Mrs. Friedman's Golem

i

Because I was “the heathen boy” and smart

enough to pass for Jewish, free I ran

on the Friedmans’ neighboring house and grounds.

One early-summer day, with Marilyn,

a year my elder, we played in the pines

that fringed their leaf-filled, empty swimming pool.

An endless ball of packing twine unwound

around the spindly trees, not spider webs,

but corridors and doorways, here a room,

a closet there – in an almost clearing

a wide space for a sunbeam-lit ballroom.
The hotel dubbed “The Sunny-Day-Only”—

the sleeping rooms and beds would be up above

in tree-house heights to be scaled by ladders.

As our fancy turned up to ziggurat

heights and bird-nest bedding, we didn’t see
the bearded, smiling Mennonite preacher

until he was right upon us. “Children!”
he hailed us, then asked if we believed

in Jesus, who was up above the trees,

and died, so we could go to heaven too.
Up then went Marilyn’s defiant chin.
“We’re Jewish.” He looked at me, dubious.
“And you?” he asked. I shrugged. “So what are you?” —
“I’ve never been in a church,” I told him.

A pine cone fell at his feet and shattered.

“Don’t you believe in anything?” he growled,
now in a tone that said grownup-to-child.
“Superman, maybe,” I mocked him, and turned

to resume my arbor-building. He left
dumbfounded, his Anabaptist faith scorned

by children’s string maze in a Druid grove.

Our string hotel survived two nights, then vanished.
“My mother told me the robins took it —”
so Marilyn explained it, “ — for their nests.
Besides, the guests are coming. It’s June now,
and the swimming season starts tomorrow.”
The season, as we all came to know it,
was at the Friedmans’ immense swimming pool;

by June’s end swell, a half a hundred guests,

from wading toddlers to aquatic teens,

babies in prams to motionless elders,

umbrella-tabled at the green-blue pool.

That afternoon, indoors, we played at cards —
an outsize canasta with twenty decks,
which drew a great shriek from Mrs. Friedman
as she came home with the month’s vast larder
of picnic food and frozen lemonade.
Our task: re-separate and sort the decks
and stack them up in a neat pyramid.
Summers these rumpled cards had seen before,
beneath the hawk-eyed ladies’ gaze, enthroned
and clucking at their poolside card tables;

the cards would doubtless outlive some of them.

Scores would be there by shimmering August,
the men apart from the women, a cloud
of cigarettes where they leaned together
and worried over business and politics.
Children in bathing suits ran to and from
the house, wet trails and footprints to and from
the bathrooms, the sinks, the freezer. Sometimes
I was asked to take ice or a pitcher
to one of the tables, there where I learned
     one should never swim just after eating

     and tales of drowning, worries about
     the unfortunates who got polio,
     and Mrs. Friedman’s oft-repeated fretting
     about one bad boy who peed in the pool,
     (never enough chlorine when that occurs).


The men talked
of other things I knew nothing of
in a language I did not understand.

ii

“The season really starts next week, you see. Next week.”
As Marilyn explained to me. “Mother has asked
everyone to come over tomorrow to help.
The pool needs cleaned, the cobwebbed furniture wiped down,
Dead leaves, dog poop and pine cones everywhere. We’ll see

if anyone shows up.” — “Won’t they?” I asked. — “Not one.”

Card sorting done, we went back to our comic books:

she read my Superman, I her Wonder Woman,

a title no boy would ever be caught reading.

Saturday came. The day waned and one car only
came up the lane and parked. All day we made the ice
for grape juice and lemonade brimful in freezer

and buckets. Sandwiches were made, and snacks put out.

Squirrels came to the windows expectantly, bird-chirp

anticipated the crowd, the crumbs, the leavings.
I lingered for dinner as Mrs. Friedman seethed on,
serving cold plate with embarrassment and anger.
The guest was new, a stranger, a bearded, calm man
in a business suit they called Rabbi. His voice

was deep, and with a foreign sound I could not place.
“Rabbi Doctor Baruch,” they said I should call him.
Already he knew my name, and turning, he said:

“And you are the little boy who is not Jewish
who made string Stars of David all over the porch
December last. “I blushed, recalling Mrs. Friedman’s

horror at finding her decorated house-front.
“He felt sorry for us,” Mr. Friedman offered up,
“because we had no Christmas ornaments outside.”
They all laughed heartily. Still no one would tell me

why my six-pointed ornaments had been torn down

with such speed and alarm. “Anyone driving by,”

was all that Marilyn’s mother said, “they could see.”

