The One Commandment

Madman at the peak
of the desolate mountain,
led there by a will o’ the wisp,
a still small voice amid
the flashing rhomboids
of a splitting migraine.

He howls at the God
whose every commandment
he has come to fetch.

After a throat-clear of steam
and a spurt of magma,
the great voice bellows
as he flattens himself
in a yellow pool
of his own terror.
Words glorious
     and in the tongue of his fathers,
that which is everything speaks:

I AM THE JUST

COMPASSIONATE GOD,

LORD OF MERCY

AND SOLE SALVATION.

COME CLOSE, POUR OUT

THE HEART BLOOD ON MY ALTAR.

Not today, Lord.
he whimpers,

I have come alone
and bladeless.
Only this shepherd’s staff —

The mountain quakes:
BLOOD! POUR THE BLOOD!
AND NOT JUST ONCE
BUT ALWAYS.
MAKE SURE THE BLADE

IS EVER SHARPENED FOR ANOTHER.

LEAN CLOSE AND HEAR

FROM DEEP WITHIN CREATION’S
SOUL AND DEMIURGE,
MY ONE AND TRUE COMMANDMENT:

KILL. KILL EVERYONE.
GO YE FORTH IN CHARIOTS,
TAKE SWORD AND FIRE AND JAVELIN,
COVER THE GLOBE WITH WARRIORS.
KILL ONE ANOTHER, SLAUGHTER
THE BABIES AND INNOCENTS.
CEASE NOT UNTIL
BUT ONE OF YOU REMAINS.

Then God went silent.
Struck dumb with horror,

Moses went down

to the calf-mad Israelites,
told no one the real command,
invented a tale,

inscribed some laws.

Despite his prudence
he talked in his sleep.
His sons took up the cudgel,
passed on the secret
maniacal urge of the tyrant god.

Always behind the king
an advisor, or patriarch
steeped in the long-range
marching orders.
Five thousand years the wars
raged on, the world swept thrice
into total commotion,
each peace a mere gathering
of new and more lethal
armaments, until

one man,
brown-caked with blood,
covered with scar and bruises,
climbs to the peak of Sinai.

Lord, he reports,
     all you have said

is done. I am the last

warrior. I come
for my reward
for the task accomplished.

  

     The mountain quakes,
winds roar,
            a boulder tips
out from its neighbors
on the cliff above,
falls and crushes
the supine worshiper.

The Being laughs
     in his magma bed,
passes on the joke
to his silicon cousins.

The crystals rejoice,
poles shift in mirth
as nickel-iron celebrates.
Aluminum could bust a gut.
Limestone and shale
are splitting with laughter.
Coal stamps its feet
and grinds out diamonds.

“Just think,” repeats

the howling Titan,

“how stupid they were,

those meddling humans,

those ugly bone-bags

of knotted carbon!

So dumb they’d do

whatever a doddering
volcano commanded!

If only we’d thought of it sooner!”

1988/ rev. 2011

THE PINES

Grandmother Butler

grew up with the pines
that dotted her acres.
Her grandpa Diebold
first planted them,
edging the house,
the gravel drive,
the property line.
She watched her daughter
who once could leap
the saplings
grow tall and straight.

Her parents are gone now,
her husband vanished,
her daughters grown and married.
She sits on the porch
and communes with the trees.
Some skirt the house —
she walks soft needle loam
to her raspberry patch.
Squirrels are there in the branches,
black snakes steal eggs
from the hapless robins.
Jays and crows,
cardinals and tanagers
live tier by tier
in their sheltered nests.

Each season a song —
bird twitter spring,
storm hum summer,
cone-drop in autumn,
the groan of trunk
in snapping winter.

They are an orchestra
eternally in tune,

black pyramids at night
against the burning stars,
a comforting wall
against the whippoorwills,
the mountain lions,

the howling winds.

2­
One winter day

she’s digging down

to the dregs of her coal pile,
filling a pail for the stove,
when a great truck
lumbers in,

piled high with coal.

