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.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
my son is the better artist.
My son, Mike is posted at this site: http://mrwolfeconcoctions.deviantart.com/. He's a cartoonist and has been since the age of four. His talent is a little uncanny. He is proof that artists are born more than made. He drew my profile picture, cover art for my poems called THE MOONSONG ROUND. He and I comprise the last of the old art-crowd with whom we collaborated in Salt Lake in the 1980s. We wish to resurrect it anew.
pure art
To know poetry is to know something Aristotle didn't, a psychic fact that can't be taught but learned only by reading between the lines, by listening to the world and swimming in the wine dark blood that pulses and throbs in a robin's wrenched calling. They are the pure poets who ride the crest of the world's own warbling wobble and sing those rhythms back into creation. Theirs are the red breast and song and that is why: the emblem of Orpheus is given them to wear.
Analysis is vivisection of the soul, a lifeless prize for sterile writers anal in their cross-eyed probing of colon and semi-colon [are we there yet?], never to find the pulsing heart of living art. You have to surf the quantum wave and feel it splashing all about you all the time, circadian in the marrow of yourself, a tickle and a hum that sends your syllable page-ward in abandonment of conscious worry. You will know it when you finally do it, burst beyond the primate rules of social gaming and express pure art that is at once an animal instinct and an invitation to the gods by invocation wrought as music.
A little sacrament with wine and bread won't go awry but steers the wheel to bliss--and this I'm sad to say disqualifies too many worried about their covenant with narrow, unforgiving prescriptions. It's one thing to fear God and entirely another to be scared to death of Him.
Poetry requires meditation and that requires time and patience, indolence and rainfall patter in the senses and the smell of earth and vegetation; for the nose knows keenly memories transcending presence. This can only cancel out the all too freaking *B*I*Z*Z*Y* whose lives are tight schedules precisely designed to please their overlords to the final nuanced moment to retirement. Stupid fools. You might have had the time. It's yours not theirs. How I love and long for and ultimately miss intelligent conversation with a friend, a thing most certainly murdered by machines, the last gasp of the human being. Congratulate yourselves. You are no longer human. You are either snob or slob, the one of whom cannot make time, the other of whom cannot make use.
Sometimes you can't tell them apart as they jog through the park. Frankly I suspect they run away from actual people. I feel like a voice in the wilderness screaming why are you jogging? It isn't good for you! It robs you of breath and breadth, of time and ease. You can simply walk to work! It's better for you as you gain the full flavor of the day. And please: the robins are singing. Politely remove your idiot iPods, and hear a sermon direct from Benelovence.
"Hairy fist and love will die." Machines have lately obsolesced the male. There's a recipe for sperm now. You can google it but who will change the oil in your car? Some dainty droid? And who will fight for you? Drag queens may dress like you but don't be fooled. They'll never stand and fight, not for a woman they won't. "Hairy fist and love will die," and with it true poetry, so prophesied Bukowski.
Analysis is vivisection of the soul, a lifeless prize for sterile writers anal in their cross-eyed probing of colon and semi-colon [are we there yet?], never to find the pulsing heart of living art. You have to surf the quantum wave and feel it splashing all about you all the time, circadian in the marrow of yourself, a tickle and a hum that sends your syllable page-ward in abandonment of conscious worry. You will know it when you finally do it, burst beyond the primate rules of social gaming and express pure art that is at once an animal instinct and an invitation to the gods by invocation wrought as music.
A little sacrament with wine and bread won't go awry but steers the wheel to bliss--and this I'm sad to say disqualifies too many worried about their covenant with narrow, unforgiving prescriptions. It's one thing to fear God and entirely another to be scared to death of Him.
Poetry requires meditation and that requires time and patience, indolence and rainfall patter in the senses and the smell of earth and vegetation; for the nose knows keenly memories transcending presence. This can only cancel out the all too freaking *B*I*Z*Z*Y* whose lives are tight schedules precisely designed to please their overlords to the final nuanced moment to retirement. Stupid fools. You might have had the time. It's yours not theirs. How I love and long for and ultimately miss intelligent conversation with a friend, a thing most certainly murdered by machines, the last gasp of the human being. Congratulate yourselves. You are no longer human. You are either snob or slob, the one of whom cannot make time, the other of whom cannot make use.
Sometimes you can't tell them apart as they jog through the park. Frankly I suspect they run away from actual people. I feel like a voice in the wilderness screaming why are you jogging? It isn't good for you! It robs you of breath and breadth, of time and ease. You can simply walk to work! It's better for you as you gain the full flavor of the day. And please: the robins are singing. Politely remove your idiot iPods, and hear a sermon direct from Benelovence.
"Hairy fist and love will die." Machines have lately obsolesced the male. There's a recipe for sperm now. You can google it but who will change the oil in your car? Some dainty droid? And who will fight for you? Drag queens may dress like you but don't be fooled. They'll never stand and fight, not for a woman they won't. "Hairy fist and love will die," and with it true poetry, so prophesied Bukowski.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
the short story as poem is in truth a tale.
To see the short story as poem is to wrest it from writers, i.e., propagandists, axe-grinders, diploma chasers, genre specialists, gobbledegook post-structuralists, obstructionists, existentialist bores, deconstructionists [hard to tell one from another], Ists of all variety, sermonizers, shallow headed columnists, hacks, and authoritarian shit heels and give it back to the poets.
Writers write. Poets compose.
Poets who are any of the above are not poets. They are jerks pretending to be poets. The poor dears know not why this is nor do they know what I know in my bone marrow, that poets are the resurrectionists of structure which originates meaning and thereby marries flesh and spirit into a tactile whole. We create myth from the soil and vegetative force of Earth. Scientists are the only other people I know who possess any understanding of this essential fact. Writers are the last to see it so obstinately steadfast in their assertions are they that 'it' is about 'language' or else it is about their jealously guarded specialties. They go out of their way to scribble mundanities like a slap in the face and then wonder why they go ignored. Those who believe that language is everything wonder why they are left standing at the train station. They beg the question 'what is language about? What is it for? And why am I able to make music with it? And why does this music move me? And why do I discern through the muddle of my expectations the face of the Beloved taking shape?
I studied ballads because I couldn't understand where the music and the story-telling merged. I wrote a few...dozen until I was able to discern the buzz in the bone marrow where all understanding resides, it seems. How to apply my strange new knowledge to the shooooooooooort storrrrrrrrrrrry defied my understanding. In the mid-1980s I managed to waste years composing stories in stanza form of a strict geometrical structure and hitting my head on the wall because the results were so terrible. This went on until I took another look at Whitman's poetry. It was not until I was actually able to see the poetry in Whitman that I learned to apply his cadences to forming paragraphs and then I saw precisely why an old professor of mine had once called the short story narrative poetry.
This past year I put my idea to paper and composed an epic poem in the American short story vernacular. I am completely willing to give the short story back to genre specialists et al. I always despised genre-writing. If the prosaic produce it in all their glorious banality let it be called a short story. I will call it for my own purposes a tale, hence the title of my epic poem: 13 Tales of Nephi Gass. The tale was good enough for Hawthorne and Poe, those giants who first distilled the elixir, and it's good enough for me.
The resonance of the old ballads my folks sang resonates in my bones today. To apply the principles there of to my gifted form, the tale, is to achieve something I can truly love. It is the perfect way to avoid analysis--that vivisection of the heart.
Writers write. Poets compose.
Poets who are any of the above are not poets. They are jerks pretending to be poets. The poor dears know not why this is nor do they know what I know in my bone marrow, that poets are the resurrectionists of structure which originates meaning and thereby marries flesh and spirit into a tactile whole. We create myth from the soil and vegetative force of Earth. Scientists are the only other people I know who possess any understanding of this essential fact. Writers are the last to see it so obstinately steadfast in their assertions are they that 'it' is about 'language' or else it is about their jealously guarded specialties. They go out of their way to scribble mundanities like a slap in the face and then wonder why they go ignored. Those who believe that language is everything wonder why they are left standing at the train station. They beg the question 'what is language about? What is it for? And why am I able to make music with it? And why does this music move me? And why do I discern through the muddle of my expectations the face of the Beloved taking shape?
I studied ballads because I couldn't understand where the music and the story-telling merged. I wrote a few...dozen until I was able to discern the buzz in the bone marrow where all understanding resides, it seems. How to apply my strange new knowledge to the shooooooooooort storrrrrrrrrrrry defied my understanding. In the mid-1980s I managed to waste years composing stories in stanza form of a strict geometrical structure and hitting my head on the wall because the results were so terrible. This went on until I took another look at Whitman's poetry. It was not until I was actually able to see the poetry in Whitman that I learned to apply his cadences to forming paragraphs and then I saw precisely why an old professor of mine had once called the short story narrative poetry.
This past year I put my idea to paper and composed an epic poem in the American short story vernacular. I am completely willing to give the short story back to genre specialists et al. I always despised genre-writing. If the prosaic produce it in all their glorious banality let it be called a short story. I will call it for my own purposes a tale, hence the title of my epic poem: 13 Tales of Nephi Gass. The tale was good enough for Hawthorne and Poe, those giants who first distilled the elixir, and it's good enough for me.
The resonance of the old ballads my folks sang resonates in my bones today. To apply the principles there of to my gifted form, the tale, is to achieve something I can truly love. It is the perfect way to avoid analysis--that vivisection of the heart.