“But Rabbi,” Mr. Friedman continued, “I know you wanted
to meet our friends.” The rabbi shrugged. — “You call those friends?”
his wife retorted. “All summer long they come here,
they use the pool, we feed them, and pretend to laugh
at their worn-out humor. And all this work, for what?

I could be listening to the opera on the radio.

Not one of them will come and help us clean the pool!”

“So, next week I can come back,” the Rabbi offered.
“All of us need to help Jews get out of Russia.
First Stalin was killing us all over again,

and now his heir, that smiling thug Khrushchev.”
Mrs. Friedman had other worries:
“So who’s going to clean the pool? Not you, Rabbi!
Shame on us if it came to that.” Mr. Friedman

fussed with his sandwich and fork in embarrassment.

Silence and shadow-blink of a passing cloud held us.

The Rabbi’s long-fingered hands passed twirling circles

twice in his dark beard, as though he had to ask it,
then, with one hand extended palm up he asked her,
“Mrs. Friedman, you want I should make a Golem?”

iii

Mouths opened wide, eyes wider.
Even I knew what a Golem was.
It was in the horror comics.

“A Golem,” Mrs. Friedman gulped.
“Would it — could it — ”
“Anything you want done, it can do.
It’s not an easy thing, and I need not say
that no one should know afterwards.
I have been to Prague, where such things are done.”

The Rabbi turned an intense gaze on me.
“Boy, you are not Jewish?” —
                                                  “No, Rabbi, I’m not.” —
“You are not Christian?” —
                                               “No, I’m not.” —

“Not even a tiny bit?” —

“I went two weeks to Bible School. They asked me

         not to come back.” —
“So, you are not a Christian. Swear it.” —
I cleared my throat. Whatever this was,

I had to be in on it.

“I swear I am not a Christian.” —
“Never baptized?”

I knew what that was from movies.
“No, never baptized.” —

“So, you do not know the secret name of God?”
I could have said “Yahweh” or “Adonai,” two words
I already knew from poetry. Instead I said, “No.” —

“Very well. You will be my assistant.
At ten o’clock, you come to the swimming pool. Tell no one.”

I beamed from ear to ear. “I’ll be there. I promise.”

This was better than Christmas morning. A Golem. A Golem.
They sent me home. I crept to my bedroom.
A flashlight and comics would keep me awake.

At ten, I ran alongside the Friedman house. Two cars’
headlights full beamed on the swimming pool.
The Rabbi and Mr. Friedman were up the slope
that led to the scant woods above the property.
They stooped and touched bare ground.

“Strange clay, not like back home, but it will do,”
our sorcerer intoned, as with a walking stick
he outlined the lumpy shape of a man
on the bare and eroded clay hillside,
a place I knew, where owls and wild turkeys
lurked in the shrubs and saplings.
He passed his cane this way and that,
and uttering a prayer we could not-quite hear —
it seemed to hover an inch from his beard
like a will o’the wisp — a prayer not meant
for human ears but for spirits.

And the shape he had outlined stood,
and separated itself from the yellow clay bank.
It stood. It shook itself free
of dust and tiny stones and tree-root.

It stood,
and moved no further, inert
as a sculptor’s first molding.

It was a lump with but a hint of legs,

arm-like extrusions bent at the elbow

and a great square head, two holes

where eyes should have been

and a mouth-gap the size of a mailbox.

Mr. Friedman pulled back in terror.
“I thought you were joking. I never thought.
My god, I never thought —”
Before I could react, the Rabbi had lifted me,
and placing a folded ribbon of paper
into my tiny hand, he put me up
on the Golem’s forearm.

“Put the paper in the Golem’s mouth.
Only then will he move
and obey our orders.”

I started to raise my left hand
to the horizontal gape
that was the Golem’s mouth.
His beard brushed my ear
as he whispered, “Do not,
under any circumstances,
look into the Golem’s eyes.” —

“And what would happen, Rabbi?” —

“You would see things no one
was meant to see and live.
Just do as I ask and no more,
and you will be safe, and blessed.”

