Love Spells

Disproof of ritual magic:

incense and candles, amulets and spells.

Try hard as you will, you cannot make

an oblivious boy love you. 

I know. More than once, I have tried. Despite the aid

of an army of phantom assistants —

translucent, arrow-laden Cupids —

satyrs ascending fire-escapes —

garden Priapi all compass-pointing

from his bedroom to mine —

in spite of love-arbors made

by djins, piled high with roses

from the grave of Omar Khayyam —

in spite of the mandolin serenatas,

the gypsy fiddles, the er-hu, the lute,

the mournful barrage of hautbois

and the Arcadian shepherd’s pipe,

no, he heard not a single melody

that brought my name to his lips.

Not even the darker spells availed me:

despite the unfounded panic that seized

and diverted all his would-be lovers

as bodiless wish forms stalked them

on empty streets, scaling up to the height

of a penthouse with dacoit ease;

despite the solitude my magic cast

around him, still in all that emptiness,

I was not the one he called to fill it.

His lovers fled, and he fled their fleeing.

(Spells only serve repulsively, it seems!)

Vain were the midnight oaths and promises

I made to dubious monarchs of love,

half-seen in the smog of sulfurous hearth,

as I bartered off to black-eyed Erys

(love’s phantom in Pluto’s domain),

a whole year of my life, for a night of his.

“Later,” the hard bargainer said,

placing the coin back in my hand,

“Wait, and he will then be with you always.”

Now, with ashes and Styx between us

I know the scope of the contract refused:

The coin in my hand is for the boatman.

-2011, revised 2021.

What She Was Like

In October, he was home to stay.
Last night, as chill November ripped
the last red remnants from the maples,
and Orion stalked the horizon
he told her, “Mother,
I have to leave. I am returning
to Florida. I can’t explain.”

It was all he could do to get the words out.
In a month he had not said a thing
of what he had to tell her.
He had called no one, content
to be driven to malls and dinners,
polite teas with her old friends
who had never been permitted
to forget his existence, though he
saw them all as a blur of old shoes
primped hair in unnatural hues,
coats too many times out and back
to cold storage. Tanned and plump
he felt like an exotic parrot
in a town full of mummies.

They made a striking pair.
She was a beauty once, her line
     of noble cheek and chin
as proud as his own; nature
kept all her hair and artifice
kept it black as ever, while his
had long receded, speckled with white.
Still, she carried herself well,
as if afloat above her shoes,
as if afflicted still
     with fatal allure
(once his own curse, and power).
She is Lady Madeline Usher
to his Dorian Gray.

“The cab is on its way,” he tells her
as they make morning motions
upstairs, downstairs.
She does not protest. One sigh,
head droop and hand-drop
says everything: out of her sight
is out of existence. His butterfly
would fade to moth memory.
Once more he'd be reduced
to an object of converstion:
Art School — No, never married,
poor boy — lives far away.
I've never met his friends.
Perhaps, from there, from the safe
distance of a letter, he could tell her.

As he packs the last suitcase,
reverse motion from a month ago,
things won’t fit easily.
“You have scarcely time for breakfast,”

she admonished from the doorway.
“I’d rather shower,” he said.
“You have so many things now,”
     she said, alluding
     to all her recent gifts,
“impossible to pack them all.
This is so sudden.”

Most of the clothes are in the closet.
They are dead weight, ballast
to keep his ship from sailing.
Only one new suit, an exquisite black,
was folded beneath the old jeans,
the khaki trousers and well-worn shirts.
It would have its use.

She mumbles something, it sounds
like “Oh, very well.” She’s gone.
He takes a towel and razor and soap
for his hurried shower – and then –
as though in dream’s slow motion
he passes her bedroom where

two disembodied arms stretch out,
     two alabaster cylinders
     arms odalisque, surreal,
against a paisley bedspread —

no, it is a mirror laid flat on the bed,
     reflecting two arms to the elbow bared,
the door ajar, as she intended it;

he peers round to see her thrashing there,
     half-crouched, a butcher knife
before her transfixed eyes, first
     in one hand, then tightly in two,
the one-hand gesture a throat-cut sweep,
     two-handed, it turns upon herself,
     blade pointed at base of bosom,
     a disemboweling thrust if only
she would — but she doesn’t.
     She looks up, sees him seeing her.
The door goes shut.

