Brett Rutherford Poetry Blog

Science - A Poem by Sarah Helen Whitman

2011-11-02T14:42:00.001-04:00

While the dull fates sit nodding at their loom,

Benumbed and drowsy with its ceaseless boom,
I hear, as in a dream, the monody
Of life's tumultuous, ever-ebbing sea;
The iron tramp of armies hurrying by
Forever and forever but to die;
The tragedies of time, the dreary years,
The frantic carnival of hopes and fears,
The wild waltz-music wailing through the gloom,
The slow death-agonies, the yawning tomb,
The loved ones lost forever to our sight,
In the wild waste of chaos and old night;
Earth's long, long dream of martyrdom and pain;
No God in heaven to rend the welded chain
Of endless evolution!
Is this all?
And mole-eyed "Science," gloating over bones,
The skulls of monkeys and the Age of Stones,
Blinks at the golden lamps that light the hall
Of dusty death, and answers: "It is all."
This poem is by Providence's most famous poet, one-time fiancee of Edgar Allan Poe.

September in Gotham

2011-09-11T09:48:00.002-04:00

This is the only poem I have been able to write about 9/11. It is the darkest shadow in my 40-poem Anniversarius cycle.

SEPTEMBER IN GOTHAM

This is New York, and fall

has caught us unawares.

From Palisade bus I view

the gap-toothed skyline,

a forest whose tallest trees

are suddenly missing.

In Gotham, they say,

strange breezes from the south

make certain elders remember

downwind from the death camps.

There is talk of stolen watches

from shops beneath the rubble,

the discovery daily

of severed limbs.

Month’s end, I walk all day

in midtown,

with shoppers determined

to do something normal,

eat Szechuan lunch, browse

books, consider new software.

Like many others around me,

I pick things up from the counter,

then put them back —

everyday urges seem so trivial.

There is not one note of music.

People keep stopping

to stare nervously

at the Empire State,

like frightened squirrels

in the shadow

of a threatened sequoia.

The sycamores in Bryant Park

beam back the sun,

an interrupted medley

of overhanging clouds

that pause, then part,

then scud away.

Seedpods of honey locust fall,

curl brown like overdone toast

on the pavement,

but the delicate leaves remain above,

still adamant green.

It is not till night,

till I turn the corner on Lexington

and spy the dark hunched shell

of the Gramercy Park Armory,

that I see the leaves of this autumn,

its feuilles morts,

taped to treetrunks, walls and windows,

tied to a chain link fence,

row on row to the end of seeing,

flapping in rainstorm, tattered, tearing,

soon to be ankle deep in the gutter —

these album-leaves of anguish

burst forth with human colors —

faces brown and pink and salmon,

oak and ash and ebony,

the rainbow of human flesh,

of eyeflash —

visages still in their conquering twenties,

snapshot in happy moments,

embracing their brides,

babies on knees,

license, yearbook, graduation photos,

smiling at beach or barbecue,

ink fading or bleeding now

in the sky’s abundant tearfall.

In the language we use

for the recovery of wayward pets,

these posters beg the impossible:

IF ANYONE HAS SEEN HER —

MISSING — MISSING

LEFT SHOULDER SCAR —

A DOLPHIN TATTOO —

MISSING — MISSING

HAVE YOU SEEN ME?—

MISSING — MISSING

PLEASE FIND ME

MISSING — MISSING

WORLD TRADE CENTER

—September 30, 2001, New York City

In Prague, A Tree of Many Colors

2011-08-18T00:20:00.002-04:00

When the Czech student Jan Palach set fire to himself to protest the Soviet invasion of his country, I wrote this poem in his honor. It was not until very recently that we had any details about his death in the West; I had never even seen his picture until this year. The square where he committed suicide is now named after him, and the Communist government fell in 1989 during "Palach Week," a period of protest and turmoil over which his spirit certainly presided. He was 21, a student of philosophy. My poem suffered from lack of details. In 1996, I learned about the students' resistance to the invaders and worked that into the poem; now, in 2011, I know more and can make this poem more of a narrative. And I have finally given a coherent voice to the real narrator of the poem: a linden tree in Prague.
This poem is Number 2 in my new edition of Anniversarius: The Book of Autumn, a 40-poem cycle soon to be published.
New note: I have just revised this poem again, adding more details about the Linden tree, which, it turns out, is the national emblem of Czechoslovakia (!): the Muse once again led me to the one and only tree that I could have used. I have also retitled the poem, "The Linden Tree in Prague."

THE LINDEN TREE IN PRAGUE

for Jan Palach, Czech martyr,
who set himself on fire January 16, 1969
to protest the occupation of his country

Linden in Prague’s Museum Square:

I was born, I was sown

of mother and father trees in some forest.

I screamed as the sun troped me out of the earth,

grew slowly in the shadows of tall buildings.

thrust out my blossoms at the hope of spring,

Years passed; I grew protective rings

around me. Exhorted into summer by sun

and the bacchanal of squirrels, I owe each year

millions of leaf-deaths and resurrections.

The solemn students and professors

stride by with dour looks, eyes locked

into the mysteries of Marx and Engels.

I must pretend to stand up straight.

I must not follow the mocking sun

and its false revolutions.

I must wait for the ultimate paradise,

world’s daylight redistributed for all.

I tremble as angry gardeners trim

the arrogant beard-branchlets

that fringe my still-adolescent trunk.

I am all passion and impracticality.

My heart-shaped leaves are on my sleeves

as I greedily drink sunlight, give shade

to those below in blossom-fall, exude the scent

that maddens lovers to Unter der Linde mania,

then paint myself in hues of gold and brown,

shedding my currency in one great shrug

as summer ebbs to frost-dawn.

Behaving well, it seems,

is not in my nature, despite those lectures

on dialectics I hear each afternoon

from the open lecture hall’s window.

Much passes beneath my shadow:

across the square, crowds press

to bourgeois marriages and funerals —

the upright grooms go in,

the silver-handled caskets come out,

the church, the state, the people

move on in soot and sorrow, day to day.

On one side, Marx and Engels;

on the other, tradition, and just beyond

my line of sight that monument to Huss,

the great religious martyr. Conflict

divides us like the great Moldau.

We have lived through Kings and Empires,

bad governments and good. Everyone seemed

to think it was getting better last year.

But something has changed now:

Why do these people whisper always?

Why do so many avert their eyes from me?

Why does neighbor spy on his neighbor,

reporting every oddity to the men in black?

Why do I hear the rumble of thunder?

Why does the symphony break off

in the middle of rehearsing Smetana?

Why have the women gone to the cellars?

The earth shakes. Soldiers and tanks everywhere!

The streets are full of Russians and Poles,

Hungarians, Bulgarians, East Germans —

all of East Europe has come to crush us!

Men with fur hats speak swollen, Slavic words.

Death is here. The smell of blood is here.

My roots touch the entrails of the hastily buried.

Anger is everywhere. I hold my leaves,

make camouflage for lovers, conspirators.

Students rip down the street signs

and hide them in my upper boughs —

the invaders drive in circles

and cannot find their destinations.

I open my bark for secret messages,

encourage pigeons to carry the word

of where is safe, and who is betrayed.

I guess I am guilty of anti-people

tendencies — who would have thought?

Here comes that student, Jan Palach,

he’s all of twenty-one, dark-haired,

a delicate face meant for poetry,

though worn by the study

of too much philosophy, too young.

He is the ardent one, the solitary dreamer.

And more: he intends to do something.

He and some others have made a vow,

a terrible pact. He will go first.

He is not Jan Huss,

burned by his fellow citizens

over the flavor of God:

he is just Jan Palach from Všetaty,

and he will burn in the world’s eyes

because of Philosophy

(Plato’s tanks crushed

the Age of Reason).

I am his unindicted ally.

The winter ground is covered still

with the dried leaves of my autumn,

some damp, some dry and worn

to little more than vein lines.

He scoops them up; he stuffs his coat with them,

fills his cap, book bag and pockets,

fuel and kindling for his mission.

He is the icon of our unhappiness:

he will open like a triptych of gold

into a flame to embarrass the sun.

He opens the can of gasoline,

and before anyone can stop him,

he explodes into a fireball,

a flaring marionette; he whirls three times

then falls into a curled ball

of incendiary horror.

Earth gives him no resting place.

As mourners gather

in ominous groupings,

the men in black dig Palach up,

cremate his already-half-cremated frame

and send the urn off to his mother.

There, in Všetaty, no one is allowed

to give him another burial.

No graveyard dares take the ashes

for half a decade.

In Prague, Palach’s first grave

Is repossessed. The state deposits there

the corpse of a nameless old woman.

On your way now, nothing to see —

just some old cleaning lady’s grave.

No Martyrs in this cemetery —

I’ll see your papers please.

Twenty years on, a crowd will gather

for something called “Jan Palach Week,”

a pretext to take to the streets again,

and one day later,

the Communist government falls.

Your ashes, Jan Palach, will return in Prague.

I will be beyond returning, for long ago

an angry axe man removed all trees,

to the despair of poets and squirrels,

the better to conduct surveillance

of all the law-abiding citizens.

There, on the spot of his immolation,

a bronze marker, half cross,

both Catholic and Slav,

lifts out of mosaic’d pavement.

My last root is hidden beneath it,

as leaf by dry leaf, and ash by ash,

my ghost is a receptacle for tears, and memory.

I was there, around and within him.

I, too, exploded for Liberty.

— October 1969, New York, revised 1986,
rewritten 1996; rewritten 2011

Ben Jonson's Witches' Song

2011-08-17T21:19:00.000-04:00

More of my work on Volume 2 of Matthew Gregory Lewis's 1801 anthology, Tales of Wonder. Here is Ben Jonson's wonderful "Witches' Song" from 1609. The witches recite a veritable botanica of plants used in witchcraft, including the mandrake root. I have annotated the entire poem to make clear all of its references to the witch lore of antiquity and of the 1600s. These stage witches were quite believable to Jonson's audiences. The Masque production must have been lavish, calling for a dozen witches to sing out these lines.

The Witches’ Song

BEN JONSON.

From the Masque of Queens, presented at Whitehall, Feb. 2d, 1609

1 WITCH.
I have been all day looking after
A raven feeding upon a quarter;¹
And, soone as she turn’d her beak to the south,
I snatch’d this morsell out of her mouth.

2 WITCH.
I have beene gathering wolves haires,
The madd dogges foames, and adders eares;
The spurging² of a deadman’s eyes:
And all since the evening starre³ did rise.

3 WITCH.
I last night lay all alone
On the ground, to heare the mandrake⁴ grone;
And pluck’d him up, though he grew full low:
And, as I had done, the cocke did crow.⁵

____
1. Quarter. A piece of an animal’s carcass, or, more suggestively, a piece of a human body that has been drawn and quartered. Each part of a quartered body contains one limb (arm or leg) and whatever else came detached with it.
2. Spurging. Decaying matter foaming up or being exuded.
3. Evening starre. Venus.
4. Mandrake. Mandrake, or “May Apple” has a root resembling a human form. Folklore asserted that mandrakes grew spontaneously under gallows, where the sperm of hanged men supposedly fell into the ground and produced mandrakes.
5. Cocke did crow. Witches’ activities are often interrupted by the rooster’s crow, announcing the coming day. The rising sun dispelled all supernatural activities. Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain are 19^thcentury musical works depicting this sudden interruption of witch frenzy by the coming of day.

Mandrake root, from de Bry’s Florilegium Renovatum et Auctum, 1641.

4 WITCH.
And I ha’ beene chusing out this scull
From charnell houses⁶ that were full;
From private grots,⁷ and publike pits;⁸
And frighted a sexton⁹ out of his wits.

5 WITCH.
Under a cradle I did crepe
By day; and, when the childe was a-sleepe
At night, I suck’d the breath;¹⁰ and rose,
And pluck’d the nodding nurse by the nose.

