Snofru the Mad

One of the oddest-sounding names for a ruler (at least to English ears) is the Egyptian "Snofru." My poem starts with a child's embarrassment about the sound of his name, and leads to more and more outre and outrageous obsessions. This is a fantasy, of course, but grounded in an obscure chapter in Egyptian history.

Snofru or Snefru was Pharaoh in the Fourth Dynasty and the immediate predecessor of Khufu (Cheops), builder of the Great Pyramid. Historians are baffled as to why Snofru built himself three separate pyramids. Snofru was the first Pharaoh to enclose his name in a cartouche on monuments.

SNOFRU THE MAD

With a name like Snofru

you’d better be good

as a Pharaoh, as a survivor.

Would the gods laugh, he wondered,

when his weighing time came up —

his heart against a feather

on the fatal balance —

would tittering among them

make his recitation falter?

A careful planner,

he lays four boats in his pyramid,

one pointed in each direction —

he’d launch all four

so his soul could elude

the pursuing god Set

and confound old Ammit,

the Eater of the Dead.

Grave robbers? He’d baffle them,

build three great pyramids

for Snofru the Pharaoh —

hang the cost!

He’d bury an imposter

in each sarcophagus.

The gods alone would know

his final resting place,

a well-appointed tomb

whose architect he’d strangled.

As for his Queen Hetephras,

dead these three years now,

he left her innards

in an alabaster jar,

yet carried her mummy away.

Nights, he unwinds her wrappings,

kisses her natron-scented lips,

caresses her sewn-up belly,

then carefully restores

her royal bandages,

her mask and jewels.

His courtiers avoid him,

smell death despite

the unguents and incense.

An impudent general

already makes eyes

at his daughter. They shceme.

There is talk, there is talk.

He will neither make war, nor peace,

turns back ambassadors

as he spends his days divining

how to turn his eye-blink life

into the gods’ eternity.

One night he slips away.

The upstart will assume his name,

bed his black-eyed daughter,

inherit his unused pyramid —

the better to advance his stratagem.

With pride and pomp

he circled his name

on a hundred monuments,

but he is far from Memphis now,

where he speaks to his servants

in but a whisper.

His modest sarcophagus,

when that time comes,

is inscribed with another name.

His journey West

will be uneventful.

Then, coming and going

among the living the dead,

he’ll watch as the proud

are judged and eaten,

then take his place, unsandaled,

plain as the commonest slave,

serving his mummy-bride

at the table of the gods.

The Anaconda Poems

From my 2005 collection, a touched-up version of my animal reincarnation poem, which came to me after reading an article about the sex life of the giant anaconda snake.

1

Some want to come back from death,

reliving their human folly

again and again,

life after dreary life

until they get it right,

then slide down the chute

to soulless oblivion.

We who don’t care for perfection

are doomed to come back as animals.

Do we return

according to our habits,

the heaped accounts of karma,

or can we choose?

I choose,

study the animal kingdom

for the soul’s best condo,

the leafiest turf,

the longest return engagement.

Choosing is hard for a hermit poet.

No herd instinct for me,

no hive or flock or pride

if you please.

Let me be something

solitary yet strong,

lordly and unapproachable.

I search for incarnations

on top of the food chain.

I’ll eat

but not be eaten

hunt, but elude the hunter.

At last I find it —

the giant anaconda.

Female I’ll have to be —

the males are nothing.

Mother of all snakes,

I’ll grow to thirty feet,

spend all day lazing

in the waters of the Amazon.

Nights I’ll wait

at the edge of the river,

when deer and rabbit,

panther and lemur

come to drink.

My fangs attach

to whatever approaches;

I throw throw my coils

with amazing speed.

The astonished prey

immobile, breathless

as I squeeze squeeze

squeeze

to heart-stop stillness.

Compacted to sausage shape

the still warm animals

slide down my gullet,

my inward turning teeth

guiding them onwards.

I have no enemies,

swim unconcerned

among piranha

electric eels

and crocodile caymans.

