A Gallery of My Cover Designs 4

More of my cover designs for The Poet's Press...

A Gallery of My Cover Designs 2

More cover designs I have done over the years...

A Gallery of My Cover Designs 1

As The Poet's Press has just passed its 200th published book, I wanted to show off some of the book covers I have designed over the years. I will post more of these covers as I find the artwork.

Bruckner and The Three Monkeys

Anton Bruckner’s love for animals was exceeded only by his love for God. When three of Vienna’s most popular organ grinders died suddenly during a cholera epidemic, Bruckner adopted their three monkeys. To his delight, he discovered that these monkeys had the ability to play the instruments, not just turn the crank. In a dream, Bruckner realized that he could use the monkeys to play his unperformed Eighth Symphony, so he proceeded to teach the three monkeys the difficult parts. They were so adept, in fact, that they were also able to play drums, so Bruckner created his Eighth Symphony for Three Street Organs and Obbligato Drums.

One morning, Bruckner set up the three organs, monkeys and drums in the square in front of the Imperial Palace. “The Emperor will finally hear my symphony!” Bruckner exclaimed. All went well, and a small crowd gathered around as the performance began. Windows in the palace opened, and servants and nobles looked down at the spectacle. Several Hapsburg faces with their distinctive lack of chin peered out from the upper balcony.

Then, a disaster. As is well known, Bruckner was so profoundly religious that he compulsively fell to his knees every time a church bell rang. Sure enough, a nearby church bell began to chime, and the composer dropped to his knees and crossed himself. The monkeys, seeing him thus employed, tried to imitate him, but, as they had the drumsticks in their hands, they wound up putting out their own eyes.

Blind and confused, the monkeys played and drummed on, reaching the tumultuous ending of the first movement. Random notes and shrieking discords rang out, peppered with cacophonic drum rolls. At that climactic moment, a young music student named Arnold Schoenberg turned the corner into the square, and stood transfixed.

“Mein Gott,” he cried. “This is the breakthrough I have been waiting for!”

(Source: Gessellschaft des Oesterreichich Orgelplayerfunken Orangutangen)

Out Home: A Prose Memoir

OUT HOME

When I was around fifteen, my grandmother, Florence Butler Ullery, decided I was old enough to hear grown-up things. She told me how her father, Albert Butler, had robbed a bank sometime after 1910. He had miscalculated what day the payroll cash arrived, and had come home with only $30 for his trouble, followed within an hour by the police, who dragged him off to jail. She showed me a photo of him — a middle-aged man with a Masonic pin on his lapel — taken in Scottdale, apparently the day he went off to serve his prison term. On the back was written, “The pictures with both of us in them didn’t come out. Good-bye from your Pa.” He never returned, leaving my great-grandmother Christina Butler, and her children, to fend for themselves.

“Those were rough years, during the First War, and then the Depression came,” grandmother sighed. “But folks got through.”

 Great-grandmother Christina had died four years before, preceded by “Homer,” the cigar-smoking old man who boarded with her and to whom it was said she was “secretly married.” Homer had presided over one room, piled to the ceiling with cigar boxes, old 78 RPM records and back issues of Popular Mechanics. Helter-skelter piles of yellowing newspapers in English and German were hurled out of the window after his death and burned.

My grandmother, a wide-faced, simple woman, sat peeling onions, her chair pulled near the “slop bucket” where the peels fell. “The truth is like this here onion,” she said — the first and last time I ever heard her speak metaphorically.

“What do you mean, Grandma?”

She held the onion out for me to examine. It was partially cut open to reveal the white under the skin. “See here — I peeled it and there’s the white part.” She cut some more. “Now look — there’s some dirt and another peel inside.” She cut again, halving the onion. “Now the rest is all white. That’s the way people talk to you. There’s always a lie outside, then a little truth, and then some more lies, and then the inside is all true.” She asked me if I understood.

Yes, I said, there were people in town who said one thing and did another. Like my stepfather, “Uncle Joe.”

My parents had divorced the previous summer. My mother took up with my father’s sister’s husband. Two divorces ensued. “Uncle Joe” became my stepfather, proclaiming how happy he was to have such brilliant stepsons and how he would make sure my brother and I got to college. We moved to a new town where nobody knew us, and Uncle Joe and my mother pretended to be married.