6 WITCH.
I had a dagger: what did I with that?
Killed an infant to have his fat.
A piper it got¹¹ at a church-ale,¹²
I bade him again blow the wind i’ the taile.¹³

____
6. Charnell houses. Buildings or vaults used as a repository of bones. Bodies were routinely removed from European churchyards after twenty years’ interment to make room for more burials; only the rich and powerful were allotted permanent graves. Bones were either piled up in the open air in a bone-yard, or stored in a charnel house or ossuary. Skulls were readily available for pilfering from such places.
7. Private grots. A grotto, cave, or crypt owned by a family and used as a mausoleum.
8. Publike pits. Common graves for paupers, potters’ fields, or mass graves used for hasty burial of victims of epidemics or warfare.
9. Sexton. A church official responsible for buildings and grounds, bell-ringing, and care of the churchyard. A position frequently occupied by an elder, with little by the way of duties and a great temptation for sleep, idleness and drunkenness.
10. Suck’d the breath. Witches were accused of smothering infants, often in the shape of a cat. Cats, atttracted to the smell of milk on babies’ mouths, would occasionally visit an infant’s cradle: hence, cats as witches or witches’ familiars caught the blame for crib deaths. This folk belief still prevails in the Appalachian region of the United States.
11. A piper it got. The witch used the dagger to puncture a bagpipe.
12. Church-ale. In the 16^th Century, English churches dispensed ale on key festival days such as Easter, Christmas and Whitsuntide.
13. Wind i’ the taile. Possibly obscene.

___________________________________________

7 WITCH.
A murderer, yonder, was hung in chaines;¹⁴
The sunne and the wind had shrunke his veines:
I bit off a sinew; I clipp’d his haire;
I brought off his ragges, that danced i’ the ayre.

8 WITCH.
The scrich-owles egges and the feathers blacke,
The bloud of the frogge, and the bone in his backe
I have been getting; and made of his skin
A purset, to keep Sir Cranion in.¹⁵

9 WITCH.
And I ha’ beene plucking (plants among)
Hemlock, henbane, adders-tongue, ¹⁶
Night-shade, moone-wort, libbards bane; ¹⁷
And twise by the dogges was like to be tane. ¹⁸

____
14. Murderer . . . in chaines. The bodies of murderers, traitors and other serious offenders were left exposed to the elements, to be picked over by crows. This gruesome display served as a warning to would-be offenders.
15. Sir Cranion. Probably the witch’s familiar, a demon assuming the form of a small animal.
16. Hemlock, henbane, adders-tongue. Hemlock describes a variety of poisonous plants, the Mediterranean form of which was used to poison Socrates. Henbane is a narcotic and poisonous weed, Hyoscyamus niger, believed to kill poultry. Adder’s tongue is a fern (Ophioglossum) whose structure suggests a snake’s tongue and mouth.
17. Night-shade, moone-wort, libbards bane. Deadly Nightshade (Atropa belladonna) is a poisonous and narcotic plant. Moonwort is a small fern whose fronds have a crescent shape, believed to be a treatment for the bite of a mad dog. Libbards-bane, from Leopard’s bane, is a member of the Aconitum family to which wolfsbane also belongs, a source of paralyzing strychnine.
18. Tane. Taken.

10 WITCH.
I from the jawes of a gardener’s bitch
Did snatch these bones, and then leap’d the ditch:
Yet went I back to the house againe,
Kill’d the blacke cat, and here is the braine.

11 WITCH.
I went to the toad, breedes under the wall,
I charmed him out, and he came at my call;
I scratch’d out the eyes of the owle before;
I tore the batt’s wing: what would you have more?

DAME.
Yes: I have brought, to helpe your vows,
Horned poppie, cypresse boughes, ¹⁹
The fig-tree wild, that growes on tombes,
And juice that from the larch-tree comes,²⁰
The basiliske’s bloud,²¹ and the viper’s skin:
And now our orgies let’s begin.

Tam O'Shanter

2011-08-16T20:34:00.002-04:00

I just finished annotating one of the most famous of all supernatural poems, the 1791 chased-by-witches poem by Robert Burns titled "Tam O'Shanter." Between the Scottish dialect, the place names, and the supernatural allusions, it has taken a long time to create what I hope is the ultimate annotated text of this poem. It's intended to help students, scholars and casual readers get the full meaning of a poem that is truly fun to read. It's part of a great tradition of horseback chase poems. German ghost ballads like "Erlkonig" and "Lenore" belong to the same class of narrative.

Sooo, for those who dare, here is the text, interspersed with the annotations, broken up as it will appear in my forthcoming Volume 2 of "Tales of Wonder."

Tam O’Shanter

ROBERT BURNS

[A Tale.

“Of Brownyis and of Bogillis full is this Buke.”]^a

When chapman billies¹ leave the street,
And drouthy² neebors,³ neebors meet,
As market-days are wearing late,
An’⁴ folk begin to tak the gate;⁵
While we sit bousing⁶ at the nappy,
An’ getting fou⁷ and unco⁸ happy,
We think na⁹ on the lang Scots miles,¹⁰
The mosses, waters, slaps, and styles,¹¹
That lie between us and our hame,¹²
Whare¹³ sits our sulky sullen dame,
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

____
[a] The subtitle “A Tale” and the Epigraph appear in Burns’ Collected Poems, but did not appear in the Lewis volume.
1. Chapman billies. Peddler boys.
2. Drouthy. Thirsty.
3. Neebors. Neighbours.
4. An’. And.
5. Tak the gate. Return home.
6. Bousing. Drinking.
7. Fou. Drunk.
8. Unco. Very.
9. Na. Not.
10. Lang Scots miles. Long Scots miles. Scotland had its own mile, based on the distance from the castle to Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh. Scotland did not adopt English miles until 1824.
11. Mosses, waters, slaps and styles. Bogs, waters, pools, and styles. Styles are openings or breaches in fences or stone walls.
12. Hame. Home.
13. Whar. Where.

__________________________________

This truth fand¹⁴ honest Tam O’Shanter,
As he frae’¹⁵ Ayr ae¹⁶ night did canter,
(Auld¹⁷ Ayr wham¹⁸ ne’er a town surpasses,
For honest men and bonny¹⁹ lasses.

O Tam! had’st thou but been sae²⁰ wise,
As ta’en thy ain²¹ wife Kate’s advice!
She tauld²² thee weel?²³ thou was a skellum,²⁴A blethering,²⁵ blustering, drunken blellum;²⁶That frae November till October,
Ae market-day thou was nae²⁷ sober;
That ilka melder,²⁸ wi’ the miller,
Thou sat as lang as thou had siller;²⁹That every naig was ca’d a shoe on,³⁰The smith and thee gat roaring fou on ;
That at the L——d’s house,³¹ even on Sunday,
Thou drank wi’ Kirkton Jean till Monday.
She prophesy’d that, late or soon,
Thou would be found deep drown’d in Doon;³²
Or catch’d wi’ warlocks in the mirk,³³
By Alloway’s auld haunted kirk.’³⁴

___________

14. Fand. Found.
15. Frae. From.
16. Ae. One.
17. Auld. Old.
18. Wham. Whom.
19. Bonny, or bonnie. Handsome.
20. Sae. So.
21. Ain. Own.
22. Tauld. Told.
23. Weel. Well.
24. Skellum. A rogue.
25. Blethering. Talking idly, chattering.
26. Blellum. A babbler.
27. Nae. Never.
28. Ilka melder. Each installment of grain, .i.e., Tam gets drunk while waiting for the miller to grind his grain into flour.
29. Siller. Money, from silver.
30. That every naig was ca’d a shoe on. Every time a horse had a shoe nailed on.
31. L——d’s house. Lord’s House. An act of self-censorship on the part of Lewis’s printer. Burns spells it out in his text. Printers in England were wary of blasphemy charges.

__________________________________

Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet³⁵To think how mony³⁶ counsels sweet,
How mony lengthen’d sage advices,
The husband frae the wife despises!

But to our tale: Ae market night,
Tam had got planted unco right;
Fast by an ingle,³⁷ bleezing³⁸ finely,
Wi’ reaming swats,³⁹ that drank divinely;
And at his elbow, Souter⁴⁰ Johnny,
His ancient, trusty, drouthy crony;⁴¹
Tarn lo’ed him like a vera brither;⁴²
They had been fou for weeks thegither.⁴³
The night drave⁴⁴ on wi’ sangs and clatter;⁴⁵
And ay the ale was growing better :
The landlady and Tam grew gracious,
Wi’ favours, secret, sweet, and precious:
The souter tauld his queerest stories;
The landlord’s laugh was ready chorus :
The storm without might rair’⁴⁶ and rustle,
Tam did na mind the storm a whistle.

_______

32. Doon. The River Doon.
33. Mirk. Dark.
34. Alloway Kirk. The roofless church of Alloway, two miles south of the town of Ayr, abandoned in 1756.
35. Gars me greet. Makes me weep.
36. Mony. Many. 37. Ingle. Fire.
38. Bleezing. Burning.
39. Reaming swats. Foaming ale.
40. Souter. A shoemaker.
41. Crony, or cronie. an old acquaintance.
42. Vera brither. Very brother.
43. Thegither. Together.
44. Drave. Passed.
45. Sangs and clatter. Songs and discourse.
46. Rair. Roar.

________________________________________

Care, mad to see a man sae happy,
E’en drown’d himself amang the nappy,⁴⁷
As bees flee hame wi’ lades⁴⁸ o’ treasure,
The minutes wing’d their way wi’ pleasure:
Kings may be bless’d, but Tam was glorious,
O’er a’⁴⁹ the hills o’ life victorious!

But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white — then melts for ever;
Or like the borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow’s lovely form,
Evanishing amid the storm. —

Nae man can tether⁵⁰ time or tide ;
The hour approaches Tam maun⁵¹ ride;
That hour, o’ night’s black arch the key-stane,
That dreary hour he mounts his beast in;
And sic⁵² a night he tacks⁵³ the road in,
As ne’er poor sinner was abroad in.

The wind blew as ‘twad blawn⁵⁴ its last;
The rattling showers rose on the blast;
The speedy gleams the darkness swallow’d;
Loud, deep, and lang, the thunder bellow’d:
That night a child might understand,
The deil⁵⁵ had business on his hand.

_____
47. Amang the nappy. Among the ales.
48. Lades. Loads.
49. A’. All.
50. Tether. Tie.
51. Maun, Must.
52. Sic. Such.
53. Tacks. Takes.
54. As ’twad blawn. As if it would have blown.
55. Deil. The Devil.

________________________________________

Weel⁵⁶ mounted on his grey mare, Meg,
A better never lifted leg,
Tam skelpit⁵⁷ on through dub and mire,⁵⁸
Despising wind, and rain, and fire;
Whiles⁵⁹ holding fast his gude⁶⁰ blue bonnet;
Whiles crooning⁶¹ o’er some auld Scots sonnet;
Whiles glow’ring’⁶² round wi’ prudent cares,
Lest bogles⁶³ catch him unawares:
Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh,
Whare ghaists and houlets⁶⁴ nightly cry. —

_____
56. Weel. Well.
57. Skelpit. Galloped.
58. Dub and mire. Pools of water, and mud.
59. Whiles. Sometimes.
60. Gude. Good.
61. Crooning. Humming or singing.
62. Glow’ring. Staring.
63. Bogles. Bad spirits.
64. Ghaists and houlets. Ghosts and owls.

