high hopes

Is it right
to hope so high
so high that I
may tie on a tie?

People ask me
why the tie?
A rope to hold
as I fly high,

and pray to alight
in paradise
as blue as agate,
gold as eyes.

Ever the more
am I to be
to move to morrow
hopefully.

The scene has altered
and defies
my lifelong need
to recognize.

And yet through all
remain alive
to see kind friends
anew arrive.

Ah, career women

Busy as sexless worker bees they buzz,
Heads bent, hiding in their cages, rattling
Invisible chains of wage slavery,
Denying meaning to themselves, and love.
An hour to munch the crumbs and read a book,
They spend their sunrise running in the park
In regulation shoes and uniform,
The austere maidens of the master race!

A walk to work would yield them joy, actual
People along the way to talk with, and
The city like a symphony of singing.
Grant you they are bright but bright as sheen
Reflecting from a blacktop after rain
A shallowness of being, devoid of depth,
And merely sky of brooding clouds, and self
Deception, like a narcissist forever
Gazing on her face in disappointment.
So it is eternal beauties die
Alone and unremembered.

and they do this to me:

Does the veri vary in my sweaty palm,
as pencil rides the crest of dimpled meaning
scratching on a page of slight blue lines
my own mundane allotment beating time?
A dose of dousing in the myriad of words
is medicine to make one melancholy,
memory the long boat in a sea
of lonely mist arising out of sapphire
blue as perfect sunrise, bright and cold
like unforgiving iron to searching hands...


Was once a time when I was forced to count syllables but the 5 beat singsong comes so naturally to me now that I consider full abandonment of prose.

unrequited love inspires brief asides

Winter wind is a murder song
Lamenting ever and on,
Driven by love as blind as hate
And ice that grips thereon.

White hot fly the piercing shells,
The blue smile stabs as deep
As arctic eyes that cruelly set
Your own to bend and weep.

Forsaken high to swallowing sky
This one to blight above
Remembers with the crickets gone
The last he saw of his love.

***

I love you
is scald to skin,
Desire delivering
Wages of sin.

I love you:
My stifled sigh
Resounding surrenders
To no reply.

forked meanings hide true intent

When friends tell me they don't know how to read poetry, I feel such retorts point to a dearth if not a death of imagination. These days things either are 'cool' or else they 'suck.' And that's the pinnacle of adjectival description. Truth is, perhaps, the intelligent expect too much of themselves. All you have to do when you read a poem is let your thoughts bound alongside the music, and all of a sudden then this decidedly randy lyric makes perfect sense, I love forked meanings, and this is rife with them, one way of which is to use the rhyme of the word I meant to use and so point to two separate meanings simultaneously:


Stupidly grow? Or groupedly stow
A bear of palsied huevos unadorned
In wrinkled baggage cupped and soothed,
A balm bag for the scorned?

And so forlorn it tickles ye
A mauve o' linnet in the din
Of howling? Oh the cad is kicked...
For arching sluice to hide therein.

He longs in longing thick as beams
Aglitter in the piercing darkness
For the tactile reassurance
Of his briny, shellfish dreams.

His nose gone rich with sunrise
To the treasure under shroud
Of sea-scent crinkling in his knowing
More than modest words allowed.

dee p eed

sent these to my muse, lately...

everyone should have a muse, y'know. They're all the rage, lately...


so i confess to you,
my dear, i am a snob;
the art i make is never
meant to quell the mob.

the angels, only, who
uphold the higher laws
are they from whom i yearn
to hear applause.


as peaches dangling amber in an orchard by the ocean
where the crest and trough in endless roil seem saying
"you there, dreamer deem to highlight in your visions'
spectacles of golden ripeness all sublime in sunrise;
stars in waning facets vanish in a blare of morning,
bleary, waken to it urgent and heartbreaking in the pallor
of eventual demise in twilight...."

So it wilts away the delicate beauty in your fingers
tracing lines along a road map of the years
with memories augmented bubbling up in frothy dreams
a face unnamed, a name that knows no face,
all gone into the oblivion of night's reproach.
Ah, the years, my friend, you cannot know the years
until you've lived them and the seasonal tears
have washed new lines into the old.

Ancient injuries return to bite again
as if arisen from the dead, to cripple brittle
all my yellow bones, my mess of brain, ejaculations,
seepages and sundries soiling all.
I am an old man rummaging in discards for a dream
of gossamer to cure the bladder sting with visions
of a memory long buried under weathered boards.

my poetics of the short story form

I'll confess to one and all that ambition of epic proportions took hold of little old me, and 13 Tales slowly began to morph into iambic pentameter--until an ounce of horse sense intervened and stopped me. The tale is a bardic tale as it is and needs little further meddling. As it is, the 13 Tales can be all too easily confused with a type of serial novel, and that's fine. I don't care. I know I wrote the thing as 13 separate short stories arranged chronologically, and in the style of short stories which are themselves poetic forms born of poetic inspiration, something that novelists, who tend to compose piecemeal, can't do.

I think in terms of 5000 words and compose in this crystalline shape [in truth the length varies from 3500 to 7000 words--especially after revision]:

*
**
***
**
*

that is, 5 parts and 9 sequences. Lately, the challenge has been to adopt the flowing cadences of Whitman; and, truthfully, it would be a lie not to admit Angela Carter's influence.

The novel is out for me. Such a burdensome read, so much attention to micro-cosmic detail and over-wrought descriptions, neurotic confession and mind-numbing dialogue going on page after page. I don't mind it all that much but read novels sparingly. I always took it personally and bitterly to hear that short stories were 'little novels.' They are a different animal as conceptually opposed to novel form on the one hand as they are to the play on the other. Nor are they a minor form. In the novel it is description and character development defining the form. In the play it is dialogue that does the job.

But the short story is about action, the moral imperative to act upon a decision that guides people to their necessary consequences. In my story, THE RUDDY ROSE, Nephi's weakness for erotic fantasy renders him impotent and so his more virile rival wins the reality while Nephi is left to ponder his loss. A decision taken cancels all other possibilities. See how it all plays out. This is not moralizing. These are not sermonettes I write, but actions have consequences. That is the soul of story telling.

In each story of the 13 Tales Nephi suffers the consequences of his decisions. They are therefore not chapters of a novel but a cycle of tales.

I have a few problems with what passes for poetry...

Mark Strand's poetry has always been problematical although I can claim a victory and say what I have always suspected, that there is much less there than meets the eye. This one for example:

Keeping Things Whole by Mark Strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

He's really saying in his musicless fashion that in an orchestra he is the absence of music, that he's what's missing in the score. This is the real confession to me as I believe that poetry is music and language its instrument. So, what the hell. I thought I might rehabilitate Strand and play his fiddle my way. I have rendered his abstractions concrete. Verily, August doth shimmer, Mark. Have you never walked through waves of hay? And what I have done, here? Turned his ironies to myth. Wound up meaning more than I said, and only subsequent re-reads will reveal the tiny revelation of true mind that is the world's own mind coiled like a wise and ancient snake at our feet:

In a field I am its absence
moving in the August hay
disruption lolling in a shimmer
through the rolling waves of day.

I part the air as it moves past
as always is the case with me;
where I have moved the absent air
assumes the new void absently.

And as I move so do the lot
who track a path through waving roll,
given reasons all their own:
I merely move to keep things whole.


I'll pick on someone else tomorrow.

readers

shouldn't have to know a danged thang about poetry. They aren't the ones who have to open themselves to poetry. It's our job to lure them in and present an engaging and beautiful world they can recognize at once. Granted, they don't know what's poetry any more thanks to a lot of masquerading out there lurking in academic chapbooks, and the willful sabotage of post structuralists farting up faculty lounges from coast to coast. I believe the problem began with TS Eliot telling his students to deliberately fight the natural flow of meter. Yes, and who reads him now, save the occasional, rebellious college academic for whom cleverness is everything?

A poem is like a flower. It has to open itself up in order to live. It has to have that petaled symmetry and structure and say what it means to say with utmost clarity so no one can mistake it for the abounding thorns and briars that call themselves poetry: "Yes, by all means step over here. Oh, you don't see that I'm a brilliant, clever poem? You don't GET me? You must be stupid!"

And that is how they stick you as you turn away. I have a good little library of chapbooks by 'poets,' but I would no more call them poets than call them peach pudding. A couple of decades ago I hosted a poetry reading where one poet's rhyming verse was hooted down by the mob. Technically, he had a few problems. However, the bigger problem is that he wrote an unforgettable poem: "When McLad was a lad, he was oftentimes sad," it begins. The rest wrote in the conventional ironic manner of so much that is sludge to me. I can't remember any of it. But you should have seen them gang up on this guy after I put his reading on tape. Can't have that. But you see, he alone had written a poem.

went to a slobfest in tie and jacket...

And what did I learn? It's very simple: When people cease to take themselves seriously, most importantly, how they look to other people, they themselves will cease to be taken seriously. So now the situation has finally hit rock bottom. We live in a culture that is no longer taken seriously. A man in a tie is an intimidating presence. He looks like 'the man.' the law, an authority figure, the school principal, and nobody wants to look that that. So let us look like we've gone to hell, instead. We are a nation of the fat and slovenly now, all ringlet-ed, tattooed, drunk, high, slobbering, stupid, unintelligible, boorish, abusive and narcissistic. If yer gonna' go to Hell, anyway, you may as well dress for the trip. At the slobfest in question, some fat little man in his death metal attire smirked at me as if to say "dude, you don't belong here." I smiled back as if to say "little one, I don't ever want to be confused with you."

Where's a poet spozed hang his hat?

Ah, poetry, that that that...balm in Gilead. Been perusing blogs of 'otherwise' though it sez it be poetry. I want to ask the dumb bastard producing his 'clever' bilge, "do you know what you're doing besides going out of your way to make things harder for the reader?" News flash, folks: poetry ain't supposed to be hard to read; it's supposed to be hard to write. If it's hard to write but easy to read then it may or may not be poetry; but if it is easy to write [just throw words together out of context] then, as a consequence, you've a puzzle not a poem, and most likely an unsolvable one. Poetry must engage first and entertain. Then and only then [are you hearing this, little poets?] it challenges a re-read. Not to follow this simple directive is not to write poetry at all. At ALL! It's not for the general public to be put in a position where they have to KNOW what we are doing, any more than the average film goer should have to know about the subtleties of that craft. It's silly. Granted an understanding may increase enjoyment; but I tell you there are legions of frauds out there writing absolute shit that is perfectly meaningless and completely unmusical but they pass it off as poetry because it's a way of making their mud pies seem like clever compositions. How do you tell? Anal-eyes the damned things, that's how. Look for words that have no context except to seem...MYSTERIOUS somehow. I talk to people all the time who complain that they don't read poetry because they don't have to. These people have been cheated by a lot of confidence frauds. I tell them they shouldn't have to know how to read poetry any more than they should have to know how to watch a movie. But don't forget the popcorn.

Glad we got that harangue out of the way.

Have been reading old Mark Strand poems online and finally begin to see his trick. He evokes far less than he says. I think this is his way of avoiding sub-textual analysis, likely in the hands of angry feminist deconstructionists/jilted lovers, ex-wives, dates left holding the tab, etc.

The Ruddy Rose
By Dee Wolfe

“…And then they tied a true lovers’ knot,
The red rose ‘round the briar.”

Nephi Gass wished to be a farmer. The summer of his eighteenth year saw sunrise after sunrise through silver clouds in patches looming above the willow damp of Shepherd’s Canyon, glories coming through them like Jove’s own fingers touching the face of His beloved Earth. It would have been a nearly perfect summer had his father’s death not left Nephi with the orchards to care for, and the vines, the chickens to feed, the animal corn to harvest in the north field to feed the chickens through the winter. Nephi and his mother and his sisters, yes and his helpful cousins carried on without old Gus to guide them. He had died of lung cancer after Halloween before Nephi’s fifteenth birthday; and it had been a hollow Christmas for the family, all of them hearkening to the past and Nephi’s mother in tears remembering her own beloved.