My head averted, I found the mouth
by touch and slid the paper in.
There came a groan,
as low as a tuba in a passing parade,
no, low as the bass drum that rattles
your stomach in passing,

and then I was standing,
the Rabbi’s hand atop my head
for the longest time
until he let me go.

We saw the Golem in silhouette first
as the great shape lumbered
to the lit-up pool.
And so, with broom and mop
and chemicals, the hulking thing
descended the shallow-end stairs
into the vacant pool, as Mrs. Friedman,
at ease as though a local workman
were there before her, paced round
the pool and gave out orders.
Sweep there, no, higher up,
you missed a spot.

How long this took, I cannot recall.

Marilyn saw some of it

from her bedroom window,

just lights and a shape in silhouette

and her mother going this way, that way

waving her arms in command.

(Her little sister, sent to bed early,
saw nothing.)

The pool was filled, the last leaves swept

into heaps to be bagged and carted.

Then Mr. and Mrs. Friedman argued.
She wanted more done. The men were nervous.
Cars might come along Kingview Road.

So far, not one had passed.

There was that house, at hilltop,
whose windows frowned down
on all their summers, a house
that just a dozen years back
had hosted a rally of sheeted rioters,

that day the thirty thousand Klansmen
poured into town to terrify the Catholics.

Catholics then, but now the Jews and Negroes.

You worried about groups of men

riding on the back of a pickup truck

up to no good on a Saturday night.

The moonless night blazed with stars.

Shapes human and not,

moved in and out of the headlamps
as the Golem swept, and scrubbed,
and swept again. At the end of it all,
the Golem returned to the edge of the wood.

All looked with relief
at the still-black windows
of the big white house on the hill.
No light had come on up there.

No one had seen us.

Then I was raised once more
to retrieve the undecipherable scroll
that I knew, but did not tell them,
read “emet,” the word for truth.
The clay mouth was wider, deeper
than when the Golem was made,

wide enough for a small boy

to fall in and be devoured.
“Go on!”
the Rabbi chided me. “He cannot bite.
He has no teeth. Just find the paper.”
I reached, back till my elbow was wet
with clay. He smelled now of chlorine
and year-old leaves. I found it.
My fingers closed around it.
My head went back. My eyes
gazed straight into the emerald
furnaces of the Golem’s still-living orbs.

iv

And I saw everything —

A high-domed palace of giants,
packed to the walls with them,
legion of lumbering Golem shapes
impatient to be born
from a place of good deeds unbidden,
of help that could have, but never came —
the nullity of unworked magic
and failed alchemy.

I saw new kinds of geometry —
triangles unnamable
through which the news of past
and future calamities flies
like telegraphs, most sent
to wrong recipient, and read too late —
how triangles, upward and downward
formed openings how spun they formed
vast polyhedrous entities
whose facets were the insides
of never-opened geodes,
arched around gateways
of onyx and adamantine —

Vectors of force and how
to form and shape them
from nothing but will,
nudged by the eye
in forehead’s center
into a brooding shape
of inward angles
then up and out bat-winged
hurled down as a smiting force
upon the smiters —

Power I saw, but not compassion,
a dark, cold cavern
despite the light of whirling wish-forms
and the firefly storm of eyes
the color of emeralds.

v

I think I fainted.

The Rabbi, the Friedmans

stood in a circle around me.

A cold cloth was on my forehead.

“Thank God,” said Mrs. Friedman,

“we don’t have to call an ambulance.”

The Rabbi leaned down

and hissed in my ear:

“Did you see? Did you see?”

I dared not smile, despite

the exultant knowledge

that flooded over me.

“I saw,” I answered simply.

He paused, eyes shining.

“I saw … everything.”

He raised his hands in horror,

then waved two counter-circles

above my head

as if to cut a cord above me.

I went back home. I added

the Hebrew-lettered paper

to my scrapbook of monsters,

Golem marked off between

“Frankenstein” and “Mummies.”

I had an ovoid sandstone

warm in the palm, I dubbed

“The Philosopher’s Stone,”

thought it would help make

little Golems I’d shape one day.