Two men follow

in a black Studebaker,

tell her they’ll dump

as much as she needs —

enough to last her

through widow’s winter,

all the way to April.

She hesitates.

They mention her neighbors,
Wingroves and Sweeneys,
Ulleries and Dempseys:
some winters back
they helped them too.

She doesn’t answer them;
her head shakes ever
so slightly no; the man
exhales an ice cloud,
chilled hands shrugged in
at his elbows. The other
starts up the car to back it
away and out to the road.

“It’s just a good neighbor thing”
he tells her. “The Almanac, it says
it’s going to a terrible winter.”
“All right,” she says. “Thank you.”
She lets them dump coal.
All they want is a signed receipt,
oh, and they’d like
to trim a few trees
for the nearby sawmill.
She hesitates again —
they mumble some words
about another delivery
next winter.

She signs.
Hard winter sets in.
The ziggurat of coal
diminishes to sludge,
black dust in melting puddles.

She goes off in May
to visit her daughters,
hold their new babies.
When she comes back
the pines are gone,
     all of them
reduced to stumps,
her acres exposed
to passing cars.

All night the animals
scream in the forest.
Homeless squirrels,
nestless sparrows
hysterical robins,
even the prowling wind,
with nothing to rub against,
makes angry vectors
among the boulders.

Then she finds the paper
in the kitchen cupboard,
reads with her glasses
the fine print over her signature.
Far off, the ripsaws mock her
as she reads and repeats
what she gave to the stranger —-
not just once but forever­
like a contract
with a rapist,
     her rights, her

          timber rights.

Love Spells

Disproof of ritual magic:

incense and candles, amulets and spells.

Try hard as you will, you cannot make

an oblivious boy love you. 

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

of an army of phantom assistants —

translucent, arrow-laden Cupids —

satyrs ascending fire-escapes —

garden Priapi all compass-pointing

from his bedroom to mine —

in spite of love-arbors made

by djins, piled high with roses

from the grave of Omar Khayyam —

in spite of the mandolin serenatas,

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

the mournful barrage of hautbois

and the Arcadian shepherd’s pipe,

no, he heard not a single melody

that brought my name to his lips.

Not even the darker spells availed me:

despite the unfounded panic that seized

and diverted all his would-be lovers

as bodiless wish forms stalked them

on empty streets, scaling up to the height

of a penthouse with dacoit ease;

despite the solitude my magic cast

around him, still in all that emptiness,

I was not the one he called to fill it.

His lovers fled, and he fled their fleeing.

(Spells only serve repulsively, it seems!)

Vain were the midnight oaths and promises

I made to dubious monarchs of love,

half-seen in the smog of sulfurous hearth,

as I bartered off to black-eyed Erys

(love’s phantom in Pluto’s domain),

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

“Later,” the hard bargainer said,

placing the coin back in my hand,

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

Now, with ashes and Styx between us

I know the scope of the contract refused:

The coin in my hand is for the boatman.

-2011, revised 2021.

What She Was Like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Butcher Knife

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

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

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

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

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

a Pennsylvania Gothic sword
that never needs sharpening.

The Brown Derby

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

THE BROWN DERBY
 

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

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

H P Lovecraft at the Newsstand

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

H P LOVECRAFT AT THE NEWSSTAND

                on seeing a Justin Bieber special issue of US Magazine

COLLECTORS' EDITION

SIX HOT
POSTERS INSIDE!

H. P. LOVECRAFT:
MY
PRIVATE
WORLD

Exclusive photos
inside my bedroom

My New
Letter-Writing
Life

How I Cope
With Being Unknown

WIN A TRIP
TO MEET
HOWARD.

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

Online:
Howard Lovecraft Totally Naked OMG!

New Howard Lovecraft
Six-Pack Abs.

More Howard Shirtless Pictures
Click Here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON A CHINESE FAN BY DONG GAO

ON A CHINESE FAN BY DONG GAO[1]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

well, almost.

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

---

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

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

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

[4] Pi-pa, the Chinese lute

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

[6] Zheng, the Chinese zither.

Autumn on Pluto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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