The Battle of Pydna

This painting, showing the surrender of the Macedonian leader Perseus to the Romans, followed one of the most important battles in history, the Battle of Pydna in 186 BCE. Never heard of it? Neither did I, until today. Alexander the Great was a Macedonian, and the vast empire he conquered was divided among his generals when he died in 323 BCE. Macedonia remained a powerful kingdom amid all the struggles of Alexander's successors, making and breaking all kinds of treaties with the other Greek kingdoms. But the end came in this battle, with the Romans.
The battle involved more than 80,000 men and 22 elephants. The Romans broke up and destroyed the classic Greek "phalanx" formation and slaughtered the Macedonians. Mass plunder and rape followed, for the Roman soldiers were unmatched in brutality. More than 300,000 Macedonians were sold into slavery. 
Macedonia was finished, and Rome was now the Great Power.
Never again would Greeks be more than second-tier players in history. The dream of Alexander -- one world under one wise ruler -- died at Pydna. All of this is a stern reminder that so much of history is brutal, horrible and inhuman, and that a turning point comes, and no one knows it is the actual end of something. If the moment comes that the United States, as a Republic, is "finished," no one in that moment will know it.
History is a long process. It is a text, written slowly and patiently, corrected by hindsight, and by shards found in ruins and lost testimony, but it conheres and makes sense.
Weep for Pydna, for Greece, for the glory of Alexander.
Tremble at the thought of the Roman wolf, the Roman eagle, ascendant.

The Loved Dead (Ode 15)

1

Another year,

the sun resembles itself

but does not fool the trees

who shun its cool imposture.

Buds open reluctantly,

their slanted eyes askew

with annual doubts.

It is never the same,

each lap of light a ghost

of former springs, each ray

a waning monument

from where a darkling star

gluts space

with ever-diminishing mass.

The year we met,

is the immemorial year, the year

that cannot be repeated.

What world is this,

in which you do not wake,

and sleep, and call me?

The universe forgets itself —

the idiot sun implodes

into a fathomless mouth,

both feaster and food

adjourning to nothingness

at the event horizon.

The earth spins blindly on.

First, love can die.

And then the loved

becomes the loved dead.

What if, in world-wipe,

you never existed?

2

I swear, I have not lost you.

Your disassembled eyes

rode in another’s skull today.

I saw them — there was no blue

akin to your lapis irises.

Your disconnected arm

hooked onto mine at dusk.

(I walked alone, and blushed

at how and where

the hand-touch held me.)

Tonight before I slept

your mouth surprised me.

(The room was empty.)

It is better this way —

each bit of you a ghost

returning on an X-ray wind.

Each day some icy shard of you

drops off some glacial height

onto an unsuspecting face,

as though the gods that made you,

singular, keep trying

to make another.

The universe deceives itself.

One thing may be like another;

one thing is not the other.

Though ardent spring explodes

upon the feathered fields,

it is a new spring, slate clean.

The past — if there is a past —

is amnesia’d in wormhole transit

to the fiercely blazing present.

I wait in solitude. If ghosts

could ever present themselves,

they’d rage because they could

not say their names.

If phantom faces seem to be yours,

I love them for the lie they speak,

of being you.

3

In park-walk past, I came upon

your ancestor’s statue,

a soldier patriot who served

with General Washington.

He has your face. The bronze

has weathered little. I stand,

and stand, and cannot stop looking.

Not acid rain, nor pigeon insult

has weathered it. I have you yet,

and yet have nothing. A few things

we touched in common: a bowl,

a red-glass pitcher whose breaking

I dread to think of. Not one photo.

Who is alive who ever

saw us together?

What proof but memory,

a weave of cell and synapse?

In the hard light

of a winter afternoon,

I am cheerful in graveyard

until I see the name

of one of your countrymen.
Joy is eclipsed.
The sun, slunk low,
beams hard into my eyes.

Amid these tombs and columns,

sphinxes and obelisks,

what is there left

but never-ending mourning?

What is there left

except to live on out

our ever-precious moments

in their honor, and in their names?

The loved dead

who never come again

except in shards and glances,

moment of shuddering grief

and the remembering smile,

by what of you, and why,

am I haunted?