__________________________________

By this time he was cross the ford,⁶⁵
Whare in the snaw⁶⁶ the chapman smoor’d;⁶⁷
And past the birks⁶⁸ and meikle staine,⁶⁹
Whare drunken Charlie brak’s neck-bane;⁷⁰
And thro’ the whins,⁷¹ and by the cairn,⁷²
Whare hunters fand⁷³ the murder’d bairn;⁷⁴
And near the thorn, aboon⁷⁵ the well,
Where Mungo’s mither⁷⁶ hang’d hersel. —

Before him Doon pours all his floods;
The doubling storm roars thro’ the woods;
The lightnings flash from pole to pole;
Near and more near the thunders roll:
When, glimmering thro’ the groaning trees,
Kirk-Alloway seem’d in a bleeze;⁷⁷
Thro’ ilka bore⁷⁸ the beams were glancing;
And loud resounded mirth and dancing. —

_____
65. Tam crosses a stream called the Slaphouse Burn. Since this stream had bridges and no known local ford, this detail is considered to be imaginative.
66. Snaw. Snow.
67. The chapman smoor’d. The peddler smothered.
68. Birks. Birch trees.
69. Meikle stane. A large stone.
70. Brak’s neck-bane. Broke his neck-bone.
71. Whins. Gorse plants.
72. Cairn. A heap of stones, often a prehistoric burial site. The cairn still stands, on the Campusdoon estate in Ayr.
73. Fand. Found.
74. Bairn. A child.
75. Aboon. Above.
76. Mungo’s Mither. Mungo’s Mother. St. Mungo’s Well, located just west of Alloway Church. The suicide is imaginary, as St. Mungo is associated with Glasgow. The Alloway Church had been dedicated to St. Mungo, since Glasgow Cathedral had owned the land. Mungo here might simply refer to a person born in Glasgow, St. Mungo’s See. Doubtless the idea of a saint’s mother being a suicide verges on the blasphemous. St. Mungo’s mother was herself canonized as St. Thanew (Harvey 64).
77. Bleeze. Blaze.
78. Ilka bore. Every crevice.

________________________________________

Inspiring bold John Barleycorn!⁷⁹
What dangers thou canst make us scorn!
Wi’ tippeny,⁸⁰ we fear nae evil;
Wi’ usquebae⁸¹ we’ll face the devil! —

The swats⁸² sea ream’d in Tammie’s noddle,⁸³
Fair play, he car’d na⁸⁴ deils a boddle;⁸⁵
But Maggie stood right sair⁸⁶ astonish’d,
Till, by the heel and hand admonish’d,
She ventured forward on the light;
And, vow! Tam saw an unco⁸⁷ sight!
Warlocks and witches in a dance;
Nae cotillion brent new frae France,⁸⁸
But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys,⁸⁹ and reels,
Put life and mettle in their heels.
A winnock-bunker⁹⁰ in the east,
There sat auld Nick,⁹¹ in shape o’ beast;
A towzie-tyke,⁹² black, grim, and large,
To gie⁹³ them music was his charge:

___
79. John Barleycorn. The personification of the spirit of ale.
80. Tippeny. A weak ale, sold for two pennies a pint.
81. Usquabae. Whisky.
82. Swats. Fumes.
83. Noddle. head.
84. Car’d na. Minded not.
85. Bodle. A farthing, a coin worth one quarter of a penny.
86. Sair. Sore, seriously.
87. Unco. Strange.
88. Cotillion brent new frae France. Cotillion brought new from France. The French cotillion, a variety of contredanse, became popular in England in the 1700s. Placing dancers in square formation, it encouraged flirtation, and is the ancestor of the American rural square dance.
89. Strathspey. A slow and stately Scottish dance in 4/4 time, slower than a jig or reel. The melody for a strathspey often contains many “snaps,” short notes followed by dotted notes. Strathspeys were composed and arranged both for fiddles and for bagpipes.
90. Winnock-bunker. Window seat.
91. Auld Nick. Old Nick, the Devil.
92. Towzie-tyke. A shaggy dog. Mephistopheles first appears in Goethe’s Faust in the form of a black dog. — BR
93. To gie. Give.

_________________________________________________

He screw’d the pipes and gart⁹⁴ them skirl,⁹⁵
Till roof and rafters a’⁹⁶ did dirl.⁹⁷ —
Coffins stood round, like open presses,⁹⁸
That shaw’d⁹⁹ the dead in their last dresses;
And by some devilish cantrip¹⁰⁰ slight,
Each in its cauld¹⁰¹ hand held a light. —

By which heroic Tam was able
To note upon the haly table,¹⁰²
A murderer’s banes’¹⁰³ in gibbet airns;¹⁰⁴
Twa span-lang,¹⁰⁵ wee,¹⁰⁶ unchristen’d bairns;
A thief, new-cutted frae a rape,¹⁰⁷
Wi’ his last gasp his gab’¹⁰⁸ did gape;
Five tomahawks, wi blude¹⁰⁹ red-rusted,
Five scymitars’,¹¹⁰ wi’ murder crusted;

_____
94. Gart. Made.
95. Skirl. Squeal.
96. A’. All.
97. Dirl. Rattle, shake.
98. Presses. Linen closets or wardrobes.
99. Shaw’d. Showed.
100. Cantrip. A charm or spell.
101. Cauld. Cold.
102. Haly table. Holy table, the church altar.
103. Banes. Bones.
104. Airns. Irons.
105. Twa span-long. Two spans in length. A span is the width of the hand from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger, with the fingers fully-extended. The span was used in the absence of measuring tapes or rulers as a rude unit of measure.
106. Wee. Little.
107. New-cutted frea a rape. New cut from a rope.
108. Gab. Mouth. /
109. Blude. Blood.
110. Tomahawks . . . scymitars. Massive emigration from Scotland began around 1725 and accelerated after English repression of Scots culture after the Battle of Culloden in 1745. Tens of thousands, dispossessed by land “clearances” that resembled “ethnic cleansing,” fled to America. Scots were also prominent in the British armed forces, placing them in the campaigns such as the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War in America) and Scots figured prominently on both sides of the American Revolution. Revolutionary soldiers in America received tomahawks as part of their kit (Thayer XX). Burns here reminds his reader that Scots were dying in faraway places, killed by Indians, Colonials, or Turks, and that their ghosts would nonetheless return to Scotland. —BR

_______________________________________________

A garter, which a babe had strangled,
A knife, a father’s throat had mangled,
Whom his ain¹¹¹ son o’ life bereft,
The grey hairs yet stack¹¹² to the heft;¹¹³
     [Three lawyers’ tongues, turn’d inside out,
     W’ lies seam’d like a beggar’s clout;¹¹⁴
     Three priests’ hearts, rotten black as much,¹¹⁵
     Lay stinking, vile in every neuk.¹¹⁶]¹¹⁷
Wi’ mair¹¹⁸ o’ horrible and awefu’,
Which ev’n to name wad be unlawfu’.¹¹⁹

As Tammie glowr’d, amaz’d, and curious,
The mirth and fun grew fast and furious:
The piper loud and louder blew;
The dancers quick and quicker flew ;
They reel’d, they set, they cross’d, they cleekit,¹²⁰
Till ilka carlin¹²¹ swat¹²² and reekit,¹²³
And coost her duddies¹²⁴ to the wark,¹²⁵
And linket¹²⁶ at it in her sark!¹²⁷

____

111. Ain. own.
112. Stack. Stuck.
113. Heft. Haft, handle.
114. Clout. A patch in a cloth.
115. Much. Muck. Excrement, manure or other rotting organic matter. “Much” appears to be an idiosyncratic Burns spelling, as this does not appear in OED.
116 Neuk. Nook, small corner or recess.
117. Three lawyers . . . / . . . every neuk. Burns suppressed these four lines at the behest of a friend, a judge, and replaced them with the two lines following. They did not appear in Lewis’s edition, or in Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland.
118. Mair. More.
119. Unlawfu’. Unlawful. A nod to the censorship laws that clamped down on English publishing after the French Revolution.
120. Cleekit. Linked together.
121. Carlin. A stout old woman.
122. Swat. Sweated.
123. Reekit. Smoked, steamed.
124. Coost her duddies. Cast off her clothes.
125. Wark. Work.
126. Linkit. Danced.
127. Sark. A shirt or shift, an undergarment.

_____________________________

Now Tam, O Tam! had thae¹²⁸ been queans,¹²⁹
A’ plump and strapping in their teens,
Their sarks, instead o’ creeshie flannen,¹³⁰
Been snaw-white’¹³¹ seventeen hunder linnen!¹³²
Thir breeks¹³³ o’ mine, my only pair,
That ance¹³⁴ were plush, o’ gude blue hair,
I wad hae gi’en them off my hurdies, ¹³⁵
For ae blink¹³⁶ o’ the bonnie burdies!¹³⁷

But wither’d beldams, auld and droll,
Rigwoodie¹³⁸ hags wad spean¹³⁹ a foal,
Lowping¹⁴⁰ an’ flinging on a crummock,¹⁴¹
I wonder didna¹⁴² turn thy stomach.

_____
128. Thae. These.
129. Queans. Young women.
130. Cretshie flannen. Greasy flannel. Flannel, orginally made from wool, was manufactured in Wales starting in the 17^th century.
131. Snaw-white. Snow-white.
132. Seventeen hunder linnen. Fine linen, 1700-thread gauge. Huguenots settling in Ulster, Ireland after 1695 established the linen-making industry there, and the use of linen expanded rapidly after 1700.
133. Thir breeks. These breeches. Men’s trousers, extending just below the knee. Would be considered an undergarment, as it is the first item one would put on, and the last one would take off.
134. Ance. Once.
135. Hurdies. Buttocks, hips. — OED
136. Ae blink. One look.
137. Bonnie burdies. Pretty creatures.
138. Rigwoodie. Dried-up and wrinkled, resembling twisted twigs, straw or rushes.
139. Wad spean. Lewis footnotes this as “would wean.” Weaning foals seems a rather benign activity for ghosts and witches. Spean also means “to abort,” and “foal” is also used to describe a pregnant mare (OED). This is almost certainly what Burns would have wished to express, since witches were accused of causing stillbirths among humans and animals. The euphemism of weaning for abortion is certainly ironic – abortion being premature weaning! Local “wise women” were midwives and many knew the secrets of abortifacients. Scotland had been swept with witch mania in the 1600s, so this lore would be familiar to Burns’ readers.
140. Lowping. Jumping.
141. Crummock. A crutch.
142. Didna. Did not.

___________________________________

But Tam kend¹⁴³ what was what fu’ brawlie,¹⁴⁴
There was ae winsome¹⁴⁵ wench and wawlie,¹⁴⁶
That night enlisted in the core,¹⁴⁷
(Lang after kend on Carrick¹⁴⁸ shore;
For mony a beast to dead¹⁴⁹ she shot,
And perish’d mony a bonnie boat,
And shook baith¹⁵⁰ meikle corn and bear,¹⁵¹
And kept the country-side in fear),
Her cutty sark,¹⁵² o’ Paisley harn,¹⁵³
That while a lassie¹⁵⁴ she had worn,
In longitude tho’ sorely scanty,
It was her best, and she was vauntie. — ¹⁵⁵Ah ! little kend thy reverend grannie,
That sark she coft¹⁵⁶ for her wee Nannie,
Wi’ twa pund Scots,¹⁵⁷ (’twas a’ her riches),
Wad ever grace a dance of witches!

____
143. Kend. Knew.
144. Brawlie. Very well.
145. Winsome. Buxom.
146. Wawlie. Comely.
147. Core. Corps.
148. Carrick. An Ayreshire district, earldom of the famous Bruce family. — BR.
149. To dead. To death.
150. Baith. Both.
151. Bear. Barley.
152. Cutty sark. A short shift.
153. Paisley harn. A cotton woven in a distinctive pattern, made in the town of Paisley in the Scottish lowlands. The town had a reputation for radical politics and free-thinking, so the wearing of Paisley probably had a caché of radicalism about it. — BR
154. Lassie. Little girl.
155. Vauntie. Proud.
156. Coft. Spun.
157. Twa pund Scots. Two pounds in Scottish currency. The Scots pound was worth only about one-twelfth of the British pound sterling during the period of this poem. It took more than two centuries for the two currencies to merge into one. — BR.

