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.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Once A Poet
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.
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
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.
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.
Symphonie Fantastique
This poem answers two questions that came to me from readers. The first was, "Don't you ever write love poems with girls in them?" The second was, "What is your oldest surviving poem?" I started writing some little verses soon after discovering Poe, then, under the guidance of Mrs. Van Kirk, my high school Latin teacher, I composed a few poems in Latin and then translated them into English. One of the Poe-esque poems has survived and is in my "Whippoorwill Road" collection. The other is here.
At age fifteen or so, I was hospitalized for a few days after a nearly-fatal nosebleed. I lost two-and-a-half pints of blood and was declared dead by an intern since I had no pulse while sitting up. After transfusions, I recovered. Sitting in my hospital bed, whose windows faced a cemetery lit up by a steel mill's red glow, I was given a little AM radio, on which I heard the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique for the first time. The radio announcer spelled out the program of this daring 1827 symphony. In the first movement, a young artist falls hopelessly in love, and the music depicts the storm of his passion, and his hopelessness when he isn't noticed. In real life, Berlioz was smitten with Harriet Smithson, an Irish actress who came to Paris to perform in Shakespeare. Of course she played Juliet.
My first "real" poem was written that night: lines written in response to the music and its program. What survives my later editorial destruction is marked as my Opus 16, and only two parts of the five survive. I cast the love affair of the first movement literally, as the starving young student in love with the famous artist. The third movement, when the poet is off in the mountains trying to forget his love, includes imitations of lonely shepherds playing their pipes, interrupted by thunder rolling off the Alpine mountains.
As an "ekphrastic" poem relating impressions of the Berlioz music, I think it conveys that adolescent ardor, so I offer it in response to the challenge question about whether I had any boy-girl love poems that didn't involve witches, goddeses or vampires. I wish that my efforts to describe the "March to the Gallows" and the "Witches' Sabbath" that end the symphony were printable, but they were truly dreadful, consisting of jingling rhymes in very short lines.
[Note since the first posting: I just discovered another revision of this poem that has more details corresponding to the outline of Berlioz' music. Alas, it also includes a grimmer ending to the Pastorale movement, in which our hero decides to go back to Paris and strangle his beloved. Well, that is where Berlioz takes it next, with a March to the Gallows for the hero. The text below is now the expanded, darker version of the poem.]
By the way, I still love the symphony as much as I did then.
So here is young Berlioz, as told by teen-aged Rutherford:
SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE
YOU CAN HEAR THE SYMPHONY IN FULL HERE:
At age fifteen or so, I was hospitalized for a few days after a nearly-fatal nosebleed. I lost two-and-a-half pints of blood and was declared dead by an intern since I had no pulse while sitting up. After transfusions, I recovered. Sitting in my hospital bed, whose windows faced a cemetery lit up by a steel mill's red glow, I was given a little AM radio, on which I heard the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique for the first time. The radio announcer spelled out the program of this daring 1827 symphony. In the first movement, a young artist falls hopelessly in love, and the music depicts the storm of his passion, and his hopelessness when he isn't noticed. In real life, Berlioz was smitten with Harriet Smithson, an Irish actress who came to Paris to perform in Shakespeare. Of course she played Juliet.
My first "real" poem was written that night: lines written in response to the music and its program. What survives my later editorial destruction is marked as my Opus 16, and only two parts of the five survive. I cast the love affair of the first movement literally, as the starving young student in love with the famous artist. The third movement, when the poet is off in the mountains trying to forget his love, includes imitations of lonely shepherds playing their pipes, interrupted by thunder rolling off the Alpine mountains.
As an "ekphrastic" poem relating impressions of the Berlioz music, I think it conveys that adolescent ardor, so I offer it in response to the challenge question about whether I had any boy-girl love poems that didn't involve witches, goddeses or vampires. I wish that my efforts to describe the "March to the Gallows" and the "Witches' Sabbath" that end the symphony were printable, but they were truly dreadful, consisting of jingling rhymes in very short lines.
[Note since the first posting: I just discovered another revision of this poem that has more details corresponding to the outline of Berlioz' music. Alas, it also includes a grimmer ending to the Pastorale movement, in which our hero decides to go back to Paris and strangle his beloved. Well, that is where Berlioz takes it next, with a March to the Gallows for the hero. The text below is now the expanded, darker version of the poem.]
By the way, I still love the symphony as much as I did then.
So here is young Berlioz, as told by teen-aged Rutherford:
SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE
(After the Symphony by Berlioz)
1
First Movement: Dreams, Passions
I did not plan this passion.
Your voice intruded on my consciousness,
its foreign lilt, its strange inflections,
the way your meter’d tongue dropped pearls
of Shakespeare, Poe and Baudelaire,
the way your eyes implored me
as though it were my destiny
to grapple with some hooded Darkness
to win you for myself.
But what am I?
What is my frail embrace
to beauty such as yours?
All eyes are chained to you.
See how the students crave your neck,
the soldiers admire your slender waist,
the old men yearn for your kisses —
an army would not suffice for you!
I am your unknown conqueror.
I am the one who sends you violets,
a myrtle wreath, a sonnet.
Others impress you with jewelry,
offer to garb you in silk and velvet.
I stood at the fringe of the stage door crowd.
Strong ones pressed in toward you--
oh, the broad-shouldered ones,
the lion’s-mane heroes, the uniforms!
I was the shadow at the edge of gas lamp.
You smiled, touched hands,
absorbing their love like a thirsty plant,
rose blush rising on your ivory cheek.
You never noticed me —
not tonight, nor on all the other nights.
But then my heart rose up
a double timpani of triumph.
You entered your carriage,
one hand enfolding a billet doux
(still in its envelope, unread perhaps),
the other protecting a fragile bouquet —
my violets! my violets! oh god,
tonight you will read my poems,
tonight you will know that I love you!
I walk the streets all night,
chilled by the Seine
on half a dozen crossings.
chilled by the Seine
on half a dozen crossings.
I pause before the gray cathedral,
look up into the knowing clouds
that hurtle eastward
to the sunrise.
look up into the knowing clouds
that hurtle eastward
to the sunrise.
The rosette window is dark,
for all the candles
and their attendant prayers
have guttered out.
This night my angel,
good or ill,
is absent. I am resigned.
for all the candles
and their attendant prayers
have guttered out.
This night my angel,
good or ill,
is absent. I am resigned.
The heavens will do nothing.
My words alone shall win you.
My words alone shall win you.
iii
Third Movement: Scene in the Fields
You shepherds, play!
You know not what your fluted night
does to the haunted.
You wind, rising in harmony,
I think you plowed great ships
across some sea,
you tasted salt not of tears only.
Look how you grapple
with the landlocked cedars,
birch staffs taut as ropes,
leaf sails tattering.
The trees snap back, you drown
the frail reed pipes
and rage with your own voice
among the mountain pines.
The shepherds flee. Now double thunder
rolls from peak to valley,
a mournful rumbling
of discontent, as though the gods
had lovers just as oblivious
as she to me.
rolls from peak to valley,
a mournful rumbling
of discontent, as though the gods
had lovers just as oblivious
as she to me.
If these vast and terrible beings
can gain no solace, then what of me?
can gain no solace, then what of me?
Would I were dead and gone, would that
bare earth and unabating wind
outlived me, sole dwellers
of an everlasting night!
If I were left
to wolf and vulture,
to eagle, crow and carrion —
if only these pages
(made orchestral by a hand
unseen that guides my hand!)
to wolf and vulture,
to eagle, crow and carrion —
if only these pages
(made orchestral by a hand
unseen that guides my hand!)
remained, spun down
to the valley, the river, the sea.
to the valley, the river, the sea.
If one day decades hence,
this poem falls from an opened book
into your startled view, or,
passing the concert hall
you hear the corresponding melodies
and discern your name in them,
this poem falls from an opened book
into your startled view, or,
passing the concert hall
you hear the corresponding melodies
and discern your name in them,
would you recall me then,
knowing the one who loved you
knowing the one who loved you
left a bleached skull
on a granite mountain
a heartbeat petrified
into a stony silence
the thunder punctuates?
on a granite mountain
a heartbeat petrified
into a stony silence
the thunder punctuates?
My solitary end is pointless
unless its iron-black pole
can draw you to it.
I will live on, and draw new breath;
I will return to you, unwelcome
as my love has been, not loving,
but as the Messenger of Death.
The pale throat I love,
unless its iron-black pole
can draw you to it.
I will live on, and draw new breath;
I will return to you, unwelcome
as my love has been, not loving,
but as the Messenger of Death.
The pale throat I love,
I will crush beneath my hands.
Hyllus and the Charioteer
Another in my series of poems in the manner of the Greek poet Anakreon. It really takes place in Providence, but that's another story.
Anakreon, to Hyllus:
Last night I followed you, to the foot
of your street, to that Dionysian ruin
where men and youths commingle 'mid
broken columns and pedestals.
I saw you, "virgin” Hyllus
in quadruped surrender
to a popular chariot driver.
I watched and heard it all
from the anonymous shadows:
the brutal, pathetic beauty of it,
the animal moans,
the false starts,
the invoking of gods,
the simultaneous gasps,
the hurried redress of tunic and belt,
the counting out of three small coins,
I almost laughed at how, departing,
you brushed aside my friend Harmodius
with that most wonderful line:
"Only the hand that has held a whip
can ever hold mine!”
Small wonder that I have never possessed you,
slave as I am of scribbling,
more fond of vowels than hard-edged consonants,
my only rod the stylus. How strange
when beauty seeks not its merited worship,
leaving its pedestal for the dust,
kneeling for the promise of certain pain
and its negotiated, small price.
Anakreon, to Hyllus:
Last night I followed you, to the foot
of your street, to that Dionysian ruin
where men and youths commingle 'mid
broken columns and pedestals.
I saw you, "virgin” Hyllus
in quadruped surrender
to a popular chariot driver.
I watched and heard it all
from the anonymous shadows:
the brutal, pathetic beauty of it,
the animal moans,
the false starts,
the invoking of gods,
the simultaneous gasps,
the hurried redress of tunic and belt,
the counting out of three small coins,
I almost laughed at how, departing,
you brushed aside my friend Harmodius
with that most wonderful line:
"Only the hand that has held a whip
can ever hold mine!”
