The maze of mind unravels where we act

Religion and Faith are complex for me.  At one time, I thought that I might be able to deliver a message of hope and salvation in the role of a pastor.  But I think I always knew that my own path would not be a path that others ought to follow.  I was more spiritual than religious and ultimately more carnal than spiritual.  This book, The Saviors of God shaped and changed my way of looking at myself and my spiritual journey. When Kazantzakis wrote in the chapter First Step, the Ego, " I am not good, I am not innocent, I am not serene. My happiness and unhappiness are both unbearable; I am full of inarticulate voices and darknesses; I wallow, all blood and tears, in this warm trough of my flesh." , I knew I had found a voice who knew me. I am not an ascetic, as Kazantzakis strove to be,  but his insights have inspired me.  They also inspired this poem.  In my handwritten notes are two quotes from The Saviors of God, although they are not quoted in the final typewritten version of the poem.  Nor does the poem have a title or date.

"The ultimate most holy form of theory is action" p.99

"It is not God who will save us - it is we who will save God, by battling, by creating, and by transmuting matter into spirit." p. 106 

I also have a note of my own: "To fear and in that fear to weep for God for hope for love. Death"


The maze of mind unravels where we act,
Pursue our thoughts to logic's ending place,
Where dreams like mist drift off the cliff of fact;


Where theory arms us, praxis sets the pace.
To act can answer queries of the heart;
To win the prize we must endure the race.


The die is cast when we decide to start,
Bolt out from logic, theory's starting block
To merge with racers who seek their part,


Like you, to act to break in God's deadlock.
God runs, He falls, we carry on to make
A place for God where with us he may walk.


The road of action God commands we take
So He we save in our warm body's meat.
We burn an arc across the sky for sake
of God's salvation . . . and our moment, fleet.

No Pure Air

My original plan for this Easter post was to quote Anne Sexton's 'Rowing' from "The Awful Rowing Toward God", a book of hers I was given a long time ago.  While traveling this week, I picked up The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton, but in rereading it this morning, I decided not to quote it today.  I thought it might echo my own ambivalent feelings about God and to some extent it does, but it just didn't feel right to me today, just a little too despairing.  So I went to my folder and this is the next poem that came up.  It started as a sort of Beat, 'stream of consciousness' poem that got morphed and clean up to this final version.  It is not a pretty poem, that is for sure.  I am sure that I must have been feeling lost and in despair that I could write anything at all.  The funny thing is over the six months or so I worked on the poem (six drafts, no less) from July 31, 1979 to March 25, 1980, the title changed with each draft.  So here are the title changes, a little bit of verse in itself.

Untitled

Crack!

Conversation with Lenin in exile in 1902

Conversation with Luther in exile in 1902 

Conversations with Luther and Lenin in exile in 1902

Conversations with Luther and Trotsky in exile in 1902

Poet in exile

Conversations with Luther and Trotsky in exile in 1902

Poet in exile

No Pure Air

Does that help explain the theme at all?  Maybe. I will admit that the end is full of pretensions and give that up to youth.  There are a few interesting images, perhaps, that make up for the rest. Glad at least to say that I seldom feel this kind of despair.


No Pure Air


Crack! split back spine
paunched fish guts
red glistening organs so
perfect and glossy   burst
spilt bile all over
snow white beaches already
so soaked as to be 
                              full.
Gross putrid failures
befoul us   bring us down
down into the sulphurous
depths   into the chamber pot
old fart hell of
                       failure.


No pure air
only gagging doubts like mustard
gas floating over barbed
wire   muckholes   agent orange
dead   rotting   leaves   babies   women
(how little war has changed)


Drunken piss covered pants   men wander
the streets   panhandling   scaring
the bourgeois hell out
of us in our patrician
                                 complacency.


Striving to give . . . .what?
there is no reality
only images we feel
                               make
                                          die for.

Peter Quince at the Clavier by Wallace Stevens

"Susanna and the Elders" . . . wow, google that for a history of porn in the arts!  Two thousand years of naked chicks by every master imaginable.