The following week

the Rabbi ignored me

as I carried ice and card decks

to the women’s tables

the darting eyes of Mrs. Friedman

said Don’t you dare tell.

I stood off in the pines to watch.

The women sunbathed and played at cards.

The shirt-sleeved men kept apart

as one by one they came to the Rabbi’s table

and passed him envelopes, a stack

before him by the end of the afternoon.

They had done their part against Krushchev.

He watched them. 
He watched them watching

as one another’s wives dived in

to the deep end of the swimming pool.

His back was to the women.

After one walk uphill to the clay bank,

just to be sure it had resumed its previous state,

I’m sure, he went to his car. I waved.

I think he saw me. I think a slight nod

was his only thank-you. I was the clay

he could not put back from where it came.

Not to worry. I am still

not a Christian.

vi

Rabbi, The Golem said to tell you:

A hammer is as nothing

without a hand to wield it.

A hand is as nothing

without a mind to guide it.

A mind is as nothing

without the will to drive it

The will is as nothing

without the gift of knowing

Knowing is as nothing

without the love that burns

at the core of the never-dying stars:

love of what was, love of what is,

love of what can be.

vi-a (The Golem’s message in Yiddish) (tentative)

A hammar iz gornisht
felndik a hant
tsu vild es.

A hant iz gornisht
felndik a gayst
tsu firn es.

A meynung iz gornisht

felndik di vilpauer
tsu for es.

Vilpauer iz gornischt
felndik di talant
fun visn.

Veyst iz gornischt
felndik di libe
vos brent
in di harts
fun imortal shtern:

libe aoyb vos iz geven,
libe aoyb voz iz,
libe aoyb vos kenen zeyn.

The Cannibal Hymn

The Cannibal Hymn is at least 4,300 years old. It is found in Egyptian Pyramids, and also occurs as a "coffin text." It was so alarming and primitive that the Egyptians eventually stopped making copies of it. It is one of the masterpieces of ancient literature. Here is an abridged, modern adaptation the era of King Donald. (2018 slight revision).


Warming, the weather turns terrible.
The stars frown.
Fracked bones of the earth tremble.
The coal mines are empty and dark
at seeing the Donald rising,
a god of inherited fortune
who feeds on the flesh of his mothers.

Though Donald is Lord of Wisdom, bigly,
his mother does not know his name.
She meekly calls him The Tiny One,
The Giant-Insane-Baby Who Eats the Sky.

Donald’s glory is in the clouds, bigly,
his large hands span the horizon
like his realtor father before him,
though his son, Jared,
is mightier than he.

Donald’s tweets are behind him.
His party, his Dark-of-Water are at his feet.
Jesus and Mammon are over him,
the eyebrow-serpents are on his brow,
the Donald’s guiding over-comb
protects his forehead,
each hair alert for enemies
to add to the death-list.

His neck is there,
not to be moved from his mighty Trunk,
nor shall he arise from his golf cart
except to smite bad people, bad.
His mighty implement is not a mushroom;
yea, bigger than a Behemoth's
is his engorgement.
Donald is the Bull of the Sky;
flag-waving, he alternate-facts
his enemies into submission.

He lives on the past:
without reading its books he
devours its innards.
Everything he does, he does firstly.
He swallows even scientists
without acquiring knowledge;
their magic counts as nothing.
Donald himself suffices.
He assembles his cabinet, then fires them.
Assembles more, and eats them.
Beware the field of spit-out ministers!

Donald appears as the Great One,
shoving aside the foreigners,
yea even Montenegro’s leader.
He calls on tribute lands for tithes,
withholding his hands and mighty arms
on account of less than two percent.

He sits with his back to the Potomac.
He needs no Congress for his advisor
since Him-Who-Is-Not-Be-Named,
the faraway Tsar advises him
on this day of drone-and-missile-sending.

Donald is the Lord of Offerings.
His coffers swell, his tax returns
known only to the gods below.
His meat and his ketchup suffice him;
no foreign chef does he require.
At night he eats his enemies
and sends out tweeted warnings
that the pundits and journals tremble.

