Circle Dance

This poem was part of my work for an English class and was written May 5, 1980.  I have several rough drafts and modifications.  When I wrote about stone flutes and stingless lyre, I was thinking of an ecstatic dance where only God could hear the music and I think there was a bit of Lord Dunsany there as well.  I think I had in mind as well the juxtaposition of corporate worship - literally, ecstatic worship like I experienced among the Catholic charismatics - and individual devotion. I might also have had in mind, William Carlos William's Danse Russe, which I love.  The image of the man dancing naked in the attic, asserting (quietly, so as not to awaken anyone)  'I am an artist!' is very powerful.  No measured days in coffee spoons. In looking for images, I found this site, which has some pretty cool images of Tantric and ecstatic dancing. The quote from Eliade, whom I studied, appears at the beginning of the poem

". . . a dance always imitates an archetypal gesture or commemorates a mythical moment.  In a word, it is a representation, and consequently a reactualization, of illud tempus, 'those days'."
                                       Myth of the Eternal Return, M. Eliade

Our hearts, they leap up high beyond the fire
to seek the circle dance of God sublime;
To dance, to dance to music out of Time,
played on flutes of stone and stringless lyre.
But dust and clay against the heart conspire;
Seduced, minds weep their tiny china tears.
Will hearts repent their quest and bow to fears,
Will they forget the naming and retire?
Some wait at night the call of flutes of stone
and cast aside the waves of earth's advance.
The clay lies cold and we rejoice alone;
our solitary lives, we dance before the throne.
In higher places seek the circle dance,
the perfect dance, the dance for God alone.

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A Sonnet to the Men in Bunkers Under Washington

This poem was written April 28, 1980 for a poetry class I took with Constance Hunting at the University of Maine.  Now that I think about it, most of the men I was thinking about are all dead and gone, but 30 years later, we are still a nation at war.  Perhaps not the nuclear destruction I envisioned them fleeing, but a conflict no less devastating to the national conscience as we make the slow, steady transition from republic to empire.  I can only wonder in re-reading this how naive this young man was.  Well, Conny seemed to like it, by the grade, I guess, and I hued to the format. That can be said for it, at least.

To the fragile bloom of life we cling,
When war around our lives has pitched its tent.
Lamenting songs of Babylon we sing,
Yet onward press the soldiers, none repent.
We hope, we pray, that all will soon be done;
That peace and truth will guide the ship of state,
But light and justice oft the generals shun,
For darkness is the breeding ground of hate.
Yet hope we still that war will not consume
The hearts and souls of our people fair;
That no one will be taken to presume
We will not seek, for judgement, our betrayer.
Think not this fragile bloom we will let die,
Life's valued more than glory gone awry.


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An Unexpected Friending on Facebook

This is a new poem I wrote after an unexpected friend request on Facebook.  Small world, isn't it? as Walt used to say.  The event that inspired this poem actually took place, more or less as described, on the River Road in Bar Mills last Winter. I just had to wait for the proper inspiration to use it, I guess.


The road is white with snow and flakes dance before the headlights.
The dark pines lean over, listening for the passing cars,
Canopy the way.
I am almost home, the familiar river is a black ribbon
To my left, beyond the trees.
I am alone on the road.
The headlights race ahead just so far and no further,
Define the limit of my vision,
But I know this road, I know its curves and bends.

The darkness beside me moves into the road
And the moose steps into the headlights' path.
He turns his great antlered head to look at me.
The cow steps out of the trees  beside the car.
I stop.
I can see the streaks of gray and brown and black in her fur,
Can see the muscles shifting as she paws the road.
She is less than a foot from my window:
The glass now seems ridiculously thin.
I can hear her breath.
He turns toward me, unafraid, imperious,
Questioning why I am so close to his mate.
She moves beside the car and I wonder,

If I got out now and stood beside him,
I could not see over his shoulders, shaggy and chunked with snow.
What am I thinking? Get out of the car?

In most accidents involving moose and cars, the moose wins;
Legs clipped from under them; rolls over the roof,
Crushing the driver,
then gets up and walks away.
Happens all the time.

Get out of the car?  What am I thinking?
Stand in the headlights, his breath a moist fog between us,
and try to determine intentions expressed in those dark eyes?
My hands drop from the steering wheel.

He turns finally and moves down the road. She follows.
I slowly inch the car forward behind them.
The trees break into a pasture and they move, as one,
up the hill, through the night and are gone.

I breathe again and pick up speed toward home,
Pass houses warm with light.
What was I thinking?