Not even my prey

seem to notice me

as I mount skyward

to the treetop banquet,

my green and black camouflage

matching the dappled forest.

Parrots and toucans

I eat like candy.

Only the monkeys fear me

somersault screaming

at the sight of me —

Oh, and the hairless apes

in the jungle villages:

I need but show my tongue,

my unblinking eye,

to make them run away.

Taking the sun

on a bank a-burst

with yellow blossoms

I am a jasmine empress

irresistible

to the males of my species.

I sense them coming,

feel the grass parting,

a dozen today

twining about me.

I turn with them,

move toward mud.

Hours we coil together —

puny as they are, it

feels good everywhere —

one of them will find the spot.

2

I stow away

on an airplane’s cargo hold,

emerge at La Guardia,

hitch ride on a luggage rack

through tunnel to Manhattan.

I mean to eat my way around —

a big green worm

in the big green Apple!

City Hall Park has plenty of trees,

pigeons abounding.

I study the populace,

learn how to move among them

with camouflage and mimicry.

This is going to be easy.

I will have my fill of man-food.

Homeless Anaconda

a garbage bag

unraveled to wrap me

gets me a night

in the city shelter

(lots to eat,

but it needed washing)

Hip-Hop Anaconda,

plenty of room for me

in those baggy pants.

Ate well on 125th Street

but had to spit out

gold chains and a boom box.

Transvestite Anaconda

prowling the piers

in matching alligator

accessories. Honey

I could just eat you alive.

An Anaconda Dowager

draped in furs

indulging my sweet

incisors

with the ladies

at Rumpelmeyers.

Roller Blade Anaconda

knocking down doormen

on Central Park South,

scarfing up poodles

at the curbside.

Painted purple,

welcomed as Barney,

I am Day Care Anaconda,

turning a jungle gym

into my cafeteria

(I really must start

counting calories!)

I’m unadorned as

Bowery Anaconda —

an hallucination —

acquiring a taste

for marinated men

left out for the taking

in cardboard boxes!

The Anaconda Nun

in her floppy habit

waylays worshipers

in the nave of St. Patrick’s.

The Irish cardinal

wouldn’t know a snake

if he saw one.

Resting now, I am

Steam Tunnel Anaconda

need time to digest

all my victims

time to prepare

for the progeny

already swelling in my belly.

I’ll winter here in warmth,

no rent no taxes,

won’t need a green card

welfare or Medicaid

They can’t zoo or jail me

I have immunity

endangered species status.

When my seventy-five babies

emerge from manhole covers

on Easter morning

on lower Fifth Avenue

they’ll already be citizens —

American Anacondas!

The Exhumation of Goethe

In 1970, the East German Communist government wanted to create an international cultural tourist attraction that would rival Red Square in Moscow. So they decided to exhume the body of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest of all German poets and thinkers, so they could make a mummy of him, like the preserved body of Lenin in Red Square. Things did not go well. We never got have that Faust theme park, or be welcomed by docents dressed as Werther, Gretchen or Mephistopheles.

East Germany, 1970

By all means do this at night, while Weimar
sleeps, while even those whose job it is to watch
the watchers, sleep. In merciful dark,
the third shift silence when the local electric plant
shuts down for the Good of the State,

take a cart — no, not a car,
a hand-drawn cart —
dampen its wheels so your journeys to,

and from, and back
to the foggy graveyard are soundless.

Do not awaken the burghers!
Here are the keys to the wrought-iron gates —
mind you don’t rattle them.
The crypt has been purposefully left unlocked.
You need but draw the door.
The cart will just squeeze through
(Engineer Heinrich has measured everything!)

Open the sarcophagus as quietly as possible.
Watch the fingers! Don’t leave a mark
on the hand-carved cover.
Be sure it’s Goethe, the one with a “G.”
We don’t want his crypt-mate Schiller
(too many anti-People tendencies).

Lift up the whole thing gently.
The bones will want to fly apart.
Only the shroud, and some mummified meat
keep him in the semblance of skeleton.
Just scoop the whole thing up
like a pancake, then into the cart.