His thoughts are like falcons, bigly.
It is “Bring-Back-the-Slave-To-Service” who is Sessions
who lassoes them for Donald.
It is “Snake-Even-Worse-Than-Donald”, the Pence, who guards and keeps the Congress fattened for him.
It is “She-As-Dumb-As-Willows”, named DeVos,
whose job is to keep them meek and stupid.

It is Ryan, slayer of Big Government,
demolisher of Bureaus,
who cuts the throats of the victims, singing,
McConnell the one who will extract the innards.
Conway will cut them up for Donald,
and Sanders the messenger whom Donald sends forth
to say the Yea-That-Is-Nay daily.

His consort Melania, and Ivanka,
darkly-beloved daughter, who cut them up
and pour spice into the Donald’s dinner-pot.
Bigly, the meals, with ketchup.

The ones who serve in Congress,
yea, even the Senate and the House,
from their heights they serve Donald.
The uninsured are butchered, the unborn
one and all are guaranteed to his platter.

Donald eats everything:
athletes for breakfast,
businessmen for his business-man’s lunch,
children for dinner with alt-spice and pepper.
Veterans and seniors are burned as incense.
A cauldron of women for a late-night pussy-grab.

Donald has filled the sky, and is the sky.
He crowns himself with the Pope’s mitre,
the crown of many Kings. He dreams
of Jared, Ivanka as Tsar and Tsarina
of Russo-Europe, the coming empire.

He has swallowed the Red States.
Though he does not like their savor,
He will devour the Blue.
With the help of his Dark-of-Water,
he will march against the Urals
and snap the necks of the Asian warlords.

He has swallowed all knowledge
and never once passed gas or turdling,
so he has forgotten nothing.
His reign will be limitless; he is the sum
of all the enemies he has devoured.

Whomever he likes is good,
whomever he dislikes is loser, Kenyan.
Soon no one will be left unbowed.
The rest will be eaten.
Do-gooders and liberals are helpless before him.
His tower of gold and marble the highest,
himself on top, immortal, beloved
of gods and the blazing stars.

He is forever, and forever, the Donald.

Alien Covenant -- A Review

Most of my friends seem to have hated the new film Alien Covenant. It is director Ridley Scott's follow-on to the baffling Alien "prequel," Prometheus, and it fills in many gaps in the narrative.
Friends commented on the stupid actions by the characters being pursued and devoured by the aliens, but they are an underpaid crew ferrying colonists in space, not scientists on exploration, and "first contact" was the last thing they expected.
The film contains serious debates about artificial intelligence/robots and the ethics thereof; the question, from Frankenstein, of whether the creation should have contempt for its physically frail creator; it quotes from Wagner's Ring Cycle both musically and in ideas; it evokes and quotes Milton, and Shelley's "Ozymandias."
Alien Covenant includes a necropolis city it will be impossible to forget, one aspect of which is lifted directly from Arnold Bocklin's painting, "The Isle of the Dead." It plays on twins/doppelgangers. And it advances the Alien story-line continuum with a new agency, many twists of the created turning against the creators. It suggests that species are not kind to one another, and that mutual annihilation might be out there in the stars as well as on earth.
The weak part of the script is that the only intellectual characters are robots, and the humans bumble around, trying to substitute bravery for brains. But that too, is part of the message throughout these films: a safe world is safe for the not-so-bright, too. We don't get close to any of the characters to bond with them the way we did with Sigourney Weaver in Alien/Aliens/Alien3, and that is too bad. It is too easy to forget that the Earth culture of the Alien series, toward which this episode is building, is a dystopia in which free-thinking individuals seem to have been pushed aside in favor of desperate workers who want to obey orders and get their next paycheck. And going into space does not appear to be a plum job.

If you have seen the previous films and thought about them, you need to see this one too, and then go home and think about it. And then don't go near anything even remotely shaped like an egg.

