End of the World, or Let's "Rapture" Everybody

Quite a few years back, I read a Christian comic book that depicted "The Rapture," and found it hilarious. That prompted this poem, the 21st in my "Anniversarius" autumn cycle, in which a Universal Rapture occurs on an autumn Monday morning:

Not with a trumpet
but a whisper. No angels
proclaimed the end. Prophets
with sandwich signs
did not predict it.
No tea-leaf ladies
or noted astrologers
knew that the end would come
at half-past eight
in the morning.

It was a Monday,
(of all days!)
catching them dressed
for their funerals.

Who would have guessed
that this October,
instead of leaves
the people turned
and blew away,
that gravity,
the faithful plodder,
would take a holiday?

First some commuters
on a platform in Connecticut
fell straight into a cloudless sky
trying to hook
to lampposts and poles
with flailing arms.

Even the oversize stationmaster
was not immune,
hung by his fingertips
to shingled roof,
an upside-down balloon.
His wig fell down,
the rest of him
shot shrieking upwards.

Slumlords in Brooklyn
dropped rent receipts,
clutched hearts and wallets
as they exfoliated,
burst into red and umber explosions
and flapped away.

A Senator stepped down
from his bulletproof limo,
waved to the waiting lobbyist,
(sweaty with suitcase
full of hundreds)
only to wither to leaf-brown dust,
crumbling within his overcoat.

Stockbrokers adjusted their power ties,
buttoned their monogrammed blazers,
pushed one another from narrow ledge
falling from Wall Street precipice
into the waiting sky,
printouts and ticker tapes,
class rings and credit cards
feathering back down.

Bankers turned yellow,
wisped out like willow leaf
from crumpled pin-stripe,
filling the air
with streamers of vomit
as they passed the roof
of the World Trade Center.

The colors were amazing:
black women turned ivory,
white men turned brown and sere,
athletes swelled up
to fuchsia puffballs,
Chinese unfurled
to weightless jade umbrellas.

Winds plucked the babies from carriages,
oozed them out of nurseries,
pulled them from delivery rooms,
from the very womb--
gone on the first wind out and upwards.

They filled the stratosphere
darkened the jet stream,
too frail to settle in orbit,
drifting to airless space.

They fell at last into the maw
of the black hole Harvester,
a gibbering god
who made a bonfire
of the human host
the whirling spiral of skeletons
a rainbow of dead colors
red and yellow and black and brown
albino and ivory
parched-leaf skins a naked tumble.

The bare earth sighed.
Pigeons took roost in palaces.
Tree roots began
the penetration of concrete.
Rats walked the noonday market.

Wild dogs patrolled
the shopping malls.
Wind licked at broken panes.
A corporate logo toppled
from its ziggurat.
Lightning jabbed down
at the arrogant churches
abandoned schools
mansions unoccupied

started a firestorm
a casual fire
as unconcerned
as that unfriendly shrug
that cleaned the planet.

Gutenberg and His Bible: A Review

I was pleased to see that Janet Ing's intriguing chapbook on Gutenberg and His Bible is still available at Amazon

This is the text of a review I wrote when the little book first came out:

Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about Johann Gutenberg, yet what we actually know about the shadowy inventor of movable type can fit readily into a slender volume.
Janet Ing has a bone to pick with Gutenberg scholars, and she picks at it with grace and erudition in a beautiful new volume in The Typophiles Chapbook Series.
In a modest 154 small pages, the author recounts the sparse history of Gutenberg. At the same time she deflates the wordy effusions of scholars who borrowed well into mental deficit on intuition and guesswork, choosing instead to rely on hard facts. Most important of all, she reviews in clear, precise terms the latest scientific analysis of Gutenberg Bible pages, in which proton beams from a cyclotron were used to study the ink in which the text was printed.
Paul Needham, in an introduction to Dr. Ing’s succinct work, describes the new book as one good for "clearing away the unruly undergrowth" of previous writings on Gutenberg.
Reading the scant biographical details of our printing forefather, it is easy to see how students and scholars, not to mention popular writers of history and fiction, would tend to fill in data based on fancy, inspiration-even a healthy dose of imagination.
It's almost impossible even to paraphrase the outline of Gutenberg's life without interpolating particulars. We take our own knowledge of human nature, our own experience in how printing gets done on a day-to-day basis-and, voila! we think we have a sense of the man, his shop, his problems, and his ambitions.
Dr. Ing tries to combat this romanticizing of Gutenberg, largely the result of works written since the 19th century. History nearly forgot this patient craftsman, who first gained notice in 1438 or 1439 as a manufacturer of "spirit mirrors," mirrored badges worn by pilgrims to Rome. It is speculated that Gutenberg developed a way to mass produce them using a "press" and that he may have gained some of his familiarity with the properties of alloyed metals while engaged in this work. One thing is certain-he had partners in the venture who sued him to get their money back because they were impatient for results.
We can almost see the steadfast tinkerer in his workshop, perhaps examining some reverse die used to emboss a pattern on the pilgrim badges, fiddling with molds and trying new alloys of lead, mixing his own inks out of carbon and lead and sulfur. The smell of brimstone might even have brought a few whispers of alchemy or sorcery from the old wives of Mainz!
We can imagine the "Eureka!" moment when Johann cast a complete word or line of type and then inked the backwards letters to produce a proof.
What Was His Vision?
Then, just as Edison envisioned a world ablaze with electric light, Gutenberg saw the printed book. First, the Bibles would pour forth so that every person capable of reading could see the word of God with his own eyes.
Did he imagine that printing art would one day topple the intellectual and moral monopoly of the Church of Rome! Or that pamphlets and books from presses would eventually undermine monarchies and establish a new nation across the Atlantic? Or that the printer and publisher would gain incredible freedom and power in shaping opinion and spreading knowledge!
You see what we mean about the inclination to elaborate! We are Gutenberg's great-great-whatever-grandchildren. We want Gutenberg to be a visionary-an Edison or Einstein. Or we want him to be an inspired perfectionist, like Bach with his Art of the Fugue or Stradivarius with his violins.
Back to the Facts
Dr. lng, however, brings us squarely back to the facts of the matter. We have, she assures us, no single insight into the mind of Gutenberg other than testimony by or about him given when Johann Fust, a Mainz money- broker, sued Gutenberg to. get back his investment in Gutenberg's venture, referred to cryptically as "the work of the books." This was in 1455, and it is generally agreed that the lawsuit brought Gutenberg to the point of insolvency if not bankruptcy. Somehow, though, Gutenberg seems to have stayed in business well into the 1460s.
Johann Fust took in a partner, one Scheffer, who became his son-in-law, starting a printing dynasty that later claimed to have "invented" printing.
One of the most fascinating parts of the early printing story has 'been the detective work that led scholars to de¬cide which early Bible came first, the 36-line (per page) Bible or the 42-line Bible. Dr. Ing joins those who favor the 42-line Bible. She reproduces passages that show convincingly how a typositor for the 36-line Bible made an error that could be based only on reading a printed copy of the 42-line Bible. (It's all a matter of the final words of one chapter tucked into the end of the first line of the next.)
The author narrates with clarity and a sense of excitement how scholars have gradually learned more and more about how the Bible was printed. This is real detective work, since no one knows how many presses were used or how many typositors were employed. All conclusions have to be made from examining the extant Bibles in museums and collections, and from pages preserved from Bibles broken up and sold in pieces.
AAs We’ve Had Always with Us
As if this weren’t complex enough, the first job by the world’s first printer had “Author's Alterations”!
Less than a quarter of the way into production, Gutenberg increased the print run from about 124 copies to perhaps as many as 167 copies (paper and vellum editions combined, based on estimates by Paul Needham). This change forced them to reset part of the Bible, and to buy additional paper of a different watermark that had to be cleverly insinuated throughout the press run.
Recent analysis by proton beam of the highly variable ink has even made it possible to determine which sheets were printed from the same batch of ink. This, combined with examination of watermarks, has provided many pieces of the "how did he do it?" puzzle.
Dr. Ing speculates that Gutenberg probably operated a second shop for the printing of papal indulgences, calendars, and other ephemera. Would he have called this "Johann's Augenblicklich Incunabula Shop," we wonder?) Type from both the 42-line and 36-line Bibles appears in these early specimens.
Nearly Forgotten
Why did we almost lose the name of Gutenberg altogether? Johann Gutenberg died a mere 12 years after the lawsuit. Fust and Scheffer continued, and their successors dominated the local market. Early colophons and notes about printing credited Fust. Even Erasmus made the, mistake, but not without encouragement from eager salesmen from the Fust printing family.
Apparently some of Gutenberg's own apprentices, who doubtless went to other cities to found their own printing dynasties, got the word out. The fatherhood of the printing art became disputed, and even though Fust or other early printers still have their adherents, the name of Gutenberg has finally triumphed. Whoever said that history is written by the victors was wrong — history is written by the survivors. The unterhund [underdog] will become the uberhund thanks to the very press Gutenberg invented.
Behind the Mask
Obscure as the figure of Gutenberg is in this carefully researched book, we see ample evidence that old Johann was a diligent craftsman, a perfectionist who accepted no compromise in striving to make printing look like fine calligraphy.
Have you ever reflected on the incredible accomplishment of Gutenberg’s work — how it is that the first book ever printed came out as a breathtaking masterpiece? The magnitude of the task set before him explains all too well his backers’ impatience and the resulting lawsuit. Human nature was the same then as now, and the first printer already knew how to say, “Call me tomorrow — ¬the job is on the press!”
Early Linecasting
One of the most tantalizing portions of Johann Gutenberg and His Bible is a later chapter called “Gutenberg and Other Early Printing.” Here Dr. Ing traces a dictionary called the Catholicon, printed with Gutenberg’s type and quite likely with his participation, in editions between 1460 and 1467.
Dr. Ing discusses the startling theory that standing type was kept for seven years on this book, which was reprinted several times. An examination of the printing, including some two-line segments that were mixed up, suggests very strongly that Gutenberg developed a way to cast blocks of type in two-line “slugs,” which could be easily reassembled and locked up for a reprint.
If this suggestion is correct, it's not hard to see the hand and mind of Gutenberg at work. Even to the end, he was seeking a way to economize and gain even further efficiency. We can see him setting two lines of type by hand in a chase, making a mold from them, and then casting and trimming two-line slugs. This makes him the inventor of linecasting and a precursor of Mergenthaler!

Dawn

He thinks: if someone could describe this scene,
it would be stark and simple, a blond-haired man
leans forward on a folding chair. The air is chill,
though no breath rises from his nose or mouth.
He is quite still, as night-bird songs beyond
the French windows subside to that hush
that precedes the dawn, the guard change
from nightingale to lark. To him,
the room appears to be empty. Although he feels
cold steel through his tight, black jeans
and the damp tug of the back of his T-shirt
to the seat-back, he cannot see himself.
His clothes are likewise invisible to him.
He can feel the breath in his nostrils, press lips
against the back of his hand to prove he is there.
His vision, sharp as an owl’s, sees all
that passes on the lawn and garden,
down to the tiniest roil of mouse and vole,
but he is blind to his own hand before his face.