Critics have lots to say about this poem.  When I read it in 2003, I was struck by the fourth part -
"Beauty is momentary in the mind - 
the fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives on." 
It turns on its head the Platonic notion of the ideal of Beauty.  It means (I think) that beauty is in the thing.  Beauty is - literally- incarnate. And the beauty that has gone into the dust of Israel? Like music played or words spoken?  We think we can capture and imprison beauty in an .MP3 or a .JPG or even on a written page.  But I don't think we can.  The experience of beauty is in the mind's reaction to music or words or images. We 'see' Susanna in her green evening, or the woman of the first stanza in her blue-shadowed silk in our minds, we re-create.  That is what poetry does, I think, takes rich, meaningful language and uses it to sketch an emotion or experience for the writer and the reader together.  Or maybe poetry is just an excuse to think naughty thoughts. Who can say?

Peter Quince at the Clavier


I

 Just as my fingers on these keys
 Make music, so the self-same sounds
 On my spirit make a music, too.

 Music is feeling, then, not sound;
 And thus it is that what I feel,
 Here in this room, desiring you,

 Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
 Is music. It is like the strain
 Waked in the elders by Susanna:

 Of a green evening, clear and warm,
 She bathed in her still garden, while
 The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

 The basses of their beings throb
 In witching chords, and their thin blood
 Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

II

 In the green water, clear and warm,
 Susanna lay.
 She searched
 The touch of springs,
 And found
 Concealed imaginings.
 She sighed,
 For so much melody.

 Upon the bank, she stood
 In the cool
 Of spent emotions.
 She felt, among the leaves,
 The dew
 Of old devotions.

 She walked upon the grass,
 Still quavering.
 The winds were like her maids,
 On timid feet,
 Fetching her woven scarves,
 Yet wavering.

 A breath upon her hand
 Muted the night.
 She turned--
 A cymbal crashed,
 And roaring horns.

III

 Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
 Came her attendant Byzantines.

 They wondered why Susanna cried
 Against the elders by her side;

 And as they whispered, the refrain
 Was like a willow swept by rain.

 Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame
 Revealed Susanna and her shame.

 And then, the simpering Byzantines,
 Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

IV

 Beauty is momentary in the mind --
 The fitful tracing of a portal;
 But in the flesh it is immortal.

 The body dies; the body's beauty lives,
 So evenings die, in their green going,
 A wave, interminably flowing.
 So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
 The cowl of Winter, done repenting.
 So maidens die, to the auroral
 Celebration of a maiden's choral.

 Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
 Of those white elders; but, escaping,
 Left only Death's ironic scrapings.

 Now, in its immortality, it plays
 On the clear viol of her memory,
 And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

1915.

Hear the poem read out loud courtesy of wikipedia.org

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I dreamt of Perm

A characteristic feature of overvalued ideas is the patient's conviction of his own rectitude, an obsession with asserting his trampled "rights' and the significance of these feelings for the patient's personality.  They tend to exploit judicial proceedings as a platform for making speeches and appeals

Description of characteristics of 'sluggish schizophrenia' displayed by dissidents committed to psikhushkas during the Soviet period in Russia.  Quoted in Gulag: a history by Anne Applebaum.

I am not sure I entirely understood the details of the political situation when I wrote this poem on April 7, 1980.  I had certainly read my Solzhenitsyn and harbored no illusions concerning the Soviet Union, in spite of my leftist leanings.  More to the point, in this poem, I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a country where you were declared mentally ill because you disagreed with the government. . . . hmm . . . . yeah, about that.  I also tried to consider what it would be like to be under systematic torture, the agony of waiting your turn and knowing it was coming.  The first part is the prisoner, obviously, the second part is me. Vladimir Borisov was, I believe, an electrician.  Hardly a literary figure or intelligentsia.  The final line? Oh please, do you not know me at all? Irony and an ice pick in Mexico City.


I dreamt of Perm
                              for Vladimir Borisov

1.
I swear I will not piss my pants 
again, no matter how scared or blind.
I wait and wait and wait; building castles
room by room inside my mind. Surely
I am still sane, still whole, still in control?
I wait here in this psikhushka
until the clicking steps stop before my door.
Then, with tremors in my bowels and ice knives 
in my heart, quivering, I am led below.