He tiptoes past, decides
     he will forego the shower.
With a great motion
     he did not think within him,
he rose, bags in both hands —
neither embrace nor handshake
a possibility as he backs
down the stairway
to the door; it opens somehow
behind his fumbling fingers
twisted as they are with bag-holds,
and he is out.

The full light of cloudless day,
out there, the oxygen
which seemed so lacking amid
the wallpaper and tapestries —
was the cab even in sight? —
no matter — he would turn the corner,
away and out of her sight at last.

Gone was the death-urge that brought him here
to a rust-belt town that even rust
had abandoned, as if old broth
were a cure for his tumors, as if
the thing that gnawed him
would stop gnawing if she forgave him
the sin of their decades’ severance.

He breathes hard breaths, short,
     then longer. No, it is still there,
odds not good if they cut him open.
He will go back to the sand and the coral,
     the indifferent tide,
the long, slow sunsets.

He pauses once, before the turn
to the safe side street, feels eyes
like spider tendrils on neck-nape.
She is there;
she has ascended to the attic,
watching,
          mouth mouthing incantations
of arachnid web-pull.

He will not turn; he will not look.
Thank God, he thinks, the mad
do not go forth. They stay at home,
tethered to memory and failure,
eyes fixed at last on blankness,
a pale face in a rhomboid window.

This poem was a dream I had after learning of the death of a friend. Later I learned that he had briefly and secretly returned home to Pennsylvania, and had just as abruptly returned to Florida where he died. I have never met his mother, so this poem comes entirely from dream and imagination. As a young college student he had often spoken of his mother as a figure of some dread, so this doubtless influenced the content of my dream. Having to deal with my own "terrible Mother" in life and in poetry, I guess it would be surprising if I had seen a benevolent mother figure.

The Butcher Knife

Not once did I see one used for butchering.
The wooden handle firm in the grasp,
the broad, long edge, serrated ominously,
quite capable of rending limb from torso,
or a small head from a shuddering spine.

No, the fame of these kitchen implements
was their use by neurotic aunties,
stepmothers too jealous and easily provoked,
old wives at the end of married tether.

Medea in slippers and terrycloth,
red-eyed from onion chopping,
she waved it aloft in a shrieking rage, or,
worse by far, swung it in stone-eyed silence.

She could chase and corner a terrified
stepchild (while her own, better daughter
watches from the stairwell landing),
or send the man hurtling to corner tavern.

In the right hands, this most domestic
of kitchen tools clears any house
of inconvenient relatives,
of the need for cooking and mending,

a Pennsylvania Gothic sword
that never needs sharpening.

The Brown Derby

Racial segregation was a fact of life in rural Pennsylvania where I spent my childhood. There was a road we didn't go down where all the black people lived. As a result of my trip back to Pennsylvania I am writing my recollections of this for the first time. First came "Monday Miss Schreckengost Reads Us Little Black Sambo," a major poem that will be in my next book. I am working on a piece about an elderly woman who froze to death and the attitude of neighbors who brushed it off because the black neighbor was "too proud" to ask for help. The poem below is just a small recollection of the road itself, one of a number of coal shantytowns that followed the creek.

THE BROWN DERBY
 

Road we don’t go down
     weed trees and roadside flowers
shack houses     no toilets
     a collapsed barn
a shingled hall     the Negroes’ nightclub
its paint-peeled sign
     THE BROWN DERBY
crowded Saturday
     cars and shouting
sometimes a gunshot     a body
     would float in the creek behind,
     tangled with discarded shoes,
     coal miners’ helmets,
     belts and suspenders
     old tires     turtles and crayfish
fished out     dragged to the county morgue
     John Doe’d till someone’s son
     was reported missing

Who lives there?     What do they do
on that road we don’t go down?
How far does it go?     How many live down there?
Why don’t we ever see them
in the school, the bank, the post office?
It’s not even on the street map,
     the nameless lane
          of The Brown Derby.

H P Lovecraft at the Newsstand

 Caution: This poem has inside jokes for fans of H.P. Lovecraft. 

H P LOVECRAFT AT THE NEWSSTAND

                on seeing a Justin Bieber special issue of US Magazine

COLLECTORS' EDITION

SIX HOT
POSTERS INSIDE!