_________________________________________

But here my Muse her wing maun cour;¹⁵⁸Sic¹⁵⁹ flights are far beyond her pow’r;
To sing how Nannie lap and flang,¹⁶⁰
(A souple¹⁶¹ jade¹⁶² she was and strang),¹⁶³

And how Tam stood, like ane¹⁶⁴ bewitch’d,
And thought his very een¹⁶⁵ enrich’d;
Even Satan glowr’d, and fidg’d fu’ fain,¹⁶⁶
And hotch’d and blew wi’ might and main;
Till first ae caper, syne anither,¹⁶⁷
Tam tint¹⁶⁸ his reason a’ thegither,¹⁶⁹
And roars out, “Weel done, Cutty-sark!”
And in an instant all was dark:
And scarcely had he Maggie rallied,
When out the hellish legion sallied.

_____
158. Maun cour. Must lower.
159. Sic. Such.
160. Lap and flang. Jumped and flung.
161. Souple Supple.
162. Jade. A term of reprobation applied to a woman. Also used playfully, like hussy or minx. — OED.
163. Strang. Strong.
164. Ane. One.
165. Een. Eyes.
166. Fidg’d fu’ fain. Became very restless.
167. Syne anither. Then another.
168. Tint. Lost.
169. A’ thegither. Altogether, entirely.

_____________________________________

As bees bizz¹⁷⁰ out wi’ angry fyke,¹⁷¹
When plundering herds¹⁷² assail their byke;¹⁷³
As open pussie’s¹⁷⁴ mortal foes,
When pop! she starts before their nose;
As eager runs the market-crowd,
When “Catch the thief!” resounds aloud;
So Maggie runs, the witches follow,
Wi’ mony an eldritch skreech¹⁷⁵ and hollow.

Ah, Tam! Ah, Tam! thou’ll get thy fairin!¹⁷⁶
In hell they’ll roast thee like a herrin!
In vain thy Kate awaits thy comin!¹⁷⁷
Kate soon will be a woefu’ woman!
Now, do thy speedy utmost, Meg,
And win the key-stane of the brig;¹⁷⁸

____
170. Bizz. Buzz.
171. Fyke. Mood.
172. Herds. Shepherds.
173. Byke. Bee-hive.
174. Pussie’s. A hare.
175. Eldritch screech. A frightful scream. The term “elrich screik” dates to 1513, in Douglas’ Aeneis, VII. 108. Eldritch is a word seldom used outside of the small circle of supernatural writers, but the OED does cites its use by Burns, Hawthorne, Lord Lytton and William Dean Howells. It was one of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite adjectives. —BR
176. Fairin. A fairing, a present.
177. Comin. Coming.
178. Key-stane of the brig. Key-stone of the bridge, i.e., the centermost part of a stone bridge. “It is a well-known fact that witches, or any evil spirits, have no power to follow a poor wight any farther than the middle of the next running stream. It may be proper likewise to mention to the benighted traveller, that when he falls in with bogies, whatever danger may be in his going forward, there is much more hazard in turning back.” — RB

______________________________________

There at them thy tail may toss,
A running stream they dare na cross.
But ere the key-stane she could make,
The fient a tail¹⁷⁹ she had to shake!
For Nannie, far before the rest,
Hard upon noble Maggie prest,
And flew at Tam wi’ furious ettle;¹⁸⁰
But little wist she Maggie’s mettle —
Ae spring¹⁸¹ brought off her master hale,¹⁸²
But left behind her ain¹⁸³ gray tail:
The carlin claught¹⁸⁴ her by the rump,
And left poor Maggie scarce a stump.

Now, wha¹⁸⁵ this tale o’ truth shall read,
Ilk¹⁸⁶ man and mother’s son, take heed:
Whene’er to drink you are inclin’d,
Or cutty-sarks run in your mind,
Think, ye may buy the joys o’er dear,¹⁸⁷
Remember Tam o’ Shanter’s mare.

____
179. The fient a tail. Fient is a petty oath, as, “The devil a tail.”
180. Ettle. Zeal.
181. Ae spring. One jump.
182. Hale. Whole.
183. Ain. Own .
184. Claught. Seized hold on.
185. Wha. Who.
186. Ilk. Each.
187. O’er dear. Too dear.

Not Years Enough

2011-08-11T09:20:00.000-04:00

NOT YEARS ENOUGH

How many autumns more? I cannot guess.

How slowly thirteen moons go rolling by,

how achingly the thirty dozen days

count off the torn inked sheets of calendar.

Life wrinkles silently, by phases imperceptible

the skull and bones show through the flesh.

More than the other signs of passing

the shelf of unread books accuses me —

not years enough to read them all!

And all those books unwritten, languages

to learn the lilt of, music to shape

beneath the independent fingers —

millions of words and thousands of melodies.

No matter what, the end must come

before the final page is writ, the coda sung.

Composers dreaded to start their Ninth

of symphonies, but trembled all the more

when the Ninth was done, behind them.

How many symphonies would they eke out

before the unrelenting knock of Fate?

If only Sleep, that dark-eyed panda,

were less the brazen thief — if only dreams

could quicken the long drear nights

with more than a passing vision.

I do not need to dream-quest Mt. Yaanek —

a quiet study would do, a reading lamp,

a chair and a sturdy book. My ka,

my lazy double, my astral body

can lounge on a hammock with a Dickens novel,

lean over calligraphy in a Ming gazebo,

or browse through the night-locked Athenaeum.

Never too late to learn the names of trees,

of sleeping birds and withered flowers,

the Three Kingdoms’ heroes, the ladies

and lovers of The Story of the Stone.

Or maybe I’d walk with book in hand

barefoot in graveyard, a midnight reader

of horror tales, an epic reciter.

I’d make the dead listen to the Faerie Queene,

count on their fingers the knights and Moors

of the endless Orlando Furioso,

wear them out with the embracing lists,

the straw that stuffs the Song of Myself.

Maybe my eyes would retrace Shakespeare.

But this is Autumn: lamp-dousing time

for my waking self, long nights sliding

to the gravity of solstice, dead leaves

like pages escaping me unreadable.

Ah! War and Peace requires another reading;

Gormenghast requires slow delectation;

I want to read all Cooper’s novels again

in parallel with all Scott’s Waverly tales;

read Greek and Runic verse aloud,

along with forty years (count them!)

of Mighty Thor comics. How many operas

have I heard without the libretto before me;

how many Schubert songs just grazed

my consciousness without the poems there?

Projects unending to attend to,

not years enough to read them all,

not years enough to count them!

— October 31, 1987, Providence-New York, revised 1990, 2011

The Collectors

2011-08-10T15:43:00.001-04:00

THE COLLECTORS

after Magritte

I know it was our father’s house,

but prudence says he wouldn’t mind

your packing up his legacies, a trunk

or two of city clothes, a photograph,

perhaps, of what had been a neighborhood

where now the sea laps barren beach

behind your yard. Do you enjoy the thought

that apple trees you climbed as a boy

are now the hanging place of cuttlefish?

Do you expect that whatever it is

that gobbles houses by night

and hauls the sidewalk off in chunks

will spare your little edifice?

I don’t worry so much

about the lobsters, big as cows,

that made off with the Belgian clock,

the marble mantelpiece, or the horn

that I left in the attic; their taste

is too baroque to warrant another visit.

But I will prove, if I must

with photographs and measurements

that the oblong rock once half a mile

at sea will soon adorn the lawn,

then, with a nudge, the stairs;

next day it will bulge into the parlor;

and probably within a fortnight

sweep you a mile up the beach

to that stack of abandoned houses

where it has already assembled

what’s left of the town.

It’s one thing to be “lived through”

by Cosmic Consciousness,

serving some higher purpose as though

the Universe had plans, and we

were its chessmen. But this won’t do,
this passive acceptance of

granite elbow-nudge,

this nibbling away at things,

reducing us to dust mite status

at the bottom of the vacuum bag!

Note: This is a revision of a poem that appeared in Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems. I suppose the "victim" feeling of the narrator is a good metaphor for today's politics, where we are all being nibbled to death by mice. The poem refers to three Magritte paintings, two of which I found, and was written back in the days when Barbara A. Holland and I hurled Magritte-inspired poems at one another weekly at poetry readings. These poems don't make a whole lot of sense alone, but when read against the paintings, I think they're pretty amusing: the weakness of "ekphrastic" poetry is that poet and reader really need to share the image. Magritte's strange work continues to haunt me, odd since I am not in the least a modernist.

Regaining the Muse

2011-08-07T11:03:00.000-04:00

I wrote the original of this poem after spending almost two years writing novels (a terrible mistake, in retrospect, even though they were published). The original, called "Avoiding the Muse," was rather irregular in its metrics. In preparing the new edition of "Poems from Providence," I took a deep breath, and the Muse said, "Look, the least you could do here, if you can't give me a sonnet, is to re-do this in blank verse." I submitted, the poem got a little longer, and I think it more worthy of its subject now. A little rhymed couplet popped up in the middle, unplanned, as if in a nod to that mode. The poem as it stands, rude as it is, expresses my gratitude that the Muse did not abandon me.

REGAINING THE MUSE

Silent this voice for more than a year now —

homeward I come again with head bowed down,

weighted with other laurels and their debts,

back to poetry and its finer lyre.

Time and this book alone shall tell if I

am any wiser than I was before,

or if the Muse whose hardened gaze I dodged

shall reconcile herself once more to me,

come to the window I deck as of old

with that dim flame that She and no other

can see. Heartbeat pentameters return,

furrows I plow anew; bones, rock & root

I move away, to plant a newer crop:

trees that will rise to the bellies of clouds,

roots tapped in the strata of dinosaurs,

leaf sprouts that will themselves contain whole books.

From one thought, many lines; from but one dream,

a vision framed at the heart of epic;

from sap of imagination, the sword

of heroes and the gods who inspire them

to plant a Troy, a Rome, an Asgard bright,

as hope against the all-devouring night.

Shield-maiden of Bard, Skald and Poet,

Muse, take me back! Have I not given up

everything to make these lines? Look at me,

Muse: the fading wraith I am, you made me.

Creation Revisited

2011-08-07T10:55:00.001-04:00

I just revised this old poem from "Poems from Providence," and wanted to share its slightly more coherent new incarnation. This is based on the Bishop Ussher's declaration that he could name the exact day of Creation: October 23, 4004 BC. Counting forward, I made an intuitive leap about what God might have been up to eight days later. I also seem to have anticipated The Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster, a wonderful religious hoax now all over the Internet.

CREATION REVISITED

According to Ussher,

the Bishop chronologer,

the act of Creation commenced

no later than Four Thousand

and Four

Before Christ —

thus spake the annals

of the knews and begats

traced back to Genesis.

Those Hebrew midwives

remembered everything!

According to Lightfoot,

an even more accurate Anglican,

God started the commotion

on Sunday the 23rd

October, 4004 B.C.,

fossils and Darwin

notwithstanding,

to the very morning,

to the very hour

of God’s day shift

a workmanlike 9 AM.

Now just imagine

the confusion of Adam,

wandering through jungle,

surveying the plains,

leaping to hilltops,

alone on the Eighth Day,

his God mysteriously absent

after the sudden, tiring burst

of creation: Man, the afterthought.

He finds himself alone,

lord and progenitor,

mouthing the names

of leafed and feathered things,

saplings and hatchlings,

chrysalis and cub and lamb —

big-headed and knock-kneed

lnone knowing their names,

their natures,

ignorant of who should eat whom,

oblivious to sex.

Adam revels in the chaos,

in his sole possession of

the magic power of naming.

But now the horizon rages

with whirlwind, flashes

with fire-tongues, shakes

with terrible thundering.

A heaven-arching demon

splits the zenith, its eye

reptilian, its formless

cloud-bag hung with tentacles,

an airborne jellyfish.