Small wonder that I have never possessed you,
slave as I am of scribbling,
more fond of vowels than hard-edged consonants,
my only rod the stylus. How strange
when beauty seeks not its merited worship,
leaving its pedestal for the dust,
kneeling for the promise of certain pain
and its negotiated, small price.
From A Lost Drinking Song, Attributed to Herakles
A revision of something I wrote in 1994 on a north-bound train. I probably tossed it aside since I was still in my anti-rhyme period. It's perfectly OK for a drinking song to rhyme.
Pound the grape, pour the wine.
The lads will serve us,
the maids will twine
our heads with laurels
and leaves from the vine.
Live and love, fight and die!
The gods will give us
a piece of the sky,
a garland of bright stars
to remember us by.
Pound the grape, pour the wine.
The lads will serve us,
the maids will twine
our heads with laurels
and leaves from the vine.
Live and love, fight and die!
The gods will give us
a piece of the sky,
a garland of bright stars
to remember us by.
The Dead Rose
He bought her the rose as a joke.
After all, he was gay —
she was the frat boys’ tramp
and they had spent all of a night
joking about the ones they’d had
in common.
He didn’t deliver it:
on a perverse whim
he held the rose an extra day.
By the next morning it was
a limp and withered hagbloom,
the petals pale, the nectar dry,
the dust as from a tomb or trashcan
marring its too perfect face.
Would he nurse the thorn
with the blood of his hand?
Would he wet the leaf
with a tear? Not in this life.
He wrapped his sad sigil of mock love
in gaily-colored paper,
added a card
headed Memento amorae,
told her their “grand affair”
was already over:
hence the dead
instead of the living
red rose,
then left it on her doorstep.
Did she weep at the thought of his laughter?
Did he smile at the thought of her tears?
He really only did this
so he could write a poem.
Years later he would think about his callowness.
Finding the poem, he would
destroy it with a shudder.
An irony, since most of the women he knows,
Gothically inclined,
prefer dead roses to living ones
But way back then,
no fraternity boy ever gave her, or him,
a single rose, alive or dead.
After all, he was gay —
she was the frat boys’ tramp
and they had spent all of a night
joking about the ones they’d had
in common.
He didn’t deliver it:
on a perverse whim
he held the rose an extra day.
By the next morning it was
a limp and withered hagbloom,
the petals pale, the nectar dry,
the dust as from a tomb or trashcan
marring its too perfect face.
Would he nurse the thorn
with the blood of his hand?
Would he wet the leaf
with a tear? Not in this life.
He wrapped his sad sigil of mock love
in gaily-colored paper,
added a card
headed Memento amorae,
told her their “grand affair”
was already over:
hence the dead
instead of the living
red rose,
then left it on her doorstep.
Did she weep at the thought of his laughter?
Did he smile at the thought of her tears?
He really only did this
so he could write a poem.
Years later he would think about his callowness.
Finding the poem, he would
destroy it with a shudder.
An irony, since most of the women he knows,
Gothically inclined,
prefer dead roses to living ones
But way back then,
no fraternity boy ever gave her, or him,
a single rose, alive or dead.
Request for a License to Kill:
So many people are so full of rage, and feel so entitled to it. Here's a merry little rant:
REQUEST FOR A LICENSE TO KILL:
Owners of car alarm that will not stop.
Yappy little dogs, on sight.
Dowagers drenched in rose water
who make me sneeze uncontrollably.
Ash-spewing pretzel vendors.
Young men who smoke cigars in public.
Anyone playing hip hop
bass a-thump in a passing car.
The beggar who told me
“You have stolen wealth
in your pockets!”
(me with fifty cents!)
Anyone with a law degree.
Anyone walking a pit bull
(unless it is biting a lawyer).
The unseen passengers of stretch limos
doing who knows what behind tint-glass.
Mimes and clowns, monkeys and poodles.
Anyone with alarming tattoos.
Anything loud in a baby carriage.
Oh, and add to my list
anyone who asks for a license to kill.
REQUEST FOR A LICENSE TO KILL:
Owners of car alarm that will not stop.
Yappy little dogs, on sight.
Dowagers drenched in rose water
who make me sneeze uncontrollably.
Ash-spewing pretzel vendors.
Young men who smoke cigars in public.
Anyone playing hip hop
bass a-thump in a passing car.
The beggar who told me
“You have stolen wealth
in your pockets!”
(me with fifty cents!)
Anyone with a law degree.
Anyone walking a pit bull
(unless it is biting a lawyer).
The unseen passengers of stretch limos
doing who knows what behind tint-glass.
Mimes and clowns, monkeys and poodles.
Anyone with alarming tattoos.
Anything loud in a baby carriage.
Oh, and add to my list
anyone who asks for a license to kill.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Ivan Grozni
Concentration camp monster John Demianiuk was finally convicted of war crimes in Germany. Here is poem I wrote many years ago when he was first exposed, and was living a comfortable life of retirement in Cleveland.
Ivan Grozni,
Tyrant of the Oprichniks
Little Father to the trembling serfs.
Your murders pale, poor Ivan the Terrible,
beside the deeds of a fat old man —
a pensioned auto worker
front porch grandpa in old Cleveland
a beer and pretzel neighbor
picnics and barbecues
ball games on the radio
nodding to sleep before the television.
He is another Ivan, Ivan Grozni,
Ivan the Terrible
lord of Treblinka
counting the days to his
Social Security check,
his numbered entitlement —
As Ivan he numbered his subjects —
gypsies and Jews and misfits,
counted them by the hundred,
gassed them by the thousand,
bookkeeping entries at every
ten thousand mark,
medal from the Fuhrer
for every tenth
of a million exterminated,
numbers on a golden arch of death
Gold watch retirement gift —
good man on the assembly line,
speedy with wrench and rivet —
how many cars did he finish?
A mere few thousand, maybe,
nothing to match
the nine hundred thousand
he prodded in
through the one-way door.
He understood efficiency.
Their slouching gait
from off the boxcars
not fast enough,
he whipped and prodded,
maimed and mowed down
the laggards and lame ones.
(His fat hands picked out
the defective bolts,
dropped them to bin —
nobody’s business where
they went — )
Tried for his crimes
he rallies his wife and family,
hires an attorney to fight
this case of mistaken identity.
He smiles at the battered old Jews
who say they remember him,
call him the Beast of Treblinka,
waves to the courtroom audience
and says in Hebrew — I am innocent.
I am not Ivan the Terrible.
Yet who are these ghosts
that crowd the air,
clotting the room with accusation?
Who are these legion whisperers,
nine tenths of a million strong
chanting like monks at a Tsar’s interment
singing like bells of monotonous iron
one steeple truth in a landscape of lies:
Ivan .... Ivan .... Ivan Grozni.
Ivan Grozni,
Tyrant of the Oprichniks
Little Father to the trembling serfs.
Your murders pale, poor Ivan the Terrible,
beside the deeds of a fat old man —
a pensioned auto worker
front porch grandpa in old Cleveland
a beer and pretzel neighbor
picnics and barbecues
ball games on the radio
nodding to sleep before the television.
He is another Ivan, Ivan Grozni,
Ivan the Terrible
lord of Treblinka
counting the days to his
Social Security check,
his numbered entitlement —
As Ivan he numbered his subjects —
gypsies and Jews and misfits,
counted them by the hundred,
gassed them by the thousand,
bookkeeping entries at every
ten thousand mark,
medal from the Fuhrer
for every tenth
of a million exterminated,
numbers on a golden arch of death
Gold watch retirement gift —
good man on the assembly line,
speedy with wrench and rivet —
how many cars did he finish?
A mere few thousand, maybe,
nothing to match
the nine hundred thousand
he prodded in
through the one-way door.
He understood efficiency.
Their slouching gait
from off the boxcars
not fast enough,
he whipped and prodded,
maimed and mowed down
the laggards and lame ones.
(His fat hands picked out
the defective bolts,
dropped them to bin —
nobody’s business where
they went — )
Tried for his crimes
he rallies his wife and family,
hires an attorney to fight
this case of mistaken identity.
He smiles at the battered old Jews
who say they remember him,
call him the Beast of Treblinka,
waves to the courtroom audience
and says in Hebrew — I am innocent.
I am not Ivan the Terrible.
Yet who are these ghosts
that crowd the air,
clotting the room with accusation?
Who are these legion whisperers,
nine tenths of a million strong
chanting like monks at a Tsar’s interment
singing like bells of monotonous iron
one steeple truth in a landscape of lies:
Ivan .... Ivan .... Ivan Grozni.
Regaining the Muse
With gratitude to the Muse, who has granted me, in the last two months, the greatest burst of new poems and revisions...
Silent this voice for more than a year!
My head now bowed with other laurels,
I am back to poetry and its finer lyre.
Time and this book alone
shall tell if I am stronger now —
or if the shining, word-wise daemon,
whose gaze and beckoning
I shunned and spurned
like the advances of a rasping crone,
shall now return to guide my pen.
Muse! come to the window I deck as of old
with that solitary flame that you alone can see!
Here the paper, here the pale blue lines,
the furrows I plow again with fountain pen;
bones, rock & root the silences
I move away to plant a newer crop:
sonnets to scrape the bellies of clouds,
elegies whose solemn tears
tap roots into the strata of dinosaurs,
lyric sprouts that will contain whole languages.
Beware my harvest, for dragon's teeth
lurk in the words I plant today!
The Muse will take me back.
Have I not given everything
to consecrate myself to her? Like all
who serve poetry I gave my youth,
heedless of age’s hunger and need.
I gave her blood, though she in turn
could never give me bread! Look at me:
the scribbling thing I am,
addict of adverb and adjective,
drunkard of Orphic utterance,
I am what she made me.
Silent this voice for more than a year!
My head now bowed with other laurels,
I am back to poetry and its finer lyre.
Time and this book alone
shall tell if I am stronger now —
or if the shining, word-wise daemon,
whose gaze and beckoning
I shunned and spurned
like the advances of a rasping crone,
shall now return to guide my pen.
Muse! come to the window I deck as of old
with that solitary flame that you alone can see!
Here the paper, here the pale blue lines,
the furrows I plow again with fountain pen;
bones, rock & root the silences
I move away to plant a newer crop:
sonnets to scrape the bellies of clouds,
elegies whose solemn tears
tap roots into the strata of dinosaurs,
lyric sprouts that will contain whole languages.
Beware my harvest, for dragon's teeth
lurk in the words I plant today!