Friday, June 19, 2009
experts are better than you and me
TV is such an outrageous bore yes, a wasteland, indeed a dust bowl. I prefer a book and preferably one with the sort of meandering and melodious whimsies that are otherwise gone from the scene. Whimsies of the meandering sort have been rounded up and mostly murdered by specialists: you know, those neat, tidy machines with acronyms for titles who have worked as diligently as scullery maids to scour every last remnant of old human nature away forever. And ever and ever amen...
Verily, they are the new gods.
The perfect bores are trying to remake the rest of us in their likeness. And of course the media who long ago sided with the one-eyed beast, are complicit in this. They call forth their experts and specialists to gain I suppose an insect's eye view of the ongoing crisis, and stop one as he jogs importantly through the park with his iPod blaring:
"Sire, and what is your field of study?"
"I have a doctorate degree in oneupsmanship, as well as two masters in self-seriousness and self importance."
"My, that's impressive."
"Yes, it is."
"Could you give us your perspective on the ongoing crisis? How does it make you...FEEL?"
"Why of course, little man. When I was importantly earning my all important doctorate degree I ran only with other very very important people..."
"You mean jogging?"
"I was running..."
"Weren't you jogging just now?"
"No, I was running. Running away. I always run away."
"From what?"
"From unimportant people like you..."
"Have to run for a word from our sponsors...Back to you, Katie."
Ah, the busy-ness of experts! They have barely enough time to dress, eat, spritz, jog, tweet their twitteers, piss, poop, admire their reflections and make it to their jobs, jobs that make of them entirely slaves not only to the wage but the wages of their egos. These are the high and mighty, the haughty and aloof who make no time for friends but are the ones who get to lord it over the rest of us because they have an acronym behind their names. Truly they are specialists because, outside their narrow frame of study they stand ignorant before nature and her crowning achievement, the human being. Of course, they have all of eternity to ponder where they went wrong.
I too am cursed with specialty. I am a senior library specialist. This lofty title insists that I can type/lift fifty wpm/lbs routinely while searching the hollows of this labyrinthine karnak for places to hide/sleep/smoke/nap/read or do nothing at all.
There is the art, my friends, lost in this age of frenzy and running away, of busy work [P]iled [H]igher and [D]eeper [and here's your diploma, fool, and forty mules and an acher], yes, the lost art of doing nothing at all, of gazing skyward upon wispy cumulus hallucinations and see the Good Lord smiling benevolently back--tis a wondrous notion. You don't even need to go to college to learn to appreciate it.
Verily, they are the new gods.
The perfect bores are trying to remake the rest of us in their likeness. And of course the media who long ago sided with the one-eyed beast, are complicit in this. They call forth their experts and specialists to gain I suppose an insect's eye view of the ongoing crisis, and stop one as he jogs importantly through the park with his iPod blaring:
"Sire, and what is your field of study?"
"I have a doctorate degree in oneupsmanship, as well as two masters in self-seriousness and self importance."
"My, that's impressive."
"Yes, it is."
"Could you give us your perspective on the ongoing crisis? How does it make you...FEEL?"
"Why of course, little man. When I was importantly earning my all important doctorate degree I ran only with other very very important people..."
"You mean jogging?"
"I was running..."
"Weren't you jogging just now?"
"No, I was running. Running away. I always run away."
"From what?"
"From unimportant people like you..."
"Have to run for a word from our sponsors...Back to you, Katie."
Ah, the busy-ness of experts! They have barely enough time to dress, eat, spritz, jog, tweet their twitteers, piss, poop, admire their reflections and make it to their jobs, jobs that make of them entirely slaves not only to the wage but the wages of their egos. These are the high and mighty, the haughty and aloof who make no time for friends but are the ones who get to lord it over the rest of us because they have an acronym behind their names. Truly they are specialists because, outside their narrow frame of study they stand ignorant before nature and her crowning achievement, the human being. Of course, they have all of eternity to ponder where they went wrong.
I too am cursed with specialty. I am a senior library specialist. This lofty title insists that I can type/lift fifty wpm/lbs routinely while searching the hollows of this labyrinthine karnak for places to hide/sleep/smoke/nap/read or do nothing at all.
There is the art, my friends, lost in this age of frenzy and running away, of busy work [P]iled [H]igher and [D]eeper [and here's your diploma, fool, and forty mules and an acher], yes, the lost art of doing nothing at all, of gazing skyward upon wispy cumulus hallucinations and see the Good Lord smiling benevolently back--tis a wondrous notion. You don't even need to go to college to learn to appreciate it.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
a cheery cherry of a notion
What is prayer but this then:
Lolling grasp of fishes dank in bog hollows
Come to the surface for a handful of crumbs,
And mouths in movement as if to speak
But gasping silently against the open sky?
What is love then but this:
A violent shiver to the hand’s caress,
Annoyance and anger thrust into a groping eye,
Her fingers yanking back onto her ocean floor
Her organism shied behind a blood-cloud?
What is life, then but this identity of self
Sounded from a fenced in herd of rodents
Trampling all to break away from blind confinement
In this the arching blackest room of domed night,
Moonset exit to the far west wind in tumult?
What is death therefore but severed soul
To incarnations other in the ever search,
The never found abounding out of reach,
Tendrils of my ghost a mist of morning
Clung to gleaming bark of early spring?
Lolling grasp of fishes dank in bog hollows
Come to the surface for a handful of crumbs,
And mouths in movement as if to speak
But gasping silently against the open sky?
What is love then but this:
A violent shiver to the hand’s caress,
Annoyance and anger thrust into a groping eye,
Her fingers yanking back onto her ocean floor
Her organism shied behind a blood-cloud?
What is life, then but this identity of self
Sounded from a fenced in herd of rodents
Trampling all to break away from blind confinement
In this the arching blackest room of domed night,
Moonset exit to the far west wind in tumult?
What is death therefore but severed soul
To incarnations other in the ever search,
The never found abounding out of reach,
Tendrils of my ghost a mist of morning
Clung to gleaming bark of early spring?
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
a few ballads, starting with the newest...
Ballads aren't the easiest things to compose: they have to merge the narrative with the lyrical and do it neatly and elegantly and in a rolling manner that reveals no hiccups. I am not always up to the task. It doesn't help that I was told by one who smelled of after shave that 'nobody writes ballads, anymore." Hmm. I guess this nobody does [fool that I am]:
John Bailey [this one varies the meter, a little]
I knew John Bailey when the summer
Fled the tired town
As Salt Lake leaned into September
When the rains came down.
A slosh, a haggard bum, he wandered
Stooping with a bag
Door to door to rest his feet,
And slump to the steps and sag.
A hacking santa claus, a billy goat
Gone shaggy and gruff,
His whiskers green with cud he hadn’t
Spit quite far enough,
He limped away to sit,
His shopping bag set close beside,
An ample burden of mysteries
He never would confide.
On Autumn Sundays when the wind
Danced papers strewn through town,
Down empty boulevards we strolled
And he’d invite me to sit down
And watch the hippies begging change
Where 2nd South met State,
He croaked “this bag is all I got—
“This or else the gutter grate.”
“What’s in that bag,” I asked him,
And he said “it’s me religion,”
And clung to it like a teddy bear,
Like fleas to a mangy pigeon.
“Whatever you believe in
Always keep it close you see,” .
These fuckin’ hypocrites are better than
The likes of you and me.”
And while I sat beside him,
Wondering who it was he meant
He pointed to the intersection,
And the heaven sent.
“Bunch of pan handlin’ hippies,”
And he waved them off with a growl,
Which made them laugh. “And what are you?
“A pervert on the prowl?”
“Pervert? Shit,” he put up his fists—
“Then show us all what’s in your sack!”
“None of yer business—“ he grabbed it and hugged it
Close, and turned his back.
The one they called the Moonman,
Justly known to fly that high
On root beer laced with hairspray,
Truly one to stupefy,
Staggered toward him leaning low,
Rolling with the rolling walk,
And made a grab for Bailey’s bag
As Bailey mailed an arcing sock,
That sent the moonman sprawling back
And blinking at the marble sky
That drizzled on his beard and both
His balled out bulging eyes.
He hopped back to his feet and came
With madness spewing out,
And fingers flailing at our faces
Like a spraying spout,
And tore the sack asunder
Spilling from the sudden slash
The scattered magazines to lie
And mingle with the trash.
The hippies then converged like murder
All about a pile of corn,
Pecking over copies, all
Of which were Swedish porn;
But left behind one tattered cover,
Half the face of a smiling whore,
Once an old man’s secret lover,
To remind him all the more
Of lost religion learned in private
From the view of freer lands,
And set him down on jilted hopes,
To laugh and cry into his hands.
“However cold that country is,
The Lord sure knows it can’t beat this
For people frozen to the bone
And treacherous as any kiss
“Of Judas— Preach utopia!
It fits ‘em like a glove,
But they forget a perfect world
Ain’t got no place for love;
“Ain’t got no place for weakness—
They will purge the place of sin
And every comfy chair there is
To seat an old, imperfect man.”
And that’s the last I heard of John
Who went his way and died
While I went on existing
In a world that can’t abide
The imperfections of a man
Who suffers for desire,
For any smile returning to
To the source of human fire.