Its vacuum maw extinguishes

unwary birds, uprooting

trees, reaching for Adam.

Its suckers engulf him,

lift him to cloud-top.

And Adam screams, eyes shut

at thought of too many eyes

and countless tentacles. No way

to make a name for this one!

He weeps at the idea

of his own annihilation.

God laughs, resuming his form,

the gentle greybeard Father;

puts Adam on mountain peak,

roaring with merriment

at the first man’s terror,

leaves him mystified

to clamber back to the garden,

asking Why?

against the unanswerable.

First day of his life,

he is seized by a monster,

mocked by his Creator.

Last day of October.

Halloween, 4004 B.C.

Trick or Treat.

Ganymede

2011-07-11T20:36:00.000-04:00

The following poem is the first of three poems that comprise a "prequel" to Homer's Iliad. Don't be daunted: this is a love poem about a young man abducted by an eagle, who turns out to the the Olympian god Zeus. Ovid devotes only a few stanzas to this story, one of the most-painted and most-sculpted episodes in all Greek Myth. It is related to Troy, since the boy's father is the precursor of the Kings of Troy. I weave it all together in a Shelleyan manner. This was published in 1991, and when it appeared in a British magazine, the journal was seized by the authorities. For the upcoming 20th Anniversary edition of my book, Poems from Providence, I have revised the Ganymede poems. Here is Part One, which stands alone as a rhapsodic poem about the Alternate Lifestyles of the Gods. By the way, the Greeks approved of this kind of behavior and emulated it: although Zeus's girlfriends were usually hunted down by jealous Hera and either killed or turned into animals or inanimate objects, Ganymede is still up there, the favored cup-bearer, known to us as "Aquarius."

Night after night the pack of wolves came down

to stalk and ravage the peaceful flocks. Rams

fled and bellowed, ewes wailed while white lambs fell

and blood, black in the moonlight, stained the rocks.

Teeth gnashed at tender necks, bellies gave way

to serpent-sprawling innards, torn apart.

Dark silhouettes dragged limbs, ribs and gore

off to their own awaiting young ones. “Likos!”
the wolf-cry, made the blood run cold,

“Likos” made mothers reach for children,

elders to run for gorse-piles to increase

the fire that kept the hungry ones at bay.

At dawn, in cover of iron-gray clouds,

the men set out to find the lupine lairs,

hoping to slay the mothers and cubs,

then track and destroy the rest of the pack.

Never had so many wolves run wild;

never had so many flocks ’round Ilion
suffered such losses repeatedly,
as though a new kind of night-beast,
wily as man himself, strode on long legs,
feeding with jaws that never seemed
to fill a belly, as though they killed for sport,

Likos, then, or likanthropos —
the wolves that once were human?

The chief's son, young Ganymede,

too young to hunt, too gentle and kind

for the ways of killing,

remained at the shelter-cave with the women.

Tros took his nephews,

leaving his own son to guard the clan mothers,

the virgin sisters, the incoherent babes.
One torch at cave-mouth would be enough,
for no beast dared a burning brand.

All day, no enemies appeared.

Had not his mother thirsted for spring-fresh

water, had she not sent him with empty pouch

to the hillside source

(oh, as she later rued it!)

nothing might have happened.

But one low-hanging cloud which spread

from Ilion’s walls to these high shepherd crags

was no mere storm — it was a god,

the dozing presence of Zeus himself,

who sometimes sleepwalks, unmoored from Olympus,

drifting from Hellas to the ends of Ocean,

or grazing the firetips of spouting Oeta,

or waking at the bruise of Caucasus,

scattering beneficent rain and the random strokes

of hubris-guided fire to some impious target.

Had not the thunder god awakened then

and seen the slender boy, filling the pouch

from the patient trickle of rock-pure water

(oh, how they wept and rued it!)

nothing might have happened.

The boy felt the tense of lightning poise.

His reddish hair stood on the nape of his neck,

his ivory skin, his eye-whites luminous.

He froze when the cloud unveiled itself —

A terrible eye regarded him

from the black moil of suspended rain —

a place of cerulean blue, windless and calm,

the all-perceiving eye of the son of Cronus.

In one rock-rending thunderclap

the heavens shattered.

The bowl of sky-clouds spiraled in,

the self-annihilating storm

consumed itself —

For that immaterial

blink-out the heir of Titans nearly ceased:

the strength to make a storm

was but the night sweat of his stupor,

the strength to stop one

a nearly impossible act of will

for even the hoary father of Olympus.

He caught his breath, feared

that the quake might tremble the arms

suspending the Earth from Chaos —

And then he hovered there, vast hawk

over hapless sparrow, assuming eagle spread

and talon grasp to assure the taking.

He pitied the tiny boy, frozen in his shadow.

No one had ever done this to Zeus —

no love at first sight for Io and Semele

(the prayers of suitors to Eros had scented

them out and lured a curious deity,

misunderstood by goddesses, to sample

the charms of mortal womanhood.)

But this was only a shepherd boy,

sprung from the loins of the chieftain Tros,

unsung in any lover’s plea, a boy

whose beauty would bloom

for an instant as dew on hyacinth

or frost upon a frozen bowl —

a face, an eye, a cheek, a brow

so great as to transfix the storm

and make the mid-day Phaeton

stumble in his headlong course.

Beauty too soft for marble, subtle for wood,

too unrepeatable to risk to memory,

too human to transform to star or shrubbery:

Ganymede, a happy accident of nature,

spared by the Fates until this imperious peak

of his brief, unnoticed existence.

It was worth the wrath of Hera

and the mockery of the wine-drunk gods.

“Zeus with a boy? A stripling boy!

Poor child, he’ll waste away on arid Olympus,

turn to a withered ancient while Zeus

forgets him in one of his longer slumbers.”

To their astonishment, the Titan forfeits sleep,

sends to the boy each dawn a cup

of nectar and a slice of Pomona’s apples.

He summons the troupe of ageless gods,

puts on his grey-beard visage and says:

“None but Ganymede shall bear this cup,

none but Ganymede shall serve me wine,

and his the hands that pour clear water.

None but Ganymede shall turn the clouds

on which I rest and forge my thunder.

One tithe of my lot of immortal life I give

so that this boy will never age. His voice

will stay at the threshold of manhood,

his locks unshorn, his beard withheld.

He shall not shed even the salt of a tear,

immutable in my affections, semidivine,

safe from the envy of goddesses.

Let him attend me always.”

As seal of his oath, great Zeus displays

the form of Ganymede among the elder worlds,

joining the sun-path zodiac, the faithful boy,

star-striding Aquarius.

Ganymede feared the eagle.

He was relieved when great Zeus came to him

as the gray-beard god, almost a grandfather.

He came again in shepherd’s robes,

younger by decades than before, hugged him

with great arms like a loving father.

Zeus laughed, then leaped into a waiting cloud,

his ever-ready tapestries and anterooms.

That night, he returned to the boy

as a handsome youth,

fringed with first beard, tightened

with muscle on arm and calf.

The boy did not resist, but let his hand

touch the hard lines of the lover’s chest,

slipped to his knees in terror and awe,

not breathing when the athlete’s body

covered him,

thrilled with the priapic thrust against

his loins,

not caring that a seedburst could cinder him,

not fearing the rending of flesh by godhood.

And there was no pain — the ardent god

gave him, and took, a thousand pleasure strokes,

and every one was joy to both of them.

No one has ever been raped by a god.

Zeus steals again to look at the sleeping boy.

At last there is a question he cannot answer,

a riddle whose solving no manner of trickery

or Titan bluster can achieve. He asks himself:

Suppose I withhold a month of apples

from Ganymede? Suppose I let him age

just that much more? It maddens me

to hold a perfect Ganymede if Ganymede

plus Time were yet more perfect still.

The god turns sleepless on his mountain peak,

frozen between beauty and a mystery.

Ganymede thinks only of Zeus.

No one could imagine a greater joy.

And yet his delicate fingers shake

as he takes the green-peeled apple.

He puts it down on the golden tray,

looks at his blushing cheeks

reflected there,

his hair still tousled by passion,

his lesser size, his frailer limbs.

He wonders: if I refuse the gift,

and let but one day’s aging pass.

If I were older, fuller, stronger —

would Zeus love me better?

The boy turns sleepless in his sheltered bed,

frozen between love and uncertainty.

Hera paces outside the banquet hall.

Each night the men gods revel there:

Hephaestus, Apollo, blood-stained Ares,

Hades with his burning gaze, tide-worn

Poseidon.

Each night they sing more merrily,

trade dangerous boasts about the Titan wars

as if Tartarus held no sleepers,

wax even stronger in their tales of love

for maids, and goddesses — and mortal boys.

Each night they leave, brawling with shields

and swords and tridents and staffs,

down to the waiting chariot hall,

until the room holds none but Zeus and Ganymede,

Ganymede and Zeus. For months, the goddesses

have been ignored and shunned.

Now Hera, the lawful mistress of marriages,

of love and hearth-fire parentage,

is banished to the kitchen of the gods,

the weaving room, the tending

of her temples. How long, she asks,

how long will this Olympian dalliance

preoccupy the lord of the gods?

I like to think of the gods still banqueting,

how they all came to love young Ganymede,

how Zeus neglected his Olympian rites

and ceased to trouble with the squabbling of gods.

I like to think of this summer storm

as the rolling of cloud from their lovers’ bed,

as the never-tiring spark of their passion

rejuvenates this earth of forgotten temples.

I like to think of a joy that never dies,

of a beauty that never fades,

of a god’s love transforming a boy,

of all manner of love enthroned

and noble at last,

of love oaths written with stars.

I stand in the sorrowing wastes of Ilion.

By an eternal spring, I raise my cup,

in the shade of a lonely apple tree.

An eagle takes wing from a distant crag.

My heart cries: Ganymede!

The House by the Coke Ovens

2011-07-09T21:27:00.001-04:00

I saw my childhood home only one time between the ages of 13 and last fall: I was 35 and was driven through Scottdale PA hastily and out into the country to find the house by the coke ovens. Here is a revision of the poem I wrote that summer, from a cycle that uses the Native American "God's Eye" and wild berries as recurring motifs.

I wanted to see my childhood home again,

the country house, the demon-haunted

rooms that gave my inner self their imprint.

We drove through Scottdale with its too

many churches, stores boarded up, cold

as an exhausted and empty mine.
Looking for Carpentertown,

we drove back and forth in the hollow,

passing again and again the barren, black

lot by the edge of the fen. “Stop here,”

I said. “This is the place. The house

stood here. Back there, coke ovens blazed

all night, and there, the trucks

ground by with their tons of coal.”

Of the house that stood here — nothing.

Of the solemn poplars of Lombardy

that wrote on my window panes — nothing.

Of the stately porch and its swing,

the apple tree’s promise — nothing.

Of the locked, steep attic and its

imagined relics — nothing.

Of the deep, deep cellar with its

warden rats – nothing.

Of the cool spring house and its poisoned well —

nothing.

Of the very stone and shape of foundation,

the lineament of property — nothing.

Am I seeing the future? Is carboned ground

a resonant prophecy of bomb-fall —

is this desolation my past – or a future

of our own time sewn with apocalypse?

(The God’s Eye blinks but cannot answer.)

A neighbor comes to tell us the house

burned to the ground some fifteen years ago.

The timbers and bricks were trucked away.

Slag dumps drifted, quicksand consumed,

until the foundation itself was buried.

Trees tumbled to ruffian winds.

And as for the “quicksand”

I thought I remembered, the local said:

“Oh yes, out there in the middle,

there are bad places. Last spring it got

our grandma: she was in past her knees

when we heard her screaming and pulled her out.”

We walk where the house was,

where it seems dry and safe enough.

Breaking through black-crust earth

the stalks of lichens, brittle, rigid,

stand at attention with lurid caps

of crimson. (The field guide shows them,

and says they are called British Soldiers.)