Here’s a bag for the skull. Don’t muss
those ash-gray laurel leaves.
We plan to coat them in polymer
after we study that Aryan skull
whose brain conceived Faust,
Egmont, and sorrowful Werther.

We’re going to wire the bones together,
strip off that nasty flesh,
maybe bleach him a little,
make a respectable ghost of Goethe.

Who knows, if he looks good enough,
in a newly-lined sarcophagus,
we could put him on display.
Come to Kulturstadt!
See Goethe’s body!
Even better than Lenin!
(Can we say that?)

It will be a world attraction.

We’ll pipe in lieder and opera.
Tour guides will be dressed as Gretchen.
Maybe a fun house
with Mephistopheles,
a sausage-fest at Brander’s Inn.

Ah! the cart is here! The bones,
yes, the bones. Unfortunate, the odor.
We can work on that.
The colors, mein Gott,
(excuse the expression)
they will not please —

over there, Klaus,

if you’re going to be sick —

It’s such a little skeleton —
was he really so short?

The books said he towered

over his contemporaries.

So much for the books!
And the shroud — that color —
not at all what we imagined.
Perhaps the opera house
could make a new one.

Watch those ribs —

so many little bones

in the fingers.

Things are just not . . .

holding together.

I can’t do this.

The project is cancelled.

Poets are just too — flimsy.

Put this mess back
where it came from.
Next time let’s exhume a general,
Bismarck, the Kaiser,
someone with a sword and epaulets.
Armor would be even better.
The People want giants!

Just One More

Midnight has passed. The kerosene lamp

is the only thing on in the kitchen.

I tip-toe out for our secret ritual.

“Hungry again,” my grandmother asks?

I nod. There wasn’t much to eat

now that the garden had browned out

and snow came up to the porch-step.

In the tiny pool of yellow light

on the oilcoth-covered table,

she opens a stack of saltine crackers,

splits the wax paper wrapping

to a domino line of leaning squares,

salt-crackled and crisp. The dish

of butter was already waiting.

With one broad knife she spreads

the golden soft butter on one,

then two, then half a dozen.

Hunched over the cracker feast,

we nibble as quietly as mice.

In every room, the sleepers breathe.

We bite – one snorts – we chew —

another begins to snore – we swallow —

as someone moans and turns to one side.

They never hear us, and never will.

“One more?” my grandmother asks me,

broad butter knife in hand.

“Just one,” I say. If I eat one,

she eats another. Somehow we always

find two at the bottom.

A cup of spring water to wash them down,

a good-night wave at the kitchen door,

and I creep back to bed. You never

go to bed hungry if a grandmother is there.

In Chill November

There is a day in November, when you walk in the woods (here, it is Pittsburgh's vast Frick Park), when you see a great stand of leafless trees, and, at a distance, you cannot tell if they have lost their leaves, or if they were dead already. How could you tell? This revised poem comes from that quandary.

IN CHILL NOVEMBER

The leaves be red,

The nuts be brown,

They hang so high

They will not fall down.

—Elizabethan Round, Anon.

The snow has come.

The leaves have fallen.

Long nights commit the chill

low sun and flannel clouds cannot disperse.

We walk the park, stripped now

     to mere schematics,

vision drawn out to farther hills

now that the forest is blanked

like flesh turned glass on X-ray negative.

These woods are sham so near the solstice,

play out a murder mystery of birch and maple.

The riddle is, who’s dead and who’s pretending?

That witches’ elm with clinging broomsticks —

     is it deceased or somnolent?

Which of these trees will never bloom again:

     A Lombardy poplar stripped by blight—

     A maple picked clean by gypsy moths —

     A thunder-blasted pedestal of ash —

     A moribund sycamore whose only life

          came in a few vain buds

          (growing like dead men’s hair and nails,

          slow to acknowledge the rot below)?

The ground’s a color cacophony,

     alive, alive!

the treeline a study in gray and brown.