Years have passed while imperfections
Dent the smooth, utopian dream
That die-hards force right down our throats
With bucket loads of sour cream.
I wander empty boulevards
Where vacant, eyeless, stand
The temples to Utopia;
And I’m the lonely man
Who wants religion while the winds
Of winter sweep the town
And bite me to the bone
And don’t invite me to sit down.
And here's this monstrosity I consider to be one of two masterpieces by little old me:
Better Days
A busted shard of neon dangles
Off the brick and its legend says,
For all the world to gape and gawk,
That here is a bar called Better Days.
And of the souls who drank its brew,
Many have seen what others never
Will ever enjoy even though
It is their curse to live forever.
In old Salt Lake no better hole
Beat Better Days when a schooner of brew
Was had for a quarter; but knives came free
In case you forgot what’s good for you.
And fights were fiercer way back when,
Especially at the height of the craze
When hotrods ruled the night on State
And stops were made at Better Days.
And bikers flew their colors high,
And swarmed the streets like hornets flying,
And beat the shit out of dumb punk kids,
And left them on the roadside lying.
Moods of desperation darken
When the crimson devil plays
A fugue of rancor and of sin
When sunset comes to Better Days.
Stale as smokes in ashtrays stinking,
Staler than the piss and beer
Is any skinny meth-mouth bitch
Seducing any john in here.
And if she is the poolshark’s bitch
Then ain’t no matter who she plays,
That sorry motherfucker’s dead
If he’s walked into Better Days.
A scuffed up biker in a beard,
Tobacco fingers grimy brown
Put the moves on the poolshark’s bitch
Until a cue stick beat him down.
And up he came with a derringer
And lightning flashed and thunder rumbled;
Out of the way the poolshark danced
The while the biker spun and stumbled.
Then the poolshark reached in his pants
For the pistol kept tucked under his balls
And put five slugs in the biker’s gut
That went on through and into the wall;
And wheeled the sonofabitch around
And sent him crashing through the door;
Behind him smoke in the air hanging foul
And warm blood pooling on the floor.
And into the night of noise and light
He tried to hold his guts inside,
And fell to the ground in the cold south lot
And brought his knees to his chin and died.
His face glued to the smoky sky,
And the eyes in his head were a colder glaze
That stared upon the broken sign
Proclaiming the bar that was Better Days.
And this one:
Orphan Sister
Astride a bicycle recently bought,
As near to the best his parents could buy,
Miles had conquered the vacant lot
Behind the weed-grown junior high.
As any kid who goes it alone
He played alone, as he preferred
The rustling weeds in the hot wind blown.
Behind him then he thought he heard
A man speak out behind the weeds
With words that touched the hairs behind
The head, as high and thin as reeds,
Inquiring, “Would you be so kind?”
He stepped into the high June heat
In beard and hat and heavy black coat
Saying “Somebody here I’d like you to meet.”
A ghost of a girl stepped out on the road
Smiling a weary, wire-thin smile,
As thin as she in her ashen dress,
The wear of it worn and out of style.
She appeared to be starved and nothing less.
The stranger said “She needs a home,”
And paused to study the lot with a frown,
Content to see they were three alone
In a vacant lot on the edge of town.
“Take her boy, would you please?
I promise you nobody’s breaking the law--”
He took off his hat and sank to his knees
As sweat ran streaming down his jaw.
“Boy, believe I’m a desperate man.
Times been bad for me and her;
She needs a family, you understand--
Her folks been dead these past five years.
“Saddens me most this turn of the page
But you could make a home for her
And when this girl has come of age
You’ll find a boy who’ll marry her.”
Miles made a start to the edge of the lot
While the summer heat like a show of applause
Arose to remind him he’d better got
Some better idea of prevailing laws.
She’d once known love in a loving home,
And had been somebody’s precious pearl,
By circumstances forced to roam,
And so he felt for the wandering girl;
And slow-rolled back to where they waited,
Wondering at that roll of the dice
That made the world so complicated,
Pearls dearer than their price.
“If it’s money you want my folks are broke--”
“All I ask is you give her the care--”
“This better not be some damned joke--”
“This ain’t no joke, my boy, I swear.”
The more Miles thought to turn and flee
The less he could but stand and stare,
Unconvinced to leave it be,
Her small pale face, her thin black hair,
And rattled a sigh--”Alright then, Mister.”
Then the stranger bowed and wept:
“Go, little one, and be his sister.
Now the promise I made is kept.”
He straightened up in a sudden gust
And hobbled away on his tiny feet
In a swirling ghost of a billion years’ dust
That danced away in the billowing heat.
And then a dot on the far horizon,
His absence allowed the boy to be
The master of the situation:
“I think you’d better come with me.
“Climb aboard and hold to the bars.”
He walked beside and held it steady
Westward toward the benevolent Star
Lowering in the sky already.
“Hopefully they’ll have dinner made,”
He said, although the end of day
Loomed to remind him at the grade
To wonder what his folks would say.
Alright, here's my first published ballad from 1984:
Florence Wheeler
The trees that Missus Wheeler loved,
Whose gnarled fingers raked the air,
Lie timbered to the side of the road
But Florence Wheeler is not there.
She visits in my sleep each night
As young as sixty years ago;
Her hair is black, and brown, her eyes.
She hasn’t spoken much although
I’d only give my old excuse:
“I’ve much to do, too much to do...”
The sycamores stood by and waved,
Now all they are is firewood.
“How long does sleep compass a life?”
She asked me in the dreamy night.
You push your trade and sleep the sleep
That makes your effort somehow right.”
I never had the time, you see,
To talk at her gate, as I have said.
There’s little point in it at all
Now that Florence Wheeler’s dead.
“I died for my trees,” she said, “Although
“Some say they died off long ago.
But I recall when they were young,
When it seemed best to let them grow.”
“The city chopped them down,” I smiled.
“They said the trees were in the way
Of power lines that must go through,
And time was short; they had one day
“To make the deadline--” then I stopped.
She said “I think I know you now,
And why you never came to my gate,
And why you’d rather sleep just now.”
I stepped outside in the cool, crisp air
To see the movement of our moon,
And red flags wrapped around my trees,
And swore that they would go, and soon.
Alright, one more:
Winter Incident
There lived a girl named Alice, who
In loyalty stayed forever true;
Her mother yet forever rued
The day the angels brought her.
So Alice left home early on,
But circumstances plagued upon
The soul of her ‘til all had gone
And left a ruined daughter.
As she had grown so wearily poor,
Returning to her mother’s door:
“There’s nothing for me anymore
And I won’t last the winter.”
And when she sickened she was sure
Her mother’s potions were no cure;
Something in them seemed impure,
To agony they sent her.
“I will not last the night, she said.
“I doubt your words,” her mother said.
But Alice said “I’ll soon be dead
And gone before tomorrow.”
Then as the night came racing round
To settle down upon the town,
Into that night fell Alice down
To leave this world of sorrow.
They slid her corpse into a grave.
The bishop claimed her soul was saved,
But three nights later did she rave
Despite her mother’s trouble.
The old dame heard the moans and sighs,
Fearing the worst she searched the skies;
Never were there heard such cries
To turn the nerve to rubble.
Among the squat trees in a clear
She saw her Alice standing there;
The moonlight glanced a glowing tear,
The dead face of her daughter.
“Oh, daughter mine, then will you go
“To where the spirit waters flow?
“To heaven she must surely go
And as the good book taught her.”
But closer came the ghost in view
And clutched her mother cold but true:
“No, mother, I have come for you.
Tonight we leave together.
I’ll take you were the dank and cool
Beneath the salamander’s pool
Seep in the hallways of the skull
Away from wind & weather.”
Her fingers icy, long and thin,
They stabbed her mother like a pin
And dragged her by the arm therein
The place that knows no toil.
Come morning then the townsfolk came
To find the mother dead the same
Where she had scratched her daughter’s name
Into the frozen soil.
John Bailey [this one varies the meter, a little]
I knew John Bailey when the summer
Fled the tired town
As Salt Lake leaned into September
When the rains came down.
A slosh, a haggard bum, he wandered
Stooping with a bag
Door to door to rest his feet,
And slump to the steps and sag.
A hacking santa claus, a billy goat
Gone shaggy and gruff,
His whiskers green with cud he hadn’t
Spit quite far enough,
He limped away to sit,
His shopping bag set close beside,
An ample burden of mysteries
He never would confide.
On Autumn Sundays when the wind
Danced papers strewn through town,
Down empty boulevards we strolled
And he’d invite me to sit down
And watch the hippies begging change
Where 2nd South met State,
He croaked “this bag is all I got—
“This or else the gutter grate.”
“What’s in that bag,” I asked him,
And he said “it’s me religion,”
And clung to it like a teddy bear,
Like fleas to a mangy pigeon.
“Whatever you believe in
Always keep it close you see,” .
These fuckin’ hypocrites are better than
The likes of you and me.”
And while I sat beside him,
Wondering who it was he meant
He pointed to the intersection,
And the heaven sent.
“Bunch of pan handlin’ hippies,”
And he waved them off with a growl,
Which made them laugh. “And what are you?
“A pervert on the prowl?”
“Pervert? Shit,” he put up his fists—
“Then show us all what’s in your sack!”
“None of yer business—“ he grabbed it and hugged it
Close, and turned his back.