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Something About Maps

Not everything I ever published was poetry.  When I first began to work for Waldenbooks after our return from Europe, I managed a store in Norwalk CT.  There I worked with Sam Gafford, a devoted fan of H.P. Lovecraft.  Sam and a few of his friends published books - pamphlets really, under the sign of Hobgoblin Press.  Sam asked me to write something for one of their publications, "a guide to the WORLDS OF H.P. LOVECRAFT" and I am sharing that with you today.  You have to remember that in 1983, there were no word processors, no computers, no scanners or printers, no Photoshop.  So this 12 page book of maps related to the writings of H. P. Lovecraft was more of an effort than readers now can imagine.  And Sam was generous enough to share two of those pages to my little essay on maps and Lovecraft.  Sam is still around, living in his (well, Lovecraft's) beloved Rhode Island and a published author.  (I friended him on Facebook, naturally.)  Kudos to him for keeping interest in the weird fiction genre alive and here is my small contribution.  See if you can find the references to two other authors I was reading at the same time -  Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Castaneda .  By the way, I have 2 of 25 copies of this super rare book, so if there are any Lovecraft fans out there . . . . .


Something about Maps

To journey over all the universe in a map, without expense and fatigue of traveling, without suffering the inconviences of heat, cold, hunger , and thirst . . . "   Miguel de Cervantes; Don Quixote

Ah maps! I am a great lover of maps like Conrad, who related the story of poring over a map of Africa and pointing to the blank sections marked 'unexplored' declaring, I want to go there!  Maps provide portals of visualization through which we readers may pass into the interior realms of dream, mythos and tale.  They form a vantage point from which to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of prose.  H.P. Lovecraft had a keen interest in geography, as we learn from correspondence and his stories themselves. He, of course, also had a precises prose style that readily lends itself to the cartographic.

Lovecraft mentions maps explicitly in several places in his writings including the famous sketch of Innsmouth made by the grocery clerk and used by the narrator for; firstly, his daytime circumambulations, secondly in his escape during the hellish night when the denizens of the decayed city and off-lying reef come searching for him.

"Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient features.  After a moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks"  Shadow Over Innsmouth

Lovecraft's sense of place, however, is implicit throughout his writings - from the elegant, decaying streets of his kindred city of Providence to the hardscrabble, Mi-Go haunted mountains of Vermont -  Lovecraft clearly had a sense of the glacier-worn, ancient, early settled and still haunted nature of New England.  His writings about such "real" cities as Providence and Boston, as well as his "unreal" hamlets, towns and lonely burgs - Innsmouth, Arkham, and Dunwich to name a few - infuse even the familiar cartography of New England with haunting mystery and sinister foreboding.

"West of Arkham the hills rise wild and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.  There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight." The Colour Out of Space

But Lovecraft's works do more than colour our sense of the actual place, they also pitch us headlong into fantastic worlds that have few parallels in modern literature.  The 'Dream-World' map included here is one.  Constructed over dozens of stories, Lovecraft slowly, meticulously, brilliantly created a world of dreams.  In some places it is mentioned only in passing - a reference of place: "It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Shai, no man may kill a cat . . . " while in other places it is the central component in the tale telling: " Out of the South it was that the White Ship used to come when the moon was full and high in the heavens . . . One night I espied upon the deck a man . . . Many times afterward I saw him under the full moon, and ever did he beckon me."  Beckon us indeed!  And of course, I need only mention Lovecraft'  tremendous Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath which begins auspiciously enough with a dream of a place far away - "three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city . . ."

The quote that heads these notes alludes to the ease with which one may travel via a map.  And Yuggoth, which is included herein, is an excellent example.  For as Henry Akeley warns us . . .

"To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad - yet I am going there.  The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges - things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids - ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or a Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen.  Whisperer In Darkness

But are we truly so safe in our cozy studys poring over our Arkham House texts, our 'Lovecraft Studies", our dream - and tale - inspired sketch and maps such as these?  As these maps and other examples which abound around us - both good and bad - demonstrate, we readers can never fully come away from the text unmoved.  We ingest the master's text and become, each in our own way, magician's apprentices.  That ultimately is the glory of the written text over other more 'passive' forms of media (thinking of TV and motion pictures primarily). Reading causes each of us to retell ourselves the story in our own lexicon of images, memories and myths.  the Lovecrafts may make the perilous trip to Yuggoths and 'return to tell what he has seen' for us but we readers take our own risks in dreaming, sketching, studying, and yes, even mapping what we hear and read.

"To journey over all the Universe in a map" may not entail hunger, thirst, heat and cold, but there are dangers there as well as we experience new images in our dreams, new 'memories' in our observations, new ways of understanding the common ordinary world and the world that lies beyond it.  This is the great risk and reward of human creativity, of which Lovecraft's opera is one facet and this little selection of maps is a smaller facet still.  But as each of the smallest facets of a gem reflects the entire stone, so these maps reflect the whole.  And what a dream-drenched, star-veiled, frighteningly beautiful, infinite-boundering whole it is!

Your Own Place

I have only had a couple of poems published. This is one of them, published in the Puckerbrush Review in 1983.  Readers will notice my love for alliteration and internal rhymes exhibited in this poem. The line I recall most often is "That water will move to the sea without your worried circumspection." - how true.  Also, the word concupiscence is used deliberately.  It was written with a work colleague and friend in mind who was a young mother and professional.  She often spoke of her struggles to balance being a good wife, mother and her job.  At the time, Dawn and I were living in an apartment in Bangor; had no children and had little of the responsibilities that would later characterize our lives.  When this poem was published, we were living in Westport, Connecticut and had just come back from spending time traveling in Europe.

