Swan Lake Variations

1
Turns out there are twelve
alternative endings.
No one will leave Swan Lake
alone in its sound-world,
its gloom trajectory.

The cast: Prince Siegfried:
you know the type.
Irresolute, with the kind
of mother known all too well.
"Just pick one. Any one.
I'll have you married, young man."
Odette, who was once a woman,
now doomed to swanhood
in a white tutu.
Rothbart the sorcerer,
in dusty owl-gear, his gig
to turn women to waterfowl.
His daughter, Odille,
black swan seducer.

How many endings
with climactic storm,
forest confusion,
deaths and drownings?

The Prince beats Rothbart
and tears a wing off,
stealing his swan-girl away.
She'll be a human bride
by the time they get to Mother.

Or, the Prince shoots Rothbart
with his magic crossbow.
Odette forgives him
for cheating with Odille
just hours before.
It's a comedy of manners.

Or, sometimes Odette does drown
(hard work for a water-bird),
and Siegfried joins her.
Each clambers up in turn
to precipice and leaps.

Or, Soviets wanted a happy ending,
and got one, a fairy tale
to undo the melancholy
of too-long winters.
Bozhe moi, let him have the girl.

Or, Nureyev chose the death-leap.
Rothbart and the swan-bride
soar heavenward, the gay prince
relieved to be spared the horror
of a tutu wedding night.

And, in New York, two suicides
break Rothbart's spell.
The lovers ascend
in Wagner apotheosis.

Or, Odette is condemned
to be just a swan,
a haggard water-fowl.
The disillusioned prince
stands there and sulks.
Maybe they'd roast her
for the wedding feast.

Or The Prince and Rothbart wrestle.
In their exhausting struggles,
both drown. Odette remains,
the nineteenth swan, odd-out
in every choreography.

Or The eighteen swans
peck Rothbart to death.
Owl-feathers and bones
sink to the lake's bottom.
Odette and Siegfried
take bows and marry.

Or, a promise being a promise,
Siegfried marries Odile,
the bad swan, becomes
the sorcerer's son-in-law.
Odette droops wings,
Swan Cinderella.

2
Swan Lake in Pittsburgh

Disheartened by happy ending
tacked on to Tchaikovsky's
gloom-ridden ballet —
the drowned white swan Odette,
the drowned Prince Siegfried
seen floating past, as good as new
on Lohengrin's swan-raft —

Really? Amid lamenting coda,
piled high with tragedy,
this Disney charade
so that little girls in tutus
sitting in the balcony
don't go home crying?

Odette's body, swollen,
entangled in algae,
washed up on shore
three days ago.

As for the Prince,
he was found, a "floater"
beneath the Sixth Street Bridge.
Eels came from his mouth
when they hooked
the bloated corpse.
The grieving Queen
is inconsolable.

Rothbart, that bloated owl,
swan-pimp,
still lords it
with the eighteen virgins
he lured away to suicide
(three rivers here, and lots
of unhappy girls!).
Each night they rise
and dance their cygnette
sarabande, with a harp,
a violin and a cello.
Other young men
they will lure to drowning.
That filthy owl,
man-hating sorcerer,
knows only this game
and never loses.

Tableaux from a Pennsylvania Village

This is a very old poem-sequence. It dates back to the 1970s when I was living in New York but still obsessed with the little lake-side village of Edinboro, PA, where I had attended college. This "Tableaux" was in my 1973 collection as just a series of nature impressions. All four parts are about the lake, the trees and plants around it, the bats and ducks and frogs. The central part is a meditation on the eons-long battle between lake and shore: vegetation wants to fill things in; water wants to have its way. There are no people in this poem, other than the poet-observer. I think this revision has made the poems more than they were before (the war sequence now cast completely in blank verse). The last part is a Whitmanesque cry of joy at one sight of spring willow trees against a gray sky, a sublime moment. So here it is, as it will appear in my next book.

Tableaux from a Pennsylvania Village

1
Cloud Actors
Spotlit to the last,
the thunderheads recede
southeast, in sunset red,
like hoary-headed thespians
unwilling to exeunt
without a proper flourish.

Inside the clouds,
the stubborn lightning
flashes, as if another act
of Hamlet or Lear
required its illumination.
The last of day
does not take curtain calls,
trailing the curtain of eventide
it rolls off the storm’s advance
into the night’s
dark amphitheater.
The lights go out.

