AND ACROBATS. 

YOU CAN’T IMAGINE 

WHAT THEY DO! 

AH, BUT I SUPPOSE 

THEY’RE DEAD, NOW.

What’s that! Is that YOU touching me? 

NO, SUZIE, IT MUST BE — 

ONE OF THOSE WORMS, 

THE ONES WITH 

A THOUSAND LEGS. 

I know it’s you. I can’t bear it. 

YOUR DADDY’S AT BUTLER, 

YOUR MOTHER, TOO. 

PRETTY SOON THEY’LL 

COME FOR YOU! 

Howard, you promised me 

there would be no right angles 

anywhere in my casket. 

That’s right, Mother. 

I checked it myself. 

Everything is angled in some way. 

You are sure? 

Yes, Mother. 

I must be sure. They come out 

of the corners, you know. 

Right angles are weak places 

through which they come and go 

from their cold and sunless world 

to feed in ours. 

First it’s a grazing 

against your cheekbone. 

Then one touches 

the small of your back. 

Razor-sharp talons, 

long, melon-shaped heads 

and no faces — 

No faces at all! I know, Mother, 

I invented them 

in my own nightmares! 

Real! they are real! 

Filthy things, like dust rags, 

ammonia on their breath 

and old blood — 

hovering, holding 

you down, 

touching, 

touching! 

WHY DIDN’T THEY BURY YOU 

AT BUTLER, ANYWAY? 

YOU ARE A TIRESOME WOMAN! 

You! freeloader! whose family 

plot is this anyway? 

Mother! Father! There are people here! 

A dozen at least! Hear them! 

There’s the poet, and that actor 

who imitates me! Pretty damn good! 

And all the others, too! They’re back — 

I think it’s my birthday — 

Quiet, quiet! Listen to them! Listen! 

FRANK AND LYDA 

The last days of Frank Belknap Long, 

American horror writer 

Life was not kind 

at the last 

(hell, 

never had been) 

insult piled 

on illness, 

illusions shattered 

almost daily. 

His sheltered poems 

sang of Greece, 

of gods who, dead, 

were still more feeling 

than a drained 

and faded crucifix. 

His tales were gentle, 

though treading horror 

in Lovecraft’s shadow. 

Stooped now, 

his shabby gait 

so mournful, 

clothes so baggy 

that strangers 

handed him quarters. 

They did not know 

43

those bony fingers 

wrote sonnets and tales, 

of the dusty trunk 

where his last unfinished novel 

awaited his renewed attention. 

Then came the stroke, 

cruel snap of synapse — 

week after week 

in St. Vincent’s. 

We had just met. 

We had talked of his poems, 

his Lovecraft memoir — 

his boisterous wife 

intruding everywhere 

with incoherent chatter 

of Chekhov plays, 

of Frank’s world fame, 

of her childhood 

among the Yiddish actors 

thrust from Russia 

fleeing the Tsar’s pogroms, 

to Shanghai 

to Canada to California. 

I liked them both. 

I called her charodeika, 

enchantress, 

she called me 

Britannica. 

We talked Tchaikovsky, 

Akhmatova and Pasternak. 

Now at St. Vincent’s 

Lyda’s mad wheelchair 

glides in the corridor 

as she pigeonholes doctors, 

nurses, orderlies, 

telling them all 

her Frankele is a famous author. 

He lapses in 

and out of memory, 

recites “The Gods Are Dead” 

to completion, cries out 

as Lyda maligns his hero, 

calling him Lousecraft. 

“Lovecraft! Lovecraft!” he shrieks 

44 

in the thinnest tenor, cracking. 

“He was the kindest man I knew!” 

Lyda goes on 

about her trip to Moscow, 

“You’ll see! They know me there! 

They haven’t forgotten my family! 

They’re meeting me 

at the Aeroflot terminal. 

And I’ll come back 

and open my bookstore in Chelsea 

in that huge loft I’ve chosen. 

And Frank will be there, 

sign books for his fans every day. 

Ray Bradbury wrote, 

and Stephen King is sending us 

ten thousand dollars.” 

“My wife,” Frank tells me, 

“is an alcoholic, 

and a manic depressive. 

What can I do?” 

I visit Lyda at home, 

watch roaches crawl 

across discarded magazines. 

I argue with her 

as she opens the trunk, 

tries to throw out 

Frank’s manuscripts. 

I put the papers back, 

distract her with a pile of envelopes. 

“Let’s clean up this,” I say. 

We throw away bank statements. 

Decades of misery blink before me, 

whole years in which 

a mere three hundred dollars 

stood between him and the Reaper. 

Soon Frank is home, 

confined to his bed, 

then to a hobbling walker. 

Lyda throws parties, 

serves wine and cold cuts 

amid the thriving roaches. 

Her new dog wets 

Frank’s manuscripts. 

The kitchen sink 

is a mold terrarium,

feelers and tentacles 

amid the dishes. 

She announces her plans 

for Moscow and Tel Aviv, 

for her not-yet-started memoirs 

of the Yiddish theater 

as she swigs her vodka 

and sings Tchaikovsky 

in a bleary contralto. 

“Why did you marry me?” 

she hisses at Frank 

as an argument dies down. 

“My mother had just died,” 

Frank answers bluntly. 

“I didn’t know what to do.” 

She tells me in French 

how, despite her many lovers, 

she was still a virgin 

with her husband. 

“J’ai un problème sexuelle,” she says. 

She kneads the things 

that once were breasts. 

“We couldn’t do it. 

“His hernias got in the way.” 

Once, Frank had been 

an armchair Bolshevik, 

led on by Lyda’s memories 

of the Jew-oppressing Tsar. 

Now I tell him 

of Lenin’s crimes, 

how the order went out 

to shoot anyone 

with hands uncallused. 

I call Lenin, as I often do, 

a filthy murderer. 

Now Lyda shouts, 

“Watch what you say! 

Watch what you say!” 

Frank’s 82 

and doesn’t know 

what Stalin did. 

I left one night 

amid the shrieking 

and screaming, 

just couldn’t go back 

rode home with a friend 

and found myself saying, 

“So this is how it ends 

for a famous horror writer.” 

My friend says, 

“So this is how it ends 

with a marriage.” 

* * * 

Death came, but not an end 

to the indignity — 

Frank’s body lay 

for months in the morgue, 

unclaimed, unspoken for 

while Lyda bided time, 

cashing the pitiful checks 

that came in his name. 

Then to a potter’s field 

where what he dreaded most — 

to mingle with the crowd, 

touched by their dirt 

and violence, 

alone without 

a woman’s caring touch — 

befell him, 

a frail ghost jostled 

by addicts and derelicts, 

mere revenants of animated meat. 

Soon Lyda passed. 

Then Frank was retrieved, 

his body moved 

to a distant family plot. 

Alone at last 

in the clear white light 

of blessed solitude. 

45

AFTER THE STORM 


Dead night. I tramp the midnight lane 

of yews and mausoleums. 

The air resounds with muffled cries: 

a cat? a wailing ghost? 

a child abandoned, exposed 

to gusts and rain and fatal chill? 

I think of Roman fathers 

exposing their infants on hilltops — 

or, far more likely in this 

ignoble time, a furtive birth 

dumped from the back of a passing car. 

My eye expands into the moonless dark. 

I brush against the rain-filled leaves, 

push through the hedge 

until I find the source: 

on a mound where six markers 

neatly grew, 

a tree had crashed upon an infant’s grave. 

Sleep, sorry ghost, 

from your Indian awakening! 

Was it not here the Iroquois 

made secret pledges to moon and stars? 

Did they not tell of jumbled boneyards 

where felling trees brought back 

the dead — 

not whole, but with the jaws and tails 

of animals, were-things with fangs 

and claws and antlers, hoofed hands 

and legs attached at useless angles? 

Hence their horror of disturbing bones! 

Something ascends before me, a blur 

between the graveyard and the pines: 

I see the outspread wings of an owl, 

the twisted arc of its talons, 

but it regards me with a human face, 

a tiny death-head in a feather shroud, 

withered and wise and ravenous 

for the mother milk of the skies. 

46 

HART ISLAND 

Ferry cuts fog 

in Long Island Sound, 

baleful horn bellowing 

a midnight run 

unblessed by harbor lights, 

unknown to the sleeping millions 

convicts at the rails, 

guards behind them, 

dour-faced captain at the helm 

a face and a pipe 

and a dead-ahead glare, 

an empty gaze that asks no questions 

offers no advice 

A careful mooring, 

cables thicker than hanging noose 

bind ship to pier; 

pilings like pagan columns 

bind pier to Hart Island 

Convicts shuffle to the end of the dock, 

guards behind them with billy clubs 

hands tensed at holster. 

You fellas better behave now, 

the captain mutters, 

just do what you’re told. 

And no funny business, 

another voice warns, 

‘cause anything could happen to you here. 

The prisoners shiver at moonless 

expanse 

of blackened water, 

dead shell of Bronx one way, 

bedrooms of Queens the other; 

clap their hands, blow on their fingers 

to fight the chill. 

Guess you would freeze one speculates 

before you could get to shore. 

Just do what you’re told, 

the biggest con admonishes.

I been here before. Do what 

you’re told and then it’s over. 

Eager to earn 

the early release, 

willing to dig and lift and carry, 

they turn to the foreman. 

He points to the tarp 

that covers the cargo. 

They lift the tiny oblong boxes, 

frail as balsa 

thin pine confining 

the swaddled contents. 

What’s in these things? 

one asks, taking on three 

stacked to his chin. 

Over there, is all the foreman says, 

pointing to mounds 

where a silent back hoe 

stands sentinel. 

These be coffins, the older con explains. 

Baby coffins. 

They lower the boxes 

into the waiting holes, 

read the tags attached to them: 

Baby Boy Franklin 

Carl Hernandez 

Unknown Baby Girl, Hispanic. 

The adult coffins are heavier, 

two men at least to carry each one. 

They can joke about these: 

Heavy bastard, this Jose. 

Carla here, she musta wasted away. 

But no one speaks about the babies. 

The convicts’ eyes grow angry, then sad. 

Later the mounds will be toppled, 

the soil returned to the holes, 

flattened and tamped 

with a cursory blessing 

by an ecumenical chaplain. 

These are the lonely dead, 

the snuffout of innocence: 

crack babies 

AIDS babies 

babies dead from drive-by bullets 

babies abandoned like unwanted kittens 

dumpster children 

No wonder this island cries in its sleep. 

NIGHT WALKER 

Still in her nightgown, 

the gaunt old woman, 

nearly a skeleton in satin, 

sleepwalked through lawns, 

onto a well-known path 

passing her mother’s grave, 

barefoot between the Civil War 

cannons, 

out the back gate, 

then down the slope to the river. 

Imagine her walk, 

oblivious to gravel, 

untouched by thorns, 

then over rail and tie 

without a splinter, 

then down the bank 

to the waiting waters! 

Cats she’d once fed 

watched from the dark 

of rhododendrons 

but did not go to her. 

I saw her, too, 

mute and astonished 

as she passed the monument 

where I recited Ulalume — 

The cold chill current 

did not awaken her, 

lifted her up from her wading. 

Weeds and crayfish 

merged with her streaming hair. 

She sank, her gown 

a luminescent ribbon. 

Her life dissolved 

in unseen bubbles. 

Who beckoned her? 

What star deluded her? 

What long-dead lover 

called from the mud 

of the river bottom? 

47

AN EXETER VAMPIRE, 1799 

She comes back, in the rain, at midnight. 

Her pale hand, not a branch, taps the glass. 

Her thin voice, poor Sarah Tillinghast 

whines and whimpers, chimes and summons you 

to walk in lightning and will’o wisp 

to the hallowed sward of the burial ground, 

to press your cheek against her limestone, 

to run your fingers on family name, 

to let the rain inundate your hair, 

wet your nightclothes to clammy chill, 

set your teeth chattering, your breath 

a tiny fog before you in the larger mist. 

You did not see her go before you, 

yet you knew she was coming here. 

Soon her dead hand will tap your shoulder. 

Averting your eyes, you bare your throat 

for her needful feeding, your heat, your 

heart’s blood erupting in her gullet. 

You will smell her decay, feel the worms 

as her moldy shroud rubs against you. 

Still you will nurse the undead sister, 

until her sharp incisors release you 

into a sobbing heap of tangled hair, 

your heart near stopped, your lungs exploding, 

wracked with a chill that crackles the bones. 

The rain will wash away the bloodstains. 

You will hide your no more virginal 

throat like a smiling lover’s secret. 

Two brothers have already perished — 

the night chill, anemia, swift fall 

to red and galloping consumption. 

Death took them a week apart, a month 

beyond Sarah’s first night-time calling. 

Honor Tillinghast, the stoic mother, 

sits in the log house by the ebbing fire, 

heating weak broth and johnny cakes. 

One by one she has sewn up your shrouds— 

now she assembles yet another. 

She knows there is no peace on this earth, 

nor any rest in the turning grave. 

48

The storm ends, and birds predict the sun. 

Upstairs, in garret and gable dark, 

the children stir, weak and tubercular, 

coughing and fainting and praying for breath. 

The ones that suck by night are stronger 

than those they feed on, here where dead things 

sing their own epitaphs in moon-dance, 

and come back, in the rain, at midnight. 

_____ 

Exeter, Rhode Island’s “vampire” case of 1799 ended with the exhumation and 

destruction of the corpse of Sarah Tillinghast after four siblings followed her in death by 

consumption. They burned Sarah’s heart and reburied all the bodies. 

49

GRAVEYARDS I’D LIKE TO SEE 

1 

An animal cemetery 

with obelisks 

and stately groves 

of redwood. 

No mongrels here, 

no stones for Spot 

or Flossy, 

for parakeets or hamsters: 

These stones are serious, 

basalt polished black, 

shiny as obsidian, 

noble as a Pharaoh’s monument, 

in honor of the Trilobite, 

the wheeling Pterodactyl, 

and up on the hill, 

a double-doored pyramidal 

mausoleum, ten stories high, 

housing a skeleton 

of the King of Kings, 

loudspeakers roaring 

the hunger calls, 

the territorial warnings, 

the mating imperative 

of Tyrannosaurus Rex. 

2 

Dead trees, parched grass, 

sinkhole and swamp 

surround the stepfathers’ graveyard, 

one tiny fence away 

from the witch-elm Aceldema 

where stepmothers’ ghosts 

rise from potters’ soil 

to screech their complaints. 

Crows flee the spot. 

The barren trees 

sprout fungoid terraces. 

The branches clot 

with drooping, rabid bats. 

All night, all day, 

the angry spirits 

mutter in vain. 

No one listens — 

50 

the scorned sons are free, 

the beaten daughters 

a thousand miles away. 

Dry earth cracks 

around the nameless markers, 

as sunken mounds 

are upthrust suddenly 

as though the earth 

would spit them out. 

3 

On a featureless plain, 

a potters’ field for bigots, 

a noisome heath 

where nothing grows, 

and feral cats 

gnaw desiccated rats. 

The weathered pine planks 

that serve for tombstones 

are spray-painted 

with ghetto epithets, 

rotten with termites, 

ringed with slime mold. 

The bone-dry yard 

is a place of nettles, 

skunk cabbage 

and poison ivy. 

Last home for famous 

TV evangelists, 

faith healers and con men, 

grasping politicos, 

hooded supremacists, 

grumpy class warriors, 

Mayflower lily, 

Panther and Klansman 

subsumed in stew 

by the tolerant earth, 

the undiscriminating 

worms.

4 

Somewhere in Europe — 

that boneyard 

of murderous ideologies — 

let’s have a solemn memorial 

for ideas whose time 

has come and gone — 

last resting place of isms 

and ologies, 

a place where splinter sects 

who slaughtered one another 

for their version of God 

lie head to head in silence. 

Crows come by the hundred, 

convene in the abundant oaks. 

The shrill debates are endless, 

committees and caucuses, 

congresses and parliaments. 

The ground is spattered 

with their philosophizing. 

And every one of them 

wants to rule the earth. 

Stones in a standing pool 

argue forever 

on the proper method of baptism. 

An empty chapel 

is alternately seized 

by ghosts of every sect 

who promptly banish all others. 

Two hillsides have hundreds 

of facing cannons 

not rusted not retired 

eternally on alert, 

cannonballs piled high, 

fuses and powder dry, 

ready to roar and thunder 

as the crows keep tally 

Catholic caw Huguenot 

Anglican caw caw Roman 

Christian caw caw caw Muslim 

Muslim caw caw caw caw Jew 

each shot resounds 

in boom and crow-cloud. 

Smoke settles, 

the senators return 

to the golden oaks, 

war without end. 

51

THE HARVESTMAN 

Day fell. The cooling sun careened and set, 

an orange flare behind the broiling hill. 

August is full upon the town, and yet 

the lakeside grove is desolate and still. 

No gravestones bear my surname here — 

(my forebears have vanished to scattered dust) — 

yet this is where I contemplate a bier, 

a monument, a poet’s shattered bust. 

This burial ground of proud and prudent Scot 

is now a blasted place of toppled stones, 

storm-blasted trunks and layered, fungal rot, 

tree ears and bell-shaped mushrooms white as bones. 

The ancient limestone markers, tumble-tossed, 

cast off like cards at the end of a game, 

speak of loves played and grand illusions lost, 

fragmented now to letters from a name, 

scrabbled by giants or angry, spiteful youth, 

treefall, or lightning’s vengeful, jabbing pen, 

first from surname pulled like a broken tooth, 

birth date from death, the where of it, the when 

now jumbled like a madman’s ransom note. 

Words carved in stone as certain history 

confound the reader now in jumbled quote, 

turning church’d facts to puzzled mystery. 

Upon an obelisk of limestone, cold 

with the chill of glacial remembering, 

beneath the wizened shade of maples, old 

with a century’s Novembering, 

a host of Harvestmen ride skitter-skit, 

legs tracing Braille of infant’s monument. 

Daddy-Long-Legs! sly arachnids, unfit 

for sunlight, silent raptors, demon-sent — 

Why do you writhe and twine those wiry limbs 

(too many to count as they crouch and leap)? 

Why herd like worshipers entranced by hymns, 

then fly like clerks with appointments to keep? 

52

One moment you’re here in a skittering tide; 

then, as my shadow touches your eyes, 

you race to the obelisk’s other side, 

the way a tree’d squirrel is caught by surprise. 

We play out this Harvestman hide-and-seek, 

round and round the moss-fringed, ancient grave, 

‘til I can almost hear these monsters, meek 

and voiceless, moving in a song, a wave 

of primal hungering. Bad luck, cursed crops, 

they say, if you kill one. Better to dread 

their venomless fangs, their sinister drops 

from overhanging branch or dusty bed! 

What do they eat? What do those tiny eyes 

seek out and chase amid marble and slate? 

Leaf-litter bugs, dead things of any size, 

trapped beneath fangs and feeders (eight!) 

Are you the harvesters of suicides? 

Do the soul buds of babies appease you? 

Do you drink the tears of abandoned brides? 

Does the mist from rotting coffins please you? 

Your mouths are not for speaking, Harvestmen. 

Your secrets, like the truth behind the stones 

(how did they really die, and why, and when?) 

are told in your thousand-leg dance on bones. 

Night now. The knowing moon will rise and set, 

an umber globe behind the misty hill. 

Pregnant autumn is in the air, and yet 

the still-green grove is desolate and still. 

All night, ten thousand eyes are watching here, 

shepherds tending their ectoplasmic fold, 

forty thousand spider tendrils, fear 

incarnate, soul vampires, patient and old! 

Harvestman, Harvestman, whom do you seek? 

53

THE EAR MOUND SHRINE, KYOTO 

1 

Korea, 1597 

Too many heads, my lord! 

Too many heads! 

How to get home 

a hundred thousand 

of these Korean keepsakes? 

Our ships are laden with gold and silver, 

jade and ceramics, 

inlaid cabinets, 

silks and scrolls. 

If we leave them behind, my lord, 

the men will be furious. 

We have to prove the extent of our 

triumph. 

Our honor is at stake. 

We have burned their palaces, 

looted their pathetic little temples, 

turned all their mansions to ash, 

squeezed the last coins 

from the rural landlords, 

but we shall be seen 

as idle braggarts, 

robbers of tombs and empty houses, 

unless we pile the skulls 

at Toyotomi’s feet. 

What will the general say? 

The leader deliberates, 

talks with his captains 

of ballast and measures, 

the weight of captives, 

then calls his men 

to the hilltop tent. 

Cut off the ears, 

he tells them. 

We’ll give the general 

a mountain of ears. 

If ears are already missing, 

we’ll take the noses. 

As for the rotting heads — 

line them up 

along the sea-cliff. 

Let them face east, 

eyes wide, 

54 

mouths open 

in suitable terror, 

a warning to all 

of our superior power. 

Drink to the general — 

a thousand years 

to Toyotomi Hideyoshi! 

2 

Japan, 1598 

The ladies lounge 

in the treasure chamber. 

Look what Hideyoshi brought us! 

They test the furniture, 

line up the vases — 

these for spring, 

these for autumn — 

chitter with laughter 

at pornographic scrolls. 

Do Korean women really do that? 

Their fluttering robes 

and cherry-stained lips, 

their dancing fingers 

and playful eyes 

ignore the line of captives 

seated on wooden benches 

before the general’s chamber. 

More Koreans pass through daily — 

women for the taking 

for a life of kitchen labor, 

sad old scholars 

with mandarin whiskers 

destined to tutor 

the general’s nephews, 

rosy-cheeked boys 

for the monks 

and opera masters. 

There is another room 

that only Hideyoshi enters. 

What does he do 

in the “Chamber of Ears”? 

The servants say 

the smell is terrible, 

flies and rats everywhere. 

Not even burning camphor 

can mask its charnel aroma.

They know he requisitioned urns, 

boxes and baskets of all dimensions; 

they know that thousands of ears 

are piled in pyramids 

from which they tumble daily, 

each fleshy nautilus tilted 

a different way. 

The general arranges them for hours – 

something not right 

about an inverted ear, he says. 

He thinks of sorting lefts and rights — 

what odds against 

the reuniting of ear lobes 

of just one victim? 

This has been going on for months. 

Not one of the concubines 

has gotten pregnant 

since the ears were delivered, 

and the soldiers rewarded. 

If this goes on, what of the dynasty? 

A servant tells the oldest wife: 

It can’t go on. He’ll tire of it. 

The ears are black and shrunken now 

like poison mushrooms. 

The general stops speaking 

to his subordinates, calls in 

a scribe to issue written orders. 

I am spied upon, he tells his minister. 

Toyotomi’s nights 

are not given to slumber. 

He spends three days 

in the Chamber of Ears, 

comes out white-haired 

and foaming at the mouth. 

Fever’s bed claims him. 

The ears, it seems, 

have been listening. 

The general has good ears, too. 

He knows that something fleshy 

fumbles about in there — 

and not a rat — one living ear, 

or a pair of them, 

among two hundred thousand dead ones, 

spying his words, his plans, 

waiting to fly on ghost wings 

to the Korean fleet, 

to tell Admiral Yi, 

his nemesis, 

of every weakness. 

Before he dies 

in a black-face fever, 

with trembling hands, 

throat choking 

as though pressed down 

by invisible stones, 

Toyotomi utters his final order: 

Bury the ears! All of them! 

Put a stone shrine above them. 

Guard the place. Let nothing escape. 

3 

The Ear Mound Shrine, Kyoto, 1998 

Caretaker, gardener, 

shrine attendant, 

one old man of eighty, 

sweeps up the cigarette butts 

a careless wind deposits 

at the base of the Ear Mound. 

A plaque commemorates 

the ancient invasion 

four hundred years ago, 

the massacre, 

the burial of Korean ears 

in hopes of atoning 

the angry spirits. 

It is silent here in Kyoto, 

the odd stillness of tree and stone, 

of the looming, stark monument — 

more than silent, I think. 

This place takes in sound. 

It is listening. 

It would hear a whisper, 

a wish in the subconscious. 

There is an annual ceremony, I am told, 

a burning of incense, 

a proper prayer. 

But is it heard across the water? 

Tenfold ten thousand ghosts 

gasp on the Korean seashore, 

waiting for apologies they cannot hear, 

scanning the east 

with doleful demon eyes,

ghost hands on their 

ever-bleeding cheeks, 

mouths open still. 

The place asks: Have you learned? 

Does life still sever life? 

Is the thread from sire to son 

to be left unbroken now? 

At dawn, the raked earth 

stirs around the monument. 

The tiny pebbles levitate, 

grooves, channels, wormholes 

into the ancient mound 

push out like tiny volcanoes. 

Then hordes of pink antennae 

burst out at the trumpeting sun. 

One hundred thousand 

hatching butterflies! 

Clouds of pink and salmon, 

vermilion and cherry, 

spread their matched wings 

in endless mutation, 

whirlwind of cho-cho maidens, 

warrior moths, 

mandarin and concubine, 

scholar, musician – all butterflies, 

glyphs on their wings 

of all the ancient families, 

ascending on an updraft, 

cloud of every color 

heading westward, 

westward to sing 

to the ghosts who called them. 

ACELDEMA, THE FIELD OF BLOOD 

Why does the wind howl so? 

Why, in this holy land 

will neither Jew nor Christian 

bury their elders here? 

Why no flowers ever 

in this monochrome graveyard? 

This is cursed ground 

where nothing wholesome grows. 

Markers and monuments 

are toppled by earthquakes, 

56 

names weathered off by wind-sand, 

communal stones from plague times 

(mere icons of contagion) 

a potter’s field, rock sepulchres, 

dry hills honeycombed 

with doorless, nameless tombs. 

Here slaves and foreigners, 

assassinated strangers, whores 

and their discarded fetuses 

mingle their bones and dust. 

The twisted fig trees 

grew old and died 

a single olive tree 

leans on a wall, 

its black fruit withered, 

leaves yellow and black 

with leprous patches. 

Here a millennium of graves 

is untouched by robbers 

for even the lowest of thieves 

will not seek plunder here. 

Whatever is put here 

stays here, untouchable. 

The shadows at dusk 

skulk by like beggars, 

furtive penumbras 

fleeing to better darknesses. 

It is a ghostless place 

save for the owner’s spirit. 

If you would find a man 

and love him, 

as teacher, soul-mate, friend, 

and in one night, 

betray him, 

so, too, would your soul-poison 

envelop the land you bought — 

the place you gave away 

to everyone and no one, 

your charity to corpses, 

desolate Aceldema, 

deeded for thirty 

silver pieces, Judas!

MRS. WEEDEN, OF PAWTUCKET 

Someone exhumed 

in dead of night 

heart of Pawtucket, 

blank eyes of empty factories 

the only witnesses, 

exhumed Elizabeth Weeden 

dead eighty years now — 

ripped off the lid 

of her sarcophagus, 

lifted the coffin 

from a trough of water 

(What smells? 

what scraping beneath 

of clawed, albino rats?) 

came in a pickup, 

backed over tombstones, 

ripped up the shrubbery 

to get at her — 

but nothing went right 

for these amateur ghouls. 

The fine box shattered 

like so many matchsticks. 

The skull went one way — 

shroud tearing like spiderwebs 

as bones fell everywhere — 

not white in the starlight, 

not white in the beams 

of their furtive, 

terrified flashlights 

but black, 

digits and vertebrae, 

femur and rib-cage 

dark as the quill 

of a graveyard crow — 

They fled with nothing. 

Next day I stand 

with a Pawtucket detective 

who asks me what sense 

I can make of this. 

I’m not sure. 

But last night was Lovecraft’s birthday. 

In his “Reanimator” tale 

a man named Ezra Weeden 

is the first revived from the dead, 

from the “essential salts” in his grave. 

Even in sunlight this tomb is hard to 

read. 

It says “E....ZA... WEEDEN.” 

A shard or two of bone remains, 

black on the stubborn green of lawn, 

and everywhere, in tatters, 

fragments of shroud appall the sun: 

the color is rust, and brick, 

persistence of blood, unclean, 

outlasting worm and tree-root, 

a color which, once seen, 

can never be forgotten. 

I do not want to see its like again. 

57


THE EXHUMATION OF GOETHE 

Weimar, Germany, 1970 

By all means do this at night, 

while Weimar 

sleeps, while even those whose job 

it is to watch 

the watchers, sleep. In merciful dark, 

the third shift silence when 

the local electric plant 

shuts down for the Good of the State, 

take a cart — no, not a car, 

a hand-drawn cart — 

dampen its wheels so your journeys to, 

and from, and back 

to the foggy graveyard are soundless. 

Do not awaken the burghers! 

Here are the keys 

to the wrought-iron gates — 

mind you don’t rattle them. 

The crypt has been purposefully left unlocked. 

You need but draw the door. 

The cart will just squeeze through 

(Engineer Heinrich has measured everything!) 

Open the sarcophagus as quietly 

as possible. 

Watch the fingers! Don’t leave a mark 

on the hand-carved cover. 

Be sure it’s Goethe, the one with a “G.” 

We don’t want his crypt-mate Schiller 

(too many anti-People tendencies). 

Lift up the whole thing gently. 

The bones will want to fly apart. 

Only the shroud, and some mummified meat 

keep him in the semblance of skeleton. 

Just scoop the whole thing up, 

and into the cart like a pancake. 

Here’s a bag for the skull. Don’t muss 

those ash-gray laurel leaves. 

We plan to coat them in polyester 

after we study that Aryan skull 

58

whose brain conceived of Faust, 

Egmont and sorrowful Werther. 

We’re going to wire the bones together, 

strip off that nasty flesh, 

maybe bleach him a little, 

make a respectable ghost of Goethe. 

Who knows, if he looks good enough, 

in a relined sarcophagus, 

we could put him on display. 

Come to Kulturstadt! 

See Goethe’s body! 

Even better than Lenin! 

(Can we say that?) 

We’ll pipe in lieder and opera. 

Tour guides will be dressed as Gretchen. 

Maybe a fun house 

with Mephistopheles, 

and sausages at Brander’s Inn. 

Ah! the cart is here! The bones, 

yes, the bones. Unfortunate, the odor. 

We can work on that. 

The colors, mein Gott, 

(excuse the expression) 

they will not please — 

over there, Klaus, 

if you’re going to be sick — 

It’s such a little skeleton — 

was he really so short? 

The books said he towered 

over his contemporaries. 

So much for the books! 

And the shroud — that color — 

not at all what we imagined. 

Perhaps the opera house 

could make a new one. 

No, the project is canceled. 

Poets are just too — flimsy. 

Next time let’s exhume a general, 

Bismarck, the Kaiser, 

someone with a sword and epaulets. 

Armor would be even better. 

The People want giants! 

59

WINTER SOLSTICE 1989 

December skies are ominous: 

gray walls of cloud 

obscure the universe. 

Even the sun is secretive, 

a burnished coin 

in miser’s pocket, 

a hooded monk, 

a bashful Cyclops 

now in, now out of snowstorm, 

avoiding the north like a criminal. 

Whoever thought that such a sun, 

such arctic windblasts, 

could herald liberation? 

Who knew what anthem 

the wind blasts bellowed, 

what symphony the arctic snows 

had scored on skytop? 

Joy, thou source of light immortal... 

Beethoven’s hymn 

and Schiller’s Ode 

played by an East/West orchestra, 

sung by a chorus 

eager to substitute 

Freiheit for Freude, 

a burst of happiness 

sparkling from Bernstein’s eyes 

as he conducts them. 

“Freiheit indeed,” he says, 

“and not a single bullet was fired!” 

Crowds fill the public squares, 

shake fists at balconies. 

In Hungary the People’s Party 

abolishes itself; 

wire cutters make souvenirs 

of barbed wire barriers. 

In East Berlin they planned to shoot 

protesters, crush their placards 

beneath the wheels of tanks: 

the generals depose the leaders. 

Dumbfounded border guards 

read orders to let all citizens through, 

protest to newsmen: 

“This means no jobs for us!” 

60 

Hole after hole, gate after gate, 

the hundred mile barricade shatters. 

Guard towers fall like dominoes. 

Two Germanies embrace and weep. 

Daughter of Elysium... 

In Prague, the workmen knock down 

a neon hammer and sickle 

from the local power plant. 

In Poland the workers remove 

the frowning bronze Lenin 

no longer managing 

his bankrupt shipyard. 

The Russians who once 

gave tanks to crush rebellion 

now tell the Czechs 

they’d better reform — and fast! 

The aged leaders of Belgrade, 

encrusted lords of Sofia, 

tremble and surrender rule 

to the astonished populace. 

In Bucharest they spit 

on portraits of Ceaucescu— 

whom but a month before 

they eulogized 

The Danube of Thought, 

Genius of the Carpathians. 

Soldiers begged 

for a place in the firing squad, 

loaded and fired 

before the order was even uttered. 

It takes three days 

at the blowtorch 

until the frowning monolith of Lenin 

the king of workers 

in his suit and vest 

dainty fingers 

that had lifted no tool 

toppled to the jeers 

of the crowd. 

A flatbed removes 

the humbled colossus, 

cheek to the ground, 

his exhortative gesture 

meaningless.

The workers chant 

no Internationale. 

His bronze should crack 

to hear their anthem today: 

No more Communists! 

No more 

Communists 

ever! 

The boot has lifted 

from the face of Europe 

IN THE STREETS OF MOSCOW 

AND ST. PETERSBURG 

Idol-smashing multitudes, I salute you! 

Cut off Lenin at the kneecaps, 

then lift his noos’d neck 

at the end of a wrecking crane. 

Topple Dzerzhinsky from the KGB 

he built. 

How imperious he looked in his 

bronze overcoat, 

now nothing but a tumbled derelict! 

Marx’s face is daubed with splotches, 

red paint, white paint — 

his imperium now reads 

WORKERS OF THE WORLD 

FORGIVE ME 

Prostitye menya...prostitye menya... 

The dying words of Boris Godounov! 

Do not stop at these beginnings, 

O Russians long suffering! 

Rip that mummy from Lenin’s tomb! 

Scatter the bones of Stalin to the dogs! 

What to do with all 

the toppled monoliths? 

Melt them down for bells! 

I hear new bells in Moscow tolling, 

Low the notes, melancholy 

the harmonies. 

Bells of iron, bells of bronze 

Bells of the sorrow of a million kulaks. 

Bells to shatter the walls of Lubyanka, 

topple the last towers of bitter Gulag. 

Ring them all in one great 

universal chord! 

Let the largest orchestra ever assembled 

play the Overture of 1812! 

Cannons bursting! 

Fireworks over the onion domes! 

Swing the clabbers! 

Lenin’s head is a church bell! 

Stalin’s a row of jolly carillons! 

The brow and beard of Marx intoning 

Glory! Glory! Slava! Slava! 

61

STALIN AND SHOSTAKOVICH 

It’s three in the morning and snowing in Moscow. 

The streets are dark — but here and there a light — 

a solitary bulb throws out its beacon: 

a yellow beam from Stalin’s workroom, 

steady when the Great Helmsman has an idea, 

tilted downward as he studies his lists, 

casting a shadow of his giant hand 

as fountain pen 

makes check marks next to offending names. 

Tomorrow those names and their owners 

will separate forever as People’s Enemies 

become “Former People.” 

The offices of Ministries are well lit, too — 

memos to write, conspiracies to ferret out, 

coffee to drain by the cup, by the gallon. 

(If Comrade Stalin can work all night, 

who dares to leave his tasks unfinished?) 

At the Lubyanka Jail, one basement window 

emits its light in slitted segments. 

One could see — 

if anyone dared to press his face there — 

an arm with a truncheon — a mangled visage. 

Dim slots of light — a doorway — come on and off. 

Men in black coats are framed there. 

Then slashing beams and feral tail lights 

precede and follow the Black Marias. 

2 

The clock chimes four. 

Another lamp is burning, too — 

another hand makes nervous tick marks 

as Shostakovich blocks out chords and melodies. 

Even the vodka and cigarettes 

are quite forgotten as the climax approaches. 

Eyes blur with staves, 

sharps dance like angry snowflakes. 

He cannot concentrate. 

Half his brain is listening. 

Not to his inner Muses — 

not tonight, 

not any night this year — 

listening for the Black Marias. 

A car glides by — too slowly? 

Someone is running at the end of the block — 

why, at this hour? 

An interval of silence — too long, too quiet. 

A truck stops — how long 

until the doors swing wide 

and heavy-footed steps 

62

echo from the building fronts? 

A street lamp winks out; across 

the street a curtain parts, 

a candle moves once 

across a table — 

is it nothing— or a signal? 

He cannot go to the window and look. 

Watchers in raincoats 

dislike being spied upon. 

It’s never wise to stand in a window, anyway: 

rocks have been thrown 

by zealous members of the Communist Youth 

rocks with notes 

that read: SHOSTAKOVICH—PARASITE— 

FORMALIST!!! 

What if one of them took a gun to a nearby rooftop-? 

Open season on Formalist Anti-People Artists! 

His hands make notes in jagged gesture. 

Staccato—-staccato—-agitato— 

Attaca subito— 

Stalin condemned his last opera. 

What will he think of this symphony — 

its Mahleresque, giant orchestra, 

its jarring, piled-on harmonies, 

its bleak and withering quietudes? 

Will this, too, be a “muddle instead of music?” 

How can be help being himself? 

He writes not what he wants, 

but what he has to. 

He tries to be grand — it comes out bombast. 

Tries humor, only to ooze sarcasm. 

He has no smile that convinces — 

could a lobster smile 

while dangling over the cooking pot? 

He must put everything into this symphony. 

It may be his last, anyway. 

Ignoring the clock, he labors on. 

This page: the whimper of the beaten. 

There: the shriek of the victims’ widows. 

There: the whining voice of the apparatchik. 

This horn sounds a denunciation. 

This oboe betrays a friend for a dacha. 

This violin divorces its partner, 

disclosing her unacceptable class origins. 

A clarinet warns of rootless cosmopolitans. 

Let them guess what it’s all about! 

To hell with their need for uplift! 

Rub their faces in the ruin of Russia! 

Let them try their dialectic on this one! 

63

3 

Stalin works on. He sees the name 

of Shostakovich. A memo asks: 

Arrest and interrogate? 

“I like a tune,” he says to himself, 

“and now and then even a poem.” 

The chastised artists would come around. 

They’d write their odes and symphonies 

to Russia and Comrade Stalin. 

They’d do it willingly. 

They’d trample one another for the privilege. 

No action at present, the dictator writes. 

4 

Done for the night, the weary composer 

dons coat and shoes, tiptoes 

out door to the unheated hall. 

Suitcase beside him, he curls up there 

between the elevator and the apartment door. 

Tries to sleep, tries not to listen 

to the spiderweb sounds of the dying night. 

The suitcase is packed for a long journey — 

a cold one. 

Better to wait in the corridor, he thinks; 

better not to wake his sleeping wife and son 

if this is the night that makes his life 

another unfinished symphony. 

64

THE PIANO UPRISING 

A Dream, from the Dark Years of Poland 

1 

Troops at the border; all weapons are confiscated. 

Advisors in place, an abundance of secret 

police. The informers are always willing. 

The Church, pretending everything, doing nothing, 

locked in the stasis of state against god, 

the people’s servitude a foregone conclusion. 

The men are drafted into the army. 

The miners and workers uneasily obey 

the order to stay at their critical jobs. 

The women wait in endless queues, 

their shawls and kerchiefs aligned 

like segments of an endless tapeworm 

kept at the edge of hunger. 

The meager stores can barely feed them. 

The cattle and chickens and eggs go East, 

get eaten by the well-fed army, 

leaving a handful of dwarfish cabbages, 

the ubiquitous potato, the accusing spaces 

of emptiness on the collective’s shelves. 

Women work in the steaming kitchens, 

coaxing soup from skeletons, 

bread from rye, a bottomless pot 

of cabbage ends and sausages. Somehow, 

everyone eats. 

They put aside an extra helping 

for the buxom and blonde granddaughters. 

At night, or in slices of stolen afternoons, 

youthful and agile-fingered, 

girls master the dancing of eighty-eight steps, 

play on thousands of legal pianos — 

the old Mazurkas, the Waltzes, of Chopin. 

No one has thought to outlaw the instruments. 

As Nadia practices in Gdansk, 

Lidia plays grandmother’s spinet in Krakow. 

A school piano in Warsaw 

hums by itself in resonance. 

No one knows they play to one another, 

that the Polish girls have long ago ceased needing 

to guide imprinted keys in their etudes. 

No one suspects they are secret weapons, 

strings drawn taut, 

brass frames like crossbows. 

65

Determined and sinister, shining and black 

as coffins in a showroom, 

they bide their time rehearsing 

the Revolutionary Etude for the people, 

the Marche Funèbre for the martyrs, 

roulades of Paderewski held in reserve. 