The one they called the Moonman,
Justly known to fly that high
On root beer laced with hairspray,
Truly one to stupefy,
Staggered toward him leaning low,
Rolling with the rolling walk,
And made a grab for Bailey’s bag
As Bailey mailed an arcing sock,
That sent the moonman sprawling back
And blinking at the marble sky
That drizzled on his beard and both
His balled out bulging eyes.
He hopped back to his feet and came
With madness spewing out,
And fingers flailing at our faces
Like a spraying spout,
And tore the sack asunder
Spilling from the sudden slash
The scattered magazines to lie
And mingle with the trash.
The hippies then converged like murder
All about a pile of corn,
Pecking over copies, all
Of which were Swedish porn;
But left behind one tattered cover,
Half the face of a smiling whore,
Once an old man’s secret lover,
To remind him all the more
Of lost religion learned in private
From the view of freer lands,
And set him down on jilted hopes,
To laugh and cry into his hands.
“However cold that country is,
The Lord sure knows it can’t beat this
For people frozen to the bone
And treacherous as any kiss
“Of Judas— Preach utopia!
It fits ‘em like a glove,
But they forget a perfect world
Ain’t got no place for love;
“Ain’t got no place for weakness—
They will purge the place of sin
And every comfy chair there is
To seat an old, imperfect man.”
And that’s the last I heard of John
Who went his way and died
While I went on existing
In a world that can’t abide
The imperfections of a man
Who suffers for desire,
For any smile returning to
To the source of human fire.
Years have passed while imperfections
Dent the smooth, utopian dream
That die-hards force right down our throats
With bucket loads of sour cream.
I wander empty boulevards
Where vacant, eyeless, stand
The temples to Utopia;
And I’m the lonely man
Who wants religion while the winds
Of winter sweep the town
And bite me to the bone
And don’t invite me to sit down.
And here's this monstrosity I consider to be one of two masterpieces by little old me:
Better Days
A busted shard of neon dangles
Off the brick and its legend says,
For all the world to gape and gawk,
That here is a bar called Better Days.
And of the souls who drank its brew,
Many have seen what others never
Will ever enjoy even though
It is their curse to live forever.
In old Salt Lake no better hole
Beat Better Days when a schooner of brew
Was had for a quarter; but knives came free
In case you forgot what’s good for you.
And fights were fiercer way back when,
Especially at the height of the craze
When hotrods ruled the night on State
And stops were made at Better Days.
And bikers flew their colors high,
And swarmed the streets like hornets flying,
And beat the shit out of dumb punk kids,
And left them on the roadside lying.
Moods of desperation darken
When the crimson devil plays
A fugue of rancor and of sin
When sunset comes to Better Days.
Stale as smokes in ashtrays stinking,
Staler than the piss and beer
Is any skinny meth-mouth bitch
Seducing any john in here.
And if she is the poolshark’s bitch
Then ain’t no matter who she plays,
That sorry motherfucker’s dead
If he’s walked into Better Days.
A scuffed up biker in a beard,
Tobacco fingers grimy brown
Put the moves on the poolshark’s bitch
Until a cue stick beat him down.
And up he came with a derringer
And lightning flashed and thunder rumbled;
Out of the way the poolshark danced
The while the biker spun and stumbled.
Then the poolshark reached in his pants
For the pistol kept tucked under his balls
And put five slugs in the biker’s gut
That went on through and into the wall;
And wheeled the sonofabitch around
And sent him crashing through the door;
Behind him smoke in the air hanging foul
And warm blood pooling on the floor.
And into the night of noise and light
He tried to hold his guts inside,
And fell to the ground in the cold south lot
And brought his knees to his chin and died.
His face glued to the smoky sky,
And the eyes in his head were a colder glaze
That stared upon the broken sign
Proclaiming the bar that was Better Days.
And this one:
Orphan Sister
Astride a bicycle recently bought,
As near to the best his parents could buy,
Miles had conquered the vacant lot
Behind the weed-grown junior high.
As any kid who goes it alone
He played alone, as he preferred
The rustling weeds in the hot wind blown.
Behind him then he thought he heard
A man speak out behind the weeds
With words that touched the hairs behind
The head, as high and thin as reeds,
Inquiring, “Would you be so kind?”
He stepped into the high June heat
In beard and hat and heavy black coat
Saying “Somebody here I’d like you to meet.”
A ghost of a girl stepped out on the road
Smiling a weary, wire-thin smile,
As thin as she in her ashen dress,
The wear of it worn and out of style.
She appeared to be starved and nothing less.
The stranger said “She needs a home,”
And paused to study the lot with a frown,
Content to see they were three alone
In a vacant lot on the edge of town.
“Take her boy, would you please?
I promise you nobody’s breaking the law--”
He took off his hat and sank to his knees
As sweat ran streaming down his jaw.
“Boy, believe I’m a desperate man.
Times been bad for me and her;
She needs a family, you understand--
Her folks been dead these past five years.
“Saddens me most this turn of the page
But you could make a home for her
And when this girl has come of age
You’ll find a boy who’ll marry her.”
Miles made a start to the edge of the lot
While the summer heat like a show of applause
Arose to remind him he’d better got
Some better idea of prevailing laws.
She’d once known love in a loving home,
And had been somebody’s precious pearl,
By circumstances forced to roam,
And so he felt for the wandering girl;
And slow-rolled back to where they waited,
Wondering at that roll of the dice
That made the world so complicated,
Pearls dearer than their price.
“If it’s money you want my folks are broke--”
“All I ask is you give her the care--”
“This better not be some damned joke--”
“This ain’t no joke, my boy, I swear.”
The more Miles thought to turn and flee
The less he could but stand and stare,
Unconvinced to leave it be,
Her small pale face, her thin black hair,
And rattled a sigh--”Alright then, Mister.”
Then the stranger bowed and wept:
“Go, little one, and be his sister.
Now the promise I made is kept.”
He straightened up in a sudden gust
And hobbled away on his tiny feet
In a swirling ghost of a billion years’ dust
That danced away in the billowing heat.
And then a dot on the far horizon,
His absence allowed the boy to be
The master of the situation:
“I think you’d better come with me.
“Climb aboard and hold to the bars.”
He walked beside and held it steady
Westward toward the benevolent Star
Lowering in the sky already.
“Hopefully they’ll have dinner made,”
He said, although the end of day
Loomed to remind him at the grade
To wonder what his folks would say.
Alright, here's my first published ballad from 1984:
Florence Wheeler
The trees that Missus Wheeler loved,
Whose gnarled fingers raked the air,
Lie timbered to the side of the road
But Florence Wheeler is not there.
She visits in my sleep each night
As young as sixty years ago;
Her hair is black, and brown, her eyes.
She hasn’t spoken much although
I’d only give my old excuse:
“I’ve much to do, too much to do...”
The sycamores stood by and waved,
Now all they are is firewood.
“How long does sleep compass a life?”
She asked me in the dreamy night.
You push your trade and sleep the sleep
That makes your effort somehow right.”
I never had the time, you see,
To talk at her gate, as I have said.
There’s little point in it at all
Now that Florence Wheeler’s dead.
“I died for my trees,” she said, “Although
“Some say they died off long ago.
But I recall when they were young,
When it seemed best to let them grow.”
“The city chopped them down,” I smiled.
“They said the trees were in the way
Of power lines that must go through,
And time was short; they had one day
“To make the deadline--” then I stopped.
She said “I think I know you now,
And why you never came to my gate,
And why you’d rather sleep just now.”
I stepped outside in the cool, crisp air
To see the movement of our moon,
And red flags wrapped around my trees,
And swore that they would go, and soon.
Alright, one more:
Winter Incident
There lived a girl named Alice, who
In loyalty stayed forever true;
Her mother yet forever rued
The day the angels brought her.
So Alice left home early on,
But circumstances plagued upon
The soul of her ‘til all had gone
And left a ruined daughter.
As she had grown so wearily poor,
Returning to her mother’s door:
“There’s nothing for me anymore
And I won’t last the winter.”
And when she sickened she was sure
Her mother’s potions were no cure;
Something in them seemed impure,
To agony they sent her.
“I will not last the night, she said.
“I doubt your words,” her mother said.
But Alice said “I’ll soon be dead
And gone before tomorrow.”
Then as the night came racing round
To settle down upon the town,
Into that night fell Alice down
To leave this world of sorrow.
They slid her corpse into a grave.
The bishop claimed her soul was saved,
But three nights later did she rave
Despite her mother’s trouble.
The old dame heard the moans and sighs,
Fearing the worst she searched the skies;
Never were there heard such cries
To turn the nerve to rubble.
Among the squat trees in a clear
She saw her Alice standing there;
The moonlight glanced a glowing tear,
The dead face of her daughter.
“Oh, daughter mine, then will you go
“To where the spirit waters flow?
“To heaven she must surely go
And as the good book taught her.”
But closer came the ghost in view
And clutched her mother cold but true:
“No, mother, I have come for you.
Tonight we leave together.
I’ll take you were the dank and cool
Beneath the salamander’s pool
Seep in the hallways of the skull
Away from wind & weather.”
Her fingers icy, long and thin,
They stabbed her mother like a pin
And dragged her by the arm therein
The place that knows no toil.
Come morning then the townsfolk came
To find the mother dead the same
Where she had scratched her daughter’s name
Into the frozen soil.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
a wee bit o' fluff, this mornin'...
