Arabesques on Early Modern Mathematics

     for Travis Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the Funeral Home

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

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

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

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

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

The others I have never met.

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

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

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

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

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

The Blue Boy

On certain Sundays I was sent alone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nights at the Strand

The Strand Theater, Scottdale, PA

As the lights dim and the tattered curtains

rustle and part with a creak-crank

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

widen to a dark screen grown suddenly bright

and huge – not the tiny ovoid TV

but vast, enormous, spanning the width

of his field of vision from Row Three,

the row, as Marilyn tells him

with a fifth-grader's knowing accent

the monsters are in perfect focus.

He cleans his glasses furiously

as the sound track crackles, and a globe

topped with the RKO tower emanates

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

he commences his movie-watching Saturdays

with King Kong, who, on that screen,

amid those shrieks and screams of the crowd

on-screen and in the audience, strides tall

on his island, taller yet as he scales

the uncountable floors of the Empire State.

He had seen cartoon dinosaurs, but those

who try to wrest the Fay Wray-morsel from Kong

are as real as they get, the first taste

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

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

of the fate of him who falls for Beauty.

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

recite all the names of the movies he saw there

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

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

A basement full of surgical failures in The Black Sleep –

first view of an exposed brain a special thrill.

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

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

poked and stirred around for no more reason

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

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

the man who had been Dracula reduced to a doorman.

Rathbone and Carradine, Tamirov and Johnson

the mad doctor and his henchmen and victims.

This double-billed with The Creeping Unknown,

whose alien-microbed astronaut, gaunt and wandering

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

until it oozes octopoid onto the scaffolding

around Westminster Abbey. Fast work

for stalwart scientist Quatermass who rigs

the metalwork with a million volts

from a nearby power plant.

After The Blob he turned inward to his chemistry set

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

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

that festered for two days in a Florence flask, then

made a nocturnal exeunt into the floor drain. For weeks

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

in house pipes and gurgling drains; one went so far

as to say it raised its white pseudopods when he looked

into the late-night toilet bowl.

                                                    The dreaded Cyclops

from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad seemed as he woke

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

When the garish colors of Curse of Frankenstein

reveled in blood and bosoms, he set up shop

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

the hand-drawn poster said in drip-red lettering

and the children came from all around.

Clothesline and sheet for curtain, old 78

of The Sheik of Araby a Gothic foxtrot,

his fellow fourth-graders no longer chemists

but grease-paint actors: monster and villagers,

doctor and hunchback. Naturally he is the Doctor,

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

rivulets down the aisles among the screaming girls.

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

He sends for a mail order course in hypnotism.

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

dry ice for malevolent Jekyll-Hyde elixirs.

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

accelerating horrors. The bugs have invaded:

ant and tarantula, mantis and locust grown

to the size of locomotives, the dark side

of the atom whose giant-flower mutations

they are taught about on schooldays. They would

all glow in the dark and in perfect health

when Our Friend the Atom was done with them.

After Them! and Tarantula, Beginning of the End,

The Giant Claw, and The Deadly Mantis,

the worst was The Black Scorpion, so horrible,

in fact, that as he watched it open a train

like a sardine can, extract the passengers, then sting

them with its terrible venom before the slow

ascent to the drooling jaws and mandibles, someone

on the balcony vomited a visual melange

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

Then came Godzilla, a whole new order

of urban destruction and radium-breath:

boys who had never seen a city looked on

as powerlines and factories, gas terminals and seaports,

glass and steel towers, department stores and palaces

were stamped to splinters and rubble

beneath the wayward reptilian scourge

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

a force that might wipe clean the earth once and forever

of the human infestation.

                                               Godzilla made manifest, too,

in the form of a fat bully on Mulberry Street

who waited to knock the school and library books

from his hands into the nearest snowdrift.

He filled a squirt gun with ammonia and onion juice,

a minor armament since he was studying nuclear fission

and knew a dozen withering curses in Latin.