The police think nothing of the white-haired tuner — 

he goes from home to home, adjusts, 

re-strings and tempers, 

adds unusual parts to the pedals. 

An abandoned piano factory springs to life, 

new models in crates on the loading docks, 

the shipping manifests immaculate. 

It seems that everyone is getting a piano. 

The Minister of Finance shrugs. The economy 

opens an eye and goes back to sleep. 

The Minister of Culture smiles: 

music without words is a harmless 

expression of the people’s art. 

2 

Nadia practices in Gdansk. 

In Krakow her grandmother’s 

piano is waiting. 

In Warsaw the instrument 

she studied on 

hides in a cellar 

(the piano underground). 

Then from a million radios 

a great C resounds, 

eight octaves thick, 

a Resurrexit of brass and wood, 

a rhapsody of unity, 

harmonics to the nth degree. 

Casters unlock, wheel guards 

are thrust aside. 

Grands roll through empty apartments, 

tiptoe impossibly 

down curving stairs. 

Spinets swerve out 

from alleyways. 

Baby grands dart 

from tree to tree, 

play cat and mouse 

with the traffic police. 

66

The sergeant leafs through 

reports of abandoned furniture, 

scratches his head in puzzlement. 

It is, of course, the piano rebellion. 

The pianos are coming: 

wheeled piano tanks 

death black, coffin-shaped, 

polished and retrofit 

with well-tuned armaments. 

They all play Chopin in unison — 

the Military Polonaise. 

Their lids drum open and shut like jaws, 

rolling on tractor tires, juggernauts 

rumbling bass notes, the r-r-r-rum-ta-tum 

of Polonaise audacity. 

The battle begins: 

Pianos crash from the rooftops. 

A phalanx of interlocked pianos 

take the field, sound boards locked 

in invincible wedges. 

Flying pianos buzz over the airport, 

their black and white teeth 

rat-tat-tat arpeggios, 

down with ease the clumsy MIG fighters. 

They drive the generals into the sea. 

The troops desert, 

lock arms and dance 

into the countryside. 

File clerks toss documents from windows, 

topple file cabinets, 

pour chicken soup on bureaucrats, 

sing r-r-r-rum-ta-tumin in the hallways. 

Cornered in public squares 

the secret police deny everything, 

their crimes, their ranks, their names. 

In Warsaw the sweating minister 

of secret police and internal security 

shouts on his hot wire to Moscow: 

“Not royalists, stupid, royali, pianos! 

it’s an uprising of legions of pianos. 

Tell them — tell them the pianos are coming!” 

The connection is broken by a piano wire. 

67

Instruments re-gather in the countryside. 

Flying Becksteins invade Soviet airspace, 

lead missiles cat-and-mouse 

back to the planes that launched them. 

(Whoever thought a Hammerklavier 

could turn right angles at Mach 2?) 

The Polonaise goes on. 

Others conduct guerrilla war 

to the shifting beat of Mazurkas. 

Lithe and supple assassins 

hunt down the Russian advisors 

(those white enamel spinets, 

fast on their wheels, 

eager to leap from a third floor window 

to squash a fleeing foreigner!) 

Steinways roll through Warsaw, 

Polish flag on their sides, 

Bösendorfers to the rescue at Lidice, 

Baldwins at the border to reinforce them, 

Becksteins fight shoulder-to-shoulder 

with lowly domestic models. 

Antique pianos in square cases 

come apart at the joints but fight; 

half dozen harpsichords at the windows, 

watch wistfully. 

Their quills fly out like arrows. 

A tiny virginal bursts its frame 

to whip a visiting professor of Marxism, 

draws blood with snapping steel wires. 

The highway is clogged with black Volgas. 

Battalions of Russians fall back in retreat. 

And this is but the start of it: 

As Anna practices in Leningrad, 

Irina plays grandmother’s spinet in Moscow. 

A school piano in Odessa 

hums by itself in resonance. 

68

THE ANACONDA POEMS 

1 

Some want to come back from death, 

reliving their human folly 

again and again, 

life after dreary life 

until they get it right, 

then slide down the chute 

to soulless oblivion. 

We who don’t care for perfection 

are doomed to come back as animals. 

Do we return 

according to our habits, 

the heaped accounts of karma, 

or can we choose? 

I choose, 

study the animal kingdom 

for the soul’s best condo, 

the leafiest turf, 

the longest return engagement. 

Choosing is hard for a hermit poet. 

No herd instinct for me, 

no hive or flock or pride 

if you please. 

Let me be something 

solitary yet strong, 

lordly and unapproachable. 

I search for incarnations 

on top of the food chain. 

I’ll eat 

but not be eaten 

hunt but elude the hunter. 

At last I find it — 

the giant anaconda. 

Female I’ll have to be — 

the males are nothing. 

Mother of all snakes, 

I’ll grow to thirty feet, 

spend all day lazing 

in the waters of the Amazon. 

Nights I’ll wait 

at the edge of the river, 

HORRORS! 

when deer and rabbit, 

panther and lemur 

come to drink. 

My fangs attach 

to whatever approaches; 

I throw throw my coils 

with amazing speed. 

The astonished prey 

immobile, breathless 

as I squeeze squeeze 

squeeze 

to heart-stop stillness. 

Compacted to sausage shape 

the still warm animals 

slide down my gullet, 

my inward turning teeth 

guiding them onwards. 

I have no enemies, 

swim unconcerned 

among piranha 

electric eels 

and crocodile caymans. 

Not even my prey 

seem to notice me 

as I mount skyward 

to the treetop banquet, 

my green and black camouflage 

matching the dappled forest. 

Parrots and toucans 

I eat like candy. 

Only the monkeys fear me 

somersault screaming 

at the sight of me — 

Oh, and the hairless apes 

in the jungle villages: 

I need but show my tongue, 

my unblinking eye, 

to make them run away. 

Taking the sun 

on a bank a-burst 

with yellow blossoms 

I am a jasmine empress 

irresistible 

to the males of my species. 

69

I sense them coming, 

feel the grass parting, 

a dozen today 

twining about me. 

I turn with them, 

move toward mud. 

Hours we coil together — 

puny as they are it 

feels good everywhere — 

one of them will find the spot. 

2 

I stow away 

on an airplane’s cargo hold, 

emerge at La Guardia, 

hitch ride on a luggage rack 

through tunnel to Manhattan. 

I mean to eat my way around — 

a big green worm 

in the big green Apple! 

City Hall park has plenty of trees, 

pigeons abounding. 

I study the populace, 

learn how to move among them 

with camouflage and mimicry. 

This is going to be easy. 

I will have my fill of man-food. 

Homeless Anaconda 

a garbage bag 

unraveled to wrap me 

gets me a night 

in the city shelter 

(lots to eat 

but it needed washing) 

Hip-Hop Anaconda, 

plenty of room for me 

in those baggy pants. 

Ate well on 125th Street 

but had to spit out 

gold chains and a boom box. 

Transvestite Anaconda 

prowling the piers 

in matching alligator 

accessories. Honey 

I could just eat you alive. 

70 

An Anaconda Dowager 

draped in furs 

indulging my sweet 

incisors 

with the ladies 

at Rumpelmeyers. 

Roller Blade Anaconda 

knocking down doormen 

on Central Park South, 

scarfing up poodles 

at the curbside. 

Painted purple, 

welcomed as Barney, 

I am Day Care Anaconda, 

turning a jungle gym 

into my cafeteria 

(I really must start 

counting calories!) 

I’m unadorned as 

Bowery Anaconda — 

an hallucination — 

acquiring a taste 

for marinated men 

left out for the taking 

in cardboard boxes! 

The Anaconda Nun 

in her floppy habit 

waylays worshipers 

in the nave of St. Patrick’s. 

Irish O’Connor 

wouldn’t know a snake 

if he saw one. 

Now I am 

Steam Tunnel Anaconda 

need time to digest 

all my victims 

time to prepare 

for the progeny 

already swelling in my belly. 

I’ll winter here in warmth, 

no rent no taxes, 

won’t need a green card 

welfare or Medicaid

They can’t zoo or jail me 

I have immunity 

endangered species status. 

When my seventy-five babies 

emerge from manhole covers 

on Easter morning 

on lower Fifth Avenue 

they’ll already be citizens — 

American Anacondas! 

THE SPIDERS 

Nature is not all birds and squirrels. 

Under your feet cruel orders thrive. 

Things you cannot dream of 

or should not dream of 

feed upon one another; 

things feed upon them, 

every predator a prey, 

every parasite sucked dry 

by some relentless nemesis. 

Look on your lawn — 

eight-legged priests in bloated ease 

tending their silken tapestries, 

a dark cathedral for arachnid gods. 

Watch how the chosen victims struggle, 

captured in weed-strung ziggurats, 

flyers downed, pedestrians waylaid, 

sailors shanghaied and paralyzed. 

This silken Karnak laced in dew 

that only glimmers in early morn 

before the sun erases it, 

what do these gleamings signify? 

Necropolis of wolf and garden spider, 

eating a billion souls and wanting more; 

male spiders blind in a frenzy of sex; 

black widow brides 

with hour glass bellies; 

egg sacs swelling with the death 

of the universe. 

Barn spider giants on sunlit stones. 

The skitter-skit of daddy long legs, 

insane horsemen of hunger’s apocalypse. 

A million spiders in your uncut lawn! 

Eight million legs, two million 

venom fangs! 

How many eyes? Some of them have 

more than two! 

They never sleep! They can live forever! 

Their stomachs expand to any size! 

They have been at it 

for a hundred million years! 

It is better not to think of them. 

They do not want you to be 

aware of them. 

Their webs are meant to be invisible. 

They kill and eat and train 

their offspring silently. 

There are more of them every year. 

Tear up this poem 

and do not think of them! 

KNECHT RUPRECHT, OR, 

THE BAD BOY’S CHRISTMAS 

Don’t even think of calling your 

mother or father. 

They can’t hear you. 

No one can help you now. 

I came through the chimney 

in the form of a crow. 

You’re my first this Christmas. 

You’re a very special boy, you know. 

You’ve been bad, 

bad every day, 

dreamt every night 

of the next day’s evil. 

It takes a lot of knack 

to give others misery 

for three hundred and sixty 

consecutive days! 

How many boys have you beaten? 

How many small animals killed? 

Half the pets in this town 

have scars from meeting you. 

Am I Santa Claus? Cack, ack, ack! 

Do I look like Santa, you little shit? 

Look at my bare-bone skull, 

my eyes like black jelly, 

my tattered shroud. 

My name is Ruprecht, 

Knecht Ruprecht. 

I’m Santa’s cousin! Cack, ack, ack! 

Stop squirming and listen — 

(of course I’m hurting you!) 

I have a lot of visits to make. 

71

My coffin is moored to your chimney. 

My vultures are freezing their beaks off. 

But as I said, you’re special 

You’re my number one boy. 

When you grow up, 

you’re going to be a noxious skinhead, 

maybe a famous assassin. 

Your teachers are already afraid of you. 

In a year or two you’ll discover girls, 

a whole new dimension 

of cruelty and pleasure. 

s 

Now let’s get down to business. 

Let me get my bag here. 

Presents? Presents! Cack, ack, ack! 

See these things? They’re old, 

old as the Inquisition, 

make dental instruments look like toys. 

No, nothing much, no permanent harm. 

I’ll take a few of your teeth, 

then I’ll put them back. 

This is going to hurt. There — 

the clamp is in place. 

Let’s see — where to plug in 

those electrodes? 

Oh, now, don’t whimper and 

pray to God! 

As if you ever believed in God! 

Cack, ack, ack! 

I know every tender place 

in a boy’s body. 

There, that’s fine! My, look at the blood! 

Look at the blood! Look at the blood! 

You’ll be good from now on? 

That’s a laugh. 

Am I doing this to teach you a lesson? 

I am the Punisher. I do this 

because I enjoy it! I am just like you! 

There is nothing you can do! 

I can make a minute of pain 

seem like a year! 

No one will ever believe you! 

Worse yet, you cannot change. 

Tomorrow you will be more hateful 

than ever. 

72 

The world will wish you had 

never been born. 

Well now, our time is up. 

Sorry for the mess. 

Tell your mother you had a nosebleed. 

Your father is giving you 

a hunting knife 

for which I’m sure you’ll have a 

thousand uses. 

Just let me lick those tears 

from your cheeks. 

I love the taste of children’s tears. 

My, it’s late! Time to fly! 

Cack, ack, ack! 

I’ll be back next Christmas Eve! 

_______ 

Knecht Ruprecht, from German folklore, 

is St. Nicholas’ evil twin, who punishes bad children. 

MY LIFE AS AN INCUBUS 

1 

One iron-black night of summoning 

I found and tried a book of spells 

(low Dutch and loathsome Latin 

ciphering, peppered with Hebrew, 

dotted with phrases in Coptic Greek). 

It was rubbish, I muttered — 

an alchemist’s meatloaf — 

the stupefying nonsense of Kabbala — 

Yet there he stood — a hoary demon, 

now in, now out of surrounding mist. 

He wavered, he groaned, his 

half-blind eyes avoiding me — 

he would not stay unless I spoke, 

would not obey 

till seal and sigil bound him. 

I read the name 

that charms the Furies, 

invoked the tone, 

wordless, that gods incarnate

must heed, the chord 

that binds eidolons to the chains 

of matter. 

The demon smiled, then. 

What would you have, or be? he asked. 

I am a thing of books and fancies, 

ill-versed in animal passions. 

The world of joy has passed me by. 

I want— 

Your youth returned? he shrugged. 

A simple thing! A lover or two— 

A legion of girls or boys 

Enslaved to your newfound beauty? 

I am no Faust! I answered. 

My soul’s no petty thing 

to trade for a common morsel, 

a Gretchen, a bone-dry Helen, no! 

I want to be that which 

no one refuses — 

a being of night whom none can resist — 

unsought yet irresistible — 

then tender lover when love is needed, 

the forceful one when force 

is secretly desired. 

An incubus! he marveled. 

Incubus/ succubus! I would be both. 

Make me the world’s nocturnal visitor, 

winged, strong and passionate, 

invisible and cruel. 

Men have sought such companions, 

the devil extemporized, 

yet none have sought to be 

the thing that pleasured them. 

I’ll give you two to own, 

a good diversion 

from your moldy books. 

Enough of books! 

They brought me thee, 

shape-shifting broker of souls, 

gave me the power to ask no end 

of favor from the Stygian realm. 

Make me a prodigy of wantonness! 

Both incubus and succubus? 

Either at will. I want to play 

these mammal passions to the hilt. 

There lay the coins you must accept 

(The devil scowled at the false tokens), 

There are the bounds of Pentagram 

I can erase and set you free... 

He raised his hand to stop my words. 

Enough, enough, my sorcerer: 

I see I must serve, and well, 

or you will summon me for worse. 

Be then, what you will. 

I render you unseen, unseeable, 

unloved yet irresistible— 

He muttered here Plutonian spells 

that I half-heard, half-felt 

as my prolonging limbs caught fire 

and wings splayed out my spine. 

Oh, I am beautiful, 

enormous, strong! 

Now up and out — the night is mine! 

So many calls to make: 

the list is long! 

2 

Incubus, male god 

with overarching lust — 

Succubus, a female hunger 

as big as the moon, 

I rise yin-yang, contrary mist, 

across the silty river, trail steeple tops. 

I wing above a Midnight Mass, 

mock hushed and kneeling choristers 

with Orphic songs 

of unappeasable desire. 

The buzzing litanies pass me by, 

scatter like gnats beneath my pinions. 

Through walls and windows 

I hear too well 

the human longing held in reserve, 

trapped in music and television 

monotone. 

This psychic babble does not 

distract me. 

73

I spot the easy prey, hear sighs 

from open windows, youths 

self-pleasuring, dreams arcing 

to climax. 

I squeeze into a shuttered room. 

Your room — 

you of all on earth I have chosen. 

You’re reading poetry, your dream 

an abstract reverie. The way I want it: 

passion where passion is most denied. 

I am there; the corner unreached 

by lamplight 

can barely conceal my massive outline, 

the silhouette that ought 

to make you scream. 

You drop the book. You nod 

into slumber. 

My talon-fingered shadow extends 

to you, 

until my darkness covers you, 

breath matching your breath, 

heartbeat in unison, 

hands cupped in hands. 

Amazing! I can undress you 

with wish forms! 

Cloth parts, the buttons explode — 

you are naked. 

My subtle tongue explores you, 

tastes salt 

from the cup of your palm. 

I follow the pulse 

from wrist into brain and I am there 

with purple flowers 

mechanical bees, 

a magellanic cloud 

of jasmine and light/ 

you turn in your sleep, we tumble, 

my imperceptible hands guide hips 

and legs to a full-length embrace 

where/ 

festive domes coalesce 

from amethyst, 

the sound of horns 

cracks frozen air, 

a field of quartz 

gleams gold in sun/ 

74 

encircling me with arms 

you gasp; the tremors that drain 

your flesh and your sunburst skull 

into me, conclude and quell 

into heavy sleep/ 

I drift off languidly, 

gorged with the seed of a race 

of dreams. 

SNOFRU THE MAD 

With a name like Snofru 1 

you’d better be good 

as a Pharaoh, 

as a survivor. 

Would the gods laugh, he wondered, 

when his weighing time came up — 

his heart against a feather 

on the fatal balance — 

would tittering among them 

make his recitation falter? 

A careful planner, 

he lays four boats in his pyramid, 

one pointed in each direction — 

he’d launch all four 

so his soul could elude 

the Eater of the Dead. 

Grave robbers? He’d baffle them, 

build three great pyramids 

for Snofru the Pharaoh — 

hang the cost! 

He’d bury an imposter 

in each sarcophagus. 

The gods alone would know 

his final resting place, 

a well-appointed tomb 

whose architect he’d strangled. 

As for his Queen Hetephras, 

dead these three years now, 

he left her innards 

in an alabaster jar, 

yet carried her mummy away. 

Nights, he unwound her wrappings, 

kissed her natron-scented lips, 

caressed her sewn-up belly,

then carefully restored 

her royal bandages, 

her mask and jewels. 

His courtiers avoid him, 

smell death despite 

the unguents and incense. 

An impudent general 

eyes his daughter. 

There is talk, there is talk. 

He will neither make war, or peace, 

turns back ambassadors 

as he spends his days divining 

how to turn his eye-blink life 

into the gods’ eternity. 

One night he slips away. 

The upstart will assume his name, 

bed his black-eyed daughter, 

inherit his unused pyramid — 

the better to advance his stratagem. 

With pride and pomp 

he circled his name 2 

on a hundred monuments, 

but he is far from Memphis now, 

speaks to his servants 

in but a whisper. 

Soon he will join Hetephras. 

His journey ended at the judging hall 

he’d watch as the proud 

were judged and eaten, 

then take his place, unsandaled, 

plain as the commonest slave, 

at the table of the gods. 

_________ 

1. Snofru or Snefru was Pharaoh in the Fourth 

Dynasty and the immediate predecessor of Khufu 

(Cheops), builder of the Great Pyramid. 

Historians are baffled as to why Snofru built 

himself three separate pyramids. 

2. Snofru was the first Pharaoh to enclose his 

name in a cartouche. 

THE WAKING DREAM 

Tonight it comes to me, rolls off 

the rounded moon that fatted 

all week with premonition, 

drops in a brownish haze 

a frozen thunderclap of thought, 

a distillation of drums, a bell 

anticipating alarm. It comes! 

Telegraphy on bristling hairs— 

no need to send a thunderstorm 

to tap it out on hills or burn 

the message on the trunks of trees — 

I hear it! I taste 

the spice of ashes on my tongue 

before my mouth can say it, 

a thought as bitter as cyanide. 

Ripe with your fate the earth 

bears it like fruit: the rain 

that hangs its hair on clouds 

withholds the whispered secret — 

You woke me from dreaming 

into a deeper dream. 

Your face appeared 

inside my skull 

pleading for a neck to fasten to, 

your beauty reduced 

to fingertips of wind on spine, 

dressing itself in rags 

of others’ memories. 

Long I remembered you, 

then fought to forget you. 

I walled you away; brick 

by brick I lost you, 

stopped seeing you 

mortared in other faces. 

Now how little I know! 

How tall were you, anyway? 

How old? What shade was that 

within your irises? 

What really pleased you? 

Your profile is pressed 

into my seabed, 

yet it is one pale fish 

you search me for, 

crying out telepathically, 

75

preceding thunderstorm 

in rasp of air, 

dropping a thread 

to anchor us 

against awakening — 

I open my eyes. 

I almost see you. 

Yet which is real? You, 

semitransparent above me — 

or the doused lamp 

beyond the bowl of wings? 

You, almost perceptible again, 

or the hole inside the sun 

to which my outer dream 

still plummets? 

There is perception 

unbearable to know or name — 

foreknowledge that fills 

the sky with its 

concavity, takes root 

between my waking 

and your invasion. 

Have you called to me 

because our past 

still joins us? 

Or is your spirit 

vagrant now, 

drifting from bed to bed, 

seeking a shelter? 

while on your own cold sheets 

who broadcasts dreams — 

you, 

or the mouthless, earless 

socketless Lover 

who seizes your breathing — 

Death? 

76 

POEM FOUND ON THE NECK 

OF A DEER KILLED 

IN THE BLACK FOREST, GERMANY 

1 

“We’ve met before,” 

he smiled, all teeth 

and grin, dark hair 

upon the back of his hand, 

eyebrows 

that nearly joined, 

a sense of tension 

in every muscle 

poised. We leaned 

into the sun on his balcony. 

“I don’t think so,” 

I started to say, 

but his assuredness 

unnerved me. 

“Down there,” 

he pointed to the forest, 

wave on wave of fir and ash 

surrounding his castle. 

“When you were something else, 

we met, I’m confident.” 

A serving tray was proffered. 

He took a skewered tidbit, 

inhaled the scent of broiled lamb. 

I chose a celery stick. 

“Herr Baron,” I told him, 

“I’m quite a stranger here.” 

“And yet I’m sure of it.” 

The bitten lamb bled 

upon his lower lip. 

“A prior life?” I jested. 

“You don’t look the type 

to fall for reincarnation.” 

He didn’t blink. 

“There’s only one life, I grant, 

but one can go on 

for many years.” 

“You can’t be over thirty.”

“I watched the army of Bonaparte 

from this very balcony.” 

I thought: madman. 

He caught it, hurled 

it back with a laugh. 

He touched the scarred place 

on my shoulder, 

that tender, five-lobed 

birthmark I hate, 

as if he saw it 

through my jacket. 

“You came for your poetry, 

so I feed you a little madness. 

You’ll indulge me, I hope, 

by staying a week 

to browse our books. 

My wife is a fine cellist—” 

He pointed within, 

where the quartet assembled 

for the afternoon’s concert. 

“I’ll warrant the Grosse Fugue 

is an ugly thing.” 

“Beethoven’s worst mood, 

I agreed. “He dares you to listen.” 

“Wait till you hear what she makes of it. 

And you must stay till Sunday next. 

We’ll play Mozart, 

and the moon will be full.” 

I froze. “The moon?” 

“That’s what connects us, 

isn’t it?” 

I sat in silence 

as the quartet struggled 

with Ludwig’s mad fugue. 

The Baroness was fierce, 

struck sparks with her bow, 

leaned back 

as though giving birth 

to her cello. 

Her yellow-green eyes 

looked past the music, 

beamed at the Baron 

and, at moments, 

locked on mine. 

She looked pleased 

at my astonishment. 

2 

When all the guests departed, 

I stayed. The books, 

occult and classic, 

consumed me. They kindly sent 

my meals into the library. 

The Baron came and went, 

the Baroness and I 

talked Mozart, Bach and Handel. 

Days passed. 

The quartet’s Mozart 

was fine Vienna pastry, 

mannered and elegant 

where the deaf Titan 

had thundered his counterpoint. 

At last the moon came up. 

My turret room, 

at the top of a winding stair 

was solitude itself, 

still as a monk’s cell. 

I walked to the courtyard, 

paused at the gateway, 

a winding path on the side 

that led to the forest below. 

I heard a distant waterfall. 

All were asleep. They would not know 

if tonight — this night when sleep 

was unthinkable — I tramped 

till dawn in the out-of-doors. 

3 

The deer that a full moon lures 

to leaves and spangled fruit 

awakes in me 

this summer night. 

In innocence of fawn 

I want to taste moss, 

the bite of berries tinged 

with green; exult in wind 

that bears the scent 

77

of pine and hemlock boughs, 

an elder wind I must have known 

before I woke as a man. 

My clothes come off. 

I roll them up, tuck them 

in a crevice between two rocks, 

crouch naked 

as startled flesh adapts to air, 

then rise. I am one with night. 

Moon’s eye does not accuse me. 

It rolls in a cloud 

that lids it black, to haze, 

and then to amber again. 

Blood flows to neck, to knob 

of undeveloped antlery. 

This moment I know my destiny. 

I writhe in suppleness of fur, 

clack hoof on stone, 

hands gone, 

two legs now four, 

strength and speed 

if I but learn 

to use them. 

4 

The memory is fresh. 

I never rejoined the herd 

that wintered south 

with the slanting sun. 

I waited here, 

oblivious to shapes 

that stalked me, 

lulled by the moon, 

oblivious to tread 

of the padded feet 

concealed in the roar 

of the cataract. 

They were upon me, 

rending and tearing. 

I toppled in terror, 

felt fang at my throat, 

my entrails ripped 

as claw and snout— 

triumphant wolf-howl 

as the moon ran red. 

78 

I opened my eyes. 

as the vision ended. 

I was man again, 

I was at the place 

below the falls 

where waters calmed. 

The Baron’s castle 

loomed high above me, 

a crenellated silhouette 

the moon was grazing now— 

how had I come so far? 

Had I run in my dream, 

run as a deer can run, 

bounding through trees 

and over boulders? 

My shoes were gone! 

I had come all this way 

without a bruise or pain. 

5 

What am I now? 

Can I wish-form 

myself into an animal, 

climb back to the castle, 

resume my rational, 

unmagical self 

before the moon has set? 

Or will I run, 

a naked, bleeding fool 

across the courtyard 

in full view of the servants 

as the sun rises? 

I close my eyes, 

beg the moon’s mercy: 

return me to my starting place. 

I feel it happening again, 

that strange pulsation 

of skin to fur— 

and stop myself 

in tingling terror 

as padding feet 

draw near— 

two pair of eyes 

regard me, 

great dog-like things 

with lowered heads,

jaws open 

and slavering— 

one leaps 

and has me by the shoulder, 

claws raking flesh away. 

He rolls me over. 

The she-wolf on my belly 

tears at me, 

her muzzle inside me, 

gorging on my venison. 

Our destiny complete, 

we merge. She-wolf 

becomes the Baroness, 

he-wolf the Baron. 

We all resume two-leggedness 

in wane of moon. 

6 

As my host had said, 

Were-things never die. 

We just go on. 

I limp to a cave, 

where I fold in 

my coiled intestines, 

lick the ripped tendons, 

stuff clay into my ruined throat. 

I will spend the winter healing, 

flee Germany, start over. 

Or is it my destiny 

to be caught and eaten, 

caught and eaten, 

an eternity of prey 

for these eternal hunters? 

This time I will not forget. 

I write this poem on tree bark, 

carry it always with me 

in a leather pouch, 

burn it in my memory. 

I am not the moon’s prisoner. 

NO MAUSOLEUM, PLEASE! 

It’s addressed to “Occupant,” 

this personal letter 

that opens with 

Does the thought 

of underground burial 

disturb you? 

Should it? 

Your mausoleum, 

clean as a shopping mall, 

dulled to white glove 

cleanliness, 

Lysol and lilac scent, 

invites me to sterile 

decomposition, 

a place where my rot 

will offend no one 

a place where the 

—ahem!— 

elements 

will never intrude. 

My friends will be grateful 

for multiplex viewing rooms 

the day of my interment: 

Now Showing: Rutherford, 

Matinee 2, Features at 8 and 10. 

Thanks to the strains of Mantovani, 

their ears will not be hurt 

by coffin lid hammering, 

clod fall 

of filthy soil. 

No one gets wet or muddy. 

Who needs a box 

secured against the elements? 

Indoors, an urn will do. 

No one can see 

behind the marble slab 

if I’m encased in Plexiglas, 

stuffed into Tupperware, 

or neatly cataloged 

in office jiffy bags. 

Who needs a stone, 

a monument, 

statue or obelisk, 

subject to weathering 

79

and lewd graffiti, 

risking neglect in weed field, 

when they can etch my name, 

my tombward tangent of years 

in crisp Helvetica, 

when I can have my numbered niche 

where visitors can sit 

(yes, sit!) 

upon a cushioned stool. 

The sound track pipes in 

Autumn Leaves 

while they remember me, 

swap recipes, 

brag about their computers. 

No flowers to buy! No weeds to tend! 

See you again next year! 

Here is my will and testament: 

I want to lie in the cold, cold ground. 

Embalm me if you must, but leave 

the rest of me intact. 

A plain pine box will do. 

Then come and read me your poetry. 

Read one of mine 

if it pleases you. 

Leave trinkets and flowers, 

plant shrubs and vines, 

send riot root down 

to sweeten me. 

Let fall an ice cream cone, 

strawberry melting, 

vanilla veining down. 

Return at night for solitude. 

Make love across my coffin bed. 

Even if no one comes 

I’ll have the rainfall, 

the cooling frost, 

the pulse of never-tiring worms, 

influx of iron and silica, 

outpour of carbon and calcium 

until I am the elements, 

until the weed you crush, 

the soil you tread, 

the air you breathe, 

the stone you cup 

in palm of hand 

are all from me, 

the poet in the cold, cold ground. 

80 

ONE DAY’S NEWS 

from The Jersey Journal, 

Nov. 21, 1995 

Five years before millennium 

and here is one day’s news: 

An Oklahoma teen 

is chained in a well house, 

burned with an iron, 

scalded with bleach, 

shocked with high voltage. 

Give back the money! 

his tormenters scream. 

He didn’t take 

his mother’s 

drug dealing treasury, 

but she won’t hear it. 

Beat him! she tells her husband. 

Well-oiled gears 

crave Aztec offerings. 

An escalator rips off 

three tiny toes 

from the three-year-old girl 

on the New York subway. 

A leaf shredder sucks 

park worker’s hand 

into the chopping blades 

in maple-red Hoboken. 

A head and a leg 

wash up in Newark. 

Cops say they match 

a torso found 

in an unmarked suitcase. 

Thieves shoot cabbies 

in back of the head, 

then strip off their socks 

to get their money. 

Wanting a baby, 

an Illinois woman 

kills her pregnant rival, 

cuts open her abdomen 

with a pair of scissors 

to deliver a boy. 

She flees the scene, 

but not before 

she slashes the throats 

of the woman’s other children.

At jail, she says 

“So what’s the problem? 

Just why am I being charged?” 

Down in San Juan 

the livestock are killed 

by chupacabras, 

goatsucker vampire 

that drinks the blood 

and eats the innards. 

Two cats, five goats 

and twenty parakeets 

already murdered, 

the baffled police admit. 

Sufficient to one day 

is the evil thereof. 

THE DEAD END 

Far west, beyond the numbered avenues, 

there is a street, 

accessed by a curious courtyard, 

a peopled lane 

where lost on a moonlit but foggy night 

you seem to know the passers-by. 

House numbers seem too high, 

the street signs are illegible 

but you feel recognized, and safe. 

Each casual stroller, 

each idling window shopper 

seems known to you. 

They, for their part, impart a smile, 

an instant’s head-nod, 

yet still pretend they do not know you. 

And then it comes to you— 

the vague acquaintances, 

childhood friends you moved away from, 

once met and nearly forgotten lovers, 

all of whom suddenly—or so they said— 

just up and died. 

You never saw a body. 

The service was over before you heard. 

The players reshuffled and life went on. 

You never quite believed it, of course, 

and now you have the proof: 

they all just moved 

to this brick-lined street, 

took up new names and furtive jobs 

caretaker, night watchman 

lobster shift foremen 

invisible cook in the diner kitchen 

night workers in office towers 

unlisted phone, anonymous 

in nameless lodgings. 

I found the street once, then lost it. 

I’ve never managed to find it again, 

can’t help but wonder 

about those houses — 

brownstones and bricks 

and a high-rise tower — 

whose windows were those 

whose curtains parted, 

whose astonished eyes saw me 

and pulled away? 

Wish I could go up and read 

the nameplates, 

knock on a certain door or two, 

resume an interrupted dialogue, 

give or receive an embrace 

I’m sorry I never shared. 

But all too soon 

I’ll be there anyway, 

an anagram, a pseudonym, 

a permanent resident 

of Incognito Village 

SON OF DRACULA 

I was the pale boy with spindly arms 

the undernourished bookworm 

dressed in baggy hand-me-downs 

(plaid shirts my father 

wouldn’t wear, 

cut down and sewn by my mother), 

old shoes in tatters, squinting all day 

for need of glasses that 

no one would buy. 

I was eight, at last, when they said 

I could cross the line 

to the adult part of the library 

those dusty classic shelves 

which no one ever seemed to touch. 

I raced down the aisles, 

to G for Goethe and Faust 

reached up for Frankenstein 

at Shelley, Mary 

81

(not pausing at Percy Bysshe!) 

then trembled at lower S 

to find my most desired, 

most dreamt-of — 

Bram Stoker’s Dracula. 

This was the door to years of dreams, 

and waking dreams of dreams. 

I lay there nights, 

the air from an open window chilling me, 

waiting for the bat, 

the creeping mist, 

the leaping wolf 

the caped, lean stranger. 

Lulled by the lap of curtains, the false 

sharp scuttle of scraping leaves, 

I knew the night as the dead 

must know it, 

waiting in caskets, dressed 

in clothes that no one living 

could afford to wear. 

The river town of blackened steeples, 

vile taverns and shingled miseries 

had no appeal to Dracula. 

Why would he come 

when we could offer no castle, 

no Carfax Abbey, no teeming streets 

from which to pluck a victim? 

My life — it seemed so 

unimportant then — 

lay waiting for its sudden terminus, 

its sleep and summoning to an Undead 

sundown. How grand it would have been 

to rise as the adopted son of Dracula! 

I saw it all: 

how no one would come to my grave 

to see my casket covered with loam. 

My mother and her loutish husband 

would drink the day away 

at the Moose Club; 

my brother would sell my books 

to buy new baseball cards; 

my teachers’ minds slate clean 

forgetting me as they forgot all 

who passed beneath 

and out their teaching. 

82 

No one would hear the summoning 

as my new father called me: 

Nosferatu! Arise! Arise! Nosferatu! 

And I would rise, 

slide out of soil 

like a snake from its hollow. 

He would touch my torn throat. 

The wound would vanish. 

He would teach me the art of flight, 

the rules of the hunt 

the secret of survival. 

I would not linger 

in this town for long. 

One friend, perhaps, 

I’d make into a pale companion, 

another my slave, to serve 

my daytime needs 

(guarding my coffin, 

disposing of blood-drained 

bodies) — 

as for the rest 

of this forsaken hive of humankind, 

I wouldn’t deign to drink its blood, 

the dregs of Europe 

We would move on 

to the cities. 

The pale aristocrat and his thin son 

attending the Opera, the Symphony, 

mingling at Charity Balls, 

Robin to his Batman, 

cape shadowing cape, 

fang for fang his equal soon 

at choosing whose life 

deserved abbreviation. 

A fine house we’d have 

a private crypt below 

the best marbles 

the finest silk, mahogany, brass 

for the coffin fittings 

Our Undead mansion above 

filled to the brim with books 

and music... 

I waited, I waited — 

He never arrived.

That year I had a night-long nosebleed, 

as though my Undead half 

had bitten me, 

drinking from within. I woke in white 

of hospital bed, my veins refreshed 

with the hot blood of strangers. 

Tombstones gleamed across the hill, 

lit up all night in hellish red 

from the never-sleeping iron furnaces. 

Leaves danced 

before the wardroom windows, 

blew out and up to a vampire moon. 

I watched it turn from copper 

to crimson, 

its bloating fall to treeline, 

its deliberate feeding 

on corpuscles of oak and maple, 

one baleful eye unblinking. 

A nurse brought in a tiny radio 

One hour a night of symphony 

was all the beauty this city 

could endure— 

I held it close to my ear, heard Berlioz’ 

Fantastic Symphony: the gallows march, 

the artist’s Undead resurrection 

amid the Witches’ Sabbath — 

my resurrection. I asked for paper. 

The pen leaped forth 

and suddenly I knew 

that I had been transformed. 

I was a being of Night, I was Undead 

since all around me were Unalive. 

I saw what they could not see, 

walked realms of night and solitude 

where law and rule 

and custom crumbled. 

I was a poet. 

I would feed on Beauty for blood, 

I would make wings of words, 

I would shun the Cross 

of complacency. 

A cape would trail behind me always. 

83

HUNCHBACK ASSISTANT TELLS ALL 

1 

My dear Mrs. Shelley — 

won’t do — she’s neither ‘mine’ nor dear 

To Mary — 

sounds like a dedication 

when nothing of that sort’s intended 

Madame 

so cool, polite and very French, 

that will do. 

Madame — 

No doubt you suspect, if you have not heard 

of the sensation caused by your romance, 

newly translated to our Alpine tongues. 

Neither the French nor the German booksellers 

can keep enough of Frankenstein, 

or The Modern Prometheus. 

The bookbinders are up all night 

preparing the slender volumes 

for the fainting sight of the ladies. 

Nothing else is spoken of, and little else read 

at our little University. 

I have studied your book, Madame Shelley, 

and being more intimate than you 

— or anyone else yet living — 

with the facts in the case of Frankenstein, 

I must hasten to write you, 

that you might correct the grievous oversight 

of omitting my role—my pivotal role 

in the great endeavors, 

the tragic conflagration. 

I am Fritz, 

poor old one-eyed, limping Fritz 

the hump-backed, 

unbaptised son of a priest and a nun, 

a throwaway 

raised by gypsies. 

I will spare you nothing, 

for only the sum of what I am 

can justify what I was 

to Victor, his bride and his monster. 

2 

You never mention me, Mrs. Shelley, 

but I was there from the start. 

I saw him at the medical school. 

I always went to the dissections 

(I have, you see, insatiable interest 

in human anatomy.) 

84

I loved to watch those perfect bodies, 

naked and cold, 

white as marble statues, 

opened and disassembled 

by the knowing hands of the surgeons. 

I took my pad and crayon with me, 

drew every line and contour— 

the man’s bold lines, 

the woman’s curved exterior— 

the coiled horrors within, 

the entrails unraveling, 

the mysteries of the ensorcelled brain! 

Then suddenly I noticed him. 

His jet-black hair, eyebrows of Jove, 

his burning eyes intent upon the scalpel and saw, 

absorbing each surgical thrust. 

I saw him and knew, 

knew from the start as one soul knows another, 

that he perceived beyond life and death. 

He saw me drawing, and nodded, and smiled. 

From that day forward I drew only him, 

intent no more upon the surgery, 

I sought to capture the fire of his pupils, 

the furrow on his brow 

as some doubt troubled him, 

the gesture his hand made 

when his mind made one 

great thought from two 

of a professor’s ideas. 

Cupping a handful of gelatin, 

gray and convoluted, 

the lecturer shrugged and dropped it, 

“Is this the seat of knowledge?—this organ?— 

Is this the soul writ here in nerves and ganglia? 

No one knows.” 

The orbs of Frankenstein replied 

“I am the one who will know.” 

Hunched in the darkest nook 

of the students’ wine cellars 

I heard him complain, 

“It’s not enough to watch 

those well-rehearsed dissections. 

If only I had a cadaver — 

one of my own — 

I must know the inner workings of life!” 

85

How could I bear to hear him suffer, 

he who should want nothing? 

That night I robbed a mausoleum— 

a rich man’s grave easy to plunder, 

a simple job of claw and crowbar, 

a lumpy sack and a handcart. 

I dumped the sack before his door and knocked. 

He came in nightshirt, candle in hand, 

looked down at me in startlement. 

“For you,” I said. “Your own 

c—-c——ca—-cadaver,” I stammered. 

He did not seem surprised. He took 

one end of the heavy burden, let me 

come in with the rest of it. 

“It’s very fresh,” I assured him. 

“He was only interred just yesterday.” 

I waited. He stared at me. 

“How much do you want?” he asked. 

“Oh, nothing!” I answered. 

“You must want something for this!” 

“I want...I want.” I could not say it. 

“Tell me.” He looked a little kind, then. 