When out it pours like creeks
To rhythms of the Brahma's breath
And sea's own secret chamber,
Ringed in mossy wreath,
Then breathes my breath-lust whole
To rhythms of the Brahma's yawn,
The yawning whole of all creation,
While is hope to hope upon.
To rhythms of the Brahma's breath
And sea's own secret chamber,
Ringed in mossy wreath,
Then breathes my breath-lust whole
To rhythms of the Brahma's yawn,
The yawning whole of all creation,
While is hope to hope upon.
Monday, June 15, 2009
late in the day...
sent this one to a friend today, and thought what the hell:
...how tenuous our hold upon this life
enough that it is nothing and death is less,
and all our energy is given unto birth,
that holy act of sunrise over this hieratic code
of molecules in weaving fabric making of us
smile and sweetness, love and kindness
and embrace and soft embrace, the rhythm of forever
in a soft embrace and love spoken, animal, a murmur
with the trees that will outlast us, and the stars
forever in gyration while we lie amazed
to draw our bit of warmth, and know so little...
...how tenuous our hold upon this life
enough that it is nothing and death is less,
and all our energy is given unto birth,
that holy act of sunrise over this hieratic code
of molecules in weaving fabric making of us
smile and sweetness, love and kindness
and embrace and soft embrace, the rhythm of forever
in a soft embrace and love spoken, animal, a murmur
with the trees that will outlast us, and the stars
forever in gyration while we lie amazed
to draw our bit of warmth, and know so little...
I should say that I feel the same way about the ballad form, that its 4-beat cadence and end rhyming are not formal but instinctive and an ancient and integral part of our oral tradition. Terza Rimas, Villanelles, sonnets, etc., with all their elaborate rules, formalities to me, artificial and arbitrary.
Like tears in rain...
The following poems should I hope illustrate my main philosophy of poetics, that poetry like painting is an animal instinct in people. Therefore do I eschew arbitrary formalities and simply move my language with the ebb and flow of my own nature. If it works, it works:
I Love to Remember
I love and that's my blessing; and I desire, and that's my curse.
So goes the wheel of fortune down into misfortune and then up,
And all my life has been a constant rolling round and round
Because a tickle in my brain has ruled me with a strange benevolence
That brings me visions of a keener joy and abiding sadness all at once;
And so I gaze upon the ruins in my dreams of old rock houses in our Farmington,
And I think of the come and gone, of all my own that have come and gone,
And cry for them turned skeletal beneath the earth, and weep for their souls
And long for their company and their smiles and how they once kissed me,
And I was loved by them and now they are stone ruins in the gullies of memory.
My Own Skull Polished White
I'm scraping ancient muck from walls of my skull
The legacy of porridge pouring out in syllables
Attached to the Voyager off in black indifference
Alas, alas I send this excrement to you
But flowers thrive on dung so let us hope
The smells abate as I through some bleak portal
Exit soon enough, and let us pray for that.
People tire of me--that's a fact;
My boring into words becomes a bore into an evening,
Ultimately left to pore into my lexicons
The river of my ignorance and curiosity
The swell of it, the flood flow under nocturnes
Where the enigmatic moon is all the portrait of a sneer.
Syllables in a cadence are the music I love best
Beside herself, the secret goddess of my being.
She held my hands in dreams and gazed into me
Laughing in a meadow that was paradise
And music washed the wispy cumulus above the cedars,
Laughter of the innocent, their childlike play
Where all was endless lawn in velvet carpet verdant
Alongside where a little stream meandered.
Why this dream then? Why this disappointment?
Words come of it merely empty, hollowed, gutted,
Memories of Heaven I will never know again.
My Irish
Asleep, MacDuff?
Hirsute is Macbeth, vest and beard, the best have veered from him.
Oy, evolve Italians to the Jewish answer but the sons of Erin know no usury.
The Scots are in their quaking cots and taking tokes from Angled pipes;
Poor whipsnorts blundrin' how the Irish got away with independence.
Well, you have to have an independent mind. It can't be bought by bigots
Neither had from spigots--may as well shoot straight me Gaelic lads.
Still I'm coughin' now in state, an Irish lad ain't mist but waked,
To the great moon sticks his tongue into the cold damp air of Bantry Bay,
Canoodlin' nothing but the wispy ghost of cold Andromeda arisen eastward
So be it, redbeard bandy-legged cockadoodlin' piper of the Irish night,
All whisky soaked, and may you cry for Cahair who stood his ground
And soaked it with his sacred blood.
Having Sat Through 10,000 BC
Turbid from turgid, sail a [moe]vee cross the muddies,
woulda' clog a balsa flotilla, doan yoo spee bozin'?
Hear then comma raddery gone all off to a fine moovy
sittin' in dark aromas all poppin' jaybirds flittin'
In yon cinematic shadows, sounds fill up the nostrils
Like gas stanks on an izland in Hellay, Mazdas humming in a line;
The readits crawl upon a screen of silk care esses
Chimes swound dissonant as if to milk some supernova
of its crimson character in eyes that are bowls of sloop.
Fair dee whale we sailin' at the mobies sharin' a baggo burst ass-undies
Handfuls scarf across our glistening maws in butter breath
while bleak stars hopeless rise above us in a fever dream:
The chronic olds of Kali Forlornia: Prance Kisspian a thespian [he's gaspyin']
They flit from left to right and exit out an edit like a portal to obscurity,
Back to pressed releases, hints of scandal, sexed up foto glossies,
Warnings never to ignore the artlessness of CGI, the ill that skewers all pills.
The Lizard Cold as Blizzard
The lizard cold as blizzard moves with most indifferent nonchalance
In wildernesses made against his understanding,
Far beyond his feeble chemistry, his physics in the scouring heat of August
Where the sun's descent into the broiling sea of sand, the anguished sweat of tears,
Desires only recognition of itself, humbled by its love for this impervious reptile.
Yet he lies a bed, a hider in the hollows of the massive boulders
Like a universe of planets set in academic sand and emptied of credentials.
Beautiful beast as cold eyed as a lesbian's pudendum to the male's caress,
The hand that pets the brilliant patterns colored like a quilt of Navajo,
Detached as doctors are in clinical analysis of one's desire splashed as blood
Asunder on a boulder, there to bubble, there coagulate in reddened sunset,
All regret and tears upon this barren night of hollow howling.
Weep for him who loves to no avail, whose flesh that did desire once
Is torn apart by carrion birds and scattered with the grinning skulls.
The lizard knows no love of man nor needs that love, requiring only adulation,
Praise for the lurid colors of accomplishment,
The ghastly feel of scales that measure worth in smocks and beakers,
Liquids red as pained expressions, boiling in a hot retort of alchemies
Forever locked in basement labs where passions are eviscerated,
Boiled away in a lizard's desert of the flesh.
Down to the Sea
Down to the sea, down to the rich brine and rot,
Down to the half tire arching from the muddies
Down to the metal cart forever stuck in hard mosses,
Down to the filthy birds that scream from dead branches
Down to the garbage dumped in dank ravines
I go through stenches of the aging human presence
To observe the carp go herding in the garbling morasses,
The roily river that oils the great dank lake;
I tread the spongy ground soft layered in the grasses
Tiny as the March can make them struggling upward
Brisk through breezes brusque in mid-winter,
Walking, forever walking northward near great Redwood
Back to the place of my origin, the alkali grasses,
The chill of the day upon me, the shacks of memory
Standing yet against the merciless lake winds,
The lightning nights in bowls of blackest howling
Rising like the monster mouth from out of the lake,
A gaping and malevolent hunger, vilest of gods
Swelling out of infinite depth, the great waves surging,
Out of the lethal lake, out of the poisoning brine.
The lake today lies calm and gray as an aged woman
Waiting in a clinic as she fingers a facial tumor,
Wincing to fear but nothingness beyond all this,
Become a part of the sea again and soon,
A molecule anonymous in oceans rising over all;
And she will know that gift of immortality,
The sea being everything, eternal, abiding in the cloisters of memory.
The lake has killed my friends.
The treachery that guides it is a devil's guile of calm.
To live beside it is to ask it to bed with you,
To infiltrate your dreams with hideous promise
And to ask for death to guide your future into doom
And there to recognize it like an enemy you'd forgotten.
I feel the forever of the lake, the wind beats through my jacket;
Out across the sand and brine flies blows it ever and ever,
A woman I can never please, a treacherous companion,
Though I long for it, long for that first vision of its hatred
Unabated on the heads of us although we cowered;
So I say this is no lake at all but a demon’s face, a beast
Of salt and water, wind and force uncoiling like a snake.
I stand beside it, longing as I watch the sailboats
Go careening to the west and see them waving cheerfully.
I Invoke the Goddess
I pluck my mandolin, my eyes arise
With moonlight on the crest of bristling Wasatch
Where the high clouds roll like a promenade
Of bearded antique men all marching stooped
Forever northward on this night of stars.
And there I wish to find Her mystery,
Her beating heart above the hum and drum
Of late-night traffic, and Her breath as cool
As breezes down the canyon of her body,
And Her whisper with the rattling leaves
That say 'I love you' in the languages
Of ancient Earth primordial.
My Love,
I pine among the pines, I am a river
With the river rolling ever rolling,
Trembling with the touch of Her, my one,
And feel again her slender fingers
While I shiver and my breath blows hot;
To lie between the cleave and feel the rhythm
Of forever in its cycle wheeling to
This instant of our bliss, and hear from Her
The sigh of leaves that is our name together.