H. P. LOVECRAFT:
MY
PRIVATE
WORLD

Exclusive photos
inside my bedroom

My New
Letter-Writing
Life

How I Cope
With Being Unknown

WIN A TRIP
TO MEET
HOWARD.

South Pacific Nightmare:
Edward and Bella
Breakup.
Eddie Storms Out
Over Howard-Bella
R’lyeh Love-Nest.

Online:
Howard Lovecraft Totally Naked OMG!

New Howard Lovecraft
Six-Pack Abs.

More Howard Shirtless Pictures
Click Here.

Howard and Sonia —
Our Embarrassing
First Date:
Young Author Panics
At First Sight of Spaghetti.

“He was An Ugly Baby”:
Howard’s Mom Tells Diary
In Weird Rant
From Butler Hospital.

First Photos:
Howard in Rio.
Grandpa’s Coat by Day;
Wig & Mom's Dress
For Carnival.

HPL Signs On
For Reality Show:
“The Whateleys”
Won’t Talk
About Howard’s
Attic Room-Mate.

Teen Alert As Nuns
Seize Lovecraft Volumes:
Why Believing In Cthulhu
Means You’re
Not Catholic.

Death Watch After
Lovecraft Shocker:
My Thirty-Year Addiction
To C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁.
“This Quadrant of Pie
Is My Last.”

ON A CHINESE FAN BY DONG GAO

ON A CHINESE FAN BY DONG GAO[1]

Hand-painted, a universe of greens and grays
emerging from a background mist
on the sewn strips of a Chinese fan:

the scholar, a man of some wealth
and even greater erudition, has brought
(o wonder of labor and engineering)
a good half dozen scholar’s stones,

each high as a house wall, soft stone
eroded to honeycomb by a millennium
of patient rain and hollowing,
forming three sides around his table;

at ease with his calligraphy, the brazier
bright and burning with water a-boil,
the servant refilling the yi xing[2] pot
as fast as he drinks down
the finest of water-nymph teas;

the reedy crooning of an er-hu[3]
fiddle at his right; off to the rear
a pi-pa[4] lute player awaiting
her turn to please him, the rocks
a perfect amphitheater;

birds hovering, pruned trunks
of trees on one side bending
the trunk in an artful curve
(how long it took to tease
one cherry in and among
the hollows of the lingbi stone!).[5]

No solitary scholar this,
alone in a gazebo perched
on some cliff above the cloud-line:

he has a secondary grove,
o’erhung with pine and willow
beneath whose shade
a table is spread with all his poetry,
where two friends tune the zheng,[6]

to whose melancholy fingerings
(glissando and tremolo)
they’ll echo back his lines to him,

even while serving girls unwrap
the afternoon repast of tofu,
pickles piquant with rice vinegar
and red chilis, and red-bean cake.

Other friends ambulate
amid the upthrust rocks
and clinging tree-roots,
catching the drift but not
the meaning of his poems
as wind and waterfall
hum through the sighing pines.

It is a place so beneficent
that in it poems are superfluous —

well, almost.

CLICK OVER RED TITLE AT TOP OF THIS POEM TO SEE THE WORK OF ART (AT LEAST AS LONG AS IT STAYS LIVE ON CHRISTIES' WEBSITE.)

---

[1] Dong Gao (1740-1818). The Chinese fan described here was sold at Christie’s in 2010.

[2] Yi xing, a red-purple clay used for making scholar’s teapots and other ornamental ceramics.

[3] Er-hu, the two-stringed Chinese fiddle.

[4] Pi-pa, the Chinese lute

[5] Lingbi, name of the hollowed, perforated stone from Anhui province favored for scholar’s stones.

[6] Zheng, the Chinese zither.

Autumn on Pluto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

Arabesques on Early Modern Mathematics

     for Travis Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the Funeral Home

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

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

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

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

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

The others I have never met.

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

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

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

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

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

The Blue Boy

On certain Sundays I was sent alone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nights at the Strand

The Strand Theater, Scottdale, PA

As the lights dim and the tattered curtains

rustle and part with a creak-crank

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

widen to a dark screen grown suddenly bright

and huge – not the tiny ovoid TV

but vast, enormous, spanning the width

of his field of vision from Row Three,

the row, as Marilyn tells him

with a fifth-grader's knowing accent

the monsters are in perfect focus.