I think he understood. 

“I want to serve you,” I told him. 

“Serve you...always.” 

3 

We worked on happily — 

my shovel and cart, 

his saw and scalpel. 

We found a more remote 

and spacious laboratory, 

paid for with gold 

(how I laughed 

as I melted each crucifix, 

stripped village churches 

of their gilded adornments!) 

I turned the wheels 

that made small lightning 

leap over the ceiling vault. 

I bellowed the gas 

that lightning condensed 

into the glowing elixir 

that made life scream 

into inanimate matter. 

Our workroom was madhouse— 

old vellum books and amulets 

86

heaped up with bones of animals, 

crystal and astrolabe, 

the surgeon’s shining tools, 

the charnel pit 

of amputated limbs. 

In madness we succeeded. 

We howled 

as tissues dead or rotting 

quivered and multiplied, 

as hands flew off 

in every direction, 

eyes rolled 

and irises dilated 

in lidless horror, 

brains roiled 

in their captive tanks, 

their spine stems twitching 

with inexpressible longings. 

Then we threw all 

into a vat of acid. 

“These are but preludes,” 

he confided to me. 

“What next?” I asked. 

“Shall we raise the dead?” 

“No, Fritz, I have no use 

for the rotting dead. Most men 

are little more than animated meat, 

unfit for the one life given them. 

“We shall make a being new, 

a manufactured man.” 

So raptured was he, 

that saying this, 

he fell down senseless. 

I put him in bed, 

undressed his senseless form, 

stroked the white limbs 

no scalpel had scarred, 

then limped to my corner 

where I slept like a dog, 

like some great hound 

who had found his god. 

87

4 

Then she came — Elizabeth. 

At first I hated her. 

Her finery mocked me, her manners 

impeccable, her accent just so. 

Though he had never mentioned her, 

they were betrothed, in love 

since childhood, it seems. 

Daily she came for tea, 

tried to win me over 

with pastries and gingerbread, 

plied Victor for news 

of his abandoned studies. 

As one upon another 

each Ingolstadt don 

came up for our mockery 

(except our idol Waldman) 

her awe increased. 

I liked her laughter, 

the way blond hair exploded 

when she threw off her bonnet, 

the Alpine sky in her eyes. 

Yet I hated to watch 

her chaste little kisses 

that fell on Victor’s blushing cheeks, 

they way their hands 

would find each other. 

One day we were alone. 

I had to make excuses 

while Victor dissected 

a youthful suicide 

we’d fished from a stream, 

his copy of Werther 

still in his pocket. 

Then she told me 

she was an orphan too, 

her name not Frankenstein 

like those who raised her 

as Victor’s “cousin,” 

but Lavenza. 

Frau Frankenstein had found her, 

one of five babies in a hovel, 

kept by peasants 

to whom she’d be 

a careworn Cinderella. 

88

She was a fairy child, 

raised by the Frankensteins 

on music and poetry. 

She knew nothing of what we did. 

The sight of blood, the surgeon’s saw 

would fill her with horror. 

How could she hope to companion 

this man who walked with gods? 

And then it happened. 

She touched me. 

A passing thing, really. 

A piece of gingerbread 

from palm to palm, 

but then she lingered, 

pressed fingers against 

my inner palm. 

“You are so loyal to Victor,” 

she said, 

“so you shall be dear to me.” 

She never flinched 

at my twisted visage. 

Her eyes saw past 

the hump and its shadow. 

Dear to her! Dear to her! 

That night I scaled 

the boarding house wall, 

watched from a tree 

as she undressed, 

then drank some warm milk 

at her bedside. 

I watched in slice of moonlight, 

her breasts and bosom 

in lonely heaving, 

her legs this way and that. 

Had Victor ever lain with her? 

Might I, “dear friend?” 

Next night the milk 

was tinged with laudanum. 

I crept beneath 

her silken beddings, 

buried my face 

in her virgin globes— 

oh, I was light upon her, 

like the fairies she dreamt of. 

Once she cried out, 

“Oh, Victor!” 

89

I stole away, 

the scent of her golden nape, 

those wondrous nipples 

with me always. 

5 

Next night more laudanum 

was in Victor’s red wine, 

cheap vintage we bought 

to celebrate the surgery 

by which the suicide’s heart 

now beat in a headless torso. 

I carried him to bed, 

removed the blood-stained smock, 

sponged off his fevered brow, 

watched him in candlelight 

as his features softened, 

his eyelids fluttering 

in pulse of dream-state. 

I lay beside him, 

touching, oh! everywhere. 

Twice he cried out; 

once, he held me 

without awakening. 

I crept away in bliss, 

mad as a moth in a lamp shop. 

Now, when they talk of marriage 

it is a happy thought. 

I can be wed to both of them 

as long as the laudanum holds out. 

6 

Damn the chemist! The sleeping draught 

wore off at the worst of times. 

The master knows all. He woke from his sleep 

as I perched at the foot of his bed. 

My nakedness repelled him. He hurled 

me out of his window into a haycart, 

damned me, warned me never 

to return to my room in the cellar. 

What could I do? To whom could I go? 

I took a whip from the half-wrecked cart, 

climbed up the stairs to the empty laboratory. 

He would need me when he ascended. 

A storm was coming soon. The lifeless shell 

up there was nearly ready for animation. 

I would hand him the whip. 

90

I’d beg him to punish me, hurt me, 

but let me stay for the great work. 

I wanted to see his eyes 

as his being stood before him, 

hear his cry of god-defying blasphemy 

as man took control, 

and named the day of dead’s arising. 

7 

My god and punisher returned. 

He found the whip, and used it. 

For days I lay not moving, 

my lacerating flesh alive, 

my blood congealing 

to the scabs I was proud to wear, 

the stripes of his forgiveness. 

He sent me out on a sacred quest: 

a pair of kidneys but hours dead, 

a male, with “everything intact.” 

I understood what was needed. 

As I prowled the street for drunkards 

I conceived a monstrous jest. 

Our being must be superlative, 

and I knew just the man. 

Jean-Christophe Weiss was the talk 

of every student in the beer hall. 

He boasted of his conquests, 

how women fainted 

beneath his exertions. 

The Ingolstadt brothel would not admit him 

unless he paid a triple rate. 

Mothers warned daughters to turn away 

when his languid gaze caught them. 

Their faces reddened as he shopped the stalls, 

one hand on an apple or a load of bread, 

the other lifting a veil, or a skirt. 

It was said that certain widows 

happily opened their doors to him. 

One night he leaped from the balcony 

of the nunnery of St. Genevieve’s 

and what happened there 

not one of the sisters would tell. 

I did not wait long to find him. 

Like me, he knew how 

to evade the curfew. 

I caught him emerging 

from a certain garden gate 

91

(a house with three comely daughters). 

One blow to the head 

with my crowbar, 

then into the sack he went.) 

The surgery was flawless. 

Once more I watched 

as disconnected tissues, 

loose veins and nerves 

like roots from a flowerpot 

quivered, electrified, 

sought one another 

like amorous eels 

and connected, 

how the rent flesh closed 

beneath the sutures: 

weeks of healing 

completed in minutes! 

If Victor recognized 

the organs’ donor, 

he never showed it. 

I know he looked 

again and again 

as our perfect being’s 

perfect manhood 

rose and fell 

rose and fell, 

as vein and synapse 

made their connections. 

“Cover him!” 

he said at last. 

“My God, 

what a monster!” 

8 

“The kites, Fritz! The kites!” 

With these words all 

was forgiven — he needed me. 

The howling storm raged. 

Day became night as roiling thunderheads 

collided like contending Titans, 

black rams butt-heading the Alps 

and one another. 

The rain came down 

in undulating sheets, blown 

this way, that way. 

Right over us, two airborne lakes 

92

smashed one upon another’s cheek 

and fell, exploding. Roulades 

of thunder echoed everywhere. 

Streams became torrents, meres rose 

and swallowed astonished sheep and cattle. 

As every shutter in Ingolstadt 

clamped shut, we knew the day 

was ours. No one would see 

the sloping roof of our old mill tower 

slide open to the elements, 

or how the scaffolding rose up, 

and I within it, high as the steeples. 

From safe within my insulated cage 

I unfurled the kites on their copper wires. 

Up they went, hurled eastward, 

then back again in gales contrary, 

till they soared taut and defiant, 

o’er-arching the blackened granite hill 

whose woods surrounded our workplace. 

I did not fear the lightning. 

I sang to it, danced it down. 

“Strike! Strike!” I screamed. 

“Come now, ye flames of Heaven! 

Waste not your energy 

on those pitiful pines. 

I am the bait, 

so come for me — 

I am King of the Gargoyles — 

I am deformity incarnate — 

blasphemer since infancy — 

robber of graves and churches — 

rapist and fornicator!” 

I was the spider, the wires 

my webs to lure God down. 

It came! I howled 

as the great light jabbed toward me, 

reveled in the thunder’s drum, 

exulting as the kites survived 

lash after lash, boom upon boom. 

Blue, green and amber sparks 

spun, danced and plummeted. 

I could not see below, 

but I knew what was happening: 

how Victor captured it all below 

in those vast and hungry capacitors, 

how the hot wires sparked and smoked 

as the current transferred 

93

to the vat of green elixir 

in which our creature bathed — 

how all its flesh, unable to die 

(and yet thus far without the will 

to live) would join the ranks of creation. 

How long I played there, 

tempting with soliloquies 

the angry sky, 

how long the kites 

drew power downward 

till they fell in tatters 

I cannot tell. 

I was deafened and nearly blind 

when the master drew me down. 

He led me to my corner, 

said I would see in a while. 

My ears already made out 

the master’s song of victory 

as he cried out “It’s alive! 

It’s alive!” 

He robbed the gods 

of more than fire or gold — 

my master, Frankenstein, 

the modern Prometheus! 

94

MILKWEED SEEDS 

The air is full of milkweed seeds — 

they fly, they light, they fly again — 

they cling to leaf, to cat-tail, 

dog fur and hedgehog quill. 

They burst out of pods 

like wizened hags, 

white hair pluming on witch winds. 

Do not be fooled 

by their innocent pallor: 

the sour milk sac that ejected them 

is made of gossip, spite and discord. 

Pluck this weed once, two take its place, 

roots deep in the core of malice. 

Cousin to carrion flower 

and pitcher plants 

they fall on sleepers who toss in misery, 

engendering boils and bleeding sores. 

These are no playful sprites 

of summer — 

they go to make more of their kind — 

and if one rides through an open window 

it can get with child 

an unsuspecting virgin, 

who, dying, gives birth to a murderer. 

Just give them a wind 

that’s upward and outward 

and they’re off to the mountains 

to worship the goat-head eminence, 

pale lord of the unscalable crag, 

Evil as white as blasted bone, 

his corn-silk hair in dreadlocks, 

his fangs a black obsidian 

sharp as scalpels, 

his mockery complete 

as every dust mote sings his praises. 

Do not trust white, winged 

and ascending to heaven! 

Beware, amid the bursting flowers, 

the sinister pod! 

HEARING THE WENDIGO 

There is a place 

where the winds meet howling 

cold nights in frozen forest 

snapping the tree trunks 

in haste for their reunion. 

Gone is the summer they brooded in, 

gone their autumn awakening. 

Now at last they slide off glaciers, 

sail the spreading ice floes, 

hitch a ride with winter. 

Great bears retreat and slumber, 

owls flee 

and whippoorwills shudder. 

Whole herds of caribou 

stampede on the tundra. 

The Indian nods and averts his eyes. 

Only brave Orion watches 

as icy vectors collide in air. 

Trees break like tent poles, 

earth sunders to craters 

beneath the giant foot stamps. 

Birds rise to whirlwind updraft 

and come down bones and feathers. 

I have not seen the Wendigo — 

the wind’s collective consciousness, 

id proud and hammer-fisted — 

to see is to be plucked 

into the very eye of madness. 

Yet I have felt its upward urge 

like hands beneath my shoulders, 

lifting and beckoning. 

It says, You dream of flying? 

Then fly with me! 

I answer No, 

not with your hungry eye above me, 

not with those teeth 

like roaring chain saws, 

not with those pile-driving footsteps — 

I too avert my eyes 

against the thing that summons me. 

Screaming, the airborne smiter 

rips off the tops of conifers, 

crushes a row of power line towers, 

peppers the hillside with saurian tracks, 

95

then leaps straight up at the Dog Star 

as though its anger 

could crack the cosmos 

as though the sky bowl were not infinite, 

and wind alone could touch the stars 

and eat them. 

WEST OF ARKHAM 

West of Arkham, the hills rise wild 

where alder groves are still uncut. 

The hawk can spy the boulders piled 

by savages till stones abut 

their brothers in a gapless wall, 

the stern geometry within 

an unknown god’s abandoned hall, 

altars oblivious to Sin. 

Pillars of gneiss, hand-hewn and still 

(their bones are now dust 

who made them!) 

waiting for one with book and skill 

to find the eon-spanning gem 

whose mere exposure to the stars — 

upon the utterance of chants — 

will break a god’s confining bars 

and sunder men like scattered ants. 

Chaos will come, and I its priest 

will be, if I can mouth the rite, 

voice not man yet more than a beast, 

mere words that can a planet smite! 

I will be lord of this great palace, 

while down below, in veining rivers red, 

the Old Ones shall sport, 

and slay for malice, 

till those who mocked me 

are eyeless and dead. 

96 

THE GRIM REAPER 

paraphrase of an old German Folksong, 

“Es ist ein Schnitter, heisst der Tod” 

There is a Reaper and his name 

is Death, 

and though he kills, he kills for God, 

and though his blade is sharpest of all 

he stands at the wheel and whets it, 

and when he is ready 

we must be ready, too. 

O fair little flower, beware! 

No matter what is green today, 

the Reaper’s scythe will mow away. 

His blade never misses 

the noble Narcissus, 

down from its plinth 

the lovely Hyacinth, 

the T urk’s Cap lilies fall — 

harvested, all!, 

the meadows’ roses dear 

now toppled and sère. 

O fair little sister, beware! 

Will he take everything 

in sidelong swing 

of the blood-edged scythe? 

While tulips are falling, 

speedwell flying, blue tops 

into a bluer sky, 

silver-fringed bluebells crying, 

doomed phlox not gold enough 

to ransom its beauty 

against the swish, swish 

of the Harvester. 

O fair little brother, beware!

But now I defy you, Death! 

Your holocaust night 

gives way to dawn. 

I stand amid the scythe-cut lawn 

and scorn your reaping. 

Pass by! pass by! 

(But if you turn, and your red eye 

turns back to seize me suddenly, 

then mow me! take me away to be 

the newest bloom in Death’s 

dark flower pot, 

a blossoming of interrupted thought, 

deprived, yes! of pen and speech, 

and power, 

but still I would defy you: no flower 

of all earth’s millions is the last!) 

Be happy, my fair ones! Live on! 

SALEM 

At Salem 

the burying ground 

is a garden of stones, 

an orchard of oaks. 

Acorns burst to grow, 

tombstones erase 

their shallow tattoos, 

becoming anonymous— 

Death’s heads 

and angel wings, 

bad poems 

consumed by moss, 

the promise of Heaven 

like Confederate money. 

Still there is some 

justice — an oak trunk 

engulfs the stone 

of a solemn Puritan, 

roots clinging like 

rabid dogs. 

He doomed the innocent 

as witches and wizards, 

to infamy and hanging, 

to a farmyard burial 

in family shame. 

Imagine this — 

his grave invaded 

by inexorable roots, 

the frail box split, 

his gradual awakening 

as vampire tendrils 

invade his ears, 

his mouth, his nostrils, 

the circling of taproot 

to snap his neck, 

his arms and legs 

broken and useless. 

Doomed to immortal 

consciousness 

(the Life Eternal!), 

nerves and ganglia 

a web of pain receptors/ 

An old woman 

condemned him to this. 

She spoke the words 

on a Candlemas midnight, 

took from the hanging tree 

where her mother’s mother 

died innocent, 

the patient acorn of revenge. 

She wrote his name on it, 

pushed it with thumb 

into the loam of his grave, 

traced runes in blood 

upon his stone, 

danced the wild dance 

of his resurrection — 

sang things that the wizened 

old ladies of Salem never knew 

as there were no witches 

in Salem 

then. 

97

APPALACHIAN IDYLL 

I have seen it: 

the slantbrow horror of the hills 

the runt church hatred 

the pyramid of ignorance 

the wild eye of moonmalt killers 

trigger poised, the gaping despair 

of the women from chickenfeed dawn 

to mattress-thump midnight. 

The eyes of the children are eggs 

dream-snatched and scrambled, 

guttering lights of intelligence. 

The idyll image is flawed: weeds, 

hills clotted with battered shacks. 

a firetrap barn, 

a wrecked-car planter, 

a thicket of corn, 

a rusted mailbox. 

Their cookie-cutter faces 

are all alike— 

hoe-broken wives and hardhand 

boys, the spark of will 

wet-snuffed by beatings 

and Bible water. 

Father begets daughters 

upon his daughter; 

brother has sister; 

a visiting niece 

is passed from bed to bed. 

Children of uncertain fathers 

are swapped from house to house, 

Cinderella to stepmothers 

who rage with butcher knives. 

Saturday they go to town, 

smelling of hay and manure, 

buy lard and flour and cooking oil, 

wind up at roadside taverns, 

drinking till pleas of 

Daddy let’s go home 

98 


irk them into the wobbly ride 

down single lane highways 

to the tar-paper house, 

the chicken coop, the night 

of burning, ignorant stars... 

The sleep of reason breeds 

the hill people. 

THE MOLESTER 

There was a chill place 

amid the heat and brambles, 

past blackberry hedge, 

a place where acrid fumes 

and coke oven smoke 

could never intrude — 

a spring-house, a covered well, 

a cobwebbed corner 

of pumps and pipes. 

The door creaked open 

to admit me. Here 

I could sit in solitude, 

pretend there was another door 

to a treasure cave, 

a golden city, 

a waiting spaceship. 

One day a man was there. 

I sat beside him 

on the cold stone lip 

of the gurgling well. 

His whispered words 

were barely louder 

than the distant trucks, 

the chirring cicadas. 

His name was Eric, 

a young man, yet 

bigger than my father. 

He asked about my mother, 

how pretty she was, 

too bad she’s already married; 

I told him about my 

first-grade teacher, 

the friends

I would see again 

in second grade in the fall. 

I brought him cookies. 

He taught me things. 

Once, I touched 

the soft blond beard 

that glazed his cheekbones. 

I could tell him anything. 

One day in the car 

I mentioned Eric. 

“That’s all he talks about,” 

my mother explained. 

“That’s his friend, 

his imaginary 

playmate out back.” 

My father grew angry. 

At home, they shouted 

and sent me upstairs. 

Cars came, men tramped 

into the house and the cellar. 

I heard many dogs barking, 

my mother’s voice answering 

no to someone’s many questions. 

The spring-house was locked. 

I stayed indoors 

all summer. 

I never mentioned Eric again. 

No one ever asked me anything. 

Years later I heard 

of men who slept 

in the nearby foothills, 

setting up camp 

in abandoned ovens — 

draft dodgers and hoboes 

who skulked and begged 

by the roadside. 

Years after that I remembered him — 

a kind voice in the darkness, 

the trusting man to whom I said 

“I’ll never tell ... I promise.” 

THE PINES 

Grandmother Butler 

grew up with the pines 

that dotted her acres. 

Her father 

first planted them, 

edging the house, 

the gravel drive, 

the property line. 

She watched her daughter 

who once could leap 

the saplings 

grow tall and straight. 

Her parents are gone now, 

her husband vanished, 

her daughters grown and married. 

She sits on the porch 

and communes with the trees. 

Some skirt the house — 

she walks soft needle loam 

to her raspberry patch. 

Squirrels are there in the branches. 

Black snakes steal eggs 

from the hapless robins. 

Jays and crows, 

cardinals and tanagers 

live tier by tier 

in their sheltered nests. 

Each season a song — 

bird twitter spring, 

storm hum summer, 

cone-drop in autumn, 

the groan of trunks 

in snapping winter. 

They are an orchestra 

eternally in tune, 

black pyramids at night 

against the burning stars, 

a comforting wall 

against the whippoorwills, 

the mountain lions, 

the howling winds. 

One winter day 

she’s digging down 

to the dregs of her coal pile, 

99

filling a pail for the stove, 

when a great truck 

lumbers in, 

piled high with coal. 

Two men follow 

in a long black car, 

tell her they’ll dump 

as much as she needs — 

enough to last her 

through widow’s winter, 

all the way to April. 

She hesitates. 

They mention her neighbors, 

Wingroves and Sweeneys, 

Ulleries and Dempseys. 

She lets them dump the coal. 

All they want is a signed receipt, 

oh, and they’d like 

to trim a few trees 

for the nearby sawmill. 

She hesitates again — 

they mumble some words 

about another delivery 

next winter. 

She signs. 

Hard winter sets in. 

The ziggurat of coal 

diminishes to sludge, 

black dust in melting puddles. 

She goes off in spring 

to visit her daughters, 

hold their new babies. 

When she comes back 

the pines are gone, 

all of them 

reduced to stumps, 

except the two 

that sheltered the porch, 

her acres exposed 

to passing cars. 

All night the animals 

scream in the forest. 

Homeless squirrels, 

nestless sparrows, 

100 

hysterical robins, 

even the prowling wind 

with nothing to rub against, 

makes angry vectors 

among the boulders. 

Then she finds the paper 

in the kitchen cupboard, 

reads with her glasses 

the fine print over her signature. 

Far off, the ripsaws mock her 

as she reads and repeats 

what she gave to the strangers — 

not just once but forever — 

like a contract 

with a rapist, 

her rights, her 

timber rights. 

MIDNIGHT WATER 

Things told 

to frighten children: 

never drink water 

at the stroke of midnight — 

you’ll choke, 

fall dead of a heart attack — 

this happened to one 

of your many cousins. 

We lay awake 

at grandmother’s house, 

no one going to the kitchen, 

no one lifting 

the dented tin cup, 

the old enamel dipper. 

Even if midnight waters 

didn’t kill — 

in the dark 

a bug might be there, 

a hairy caterpillar, 

a centipede sipping, 

ready to be swallowed, 

or a chunk of moss 

from the cold spring, 

floating unseen in the bucket,

sliding like slug 

into the dipper. 

Pitch-black nights 

the grandpa clock 

ticked and chimed 

above the wheezes and snores, 

the whippoorwills calling, 

waiting like you 

for the pre-dawn hours, 

the safe water. 

AND THEN WE GOT USED TO THE 

ATOM BOMB… 

We thought the world would end soon. 

We huddled for omens: nightly 

the television spoke disaster — 

sat by a faux-log fireplace 

that burned but was not consumed 

with pipe-smoking professors 

whose worst-case scenarios 

high-altitude detonation 

firestorms hyperheated steam 

plutonium half-life millennia 

of runaway mutation 

universal death, sudden only 

for a minority, 

but for the majority 

a slow torture of disease 

and disintegration* 

filled our waking dreams. 

The men who know the most 

are the most gloomy.* 

Somehow their worried wives 

afraid to bring more children 

into a nuclear winter 

saw their way to garden and cook, 

raise their soon-to-be-cindered 

boys as though, somehow, 

it would all come out in the end — 

an explosion of blond energy 

played all around us, 

model airplanes aloft, 

their bomb-bays open — 

in their world, pilots returned, 

bombs were recovered 

from the carpet pile, 

the cat’s fur, 

reloaded, re-used 

on enemies who never perished. 

We listened to Bertrand Russell, 

on a well-played record, 

reading his latest warning, 

co-signed that fateful year 

by Einstein on his death-bed. 

“First we had the atom bomb,” 

the Englishman intoned — 

—the plastic airplane darts again — 

“and then we got used 

to the atom bomb, 

and so we developed 

the hydrogen bomb.” 

—an even bigger bomber model 

descends from tiny hands — 

Shall we put an end to the human race 

or shall mankind renounce war?* 

and an ice-cream truck melted 

somewhere in Japan in midtune, 

while children 

with rising sun nickels 

danced into chrysanthemum 

fireballs — 

It is too late, he said, 

to be invoking god — 

the god of bullet holes 

and amputated stumps 

and useless dead. 

It is too late, he said, 

to be waving flags — 

what color blood and honor? 

which side of civil war, 

101

holy war, muddled 

ideology, can claim us? 

So Russell and Einstein say, 

as simple as sunlight, 

Remember your humanity 

and forget the rest.* 

I came to tears upon those words — 

the danger all too real 

that these small boys 

would be bombed — or bombers. 

Strange, they are grown now. 

The world did not explode, 

but not for lack 

of military effort. 

GRANDMOTHERS 

Grandmothers know 

the things we have no names for: 

the blood of birth, 

the severing 

of umbilicus, 

how to lay out 

a corpse in the parlor, 

how to wring a hen’s neck 

with one sure gesture, 

how to swing a sure stick 

to kill a copperhead, 

how to turn memories 

into a comfort quilt, 

forgiving what’s past 

with the patience of boulders. 

When the men talk darkly 

of war and disaster, 

they wisely digress 

“That rainy spring 

we had so many berries — 

was it ’forty-eight, or nine? — 

I think this year will be like it.” 

102 

FRAGMENTS, WRITTEN AT TWENTY 

1 

Who shall celebrate 

what no one has sung since Walt, 

that crazy lover, 

took Death in his arms? 

Who shall take the whole of life/death 

flesh/skeleton, birth/decay, 

remembrance/forgetfulness? 

Who shall love this barbed wire planet, 

these scrambling apes 

who dream like gods 

and slay like panthers? 

2 

We are the bandits of being, 

heroes on borrowed time 

oblivious to Death 

because we rob him blind 

with every flaring sunrise. 

Days do not end 

though earth spins on beneath us. 

These are the days of youth, 

and only what we win now 

can be kept. 

Stand now at the crest of your days. 

Of all that befell you yesterday 

you are the proud negation. 

You have taken pain — do not inflict it. 

You have been scorned — 

turn not your back 

on battered genius. 

They taught you lies — undo the lies. 

Your family denied you — find friends 

and love them never failing. 

Fate made you as you are — 

be the cause of all that follows. 

Make no complaint against the universe, 

for not a door in the starry waste 

is closed to you. 

Earth, hear my newly minted credo. 

I fling my torch into the heavens. 

I will add to the fire that made me 

a laurel wreath around the sun. 

I make a new song 

to astonish the planets.

TABLEAUX FROM A PENNSYLVANIA 

VILLAGE 

1 

Spotlit to the last, 

the thunderheads recede 

southeast, in sunset red, 

like hoary-headed thespians 

unwilling to exeunt 

without a proper flourish. 

Inside the clouds 

the stubborn lightning 

flashes, as if another act 

of Hamlet or Lear 

required its luminance. 

The last of day, 

trailing the curtain of eventide 

rolls off the storm’s advance 

into the night’s 

dark amphitheatre. 

2 

The Bats At Dusk 

See them now, 

in their new-bird pride! 

The bats — presumptuous mice — 

take wing, up on a twilit wind, 

down into a gnat-rich dusk. 

As ducks float south 

the backs of white mallards 

turn like the final page 

of a silk-lined novel, 

flap shut in sun gem’s fall 

from weeping willow tapestry. 

From the bridge I eye their 

cooling retreat 

passive in downstream current, 

while celebrant fledermice 

beat on at the stars. 

3 

At the Lake Shore 

Old men give the orders; 

young men march and die; 

the dead lie in their graves 

and dream of returning. 

The maples have built a palisade, 

gray warriors stiff at the lake edge. 

They bend their grave green heads, 

brush shaggy seeds at the water’s verge 

cast like orphans into the battlefield. 

They argue on tactics, 

give orders to saplings, 

shake in a windy tumult 

of arthritic limbs. 

They are the generals, the Lake 

their blind old nemesis. 

They have contained him 

for a thousand years. 

One day they know they will cover 

and absorb him. 

His Majesty the Lake must be content 

to weave millennial plots, 

gnawing on pebbles, 

feeding on creeks and rainfall, 

tolerating a man-made dam 

that deepened him. 

He dreams of expanding his border, 

goes nowhere, 

weaves decadent breakers 

against the shore, 

hunched in the kettle the glaciers 

carved him. 

He frightens no one, looks 

to a mystic cloud 

for auguries, sleeps afternoons, 

interrogates the fish and flotsam, 

tries to read the Braille of rain drops, 

traces the ice cracks in dead of winter. 

No one betrays the army’s secrets. 

Now it is spring. The officers conspire, 

summon from sun and dew 

a seedling explosion. 

They raise a line of green colossi: 

rusty, belligerent day lily dragons 

issue their challenge to cowardly waves. 

Others are drafted, too: spies creep 

toward the water in a bed of moss. 

Fern leaves unfurl in flagrant banner. 

Foot soldier mushrooms 

pop up everywhere. 

Roots furrow underground, 

touch hands and hold. 

103

One sleepless night the King makes fog, 

clouding the warriors’ 

senses in fairy mist. 

Then comes the rain — 

an equinoctial deluge. 

A night of rain — a day — 

a night again. 

Waves pound against the stony edges, 

muscles renewed 

and tendons vivified, 

he roars like an ocean, spews tidal spray. 

The army breaks, then mends, 

then holds. 

Where roots had lost the soil 

to cling to, 

the tree falls willingly 

to make a barricade 

of leaf and limb and sundered trunk. 

Where water attempts to break the land, 

a rope tough vine, a wild-rose thorn, 

a dead tree pike shaft punctures him. 

Howling and humbled the King retreats. 

His waves recede to mirror stillness. 

At dawn the silver orb of Venus 

looks down and sees herself; 

bird echoes bird; each cloud 

his symmetric brother. 

The tangle of flora begins to heal itself. 

Who won? Look at the lake edge now, 

see that parade line pluming there, 

as day lilies burn against the light! 

4 

Stormy Day in Spring 

No one goes out on these cloudy days. 

The forest is empty. A willow tree 

burns in first green, vibrant 

against a red-gray skillet of clouds. 

Was green ever greener than this? 

This is the secret hue of spring, 

saved for the rainy-day elite! 

They are all indoors 

with damp umbrellas, 

their soggy shoes drying, 

while I am here on the stream bed 

alone as though their world had ended. 

Give me this brooding, north-born sky, 

the ardent chill of this windy noon — 

give me a little sun — a beam or two 

to slice the scudding rain clouds. 

104 

Splash rainbows on the canopy 

of gray and brown and emerald. 

Give me this — there is nothing 

sweeter 

than this encompassing embrace! 

To be a man, alive, alone 

surrounded by willows 

and senseless rain, 

to be at the apex of consciousness — 

to feel the very pulse of life evolving — 

green! green and alive upon the world! 

THE TOWN IS STILL ASLEEP 

The town is still asleep. 

The sky is pale with quickening light. 

Quenched, the long night of stars 

swirls under the earth, but one, 

that silver planet Venus, holds 

over the ice-haired lawns 

a vernal promise: that love is not lost. 

Walk through the streets 

with birds and the clatter-clack 

of streetlights as they change; 

feel a tremble as the chill of night 

dies in a sunburst from the trees. 

Witness the signs of entropy: 

a vacant house whose owner died; 

a fallen elm; an abscess in the line 

of shops; a broken pane. It will 

all change. Unlike the fixed bright stars 

the homes are not immutable. I hold 

my book, which is all I may carry away: 

which reads that love will come again. 

WATER MUSIC 1 

You flow. You do not understand. 

The spring has eked you 

out of the earth. 

You fell from the storm, 

you barely coalesced 

before the journey began. 

A gust of wind from a cloud’s dead eye 

blew you onto the clay of the north. 

You roll downhill, impelled by gravity, 

jostled by roots, inhaling minerals,

fall to a pond, where spawn of frogs 

grope in the eye of batrachian sun. 

At the end — a hesitant stream. 

The grass barely parts in your path. 

By noon, you have come to the lake, 

your flow anonymous, your voice 

a cancellation of wave forms. 

You fear you are the plaything 

of the world, 

toy of a god 

whose cruelty is your solitude. 

You flow, you do not understand. 

You cannot feel your strength, 

your shoulders against a dam, 

your spirit overtopping barriers. 

You are insensible of reeds, of rust, 

the thrust of fish, the wear of shore, 

the notes you leave on agate. 

Do you know you are incompressible — 

that steel would split 

before it would compact you, 

that your ice can rend the hull of a ship? 

Do you know you are the stuff 

of comets, 

emblazoned by sunlight, 

your tail as long as the gap 

between planets? 

Do you know you are going South? 

How far you have come you 

cannot comprehend. 

You do not know who awaits you! 

SPRING EARTH 

Somewhere it is always spring — 

here, too, perhaps 

within these barren trees. 

The thought, the idée fixe 

the twig to be 

outlasts the snowstorms. 

Its double helix symphony 

sleeps on in xylem, 

unravels in sequestered leaves. 

Some seeds refuse to sprout 

until a winter has seasoned them 

(wise monarchs outlive 

their enemies). 

Earth thaws. 

Tendrils reach out 

beneath me. 

Seed’s urge unjackets me, 

soaks me to root in run 

through falling rain. 

I taste the sky: 

lime and raw iron, 

phosphorus and calcium, 

inhale the animal sweetness of air, 

soak up the sunlight, 

open a cotyledon eye, 

banish the frost 

in bacchanalian riot. 

It is time! It is time! 

SPRING FROST 

Weep not for the lilacs, 

the withered oak, 

the cherry blossoms 

burned by night frost 

this millennial May, 

for the aborted pear, 

magnolia buds shivering, 

shoots shocked, 

seeds warned 

to wait 

for another warming. 

Life somehow goes on 

after false promises. 

The young replace 

the immolated ones. 

We forget 

there ever was a winter. 

Trees lured by sun 

reached out with tentative 

green-tipped fingers. 

It was a spring 

of fool’s gold 

and false truffles, 

snakes shuffling back 

into the earth’s 

eye sockets. 

No right to life 

for the aborted seeds. 

This is how Nature 

sorts the strong. 

105

THE OLD GRAVESTONES 

Names last, dates fade, deeds disappear. 

Try if you will to read these stones — 

earth clots around inscriptions, 

moss rubs like moist eraser. 

Even in best light you cannot read 

their rhymes of what heavens they earned 

or paid that others should think so. 

Stonemason’s script rubs down to worm-lines, 

elegant esses and effs are mere wrinkles. 

Would anyone know if the stones were swapped, 

if pious spinster’s stone became confused 

with an outcast wench’s marker, 

if brides and grooms and stillborn babes 

exchanged their names and families, 

half-breed with minister, 

hermit with midwife? 

What a terrible stew at Resurrection 

if these stones were needed, 

carried like credit cards 

to the last communion! 

Even the wind, and windborne waters, 

shorn of the lake and incontinent clouds 

work bald forgetfulness in granite. 

Easy to read BORN. 

Born is everywhere. 

Born as we all are, 

but when is gradually erased. 

Zeros and eights and nines 

curve into shallow depressions, 

sevens and ones to cuneiform, 

thin lines and gashes. 

Easy to read DIED 

but isn’t that obvious? 

Death dates and Aetat ages 

wink out in wind-rub. 

A few are blank, 

carved and waiting 

for sleepers who never came. 

(Fought in a war — 

no body was found — 

went to the city — 

ran for a freight train — 

or just plain never died?) 

106

Names. The names linger. 

Eye leaps from letter to letter, 

fills in the biblical 

and well-known names. 

The sculpted angels are armless now, 

the willow tree stones are toppled, 

others were reinstalled 

on broken pediments 

with bolts and metal braces. 

Do they toss in their sleep? 

Do stones fly up 

like lumpy pillows, 

tilt down 

to shade unhappy eyes? 

I too would turn 

if line by line 

and page by page 

the universe erased me! 

AN AWESOME PLUMMETING 

Just when I think I’ve seen it all: 

counted the branches too many times, 

worn down the leafless sky with stares 

at the pregnant north; just when the metaphors 

for leaves go bald — that’s when a granite bell 

sprouts like a mushroom from the hill 

to mark a grave I’ve never seen before. 

Do skeletal hands below still clasp 

a useless hand-pull? Did frugal relatives 

ignore his request for a working alarm, 

doing the sensible Scottish thing 

with this clapperless, toneless thing of stone? 

Just when the measured snowflakes look alike 

and I come here haunted by Tchaikovsky’s muse, 

an awesome plummeting occurs — 

the shadows, first, spew gray upon the snow banks, 

then fans of whiter whiteness settle down 

upon the astonished wilderness of gray-green lake. 

Just moments ago Prince Siegfried drowned 

in the arms of the transformed swan, 

just moments since the despairing harmonies 

sent me fleeing into the barren trees, 

now half a thousand swans arrive, 

bobbing serene as never ballerina danced, 

still and majestic, curved necks 

an endless armada of question marks. 

107

Did they hear, through my chimney, 

the cataclysmic ends of the swans of the mere? 

Are they fleeing some Rothbart enchanter? 

Or does this pilgrimage follow Swan Lake everywhere? 

The swans are mute. They have no answer. 

Soon they will arrow up in near silence, 

vanish in low-hanging feathery clouds, 

lake water resonating one great chord, 

the oboe, the harp, the tremulous strings. 

IRISES 

Before a certain bridge I cross each night — 

my eyes are bent downward so as to miss 

who does or doesn’t come to that window — 

I study a cottage’s garden plot. 

I have never known who lives here, 

but have grown to know that militant line 

of soldier irises in purple plumes, 

their wind-rumpled hoods on defiant spear-ends, 

the constant bulbs as certain as sunrise. 

By day the flowers welcomed visitors — 

hived bees and humming, brazen dragonflies, 

by day they shamed the variable sky. 

(By day I see that your windows darken 

concealing your presence or your absence. 

Only your door mouth, opening and closing, 

admitting and ejecting visitors, 

confirms to me that you are tenant still. 

Your lovers’ faces smite me with smiling; 

if they’re dejected I take small hope.) 

On moonless nights I man the silent bridge, 

brood on the madness of water lilies 

that choke up the swelling, algae’d outlet. 

I peer over the dam-edge precipice 

at the shallow, tamed creek bed far below. 

The irises are there like sentinels, 

dark eyes a-watch beneath those still petals, 

the hidden golden stamens scolding me, 

the patient bulbs oblivious to love, 

serene as Buddhas, requiring nothing. 

Within your casements a galaxy stirs, 

a sphere of light in a candle centered, 

then other spheres, then moving silhouettes. 

One is your cameo, then you are lit. 

Moving to music now, your arms might close 

around another’s neck. Your visitor eclipses you, 

108

his night enfolding you, 

your ivory breast his evening star, 

his your heartbeat till morning’s dim crescent. 

(O double Venus, which of you is true?) 

I turn back to my sleeping irises, 

black blooms in owl-watch, consoling friars. 

All day you give me eyes-alms blossoming; 

all night you silently companion me, 

never mocking this madness of loving, 

dying of perfect beauty, and alone. 

AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD 

The mountain is not the object of climbing. 

Nor does the act of climbing suffice. 

To climb is to achieve the height 

from which, alone, 

you can describe the overarching beauty 

of a curved horizon filled with summits. 

It is not the triumph of reaching a top, 

but the sudden, dizzying knowledge 

that what you scale is but a hair 

on the bristled beard of the cosmos. 

See now the range of upthrust pyramids 

on which you perch, a giddy rider 

on the hump of a thousand mile camel, 

a spec on the Andes’ anaconda. 

Blue peaks, pure snow, kingdom-encompassing 

rainbows, stark shadows as lambent sun 

inks fold on fold of airbrush color 

upon the distant ranks of staggered hills — 

all this you spy, and something more: 

upon each mountaintop 

the form of another climber, 

your brother who stands, regards you, 

eye to eye your equal. 

Or sometimes you see the spike and banner 

where an explorer has come and gone — 

sometimes a peak is vacant, but, lo! 

a figure is scaling upward towards it. 

Your rock is narrow, the way 

so difficult that none may follow you. 

Is it the same for each who struggle 

out of the shadows into the sun? 

109

You cannot turn back, belong no more 

to the settled valleys, 

where they see only your shadow 

and fear it. 

Down there, they hone 

their knives and swords, 

covet their neighbors’ acres. 

Their cannons spark 

this way that way 

in the distant gorges, 

their river-hugging cities 

engulfed in flames 

as each invades the other. 

The gods and their mountains 

look down in scorn. 

WATER MUSIC IV 

To be is to have been with these waters; to be 

is to have roots in bleeding earth, 

from mud, that oozing formless mother squeezed, 

is to have known the longest path downhill — 

falling, fierce drops from the blistering clouds — 

or to be born as dew in pre-dawn light 

or to come as crystal. solemn in frost. 

or to spring from the rocks’ deep airless streams, 

chill child of the darkness, full of tumult.’ 