The Poet's Press Loft in Manhattan

This two-part poem is a recollection of sitting on the balcony of The Poet's Press Manhattan loft in 1973, while the printing press ran inside, and then visiting the locale two decades later. I photographed the building this past November. The building is 668 Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue to locals).

OF THE MAKING OF BOOKS

1973

What is it about ink

poised over virgin paper

if pen, a word at a time,

why not a press,

page upon page repeating?

Plate, blanket, roller,

compressor, roller, sucker, gripper

(the guts of unromantic offset

supplanting Gutenberg)

the lift and thrust of the sheet

no hand has touched,

the slurring commingle

of ink and water in foaming fountain

till stanza follows stanza

canto and chapter —

sheaves to be folded and sewn

into a hundred books,

five hundred books!

I call it making paper babies,

my dingy loft on Sixth Avenue

a hatching hive of chapbooks.

I sit on the fire escape

outside my soot-grime windows.

The moon has long since set,

street dark in cast-iron canyons.

It is insufferable August —

I want to sleep in coolness —

the press churns on behind me,

the infeed pile diminishing,

the finished sheets descending.

I know its sound like a heartbeat,

just how long I can linger

before the ink needs tending.

I watch the late-night drifters below:

rag pickers and winos and psychopaths,

a junkie laden with burglar tools

eyeing each storefront,

some swearing brawlers

from the lesbian cycle bar

around the corner,

the blur of cabs with
rolled-down windows,

blear-eyed drivers barreling

in homeward trucks,

the dilatory patrol car

beaming the doorways
for sleeping bums

or a glimpse of frenzied sodomy.

Inside, I empty the paper bins.

It is three a.m. I can still print

another signature, wait out

the early dawn on the fire escape.

I cannot sleep anyway.

Sometimes it seems I work
for the machine.

There has been little profit in this,

yet everywhere I go in this rusted city,

poets are gathering.

A multitude of hands lift up
these books.

In chorus they chant

Just off the press

My latest

Please buy one

1996

The cast-iron street is floodlit now

the columns as white as marble

bed bath and book and clothing stores

draw thousands here. I always pause

to look up at the forgotten loft

where I began my consummate folly.

I have dragged this book madness

two decades now. My closets explode

with unsold volumes,
projects half bound

and then abandoned, the beached whale

guillotine cutter in my bedroom.

The poets I published are dying off:

the Village Sibyl, Barbara Holland, gone,

now Emilie Glen, my poetry mother.

I hear it said at her memorial

that these things mattered after all,

that little books are voyagers,

bottle messages into indifferent seas,

rockets to the future.

In this world of too many books,

so much bad verse and rotten prose,

it is hard to believe it.

Yet it was thus with Poe,

Whitman and Dickinson.

Barbara haunts Morton Street,

and Emilie, Barrow.

Only their books wing onwards,

perching on brownstone rooftops,

flapping their shiny covers,

ready to plunge when least expected,

open to that page,

that singular poem,

that line with its magic

in words that stay.

Tillie

Steel-town Tillie

was my first bag lady.

As a child I trailed her,

just out of reach

of the miasma of sour milk

and spoiled meat.

She stopped before the five-and-dime

to comb her thinning hair,

mouse brown now streaked

with yellow-white

no manner of primping

could beautify.

She had a Hepburn face,

high cheekbones.

She’d stop in every doorway

to see herself mirrored

and re-arrange her scarf.

Dogs sniffed the oily stains

that marked her bundles and rags.

Starving birds pecked

at the trail of crumbs,

burst buttons and candy wraps,

the lengths of multi-colored thread

that dropped through her
bottomless pockets.

Don’t ask her age, how many

winters she’d tramped the streets —

how many weddings and funerals

she’d watched, like the uninvited fairy

from the shadowed, latter-most pew.

(She had a wedding once, they say.

Asked where her husband is,

folks look away.)

She’d talk, if you ask,

of her house on the hill —

new furniture just in,

painting in progress,

wallpaper sample books

thumbed through.

She doubled back

when no one watched

to the abandoned car

by the railroad tracks,

where she slept,

cradling her packages

like swaddled infants.

Year by year

she was gaunter, thinner.

Finally, they cornered her,

shoved her screaming

into an ambulance.

Word spread around town

of an abscess gone wild,

a hole in Tillie’s neck

where everything she drank

gushed out as from

a cartoon bullet hole.