2
The Bats At Dusk, The Ducks Withdraw
See them now, dart silhouette
in their new-bird pride!
The bats — presumptuous mice —
take wing, upwards on a twilit wind,
downwards into a gnat-rich dusk.

As ducks float south,
the backs of white mallards
turn like the final page
of a silk-lined novel,
flap shut in sun-gem’s fall
from weeping willow tapestry.

From the bridge I eye flock’s
     cooling retreat, 
the “V” of their coming
an almost-“A” arrow departing
passive in downstream current,
each quack from on the water
answered by croak
from a somnolent frog.
Above the processional,
the celebrant fledermice,
afloat on sonar-guided updraft,
feasting on bug-fest 
     with open mouths,
squeak-flap chitter their exultation,
beat on past dusk
     toward the stars.

3
War of the Lake Against Its Borders
In war, old men give out the orders —
      the young men march out and die.
The already-dead in their Civil War,
World War One and Two grave plots, silent lie,
drum-taps and bugles and epaulets gone.
Nothing down there in the lakeside graveyard
but pine-box rot and the long slur of worms,
but up here, the ancient maples have made
against wind and water, a palisade,
gray warriors stiff-stern at the lake-edge. 
They bend their grave green heads in counsel, brush
shagged samaras in a windy tumult,
send gossip-squirrel couriers to branch-
end, the golden leaflets propelling down,
leaf-pile wind-pushed advance to battlefield.
They argue tactics, instruct the saplings,
shudder in windy speeches, arthritic.
They are the proud maple-leaf generals. 
The Lake is their ancient, blind nemesis.
A hundred years they have contained him. 
Root-strong, they know they will one day surround
and absorb him, tame him to pond, to puddle.
to a mere widening of snow-filled creeks.

His Majesty the Lake must be content
to weave a plot for the millennium,
to gnaw on pebbles ignominious,
to swell with the creek-and-rainfall tribute,
smug at the man-made dam that deepened him.
He dreams of expanded borders, does naught
but lap his decadent breakers, weak-wan 
against sand and silt of the pebbled shore,
hunched in the kettle the glaciers carved him.
He frightens no one, looks to mystic clouds
for auguries, sleeps in the afternoons,
interrogates the fishes and flotsam,
attempts to read news from the incoming Braille 
of pelting rain drops (all reassuring),
traces lake’s ice cracks in dead of winter
but fails to detect the coded messages.
No one betrays the tree-army’s secrets.

Now it is spring. The officers conspire,
draw from sun-dew a seedling explosion.
They raise up a line of green colossi:
rusty, bellicose day lily dragons
issue their challenge to cowardly waves.
Others are drafted, too: spies creep
toward the water in a bed of moss.
Fern leaves unfurl their flagrant green pennants.
Foot soldier fungi pop up red-capped, spores 
ready to replenish their short-lived selves.
Roots furrow underground, touch hands and hold.

Lake’s King has weapons, too: one night a fog
clouds up the foe’s senses in fairy mist.
Then comes the rain — an equinoctial storm —
A night of cold downpour — a deluged day —
a night more of of starless, moonless cloudburst.
Waves batter-ram the tree-line barricades.
Muscles renewed and tendons vivified,
he roars like an ocean, spews tidal spray.

The border army breaks, then mends, then holds.
Where roots had lost the soil to cling to,
a tree falls willingly to barricade
with leaf and limb and sundered trunk.
Where water attempts to break the land,
elsewhere, a rope-tough vine, a wild-rose thorn,
a dead-tree pike-shaft punctures him. Roots hold.
Howling and humbled the Lake-King retreats.
His waves recede to a mirror stillness.

At sun-up, the silver orb of Venus
looks down and sees her own slender crescent;
bird echoes bird arc in parallel flight;
each cloud regards his symmetric brother.
The tangled flora begins to heal itself.
Who won the war? Look at the lake edge now,
see that parade-line stiff and pluming there,
as day lilies burn gold against the light!

4
Stormy Day in Spring
No one goes out on these cloudy days.
The forest is empty. A willow tree
burns in first green, vibrant
against a red-gray skillet of clouds.
Was green ever greener than this?
This is the secret hue of spring,
saved for the rainy-day elite!

The civilized ones! They are all indoors
with damp umbrellas, their soggy shoes drying,
while I stand here on the stream bed,
alone as though their world had ended.
I look at the backs of houses: no one
comes down to the stream-bed
to exult with me in willow-rapture.