Still, the cherries and peaches had to be pruned and, with the harvest, picked and carted off to market in bushel baskets or crates. There was corn to be planted no matter what else, and chickens to be fed every day, and eggs to be gathered every day. Three years went by as Nephi grew enthusiastic for farming and thought, by Spring’s end, having little regard for schooling, reading a favorite book while he navigated the old family tractor, he could be a farmer for the rest of his life, and saw himself in coveralls mucking boots and straw hat, chewing a shaft of wheat.

He was slight in those days, not much to see, brown hair bleached as white-yellow as corn silk as he went out into the yard to work one of twenty acres. High school lay behind him forever in the squalid dust of Davis High halls and Nephi had only the ripening of fruit to worry about, and not one thing else. He had found in the tool shed his dad’s old pipe and a pouch of fragrant tobacco. He lit up as he had seen Gus do in the past and liked to smoke in the east orchard on the hillside near the property line where his mother couldn’t see him.

“Mom,” he had told her, “I can handle the farm well enough. We can truck the lot of this to market and move the rest to the bishop’s storehouse. It isn’t anything I can’t handle.”

Myrna replied “I can’t bear to see you carrying this load by yourself. You’re still a young man and I won’t tie you to this farm if I can help it.” As she spoke she fingered the long tail tied behind her graying hair, looking off to a mythical place where Gus still stood holding her world on his shoulders.

She invited all the greater Gass family, spread from Weber through Davis and on into the farthest reaches of Salt Lake County to come pick fruit and help sell it, and for this she would pay them in harvest. As well she invited her own side of the family, the Roses, though they were somewhat fewer in number. As a result her brother and his family of ingrates and ne’er-do-wells arrived in a station wagon, and Nephi saw his cousin, Ray again. The pretty blonde and ruddy boy stepped from the backseat with his curls on his shoulders and a killer’s grin on his face. They were the same age though Ray was a little bigger, and a bully and liked to bully littler boys. Nephi could only imagine his fate had his mother not intervened in a fight were Ray had held him pile-driven into the front lawn, his neck twisted out of sorts and his head to one side gasping red. A few years had passed, and now Ray had learned new games like how to steal cigarettes and ‘fan a fag’ so authorities didn’t notice, and how to get out of doing any work at all.

Nephi wished for his cousin to see him in his element, the master of the property, a wizened farmer used to toil and rough hands, and a farmer’s intuitive sense of seasons and the play of light on leaves of trees. He wished for Ray to see that he, Nephi had conquered the world’s expectations of his place and skills, stalwart standing in his straw hat taking the measure of a peach. He wanted Ray to see him smoking a pipe.

After Ray had climbed out of the wagon and laughed a little at Nephi he reached an arm back in and brought forth a dark haired slender girl all legs as brazen as sunlight. No mere daintiness here but grace, a dancer’s easy grace, a ballerina’s lightest movements. She got out and smiled at Ray and fanned the back of her shorts as if brushing something away. She wore a white blouse that opened in front and followed her cleavage and tied together with a string at the breasts. The sleeves were long and billowy and cuffed. She looked wonderful that way. Her feet were bare but Ray crawled into the car to retrieve her thongs.

Nephi knew her at once, remembered from summers ago, Renee Walker, whose parents were pure trash but friends to the Roses. Ray walked her past Nephi, neither saying a word, holding her arm and saluting him with a terse fling and went on into the house. Nephi turned and watched them, the girl’s round rear rolling like an ocean calm on a sunny day. He followed them in and stood in a corner of the kitchen leaning on a counter as Myrna peeled potatoes and the coffee pot percolated merrily. He heard Ray answer her query: “You remember Renee Walker. She’d like to take home a bushel of peaches for her folks and says she’ll work for them.”

“I remember you, Renee. Sounds fine,” Myrna smiled broadly, not considering in the least where Renee should sleep. Nephi smelled trouble and the same anxieties that nibbled at him in the weeks before his father died, when school was too difficult a thing to bother with, when there were only the paperbacks to hide in, moodily immersed as he was in UFO lore, ghosts, and prophecies of end times. But the one end time affecting his heart to a sinking terror, he could not face at all until it came upon him. Convinced by that event that he had seen it all and could face anything, Nephi moved unprepared for this day. It took no time at all to realize that he had suddenly fallen in love with Renee, and hated his cousin for her all the more, and did so in the time it took to peel potatoes.

Nephi poured himself a cup of coffee and stomped outside to fire up the tractor, something he convinced himself his cousin could not do. He turned the crank around and around although it would not start. He saw her floating before his inner vision like a gust of pollen through orchard leaves, her smooth, oval face and brown eyes large and soulful, gazing at him not quite blankly but expectantly. Ray kept stepping to her to laugh and take her away and, when Nephi looked up, there they were standing before him, her thighs so close and scented with the primordial fragrance of nakedness, standing close together, her shorts so short he could see a wedge of light through her closed thighs.

“Won’t it start?” asked the grinning Ray as he turned to flip the switch below the tachometer. “Now try it.”

Nephi swore under his breath and tried the crank again. This time the tractor roared to rumbling and Ray said “you have to turn it on first.” He made a face at Renee who could not help a little giggle. They turned as one away from the tractor and left Nephi to fume alone as he climbed in the seat, and no one to see him as an angry clown without makeup.

For the past several years since his father had died, Nephi had left the management of the orchards to Uncle Denny Rose. He it was first brought the Walkers in to help pick the fruit, and they had brought along young Renee, a skinny twerp of thirteen forever at the mercy of her tormentor, Ray. They came in the month of March to see to the pruning and in April and May to irrigate the trees. Finally they showed up on golden warm mornings in June to pick the bundled fruit of the cherries, and the kids made a go of it, the three of them into mischief whenever they could get away and run under the trees or wade in the wide ditch on the firebreak along Shepherd’s Canyon. Ray had never liked Nephi, and bullied the slighter boy until Denny took the strap to him, making him yelp for mercy in front of Renee. Nephi pitied his cousin for the yowling and howling and made a secret pact one day when Denny came into the tool shed carrying his strap, and nearly caught Nephi smoking his late father’s pipe. At that moment Nephi realized that Ray had been hiding behind the bench and crouched against the wall. Denny stepped out to stand at the mouth of the shed surveying likely hiding places. Just then Ray popped his head up surprising Nephi, and put a finger to his lips—“please…” Nephi nodded and held up the pipe. They were conspirators now, and waited in silence while old Denny moved away from the tool shed. Something was up, the old cuss knew it but couldn’t sniff it out.

Suddenly he came back into the shed. “Sure you ain’t seen my boy?”
Nephi dropped the pipe as Ray ducked down, and picked up a hammer pretending to tap something before him, nothing there, of course, but held it up a little above the bench.

“No, Uncle,” he said.

“If you do,” Denny sneered, “give him something to do,” and hung the strap on the nail of the outside wall of the shed. He sauntered off, something terrible on his mind.

“Coast is clear,” Nephi said, and his cousin popped up.

“When’d you take up smoking?” Ray asked.

“When’d YOU?” Nephi asked as his cousin lit a cigarette.
Ray drew a deep pull and let out smoke as lazily as it would drift. “Thanks for that, man,” he said.

Nephi thought of those years behind him now as he drove the tractor to the tool shed and hooked a two-wheeled trailer to it. While the tractor grumbled loudly, he filled the trailer with cherry crates and little green baskets to fill a lug of cherries. Making a fair stack and laying two long wooden ladders across the trailer he climbed back in the tractor and started for the orchard where the big black-red cherries dangled like small hearts engorged with blood. Up in the midst of deep shade of cherries he parked and stopped the engine. Here were galvanized buckets with hooks on the handles hanging from the crotches of trees. Nephi took one and chose a likely tree and began to pick. All the cherries gone from the bottom limb he climbed into the tree and picked more, filling the bucket as he did so until it swayed heavily from a branch beside him, and then he lost himself in dreaming and ate several cherries near him. He could not say how long he sat musing.

He thought of Ray and Renee and himself running in the orchards far into the night, playing hide and seek and telling ghost stories to the trickle of water where the ditch widened into a small pond. One night Ray took his clothes off in front of her and she stared brazenly at him with a twist of her lip. “Come on. Let’s go skinny dipping,” and finally coaxed her down to her panties as she got into the water and complained how cold it was. After a moment Nephi got in too, and they sat staring at one another from a distance until Nephi heard his mother calling and scrambled out to fight his way into his grubby clothes. He ran to meet his mother and made up some story that would suit her.

Mostly Ray and Renee were happy to throw pebbles at each other and chase each other wildly through the starlit avenues between the trees, hiding behind the trunks and popping out with a boo; and Nephi wished she would throw a pebble at him. Then they played a kissing game in the tall wild wheat and Nephi felt her cool wet lips on his cheek, her tongue licking the iron taste of his skin as he closed his eyes and enjoyed a little thrill in his groin. Ray laughed and said “you’re full it, baby!”

In the near absolute darkness of the orchard they walked together just ahead of Nephi as he slowed down lost in his own reverie. He could see their silhouettes holding hands to the far end, her legs pressed to Ray’s, their heads coming together for a long kiss. His heart leapt to see it. She wore the tiniest cut-off jeans in those days, and Ray’s bold hand massaged the mound of her maiden-hood while she leaned into him kissing him hard.

Her bare brown thighs kept coming to Nephi’s mind just now, lying back in a high branch of the cherries and he felt the swollen member standing against his coveralls and wished for her, wished to part her legs and find the joy between, her face smiling and urging him in. To his surprise he ejaculated in a spasm of twisting and crimson embarrassment. He panted. He found his composure and checked for telltale signs, and then lay back and fell briefly asleep.

He awoke to voices arising from below and opened his eyes to see a robin not two feet away tilting its little head in scrutiny as if a party to his weakness and there to mock him with a merry song. He blinked and started to and the robin flew off in a flurry and Nephi turned to the west toward Antelope Island to see them coming up, his mother and sister, his mother’s brother and sister, and Ray with his Renee bringing up the rear. “Where are the buckets?” he heard Ray yell out and then “here they are.”

“Where’s Nephi?” his uncle asked.

“Check your book of Mormon, Pop,” said Ray and chortled derisively. The old man stopped in the dust and turned to give him a cold look. It was enough to shut Ray up for a moment but Nephi answered from his tree “I’m up here.”

“With the seagulls,” said Ray.

“Try robins,” said Nephi. “They like the cherries.”

“So do I,” said Ray who brazenly winked at Renee. She rolled her eyes at him and made a look of unconvincing disgust. Nephi saw it all from his secret spot in the shady tree, and felt a tinge of hope that she might drop his cousin and fall for him. He dared not think that she had eyes for Ray alone.

Buckets were handed out and Nephi descended his tree, laden with the heavy bucket, the spent juices of desire squishing in his briefs. He hauled the bucket to the trailer and poured out the cherries, all attached to their stems, filling a lug a third of the way. He turned to announce that he needed to go back to the house for a moment.

“Everything okay, Son?” His mother asked, never entirely sure that her baby boy wasn’t dying from some disease and wasn’t telling her.

“Bathroom,” he lied and fumbled back down the sloping orchard toward the back door. Once inside he drew the drapes on his bedroom window and got out of his coveralls, went to the bathroom to wet a rag and brought it back to his room, removing his shorts from where he sat on the edge of the bed as a line of semen slimed slowly down his leg. He wiped it up, the little coagulated nubs like bits of curd piled up around his predicament and all smelling of wet paper. He felt the tiredness in his legs and pulled on a pair of fresh underwear. He lay back on his bed and dozed in an overwhelming sense of defeat and guilt. Renee, he thought to himself, I don’t care, and indeed he didn’t as sleep took him and a half an hour passed away.