One Saturday Uncle Joe came into my room and told me, “You’re not welcome here. There will be food on the table, but that’s it, since we get child support from your father. The day you graduate from high school, I want you out of here, and don’t expect anything from me.” I later found out he had dumped his children by a previous marriage in an orphanage some years before. From that time forward, I heard nothing from him except verbal abuse. He condemned me for “sitting around and reading books.”

To get away from Uncle Joe and my mother, (“Gertrude and Claudius” in my own Gothic imagination) who were quickly becoming the town drunks, I spent that summer with Grandma, who lived alone now since my grandfather’s death. I remember taking Grandma Butler’s old rocking chair and placing it under the huge pine boughs, reading Poe and Lovecraft, Dumas and Hugo until it was too dark to see. I had books to read, and woods to roam in, and a quilted bed to sleep in.

Everyone called the four-room house, never completely finished and covered only with black tarpaper, “out home.” A coal stove heated the kitchen and a system of pipes and flues heated the other rooms as well. It was snug and warm in winter; in summer, open doors and windows admitted a cool mountain draft, and a lot of chores and food preparation moved to the back porch. There was a dark cool cellar with what seemed thousands of jars of home-canned raspberries, peaches, yellow string beans and apple sauce. Water was carried from the nearby spring in buckets, and when it rained, all the washtubs were rushed into the yard: free bath water!

Sitting in the kitchen one rainy afternoon, I noticed something I had never seen before. Grandma had a loaded shotgun near the door.

“What’s that for?” I asked, alarmed. I was terrified of guns.

“It might be for your Uncle Joe,” she said. I smiled at the thought, but assumed she was joking. While my grandfather was alive I had never seen a gun in the house.

The next day, a car came up the long driveway and grandma called me in and told me to turn off the light and duck down in her bedroom. She turned off the television and all the other lights, locked the door, and came into the room and crouched down on the carpet.

I heard the chickens scattering in the yard, then a single set of footsteps on the porch. A light knocking on the door, then louder. Then an angry pounding.

“God-damn it, Florence — I know you’re in there! I just want to talk!”

It was Uncle Joe’s voice. He must have known I was in there, too, but he didn’t call my name. (I can’t recall him ever addressing me by my name).

He called “Florence!” one more time, pounded again, cursing. We could hear his angry breath puff out. He stood for a while. He waited; we sat in silence. Then the footsteps tromped down off the porch. There were chicken noises again — a loud one as the rooster went for him and he likely kicked it; anther round of cursing as the rooster followed him to the car;  and then the car started up and did the turnaround to retreat back to the mountain road. We waited until everything was quiet again.

“What did he want?” I asked.

Grandmother was livid. She shook  with a combination of rage and fear.

“He comes out here, on days when he’s supposed to be working. He wants me to go to the courthouse and sign my property deed over to your mother. I told him ‘No’ twice. I have three children and this will always be home for all of them. He wants to use me and your mother to get this house. Your Uncle Ron and Uncle Bob will always have a home here, and your mother too. When Joe comes in the daytime like this, I just turn out the lights and hide.”

That night I dreamt of Grandma shooting Uncle Joe dead. It was a good dream.
 

                                       *     *     *

A few days later, while peeling potatoes over the slop bucket, Grandma bent her head toward where the gun stood, and she saw me looking at it, too. She took a deep breath and told me another story.

“My mother — your grandma Butler — lived here for a long time after my Pa went to jail. You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman in the country, running a house all alone. Your husband’s in jail, or in the war, or dies, and there are all these men sitting around in roadhouses reading the paper, and they see the name, and they remember you. They know you’re alone — men you haven’t seen since you were a little girl in school.

“One day a car comes up the drive and it’s two or three men. They see there’s no car in sight, and no man anywhere around, so they get out. They’re real polite and respectful. They knock on the door with their hats off. They bring a big sack of groceries. They come in and sit down and have some of your bread. There’s a bottle of whiskey in that sack, so they say, ‘Let’s open it and have a drink.’ And you want to be polite, so you get the glasses out.