Keep your clapboards and chimneys!
Give me this brooding, north-born sky,
the ardent chill of this windy noon —
give me a little sun — a beam or two
to slice the scudding rain clouds.
Splash rainbows on the canopy
of gray and brown and emerald.

Give me this — there is nothing sweeter
than this encompassing embrace!
To be alive, alone
amid the willows and the indifferent rain,
to be at the apex of consciousness —
to feel the very pulse of life evolving —
green! green and alive upon the world!

Lethe

I was a terrible hippie. I hated drugs and had no use for them. Yes, I was around marijuana in college days, and even when I inhaled, I was not impressed. Drugs are a curse on the poor, and an arrogant toy for the rich. No one I knew ever had a better life, or accomplished more, because of drugs, and a vast number are dead, or killed themselves. This is an old poem, a catch-all tirade against drugs in general. The image of the horse is a word-play on one of the street-names for heroin. The Juggernaut is from India, a huge stone wheel like a steamroller, and devotees would hurl themselves in front of it to be crushed to death. I was so sad and horrified at the death of River Phoenix, a pointless death of a wonderful young genius actor, that I revised and expanded the poem to include the drug-addled celebrities. Every one of these deaths is a crime against life, and against the living.

Deliver the fruit of the garden of Lethe!
The white horse of sleep is at home in his stable,
mane twined with coca and hemp leaves,
neck wreathed in poppies, his breath a cloud
of Hypnos’ hashish. He feeds on hay,
mixed rich with ergot and mushrooms.

The white horse of sleep goes forth,
draws a black coach through city streets,
pauses in alleyways,
lingers at school-yards.
A dark hand hurls cigarettes,
bags and vials, syringes and pipes
toys scattered with whispered promises
of power and wealth and instant joy.
Boys fight for the poisoned apples.

Mothers shake fists from fire escapes
as the white horse passes.
On curbs, on broken bench,
in frame of rotted door,
the sleepers have fallen.

Others fan out to sell their treasures.
There is never enough.
Someone must always pay —
even here where no one has money —
or someone must die.

Some days the white horse pulls
a great stone Juggernaut.
The children run to greet it,
and one by one are pulled beneath.
Iron wheels burr
with shattered bones,
grindstone steam roller
makes lithography of skin,
cheekbones and brows,
limb and arm and ribcage
spread out like a map,
dreamers’ lives snuffed
into a red-brown inkblot.

The mothers’ sons
are crimson smears on the sidewalk.
Mica glints mockingly
as blood dries to flaking rust.
Silence, then choked weeping,
and then the sound of Juggernaut
rumble-crush rolling
on distant streets, the muted screams
diminuendo to deathly quiet.

Uptown, at the fashionable clubs,
no horse-drawn carriage comes.
Instead, the white stretch limos
arrive and depart,
arrive and depart.
A movie star falls to the pavement,
dead of an overdose
at twenty-two.

Inside, the revelers
compare the merits
of various white powders.
No Juggernaut comes for them:
the white limo doubles
as a hearse when necessary.

They are politically correct,
vegetarian, even.
They are supporting
the produce
of the endangered rain forest.
Nothing could possibly hurt them.

Arabesques on the Statue of Liberty

A rapist on the Staten Island Ferry lusts after the Statue of Liberty. On Canal Street, a Chinese wife makes a break for freedom. And then King Kong and the Statue of Liberty switch places. A new revision of an old New York poem.

1

Bad Dingo rides

the Staten Island ferry

dusk till dawn,

clinging to rail,

nestling an all-night

tumescence,

hard at the sight

of the robed lady,

vast,

unapproachable.

He’s stalking her,

biding his time.

Some night

there’d be a fog,

a power failure.

He’d come up behind her,

prodding the small

of her spine

with his imperious knife,

jostling her bronze buttocks

with his ardent flesh prod.

She’d drop the tablet;

the torch would sputter.

He’d push her off her pedestal.

Bad Dingo would give it to her good

the way he did to all the white ladies

in parks and stairwells and subway cars.

This would be the rape of all rapes,

the pinnacle of his career,

the ultimate boast

“See that toppled goddess

in the harbor--

she ain’t so proud now

since someone had her,

made her moan.

Bad Dingo had her,

stuck it to the Statue,

white-lady Liberty!”

2

In Chinatown,

Mrs. Wang mounts

a quiet rebellion

against the ways of the elders.

She has done all

her mother asked her:

married the boy

the matchmaker ordained,

bore sons and daughters

in regular order

burned joss and incense

at every altar,

sending ghost gold and peaches,

phantom cars and televisions

Hong Kong Hell dollars

to the teeming, greedy dead.