The Muse will take me back.
Have I not given everything
to consecrate myself to her? Like all
who serve poetry I gave my youth,
heedless of age’s hunger and need.
I gave her blood, though she in turn
could never give me bread! Look at me:
the scribbling thing I am,
addict of adverb and adjective,
drunkard of Orphic utterance,
I am what she made me.
An Expectation of Presences
This is a new revision of a poem written in the pioneer graveyard in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, a place where ghosts ought to, but do not, appear.
"To die is far different from what
anyone supposed...and luckier."
-- Walt Whitman
This gravesite, phantomless, does not appease
my walk -- not for myself alone
have I come, but in an expectation
of presences drawn forth like tides
from that alluring moon, to sit
and hear the chattering of ghosts
for the dead must have many songs to sing:
their dire complaints, their unrequited loves,
their broken oaths, their bony fists
clenched in the earth for some unsweet revenge;
their pleas that some neglected deed be done
to free them from a wormy pilgrimage;
their wry requests to know what souls
once famed to them, now call such pits
a hearth. But here’s no tombly talk;
none but a nightbird and a tapping branch
reply to my arcane soliloquy.
My eyes, as keen
for darkness as those of an owl,
spy nothing; my ears, keen
almost to the ultrasonic,
hear nothing but the bird-stir
and the limestone lap of lakebed.
Where are the ghosts?
These peaceful dead, this tranquil town
sleep far too well reposed.
Doubts do not stalk
these penny plots, no killers wring
remorseful hands, not one protesting atheist
is doomed to somnambulist stumbling.
Can it be
that in their simple times
(the whole of the 1800s buried here!)
mere faith
could be a perfect opiate,
that life within a wall of hymns
led to this silent, dreamless death?
Ah, so they die, who believe in Death,
they never rise, who sell their souls
into a cleric's dull paradise;
they never fly, who think their wings
are promises, to be attached
in worlds not one can wake to see.
O fraud of frauds, and no recourse:
no lawyer can sue an evangelist.
Yet in my heart of hearts I wish
for ghosts. For here is the depth
of all possible woe --
to leave nothing behind.
Nothing to strain against stars
from the haunted tips of trees;
nothing to drift like summer heat
and catch a gable's underside;
nothing to gust from cellar doors
or brood with the trunks in the attic;
nothing to serve as a core for leaves
as they fly in autumn deviltry;
no remnant left to walk the town,
no shadow over the bed, no chill
or mystery for the nervous ones--
those living yet
who think they see the dead --
to be lost from the hands of conjurers,
not even a gleam, a shard
of phosphorescent ooze?
Oh, no, if the choice be
God’s heaven or earth-bound ghost,
I'll keep my anchorage to moonlit nights,
take deed to swamps and vacant lots,
turn houses to renounced estates
abandoned to fright's hostelry;
sunbathe on monuments,
dance wild in summer thunderstorms.
Then, I shall wait for the night
when a dreaming poet comes
to my scarcely-legible tombstone,
mad as myself, my laughing heir.
What things I shall whisper
into his modern, doubting, skeptical
ear, as I reach out ...
and take his hand.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Hephaistion and Alexander
Written many years before "Brokeback Mountain," here's my poem about two men in a tent. One of them is Alexander the Great, the other is his boyfriend Hephaistion. These are not sheep herders in Montana: they are soldiers at the dawn before a great battle. Jared Leto (above) played Hephaistion in the 1994 film, but to me he looks more like Jesus than a Greek warrior.
Sleepless Hephaistion
is watching the dawn
steal gold from Alexander's hair —
the dozing god for whom a globe
gave way, high on a rock,
asleep, their tent a sail to catch
the suneast rising.
Soon horns will stir the troops
into another march. All eyes
will be on the Macedonian boy
for his commands. Nations
lay by their futile defense
topple their deities,
Persia and Babylon supine
as women eager for conquering,
Asia and the scented Chin of Flowers,
and many-templed India
waiting for his aegis in temple dance
of preordained surrender.
Empire may steal him again for a day,
a bride may blush at his summoning
to seal another chain to Macedon--¬-
but night will bring him back
(so dreams Hephaistion,
his hand upon unarmoured breast,
his lips upon the unscarred neck,
his eyes awash in godgold curls)
Since jealous gods listen,
he cannot say “I love you”
to the earth’s emperor.
All he can do is whisper
to his own inner listener:
He’ll meld the world into a ball,
repeople it with Hellene rule,
journey it from Atlantean to Eastern Sea--¬
yet all he is
and owns are mine!
Empire enough,
this naked conqueror
my arms enfold to heartdrum pulse.
Reft of the joy of being god,
it is enough
to possess one.
Quand il pleut, il pleut des financiers
(Men in bowler hats descend from the clouds in Magritte’s painting, “Golconde”)
America, awake! Last night Connecticut
suffered a fall of financiers, precipitate
from aerial fleets unseen and traceable
to nowhere on or in the globe.
At dawn a gray cascade
of overcoats and bowler hats
commenced, each agent replete
with tie and unscuffed shoes,
each with a grim and businesslike
demeanor -- a few, with executive
gray sideburns, clasped briefs
full of significant business plans
and letters of unlimited credit.
Only a few insomniacs
witnessed this chute des etrangers,
silent as dew and just as discreet,
without a flutter of parachute,
without a crease in the perfect lawns.
The anti- Newtonian host
walked with deliberate speed
to the waiting commuter trains
from whence they vanished
unnoticed into Wall Street,
courthouse and brokerage,
library and chapel, gone --
gone and never seen again!
Imposters! Who knows what plots
they hatched in their resemblance
to no one at all! Within days the banks
were belching loans; the wives at home
had well-dressed afternoon lovers;
dogs stood confused at whom to heel
or whom to bar from the kitchen door.
The birth rate rose astonishingly,
as featureless babies that refused to cry
swamped the suburban nurseries.
And this was just the start: the cloud
that made them was but a wisp
of a much larger storm, forging
its turgid thunder into an army
of Nobodies, incurable bores
intent on crowding out everyone
who’s read a book or has an opinion.
Their secret handshakes and nods,
the curious little lapel pins
that your eyes can’t focus on,
the sinister stripes on their ties
not corresponding to any known school
or regiment; the half-wink
they seem to use to greet one another,
smirking at others’ exclusion:
these were the symptoms, alien
and alienating. There were more
like them with each passing month.
The “suits,”
as they called themselves, were here to stay.
As for the rest of us, we
were merged and acquired,
outsourced, down-sized,
shown to the door by security,
pension-plundered,
rezoned, foreclosed,
eminent-domained, evicted,
bankrupted and down-debited,
rust belt trailer park shantied –
just as it was planned
in their spreadsheets,
forecast in their Powerpoint
laptop PDA wireless
global master plan.
We were only here
to serve the Nobodies
on their road to acquiring
Absolutely Everything.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Prometheus on Fifth Avenue
This is one of the first poems I wrote on arriving in New York City many years ago. Its early versions were a little imprecise: I think it is sharper and clearer in this revision. St. Patrick's Cathedral was then a soot-covered haven of religiosity, and I loved the gilded paganism of Prometheus as the antithesis to Jesus -- both suffered, but Prometheus suffered for a purpose and requires no sacrifices or groveling on our part. I was quite besotted with Shelley at this point, so the rebellious spirit of "Prometheus Unbound" is here too. I would come back to this story just a few years ago with my longish poem "Prometheus Chained."
One kind of hero draws no veils,
no fainting ladies, hides not
in St. Patrick’s, binds no virgins
to their rosaries,
shuns candles and goes naked
down Fifth Avenue.
Bronze fleshed, he walks
unnoticed, sees the morning
flush of fire on windows half-mile high,
ignored by cold-eyed men,
oblivious girls, the passing eyes in
buses bent on headlines, paperbacks.
At the peak of mob-time, he stops.
He and the sun flash gold together.
Here’s Rockefeller Center.
Above a pagan tree a-lit with lights,
atop an ice rink decked with world-flags
he is astonished to see himself.
One gleaming statue rises, words
in stone to celebrate Prometheus
are carved behind/
Two gaudy spinsters
cross the plaza, way to Mass. One frowns
at the sculpture’s nakedness, its leap
from earth to challenge the heavens.
“I think it’s not heroic at all,
why put that nude and vulgar carving
right over our beautiful Christmas tree?
I mean, if it’s a god, isn’t a god
supposed to suffer?”
“He has always been there, my dear,”
the platinum harpy rejoined,
“That’s Saint Prome-something.
They nailed him good, right onto a rock,
left him for birds in the sun.”
“How dreadful!
Then he died?”
“I think he suffered a very long time.”
“Why, why?”
“Why?”
“Why did he?
What did he do?”
“He died for someone’s
sins, I’m sure. Just like Jesus. I read it all
in The Book of Saints, with the Sisters.
There’s just no other way to be a hero.”
“Saint Prome? Saint Prome? I think it’s
coming back to me now, Matilda.
I think they named an orphan’s home or —”
Running, he
fled the place, flew on a swift wind
to Caucasus, climbed the purple mountain,
stood high on a snowcap, blasted by wind,
greeted the deathless vengeance of Zeus, hurled
himself from cliff to cliff, rose unwounded,
cursed, crying the wrath of the last hero.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Water Music I
You flow. You do not understand.
The spring has eked you out of the earth.
You fell from the storm, you barely coalesced
before the journey began.
A gust of wind from a cloud’s dead eye
blew you onto the clay of the north.
You roll downhill, impelled by gravity,
jostled by roots, inhaling minerals,
fall to a pond, where spawn of frogs
grope in the eye of batrachian sun.
At the end — a hesitant stream.
The grass barely parts in your path.
By noon, you have come to the lake,
your flow anonymous, your voice
a cancellation of wave forms.
You fear you are the plaything of the world,
toy of a god
whose cruelty is your solitude.
You flow, you do not understand.
You cannot feel your strength,
your shoulders against a dam,
your spirit overtopping barriers.
You are insensible of reeds, of rust,
the thrust of fish, the wear of shore,
the notes you leave on agate.
Do you know you are incompressible —
that steel would split
before it would compact you,
that your ice can rend the hull of a ship?
Do you know you are the stuff of comets,
emblazoned by sunlight,
your tail as long as the gap between planets?
Do you know you are going South?
How far you have come you cannot comprehend.
You do not know who awaits you!
The spring has eked you out of the earth.