A lifetime had passed, a hundred thousand years perhaps and Nephi awoke into a quiet afternoon of blowing wind in the rafters of the old farmhouse, a ghostly sound that filled his dreams with wind-bent structures and faces slanting away in agendas alien to him. Voices were stopped and garbled in such a swound and Nephi always awoke a little mystified by ambiguities, as he did now seeing his father’s face of desperate reassurance as the old man called to him.

Nephi dressed himself once more in musty-smelling coveralls and pulled on his mucking boots. Straw hat upon his head he went out the back door and back up the slope to his mother who asked “good grief, where’ve you been?”

“How long’s it been?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Fall asleep in there, Neeph?” his cousin asked.

Wearily, Nephi took his bucket up again and climbed halfway the height of a long wooden ladder, the type like a three legged stool supported by a single post set in the ground. It was wobbly at best and Nephi feared precarious heights, and hated the cursed thing and the far places it took him into the highest branches of a fruit tree, gingerly balanced on the next to last step, swaying back to see above him while holding to a mere twig for balance, knees hugging wood as he reached past the last bundle of leaves for the last cheery handful of cherries.

So, the afternoon curved on into sunset, and Nephi and his uncle Denny called it a day and Nephi hauled the day’s harvest down to the highway in his dad’s old pickup truck, its dusty upholstery smell that soothed him back to better days he knew when the Little Dippers played ‘Forever’ on the old truck radio and rain swept the windshield in rhythm, and the world grogged on asleep and content. The Philco still played a thousand rock stations, and Nephi heard a recent not-so-oldy, oddly appropriate as he punched the dial: ‘just walk away, Renee, you won’t see me follow you back home…’

Oh, yeah, thanks for the memories. They wandered hapless hand in hand to nursing homes to be tube fed unto demolition, verily.

Later, coming back in the truck with its bed emptied, Nephi saw the two Rs sitting at the edge of the property gazing cross-legged upon the highway. He pulled onto the dusty drive and stopped and rolled down the window. “What are you up to?”
Ray said “Cherry Red mustang.”

“What? Where?” He grimaced through dust cloud.

“Right here on the highway, movin’ slow, not a care in the world, the most beautiful little car you ever saw in your life, and it’ll never be prettier than it was passing by me. I saw it and I drank it up, and you missed the boat, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t see it, said Nephi and put the truck in the lowest gear, grinding slowly along up the bumpy driveway. But just then he heard Renee whine “don’t—“ as she came up in a huff and yanked the other door open and slid in beside him.

“What’s going on?”

“Just drive,” she said, glowering through the windshield, her arms crossed before her like a put out Nefertiti all out of patience. Ray came running up and dove into the bed and came up behind the back window, slapping at the glass and making faces at Renee, all of which she ignored. She ignored Nephi, too, ignored everyone and all of herself, her slender graceful self with the perfect hair about her shoulders. How he wanted her.

He droved as slowly as he dared to, glancing side-wise at her trying to peruse the closed blank book beside him, studying the nipples rising against her blouse so desirably he wanted to reach across and pinch the little things but lost courage and held desperately to the wheel. He felt he had a chance, somehow, that he could play the gentleman and let her see a how a polite, kind man treats a lady and then she would know the difference. He would take her right out from under Ray and he would love her and she would be grateful, all this, while Ray slapped at the windshield and called her name out as if it were an obscenity, and Nephi knew it was so he could make a face at her, a puerile gesture that surely she would reject. A woman needed a man not a boy.

Suddenly she brightened and turned a wide smile toward Nephi to his surprise, and he was about to smile back at her but the smile was not for him as she continued on and turned her head behind her with a great grin, and pounded on the glass and, to Ray’s out loud laugh, gave him the finger. He returned it and she giggled as if nothing on this Earth were funnier.

Dinner sat ready at the house. Myrna had baked two chickens and opened a jar of her canned string beans. The chickens were stuffed and an open can of cranberry sauce had been spooned onto a plate. The potatoes were boiled and mashed and gravy from the chickens served in a white porcelain tureen in a flowery motif. Nephi would not notice until later they were roses. A bottle of Coca Cola sat beside each plate as went the Gass family custom. All took their chairs and commenced to dig in.

“Stop!” Myrna held up a hand in protest. “Nobody eats under my roof until the food’s blessed.”

Ray, sitting next to Renee as if he owned her set the spoon back in the tureen and folded his arms in a sarcastic way, leaning back in his chair to show them to Renee, who did likewise. Denny stood and bowed his head and delivered a jack-Mormon’s typically clumsy and fumbling benediction: “…and we say these things in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ…” after which ‘amen’ expelled like a rumbling fart, they attached the table.

“I don’t how you do it, Myrna,” Ray’s mother gushed through a gob of masticated chicken flesh. “Mine always turn out so dry.”

Nephi studied across the table Ray and Renee as together as doves in bas relief on a plate of sentimental china, complementary and complete in symmetrical affection, and yet a serpent slept in the dense foliage of their nest. “Don’t,” she said, squirming away from his pokes and pinches while he grinned wide and toothy to torment her. A little leg of chicken in her dainty fingers it was all she could do to get a nibble out of it. “Stop it,” she whined, leaning away and glancing back sidelong at him while she sucked the grease from her fingers. At this point Ray caught her hand and put a finger in his mouth and mocked her with a leer that Nephi found repellant.

She’d had enough and got from the table, bluntly asking to be excused and slammed out the kitchen door into the eastern night of lunar pillars of light arraying behind the mountains. Nephi had stared at her, watched every slender muscle of her movement, the black river of hair cascading down her small shoulders, the innocent soft face of her, the long legs under her little round butt that moved like music out of the hollows of his spent desire. He wanted her but watched her leave and knew that now was the time, or else never, and she would never be as beautiful as she was just now. He could feel the primeval readiness of her in his groin, but had spent the seed of himself for her into his clothes, and so sat like a straw man.

Passed a quantum pause and Ray got up rubbing the greasy nubs of his fingers on his pants with a “scuse me,” and followed her into the melodic mystery of crickets and cycles and the Earth’s abiding whims, the breezes of night, the rising lunar disk, the very hills glowing at the rim.

“What’s that all about?” asked Myrna.

“Who knows?” asked Denny, nosing the last of the mashed potatoes. “She’s an odd one, that Renee.”

Nephi pretended not to be curious and so took his time pushing his plate back. After awhile he made a show of parting and patted his belly, mumbling about going to fetch something or other and putting it in the tool shed for the night. He went out the door but pulled the screen close behind him very quietly until it clicked, and stepped from the small cement square into short grass, and the scene before him dim into the shadowy lines of sheds and trees, and meandering toward the tool shed to find his father’s pipe and pouch. He felt in his coveralls for matches and rolled the book around in his nervous fingers, thinking of her, thinking of them together hand in hand in the quiet, lovers exclusive, three a crowd, one lost in pipe smoke behind them awishin’.

A secret sentence came upon the leaves in breezy night, and Nephi wondered at its grammar. Arrived and paused and re-arrived and taken elsewhere to another congregation of hearers, strangely spoken gospel telling the history of all the winds that ever blew on summer nights when lovers met in moon glow.

And as if on cue the fat moon arose amidst her musty light of yellow ethers flying on her scattering of moon spores pungent and vibrating, emitting her nocturnal phosphors filled with purpose and portent, like a dandelion gone to stars in feathery spin.

Nephi never found his pipe, gone antsy with anticipation, yearning for her as he moved into the eastside orchard where the cherries had lately clung. He followed moon-cast footsteps up the way and stopped to hear the breeze, wherein he heard a soft moan, a whine perhaps not as animal as human coming from the south where the tall grass waved and shimmered. He crept toward on tiptoe until he saw them in a circular flat of grass wriggling, writhing like pale maggots nearly at his feet, primeval forms conjoined in pulsing rhythm, Ray atop Renee, the full moon catching the joy in her lidded eyes, her lips to his lips, her hands clasping her toes as she brought her legs way up to splay about Ray’s own body, the moon upon his own halved moon, while he held her head in his long right arm and kissed her face and thrust himself into the sweating, coiled hairs of her groin, the inverted patch of her forest temple, moving forth and back in abandonment to the simple directive to merge in love, the Rose and his briar piercing the flesh that held him.

Nephi gulped and backed away. The little war between them was won and Ray had won it, and the defeated must retreat in darkness to a sad lay, a song of loss. He wandered east to where the orchard ended and moonlight illuminated rolling hills of sage and numinous wheat like squares of oriental language, hieratic codes formed in lines of constant change as if a poem were pouring forth to him in the oldest and most mystifying syllables. The whisper of breeze and call of robins, creak of branches, celebrating coupling angered him, the weakness in him, the spent sperm to nowhere, seed across a barren plain. How he envied lovers, and wished to be loved. He wished, yes he did, but no longer wished to be a farmer.

7 bonnets

Here is the best ballad I ever wrote. It is nearly thirty years old and has gone through many, many revisions. It is not to be taken as anti-Mormon nor anti-polygamy [not in the least, no ma'am--I'm all for that]. It is entirely against the abuses of patriarchy. I should note here that most Mormon polygamists in old Utah territory were very respectful of their wives, packed them off to college, and were early champions of suffrage. This ballad is not about them.

Who, then? Those to whom a woman is property and nothing more. As for the woman in particular who is the subject of this poem, she still lives but the evil party that abused her still lives, too. I'd rather spare her the embarrassment:


Seven Bonnets

A farming man came questing
Looking to the great west desert
Underneath the snaking mountains;
Drove a buggy through the dugways,
Hung his hat upon a nail.
He sowed a field in an acre growing
And a path ran through it under the sun.

And his name was Hezekiah
And he lived by narrow scripture
That he saw as through a pinhole
With a glance askance and sneering
All upon the head of a nail.
He sowed a wide field swiftly growing
Where a path ran through it under the sun.

Hezekiah bought a virgin
Who was taught to be compliant
Sang the hymns he thought worth singing,
Spread her legs for him most willing,
Hung her bonnet on the nail.
Another life was swiftly growing
And a path ran through it under the sun.

Hezekiah ran his household,
Hopeful, careful, patriarchal,
Potent, yes and full of purpose,
Building seven stalls completely,
Seven bonnets on the nail.
Seven fields were green and growing
And a moonlit path snaked through each one.

In the good wives fruitful gardens
Serpents wriggled, caught and strangled
While the serpent who advised them
Sucked the breast milk from them, smiling,
Bonnets hanging on the nail.
Six green fields were fat with bounty
Serpentine the path through every one.

But the childless bride went restless
With a nature unbeholden,
Walked alone in the higher meadows
Where the dreamer she had followed
Leaped in solitude and song.
Open pastures sang out to her,
Slender paths were etched through every one.

Clouds like clippers on the ocean
Moved beyond her ever farther
Past the good wives fat as cattle,
Past the jail of her estrangement,
That dilemma driving the nail.
She tossed her bonnet in the pastures
Where the freer ladies liked to roam.

She forsook her snake of ransom
Not forgetting who had bitten
Deep as in that ancient apple
One had ransomed in the dim past--
Yanked her bonnet from the nail.
The seventh field went quickly fallow
And the prophet’s path was overgrown.

Keen eyes aiming, Hezekiah
Saw but red in this rebellion,
Dragged her to the starry pasture
Milking in the greenish downy,
There he stabbed her with the nail.
And dug a grave in a quiet pasture
Under the very path she liked to roam.