When the saucers of The Mysterians began airlifting women

to help repopulate a dying world, he was jealous,

dreamt of a gravity beam abduction from his own bed.

Forbidden Planet taught him to embrace the alien:

if left on Altair Four he'd happily join Morbius

in solitary study of the long extinct Krell geniuses;

if taxed enough with unjust bullying, he'd join

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

when he sank half the Atlantic fleet or turned

the submarine to starship and beat the Russians to Mars.

He had never been two towns away,

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

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

sewn from his father's old shirts,

goggle-eyed with wrong glasses, arms full

of comics and all the books he could carry,

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

the doorway to a higher reality. No matter

how far he has gone, what written or done,

he is still there, in that seat in Row Three

as the ships land, the invasion commences,

the tentacle comes slowly into focus

at the edge of vision, the branches part

to those two great orbs of The Beast.

He was the one who ran away

     to join the Monsters

          to explore the stars,

haunted, to become the Haunter.

--October 2010 – March 2011

Scottdale, PA

Ode 100 of Hafiz

Adapted from Richard LeGallienne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All I Know About My Father

When someone asks Your father?
I conjure a blank, a void,
a vacant place at table, in heart,
a self-erasing memory.
Sometimes I envy poets
who sift from out their childhood days
a paradigm moment,
a passing of wisdom,
a graceless hug,
eye twinkle of reflected pride.
I try, and come up empty.

Once, in the living room,
he showed me places on a globe;
I glimpsed
in closely guarded scrapbook
a ruined, barbed-wire Europe
whose ovens had singed him.
He had a German medal.
Arbeit, it said.
He showed me the tanks,
the marching columns
in which he'd tramped,
GIs like chessmen
riding and walking
filling the map
to meet the Red chessmen,
pawns in the mine and yours
diplomacy of Yalta.
I still recall their farmboy faces,
the broken walls behind their pose.

Once we walked on a slag pile.
He hurled things angrily --
sticks, rocks and bottles -
into a quicksand pool.

I think he meant to tell me something:
There is a place that draws you to it.
There is a force that sucks you under.
There is a way to walk around it.

Days he kept books at the belching coke ovens,
debits and credits in the sulfurous air;
nights he played jazz at roadside taverns.
One night we even heard him on the radio.

I tried to play his clarinet -- just once.
He yanked it away.
Daily and nightly the man was there.
Thirteen years of a father
who wanted a room between himself and sons.
So this is all that I remember:
He was the voice who fought with my mother.
He slept on the couch, then in another house.

Years passed, birthdays and Christmases
unmarked and unremembered.
When I was seventeen he phoned the school,
said he would meet me at the top of the hill.

I walked there, wondering
what we might have to say,
what new beginnings--

Sign this, he said.
What is it?
A policy. Insurance we had
on you and your brother.
I'd like to cash it in.
I signed. The car sped off.
I never told anyone.

When someone asks Your father?
I shrug. He is an empty space,
a vacuum where no bird can fly,
a moon with no planet,
an empty galaxy
where gravity repels
and dark suns hoard their light.

Note: This poem, although written in 1993, was just published for the first time in 2011 in the Longman textbook, Literature and Gender.

True Friends

For Pierre and Jen

True friends
are those who downplay
your protestations
of seasonal depression,
drawing you out
on the shunned holiday
and its grim barrage
of hurled presents,

who ply you with roast beef
and good cheer;
good talk, too,
of all our friends
who are sliding to their ruin
save thee and me;

who, gleaning your thoughts
as moonlight glistens
on nearby snow mounds,
propose a midnight walk

through a densely-peopled place
where not one voice is caroling,
not one wine drunk reels,
and dead trees worthy
of Kaspar David Friedrich
thrust vine-clogged branch
into the lunar orb’s
eye-socket, a tramp
to the glazed and silent pond
of the North Burial Ground.

