Autumn on Pluto

Charon has set
     below the Plutonian horizon.
Beneath the dimmer satellites,
     desolate Nix and even dimmer Hydra,[1]
an autumn tree of volcanic glass
     glints like a spiderweb, leaf-cups
 

athirst for lunar light, weak beams
    more doubt than promise,

orbs almost black in total blackness,
real only in those eye-blinks
when they occlude some distant star.

Blue-black obsidian limbs
     cascade to branchlets,
death-willow leaflets serrated and thin,
     not falling (as there is no wind
        here ever) but flung
with crossbow efficiency,
     a flight of tri-lobed arrows
sharper than surgical knives.

The only red of this world’s autumn
     is blood-flow as deer
(the stock and store of Hades)
     collapse in agony,
and silicon roots thrust funnel
    and thirsty filament
to drink from the spreading rust
of severed carotids,
pierced hearts pumping,
antler and bone and hide
a-pile the slaughter-field.

After a few weeks’ wintering,
     the branchlets crackle and split
as red-berry buds form perfect spheres,
Pluto’s cornelian cherries,[2]
untouched, inedible
amid the bone and gemstone clutter
      of dead Arcady.

Not far from Acheron’s turgid flow
(nitrous ice in a methane river),
dread Hades dreams of venison,
afloat in sauce of cornelian cherry.
 

Persephone wipes clean
     his fevered brow, proffers
a bowl of wheat-porridge
     and raisins, the flesh
of olive and apricot. He sighs.
 

She can only make
     what her mother Ceres taught her.
The juice of venison has never
     run down her chin, nor has
she savored the sourest of cherries
drowned in bee-honey.

He must count the days
     till her vernal journey upward,
till he can pluck the victims
from beneath the kill-deer willow,
fill baskets with precious cornel fruit,
then call forth poets and heroes,
     (Hephaestus and Mars as well
     if he’s in a generous spirit)
for a bone-gnaw feast
around the lava pit,
a bard- and-boast orgy
of odes and war-talk.

It goes on for weeks, and
although the words they speak
are apt to freeze between one’s mouth
and the receiving ear,
for the summer-widower Hades,
death is a bowl of cherries.

---

[1] Nix and Hydra were discovered by the Hubble telescope in 2005.

[2] Although consecrated to Apollo, the cornelian cherry tree was believed to be the food of the dead in Hades.

Arabesques on Early Modern Mathematics

     for Travis Williams

1
Somehow, before the zero,
the circle door into infinity
     via a nullity,
the world went about
its lucrative business.

Wealth was relative,
     untold riches,
     like Croesus or Midas,
     the sum total
      of all the tea in China.

Somehow, before the zero,
on toes and fingers, beads
     and the abacus,
with Byzantine rigors
of Roman numerals,
the profits were calculated,

the cost of carrying a fish on ice
from a stream in the Caucasus
to the Emperor’s table
known every step of the way.

Somehow the counting houses
     counted, the censuses compiled,
          the taxes and tithes all gathered
in numbers inexact enough
     for each to slice a share
     along the way.

Until the subtle Arab zero,
     a lopsided egg, arrived.
Zero a placeholder,
     at first for nothing,
then, moving leftwards
     into hundreds, thousands,
stands for someone’s
    possessing vaste hordes
     of something.

Naught becomes aught,
     the aught implies the ought,
the obligation to pay
     the precise amount,
every counter counting
the same to the last drachma.

2
O miserable digit, as onerous
as Arab scimitar, shariah
of unforgiving digits!

Schoolboys now labored,
as though Greek and Latin
were not punishment enough,
on math, the museless art
beneath all trade and commerce.

This Arabized England
spewed forth unerring texts
applying number to space,
to time, to matter:

maps, ephemera of stars
and rising and falling moons,
aids to the perplexed farmer,
chemist and apothecary:

everything that was now had a number,
till Newton yoked number
to the Spheres Celestial,
poor Ptolemy disgraced and banished
so we might one day know
the price of a barrel of Saudi crude.

Even the land is subject to Number
as acres are measured and counted,
then coveted: the commons
enclosed, the poor
an inconvenient sum
to shift to another ledger:
the absorbent colonies.
Let them multiply themselves!

Primers were puzzle books,
    math without algebra,
absent symbolic thinking,
absent even the decimal,
     the fraction,
the answers whole numbers only:

easy to see the descent
    of a middling schoolboy
        from Greek to math
           to the madhouse,
shrieking a stillborn
     calculus in Bedlam,

while certain young women
whose minds did not wander
were set to task on tables
for each year’s almanac:

high tides and low, sunrise and set
at each edition’s latitude; tables
of weights and measures; days
to plant and harvest —
useful work, the knitting of numbers,
the loom of repetitive thinking.