They paused in the taverns,

in the vomit-scented Moose Hall,

with litanies of “Tillie, poor Tillie!”

On side streets,

her shadow shambled without her,

frail as a moth wing,

picked apart by moonlight,

scattered by cicadas,

waiting to reassemble

if she returned

to her appointed rounds.

Hearing the Wendigo

All the Native Americans from the Appalachians all the way North to the Hudson Bay. share the common myth of the invisible smiter who walks on the winter wind. British writer Algernon Blackwood heard the myths from Native American guides in Canada and wrote a story about it. He called the creature The Wendigo. It is campfire lore everywhere. Here is my version of the myth. My great-grandmother was probably a Pennsylvania Mingo, so this is also a family story.

There is a place

where the winds meet howling

cold nights in frozen forest

snapping the tree trunks

in haste for their reunion.

Gone is the summer they brooded in,

gone their autumn awakening.

Now at last they slide off glaciers,

sail the spreading ice floes,

hitch a ride with winter.

Great bears retreat and slumber,

owls flee

and whippoorwills shudder.

Whole herds of caribou

stampede on the tundra

in the madness of hunger,

the terror of thunder-winds.

The snow-piled Huron packs tight

the animal skins around his doorway,

hopes his small fire and its thin smoke

escape the notice of Boreal eyes.

He will not look out at the night sky,

for fear of what might look back.

Only brave Orion, hunter among

his fellow stars, watches

as icy vectors collide in air.

Trees break like tent poles,

earth sunders to craters

beneath the giant foot stamps.

Birds rise to whirlwind updraft

and come down bones and feathers.

I have not seen the Wendigo —

I scarcely dare to name it! —

the wind’s collective consciousness,

id proud and hammer-hard.

To see is to be plucked

into the very eye of madness.

Yet I have felt its upward urge

like hands beneath my shoulders,

lifting and beckoning.

It says, You dream of flying?

Then fly with me!

I answer No,

not with your hungry eye above me,

not with those teeth
like roaring chain saws,

not with those pile-driving footsteps —

Like the wise Huron sachem,

the long-gone Erie, the Mingo,

the Seneca, the Onondaga,

like all Hodenosaunee-born,

I too avert my eyes

against the thing that summons me.

Screaming, the airborne smiter

rips off the tops of conifers,

crushes a row of power-line towers,

peppers the hillside with saurian tracks,

then leaps straight up at the Dog Star

as though its anger could crack the cosmos

as though the sky bowl were not infinite,

and wind alone could touch the stars

and eat them.

The Dead End

This old poem, now revised, was based on a dream of finding a mysterious courtyard in Greenwich Village. Visiting Manhattan last November, I found the place that almost certainly inspired the dream and the poem. 

Far west, beyond the numbered avenues,

there is a street, accessed by a curious courtyard,

a peopled lane

where, lost on a moonlit but foggy night,

you seem to know the passers-by.

House numbers seem too high,

the street signs are illegible

but you feel recognized, and safe.

Each casual stroller,

each idling window shopper,

seems known to you.

Each, when looked at, imparts a smile,

an instant’s head-nod,

but then a pause, a head-shake,

implying: my error, I do not know you.

And then it comes to you—

the vague acquaintances,

childhood friends you moved away from,

once-met and nearly-forgotten lovers,

all of whom suddenly — or so they said —

just up and died.

You never saw a body.

The service was over before you heard.

The players reshuffled and life went on.

You never quite believed it, of course,

and now you have the proof:

the disappeared have all just moved

to this brick-lined street,

took up new names and furtive jobs:

caretaker, night watchman

lobster shift foreman

invisible cook in the diner kitchen

night worker in office tower

unlisted phone, anonymous
in a nameless lodging.

I found the street once, then lost it.

I’ve never managed to find it again,

can’t help but wonder
about those houses —

brownstones and bricks
backed by a high-rise tower —

whose windows were those
whose curtains parted?

whose astonished eyes saw me
and pulled away?

Wish I could go up and read
the nameplates,

knock on a certain door or two,

resume an interrupted dialogue,

give or receive an embrace

I’m sorry I never shared.

But all too soon

I’ll be there anyway,

an anagram, a pseudonym,

a permanent resident

of Incognito Village.