They rise like the whiskers of a Chthonic god,

eyeless guardians of a plain of night,

a carpet for Gorgons and barefoot Maenads,

dry to the touch, coarse as sandstone.

Only their form suggests the organic.

Concealing the lichens, as forest hides shrubs,

I see a tangled maze of blackberries,

thorns guarding the fruit with jealous teeth.

Although they hang at arm’s length, ripe

for the taking, although the sickly birds

glare down from a chancred tree, no one

will pick this fruit. It too is black —

coal dust, charcoal, coke and obsidian,

a berry hued for the Stygian shores,

for the lips of the dead and the damned.

I played here as a child, amid the thorns

and poison ivy. The earth did not open

to swallow me. Perhaps I am immune,

the one, who remembering, belongs.

There is not much left of the great coke industry,

when the coal was eked from nearby Hecla

and the smouldering coke went to Pittsburgh.

A quarter mile back, the red rust scavenges

the twisted wheel of a coal crusher,

its chute and trestle and engine works gone;

it lays like the useless jaw of a dinosaur.

Open hearth ovens sprout vengeful trees,

vine roots split mortar, firebrick moults clay.

“I lived here many years ago,” I said —

not saying how many. It was thirty —

I was five when this house protected me,

when its terrors wrote themselves upon me.

And so the hungry past steals up behind me,

a lumbering truck full of fossils,

heating my poems to the red fury of ovens,

erasing my life as quickly as I write it.

Midsummer Night

2011-07-03T11:35:00.002-04:00

I am well-met by moonlight:

Bats line the graveyard trees,

hanging from pine and maple boughs.

Not hundreds of bats,

but thousands —

Their slant inverted eyes regard me.

In their world I’m the strange one,

a two-leg walker

stuck to the ground,

dim-sighted, inarticulate,

deaf to their ultrasonic Sanskrit.

I love their wing-beats, their

startled flight when I clap my hands —

their comradeship for my monologues,

their brotherly listening —

And though they darken the trees

so the beacon moon,

the stars cannot intrude,

fireflies assemble

like landing lights,

my faerie pathway clearly marked

into the grove and the elder gravestones,

out to the lake and the quiet streets,

or — to nowhere

I can remain as their midsummer king,

a willing captive of Mab or Oberon,

regent of their passing luminance,

crowned in an aureole of foxfire

for this night of nights,
summer's briefest,

its joys packed frenzied, feverish,

from long-drawn dusk till

teasing dawn

when bat-wings fold invisible

into the foliage and the ill-met

day people rise from their beds,

cock-crow, and assume their power.

Keep me now and forever,

Thou sable Night!

Hearing the Wendigo

2011-07-01T21:27:00.001-04:00

All the Native Americans from Appalachia to the Hudson Bay in Canada share a common dread of an elemental creature comprised entirely of wind. Algernon Blackwood documented the myth in in horror tale, "The Wendigo." Wendigo stories have been campfire horror tales for generations, embellished with each telling. I first wrote about the Wendigo in 1989, and I have mentioned it in several other poems. Here is the original in a new revision, suitable considering all the tornadoes we have had lately.

HEARING THE WENDIGO

There is a place

where the winds meet howling

cold nights in frozen forest

snapping the tree trunks

in haste for their reunion.

Gone is the summer they brooded in,

gone the autumn of their awakening.

Now at last they slide off glaciers,

sail the spreading ice floes,

hitch a ride with winter.

Great bears retreat and slumber,

owls flee

and whippoorwills shudder.

Whole herds of caribou

stampede on the tundra

in the madness of hunger,

the terror of thunder-winds..

The snow-piled Huron packs tight
the animal skins around his doorway,
hopes his small fire and its thin smoke
escape the notice of boreal eyes.
He will not look out at the night sky,
for fear of what might look back.

Only brave Orion witnesses

as icy vectors collide in air.

Trees break like tent poles,

earth sunders to craters

beneath the giant foot-stamps.

Birds rise to whirlwind updraft

and come down bones and feathers.

I have not seen the Wendigo —
(I scarcely dare to name it!) —

the wind’s collective consciousness,

id proud and hammer-hard.

To see is to be plucked

into the very eye of madness.

Yet time and again as I walked here,
alone in the snow
by this solitary and abandoned lake,
I have felt its upward urge

like hands beneath my shoulders,

lifting and beckoning.

It says, You dream of flying?

Then fly with me!

I answer No,

not with your hungry eye above me,

not with those teeth like roaring chain saws,

not with those pile-driving footsteps —

Like the wise Huron sachem,
the long-gone Erie, the Mingo,
the Seneca, the Onondaga,
like all Hodenosaunee-born,

I too avert my eyes

against the thing that summons me.

Screaming, the airborne smiter

rips off the tops of conifers,

crushes a row of power-line towers,

peppers the hillside with saurian tracks,

then leaps straight up at the Dog Star,

as though its anger could crack the cosmos,

as though the sky bowl were not infinite,

and wind alone could touch the stars

and eat them.

Op. 525, 1989
Rev 2011 as Op. 856

Sleeping with Thor

2011-06-23T23:08:00.005-04:00

There might as well be a neon sign outside
that flashes “Vacancy,” for all the talk I get from you.
Your great blond hulk beside me, breathing,
that one arm holding me, tight as a battle trophy:
all fine and good. Dane, or Viking, or as you joked
when you dragged me back here, “The great God Thor
in exile from Asgard,” your open mouth is wordless,
as animal slumber, not quite a snore but a rumble
rolls over me. At the foot of the bed, your sandals,
somewhere safely off, that hammer named Mjolnir
that I think means more to you than boyfriends:
all fine. I should just relax and enjoy this, but for
the fact that you are sleeping with both eyes open
and I am staring into two tenantless holes where once
those commanding blue orbs had sundered my resistance.

Twice you have stirred, and wordless, twice
we have done everything you thought I wanted — god,
things I never even dreamt of! Even with all that armor on,
each touch was just at the cusp between joy and too much
to bear. If that was mead we drank, I’ll toast the maker,
but must I go eyeless too into some zombie slumber?

Are you in Asgard, where Odin even now scolds you
for your college-boy dalliance? Remember to tell him
I am a poet, and a fit companion and confidant!
Your strong hand will not release me; clad
in the tatters of what you tore from me, I must wait
for the next installment, or canto, or conquest.

Are you in and out of yourself as it conveniences?
Those blue eyes drilled me, as you enjoyed the spoils
of my all too easy surrender. But what I win
is this manikin semblance of a lover,
the fox’s calling card, a henhouse full of carnage
and a room chill-blasted with Arctic air.
(Good trick, since it is July outside.)

If you are phantom, a frosty incubus,
perhaps the rest of you will follow your errant eyes.
I will wake then, embracing a suit of armor,
a limp red cape and leggings.

I’ll look down empty corridors of clothes, find no one

either up your sleeves or down your trousers, the shape
of your strong legs only an imprint on the mattress.

If I reach in those vacant sockets, I’d feel my fingers touch.
I’d know the embrace that holds me was death’s rigor;
I’d feel for the cold hand inside the chain-mail glove:
try as I might for a pulse I'd find none. I’d dare
to place my lips to yours, expecting no respiration.

Dark raven wings flutter.
I think I hear a distant wind, a sigh between your ears
and mine. Perhaps it comes from Asgard, perhaps
you ride the Bifrost to return to me. Can I be bard
to your impossible beauty? Or when those eyes
assume their blueness, will the only words you mutter
be something about hockey practice, too much to drink,
and the need for a serious breakfast?

I expect nothing. I tell myself
I imagined most of this. But there,
the armored breastplate presses me still from behind,
and that arm refuses to release me,
and there, next to our hastily thrown off jackets,
reposes Mjolnir, the square-ended hammer of Thor.

The Vanished Chapel

2011-06-22T23:08:00.001-04:00

I returned to Edinboro PA last fall for the first time in years, and found that the Episcopal Center, in whose garret I had lived, had utterly vanished. I had written about the place in a poem called "Seeds from My Garden," in which I counseled my successor tenant in gardening. But seeing the building itself gone made me reflect deeper, and the rewritten poem is very different, and more revealing. (It's amazing I wasn't burned at the stake in that town!)

THE VANISHED CHAPEL

Back for a holiday some years ago, I visited

my home, that old Episcopal chapel,
whose attic garret I lived in
(scandal unheard-of in those days,
an atheist-poet-pervert
doing who knows what under the eaves)

I conduct the new tenant over the grounds,
say, “Here are the onions, back
from last year — I planted these.
A little ground fire in spring
will weed through those blackberries,
in summer they’ll go to eight feet.
The sod here is cleared, for last summer
I took shovel and planted peas, lettuce,

carrot, red radish. Rabbits, oh yes,
they ate the peas right down to the ground.
A sour kind of clover, oxalis I think it’s called,
grows here on the lawn,
boon to salads. Wild flowers,
good for a week in the house.”

(By the wall, a garrulous stalk,
alien seed pods clumped in the sun,
six feet of rhubarb — don’t know
who planted the stuff. Even the kids

keep away, too much
resemblance to Body Snatcher pods.)

A year passed.
The tenant was gone, they told me.
The grocer’s kind,
he ate no onions, left
the berries for birds;

They covered the lot with deep gravel,
for cars.

Decades passed. I came again
and hardly recognized the spot.
The chapel fell to ruin, then burned.
The garden is a weed-lot. Trees,
already thick and sturdy, assert
the primacy of forest. One more place
I have lived in, obliterated. How long
did the chapel stand empty, shunned,
the object of lingering rumors
of things that went on in that attic?
How many come back, to look and remember,
not the Episcopal mumbling
that went on downstairs, but the mad
poetic ramblings and strange seductions
that nearly rove the roof off as Wagner
and Shostakovich and Mahler rattled
the windows and sent the single bat
(too poor for a belfry) helter skelter
then out the open casement?
No need for hauntings
when you have poets in the attic!

Hawkflight

2011-06-22T01:56:00.042-04:00

A revision of one of my earliest extant poems. Gloomy adolescent infatuation, ah!

HAWKFLIGHT

The place I fell in love

with you was not a place at all:
it was a chasm whose entryway
was two black eyes.
I fell there and found you, Hawk.

When, after many refusals
you finally permitted me to hold you,
your wings were laden with nettles.
Perhaps you needed me to remove them,
to speak comforting words, to assure you
of a beauty you did not know you possessed.

Still your feathered breast resisted me,

aspired to the dark flight

against a sky of no stars --

You flew, o into blackness,

infinity your satellite and silhouette.

The same moment I rejoiced in possessing you,
I saw you move away in sadness.

Each time my hand,

was permitted to caress you,

your wings stirred skyward

at the hint of dawn.

My arms,

acquired wings, too, a mantle of despair
that only let me plummet downward.

Striving to reach you,

I fell deadweight at the black limn'd

treetop.

You soaring,

I a world-bound Leonardo

tracing the the arc of your envied ascent
as I sank into my own abyss of longing.

You circled. You returned.
One thunderstruck night
you thrust your beak
into my open window,
fluttered as though by right
to the foot of my bed.
Assuming that native form
that could always seduce me,
you pressed yourself against me
and offered everything
if I would forsake all
to follow you. And yes, I said yes,
for the proof of love is this:
if you love someone
you will go anywhere
to be with him. Anywhere.

I was this foolish once.
I have been this foolish each time
beauty coins words
it thinks I want to hear.

Somewhere, amid the mountains
that separate us, you have your eyrie,
the lone crag of your solitude.
Your days have been busy.
You have your pride, and your prey.
I do not think of you much.
I have my pride,
and five hundred poems.

Sentences

2011-06-22T01:53:00.001-04:00

The original of this poem was written during the Vietnam War. It fell under my pen again tonight for a touch-up, as fresh as ever.