I still remember flowers and Spring
and laughing children and long, slow walks
along the river at dusk.  I remember
sunny rooms, hot tea and the steamy smell
of food, long ago eaten and gone.  I remember
love and softness and tender words and 
whispers and giggles.  I remember living.


Shocks run through me-
seared flesh and frozen heart-
tearless weeping desperation
melts into a jerking mass
Final saving lapse -
                              unconscious weight.


2.
I dreamt of Perm last night, of labor camps,
of last pleading goodbyes
in stinking, smoky railway stations;
Waiting and shuffling in the snow
or rain
or sleet
or beneath the muddy sky.


Remember
and do not lose faith in the future,
For truth, not lies,
is the motor force of progress.

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Underground System by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Underground System, by Edna St. Vincent Millay was originally published in 1939 in Huntsman, What Quarry?. Millay republished it in 1940, in her book urging action by America to enter the war in the fight against European Fascism.  I have copies of both books and have taken my reproduction from the original.  Why are we reading it today, after over 70 years?  Really? Read on and find out.  It certainly echoes my thoughts and keep in mind that ESVM wrote this poem while America was still in the throes of the Depression.  The threats to the Republic were as great then, or greater, and I think ESVM and I would probably agree on who the 'moles' are.  Whether the Fascists triumphed or not, I will let you be the judge. I hoped to have more information about this poem and I just tried to find my copy of her biography, Savage Beauty, in the slag heap that is my basement and former library, but of course, could not.  Well, carry on, right?

Underground System

Set the foot down with distrust upon the crust of
    the world - it is thin.
Moles are at work beneath us; they have tunnelled
    the sub-soil
With separate chambers; which at an appointed
    knock
Could be as one, could intersect and interlock.  We
    walk on the skin
Of life.  No toil
Of rake or hoe, no lime, no phosphate, no rotation
    of crops, no irrigation of the land,
Will coax the limp and flattened grain to stand
On that bad day, or feed to strength the nibbled
    roots of our nation.


Ease has demoralized us, nearly so; we know
Nothing of the rigours of winter: the house has a 
    roof against - the car a top against - the snow.
All will be well, we say; it is a habit, like the rising
    of the sun,
For our country to prosper; who can prevail against
    us? No one.


The house has a roof; but the boards of its floor are
    rotting, and hall upon hall
The moles have built their palace beneath us: we
    have not far to fall.



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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?

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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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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

Ouroboros, For Breanne

 A short poem for Breanne on her birthday. Written December 13, 1988.

                                                                  OURBOROS
You gather her into your arms
And instantly she drops away into the deep.  
Tiny body, warm
 Against your hips: conforms
As one flesh, again complete.
The mind falls like a stone into sleep.

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The Full Moon

I woke up this morning thinking about the first lines of an old poem, one of my favorites.  The Harvest Moon shines tonight.  I wonder what we shall each reap?




The Full Moon
                           for BB


Bright white china face
Hanging over every tree
Crystalline and full of grace . . .


No wait.


So, I have a question.           Full stop.


Why does this stillborn corpse
Of unspeakable violence past,
This lost and ungrown twin,
Still circle us night after night?
Why does he try to steal the oceans
With every revolution?
Even in the daytime, he won't go away,
Skulks on the horizon, barely visible.

Pockmarked by insult and asteroid's crash,
The worst hidden from view, but still.
A dusty rock  . . . .a chunk of us, broken
Away but remaining in our path
Threatening to trip us in our grander
Flights around the Sun.


Purposeless and yet,
We would not be the same without him.







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My Affair with Ayn Rand

I know some of my friends will be shocked, but I have been flirting with Ayn Rand lately.  It started with a training I attended in which the presenter expressed his admiration for Objectivist economics and, of course, Adam Curry has been raving about Rand for years on No Agenda. . While I was in Texas, I picked up Atlas Shrugged and read about a hundred pages.  I stopped to listen to an unabridged reading of Ayn Rand and the World She Created and this weekend, I watched the movie, The Passion of Ayn Rand with Helen Mirren in the title role.  So now I am poised to listen to the unabridged reading of Atlas Shrugged which looks like it will take me months of commutes to work, based on the number of hours.