Hezekiah keeping secrets,
Six times dusk he went to plowing
Resting on the empty seventh,
Hungry for a bride's soft calling,
Ghostly, angry on the nail.
Where six burnt fields in winter tangled,
Silent paths were dug through every one.

Where a ghost of chance might aid them
Phantoms hurried in the pastures,
Where the other brides could see them,
Clear as any bride’s rebellion
As the curse that drives the nail.
Crooked fingers winter sallow
Shaped a dire harvest under the moon.

Hezekiah, ever scheming,
Buried truth in scattered rumor;
Girded he his heavenly loins,
Wives before him, sullen, nodding,
Bonnets dangling on the nail.
Though a stranger might not know it
None was a barren field that knew no plow.

Then Hezekiah heard a rumor
Of a virgin raised up pious
Who would yield to Hezekiah
And he brought her meadow flowers
That were symbols of the nail.
And so the tale ends happily
And meadows danced above forgotten bones.

The point of this blog...

Posting my poetry here is the only way I have to showcase my work in front of millions of online viewers and get paid for it [I hope]. Yes, it is vanity. Yes, I would love nothing less than adoration. This is my life's work. It's all I have. I'm no different than a front-man in a desperate rock band. The little magazines are disappearing and, as readers vanish, poets compete like micro-organisms in a rapidly evaporating drop of water. I want my art to be seen and loved, and will make it to the absolute best of my training and native ability. If I cannot make poetry that entertains, engages, evokes and convokes all at once then I have failed as a poet. My hope is that no matter what else, a visitor will go away from this site having read an unforgettable poem. The beauty of my blog is that effectively it is a free magazine of poetry, and it is my poetry and I call all the shots. I am beholden to nobody. I am paid only by the curious. This is the future, friends.

Compton Road copyright 1998 by Dee Wolfe

Compton Road & other poems
written between 1976 and 1998

Compton Sleepwalk
My dreams are moonlit paths
I take to every night,
Restless with the apple leaves
In whispering flight.

An old dog groans in his sleep
And rattles the rusty links.
Chickens brood in their roost
But one black eye blinks.

Street lights follow my shadow,
Sullenly and rude.
We guard the road, they say.
Who are you to intrude?

I am the breath of a ghost
As I go dreaming a dream
Through dissipating dusk
Along a silver stream;

Where I behold my window lamp,
A yellow, sleepy ember,
A beacon from another life
I don't remember.




Starlings
Bleak breasted near a concrete wall
A pair of starlings on the snow
Squared off in a tight circle,
Oblivious to Winter's blow.

Dark as deacons, sad as pall,
They wrestled upon a dangling worm,
A frozen remnant past all hope,
Another victim of the storm.

Accumulated clouds in tumbling
Wrought fierce cold upon their mange;
A pair of teachers, eyes of brass
Saw nothing beyond their narrow range.

And all the while the wind swept down
They battled, priest on starving priest,
Only agreed one worm was porridge
Rivaling any Christmas feast.





Cherry Creek -- 1975
At Cherry Creek the vision came
When sunset burned through town
As if the rays illuminated
Sacred ground.

Among the creaking clapboard shacks
Whistling in the walls brought dread;
A raven swooped from everywhere
Crying as to wake the dead.

The silhouette of Doom, himself
In his black hearse its engine gunned,
The raven flew from sight and then
The very breeze sat stunned.





Nothing Knew
Nothing new in the way I keep
My mind though I may wake or sleep
Or dream upon those sights of the light:
The canine cutting edge of night.

I am neither afraid to say
Where was work I made my play;
Did with fork into it force
My way and hardly played, of course.

Nor did disdain, I don't disdain
Obligations to the same
Who make a fact a fact a fact,
Eternal law of every act.

How shines old Jove with every day?
He does so in a humane way
To ease the flight of the lesser light
To the canine cutting edge of night.





A Needle Is
I fell apart in end-time
Coughing twice and groaning low;
The fluid slowly seeping in,
My heart began to slow.

Regret's a public toilet
With all the lot observing me
Perform this parody of relief--
Or take a chance and hope to flee.

A sentence is for murderers
A game of pickup sticks;
One mislaid across another
Forms a crucifix

Which imitates this gurney
Where I lie awaiting Him,
Messiah, while the eyes of my
Accusers blur and dim.

No final meal of bread will do,
The broken crust is ever His.
My wine is venom in the vein...
How like the cross this needle is.




A Despairing Ditty
It tires me
This world
In all its blustering idiocy,
A tattered flag unfurled

In a disappointing wind;
Like people I have known
Who'd bend their backs forever
If the film were shown

And reeled around their lives.
That would make me grin.
I'd see it tonight in black and white
To the pluck of my mandolin.





Above Us Nightly
Above us nightly from the West
Salts move on the breeze,
Spirits scooped from the water,
Sent like so many bees

To buzz an ocean of sleepers,
Raising, lowering as they breathe
In waves of deepest calm
As this nocturnal sea.

The salt foam undulates
And laps the shore all night,
Raises, lowers rhythmically
In pale stone light.

Soft flights come with quiet
As the dreamer sees
The salt of sleep
Ghostly in the breeze.

Veiled behind a gauze of dreams
Stroll unconsciously
Pillars all in white
Beside the calm, gray sea.





Train Track Instant
At one brown time on rust-red rails
A locomotive slow and creaking
Moved upon me from the West
Driven blind, nothing seeking.

Freight-less, bound for Sugarhouse
As always every Saturday,
Nonetheless I could not pass
And waited while it went its way.

One red second over glass
It shivered on its trembling wheels
Like cinematic ribbons
Tangling in their reels.

Sunlight panned that length of train
Telling all its history
As if it were a meteor
Hurtling toward its mystery.

At that green moment saplings waved,
Grateful wives to the happily met
When the glint of a scratch across one car
Thrust like a bayonet.





Laundromat
At the laundromat I was jolted
Out of a good book
I happened to be hiding in
When I came up for a look.

Bending over the nearest table
A pair of tight-fitting jeans
Made me anxious for the world
And all it means.

Like Kilroy I watched and waited:
Please bend lower and let me see
Hanging out of the windbreaker
Surreptitiously,

The inspiration of the ancients.
When she turned my way
Her face was lined with the ages.
She smiled as if to say

"Like what you see there, boy?" But I,
Alarmed by the fact that I had sinned,
Turned back to my book as if engrossed,
As if she had never been.





Swift, Sweet Canto
Swift, sweet canto over the highway
Hums with the mantric tread,
A ribbon taut across this basin,
Plucked with an arrow-head.

Billowing over stone and sage
Balloons the fragrant desert dawn
Held by nimble golden glories--
Let it go. It's gone.

Arriving to the yellow dashes,
Blips in the high vibrato of tires,
I tune to the pistons hammering
To a thousand thousand fires.

Over the bounding blacktop boundless
A hundred and twenty miles an hour
I leave behind the Golden Eagle
Tufting feathers atop her tower.

Ahead of me wild Devils dance
To the winds of the day beginning to grow;
And Dawn it is, and blazing Jove
Warms the West with a Fatherly glow.





Where I Go
Where I go I plant a seed
(The necessary part of me)
Not for want nor of a need
Nor of some small desire to be.

What is is less a finger's touch
As crystals pending in the sky
Which seem some less not near as much
As that which touches your and my...

My Heaven is a seeding place.
I say "Bring seeds to cover the land
In crest and crevice, black and clay,
On the ice and in the sand.

"Send seeds to sprout and sprout to leaves.
From colorless in color come
And grow for later taking, sheaves,
Each sprout a hand, each leaf a thumb."

Hands will move and hands are two;
Mine are sprouts and I am a tree,
And we are a forest, I and you,
Not of a small desire to be.






Easter '96 in Honeyville
A breeze in brittle thistle
Shivers and cracks
As redwing blackbirds in the wires
Quarrel above the railroad tracks.

On a Sunday morning in April
An old man bends his legs
To hide inside the mats of grass
All of a basket of colored eggs.

And as old Jove above the Wasatch
Rises over the cloudless dome,
His children gather in the pasture
Singing 'Love at Home...'





One Morning in Farmington
A leg of water ran beneath the snow
As milky night made gray approaching day;
Three deer were seen to cross the highway, slow,
To cock their heads suspiciously my way
While I stood watching from the front door step
To make the bus before it made the bend.
They came to eat while Farmington still slept,
To see what shoots above the snow could lend.

Across the roadway silent watchers vied
Trying to see unseen what held them gripped
In still life--but for one who cried
"Look! Three deer--" which of a sudden slipped
Away, become in the pasture's shrouded whist
As indistinct as vapors in a mist.







Compton Road
Compton Road is my itinerary
Back to Sunrise up the rutted way
Where grapes and berries tangled in the path
Under the over-hang of high boxelders.
Cherries at the fence-line to the pasture
Ringed the gnarled chapel of a grove
Where I once spent the distant afternoons
On a bed of grass beside the broken fence,
Dreaming in the deep, luxuriant shade.

I pine for you beside your briny sea,
Drowsy in a dawn of golden vines;
And where the new day builds upon the rise,
Slopes and gullies in a verdant haze
Mystify the hills of Francis Peak.
My merest hope becomes a meadowlark
Aloft forever in that scented breeze
Of alpine sage along the canyon creek,
A happy kite above an endless day.

I dreamt that I, your prodigal, came home
To see the subdivided lots in ruin,
All the empty prose that made for suburbs,
Punch lines in a pavement gone to flower.
So, you'd swept the clutter all away
With scrub-oak and with cleansing milkweed
As, anticipating my return,
You made for me from perfect memory
The April of my first awakening.

I will not betray you while I remember.
Let the brash dawn bake your purple thistle,
Bear heavy on the sullen mind of your cattle,
Burn brittle with a searing, yellow fire
Pastures hammered into fool's gold.
You will awaken always in my days
Though August ages pass me, year on year,
Ascending generations never knowing
Underneath their presence I once went.





Grand Canyon
We drove out to the canyon one Spring day,
My wife and I were in the proper mood
As we were tourists on our merry way
To view the colors and the lovely wood.
Observing downward from the highest haven
We saw the tops of nimbuses that swirled
A thousand feet beneath an arcing raven
On the ether of another world.

In truth, it was a gouge in a great plateau.
An old, vermillion man beside that wound,
Upon a rock, talked like an ancient crow
As craftily he matched the canyon's sound,
The like of which is too hard to re-tell,
In syllables that one can never spell.





2/19/83
A breeze is blowing from the south,
And I see every day
Starlings brave the road
As snowflakes cease to stay.
Winter wanes,
And all along the wire know
That March is on his way.

In citadels of crumbling snow,
Beaten icy gray,
Winter's saboteurs
Fail to seize what may
Alter things.
They upon their pyre know
That March is on his way.





Granger 1959
On Granger's grim frontier my sis and I,
Injuns in the Lord's sweet mercy, played
In dusty bunch-grass on a windless plain
When haloes ringed the venom-yellow sky,
And upturned clay was poisonous as spray
From a rattler's fangs spat on a windowpane.
The ice-cream man rolled on while we stood by
Eating welfare-bread with mayonnaise.

Old man Lizard lived on a barren hill;
His lawn was dead--we didn't make it die.
He caught us in his cold, reptilian gaze
And hissed "Get off. Get off my lawn--"until
We left the blankness of his drooping eye
To weather like a knot-hole in the haze.





November Wind
Trees their swirling leaves unwind,
Their branches creak and bend;
Birds aloft no perch can find--
Blow, November Wind.

Yesterday flies down our street,
Whose headlines reach and rend
On every gutter grate they meet--
Blow, November wind.





Private Passion
In our poignant passion
She was a ghost's reality,
Vapors and a resonance
Moving through and over me.

Beyond my understanding
How a photograph arouses pain
that I can still remember
From the distant grain.