To be is to flow, formed and yet formless, 

bubbling with atoms’ singing bravado, 

proud of a charge, an affinite valence, 

a molecule’s journey defying death, 

reflecting yet fleeing the sun’s hot lamp, 

alive yet buoying the leaves of decay, 

carving trails everywhere, here mingling, 

there feeding hungry roots, there wearing down 

some arrogant hillside, toppling its trees — 

to move with a certainty of purpose, 

knowing the land is shaped by tireless ions. 

To be, however small, yet know yourself 

the sine qua non of spring and summer! 

To leap, however deceived, to hot air 

into the trap of a motionless pool 

over the brink of a cataract, down 

to the inky depths of an ocean trench, — 

all are the same to you, no place an end, 

at home alike in gill and gullet, one 

110

with even the loneliness of glaciers — 

To know your destiny, the truth of your being, 

borne from the source by your own charge. 

To know is to reach by any means 

an end which no other essence compels; 

to be, and to leave where you pass 

your subtle fingerprint upon the hardest stone. 

AT THE WOOD’S EDGE 

(A translation into verse of “Okayondoghsera Yondennase: Oghentonh 

Karighwateghwenh," from the Iroquois Ancient Rites of the Condoling Council: 

Preliminary Ceremony) 

My son, I am surprised to hear your voice 

come through the forest to this open place. 

You come with troubled mind, through obstacles. 

You passed, my son, the grounds where fathers met, 

whose hands we all depended on. How then 

come you in ease? You tread the paths 

our forebears cut, you all but see the smoke 

from where they passed their pipes. Can you 

be calm when you have wept along the way? 

Great thanks, therefore, that you arrive unhurt. 

Now let us smoke the clay pipe together. 

We know that all around us enemies 

each think, “We will not let them meet!” 

Here, thorny ways that bar — there, falling trees — 

in shadowed glades, the beasts that wait to slay. 

Either by these you might have perished, 

my son. The sudden floods destroy; dark nights 

the vengeful hatchet waits outside the house; 

invisible disease is always near. 

(Each day our mortal foes are wasting us!) 

Great thanks, therefore, that you arrive unhurt. 

What great lament if any had died there 

along the way, and running words had come, 

“Yonder lie bodies, of those who were chiefs!” 

We, who come to mourn another, would cry, 

“What happened, my son? — Why do you not come?” 

In time of peace or peril we do this — 

ancestors made the custom, demanding: 

Here they must kindle a ritual fire, 

here, in the light, at the edge of the woods, 

condole with each other in chosen words. 

111

TILLIE 

Steel-town Tillie 

was my first bag lady. 

As a child I trailed her, 

just out of reach 

of the miasma of sour milk 

and spoiled meat. 

She stopped before the five-and-dime 

to comb her thinning hair, 

mouse brown now streaked 

with yellow-white 

no manner of primping 

could beautify. 

She had a Hepburn face, 

high cheekbones. 

She’d stop in every doorway 

to see herself mirrored 

and re-arrange her scarf. 

Dogs sniffed the oily stains 

that marked her bundles and rags. 

Starving birds pecked 

at the trail of crumbs, 

burst buttons and candy wraps, 

the lengths of multi-colored thread 

that dropped through her 

bottomless pockets. 

Don’t ask her age, how many 

winters she’d tramped the streets — 

how many weddings and funerals 

she’d watched, like the uninvited fairy 

from the shadowed, latter-most pew. 

(She had a wedding once. 

Days later, her husband abandoned her.) 

She’d talk, if you ask, 

of her house on the hill — 

new furniture just in, 

painting in progress, 

wallpaper sample books 

thumbed through. 

She doubled back 

when no one watched 

to the abandoned car 

by the railroad tracks, 

112 

where she slept, 

cradling her packages 

like swaddled infants. 

Year by year 

she was gaunter, thinner. 

Finally, they cornered her, 

shoved her screaming 

into an ambulance. 

Word spread around town 

of an abscess gone wild, 

a hole in Tillie’s neck 

where everything she drank 

gushed out as from 

a cartoon bullet hole. 

They paused in the taverns, 

in the vomit-scented Moose Hall 

with litanies of “Tillie, poor Tillie!” 

On side streets, 

her shadow shambled without her, 

frail as a moth wing, 

picked apart by moonlight, 

scattered by cicadas, 

waiting to reassemble 

if she returned 

to her appointed rounds. 

song of youth (1967) 

have you stood wordless with an anthem 

no notes can sing? 

the forest at dawn, the stars at 

midnight, 

the thunderclap’s echo 

create the lyrics and sing my song. 

have you run naked 

through woods in the rain, 

brushed clean by leaf-cup fingers, 

lay languid on a boulder 

moonbathing drunk 

with the white rays’ beaming? 

the wayward wolf, 

the cliff with its weathered face 

its beard of clinging trees, 

stand with me. 

have you known where

the fires of creation arise, 

the lid-lift of cranium 

as thought explodes 

like newborn galaxies — 

or do you feed the fire 

and never see the flame? 

Your/my I-thing are the same. 

have you said I am I, 

a solitary entity, 

treating alone with the universe 

and knowing it, 

and seeing yourself a speck in the 

cosmos, 

still laughed and said, it is good, 

this joy of oneness? 

or do you hide from you 

your temple and tomb 

from whom there is no escaping? 

will you die for god, 

a nullity, 

a madman’s playmate, 

psychotic city stomper, 

hungry for offerings? 

or will you live 

because in a world 

abandoned by idols 

Aristotle lived, 

Beethoven lived, 

Shakespeare lived, 

or will you, sorry carpenter, 

sell nails and cross to your own 

assassins? 

temples, I topple you — 

churches, I scatter your gold — 

priests, I drive you out — 

cross and altar I cast into the sea. 

let every man find his 

third eye beaming, 

his account with the spirits overflowing, 

his eyes bright and his hands clasped 

in the joyous handshake and greeting 

that only the free can grant to the free. 

stand in the clean sun: 

invent and speak 

your newfound name 

free of clan and parentage. 

be the one among many, 

one even among the solitary ones. 

still, we are brothers: 

my I-thing and your you-thing I-thing 

are the same. 

1967/rev. 1996 

OUT OF SEASON 

All over? Hardly! 

Those red leaves are not gone: 

they are under the snow, 

protecting the gentle grass. 

They will go brown, 

wear paper thin, 

veined like the hands 

of tiny mummies. 

They will endure the ice, 

as I do, 

remember the night 

when you lay upon them, 

remember that moon, 

umber, carnivorous, 

that called them down 

to garland your hair — 

my curse is memory, 

and not to stop loving 

the moment of your surrender, 

writing your name 

on these thousand banners 

of blazing maple, 

while you have already 

forgotten mine. 

113

ENVOI 

Edinboro Lake, Pennsylvania 1969 

Goodnight my starlit cup of lake, 

my sky-enclosing kettle of stones, 

my graveyard grass where long 

before dawn I watch the waves, 

as eaten galaxies implode and shatter, 

as near Arcturus plummets under, 

gone in black ripples into the inky depth 

of the lake from which no light escapes. 

Not even Venus can penetrate beneath, 

not stars as vast as red Antares — 

with but a blink the mere 

consumes them. 

Tree branches arc in ardent circles 

around the muffled street lamps. 

The leaves all lean toward Polaris, 

but get no messages from vacant space. 

The maples here are Chekhov women, 

immobile yet convoluted, their spires 

a-twist in their outward yearning. 

Now the fog comes trailing in, 

lapping the lake mist into its tresses, 

weaving the stinging fronds of frost 

it will leave as winter’s prophecy. 

The last canoes have long withdrawn 

(fish hang inert like tea bags, sleeping, 

and fishermen lay in quilted dreams). 

The frogs are falling silent, 

the huddled ducks have vanished, 

the paper-thin fluttering of bats 

shuts down as the moon descends 

behind the trees and chimney tops. 

Here is the heart of life’s memory, 

in stillness so fine 

a spider would dread disturbing it, 

and here, as I bid 

this haunted place my farewell benediction, 

I join the ghosts of yesterdays 

(Oh, many myselves are walking here, 

weeping and laughing 

by the old high fence, 

114

in and upon the sleeping lake, 

myself in a hundred moonlit crossings, 

myself on the ice as I ventured out 

to hear winter’s ominous timpani, 

its gusts that drove me back 

to the shore) 

Tonight I make another ghost, my last. 

Stars will not sing so well where I go, 

nor waves reveal the cosmos singing 

in a hard place of steel and glass. 

Goodnight, my lake-lit cup of stars, 

my stone-embracing kettle of sky, 

my dawn-wet grass where lapping waves 

sing solemnly to crumbling graves, 

my youth, my heart, 

my first-found home. 

AT THE VERGE OF SPRING 

When the snow, which veiled the slumber of lakes 

withdraws in mist, and when speckled earth 

is damp with leaves’ regenerative breath, 

I return, as I must, where the willows 

raise up their green, rebellious banners 

against the looming Canadian clouds. 

When the fog, which hailed the warming of earth 

raises its skirt over spring-swollen streams, 

I come with books in the fold of my arm, 

regard how white violets kiss the sun. 

Gone are the months of frozen endurance 

and dreaming of love through the trackless stars. 

Now earth unburdens its hoarded harvest. 

Things stir in ice-numbed crevices, seeds crack, 

a million legs quiver in webbed cocoons, 

gelid eyes open in buried eggs, 

and the tightly wound fern, a universe 

of foliage wound into a fractaled fist 

tenses, as do the nuclear maples, 

the bacchanalian twist of grapevine, 

the never-retiring undulant grass, 

the cannonade of peeping crocuses — 

all are waiting for a signal to explode. 

Veni, veni Creator Spiritus. 

115

SCRAPS 

It is a trust. 

A box for each of you 

sits on my shelf, 

opened from time 

to time to add, 

subtract, refine 

your stored essence. 

Some are trinkets, 

a souvenir of youth, 

a lost moment 

in an aging house, 

an empty setting 

for a lost sapphire, 

a frayed ribbon 

from a forgotten gift. 

Still I keep them, 

a row of tiny 

sepulchers 

among my rarest books. 

On rainy days 

I rearrange them. 

In dark of winter 

when a friend 

becomes a former 

friend, a new box 

joins its brethren. 

It is a trust, 

this little mausoleum 

of lost souls, 

young hopes 

and broken promises. 

Inside the box 

your better moments wait 

unentangled, 

kneeling to no one, 

man or god. 

You are in there 

as I saw and loved you, 

a sunburst on canvas, 

a day lily cantata, 

an ardent poem, 

your hands 

amid the clay, 

your tapered fingers 

arced in arpeggios. 

116 

I will keep them. 

Though you are not 

what you were then, 

though life has clogged 

your arteries with grief 

and demons taunt you, 

I will keep them. 

One autumn day 

you may return 

in quest of dreams, 

in need of fire, 

that spark of self 

that nearly died. 

THE TEA PARTY 

New neighbor girls have settled in. 

We hear the squeals and screams, 

the mother calls and father scoldings 

through the open windows. 

An angry hedge divides us in back, 

though our houses lean together, 

shingles and sagging porches 

almost blending, identical 

weeds abuzz with bumblebees. 

The low-slung church 

of solemn Mennonites 

sits glum and silent 

across the street. 

The girls’ names are Faith and Abby, 

my mother tells me, 

ten and seven in stiff blue dresses. 

Their parents never speak to us. 

Just up the hill, behind a fence, 

white-washed and cedar-lined, 

Charlene and Marilyn, 

the Jewish girls 

live in the great brick house 

(anything brick 

is a mansion to us). 

I play canasta with Marilyn (my age), 

learn to admire her parents, 

watch as they light 

the Chanukah candles, 

move among them summers 

as hundreds congregate 

at their swimming pool.

Their mother loves opera, 

but not, she says, 

not Wagner. 

One August day, 

an invitation comes, 

crayon on tablet paper, 

for tea with Faith and Abby. 

My mother says, Be nice and go. 

I sit in their yard 

with toy furniture. 

The doll whose daddy 

I’m pretending to be 

has one arm missing. 

The tea, which is licorice 

dissolved in warm water, 

is served in tiny cups, 

tarnished aluminum, 

from a tiny aluminum teapot. 

I want to gag 

from the taste of it, 

but I sip on and ask for more. 

Now Faith addresses me. 

“I’ll dress the baby 

and we shall take her to church." 

“Oh, we don’t go to church,” 

I told my newfound Mrs. 

“Never, ever?” 

“Not even once?” 

I shook my head— 

I’ve never set foot inside a church. 

“That’s just what Daddy told us!” 

Abby exclaimed. “You’ll go to Hell!” 

“You’ll go to Hell and be damned!” 

they chanted, 

“You’ll go to hell and be damned!” 

“What else does your Daddy say?” 

I asked them. “He says 

you’ll go to Hell and be damned, 

because you’re atheists and heathens.” 

Faith looked fierce, 

She poured more tea 

and made me take it, 

as if it were holy water, 

as if I would drink 

baptism by stealth. 

She raised her cup daintily, 

glanced and nodded 

at the fence and the cedars. 

“Charlene and Marilyn 

will go to Hell, too, 

right to the bottom 

of the flaming pit, 

because they’re Jews 

and murdered Jesus. 

Would you like ice cream now?” 

TWO, GOING ON THREE 

We moved a lot. 

Each neighbor hill and hollow 

distinctly named: 

Gibson Terrace 

post-war bungalows 

stuck together, 

laundry hanging 

on wooden accordions 

shirts and pants billowing 

in the tiny yard 

I could walk now 

so I did — 

wind spun me around — 

it rained — 

the houses looked alike — 

a kind girl brought me home 

to a spanking 

* * * 

I won’t eat eggs 

hate the yolks 

that look like eyes 

117

my mother seats me 

outside in sunlight 

says eat those eggs 

eat them for daddy 

the sun behind her 

a yellow orb, 

spoon poised 

to feed me 

my birthday comes 

and Christmas — 

I make a row 

of tiny trucks and cars 

from the tinseled tree 

back into the kitchen 

where bacon sizzles 

and the eggs, 

scrambled, 

no longer terrify 

* * * 

Everson 

behind a roller rink 

whose music and clatter 

keep everyone awake 

all night the lights 

burn through the slats 

of the venetian blinds 

I sit in my crib 

and see the spiders spinning. 

They make their webs, 

catch tiny moths and flies, 

make little white mummies. 

one night they find me. 

I cringe in a corner 

as hairy legs cross 

the lighted stripes on my sheet 

I scream for mommy 

she comes in 

doesn’t see them 

doesn’t believe me 

tucks me in tight 

back they come 

from beneath the crib — 

118 

others drop down 

on silk parachutes — 

I am still and silent 

as they move about, 

weblines crossing 

in the light above me. 

Then I see one 

at the edge of my vision 

one left another right 

They sensed me 

sensing them 

so they have come for me 

A tiny voice says 

No one will come 

No one will hear you 

We can do anything. 

by morning my face 

is covered with spider kisses, 

I am potato head swollen 

rushed to a doctor 

for witch hazel ointments 

My mother learns 

a lesson in dusting 

* * * 

I dream of flying 

free in the air 

all the way up into clouds. 

Night after night 

I learn to levitate 

right off my bed 

up to the ceiling 

then out of the house 

and over hill and valley. 

I tell my mother 

how easy it is to fly. 

She points to the zenith 

and shows me an airplane. 

Then she draws a picture, 

shows me wings 

and spinning propellers. 

if you put your hand out, 

she tells me, 

the propellers would chop them off,

then cut the rest of you up, 

just like a meat slicer. 

now in my dreams 

I fly over cloud tops, 

but always an airplane chases me 

closer closer 

I look back at my feet: 

razor propellers are closing in. 

I see the pilot’s 

cap and goggles. 

I fall I 

wake up screaming. 

Now when daytime airplanes come 

I run to the house 

cover my ears against 

the meat grinder engines. 

* * * 

after my bath 

the afternoon paper 

fills me with questions. 

how do those symbols 

turn into words you speak? 

what is that thing 

in the picture? 

that’s a tank, my mother says. 

it’s like a car, 

but rolls on those rubber treads, 

see — they go round and round 

just like this rubber band 

around my fingers. 

what’s underneath? I ask. 

if a tank ran over you 

what would happen? 

it would pull you inside, 

she told me. Yes, 

when a tank gets you, 

it pulls you in and chops you up. 

she wants to get a vacuum cleaner. 

it works just like a tank: 

things go inside 

and are never seen again. 

I think I want to live with grandma. 

THE OUTCAST 

The boy is not like 

the others. 

Their bikes ascend the hill, 

storm down like whirlwinds. 

He always walks, their wheels 

a dervish dance 

whose physics baffle him. 

He passes the practice field, 

hopes no one will notice him 

as he carries his books 

on the way to the library 

(they don’t wear glasses, 

don’t read anything 

between June and August). 

He has no idea 

what their cries mean, 

why it matters 

that a ball goes 

this way 

that way. 

When they let him come, 

he runs with some older boys, 

over a fence he can barely scale, 

watching for dogs that bite, 

to the forbidden 

apple tree. 

They climb to reach 

the great red ones. 

From high above 

they taunt him, 

dare him to join them 

at the sky-scream treetop. 

He stands below. 

Climbing a tree 

is one of many things 

he’s not allowed to do. 

They talk about baseball 

and BB guns, 

the cars they’ll drive 

when they’re old enough, 

the names of girls 

whose breasts have swollen. 

119

He reaches up 

for the lower branch 

takes unripe apples, 

unmarred by bird or worm. 

Walking alone, 

he sees a daytime moon, 

wonders how Earth 

might look from its craters. 

He goes home to his comics, 

to the attic room 

where aliens and monsters 

plan universal mayhem. 

Don’t eat those apples, 

his mother warns him. 

They’ll give you a stomach ache. 

I like them, he says. 

Green apples taste better. 

WATCH DOG 

The thing that had been a puppy once, 

running at heels, 

delight of the kitchen, carried 

like an infant despite 

its dubious parentage, 

welcomed on laps in the living room, 

stretched out for the petting hand, 

was now that skeletal hound 

on stilt-like legs, 

a yellow-eyed, encrusted cur 

at the end of a chain, 

in a cloud of hopping fleas 

by his little death-camp house. 

He ate his designated scraps. 

He howled as the moon 

rotated in its own imprisonment. 

He barked dutifully at cars, 

at interloping rabbits, 

at the free dogs standing 

at the forest’s edge. 

I was four when he licked my cheek — 

thirteen, when I thought: 

Death cannot come soon enough 

to close his eyes. 

120 

ENGLISH BREAKFAST 

i 

Grandmother died yesterday, 

a little girl tells me at breakfast, 

and Mommy says we’ll inherit something. 

How English, I think. 

The teapot hides 

in a quilted cozy. 

The sugar is cubed, 

the silver spoons polished 

by the Irish maid. 

Not one pinched face at this table 

can extrude a tear. 

ii 

On the street, a moving truck 

is engorged with furniture. 

Its double-doors close. 

A thin, pale woman 

looks back at the T udor 

house, the round hill, 

the enclosing oaks. 

I suppose I shall miss it, 

she tells her husband. 

It had too many rooms, anyway. 

They drive off. The house 

settles and sighs audibly. 

A branch falls 

from an embarrassed maple. 

iii 

My father, whom 

I have not seen in thirty years, 

tells me of his memories: 

Your grandfather took me out 

for a beer once. 

I was twenty-six 

and in the army. 

It’s the only time 

he ever really talked to me. 

When I write, I call him “Old One.” 

He signs his letters, 

“Don.”

THE NOSEBLEED 

1968 

Dizzy and bloodless I am wheeled 

into the emergency room. Nosebleed 

for hour on hour has left me senseless. 

This is a very Catholic hospital. 

A nurse with clipboard demands my name. 

She looks with scorn at my hair and beads. 

“Bet you don’t have no job?” she sneers. 

“I’m a student. At Edinboro.” 

“Drugs!” she says. “They’re in here 

alla time.” 

“Nosebleed,” I say. 

“I don’t use drugs.” 

Nosebleed, she writes, 

as I choke on clotted upheave. 

“What’s your religion?” 

“None.” 

“I gotta put something here.” 

“Say atheist.” 

“Well, that’s a first. 

I don’t know how to spell that.” 

“A—T—H—E—I—S—T.” 

“You could be dyin’ here 

an’ you wanna say atheist?” 

“You want me to lie on my deathbed?” 

She snorts. “I should put down Protestant.” 

They wheel me in. I’m in and out 

of consciousness. Later I wake 

in a deserted wardroom. I want to know 

how long I’ve been here, how much I lost. 

I find the cord and buzzer 

that says it will summon a nurse. 

I hear a distant bell ringing, 

hear voices at the nurses’ station. 

Words fly to me like startled birds 

“Appendicitis” 

“Babies” 

“Pneumonia” 

then “The hippie in 15-B” 

A male voice laughs. “We’ll make up 

something special for that one.” 

I ring the bell again. No one responds. 

121

I wake again at mid-day. 

They wheel in food on a cart. 

A plate is put before me — 

amorphous meat, a glistening heap 

of masked potatoes, some soggy greens. 

I take a spoon of potatoes 

wondering real or instant, 

bite down on razor shards of glass, 

put hand to mouth and see blood streaming. 

Rip tube from face spitting rush 

for the bathroom 

rinse rinse spit rinse 

swabbing the blood with a towel 

tongue bleeding gums bleeding 

dressed myself hastily 

left there no one stopped me 

walking walking hitch-hiking southward 

glad I never swallowed 

my special hippie atheist breakfast. 

A WING OF TIME 

This village street will always split me — 

half in the gray-fringed present, 

half quarked away in time 

from dull today to that brilliant 

yesterday — a day I am not yet 

twenty and the maples seem shorter, 

the houses whiter, the sky 

a bluer blue through eyes unclouded. 

I stand before a dingy storefront. 

Back then it was a dress shop 

with but a single mannequin. 

Next to it was Gorman’s 

steamy laundromat 

churning students’ underwear and towels, 

a nickel-dime-quarter juggernaut 

accumulating lint and buttons. 

Above the laundry, beyond that rotting 

window frame, was my first apartment. 

Was it fifteen dollars a month I paid 

for two converted office rooms, 

a hallway bathroom and shower? 

Are those the same curtains still, 

tattered and colorless as I found them 

and left them? The same glass, 

122

certainly, through which I watched 

the leaf-fall, lightning, snowstorm, 

the neon light of the Hotel Bar 

(no one under twenty-one admitted!) 

I see the pale green painted wall 

not changed in grudging landlord years. 

I climb the narrow stairs, pass down 

the beer-corroded corridor to my door, 

whose frosted glass was once gold-leafed 

with some insurance agent’s name. 

Do I do this? Are my hands, nervous, 

solid enough to knock, or am I dreaming? 

My tap on the glass is real enough. 

A thin blond woman answers, puzzled. 

I tell her I lived here as a student, 

oh, many years ago. 

Could I just stand here a moment, 

look out her window at the village green? — 

where someone, in unintended irony, 

has placed the town’s own name 

in giant wooden letters, 

as though the inhabitants 

needed to be reminded, 

the traveler admonished. 

A wave of heat rolls through the trees outside. 

Were it a wing of Time, whose darker side 

enfolds the past, what memories appear? 

I see the vanished store whose wooden frame 

extends into the square, a blur of green 

as sycamores sawed down or thunderstruck 

burst back to view. A sigh of life unfurls, 

the lake regains its water lily bloom, 

long-dead sparrows rebuild forgotten nests, 

and on the street, departed friends go by — 

Squat Bertha goes to get her mail. Next door, 

her restaurant slides to its bankruptcy, 

unpaid employees and a sheriff’s sale. 

I heard her scold her harried waitresses 

for wasting moldy pie. Do it like this! — 

a sweep of knife across the furry crust — 

now serve it with a smile! Above her store, 

she had her quart of beer, remembering 

the brothel she ran in her Erie days. 

123

The men in her rooms are boarders, students. 

Deans and professors eat at her table. 

Head high, she’s almost respectable now. 

I see four shadows in the alleyway — 

three high school boys and a retarded girl. 

She goes there often. They catch her there, 

against the wall their prying hands adept 

at raising her skirt, stealing quick pleasure. 

After the shadows mingle, pressed on brick, 

sneakered feet scatter in every direction. 

Outside the bar, the college boys loitering 

swoon as Jamie and her sketchpad pass them. 

Her tied-back hair jet black, her almond eyes 

Eurasian orbs of challenge and surrender. 

Her breasts move through their dreams 

like wrecking cranes. 

Her siren silhouette, voice-song, Muse-call, 

perfect things, untouchably sufficient. 

It was enough that she existed here. 

Now others pass: a student prince who died 

in megalo-brainfire tumor madness; 

the tragic bronchial artist coughing, 

imagining consumption’s early death; 

one, two, a half dozen for Vietnam, 

whose jungles would cripple or kill them 

(one whose body was never found, looks up 

as though his ghost and my vision had locked); 

my best friends, the mad and sad ones, strolling 

on by as though I still awaited them — 

the best of their time, the dreamer drop-outs, 

acid, depression, poverty and war 

cutting its swath through my generation. 

In this interval a hundred have passed, 

known and unknown, the loved and the yearned-for, 

all of them still before their beginnings, 

not drinking the poison of compromise, 

not marrying lies, not yet denying visions, 

not using youth to engender monsters. 

They do not see my future looking down, 

not one of them seems coarse or mediocre. 

And there, impossibly, I see myself, 

a younger form, approach. 

He has a funny, bouncing walk. 

His eyes are wide with poems. 

124

He enters through the door below, 

his footsteps sure upon the stair. 

I turn, I face the darkened hall. 

I will hide until he has passed. 

He walks toward his future, 

I, my memories. Which of us has 

the better bargain, I do not know. 

I think he was very foolish 

to linger here, 

as I was foolish to return. 

Yet this is what I learned: 

I always thought others the meteors, 

racing on by, too hot to touch, 

never quite seen or palpable. 

I thought the world a-spin 

away and beneath my grasp, 

yet here it sits, slow in its orbit 

as a banana slug. 

And now I understand it: 

I was the meteor. I am the meteor. 

I blaze through. Eyes grow wide, 

then I am gone. Nothing remains 

of me but these etched words. 

125

POETRY MOTELS 

A Helms amendment 

to the arts budget 

surprises everyone: 

a Poetry Lodge 

in every major city! 

The artist’s rendering 

is out of Beowulf: 

a great mead hall 

where bards convene, 

drink tankards of ale, 

pot after pot 

of exotic tea. 

Poets do readings 

around the clock. 

Yet something’s wrong 

with this T udor palace. 

Feet stick to the carpet. 

Wallpaper grabs you 

like vampire Velcro. 

Sit once on a bench 

and you cannot stand. 

A giant eye glares 

through the leaded glass. 

The senator intones: 

Poets check in, 

but they don’t check out. 

REGAINING THE MUSE 

Silent this voice for more than a year! 

My head now bowed with other laurels, 

I am back to poetry and its finer lyre. 

Time and this book alone 

shall tell if I am stronger now — 

or if the shining, word-wise daemon, 

whose gaze and beckoning 

I shunned and spurned 

like the advances of a rasping crone, 

shall now return to guide my pen. 

126 


Muse! come to the window I deck 

as of old 

with that solitary flame 

that you alone can see! 

Here the paper, here the pale blue lines, 

the furrows I plow again 

with fountain pen; 

bones, rock & root the silences 

I move away to plant a newer crop: 

sonnets to scrape the bellies of clouds, 

elegies whose solemn tears 

tap roots into the strata of dinosaurs, 

lyric sprouts that will contain 

whole languages. 

Beware my harvest, for dragon’s teeth 

lurk in the words I plant today! 

The Muse will take me back. 

Have I not given everything 

to consecrate myself to her? Like all 

who serve poetry I gave my youth, 

heedless of age’s hunger and need. 

I gave her blood, though she in turn 

could never give me bread! Look at me: 

the scribbling thing I am, 

addict of adverb and adjective, 

drunkard of Orphic utterance, 

I am what she made me. 

THE RIVALRY 

You have him now. 

You call me on the phone to gloat, 

to read me back the very poems 

I might have written 

if he had stayed with me. 

He’s fickle, though. 

Whole nights he’ll keep you 

there, the candle lit, 

the ink point dipped and dried 

and dipped again, 

awaiting the turn of the knob, 

the press of hands 

upon your shoulders, 

the soothing tenor that says 

“Go on, I know you can 

do it!” The chaste kiss

that pulls the chosen words 

to the tip of your tongue, 

the fingertips 

upon the small of your back 

that make the pen move faster, 

the fury in the feather bed 

as you hold him 

and the Remington pounds on 

in unassisted typing. 

He can leave you 

speechless, wordless, 

worn to a stump and steaming, 

with only half the words 

that galloped through you 

caught in your exhausted diary. 

He’ll stay 

until the wine is gone, 

until the coda of the Ninth, 

with luck 

until advance or royalty 

replenishes the fridge, 

but he is not yours 

any more than he is mine. 

He has a little book. 

There is a list. 

There is always a name 

about to fall from his lips 

as he has his way with you, 

a name with too many 

syllables, or too few. 

While I pretend to sleep 

he reads my manuscripts. 

Sometimes he laughs, 

sometimes he reads aloud. 

(One poem he tucked 

into his Levi’s, 

and I cannot find a copy.) 

He has your name and mine. 

He knows just when to call us. 

I’m a little relieved 

to know he is with you, 

to know where he is at all. 

Tell him, if he gets restless, 

that I am thinking of him, 

and I’ll return the favor. 

Maybe we’ll both write hundreds 

of poems this year, 

sharing this slim, blond, bearded 

lover, keeping him earthbound, 

wearing him down to domestic, 

that unreliable Muse. 

POETRY READINGS 

are like that: 

your exit solitary 

as your arrival 

not to be fooled 

by the promiscuous heap 

of coats at the door, 

or the applause 

which scarcely conceals 

the shuffle of chairs 

and notebook leaves; 

or those obsidian eyes 

that beam back everything 

one says, fit neither 

for sight nor selfreflection. 

Sometimes you leave 

with but the taste 

of one great poem 

lingering — 

sometimes it was yours 

to give. 

Like that, 

you say, yet I have 

hope for more than that, 

for poems more bronze 

than potato chip, epics 

more fire than glutamate, 

lyrics more subtle 

than sweeteners, 

hungry, pit bull verse 

anaconda twining 

piranha bite 

nerve end and ganglia. 

127

Instead you tell me 

I’m doomed to hear 

a reading of limericks, 

some office memoranda 

and passionate bills 

of lading; perhaps 

some neolithic chants 

recited by chanellers 

for the dead; 

the angry howl 

of class struggle — 

my poems, I say, want touched, 

bristling with verbs, tongued 

with significant commas, 

lonely, they do not sleep 

well alone, resent 

an audience of one. 

They turn in their bed, 

accuse me 

when I come home 

like that. 

PATHETIQUE SYMPHONY 

We come to the windows 

on rainy nights. 

Dogs bay behind us. 

We press our hands and faces 

against the panes. 

The waltz beyond the curtains 

lures women and men 

to brazen whirl, 

hands so daring and confident, 

slim waists turning, 

strong legs keeping time. 

We hear the beat 

but not the melody, 

we see the figures 

but not their visages, 

barred by lace and lock, 

senses numbed by leaded glass, 

by the storm behind us. 

Do they know we are watching? 

The servants pass by, 

trays heaped with wines and sweets. 

No one comes to the curtain, 

128 

no lady, alarmed, cries out 

and points toward us, 

no one observes 

our hunchback silhouettes 

in lightning fire. 

No carriage came to take us. 

But then, we do not dance. 

We are in rags — the beggar’s children, 

half breeds and excommunicants. 

They dance to threes, 

we only hear five/four in thunder time, 

lopsided beat of the lame man’s waltz. 

One day we’ll sing at their misfortunes. 

One night we’ll dance 

upon their graves. 

DECONSTRUCTION IN WISCONSIN 

He is the perfect critic. 

He brings his subjects home, 

bribes them with promises of glory. 

Then he drugs and dissects them, 

fries their biceps in a skillet, 

stews their livers, 

eats their hearts. 

The dull knife was chosen for cruelty. 

The victim should hear as well as feel 

his flesh being riven, 

veins torn with rip saws. 

He has ruined seventeen authors, 

still working on his doctorate! 

He is not fastidious: 

torsos of sonnets in the ‘fridge, 

a headless novel beneath the bed, 

fragments of verse in maggoty array 

upon the chairs and tables. 

His victims’ intentions, 

their very will to life, 

can only make him smile. 

He knows better. 

His is the discerning eye. 

He is here to deconstruct. 

Attend his lectures and he’ll 

reveal the secret: 

Literature is meat.

UNEMPLOYED 

to the Modern Language Association 

A Muse, disheartened, walks the streets these days, 

not in accustomed neighborhoods, no longer visiting 

the solitary lamplit room, the airy loft or garret. 

Her diadem is shattered, her tresses shorn. 

Her robes trail in the gutter. One of her sandals is torn. 

Gnawing a stale roll she tells the counterman, 

“It wasn’t always like this, you know. 

I was somebody. No one I favored 

was ever quite the same again. Poems and symphonies 

have been named for me.” He shrugs, 

refills the pitiful spinster’s cup. 

She eyes her soiled bundles, piled by the door — 

all she owns — a wand, a sheaf of paper (blank), 

a music score with empty staves, 

an artist’s pad uncharcoaled, 

a wad of amorphous clay. 

“So what?” another diner jibes. 

“We all got troubles. The banks have closed. 

The crooks have looted everything. 

Even when you get a job, 

the goddamned government takes half 

of everything!” 

She sips her coffee silently. Alone of all 

the downtown derelicts she’s bankrupt by decree. 

Over and over she reads the wadded clipping 

from the English professors’ convention, 

where it was solemnly declared: 

CREATIVE GENIUS DOES NOT EXIST. 

She doesn’t know where to sleep tonight — 

the library porch with the pigeons? 

the stairwell next to the museum? 

the alley behind the college bookstore? 

Or perhaps, if this goes on, 

the shallow depth of the tar-black river? 

129

DEAD POETS 

thirteen thousand lady poets 

Poe said 

gave all their verse away — 

no wonder he starved! 

too many poets, 

that’s the problem! 

too many living 

poets, 

not enough glory fodder 

to feed us! 

what’s a poet to do? 

Become a Dead Poet! 

It’s a guaranteed path 

to glory, fame and immortality! 

There’s the Memorial Reading. 

Your friends will come. 

Writers who barely knew you 

pen verse in your honor. 

Then you appear 

in the best anthologies — 

something about closed brackets 

around your years 

seems to appeal to editors. 

Critics discover you 

(they never feed on anything living) 

repeat your words 

and have their way with your meaning — 

no one cries rape 

when words are ravished — 

It matters little that your neighbors 

have forgotten you — 

already the next tenant 

shops for oven cleaner/ 

new tools in the garage/ 

oblivious traffic hums on the bridge/ 

It does not count 

that everyone you slept with 

is bedding down 

with the worst surviving haikuists, 

that even your best beloved 

has put your books in the cellar — 

130 

what’s temporal fame 

when someone can write 

a doctoral thesis 

on your use of caesura, 

your bittersweet alliteration? 

So do it quick — 

perish and publish! 

WHO CAN BE A POET 

ALL THE TIME? 

Who can be a poet all the time? 

The sons of rich fathers, 

remittance men — 

spinster heiresses with hyacinth hair, 

filling long sheets with 

delicate verse — 

the wrinkled don retired at last 

to his monument of sonnets — 

the very young — the truly mad — 

the Muse-possessed 

(not just visited, inhabited 

by the poem-urge) — 

But for the rest of us, 

being a poet 

is at best an illusion, 

at worst a vice. 

A thing of glory, certainly; 

honor or profit? 

not in this age! 

We migrant poets must distill 

into a hundred poems, 

the brandy of their thousands, 

lift up our frail mimosa leaves 

beneath their skyconsuming 

oaks. 

They are at it, day and night. 

The mail truck groans 

with their outgoing manuscripts. 

They teach this stuff. 

Honest to God, they are paid to do it! 

They sniff at one 

another’s résumés. 

Their blurbs adorn 

each other’s jackets. 

They are weighed down with medals.

The rest of us must steal these hours, 

scrawl debtors’ ink 

on dime-store paper, 

consort with the Muse 

as though adulterous, 

secret as those frenzies 

in the alleys of Sodom 

between the angels 

and the damned. 

In the anvil world we live in 

we are impractical, slothful, 

lounging for adjectives 

when we should be “working,” 

shouting our newfound lines 

against the surf, 

to the dead in graveyards, 

to the astonished grackles 

on our window ledge — 

absolutely useless, this 

non-commercial, anti- 

Puritan ethic obsession — 

Except that for these moments 

we would nothing trade, 

knowing that those who follow us 

would forfeit fortunes 

for such a poetic seizure, 

for a mouthful of words. 

DIAGNOSIS OF E.A. POE 

Poe, rabid? Never! 

A doctor avers 

from a yellow medical chart 

that Edgar died 

in Baltimore, 

not in the drunk 

delirium 

of the election night gutter, 

not walked like a zombie 

from poll to tavern, 

tavern to poll, 

signing ballots in shaking hand 

as Edgar Montresor 

and Allan Pym, 

Hop-Frog De La Poer 

and Edgardo Prospero— 

no, not this, 

but a terminal case 

of rabies. 

The question is 

what bit him? 

Was it a fleeting bat, 

a crouching wolf 

in some graveyard, 

a foaming-mouth hound 

at the tavern door, 

a squirrel 

he reached out to feed, 

ungrateful! 

Or out of the inky night 

did a red-eyed raven 

descend, raking its claws, 

its unforgiving beak 

across his forehead? 

Poe, rabid? Never! 

He was immune, I say! 

He had the scars 

of wounds long healed — 

the pestilential bite 

of the critics, 

of his Judas Reverend 

Griswold, 

the lamprey fangs 

of New York lady poets. 

_____________ 

Note: After Poe was driven out of New York 

society by squabbling admirers, and after the 

New York poetesses interfered in his 

courtship of Sarah Helen Whitman, a 

Providence poet and eligible widow, Poe 

disowned them all, writing, “I shall forever 

shun the pestilential society of lady poets.” 

131

AGAINST THE WRITING 

OF SONNETS* 

This is a concentration camp for words. 

Barbed wire is twisted every other beat, 

Five steps to posts where perch 

the sickly birds 

Who caw and mock the drum 

of marching feet. 

Say there is order here, that granite Will 

Can herd our random, halting thoughts 

to rhyme; 

Say, if you dare, that you would 

rather kill 

The genius than reveal the tyrant’s 

crime; 

How you prefer the ordered life to one 

Where Chaos and the subtle spark of fire 

Might topple gods with but 

a phrase begun 

And uttered freely with an untuned lyre. 

Sing hard, and let the prison pillars fall, 

Crushing our captors, guards — 

and Muses—all! 

______ 

* William Carlos Williams rejected the sonnet 

as a “fascist” form. 

RHAPSODOMANCY 

At loss for inspiration I turn 

to my Occult Encyclopedia, 

open the book at random 

to see what curious lore 

I might deem worthy 

of a passing verse. 

Maybe a curse, 

a spell, an oracle or two… 

The book falls open 

somewhere at “R,” 

I let my finger 

(the oracular one) 

fly out to the left 

until it touches. 

I look and read. 

“Rhapsodomancy,” it says, 

132 

“Divination by means 

of opening the works 

of a poet at hazard 

and reading the verse 

which first presents itself 

oracularly.” 

I laugh. 

So poets don’t need 

advice on magic. 

We are magic. 

OF THE MAKING OF BOOKS 

1973 

What is it about ink 

poised over virgin paper 

if pen, a word at a time, 

why not a press, 

page upon page repeating? 

Plate, blanket, roller, 

compressor, roller, sucker, gripper 

(the guts of unromantic offset 

supplanting Gutenberg) 

the lift and thrust of the sheet 

no hand has touched, 

the slurring commingle 

of ink and water in foaming fountain 

till stanza follows stanza 

canto and chapter — 

sheaves to be folded and sewn 

into a hundred books, 

five hundred books! 

I call it making paper babies, 

my dingy loft on Sixth Avenue 

a hatching hive of chapbooks. 

I sat on the fire escape 

outside my soot-grime windows. 

The moon has long since set, 

street dark in cast-iron canyons. 