You fell from the storm, you barely coalesced
before the journey began.
A gust of wind from a cloud’s dead eye
blew you onto the clay of the north.
You roll downhill, impelled by gravity,
jostled by roots, inhaling minerals,
fall to a pond, where spawn of frogs
grope in the eye of batrachian sun.
At the end — a hesitant stream.
The grass barely parts in your path.
By noon, you have come to the lake,
your flow anonymous, your voice
a cancellation of wave forms.
You fear you are the plaything of the world,
toy of a god
whose cruelty is your solitude.
You flow, you do not understand.
You cannot feel your strength,
your shoulders against a dam,
your spirit overtopping barriers.
You are insensible of reeds, of rust,
the thrust of fish, the wear of shore,
the notes you leave on agate.
Do you know you are incompressible —
that steel would split
before it would compact you,
that your ice can rend the hull of a ship?
Do you know you are the stuff of comets,
emblazoned by sunlight,
your tail as long as the gap between planets?
Do you know you are going South?
How far you have come you cannot comprehend.
You do not know who awaits you!
Sunday, May 22, 2011
End of the World, or Let's "Rapture" Everybody
Quite a few years back, I read a Christian comic book that depicted "The Rapture," and found it hilarious. That prompted this poem, the 21st in my "Anniversarius" autumn cycle, in which a Universal Rapture occurs on an autumn Monday morning:
Not with a trumpet
but a whisper. No angels
proclaimed the end. Prophets
with sandwich signs
did not predict it.
No tea-leaf ladies
or noted astrologers
knew that the end would come
at half-past eight
in the morning.
It was a Monday,
(of all days!)
catching them dressed
for their funerals.
Who would have guessed
that this October,
instead of leaves
the people turned
and blew away,
that gravity,
the faithful plodder,
would take a holiday?
First some commuters
on a platform in Connecticut
fell straight into a cloudless sky
trying to hook
to lampposts and poles
with flailing arms.
Even the oversize stationmaster
was not immune,
hung by his fingertips
to shingled roof,
an upside-down balloon.
His wig fell down,
the rest of him
shot shrieking upwards.
Slumlords in Brooklyn
dropped rent receipts,
clutched hearts and wallets
as they exfoliated,
burst into red and umber explosions
and flapped away.
A Senator stepped down
from his bulletproof limo,
waved to the waiting lobbyist,
(sweaty with suitcase
full of hundreds)
only to wither to leaf-brown dust,
crumbling within his overcoat.
Stockbrokers adjusted their power ties,
buttoned their monogrammed blazers,
pushed one another from narrow ledge
falling from Wall Street precipice
into the waiting sky,
printouts and ticker tapes,
class rings and credit cards
feathering back down.
Bankers turned yellow,
wisped out like willow leaf
from crumpled pin-stripe,
filling the air
with streamers of vomit
as they passed the roof
of the World Trade Center.
The colors were amazing:
black women turned ivory,
white men turned brown and sere,
athletes swelled up
to fuchsia puffballs,
Chinese unfurled
to weightless jade umbrellas.
Winds plucked the babies from carriages,
oozed them out of nurseries,
pulled them from delivery rooms,
from the very womb--
gone on the first wind out and upwards.
They filled the stratosphere
darkened the jet stream,
too frail to settle in orbit,
drifting to airless space.
They fell at last into the maw
of the black hole Harvester,
a gibbering god
who made a bonfire
of the human host
the whirling spiral of skeletons
a rainbow of dead colors
red and yellow and black and brown
albino and ivory
parched-leaf skins a naked tumble.
The bare earth sighed.
Pigeons took roost in palaces.
Tree roots began
the penetration of concrete.
Rats walked the noonday market.
Wild dogs patrolled
the shopping malls.
Wind licked at broken panes.
A corporate logo toppled
from its ziggurat.
Lightning jabbed down
at the arrogant churches
abandoned schools
mansions unoccupied
started a firestorm
a casual fire
as unconcerned
as that unfriendly shrug
that cleaned the planet.
Not with a trumpet
but a whisper. No angels
proclaimed the end. Prophets
with sandwich signs
did not predict it.
No tea-leaf ladies
or noted astrologers
knew that the end would come
at half-past eight
in the morning.
It was a Monday,
(of all days!)
catching them dressed
for their funerals.
Who would have guessed
that this October,
instead of leaves
the people turned
and blew away,
that gravity,
the faithful plodder,
would take a holiday?
First some commuters
on a platform in Connecticut
fell straight into a cloudless sky
trying to hook
to lampposts and poles
with flailing arms.
Even the oversize stationmaster
was not immune,
hung by his fingertips
to shingled roof,
an upside-down balloon.
His wig fell down,
the rest of him
shot shrieking upwards.
Slumlords in Brooklyn
dropped rent receipts,
clutched hearts and wallets
as they exfoliated,
burst into red and umber explosions
and flapped away.
A Senator stepped down
from his bulletproof limo,
waved to the waiting lobbyist,
(sweaty with suitcase
full of hundreds)
only to wither to leaf-brown dust,
crumbling within his overcoat.
Stockbrokers adjusted their power ties,
buttoned their monogrammed blazers,
pushed one another from narrow ledge
falling from Wall Street precipice
into the waiting sky,
printouts and ticker tapes,
class rings and credit cards
feathering back down.
Bankers turned yellow,
wisped out like willow leaf
from crumpled pin-stripe,
filling the air
with streamers of vomit
as they passed the roof
of the World Trade Center.
The colors were amazing:
black women turned ivory,
white men turned brown and sere,
athletes swelled up
to fuchsia puffballs,
Chinese unfurled
to weightless jade umbrellas.
Winds plucked the babies from carriages,
oozed them out of nurseries,
pulled them from delivery rooms,
from the very womb--
gone on the first wind out and upwards.
They filled the stratosphere
darkened the jet stream,
too frail to settle in orbit,
drifting to airless space.
They fell at last into the maw
of the black hole Harvester,
a gibbering god
who made a bonfire
of the human host
the whirling spiral of skeletons
a rainbow of dead colors
red and yellow and black and brown
albino and ivory
parched-leaf skins a naked tumble.
The bare earth sighed.
Pigeons took roost in palaces.
Tree roots began
the penetration of concrete.
Rats walked the noonday market.
Wild dogs patrolled
the shopping malls.
Wind licked at broken panes.
A corporate logo toppled
from its ziggurat.
Lightning jabbed down
at the arrogant churches
abandoned schools
mansions unoccupied
started a firestorm
a casual fire
as unconcerned
as that unfriendly shrug
that cleaned the planet.
Gutenberg and His Bible: A Review
I was pleased to see that Janet Ing's intriguing chapbook on Gutenberg and His Bible is still available at Amazon
This is the text of a review I wrote when the little book first came out:
Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about Johann Gutenberg, yet what we actually know about the shadowy inventor of movable type can fit readily into a slender volume.
Janet Ing has a bone to pick with Gutenberg scholars, and she picks at it with grace and erudition in a beautiful new volume in The Typophiles Chapbook Series.
In a modest 154 small pages, the author recounts the sparse history of Gutenberg. At the same time she deflates the wordy effusions of scholars who borrowed well into mental deficit on intuition and guesswork, choosing instead to rely on hard facts. Most important of all, she reviews in clear, precise terms the latest scientific analysis of Gutenberg Bible pages, in which proton beams from a cyclotron were used to study the ink in which the text was printed.
Paul Needham, in an introduction to Dr. Ing’s succinct work, describes the new book as one good for "clearing away the unruly undergrowth" of previous writings on Gutenberg.
Reading the scant biographical details of our printing forefather, it is easy to see how students and scholars, not to mention popular writers of history and fiction, would tend to fill in data based on fancy, inspiration-even a healthy dose of imagination.
It's almost impossible even to paraphrase the outline of Gutenberg's life without interpolating particulars. We take our own knowledge of human nature, our own experience in how printing gets done on a day-to-day basis-and, voila! we think we have a sense of the man, his shop, his problems, and his ambitions.
Dr. Ing tries to combat this romanticizing of Gutenberg, largely the result of works written since the 19th century. History nearly forgot this patient craftsman, who first gained notice in 1438 or 1439 as a manufacturer of "spirit mirrors," mirrored badges worn by pilgrims to Rome. It is speculated that Gutenberg developed a way to mass produce them using a "press" and that he may have gained some of his familiarity with the properties of alloyed metals while engaged in this work. One thing is certain-he had partners in the venture who sued him to get their money back because they were impatient for results.
We can almost see the steadfast tinkerer in his workshop, perhaps examining some reverse die used to emboss a pattern on the pilgrim badges, fiddling with molds and trying new alloys of lead, mixing his own inks out of carbon and lead and sulfur. The smell of brimstone might even have brought a few whispers of alchemy or sorcery from the old wives of Mainz!
We can imagine the "Eureka!" moment when Johann cast a complete word or line of type and then inked the backwards letters to produce a proof.
What Was His Vision?
Then, just as Edison envisioned a world ablaze with electric light, Gutenberg saw the printed book. First, the Bibles would pour forth so that every person capable of reading could see the word of God with his own eyes.
Did he imagine that printing art would one day topple the intellectual and moral monopoly of the Church of Rome! Or that pamphlets and books from presses would eventually undermine monarchies and establish a new nation across the Atlantic? Or that the printer and publisher would gain incredible freedom and power in shaping opinion and spreading knowledge!
You see what we mean about the inclination to elaborate! We are Gutenberg's great-great-whatever-grandchildren. We want Gutenberg to be a visionary-an Edison or Einstein. Or we want him to be an inspired perfectionist, like Bach with his Art of the Fugue or Stradivarius with his violins.
Back to the Facts
Dr. lng, however, brings us squarely back to the facts of the matter. We have, she assures us, no single insight into the mind of Gutenberg other than testimony by or about him given when Johann Fust, a Mainz money- broker, sued Gutenberg to. get back his investment in Gutenberg's venture, referred to cryptically as "the work of the books." This was in 1455, and it is generally agreed that the lawsuit brought Gutenberg to the point of insolvency if not bankruptcy. Somehow, though, Gutenberg seems to have stayed in business well into the 1460s.
Johann Fust took in a partner, one Scheffer, who became his son-in-law, starting a printing dynasty that later claimed to have "invented" printing.