I lie in Her lap, I smell Her warmth, I am
Accepted, and with gratitude I slumber
In Her oceanic wave of breathing,
Fluttering song a moth of gleaming powders
Dissipated in the musty gloom of evening
Over waters that are mysteries
Unto a far horizon under moonlight.
There the watchful eye is on me, child
And lover in the firm embrace of one
Who is the ghost of all my lonely days.
I pluck my mandolin, my ears arise
To hear the language of the Lord above me,
Kind, paternal and most forgiving, saying
That the soul of Her I love is with me
Shaped in song, in one transcendent instant
Living in my mandolin.
Unto
The stars above, in deepest gratitude
I tip my hat and wish them life and love.
I Dreamed I Saw My Mother Earth
I dreamed I saw my mother Earth
Alongside all her sisters stroll
The road into the misty canyon
Over the creek in springtime roll,
While I across the way observed
From hillside waving with the grass,
So longing there and weeping small
To see her with her sisters pass.
Their laughter echoed far and high
A song enveloped in a whist
That fell away around a bend
Of mountain road and rolling mist.
They'd found their place of origin,
A vacant home made all of stones,
Of wooden door and tiny windows
Wherein lay their parents' bones.
A dream of things to come then opened
On the group who posed to laugh
Before the shutter of the lens
That took a psychic photograph
I held as if a million years
Made this my only memory
Of her the daughter of my dreams,
Adrift in endless indigo sea.
And all are numberless sayeth the Grand
Creator of both suns and men,
Of mothering worlds in weaving spin
For brilliant stars to bring them in,
That I recall that simple joy,
Myself her least, anonymous child,
Her eyes alive with lightest laughter,
And her face that kindly smiled.
Five Love Songs for Louise
1.
You who are collective soul,
The living, dead, and yet unborn
Who move upon the sudden rush
Of ghostly spore upon the corn,
To you I sang the moonsong round
To welcome you into this life
That we must share as unmet friends
Oh love that is umbilical knife.
I long to lie upon your breast
And milk the areola there,
As bare not barren with myself,
A burden I can barely bear.
The year my sister passed away
I wept myself to sleep each night
But one day short of that you came,
A year gone by, into my sight.
Shall I proclaim that every poem
That squeezes out my little brain
As if a Hopi's prayer had earned
A modicum of desert rain,
Is salutation unto thee,
Sweet soul I follow down the ages,
Turned to words that pour as sand
Upon these salutary pages?
2.
Under starch of sunless sky I go and know no shade of comfort.
Bleak and blank the world before me yet unsettled as a threat
Of something lurking in the glooms of shuttered rooms
Beloved in her indifference makes unbearable my burden.
How did I arrive to love this perfect being,
Adoring her as I diminish in the farthest reaches of the sunset
Blasting over seas of wasted bloodiness
The open wound a gash emitting howling winds in agony
Asunder over all the world the while she moves away?
Even more than loved her; I adored her sympathetic to the Grand Musician
Humming strings symphonic in the
orchestrations of the planets
And their chorus all abiding harmonies upon the ether
I can hear behind the pulsing heart of me as I stoop humbly at her altar.
Can I simply say I love her, though her expectation so demands such,
That her eyes forever heavenward cannot acknowledge me at all?
But I cannot give up, my love; my need to know your secret stuns me into sadness,
Dreariness my lot as through my empty dreams I wander blindly into alcoves
Wishing for an exit into paradise and yet a slave to my perfidious mind.
So many think I am controllable, the prairie fires in me unabated nonetheless,
A world of tidal waves and earthquakes through the anger in my soul
Defines the energy I cycle like a million turbines making maelstroms
In the secret seat of psyche where the violence explodes in rage
Arising in the steams volcanic out of bubbling stews of language
Sprayed upon the cryptic code of poetry I cannot quite control, myself,
My own volcanic spurts defying circumstances of my life and death,
The spillage of this sea surge into new creation rich with minerals.
Anonymous I spill into the world and mingle with the rest.
I love you, Louise, in this the twilight of my starved existence,
You in musty mysteries who dance before me in the minor keys,
The gloom room brought to eerie lights of amniotic warmth and music,
Swaying with your pelvis swiving to the rhythms of nocturnal need;
Guitars electric sounding down Aeolian the tropic of your groin,
The smile upon you and the dark hair rampant like a million tendrils,
Sliding off your denims to the floor and neither caring
In the syncopated samba of our pelvic dance, conjoined in love,
To bring your face to mine and kiss the tears away, my Love.
3.
You came to me in the glass house of my soul that sits in an evil side of town
Awaiting murder, theft, eviction into garbage-ridden streets,
A sac transparent holding an embryo.
You were tall and beautiful to gaze upon,
You moved like darkest water in the shadows of a mystery,
In a long coat and high boots I see you in from time to time,
Brown and brooding eyes and dark hair tangling in the night's milieu;
And you had come to tell the story of yourself, to sit beside me while I slept,
To speak to me in languages beyond my ken while I lay in my kitchen on a cot,
The while the world of night observed us through transparent walls.
I felt your warm left leg upon my cheek that radiated your maternal ways into my being,
Throughout the coarse mesh of your denims, through the muscle of your long left calf;
I felt it and I touched it with my face while I half heard you tell of your misgivings,
Your arrivals and departures and the state of things that shaped your present,
Speaking on and all I wished to say was love for you, my need to know you,
And to trap you in the hollow cage of empty longing, now become one with my own augmented need.
I offered food. I said I'd cook for you if you could stay another hour,
That I took you on a tour of this my home, my soul that hides no secrets.
I'm an open book who wants to love your body naked with my naked self,
To find the center of your being and penetrate it with my seed and make a child,
To kiss your eyes I love as rich and real as Mother Earth abiding in our midst,
The pungent must between your thighs I part to penetrate and know you pulsing
Wave on wave of stanzas dancing to the distant shores of long lost places in my past,
Where you were ghostly and awaited nascence in my long career of loneliness.
I said I had some food there in my basement I would go and get;
I mean it isn't much but I would gladly feed you my beloved dream friend.
Then I went downstairs into the layered snow and waded to a shelf where sat a can of chili,
And could sense my wife asleep in the far back bedroom where the snow in coldest vapors
Lay forever like an ice-age in a barren bedroom.
You had wandered off into an upstairs hall and stood before my bedroom staring.
What is that I see upon your bed you asked me.
Well I suppose a thing I pilot in my palm, a love detector searching for you past the curtains;
And you held it in your fingers and you read the glowing screen of subtle turquoise.
Your ankles crossed, you lay across my bed upon your stomach smiling at the screen;
And I thought you would have me then, that you would take me then, and understand,
But naught was meant to me as you arose above the bed and spoke my name in terse announcement.
You were leaving and must hurry out of my agenda, out into the night as dark as notions,
Smiling to your other lovers as if to tell me you were nothing but a screen of ghostly turquoise briefly glowing.
But I have little appetite for chili, so I watched you march away into the southern sky
To Scorpius and red Antares hanging like a blood spot over lands unknown to me,
And knew I loved you but would never really know you,
That I was less than ever in your expectation.
As dreams depart the dawn is vacant and accusing like a one-eyed beggar laughing roughly
Just to say I'm all you have you dreamer, all you'll ever know you filthy penis of a man
Who has no right to hope, whose dreams are cardboard escapades with disappointing endings.
I awoke to find myself in tears.
Never address this fact, Beloved by me,
Who blithely wanders off in greener lands
Who thinks we are mere friends, a shake of hands,
Your gloried sunrise in the pool of your reflection
Seeing only self while I await a nod of your approval.
Does your own self love require no addendum?
Reminding me that I, a hollowed carcass in the heat
Devoured by a billion mites that are my increments of memory
Await removal from the earth's ongoing change of scenery
Into final disappointment never knowing love of you?
4.
The grippe of love sickness like a tightness
Where the veins swell swimming in the skull,
The hemorrhage that killed my sister when despair
And awful sadness held her in a skeletal vice,
Is there for me like a rattlesnake in wait.
And I'm not eating while imbalance permeates
And pours in perspirations sickly, glistening,
The fear like silver mucous unto love and envy,
And the ghastliness of wasted years
Drawn taut as a leathery skin across the bone.
So much to do, it seems so little reason to do it.
The hollow pit in my belly won't abate
Whatever amount of mindless poesy piles
In homage to the great Divine; these agonies
Are dedicated by this merest slave
A wretch of a man damned by circumstance.
To be a poet is no dry abstraction of the academic
But the tactile rubbing of the flesh upon the dirty world,
Which is why there ain't much going in this unloving age.
But I adore that human savor that is no stench to me,
The chemistry of lovers sweating together
Under cover of abiding night and chemical ethers,
Male and female consonant with stars and planets
In the marriage and the consummation of matter and light.
I dislike religion otherwise, dourest damnations
Shaming me into some abject and sinning particle,
And all because I love and I desire.
It aches to love, an agony to be in love,
And with the stony monument I most desire.
I'll die a-scatter as she goes on in her milky ways
And toward glory, and yet I love her perfect form,
and always did and will, that mother of my dreams.
I knew her from another time and place I can't account for.