It is insufferable August — 

I want to sleep in coolness — 

the press churns on behind me, 

the infeed pile diminishing, 

the finished sheets descending.

I know its sound like a heartbeat, 

just how long I can linger 

before the ink needs tending. 

I watch the late-night drifters below: 

rag pickers and winos and psychopaths, 

a junkie laden with burglar tools 

eyeing each storefront, 

some swearing brawlers 

from the lesbian cycle bar 

around the corner, 

the blur of cabs with 

rolled-down windows, 

blear-eyed drivers barreling 

in homeward trucks, 

the dilatory patrol car 

beaming the doorways 

for sleeping bums 

or a glimpse of frenzied sodomy. 

Inside, I empty the paper bins. 

It is three a.m. I can still print 

another signature, wait out 

the early dawn on the fire escape. 

I cannot sleep anyway. 

Sometimes it seems I work 

for the machine. 

There has been little profit in this, 

yet everywhere I go in this rusted city 

poets are gathering. 

A multitude of hands lift up 

these books. 

In chorus they chant 

Just off the press 

My latest 

Please buy one 

1996 

The cast-iron street is floodlit now 

the columns as white as marble 

bed bath and book and clothing stores 

draw thousands here. I always pause 

to look up at the forgotten loft 

where I began my consummate folly. 

I have dragged this book madness 

two decades now. My closets explode 

with unsold volumes, 

projects half bound 

and then abandoned, the beached whale 

guillotine cutter in my bedroom. 

The poets I published are dying off: 

the Village Sibyl Barbara Holland gone, 

now Emilie Glen, my poetry mother. 

I hear it said at her memorial 

that these things mattered after all, 

that little books are voyagers, 

bottle messages into indifferent seas, 

rockets to the future. 

In this world of too many books, 

so much bad verse and rotten prose, 

it is hard to believe it. 

Yet it was thus with Poe, 

Whitman and Dickinson. 

Barbara haunts Morton Street, 

and Emilie, Barrow. 

Only their books wing onwards, 

perching on brownstone rooftops, 

flapping their shiny covers, 

ready to plunge when least expected, 

open to that page, 

that singular poem, 

that line with its magic 

in words that stay. 

133

FINALISTS — CHRISTIAN LADIES’ 

POETRY SOCIETY COMPETITION. 

MARCH TOPIC: “BABIES” 

I. INFANT BREATH 

Dictated by Maudlin Carroll 

(Note to self: Must win this! 

What to write about babies? 

Cute? Dead? Fetuses? 

No, no, sick babies!) 

O baby pink and soft, 

O Heaven’s gift, 

so feeble at my bosom 

(can I say bosom?) 

wheezing and crying. 

You cannot sleep 

for God the Father 

who sees & knows all 

has given you asthma. 

Your every breath 

is a gagging Golgotha. 

How can this be? 

Is it something 

the parents did? 

Did Satan creep in 

to the nursery? 

Out, Satan! Out, Demons! 

Mistress Maudlin on her knees here. 

I may be only a babysitter, 

but I’m better than medicine. 

Throw those pills away! 

Open a channel! Open a channel! 

I hold the baby against me. 

It’s wheezing, wheezing. 

I pray, squeeze, 

pray 

squeeze 

(Note to self: 

look up correct Saints to evoke 

from Catholic Enyclopedia) 

Oh, thank you, Lord. 

134 

The baby is quiet now. 

Completely quiet. 

Hardly breathing. 

Not … breathing. 

Oh dear, what have I done? 

(Note to self: don’t send this 

to the Christian Ladies’ 

Baby Contest) 

(Note to self: burn this.) 

**** 

II 

MY BABY 

by Chastity Mugwich 

See my baby. 

It’s sicker than yours. 

No fault of mine, 

no crime passed on. 

Clean I am, 

washed by the Lamb 

of all trace 

of Original Sin 

(no ring of crime 

around this collar!) 

Your baby is plain, 

its sickness vulgar. 

Asthma! Poppycock! 

Look at my baby. 

His tiny hands are bleeding, 

holes in his ankles 

the size of penny nails. 

Of course he’s crying! 

look at that gash 

in his torso! 

Lift his ringlets now 

and see the perfect circle 

of never-healing 

little thorn pricks. 

My baby is special, you see. 

He has the holy sickness, 

Stigmata! 

******

III 

MY LITTLE ANGEL 

Name withheld by request 

My baby doesn’t cry. 

Look how he beams. 

See that glow 

above his forehead. 

It’s not the sun: 

it follows him day and night. 

See these presents: 

mountains of toys, 

fragrant spices, 

gold bars and platinum 

from his trio of godfathers. 

Say what you want. 

Make fun of me, 

unwed mother. 

You’ll all be sorry 

when my little boy 

splits the earth 

like a walnut 

and all the dead pop up. 

Laugh all you want 

at my food stamp life. 

I hear you whispering 

as I nurse my little one. 

I know you’re watching 

in the silence beyond 

those pillow-covered walls. 

I’ll never tell, 

I’ll never tell 

Who the father was. 

135

THE SHY ONE 

NOT A LOVE SONG, NO, NEVER THAT! 

What use to tell you now — 

you’ve held these poems in your hand 

like objects made for someone else — 

that your mahogany eyes 

inspired these orphaned odes? 

I polished them 

that you might see yourself, 

transformed 

in coat of myth 

within their glassy hearts, 

to no avail. 

Our dialogue descends 

to means of gravity: 

this ode I’ll wrap 

around a meteor. 

Perhaps when you wake 

to find my verse 

has cratered your lawn, 

perhaps when the hole 

in your roof gapes out 

upon the streaking Leonids 

of my passion, 

you might perceive, 

at last, 

a personal intent 

to my art. 

THE COMPANY OF EAGLES 

Your promises loom ahead of me, 

the swelling egg of them 

ready to burst 

at the nudge of a clock. 

The phone wire, door chime 

repeat expectant silences, 

anticipate your wingbeats. 

Your promise 

of an intimate visit, 

the just the two of us 

136 

at the corner of your beak — 

what will come of it? 

Those predator eggs you guard 

may come between us, 

and if they hatch, 

what then of dinner and wine 

and candlelight? 

Will the eaglets shrug 

at my proffered feast, 

go off instead 

to some mountain eyrie 

to preen and pick their feathers clean? 

Or will they just pose 

by the dining room door, 

sip tea with their beaks, 

stamping a tango 

on my harpsichord? 

Will they stay for the night, 

make nests of my furniture, 

pick my wallet clean for stuffing? 

Will they be satisfied with poems? 

If all the flock, unlettered, 

go streaming away 

when the lights are dimmed, 

will you remain 

to hear me out, 

to loan me your wingspan, 

your shadow, your mute 

but overarching company? 

Perhaps your icon is false, 

your place on flag and coin, 

seal and warplane 

not merited. 

Bird-killing bird, 

rabbit hunter, 

assassin of squirrels, 

sneak thief of cub and pup 

and kitten — 

what kind of country 

picks a raptor bandit 

for its emblem, anyway?

MAKING LOVE IN UNLIKELY PLACES 

the places 

have not changed: 

our deerwatch tree 

the tombstone seats 

that sheltered us 

the nightpew darkness 

of candled church 

where we once loved 

the same birds nest, 

the same dead sleep, 

the same god promises 

his immanence. 

you always asked 

why here? 

because our loving 

carved an anchorhold: 

I undress you forever 

beneath this tree 

press you lake-wet 

against this stone 

drop sacrilegious kisses 

in our pew-length fall. 

It never ends 

because the place endures. 

ODE 15 

1 

Another year, 

the sun resembles itself 

but does not fool the trees 

who shun its cool imposture. 

Buds open reluctantly, 

their slanted eyes askew 

with annual doubts. 

It is never the same, 

each lap of light a ghost 

of former springs, each ray 

a waning monument 

from where a darkling star 

gluts space 

with ever diminishing mass. 

The universe forgets itself— 

an idiot sun implodes 

into a fathomless mouth, 

both feaster and food 

adjourning to nothingness 

at the event horizon. 

The earth spins blindly on. 

2 

I have not lost you. 

Your disassembled eye 

rides in another’s skull today. 

Your disconnected arm 

hooks onto mine at dusk. 

Tonight before I sleep 

your mouth surprises me. 

It is better this way— 

each bit of you a ghost 

returning on an X-ray wind. 

Each day an icy shard of you 

drops off some glacial height 

onto an unsuspecting face, 

as though the gods that made you, 

singular, had tried to make another. 

The universe deceives itself. 

Though ardent spring explodes 

upon the feathered fields, 

it is a new spring, slate clean, 

the past — if there is a past — 

amnesia’d in wormhole transit 

to the fiercely blazing present. 

I wait in solitude. If ghosts 

present themselves, they’ll rage 

because they cannot say their names. 

If phantom faces seem to be yours, 

I love them for the lie they speak 

of being you. 

137

ODE 22: A HAUNTING 

There is a time — 

the unseen interlude 

between the twelve-top 

and the descending one 

(the dark-side moon 

of the clock face) — 

in which you await me. 

The painted stars 

upon that vault of heaven 

can neither set 

nor circle the Pole Star. 

The trees 

on that horizon 

have turned resplendent gold, 

but no leaves fall 

upon the perfect polygons 

of paving stones. 

The moon 

hangs full in copper hues 

a permanent sphere 

no longer dieting 

in giddy cycles. 

The night 

bears warming breezes 

but no hint of dawn. 

You are there 

like the sleeping stones, 

the eternal dead, 

the ever-refilling 

sea — 

I cannot join you. 

Not for me 

your geologic stillness, 

your celestial patience. 

My clock 

ascends to midnight, 

tumbles to dawn. 

I do not count the heartbeat 

between dimensions, 

never taste water 

at the cusp of poison, 

never permit silence 

to reveal your breathing. 

138 

It is enough 

that you are there, 

a ghost in my synapses, 

psychokinetic 

within the pendulum, 

a spring that never relaxes. 

You are my bottle imp 

of unsought kisses, 

a jinn from whom 

I make no wishes. 

Asleep, 

I am beyond your 

eye-blink affections, 

your mercury promises. 

Your name 

is not the one I call; 

your immaterial hand 

is not the one I touch; 

your form is not 

the pressing thing 

that pins me to the bed 

as I hear the chimes 

and count thirteen. 

FRONTIER 

Frontier is defined 

as that which beyond 

which is irrevocable danger: 

eternal dusk 

beyond the clearing of forest, 

the padding wolf, 

the lurking Savage/ 

a book of white pages 

where no pen has gone, 

dune after dune 

unstained by ink/ 

the distance between us: 

our hands have not yet touched 

and hesitate as though 

some killing amperage 

lurked in opposing poles/

the terror of first buttons, 

of touching turned explorer, 

of the point beyond play 

where fiercer passions lie/ 

frontier at last is seen 

as where you cannot go forward 

without becoming citizen 

of my dark kingdom, 

and where I cannot 

return without some victory — 

a champagn’d kiss, 

a falling together, 

a storm-lit moment 

of sky-impaling joy. 

Or is it our doom to stand, 

each at our wall, 

because you wait for some divinity 

to raise you up to lofty love? 

How long until you learn at last 

that gods were never men, 

nor mortals divine? 

ODE 14 

You think you are alone. 

I watch your hands 

flash white 

at turn of page, 

follow your eyes 

from line to line. 

Hands do not blush, 

the reading eye 

cannot avert, 

the mind 

does not suspect 

my omnipresence. 

Counting the beat 

your fingers trace 

these lines. 

You even whisper them 

as though my ear 

were intimate. 

You never suspect 

I dream of you, 

touch back 

your outreached consciousness, 

concealed like boy in shrubbery, 

lover in moonlit garden, 

writing a serenade 

anonymous, 

stalking this poem, 

alert between letters, 

casting my net from stanzas 

to catch you. 

CONTACT 

I know we said we’d never — 

but for a moment today 

we passed a foot apart 

on the angry pavement, 

sun in your eyes, 

the snow in mine. 

The edges of our shadows touched, 

an overlap of gray penumbras. 

My shadow dips down to page 

with its own pen. 

It gets there first, 

mocks my writing 

with invisible ink, 

writes words 

in a nearly forgotten tongue — 

O nuit cendré, 

sous l’ombre de la lune— 

la où un spectre resuscité 

se chante, 

son sang enteint d’une rouille noire, 

son oeil Cyclope, 

comme un abime d’onyx... 

_______ 

Translation: O ashen night 

beneath the shadow of the moon— 

where a risen ghost 

sings to itself 

its blood a black rust 

its Cyclops eye 

like an abyss of onyx... 

139

ODE 8 

What I would say to you is not in words. 

Lips move to speak it but fall to silence. 

Your name poised there on my inhaling breath 

Refuses to go out again exhaled. 

You passed, and did not know I called to you! 

What matters your name suspended in air, 

when you could speak to me in flush of neck, 

in blood’s rampaging beat, in arching back, 

in thrust and out of quickly tautened thighs? 

You comprehend my eyes when they blurt out 

what I would seize, and what surrender. 

My thoughts have burned your flesh, my ardent will 

has rent the wall, the room, the barricade 

of cloth between us. Give me but one touch, 

one chance to change the no upon your lips 

to the animal yes within your limbs! 

Your arms reply to unsaid sentences, 

your soul comes forth from lonely catacombs 

to join with me. We are a rhapsody 

of fingers dancing, hair entwining, legs 

in a quilt of crab and spider quivering, 

until a flash of lightning consummate 

thunders and flares to pass between us. 

Who gave? Who took? Whose seed is where? 

Make we a child? a poem? a demon of air? 

What I would say to you is not contained in words, 

though I must be content to live in them. 

This hollow rib-cage symphony of one, 

unpartnered dance of single skeleton, 

is how my melancholy half calls out, 

summons in silence what no words can dare! 

140

NOT A LOVE SONG, NO, NEVER THAT! 

1 

At last I have found you, 

but you do not know you are found. 

We dance a circle; 

you move as though you know the step — 

you do not know the melody. 

Each turn centrifugal pushes us out 

from the center where all 

must finally touch. 

You make no gesture to hold me, 

but every parting says Come back. 

If my eyes speak truth, the midnight hunger, 

you pretend not to see it. 

It is, perhaps, your kindness not to. 

Like a sparrow I take my shreds of encouragement, 

make them a pillow in the shape of your torso, 

an incomplete reflection 

a shattered Greek marble 

that I embrace before sleeping. 

I resolve never to tell you, 

unless by chance you read this, 

how you have companion’d my dreams, 

how I would trade the touch of your fingertips 

for an empire of another’s kisses. 

I shall be impossible to dislodge 

from my seeming friendship. My roots 

are deeper than I can let you know. 

I can endure your silence, your absence even. 

I can make airy transcendence of all 

except your ultimate refusal. 

Ah, that I delay! That is my stratagem! 

You must never suspect that I love you! 

2 

Expecting you’d never love me 

I had no stratagem. Defenseless I lay 

like tree refusing a hurricane, 

bending to its airy thrust, 

enduring in silence its hammerfist. 

And thus you came, uprooting me 

from sense and reason. 

I was upright, impossible to touch 

except in formal ways 

(so much in a handshake, a hand 

lightly laid upon shoulder). 

Now I am horizontal, pinned 

beneath your will, 

your arms my sky, your breath 

the outer limits of my cosmos. 

141

Lightning erupts 

between our fingertips, 

empires expire 

before our tongue-filled kiss 

exhausts itself. 

The secret I kept is no secret. 

You had read between the lines. 

The reconstructed gods, perhaps, 

came to your dreams and said 

the things I dared not tell you. 

I pull you down toward me — 

it is as though I embrace a world — 

fierce with eagles and ruby’d heart — 

pulsing with rivers subterranean — 

At last you have found me. 

I did not know I was found. 

3 

This night I have bound you. 

Soundless you lay in your moonlit bed. 

The dancing is finished now, 

the candles guttered, the incense dead. 

The symphony of contested wills, 

the tug-of-war and centrifuge 

led to the touch that kills. 

Your terrified screams revolt me — 

your shudder when I touch you tenderly 

slaps me as magnet fields repelling — 

but still your eyes say Stay! 

You push my overarching frame 

yet hold your strength at bay. 

Your midnight hunger is for pain, 

for pleasure taken at your body’s cost. 

It is my kindness to refrain 

from seeking the false coin of your consent. 

My eagle talons shred your breast — 

You gasp and bleed and call for more— 

I’ll wing you up into my eyrie nest, 

Embed my beak in your aortal core. 

Though you’re alive and wishing death, 

I will dismember and reassemble you 

within my house of broken idols — 

god busts, fragments of athletes, 

storm-tossed remains of graveyard angels. 

You love this violence 

but never tell me so, 

unless by chance I read it 

142

when I invade and spy your dreams. 

I was with the incubus, the succubus, 

the Cossack, the Nubian 

the Grand Inquisitor, 

the sailors, the motorcyclists, 

the Roman legions 

who peopled your moist and passive nocturnes. 

Theirs was an empire of lust, 

mine the throne. 

I am the Emperor twice deified — 

already dead 

and thus impossible to kill. 

You cannot dislodge my iron embrace, 

my root has entered you. 

You can endure my motions, my molten fire: 

you may even grow to like them. 

But that I delay! That is my stratagem. 

Now my unwelcome face is all you see. 

I am the thing you loathe, that loves you — 

the hunchback, the phantom, the night-bred bat, 

the child the mother scorned, the father beat, 

a thing the grave refused, condemned 

to stalk the shadows of your undead sleep. 

You must never divulge that you love me. 

LIGHT YEARS 

Love someone, cold star, 

that I may someday hear of it. 

Love anyone, blink out 

if you must to black hole suicide 

to prove the depth of your feeling. 

Go nova! Fill up the galaxy 

with the news of your passion. 

Make our sun blush 

to see the blaze of your triumph. 

Be not like me, a sullen star, 

a white dwarf, dwindling, 

a tremulant pulsar, 

bypassed by all 

in this expanding 

universe. 

143

ODE 19: LOVED ONES 

Loved ones, the early dawn’s 

illusion-loves 

seem still the finest 

though rippled dead 

in the sea of years 

Loved ones 

for whom mere sight 

was swooning, 

words full 

of double, triple meaning, 

eternal prospects, 

each falling into 

and out of 

as certain and final 

as the death of dinosaurs. 

Loved ones 

afloat a haunted lake — 

desperate trees, 

bone-dry bird nests 

a brambled heart 

wintering on promises, 

utopias delayed 

in permafrost, 

star-speckled night 

nerved with nebulas. 

Yearning was more 

than having, 

as every elm tree 

leaned with me 

toward the absent beloved. 

Loved ones 

outgrew those student days, 

subsumed to normalcy, 

sank like a stone to suicide, 

took up the faith. 

The stars I named for my beloved 

shrug off their brightness, shamed 

at their worldly outcome. 

Pursue the Beloved, 

a Sufi advises me. 

It seems I hurled them skyward — 

Andromeda and Venus, 

Mars and Ganymede— 

I am too fixed a star, 

my orbit limited 

144 

(evading black holes 

of death & depression, 

wobbling a little 

when some new planet approaches) 

Loved ones 

escaped me: 

the more they changed 

the more immutable 

the past became, 

as what they were 

and what I am 

danced endlessly 

in Autumn air. 

ODE 20: DESERT SONG 

To you, who in the West 

sift sand and sorrow 

in the shadow of scorpions — 

I send you Spring. 

Your swollen sun 

has seared the desert, 

parched the throat songless — 

the rap of rattlesnakes, 

drum of earthquake, 

suffice for sonnets — 

Your brittle wind 

comes cloudless 

bearing a hostile clarity. 

It is a place 

where nothing much happens 

except by stealth, 

like the subtle growth of cacti. 

A semblance of love 

rolls by in sagebrush, 

a furtive kiss 

like a coyote in the scrub, 

your heartbeat alone 

in ghost town stillness. 

Turquoise and silver 

are sky and water 

petrified, fit wealth 

for mummified warriors, 

hammered and joined

so that no flood 

or thunderbolt 

can break their geologic calm. 

Come back 

to the enveloping East — 

our hanging gardens still 

bloom and blossom — 

to hills where rain clouds linger, 

where symphonies spring 

like astonished ferns 

from every stream bed. 

Leave to the desert 

its golden nuggets, 

its neolithic defeats, 

its meteor-scarred wastes. 

I send you this sprig of lilac, 

this magnolia explosion, 

this weeping willow branch, 

this bloom of carnelian cherry. 

RENUNCIATION 

I rose at dawn, looked down upon 

the length of you asleep there, 

moon-like, your naked back 

curved down 

to slightest waist, the white of you 

more luminous than silk, and softer. 

I lay back down beside you then, 

cupping the curve of you against 

my sleepless breathing. Your stillness, 

a pearl’s perfection in the shell — 

did it ignore, or take me in? 

Was my entwined embrace your wish, 

or a thing you merely endured 

below the threshold of wakefulness? 

It was too real — not real enough! — 

this summer night — this thing you said 

you always wanted, yet withheld, 

a consummation I wished too, 

yet kept at bay like a tiger. 

Now one night’s storm has sated us. 

It was the grape — not you — 

that spoke. 

By the time you said you loved me 

it did not matter who I was — 

only that I was there, and willing. 

*** 

Riding the southward bus, I watch 

the gray New England towns go by. 

I gaze as things become themselves, 

emerging from mist and darkness: 

these are not trees, but power poles, 

clouds are not blankets or curtains, 

but mere conflations of vapor. 

I lean my cheek against the chill 

of glass. I could be no one now, 

a cipher in a rattling morning bus, 

going from nowhere to nowhere, 

eating my lunch without thinking, 

ignoring my fellow passengers, 

hollow as a serial murderer. 

My hands that touched you 

now want to hide from me. 

The day draws on, and still 

these brickwork towns are all alike. 

Which one do you live in, anyway? 

What color are those eyes of yours? 

What bridges, streams and rotting mills 

are yours, what sunsets 

and diving crows, 

what steeples penetrating your view? 

Is every spinster shutter yours, 

are yours the hands 

drawing those shades to darkness? 

Are these drear trees the same 

sad troop that line your garden? 

The rancor of my leaving you 

pursues me thus like an ash cloud. 

Tall buildings loom, New York 

a tombstone row of granite, glass. 

It must be five o’clock — by now 

you’ve read the letter 

I propped upon your table top. 

I close my eyes. It rains 

inside my face. 

145

TRIPTYCH 

i 

Eros, 

you are a child no more: 

you have grown ripe for mouths to taste, 

tongued tender neck to shoulder line 

breast taut and sloping down where firm 

yet yielding to a poet’s fingers 

what dragons beneath the belly 

in longing flesh awakening! 

I set my eyes upon you now 

in your statue-perfect moment — 

ah, winged-foot kouros, do not move! 

Beneath your sandaled tread the earth 

indents and hardens, hungry clay. 

You swim the sea, delight the waves 

foam-white with arm- and legstrokes bold; 

when you turn back, the ebbing tide 

tugs out and downward, desperate, 

like a disappointed lover. 

Sea beasts thrust up green tentacles, 

amazed at your beauty, craving 

the hoarded air in your rib cage. 

Your vanished body, diving, mocks me. 

You cannot drown! The gods have much 

to utter through your vocal chords! 

A lifeguard zephyr transports you 

above, beyond the crashing surf. 

Eyes closed, you ride on mist and cloud, 

immobile as marble, your hair 

a boreal banner of gold 

across the blind, astonished sky. 

You do not see the eyes that watch you, 

do not acknowledge worshipers; 

your youth an uncrossable chasm. 

I hesitate to speak, my hand 

in greeting grasps you too lightly. 

You flee the seven-hilled city. 

I watch from a bench on the summit 

as you hurtle down Angel Street. 

Long I linger, long I watch for you 

as you turn down the twisted lanes. 

But you are always departing — 

your future is too much my past. 

146

You are too beautiful to touch, 

almost too beautiful to live 

in our tawdry and tarnished world, 

unbearable Phoebus, a searing star! 

2 

Philia, 

more rare than lust, more lasting, 

desiring all and yet beyond desire; 

the unseen walker-beside of dreamers, 

first ear to my poem, fresh from the pen. 

You are the comforter of solitudes, 

the perfect thou in silent communion. 

For you the bread is baked, the teapot full, 

the door unlocked, the sleeping place secure. 

If you come for a day, or forever, 

it is the same to me — what’s mine is yours. 

I swear I shall not pass a day with you 

unless it be filled with astonishing things. 

At night, the room you sleep in breathes with me, 

the darkness between us webbed with moonlight, 

cicadas heralding my dreamless sleep. 

Scarce half a dozen times I’ve met you now, 

soul mate and artist and fellow outsider. 

How many leagues we two together walked, 

how many ancient stones deciphered! Worlds 

turned within us as we riddled science; 

with thought alone we toppled cathedrals, 

lived in all ages and nations at once, 

counted as friends the poets and sages. 

(These the mingled streams, the parting rivers, 

the memories that are always with me, 

friendship true in a world without honor, 

with brothers who choose us, and whom we choose.) 

3 

Agape, 

rarest and last of all the affections 

you are the solace of the spurned, 

of those who cannot trade 

in beauty’s coinage, 

the vestal hope of those 

whose love outlives the body — 

you are love’s eidolon. 

You are the stillness preceding dawn, 

the hush that follows the thunderclap: 

you are lord of all benevolent silences. 

147

Even the unremembered hermit 

can find your silken threads each morn, 

dropped like fine ash from the burning stars. 

Where you recite your enigmatic verse 

tribe, shade and totem slip away, 

and all become ensoul’d in one great heart. 

ii 

My beloved is three-faced, 

triptych in unity. 

Approached, he hesitates 

to give his name. 

One name is not enough. 

Lust is too quickly slaked 

to hold him long, the vows 

of hollow fellowship too soon betrayed. 

No one suspects the aspirant god 

in his bones, defying weight, 

yearning toward the zenith. 

Am I to be your lover, 

brother, 

fellow spirit? 

Is my yearning for hair and bones? 

For hearth and soul mate? 

For winged companions to Olympus? 

I do not know, 

cannot define 

my troubled and troubling affections. 

And as for him, 

Adonis, Atys, Adonai, 

who knows what he means 

by being beautiful? 

148

THE WATCHER 

The love that does not touch, 

that makes no penetration, 

requires no mirror back to verify 

that what is real is real. 

This love excels all lovers. 

The unmailed letter superior 

to the letter returned unread, 

the passion that leaves the eye 

as a gift to beauty. 

Love thus, in secret, and love again. 

Enlarge the heart 

(O it has many chambers!) 

If the loved one be as oblivious 

as a fieldstone, 

so be it! Moss clings, sun warms, 

water wears down — 

there are many ways 

to make love to granite. 

You say the love you give 

is not returned to you? 

Leave to the bankers 

the keeping of balances, 

the squeezing out 

of interest. 

Love is returned, somehow, 

in the ease of future loving, 

the cavalcade of youth 

pressing on by 

as you watch from the café window, 

marveling there is so much in you 

beaming back at them, 

so many qualities and curves, 

neck napes and striding legs, 

sungold, raven black & pumpkin hair, 

and the gemstone eyes 

of onyx, turquoise, emerald and hazel — 

what would they be 

if you were not there to love them? 

what coal mine darkness 

would they walk in, 

if we did not spark them 

with our admiration? 

Be not jealous of touching. 

Does not the air, 

thick with the ghosts 

of the world’s love cries 

press down upon you? 

Do not the star lamps 

warm you? Does not the tide 

crash out your name 

upon the lonely cliffs? 

Without desire, the universe 

would cool to neutrons; 

the whirligig of being 

would slow to a stop. 

So storm out! radiate 

your unsought affections, 

the passing poet, taking nothing, 

giving all. 

SUMMER STORM 

I am standing in the rain. 

The summer cloudburst 

clots the sky, soaks me 

as I stand in the unmown grass 

behind the summer cottage. 

The clapboards, streaked and shining, 

reflect the corrugated bolts 

of jabbing lightning. I stay 

until the rain-lash wears me down. 

I have left your easy sleep, 

your clutching arms, 

in the attic that quakes 

with thunder and wind, 

air like lost bats against the panes. 

I lay down rain-wet beside you. 

The candle is guttering, 

exchanges flashes 

with the expiring tempest. 

In me, a furnace burns 

within a heart of brass. 

In reason’s engine 

there is no rain now. 

I watch you turn and toss. 

I try to feel nothing. 

To think that you love me 

is hubris anyway. 

All of your nights are sudden storms. 

149

CHILDREN OF ATLAS 


Out of my sloth and sorrow I am called to write 

a hymn to struggle in the name of Mars. 

What does life want but more life? 

a shield, but a sword to clash against it? 

These cold winds brace us: we are of the North. 

I am the herald of a war-like spirit. 

Why are so many babies being born, 

if not to lean 

their shoulders against the weight of planet, 

defying its old inertia, its downhill entropy, 

to lift, strain upward and onward, 

to make a path to the very stars. 

Beat, drums, a march of rising beyond— 

we shall not fall into the flame. 

The pit has not been made to contain us. 

We shall take hold of this mighty sphere 

with force of will—and peals of laughter. 

We are the owners and drivers—not slaves— 

not tenants to tremble and bend the knee— 

we are of the earth entirely, 

capped in clouds and rooted in iron, 

not apart from Nature 

(not even the basest thing we do 

comes from anywhere but Nature). 

We are the destiny of carbon’s unfolding. 

One man spends seven years on a symphony; 

one waits with a knife in an alley. 

(Somehow, both are the same— 

somehow, very different.) 

We are all the children of Atlas. 

We need only a burden big enough, 

a sphere our own and a place to push it. 

To the old in heart, the death-fearing, 

the envious and self-defeating 

we have one message and one only: 

Stand back! Make room! We are coming! 

150

FIRST SNOW 

i 

Dwarf roses, faded, leafless, 

twisted branches gray and brown, 

intricately overlaid 

with pristine snow, pyramidal 

tracings of every line and arc 

in flakes of falling crystal. 

There is not a breath of wind 

to disturb this perfect canvas. 

Suspended within 

the latticework 

a thousand rose hips burn 

like sour radishes 

or petrified cherries, 

a memory of blushes 

and blood-flushed passion 

caught unawares by winter. 

ii 

An hour later, I pass again. 

The snow’s calligraphy 

is still untouched by wind. 

Rose hips still beam 

their ruddy messages. 

The sun has slid 

across the ice-sky 

to its low-slung zenith 

and one hundred 

astonished roses 

have opened their petals — 

dying as fast 

as they unfurl, 

their wilting edges burned 

by unkind frost, 

virgin Juliets 

no sooner born 

than entombed. 

The suicidal blooms 

lean to the sun, pleading 

their disbelief of darkness, 

the impossibility 

of sudden perishing. 

Love comes unbidden thus, 

as the capricious rose. 

THANKSGIVING THOUGHTS 

i 

Although base Nature made us 

and will have its way, 

we bow our heads in thankfulness 

that we do not live in a universe 

where all the food is gray. 

ii 

Just halfway through 

the holiday repast, 

the room explodes 

in fisticuffs, 

drawn knives 

and a pool of blood 

on the dining room floor. 

That’s how Thanksgiving ends, 

as every hostess knows, 

if too small a bird provokes 

an insufficiency of stuffing. 

iii 

Sixth place at table 

reserved for Squanto’s ghost. 

Over the steaming corn, 

turkey and gravy, 

cranberry red 

he utters the words 

his people would one day rue: 

“Welcome, Englishmen!” 

iv 

Apocryphal feast 

we learn about 

as we droop 

from sauce and stuffing: 

An immense turkey 

stuffed with a duck entire, 

its swollen cavity 

crammed with a hen, 

into whose bosom 

three pigeons, 

stuffed with quail, 

each tiny quail 

engulfing one minute 

hummingbird. 

151

As we walk home, 

wine-warmed and down 

in our vigilance, 

will some vast hand 

sweep downwards 

from the kettle-black sky — 

and after a suitable 

cleaning and marinade, 

will we be stuffed 

in turn inside 

some vast and whale-like 

cavity, waiting to bake 

slowly and tenderly for those 

who know Earth 

as The Food Planet? 

IMPROMPTU 

after a painting by Riva Leviten 

There are things the hands remember, 

things we could do in darkness, 

things that come back as fresh 

as childhood. 

Round, round, ready, write! 

the teacher chanted 

as our tiny thumbs fumbled 

to balance the ink pens. 

Pages of ovals and calligraphic lines 

on blue-lined tablets, 

all hands in unison 

as the steel-nibbed fountain pens 

flew like determined birds 

between the line above 

and the line below. 

Nervous at blackboards 

we stood with chalk, 

elbows and arms everywhere — 

Round, round, ready, write! — 

making large the magic letters 

that opened books and history. 

The hands remember after all. 

Pick up a pen, 

and the arm still traces 

the early morning drill 

of militant Palmer 

152 

who wanted every Christian boy 

and girl to race 

across a page as fast as a typewriter. 

No sloth in those fingers! 

No deviation from those capitals! 

Elide those letters into a graceful form! 

The hands remember, 

though the mind forgets 

each improvised or memorized 

note once played on a piano. 

One year I practiced 

in midnight classrooms, 

in an unlit organ loft 

until my hands could play the notes 

without my eyes’ assistance. 

If I play for a day, 

last year’s music roulades up; 

for a week, and a decade 

of music is back — from where? 

*** 

The mind remembers — 

vast Plato’s cave 

with a tiny door. 

What stuff gets in — 

flitting about 

the greater darkness? 

The words we read 

are all there, 

so too the music our ears 

embrace and echo 

in nautilus of nerve cells. 

Somehow the things 

we shouldn’t know 

stay in there, too: 

forgotten cruelties 

wiped clean 

on the external slate, 

the fluttering bats 

of a lifetime 

of migraines, 

the counting house 

of unforgiveness, 

and the darkness 

in which we dream, 

the void preceding 

then following 

our desperate years.

*** 

Hands wash themselves 

in midnight, 

begin to vanish, 

take forms 

of fluttering half angels. 

Yet they are stamped 

with trembling music, 

tattooed with staves 

they’ll twitch to remember 

even if amputated. 

The old mind 

peers out its upper door 

into the too-bright 

universe, 

beckoned again 

by those vowels 

inscribed on slate, 

the voice of a long-dead 

teacher intoning 

Round, round, 

ready, write! 

DUSK 

Red-purple dusk 

streaked with a bridge of clouds 

mirrors itself in placid waters 

(sea viewed from rushing train). 

Our hemispheres between — 

an unlit earth of willows 

and treetops, wired poles 

and slanted steeples — 

lies like a dream in black cotton. 

Full tree and bare tree 

stand side by side 

in the violet blaze, 

one a fulsome silhouette of youth, 

the other a waning skeleton 

X-rayed by sunset. 

Streetlights blink on, 

shatter this tensed moment 

when two immensities poise 

like cupped hands 

to cancel the earth. 

Now one by one the edison flares 

spark on in darkened windows. 

Dusk brings on fear, 

sun’s death 

and greater darkness. 

We huddle, dine, deluded, 

in our dim circles of finite light, 

while the night sky opens its irises 

into the orbs of watching wolves. 

AS IDOLS FALL IN THE AFGHAN 

HILLS 

What to do? 

What to do? 

Mail a Mullah 

a thousand portraits 

of Bodhisattvas. 

Airdrop a hundred 

thousand little Buddhas 

on tiny parachutes 

onto the streets 

of Kabul. 

Mate giant Japanese 

Buddhas with Godzilla, 

send their offspring 

to the Afghan Hills 

to sit serene 

in lotus pose 

(but watch their fire-breath 

melt Taliban tanks 

and send the soldiers 

shrieking!) 

Sky-write 

LORD BUDDHA 

from border to border 

in every known language. 

Or wait for Karma 

to burn the burners, 

shatter the shatterers, 

silence the mouths 

of the speakers of law? 

153

(No time, no time 

as the dynamite explodes 

a Buddha head 

from fifteen hundred 

years ago.) 

Let Allah, Buddha 

Christ and Brahma 

rage like comets, 

moth fluttering 

around the Man Sun. 

One vanity makes them, 

A greater vanity destroys them. 

Yet a child with hands in clay, 

in the mud by the riverside 

will make a new god 

with broad shoulders 

far-seeing eyes, 

a forgiving visage, 

a palm extended 

for the benediction 

of unbearable Beauty. 

This parched land 

needs its memories, 

its slender share 

of human fairness, 

against the dark night 

of goats and dynamite. 

SIX CHRISTMAS VERSES 

CHRISTMAS DINNER 

Spoiled meat and green potatoes, 

Sour milk and black tomatoes, 

All mixed in with something found 

Sprouting from a graveyard mound. 

Don’t eat Grandma’s mushroom stew, 

If you know what’s good for you! 

THE CHRISTMAS TREE 

Fall to the carpet! Cover your head! 

Go up the stairs and keep to your bed! 

There’ll be no presents for us to see — 

There’s a rabid bat in the Christmas tree! 

154 

A DECEMBER CUSTOM 

When Sarah wanted the men to kiss her, 

She stood just where they 

couldn’t miss her. 

She took them all beneath the door — 

Yet none of them came back for more. 

The moral’s plain — it only figures — 

The mistletoe was full of chiggers. 

OUR HUNTING FATHERS 

The snow was white, the snow was red, 

When hunters shot the reindeer dead. 

They tossed the sleigh into the lake. 

Hoping to hide their worst mistake, 

They torched the old fart 

in his crimson suit, 

Opened his bags and divided the loot 

JINGLE BELLS 

Carolers came to the end of the lane 

(They thought they’d cheer 

the widower Miller). 

If only they’d known 

the old man was insane, 

Dreaming the dreams of a serial killer. 

He asked them in for some 

Christmas cheer, 

Plied them with candy 

and soda and beer. 

They stayed and they laughed 

till they almost cried, 

Then choking on poison 

they promptly died. 

APPALACHIAN MARY 

O wonder of wonders! O day so lucky! 

The Virgin Mary will visit Kentucky! 

I hear an angel crying, “Hark! 

See Mary’s face in that twisted bark!” 

“No—there she is!—and I’m no fool— 

See her eyes in the swimming pool!” 

“No, here! No, here! Come see it, 

please— 

Her folded hands in this 

moldy cheese!” 

“T-shirts! T-shirts! Buy souvenirs 

Before the apparition disappears!”

THE ‘POSSUM 

Opossum along the refectory wall 

licks the underside of discarded meat wrappers, 

thin snout just fitting the oblong hole 

in a tipped beer can — 

it has a furtive, mustache kind of life, 

darting from shrub to shrub in lamplight. 

It has a wife somewhere that barely tolerates it, 

pink-skinned offspring it is too stingy to feed. 

Its best game is to be pathetic and inoffensive, 

to play dead, to feign an empty wallet, 

to always arrive at the cusp of dinnertime, 

to sidle up to one with those colorless eyes. 

He’s not quite bold enough to beg, 

too timid to steal the rat’s larder, 

content with grubs and offal that come easily. 

He makes his home in a steam-pipe cellar 

where other albino night things dominate. 

He is the lowest of the low, for even they 

cannot quite think of what they should call him. 

TWENTY-YEAR NEW YORKER, AFTER HIS EXILE 

Though I thought I had shed it, 

this city has grown on me, 

my head-top soaring 

amid the clouds 

fingers outstretched 

toward the harbor goddess. 

I am all of it — 

luster and greed, 

poet and dreamer, 

Helmsley and Trump 

lording it over the slums of Lorca, 

twin baby carriages 

with baby investment bankers 

scooting past squatter punks 

pierced and tattooed in rage, 

the towers clean and classic 

for an Age of Silver, 

the canyons squalid and smoking 

with phosphorescent agony. 

I can be all and celebrate all, 

make my inkwell of the things 

you dare not think of: 

the crumbling infraworld 

of steam pipes that, bursting, 

cook office workers like lobsters, 

155

the rivets and spikes that loosen 

beneath the wheels of the subway, 

the furtive shadow 

that gives itself in doorways 

to random takers. 

This is Atlantis, Babel, Gomorrah and Tyre, 

The Temple of Dendur, Tyrannosaur, 

Ming, Ch’ing and Tang ceramic 

Carnegie Hall, the Opera, the Symphony, 

the thunder thump of 1812 in the Park 

The nights of undulating ecstasy 

sparking still in a hundred thousand eyes 

in the city that will not sleep 

and will not surrender its secret yearnings, 

the pagan embrace of gods in underwear 

towering over neon flesh amphitheatre 

Times Square unsquaring America 

into Dionysian dervish naked dancing. 