If there be Yule or Wassail,
raise cups
at Nicholas Brown’s
bilingual obelisk,
the Latin side well-lit
for night-bird reading,

or tip your cap
to the derelict women’s
Last Home on Earth
(the potter’s field
of the workhouse), or heave
the old year’s slave-chains
into the mailbox vault
of John Brown’s shattered
table-top tombstone.

Too chill for even
the flitter of bat,
the night is warm despite,
the august society
of graveyard walkers
our aristocracy.

Keziah's Geometry Lessons

from the world of H.P. Lovecraft's "Dreams in the Witch House"

“Something’s not right
about Keziah.”
So spoke the tutor
old Mason,
the defrocked minister
hired for his
only daughter’s lessons
in Latin and Greek,
geometry and music.

The old man sighed.
Five tutors had fled
at the sight of his hideous daughter.
This one had stayed
three months —- the record.
She labored him, not her, her,
in Latin; her Greek,
the tutor felt,
was somehow pre-Homeric,
littered with words not in
his Hellenic lexicon.

“Is it the Greek again?
She’s stubborn.”

The tutor — his name was William —-
waved his thin hand,
which seemed thinner
if that was possible,
than when he arrived.
(He had been eating
noticeably less at table
since moving his lodgings
to the upper garret).

“No, the geometry.
The things she says,
although she knows her Euclid,
are troubling me. She draws,
first squares, then cubes,
then hints at something
unrepresentable —-
a cube cubed
or transcended,
each of its six facets
exploded
to fifty-four invisible forms —-
yet only visible, she says
by standing outside
and seeing from above.

‘The cube I draw,’
she tells me
‘is but a mouse-hole
to the higher space.
Can ye not see there?’ ”

“Is she mad,
do you think,
or a kind of genius?”
the father muses.

“She lacks constraint,”
the tutor speculates.
“It’s not the way
a young woman thinks.”
He pauses.
“Or a Christian.”

“Indulge her,”
old Mason tells him,
“for neither cross
nor catechism
can come near her.
She will not leave this house
till I can marry her
to some doddering scholar
or ship captain derelict,
someone who will find her
amusing, her dowry
adequate, so long
as he expects no peace,
or children.”

The tutor gleans
at last, some sense
of Mason’s burden, the why
of his abandonment
of Bible and congregants.
Keziah was God’s
affliction for his own
pride of intellect,
a strident mind
in a hunch-dwarf body,
his penance
to be her keeper.

The tutor withdrew,
prepared for bed,
washed himself everywhere,
lay naked
the better to attract
his guilty pleasure,
his imaginary lover
by whose graces
he no longer need commit
the sin of self-pollution,

to await its coming,
to please its inquisitive,
pulsating and thrusting
machinery,
when it arrived,
not through the door
or window,
but from the crazed-angle corner
he filled with plaster
to unsquare it
and through whose polyhedrous
mouse hole
it came
a congeries of bubble-forms
to a geometer
as fair as Helen
before even Menelaus
took her, let alone
Trojan Paris,

with whom he flew
rhapsode ecstatic,
feeding and fed upon,
sung to and singing,
his Bible too,
unopened for weeks now,
turned down in the corner;

April’s end his own end
as she witch-waltzes
him to a Greek Walpurgis
he neither expects
nor wishes to survive.

His climax-death
will span eons and galaxies,
feelers and tentacles a-quiver,
hydrofluoric neurons
in orgasmic tremor,
worlds colliding, orbits
asunder, seismic,
ichthyc, arachnid,
reptilian pleasuring.
Keziah likes him.
And whom Keziah loves,
she shares with her gods.

Walter Scott's Translation of Goethe's Erl-King

O who rides by night thro' the woodland so wild?
It is the fond father embracing his child;
And close the boy nestles within his loved arm,
To hold himself fast, and to keep himself warm.

“O father, see yonder! see yonder!” he says;
“My boy, upon what dost thou fearfully gaze?”
“O, ’tis the Erl-King with his crown and his shroud.”
“No, my son, it is but a dark wreath of the cloud.”