For Sue
Some nights I travel back to early days.
In that young Summer we were barely wed.
Under fragrant lilac blooms we lazed;
We hugged each other happily--and off to bed!
Do you recall the music of that time?
Waves of our inland sea in ebb and flow
Made salty melodies to fall and climb
On Seventh East above us and below.

As I recall our cats were kittens then.
I banged an old guitar with catgut string
And saw high zephyrs in the valley spin
And heard a trumpet in the canyon ring.
Trade those moments? Not for eternity.
I'd have them again if you would marry me.





Sunset--Upper Wasatch
You are the evening sight I see
Who, vagrant, ride the reddening air,
And shape that trace of memories
I single file in lines with care.

Whose weight is pending in the hills,
Imprisoned with the hill-locked mind
In canyons where the river spills
With tears to flow that still remind.

Your fear I see in sunset stain;
Your stripling eyes are fear enough
That glitter in the tall, dead grain,
That skitter in the clump and brush.

Your spawn lie clumped in baking blood;
The dark ore stones lie up in ruin
Where the bones press in the mud
As lupus lies beside the bruin.

Rhythms in my footsteps keep
A dull vibration, mind on mind,
Near where an age's memories sleep
Before my feet, beneath, behind.





"...hidden in the misty woods."
Who was son of the light
Was heir to the light
Of the might of the Comet's
Ominous flight.

As a running bore ran
With a roar the plan
Read entrails better
Than augury can.

Come Friday, give or take
A day, the pointed stick
Held sway, No cowering
Men in suits to wake.

No bills to pass had they
By Noon in that mysterious day
The White House doors stood barred,
Hounds in the mist at bay.

When he took power, he,
Of angel hair, did he
Deceive the salt by the sea
Who played at prophecy.




Nothing Much
Nothing much I will express
But that which isn't me;
The same I weather to impress
Some grand authority.

It isn't much, my soul today,
Encapsulated 'round
By one dark moat of dissolution
Barren as the salted ground.




Poor Us
Mine were urchins near the realm
Of media; unto the glass
Portal they pressed their noses
Begging the tiniest remnant of class.

The world of wealth that lay beyond us,
Castles under petaled skies,
Alpine lakes as blue as bliss,
And elegance (elusive prize),

Were windows on a universe
Denied. I spent those days
Above the desert contemplating
Angels and angelic ways.




Victoria B.C. (1998)
I pray we never ban the human being,
All imperfections made against the law.
Tell me, how then can we ever sing
If every song is seen to have a flaw?

"Why?" they ask me. "Why'd you ever come
To Canada? We're one fifth unemployed.
Nothing here worth seeing or having, Chum,"
They smile to say but are not overjoyed

To hear my own premeditated answers,
Nor present their fiery opinions
As they had when they were lucky chancers
In Columbia's loveliest dominions.

Meanwhile I observe the envied coast,
The Strait of Juan de Fuca like a gem;
So obvious that no one has to boast
And therefore do I truly envy them

Who may resent this loud American.
He stops to chat with every soul he meets,
And wonders why he's not Canadian
To kick the cobbles on these rainy streets.

I'm grateful most that they ignore my flaws
Which renders sweet that bronze solemnity
Of Queen Victoria whose gentle laws
Began my crisis of identity.





March 1963
On a still Sunday chill as piety
Sis and I into the mountain wandered
Up the incline to the burial grounds
Above the leafless gray boxelders lining
Compton Road, beyond which we could see
The edges of our world in sage pastel.
We wove a path around the barren brush
And lost ourselves above the fallow hayfield.
Stooping low to fetch for bloodless agates
Mirroring the polished, marble sky,
We veered from pebbles paired as if they seemed
The eyes of dour and observant demons.

We were children. We were new to the hill.
The frail dominions of the Summer grass
Resembled us, trembled as we trembled
To the hollow groan of the gaping granite,
Stones like old men leaning in the wind.
And we were new to the ominous eagle arcing
High in the turbulent dome of white above,
Whose hateful eye like pearl obsidian
Pursued us to an overhang of boulders.
Rain in rivers rolled the red rock down
As from the sudden tear of an eagle's talons.

Shivered we to the low reproach of a howler
Sounding where the castle keep stood sentry.
There the darkness brooded in the hollows;
There the bleak light pierced through parapets.
Spindly oak in bundles scrubbed the sky,
Whipped around like brittle, swirling bones
Of the dead arisen, resurrected, twirling
To the wand of a necromancer's angry magic.
Storms arising out of nowhere fast
Were grave reminders: We, the very little,
Ought to strive for insignificance.
Hand in empty hand, we hurried home.





Old Age
I muttered with Old Age as all the while
He leaned upon the bricks that formed the tiers
Of every whitewashed irony he mustered.
"I know how it used to be," he wheezed,
"Before I was a rack of tattered leather"
(Sails tied to a wishbone). He believed
If he could hang a few years on those bricks
He'd be them by and by and leave behind
His shade to shudder in the blurred borders
Of a silent cinematic tale of mists.

I stooped beside Old Age while she went moping
Scouring her box of discard rags;
Her rickety fingers made a frantic gesture
shaping all the years she'd spent and spend
Adorning gaudy colors to her face
Of withering gazes (skin as white as fish bone).
And her eyes were bowls of hope. She said
Now I will wear bright colors all the day
When I come calling down the jealous moon."
She shuddered like a fragment in the wind.

I slowly pedaled with Old Age behind me
On my bicycle the length of all
My avenues unto the steepest grade
Until I argued "YOU. Get off my fender.
Walk behind me since you think you have to.
Look to your own troubles." Old Age answered
"I will paint my face a gaudy color,
Mold myself into a scowling shade,"
As struggle he did to mount my bike once more,
Straddling his spindle-legs, wheezing his joy.




Apology
A worn man shuffles toward town
As boughs of heavy apples bounce
On the breeze that curls his hair and collar.
Weight of endless waiting wears upon him,
And he drags his passion like a sack
To stop beneath a woman's window.
Under the gray ghost of her shaded eyes he calls
While she entwines her lover in an altered cave
Behind the remembering pane,
Its cuts and cracks of microscopic days.

Night wears like a folded crease
On a mottled, down-turned page
Where all his calling wrote itself
In lines connecting him to the moon and stars
A thousand nights ago.
Though he imagines she can hear him,
Turns her fluttering eyes to the pane,
An ear to a mumbled name,
Her fingers raking in the womb of darkness,
He can only hope she wakes and rises,
Hope for the movement of her naked hips
In the window's lonely eye.

He stays until the stars turn one by one on edge
Canceled to the chrome of eastern clouds,
Another tin-pan glare of accusation
Singling one who fumbles in its light.
He stoops as if a hard wind drove him
Like a weather-vane steered for home.
And he will rock in his chair and wait,
His eyes sewn shut to hide his longing
For that final day to end his walking
And his wasted breath.




Your Hand
To hold you like a book in my fingers
Is to know the sea
Of boundless waters, a gambit
for immortality.

And what are words but strands
That vanish south and north,
Every syllable a grain of sand
As one goes forth?

The lines that speak in secret
Of your life inside your hand
Evoke the cryptic code that is
The restless, shifting sand.





Our Maker
He roams this Earth
In myriad disguise,
Our Maker, only poets
Ever recognize

Because they care to.
Cut me down to size,
Oh, Lord, I see Thee
Like a zephyr rise.




Deep Night
I stroll the walks nocturnal with my Love
Through avenues of sleepy Deseret
While rolls the silent majesty above
This paradise of leaves in silhouette.
As blooming lilacs stir a fragrant brew
To fill the night beyond the astral band,
So too my Love arises lilac blue,
Become as star-light in my open hand.

And every hedge-row is a friend I know,
And every bending Iris, where the lawn
Occasions with a greeting, waves hello
As she and I move slowly onto dawn,
Where she departs but only as she wills,
Sweet lucifer, above the Wasatch hills.




Farmington History
Above the freeway lights I settle in
Beyond the suburb cold as Pluto's moon,
Lie back upon a hard-pack drift of snow
And listen to the calling canyon wind.

In Farmington, they say, the East wind blew
When Brother Brigham rode his buggy North,
And knocked the buggy over off the road,
Which put our prophet in a vengeful stew.

He marched up State to give that breeze a piece
Of prophet's ire, and kicked the swirling grit;
He shook his fist and, gathering up his girth,
Commanded that by God the wind shall cease.

Whiskey pours down like a burning creek.
"Serves you right, you howler, settle down!
What sort of element are you to cower
All because a prophet deigns to speak?"

Above me stoops Orion on the fringe,
An old sot drunk with golden streams of light.
I'll join him in the stars and we will see
The worlds unnumbered called upon to binge.

The Moonsong Round copyright 1998 by Dee Wolfe

The Moonsong Round
originally written Spring 1982


I
The Moonsong Round I sing to you
This day become as night
As sudden crickets harmonize
In deep twilight.

In the orchard old as old
As bent by happenstance
Do I defy advancing stars:
Observe my stance!

Clip the cloth ephemeral
Upon your secrecy,
Penumbra at the why
Of pungent mystery.

II
Who never heard the Magpie,
Black as heart's despair,
Wringing lamentations from
The bitter Winter's air?

III
Snow in a low, blue valley,
Sparkling distantly,
Invokes the dawn of purest hope;
Star of the Morning, I see.

IV
The girl I saw went lazily
And made a meandering track,
A beauty in a pilgrim's habit
Toting a burlap sack.

Tell me, therefore, is this world
Your treadmill, wandering girl?
Oceans travel it all to find
A solitary pearl.

She stored her lentils in a jar
That sagged the bottom of her bag.
I wondered that her stubborn chin
Had yet to sag.

Her brown hair wound about her head;
A wisp untangled free.
The mirror of a man, I saw,
Myself reflected back at me.

V
Winter with the sheets pulled back,
A fluctuating chill
Arouses every sleeper
When the growing spell is still.

VI
The noises of the world
Are sweet and clear.
I hear the Starling singing
At my ear.

And I'm a married man
But feel no dread.
I see the Robin Redbreast
Near my bed.

In the little while I'm here,
With His own eyes I see.
The Magpie cheers
With me.

VII
My little cat took sick and died;
He fought to the bitter last
Until one day I wept to see
His life had passed.

For one small soul who leapt and lived
A mere box seems to lie;
This tattered towel is hardly the field,
These pinholes no night sky.

VIII
I do not welcome this,
The sudden slap of cold,
The clutch of frozen mist
That makes my bones feel old.

Wrapped in an arctic shroud,
My car sits by the street
In manacles of ice
My clumsy fingers meet.

Salted trees above
Are brittle in the bud,
Their puny leaves are burnt,
Bereft of blood.

My misery is kin;
I pant in clouds my breath,
Drudging in a drift
Of incontestable depth.

IX
Horses I have known too well
As royalty made to work
Are fitted to a tiny field
By awesome quirk.

Unfolding ages wear away
Such sinuous perfection;
Beauty is the ghost of a chance,
Shape is fabrication.

Time there was unfettered pastures
Counted no net worth,
A horse could, with desire, run
The whole expanse of Earth.

X
Dust to ashes, man to woman,
Life's a necromance.
Until we're spinning in our graves
Why don't we dance?

Love, the light must fear no darkness,
Sons of the Sun will rearrange
Star dust into crimson embers--
Set the match. Observe the change.

Arise from ash! We're born anew,
And all consumed is whisked away;
While we embrace and kiss as lovers,
Stars are started where we lay.

XI
Go forth, Doom-sayers,
Warn the World.
Those words you gasp
Are twirled

Even while you stand
Unknowing.
Seeds swirl,
Life is growing.

Embrace your righteous ends
But know this Earth
Prepared your life
And gave you birth.