I am nothing to her, a microbe, a little asteroid's
Dwarfish roundness occupying swirling space,
Yet every syllable that pours out of my mouth is love for her.
Yes, and all her incarnations beautify the view.
Suppose it bothers her to know she's loved this way?
I won't apologize as this must come of it:
Creation and the language and the music
Of the planetary dancers always and forever in the majesty
Of everlasting stars, the choral celebration
Of angels singing out across the sky in glories of the morning.
5.
Had I your beauty
With your naked self I'd lay
Within your animal warmth of Earth
And kiss your sea of tears away.
To lose you agonizes
In my anonymity of being,
The hollowed skull that nameless
Lies agape as if to sing.
Although my fingers tremble,
Yet my pencil dares to speak
The facets of my syllables
So crystal they could break.
Louise, immortal being:
Your eyes intelligent and wise
Are oceans drowning all my breath
That you alone may hear my cries.
Forever in your ocean
I will drift alive in death
Waved along by long night's breathing,
Warmed along by whispered breath.
I Love to Remember
I love and that's my blessing; and I desire, and that's my curse.
So goes the wheel of fortune down into misfortune and then up,
And all my life has been a constant rolling round and round
Because a tickle in my brain has ruled me with a strange benevolence
That brings me visions of a keener joy and abiding sadness all at once;
And so I gaze upon the ruins in my dreams of old rock houses in our Farmington,
And I think of the come and gone, of all my own that have come and gone,
And cry for them turned skeletal beneath the earth, and weep for their souls
And long for their company and their smiles and how they once kissed me,
And I was loved by them and now they are stone ruins in the gullies of memory.
My Own Skull Polished White
I'm scraping ancient muck from walls of my skull
The legacy of porridge pouring out in syllables
Attached to the Voyager off in black indifference
Alas, alas I send this excrement to you
But flowers thrive on dung so let us hope
The smells abate as I through some bleak portal
Exit soon enough, and let us pray for that.
People tire of me--that's a fact;
My boring into words becomes a bore into an evening,
Ultimately left to pore into my lexicons
The river of my ignorance and curiosity
The swell of it, the flood flow under nocturnes
Where the enigmatic moon is all the portrait of a sneer.
Syllables in a cadence are the music I love best
Beside herself, the secret goddess of my being.
She held my hands in dreams and gazed into me
Laughing in a meadow that was paradise
And music washed the wispy cumulus above the cedars,
Laughter of the innocent, their childlike play
Where all was endless lawn in velvet carpet verdant
Alongside where a little stream meandered.
Why this dream then? Why this disappointment?
Words come of it merely empty, hollowed, gutted,
Memories of Heaven I will never know again.
My Irish
Asleep, MacDuff?
Hirsute is Macbeth, vest and beard, the best have veered from him.
Oy, evolve Italians to the Jewish answer but the sons of Erin know no usury.
The Scots are in their quaking cots and taking tokes from Angled pipes;
Poor whipsnorts blundrin' how the Irish got away with independence.
Well, you have to have an independent mind. It can't be bought by bigots
Neither had from spigots--may as well shoot straight me Gaelic lads.
Still I'm coughin' now in state, an Irish lad ain't mist but waked,
To the great moon sticks his tongue into the cold damp air of Bantry Bay,
Canoodlin' nothing but the wispy ghost of cold Andromeda arisen eastward
So be it, redbeard bandy-legged cockadoodlin' piper of the Irish night,
All whisky soaked, and may you cry for Cahair who stood his ground
And soaked it with his sacred blood.
Having Sat Through 10,000 BC
Turbid from turgid, sail a [moe]vee cross the muddies,
woulda' clog a balsa flotilla, doan yoo spee bozin'?
Hear then comma raddery gone all off to a fine moovy
sittin' in dark aromas all poppin' jaybirds flittin'
In yon cinematic shadows, sounds fill up the nostrils
Like gas stanks on an izland in Hellay, Mazdas humming in a line;
The readits crawl upon a screen of silk care esses
Chimes swound dissonant as if to milk some supernova
of its crimson character in eyes that are bowls of sloop.
Fair dee whale we sailin' at the mobies sharin' a baggo burst ass-undies
Handfuls scarf across our glistening maws in butter breath
while bleak stars hopeless rise above us in a fever dream:
The chronic olds of Kali Forlornia: Prance Kisspian a thespian [he's gaspyin']
They flit from left to right and exit out an edit like a portal to obscurity,
Back to pressed releases, hints of scandal, sexed up foto glossies,
Warnings never to ignore the artlessness of CGI, the ill that skewers all pills.
The Lizard Cold as Blizzard
The lizard cold as blizzard moves with most indifferent nonchalance
In wildernesses made against his understanding,
Far beyond his feeble chemistry, his physics in the scouring heat of August
Where the sun's descent into the broiling sea of sand, the anguished sweat of tears,
Desires only recognition of itself, humbled by its love for this impervious reptile.
Yet he lies a bed, a hider in the hollows of the massive boulders
Like a universe of planets set in academic sand and emptied of credentials.
Beautiful beast as cold eyed as a lesbian's pudendum to the male's caress,
The hand that pets the brilliant patterns colored like a quilt of Navajo,
Detached as doctors are in clinical analysis of one's desire splashed as blood
Asunder on a boulder, there to bubble, there coagulate in reddened sunset,
All regret and tears upon this barren night of hollow howling.
Weep for him who loves to no avail, whose flesh that did desire once
Is torn apart by carrion birds and scattered with the grinning skulls.
The lizard knows no love of man nor needs that love, requiring only adulation,
Praise for the lurid colors of accomplishment,
The ghastly feel of scales that measure worth in smocks and beakers,
Liquids red as pained expressions, boiling in a hot retort of alchemies
Forever locked in basement labs where passions are eviscerated,
Boiled away in a lizard's desert of the flesh.
Down to the Sea
Down to the sea, down to the rich brine and rot,
Down to the half tire arching from the muddies
Down to the metal cart forever stuck in hard mosses,
Down to the filthy birds that scream from dead branches
Down to the garbage dumped in dank ravines
I go through stenches of the aging human presence
To observe the carp go herding in the garbling morasses,
The roily river that oils the great dank lake;
I tread the spongy ground soft layered in the grasses
Tiny as the March can make them struggling upward
Brisk through breezes brusque in mid-winter,
Walking, forever walking northward near great Redwood
Back to the place of my origin, the alkali grasses,
The chill of the day upon me, the shacks of memory
Standing yet against the merciless lake winds,
The lightning nights in bowls of blackest howling
Rising like the monster mouth from out of the lake,
A gaping and malevolent hunger, vilest of gods
Swelling out of infinite depth, the great waves surging,
Out of the lethal lake, out of the poisoning brine.
The lake today lies calm and gray as an aged woman
Waiting in a clinic as she fingers a facial tumor,
Wincing to fear but nothingness beyond all this,
Become a part of the sea again and soon,
A molecule anonymous in oceans rising over all;
And she will know that gift of immortality,
The sea being everything, eternal, abiding in the cloisters of memory.
The lake has killed my friends.
The treachery that guides it is a devil's guile of calm.
To live beside it is to ask it to bed with you,
To infiltrate your dreams with hideous promise
And to ask for death to guide your future into doom
And there to recognize it like an enemy you'd forgotten.
I feel the forever of the lake, the wind beats through my jacket;
Out across the sand and brine flies blows it ever and ever,
A woman I can never please, a treacherous companion,
Though I long for it, long for that first vision of its hatred
Unabated on the heads of us although we cowered;
So I say this is no lake at all but a demon’s face, a beast
Of salt and water, wind and force uncoiling like a snake.
I stand beside it, longing as I watch the sailboats
Go careening to the west and see them waving cheerfully.
I Invoke the Goddess
I pluck my mandolin, my eyes arise
With moonlight on the crest of bristling Wasatch
Where the high clouds roll like a promenade
Of bearded antique men all marching stooped
Forever northward on this night of stars.
And there I wish to find Her mystery,
Her beating heart above the hum and drum
Of late-night traffic, and Her breath as cool
As breezes down the canyon of her body,
And Her whisper with the rattling leaves
That say 'I love you' in the languages
Of ancient Earth primordial.
My Love,
I pine among the pines, I am a river
With the river rolling ever rolling,
Trembling with the touch of Her, my one,
And feel again her slender fingers
While I shiver and my breath blows hot;
To lie between the cleave and feel the rhythm
Of forever in its cycle wheeling to
This instant of our bliss, and hear from Her
The sigh of leaves that is our name together.
I lie in Her lap, I smell Her warmth, I am
Accepted, and with gratitude I slumber
In Her oceanic wave of breathing,
Fluttering song a moth of gleaming powders
Dissipated in the musty gloom of evening
Over waters that are mysteries
Unto a far horizon under moonlight.
There the watchful eye is on me, child
And lover in the firm embrace of one
Who is the ghost of all my lonely days.
I pluck my mandolin, my ears arise
To hear the language of the Lord above me,
Kind, paternal and most forgiving, saying
That the soul of Her I love is with me
Shaped in song, in one transcendent instant
Living in my mandolin.
Unto
The stars above, in deepest gratitude
I tip my hat and wish them life and love.
I Dreamed I Saw My Mother Earth
I dreamed I saw my mother Earth
Alongside all her sisters stroll
The road into the misty canyon
Over the creek in springtime roll,
While I across the way observed
From hillside waving with the grass,
So longing there and weeping small
To see her with her sisters pass.