The Erl-King Speaks:
“O come and go with me, thou loveliest child;
By many a gay sport shall thy time be beguiled;
My mother keeps for thee many a fair toy,
And many a fine flower shall she pluck for my boy.”

“O father, my father, and did you not hear
The Erl-King whisper so low in my ear?”
“Be still, my heart's darling -- my child, be at ease;
It was but the wild blast as it sung thro' the trees.”

Erl-King:
“O wilt thou go with me, thou loveliest boy?
My daughter shall tend thee with care and with joy;
She shall bear thee so lightly thro’ wet and thro’ wild,
And press thee, and kiss thee, and sing to my child.”

“O father, my father, and saw you not plain
The Erl-King's pale daughter glide past thro’ the rain?”
“Oh yes, my loved treasure, I knew it full soon;
It was the grey willow that danced to the moon.”

Erl-King:
“O come and go with me, no longer delay,
Or else, silly child, I will drag thee away.”
“O father! O father! now, now, keep your hold,
The Erl-King has seized me -- his grasp is so cold!”

Sore trembled the father; he spurr’d thro’ the wild,
Clasping close to his bosom his shuddering child;
He reaches his dwelling in doubt and in dread,
But, clasp’d to his bosom, the infant was dead.

Featured in the new anthology, "Tales of Wonder," written and compiled by Matthew Gregory Lewis (1801) and edited and annotated by Brett Rutherford

Order from Amazon

A New H.P. Lovecraft-Related Poem

KEZIAH MASON

After H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House” (1932)

“Something’s not right
about Keziah,”
the midwife tells
the scholar father,
Pastor Mason,
the Salem Divine.

The doting mother
won’t hear of it.
“Bad auspices,” the father nods.
“I told you so.”

The mother cradles it
as midwife scurries off
with rags and the bloody
umbilical,
an accusing serpent.
“Baby Keziah,” the mother croons,
“my perfect child.”

“Not right, bad auspices,
bad numerology,
too many vowels,
bad luck to have alpha
follow zed that way.”

She waves him away.
Anxious, he follows
the weary midwife,
Old Goodie Brown.
Their eyes meet.
“Tell me, “ he asks.
“Why didn’t you say
if I have a son or daughter?”

“Neither,” she says.
“Who knows,” she shrugs,
“what it will grow to?”

“Deformed?” he guesses.

She shakes her head.

“Hermaphrodite?”

Her eyes avoid him.

“The ancients write
of such creatures.”

The midwife hesitates,
taking the small purse
he discreetly offers.
“I’ve seen odd things,
good Pastor Mason,
but never this:
not male, not female.
What’s there,
I’d call machinery,
and what use God
or the Devil intends for it
I’ll not be thinking on.”

She hurries out
into the snowstorm,
the bloodied rag
held tight,
not one but two
umbilicals,
a black-furred thing
whose razor teeth
gnaw and consume
the after-birth.

“There, there,” she coos,
petting its fur,
as a tiny facsimile
of the Pastor’s face
stares up at her.
“Old Goodie Brown
will look out
for her little Jenkin,
my perfect child.”

Then the thing cleared
its tiny throat
and after a dry
and preliminary chittering
it thanked her
in fourteen languages.

Review of D H Melhem's New Book

ART AND POLITICS, POLITICS AND ART. D.H. Melhem. Syracuse University Press.
High explosives warning: this slender new volume of poems is poetical and political dynamite. Manhattan poet Melhem thought she would set out with a very classical purpose, to present poems that were inspired by, or narrate the stories of, works of visual art — an urge that arose from her own childhood engagement with painting, drawing, and sculpture. But her own life as a child of Lebanese immigrants, and the war-torn half century we have passed through, dictated otherwise. Although many of the poems here center around works of art, Melhem's poems hone in on the life-and-death issues that confront us as citizens and as a nation. This is not so far from the classical model, it turns out, since the model of ekphrasis, in The Iliad, is a description of the shield of Achilles. The shadow of war hangs over art, visual or poetic.