I am sure that I had heard of Ayn Rand when I was in school, but naturally I was travelling in other circles at the time.  I have friends (and relatives, I learned last weekend) who felt moved by her books and philosophy, as many do now, I think.  With the resurgence of Right-wing, Nativist, Free Market Capitalists in the form of the Tea Party, the notion of going to the roots is intriguing.  I wonder, however, if her philosophy will have the same effect on me now as it might have had when I was twenty?  O how the notion of the misunderstood genius, persecuted for his virtues, rings so true when you are young!  Whether on the left or the right, being misunderstood seems to be the norm for young people.  What about a person in middle age, jaded by a lifetime of real world experiences? Will I be moved in the same way?   I'll let you know.

Part of John Galt's speech, from Atlas Shrugged

In the name of the best within you.
do not sacrifice this world
                                            to those who are its worst.

In the name of values
                                           that keep you alive,
do not let your vision of man
be distorted by the ugly,
                                         the cowardly,
                                                     the mindless
in those who have never achieved
his title.

Do not lose your knowledge
that man's proper estate
                                          is an upright posture,
an intransigent mind and
                                                        a step that travels
unlimited roads.

Do not let your fire go out,
                                                           spark by irreplacable spark,
in hopeless swamps of the approximate,
  the not-quite,
                            the not-yet,
                                                  the not-at all.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish,
in lonely frustration for the life you
deserved,
but have never been able to reach.

Check your road
                and the nature
of your battle.

The world you desired can be won,
it exists,
it is real,
it is possible,

it's yours.

The Poet is a Seashore Dweller

Tidal Pool, Innishmore

Rachel Carson once wrote: "To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of year, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be."
Today's poem was the last one in the Charles Street Manuscript and was meant to express all I felt about what it meant to write and be a writer.  It owed a dept to Rich, of course and perhaps a bit to Eliot, but mostly I wanted to take something I knew well - the experience of ocean's edge - and imbue it with what I thought was a deeper, more symbolic meaning.  Every image here is symbolic, and the experience of the poet as standing on the edge was meant to be as well.  To write poetry is to stand on the shore between the symbolic, the magical, the sacred on the one hand and the mundane, the earthly , the profane on the other.  It is the poet's job to point out that sacred quality in everything they observe.  In that way, poetry differs from prose.  Good prose makes us think " Yes, I know that.  I understand that, I have experienced that."  Good poetry makes us feel " I have felt that way, I remember that experience, I have lived that."  I submitted this poem to the only writing course I have ever taken, an introduction to poetry with Constance Hunting.  Her comment was "Big stuff indeed".  Well, a good effort, I guess. My apprentice work, if not my masterpiece.

Neither sea nor solid land,
the place wherein the poet dwells.
To one side rolls and swells the grey
green back of the ocean depths, of icy murk.
Hidden there beneath the waves
the predatory sharks of guilt,
the sounding whales of wisdom deep,
the moving schools of caprice and quirk.
Mysteries glowing far below -
glowing, even deeper places showing;
lost to all but the the strongest swimmer
who dares to dive below, desires
to plumb the depths of his soul.


The other side is light and land
of reason and of everyday demands.
The beaches, in their season, filled
with youngsters, dogs and radios.  Tanning
faces turned to the sun; coconut and sand.
Young men run to fetch light cans
from their treasure chests of ice.
Yet even here the sea intrudes,
not obvious, the waves allude
to deeper places further off.
But the sea remains confined
in basins, algae lined, rocky places
where sun-warmed water small life breeds,
snails, crabs, bright glinting seaweeds.


Neither sea nor solid land,
the place wherein the poet dwells,
Neither the ocean of Being, holy space
and time; deepest feelings from whence
all living symbols come;
Nor beaches, dunes and land
of everyday and ordinary.  Not the 
sun-warmed rocks and sand, the solid 
experience of living here.


