Each Autumn, I write one or more "seasonal" poems, adding them to an ever-growing cycle called "Anniversarium: The Autumn Poems." This is the 34th in the series. In Chinese art and folklore, the white tiger is a symbol of autumn (white itself is the color of funerals and mourning in China).
ANNIVERSARIUM 34: THE WHITE TIGER
I dreamt — it was no dream! —
for there, on the floor, the melted snow,
the window-lattice broken, night coals
from the brazier scattered everywhere.
I dreamt he was there beside me:
the great white cat, tiger of Siberia,
lord of Manchurian wastelands. He,
my servant comes trembling to tell me,
has taken up residence
at the far end of the north pavilion.
Ah! let him stay! Bring me my sword?
No! my pen and scroll! I must wash
my thoughts with a draught of tea.
Renew the fire. Refill the yi xing
pot with pale white tea leaves.
“He is Death,” my servant tells me.
I shake my head and answer:
“He is Autumn, the world’s Fall,
my autumn, the end of my youth.
Where he treads, frost follows,
his breath the snow that fells the wheat
and makes the maples scream
red murder. Long have I known
he would be our guest one day.”
“Repair the window,” old Chen admonishes.
“We shall light torches to keep him off.”
I see two feline eyes
grow larger in the passageway.
“It is too late. A guest once past the threshold
must be offered food and lodging.
The tiger may come and go as he pleases.”
I point to where the great beast enters.
My servant issues a piercing cry.
Ignoring us, the monster, white
in the whiter moonlight, lies down
on the warm tiles of the coal hearth.
“You see, old Chen, how he reclines.
I do not think he means to harm me.”
Chen bows and backs to the doorway,
and as he closes the double door, calls back,
“Tomorrow brings terror to the countryside.
The tiger will kill the fallow deer,
and, should you venture forth by daylight,
he, pretending not to know you,
will turn on you as well. An old poet
is sweet fruit after a venison banquet.”
’Twixt Venus and Jupiter, one moon
hangs crescent; ’twixt sleep and dawn
the great beast cradles me, and I, him;
sword, fang, and claw forgotten, defying
our double death; a frozen interval,
two hearts abeat, and four lungs breathing.
I dream of being a great beast, rampant;
the tiger dreams of the calligraphy brush,
the tail-flick ink flow that places songs
on paper, words in the ears
of unborn readers and listeners.
I taste the blood in his mouth, the flex
of great legs that can overleap all prey;
he tastes pale tea and delicate sauces,
the savor of rare wine in a heated bowl.
As dawn breaks through,
the Heaven-tree, the willow boughs,
the distant pines sigh, shiver, shrug:
they will fight for a green day,
bird-harboring, leaf-tipped
to the lambent sunbeams.
Somewhere, out there, the tiger
drags Fall behind him as he hunts
life down with a panther frenzy.
Great clouds of birds assemble and flee
before him; cave, den, and warren
pull in their denizens for the long sleep
of winter. He leaves a trail
of antlered skeletons, doe-widows,
trees clawed clean of summer.
My place is here with lamp and teapot.
I wrote a poem. I rolled and sealed
the rice-paper scroll, wiped clean
the brush and closed the ink-jar.
This is not just any autumn’s beast.
There is some cause for which
he spared me, and was not my Autumn
or the death-breath of my winter.
No, he is the Tiger of Entropy:
he drags tornados, kill-winds
and glaciers behind him.
He would blink out
the world’s great cities if he could;
he would strike down the moon
as his ball-of-string plaything,
leave earth an orphan
in a sunless cosmos.
If I let him.
Tomorrow, while he sleeps,
wherever he sleeps —
and I see the place,
in the shade of the pines
beyond the placid river —
I shall send Chen for my finest mount,
my armor and my banner men.
I shall ride forth,
my flag the three-no poem of summer
defiance: No to death,
No to surrender, No to the idea
that all things must have their autumn.
I have sixty-one years
as I leave the pavilion.
I have fifty-one years as I cross
the great wheat fields.
I have forty-one years
as I track the red-maple forest.
I have thirty-one years
as I ford the river,
horse-neck and saddle
just barely above the water.
I have twenty-one years
as Chen passes me
the great halberd
of my ancestors.
Now, I shall kill the White Tiger.
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Mr. Penney's Books
Bay-windowed room in gingerbread Victorian,
bookshelved from floor
to cast-in-shadow ceiling —
my dream of my own retirement-exile, to be
left alone at last amid ten thousand
books, and cabinets whose sliding drawers
concealed vast sheaves of etchings, prints,
treasures way back to incunabula days.
And the room — it was Mr. Penney's
with its great desk and drawing board
tack-pinned with unfinished blueprints
of a magnetic perpetual motion engine —
was itself a mere anteroom
to corridors and attics, niches
and passageways, book
upon book, a hollowed hive
of unkempt learning.
It was here, as a high-school boy,
I came for my real reading:
Voltaire and Paine and Ingersoll,
the little Blue Books of skeptical thought,
the slim red classics of Everyman's library,
the histories piled high 'mid Verne
and Conrad, Tolstoy and Maupassant.