So, who can tell

     the bare tree from the dead,

     the thin man from the skeleton?

Which denizens of wood-lot shed these leaves?

Which is a corpse? a zombie?

Which one is but a vermin shell?

Which treads the night on portable roots,

festooned with bats,

sinking its web of trailing vines

into the veins of saplings?

Which stalwart oaks will topple,

which trunks cave in to termite nests?

Which is the next victim of carpenter ants?

How can we tell the living from the dead?

It is just the month: November lies.

October always tells the truth.

You could no more fake

the shedding of leaves

than simulate a pulse in stone.

Only the living fall in love,

only the living cry for joy,

only the living relinquish that month

in red and yellow shuddering!

The pines,

those steeple-capped Puritans,

what price their ever-green?

Scrooge trees, they hoard their summers,

withhold their foliage,

refuse to give the frost his due.

Ah, they are prudent,

Scotch pine and wily cedar,

touch-me-not fir and hemlock.

They will live to a ripe old age

(if you can call that living).

I shun this sham Novembering.

Turn back the calendar: there, Halloween,

no, further back to the start of leaf-fall!

There! The first-frost autumn shuddering!

Love! Burn! Sing! Crumble!

Dance! Wind! Fall! Tumble!

Into the wind-blown pyramid of leaves!

Spin in a whirling dust-devil waltz!

Leaf-pile! Treetops! Tramping on clouds!

Weightless, flying, red-caped October!

Prologue

I am revisiting/revising my 2005 book, The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets, for a new 2018 edition. Here is the new version of the opening poem.

PROLOGUE

A fountain pen,

     a yellow legal pad,

a cup of tea, a symphony —

these set the stage.

The empty page is one

     of an eternity of silences,

     the start of an infinite line

          of rambling letters.

The pen is ordinance,

     cannoning lines and dots

     onto the ruled pages.

This page is but a clearing,

     the tablet a wilderness.

     Guidelines are there,

          but they are not a map:

     the short line finds its measure,

     the long one cascading over.

Fall in — you’ll find

     no bottom, no sense

of beginnings and endings.

You’ll find yourself

in a Black Forest of poems.

Wolves lurk within —

     no compass

will help you navigate.

You may slip on a comma,

wind up alone and desolate

because a colon misled you.

Three dots will send you flying

into a waiting sink-hole.

Here is some danger,

yet some reward: poems

may change you forever.

I mean to change you forever.

It is too late to turn back.

I’ve got you, guest,

in my little book.

I will not leave you behind.

Here is my hand.

Read on!

New Year's Day

The meal is, shall we say,

     monochromatic:

in the cramped dining nook

with a hard-white beam

     of afternoon sun

chiaroscuro, bouncing off

white table-cloth, white china,

the white serving-platter

of pale roast pork,

the pearly-white of mashed spuds,

chalky pork gravy,

off-color rancid butter,

bread — white, of course,

no other, ever —

white paper napkins,

the pale complexions

of the right kind of people.

Stepfather presides

over a Swede Lutheran silence.

No one is permitted to speak,

save for pass-this-pass-that

and thank-you. The only sounds

are knife-scrapes and fork bites,

the shuffle of chairs

against the splintered floor,

the stifled winter cough.

Mother says nothing; beer

     has done its work.

Stepfather has no use

     for the two stepsons,

book-reading idlers and spawn

of the man he hated and replaced.

Still, as long as the child-support

checks came every month,

he’d have to feed them.

Nothing has any flavor.

White salt, passed round,

and added liberally,

helps not so much as pepper,

lots of it, and water aplenty.

Food cooked in hatred

can only be washed down,

     not eaten.

Ignoring the shouted order

to “excuse himself.”

the older boy gets up,

takes empty water-glass

to the kitchen sink,

and standing there,

he gazes into the sunlit nook,

at the dusty sunbeam

below the unlit chandelier,

from whose never-dusted

maze of dangling crystals,

descended

on pale white threads of silk

hundreds upon hundreds

of

tiny

white

baby

spiders

onto the white pork

the white bread

the white gravy

the white potatoes

the white tablecloth

the white paper napkins

onto the stern whiteness

of the Stepfather,

the passive Mother,

the little brother

gobbling away

at gravy-bread.