The poet is a seashore dweller
between the ocean and the land
seeking the experience
of the fuller life between;
so that both worlds 
he may command.

Voices

Well, time to take a breather after all the content last week.  This week I am returning to the Charles Street manuscript.  This poem is about writing, and the content and context of writing.  I think what I was getting at was the content of my writing is my own experiences and thoughts and those closest to me.  There is / was an element of voyeurism being a writer, you listen in and steal the thoughts and feelings of others to make your own work.
The only major edit I have done is to leave off the last four lines of the original poem because, frankly, I can't puzzle out what they had to do with the rest of the poem. They were:

It is the constant
oscillation
between hope and dis-
couragement.

Words, rhythm, triggering phrases
 voices in the wilderness
make straight the path of God   or
voices in the bed at night
   whispering.
Thoughts punishable if spoken
  or read
  or felt
said here in secret language.
The replies not made   the pleas
made in silence
  or not made at all.
The strengthened voices
coming out of despair
  or sorrow
    or ecstatic joy.
Such is what we do at night
at our clacking typewriters
  or at lunch on napkins   or envelopes.
Hurried scribbles while we listen,
souls vivisected.

October - The Great Hunger

What is October if not the turning of the seasons to sleep? Trees shed their leaves; the harvest is in; the days grow suddenly shorter and colder.  You realize that all the promise of Spring and the lazy horizon of Summer have compressed into the darkening days and the cold sea of Autumn. Donald Hall starts his poem "New Hampshire" with the line "A bear sleeps in a cellarhole . . ." and I am put to mind of the sow finding her nesting place in the abandon farm foundations I used to visit with my grandfather in South Oakfield. Forgotten farms and villages in Aroostook abandoned to the bear, the deer and the woodchuck.  We would go and watch the bears at the dump in the dusk, fattening on human leftovers, pushing their snouts into mayonnaise jars and eating butter wrappers in an embarrassing search for fat to sustain them and their cubs through the long winter to come. Using their great claws to grope through dirty diapers and empty beer bottles; seeking a cast off peel or a smudge of jelly.

So there are lots of poems about Fall.  One of my own I posted in in 2008, "Ice Storm and Getting in Wood" having to do with the closing in of the season after the last of the Summer fairs.  But as I went searching for poems that take place in October, I decided to quote the first part of Patrick Kavanaugh's poem, The Great Hunger.  As I mentioned in a post last year, I first read Patrick Kavanaugh in a collection, Irish Poetry After Yeats edited by Maurice Harmon.  Seamus Heaney says of The Great Hunger in his essay "From Monighan to the Grand Canal" collected in Preoccupations Selected Prose 1968-1978:

"The Great Hunger, first published in 1942 and collected in A Soul for Sale, is Kavanaugh's rage against the dying of the light, a kind of elegy in a country farmyard, informed not by heraldic notions of seasonal decline and mortal dust but by an intimacy with actual clay and a desperate sense that life in the secluded spot is no book of pastoral hours but an enervating round of labor and lethargy . . . . It is not about growing up and away but about growing down and in.  Its symbol is the potato rather than the potato blossom, its elements are water and earth rather than fire and air, its theme is consciousness moulded in and to the dark rather than opening to the light."

To me, the poem evokes rural Maine and the people who live there.  Not in the way that so often Maine is portrayed as some utopia for those seeking a simpler life ("The Way Life Should Be."), but a little like Ireland, a post-colonial land where poverty and desperation stand side by side with the homes of the wealthy.  And it evokes the location of beauty and the sacred, at our feet - even if we don't or can't see it.

The last stanza of Part 1:

The wind leans from Brady's, and the coltfoot leaves are holed with rust,
Rain fills the cart-tracks and the sole-plate grooves;
A yellow sun reflects in Donaghmoyne
The poignant light in puddles shaped by hooves.
Come with me, Imagination, into this iron house
And we will watch from the doorway the years run back,
And we will know what a peasant's left hand wrote on the page.
Be easy, October. No cackle hen, horse neigh,tree sough, duck quack.