Against Copyright

The "public domain" is the world's intellectual treasure-house of all the art, writing and music that has ever been done by humans. It is our common inheritance and is the sum of what it is to be human -- to have a direct connection to all who came before. This means that all these works may be copied, edited, sequeled, adapted into other media, etc. It is your right to do so. Copyright laws are do not protect a right -- they take a right away for the benefit of publishers and authors, originally for a limited time. Copyright used to be 28 years, renewable once if the author or publisher bothered to re-register. Thanks to the machinations of lawyers protecting Mickey Mouse, U.S. copyrght is now something like 95 years past the death of the 'creator'. They are pushing to make these copyrights, in effect, go on forever.
Copyrights extended this way hamper the creativity of those seeking to create derivative works, or even just to quote from or adapt the originals, all for the benefit of people referred to in my circle as "shiftless heirs." People who do no work, collecting royalties into infinity, and prohibiting posterity from creating new work with paying them ransom.
In the case of poetry, I have seen "shiftless heirs" of a dead poet, harboring a fantasy of future wealth, and prohibiting any of the poet's friends from assembling and publishing books of their work. I have seen poets' life work hurled into dumpsters by contemptuous family members. Copyright serves no one when the work has no monetary value -- ironically, poetry, one of the ultimate treasures of any era, is almost always regarded as trash by the contemporary culture around it.
So, for poetry, I stand against copyrights altogether, and encourage poets to place statements on their copyright page, specifying the year in which they wish their work to be in the Public Domain. To hell with the lawyers.

Four Generations of Rutherfords in the "Book Business"

Runs in the family, even though I was separated from the Rutherfords at age 13.
My great-grandfather John Rutherford came from England to Scottdale, PA, and ran a book and stationery store (other Rutherford siblings had shoe factories, coal mines, banks, and a steam engine factory).
My grandfather took over the "bookstore" and became a newspaper distributor for several counties. Untold numbers of paperboys worked for him, and he sponsored 12 boy scout troops.
Some of the Boy Scout troops had marching bands and they probably bought their instruments at a local store called "Rutherford Studios." It was rumored of the Rutherfords that any of them could pick up any musical instrument and be able to play it within a few months.
One auntie secretly wrote poetry.
The news store was inherited by my Uncle Bill, a grumpy man with an eye-patch who lived above the store. Rutherford News closed forever sometime in the late 1970s.
As a child in Scottdale, I would cut up magazines and rebind them in various ways and sell them to neighbors; I also printed a mimeographed science newsletter and tried to draw comics. By the fifth grade I was writing monster plays and staging them in a local garage, and charging admission to the all the neighborhood kids. People in town said I was just like my grandfather.
And here I am, a curmdugeon, publishing books and picking away at writing and music. Did I have any choice in the matter?
This corner building was the site of Rutherford News. Since it was built around 1880, it was probably always in the family.

Fame at Last!

Whoop-de-goddamm-doo! Fox Business Network just sent me an email telling me that the Poet's Press can have a two-minute spot on the FOX Business Network for only $4,000. Now I can reach all those toothless troglodytes who have just been waiting for BIG POETRY ENLIGHTENMENT and I can sell my books by the boxcar-load. Hell, I'll need my own railroad siding since Fox Business Network will reach a MASSIVE AUDIENCE of AFFLUENT CUSTOMERS. Why didn't I think of this before? My god, I can be famous at last! The Poets Press authors can ride around in limousines! The Kardashians will quote my poems. My lines will turn up in tattoos, on T-shirts, and the lids of the flat-brimmed baseball caps.

The Nosebleed

On a day when the government decides to bolster the prejudicial treatment of anyone who offends anyone's "religion," and a day when the House of Representatives votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act, I am reminded of the time when, as a poor college student, I needed emergency care at St. Vincent Hospital in Erie, PA.





1968

Dizzy and bloodless I am wheeled
into the emergency room. Nosebleed
for hour on hour has left me senseless.

This is a very Catholic hospital.
A nurse with clipboard demands my name.
She looks with scorn at my hair and beads.
“Bet you don’t have no job?” she sneers.

“I’m a student. At Edinboro.”
“Drugs!” she says. “They’re in here
alla time.”

“Nosebleed,” I say.

“I don’t use drugs.”

Nosebleed, she writes,
as I choke on clotted upheave.

“What’s your religion?”

“None.”

“I gotta put something here.”

“Say atheist.”

“Well, that’s a first.
I don’t know how to spell that.”

“A—T—H—E—I—S—T.”

“You could be dyin’ here
an’ you wanna say atheist?”

“You want me to lie on my deathbed?”

She snorts. “I’ll put down Protestant.”