Their laughter echoed far and high
A song enveloped in a whist
That fell away around a bend
Of mountain road and rolling mist.
They'd found their place of origin,
A vacant home made all of stones,
Of wooden door and tiny windows
Wherein lay their parents' bones.
A dream of things to come then opened
On the group who posed to laugh
Before the shutter of the lens
That took a psychic photograph
I held as if a million years
Made this my only memory
Of her the daughter of my dreams,
Adrift in endless indigo sea.
And all are numberless sayeth the Grand
Creator of both suns and men,
Of mothering worlds in weaving spin
For brilliant stars to bring them in,
That I recall that simple joy,
Myself her least, anonymous child,
Her eyes alive with lightest laughter,
And her face that kindly smiled.
Five Love Songs for Louise
1.
You who are collective soul,
The living, dead, and yet unborn
Who move upon the sudden rush
Of ghostly spore upon the corn,
To you I sang the moonsong round
To welcome you into this life
That we must share as unmet friends
Oh love that is umbilical knife.
I long to lie upon your breast
And milk the areola there,
As bare not barren with myself,
A burden I can barely bear.
The year my sister passed away
I wept myself to sleep each night
But one day short of that you came,
A year gone by, into my sight.
Shall I proclaim that every poem
That squeezes out my little brain
As if a Hopi's prayer had earned
A modicum of desert rain,
Is salutation unto thee,
Sweet soul I follow down the ages,
Turned to words that pour as sand
Upon these salutary pages?
2.
Under starch of sunless sky I go and know no shade of comfort.
Bleak and blank the world before me yet unsettled as a threat
Of something lurking in the glooms of shuttered rooms
Beloved in her indifference makes unbearable my burden.
How did I arrive to love this perfect being,
Adoring her as I diminish in the farthest reaches of the sunset
Blasting over seas of wasted bloodiness
The open wound a gash emitting howling winds in agony
Asunder over all the world the while she moves away?
Even more than loved her; I adored her sympathetic to the Grand Musician
Humming strings symphonic in the
orchestrations of the planets
And their chorus all abiding harmonies upon the ether
I can hear behind the pulsing heart of me as I stoop humbly at her altar.
Can I simply say I love her, though her expectation so demands such,
That her eyes forever heavenward cannot acknowledge me at all?
But I cannot give up, my love; my need to know your secret stuns me into sadness,
Dreariness my lot as through my empty dreams I wander blindly into alcoves
Wishing for an exit into paradise and yet a slave to my perfidious mind.
So many think I am controllable, the prairie fires in me unabated nonetheless,
A world of tidal waves and earthquakes through the anger in my soul
Defines the energy I cycle like a million turbines making maelstroms
In the secret seat of psyche where the violence explodes in rage
Arising in the steams volcanic out of bubbling stews of language
Sprayed upon the cryptic code of poetry I cannot quite control, myself,
My own volcanic spurts defying circumstances of my life and death,
The spillage of this sea surge into new creation rich with minerals.
Anonymous I spill into the world and mingle with the rest.
I love you, Louise, in this the twilight of my starved existence,
You in musty mysteries who dance before me in the minor keys,
The gloom room brought to eerie lights of amniotic warmth and music,
Swaying with your pelvis swiving to the rhythms of nocturnal need;
Guitars electric sounding down Aeolian the tropic of your groin,
The smile upon you and the dark hair rampant like a million tendrils,
Sliding off your denims to the floor and neither caring
In the syncopated samba of our pelvic dance, conjoined in love,
To bring your face to mine and kiss the tears away, my Love.
3.
You came to me in the glass house of my soul that sits in an evil side of town
Awaiting murder, theft, eviction into garbage-ridden streets,
A sac transparent holding an embryo.
You were tall and beautiful to gaze upon,
You moved like darkest water in the shadows of a mystery,
In a long coat and high boots I see you in from time to time,
Brown and brooding eyes and dark hair tangling in the night's milieu;
And you had come to tell the story of yourself, to sit beside me while I slept,
To speak to me in languages beyond my ken while I lay in my kitchen on a cot,
The while the world of night observed us through transparent walls.
I felt your warm left leg upon my cheek that radiated your maternal ways into my being,
Throughout the coarse mesh of your denims, through the muscle of your long left calf;
I felt it and I touched it with my face while I half heard you tell of your misgivings,
Your arrivals and departures and the state of things that shaped your present,
Speaking on and all I wished to say was love for you, my need to know you,
And to trap you in the hollow cage of empty longing, now become one with my own augmented need.
I offered food. I said I'd cook for you if you could stay another hour,
That I took you on a tour of this my home, my soul that hides no secrets.
I'm an open book who wants to love your body naked with my naked self,
To find the center of your being and penetrate it with my seed and make a child,
To kiss your eyes I love as rich and real as Mother Earth abiding in our midst,
The pungent must between your thighs I part to penetrate and know you pulsing
Wave on wave of stanzas dancing to the distant shores of long lost places in my past,
Where you were ghostly and awaited nascence in my long career of loneliness.
I said I had some food there in my basement I would go and get;
I mean it isn't much but I would gladly feed you my beloved dream friend.
Then I went downstairs into the layered snow and waded to a shelf where sat a can of chili,
And could sense my wife asleep in the far back bedroom where the snow in coldest vapors
Lay forever like an ice-age in a barren bedroom.
You had wandered off into an upstairs hall and stood before my bedroom staring.
What is that I see upon your bed you asked me.
Well I suppose a thing I pilot in my palm, a love detector searching for you past the curtains;
And you held it in your fingers and you read the glowing screen of subtle turquoise.
Your ankles crossed, you lay across my bed upon your stomach smiling at the screen;
And I thought you would have me then, that you would take me then, and understand,
But naught was meant to me as you arose above the bed and spoke my name in terse announcement.
You were leaving and must hurry out of my agenda, out into the night as dark as notions,
Smiling to your other lovers as if to tell me you were nothing but a screen of ghostly turquoise briefly glowing.
But I have little appetite for chili, so I watched you march away into the southern sky
To Scorpius and red Antares hanging like a blood spot over lands unknown to me,
And knew I loved you but would never really know you,
That I was less than ever in your expectation.
As dreams depart the dawn is vacant and accusing like a one-eyed beggar laughing roughly
Just to say I'm all you have you dreamer, all you'll ever know you filthy penis of a man
Who has no right to hope, whose dreams are cardboard escapades with disappointing endings.
I awoke to find myself in tears.
Never address this fact, Beloved by me,
Who blithely wanders off in greener lands
Who thinks we are mere friends, a shake of hands,
Your gloried sunrise in the pool of your reflection
Seeing only self while I await a nod of your approval.
Does your own self love require no addendum?
Reminding me that I, a hollowed carcass in the heat
Devoured by a billion mites that are my increments of memory
Await removal from the earth's ongoing change of scenery
Into final disappointment never knowing love of you?
4.
The grippe of love sickness like a tightness
Where the veins swell swimming in the skull,
The hemorrhage that killed my sister when despair
And awful sadness held her in a skeletal vice,
Is there for me like a rattlesnake in wait.
And I'm not eating while imbalance permeates
And pours in perspirations sickly, glistening,
The fear like silver mucous unto love and envy,
And the ghastliness of wasted years
Drawn taut as a leathery skin across the bone.
So much to do, it seems so little reason to do it.
The hollow pit in my belly won't abate
Whatever amount of mindless poesy piles
In homage to the great Divine; these agonies
Are dedicated by this merest slave
A wretch of a man damned by circumstance.
To be a poet is no dry abstraction of the academic
But the tactile rubbing of the flesh upon the dirty world,
Which is why there ain't much going in this unloving age.
But I adore that human savor that is no stench to me,
The chemistry of lovers sweating together
Under cover of abiding night and chemical ethers,
Male and female consonant with stars and planets
In the marriage and the consummation of matter and light.
I dislike religion otherwise, dourest damnations
Shaming me into some abject and sinning particle,
And all because I love and I desire.
It aches to love, an agony to be in love,
And with the stony monument I most desire.
I'll die a-scatter as she goes on in her milky ways
And toward glory, and yet I love her perfect form,
and always did and will, that mother of my dreams.
I knew her from another time and place I can't account for.
I am nothing to her, a microbe, a little asteroid's
Dwarfish roundness occupying swirling space,
Yet every syllable that pours out of my mouth is love for her.
Yes, and all her incarnations beautify the view.
Suppose it bothers her to know she's loved this way?
I won't apologize as this must come of it:
Creation and the language and the music
Of the planetary dancers always and forever in the majesty
Of everlasting stars, the choral celebration
Of angels singing out across the sky in glories of the morning.
5.
Had I your beauty
With your naked self I'd lay
Within your animal warmth of Earth
And kiss your sea of tears away.
To lose you agonizes
In my anonymity of being,
The hollowed skull that nameless
Lies agape as if to sing.
Although my fingers tremble,
Yet my pencil dares to speak
The facets of my syllables
So crystal they could break.
Louise, immortal being:
Your eyes intelligent and wise
Are oceans drowning all my breath
That you alone may hear my cries.
Forever in your ocean
I will drift alive in death
Waved along by long night's breathing,
Warmed along by whispered breath.
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