For the second and third parts check this Youtube video.  The full first part is printed below.

I
Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.
If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove
Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book
Of Death? Here crows gabble over worms and frogs
And the gulls like old newspapers are blown clear of the hedges, luckily.
Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?
Or why do we stand here shivering?
Which of these men
Loved the light and the queen
Too long virgin? Yesterday was summer.  Who was it promised marriage to himself
Before apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe'en?
We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain,
Till the last soul passively like a bag of wet clay
Rolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the angles
Where the plough missed or a spade stands, straitening the way.
A dog lying on a torn jacket under a heeled-up cart,
A horse nosing along the posied headland, trailing
A rusty plough. Three heads hanging between wide-apart legs.
October playing a symphony on a slack wire paling.
Maguire watches the drills flattened out
And the flints that lit a candle for him on a June altar
Flameless. The drills slipped by and the days slipped by
And he trembled his head away and ran free from the world's halter,
And thought himself wiser than any man in the townland
When he laughed over pints of porter
Of how he came free from every net spread
In the gaps of experience. He shook a knowing head
And pretended to his soul
That children are tedious in hurrying fields of April
Where men are spanning across wide furrows.
Lost in the passion that never needs a wife
The pricks that pricked were the pointed pins of harrows.
Children scream so loud that the crows could bring
The seed of an acre away with crow-rude jeers.
Patrick Maguire, he called his dog and he flung a stone in the air
And hallooed the birds away that were the birds of the years.
Turn over the weedy clods and tease out the tangled skeins.
What is he looking for there?
He thinks it is a potato, but we know better
Than his mud-gloved fingers probe in this insensitive hair.
'Move forward the basket and balance it steady
In this hollow. Pull down the shafts of that cart, Joe,
And straddle the horse,' Maguire calls.
'The wind's over Brannagan's, now that means rain.
Graip up some withered stalks and see that no potato falls
Over the tail-board going down the ruckety pass -
And that's a job we'll have to do in December,
Gravel it and build a kerb on the bog-side. Is that Cassidy's ass
Out in my clover? Curse o' God
Where is that dog?.
Never where he's wanted' Maguire grunts and spits
Through a clay-wattled moustache and stares about him from the height.
His dream changes like the cloud-swung wind
And he is not so sure now if his mother was right
When she praised the man who made a field his bride.
Watch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose spirit
Is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time.
He lives that his little fields may stay fertile when his own body
Is spread in the bottom of a ditch under two coulters crossed in Christ's Name.
He was suspicious in his youth as a rat near strange bread,
When girls laughed; when they screamed he knew that meant
The cry of fillies in season. He could not walk
The easy road to destiny. He dreamt
The innocence of young brambles to hooked treachery.
O the grip, O the grip of irregular fields! No man escapes.
It could not be that back of the hills love was free
And ditches straight.
No monster hand lifted up children and put down apes
As here.
      'O God if I had been wiser!'
That was his sigh like the brown breeze in the thistles.
He looks, towards his house and haggard. 'O God if I had been wiser!'
But now a crumpled leaf from the whitethorn bushes
Darts like a frightened robin, and the fence
Shows the green of after-grass through a little window,
And he knows that his own heart is calling his mother a liar
God's truth is life - even the grotesque shapes of his foulest fire.
The horse lifts its head and cranes
Through the whins and stones
To lip late passion in the crawling clover.
In the gap there's a bush weighted with boulders like morality,
The fools of life bleed if they climb over.
The wind leans from Brady's, and the coltsfoot leaves are holed with rust,
Rain fills the cart-tracks and the sole-plate grooves;
A yellow sun reflects in Donaghmoyne
The poignant light in puddles shaped by hooves.
Come with me, Imagination, into this iron house
And we will watch from the doorway the years run back,
And we will know what a peasant's left hand wrote on the page.
Be easy, October. No cackle hen, horse neigh, tree sough, duck quack.