Does he tell them?

Or does he run outside

howling with laughter,

thanking the cosmos

for just desserts?

Poets in a Chelsea Brownstone

Hostess. I remember her hunched shadow

on the frosted glass

of the sliding French door,

as we poets read,

and the door slid silently,

just ever so much,

enough for the thin arm

and age-knobbed wrist

to enter, to place

on the refreshment table,

without one ice-clink sound,

the sweating-cool pitcher

of lemonade.

Most of the eager poets

assembled here,

tracking who-knows-what

on her parquet floor,

shuffling their papers and notebooks,

awaiting their turn to read,

did not know her name.

The elegant brownstone

they come to weekly

is just a place,

one among many that come and go

in The Village Voice listings,

places that tolerate

the disheveled artists,

word-crazed, impractical,

the ones who will never

earn a penny.

As I read in my turn,

she listened there

behind the veil of glass,

a listening that leaned

on every consonant I uttered,

a keen pre-echo

to every vowel.

Oh, she heard us.

We did not know her name,

or how the upstairs rooms lodged

a succession of broken souls,

her “causes,”

knew not that we’d been adopted, too.

One day, with a friend, I saw her,

emerging from the brownstone,

sun-walking Ninth Avenue,

behind some tugging hound

misfortune had doubtless thrust

upon her charity.

The warm day reddened

her parlor-pale face.

My friend tells me,

“That’s Mrs. Tanner, you know.

That’s Auntie Mame!”

A Clarinet Wonder

Something weird and wonderful, Romantic and yet modern. The New York Philharmonic's composer-in-residence in 2010 was Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg. Hear his amazing Clarinet Concerto. Alas, the CD is out of print and the record company (Ondine) does not sell MP3 downloads either. I think it's even harder to be a contemporary composer than to be a contemporary poet.

Rachmaninoff Had Big Hands

Rachmaninoff and Humor do not seem to be two words that could share the same sentence. This video, titled "Rachmaninoff Had Big Hands" will thrill all classical music fans, especially those who once thought they could play the great C-Sharp Minor Prelude, until they saw the chords.  

Teddy Tahu Rhodes

Amazing baritone — Teddy Tahu Rhodes — made a breakthrough appearance on the 2010 Saturday live HD broadcast of "Carmen," filling in for an ailing Toreador. 

Here's also a YouTube clip of Teddy, also nicknamed "the baritone with abs," singing the great solo from Handel's Messiah, "The Trumpet Shall Sound."  

The Most Gothic Spot in Pittsburgh

I've been visiting Pittsburgh's cemeteries for two years now, but I have not seen every ravine and hillside that houses tombs and mausoleums. This week I found the best so far: a round, Gothic mausoleum that looks like a set for Poe's "Ulalume." It's in Allegheny Cemetery near the Bloomfield entrance. 

Moments of the Sublime

Breakthrough moments in human consciousness. Plotinus describes achieving oneness with nature/God/the Sublime (substitute your own overarching noun): "He was one himself then, with no distinction in him either in relation to himself or anything else; for there was no movement in him, and he had no emotion, no desire for anything else when he had made the ascent, no reason or thought; his own self was not there for him, if we should say even this. He was as if carried away or possessed by a god, in a quiet solitude, in the stillness of his being turning away to nothing and not busy about himself, altogether at rest and having become a kind of rest." My first moment like this was experienced at night, leaning against a great maple tree in Edinboro graveyard, after I had entered into the very essence of the tree itself (imagining myself as it, not me as one looking at it) .... another time in Providence late at night in the woods as a family of raccoons and I sat regarding the stars ... a few times, not enough times, in a lifetime. To attempt to describe such moments, and to give them value in everyday life, is a poet's life's work.