3
There’s no escape in Faith.
Who drew the first Saint’s halo
presaged the Rome-world crowned
with the transcendent Zero,
an alien cuckold sign, a jest
against infinity and Trinity.

Trinity times Zero is Zero.
Trinity divided by Zero is Infinity.
The square root of Trinity
is an Irrational Number.
The straight and narrow,
the only line to heaven
is only the arc of an infinite circle,
the circle itself a Zero.

4
There is no escape.
Everything is nothing.
Your bank account is consumed
by zeroes, your numbered days
run down to zero like a bomb-tick.

You cannot knot the naught; it rolls
according to its own laws, its radius
locked to its outer measure
by the madness of pi. Ziggurats
of zeros, numbers’ nebulae,
cosmos uncountable, columns
left, left, leftward until the number
expressed is more than the number
of anything that is or ever was or will be.
Still it does not end, this monster,
this all consuming oh   oh     oh    oh!

The above rant from notes scribbled during a Faculty Colloquium talk by Prof. Travis Williams.

At the Funeral Home

My mother, behind me,
pushes open the door
to the funeral parlor.
“Go in,” she says,
“and sign the book.
Pay your respects
to your grandmother.”

Not sure what that means
except in movies, I enter
the dim vestibule: a slanted table,
a large book opened
to “Olive Rutherford.”

I sign. Tall men in suits
and women I’ve never seen before
move in and out of another room.

I follow. I am drawn,
though I do not wish to be
to the casket. My steps
become protracted, smaller,
as though infinitesimal
inchings would never get there.

I look around for uncles and aunts:
there are ten of them, a horde
of cousins I’ve never met.
My father, who never spoke
to his mother, is absent;
gone since the double-divorce
and scandal.
No sign of his sister, Margie.
No sign of Uncle Bill, the newsstand owner.

The others I have never met.

These are all strangers. If Rutherfords,
they ignore this adolescent Rutherford
as I approach the dread casket.

There, gaunt as ever, hair black
as a raven’s quills, her Indian nose
and high cheekbones, hands crossed,
some rose and lily petals tossed
hazardly here and there around her,
there, is Olive Rutherford.
I don’t remember make-up:
they have made her phosphorescent.
Her pursed lips preserve their secrets,
the things I should have known
when I was old enough. What interval
passes as I stand there, I do not know.
I have never seen a dead person before.
Like this, I think, beneath the ground
and forever.

I feel like a chimneysweep
among these dressed-up people.
Snatches of talk pass over me:
“I don’t suppose she left you
anything.” “She owned two buildings.”
“We’ll not be staying for the funeral.”
“Her late husband, the old Burgess,
a wonderful man. We all miss him.”

No one speaks to me. No one comes forward
to ask who I am. I tip-toe backwards,
back to the dark vestibule, out
to the winter sunlight, to the car,
where my mother, no longer Rutherford,
waits with eyes turned downward.

Our car, the right rear door held on
with rope, slinks out of Scottdale.
Except for last respects we have
no business being here.

The Blue Boy

On certain Sundays I was sent alone

to the apartment on Pittsburgh Street,
its mothball and camphor-smelling hallway
cool in the steep ascent, the dim window
into an airshaft a curiosity, the knock
on glass-paned inside doorway, the wait
as slippered feet padded slowly, as the brass

knob turned and the small frail figure
of Olive Rutherford peered out,
pretended surprise, and her calm voice said,
as always, “You’ve come for tea, and cookies.”

Sweet oven smells, and cinnamon
flooded out to greet me. She had an air
of lilac and smothered roses.

The parlor was small,
the sofa seat so high my short legs dangled
as I waited for the tea tray, the fine white teapot,
the delicate curved cups, the cubed sugar,
the milk I always declined and wished she wouldn’t
fill to precarious brim in a silver pitcher.

“So nice that you prefer tea,” she always began.
“So civilized.” “Coffee,” I’d say, “is for barbarians.
I tasted it once when I was five – enough that once
for a lifetime.” She asked what I was reading, I rattled
off authors and titles: Dumas and Dickens,
last week two science fiction books: Van Vogt
and Merritt. She nodded at the classics, looked down
at the science-fiction names, said not a word
at the Superman comics I held on my lap.

To my mere ten, she seemed a thousand years old.
I wondered whether she slept, and what
she did in all the days of her solitude
(husband dead for thirteen years now).
The one bright thing in this mummy parlor
was the immense portrait on the wall
that seemed to glow with its own power.

Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, she told me.
Painted in 1770, so loved in London
that ninety thousand persons lined up
to view it for one last time
when a California millionaire bought it.