Anyone entering the room would see him.
He supposedly looks awfully good for his years,
three hundred to the day if his memory serves him.
This English house has endured much: riots and war,
Zeppelin and V-2 attacks, the onslaught of blight
and public housing. His well-paid agents
have kept the house intact, managed his gold
with great discretion, and shielded his name
from prying scholars and historians. A blind wall
of trust funds secure his quotidian (quotinoctian?)
needs and secures the multiple vaults, some linked
to one another by passages no rat could fathom.
He has been the perfect vampire, discreet
in his comings and goings as a Windsor heir,
and London’s finest have never discerned him
as a creature of great need and urgency:
a city envelops and forgets so many deaths.
His very contentment, the ease with which
he goes about his business, is the very cause
of his decision to end it – his life – or whatever
this existence is called – at the three-century mark.
He will let the sunlight do it: he waits for dawn
by the eastern doorway, the old drapes
and their dustwebs pulled to the floor, the lace
of even older curtains torn to tatters, panes
broken to admit the acid beams of daylight.
And after this? He assumes: oblivion.
The vampire life did not come with a manual.
The already undead are all clueless; for all
he knows the universe was just one vast
hunger for blood, the feeding and being fed,
the summa as well as the sine qua non.

Just one thing has him curious:
It is said that a vampire, on dying,
can see his own reflection then,
and at no other time in his undead
existence. All the more poignant,
that he has assembled all the mirrors
this decrepit house possesses:
two sets of dresser triptychs; a pile
of hand mirrors and shaving glasses
(the vanity of guests and how much fun
to creep up on them as they regard themselves
in all-too-flattering lamplight!);
three full-length wall mirrors leaned
against chair-backs.
Mirror upon mirror, until the gaze dizzies
in endless fun house angles,
an infinity of floor tiles, chair legs
and angled corners, eye-twinkle
of the six-armed candelabra
into constellations of ever-diminishing stars,
a kaleidoscope of everything there is,
but not a glimmer of him.

What will they find, afterwards,
if they track his most careless, audacious
killing to this house at last,
or when they come some day to demolish it?
The dust or whatever it is that he leaves behind
like a spilled hourglass? Or just the empty room
with its puzzlement of mirrors, that wide bed
canopied with cobwebs, whose dark sheets conceal
untold congelations of victims’ blood?

They will find the clothes, of course:
a closet full of black suits, black jeans,
black leather jackets, black Calvin Klein
dress shirts and T’s, all fitting his mode
of “fashion model gone Goth boy.”
Yes, too, there’s a black opera cape,
wolf-fur trimmed with red velvet lining,
black shoes in every style since 1780
(strange how they never seem to wear out)
right up to present-day sneakers, all black,
black gloves and a variety of useful luggage,
leather, black. Odd that he can only see them
as they hang in the closet: one slip of hand
into a glove or jacket, one toe inside
a shoe or pantleg, and it vanishes, gone
to his own eyes and to the mirror.

How strange to be real only to others,
to touch a willing neck or shoulders
yet never see his hand doing it, never to sense
except by touch his nose-end, toe or fingertip.
How long it took to become at ease and graceful,
even — to see a wineglass rise magically
before one’s one eyes and come to lips,
and then on top of that to have to feign
drinking, to let a wine-wash cross his palette
then fall discreetly back into the glass, that took
a lot of practice! At least the clothes were simpler
now: no more the Edwardian dandy, he slid
into a T-shirt and pulled on jeans as fast
as any teenager. One merely had to remember
zippers and not be inside-out or backwards.

This could have gone on forever, of course,
but the people have grown less interesting,
more easily fooled, more of them glazed
stupid drunk or reeling from drug to drug,
others were smug oxen, waiting the day
their personal savior delivered them.

Who knew it would come, the night
when he could walk into a Goth bar,
and announce “I am a vampire” and silence
followed. A trio of black-clad women
flashed plastic vampire teeth and smiled,
asked which coven he belonged to.
He discerned two types: the overdressed
in opera garb though none, from their dull
look had even been to an opera, and the
down-dressed in some kind of torn rags
punctuated with metal grommets. The men
in both groups eyed and dismissed him.
No uniform, no admission, it seemed.
He lingered a while over a red drink
he didn’t even feign to taste, his ears
offended by machine noise attempting
to form itself into music. A young man
in the torn pin-cushion mode came up,
made sure he saw the Old English lettering
on his T-shirt that read, “Vampire Victim.”
“You’re new,” the young man said.
He nods. “You’re the real thing, aren’t you?”
He nods. “Will you kill me?”
He nods. He’s happy to oblige, but bored.

There was something to be said for the struggle.
The hunt, and its danger, and the threat
of discovery had been The Great Game for him.
He liked it best when they resisted. Sometimes
he almost let them win, or even escape
in order to overtake and surprise them later.
There was a moment, always, the pause
when he pulled from a throat in drinking
and looked the victim eye-to-eye, a dark
and terrible secret that nature withholds:
the victim in that moment loves the killer,
admires his superior essence, gives up
his life force in abject adoration.

Every one of them said “Kill me,”
if not in words then in eyes’ surrender.

What he could never know, was what they saw:
whatever was in their eyes, was not him.