SENTENCES

the army came home,
to parade on the soft graves
of the war dead.
the general faced the orphan child
with his little folded flag
and had nothing to say.
the universe stopped
while something that called itself god
pondered the full implications of his beliefs.
in January, a fresh-baked doughnut
crystallizes in the cold air
before you can finish eating it.
the stringy-haired girl who told me
“just pray and God will grant your wishes”
made me laugh as I thought
of my stepfather eaten by oversized rats.
does the great eagle know
that its eggs will not hatch?
yes we will over your dead body.

About Marge Piercy

2011-06-20T15:06:00.001-04:00

Marge Piercy came to Providence last April to judge the Philbrick Poetry Prize and to read from her work. I had the honor of introducing her, but did not know, to my regret, that she hates being introduced by people who quote from her work. So, my sincere and well-prepared remarks about this significant poet were somewhat curtailed. I just came across the text and thought I would share it, since Marge Piercy's work is truly outstanding. I know that our devoted poetry audience in Providence had gone out to the local bookstores and gobbled up every Piercy book they could find in anticipation of the event. So should you.

When I said, again and again to our judging committee and to various friends, “Marge Piercy.” I was told, “Watch out! She’s fierce! She has three husbands, lives on a compound with 120 cats and a pride of lions. She’ll snap your head off.” I said, “Now that’s the kind of poet I want to meet!” back in the early 1970s, when I started my little press in New York City, I published mostly women poets, and all of them, young and old, were always carrying Marge Piercy books around with them. They connected with her in an intense way: a female writer who, at an early point in her career, had “arrived” in a way that women accepted and admired, and which men acknowledged with the grudging admission that she did everything as well as, or better than, they did.

Along the way, Marge Piercy moved from being “that poet that women read and cling to” to a poet everyone read, and a novelist whose books you couldn’t put down. She rip-roared into science fiction, a veritable boy’s club, and made her mark there, along with Ursula LeGuin and the woman who called herself “James Tiptree, Jr.”

The poet is always the outsider. “When I flirt I feel like an elephant/ in a pink tutu balancing on a beach ball,/ a tabby wearing a doll’s dress.” Elsewhere she describes herself as a young girl:

I did not want to be a boy. Most
of them were imbeciles, I thought,
nor did I want to be a girl or woman.
Maybe I would grow up to be a cat.
Maybe I was an alien, a changeling.

She is a satirist worthy of the Roman Juvenal, often at her best when turning her focus on her own gender. She can mock women with giant purses, “women who hang leather hippos from their shoulders” but there is self mockery when she Whitman-lists the purse’s contents: “Ten pens, because the ink may run out … maps, a notebook in case” Of course only a writer would say this! “Women like kangaroos with huge purses bearing hidden / our own helplessness and it s fancied cures.” When she mocks “The Beauty Myth” she describes “hair like a museum piece, daily/ ornamented with ribbons, vases,/ grottoes, mountains, frigates in full/ sail, balloons. Baboons, the fancy/ of a hairdresser turned loose” and reminds us “It is not for male or female dogs ... that poodles are clipped … to topiary hedges.” “If I had a $400 haircut,” she asks, “would people buy calendars just me on every month grinning?” Satire is an unlicensed firearm. When she writes about horrible gifts no one wants to receive and which no one can get rid of, she might have inspired,or may have been inspired by, the wicked Edward Gorey cartoon that shows Edwardian ice skaters hurling wrapped objects into a hole in the ice. The caption: “FRUITCAKE.”

Those wonderful flarings-up, as she confesses “but oh, oh, in me/ lurks a tyrant with a double-edged ax who longs/ to swing it wide and shining, who longs to stand/ and shriek, You Shall Do As I Say, pig bastards”. She can say, on spying an ex in a supermarket, “Now I could walk through him like smoke/ and only sneeze.” On the arrogance of America invading everybody: “The harder you push, the harder what you never bothered to notice pushes back.” On same-sex marriage: “In earlier times and different cultures and tribes, men married men and women married women, and the sky never fell …” On the Patriot Act, which results in an FBI interrogation, “collected receipts from your/ restaurant meals for the past five years. You have ordered hummus six times, falafel twice and lamb four times. … Welcome to the Inquisition!” In a poignant little grouping called “No one came home,” she recalls the horror and emptiness of never knowing what become of a loved one, from a single lost cat, to the thousands in Argentina “disappeared” by their own government. Her poem, “Buyer Beware,” on the cost of war, should be pinned to the lapels of certain former government officials should anyone have the god fortune to arrest them.

I love her poem about opera, the most artificial and intense of all art forms. No skinny blonds here, she tells us: “The heroine is fifty and weighs/ as much as a ’65 Chevy with fins. She could crack our jaw in her fist. She can hit high C lying down.”

But who also comes to the peace and calm of rituals, of the year’s turning points, to the outer skin of ancestry we all wear and cannot really put off, coming home to her own Jewish heritage but in her own words, who can invert the old rabbinic saying of “Thank God I was not born a woman,” with “Thank God I was.”

A social poet too, able to compress the evils of society into just a few words. Leaving urban Detroit, her family sold the house to a black family. The consequence, Piercy writes: “my old boyfriend next door poisoned/ my cat … It took him all night to die.” She writes of a women working in a women’s clinic,. Threatened with murder every day by an anonymous phone caller. Our penchant as a species to invent tortures made her write “We could erect a Smithsonian of pain’s / little helpers, racks, prods, all the mechanical, electrical, computerized/ vehicles for imposing hostile will.” When Piercy recalls, in detail, a Detroit neighbor who brutally beat his wife and children every payday, and how no one did anything about it because half the other neighbor men did the same, or worse, she packs the poetic payload of the poem into the title, “Family Values.”

She is a nature poet, proving that poets see, and know the names of things. “I can get drink on color, lured like a bee/ to drench myself in reds and blues and purples,” she says. She writes of Cape Cod, her adopted home since 1971, with the enraptured eye of the newcomer, the naturalist, the seeker. “Voice of the Grackle.” “A Long and Busy Night” “Tracks” “Crow Babies.” Her poem, “The Rush at Equinox”, free as it is, is as compressed and cogent as the best of Robert Frost. Yet she does not flinch at nature’s cruel side. She knows her cat has gone to the coyote’s dinner, that life eats life, and that animals do not run about in Disney costumes. Writing of our mammal cousins, the great whales, she says “Each is a poet, a composer, a scholar of the roads/ below. They are always singing, and what they know/ is as alien to us as if they swim past Sirius.”

Writing of her mother’s death, she makes no claim to prophecy or premonition, an uncanny modesty for a poet. “That day,” she recalls, “opened like any ordinary can of tomatoes. … I was caught by surprise/ like the trout that takes the fly/ and I gasped in the fatal air.” Death seems repeatedly to arrive by surprise in Piercy’s poems, as when she encounters a wounded and drying deer, “the thing that strikes in the middle of the morning.” Even the Holocaust, which many of us feel compelled to document from its obscure origins to the last detailed survivor’s memory, sweeps across her poems like a whirlwind:

I remember my grandmother’s cry
when she learned the death of all she had
remembered, girls she bathed with,
young men with whom she shyly
flirted, wooden shul where
her father rocked and prayed…

Piercy resists death: “I go to charm death like Sheherezade / with stories I refuse to end until my wish is granted.”

There are some poets we know, and whom we trust to take us through pain and anger and loss, because they come to tell truth, to shed light on the dark inside us, ultimately, to heal. Piercy’s older brother, her Everyman, refused to read her poems of childhood memories. We can and must. What does she tell us when she recounts the Detroit father beating his wife and children, and everyone looking the other way?

That so long as we do so on the minutest level – person to person, man to woman, parent to child – then we shall continue to do as much, or worse to anyone we deem the Other.

If Piercy were only a social and political poet, we would owe her a great debt, but I am glad that she dwells in a place where sea and sun and all of nature fill her palette as well. Like Robinson Jeffers on the west coast, she embraces the long arc of geologic and ocean time and sees us a part of an animal spectrum.

Seldom it is that a poet knows, at the beginning of a career, the solemn mission ahead. Marge Piercy wrote,sometime before 1969, the last lines of her collection, Hard Loving:

It is time to loosen and make new.

We are sacs of mad cells that have forgotten how to grow.

It is time to close ourselves to the steel probes

of the corporate generals and devisers.

It is time to open ourselves to the other with respect …

Time to learn we are part of one wave and each other.

Sisters and brothers in movement,

we carry the wet cuneiform of proteins

the long history of working to be human …

We must be healed at last to our soft bodies

and our hard planet

to make live and conscious history in common.

A Year and a Day

2011-06-09T22:23:00.000-04:00

I found this poem in an old journal, a fragment. In its new reworking I suddenly found myself recalling the terrifying scene in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein when Victor Frankenstein unexpectedly encounters the monster while hiking alone on a glacier -- a sublime and terrifying place in and of itself -- so that found its way into the poem as well. This was another obsessive, self-absorbed love poem, in language unabashedly hyperbolic, but I hope it is now redeemed. It is as true to me as a "Howl" was to Ginsberg.

A YEAR AND A DAY

A year since last I saw you. No: a year and a day.
The round red sun struck an octave falling,
rung out the interval as turning earth
returned to the self-same place in its orbit:
and what should happen, but nothing at all.
Nothing, or rather, another day void
to add to a year of days without you,
the same fields dressed up in the same green trees,
the same indifferent sky accepting bursts
of egomaniacal seedpods
attempting escape velocity.

During the year, I fled the quotidian,
twisting with maple propellers,
out and upward to the highest cirrus.
I sought the place of your waiting
somewhere in orbit beneath the Dog Star.
All too soon I fell, repelled
by a single graze of your cheekbones.

I thought the sun, unbent by atmosphere,
would melt your cold heart ;
the rain that came
we mistook for a sign of advent —
o roots, o tendrils, o new shoots twining,
abandoned as abruptly
to summer’s drought,
to hoarfrost cold,
and now, to this barren anniversary.

Each height I sought
you had already abandoned.
Each bloom thrust up —
whether the frail violet
or the tight-fisted peony —
beautiful to me only
in some resemblance, passing,
to some aspect of you,
fell petal by petal to cindered ash.
Earth’s autumn hecatombs
were burned in vain at your altar.

I know you were always there,
just one horizon beyond me,
hurrying on, pursued, and pursuing
(I dread to name whom or what!)
Must I follow you to desert rim,
the unforgiving edge of the glacier,
the Mere de Glace where Monster
and Maker (for what else are lover
and beloved?) meet once,
soliloquize and part, sworn enemies?

For a year and a day you have fled me —
(Ah! it is a year and a day, times thirty now!) —
and still the secret lives, as flowers shriek
in fields the winds italicize with longing,
in wan birch forests that topple and fall
at your departing slant. The secret lives;
the long count of calendar days resumes,
and we (myself and all things living)
tread on in quest of that one contrary wind
that would be harbinger of your return.
I will not die waiting, but you will wait
’til your own death to plumb regret’s full sea.
Green things will bloom, mute, melancholic, doomed,
beneath a kettle of iron-gray storm-clouds.
Life will go on somehow, though gods are fled
and I, of words and love, am but a ghost.

Something There Is In the Attic

2011-06-05T12:22:00.003-04:00

Every human body is a haunted house.

Something there is in the attic

that drives it and sets its course.
Are the shutters half-drawn?
Are they nailed against sunrise?
Do spiders spin in the tenantless rooms?
Who lives there? Ahab and his mono-
Moby madness? Emily with her dry-
leaf poems like money under a bed?
Or no one at all? Does no one hear
as each flaked shingle falls,
as varicose ivy beards up, as sun
and sag gray-wash the porch beams
and lintels? Something there is
in the attic that drives it and
sets its course. Whose will? An old
man’s will? A boy’s? A loud-mouthed
betrayer of dreams? A dreamer
paralyzed? Why does this house
not fall, but stand at elmward avenue,
accusing all, begging a moon,
a clean sweep, a neighbor’s knock,
a letter? Something there is
in the attic that drives it and
sets its course. This house is
Ahab’s ship, Usher’s manse, Lovecraft’s
infirmary, a witch house, feast
hall, love nest and chapel, sanctum
of Solitude, the Capulets’ tomb.