Every Manhattanite acquires the survival skill of being a keen observer. In "Naked Woman Walks Down the Street," Melhem throws the spotlight on a naked madwoman, noticed and arrested within minutes, while the homeless — the army she leads in the poetic fantasy that ensues — remain invisible. Like Ovid, Melhem petrifies them, warns of "their malice, their might" if they are too long ignored.

At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the poet contrasts three disparate exhibits of Coco Chanel, Dianne Arbus, and Duccio. Like most of us, she lingers over the latter artist's Madonna and child, searching for some secret message. Why, she seems to ask, is future violence prefigured in domestic bliss, "tiny Jesus about to grow/ into his inheritance, future already/ worn into his face,/ and his mother's."

"Lincoln's Summer Home" is a masterpiece. Risky as it is to write of Lincoln in the shadow of Vachel Lindsay, Melhem succeeds in terse lines to tell us how Lincoln did not, and could not, evade reminders of his war in progress. The President did not play golf in some gated compound: his house overlooked Rock Creek National Cemetery, and from his windows he saw the daily interment of dead soldiers. She ends her poem eye to eye with Lincoln's portrait, "the monumental grief carved into it." If only Congressmen and Senators were obliged to watch the coffins of the military dead pass through their chambers.

"Poem for Elizabeth Cady Stanton" celebrates a great American heroine of the struggle for women's rights, and was occasioned by the renaming of her own Upper West Side apartment building as "The Stanton" in 2007, a belated act of architectural tribute in an age when every other hydrant is named "Trump."

"Hannibal Crossing the Alps" has its political lessons on imperial follies, but it is also an effective ekphrasis of paintings by Turner and Poussin.

In other poems more overtly social and political, Melhem displays the keen eye for the hidden powerplays of urban life that characterized Notes on 94th Street (her first book which I had the honor of publishing many years ago). She imagines a city flooded by global warming in which "submerged real estate and soggy towers/ address of sharks and whales and bloated bears." She sees prostitutes at their stations as "stone-eyed/ caryatids of their littered turf," and she throws the hard light of judgment, almost Olympian, at their pimp: "entrepreneur, landlord without land/ sultan of slumbodies/ you parade their gargoyle emblem/ for a pair of new shoes/... boss, now/ selling your sister."

"April 2004" reminds us that moments of heart-stopping beauty — a sudden bloom of cheery trees — comes to us in war-time as well as in peace-time, but these blessings of nature are not the same during a time of hurled bombs and deadly drones.

In her post-9/11"New York Epic," Melhem is Whitmanesque, becoming the sidewalk, the street, the neighborhood itself. This is urban transcendentalism, bracing and brave, self-as-personification taken to its limit, leaping to:

Impulse of rain vaults across waters
pelts me with world-horror
triggers chaos around me
wild with Baghdad and Fallujah
the bomb craters of Kabul
my gutters weep khaki and body parts
wail with prayers from mosques and temples
market air perfumed with sweet breath of dying children
and sparked with random light of exploding eyeballs
drowning in oil ripped from the earth
set afire in the land an on waters
burning me burning this street
burning its heart out
until no one
comes home to me
whole

I am you — your lives run through me within me
I am you and whatever you are intending
stained by indelible ashes blown five miles uptown
in an inconsolable shroud of acrid taste
and trembling trembling trembling
with continuing off sense
of a distant folly



Ekphrasis takes an urgent tone elsewhere in the book, when the work being explicated is an atrocity photo, in "These Policemen Are Sleeping," an indictment of Israeli-Palestinian violence, a war so unrelenting that all-consuming that it "spares lives as lottery prizes." A string of powerful poems on the Gulf War and other wars ensues, each pointed and poignant. Melhem returns to the literary classics, in "Hecuba to Hector," accusing the men's business of war, as the soldier's mother protests:

"War is men's business,"
you say. What then is women's? To tend
the funeral pyres and whitened bones? To pluck
the lyres of lamentation? I should have
rent my breasts before they suckled you
or any of my sons. Do not, I pray,
go out to meet Achilles.