Opine away! Your dire words
Hold no real worth
Beside the gratitude
Of birth.

XII
Strands of web and a broken shell
Dangle on leaves and loam;
Little Arachne has left it--
Nobody home.

XIII
Mortal Bee, in your
Machinery I detect
No broken parts or cracks
But something's wrecked.

XIV
I sing the blessed vision
Of your sight!
Am I, your mystic craftsman,
Making light?

I speak to your particular
Winding life:
Unwind a spell and
Hear my fife.

Purge the piffle that is
The parson's paltry law.
Persuade yourself to
Hear my saw.

Dogma's canon
Fires a blunderbuss.
Listen--I will sing
For both of us.

XV
A face and name remembered
Came on the crest of a song;
An angel, though her breath was gall,
I loved her far too long.

As I am a river wanting his source
So I travel on;
Unfamiliar grows the land
As I am gone.

I make these songs to follow,
Rippling quickly to the wide
Immortal sea anonymously
Awash in the rising tide.

And all is bleak, as bleak
Is the way of a bootless melody.
How will she ever hear of it,
Removed from me?

XVI
Seagulls circle a droning tractor,
Clouds of them to wing and flirt
Until, like folded napkins, do they
Perch upon the dirt.

XVII
The mover of this Earth,
Mother of all Life,
Who came to me one morning,
Subtle as a knife,

Spoke through my silent vacuum,
Sleep as deepest death.
A silver river filled it
From her fluent breath.

XIII
The meadows of her hair
Like flowing rills,
I've flown my kite
Above her hills.

XIX
Beyond the well worn path
I nudged a trail of trials;
Imagine my dismay to see
Footprints, miles and miles.

XX
A blacktop quivers in the heat
In a field where I used to play;
Forget-me-nots are all that grow.
Spring begins this day.

The tiny things see fit to flower,
Bursting through the broken clay,
And blue as bluest memory:
"Don't ever forget," they say.

XXI
Happy is the second
Day of Spring!
The grasses gain the wind
And sing.

I see the new
Red Robin rise.
He tells old Boreas
"Go with all that lies!"

XXII
I go the pastures of my days
Where June grass grows as green.
Dandelions mimic the Sun:
Fiery and serene.

Robin like a fire flows,
A crimson comet on the green.
Little Robin little knows
How fires blaze serene.

XXIII
I am a trout below the river
Looking to the eggs
Dropped in darkness on the bottom,
Sprouting swimmers' legs.

Guide my fins and I will swim
To come to spawn and bring
A meaning to the waving grasses
Random currents fling.

Then to the top, fast to the top--
A shade un-stills the sky!
I flash into the other world
Snapping at a fly

XXIV
Who own the gift of Orpheus?
The hated I have heard
Who hail each silver day
This winter of His word.

Above these sullen dwellings,
Starlings, unaware
How truly they prevail unto
The pristine dome of the air,

Impart their generous joy
In languages that bring
More to the January dawn
Than all my muttering.

Huddled while He gazes down
They sleep above the street.
When they awaken, all that lie
Awaken at their feet.

XXV
The Weber broke the light
That broke my sleep;
I watched it while I fished
In canyon deep

And saw a trout pursue
That river's crest
To catch a mayfly,
Feathery at rest.

As Lucifer exhaled
A chilling breath
I led the predator
Before his death

And cut him on the bank.
The day moved high
As quickly as the rise
Of trout and fly.

XXVI
Come Spring the gentle dandelion
Shows a supple face
While underneath she seeks
A safer place.

Dandelions were my sister
Flourishing everywhere
As dandelions were her eyes,
Her lips, her hair.

Her yellow petals waved goodbye;
Her roots were in the ground,
While I went picking
Dandelions all around.

Multitudes resemble her
On and in the lawn;
Weeds, the lot of them,
Here then gone.

XXVII
Mindful yet of laws and notions
Nod your head to me
And count our similarities.
They are many.

Give a thief what he is due;
Your honest, half a chance.
Let them hold their gratitude.
Yours, enhance.

As all are just as you and I,
And graced as any god,
They bloom beyond all rationale
As goldenrod.

Laws and notions, insects all,
Scramblers in a massive tree
Of numberless leaves abounding.
Count our similarities.

XXIII
Miniature songs are these
Or a fife
I pluck from the cupboard
And whistle twice.

XXIX
Some like some.
Some like cake.
Some like much
And take

Their everlasting dues
"That sheep may safely graze..."
Coyote, he must hide,
So says

The Arbiter, his ethos,
And his arbitrary mind.
"Sleep, Jesus, sleep.
Your words, kind

"And alive. Sleep.
We'll do your work
Certain every sheep
Won't shirk."

But I'm no sheep. Then,
Jesus, take my hand
Where no one has to hide
In open land.

Anyone who's hungry gladly
Suffers bread or cake.
A starving coyote, he
Will certainly take.

XXX
Mid-June makes illusion green;
A hot wind bends the sky
When one can hear that ancient joke,
The Magpie's threatened cry.

XXXI
One eye still shined as if it lived.
The coyote did not stir.
I brought the body from the grade,
A sack of bones and fur.

XXXII
Breezes through September grain
Incite a dance of grasses,
All that you will miss, old Horse,
When hay and harness passes.

XXXIII
A host of Starlings scattered,
Builders pushed the awkward ground.
Buzz buzz, trees
Came stumbling down.

XXXIV
Strolling above
I wander high
Unto a bowl
Of velvet sky,

And hold a star light
In my hand
I stoop to plant
Beneath the land.

Cultivate, I pray.
Arise. Arise.
Fill up these endless,
Endless skies.

Bloom and leaf,
Become a tree
Of numberless leaves,
A galaxy.

XXXV
Once, to confess, I hated my life.
Another I knew did.
One night in a dream I saw her
Drift beside my bed.

"While I have hated you
You ought to love, yourself.
Why deprive this tear-less world
Of all your briny wealth?

Believing I could change for the best
I begged her shape to stay,
And saw it everywhere I looked
That waking day.

XXXVI
Stacks of books in a hall
What quantum thoughts inspire.
Imagine it, one billion words,
One little fire.

XXXVII
I held a ridiculous notion
To live in a deep-sea bed,
Become some scuttling crab.
How I'd misread.

No sojourn beside the snails
Nor friend among the fish,
I squat below and gaze...up,
And I wish.

Say that I should climb to the shoals,
See what the wild surf hurls.
But I'm on the bottom prying open
Clams in search of pearls.

XXXIII
Who is this clinging to the nook
Afraid to ask to live?
Arachne of the field.
To her what can I give?

Arachne of the field
Where is your twig and leaf?
Unless you find your food without
Your stay with us is brief.

Are those your starving children
Clinging to your back?
I fear that they will fare the worse
For what you lack.

I know a place where weeds grow high.
I'll take you there to live.
Arachne of the field, much more
I don't know how to give.

XXXIX
Magpie, Magpie,
What is real?
Wings to fly?
Or an angel's appeal?

Robin, proclaim
Your connubial jest
And bring them to bear,
The worst and the best.

Starling, spend
Your penniless song
And pray that you
Will not live long.

Magpie, Magpie,
What is hope?
Wings that walk
And legs that grope.

Magpie, Magpie,
Hope is real.
Sweet dreams come
Of crumbs you steal.

XL
When all the others have gone
In their graveyard we will play,
Magpie and I in the Autumn chill
And waning day.

And he and I will tell sad tales
Of once majestic souls we knew,
When hand in hand to the Moonsong Round,
Like leaves they flew.

Then I'll ascend this obelisk
Arising above these gents and dames
And read aloud in tears, my friend,
Their beautiful names.

XLI
Sunny flourish, flight
Of stars...our Dandelion,
Dispersing her seed,
Aspires to Orion.

XLII
Make our people golden;
We will do no wrong.
Misunderstandings they
Have bothered far too long.

Atlanta will, that gem
Of cities, yield
Temples Timbuktu
Could never build.

Richmond, she'll discover
Wondrous plowers
Raising from her
Ashes, flowers.

Hybrid children, peaceful,
Flowers bringing,
Sing. I hear them
Sweetly singing.

XLIII
What joyless sunset met his sorrows
Hopeful Robin schemed
To re-familiarize the world
And sing it back to being.

XLIV
"Speak to me," I begged her
In my mind,
And she replied
In kind:

"You knew that seed comes
Of the winds that blow
Over Earth less firm
Than snow?

"You knew as well your
Life is a road you go
Into the withered ground
Below the snow?

"And all you hold
Onto you feel
Only as this winter's
Memory is real."

She turned to vapor and
Became the chill
Where snow lay now
Upon the window sill.

The day grew bitter as
The caustic bile
Behind her words, although
I tried to reconcile...

XLV
Death is a White Fox in the pasture
Where the Magpie flies,
Creeping in the vaulting stems
With glittering eyes.

Life's a brown mouse on the lam,
Energetic, filled with fear;
Within the gaze of the waiting Fox
His fate's unclear.

The Fox does not pretend to play
What's his to take or give:
"Hop, Brown mouse. Hop fast
And I may let you live."

XLVI
The song of the day's not partial,
Changed tongues change reply
To the echo of a ceaseless wind
That varies by and by.

Then to your wandering places go;
They shifted under your feet.
The path you knew not long ago
Ends and is incomplete.

XLVII
Capricious Cat will render all
As weary and as wan
As cold despair that chills the bones
When hope's own warmth is gone;

And we are bitterly bemused
With truth that we can feel,
Yes, and what is gone forever
He, Himself can't steal.

None beguile Capricious Cat
To stay when he's made his play
And holds in each gold, glaring eye
No other day.

XLVIII
Fair tidings, fellow traveler,
We've left our homely land
For the sea of Sagittarius
Beyond this mortal strand.

Stars spread past a vast frontier
As so much scattered sand;
Boot them while you stroll along
Beyond this mortal strand.

XLVIX
Your sight goes with me
In my mind
As leaves of incense
Intertwined.

We are as one, together
In the earth;
The guiding fingers of the many
Made one birth.

I dream a simple pleasure:
You and I, alive.
From this all songs
Derive.

L
Upon the abyss in perfect poise
Oh, wandering cat's-eye, hear me cry,
To see this silver sliver of light,
That hope is no fool's lie.

LI
Lovers are a rose, Love,
And you and I a rose;
Bloom and briar both, we live
Where His high garden grows.

And where His river flows, Love,
A single flower grows;
Plume and fire both, it is
His first, His favorite rose.

LII
A vacant house there was still stood
When centuries passed away,
Overgrown the founding stones
Of ancient clay.

A silver moth moved like a ghost
Aflutter in the halls
And found therein a vermin's brood
In secrecy behind the walls.

Saplings swelled to sycamores,
Pillars to the sky,
Capillaries on the iris
Of the wandering eye.

Leaves that fell this Autumn last
Were marionettes alive
Who, through the puppeteering wind
Were made to strive.

Demiurge

The poet can't afford to lose his muse,
so much inspired splashed to pages red
with soul's blood bubbling out in fountain
played upon this sky of indigo and sparkles.

I am a beast of animal emotion eyes aglitter
peering through the amber straws of foliage expired
out on a hill in late September, evening and desire spent,
on haunches searching as I creep in sage and oak brush,

eyes upon her rising in a mist of memories so ancient
as the bones of my own brooding conscience
that I see her ghost above the breeze-play grasses
shimmering hieratic in the language of my Mother.

I have known her all my animal days, and saw her ghost
appraising from a distance, she who is your doppelganger,
eyes so deep as deep Antares hanging over southern regions
where my life began in seas that were a cradle rocking.