One of the most fascinating parts of the early printing story has 'been the detective work that led scholars to de¬cide which early Bible came first, the 36-line (per page) Bible or the 42-line Bible. Dr. Ing joins those who favor the 42-line Bible. She reproduces passages that show convincingly how a typositor for the 36-line Bible made an error that could be based only on reading a printed copy of the 42-line Bible. (It's all a matter of the final words of one chapter tucked into the end of the first line of the next.)
The author narrates with clarity and a sense of excitement how scholars have gradually learned more and more about how the Bible was printed. This is real detective work, since no one knows how many presses were used or how many typositors were employed. All conclusions have to be made from examining the extant Bibles in museums and collections, and from pages preserved from Bibles broken up and sold in pieces.
AAs We’ve Had Always with Us
As if this weren’t complex enough, the first job by the world’s first printer had “Author's Alterations”!
Less than a quarter of the way into production, Gutenberg increased the print run from about 124 copies to perhaps as many as 167 copies (paper and vellum editions combined, based on estimates by Paul Needham). This change forced them to reset part of the Bible, and to buy additional paper of a different watermark that had to be cleverly insinuated throughout the press run.
Recent analysis by proton beam of the highly variable ink has even made it possible to determine which sheets were printed from the same batch of ink. This, combined with examination of watermarks, has provided many pieces of the "how did he do it?" puzzle.
Dr. Ing speculates that Gutenberg probably operated a second shop for the printing of papal indulgences, calendars, and other ephemera. Would he have called this "Johann's Augenblicklich Incunabula Shop," we wonder?) Type from both the 42-line and 36-line Bibles appears in these early specimens.
Nearly Forgotten
Why did we almost lose the name of Gutenberg altogether? Johann Gutenberg died a mere 12 years after the lawsuit. Fust and Scheffer continued, and their successors dominated the local market. Early colophons and notes about printing credited Fust. Even Erasmus made the, mistake, but not without encouragement from eager salesmen from the Fust printing family.
Apparently some of Gutenberg's own apprentices, who doubtless went to other cities to found their own printing dynasties, got the word out. The fatherhood of the printing art became disputed, and even though Fust or other early printers still have their adherents, the name of Gutenberg has finally triumphed. Whoever said that history is written by the victors was wrong — history is written by the survivors. The unterhund [underdog] will become the uberhund thanks to the very press Gutenberg invented.
Behind the Mask
Obscure as the figure of Gutenberg is in this carefully researched book, we see ample evidence that old Johann was a diligent craftsman, a perfectionist who accepted no compromise in striving to make printing look like fine calligraphy.
Have you ever reflected on the incredible accomplishment of Gutenberg’s work — how it is that the first book ever printed came out as a breathtaking masterpiece? The magnitude of the task set before him explains all too well his backers’ impatience and the resulting lawsuit. Human nature was the same then as now, and the first printer already knew how to say, “Call me tomorrow — ¬the job is on the press!”
Early Linecasting
One of the most tantalizing portions of Johann Gutenberg and His Bible is a later chapter called “Gutenberg and Other Early Printing.” Here Dr. Ing traces a dictionary called the Catholicon, printed with Gutenberg’s type and quite likely with his participation, in editions between 1460 and 1467.
Dr. Ing discusses the startling theory that standing type was kept for seven years on this book, which was reprinted several times. An examination of the printing, including some two-line segments that were mixed up, suggests very strongly that Gutenberg developed a way to cast blocks of type in two-line “slugs,” which could be easily reassembled and locked up for a reprint.
If this suggestion is correct, it's not hard to see the hand and mind of Gutenberg at work. Even to the end, he was seeking a way to economize and gain even further efficiency. We can see him setting two lines of type by hand in a chase, making a mold from them, and then casting and trimming two-line slugs. This makes him the inventor of linecasting and a precursor of Mergenthaler!
This is the text of a review I wrote when the little book first came out:
Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about Johann Gutenberg, yet what we actually know about the shadowy inventor of movable type can fit readily into a slender volume.
Janet Ing has a bone to pick with Gutenberg scholars, and she picks at it with grace and erudition in a beautiful new volume in The Typophiles Chapbook Series.
In a modest 154 small pages, the author recounts the sparse history of Gutenberg. At the same time she deflates the wordy effusions of scholars who borrowed well into mental deficit on intuition and guesswork, choosing instead to rely on hard facts. Most important of all, she reviews in clear, precise terms the latest scientific analysis of Gutenberg Bible pages, in which proton beams from a cyclotron were used to study the ink in which the text was printed.
Paul Needham, in an introduction to Dr. Ing’s succinct work, describes the new book as one good for "clearing away the unruly undergrowth" of previous writings on Gutenberg.
Reading the scant biographical details of our printing forefather, it is easy to see how students and scholars, not to mention popular writers of history and fiction, would tend to fill in data based on fancy, inspiration-even a healthy dose of imagination.
It's almost impossible even to paraphrase the outline of Gutenberg's life without interpolating particulars. We take our own knowledge of human nature, our own experience in how printing gets done on a day-to-day basis-and, voila! we think we have a sense of the man, his shop, his problems, and his ambitions.
Dr. Ing tries to combat this romanticizing of Gutenberg, largely the result of works written since the 19th century. History nearly forgot this patient craftsman, who first gained notice in 1438 or 1439 as a manufacturer of "spirit mirrors," mirrored badges worn by pilgrims to Rome. It is speculated that Gutenberg developed a way to mass produce them using a "press" and that he may have gained some of his familiarity with the properties of alloyed metals while engaged in this work. One thing is certain-he had partners in the venture who sued him to get their money back because they were impatient for results.
We can almost see the steadfast tinkerer in his workshop, perhaps examining some reverse die used to emboss a pattern on the pilgrim badges, fiddling with molds and trying new alloys of lead, mixing his own inks out of carbon and lead and sulfur. The smell of brimstone might even have brought a few whispers of alchemy or sorcery from the old wives of Mainz!
We can imagine the "Eureka!" moment when Johann cast a complete word or line of type and then inked the backwards letters to produce a proof.
What Was His Vision?
Then, just as Edison envisioned a world ablaze with electric light, Gutenberg saw the printed book. First, the Bibles would pour forth so that every person capable of reading could see the word of God with his own eyes.
Did he imagine that printing art would one day topple the intellectual and moral monopoly of the Church of Rome! Or that pamphlets and books from presses would eventually undermine monarchies and establish a new nation across the Atlantic? Or that the printer and publisher would gain incredible freedom and power in shaping opinion and spreading knowledge!
You see what we mean about the inclination to elaborate! We are Gutenberg's great-great-whatever-grandchildren. We want Gutenberg to be a visionary-an Edison or Einstein. Or we want him to be an inspired perfectionist, like Bach with his Art of the Fugue or Stradivarius with his violins.
Back to the Facts
Dr. lng, however, brings us squarely back to the facts of the matter. We have, she assures us, no single insight into the mind of Gutenberg other than testimony by or about him given when Johann Fust, a Mainz money- broker, sued Gutenberg to. get back his investment in Gutenberg's venture, referred to cryptically as "the work of the books." This was in 1455, and it is generally agreed that the lawsuit brought Gutenberg to the point of insolvency if not bankruptcy. Somehow, though, Gutenberg seems to have stayed in business well into the 1460s.
Johann Fust took in a partner, one Scheffer, who became his son-in-law, starting a printing dynasty that later claimed to have "invented" printing.
One of the most fascinating parts of the early printing story has 'been the detective work that led scholars to de¬cide which early Bible came first, the 36-line (per page) Bible or the 42-line Bible. Dr. Ing joins those who favor the 42-line Bible. She reproduces passages that show convincingly how a typositor for the 36-line Bible made an error that could be based only on reading a printed copy of the 42-line Bible. (It's all a matter of the final words of one chapter tucked into the end of the first line of the next.)
The author narrates with clarity and a sense of excitement how scholars have gradually learned more and more about how the Bible was printed. This is real detective work, since no one knows how many presses were used or how many typositors were employed. All conclusions have to be made from examining the extant Bibles in museums and collections, and from pages preserved from Bibles broken up and sold in pieces.
AAs We’ve Had Always with Us
As if this weren’t complex enough, the first job by the world’s first printer had “Author's Alterations”!
Less than a quarter of the way into production, Gutenberg increased the print run from about 124 copies to perhaps as many as 167 copies (paper and vellum editions combined, based on estimates by Paul Needham). This change forced them to reset part of the Bible, and to buy additional paper of a different watermark that had to be cleverly insinuated throughout the press run.
Recent analysis by proton beam of the highly variable ink has even made it possible to determine which sheets were printed from the same batch of ink. This, combined with examination of watermarks, has provided many pieces of the "how did he do it?" puzzle.
Dr. Ing speculates that Gutenberg probably operated a second shop for the printing of papal indulgences, calendars, and other ephemera. Would he have called this "Johann's Augenblicklich Incunabula Shop," we wonder?) Type from both the 42-line and 36-line Bibles appears in these early specimens.
Nearly Forgotten
Why did we almost lose the name of Gutenberg altogether? Johann Gutenberg died a mere 12 years after the lawsuit. Fust and Scheffer continued, and their successors dominated the local market. Early colophons and notes about printing credited Fust. Even Erasmus made the, mistake, but not without encouragement from eager salesmen from the Fust printing family.
Apparently some of Gutenberg's own apprentices, who doubtless went to other cities to found their own printing dynasties, got the word out. The fatherhood of the printing art became disputed, and even though Fust or other early printers still have their adherents, the name of Gutenberg has finally triumphed. Whoever said that history is written by the victors was wrong — history is written by the survivors. The unterhund [underdog] will become the uberhund thanks to the very press Gutenberg invented.
Behind the Mask
Obscure as the figure of Gutenberg is in this carefully researched book, we see ample evidence that old Johann was a diligent craftsman, a perfectionist who accepted no compromise in striving to make printing look like fine calligraphy.
Have you ever reflected on the incredible accomplishment of Gutenberg’s work — how it is that the first book ever printed came out as a breathtaking masterpiece? The magnitude of the task set before him explains all too well his backers’ impatience and the resulting lawsuit. Human nature was the same then as now, and the first printer already knew how to say, “Call me tomorrow — ¬the job is on the press!”
Early Linecasting
One of the most tantalizing portions of Johann Gutenberg and His Bible is a later chapter called “Gutenberg and Other Early Printing.” Here Dr. Ing traces a dictionary called the Catholicon, printed with Gutenberg’s type and quite likely with his participation, in editions between 1460 and 1467.