Each day I'd listen rapt to his tales
of selling Vermont marble
in post-earthquake San Francisco
of his newspaper days,
dragging O'Henry from drunk bar
to his deadline desk, long years
of teaching young men the rigors
of mechanical drawing; of buildings
designed and constructed (he’d built
one of the first automat restaurants);
of patents granted and sold too cheap.
Eight decades had crept upon him; he joked
“I never dreamt I’d live to the day
that I grew tits, and my wife a beard.”
Sons and grandsons tramped the big house,
not one of them a reader. Each week
his son's wife heaped Penney's books
into the curbside trashcan; each week
he was up before dawn-crack to retrieve them.
Hundreds were the volumes he gifted me.
“You'll read them. What's more, you'll pass the gift.”
I nodded, books piled to my chin, tottered home.
I read three a day then,
as though I had come to books from a desert,
or dreaded returning to one. Gone from home,
gone to school, gone to the city, I have
a dim memory of someone mentioning
“Old Mr. Penney died a while back.”
I made one final visit to the hated town,
raked my stepfather'd house of every scrap
of my existence there: old manuscripts,
my few remaining comics, cartons of books
I had left behind for someday-retrieval.
My mother, between beers and cigarettes, said:
“Oh, the Penneys came by one day. They said
he left you all his books. We were
going to write you a letter,
but then I never found a stamp,
and I guess I lost the envelope.”
My mind screamed What?! —
my voice went novocain,
a tiny “Oh,” my only response.
Friend’s car packed up
with all my juvenilia, I asked,
"Let's turn left here. There's a house
I want one last remembrance of.”
We slowed to stop. Three people rose
from their porch chairs, swung wide
the double stained-glass door.
The porch light flickered, failed.
Inside, the door to Mr. Penney's library
was thrust open, then slowly shut
like a drowsy eyelid. An arc
of hall-light swept over the floor,
over and across to the deep bay window.
Bare floors, bare walls, stark corners,
bookless, shelfless, deskless and desolate,
then dark as the door closed. The hall's
lights went black, unlettered Penneys
ascending their crisp, clean, dustless stairs
to sleep. We drove off
without speaking, our car trunk full,
back seat piled high to the tipping point
with all the books I'd ever owned.
Copyright 2009 by Brett Rutherford. All Rights Reserved
bookshelved from floor
to cast-in-shadow ceiling —
my dream of my own retirement-exile, to be
left alone at last amid ten thousand
books, and cabinets whose sliding drawers
concealed vast sheaves of etchings, prints,
treasures way back to incunabula days.
And the room — it was Mr. Penney's
with its great desk and drawing board
tack-pinned with unfinished blueprints
of a magnetic perpetual motion engine —
was itself a mere anteroom
to corridors and attics, niches
and passageways, book
upon book, a hollowed hive
of unkempt learning.
It was here, as a high-school boy,
I came for my real reading:
Voltaire and Paine and Ingersoll,
the little Blue Books of skeptical thought,
the slim red classics of Everyman's library,
the histories piled high 'mid Verne
and Conrad, Tolstoy and Maupassant.
Each day I'd listen rapt to his tales
of selling Vermont marble
in post-earthquake San Francisco
of his newspaper days,
dragging O'Henry from drunk bar
to his deadline desk, long years
of teaching young men the rigors
of mechanical drawing; of buildings
designed and constructed (he’d built
one of the first automat restaurants);
of patents granted and sold too cheap.
Eight decades had crept upon him; he joked
“I never dreamt I’d live to the day
that I grew tits, and my wife a beard.”
Sons and grandsons tramped the big house,
not one of them a reader. Each week
his son's wife heaped Penney's books
into the curbside trashcan; each week
he was up before dawn-crack to retrieve them.
Hundreds were the volumes he gifted me.
“You'll read them. What's more, you'll pass the gift.”
I nodded, books piled to my chin, tottered home.
I read three a day then,
as though I had come to books from a desert,
or dreaded returning to one. Gone from home,
gone to school, gone to the city, I have
a dim memory of someone mentioning
“Old Mr. Penney died a while back.”
I made one final visit to the hated town,
raked my stepfather'd house of every scrap
of my existence there: old manuscripts,
my few remaining comics, cartons of books
I had left behind for someday-retrieval.
My mother, between beers and cigarettes, said:
“Oh, the Penneys came by one day. They said
he left you all his books. We were
going to write you a letter,
but then I never found a stamp,
and I guess I lost the envelope.”
My mind screamed What?! —
my voice went novocain,
a tiny “Oh,” my only response.
Friend’s car packed up
with all my juvenilia, I asked,
"Let's turn left here. There's a house
I want one last remembrance of.”
We slowed to stop. Three people rose
from their porch chairs, swung wide
the double stained-glass door.
The porch light flickered, failed.
Inside, the door to Mr. Penney's library
was thrust open, then slowly shut
like a drowsy eyelid. An arc
of hall-light swept over the floor,
over and across to the deep bay window.
Bare floors, bare walls, stark corners,
bookless, shelfless, deskless and desolate,
then dark as the door closed. The hall's
lights went black, unlettered Penneys
ascending their crisp, clean, dustless stairs
to sleep. We drove off
without speaking, our car trunk full,
back seat piled high to the tipping point
with all the books I'd ever owned.
Copyright 2009 by Brett Rutherford. All Rights Reserved
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