I am the weed lot strewn with mattress springs, 

the chaste fountains of Lincoln Center, 

the pride of the library lions on Fifth Avenue. 

long-legged Athena strides here in the sunlight— 

behind her, a crack Medusa beckoning. 

Forward or backward? Where will this city go? 

Where its inhabitants? 

Jack hammers and dynamite 

remake my countenance, 

revise my profile. 

I am always fleeing this city to save my soul. 

I am always coming back 

to make it anew in marble. 

156

REVELATIONS 

as out of the burning bush 

the meteor’s heart 

the hieroglyph 

the tablet 

spoke god 

it said 

I am the sum of all that is 

I have never 

written a book 

dictated a law 

taken a wife 

sired son or angel. 

I do not answer plea or prayer. 

love whom you may. 

eat what you must. 

the planet is yours, 

stars too 

if you can reach them 

but neither out 

nor inward seek me. 

I am not at the Pole Star 

turning orbs mechanical. 

I have no wish to visit your dreams. 

I am and will be a mystery, 

the riddle between zero and unity. 

How could death bring you to me 

when you cannot discern me now? 

Go, now, and tell your brethren 

that god’s wish 

is to be left alone. 

I have spoken 

and will not speak 

again. 

ARABESQUES ON THE STATUE 

OF LIBERTY 

1 

Bad Dingo rides 

the Staten Island ferry 

dusk till dawn, 

clinging to rail 

nestling an all-night 

tumescence, 

hard at the sight 

of the robed lady, 

vast, 

unapproachable. 

He’s stalking her, 

biding his time. 

Some night 

there’d be a fog, 

a power failure. 

He’d come up behind her, 

prodding the small 

of her spine 

with his imperious knife, 

jostling her bronze buttocks 

with his ardent flesh prod. 

She’d drop the tablet; 

the torch would sputter. 

He’d push her off her pedestal. 

Bad Dingo would give it to her good 

the way he did to all the white ladies 

in parks and stairways 

and subway cars. 

This would be the rape of all rapes, 

the pinnacle of his career, 

the ultimate boast 

“See that toppled goddess 

in the harbor — 

she ain’t so proud now 

since someone had her, 

made her moan. 

Bad Dingo had her, 

stuck it to the Statue, 

white lady Liberty!” 

157

2 

In Chinatown, 

Mrs. Wang mounts 

a quiet rebellion 

against the ways of the elders: 

She has done all 

her mother has asked her: 

married the boy 

the stars ordained, 

bore sons and daughters 

in regular order 

burned joss and incense 

at every altar 

sending ghost gold and peaches, 

phantom cars and televisions 

Hong Kong Hell dollars 

to the teeming, greedy dead. 

Now her husband travels, 

has mistresses, won’t talk 

about his gambling. 

Her children are gone 

married to foreign devils. 

Her round-eyed grandchildren 

won’t learn Mandarin, 

won’t send joss riches 

to her when she is dead. 

Now she becomes a whirlwind: 

She sells her jade and porcelain, 

cleans out her savings account, 

buys an airline ticket 

for San Francisco — 

from there, who knows? 

She pawns the statuette 

of pearly white Kuan-Yin, 

the Goddess of Mercy 

whose only blessing 

was endless childbirth 

and washing and ironing. 

On a whim she buys another 

to take its place at her bedside: 

a foot-high Statue of Liberty 

with batteries and glowing torch 

she leaves it for her husband, 

her wedding ring 

on its spiky crown 

158 

3 

Today two New York titans 

switch places: 

A grumpy Green Liberty 

strides up Fifth Avenue, 

crushing pedestrians in verdigris. 

Her sandaled feet 

send buses flying, 

kiosks shattering. 

Her great head turns 

among the office towers. 

She reaches in, 

pulls screaming executives 

through razor edge panes, 

undresses them 

with her copper fingers, 

discards them to the pavement 

twenty stories below. 

The man she wants 

is not among them. He’s got 

to be blond, and a screamer, 

a yielding but unwilling male 

under her stern metallic nails. 

Uptown, she finds him: 

a curly-haired messenger, 

cups him in her palm, 

drops her tablet, 

rolls up her sleeves 

and starts the painful ascent 

of the Empire State Building. 

Downtown 

on Liberty Island 

King Kong wields a torch, 

incinerating all passing freighters, 

capsizing the passenger ships. 

He hurls great boulders skyward, 

picking off airplanes one by one. 

He is guarding the harbor now. 

He is a real American 

and he knows his business: 

Stay out. 

Go home. 

No foreigners 

allowed.

QUACK 

No wonder you’re depressed 

with all those demons in you. 

Just take this pill 

stare into the light 

till you’re very sleepy 

very sleepy 

very . . . 

The Devil’s there, 

(I knew it!) 

got his talons in you 

ever since the funeral 

you don’t remember 

when you went face down 

into an open grave 

Another demon got in 

when your daddy raped you 

on your seventh birthday 

(of course you can’t remember 

but you will) 

you have three bad sisters 

all sharing your psyche 

each taking a turn 

at making your life a ruin 

(your mother aborted them 

so their souls moved in 

to be near you) 

This is going to take 

one hell of an exorcism. 

Last session I discovered 

an animal possession— 

no, nothing awful, 

a harmless duck 

who never migrated 

when death took him, 

but we’ll have to evict him 

down to the last feather. 

Good thing you have insurance. 

Those Angels chattering 

in Aramaic 

are quite a nuisance 

when you talk in your sleep, 

came in when the nuns 

did that awful thing to you 

you say you can’t remember. 

We’ll need a specialist 

to clear them out. 

Don’t even consider suicide. 

There’s so much more 

you need to remember: 

the Montana Satanists, 

the livestock orgies, 

your uncles’ lewdness, 

that early miscarriage 

you keep on repressing. 

I count a hundred 

and twenty inside you. 

Ten dozen personalities, 

all of them neurotic. 

You’re one for the journals, 

more characters together 

than all of Dostoyevsky. 

Sign here, and here, and here. 

Use each of your names— 

that’s S-A-T-A-N, 

an “x” for the duck will do. 

Aside from the drugs 

and the hypnotic sessions 

we’ll have group therapy 

to iron things out 

among the lot of you. 

(Blue Cross alone 

will spring for a hundred thousand. 

God, I love psychiatry!) 

BOSTON LUNCH COUNTER 

The chili has no beans. 

The salad has no greens. 

The pumpkin’s rotten. 

The chef’s forgotten 

how to make chicken tarragon, 

and to wash 

after using the john. 

The flies are delighted. 

Two rats have been sighted. 

(That’s bad, for you see, 

there used to be three!) 

159

GUTENBERG’S HELPER 

On the rediscovery of the 

formula for cleaning types and 

presses, c. 1456* 

Johannes Gutenberg, my master 

would vouch for me, were he 

alive to honor my telling. 

I saw the first white sheets, 

limp and virginal, 

pressed wet against the type, 

those brooding Latin letters 

bound in like bees 

in a leaden hive. 

I watched them turn 

the patient screw 

that wedded the inked form 

to the hand-made paper, 

then peel away the miracle— 

God’s Bible in pristine text, 

a monk’s month of lettering 

passed off in the blink of an eye. 

Hard work it was: 

hundreds of letters and pairs of letters 

to pick and sort and reassemble; 

the thrill of firing the furnace, 

casting the molten lead 

to a’s and e’s and æ’s. 

They called him a madman, 

impractical, a dreamer, 

but when we finished, 

from alpha of Genesis 

to omega of Revelations, 

a song and a cheer burst forth 

from the humble shop in Mainz. 

You will not find my name 

in the annals of the printing art. 

I was the merest boy, 

not an apprentice, even. 

I was not paid a pfennig, 

but there is something of me 

in every page of Gutenberg. 

Ink, like blood, is thicker than water. 

Old type must shed its black 

or red ink scab 

before another page 

can be assembled. 

160 

So I was there 

to make the great Elixir, 

the secret noxious solvent 

to clean the type 

and the inking balls. 

I was Wasser Johann, 

he of the great bladder. 

Free beer they gave me, 

a barrel of ale 

at my disposal. 

Daily my personal springs 

replenished the reservoir 

of pungent fluid. 

I was the flood 

overtaking Noah; 

an ague overcame me 

to turn my Nile 

Mosaic red; 

I screamed one day 

as my kidneys parted 

for the passage of Israel; 

mine the waters 

of Babylon, of Nineveh. 

I’m a modest man, really! 

It’s not too much to say 

there’d be no Gutenberg 

without his Wasser Johann! 

_____________________ 

“Preparation of the leather so it would accept 

ink required the skin to be soaked in urine and 

squeezed out a number of times. … After a day’s 

printing, the leather was removed from the balls 

and soaked overnight in urine to keep it supple. 

Washing up the type after the form was printed 

also relied on the ever-present yellow liquid, 

creating a latrine-like stench in early print shops 

that one can only imagine must have helped 

keep the secret of the ‘black arts’ secret.” 

—Randy Silverman, “The Origin of Printer’s 

Ink,” Graphic Arts Journal, April 1994.

NEMESIS 

i 

If you are Cobra, 

King of Death, 

then I am Mongoose. 

Slither away! 

If you are Lion, 

slaying all, 

I am the Jackal 

who steals your prey. 

ii 

If you are Danger, 

stealing sleep, 

I am Pleasure, 

there till dawn. 

If you are Martyr, 

killing for God, 

I am the Ifrit 

who leads you on. 

iii 

If all your Ends 

are justified, 

I am the Means. 

Ignore the blood. 

If you are Noah, 

saving beasts, 

forget the people. 

I am the Flood. 

iv 

If you are Lot’s wife, 

looking back, 

I am Sodom, 

still calling you. 

If you are Caesar, 

dead in Rome, 

I, Queen of Egypt, 

am weeping, too. 

THE STERILE SQUASH 

One glance from Mrs. Trog 

and my porch vine withers! 

This hump-back widow 

has the evil eye for sure. 

She has no time 

to change a light bulb, 

but can linger here to stare 

at the florid blossoms 

of the squash I’ve nurtured, 

spilling from pot 

across the porch rail, 

clinging to cracks 

in the paved-over yard. 

One by one she darts them 

with her steel-gray orbs, 

her kerchief twitching 

over her rigid coif. 

The fat orange blossoms 

quiver with fear, 

the florid leaves 

brown at the edges. 

These vines will be spinsters, now. 

No bees will come and play here; 

only winged wasps 

like nattering nuns 

will hover, warning away 

all pollinating visitors. 

Sunlight! slant away! 

Nor’easter! bring on 

the rotting microbes. 

This garden is cursed! 

A block away, 

in her darkened house, 

my landlady drinks tea, 

smiles at a dusty vase 

of plastic roses, 

beside the urn 

of unremembered ashes. 

161

VERMONT IMAGES 

for Don and Laura 

1 

The trees are everywhere, 

straight as arrows. 

The rocks abound, 

sharp-edged for tomahawks, 

or smooth for grindstones. 

The sky is screaming 

with warrior clouds. 

How sad to see 

the abject Abenaki 

joined by their blond 

half-children, 

dancing a pow-wow 

in a college gymnasium, 

unseen by sun 

and cloud and badger, 

ringed by vendors 

of New Age regalia. 

Do I see angry Manitous 

at the wood’s edge, 

turning their backs 

on this shabby magic? 

2 

The year has expired 

on the mountain slopes. 

Blueberry bush 

with mottled leaves, 

unclaimed fruit 

blue-back and shriveled. 

A solitary grasshopper 

poised on a branch 

outliving his welcome 

as frost approaches. 

Whose woods these are — 

black cherry and beech, 

white pine and alder — 

Frost’s poems posted 

where paths converge — 

lines to read aloud and ponder — 

as the trees mark their places, 

reseed their tribes. 

162 

Trunks trooped like ranks 

of opposing armies, 

ready to flag 

in crimson, yellow, 

or green-brown camouflage. 

We are peaceable, 

preferring tree-bark solitude 

to the world’s wars — 

but look! seed bullets fly 

at rival mountains — 

squirrels scavenging 

the hand grenade pine cones. 

Seed pods fly parachute 

into the helpless valley. 

Every seed covets 

the empty upland pasture, 

life against life 

for a little space, 

a piece of sun, 

a root in the rocky soil. 

3 

Black crows descend 

upon a field of pumpkins, 

claws down on frostfringed 

globes, 

then corveaux rampant 

on golden orbs, 

right claws raised, 

right wings extended 

flock falling everywhere, 

yet each upon 

his chosen fruit 

assumes the same 

athletic pose. 

Is this the way of Wotan? 

Will they go off in threes, 

in perfect formation, 

swift as a dream, 

a premonition, 

casting their shadows 

upon the doomed, 

a flying scythe 

hastening with names 

to the Lord of the Dead

three ravens fly 

for every death, they say, 

their caws identical 

to rip a soul 

from its casing 

(like seeds they crave 

at the heart of pumpkins). 

4 

Mist-shrouded mountains. 

Alders, 

upland pastures with 

stubbles of harvested cornfields. 

Birch skeletons 

on the dark slopes, 

inverted white thunderbolts 

as though the earth 

would chide the sky 

for its acid rain weeping. 

Mist rises like steam 

from pastures, 

yesterday’s sun-heat 

hoarded by wheat root, 

reluctant radiant 

this rocky ground. 

Tiny red leaves of maple – 

explosive love letters 

inscribed at night 

like Tatiana’s declaration 

to haughty Onegin. 

The missives are everywhere. 

The trees are expiring 

in their adolescent 

passion. 

Letters unread, 

mocked by the wind, 

crisping to unintelligible 

wrinkles as winter comes. 

How the earth 

and all its tenants 

yearn for embracing — 

for a harvest this once, 

without reaping 

for an October that lingers 

till springtime, 

banishing in pumpkin splendor 

the sad, drear days of solstice. 

DEAD PRINCESS 

Not huntress, but hunted 

Not chasing the antler’d stag 

but run down like the fallow doe 

Not arrows, but flashbulb quivers 

fell you, hands reach 

to seize your garlands, 

tear some trophy 

from your dying. 

Not princess, and not yet goddess — 

Your temple a marble tomb, 

an island inaccessible. 

Gamekeepers cross 

in a humble rowboat, 

leave flowers for you 

as at an altar 

London becomes a pagan festival, 

where every living flower is cut 

and laid amid tears & sobbing 

as if to affirm in desiccation 

that all must die, 

that bloom once cut 

is never resurrected, 

no matter how many requiems. 

Proud state that claimed permit 

from Jove 

to trample the far horizon 

calls now for this mere mortal 

to be sublimed at once to temples: 

grave and grove and mourning day, 

sacred to Diana. 

CAVE DEUM 

For once, dyslexia is truth. 

The letters dance 

and re-arrange 

to make mundane 

and seldom-heeded messages 

an egg-hatch of deeper meaning. 

CURB YOUR GOD! 

the sidewalk placard urges 

(I look in the gutter 

for feathers or angel hair.) 

163

THIS BUILDING PATROLLED 

BY VICIOUS GUARD GOD! 

Icon of Doberman 

red-eyed and drooling 

on a wooden sign. 

BEWARE OF GOD 

the windows scream out 

behind geranium pots, 

crisscross of burglar gates, 

a holy muzzle waiting 

for the hapless intruder. 

A little mercy, at least, in 

NO GODS ALLOWED 

(EXCEPT FOR SEEING-EYE GODS) 

BY ORDER OF NYC 

HEALTH DEPT. 

A god chases a cat, 

another god barks, 

while yet another genuflects 

to anoint a hydrant. 

What revelations emerge! 

See how the citizens 

dragged by their leashes 

walk round and round, 

pulled by a howling caprice, 

a quadruped perspective, 

losing the tug of war, 

always back home 

with the same god they left with. 

Some use their gods 

to fend off strangers, 

some train their gods 

to fetch or kill. 

I see it now, 

the truth made plain. 

Oh, my Dog, how can I tell them? 

164 

DRAMATIS PERSONAE 

Shakespeare’s Gay Bar 

on Christopher Street— 

now there’s a roster of royalty! 

That dark one, brooding, military, 

wins sympathy with his battle scar, 

then smothers his lovers with a pillow. 

Richard the Second’s been had 

by absolutely everyone, 

a poor, limp, passive thing. 

Richard the Third is into dungeons. 

Young Hal hangs out with Falstaff, 

a chubby chaser. 

Old Hal is a pompous bore, 

gives speeches while inspecting 

the troops. 

Old Henry the Eighth 

had dozens of lovers 

(one hot season, 

then off with their heads!) 

There’s poor old Lear 

in his long underwear — 

the Fool is always with him. 

That’s Danish Hamlet playing pool, 

loon-crazy and going on 

about his mother. 

Titus Andronicus works in the kitchen 

and does a mean stew. 

Gloomy Macbeth, counting his change, 

thinks the bartender has cheated him. 

That spot-lit table aglow with gems, 

false breasts and curls 

and boy/girl charms 

is throne tonight to Cleopatra, 

black-eyed and shrill and sharp 

as an asp, 

waiting for Caesar, Mark Antony 

or any Italian worth dying for. 

Take your pick. They know their lines. 

You need not seek an audience— 

just be one.

ARTICLES OF FAITH 

Things are in the saddle 

And ride Mankind. 

—Emerson 

I will tell you of 

a man, a horse, and a journey. 

There are as many ways of telling it 

as there are pearls in the sea. 

*** 

The man lets go the reins. 

The horse knows the way. 

The end of the journey is predetermined. 

*** 

The rider is mad 

The horse is a fool. 

They see the cliff, but cannot stop. 

*** 

The horse thinks, 

There once was a man 

who chose this journey, 

but now he is dead. 

I can go where I please, 

but I choose to follow his footsteps. 

*** 

The man thinks The horse thinks 

there is no horse there is no man 

No journey, either, 

since neither starting point 

nor end exists. 

*** 

The horse sees a mare, 

the man a maiden. 

In summer meadow frolicking 

the journey is forgotten. 

*** 

Spurs bite, whips sting: 

the rider shows no mercy. 

The famished horse 

plods on. 

Water has been promised, 

and a mountain of oats, 

someday, at the end of the journey. 

*** 

Fearful Fearful 

that the horse that the man 

will choose another 

rider horse 

he 

shoots tramples 

his companion. 

Alone in the desert now, 

he has defended his honor, 

fulfilled the Commandments. 

*** 

The man sees The horse sees 

some good in 

the horse. the man. 

He asks the other: 

Did you decree this journey? 

What if there is no point 

except the journeying? 

What if we have 

already arrived? 

FROM SALEM FORWARD 

for Matthew 

how the daughters turned 

against the midwives 

whose wrinkled hands 

had swaddled them, 

denouncing them 

as Satan’s mistresses 

how the five-year-olds 

squirmed on the video, 

prompted and prodded 

until they told of teachers 

who flew through the air, 

led them through tunnels, 

touched them 

down there 

how a mother intoned: 

and your daddy beat you 

daddy beat you 

165

eat you 

beat 

as the day approached 

for the custody battle 

until the coin of the realm 

among the Salem girls, 

tot and prosecutor, 

mother and child 

becomes the adder’s kiss 

and what never was 

becomes what is. 

How long does it take 

for a lie to be unremembered? 

Some Pilgrim girls confessed 

to the pious fraud, 

shunned, unwed, 

to die unshriven. 

Brainwashed children 

will scream their way 

from nightmare to dawn, 

a world without horns 

and dark penetrations. 

The son will judge the mother 

and walk to his father’s side. 

166 

MISER 

An hour has passed since I saw it. 

There. In the middle of the floor. 

Gleaming beside the coffee table. 

Right below the soda and wine. 

Why doesn’t anyone see it? 

Back and forth they go. 

Talking, reading their poems. 

The men. The women. 

They fill their glasses, tumble ice. 

Their merry eyes are everywhere 

except that place on the carpet. 

What’s wrong with them? 

Don’t they know the value of money? 

A whole quarter. Just lying there! 

Four of them make a dollar. 

Pick up twenty — 

that’s a five dollar bill. 

Forty make ten dollars. There! 

Another one just passed it by. 

Oh! under a shoe now. Out again. 

So bright. Why can’t they see it? 

My glass is empty now. 

Not too soon to be thirsty again, 

especially when it’s free. 

I could just walk over. 

Bend down to the table. 

Fill the glass. Take the ice. 

Put the glass down for a moment. 

That’s it. I’m doing it. 

Ice first, but not too much. 

You get more to drink 

with less ice. 

Now take a breath. 

That’s it. I’m doing it. 

Reach down. Take the quarter. 

There! One smooth motion, 

into the palm, into the pocket. 

I did it. I got it. 

No one saw. 

Twelve in the room 

and no one said 

Hey, that’s mine. 

A whole quarter. 

My lucky day.

HANDICAPPED GAME PRESERVE, 

WEST VIRGINIA 

Deep in the brush 

an undulating torso 

in a red plaid hunting jacket 

pauses, a halfformed 

hand 

thrusts knife 

into a groundhog. 

The prey is small, 

the blood 

a demitasse of crimson, 

the tiny heart, 

fast lungs palpitating, 

astonished eyes 

reflecting the hunter’s 

thalidomide smile. 

A half-mile in, 

another hunter waits, 

warm in his cap, 

his leather Harley jacket. 

He has come a long way 

for a man in a wheelchair — 

not even motorized — 

came the hard way 

up an incline, 

through the trees. 

If he waits quietly, 

a deer will come, 

a squirrel will stop 

within his cross-hairs. 

His wheels are locked, 

but still the gunshots 

may topple him. 

he doesn’t mind the challenge, 

can call for help 

on the cellular phone. 

He’ll never track 

the things he shoots, 

nor take a deer 

home for the freezer. 

That’s not the point. 

He hates the fleet deer, 

the nimble squirrel, 

the agile raccoon. 

Make four legs three! 

Maim them! 

Make them limp! 

Fill the forest with 

scarred, stumped animals! 

HOUSECLEANING 

Three empty sparrow nests inside 

my air conditioner! 

Like something out of Breughel, 

beaks and claws protruding 

from the louvre vents, 

straw everywhere & eggshells, 

feathers and down and wing-dust 

(no wonder I wheezed and sneezed 

all summer!) 

How proud they must have been 

of their impregnable shelter, 

battleship gray, 

out of the hawk’s eye, 

beyond the talon snap 

of the fiercest raptor. 

They have raised their young 

and gone, flown free 

among the lindens and sycamores, 

chirping defiance at my landlady 

who long ago chopped 

her rowans and flowering pears, 

paved over her garden front. 

“Trees no good,” says Mrs. Trog. 

“Plant trees and you get birds. 

Birds and squirrels. No good. 

No good.” 

Last night I dreamt of moving 

to a Tarzan tree-house, 

cool and lush amid the vines, 

birdsong everywhere, 

squirrels welcome. 

We pay our rent with acorns 

and our house grows bigger, 

wider with each passing year. 

167

LETHE 

Deliver the fruit of the garden of Lethe! 

White horse of sleep at home 

in his stable, 

mane of coca and hemp leaves, 

wreathed in poppies, breathing a cloud 

of Hypnos’ hashish, feeding on hay 

mixed with ergot and mushroom brew. 

White horse of sleep 

draws a black coach through city streets, 

pauses in alleyways, 

lingers at school yards. 

Bags and vials, syringes and pipes 

scatter like toys as the occupant 

lures with promises of instant joy. 

Boys fight for the offered prizes. 

Mothers shake fists from fire escapes 

as the white horse passes. 

On curbs, on broken bench, 

in frame of rotted door, 

the sleepers have fallen. 

Others fan out to sell their treasures. 

There is never enough. 

Someone must always pay, 

even here where no one has money, 

or someone must die. 

White horse pulling 

a great stone Juggernaut, 

iron wheels burred 

with shattered bones 

grindstone steam roller 

making lithography of skin, 

cheekbones and brows, 

limb and arm of backbone 

spread out like a map, 

dreamers’ lives snuffed 

as though they had never 

been. 

168 

The mothers’ sons 

are crimson smears on the sidewalk. 

Mica glints mockingly 

as blood dries to flaking rust. 

At the fashionable club 

the white stretch limos 

arrive and depart, 

arrive and depart. 

A movie star falls to the pavement, 

dead of an overdose 

at twenty-two. 

Inside, the revelers 

compare the merits 

of various white powders. 

No Juggernaut comes for them. 

The white limo doubles 

as a hearse when necessary. 

They are politically correct, 

vegetarian, even. 

They are supporting 

the produce 

of the endangered rain forest. 

Nothing could possibly hurt them.

PROMETHEUS ON FIFTH AVENUE 

One kind of hero draws no veils, 

no fainting ladies, hides not 

in St. Patrick’s, binds no virgins 

to their rosaries, 

shuns candles and goes naked 

down Fifth Avenue. 

Bronze fleshed, he walks 

unnoticed, sees the morning 

flush of fire on windows half-mile high, 

ignored by cold-eyed men, 

oblivious girls, the passing eyes in 

buses bent on headlines, paperbacks. 

At the peak of mob-time, he stops. 

He and the sun flash gold together. 


Here’s Rockefeller Center. 

Above a pagan tree a-lit with lights, 

atop an ice rink decked with world-flags 

he is astonished to see himself. 

One gleaming statue rises, words 

in stone to celebrate Prometheus 

are carved behind/ 

Two gaudy spinsters 

cross the plaza, way to Mass. One frowns 

at the sculpture’s nakedness, its leap 

from earth to challenge the heavens. 

“I think it’s not heroic at all, 

why put that nude and vulgar carving 

right over our beautiful Christmas tree? 

I mean, if it’s a god, isn’t a god 

supposed to suffer?” 

“He has always been there, my dear,” 

the platinum harpy rejoined, 

“That’s Saint Prome-something. 

They nailed him good, right onto a rock, 

left him for birds in the sun.” 

“How dreadful! 

Then he died?” 

“I think he suffered a very long time.” 

“Why, why?” 

“Why?” 

“Why did he? 

169

What did he do?” 

“He died for someone’s 

sins, I’m sure. Just like Jesus. I read it all 

in The Book of Saints, with the Sisters. 

There’s just no other way to be a hero.” 

“Saint Prome? Saint Prome? I think it’s 

coming back to me now, Matilda. 

I think they named an orphan’s home or —” 

fled the place, flew on a swift wind 

to Caucasus, climbed the purple mountain, 

stood high on a snowcap, blasted by wind, 

greeted the deathless vengeance of Zeus, hurled 

himself from cliff to cliff, rose unwounded, 

cursed, crying the wrath of the last hero. 

PROMETHEAN EPILOGUE 

Feast worthy of Titans! 

Put on the cauldron! 

Stoke the flames! 

Onions! Potatoes! Yams and bread! 

Invite the guests 

to the hall of Prometheus. 

We’re having 

vulture with stuffing! 

Come, tear its breast — 

there’s always more — 

a hundred years of rending 

for every year it tore at me, 

drumsticks unending, 

a cornucopia of gizzards. 

The bird shall feed a legion, 

and a legion’s heirs. 

I’ll even sell its flesh to mortals, 

unknown nuggets of poultry, 

dropped by the ton 

under the golden arch 

of sweet revenge. 

170 

Running, he

ATHENA AND MEDUSA 

She may be wise, that owl-eyed 

Athena, but she’s Greek 

and steeped in spite. Her wrath 

against Medusa just has no end. 

It’s not enough to have 

the Gorgon’s never-dying head 

(thank you, brave Perseus!) 

stuck to her shield, 

not enough to make her watch 

(she who so adores male beauty) 

as handsome warriors petrify 

on seeing her serpentwreathed 

visage 

not enough 

that her parched lips thirst, 

her black tongue 

aches for nourishment, 

while wine and victuals 

pass through her mouth 

into a sodden heap 

at neck-base 

not enough that the name 

Gorgon 

makes women shudder 

and men avert their eyes 

lest the thing they crave, 

hard upon soft, 

becomes the stillness 

of rigor mortis, 

an eternity of marble 

not enough that mind 

should suffer: 

she’s shipped Medusa’s body, 

pure as alabaster, 

(no hint of monster about her 

from dusk till dawn) 

to a brothel in Smyrna 

where drunken sailors, 

for a few spare drachmas 

pile into a dark room 

to hump a headless maiden 

not enough that midwives 

come annually 

to deliver up her monsters — 

winged things with T urkish 

eyebrows, egg-shell 

objects that only Harpies 

would dare to hatch 

Oh! not enough! and all for spite, 

for that day she found Poseidon, 

long-limbed and sleek 

entwined in the Gorgona’s arms, 

in the dark confines 

of Athena’s temple — 

buttocks and legs and bellies 

spread on her very altar! 

(Is there no place the gods will not go 

to have their way with a woman?) 

She could not punish 

her father’s brother-god, 

but she seized Medusa, 

twisted her golden, braided hair 

into a gnarl of hissing serpents, 

cursed her with the petrifying glare, 

wild eyed, leering, black-tongued — 

her body goddess-fair by night, 

by day a winged monstrosity, 

rough skinned with 

overlapping scales, 

arms ending in razor talons. 

Go to some island unknown to me, 

Athena cursed her, 

Go hide your shame and pray 

I forget you. 

Conceal yourself in sea caves, 

or sink-hole chasms where sunlight 

will not reveal you to men or gods. 

For this, her wounded vanity, 

five thousand years at least 

Medusa paid, and pays, her debt 

to Wisdom’s darker side, 

implacable and cruel. 

171

BURNT OFFERING 

Anakreon, to Harmodius: 

About that letter, the fervent one, 

the one you hinted you’d sell when I die, 

mocking its shaking autograph, 

intimating the scandal — 

I know your threat is false. 

Last night in my sleep I saw 

your hands on a crumpled scroll, 

the thrust toward a sputtering lamp, 

the tiny screams as my words, 

my awesome and unrepeatable vows, 

my praise of your unworthy beauty, 

collapsed and withered 

in a blue-green flame. 

You brushed the ashes from your 

gentle arms — 

they scattered, mingled with dust motes, 

rode a moonbeam in a moment’s leap 

toward ghosthood, then dissipated. 

This time, no Phoenix rose. 

He who burns love letters 

offends the Gods. 

You dare undo my holy madness 

with little papyrus hecatombs? 

They will sting you, my salamander 

syllables. 

Try and love anyone now! 

Your sunken cheeks 

and pale complexion will 

drive him away. 

All will know you are pursued 

and haunted. 

You will wish you had kept 

the living scroll 

when you see how Love, 

an ash-faced Fury, 

comes back from Acheron, 

hungry, and needful, and unforgiving. 

172 

DIALOGUE 

Harmodius to Anakreon: 

Your latest scroll’s unread, 

the seal’s unbroken, too. 

I send my servant hag 

to hurl it through your window. 

(How passers-by will laugh 

to see a withered crone 

scaling your garden wall — 

they’ll say Anakreon 

now plunders graves 

as well as cradles.) 

Shamed now perhaps, 

you’ll stop those ardent letters. 

Don’t put me in your poems. 

Don’t ask me to read them, 

don’t pay to have them sung 

at your next banqueting. 

You’re nothing but trouble for me. 

You could be my uncle, 

my father, even — 

so no more loving glances, ever! 

Anakreon to Harmodius: 

Cupid’s bent arrows cannot return. 

Cruel one, our secret is out. 

My passion is over 

before its egg could hatch. 

I did not name you, or confess it. 

You did not mind my admiration, 

you did not mind my poems, even. 

Now that your brass-faced vanity 

refuses me and scorns my gifts, 

I am not bound by modesty. 

Henceforth I wear the badge of love 

not in the heart-held lining 

but on the sleeve for all to see. 

Let people judge who is the baser fool: 

I, the unloved lover, or you, 

the worthless object of a great Desire!

PROMETHEUS CHAINED 

after a painting by Riva Leviten 

to be read with Beethoven’s Prometheus Variations, Op 35 

(sections of the poem alternating with the Variations) 

1 

The gods did not do this blasphemous thing: 

the Titan banished to the mountain heights, 

draped in iron chains to a platform of oak, 

eyes closed, a shadowed hulk unseeing, hunched 

like an animal in some hunter’s cruel trap — 

this deed was not the grim command of Zeus, 

Poseidon did not stir from ocean trench; 

Mars did not polish his shield, nor Athena hers. 

Blame not jealous Hera, nor Vulcan’s forge, 

despite the dark treachery of metal work. 

2 

They did this. They put him here. 

Those little creatures with the monkey eyes, 

the ones with all those fingers fluttering. 

Someone said he made them from lumps of clay. 

Prometheus didn’t. He found them scampering 

from tree to cavern to waterhole, 

a fornicating horde of unformed talents, 

flea-bitten, screeching, night-chilled, 

terrified of lion, wolf and vulture. 

They ate whatever the earth provided 

or whatever dead thing no jackal touched. 

They sang as they shared their pitiful raw feasts. 

3 

Some mornings one of them did not awaken. 

Some mornings an infant stopped breathing. 

They ate their dead silently 

so the vultures would not get them. 

Those were the days they did not sing. 

They walked about silently 

gnawing on bones whose shapes 

disturbed them. 

4 

The solitary Titan, 

outcast among the gods 

and last of his kind, 

sat quietly and watched them. 

They took him for part 

of the landscape, a hillock, 

173

a man-shaped terrain 

in whose shadow they rested. 

He watched their women, 

their young at play, 

their ritual matings 

en masse beneath the moonlight. 

The songs they sang 

the skin drum rhythming — 

the struggle toward harmony 

pleased him. 

5 

Prometheus considered the gods— 

their arrogance, amours, wars and jealousies, 

the way they fought for dominance — 

no room for Titans in their universe! — 

and he had thought: 

there is as much god in these monkey-things 

as there is monkeyness among the gods. 

And so the great idea had come to him. 

6 

Cursed be the day he conceived of it! 

Whatever was he thinking? 

He made himself visible to all of them. 

One morning the sheltering hill 

bent down, and opened its two 

great blue eyes, 

forming a face and two extended hands, 

bridging their language of grunts and nouns 

with the pure Attic of Olympus. 

They ran screaming. He waited. 

He called them back in mother words, 

fatherly admonitions. He shook an oak 

until the acorns covered the ground. 

He pulled up edible tubers, found fruit, 

laid forth the bounty of things 

it was safe to eat. 

One by one, they came. They tasted, 

ate and slept as he gently taught them 

what of the earth was wholesome 

and what dark herbs belonged 

in Pluto’s garden. 

174

He showed them the seed, and the seedling, 

and the furrow, and the harvest watch, 

and the sweet sunrise of waving grain. 

7 

If he had left it there, 

they would have been but farming apes. 

But oh, no, he could not bear their hunger, 

their night fears, their mindless worship 

of sun and moon and lights in the sky. 

So he took one boy aside, 

taught him all the words of the gods, 

and showed him how to make a fire. 

But what is fire for? the stripling asked, 

trembling at the torch he held. 

Prometheus answered: 

That which cannot be eaten 

fire transforms into food. 

The beast you now fear 

will fear you when it sees the flame. 

The other secrets, you will discover. 

8 

The memory turns to gall 

as the Titan shifts in his chains. 

Fire he gave them forged those chains. 

Fire he gave them melted the tar 

with which they blacked his bronzed limbs. 

Now they are spewing oil 

from Pluto’s kingdom; 

they mine heavy metals 

that even Vulcan will not touch. 

They will ascend the mountain soon 

with gasoline, and napalm, 

or something ominous 

they call a “thermonuclear device” 

to dispose of him once and for all. 

Presumptuous monkeys! 

they claim they have pried apart 

the indivisible atom! 

9 

Weekly, the humans’ Grand Inquisitor 

comes to call on Prometheus, 

a little man in self-important robes, 

like a portable black thunderstorm. 

175

His hawk-face is blue with ague. 

(Pestilence is everywhere in their cities now.) 

He comes to inspect and tighten the chains. 

He will make his report to the Ministry, 

and assure the Faithful 

that the blaspheming Titan 

will soon be no threat — 

after the final solution, that is. 

10 

The Titan ignores the blue-faced visitor. 

He knows him well, but will not deign 

to lift an eyelid for such a devious gnat. 

This is the one who came for wisdom, 

asked who the gods were and how they came to be. 

Prometheus mistook him 

for a fellow seeker. 

He asked how the gods as the Titan knew them 

meshed with the gods the monkey-men 

had recently invented. 

The Titan revealed 

his own discovered truth: 

that the gods are fools and rogues. 

That they are only gods because bigger, 

stronger, and older than others. That Titans 

had come earlier and been defeated 

(all but one!). And before the Titans, 

others, world-spanning, time-defying 

entities who hurled whole galaxies 

at one another in eons-long struggles — 

insect gods, reptile gods, unspeakable beings 

with tentacles and eye-stalks, leaping 

from space to space and age to age, 

and behind all gods the crawling Chaos, 

which only the great I am of life-force 

prevents from devouring it all — 

He revealed this, and more — 

of thirty-two so-called creations 

that rescued life from nothingness — 

and every one followed 

by a madhouse of life, 

striving up from mud to the stars. 

176

11 

When the human repeated 

the Titan’s theogeny 

to his assembled ministers 

they shouted Blasphemy! Blasphemy! 

They came from all over — 

the learned men 

whose fathers he had taught to read — 

they recited proofs 

in a language but recently forgotten 

that their own god — a monkey-Zeus — 

had made the earth just recently, 

and only for the use of monkeys — 

especially for the monkeys 

who believed in monkey-Zeus. 

(All others were to be put to death, 

or made to serve in silence.) 

12 

An eagle arrives, 

lights on the Titan’s 

massive forearm. 

Prometheus laughs bitterly. 

“That old device again? 

Fine for abducting boys. 

Or have you come to add feathers 

to my indignity?” 

The eagle says nothing. 

Its glacier eyes pierce him. 

He tries in vain 

to throw off the raptor. 

“So, Zeus, you come to gloat! 

Acorn-eater, 

Cronus’s vomit-ball — 

go back to Rhea’s nipples, 

or hide behind Hera.” 

“Proud to the last,” 

the eagle finally responds 

in a parody of god-voice. 

“Did I not warn you 

about the human kind?” 

“I see your hand in this,” 

Prometheus replies, 

“filling their little minds 

with holy madness. 

I taught them the way of knowledge.” 

177

“We scarcely noticed them,” 

the eagle insists, 

“until their arrogant prayers 

polluted the atmosphere. 

They have a plaything god 

who forbids other gods 

their proper commerce.” 

“They have gone mad,” 

Prometheus conjectures. 

“Their little monkey-god 

was bad enough 

with his orangutan beard 

and stone tablets. 

“Now, according to some, 

he found a virgin, 

begot a son on her, 

sent the son down 

to teach the humans. 

They killed him. 

Then they felt sorry 

and decided he rose 

from the dead. 

Then the son promised 

to bring them all back 

if they worshipped him — 

“There goes Hades!” 

Zeus laughs. 

“Each time the little 

Inquisitor comes, 

the story has changed,” 

Prometheus complains. 

“Finally they called me 

to make peace among them. 

I went, down there 

where their great stone towers 

follow both rivers 

to the sea. 

I heard them. I drank 

their new-pressed wine 

(good as yours on Olympus, too!) 

Their sermons made me sleepy, 

or so I thought. 

They had drugged my wine! 

“Days later I woke 

to this prison of chains. 

178

Then came the tar — 

they hauled it by the truckload. 

Three times they have tried 

to burn me to cinders. 

Three times my Mother the Earth 

has healed me.” 

13 

“Should we open Tartarus,” 

I wonder?” 

old Zeus proposes. 

“One swipe of a berserker Titan, 

your elder, snake-footed brother, 

and their cities would topple. 

Or we could send Poseidon’s Kraaken – 

a million nightmare tentacles 

and one consuming beak 

with appetite enough 

to consume their species —“ 

“No!” says Prometheus. 

“Much as I hate some of them, 

the best of them are better than us. 

No! listen, or swoop below and look! 

Their towers gleam in the sunrise. 

Bridges, aqueducts, fountains and spires, 

women in jeweled splendor, 

boys in the glory of their summer games, 

the poets, the orchestra of viols, 

flutes and trumpets. For every word 

I taught them they invented twenty. 

They can stride the planet, 

take the stars. 

I want to see 

what they do next.” 

14 

Swirling black clouds 

cascade from nearby mountain ranges, 

a storm of discord, woe, suspicion, 

a hurricane of malice and pestilence, 

a bee-swarm of lies, boils and tumors, 

wing-dust of a generation of Harpies. 

He sees it hovering — 

he knows that only he 

stands between it and the city — 

179

hag-things with multi-jointed 

spindle legs, splayed knees, 

elbows and ankles 

at insane angles, 

broom down 

with their companion rooks 

to hurl their curses at the earth. 