He takes the boy by the scruff of the neck,
and passing the bar he reaches deftly
for three crystal sherry glasses, cupped
between the fingers of his left hand.

The club, which billed itself Tartarus,
(the place beneath Hell if one needed explaining),
has, as clubs are wont, an alleyway out back,
trash cans and strident ailanthus trees, dark spots
behind high shrubbery against a chain link fence.

Right hand against the boy’s chest, he feels
the terrified and excited heartbeat rise
as neck veins flush to readiness, oh, too easy!
He rends the shirt away, leans down, parts flesh
with his expert incisors, inhales the blood
like a breath of fresh air, takes it in fast,
faster than he has done for years, the breath
fails, the heart falters -– no! he pulls back,
pounds at the ribcage to start the heart again --
he would not be cheated -– the boy’s mouth
is frozen in an oh! of horror and no, I
didn’t really want this won’t you please stop?
He doesn’t stop – he ends the life that bleeds
beneath him, sucks dry the husk of heat,
life and the great force that animates all things
like a great and overflowing battery.
This ought to be exciting, yet in a moment
he is sated, this death as boring
as a fast-food hamburger. What to do
with the body? With strength he knew
no way to measure he lifts the limp form
and shakes it against the steel grid of fence,
firm, then fast, then faster, till bone and tendon,
flesh and skull and garment all pass on through
like a cabbage passed through a grater,
soft wet fragments falling through, as cloth
slides down, a heap of belt and cloth and grommets.
This was not his usual, careful feeding. The mess
would be considerable, the mystery
of how a man passed through chain links
a riddle for the local police station.
Dogs were coming; he sensed them already,
a feral pack that followed him everywhere
and often helped him in the aftermath.
With luck, they would drag off the bones
and fragments: no matter anyway,
since this would be his last feeding.

Re-entering the Goth club, quite unaware
of whether his T-shirt is dark with heart-blood
he approaches the trio of vampirellas
and puts down, with perfect balance,
three brimful sherry glasses, still warm
with the victim’s body heat. “On the house,”
he tells them. “Drink – if you dare.”

He smiles his best smile, puts hand to lips
and makes a downward, smearing motion
in hopes they will see blood there.
They stare at him, then at the glasses.
He is at the door; he is out. No one
has said a word or moved to stop him.
He hands a hundred to the bouncer, who nods
an assurance of his forgetting his ever
having been there, turns the corner
as the dogs begin turning into the alleyway.

If he were only one century old tonight
perhaps this would be amusing. The weight
of fresh blood within him slows him
and he window-shops on the long walk home.
No one seems to notice the blood all over him,
or if they do they pretend not to notice
another young man’s Gothic fancy.

Now home, he waits for dawn.
The sun seems his most reluctant prey:
it just will not arrive on schedule, the clock
seems to have slowed its ticking, the intervals
between seconds get longer and longer.
When will it end? Does anyone in London
even have a rooster as harbinger
of the upcoming solar disk? The bats,
the owls, have all retired: is that red line
beyond the oak trees the edge of sunrise.

He turns to face the mirrors. It starts.
His eyes begin at last to see eyes, a face,
dark lips, those fine and perfect teeth,
the line of neck to shoulder, the skin,
as white and soft as ever he was twenty.
He leans to the glass: oh, oh,
so beautiful, so —-
by some dark instinct unknown to him
his mouth finds his wrist and pierces it.
He watches himself drink from himself,
the blood flows out and inward,
an Ouroboros circle, feeder
and feeding, self-murdering Narcissus,
frozen, visible in the yellow glory
of the morning sunbeams.

He could do this forever. The sun
is doing nothing so long as he keeps
circling the fresh blood inward, outward.
If he can do to this till sunset
he will survive this burning.
Three hundred years more, at least,
he needs to exhaust his beauty.
He could take hundreds more,
or thousands; he could let
all life on earth flow through him.
It need never end.
The universe wants him in it.
Maybe he is one of the Horsemen
of universal doom and never knew it.

Sunset is only hours away.
He sways in the ecstasy of his feeding,
the sublime dream of untold victims before him.
Now that he knows the difference
between hunger and desire,
there are lists to make.
He will start with the three vampirellas.
Later, the Goth club bouncer.
Night will be his blood carnival.

Ballet of the Hors d'Oeuvre

The gentlemen down front
at the Opera House,
the pretended balletomanes
who crowd the best seats
for calf- and leg-views,
brood over the program.

Tonight’s dance interval
amid the modernist opera’s
banging and clanging is — what? —
Ballet of the Hors d'Oeuvre.
“Horse Doovers?” asks one.
“Whore’s Works!” another,
adept at translation (he is after all
an international banker) says
assuredly. A third,
the monocled one, harrumphs
and simply pronounces
“Or derve, gentlemen,
as in — appetizers.”

A welcome roll from the timpani
muffles the disgrace
of the top-hat tycoons
as the ballet commences.
The music is, thank God, melodic.

First come the celery sticks,
vaguely aphrodisiac,
stalking on stage in stiff
march time, leaf-fringed
and vertical, tilting in time
to the Danse Crudité
and deftly choreographed
considering the absence
of any visible eyes.

As if to mock men’s
expectations of limbs exposed,
two dozen chicken wings
crab-walk in unison
from left to right, then
right to left, then leap
into a wagon, a heap
of unappealing angles,
pulled off the stage
by a Harlequin cat.