They wheel me in. I’m in and out
of consciousness. Later I wake
in a deserted wardroom. I want to know
how long I’ve been here, how much I lost.

I find the cord and buzzer
that says it will summon a nurse.
I hear a distant bell ringing,
hear voices at the nurses’ station.

Words fly to me like startled birds
“Appendicitis”
“Babies”
“Pneumonia”
then “The hippie in 15-B”

A male voice laughs. “We’ll make up
something special for that one.”

I ring the bell again. No one responds.


I wake again at mid-day.

They wheel in food on a cart.
A plate is put before me—
amorphous meat, a glistening heap
of mashed potatoes, some soggy greens.

I take a spoon of potatoes
wondering real or instant,
bite down on razor shards of glass,
put hand to mouth and see blood streaming.


Rip tube from face spitting rush
for the bathroom
rinse rinse spit rinse
swabbing the blood with a towel
tongue bleeding gums bleeding

dressed myself hastily
left there no one stopped me
walking walking hitch-hiking southward

glad I never swallowed
my special hippie atheist breakfast.

Trilobite Love Song

My thousand eyes are upon you.
Even when I molt, when others would dream
in an agony of pain denial, I stay alert.
I watch for your every passing.
Everything I sense about you
     from infrared to ultraviolet
     is in perfect focus at every distance.
Not even a feeding cave or a narrow crevice
can hide you from me: I know
the subtle song of your feet and feelers.
The mottled markings on your thorax
make me go rugose:  I cannot help it.
The intricate spines of your cranidium,
stretching like the finest sea-flower,
drive me to impolite excesses.
     (Oh I have mapped them and would
     ten times trace them with my ten
     appendages if only you would permit it!)

Greater order, you
     have never noticed me,
     a bottom-feeder for all you know.
Yet I have followed you for years now.
I listened silently as you and all those others
formed into a linked circle, a thousand-feeler,
ten-thousand spine symphony of singing.
I think the earth stopped in its orbit
when  you played the click-click-click symphony
of the revered master click-rrr—click---rrr-click---ahk.
All I could so was weep inside my calcite lenses
and let my spines go limp.

How could you know my dream of you
     inspired me to swim higher
     beyond the blue-green fringe water
     into the blazing Greater Light,
where I lay gasping with salt-dry gills
     click-clicking your name
as the Greater Light plummeted
     and the blue-white Lesser Light
     stole in to replace it —
just so do I, the lesser, pursue you.

I am not worth
     one twitch of your pygidium tail
but I am convinced of a destiny
since ever I first looked upon you.
I guard your molting against all predators,
though you have never known it.
When I was younger, I traced
lewd messages on the sand floor,
wiping them out as fast as I wrote them –
oh, things that would embarrass you,
one typical juvenile verse went something like:
          I want to hold my click-click
          against your click-click-ack-click
          until we grrrr-te-te

So as you see, I am not much of a poet,
even less a courtier. My only hope
is that you have held yourself aloof,
that perhaps in your greater essence
is a greater shyness. Or, hope of hopes,
that you have seen me all along,
and only need my boldness. Oh, dare I?

Without your prior enrollment and slow
unrolling, without that stretch of feelers
and the ensuing embarement of thorax,
dare I approach and say the words
of surrender and engagement:

Thou, greater than me, and whom I love:
I lay my eggs at your feet.

Brahms' First String Quartet

For more than ten years, I have been writing program notes for chamber music concerts. I will begin to share these, with a link to a video of a performance of the works. At some point I might have enough notes for a little book. Audiences and musicians have been amused and informed by my notes, so I hope to pass along the pleasure.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897).
String Quartet in C Minor, Op. 51 No. 1 (1865-1873)