Dr. Ing discusses the startling theory that standing type was kept for seven years on this book, which was reprinted several times. An examination of the printing, including some two-line segments that were mixed up, suggests very strongly that Gutenberg developed a way to cast blocks of type in two-line “slugs,” which could be easily reassembled and locked up for a reprint.
If this suggestion is correct, it's not hard to see the hand and mind of Gutenberg at work. Even to the end, he was seeking a way to economize and gain even further efficiency. We can see him setting two lines of type by hand in a chase, making a mold from them, and then casting and trimming two-line slugs. This makes him the inventor of linecasting and a precursor of Mergenthaler!
Friday, May 20, 2011
Dawn
He thinks: if someone could describe this scene,
it would be stark and simple, a blond-haired man
leans forward on a folding chair. The air is chill,
though no breath rises from his nose or mouth.
He is quite still, as night-bird songs beyond
the French windows subside to that hush
that precedes the dawn, the guard change
from nightingale to lark. To him,
the room appears to be empty. Although he feels
cold steel through his tight, black jeans
and the damp tug of the back of his T-shirt
to the seat-back, he cannot see himself.
His clothes are likewise invisible to him.
He can feel the breath in his nostrils, press lips
against the back of his hand to prove he is there.
His vision, sharp as an owl’s, sees all
that passes on the lawn and garden,
down to the tiniest roil of mouse and vole,
but he is blind to his own hand before his face.
Anyone entering the room would see him.
He supposedly looks awfully good for his years,
three hundred to the day if his memory serves him.
This English house has endured much: riots and war,
Zeppelin and V-2 attacks, the onslaught of blight
and public housing. His well-paid agents
have kept the house intact, managed his gold
with great discretion, and shielded his name
from prying scholars and historians. A blind wall
of trust funds secure his quotidian (quotinoctian?)
needs and secures the multiple vaults, some linked
to one another by passages no rat could fathom.
He has been the perfect vampire, discreet
in his comings and goings as a Windsor heir,
and London’s finest have never discerned him
as a creature of great need and urgency:
a city envelops and forgets so many deaths.
His very contentment, the ease with which
he goes about his business, is the very cause
of his decision to end it – his life – or whatever
this existence is called – at the three-century mark.
He will let the sunlight do it: he waits for dawn
by the eastern doorway, the old drapes
and their dustwebs pulled to the floor, the lace
of even older curtains torn to tatters, panes
broken to admit the acid beams of daylight.
And after this? He assumes: oblivion.
The vampire life did not come with a manual.
The already undead are all clueless; for all
he knows the universe was just one vast
hunger for blood, the feeding and being fed,
the summa as well as the sine qua non.
Just one thing has him curious:
It is said that a vampire, on dying,
can see his own reflection then,
and at no other time in his undead
existence. All the more poignant,
that he has assembled all the mirrors
this decrepit house possesses:
two sets of dresser triptychs; a pile
of hand mirrors and shaving glasses
(the vanity of guests and how much fun
to creep up on them as they regard themselves
in all-too-flattering lamplight!);
three full-length wall mirrors leaned
against chair-backs.
Mirror upon mirror, until the gaze dizzies
in endless fun house angles,
an infinity of floor tiles, chair legs
and angled corners, eye-twinkle
of the six-armed candelabra
into constellations of ever-diminishing stars,
a kaleidoscope of everything there is,
but not a glimmer of him.
What will they find, afterwards,
if they track his most careless, audacious
killing to this house at last,
or when they come some day to demolish it?
The dust or whatever it is that he leaves behind
like a spilled hourglass? Or just the empty room
with its puzzlement of mirrors, that wide bed
canopied with cobwebs, whose dark sheets conceal
untold congelations of victims’ blood?
They will find the clothes, of course:
a closet full of black suits, black jeans,
black leather jackets, black Calvin Klein
dress shirts and T’s, all fitting his mode
of “fashion model gone Goth boy.”
Yes, too, there’s a black opera cape,
wolf-fur trimmed with red velvet lining,
black shoes in every style since 1780
(strange how they never seem to wear out)
right up to present-day sneakers, all black,
black gloves and a variety of useful luggage,
leather, black. Odd that he can only see them
as they hang in the closet: one slip of hand
into a glove or jacket, one toe inside
a shoe or pantleg, and it vanishes, gone
to his own eyes and to the mirror.
How strange to be real only to others,
to touch a willing neck or shoulders
yet never see his hand doing it, never to sense
except by touch his nose-end, toe or fingertip.
How long it took to become at ease and graceful,
even — to see a wineglass rise magically
before one’s one eyes and come to lips,
and then on top of that to have to feign
drinking, to let a wine-wash cross his palette
then fall discreetly back into the glass, that took
a lot of practice! At least the clothes were simpler
now: no more the Edwardian dandy, he slid
into a T-shirt and pulled on jeans as fast
as any teenager. One merely had to remember
zippers and not be inside-out or backwards.
This could have gone on forever, of course,
but the people have grown less interesting,
more easily fooled, more of them glazed
stupid drunk or reeling from drug to drug,
others were smug oxen, waiting the day
their personal savior delivered them.
Who knew it would come, the night
when he could walk into a Goth bar,
and announce “I am a vampire” and silence
followed. A trio of black-clad women
flashed plastic vampire teeth and smiled,
asked which coven he belonged to.
He discerned two types: the overdressed
in opera garb though none, from their dull
look had even been to an opera, and the
down-dressed in some kind of torn rags
punctuated with metal grommets. The men
in both groups eyed and dismissed him.
No uniform, no admission, it seemed.
He lingered a while over a red drink
he didn’t even feign to taste, his ears
offended by machine noise attempting
to form itself into music. A young man
in the torn pin-cushion mode came up,
made sure he saw the Old English lettering
on his T-shirt that read, “Vampire Victim.”
“You’re new,” the young man said.
He nods. “You’re the real thing, aren’t you?”
He nods. “Will you kill me?”
He nods. He’s happy to oblige, but bored.
There was something to be said for the struggle.
The hunt, and its danger, and the threat
of discovery had been The Great Game for him.
He liked it best when they resisted. Sometimes
he almost let them win, or even escape
in order to overtake and surprise them later.
There was a moment, always, the pause
when he pulled from a throat in drinking
and looked the victim eye-to-eye, a dark
and terrible secret that nature withholds:
the victim in that moment loves the killer,
admires his superior essence, gives up
his life force in abject adoration.
Every one of them said “Kill me,”
if not in words then in eyes’ surrender.
What he could never know, was what they saw:
whatever was in their eyes, was not him.
He takes the boy by the scruff of the neck,
and passing the bar he reaches deftly
for three crystal sherry glasses, cupped
between the fingers of his left hand.
The club, which billed itself Tartarus,
(the place beneath Hell if one needed explaining),
has, as clubs are wont, an alleyway out back,
trash cans and strident ailanthus trees, dark spots
behind high shrubbery against a chain link fence.
Right hand against the boy’s chest, he feels
the terrified and excited heartbeat rise
as neck veins flush to readiness, oh, too easy!
He rends the shirt away, leans down, parts flesh
with his expert incisors, inhales the blood
like a breath of fresh air, takes it in fast,
faster than he has done for years, the breath
fails, the heart falters -– no! he pulls back,
pounds at the ribcage to start the heart again --
he would not be cheated -– the boy’s mouth
is frozen in an oh! of horror and no, I
didn’t really want this won’t you please stop?
He doesn’t stop – he ends the life that bleeds
beneath him, sucks dry the husk of heat,
life and the great force that animates all things
like a great and overflowing battery.
This ought to be exciting, yet in a moment
he is sated, this death as boring
as a fast-food hamburger. What to do
with the body? With strength he knew
no way to measure he lifts the limp form
and shakes it against the steel grid of fence,
firm, then fast, then faster, till bone and tendon,
flesh and skull and garment all pass on through
like a cabbage passed through a grater,
soft wet fragments falling through, as cloth
slides down, a heap of belt and cloth and grommets.
This was not his usual, careful feeding. The mess
would be considerable, the mystery
of how a man passed through chain links
a riddle for the local police station.
Dogs were coming; he sensed them already,
a feral pack that followed him everywhere
and often helped him in the aftermath.
With luck, they would drag off the bones
and fragments: no matter anyway,
since this would be his last feeding.
Re-entering the Goth club, quite unaware
of whether his T-shirt is dark with heart-blood
he approaches the trio of vampirellas
and puts down, with perfect balance,
three brimful sherry glasses, still warm
with the victim’s body heat. “On the house,”
he tells them. “Drink – if you dare.”
He smiles his best smile, puts hand to lips
and makes a downward, smearing motion
in hopes they will see blood there.
They stare at him, then at the glasses.
He is at the door; he is out. No one
has said a word or moved to stop him.
He hands a hundred to the bouncer, who nods
an assurance of his forgetting his ever
having been there, turns the corner
as the dogs begin turning into the alleyway.
If he were only one century old tonight
perhaps this would be amusing. The weight
of fresh blood within him slows him
and he window-shops on the long walk home.
No one seems to notice the blood all over him,
or if they do they pretend not to notice
another young man’s Gothic fancy.
Now home, he waits for dawn.
The sun seems his most reluctant prey:
it just will not arrive on schedule, the clock
seems to have slowed its ticking, the intervals
between seconds get longer and longer.
When will it end? Does anyone in London
even have a rooster as harbinger
of the upcoming solar disk? The bats,
the owls, have all retired: is that red line
beyond the oak trees the edge of sunrise.
He turns to face the mirrors. It starts.
His eyes begin at last to see eyes, a face,
dark lips, those fine and perfect teeth,
the line of neck to shoulder, the skin,
as white and soft as ever he was twenty.
He leans to the glass: oh, oh,
so beautiful, so —-
by some dark instinct unknown to him
his mouth finds his wrist and pierces it.
He watches himself drink from himself,
the blood flows out and inward,
an Ouroboros circle, feeder
and feeding, self-murdering Narcissus,
frozen, visible in the yellow glory
of the morning sunbeams.
He could do this forever. The sun
is doing nothing so long as he keeps
circling the fresh blood inward, outward.
If he can do to this till sunset
he will survive this burning.
Three hundred years more, at least,
he needs to exhaust his beauty.
He could take hundreds more,
or thousands; he could let
all life on earth flow through him.