If every human body is a haunted
house, shall we not choose
these ghosts? Can I not summon
a typing poltergeist, a coloratura
howler, a phantom raconteur
to teach me all dead languages,
a gourmet chef insomniac,
someone for whom the 1812 Overture
has not (as for me) ever lost its charm,
a friend who hovers over Batman comics
and knows every line poor Bela Lugosi
was ever made to utter? Room enough,
and beds, and food and tea, for them all!

In October this house is avalanched,
as leaves, and ghosts of leaves
from every tree that ever crisped
in the tug between slant-sun and frost,
pile high in ziggurats of oak,
maple and sumac, hawthorne and willow,
each with a tale of hope and sorrow
waiting its turn for harvest.

They almost obscure the house, so high
that one lone cupola, the poet’s watch,
stands apex at its pyramid,
as one mad vane whirls at the whim
of indecisive winds, as lightning rod
trembles for discharge of the weighted sky
into the attic haunter’s cranium.

I am that attic Something: I drive
this house unchanging, wall-to-wall
with mad cargo. My gambrel roof
is an upside-down Mayflower
as I sail against the leaf-tide. Monsters
would block my passage: great whales
of Doubt breach above a maple current;
the baleful skyward eye and tentacles
of the giant squid of Loneliness float by
in a sea-tide of weeping willow.

Yet something there is in the attic
that billows the sails, and drives me on.
The madness that fills these pages
is self-sustaining: some days
these scratchings seem meaningless,
unmusical; some days I read and gasp
and shudder to think that somehow I wrote
or was written through, to reach this apogee.
Alone? Well, lacking the guests
I crave, I must split and become them.
Books, cat and bed, a galaxy of music,
teapot that fills as fast as I empty it:
it is not a bad life,
to be the haunter of one’s cobwebbed self.

Mill Towns

2011-06-04T23:30:00.001-04:00

Old factories:

how painfully forgotten!

Once, the hopeful immigrants flocked to them.

Workers and foremen built cities around them,

     if not exactly blessing the ground they stood on,
     grateful at least to have escaped the whip
         or starvation where they came from.

The railroads webbed out to meet them,

branch lines and sidings eager to take

the crates and bundles from their gates.

Without them

the towns have forgotten the reason

of their founding.

What did they make?

cotton and calico prints,

steam engines and locomotives

parts of machines uncountable

and the tools to make other machines

and their parts uncountable,

rope walks, brass foundries,

lace- and jewelry-making,

lightbulb assembly lines,

refrigerators and fountain pens,

and glory! a piano factory –

all now only names in peeling paint

checkered on bricks and falling signs.

The nearby houses are humbled now
with torn clapboards,

rot beneath the stage paint of shingles,

the cheap bluster of aluminum siding,

walls bloated, foundations shifted,

split into rat-cell studios for commuters.

Many are boarded-up, foreclosed.

No one remembers when mansard slate

and gable and cupola gleamed new,

when a smokestack with a man's name on it

was a place arrived at as a good sign
of a continued paycheck.

Things that got made here,

kept getting made.

Now these sad brick temples accuse us:

their plywood-covered windows,

their undecipherable placards,

the weed trees on their loading docks,

the mystery of abandonment.

Like unburied dead they haunt the roadside,

sombre in daylight, shunned and abhorred

when their shadows grow long at dusk.

They will not burn, their wearing away

protracted by fences and guardians.

(Heirs living on compounded interest

preserve them like Chinese puzzle boxes

they cannot open or understand.)

At night, another commerce lights up
the sidewalks along the chain-link fence
as women sell the only thing they have
from the pavement, and men in cars
circle, circle, hands offering dollars,

other hands offering, and taking small
envelopes of powders and crystals.

Some midnights, the ghost machines awaken,

their ungreased axles screaming,

drive shafts spinning of their own accord.

A dynamo turns, furnace mouths flickering

in cool blue flame of St. Elmo's Fire.

The power looms weave an invisible shroud:

it is long enough to enclose a city.

Tombs without occupants,

they wait for the rites that no one will pronounce.

The Secret Tree

2011-06-02T23:26:00.003-04:00

I am dry. A circle of bark
peels stiffly from my crumbling limbs.
The itch of mold and termites
gives me no rest from entropy.
Leaves have not come this year.
It is rough everywhere:
parched earth has matted straw for hair
and desperate creatures huddle, homeless.
What the hot wind implies, I follow:
push out my roots to where the rains have gone,
deep, deeper, search for new rhythms
in crack and crevice, beyond the worm-world.

Dead to the wind above, bare-boned and tall,
I weave no banner poems in air, no seeds
fly out that other green may imitate:
making another like me is not the answer.
Mine is a secret growth, a sunless tree,
a new thing never seen before.
I plummet toward earth’s mantle,
sprout from the roofs of caves,
make roost for the lightless chatterers,
the bats, my only friends in this sightless
and nearly soundless chasm.
Through the bottom and beyond, I grow.
Above, my seeming corpse, that monument,
betrays no life to deadly air. The dead things
around me are truly dead. I sway
in secret winds of magma, magnetic,
I drink salt waters from the hearts of geodes.
I bloom in the dark heart of everything,
that place, not Hades, but equally dreaded,
to which everything wants to, but cannot
fall. I have more branches now
than I ever could have imagined.

Squid sing to me in the ocean trenches,
plates moan tectonic as I wrap new rings
of iron and nickel around myself.
If leaf and blossom come to me now,
who shall see them? No one.
If seeds, or something like them,
issue from my branch-ends, where
will they go? Volcano-vented upward?
Or hoarded here in darkness?
The tree above seems only a dream now,
but so long as no one cuts it
and no storm dares to topple it,
I am only its bad dream. Pray
I do not awaken.

Not A Hymn to Venus

2011-06-02T22:46:00.005-04:00

Among my suppressed poems from the 1970s, I found a draft of this poem, which was inspired by my reading of the crackpot book, "Worlds in Collision," by Immanuel Velikovsky, who claimed that Venus and Mars had a near collision within human memory before Venus settled into its current orbit. Velikovsky claimed that the Biblical Flood occurred because of this planetary catastrophe. Under the bizarre spell of this book I encountered Lucretius's great scientific poem, De Rerum Naturum ("The Way Things Are," or "Concerning the Nature of Things,") which begins with a hymn to Venus the goddess. I never published the poem, as any reader would assume that I subscribed to Velikovsky's theories, even though it was more a whimsical piece asking "How would you address the goddess/planet if it really had done us that much harm?"

This revision includes an epigraphic opening verse that recounts the Velikovksy ideas so that the poem pretty much self-explicates, and then the mock-hymn commences. I think it's fun now, and I am happy to welcome this poem into my garden of little monsters and blasphemies. Lord knows, Venus has never done me any favors, anyway.

I. EPIGRAPH
Unfair to Luna to call mad Velikovsky a lunatic,
so let us call him merely a madman. In Worlds
In Collision this self-taught astronomer declared fair Venus
a cosmic interloper, whose gravity-war with Mars
and brush with Earth produced the Biblical Great Flood
and a race memory of planetary dread. Nonsense
of course, but argued with passion and the paste-pot
of history and art, psycho- and anthro- pology:
Planets as billiard balls; humans remembering
the cataclysm as a universal shriek of “Ia!”.
Under its spell, I rewrote the hymn of old Lucretius
who commenced The Way Things Are with Aphrodite-praise.

II.
Not to you, o shining ascendant world,
morning and evening the brightest of all
in the cold night sky, not to you, Venus,
do I bring my praise and supplication.
I know from what dark nebula you came,
an apple of discord sent hurtling on
by One resenting our sweet yellow sun.
I know that man’s love is not your care
for does not loveless marriage fill the earth
with more than enough starving progeny?
Young men befooled, and maidens, may worship
and make offerings at your temple door,
while in the sad garden out back, old maids
sit in a line for whoever takes them,
the last and least bargain you offer them
before they’re only fit for winding sheets.
Seen from far off, so close to horizon,
your distance blinds us to your jagged teeth
which once unskinned the rock-strewn globe and sent
men howling back into ancestral caves;
nor can we see your fiery white tresses
which once ripped through our virgin atmosphere,
your poison breath of naphtha upon us,
oceans ripped into a tidal tumult,
a watery death that spared no lovers.
Your palpitations were not welcome then,
fair Venus, and even less welcome now.
Mars kicked you sunward; Earth lay in ruins
from just one passing toss of your girdle.

Meanwhile, we humans have outgrown panic.
Outward we look to the far suns, the blackness
nearly infinite between the galaxies.
We yearn to find our place of origin,
the place from which the oldest life blew down
athwart the wind between worlds, as we yearn
to endlessly invent new poems and songs,
vast fugues and operas and symphonies,
inwardly big as the outwardly vast.
We no longer backward-looking, blinded
no more by the sun we orbit, are winged.
That we yet live, upon a bleeding earth,
and dream such wide-eyed dreams, I do rejoice.
And you, Cytherean Venus — stay put!

Epitaph

2011-05-29T14:49:00.003-04:00

Rest here
    the still-born poems that sputtered and died
Rest here
    the prose, amphibious, grasping for land
Rest here
    the vague allusions, thrice explained
Rest here
    the early draft abandoned, orphan child
Rest here
    the art-pride wounded, neatly healed
Flown from here
    the finished poems — not here but risen
        to a better life.

Once A Poet

2011-05-29T14:43:00.000-04:00

He has the haunted look
of one bereft of Muses.
The trees conceal from him
their secret names;
the messenger ravens
no longer light
upon his lintel;
his curtains are drawn
against the pale white hands
that formerly beckoned
his insomniac scribbling.

Soundlessly and dreamless
he passes his nights.
The ink inside
his favorite pen
dry as Pompeian ash,
no longer yearns
to bleed itself
into a living poem.

The old journal
sits in a box
in an antique cabinet,
untouched as a mummy
in an undiscovered tomb.

How did he come to this?
Did he seek his Muse
in women,
bequeathing her gifts
to his children,
to his students,
or did he lose her
among the lawyers
and governing boards
that so consume
his hours?

“I used to leap
from peak to peak
like Shelley,”
he tells me.
But now he looks
before he leaps —
backwards and downwards,
calculating the risks,
the possible collisions
with other dreamers,
the futility of it all,
the caution of a muskrat
at water’s edge.

Shall I tell him the secret,
that everywhere he walks,
his Muse is waiting —
in the mica that glints
from his granite buildings,
in the shadowed space
beneath the dowager skirts
of the weeping beech,
in the unknown book
opened at random
for inspiration?
Or that she waits,
a scarf tied tight, a book
(the same book always
open to the same page,
where he left off),
unnoticed on a wooden bench
in sight of his office.

He has only to sit
with a blank sheet before him
and to call her name.

“Tell him,” she told me,
as I passed out of our meeting.
“I will,” I promised.

The Periodic Table: Hydrogen

2011-05-29T14:26:00.000-04:00

You are the First One.
Once, your unity
was the Only Thing.
A hot blast of protons,
sperm stuff of the cosmos,
jostling your jillion
identical twins, up, down,
in a vibrant scream
of creative urges,
partnering in ions,
H dating H
(no law against it),

H2 self-bonding,
converging in gas clouds,
gobbling stray neutrons,
dreaming of empire
yet eluding all,
stuff of the Ether,
the Bifrost stream
between galaxies,

ball lightning
and balloon flight,
ever at the edge
of an explosion
if oxygen is near,

holding your
secret of secrets dear:
the self-annihilating
self-fusion, the flame
at the heart of stars.

Without you, nothing;
with you, more questions
than ever answers,
light as a whisper,
Hydrogen.