Now her husband travels,

has mistresses, won’t talk

about his gambling.

Her children are gone,

married to foreign devils

Her round-eyed grandchildren

won’t learn Mandarin,

will never send joss riches

to her when she is dead.

Now she becomes a whirlwind:

She sells her jade and porcelain,

cleans out her savings account,

buys an airline ticket

for San Francisco —

from there, who knows?

She pawns the statuette

of pearly white Kuan-Yin,

the Goddess of Mercy

whose only blessing

was endless childbirth

and washing and ironing,

On a whim she buys another

to take its place at her bedside:

a foot-high Statue of Liberty

with batteries and glowing torch.

She leaves it for her husband,

her wedding ring

on its spiky crown.

3

Today two New York titans

switch places.

A grumpy Green Liberty

strides up Fifth Avenue,

crushing pedestrians in verdigris.

Her sandalled feet

send buses flying,

kiosks shattering.

Her great head turns

among the office towers.

She reaches in,

pulls screaming executives

through razor edge panes,

undresses them

with her copper fingers,

discards them one by one

to the pavement

twenty stories below.

The man she wants

is not among them. He’s got

to be a real American,

one of those Arrow short models,

blond, and a screamer,

a yielding but unwilling male

under her stern metallic nails.

The more he cries out, Put me down,

the more she likes him.

Uptown, she finds him:

a tousle-headed messenger,

scooped up from his bicycle.

She cups him in one palm,

drops her tablet,

rolls up her sleeves,

and starts the painful ascent

of the Empire State Building.

Downtown

on Liberty Island,

King Kong wields a torch,

incinerates all passing freighters,

capsizes the passenger ships.

He hurls great boulders skyward,

picks off incoming airplanes one by one.

He is guarding the harbor now.

He is a real American

and he shouts his slogans:

America First.

Stay out.

Go home.

No foreigners allowed.

First Snow

i
No breath of wind
disturbs this perfect canvas:
dwarf roses, faded, leafless;
twisted branches gray and brown;
intricate overlay
of pristine snow, pyramidal
tracings of every line and arc
in flakes of fallen crystal.
Suspended within
     this latticework
a thousand rose hips burn
like sour radishes
or petrified cherries,
a memory of blushes
and blood-flushed passion
caught unawares by winter.

ii
An hour later, I pass again.
The snow’s calligraphy
is still untouched by wind.
Rose hips still beam
their ruddy messages.
The sun has slid
across the ice-sky
to its low-slung zenith
and one hundred
astonished roses
have opened their petals —
     dying as fast
     as they unfurl,
their wilting edges burned
by unkind frost,

virgin Juliets
no sooner born
     than entombed.
The suicidal blooms
lean to the sun, pleading
their disbelief of darkness,
the impossibility
of sudden perishing.

Love comes unbidden thus,
as the capricious rose.

The Company of an Eagle

I have a date

with my eagle lover —

bird-killing bird,

rabbit hunter,

assassin of squirrels,

sneak thief of cub and pup and kitten.

His prominence

(one- or two-headed)

on flags and coins,

seals and warplanes

must have enthralled me.

And of course he might,

just might be Zeus in disguise.

I cleared my calendar,

cleaned house,

turned balcony

into a landing pad/eyrie.

Maybe my kind enjoy

being swooped down upon.

The phone will not ring,

the door chime

hoards expectant silences.

Nothing will precede him

except an updraft

and the sound of wingbeats.

Wingbeats, yes. The dull

thud of contact, then

something rolls

into my living room,

The outspread wings and talons

guiding it.

That predator egg he brought

sits on the couch

between us,

and if it hatches,

what then of dinner and wine

and candlelight?

Will the eaglet choke down

my proffered feast,

preening his downy feathers

and asking for more?

When our entre nous

becomes a raptor nursery,

shall our tryst be forgotten?

Will his nestling stay, too,

curled in my laundry hamper?

Isn’t there a Mrs. Eagle

to take charge here?

Dare I tip-toe out and back

from the bathroom

without the admonishing screech

of its never-abating hunger?

Will he remain

to hear my poems,

to loan me his wingspan,

his shadow, his mute

but overarching company?

Or is it just about him?

“Look, I have made an egg!”

He never said there was a she-eagle,

or that he’s a single dad-in-waiting.

It may not hatch at all.

What if it’s dead?

What if it’s only good

for making an omelet?