I. Allegro

II. Romanze: Poco Adagio

III. Allegretto

IV. Allegro

Happy was the lot of Louis Spohr, a composer who outlived Beethoven and composed 36 string quartets. Far less happy was the lot of composers who trembled under Beethoven’s shadow: Mendelssohn did a youthful quartet fully in the “manner” of the master’s intimidating last works, but then abandoned that high and difficult style for a more genial output; Schumann created three masterful quartets in 1840, and then no more; Schubert capped his quartet career with masterpieces worthy of his musical hero, but he was dead two years after Beethoven. Other composers shied away from the genre, and some, like young Dvorak, were just beginning to find their way.
By 1865, Brahms, the most self-conscious of all composers, had composed and torn up twenty quartet attempts. Some were played privately by friends: all were rejected and nearly-all destroyed. This one he kept, and revised, and revised, and revised. By 1873, Brahms had two quartets ready, his Opus 51, the first of which, in the high-stakes key of C Minor, we hear tonight. Brahms was 40 when he published these quartets, and he had still not completed his first symphony, another case of predecessor-panic.
The first movement is a tight-fisted sonata form, with not one note wasted. The two principal themes follow one right upon another. The first theme, although it surges upwards heroically, also has three successive downward leaps, making its return and contrapuntal use easy for any listener to recognize. The second theme, heard immediately after two long-held octave notes on the viola, is more songful, melismatic, chromatic, exactly the kind of theme we will find in his symphonies. The working-out includes sections in sunnier C Major, and then a slide into mysterious C-Sharp Minor. These modulations change the harmonic palette even while Brahms continues his tightly-worked counterplay of themes. One masterful touch in the first movement is that Brahms brings back his second subject, set one pitch higher than the “home key,” so that, although one is hearing a recapitulation of a now-familiar theme, is distinctly different in tone-color (you will hear this after about three bars of distinctly weird pizzicati). The coda is more agitated and shows us that Brahms knows the full weight of writing his first quartet in the “tragic” key of C Minor, although he imitates Bach in having the last note be a broad chord in C Major.
Like Beethoven, whose C Minor “Pathetique” sonata opens out into a melting song in A-Flat, Brahms choose this key for his second movement. This “Romanze” is intimate music, and although the thematic material is based on the main theme of the first movement, this music takes us to a different world altogether. The players are more together than pitted against one another, and we sense a pastoral mood, with suggestions of distant horn-calls. A more meditative middle section, sliding into the minor, hints not just at nature, but nature seen in solitude, but then we are brought back to the “song without words” material from the opening. If the first movement is about nervous nest-building, the second is a celebration of the natural world.
There is no Scherzo for a third movement, as you might expect from a 40-year-old composer still too timid to write his first symphony. Instead we have a moody Allegretto molto moderato e comodo. The key is F Minor (the relative minor of the A-Flat Major key of the preceding movement). The interplay between the violin and the other strings is not so much playful as sinister, and the folkish interlude with odd open-string sounds from the second violin and viola (an effect he had picked up from Haydn’s “Frog” quartet). In mood, I find this one of the loneliest pieces of music in the repertory – not so much a depiction of a lonely character, as music that springs from a solitary nature. If one had to paint this delicate music, I would envision a walk in a November wood, with gray and brown tones predominating. Perhaps, in the middle section, our solitary stroller sees some geese flying overhead, or some ducks nestled along a distant stream. Then, turning his back, he knows he is alone again, and the opening music returns.
In the busy and exciting Finale, Herr Docktor Brahms employs a technique that he would perfect in his symphonies: a short “motto” theme followed by two principal themes. By the time Brahms exposes and unfurls these handsome melodies, full of energy, there is scant time for a big development section, so there is a highly compressed one, followed by the recapitulation of the three ideas, and then a coda. This finale, based on material from the first movement, forms a solid bookend against the assertive first movement.
Brahms is given credit, in his Opus 51 quartets, with re-establishing the genre and encouraging others to go where, previously, only a few hardy souls had tread. We would probably not have the Bartok or Shostakovich quartets, had Brahms not summoned the courage to issue these works. Quartets love to play the Brahms quartets. For listeners with time and intent, it is a revelation to listen to them with score in hand. For the concert hall listener, the rewards may be mixed, as there is a difference, perhaps, between “quartet music” and “music for quartet.” Brahms himself may have sensed that the architecture of absolute music was too complex or dense for the quartet, so he almost immediately made a version of the music for piano four-hands. The outer movements may be daunting, but in the two inner movements, the lyrical gifts and nature-painting instincts of Brahms come to the fore. Or it may simply be that repeated listenings are called for to make the outer movements reveal themselves. Either way, we are grateful to have a time and space to sit quietly, and make it our business to absorb this great work.