Seedless grapes tumble
to a fast gigue
around a gaggle
of dowager strawberries,
the vast Chernobyl kind,
red-rouged, bewigged
with vernal leafage,
plump and no doubt
devoid of any trace of flavor.

To a Chinese flute, squat
four-lobed dumplings arrive
tip-toe on red shoes
scarcely visible
beneath the deep-fried
ballooning gowns.
Slow sarabanding,
the Crabs Rangoon
accelerate to dervish
then spin off stage.

A Danse Génerale
of crackers, round and square,
pair off against various
cheeses in national attire
raising the whole affair
to a Tchaikovskian frenzy.
Skirts fly, thighs bulge, as,
cubed, sliced, and quartered,
yellow and white, blue and orange,
they whirl and pair, unpair and tease
the desperate and crumbling crackers.
Then, finally, a show of stage magic
as each cheese maid slides through
the narrow blade of a slicer
and emerges as two likenesses,
whirling accelerando
until every Tilsit, Gouda,
Cheddar and Blue
meets her destined cracker
and goes obscenely
horizontal.

The front row gentlemen
are beside themselves
as the curtain falls.
What to do until the third act?
Backstage in the Green Room
where the undressing, redressing
ballerinas pretend not to be watched
by the drooling financiers,
what was one to do?

“I suppose,” the monocled one hazards,
“although we’re not even sure
which were the ladies,
we could go back for a nibble.”

Burnt Offering

Anakreon, to Harmodius:
About that letter, the fervent one,
the one you hinted you’d sell when I die,
mocking its shaking autograph,
intimating the scandal --
I know your threat is false.
last night in my sleep I saw
your hands on a crumpled scroll,
the thrust toward a sputtering lamp,
the tiny screams as my words,
my awesome and unrepeatable vows,
my praise of your unworthy beauty,
collapsed and withered in a blue-green flame.
You brushed the ashes from your gentle arms --
they scattered, mingled with dust motes,
rode a moonbeam in a moment’s leap
toward ghosthood, then dissipated.
Only one moth, before its suicide,
dipped in the ash and shared
one final taste of my missive.
No Phoenix rose, the earth
did not open to swallow you,
and your disdainful triumph
did not diminish the cosmos.

Yet he who burns love letters
offends the Gods.
You dare undo my holy madness
with your little hecatomb
of paraffin and oil?
They will come back to sting you,
my salamander syllables.
Try and love anyone now! Your sunken cheeks
and pale complexion will drive all away.
All will know you are pursued and haunted.
You will wish you had kept the living scroll
when you see how Love, an ash-faced Fury,
comes back from Acheron,
a broom hag to drive
your suitors off,


nightmare’s bedmate, engendering
alarming sores and bruises,
leaving you spent and exhausted
as though a nest of incubi
used you for practice.

Besides,
I kept a copy.

As Idols Fall in the Afghan Hills

Time to get out of Afghanistan! Here's a slight revision of a poem I wrote before 9-11, on reading about the Taliban's destruction of a huge Buddha that had been carved into a mountainside. I had a vision of a carpet bombing of tiny Buddhas or Bodhisattvas (the spirits who undertake to return to linger in mortal life to do good deeds. Little did I suspect... Here's the poem:

What to do? What to do?
Mail a Mullah a thousand portraits
of Boddhisatvas.

Airdrop a hundred thousand Buddhas
on tiny parachutes onto the streets of Kabul.

Mate giant Japanese Buddhas with Godzilla,
send their offspring to the Afghan Hills
to sit serene in lotus pose

(but watch their fire-breath melt Taliban tanks
and send the soldiers shrieking!)

Skywrite LORD BUDDHA
from border to border in every known language.

Or wait for Karma to burn the burners,
shatter the shatterers, silence the mouths
of the speakers of law?
(No time, no time as the dynamite explodes
a Buddha head from fifteen hundred years ago.)

Let Allah, Buddha Christ and Brahma
rage like comets, moth fluttering
around the Man Sun.

One vanity makes them a greater vanity destroys them.
Yet a child with hands in clay, in the mud by the riverside
will make a new god with broad shoulders
far-seeing eyes, a forgiving visage,
a palm extended for the benediction
of unbearable Beauty, brief life
the only coin we can offer.

This parched land needs its memories,
its slender share of human fairness.
It needs a spark of hope
against the dark night
of goats and dynamite.

Miner's Cemetery: Atacama Desert, Chile

Whatever is put in Atacama
stays in Atacama —
a wreath of roses,
every petal intact
in perfect desiccation;
miners’ pine markers
untouched by rot or termite,
the wooden chapel’s planks
striated fossils,
unrusted nails a century old,
copper and tin communion cups
all but untarnished,
the last wine’s dregs
a crystal ring.

The graves are shallow,
the fence a mere
formality,
for no one comes here —
the miners’ mummies
will be miners’ mummies
till the sun grows cold.

One thousand miles
of desert coast
surround this graveyard,
the vast Pacific
begrudging one drop
of rainfall,

the only damp
at the cliff-edge
and off-shore islands,
the unceasing splatter
of guano,
gulls’ gift,
millennial deposits
a hundred yards thick,
the Andes’ answer
to Dover,

mined by coolies
for explosive nitrates,
then, as luck would have it,
the miners of Bolivia,
Peru and Chile followed
to dig the hard ground
of the desert flats
for the mountains’ run-off —
more nitrates, the Titan’s ichor,
without which guns
would be mere toys —
nitrates to fertilize
the sugar-beet fields
of pastry-mad Europe —

miners worked dead
in a place
where even their sweat
was stolen.