It was not the original, of course, but a copy --
to my small eyes as large as life. The boy,
in those clothes, would be bully-taffy
from here to the schoolyard: arrayed in blue
against  the dim green background of elms
and willows, he almost stepped
from canvas into the parlor.

His silk blue suit, trimmed in silver;
his dangling wide hat, outrageously feathered,
would be torn to shreds in minutes,
the petulant pout and his lips, his large,
soft eyes, doe innocent, his runaway curls
and quiff of raven hair suggest the friend
you’d like to have but would need to protect;

but the half-cape twirled on one arm
suggested a gracefulness, the ease
of incipient swordplay, the legs
in their tight bindings were well-made
for running. I looked at my shoes,
featureless leather with string laces:
his, impractically, were tied in bows.

Hard to imagine how he dressed himself,
no Boy Scout, but a pampered aristocrat.
No one in my family possessed or wore a suit.

"Is that how they dressed in 1770?"
"He painted the boy in antique costume,"
my grandmother explained. "That's what
a nobleman's son of 1670 would wear.
That's what makes paintings interesting,
riddles inside of riddles to the mind."

This is all that I remember of her: book talk
and tea. Secrets she had: she had borne
ten children. Her mother, it was whispered,
was a Mingo Indian. She had outlived
the rise and fall of the coke ovens, the mines,
the giddy little empires of bank and ruin.
Perhaps she told me things I have forgotten:
all tea becomes, with time, but a single cup.
Half-there, is a memory: on an aunt’s
porch glider, she told me strange syllables
she said were the secret names of animals.

Three years later I saw her casket,
peered at her still-jet-black hair, her
Indian nose and cheekbones, smelled
the last hint of lilac.

Cape on one arm, broad hat
outrageously feathered,
silk tunic and leggings trimmed in silver,
a pale boy stood opposite.
I nodded, the only one
to see him, silent as mine
his last respects.

Nights at the Strand

The Strand Theater, Scottdale, PA

As the lights dim and the tattered curtains

rustle and part with a creak-crank

of unseen wheels and pulleys, as a boy's eyes

widen to a dark screen grown suddenly bright

and huge – not the tiny ovoid TV

but vast, enormous, spanning the width

of his field of vision from Row Three,

the row, as Marilyn tells him

with a fifth-grader's knowing accent

the monsters are in perfect focus.

He cleans his glasses furiously

as the sound track crackles, and a globe

topped with the RKO tower emanates

a zig-zag of Marconi waves, and, lo,

he commences his movie-watching Saturdays

with King Kong, who, on that screen,

amid those shrieks and screams of the crowd

on-screen and in the audience, strides tall

on his island, taller yet as he scales

the uncountable floors of the Empire State.

He had seen cartoon dinosaurs, but those

who try to wrest the Fay Wray-morsel from Kong

are as real as they get, the first taste

of a primal world of eat-and-be-eaten,

smite-or-be-smitten, the first "beware"

of the fate of him who falls for Beauty.

An old poet now, on a far coast, he can, if asked,

recite all the names of the movies he saw there

like a litany, week by week, in double-feature pairs,

as dear to him as the saint days to a medieval monk.

A basement full of surgical failures in The Black Sleep –

first view of an exposed brain a special thrill.

They do that to crazy people in Torrance, he’s told,

skull-top raised up like an egg-cup, brains

poked and stirred around for no more reason

than Let’s see what happens if we do this.

The mute sad butler played by Lugosi was a pathetic sight;

the man who had been Dracula reduced to a doorman.

Rathbone and Carradine, Tamirov and Johnson

the mad doctor and his henchmen and victims.

This double-billed with The Creeping Unknown,

whose alien-microbed astronaut, gaunt and wandering

assimilates all life in its path: men, cacti and lions,

until it oozes octopoid onto the scaffolding

around Westminster Abbey. Fast work

for stalwart scientist Quatermass who rigs

the metalwork with a million volts

from a nearby power plant.

After The Blob he turned inward to his chemistry set

and devised, with his friends, The Boron Monster, a bubbling mess

of boric acid, carbonates, and a medley of insect parts

that festered for two days in a Florence flask, then

made a nocturnal exeunt into the floor drain. For weeks

the four boys of the Kingview Science Club swore they heard it

in house pipes and gurgling drains; one went so far

as to say it raised its white pseudopods when he looked

into the late-night toilet bowl.

                                                    The dreaded Cyclops

from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad seemed as he woke

to stand in silhouette against the bare hill behind his house.

When the garish colors of Curse of Frankenstein

reveled in blood and bosoms, he set up shop

in Caruso’s garage in Keiffertown. Live Monster Show,

the hand-drawn poster said in drip-red lettering

and the children came from all around.