He cleans his glasses furiously

as the sound track crackles, and a globe

topped with the RKO tower emanates

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

he commences his movie-watching Saturdays

with King Kong, who, on that screen,

amid those shrieks and screams of the crowd

on-screen and in the audience, strides tall

on his island, taller yet as he scales

the uncountable floors of the Empire State.

He had seen cartoon dinosaurs, but those

who try to wrest the Fay Wray-morsel from Kong

are as real as they get, the first taste

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

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

of the fate of him who falls for Beauty.

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

recite all the names of the movies he saw there

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

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

A basement full of surgical failures in The Black Sleep –

first view of an exposed brain a special thrill.

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

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

poked and stirred around for no more reason

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

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

the man who had been Dracula reduced to a doorman.

Rathbone and Carradine, Tamirov and Johnson

the mad doctor and his henchmen and victims.

This double-billed with The Creeping Unknown,

whose alien-microbed astronaut, gaunt and wandering

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

until it oozes octopoid onto the scaffolding

around Westminster Abbey. Fast work

for stalwart scientist Quatermass who rigs

the metalwork with a million volts

from a nearby power plant.

After The Blob he turned inward to his chemistry set

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

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

that festered for two days in a Florence flask, then

made a nocturnal exeunt into the floor drain. For weeks

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

in house pipes and gurgling drains; one went so far

as to say it raised its white pseudopods when he looked

into the late-night toilet bowl.

                                                    The dreaded Cyclops

from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad seemed as he woke

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

When the garish colors of Curse of Frankenstein

reveled in blood and bosoms, he set up shop

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

the hand-drawn poster said in drip-red lettering

and the children came from all around.

Clothesline and sheet for curtain, old 78

of The Sheik of Araby a Gothic foxtrot,

his fellow fourth-graders no longer chemists

but grease-paint actors: monster and villagers,

doctor and hunchback. Naturally he is the Doctor,

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

rivulets down the aisles among the screaming girls.

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

He sends for a mail order course in hypnotism.

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

dry ice for malevolent Jekyll-Hyde elixirs.

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

accelerating horrors. The bugs have invaded:

ant and tarantula, mantis and locust grown

to the size of locomotives, the dark side

of the atom whose giant-flower mutations

they are taught about on schooldays. They would

all glow in the dark and in perfect health

when Our Friend the Atom was done with them.

After Them! and Tarantula, Beginning of the End,

The Giant Claw, and The Deadly Mantis,

the worst was The Black Scorpion, so horrible,

in fact, that as he watched it open a train

like a sardine can, extract the passengers, then sting

them with its terrible venom before the slow

ascent to the drooling jaws and mandibles, someone

on the balcony vomited a visual melange

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

Then came Godzilla, a whole new order

of urban destruction and radium-breath:

boys who had never seen a city looked on

as powerlines and factories, gas terminals and seaports,

glass and steel towers, department stores and palaces

were stamped to splinters and rubble

beneath the wayward reptilian scourge

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

a force that might wipe clean the earth once and forever

of the human infestation.

                                               Godzilla made manifest, too,

in the form of a fat bully on Mulberry Street

who waited to knock the school and library books

from his hands into the nearest snowdrift.

He filled a squirt gun with ammonia and onion juice,

a minor armament since he was studying nuclear fission

and knew a dozen withering curses in Latin.

When the saucers of The Mysterians began airlifting women

to help repopulate a dying world, he was jealous,

dreamt of a gravity beam abduction from his own bed.

Forbidden Planet taught him to embrace the alien:

if left on Altair Four he'd happily join Morbius

in solitary study of the long extinct Krell geniuses;

if taxed enough with unjust bullying, he'd join

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

when he sank half the Atlantic fleet or turned

the submarine to starship and beat the Russians to Mars.

He had never been two towns away,

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

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

sewn from his father's old shirts,

goggle-eyed with wrong glasses, arms full

of comics and all the books he could carry,

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

the doorway to a higher reality. No matter

how far he has gone, what written or done,

he is still there, in that seat in Row Three

as the ships land, the invasion commences,

the tentacle comes slowly into focus

at the edge of vision, the branches part

to those two great orbs of The Beast.

He was the one who ran away

     to join the Monsters

          to explore the stars,

haunted, to become the Haunter.

--October 2010 – March 2011

Scottdale, PA

Ode 100 of Hafiz

Adapted from Richard LeGallienne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.