“And then one of them says something about how lonely it must be out here without a man around. And they laugh and make jokes until you blush. And then they suggest something, and if you had a whiskey with them and you’re a little silly and you give in —“

She paused and looked at me, not sure if I, at fifteen, knew what she was saying. I knew. I just looked at her and waited for the rest.

“And if you’re dumb enough to do that, then there’s no stopping it. They tell their friends, and pretty soon they come by the carload. That’s the other reason I keep the shotgun there. That’s the kind of thing that happens to … women.”

I had visions of my grandmother — and her mother before her — fending off rednecks with the shotgun, and I never forgot the story.

                                          *     *     *

My grandmother Florence has been dead for many years now. Her oldest son Ron, a tall lanky man with speech as slow as melting tar, lived far away and didn’t look like anyone else in the family: he’s dead too. Her son Bob lived in the house until his passing a few years ago, a recluse. My stepfather, “Uncle Joe,” finally moved there with my mother, and gasped his last from emphysema in the run-down shack he had so coveted. The porch sagged in and collapsed. New tarpaper was nailed over the roof while the windows and doors began to rot. My mother is long gone, too, having spent her last years in a high rise where no one had to carry water in buckets from a spring or trek to an outhouse.

Curiosity about Great-Grandma Butler and her Alsatian ancestors led me into some genealogical research a few years ago. I discovered cousins I never knew, and some of them visited the house and sent me photographs. The roof had crumbled and the house was now a ruin. Through the wreckage of the house I could see tattered curtains and the frame of my great-grandmother’s bed. 

Another photo came a few years later: the land had been sold for taxes and the farmer next door acquired it. Nothing remains of the trees around the house, and of the house, there is now only a slight rise where the foundation and cellar had been.

The cousins interviewed some of the neighbors and found one farmer who remembered all his parents’ stories about the Butlers. He knew about the bank robbery, and that Albert Butler was part of a gang of three robbers, all of whom went to prison.

After Albert Butler went to prison, the neighbor farmer reported, Christina Butler supported herself by making and selling moonshine, all through the Prohibition and for some years thereafter.

“Yes, she sold moonshine there,” the farmer reported. “But she didn’t just sell moonshine. She sold herself — and her daughter Florence.”

Truth is an onion. My grandmother, at its white heart, had prepared me to understand it when the time came: “the kind of thing that happens … to women.”

But was it as simple as that: men taking cruel advantage of women?

What did I know about Christina Butler? Once, after sharing a slice of the best bread in the world, fresh from the oven, she showed me a picture of her grandfather, standing in his grape arbor in Alsace. She told me he had been a water-boy for Napoleon on one of his campaigns. “We all loved Napoleon,” she told me, “because he overthrew the monarchs.”  (Napoleon loved his Alsatian troops. He said of them, when questioned about their loyalty: “They speak German, but they saber in French!”) She died when I was eleven, and as I seldom visited her, I do not remember much else.

More papers came my way, and they were startling. Christina was married twice. First, she had married a man from Lorraine named Georges Jaquillard, who divorced her saying she had committed adultery “with numerous persons on numerous occasions,” a charge not contested in the divorce. So Albert Butler was her second husband.

It also turns out that the mining towns around Pittsburgh were a hotbed of anarchism in those days. The IWPA was started there and its “Pittsburgh Manifesto” urged violence against capitalists and a maximum of personal freedom for both men and women. “Free love” was one strong component of the movement. Emma Goldman had toured not only Pittsburgh but the coal and coke towns, fomenting radicalism. Freiheit, the German-language anarchist newspaper, was everywhere.  Was Butler’s bank robbery a political act? Did Christina have to make a bonfire of anarchist literature after the failed heist?

Christina practiced “free love,” and apparently did so for profit when she had to. And what should one make of the two men, old “Homer” and my grandfather, who made “honest women” of Christina Butler and her daughter Florence? Homer was a classic recluse, the type of what happens to old anarchists. Who knows what ends their “marriage” served?

My grandfather, averse to labor to the very end, lived off “relief” all his days. Once a year, when it came time to pay property taxes, he would trek off, with dread and disgust, to work in a coal mine, but only long enough to raise money to pay the tax bill.

A profound distrust and hatred of politicians prevailed in my grandparents’ house, and church-going was treated with mockery. “They dress up on Sunday,” my grandmother recalled bitterly, “and they make fun of you for what you wear. And then they talk about you behind your back.” I am not even certain that my grandparents were legally married to one another.