Harps of the Ancient Temples

Harps of the Ancient Temples
by Dee [about 5000 words]

In the fortified city of Gilgal, set into a canyon where the cold clear waters of a large creek spilled into the great sea of Sebus, the Nephite ruler of the city, Queen Theba knew all. She knew who had written a filthy limerick in her dishonor and so had the poet and his entire family, his wife and three daughters imprisoned in the lowest dungeon far beneath the cliff-face city with little food and water. She knew as well that she had murdered the man she loved the most, a young Nephite captain, Aha, who had journeyed south from the land of Bountiful to campaign against the Lamanites, and had beaten them in a battle that had become a ‘deus ex machina,’ otherwise unexplainable. Still many had died and mourning filled the heart of the tiny city.

Otherwise sunrise on a perfect day in late summer arose on the tail end of a robin’s greeting from the cottonwoods that grew along the shores of Sebus, sprouting as well behind the walls of Gilgal, providing shade to young widows amazed at their sudden loss. The day moved among mourning, and light shined through the tiny windows upon a vacant adobe hut that clung to the outside walls of the city, the home of Cayman the Lamanite and his wife and three daughters, deep in the deepest dungeon awaiting death.

Meanwhile Queen Theba presided over the celebratory ritual adoring the nose-picking stone idol, Momboss, a descendant of Molech, the child murdering god of the Ammonites. She perched impatiently on her throne, a beautiful woman slender of body, her long black hair upon her dainty shoulders, eyes that pierced the retina and filled her subjects with fear. She sat pulling her fingers and twitching with growing annoyance while Dooj, the court harpist played his bestial noises on a twangy thing that was some sort of skin stretched over a gourd, a fretboard fastened to that and several strings tuned to an unholy dissonance that sounded loudly and irritatingly as it echoed in the room.

“Can’t you sing a little louder over that horrible thing?” She asked the Dooj, who stood obscenely in his merest loincloth, a foot hiked on a step:

“We worship you, Momboss, our Lord, to you all blood libations poured…!”

“Enough! You sound like you’re singing in a can!”

The Dooj grinned irrepressibly through his beard and curls, a thing of cuteness; indeed his cuteness got him places and he played the trump, mugging and pursing his lips and demurring with a finger to them, smiling at the queen as if confident he had wowed her. He did not realize that he had been one upped.

The Queen had summoned the poet from the deepest dungeon where he made a tearful farewell to his wife and daughters, then led along a network of tunnels that ascended through subterranean housing and mercantile compartments, and out into a busy market in the blinding daylight, brought to the palace to bathe and be put in fresh garments, finally summoned to the queen, and the flash of fire in her eyes.

“Poet,” she said, “If your verse is any indicator I have no doubt that your hymns will prove superior to his,” and here she pointed a finger toward the Dooj, “our court harpist. He is not good and that is no harp.”

The abject poet in his kneeling stance asked “Why should I bother, Highness?”

She turned her fire on him. “I will have you put to death for that.”

“Done already,” he said. “Along with my wife and my innocent children. You doomed us to die in the dungeon.”

“I don’t like limericks in my honor,” she said.

“Kill me for defending a friend, your Majesty but I have sworn to serve you in any capacity. And I ask only that you let my wife and children go free.”

“You can free them yourself,” she raised an eyebrow as she spoke.

“How can I?”

“Write good hymns and submit them to the high priest, Truk or the chronicler, Brother Daweed. They must approve them and then I must approve them. And they had better be good if you wish your family ever to view the light of day. I will see to their care in the meantime.”

Then she dismissed him and the Dooj with a flick of the wrist, arising from her throne as she did so, followed by a small entourage to the stairs that wound up to her private chambers.

Back in the dust and glaring sunlight, Cayman made his way to the gates of Gilgal and slipped out the tiny guarded entrance, all the while the Dooj at his heels dancing along like a crazed fanatic for the presence of celebrity.

“You may think you’re important but only the Queen can say that,” the Dooj went out of his way explaining the obvious.

“I never said I was important,” Cayman tried to say.

“Yeah but you’re not. Only the queen can say.”

“Fine, then,” said Cayman. “All I want from her is my family returned to me. That’s it. You can be the important one.”

“I already am,” the Dooj said. “I’m the court harpist.”

“You call that thing a harp?”

“What else would it be?”

“A banjo, perhaps?”

The Dooj laughed outright. “And what would you know? A poet! The man who sold it to me, who taught me how to play it, taught me for years and years to play every single melody precisely the way he played it, by rote at his knee, until my mother went broke paying for my lessons, he told me it was a harp. And a harp it is because he would know before you would, a poet!”

“And you compose the hymns—“

“And will be long after you’re done with.”

“How do you come up with the melodies?”

“I borrow the ones my master taught me.”

“I see,” said Cayman, and said nothing more. Now he knew. Dooj, being a rote player and lacking all imagination, simply applied the rustic monads and melodies of a peasant player to the holiest of hymns, scribbled out rhyming doggerel and sang loudly, all the while mugging and strutting and posturing as cutely as possible in his attempt to draw all attention away from the music and to himself. Such a creature had no vision, serving no god but itself, like the snake trying to crawl up its colon forever, with nothing to sustain it but an ever dwindling supply of excrement.

“How did you come to be court harpist anyway?”

“I’m a genius,” said Dooj. “The high priest says so.” To which Cayman said nothing, having heard the rumors about the ‘spit spooge’ Dooj, offering every available orifice to the priest’s proclivities for gain. However, as the Dooj followed Cayman through the door of the poet’s little two room adobe home adjoining the outside walls on the south side of Gilgal, he had no idea that his own queen worked against him even now, that she had put out notice for a new harpist to replace him.

“So you’re the best we have?” Asked Cayman.

“Spit Spooge!” The Dooj replied.

“Not in here,” said Cayman as he knelt to start a fire. “My home is sacred to me.”

Verily, the new harpist came on wings, and with his mother in tow, arriving on a windy sunless day to await an audience in the circle of stones, where the obscene idol called Momboss now replaced the old belief. Cayman having been summoned to meet the new harpist found himself gaping in wonder on the atrocious stone object of the new god, a fat squatting facsimile of a balding man with hair down the sides and back of its head, a finger in a nostril and another in its rectum, teats hanging like a woman’s, and its puny male hubris dangling and ready to ejaculate. A real perversion it was, and Cayman detested the sight of it. Nor was he alone.

The young new harpist smiled ironically and shook his head in Cayman’s direction as if he knew him. He was a black-haired and slender teenager with a full black mustache and eyes that were innocent and sweet. Cayman brightened at the beautiful boy and smiled at his doting mother, who nodded in return. They were dressed in tunics and sandals of a make he had never seen but yet seemed familiar to him somehow. Where did he know these people?

“I am Cayman, the Lamanite,” he said and bowed low.

“The famous poet,” the young harpist said. “We are honored.”

Cayman narrowed his gaze askance and asked “You sure you have the right Cayman?”

“Word travels quickly,” the young harpist said.

At that, the high priest, Truk, an imposing presence with a face of guile and a snake’s charm, entered the chamber and led the others grandly into the circle of stones. “Let us bow in benediction to his wholly-ness, Momboss who delivered us from the Lamanite horde.”

Cayman felt only revulsion and stayed standing while several others including the emaciated Brother Daweed in his shoulder length curls, and the foolish Dooj went right to their knees to drink the piss of desperate thirst. He grimaced in disgust to see grown men carry on so as they asked for the blessings of a block of stone, and glanced over surprised that neither the young harpist nor his mother had moved so much as a hair.

When the prayer ended Truk struggled to find his footing beneath the fat pillars of his legs and scowled meanly. “Too good for our god, are you?” He asked the harpist.
“That will cost you. I don’t care who you say you are.”

The harpist said nothing but took the seat on the stone bench usually reserved for the Dooj, and, mouthing a silent prayer, began to pick the strings; and then the room seemed to take on the life of a great moth humming its wings with electric trembling as transcendent harmonies unknown to Cayman filled the air like a breeze from the sea, a blissful dream-trance carried on waves of perfect playing. Up and down the strings the nimble fingers gathered sound like harvest wheat, a searching melancholy and triumphant joy all akimbo in the jarred psyche of the court poet, that words arrived to fill the meaning of it all upon the silent lips of Cayman the Lamanite:

“That I should live to see these days, oh Lord,
Remembering in the water perfect round vibration
While I trembled at this mystery of being…
Linger with me, Lord, thy merest servant,
Weeping where the river finds the sea of wishes
Where the tears all mingle in the eyes of dream fish
Smiling their indifference in the deep abysses
Under sleeping Sebus far forever rolling
To the west horizon, to the last defeat of light
In sparkling shimmer crimson as the blood
That roils beneath this mystery of stars.
This surge of life, this pulsing wave of movement
Beating in my ears the music of my mother’s love,
Embracing in the rocking rhythm of the ancient tongue
That is symphonic in the leaves of whispering trees,
It is my mother’s language gifted to me in the long
nocturnal breathing:
Wave on wave her whispered love song to her own--

“That’s enough of that,” snapped Truk.

“You don’t like it?” The harpist’s mother asked, her eyes surprised, dismayed. Dooj beside the two priests eyed one another coldly, and the resentment felt by Dooj became a fright masking nearly rage though he said only “spit spooge.”

Brother Daweed approached, his dainty fingers intertwined in supplication. “Not that it isn’t good,” he told them. “Perhaps we need to hear from the harpist only. We feel his mother’s presence may affect his playing and we want to assess his abilities, ah…er, untainted, if you please.”

For a moment she showed shock, and then dismay, and after that a pair of crimson slits for eyes, reached over and kissed her son on the side of his face and said

“I’ll see you on the outside.”

Cayman said “I’ll come along. I need a quiet place to go compose my hymns, and I must say you’re son has greatly inspired me.”

When they had left the circle of stones and the temple dome that housed them and were back in the sunlight, the harpist’s mother said “between you and me, you’d best compose your hymns to the true and living god not some feeble block of granite.”
Cayman replied that he would keep it in mind and asked her if she was hungry. To her nod, he walked her out of the city gates and into his home on the south side where the shade of a cedar tree cooled the adobe interior. He laid out his best blankets and offered her a place and she wondered where his family was.

“They’ve been jailed for my sake. Even now they’re starving to death. But the queen has promised I will see them again if the hymns are to her liking.”

“She’s treacherous, old Theba; but don’t sell your soul, whatever you do.”

“I can’t let my daughters down,” he said as he searched desperately in the hut for his ink and his bark sheets, pulling blankets up as he went along and asking his guest to adjust her position. Instead she held up a beautifully ornate wax tablet about a foot square, and of gold with a gold stylus clipped to it. “Please,” she said. “Use these.”

“My my,” he marveled as he opened the case, and took the stylus in his fingers. “I take it you press the wax with this…” and did so, making a letter. She nodded.

“Busy yourself and I will find your ink and bark.”

So Cayman sat cross-legged with the tablet on his knee and began to work a hymn from his head to the smooth wax:

“Oh stooped stone of Momboss squat
Regaling finger unto snot,
The other in his rectum rent
To excavate his excrement.

He picks the twanger of his need
And stirs his fingers in the mead
That quaff the bounding, standing steed
To water boil with panting speed.

Six times thus he pounded mud
Albino like a milk-ed stud;
Now sterilized in stone to sit,
He merely fingers balls of shit.”

“Not quite faint praise,” the harpist’s mother said, reading over his shoulder, a warm hand upon it, a mother’s hand, “but good enough for the like.”

“When praise doesn’t work the truth has to.”

She sat beside him and took the tablet in her lap and read it again, and said that such a song could be sung to either harp or banjo. Cayman studied her face, the dark hair pulled back and tied in a tail, stray ringlets hanging like side burns.

“Who are you?” He asked.

“My name is Calliope,” she said and smiled. “I love my son. I worry for him.” She paused to think a moment then brightened and said “I found your bark and ink.”