This is Pandora’s cloud, 

a convocation of evils 

all destined to make misery 

of so short a life, 

pain-edge creeping 

just past the prime, 

making old age 

deaf, blind and crippled. 

No wonder the poor creatures 

go mad in droves! 

Zeus knows the cloud — 

he fluttered down 

from out its fore-wind. 

“Let’s see how god-like they’ll be,” 

he taunts the Titan, 

“when their flesh erupts in boils, 

when they watch their young wither, 

and their parents revert to infancy.” 

15 

“You cannot help them,” 

the Olympian boasts. 

“Their little lives are like fireflies. 

And now their higher wisdom 

tells them to kill you!” 

“A long list of gods 

has tried to kill me,” 

Prometheus replies. 

“I am the last Titan 

now that poor Atlas 

has lain down petrified. 

Perhaps my race is run, 

but I have not yet tired of it. 

Can you say as much, 

you moth-eaten god? 

180

16 

As the eagle flies off 

to the comforts of Olympus, 

the promise of apples 

that grant eternal life, 

Prometheus hurls 

his final taunt. 

“They’ll learn the truth 

that will empty your temples. 

Aphrodite’s wrinkles 

will crack her marble likeness. 

Apollo and Mars, Hephaestus, 

Poseidon will all be the stock 

of laughing school-boys. 

“I go to cinders and funeral smoke, 

but I take all of you with me, 

household gods of a dead race! 

“There were no gods. 

There are no gods. 

There are only 

monsters.” 

181

THE DEATH OF QUEEN JOCASTA: 

A NEW SCENE FOR SOPHOCLES’ OEDIPUS REX 

SCENE: The Royal Bedchamber in Thebes. A bed with bedclothes and pillows at center 

stage. The Chorus of Old Women enter individually from the edges of the stage and meet at 

the front and center of the stage. 

WOMAN 1 

I did not think to find you here today. 

Your house was dark. The plague is everywhere. 

WOMAN 2 

Apollo —or Hekate — has spared us, 

sister, but all around us dead are piled 

in doorways or stacked like logs for burning. 

Here comes my brother’s wife. Thank Zeus you are 

still among the living! What news bring you? 

WOMAN 3 

We are called to the palace. Death is not there, 

but worse than Death. Chasing his oracles, 

and running from oracles past, our king, 

sharp-witted Oedipus who beat the Sphinx, 

has brought down horrors on Thebes. 

CHORUS 

We knew it! 

Cursed is our city with plague and starving. 

Help us, sisters, to bring an end to it! 

WOMAN 1 

Shepherds and farmers come not to market. 

The fisherman, spying our funerals, 

the columns of smoke and the circling vultures, 

avoid us and sell their catch in Athens. 

WOMAN 2 

Disaster begins in the royal house, 

and all the people are doomed to suffer. 

WOMAN 3 

But why are we summoned? Keep to our homes, 

I say, until the Lord of Death passes! 

CHORUS 

Cursed is our city with plague and starving. 

Help us, sisters, to put an end to it! 

WOMAN 1 

Listen! Oedipus stands stunned. The murder 

of old King Laius is now unraveled. 

182

The blight of unsolved crime brought us the plague 

as punishment from the angry Furies. 

The killer of the old king … is the King, 

who came a stranger to our grieving Thebes 

and wed the widowed Queen Jocasta. 

WOMAN 2 

But Oedipus and she are happily wed, 

blessed by the gods with four inheritors. 

WOMAN 3 

The sorry history of King Laius 

has been told and retold by the gossips. 

But Oedipus killing Laius — not that! 

WOMAN 2 

So the gods knew the truth, and did nothing? 

WOMAN 3 

Have not many kings killed those before them? 

Greece is full of tyrants, ripe for plucking. 

WOMAN 1 

There is more, sisters! Laius was hunting. 

His escort knocked young Oedipus aside 

to make way for the king’s passage. In rage, 

possessed by fury he could not explain, 

Oedipus took sword and killed them all! All! 

He never knew from their rustic attire 

he had killed the king of Thebes! The gods knew, 

fermenting their vengeance like vinegar. 

Then Oedipus, saving the Thebans once 

and for all from the dreaded Sphinx, 

came to us. Shrouded Jocasta he took, 

these twenty years our king, and her husband, 

these years he lay with his victim’s widow. 

But here it is, Sisters: horror piles deep 

on horror in this world, this serpents’ nest: 

Know now that killing Laius, Oedipus … 

has …slain… his… father. And marrying her — 

WOMAN 3 

Laius, the father of Oedipus! Then… 

CHORUS 

Cursed is our city with plague and starving! 

183

WOMAN 2 

Jocasta is wed to her cast-off son, 

the baby King Laius hurled from a cliff: 

the one of whom the oracles warned him, 

the king-killing son, wedding his mother! 

CHORUS 

Help us sisters, to bring an end to it. 

We bow to you as eldest among us. 

WOMAN 1 

(looking from edge of stage) 

They stand in horror within the palace: 

Oedipus, Creon, nobles, messengers. 

News spreads like a bee-hum outside the walls. 

The sky is red with shame, the sea pauses 

as though the very waves would shun the wharves. 

WOMAN 2 

Only Queen Jocasta is moving — look here! 

Her long robe flutters amid the columns. 

She comes! Her face is a mask of horror. 

The Chorus withdraws to the edges of the stage and turn their backs to the center of the stage. 

Enter Queen Jocasta, in disarray, her hair flying all about her, her robe disheveled. She 

hurls herself onto the bed at the center of the stage and tears at the bedclothes in fury and 

shame. She howls. The Chorus of Old Women emerges from the shadows and surrounds her. 

CHORUS 

Jocasta, Queen, Look up and attend us! 

JOCASTA 

What? All of you here? Old women of Thebes! 

I did not ask for your counsel today. 

How dare you intrude on my day of grief! 

WOMAN 1 

We have come, as is our right, to question. 

WOMAN 2 

Who is your son, and who your husband now? 

WOMAN 3 

And what will you do to placate the gods? 

JOCASTA 

I am just come from the court, from Creon, 

my brother, and Oedipus, my — but how 

can you be here already to taunt me? 

184

CHORUS 

Faster than falcons flies the bird of woe. 

We watch and listen. 

WOMAN 1 

WOMAN 2 

We who never sleep. 

WOMAN 3 

We who guard the morals of the city. 

CHORUS 

Sacred to Hera and us, is marriage. 

Bound we are all to the proper customs, 

without which men are beasts, and women, whores. 

WOMAN 1 

Jocasta, you are Queen, we the Elders. 

You are bound to speak, and to speak truly, 

by the laws of Thebes and our sisterhood. 

Did not you dance with us on the mountain, 

in those old rites no man may see, and live? 

Are you not sworn to hear us, as always? 

Consort of Laius, what was your duty? 

JOCASTA 

To Laius, nothing! You are women. What bond 

can woman have to her son’s murderer? 

He took my first-born child. By the oracle 

driven, he cast the healthy infant boy 

I know not where. Some cliff or cavern. 

Strong cords bound his ankles together 

so the helpless babe could not elude 

the lion, the wolf, the high-soaring eagle. 

I thought him a tiny bleached skeleton 

lying in some dark ravine, forgotten. 

No grave, no stone, the very memory 

erased as though I had never borne him! 

WOMAN 1 

Yet he lived. He grew. He came to your bed. 

JOCASTA 

How dare you accuse me now of knowing 

what no one could have known of Oedipus? 

CHORUS 

How like you he looks! We guessed it! We knew! 

185

WOMAN 1 

Did you not see the stranger limping in, 

when god-proud he saved the city and took 

in a mere few days your fresh widow’s shrouds, 

and made of them your second bridal veil? 

Where was your decency, Queen Jocasta? 

JOCASTA 

You hypocrites, you ate at my table! 

Woman to woman I tell you this thing: 

I knew King Laius dead, and wished him dead, 

and I would have kissed the hand that killed him. 

(She stops with horror at what she has just said.) 

The gods ensorcel us — they make us speak, 

until our words convict us of murder, 

yet we did not kill — of lust, when never 

a thought of anything but solitude 

was what we wanted — and now of this thing 

that no one could have imagined to be! 

If I am bound to speak the truth, then hear! 

I did not care to find the thieves who killed him. 

I rejoiced in a murderer’s murder. 

In all the latter years of our marriage 

I made the choice we all have right to make: 

to bear the heartless man no children more. 

I gave him death for death. Ointments I had 

from Hekate’s sisters, ground by moonlight. 

You — you were the one who secured them! 

(Woman 3 turns her head away in denial.) 

You! 

Some bitter herbs to resist his seed, 

and some I used to expel his daughters, 

his sons, his shriveled progeny I dropped 

into a hole at the back of the garden. 

They are still there. I do not regret them. 

I wanted the line of Laius to end 

with him —his death ended my misery. 

WOMAN 2 

So hasty a bond to the unknown youth 

was unbecoming a widow. Laius 

was bad, for you and for all the kingdom, 

but you betrayed our women’s dignity 

to grovel at the feet of a stripling! 

186

JOCASTA 

Did I choose him? Chaste on my throne, all veiled 

in widow’s raiment I sat to greet him. 

Thebes could not have a mere woman above it. 

I all but gave in to Creon’s ruling, 

but many there were who did not trust him. 

They used me, just as they used Oedipus. 

The council of men made up the marriage. 

In three days I was wed to the hero. 

Where were you, old women, to speak for me? 

You saw me, a queen in name, a plaything 

for politics and the exchange of crowns. 

There you sat at my second wedding feast, 

your lewd eyes all over my groom’s young face, 

your gossips’ fingers subtracting his age 

from mine and laughing at my supposèd luck. 

WOMAN3 

Did you never guess and dread the whole truth? 

Speak now, Jocasta, to save your own life! 

JOCASTA 

The truth need never fear the light of day. 

In premonitions only did I know it. 

Waking the first morn in sun-rays, I spied 

the hard scars upon his naked ankles. 

He said he had always been thus. I shook 

from head to foot in dread and denial, 

and then the young man made love to me, my 

shudders of fear gave way to deep desire, 

and I vowed to never think it again. 

Such bliss could only come with gods’ consent. 

WOMAN2 

And you never again suspected him? 

JOCASTA 

Once I called him “my boy,” and he fled me. 

So we came to better bed-time names: 

“Old man,” he was, and I his “little girl.” 

And if I knew, within my secret heart 

he was my son, it was my joy to love, 

to bind him near me thus, as blood to blood. 

He chose me. He wanted me. He loved me. 

If you believe in gods, this was their work. 

No man was ever more Aphrodite’s slave, 

nor any wife more awed by Hyperion, 

for yes, to me, he was the sun and moon. 

187

CHORUS 

Taken in crime, they always cry, “Love, love, love!” 

Taken in sin, “It was too dark to see!” 

WOMAN1 

You have all but confessed it. You knew him! 

How could you bear his children, monster queen? 

WOMAN2 

Will you lie and wait for your grandson, too? 

JOCASTA 

With joy and dread I bore him those children. 

Is it not thus with any woman? And 

when I was shown Antigone’s visage 

wrapped in the royal swaddling cloth that morn 

I said, “The gods sleep. This is no monster.” 

CHORUS 

Lowest of women, you profane the gods! 

JOCASTA 

Look at my children, all four of them, look 

at the eyes and brow of Eteocles 

my son, our son, the son of Oedipus! 

Watch Polynices, our other fair son 

slay the fleet deer with a single arrow. 

Look at my fair Antigone and say 

that the gods have cursed us. Ismene, too, 

our youngest daughter, and our dearest pearl. 

How could the gods have blessed us in this guise 

if they intended to blast and destroy? 

WOMAN 3 

Unnatural woman! The gods look down 

and scorn you. Furies will hound your children 

until they rot as unburied exiles, 

unwelcome in any Attic-tongued city. 

Dare you say we are unpunished in Thebes 

when the streets are clogged with the dying? 

JOCASTA 

I am not an unnatural woman. 

I yearn and love and bleed like all of you. 

Do not believe those lying oracles. 

188

WOMAN3 

Your life is forfeit, Jocasta! Hera 

has spoken from her dread throne. Hearthstones crack 

and ovens eject their bread unheated, 

nor brides nor grooms can consummate their vows, 

nor even may the dead be buried, incense 

falls down and fails to go up to heaven 

so long as your marriage bed stains the earth. 

JOCASTA 

Get out of here! I curse you, hateful crones! 

CHORUS 

Your life is forfeit, Jocasta! Yield it! 

I am my children’s mother! 

JOCASTA 

WOMAN2 

A vile womb 

through which generations pass to and fro 

like the open gates to the marketplace! 

Now they’ll all cry “Thebes! The Incest City, 

Where father and daughter, mother and son, 

brother and sister all sleep in one bed!” 

CHORUS 

Your life is forfeit, Jocasta! Yield it! 

JOCASTA 

Never! Your gods are a fraud. I hate them, 

as I hate your hypocritical ways. 

WOMAN1 

(aside to WOMAN 2) 

She neither repents nor dignifies death 

by taking timely exit upon this world. 

Hand me the rope and I’ll do it myself! 

WOMAN2 

(aside to WOMAN 1) 

Here, knot it well. We’ll let her hang from there, 

where that great beam runs over the ceiling. 

JOCASTA 

Get back, you childless crones! What right have you 

to judge a queen with four bright promises 

for a thousand years of glory for Thebes? 

189

CHORUS 

We speak no more. Our hands will silence you. 

(They close in around Jocasta. Their robes conceal her.) 

WOMAN1 

(to WOMAN 2) 

Send word to Creon that Jocasta died, 

alone, an honorable suicide. 

190 

WOMAN2 runs from the stage. 

F I N I S

WHAT IS A POEM, ANYWAY? 

Poets are notorious for coming up with 

mani f est os and pron ouncem ents. Eve ryone 

has a powerful opini on that what he 

writes, and what his friends write, makes 

up the real poetry, and what eve ryone else 

does is not poetry. 

I’ve made some pretty strong pronouncem 

ents mys elf about the ragged-right-margin, 

confessional babble 

that has posed as poe try — a wheezing old 

man with a walker who still calls himself 

“avant garde.” I’ve also railed against the 

primitivist strains in poe try — rock lyrics, 

rap, and much of “slam” poe try is just 

spewing, often by people who have read 

no poetry. 

Well, what is poe try to me? It is a form 

of writing, sometimes narrative, sometimes 

merely descript ive, that has a paraphrasable 

meani ng, and employs poe tic 

devices such as rhythm, alliteration, consonance, 

rhyme, or assonance. Poetry is 

aware of what has been written bef ore; it 

builds on earlier poets (which is why a depressed 

teena ger at an open mike is almost 

never a poet.) Above all, poetry is 

imagin at ive — it taps into myth, symb ol, 

and magic, and uses ima gery to conv ey and 

reinforce its message. The final ingredient 

is that the lang uage its elf must be beaut iful, 

imaginative, striking. 

Good poets first acquire the craft to 

write in established forms, and, later, the 

skills to break the rules. Even so-called 

“free verse,” when it is worthy, employs 

some of the traditional dev ices, often in 

subt le and shifti ng ways, but there 

nonetheless. 

To rhyme or not to rhyme? I avoided it 

for most of my life in my own work, even 

though I love my Rom ant ic poe ts and my 

Poe. Rhyme is a dilemma, precisely because 

it is diff ic ult to do something with it 

that has not been done many times bef ore. 

Alm ost anyt hing can be said in rhymed 

verse, but all verses are not necessarily poems. 

Greeti ng card verse and most song 

lyri cs may be poems “by the book,” but 

they are not good poems. 

ABOUT THE POEMS 

There is another level to poetry, and 

this is the part that cann ot be taught. 

The “born” poets acquire their craft 

early on, and then turn the details over to 

their subc ons cious. They gain the ability 

— not all the time but when they are 

“tuned in” — to write long stretches of 

highly poli shed poetry almost as if dictated 

to. It’s eit her a form of ins ani ty, or 

it’s ins pir at ion. This is what poe ts pray 

for — and we sanct ify it by calli ng it the 

visi t ation of the Muse. The Muse-inspired 

is the Bardic voice, in which the 

power of creation seizes the poet and 

takes him places he never expected to go. 

The experience of writi ng, and of 

readi ng, this kind of poe try is like havi ng 

the top of your head lifted off. This is the 

poetry I live to write, and to read. My belief 

in this will exp lain my imp at ience 

with poe ts who aim too low, and who 

seem to have a deficiency of psychic energy 

and imagination. 

When a poet of this sort has the misfortune 

to be a religious fanatic, he writes 

holy scriptures and founds religions. It is 

a sad fact that good poe try red eems us, 

but the poems of rel ig ious fan ati cs lead to 

wars of conquest and extermination. 

Plato may have been right to be suspicious 

of poe ts. 

Perh aps one of the reas ons that saner 

poets cling to the idea of the Muse or 

spirit guide — think of Dante guided by 

Virg il through Hell — is that this view of 

things keeps us in our place. As poets, we 

may be privileged to env is ion things that 

ordinary mortals do not, but we are still 

ordinary mortals, and the Muse only 

grants us glimpses of higher things. 

Havi ng said that, and dared to put 

mys elf, from time to time, in the League 

of Super-Poets, I hast en to add that all 

esthetic definitions are man-made, and 

are unique to a culture. Everyt hing I say 

about poe try might be nons ense to a poet 

in ano ther time and place. What Chin ese 

poets in the Ming or Sung Dynasties considered 

to be their craft is very, very dif- 

191

ferent from what we do. Poets in Greek, 

Latin, Arabic or Japa n ese, anc ient or modern, 

likewise do what they do with radically 

different conceptions of what makes 

a good poem. I can only say what is true for 

me within the lite ra ry trad it ion that I am 

part of. And I add that I have read, or tried 

to read, many other modern poets’ 

manifestos or statem ents about poetics, 

and I find most of them incoh erent, not to 

mention intolerant of any other view of 

poetics. 

I am sayi ng this just to exp lain a litt le 

of why I write and how I write. Although I 

have taken pleasure in writi ng a few poems 

with a form al struct ure, it is usua lly a 

challenge I set for myself, not something 

done out of a feeling of nec essity. Most of 

my poems are improvisations. Iambic pentamet 

er com es naturally to me and I oft en 

comp ose in it witho ut thinking; other 

times I consciously use short lines and 

seek to use rhythm and repet ition to hold 

a piece together. Sometimes there is a 

forml ess, prose-like “reci t at ive” or 

warm-up exercise, before the truly poetic 

pass ages kick in. 

A few poems took me years to finish. 

Somet imes I had to wait for the “Muse 

mom ent” that gave me the right rhythm 

and opening line. Other times I have written 

an ent ire long, unp lanned poe m in 

one unbroken stretch, as though possessed. 

In alm ost eve ryt hing I write, I ant ici - 

pate a voice speaki ng or reading the lines, 

and a list ener, rather than a page reader. 

For this reason I strive for lucidity. Even if 

the idea I am conveying is complex, I want 

to convey it in lang uage the listener will 

grasp. I reg ard a written poem as a script 

for oral reading, so I do not play visual 

games with typ ogr ap hy. If my lang uage 

seems unu sua lly restrained in this age of 

vulg arity, it is because I respect my reader. 

In this ent ire book, sex and mayh em 

abound, but there is only a single four-letter 

word. 

Respect for the reader takes another 

form, too: don’t speak unless you have 

something to say. The “dear diary” school 

of poetry is not for me, because most writers 

lead boring lives. We are not, most of 

us, fighti ng bulls, dodgi ng bull ets in bat- 

192 

tle, or exploring Antarctic wastes. Poets 

who sit around reading poetry, and reading 

mind-numbi ng books of criti c ism, are 

goi ng to have very little to say that anyone 

wants to hear. Most of my own reading 

is in history, science, the classics, 

philosophy and, of course, my favori te 

genre, horror. Homer picked the Trojan 

War to write about bec ause it was the 

most imp ort ant thing he could find. I 

write about coll idi ng gala xi es and rel igious 

fanatics blowing up Buddhas and 

office towe rs because these things are important. 

Repeatedly, I have had people come 

up to me aft er poe try readi ngs and say, 

“I’m so rel ieved and so surp rised. I understood 

what you were saying. Why 

don’t other poets do that?” Why, indeed? 

I say this, not in boast but in chall enge to 

the next generation of poets. I am tired of 

watchi ng people squirm in their seats 

duri ng the readi ng of avant garde nonsense, 

and blami ng thems elves for their inabili 

ty to make sense of it. Trust your 

judgm ent, reader. If you smell a skunk, it 

probably is a skunk. 

ABOUT THE POEMS 

Why explain anything? Some poets 

take pride in baff ling their reade rs, and 

ensuring that criti cs will have fodder for 

their mast er’s thes es. I like to add these 

brief notes to my books, in which I say 

what I might say in a live poe try readi ng, 

by way of explaining why or how something 

came to be writt en. Somet imes I 

feel that an audience needs to have certain 

terms or mythological characters explained. 

Since I have many readers who 

are not poe ts — the gods be thanked! — I 

do indeed get notes of thanks from readers, 

saying that these back-of-the-book 

comments made the difference between 

puzz lem ent and pleas ure. So I cont inue 

on my perverse way, having my say. I will 

try to be brief. 

BETWEEN THE PAGES was written 

as a prel ude to my Anniversarius cyc le 

of aut umn poe ms. Its ima ges are a good 

preview of my weird Gothic-Romantic 

perspective. The poem is followed by 

ENTRE LAS HOJAS, my Spani sh ver-

sion of the same poem. I am seized with 

the desire to be a hemispheric poet, so I expect 

to do more transl at ions into Spani sh. 

I welcome and celeb rate the joining of cultures 

that is now occ urr ing — we pasty 

pale Ang los need some Latin passion. 

LIBER ANNIVERSARII 

IN CHILL NOVEMBER came from 

the simp le obs erv at ion that late in the season 

when all the leaves have fallen, you 

cannot distinguish (especially from afar), a 

living tree from a dead one. The idea of 

dead trees lurki ng in a living forest like 

zombies or the Undead intrigued me. At 

the end, though, is affirmation. 

In THE FENCE, I return to my favorite 

old count ry graveyard in Northwest 

Pennsylvania and discover, to my esthetic 

alarm, that a rust ic 18th cent ury gravey ard 

at the edge of a calm lake has been completely 

wrapped in a chain link fence. An 

unf ort un ate dev elo pm ent for a place 

whose natural beauty I have celeb rated for 

more than two dec ades! 

Aft er an autumn even ing in the woods 

in Rhode Isl and, I found mys elf writi ng 

TO THE ARC OF THE SUBLIME, 

which incorporates, in its cosmic musings, 

some lines from one of my earliest poems. 

I wrote this in the 1996 edition of 

Anniversarium: “The poem brings me full 

circ le to who I am tod ay, standing firmly 

on the strange rock of who I was at twenty. 

Alt hough I am cert ain to use some of the 

same themes and ima ges again, I have 

grown cert ain that, with this poem, the integral 

work called Anniversarium has at last 

been completed — more than 22 years after 

its inc ept ion.” 

I was wrong. Alt hough this poem is a 

summation of my transcendental outlook, 

I was to write more autumn poems. In the 

forthc omi ng new edit ion of Anniversarium, 

I div ide the old and new poe ms into “Ring 

1” and “Ring 2.” This poem ends Ring 1. 

When I wrote OCTOBER STORM 

1998, I was imm ersi ng mys elf once again 

in Chinese opera and lite ra ture, and I had 

rec ently acquired my Chinese nom de 

plume. The ferocious thunderstorm that 

rocked New Jersey that month — the 

most vio l ent I have ever experienced — 

yielded these not-at-all exa gg era ted images. 

On a magi c al level, if you named 

yourself “Dream of Autumn Thund er,” 

you get what you ask for. 

Somehow I had never read Pushkin’s 

immort al and unfini shed poem of 1833, 

AUTUMN, until recently. It hit me like a 

thund erb olt. Pushkin and I are poe tic 

brothe rs, and I have had Russ ian gloom 

und er my skin since I was sixt een. I can 

remember teaching myself the Cyrillic alphab 

et so that I could sing Russ ian folk 

songs and opera, and I dev oured all the 

standard Russian classics in translation. 

But this poem is spec ial, bec ause it inhabi 

ts the same world as my own aut umn 

poems. At first, I decided to leave the 

poem alone, bec ause it has been exquisitely 

translated, preserving its beautiful 

rhyme and meter. But finally, I decided 

to render the poem in my own style, and 

here and there the Muse possessed me to 

add a few lines, all in the spirit of the 

poem, of course. I found, in Stanza 8, that 

Pushkin employed some kind of word 

plays that seems imp oss ib le to transl ate, 

and here all the transl at ors seem to stumble. 

My sol ut ion was to make up my own 

abruptly-interrupted whimsy. I used 

Drac ula and Frank ens tein in them because 

I wanted somet hing that my 

friends would ins tantly recognize as 

“Rutherford perverse quirks,” and the 

sudden interruption is the equivalent of 

my stopping when everyone rolls their 

eyes as if to say, “There he goes again!” I 

have said more than the usual few words 

here because some people have strong 

feelings about translations being literal. I 

believe that brother and sister poets 

must be free to adapt one another in their 

own manner. 

ON RECEIVING A GIFT OF 

BOOKS IN EARLY OCTOBER —- This 

is an exercise. I received a big box of gift 

books from my friend Barbara Girard, and 

I let them tumble onto the floor. The 

poem is an instant improvisation based 

on peeki ng at the books at random. 

193

AUTUMN SUNDAYS IN MAD- 

ISON SQUARE PARK took some years to 

write. I lived near the square in the 1970s 

and worked near it in the 1990s, so it is a 

place deeply rooted in my consciousness 

of Manhattan. I inv ented a new metr ic 

form for this poem — don’t ask me to give 

it a name — to avoid having it all in standard 

iambic pentamet er. I used journal 

notes with vivid descriptions of the park, 

its trees, ani m als and hum an deni z ens, to 

try to sum up the feeli ngs the place 

evoked. Since I wrote the poem, the park 

has been completely renov ated, so the decrepit 

conditions described here no longer 

exi st. This is now a piece of Manhattan 

history. 

IN PRAGUE, A TREE OF MANY 

COLORS belongs here as an aut umn 

poem, but it is act ua lly part of my “Twilight 

of the Dictators” cycle, too. I first 

wrote this poem in 1970, when the events 

portrayed in it — the students’ defiance of 

the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia — 

were still in the news. But my style then 

was not up to the chall enge, and this poem 

lang uished for many years unt il I did some 

res earch on the inv as ion and the act ual details 

of Jan Palach’s death. 

The openi ng stanza is a litt le abs tract. 

Here I have the tree in the square speaking, 

and it is mocki ng the Marxi st jarg on of 

the time. This swiftly passes on into the 

act ual narrative. 

SEPTEMBER IN GOTHAM 2001. 

The destruction of the World Trade Center 

is imp oss ib le for me to write about 

without almost tot ally losi ng all emot ional 

control. Since I spent two decades of my 

life in and around New York City, the attack 

on New York is personal. I arrived in 

the city in the last week of September for 

a book publ ishi ng party for Annette Hayn, 

and I stayed at a hot el on East 31st Street. 

The Armory, a few blocks away, had been a 

command center for some of the World 

Trade Center rescue efforts, and the walls 

of the building and all the fences for 

blocks around were covered with flye rs 

showi ng the faces and names of vict ims, 

with pleas from family and loved ones, 

“Find Me,” “Missing,” “Have You Seen 

194 

Me?” New Yorkers were standing in front 

of these poste rs, weepi ng unc ont roll ab ly. 

My poem is a small att empt to describe 

just that limi ted view of the tragedy. 

The posters were disintegrating in 

rain and wind, and were becoming the fall 

leaves of 2001. More than this, I cannot 

bring myself to write. 



VIKING is my tribute to the pion eering 

space probe to Mars. Havi ng the 

space probe speak for itself was fun, ending 

in the ironic revers al of H.G. Wells’ 

War of the Worlds. 

THE GODS AS THEY ARE, ON 

THEIR PLANETS plays modern astronomy 

against Greek mythology. We now 

know that the planet Ven us is blist eri ng 

hot, with an acid atm os phere, and that 

Mars is a cold, dry, rust-colo red desert. 

This poem cont rasts these facts with the 

two gods of the same name, Ven us/Aphrodite 

and Mars/Ares. 

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE was 

provoked by hearing a poet of religious 

bent trott ing out the old “arg um ent by 

design” to prove the existence of God. 

Such a perfect universe as ours, so the argument 

goes, could only be created by 

God. I had just recently seen the NASA 

photographs of distant, colliding galaxies, 

and I ment ioned this as my reb utt al, saying, 

“If you lived in one of those gala xies, 

you wouldn’t believe nature was designed 

by God.” For days after this convers 

at ion, I cont inu ed to think about the 

NASA phot os, which I had seen in The 

New York Times. Then I began to dream 

about them, and this poem rapi dly came 

to pass. The line “alu marana echtho 

karani,” transl ated at the end of the 

poem, is in an imagi n ary lang uage from 

one of the dist ant plane ts. The poem’s title, 

of course, refers to Philip Wylie’s famous 

screenp lay and novel. 

A shorter version of AUTUMN ON 

MARS was writt en several years back and 

counted as part of the ongoing 

Anniversarium ser ies. I made it long er and 

elabo r ated on the anato my of the imagi -

nary Mart ians, with a wave of the tent ac le 

to Ray Bradbury (whose Mart ians were 

admittedly far more hum ano id). But no 

one can say “Mars” and “Halloween” in 

the same breath witho ut evoki ng the Master 

of The Martian Chronicles. 

PLUTO DEMOTED was writt en 

when it was suddenly ann ounced that the 

planet Pluto, in some ast rono m ers’ opinions, 

was too small and insignificant to be 

called a planet, and should just be a numbered 

object out in the cold depths of 

space. I had long wanted to write a poem 

of tribute to Clyde Tombaugh, who discove 

red the planet in a stroke of alm ost incredible 

good fortune, and this seemed 

the time. The name “Yuggoth” was used 

by H.P . Lovecraft to describe the ninth 

planet bef ore it had been discove red and 

named. 


I moved to Providence partially as a result 

of a lite ra ry pilgrima ge I made to see 

the homes and haunts of horror writer 

H.P . Lovecraft. But unt il I moved here, I 

wrote nothing about him, even though his 

stories were a powerful influence on my 

adolescence. My poems about Lovecraft 

are scatt ered througho ut all my books, and 

in the published edit ion of Night Gaunts, 

my biographical play. This book contains 

the newer pieces. Needless to say, these 

poems will give more pleasure to fans and 

readers of Lovecraft than to those not famili 

ar with his biz arre and ast oni shi ng 

work. (I hast en to add that I am not influenced 

by Lovecraft’s mostly horrid verse.) 

MAKER OF MONSTERS, MAKER 

OF GODS was a birthd ay poem for emi - 

nent American horror writer Frank 

Belknap Long. I met Frank Long when I 

was asked to cond uct a telev is ion int erview 

with him about his ment or, H.P . 

Lovecraft. We became friends — I only regret 

meeti ng him so close to his dec line 

and dem ise. We had been neighb ors in 

Chelsea almost two decades earlier, but 

had never met. 

DREAMING OF UR-R’LYEH has 

strange ori g ins. I was inv ited by Pet er 

Lamborn Wils on to cont ribu te to an “Astral 

Convent ion” in Antarctica. The 

premi se was that all the part ici p ants 

would think or dream about Antarctica simultaneously, 

and submit whatever they 

wrote as a result for publication. The resulting 

book should, alone, be convincing 

evi dence that there is presently no telepathic 

power in the human psyche. People 

saw and env is ioned exa ctly what they 

were inclined to see, principally sex, 

drugs and anarc hy. My own “waking 

dream” was inf luenced by Poe and 

Lovecraft, spec ifi c ally Lovecraft’s Antarctic 

novel, At the Mount ains of Madness. I 

had also read a book about Shackleton’s 

Antarctic expedition, from which I obtained 

the descriptions I used of solar and 

atmospheric conditions. There are many 

things about this poem, cons ide ra bly expanded 

since its first publ ic at ion, that I 

still can’t exp lain. I won’t try. 

In THE TREE AT LOVECRAFT’S 

GRAVE, the lordly spreadi ng beech tree 

at HPL ’s burial site is the cent er of att ention. 

This poem has now joined the small 

collection of ceremonial pieces performed 

occasionally at HPL ’s grave. 

UNDER LOVECRAFT’S GRAVE. 

HPL is buri ed next to his parents in 

Swan Point Ceme t ery in Providence, a 

spot visi ted annua lly by hund reds of the 

aut hor’s fans. This poem, act ua lly a 

mini-drama, is writt en to be read aloud 

by four or more voices, with change of typography 

giving the cues. We hear 

Lovecraft, his mother, his fat her, and a 

dead child, all speaking from ins ide their 

coffins. In the first part, an above-ground 

narr at or sets the stage. 

FRANK AND LYDA is a highly condensed 

account of my strange friendship 

with Frank Belknap Long and his tormented 

wife, Lyda Arco Long. Alt hough 

Frank and I had splend id conv ers ations, 

and I came to app reciate his poetry and 

the gent le spirit of his short stor ies, everything 

was overshadowed by his wife’s 

advanced ment al illn ess. A sad endi ng for 

a fine writer. 

195

I hesitated for a while before writing 

this poem. Have I been cruel to poor 

Lyda? The outr ag eous things she said and 

did were rep eated for anyone who set foot 

in the Long house. Lyda was alw ays “on 

stage.” And so, she still is. 


Over the years I have written dozens of 

poe ms that use ceme t eri es as their settings, 

from count ry gravey ards to vast garden 

cemeteries like Mt. Auburn or 

Greenwood or Swan Point. Sooner or later 

I will publ ish them all as a book. This book 

includes some newer entries in this series, 

along with a few older ones revised. 

AFTER THE STORM takes us back 

to Edinboro, Pennsylvania where, in a 

more modern graveyard, I heard an unearthly 

waili ng. The ideas for this poem 

come from studies of Iroquois lore. Among 

their bel iefs was the charming not ion that 

chopping down a tree over old bones 

would bring dead ani mals back to life. 

A newspaper account of a prison work 

det ail sent to an isl and burial ground in 

New York harbor prompted the poem, 

HART ISLAND. It is not a fant asy. 

In NIGHT WALKER, I witn essed an 

eld erly lady sleepw alking, and only found 

out two days later that she had walked into 

the nearby river and drowned. 

New Engl and vamp ire lore is thin, but 

the Exeter, Rhode Island case of 1799 has 

poig nant det ails. The idea of dead fami ly 

members coming back for brothers and 

sist ers is common to many cult ures, and is 

proba bly based on an att empt to exp lain 

why many memb ers of the same fami ly 

died one after another. Before Pasteur’s 

conception of bacteria as a cause of disease, 

such cases seemed to be God’s work, 

or the Devil’s. AN EXETER VAMPIRE, 

1799, is writt en mostly in lines of nine syllab 

les. I felt, someh ow, that this evoked 

the feeli ng of pass ivi ty among the 

Tillinghast children. 

196 

GRAVEYARDS I’D LIKE TO SEE is 

another variant of my ongoing series, this 

time with more sat iri c al int ent. 

I started THE HARVESTMAN several 

years before it fin ally spun its web to 

completion. It’s a very formal poem, taking 

its cues from Grey’s “Elegy in a Country 

Churchy ard.” Harvestman is the 

Briti sh name for the opiolid creature, spider-like 

but not a spid er, that we call the 

Daddy-Long-Legs. 

I read about THE EAR MOUND IN 

KYOTO, and a ceremony commemorating 

the 400th anniversary of the burial of 

the ears from 100,000 slain or mut il ated 

Kor eans. The poem is fanciful in detail 

but accurate in history. The ears were 

taken, and the warl ord Toyotomi 

Hideyoshi (actually a great hero of feudal 

Jap an) did die suddenly just a year aft er 

the ears were brought to him as trop hies. 

Jap an still ref uses to ret urn the ears; 

hence this poem. 

I read about the deso l ate burial 

ground of ACELDEMA, THE FIELD 

OF BLOOD some years ago, and saw a 

chance to tell its hist ory. Readi ng this 

poem aloud to those unf am ili ar with the 

name is very effective. 

When I specu l ated publ icly about a 

possible Lovecraft-cult connection to a 

Rhode Island grave desecration, a 

Pawtucket police detective invited me to 

the scene of the crime. This is related in 

MRS. WEEDEN, OF PAWTUCKET. 


The poem, THE EXHUMATION 

OF GOETHE, is based on a det ailed 

newspaper account of the “maceration” 

of Goethe’s skelet on by the East German 

gove rnm ent in 1970, in an att empt to 

turn the great poet’s remains into a tourist 

att ract ion, like the mummy in Len in’s 

tomb. Most of the details here are factual. 

WINTER SOLSTICE 1989 cele - 

brates the incredible events following 

the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The

concert referred to in the poem was given 

by Leonard Bernstein, conducting an orchest 

ra of mus ic ians from East and West. 

In the great final chorus, the German word 

for joy (freude) was rep laced by the word 

for freedom (freiheit.) I was then, and remain 

now, ast oni shed at the lack of jub il ation 

in the West over this remarka ble 

series of events. We should have been 

dancing in the streets. 

IN THE STREETS OF MOSCOW 

AND ST. PETERSBURG is another celebrat 

ion, noting the amazing ima ges of 

statues of Len in and Stalin bei ng toppled. 

A world-wide broadcast of a concert featuring 

the 1812 Overt ure, with brill iant fireworks 

over the onion domes, reinforced 

the idea that a new age had come. I am 

sorry that Russia is troubled once more, 

and that gangs ters and strongm en have replaced 

the party bosses, but I hold conf idence 

that things will get better, even if 

takes another revolution. 

STALIN AND SHOSTAKOVICH is 

based on Russ ian hist ory and known biographi 

c al facts about Russ ian mus ic al giant 

Dmitri Shostakovich. This is an 

att empt to port ray a time and place, and 

Shostakovich’s state of mind as he composed 

his Fourth Symphony, one of the 

toweri ng musical works of the century just 

ended. The symphony was never performed 

during Stalin’s lifet ime. 

THE PIANO UPRISING – I had a 

dream, back in the dark days when Poland 

was still firmly under Soviet control, of all 

the pia nos comi ng to life and driving out 

the Russ ians. And all to the mus ic of Chopin, 

Poland’s great exile composer. I outlined 

this poem in the 1970s, and at least 

three times I att empted to write it, yet 

never found the right voice, the right line 

length. By the time I finally found the key 

— the rhythm of the Polon aise — Pol and 

was well on its way to shaki ng off the Russian 

yoke and its own cripp ling dictatorship. 

I hope this fant asy pleases 

nonetheless. 

HORRORS! 

THE ANACONDA POEMS was inspired 

by reading, in the Science Section 

of The New York Times, about the sex life of 

the gia nt ana c onda, the world’s large st 

snake. The speaking voice of this poem is 

very much like that of my dear friend 

Emilie Glen, whose passi ng was in my 

mind as I wrote the poem. I think of it as 

a poem she would have written. Emilie 

was a vor acious reader of natural history 

and it permeated her work. 

THE SPIDERS was a tidbit in my 

early book, The Pumpkined Heart, merely a 

nature observation about spider webs on 

an early morning lawn. This exp ans ion 

puts spid ers in cont ext as 

worse-than-vampires. As my uncle Bela 

says, “The vamp ire drinks the blood. But 

the spid er! the spid er drinks ... everything!” 

My friends Pieter Vanderbeck 

and Robert Dodge contributed to the 

arachnophobia of my househ old with 

their lur id tales of New Engl and barn spiders. 

John Crompton’s informative book, 

The Spider, was also an inspir at ion. 

KNECHT RUPRECHT, OR THE 

BAD BOY’S CHRISTMAS — While 

reading over some piano music by Robe rt 

Schumann, I came across a piece about 

Knecht Ruprecht, the dark companion of 

Santa Claus who puni shes bad child ren. I 

invented all the imagery surrounding 

him, tryi ng for a Brothe rs Grimm atm osphere. 

The piece turned out to be a very 

effective actor’s monologue, and it is one 

of my perenn ial hits at readi ngs. 

MY LIFE AS AN INCUBUS is an expans 

ion of a shorter poem, a fant asy about 

becoming a gender-shifting incubus/succubus. 

Aft er a rereadi ng of 

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, I added the 

opening section detailing my bargain 

with Mephi st ophe l es. This, too, is a 

strong piece for performance, and I recall 

one eeerie party at which I read this, with 

three Gothic maidens kneeling around 

me with flickering candles. 