It seems like a good poem to re-start this blog.  I have been under water at work for the last 8 weeks and finally had a chance this past week to stop and recharge.  This  poem is about stopping and recharging, but underlying that theme is the idea of lost youth and innocence; those lost, open days of childhood before responsibilities for home and hearth; a time and space in which your thoughts can idly move forward and backward in time.


YOUR OWN PLACE
 for p

Go, I pray, to this place
of that; seek the stream bank
where the wind will quiet
all the clatter of the china you
carry, the children, the
concupiscence, and the hissing
of the passing traffic in the streets.

Seek out a lingering place of
sun-warmed ledges, of reeds moving
lightly against the shore.
Forget the great river's run;
that water will move to the sea
without your worried circumspection.

The dove's wings creak in the forest behind you,
flickering through leaf-filtered light,
until she breaks past vine and bough
into the hard plane of river light.
The white wings take no more than dancing air,
cupped in feathered fold;
she dips near the water and arcs
up into the forest again.

Do you remember your own tiny cup
of silver, your christening cup?
Your own white-gloved hand on
the swan boats edge?
How daisies slipped from your fingertips,
lingered, floating on the darker water,
then were drawn away into the
current's sweeping breast?

Is there no way back to places
so long forgotten?

photo credit

Arcana of Grief

After last week, I was ready to plunge into that period of my life from 1977 to 1980 that represented my interest in politics and religion.  My desire at the time was to understand and articulate a Christian Socialism that would be radical and yet still steeped in the mythic and mystical traditions of my faith. I dug out my political books and began to review a few poems, but paused. I need to think about this before I go further.  Writing poems about nature or my feelings as a writer or about my lover is one thing - politics? something else. First, I am just not sure how good these poems are.  They were written with specific events in the forefront of my mind at the time.  And unlike most of the other items I have put in this blog so far, they weren't organized to be published.  So in the meantime, I am going to work backwards chronologically and hopefully be able to discern the line between good work and juvenalia.

Today's poem was written for my sister, Kate, on June 24, 1989 on the death of a beloved cat of hers.  Since we are going to be celebrating Christmas at Kate's lake house and she is cooking, I have also included a short poem quoted in Observations on Popular Antiquities by John Brand, London 1913, from the section Yule Doughs, Mince Pies, etc. (Oddly, I just noticed it mentions rosemary as well. hmmm.)


ARCANA OF GRIEF


This is for Hank.


Pillowcase,  rosemary for remembrance.
Put this into the earth
Cold fur    dry eyes    stiff limbs
Decompose into Earth, Water
Fire and Air.


Say the words of ritual.


Already your thoughts are cleansed
In the pool of memory and 
You seek about for a new
Repository of care;


The delicacy of drink and 
Sleep curled bed,
The face at the window and
Voice of insistence.
You seek a living companion.


His loss twist and changes everything
In the retort of death.


"Even in the mostcoming wind, we breathe parting."


Say the word


                       Say it.


And the ritual will be complete.

 

They are likewise indicated in King's Art of Cookery - 


"At Christmas time --
Then if you wou'd send up the Brawner's Head,
Sweet Rosemary and Bays around it spread;
His foaming tusks let some large Pippin grace,
Or 'midst these thundring spears an Orange place;
Sauce, like himself, offensive to its foes,
The roguish Mustard, dang'rous to the nose,
Sack, and well spic'd Hippocras the wine
Wassail the bowl with antient ribbands fine,
Porridge with Plumbs and Turkeys with the chine.

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Image2 Source

Reading Trotsky and Listening to Borodin

To my knowledge, no picture exists of me during my last years of college.  Therefore, you must imagine me and my friend, Gary Borders, trudging through the snow in Orono in our long black wool coats.  Gary's hat was classic proletarian, mine was a black Greek fisherman's cap;  our beards the pure righteous darkness of youth.  In our bags were Gramsci and Lenin and Mao; and articles for the Maine Peace Action Committee newsletter. We saw ourselves (sometimes, anyway) as the rearguard of a revolutionary vanguard.  After Vietnam . . . before anti-nukes . . .Nicaragua was a chance be on the right side for a change . .  lost Lefties, really. Who knew what lay before us in the coming decades?  Certainly we didn't.  We imagined a revolution of some kind . . . listened to our Holly Near and looked back on the pure politics of the 60's.  We knew that it was up to us, up to the 'New Intellectuals' to define the cause, to understand and articulate what was the motor force of History.  Who knew?

Reading Trotsky and Listening to Borodin


We sit huddled in our dingy kitchen
over a pot of chicken soup.
Bleary-eyed and tired,
I think of
Russian peasant suppers,
of heavy boots on earthen floors
thick-bearded men and broad shouldered
women in scarves.
I think of
kulaks, purges, police;
of knocks on doors,
laughing apparatchiks,           of Stalin.
Of huddled men in the arctic night.
I think 
and am reminded that 
the struggle goes on
                               and on
                                           and on.




February, 1980