I could have chosen wolf,

or lion, sky-hawk or tiger

as my companion.

But here we sit, the eagle,

the egg and I,

the embarrassed silence,

the shudder of wing-shrug,

the raptor eye fixed on me.

There is nothing else to do.

Slowly, I begin to undress.

Image: Magritte, Domain of Arnheim, 1938.

The Battle of Pydna

This painting, showing the surrender of the Macedonian leader Perseus to the Romans, followed one of the most important battles in history, the Battle of Pydna in 186 BCE. Never heard of it? Neither did I, until today. Alexander the Great was a Macedonian, and the vast empire he conquered was divided among his generals when he died in 323 BCE. Macedonia remained a powerful kingdom amid all the struggles of Alexander's successors, making and breaking all kinds of treaties with the other Greek kingdoms. But the end came in this battle, with the Romans.
The battle involved more than 80,000 men and 22 elephants. The Romans broke up and destroyed the classic Greek "phalanx" formation and slaughtered the Macedonians. Mass plunder and rape followed, for the Roman soldiers were unmatched in brutality. More than 300,000 Macedonians were sold into slavery. 
Macedonia was finished, and Rome was now the Great Power.
Never again would Greeks be more than second-tier players in history. The dream of Alexander -- one world under one wise ruler -- died at Pydna. All of this is a stern reminder that so much of history is brutal, horrible and inhuman, and that a turning point comes, and no one knows it is the actual end of something. If the moment comes that the United States, as a Republic, is "finished," no one in that moment will know it.
History is a long process. It is a text, written slowly and patiently, corrected by hindsight, and by shards found in ruins and lost testimony, but it conheres and makes sense.
Weep for Pydna, for Greece, for the glory of Alexander.
Tremble at the thought of the Roman wolf, the Roman eagle, ascendant.

The Loved Dead (Ode 15)

1

Another year,

the sun resembles itself

but does not fool the trees

who shun its cool imposture.

Buds open reluctantly,

their slanted eyes askew

with annual doubts.

It is never the same,

each lap of light a ghost

of former springs, each ray

a waning monument

from where a darkling star

gluts space

with ever-diminishing mass.

The year we met,

is the immemorial year, the year

that cannot be repeated.

What world is this,

in which you do not wake,

and sleep, and call me?

The universe forgets itself —

the idiot sun implodes

into a fathomless mouth,

both feaster and food

adjourning to nothingness

at the event horizon.

The earth spins blindly on.

First, love can die.

And then the loved

becomes the loved dead.

What if, in world-wipe,

you never existed?

2

I swear, I have not lost you.

Your disassembled eyes

rode in another’s skull today.

I saw them — there was no blue

akin to your lapis irises.

Your disconnected arm

hooked onto mine at dusk.

(I walked alone, and blushed

at how and where

the hand-touch held me.)

Tonight before I slept

your mouth surprised me.

(The room was empty.)

It is better this way —

each bit of you a ghost

returning on an X-ray wind.

Each day some icy shard of you

drops off some glacial height

onto an unsuspecting face,

as though the gods that made you,

singular, keep trying

to make another.

The universe deceives itself.

One thing may be like another;

one thing is not the other.

Though ardent spring explodes

upon the feathered fields,

it is a new spring, slate clean.

The past — if there is a past —

is amnesia’d in wormhole transit

to the fiercely blazing present.

I wait in solitude. If ghosts

could ever present themselves,

they’d rage because they could

not say their names.

If phantom faces seem to be yours,

I love them for the lie they speak,

of being you.

3

In park-walk past, I came upon

your ancestor’s statue,

a soldier patriot who served

with General Washington.

He has your face. The bronze

has weathered little. I stand,

and stand, and cannot stop looking.

Not acid rain, nor pigeon insult

has weathered it. I have you yet,

and yet have nothing. A few things

we touched in common: a bowl,

a red-glass pitcher whose breaking

I dread to think of. Not one photo.

Who is alive who ever

saw us together?

What proof but memory,

a weave of cell and synapse?

In the hard light

of a winter afternoon,

I am cheerful in graveyard

until I see the name

of one of your countrymen.
Joy is eclipsed.
The sun, slunk low,
beams hard into my eyes.

Amid these tombs and columns,

sphinxes and obelisks,

what is there left

but never-ending mourning?

What is there left

except to live on out

our ever-precious moments

in their honor, and in their names?

The loved dead

who never come again

except in shards and glances,

moment of shuddering grief

and the remembering smile,

by what of you, and why,

am I haunted?