As she watched him then, Cayman managed out four more hymns to the obscene idol of Gilgal, transferring them little by little from wax to bark, until the hymns were finished. “Quick work,” he had to admit as the labor had taken a mere two hours. “Let’s take these to the priests and fetch your son.”

But the doors would not be opened for her. Armed guards held their spears against her while Cayman was allowed through with ease. He asked “who gave these orders?” And the guards replied it was the high priest who gave the order. “Since when does he replace the queen?” Asked Cayman and shook his head. The guard replied “Don’t shake your head at me, little redman.” Cayman blanched at Calliope but hurried on past the guard, assuring her as he turned his head “I’ll bring you your son.”
The temple doors themselves were barred to Cayman now, though he beat his fists on the door and demanded entrance, telling them “I’ve come to fetch the harpist! His mother is worried.”

“He’s a big boy,” cooed the high priest, Truk through the keyhole, and Cayman could hear the unpleasant Dooj in the background asking “Oh, is he in trouble? Spit spooge…spit spooge.”

“Then, will you at least accept these hymns?” Cayman called past the closed wooden door. It creaked a notch, enough that a dainty hand of Brother Daweed poked through grasping air, and Cayman took the hint and laid the sheaves of bark in the priest’s fingers. The hand pulled back as the door slammed shut and Cayman now feared for the harpist’s life. What to do now? No ideas forth came but to sit and worry. All avenues seemed blocked but one, and that to buy food and feed himself. And then he thought of Calliope standing outside the gate to the city. How hungry had she become? He bought a few shum’s worth of ready made meals, some ripe fruit and a smoked fish pulled fresh from Sebus, cradled the lot in his arms and made his way for home.

Her worry became fright when Cayman gave Calliope the news; her eyes went wide with terror but he fed her nonetheless. She ate like a starveling and drank his spearmint tea picked wild along the adobe house and cured and dried by his own rough hands. Still she trembled and pulled her fingers wondering what would happen next, as Cayman lay a blanket around her shoulders and folded another into a pillow and sat beside her, asking if he could sing an old song to mollify her worry.

“I fear for my son,” she managed to say.

“I understand,” said Cayman. “Maybe if you told me about your home it would take your mind off things because I can tell you need to sleep.”

She smiled at him and paused to remember and said finally “It is a place across the outer sea,” she looked off, her head tilted, “a land of grapes and bread and honey, songs and tales, of beautiful women and warrior kings, of poets like you who sing to their pretty children, a place to be buried in myth, someday. You would be a man of stature there, honored and loved by those who understand that music makes meaning.”

“Oh,” he said. “I would love to see it.”

“Sing to me,” she asked and Cayman brought from the depths of ancient memory the tale of the wedding dress, of the young bride who would not consent to marry until her dress was finished, and so never finished it. It was a song as old human nature, filled with the sorrow of the human being, transcending temporal matters like a freed bird from a cage in the depths of consciousness. Indeed, the human soul was the only temple true to its architecture where immortal harps were plucked in the heart of longing, and language tied itself to the music of its syllables anticipating harp songs sent as vespers to the Beloved…

Cayman did not realize he had fallen asleep where he sat cross-legged and awoke to find himself entwined with the harpist’s mother, her head upon his chest, her breathing deep and dreamy like the waves of Sebus. He came up with a start to the knocking at his door, and startled her and she awoke wildly, staring about with a new fear.

Sunset had come, and Calliope glared with a hollow eyed terror, as she met Cayman’s own frightened gaze: “Where is my son?”

The guard at the door was unmoved and addressed Cayman only, saying “you are hereby summoned by the Queen of Gilgal.”

“Just a moment,” said Cayman, slipping his feet in his sandals, and wrapping his robe about his shoulders. He followed the guard down the hill and in through the gates of Gilgal, across the market square and up the steps into the palace. He could hear the obnoxious twanging of Dooj, and a lot of yelling and raucous singing coming from inside the palace, and moved hesitantly through the doors to find himself in the midst of a great deal of merrymaking. The queen was drunk already as were the priests, the courtiers and the courtesans all stripped down to nothing, one of whom pressed her privates to Cayman’s thigh and tickled his chin with a bare nipple in her fingers. She smiled with a wantonness that shocked him, and he struggled free to seek out the harpist.

Then he saw it, the reason for the night’s celebration, a tall stone statue carved quickly and with little art, the headless statue of a man, a warrior, specifically, and Cayman knew it was the headless torso of Captain Aha who had been lately murdered and beheaded. Queen Theba stood before it, toasting with a full goblet of concord grape wine. “I wish my artisans had gotten your face right, Love,” she said to the object, and turned to see the small poet standing bandy-legged and tilting to the left. He wiped his sweaty forehead with a corner of his robe.

“You summoned me, Majesty?” He bowed low.

“Your hymns,” she spoke through wine dribble, “are magnificent.” And then she swayed in the direction of the statue. “Don’t you suppose he needs a head?”

Cayman, noticing the drying blood smear on the shoulders of the statue, said “I see you’ve tried a few, already.”

“My artists,” she said, and studied him with a greedy grin. “You knew the young captain. Perhaps your own head will do.”

“I doubt it,” he said and stepped upon a bench behind and laid his head on the shoulders, staring at her blankly.

“Never mind,” she said. “You did your work well. Go and fill yourself, and pointed at a large banquet table laden with fresh cooked food.

As Cayman studied the main chamber of the palace he saw a long box set on sawhorses in a corner of the room, the priests around it now, staring into it, along with the court harpist Dooj who seemed even from this distance supremely happy. As Cayman stepped near he stopped and his heart skipped as real horror fell upon him to see a body lying in the box, a naked form in nothing but a pale loin cloth. He moved slowly closer and recognized the moustache on the face of the young harpist at peace as if asleep, but the neck terribly bruised. The priests had strangled the boy.
Truk saw him and grinned with hatred. “He was a little too good for us,” he said. “We had to teach him a few tricks of our own. Besides, he made an unwelcome and horrible song about Gilgal being destroyed, and we can’t have that sort of talk from strangers out of town.”

Cayman grimaced in replay and backed off and made his way through the drunken crowd of noisy carousers, until he noticed the jailer jangling his keys and making obscene gestures to a nude courtesan with her slender arm around his neck, her bare and aromatic maidenhead tilted toward him ready for his nightstick.

As the jailer dropped his keys to the floor, and parted the folds of his garment, Cayman bent down and fetched the keys and carried them to the banquet table, and loaded his arms with fruit and flat bread. Then he sneaked past the drunken guards lounging outside the door and made his way across the street to the market, and into the interior, and down the snaking paths into the torch-lit tunnels, deeper and deeper into pitch black places where the dungeons were, calling out “Ruth!” as he went along, hearing her faint reply in the shadows. There were torches lit here as well, but fewer and spiced widely, that the darkness lay oppressively.

He matched the key to the lock and carried the food within and a brought his wife and daughters water as well and watched while they fell to their meal under torchlight. And when they had eaten he brought them to their unsteady feet and led them out of the dungeon, back the way he had come into the open air and through the tiny side door out of the city of Gilgal. He led them to Sebus’ shore to bathe, and brought down fresh clothing for them, and then took them home to meet Calliope, who smiled warmly.

“What about my son,” she asked.

“Cayman glanced down and stared at his feet.”

“Is he alright?”

“I’ll bring him to you,” and with that Cayman left his tiny abode and went running down the hill and back through the tiny side door where the guard welcomed him with a bow, and ran from there to the palace steps and into the palace itself. Inside, mass fornication seemed the main theme of the hour as soldiers and other drunkards pierced between the legs of whorish courtesans, squirting their seed even as the wine poured down their necks from up-raised goblets. The room reeked of dissolution as Cayman found the queen herself embroiled in a mass of naked bodies writhing on a great bear’s fur.

At that moment he saw the head set atop the headless statue standing against the main wall. As he neared it he did not wish to believe it but there it sat as if in sleep, the closed eyes the black hair, the small black mustache, the boyish face, and knew it to be the harpist. It had to be but he wanted to hope and so approached the wooden box set upon sawhorses. A headless torso greet him there, blood drenched now in a pool of the iron-strong stench of death, the spilled bile, the gore dripping out of the wooden box. He gulped as waves of nausea overtook him and whirled to face this orgy of murderers and wished them death, every last one. He removed his robe and went to the statue, and removed the harpist’s head and wrapped it up. He needn’t have been so furtive. No one noticed, so busy were they with the consummation of genital joy, the grape and semen mingling in a pool of fish-milk and sweat, the muscles taught, the eyes rolling back, the gasping and howling out in pleasures dark with the stain of unholy sin. Cayman calmly stepped past and over them, carrying his grisly memento rolled up in his own robes. Near Dooj, knocked out in a pool of vomit and snoring loudly, his exposed member having ‘spit spooge’ enough to be caked in crystallized semen, his hairy chest heaving and a smile of triumph on his bearded face, lay the harp itself tipped over on the floor. Cayman retrieved it too, and moved on.

Past the door, a guard had presence enough to ask him what he carried and he answered truthfully that they were gifts from the queen, and the guard let him go with a wink. “The queen’s favors are a remarkable thing, aren’t they?”

Cayman did not wish to answer that they were not so remarkable as all that, and so merely nodded, bowed and smiled and went on toward the great front gate. Once more he slipped through the little side door beside it and climbed the hill toward his home. Here he hesitated and, with a deep sigh, went through the door and fell to his knees before Calliope whose eyes welled up with tears.

“Please forgive me,” he said as gently he lay the covered head on the ground before her. “Be careful, it is not good to see.”

“Is it my son?” Her eyes pleaded for any other answer.

“I’m afraid so,” said Cayman.

She parted the wrap and turned the face to hers and bent down to kiss the forehead as she broke down in tears, staring upward now to wail at the heavens. “Dear God,” she cried “that this must always be so for my boy!”

“Here is his harp,” Cayman whispered, and laid it at her knee. She took it in her hands and strummed a lullaby for the sleeping face as tears washed down her cheeks:

“Sleep, my sweet little boy
And rock in your mothers arms
The wind and rain they blow without
But the fire inside is warm.

Sleep and I will warm you,
And never my love to part
Though winter rages, nuzzle yourself
To the fire in my heart…”

Then she collapsed and cried in her arms as Cayman and his family arose and went into the other room for the night, and Ruth wrapped the girls in the blankets they had not in enjoyed in nearly a month, and tried to sing to them but could not and so lay beside them staring up at the stars until they fell asleep. He got up and Ruth reached out and held his arm a moment but let it go when he smiled and nodded.

“Thank you,” her silent lips moved to say, and he kissed her hand as he left the room.

He knelt beside Calliope and lifted her up, and held her to him as she continued to cry in his tunic. He said “you’re welcome to stay with us as long as you like.”

She met his gaze and said “you are a very kind man but I won’t stay in this city. Tomorrow it will sink into the earth and be consumed—“

“How can you say that,” asked Cayman.

“Tomorrow the ghost of Dionysus the mediator dies once more at the hands of wicked men. They will spill His blood and rend His flesh and think He is dead but He will rise again in three days time. All the world must face the wrath of His Father and this city is certainly no exception. We came to warn you with a hymn to save the city from itself but its wickedness is all too plain.”

“What can I do?”

“I will see to your protection,” she said.

“Such a wonderful mother you are. He must have been a happy boy.”

“His name was Orpheus,” she said through a mother’s tears. “He tuned the crickets’ harps and taught them how to play. And now you know.”

It was then that Cayman noticed it, the eerie quiet of the night where not a breeze came whispering to comfort troubled hearts. The crickets were silent. Would they ever sing again, he wondered, those harps of the ancient temples? Calliope wept, and that was all there was to hear.