Rain comes, on average,
just once in forty years.
If you blink,
you miss it.
To the dead
it has the faintest sound,
like the turning of one page.

The Outcast

The boy is not like
    the others.
Their bikes ascend the hill,
storm down like whirlwinds.
He always walks,
  their wheels
   a dervish dance
whose physics baffle him.
He passes the practice field,
hopes no one will notice him
as he carries his books
on the way to the library

(they don't wear glasses,
    don't read anything
    between June and August).

He has no idea
    what their cries mean,
    why it matters
that a ball goes
    this way,
         that way.

When they let him join in,
    he runs with some older boys,
over a fence he can barely scale,
    watching for dogs that bite,
to the forbidden
    apple tree.


They climb to reach
    the great red ones.
From high above
    they taunt him,
dare him to join them
at the sky-scream treetop.


He stands below.
Climbing a tree
    is one of many things
    he's not allowed to do.
They talk about baseball
    and BB guns,
the cars they'll drive
when they're old enough,
the names of girls
whose breasts have swollen.

He reaches up
    for the lower branch
    takes unripe apples,
    unmarred by bird or worm.

Walking alone,
    he sees a daytime moon,
    wonders how Earth
    might look from its craters.

He goes home to his comics,
    to the attic room
    where aliens and monsters
    plan universal mayhem.

Don't eat those apples,
    his mother warns him.
They'll give you a stomach ache.

I like them, he says.
Green apples taste better.

When Did I Know

That I was the thing they don’t speak of,
whose nicknames even were unprintable?
Was it all the way back
at school’s beginning, when I knew
and could name the prettiest girl
in answer to my mother’s Who
would you marry? but didn’t tell
that I could also rank the boys
in tiers of beauty, had anyone asked?

So many moments, so early:

When a boy cousin jumped on top of me
and said Let’s play husband and wife —
twelve going on thirteen I had no idea
what that meant, except
it was the first time anyone touched
who wasn’t hitting me. Even through clothes
the feel of flesh on flesh made me tremble.

When my best friend, wrestling
me down on my narrow bed, asked
Why do you always let me win?
and I couldn’t answer.

When I stopped being alone, ever,
with my grandfather, who,
whiskered in his long underwear
would try to pin me down
with sadistic tickling on any day
the women were out of sight.
Because the body is a poem, mine
for my use and not another’s, mine
to discover its vocabulary.

When boys and girls huddled
hushed in a backyard tent,
a new game with much at stake,
showing their forbidden parts
by flashlight, I looked away
at the girls’ turn, then lay awake
remembering the slow unzip
of the boys’ trousers.

When one of the girls
it was dangerous to know
contrived a dozen ways
for me to walk her
through lonely places, woods,
even the night-time graveyard,
and I was a gentleman always.
(And when another, heaped
against me on the dance floor,
finally blurted despairingly,
Don’t my breasts interest you?)

When, as a seventh grader
on the first day of school I watched
in mingled horror/fascination
as senior boys emerged
from the gym class showers,
and then I dreamt of dark caverns
or a secret-passage attic
where all of them,
in an endless state of dressing,
undressing and self-caressing
lined up in an A to Z roll call,
slaves of my eyes’ hunger.

When I watched one after another
Godzilla and Toho monster films
and could not take my eyes off —
no, not the lumbering, costumed
monsters —  but Japanese men,
young ones, hard-cheeked,
dark-eyed and raven-haired,
an urge I could never plummet
to sated boredom.

And why, when I learned
that some men were otherwise inclined,
did my mouth not utter, ever,
the expletives? Surprised, delighted
even, each clue and glimmer
of a kindred species like a key shard,
a piece to be joined with other pieces
until the rainbow bridge could be completed,
my exit up and out of this
world I did not belong to.

If there had been a place to go
to meet them, I would have gone there.

But most of all is that starburst
explosion when you find the one face,
the one accepting glance, the one
surrendered night when all is given,
all asked-for taken with joy,
to know that the love given here
is as cosmic as any force in the universe,
to want and to be wanted by the same person.

I never asked to be normal.
Always and ever,
     for as long as I can remember
I was not like the others,
and the joy-quest yearning
was to find others
     equally blessed, equally scorned.
The names they call us
were nothing compared to the golden vowels,
the sibilants, the fluted song-tones
by which we would greet one another.

Somehow,
     in the dark of nightside passages,
and in the intervals of daylight
they grant us, we find our own,
either the fervent flesh-touch
of youth to youth, or the helping
hand of our elder kind, the lift
and repair of wings broken, hopes
not yet dashed by mortality.
We have our own biology and history.
Our children are the things we make,
our fossils the Trilobites of culture.
Try to imagine the world without us.

Spring Earth

Somewhere it is always spring—

here, too, perhaps,

within these barren trees.

The thought, the idée fixe

the twig to be

outlasts the snowstorms.

Its double helix symphony

sleeps on in xylem,

unravels in sequestered leaves.

Some seeds refuse to sprout

until a winter has seasoned them,

as cunning monarchs outlive

their enemies.

Earth thaws.

Tendrils reach out

beneath me.

Seed’s urge unjackets me,

soaks me to root in run

   through falling rain.

I taste the sky,

    limestone and elemental iron,

    phosphor and calcium,

inhale the animal sweetness of air,

soak up the sunlight,

open a cotyledon eye,

banish all frost

in bacchanalian riot.

It is time! It is time!