One Day's News

Not quite a "found poem," but a poem from "found" news. While living in Weehawken NJ in 1995, I was startled by the overall gruesome tone of one day's headlines and news stories. They seemed indicative of where we are as a species.

ONE DAY’S NEWS
from The Jersey Journal,
Nov. 21, 1995

Five years before millennium
and here is one day’s news:
An Oklahoma teen
is chained in a well house,
burned with an iron,
scalded with bleach,
shocked with high voltage.
Give back the money!
his tormenters scream.
He didn’t take
his mother’s
drug-dealing treasury,
but she won’t hear it.
Beat him! she tells her husband.

Well-oiled gears
crave Aztec offerings.
An escalator rips off
three tiny toes
from a three-year-old girl
on the New York subway. 

A leaf shredder sucks
park-worker’s hand
into the chopping blades
in maple-red Hoboken.
A head and a leg
wash up in Newark.
Cops say they match
a torso found
in an unmarked suitcase.

Thieves shoot cabbies
in back of the head,
then strip off their socks
to get their money.

Wanting a baby,
an Illinois woman
kills her pregnant rival,
cuts open her abdomen
with a pair of scissors
to deliver a boy.
She flees the scene,
but not before
she slashes the throats
of the woman’s other children.
Arrested, she asked
“So what’s the problem?
Just why am I being charged?”

Down in San Juan
the livestock are killed
by chupacabras,
goatsucker vampires
that drink the blood
and eat the innards.
Two cats, five goats
and twenty parakeets
already murdered,
the baffled police admit.

Just one day’s news.
Sufficient to one day
is the evil thereof.

School Children Set Fire to London

Every year in Great Britain, school children recreate the Great London Fire of 1666. They build miniature streets of Tudor houses, take them out to the schoolyard, and then watch in merriment as the whole thing burns down, building by building. See what you missed in your boring American school days.

Snofru the Mad

One of the oddest-sounding names for a ruler (at least to English ears) is the Egyptian "Snofru." My poem starts with a child's embarrassment about the sound of his name, and leads to more and more outre and outrageous obsessions. This is a fantasy, of course, but grounded in an obscure chapter in Egyptian history.

Snofru or Snefru was Pharaoh in the Fourth Dynasty and the immediate predecessor of Khufu (Cheops), builder of the Great Pyramid. Historians are baffled as to why Snofru built himself three separate pyramids. Snofru was the first Pharaoh to enclose his name in a cartouche on monuments.

SNOFRU THE MAD

With a name like Snofru

you’d better be good

as a Pharaoh, as a survivor.

Would the gods laugh, he wondered,

when his weighing time came up —

his heart against a feather

on the fatal balance —

would tittering among them

make his recitation falter?

A careful planner,

he lays four boats in his pyramid,

one pointed in each direction —

he’d launch all four

so his soul could elude

the pursuing god Set

and confound old Ammit,

the Eater of the Dead.

Grave robbers? He’d baffle them,

build three great pyramids

for Snofru the Pharaoh —

hang the cost!

He’d bury an imposter

in each sarcophagus.

The gods alone would know

his final resting place,

a well-appointed tomb

whose architect he’d strangled.

As for his Queen Hetephras,

dead these three years now,

he left her innards

in an alabaster jar,

yet carried her mummy away.

Nights, he unwinds her wrappings,

kisses her natron-scented lips,

caresses her sewn-up belly,

then carefully restores

her royal bandages,

her mask and jewels.

His courtiers avoid him,

smell death despite

the unguents and incense.

An impudent general

already makes eyes

at his daughter. They shceme.

There is talk, there is talk.

He will neither make war, nor peace,

turns back ambassadors

as he spends his days divining

how to turn his eye-blink life

into the gods’ eternity.

One night he slips away.

The upstart will assume his name,

bed his black-eyed daughter,

inherit his unused pyramid —

the better to advance his stratagem.

With pride and pomp

he circled his name

on a hundred monuments,

but he is far from Memphis now,

where he speaks to his servants

in but a whisper.

His modest sarcophagus,

when that time comes,

is inscribed with another name.

His journey West

will be uneventful.

Then, coming and going

among the living the dead,

he’ll watch as the proud

are judged and eaten,

then take his place, unsandaled,

plain as the commonest slave,

serving his mummy-bride

at the table of the gods.