There are many more wonders passed over in this brief review: all 33 poems in this collection are worthy of this fine poet, working at the peak of her powers. Order the book from your local bookstore or from Amazon.com.

The Garden of Numa Pompilius

simulat sibi cum dea Egeria congressus nocturnus esse*
— Titus Livy, Ab Urba Condita, i. 9

From whom does the great king
gain his wisdom, the king
whose great laws pour
as from a river?
Some say a woman advises him,
but the king’s house
has neither woman nor woman-child:
no dainty foot has walked here
since the consort’s burial.

Some say, in his grief
he has gone Orphic-mad,
and now a boy inspires him.
It’s true that beardless youths
come freely, serving from silver
bowls and chalices. (Greek ways
and wiles — are they among us?)

This too is idle gossip —
for neither youth nor maiden
has seen the silent garden
of Numa Pompilius.
The summer’s short nights
he sleeps alone here.
Scribes come at dawn
to take his judgments,
hear the new laws.
His wisdom astonishes,
surpassing, surprising
his ever-contending counselors.

The source of his power is here,
a stone-cut spring, old as the Tiber,
that only kings may drink from,
in the grave-scent of yew trees,
the bitterness of laurel —
a still voice that thrills him,
pale arms that come
fro out of nowhere
to rest on his shoulders —
the voice above calumny,
conspiracy and faction.

Rome is Numa, and Numa, Rome.
His, the rites to Jupiter,
the incense rising, entrails read;
his Virgins at Vesta’s hearthside;
his, the temples of Mars and Janus,
the ordered calendar and the names of days —
his thoughts no sooner spoken than enacted.

Her thoughts. Those garden nights
he dare not look backward
to search her countenance —
madness or blindness
the nympholept’s punishment.
She might be crone, or eyeless,
or Gorgon-locked, or nothing more
than poplar leaves rustling.
Her name on his lips,
an Etruscan mystery,
is all he has, or knows.

She will not have a temple,
chooses her own altar and pontifex.
He comes to the spring font,
to the branches bowed
with night-wind,
calls thrice (their only ritual) —
Egeria! Egeria! Egeria!

__________________
* He himself pretended to be in nocturnal congress with the goddess Egeria. — Livy, History of Early Rome.

Water Music IV

To be is to have been with these waters; to be
is to have roots in bleeding earth,
from mud, that oozing formless mother squeezed,
is to have known the longest path downhill —
falling, fierce drops from the blistering clouds —
or to be born as dew in pre-dawn light
or to come as crystal. solemn in frost.
or to spring from the rocks’ deep airless streams,
chill child of the darkness, full of tumult.’

To be is to flow, formed and yet formless,
bubbling with atoms’ singing bravado,
proud of a charge, an affinite valence,
a molecule’s journey defying death,
reflecting yet fleeing the sun’s hot lamp,
alive yet buoying the leaves of decay,
carving trails everywhere, here mingling,
there feeding hungry roots, there wearing down
some arrogant hillside, toppling its trees —
to move with a certainty of purpose,
knowing the land is shaped by tireless ions.
To be, however small, yet know yourself
the sine qua non of spring and summer!

To leap, however deceived, to hot air
into the trap of a motionless pool
over the brink of a cataract, down
to the inky depths of an ocean trench, —
all are the same to you, no place an end,
at home alike in gill and gullet, one
with even the loneliness of glaciers —
To know your destiny, the truth of your being,
borne from the source by your own charge.
To know is to reach by any means
an end which no other essence compels;
to be, and to leave where you pass
your subtle fingerprint upon the hardest stone.

Note: The equinoctial storms engulfing the Notheast this weekend made me think of this poem.