Pluto Demoted

A poem protesting the move to strip Pluto of its designation as a planet, and a tribute to Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto on photographic negatives of star photographs in 1932. There's also a reference to H.P. Lovecraft, who called the as-yet-undetected ninth planet "Yuggoth" in his writings.

No longer a planet, they say!
Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth*, Nine
is now a nothing,
a rock among rocks

despite the tug of its companion,

silent and airless Charon,

the loyal circling
of Nix and Erys.**

Now you are a “mini-world,”

an oversize asteroid

tumbling in dustbelt

so dark and distant

our sun is but a blob

of wavering starlight.

World of death and darkness,

methane, monoxide molting

in every orbiting,

shunned by the sun that made you,

must you now be snubbed by man?

How demote a planet

so lustrous in history?

It has its gods! It has its gods!

Can they evict

  the Lord of the Dead

with just a say-so?

What of the millions of souls

whose home was Hades?

What of beautiful Persephone

who shuttles still

   on a high-speed comet

for her six-month residency

as mistress of the underworld?

What of the heroes and philosophers,

the shades of pagan times

who teem those basalt cities

warming the Plutonian night

with odes and songs and serenades?

Are they to be homeless vagabonds,

slowed from their distant heartbeat

to the stillness of absolute zero?

****

At first, it was “Planet X,”

   out there somewhere

   because Neptune wobbled,

   nodded its rings

   toward Death’s domain.

Then a Kansas farm boy

obsessed with the stars

   ground his own mirrors

   built his own telescope

   with car parts and farm equipment.

Hailstones destroyed the farm crops.

   The telescope survived.

The boy sent drawings of Mars

    and Jupiter

to Lowell Observatory —

Come work for us, they said.

He hopped a train, had just enough

   cash for a one-way fare.

And then, in monk-like hermitage

he toiled at Flagstaff,

comparing sky photographs,

hundreds of thousands of stars,

negative over negative to light,

searching for celestial wanderers,

planetoi, asteroids, comets

that moved when everything else

stood still in the cosmos.

Clyde Tombaugh, twenty-four,

surveyed a sky

where fifteen million lights

the brightness of Pluto twinkled

but only one was Pluto.

He found it.

***

They sought him out

in his retirement,

those fellows

from the Smithsonian,

asked for his home-made instrument

for their permanent collection.

“Hell no,” he said,

“I’m still using it.”

***

I would as soon

forget Kansas as Pluto.

Tell Tombaugh’s ghost

his planet is not a planet!

I can see the old man now,

just off the death-barge

he hopped from Charon,

greeting the Lords of Acheron,

that rusted tube of telescope

under his arm,

scouting a mountaintop

for his next observatory.

Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth, Nine!

Change at your peril

a thing once named!

Yuggoth is the name assigned to the Ninth planet, before its discovery, in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
* Nix and Erys are two smaller satellites of Pluto.

Monday, Miss Schreckengost Reads Us Little Black Sambo

I

We three boys, in the third-grade playground,

one skinny (that’s me), one short, and the fat one,

horn-rimmed glasses all, schoolbooks and lunches

in hand-me-down, important-looking briefcases.

We are the serious scholars, the brainiacs —

we know what the ominous Sputnik is beeping

and even why it’s there and doesn’t fall —

just ask us! We are no good at sports,

try not to be noticed amid the yelling,

the bigger boys’ heave and toss of baseball,

football, basketball, whatever ball

it is the season for. We trade our comics,

Superman, Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern,

and offer furtive glances at the forbidden ones,

brain-rotting horror comics some Congressman

has warned our parents to confiscate and burn.

We’re saving up to buy sulfuric acid;

a long list of chemistry projects depends

on the pharmacist, Mr. Hoffmann, dispenser

of potions, acids, saltpeter and horehound drops.

“Now, boys,” he’d warn us, winking,

“don’t go mixing saltpeter with sulfur,

’cause that plus a little charcoal is gunpowder.

Don’t get yourselves in trouble, okay?”

Oh, no, Mr. Hoffmann, we promise,

we’d never do that, Scouts’ honor.

Not one of us is a Boy Scout.

The sun-drenched playground, dark

in the hulking late-day shadow

of the brick schoolhouse, knows fear:

the monthly air-raid sirens, the file

of all of us quickly-quickly-quickly-now

to the basement shelter, the practice

of “duck and cover” in the event of a flash,

a boom and a mushroom cloud

obliterating Pittsburgh on the horizon.

Russkies and Gerries, Japs and Fascists,

Jack-in-the-box Communists

beneath the bedsprings, enemies everywhere.

Monday, Miss Schreckengost, sometime

between geography and “Our Friend the Atom,”

reads an old book to us — you’ll like this,

she tells us — it’s Little Black Sambo.

It even has pictures.      The tall boy,

the altogether too tall boy in the front row

sinks into his seat.  All eyes are on Ritchie,

the Negro boy, held back a year, two years

from the looks of him, too broad of shoulder

to even consider playing with us.

He sits all day where the teacher can mind him.

The story unfolds. Proud little Sambo,

in his new red coat, his beautiful blue trousers,

is ambushed by tigers who want to eat him.

He bribes one with his jacket, one with

his beautiful trousers, runs home

stark naked to his mother and father,

Black Mumbo and Black Jumbo.

Black Mumbo, who looks like Aunt Jemima,

celebrates the boy’s escape with a pancake dinner.

As the book is held up to show its cover

someone calls out, “Hey, that’s Ritchie!”

Laughs roil the air like veldt heat.

On Tuesday we add Ritchie Barton

to the list of things to be afraid of.