Clothesline and sheet for curtain, old 78

of The Sheik of Araby a Gothic foxtrot,

his fellow fourth-graders no longer chemists

but grease-paint actors: monster and villagers,

doctor and hunchback. Naturally he is the Doctor,

his hands the ones that raise Jell-O brains and send blood

rivulets down the aisles among the screaming girls.

A raincoat, sleeves inverted, can pass for a Dracula cape.

He sends for a mail order course in hypnotism.

They learn the art of mummy-wrapping, green chalk
and Noxema rubbed on torn sheets for coloring,
black powder and kerosene for fires,

dry ice for malevolent Jekyll-Hyde elixirs.

But there’s no keeping up with the Strand and its

accelerating horrors. The bugs have invaded:

ant and tarantula, mantis and locust grown

to the size of locomotives, the dark side

of the atom whose giant-flower mutations

they are taught about on schooldays. They would

all glow in the dark and in perfect health

when Our Friend the Atom was done with them.

After Them! and Tarantula, Beginning of the End,

The Giant Claw, and The Deadly Mantis,

the worst was The Black Scorpion, so horrible,

in fact, that as he watched it open a train

like a sardine can, extract the passengers, then sting

them with its terrible venom before the slow

ascent to the drooling jaws and mandibles, someone

on the balcony vomited a visual melange

of popcorn and orange soda on his brother's shoulders.

Then came Godzilla, a whole new order

of urban destruction and radium-breath:

boys who had never seen a city looked on

as powerlines and factories, gas terminals and seaports,

glass and steel towers, department stores and palaces

were stamped to splinters and rubble

beneath the wayward reptilian scourge

that had nothing to do with eating: Godzilla was hell-rage,

a force that might wipe clean the earth once and forever

of the human infestation.

                                               Godzilla made manifest, too,

in the form of a fat bully on Mulberry Street

who waited to knock the school and library books

from his hands into the nearest snowdrift.

He filled a squirt gun with ammonia and onion juice,

a minor armament since he was studying nuclear fission

and knew a dozen withering curses in Latin.

When the saucers of The Mysterians began airlifting women

to help repopulate a dying world, he was jealous,

dreamt of a gravity beam abduction from his own bed.

Forbidden Planet taught him to embrace the alien:

if left on Altair Four he'd happily join Morbius

in solitary study of the long extinct Krell geniuses;

if taxed enough with unjust bullying, he'd join

the crew of Nemo’s Nautilus: they’d all be sorry

when he sank half the Atlantic fleet or turned

the submarine to starship and beat the Russians to Mars.

He had never been two towns away,

     but he knew the names of the outer planets’ moons.

Small boy in torn shoes and baggy hand-me-downs

sewn from his father's old shirts,

goggle-eyed with wrong glasses, arms full

of comics and all the books he could carry,

he was The Strand's acolyte, its screen and stage

the doorway to a higher reality. No matter

how far he has gone, what written or done,

he is still there, in that seat in Row Three

as the ships land, the invasion commences,

the tentacle comes slowly into focus

at the edge of vision, the branches part

to those two great orbs of The Beast.

He was the one who ran away

     to join the Monsters

          to explore the stars,

haunted, to become the Haunter.

--October 2010 – March 2011

Scottdale, PA

Ode 100 of Hafiz

Adapted from Richard LeGallienne

Just now, without a sign he went away;
Weary he seemed of me — he put on

His garments hurriedly, took up
His workman’s burdens, and was gone.

Gone is he, yet no single kiss
Upon his red lips did I lay,

The glance I stole but briefly – one light
My dim eyes shone upon his face,
And he has gone away.

I strive by many a magic charm
To bring him back; yea, I rehearse

The Koran's wizard chapters, I
Blow upon every verse my obverse spell.

"Never," said he, "will I forsake
My friend and my companion";

True love I gave him in exchange —
Not coin enough — Secretly is he gone
To a place where he has laid up kisses.

"Who loveth me, himself must lose";
So many a time to me he spake;
As though in promise, a proferred trade.

Thus not alone I lose myself,
But him too for his sake.
The dark well of nullness consumes us both.

Proudly he walked the meadows green,
A newly opened rose his face;

Alas! 't was never mine to walk
The meadows of his grace.

Yea, HAFIZ, 't was not even thine
His parting face to look upon,

Nor might thou say farewell to him;
And, HAFIZ, he is gone.

Note: Richard LeGallienne translated a volume of the Odes and Divans of Hafiz in 1903. Published in the terrible shadow of the Oscar Wilde trials, this version of Hafiz concealed the fact that most of Hafiz's fierce love poems were addressed to beautiful young men. I took one of LeGallienne's version, changed the pronouns, and embellished a little in my own manner. The drunk-with-beauty rapture of Hafiz takes on a new dimension when we restore him to his proper frame of mind.