It need never end.
The universe wants him in it.
Maybe he is one of the Horsemen
of universal doom and never knew it.
Sunset is only hours away.
He sways in the ecstasy of his feeding,
the sublime dream of untold victims before him.
Now that he knows the difference
between hunger and desire,
there are lists to make.
He will start with the three vampirellas.
Later, the Goth club bouncer.
Night will be his blood carnival.
it would be stark and simple, a blond-haired man
leans forward on a folding chair. The air is chill,
though no breath rises from his nose or mouth.
He is quite still, as night-bird songs beyond
the French windows subside to that hush
that precedes the dawn, the guard change
from nightingale to lark. To him,
the room appears to be empty. Although he feels
cold steel through his tight, black jeans
and the damp tug of the back of his T-shirt
to the seat-back, he cannot see himself.
His clothes are likewise invisible to him.
He can feel the breath in his nostrils, press lips
against the back of his hand to prove he is there.
His vision, sharp as an owl’s, sees all
that passes on the lawn and garden,
down to the tiniest roil of mouse and vole,
but he is blind to his own hand before his face.
Anyone entering the room would see him.
He supposedly looks awfully good for his years,
three hundred to the day if his memory serves him.
This English house has endured much: riots and war,
Zeppelin and V-2 attacks, the onslaught of blight
and public housing. His well-paid agents
have kept the house intact, managed his gold
with great discretion, and shielded his name
from prying scholars and historians. A blind wall
of trust funds secure his quotidian (quotinoctian?)
needs and secures the multiple vaults, some linked
to one another by passages no rat could fathom.
He has been the perfect vampire, discreet
in his comings and goings as a Windsor heir,
and London’s finest have never discerned him
as a creature of great need and urgency:
a city envelops and forgets so many deaths.
His very contentment, the ease with which
he goes about his business, is the very cause
of his decision to end it – his life – or whatever
this existence is called – at the three-century mark.
He will let the sunlight do it: he waits for dawn
by the eastern doorway, the old drapes
and their dustwebs pulled to the floor, the lace
of even older curtains torn to tatters, panes
broken to admit the acid beams of daylight.
And after this? He assumes: oblivion.
The vampire life did not come with a manual.
The already undead are all clueless; for all
he knows the universe was just one vast
hunger for blood, the feeding and being fed,
the summa as well as the sine qua non.
Just one thing has him curious:
It is said that a vampire, on dying,
can see his own reflection then,
and at no other time in his undead
existence. All the more poignant,
that he has assembled all the mirrors
this decrepit house possesses:
two sets of dresser triptychs; a pile
of hand mirrors and shaving glasses
(the vanity of guests and how much fun
to creep up on them as they regard themselves
in all-too-flattering lamplight!);
three full-length wall mirrors leaned
against chair-backs.
Mirror upon mirror, until the gaze dizzies
in endless fun house angles,
an infinity of floor tiles, chair legs
and angled corners, eye-twinkle
of the six-armed candelabra
into constellations of ever-diminishing stars,
a kaleidoscope of everything there is,
but not a glimmer of him.
What will they find, afterwards,
if they track his most careless, audacious
killing to this house at last,
or when they come some day to demolish it?
The dust or whatever it is that he leaves behind
like a spilled hourglass? Or just the empty room
with its puzzlement of mirrors, that wide bed
canopied with cobwebs, whose dark sheets conceal
untold congelations of victims’ blood?
They will find the clothes, of course:
a closet full of black suits, black jeans,
black leather jackets, black Calvin Klein
dress shirts and T’s, all fitting his mode
of “fashion model gone Goth boy.”
Yes, too, there’s a black opera cape,
wolf-fur trimmed with red velvet lining,
black shoes in every style since 1780
(strange how they never seem to wear out)
right up to present-day sneakers, all black,
black gloves and a variety of useful luggage,
leather, black. Odd that he can only see them
as they hang in the closet: one slip of hand
into a glove or jacket, one toe inside
a shoe or pantleg, and it vanishes, gone
to his own eyes and to the mirror.
How strange to be real only to others,
to touch a willing neck or shoulders
yet never see his hand doing it, never to sense
except by touch his nose-end, toe or fingertip.
How long it took to become at ease and graceful,
even — to see a wineglass rise magically
before one’s one eyes and come to lips,
and then on top of that to have to feign
drinking, to let a wine-wash cross his palette
then fall discreetly back into the glass, that took
a lot of practice! At least the clothes were simpler
now: no more the Edwardian dandy, he slid
into a T-shirt and pulled on jeans as fast
as any teenager. One merely had to remember
zippers and not be inside-out or backwards.
This could have gone on forever, of course,
but the people have grown less interesting,
more easily fooled, more of them glazed
stupid drunk or reeling from drug to drug,
others were smug oxen, waiting the day
their personal savior delivered them.
Who knew it would come, the night
when he could walk into a Goth bar,
and announce “I am a vampire” and silence
followed. A trio of black-clad women
flashed plastic vampire teeth and smiled,
asked which coven he belonged to.
He discerned two types: the overdressed
in opera garb though none, from their dull
look had even been to an opera, and the
down-dressed in some kind of torn rags
punctuated with metal grommets. The men
in both groups eyed and dismissed him.
No uniform, no admission, it seemed.
He lingered a while over a red drink
he didn’t even feign to taste, his ears
offended by machine noise attempting
to form itself into music. A young man
in the torn pin-cushion mode came up,
made sure he saw the Old English lettering
on his T-shirt that read, “Vampire Victim.”
“You’re new,” the young man said.
He nods. “You’re the real thing, aren’t you?”
He nods. “Will you kill me?”
He nods. He’s happy to oblige, but bored.
There was something to be said for the struggle.
The hunt, and its danger, and the threat
of discovery had been The Great Game for him.
He liked it best when they resisted. Sometimes
he almost let them win, or even escape
in order to overtake and surprise them later.
There was a moment, always, the pause
when he pulled from a throat in drinking
and looked the victim eye-to-eye, a dark
and terrible secret that nature withholds:
the victim in that moment loves the killer,
admires his superior essence, gives up
his life force in abject adoration.
Every one of them said “Kill me,”
if not in words then in eyes’ surrender.
What he could never know, was what they saw:
whatever was in their eyes, was not him.
He takes the boy by the scruff of the neck,
and passing the bar he reaches deftly
for three crystal sherry glasses, cupped
between the fingers of his left hand.
The club, which billed itself Tartarus,
(the place beneath Hell if one needed explaining),
has, as clubs are wont, an alleyway out back,
trash cans and strident ailanthus trees, dark spots
behind high shrubbery against a chain link fence.
Right hand against the boy’s chest, he feels
the terrified and excited heartbeat rise
as neck veins flush to readiness, oh, too easy!
He rends the shirt away, leans down, parts flesh
with his expert incisors, inhales the blood
like a breath of fresh air, takes it in fast,
faster than he has done for years, the breath
fails, the heart falters -– no! he pulls back,
pounds at the ribcage to start the heart again --
he would not be cheated -– the boy’s mouth
is frozen in an oh! of horror and no, I
didn’t really want this won’t you please stop?
He doesn’t stop – he ends the life that bleeds
beneath him, sucks dry the husk of heat,
life and the great force that animates all things
like a great and overflowing battery.
This ought to be exciting, yet in a moment
he is sated, this death as boring
as a fast-food hamburger. What to do
with the body? With strength he knew
no way to measure he lifts the limp form
and shakes it against the steel grid of fence,
firm, then fast, then faster, till bone and tendon,
flesh and skull and garment all pass on through
like a cabbage passed through a grater,
soft wet fragments falling through, as cloth
slides down, a heap of belt and cloth and grommets.
This was not his usual, careful feeding. The mess
would be considerable, the mystery
of how a man passed through chain links
a riddle for the local police station.
Dogs were coming; he sensed them already,
a feral pack that followed him everywhere
and often helped him in the aftermath.
With luck, they would drag off the bones
and fragments: no matter anyway,
since this would be his last feeding.
Re-entering the Goth club, quite unaware
of whether his T-shirt is dark with heart-blood
he approaches the trio of vampirellas
and puts down, with perfect balance,
three brimful sherry glasses, still warm
with the victim’s body heat. “On the house,”
he tells them. “Drink – if you dare.”
He smiles his best smile, puts hand to lips
and makes a downward, smearing motion
in hopes they will see blood there.
They stare at him, then at the glasses.
He is at the door; he is out. No one
has said a word or moved to stop him.
He hands a hundred to the bouncer, who nods
an assurance of his forgetting his ever
having been there, turns the corner
as the dogs begin turning into the alleyway.
If he were only one century old tonight
perhaps this would be amusing. The weight
of fresh blood within him slows him
and he window-shops on the long walk home.
No one seems to notice the blood all over him,
or if they do they pretend not to notice
another young man’s Gothic fancy.
Now home, he waits for dawn.
The sun seems his most reluctant prey:
it just will not arrive on schedule, the clock
seems to have slowed its ticking, the intervals
between seconds get longer and longer.
When will it end? Does anyone in London
even have a rooster as harbinger
of the upcoming solar disk? The bats,
the owls, have all retired: is that red line
beyond the oak trees the edge of sunrise.
He turns to face the mirrors. It starts.
His eyes begin at last to see eyes, a face,
dark lips, those fine and perfect teeth,
the line of neck to shoulder, the skin,
as white and soft as ever he was twenty.
He leans to the glass: oh, oh,
so beautiful, so —-
by some dark instinct unknown to him
his mouth finds his wrist and pierces it.
He watches himself drink from himself,
the blood flows out and inward,
an Ouroboros circle, feeder
and feeding, self-murdering Narcissus,
frozen, visible in the yellow glory
of the morning sunbeams.
He could do this forever. The sun
is doing nothing so long as he keeps
circling the fresh blood inward, outward.
If he can do to this till sunset
he will survive this burning.
Three hundred years more, at least,
he needs to exhaust his beauty.
He could take hundreds more,
or thousands; he could let
all life on earth flow through him.
It need never end.
The universe wants him in it.
Maybe he is one of the Horsemen
of universal doom and never knew it.
Sunset is only hours away.
He sways in the ecstasy of his feeding,
the sublime dream of untold victims before him.
Now that he knows the difference
between hunger and desire,
there are lists to make.
He will start with the three vampirellas.
Later, the Goth club bouncer.