197

SNOFRU THE MAD was based on 

readi ng about the Phar aoh’s life and times 

in Gardiner’s Hist ory of Anc ient Egypt. 

Snofru, or Snefru, was Pharaoh in the 

Fourth Dynasty and the immediate 

predecessor of Khufu (Cheops), builder of 

the Great Pyramid. Historians are baffled 

as to why Snofru built himself four 

separate pyramids. Snofru was also the 

first Pharaoh to enclose his name in a 

cartouche, the round-cornered rectangle 

that has ever since enclosed a Pharaoh’s 

name. 

When Gard iner noted the “unpala table” 

thought that Snofru had built four 

pyramids, the whole idea of this poem 

sprang forth in my mind, completely 

formed. The historical details in the poem 

are correct, but I have invented the mad 

Phar aoh’s reas oni ng. 

THE WAKING DREAM was written 

just aft er the prem on it ion of the death of a 

loved one. The premonition turned out to 

be false, but the vis ion was an int ense one: 

a dise mb odi ed spirit, waki ng me from a 

sound sleep, all but crying out: “Remember 

me! Remember me! What did I look 

like? What did I mean to you? Quickly, 

quickly, or I am lost!” Then, the sense of 

the Loved One’s spirit diss ip ati ng, 

becoming nothing. 

POEM FOUND ON THE NECK OF 

A DEER KILLED IN THE BLACK 

FOREST, GERMANY (originally titled 

“Reunion”) is my contribution to werewolf 

lore. It is much expanded from the 

original version, with a substantial plot 

change. In the early edition of Whippoorwill 

Road, my protago n ist was the host and 

the werewolf the guest. It didn’t read 

well, and making the werewolf the host 

also allowed me to add the Baroness werewolf 

as well. I wrote the first version after 

enj oyi ng Jack Veasey’s very aff ecti ng litt le 

werewolf poem, “Handful of Hair.” 

NO MAUSOLEUM, PLEASE is a satire 

that was prompted, exa ctly as the 

poem says, by the rec eipt of a direct-mail 

flyer promoting clean, modern, 

above-ground burial. I regard those 

above-ground places as twisted and unn at- 

198 

ural, kind of a Horn & Hardart automat 

with corpses stuffed in the food bins. No 

thank you! 

ONE DAY’S NEWS shows that the 

real horrors are all around us. We hardly 

have to inv ent them. 

THE DEAD END is based on a 

dream — a not unc omm on dream of being 

among those who are dead, in a 

strange zone where they have taken up 

residence. 

SON OF DRACULA was originally a 

very short poem in the Anniversarium cycle 

of Autumn poe ms — a rem embrance 

of a childhood fascination with Dracula, 

an adol escent nosebleed, and a brief Octob 

er hospit al stay in which I saw a graveyard 

on a nearby hills ide, lit up by steel 

mill furnaces. A revision turned it into 

something more profound — a very specific 

memoir of childhood angst in the 

coal towns of Penns ylv an ia, and, at the 

end, my reb irth as a poet. This is also one 

of the first poems in which I tapped into 

my childhood for material. 

Horrors! HUNCHBACK ASSIS- 

TANT TELLS ALL! Des pite all my 

years of watching horror films, I had never 

writt en a Frank ens tein poem. This long 

cyc le of poems, which will almost certainly 

have a sequel, comes entirely from 

the world of the great Univers al horror 

films of the 1930s and 1940s. 

Mary Shelley never gave Dr. Frankenstein 

a hunchb ack ass ist ant, so I let Fritz 

the hunchback set the record straight. 

And since we are in the tabloid era, this is 

a hunchback whose sex life (real or imagined) 

has quite a few surp rises in store for 

the unwary reader. 

The crea tion scenes, involvi ng not 

only electricity but an animating elixir, 

will strike a chord for those who have read 

Lovecraft’s tale, “Herb ert West, 

Reanimator.” 

The hunchback’s proclamations during 

the storm scene indic ate he has absorbed 

not only Mary Shelley, but a little 

of her friend Lord Byron as well.

The reference to Werther in the poem 

is to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, 

a book which provoked a number of adolescent 

suicides. 

MILKWEED SEEDS started out as a 

little, wispy, nature poem. A trifle, which I 

have now turned into a new myt hology. 

HEARING THE WENDIGO is about 

the legendary wind elemental supposedly 

known to all the American Indians from 

the Great Plains to Huds on Bay. Ever 

since Algernon Blackwood wrote about 

the Wendigo in his short story set in the 

Can ad ian woods, it has bec ome the stuff 

of campf ire stor ies and late-night ghost 

sessions, almost endlessly embellished 

upon. Everyone who tells a Wendigo story 

adds somet hing to it. Duri ng my coll ege 

years in Pennsylvania, my friends and I 

revelled in inventi ng new twists and details 

about this inv isi b le, smiti ng monster. 

WEST OF ARKHAM is a Lovecraftian 

poem. The opening line is an echo 

of the opening of HPL ’s “The Colour Out 

of Space.” 

THE GRIM REAPER is based on an 

old German folksong which was set as a 

chor al piece by Brahms. The origi nal German 

of this folksong was set by Brahms in 

his German Folksongs for Four-Part Choir. 

This parap hrase changes the origi n al’s 

rather conventional “die and go to 

Heaven” ending, and I chose to end each 

stanza with a diff ere nt line rather than retaining 

the original refrain, “Beware, fair 

little flower!” The original song verse uses 

this ref rain three times, and then “Be 

happy, fair little flower!” at the end. 

SALEM is based on seeing a tree 

whose roots were wrapped around a gravestone 

in Salem, Massachusetts. 


The phrase “The Pumpkined Heart” 

des cribes the lands cape of my nat ive 

Penns ylv an ia, and was the tit le of my third 

chapbook. These thirty-odd poems are 

about my childhood in App alachia, my college 

years in Northwestern Pennsylvania 

(Edinboro with its beaut if ul litt le glacial 

lake), and my early years in New York. 

I did not start writing about my 

childhood until just a few years ago. I 

don’t care much for “memoir” unless the 

events remembered serve a higher 

purpose. 

APPALACHIAN IDYLL comes from 

memories of the countryside around my 

great-grandparents’ house outside of 

Scottdale, Pennsylvania. My mat ern al 

great grandmother had sold moonshine 

during the Depression, and her house 

was a four-room structure covered with 

tarpaper. I spent some summers there. I 

remember driving past it some years ago 

with some friends, and seeing, with a 

sense of vague horror, the even smaller, 

one-room house in which my 

grandparents lived, and where my 

mother was born. “That’s not a house,” 

said a young boy in the car, “that’s a tool 

shed!” 

THE MOLESTER is fiction. And it 

is fact. I suddenly remembered having an 

“imaginary playmate,” and was struck by 

the abruptness with which that activity 

ended. I filled in the rest in this invented 

poem. The more I embellished it, the 

truer it seemed – or was I really 

remembering?It was only aft er I started 

working on the poem that I heard the stories 

about draft dodge rs and other runaways 

hiding around the coke ove ns. It 

makes a good tale, and makes one question 

the stand ard ass umpt ions. What 

would be the outcome of this story today? 

Would the boy be hypnotized and interrog 

ated into making up bizarre confessions? 

Would the young man in the spring 

house be sent away for life, unable to 

prove that “somet hing” did not happ en? I 

like the ambiguity which this poem 

leaves with the reader. 

My great-grandmother, the former 

moonshine seller, died when I was ten or 

eleven. I have vivid memories of visiting 

her, and hearing about her Alsatian 

forebears. She was tricked into signing 

away her timber rights, which I recount 

in THE PINES. I changed the story a 

199

little. She was long dead when they came 

to cut the trees, and it was my 

grandmother (her daughter) who came 

home one day and found the trees cut 

down. 

In MIDNIGHT WATER, I rem ember 

childhood summ ers in the woods of Pennsylv 

an ia, and the odd things we were told 

to keep us from roami ng around at night. 

Since the house was surrounded with a 

blanket of enveloping insects, mountain 

lions and bears, it was not such a bad idea 

to stay in bed unt il dawn. 

AND THEN WE GOT USED TO 

THE ATOM BOMB. One of the Edinboro 

coll ege professors whose house was a gatheri 

ng place for the stud ent int ell ect ua ls 

was Norm an Lee. It was at his home, surrounded 

by his children (if I am remembering 

correctly), that I heard a recording 

of Bertrand Russ ell’s powe rf ul ant iw ar 

speeches. An early version of this poem 

was in my first chapb ook, Songs of the I and 

Thou, but it was not very precise. I went 

back to the source documents and added 

mater ial to make this poem comp reh ens ible 

to tod ay’s reader. I think it gives a little 

glimpse into how terrified we all were 

in the late 1960s. Lines in itali cs and 

marked * are exact quotes from the Russell-Eins 

tein Mani f esto of July 9, 1955. 

GRANDMOTHERS is based partly 

on my grandmother Florence, who could 

behead a chicken, kill a copperhead, and 

pick morel mushrooms in the woods. Is 

there anything in world better than a 

grandmother’s home-baked bread? 

FRAGMENTS, WRITTEN AT 

TWENTY is made up of several journal 

entries from my college days, and from my 

half-year stay in San Francisco in 1967. 

They are infused with the spirit of Shelley 

and Whitman. These lines are my 

declaration of intent to “make a new song 

to astonish the planets.” 

TABLEAUX FROM A PENN- 

SYLVANIA VILLAGE comes from journal 

notes, impressions of the seasons, the flora 

and the fauna of northwestern 

200 

Pennsylvania. A mere description, 

startling or beautiful as the experience 

might be, does not always translate into a 

poem. I keep these notes and turn back 

to them, and, sometimes, many years 

later, I realize that a certain thing seen is 

right for a poem I am working on. “At the 

Lake Shore” is the most ambitious in this 

little set. There is an intensity about 

nature in places where the warm season is 

short, and when you know that the 

ground you live on was scoured by 

glaciers, you gain a sense of how nature 

works over millennia to make the 

landscape what it is. 

If water had a consciousness and 

needed a pep talk, WATER MUSIC I 

would be it. Although I wasn’t thinking 

about it, it is certainly an anthem for all of 

us born in the Aquarian age. WATER 

MUSIC IV , later in the book, is an 

extension of the same idea. (In case you 

wondered, Water Music II and III exist 

only as journal notes, not yet written. 

Maybe someday.) 

SPRING EARTH is almost 20 years 

old, and SPRING FROST was written 

just after the turn of the millennium, 

when a savage May frost nipped a lot of 

trees in the bud. I thought they made an 

intriguing juxtaposition. 

THE OLD GRAVESTONES could 

have been part of the “Things Seen in 

Graveyards” cycle, but I have kept it 

apart. Again the setting is Pennsylvania, 

although it could just as well be New 

England, with its tasty old graveyards. 

The graveyard at Edinboro, when last I 

saw it, was a mad jumble of broken 

stones. Many older stones had been so 

worn that the inscriptions were almost 

illegible, and this provoked the whimsy 

of this poem — what if we had to carry 

our gravestones like little calling cards to 

the Resurrection? 

AN AWESOME PLUMMETING 

recounts one of those co-incidences that 

happens to poets. Just minutes after I 

finished listening to Swan Lake in the 

dead of winter, I walked to our little lake,

just in time to witness five hundred 

migrating swans descend onto the water 

for a brief visit. 

THE IRISES is a poem of obs ess ive 

love, a topic of great import to gloomy adolescents. 

Many will reco gnize themselves 

in this poem of brooding, passive, hopeless, 

jealo us affection. 

AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD 

came out of a prose-poem pass age in a letter 

I wrote to my friend Tom Fitzpatrick. 

Fort un ately I kept a copy, sensi ng that 

this wanted to be a frees tandi ng poem. Its 

mess age to other arti sts — that they are 

not alone — is a vit al one. 

AT THE WOOD’S EDGE is a transl ation/adaptation 

from the Onondaga. I 

spent my childh ood on Pennsylv an ia lands 

soaked with the blood of the French and 

Ind ian War (the Ameri c an branch of the 

Seven Years’ War). As a res ult of this history, 

there were no Indians to be seen. My 

father’s grandmother apparently threw 

the fami ly – and perh aps the whole town – 

into turmoil when she let it be known, 

when she was quite elderly, that she was 

an Ind ian. Although I have traced the genealogy 

back to her parents, and found one 

dist ant cousin who spoke of a fami ly photo 

with “a young girl in Ind ian braids who 

doesn’t look like the others, and we wondered 

who she was,” I cannot prove or disprove 

my great-grandmother’s assertion. 

Native American children were taken 

from their families; Indian people were 

driven out of New York State and Pennsylvan 

ia, to Ohio and later to Kans as; farm 

families could and did adopt child ren so as 

to have extra hands to work. No one 

knows. Nonet hel ess, growi ng up with the 

whispered legend that “your grandmother 

was an Ind ian” had its eff ect on my imagi - 

nation. When I arrived in Edinboro, which 

had been a fest iv al grounds for the ext inct 

Erie Indians, I grew even more interested 

in Iroquois lore. That led to me render the 

openi ng pass ages of the Iro q uois Fun eral 

Rite into blank verse. It is a passage of 

tremendous dignity, almost classical in its 

nobility and restraint. 

I spent my high-school years in a sad, 

depressed town, and one of the few 

things I care to rem emb er about it is told 

in TILLIE. Years aft er leavi ng the place, 

I heard this tale of Tillie’s downf all. 

The all-lower-case title of “song of 

youth (1967)” shows that I was still under 

the influence of “modern” poets. I 

still like this poem, with its Beat inf lection 

and its word-play. It’s one of only a 

handful of college-boy poems I would 

still want anyo ne to see. 

Like the ope ra farewells that go on 

and on, ENVOI has been much revised. 

The probl em is that I said goodb ye to a 

place, and kept returning. Now that a decade 

or more separates each of my visits 

to Edinboro lake, I was able to rev ise this 

poem with a sense of fin ali ty. It’s also easier 

now to accept the fact that one place 

does represent “my youth, my heart, my 

first-found home.” 

AT THE VERGE OF SPRING was 

being revised as I was listening to 

Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, with its 

setting of the ninth-century hymn, Veni 

Creator Spiritus (Come, creator spirit). As 

I listened, and wrote, the descriptions of 

unfolding spring became more explosive, 

and as the Mahler chorus burst into its 

greatest crescendo, I found myself 

writing the Latin words on the page. I 

remembered too, that Lucretius begins 

his great De Rerum Naturum with a hymn 

to Venus, as the force behind the earth’s 

regeneration in spring. So when I use 

these Latin words, it is in the fullest 

pagan sense. 

SCRAPS is a personal poem I kept 

locked away for many years. It is my 

memorial for all the young artist friends 

who drifted off to drugs, suicide, or 

simply to marriage and babies. 

THE TEA PARTY takes place when I 

was in the third grade, and I had little 

girls on both sides of me — two Jewish 

girls in the big house next door, and two 

Fundamentalist Christian girls in the 

ramshackle house on the other side. The 

201

memory of licorice-flavored water, served 

in tiny aluminum cups, still makes me gag. 

TWO, GOING ON THREE was an attempt 

to rel ate my earliest memor ies. I 

can remember my second birthday, and 

this poem includes many of the concrete 

memories, including being attacked by 

spiders. My mother, with her fear of machines, 

also makes her first sini st er appearance 

in my poems here. 

THE OUTCAST pretty acc ur ately 

describes my childhood. I did not go to 

church, learn to swim, ride a bicyc le, join 

the Boy Scouts, or do much anything else 

that other boys did. I wasn ’t all owed. 

WATCH DOG could have been one 

dog, or two successive dogs, that lived out 

their mise ra ble days at my grandp are nts’ 

house. For the sake of drama I made it a 

single dog. 

ENGLISH BREAKFAST is about how 

emotionally repressed we English are. 

Even generations removed from the 

mother country, we just can’t emote. 

THE NOSEBLEED is a true acc ount. 

Peop le today would find it hard to believe 

how divided our country was during the 

Vietn am War, and how much hat red there 

was tow ard “hipp ies” among the rednecks. 

As an ado l esc ent, I was aff licted with occ asional 

noseb leeds which could turn 

life-threatening. Once, I lost two and half 

pints of blood. So this was ser io us busin ess 

that took me to St.Vinc ent’s Hosp it al in 

Erie. I still bel ieve that I narrowly esc aped 

death at the hands of some dem ented 

kitchen worker. Friends and teachers did 

not believe me when I tried to rec ount my 

story, and I left for New York City shortly 

thereafter. I never told the story again until 

I wrote the poem. It may be OK now to 

look like a hipp ie, but our presidents and 

many other elected officials still publicly 

declare that you can’t be a decent 

American if you’re an atheist. 

I put A WING OF TIME on the shelf 

for a long time. It seemed self-ind ulg ent, 

just a memo ir of a time and place, even if it 

did have some happy language in it. I 

202 

wanted the poem to succeed, but I 

wanted it to have a meaning. It only came 

to me a few days ago, and I was able, at 

last, to write the fin al stanza. The poem 

suff ered from narc iss ism, sol ips ism, even 

– the feeling that the poet is the center, 

watchi ng peop le and places pass by. In 

rea li ty, I am the one passi ng. I haunt the 

place more than it haunts me. It is not 

writi ng poe ms about me — I, in motion 

and on the way from one eternity to another, 

am hurt ling by and writi ng about 

it. I am the meteor. 


Like most poe ts, I am guilty, guilty, 

guilty, of writi ng poe ms about — writi ng 

poe ms. It’s irr es isti ble, the more so because 

the process of writing remains mysterious 

even to us. Fiction writers can 

have good days and bad days, but can 

write and write and write. Poets have to 

wait. I thought it would be a good idea to 

put all these types of poe ms tog ether: the 

Muse comp laints, the shop talk, the digs 

at critics. So the poems here are fodder 

for writers, and fun for those who spend a 

lot of time thinki ng and readi ng about 

writers. For everyone else, maybe, a 

pass-me-by. 

POETRY MOTELS is a risky poem. 

People get it today, since Jesse Helms is 

still remembered as a nemesis of the arts, 

and since “The roaches check in, but 

they don’t check out” is still remembered 

as an ad slogan for Roach Motels. A few 

years from now, this won’t be funny and 

it will need footnotes. Sigh. 

REGAINING THE MUSE was 

written after a long hiatus of depression, 

during which I wrote no poems. In fact, it 

seemed futile to be a poet. It is in some 

ways, tongue-in-cheek, since the Muse is 

chided for making me poor. I am rich in 

poems; I am poor because I have no 

money. 

THE RIVALRY provoked a stern 

disapproval from poet Ree Dragonette. 

She read an early draft and replied 

huffily, “Whoever heard of a male Muse?” 

I wrote this poem for my friend and

fellow poet Claudia Dobkins, and our 

respective sexual orientations made the 

poem make perfect sense. And it is a nice 

twist ending for those who don’t see it 

coming. 

POETRY READINGS expresses a 

lifetime of disappointment coming home 

from poetry readings “like that” — 

frustrated because there was nothing 

worth hearing. Luckily there were times, 

especially New York in the 1970s, when 

the poetry scene was vibrant and magical. 

We were out every night at readings, and 

we wrote poems back and forth. I am glad I 

saw New York when that was still possib le. 

PATHETIQUE SYMPHONY der ives 

from two different sources. When I hear 

the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s 

Pathetique Symphony, I hear a fractured, 

mela nc holy waltz, as though the dance rs 

are seen by outs ide rs who cann ot take 

part. The composer writes his mus ic in 5/4 

time, so it is not a waltz at all. And when I 

hear this mus ic, I alw ays think of young 

Heathcliff and Cat hy in Wuthering Heights, 

sneaki ng onto the grounds of the Linton 

home, watchi ng a party and its dance rs 

through the wind ows as the dogs adv ance 

to att ack them. From this I made my 

poem, which moves on to become an anthem 

for all “outsiders.” 

DECONSTRUCTION IN WIS- 

CONSIN was written while a lot of people 

were making fools of themselves writing 

articles usi ng (or abusing) this approach to 

literature. I decided that Jeffrey Dahmer, 

the serial killer, was a perfect symbol for 

the Decon- structionist. Dahmer, for 

those who don’t read about such things, 

brought home young men for sex, drugged 

them, killed them, disassembled their 

bodies in various ways, and stored body 

parts in his refrigerator for later dining. 

UNEMPLOYED is another little dig 

at Modern Literary Theory. The headline 

“Creative genius does not exist” managed 

to escape from an MLA convention and 

found its way into the general press, where 

said statement, and literary theorists, 

were much mocked. I thought of my 

Muse, and wondered how she would fare 

in a world which no longer believed that 

there were “special” people who created 

great art. It’s also ironic that eve ryo ne in 

aca d em ia wants to be the rec ipi e nt of a 

“genius award.” 

DEAD POETS covers one of the 

perennial ironies of being a poet. I know I 

will be world-famous fifty years from 

now. I have watched few brief flurries of 

interest around a few poets immediately 

after their deaths, including other poets 

who scarcely knew them trying to elbow 

into memorial readings. 

WHO CAN BE A POET ALL OF 

THE TIME? was a disg usted rea ct ion to 

seeing, in succession, a good dozen mediocre 

poetry books, all of whose authors 

wrote blurbs praising one another as great 

poets. Dana Gioia summed up this state 

of things very well in his ess ay and book, 

Can Poetry Matter? Things will rem ain 

rott en in poetry-land as long as these 

folks jam the books helves with their 

mostly uni nt ere sti ng writi ngs. I grit my 

teeth when I sit in a audie nce made up of 

eag er-to-be-publ ished poe ts, and watch 

them all app laudi ng a cel ebr ity poet who 

spent 45 minutes reading unintelligible 

balon ey. No wonder so many people hate 

poetry. 

DIAGNOSIS OF E.A. POE is my reaction 

to a newspaper account in which a 

learned physician “solved” the mystery of 

Poe’s death, claiming the poet died of rabies. 

I had been readi ng a good deal about 

Poe’s last year, so this is my sard onic take 

on the good doctor’s claim, with apologies 

in adv ance to “lady poets.” 

RHAPSODOMANCY is ano ther of 

those “coincidences,” of the sort that 

happ ens to poe ts. We ask for it. 

OF THE MAKING OF BOOKS was 

written when I found an aband oned attempt 

to describe, in verse, my days running 

The Poet’s Press in New York City. I 

countered this with a present-day ref lection, 

rea li zi ng that the litt le books I produced 

did ind eed mean somet hing. I 

203

have had dep ressed periods when I gave it 

all up, but I alw ays crept back when I 

found poets worth publ ishi ng. 

In FINALISTS — CHRISTIAN 

LADIES’ POETRY SOCIETY COM- 

PETITION, I poke fun at a gagg le of 

born-again poets who infest various poetry 

circles. Some of them claim they channel 

their poems directly from God. This 

wouldn ’t be so awful if they had any talent, 

but it seems that the Christ ian god 

only dictates truly bad poe try. In this 

poem, I have three rel igious poets submitting 

to a cont est with the topic of “babies.” 

Maybe this is a litt le cruel, but at 

heart I do not view these people as simple 

and hone st as they seem. Some even steal 

their bad poe ms from alr eady-publ ished 

books of bad rel ig ious poe ms. All my life 

experience tells me that self-professed 

holy people are often con artists. Note: 

the words with overs trikes through them 

are intentional. 

NOT A LOVE SONG, 

NO, NEVER THAT! 

Very few of the poe ms in this sect ion of 

the book have ever seen print before. I 

have held them close to me. They rev eal 

litt le, since my “love poe ms” are alm ost always 

about wanti ng and alm ost never 

about having. I have led a largely soli t ary 

life. But I guess it is “now or never” to put 

these poe ms out there, and among them 

are several of my favori te children, however 

painful the birthing. Over the years I 

wrote many little poems of yearning that I 

simp ly called “Odes,” writi ng them, numberi 

ng them, tucki ng them away. 

I use a lot of astronomy in my love poems. 

I should really stop, but this is a “conceit” 

that works well for me, and suits our 

age well. Aft er all, we are the first people 

on earth to know what our outer planets 

look like. In THE SHY ONE, I sent a 

meteor to get the loved one’s attention. 

ODE 15 is full of references to black holes 

and you’ll need to know how they work to 

make sense of the poem. CONTACT uses 

a concept I picked up in astronomy, the 

penu mb ra, to describe two shado ws 

204 

touching when the poet passes the loved 

one. LIGHT YEARS urges the loved one 

to become a sup ernova. In ODE 19 repeats 

the astronomical references in its 

next-to-last stanza. I read a lot of scie nce 

fict ion as a kid, and I was one of those 

chemistry set kinds in junior high who 

made stink bombs and blew things up. So 

it is no aff ect ation for me to fall in love 

and use Newtonian physics to describe 

the magn it ude of my aff ect ion, and how 

far and how fast people have run away 

from me. 

NOT A LOVE SONG, NO, NEVER 

THAT! is not really about any spec ific 

pers ons or events. It started as an exp eri - 

ment in writi ng. I wrote the first sect ion 

from the point of view of the Lover, who 

has found his ideal, but has sworn never 

to reveal his perhaps-unwelcome affection. 

The poem is free in form with no advance 

planned structure. Then I set out 

to write the second part, mirroring and 

rev ersi ng the ima ges from the first part, 

and this time from the point of view of 

the Beloved. So I used part one as a map 

to write part two. Then, for the third 

part, I went to part one, and imi t ated it in 

the same ord er, and this time the point of 

view is The Monster. The Mons ter gets 

the better of it, and once he is speaking, 

he gets carried away, and has more lines 

than the othe rs. I did not plan it that way; 

it just happened. You can psychoa nalyze 

this if you wish. 

RENUNCIATION was writt en several 

times, and as it is fact ual, it lacks astrono 

my or mons ters. It is just me, as a 

young man, regretting a journey I made in 

purs uit of an obs ess ive folly. Actua lly, it is 

a seq uel, some years later, to “The 

Irises.” This is a bitt er poem, but it has 

lines in it that make me want to keep it. 

It is not kind to me, or to the other, who 

hadn ’t the slighte st ink ling of the depth 

or viol ence of my emotions. It was all in 

my head, and it burned away in the great 

storm of this poem. 

TRIPTYCH is the most pers onal of 

all my poe ms to date, and it also took the

longest to write. I have re-written it from 

top to bottom at least three times. Three 

different people would see themselves in 

this poem if they cared to read it, but this 

does not matter to the reader. This poem 

says eve ryt hing I have to say about Love in 

the abs tract. The Greeks knew best, and 

had three different words for Love. No 

one has seen the final version of this poem 

— unt il now. 

THE WATCHER is a rec ent poem. 

My friend Hal Hamilton introduced me to 

the term “flaneur,” which is a Par is ian 

word describing one who delights in walking 

around, or sitting in cafes in order to 

watch all the passi ng beaut ies. I take great 

del ight in sitt ing outd oors on Thayer 

Street, enjoying all the splendors of college-age 

youth passi ng by. This is my ode 

to these vis ual del ights — there are living 

things out there as beaut if ul as Greek 

statues. 

SUMMER STORM is from way, way 

back – a summ er night in Pennsylv an ia 

when I lived in an att ic garr et. 


CHILDREN OF ATLAS is my anthem 

against angst. Walt Whitm an looks 

over my shoulder and nuzz les his beard 

against me, whisp eri ng, “You tell them!” I 

see the hum an adv ent ure as only beg inning. 

When the sun goes sup ern ova, when 

the Andromeda galaxy collides with ours, 

we must be somew here else. 

FIRST SNOW has a most mundane orig 

in — a walk past the tiny roses bushes 

that line the parki ng lot of my loc al sup ermark 

et. The sudd en bloomi ng of the roses 

amid the snow, timed so that the passi ng 

poet would see them before and after, was 

another of those serendipities of the 

Muse. The last two lines just leaped into 

place. 

When I first met the arti st Riva 

Leviten, she took me to the Providence 

Art Club and showed me a splend id encaust 

ic work that was hangi ng there in a 

group exh ibit. “What do you make of it?” 

she asked. I surprised her by extemporiz- 

ing the essence of this poem, 

IMPROMPTU, and the next day I presented 

her with the poem. We have been 

great friends ever since. You don’t really 

need to see the work to appreciate the 

poem, but the two together would be dynamic. 

Unfortunately, Riva has misplaced 

the work in her gallery/storeroom 

of thousands of works. If it ever turns up, 

I shall get a photo of it and place it on my 

website. 

DUSK was seen from a train hurtling 

(or should I say, creeping) south from 

Provi dence to New York City. 

AS IDOLS FALL IN THE AF- 

GHAN HILLS was my spont aneo us reaction 

to the horrific actions of the 

Taliban in Afg hani s tan, who des troyed 

the world-fam ous gia nt statu es of Buddha. 

Of course, this was only a prel ude to 

what would follow. 

SIX CHRISTMAS VERSES are doggerel, 

writt en to fill out the Christmas 

booklet that originally centered around 

my Knecht Ruprecht poem. I hope it is 

not my fate to be remembered only for 

these wicked verses. 

THE ‘POSSUM was seen one summer 

might, creepi ng along the wall of the 

Brown University Refectory. 

I moved back to New York City in the 

early 1990s, tempted by an int rigui ng 

publishi ng job. In TWENTY-YEAR 

NEW YORKER, AFTER HIS EXILE, my 

emotions of homecoming are expressed. I 

suppose I will alw ays be a New Yorker. 

In REVELATIONS, I say eve ryt hing 

I have to say to people who think they 

know what God wants. I know what God 

wants — he told me. 

ARABESQUES ON THE STATUE 

OF LIBERTY centers around New York’s 

only actual goddess-figure, one I take 

very seriously. I delight in seeing all those 

Statue of Libe rty mini at ures bei ng sold 

to touri sts. I get weepy when I take the 

205

Staten Isl and Ferry and get to pass close 

by Liberty Island. One day on the ferry I 

saw a man standi ng alone at the raili ng, 

stari ng at the Statue with an int ense express 

ion of hat red. That stayed with me. 

Then, a few days later, I was in Chin atown, 

and I saw an ele g ant Chin ese matron 

rushing down Canal Street, carrying 

one of those miniature Statues of Libe rty. 

Just a few hours later I was at the Empire 

State Buildi ng, thinking about King 

Kong’s tort uo us climb up the side of the 

skyscraper. These images all fell together 

in this poem. 

QUACK is based on a news acc ount of 

a therapist who was prosec uted for fraud, 

pretty much as described in the poem. He 

had a patient with multiple personalities – 

dozens of them – and he charged the insurer 

for group thera py for all the personalities, 

which inc luded dem ons and animals. 

From the tales I have heard, psyc hia try has 

to be one of the most debased of all 

professions today. 

NEMESIS is a new poe tic form. I invite 

other poets to write “nemeses” of 

their own. In each stanza, the last two 

lines must be the “neme s is” of the first 

two, and the last line of stanza 2 must 

rhyme with the last line of Stanza 1. I 

wrote four of these, but there could be any 

numb er of them strung together. Any 

takers? 

THE STERILE SQUASH is one of 

several poems featuring “Mrs. Trog,” my 

former landlady in New Jers ey. She is actually 

a composite of the worst features of 

a mother-daught er duo. 

VERMONT IMAGES is ano ther creation 

from journal notes, this time recapping 

my first trip to Burlington, Vermont, 

and to some of the haunts of Robe rt Frost. 

My hosts, Don and Laura Merit, also took 

me to a pow-wow (my first) of the Abenaki 

Ind ians, which I found dep ressi ng since it 

was held ins ide a gymn as ium. The fourth 

sect ion is my rea ct ion to the upl and pastures 

and ald er fore sts through which we 

walked, reading excerpts of Robert Frost 

poems which were posted on signs along 

the way. 

206 

DEAD PRINCESS is, of course, Princess 

Dia na, and my pag an nat ure responded 

to seeing the outpouring of 

Briti sh emot ion (there isn ’t much of that 

in the univ erse!), the vast hecat ombs of 

flowers, and her very classical final resting 

place). She got eve rything except a 

new cons tell at ion. 

CAVE DEUM (Bew are of God) is a 

playf ul piece, starti ng with a litt le dyslexia 

and poki ng fun at organized rel igion, 

my favorite opponent. People 

somet imes ask me why I’m so tough on 

rel ig ion, and I alw ays ans wer that my 

Druid ancestors were burned at the 

stake. 

DRAMATIS PERSONAE was written, 

yea, many years ago. I never go into 

bars of any kind, but I peeked in a window 

one day and thought I saw at least 

four Shakespeare characters inside, 

drinking beer and looking exceedingly 

gloomy. So there you are. 

ARTICLES OF FAITH is my only 

grown-up poem in which typographic 

means are employed to break up the text 

into para ll el streams. I don’t know how 

one person would read it out loud, so I 

don’t int end to purs ue this line much further. 

I’ve had people send me “conc rete 

poems” over the years with words every-which-way 

on the page. I asked one 

poet, “What am I supposed to do, stand 

on my head or do somersaults while I read 

this?” He never spoke to me again. 

FROM SALEM FORWARD is yet another 

commentary on the psychological 

abuse of children by pare nts, and the 

ways in which “truth” can be manu f actured. 

The app alli ng poem tit led HAN- 

DICAPPED GAME PRESERVE is based 

on a newspaper report. I don’t make 

these things up — there’s actua lly a place 

where men in wheelchairs can hunt, 

maim and kill ani m als. 

HOUSECLEANING com es from my 

house in Weehawken, New Jersey, whose 

owners had paved over the front garden

and removed the trees. Mrs. Trog makes 

another appearance. 

I was never a very successful “hippie,” 

since I think taki ng drugs is stupid. 

Like everyone else in my generation, I 

dabb led, and was uni mp ressed — if someone 

thinks that watchi ng mult ic olored diamonds 

bleedi ng down a wall is “altered 

cons ciousn ess” and a gatew ay to wisd om, I 

pity them. Duri ng my Haight-Ashbury 

days, I foll owed my own path, and drugs 

were really not part of it. 

LETHE was an old piece in which I 

used the ima ge of the Jugg ern aut, which 

crushes people like a steamroller. It concentrated 

on showing how the poor are the 

real vict ims of drugs. I left the poem and 

did nothi ng with it, and then I reali zed 

that I had to count er this with somet hing 

about the arr og ance and stup idi ty of the 

“beaut iful peop le” and their drug cult ure, 

which has much to do with why so many 

people think drugs are wonderful. The 

outr ag eous and needl ess drug death of the 

tale nted and beaut if ul young act or River 

Phoenix (who had the public persona of a 

squeaky-clean vegetarian) finally gave me 

the point of reference for the end of the 

poem. 

When I give readi ngs and talk about 

poe try, I am sometimes asked whether 

drinking “helped” Poe or Dylan Thomas, 

and whether drugs “helped” Coleridge 

and the Beats. You only have to look at the 

burned-out wrecks that these arti sts became 

to rea li ze that their (our) loss is what 

they might have done had they stayed at 

the peak of their powers and lived full 

lives. Cons ciousn ess — esp ec ially the 

poet’s cons ciousn ess — is all we have and 

all we need. Imagination provides the rest. 

That, plus a cup of good tea. 


PROMETHEUS ON FIFTH AVE- 

NUE was writt en back in 1970, and it 

used to be one of my “warhorse” poems at 

readi ngs. I had not looked at it in years, 

and then rea li zed that it should comp anion 

the other two Prometheus-themed poems 

in this book. Rev isi ti ng the poem, I 

disc overed it was far less luc id than I had 

remembered, so I have revised it. The 

poem is based on the cont rast bet ween 

the Art Deco statue of Prom et heus at 

Rockefeller Plaza (the 1933 work of 

sculpt or Paul Manship), and, just a block 

away, the blackened pile of St. Patrick’s 

cathedral. (Yes, I know it’s been cleaned, 

but it was soot-black when I wrote the 

poem and for many years therea fter.) 

The des ign of Rockefeller Cent er, 

with its bas-rel iefs of Greek gods, alw ays 

symbolized for me the true spirit of 20 th 

century New York. St. Patrick’s always 

repr es ented to me the worst of mankind’s 

rep ress ive heri t age. I sought in the 

poem to counter one world-view against 

the other. Man is not a sacr if ic ial ani m al, 

and a god, as an ext ens ion of man’s quali - 

ties, is even less so. Prom et heus is the 

antithesis of Jesus, and I am proud to call 

him my inspiration. 

In PROMETHEAN EPILOGUE, 

the libe ra ted Prom et heus gets a litt le revenge 

on the vulture who had so long tormented 

him. 

ATHENA AND MEDUSA gives the 

little-known background of how the hideous 

Gorg ons came to be serpent-headed 

mons ters. There’s a moral to it all, too — 

it is not given that those who are smarter 

are also blessed with kindn ess and emp athy. 

Who is the worse monster in this 

story? 

These two shorter poems, BURNT 

OFFERING and DIALOGUE are part of 

a small set of imagi n ary poe ms bet ween 

the tormented Greek poet Anakreon and 

the beautiful young Harmodius. A 

glimpse into ano ther world. 

PROMETHEUS CHAINED was inspired, 

in a flash, by looki ng at a tiny 

painting by Riva Leviten. This mini at ure 

shows a hunched figure, blackened, covered 

with chains. Bel ow him is what appears 

to be the skyline of city. Above him, 

mena ci ng clouds swirl, with hag-like 

creatures flying in storm-clouds. Next to 

the hulki ng, imp riso ned Tit an is a tiny 

figure in a hooded robe, his face a hideous 

blue, looking ever so much like a malevo - 

207

lent monk. On the prisoner’s breast is 

what appears to be an eagle. 

My friend Riva says she has no idea 

what the painti ng means. What I have just 

described above may or may not be there – 

it’s a very abs tract work and some of these 

det ails could be just rand om turns of the 

brush. But the mom ent I saw the painti ng, 

I said, “Riva, this is the story of Prom etheus, 

only it’s a new version. Prometheus 

has not been made capt ive by Zeus. The 

hum ans have bet rayed him, chained him 

up, cove red him with tar. They mean to 

kill him. Zeus has come, in the form of an 

eag le, to gloat.” 

I went home, and wrote this poem. 

When I saw that it had many disc rete 

parts, it occurred to me that it could be 

read aloud with mus ic al interludes, and 

the Beethoven Prometheus Variations came 

to mind. I have not yet had a chance to 

have the poem performed with the music, 

so I am not sure how well it will go, but my 

ins tincts tell me it will be a good fit. This 

is a very important poem for me, and it 

sums up some of my late st thoughts about 

myth, and what we can do with myth. 

THE DEATH OF JOCASTA had a 

fasc in ati ng ori g in. In a class I was taki ng 

last year on Modern Critical Theory with 

Prof. Tamara Bolotow at Univ ers ity of 

Rhode Isl and, a class assignment consisted 

of writi ng a brief ess ay on any play in 

our anthology, using our choice of critical 

theories. I chose Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, 

and, not sati sf ied with the abrupt offs tage 

suicide of Queen Jocasta, I decided to 

write a feminist essay on how Sophocles 

treated this tragic woman who does the 

“proper” thing, killing herself when she 

discove rs she has been married to her own 

son for twenty years. I slept on the project, 

and when I awoke in the morning to write 

the ess ay, I said aloud, “Jocasta did not kill 

208 

herself!” I opened the computer, intending 

to write my ess ay, and instead wrote a 

complete new scene in blank verse, “The 

Death of Jocasta,” in which she tells her 

side of the story. The ending was ine vi table, 

but I was surp rised when the fin al, 

rhymed couplet just landed on the page. 

This scene, with Greek chorus, was 

given a staged readi ng in April 2004 at 

Brown Univ ers ity by The Writer’s Circle. 

A number of audience members mistook 

it for a new transl at ion of a lost scene by 

Sophoc les. The dedicated work of the actresses 

helped me to refine the scene and 

work out some lines that were less than 

clear. Thanks are due to Rose Pearson, 

founder of The Writers’ Circle, for selecting 

the play. 

Since this book appeared in print in 

early 2005, more than 15,000 copies of its 

elect ronic (PDF) version have been 

downloaded by readers all over the world. 

I am del ighted that my works can now 

reach an international audience at no cost 

to the reader. It is lonely in the poet's corner, 

however, so I do app reciate communications 

from readers (other than serial 

killers, of course). Send fan mail, money, 

or indecent offers via snail mail to the address 

on the copyright page, or send me 

e-mail at 

brett@poetspress.org 

I am also delighted to rec eive transl ations 

of my works into fore ign lang uages, 

and will be del ighted to post them to The 

Poet's Press website.

The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets - The Poet's Press

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