The downhill road to Caruso’s market

becomes a gauntlet run — the price

of a candy bar was meeting Ritchie’s fists.

The older boys, untouchable, catch on,

yell Sambo! Look out for tigers!

from the schoolhouse windows.

Your mama’s name is Black Mumbo!

Your pappy’s name is Black Jumbo!

One day the fifth-grade bullies,

to our slight relief,

are knocked to the ground before us.

Words thunder                                      AIN’T

     punctuate the blows                         NO

     as he pounds Timmy                         TIGERS

     to the pavement                                 IN AFRICA!

Smaller boys run,                                 MY MA’S NAME

     take the long way home                  IS ABIGAIL!

     as he pummels Anthony                  MY PA’S NAME

     against a fencepost                            IS SAMUEL!

Fist-crack, nose-break,

tooth-snap, Ritchie’s

near-baritone shouts

haunt our dreaming.

II

Miss Schreckengost makes seat assignments

for our field-trip to the hydroelectric dam.

“Forty of us,” she counts, “and forty seats.”

A kind of chill comes over the classroom.

“Of course we’ll draw lots for seat-mates.

You will stay with your seat-mate for the whole trip.”

David, the Polish boy, the smallest in class,

is told he will sit next to Ritchie Barton.

At recess, he bursts into tears in the playground.

“I can’t sit next to him. I just can’t do it.”

And I say to Dave, “You’re prejudiced.

You’re only saying that because he’s a Negro.”

That ends the conversation.

The one thing no one wants is to be prejudiced.

That’s worse than being a Nazi or a Communist.

Dave says, his back to all of us,

“I just don’t want to get beat up.”

The day of the trip to Confluence Dam,

the Polish mother keeps her son at home.

Ritchie sprawls across two seats, feet up,

a clenched right fist slapping an open left palm.

We walk a double-line with seat-mates,

Richie alone and trailing far behind,

Miss Shreckengost flamingo-tall ahead of us,

arms pointing at engineering wonders and waterfalls.

I sit in the seat behind Ritchie; Gertrude,

a girl reputed to have head lice,

sits next to me, red pigtails flying.

I have a headache, some dark thing troubling me.

If I’m not prejudiced, I think, then I should sit

in that empty spot beside Ritchie, whose fist and palm

keep time to the road rhythms. All I can see

are noses, teeth, crutches and splints.

I do not want to be beaten, either.

I am not prejudiced.

One day, I would read in Homer:

More hateful to me than all the gates of Hell

is that man who, holding one thing in his heart,

says another, as I would learn the word hypocrite.

Whatever that thing was that I had uttered,

and could not undo, I was ashamed of it.

I vowed never to do it again.

III

Years later, new town, step-fathered,

we take a family road-trip to Washington.

The parks are filled with picnickers,

families in Sunday whites, blankets and baskets,

matrons with parasols, young couples courting.

They are dressed better than we are,

and there is not one white face among them.

Our angry car passes them, windows up,

doors locked, from Washington Monument

to Lincoln Memorial, a cursory nod

to two Presidents, then off we go

to stepfather’s cousin in Maryland.

I remember a handsome, ranch-style home.

I was sent to the living room, turned on

an expensive stereo, where I listened to

the Glazounov Concerto, played by Heifetz.

These must be nice people, I thought.

I went to the kitchen door, listening:

Never seen so many in one place, you say?

They own the city. No decent white folk

will even go there. In a couple weeks

they’re gonna have a Civil Rights March,

a half a million niggers all together,

and that Commie Martin Luther King.

Wish I could get to a rooftop

with this here rifle —

and I know how to use it, too —

wish I could pick him off

and take as many of them with him

as I could, along with those Jew lawyers

I tip-toe back to Russian Glazounov,

          to Jewish Heifetz.

IV

College, and freedom:

“You’ll do it with me?” he said, incredulous.

He thought I was joking. I wasn’t.

Once I had said yes, I had to do it.

I’d done it by then,

with artists, frat boys and athletes,

my notoriety a sure ticket

to never having to ask: they asked me.

But no one black had ever asked me.

His basketball arms and legs,

     impossibly long,

     thrust out of his clothes at impossible angles.

An African prince,

     he could snap me in two easily.

“You know what they say about us?”

he asks, teasingly, shirt sliding off.

     I nod.

“It’s true. You’ll see. No turning back.”

His lithe and supple body presses me,

each second more of him

hot against me. I’m shaking.

He pushes me downward,

my hands on his chest

exploring the statue-lines

smooth as marble.

We end up in bed, I’m gasping

against his spent repose. He lets

me examine the palm of his hand,

yes it is lighter there. One rivulet

of pearl-white fluid remains

upon his dark brown forearm.

He puts my mouth there.

I am afraid to pull away.

It is too quiet. I start to shiver.

I am waiting for the rage-burst,

counting how fast I might make it

to the door and out.

 “I’m not going to hurt you,”

he assures me. “That was good.

We’ll do it again sometime.”

He stays a while. I ask

a torrent of questions,

want to know his feelings,

the truth beneath

the hard and proud exterior.

“You want to know

that no one will rent me a room

in this town? Or about the girl,

the white girl who’ll only see me

under the bridge at midnight?

Or what they’d do to me

if anyone found out?

Or where I’d be

if I didn’t play basketball?”

Just as he’s leaving, I say,

“Oh, what’s your name?

I’m sorry I didn’t ask it.”

“Ritchie,” he says.

“My name is Ritchie.”