Night will be his blood carnival.
Ballet of the Hors d'Oeuvre
The gentlemen down front
at the Opera House,
the pretended balletomanes
who crowd the best seats
for calf- and leg-views,
brood over the program.
Tonight’s dance interval
amid the modernist opera’s
banging and clanging is — what? —
Ballet of the Hors d'Oeuvre.
“Horse Doovers?” asks one.
“Whore’s Works!” another,
adept at translation (he is after all
an international banker) says
assuredly. A third,
the monocled one, harrumphs
and simply pronounces
“Or derve, gentlemen,
as in — appetizers.”
A welcome roll from the timpani
muffles the disgrace
of the top-hat tycoons
as the ballet commences.
The music is, thank God, melodic.
First come the celery sticks,
vaguely aphrodisiac,
stalking on stage in stiff
march time, leaf-fringed
and vertical, tilting in time
to the Danse Crudité
and deftly choreographed
considering the absence
of any visible eyes.
As if to mock men’s
expectations of limbs exposed,
two dozen chicken wings
crab-walk in unison
from left to right, then
right to left, then leap
into a wagon, a heap
of unappealing angles,
pulled off the stage
by a Harlequin cat.
Seedless grapes tumble
to a fast gigue
around a gaggle
of dowager strawberries,
the vast Chernobyl kind,
red-rouged, bewigged
with vernal leafage,
plump and no doubt
devoid of any trace of flavor.
To a Chinese flute, squat
four-lobed dumplings arrive
tip-toe on red shoes
scarcely visible
beneath the deep-fried
ballooning gowns.
Slow sarabanding,
the Crabs Rangoon
accelerate to dervish
then spin off stage.
A Danse Génerale
of crackers, round and square,
pair off against various
cheeses in national attire
raising the whole affair
to a Tchaikovskian frenzy.
Skirts fly, thighs bulge, as,
cubed, sliced, and quartered,
yellow and white, blue and orange,
they whirl and pair, unpair and tease
the desperate and crumbling crackers.
Then, finally, a show of stage magic
as each cheese maid slides through
the narrow blade of a slicer
and emerges as two likenesses,
whirling accelerando
until every Tilsit, Gouda,
Cheddar and Blue
meets her destined cracker
and goes obscenely
horizontal.
The front row gentlemen
are beside themselves
as the curtain falls.
What to do until the third act?
Backstage in the Green Room
where the undressing, redressing
ballerinas pretend not to be watched
by the drooling financiers,
what was one to do?
“I suppose,” the monocled one hazards,
“although we’re not even sure
which were the ladies,
we could go back for a nibble.”
at the Opera House,
the pretended balletomanes
who crowd the best seats
for calf- and leg-views,
brood over the program.
Tonight’s dance interval
amid the modernist opera’s
banging and clanging is — what? —
Ballet of the Hors d'Oeuvre.
“Horse Doovers?” asks one.
“Whore’s Works!” another,
adept at translation (he is after all
an international banker) says
assuredly. A third,
the monocled one, harrumphs
and simply pronounces
“Or derve, gentlemen,
as in — appetizers.”
A welcome roll from the timpani
muffles the disgrace
of the top-hat tycoons
as the ballet commences.
The music is, thank God, melodic.
First come the celery sticks,
vaguely aphrodisiac,
stalking on stage in stiff
march time, leaf-fringed
and vertical, tilting in time
to the Danse Crudité
and deftly choreographed
considering the absence
of any visible eyes.
As if to mock men’s
expectations of limbs exposed,
two dozen chicken wings
crab-walk in unison
from left to right, then
right to left, then leap
into a wagon, a heap
of unappealing angles,
pulled off the stage
by a Harlequin cat.
Seedless grapes tumble
to a fast gigue
around a gaggle
of dowager strawberries,
the vast Chernobyl kind,
red-rouged, bewigged
with vernal leafage,
plump and no doubt
devoid of any trace of flavor.
To a Chinese flute, squat
four-lobed dumplings arrive
tip-toe on red shoes
scarcely visible
beneath the deep-fried
ballooning gowns.
Slow sarabanding,
the Crabs Rangoon
accelerate to dervish
then spin off stage.
A Danse Génerale
of crackers, round and square,
pair off against various
cheeses in national attire
raising the whole affair
to a Tchaikovskian frenzy.
Skirts fly, thighs bulge, as,
cubed, sliced, and quartered,
yellow and white, blue and orange,
they whirl and pair, unpair and tease
the desperate and crumbling crackers.
Then, finally, a show of stage magic
as each cheese maid slides through
the narrow blade of a slicer
and emerges as two likenesses,
whirling accelerando
until every Tilsit, Gouda,
Cheddar and Blue
meets her destined cracker
and goes obscenely
horizontal.
The front row gentlemen
are beside themselves
as the curtain falls.
What to do until the third act?
Backstage in the Green Room
where the undressing, redressing
ballerinas pretend not to be watched
by the drooling financiers,
what was one to do?
“I suppose,” the monocled one hazards,
“although we’re not even sure
which were the ladies,
we could go back for a nibble.”
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Burnt Offering
Anakreon, to Harmodius:
About that letter, the fervent one,
the one you hinted you’d sell when I die,
mocking its shaking autograph,
intimating the scandal --
I know your threat is false.
last night in my sleep I saw
your hands on a crumpled scroll,
the thrust toward a sputtering lamp,
the tiny screams as my words,
my awesome and unrepeatable vows,
my praise of your unworthy beauty,
collapsed and withered in a blue-green flame.
You brushed the ashes from your gentle arms --
they scattered, mingled with dust motes,
rode a moonbeam in a moment’s leap
toward ghosthood, then dissipated.
Only one moth, before its suicide,
dipped in the ash and shared
one final taste of my missive.
No Phoenix rose, the earth
did not open to swallow you,
and your disdainful triumph
did not diminish the cosmos.
Yet he who burns love letters
offends the Gods.
You dare undo my holy madness
with your little hecatomb
of paraffin and oil?
They will come back to sting you,
my salamander syllables.
Try and love anyone now! Your sunken cheeks
and pale complexion will drive all away.
All will know you are pursued and haunted.
You will wish you had kept the living scroll
when you see how Love, an ash-faced Fury,
comes back from Acheron,
a broom hag to drive
your suitors off,
nightmare’s bedmate, engendering
alarming sores and bruises,
leaving you spent and exhausted
as though a nest of incubi
used you for practice.
Besides,
I kept a copy.
About that letter, the fervent one,
the one you hinted you’d sell when I die,
mocking its shaking autograph,
intimating the scandal --
I know your threat is false.
last night in my sleep I saw
your hands on a crumpled scroll,
the thrust toward a sputtering lamp,
the tiny screams as my words,
my awesome and unrepeatable vows,
my praise of your unworthy beauty,
collapsed and withered in a blue-green flame.
You brushed the ashes from your gentle arms --
they scattered, mingled with dust motes,
rode a moonbeam in a moment’s leap
toward ghosthood, then dissipated.
Only one moth, before its suicide,
dipped in the ash and shared
one final taste of my missive.
No Phoenix rose, the earth
did not open to swallow you,
and your disdainful triumph
did not diminish the cosmos.
Yet he who burns love letters
offends the Gods.
You dare undo my holy madness
with your little hecatomb
of paraffin and oil?
They will come back to sting you,
my salamander syllables.
Try and love anyone now! Your sunken cheeks
and pale complexion will drive all away.
All will know you are pursued and haunted.
You will wish you had kept the living scroll
when you see how Love, an ash-faced Fury,
comes back from Acheron,
a broom hag to drive
your suitors off,
nightmare’s bedmate, engendering
alarming sores and bruises,
leaving you spent and exhausted
as though a nest of incubi
used you for practice.
Besides,
I kept a copy.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
As Idols Fall in the Afghan Hills
Time to get out of Afghanistan! Here's a slight revision of a poem I wrote before 9-11, on reading about the Taliban's destruction of a huge Buddha that had been carved into a mountainside. I had a vision of a carpet bombing of tiny Buddhas or Bodhisattvas (the spirits who undertake to return to linger in mortal life to do good deeds. Little did I suspect... Here's the poem:
What to do? What to do?
Mail a Mullah a thousand portraits
of Boddhisatvas.
Airdrop a hundred thousand Buddhas
on tiny parachutes onto the streets of Kabul.
Mate giant Japanese Buddhas with Godzilla,
send their offspring to the Afghan Hills
to sit serene in lotus pose
(but watch their fire-breath melt Taliban tanks
and send the soldiers shrieking!)
Skywrite LORD BUDDHA
from border to border in every known language.
Or wait for Karma to burn the burners,
shatter the shatterers, silence the mouths
of the speakers of law?
(No time, no time as the dynamite explodes
a Buddha head from fifteen hundred years ago.)
Let Allah, Buddha Christ and Brahma
rage like comets, moth fluttering
around the Man Sun.
One vanity makes them a greater vanity destroys them.
Yet a child with hands in clay, in the mud by the riverside
will make a new god with broad shoulders
far-seeing eyes, a forgiving visage,
a palm extended for the benediction
of unbearable Beauty, brief life
the only coin we can offer.
This parched land needs its memories,
its slender share of human fairness.
It needs a spark of hope
against the dark night
of goats and dynamite.
What to do? What to do?
Mail a Mullah a thousand portraits
of Boddhisatvas.
Airdrop a hundred thousand Buddhas
on tiny parachutes onto the streets of Kabul.
Mate giant Japanese Buddhas with Godzilla,
send their offspring to the Afghan Hills
to sit serene in lotus pose
(but watch their fire-breath melt Taliban tanks
and send the soldiers shrieking!)
Skywrite LORD BUDDHA
from border to border in every known language.
Or wait for Karma to burn the burners,
shatter the shatterers, silence the mouths
of the speakers of law?
(No time, no time as the dynamite explodes
a Buddha head from fifteen hundred years ago.)
Let Allah, Buddha Christ and Brahma
rage like comets, moth fluttering
around the Man Sun.
One vanity makes them a greater vanity destroys them.
Yet a child with hands in clay, in the mud by the riverside
will make a new god with broad shoulders
far-seeing eyes, a forgiving visage,
a palm extended for the benediction
of unbearable Beauty, brief life
the only coin we can offer.
This parched land needs its memories,
its slender share of human fairness.
It needs a spark of hope
against the dark night
of goats and dynamite.
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