Imperatrix Mundi

Recently, I was down in the basement trying to save what is left of my library from the rot and spiders and I brought upstairs a copy of Modern British Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer, 1958. I had carried this book with me when I traveled in 2003 and had highlighted several poems I liked (and will share here later).  Imagine my surprise, however, when on the back flyleaf I found the following poem. It touches on the ultimate mystery (for me anyway) which is the nature of women.  Originally the poem wasn't a 'shape poem', but as I crafted the line breaks, I saw the diminishment and when I put it into center justification . . . well, how could I resist?  As soon as I found it I began to think about what art to include and supporting materials.  I love Klimt (what man wouldn't?);  I love the colors and the women he portrays.  But you know what? This image scares the bejesus out of me. Zoom in on those pitiless eyes.
The second item is the quote from "Carmina Burana" and is where the title of the poem came from, obviously.  I know everybody knows the music from Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi because it is used every time guys are doing something 'manly' (check out the YouTube entries for Carl Orff or Carmina Burana if you have any doubt.) One exception on YouTube is a series that portrays the story of the lyrics themselves which were purported to have been Medieval student drinking songs.  However, I don't think a lot of people have listened to the entire piece (I have owned it on vinyl for years), or every read the lyrics.  Below is the second half of the Fortuna section, "Fortune plango vulnera (I bemoan the wounds of Fortune)" Fits in very nicely with my poem, I think.  (Always a danger when quoting poetry that is better than yours in the same post - but what the hell.)  You can read the full lyrics at http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/works/orff-cb/carmlyr.php . Check out the Image source link for some very interesting background on the Klimt image of Pallas Athene and his use of mythological symbols in his work.  Good stuff.


"You didn't seem to be aware I was even there . . .", she said.

Put on your leafy crown of gold and line your eyes with kohl.

Set aside your garments and stand above me, fierce

And terrible.  Your every gesture, curve of hand, 

Reflects control. You madden in your mystery, 

Reveal every curve, but I can't pierce the

Deeper Core - it lies beyond, though I 

Will give my soul for an instant in

Your Man-consuming furnace.

Fortune plango vulnera (I bemoan the wounds of Fortune)

Fortune plango vulnera	I bemoan the wounds of Fortune
stillantibus ocellis	with weeping eyes,
quod sua michi munera	for the gifts she made me
subtrahit rebellis.	she perversely takes away.
Verum est, quod legitur,	It is written in truth,
fronte capillata,	that she has a fine head of hair,
sed plerumque sequitur	but, when it comes to seizing an opportunity
Occasio calvata.	she is bald.
In Fortune solio	On Fortune's throne
sederam elatus,	I used to sit raised up,
prosperitatis vario	crowned with
flore coronatus;	the many-coloured flowers of prosperity;
quicquid enim florui	though I may have flourished
felix et beatus,	happy and blessed,
nunc a summo corrui	now I fall from the peak
gloria privatus.	deprived of glory.
Fortune rota volvitur:	The wheel of Fortune turns;
descendo minoratus;	I go down, demeaned;
alter in altum tollitur;	another is raised up;
nimis exaltatus	far too high up
rex sedet in vertice	sits the king at the summit -
caveat ruinam!	let him fear ruin!
nam sub axe legimus	for under the axis is written
Hecubam reginam.	Queen Hecuba.

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Sojourners

When I first came to college I was in the midst of a religious episode in my life.  I felt very strongly moved by presence of God in an extraordinary way.  Later, and by the time this poem was written, circumstances had changed and with them an estrangement.  This poem was an attempt at the time to deal with the feelings I had that somehow I had lost touch with experience of the numinous, that Holy Spirit that had led me to study Scripture and prepare for a life in service to God.  I knew something had changed, but I wasn't sure what. This poem was a struggle to find out why I felt the way I did. Sometimes, the girls will ask if I believe in God.  My answer is in those last two lines.

Too long have we reclined with them, asleep.
In Egypt's halls we drank away the nights.
We praised their templed plains so fair, their works
Of art so awed our hearts we wept for love.
We lust for fragrant flesh, for golden coin;
We take on vices not our own, but theirs.
Forgotten now is promise made, our bid
For freedom lost.  Hope slips, is gone away.
God turns aside and hides Her face, her child
forgets Her name, too long sojourned with them.

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