These values carried over to my mother, who seemed averse to any public activity. I think she even dreaded going to the post office. I was brought up being told, without explanation, that we were not the kind of people who could go to church, or join things. Not even the Boy Scouts for me.

Not one place I lived in as a child remains standing. Yet in my mind I always knew the Diebold-Butler place was there, a last resort and refuge. “Out home,” you could grow your own corn, tomatoes and radishes, keep a few chickens, and steal electricity by climbing the power pole and attaching your own wire. Water always filled the spring, and the rains always came. A “relief” check came once a month, and once in a great while, someone had to go and buy new tarpaper to redo the roof.

At night, you closed the windows tight and a carpet of desperate moths covered the glass on the outside. Whippoorwills echoed back and forth, and, once in a while, something large would lumber through the darkness, making the dogs howl. If you took your name off the mailbox on the road, no one would even know you existed. What you did there, and with whom, was nobody’s business.

I would not and could not have gone back there, but it will never leave my consciousness. I look at the photographs of the ruined house, with sorrow and loss. “Out Home” is gone forever.

Keziah Mason

A little poem about the birth of a famous literary witch, and the birth of her familiar, "Brown Jenkin"

    After H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House” (1932)

“Something’s not right
     about Keziah,”
the midwife tells
     the scholar father,
     Pastor Mason,
the Salem Divine.
The doting mother
won’t hear of it.
“Bad auspices,” the father nods.
“I told you so.”

The mother cradles it
     as midwife scurries off
with rags and the bloody
     umbilical,
an accusing serpent.
“Baby Keziah,” the mother croons,
“my perfect child.”

“Not right, bad auspices,
     bad numerology,
too many vowels,
bad luck to have alpha
     follow zed that way.”

She waves him away.
Anxious, he follows
     the weary midwife,
     Old Goodie Brown.
Their eyes meet.
“Tell me, “ he asks.
“Why didn’t you say
if I have a son or daughter?”

“Neither,” she says.
“Who knows,” she shrugs,
“what it will grow to?”

“Deformed?” he guesses.
She shakes her head.
“Hermaphrodite?”
Her eyes avoid him.
“The ancients write
of such creatures.”

The midwife hesitates,
taking the small purse
he discreetly offers.
“I’ve seen odd things,
good Pastor Mason,
but never this:
not male, not female.
What’s there,
I’d call machinery,
and what use God
or the Devil intends for it
I’ll not be thinking on.”

She hurries out
into the snowstorm,
the bloodied rag
held tight,
not one but two
umbilicals,
a black-furred thing
     whose razor teeth
gnaw and consume
     the after-birth.

 “There, there,” she coos,
     petting its fur,
as a tiny facsimile
of the Pastor’s face
stares up at her.
“Old Goodie Brown
     will look out
for her little Jenkin,
my perfect child.”

Then the thing cleared
its tiny throat
and after a dry
and preliminary chittering
it thanked her
in fourteen languages.

Todesblumen

One part of my family -- the Diebolds who fled Alsace in 1870 to get away from the Prussians and came to Western Pennsylvania -- retained some of their folk beliefs. One of them was a belief in the personage of The Grim Reaper. I was told of Death coming and knocking three times on a window just as a great aunt died. I used to carry buckets of water from the nearby spring to my great-grandmother's house, and some of those memories blended with the old wives' tale...

Todesblumen

A woman is dying inside,
nestled in quilts and soft pillows.
On the path from the spring,
lit by the eye of an elder moon,
her nephew returns with full wooden buckets.
By the barn, he stares at the tarpapered house.
The kerosene light from the sick room
falls on a trellis: he sees what the women
had whispered about in the kitchen —
that rose abloom in December.

(They reverted to German, called it
Todesblumen, death’s flower bloom,
would not speak of it where Aunt Lena lay,
though she might see, if she looked, a yard
from the house, where it opened.)

Raising his buckets to clear a snowdrift,
the boy hastens by the sickbed window, and there —
white, whiter than snow, without shadow,
but solid, a stark figure steps into the light.
From shapeless robes a skeletal hand emerges:
the shivered rose crumbles, falls petal by petal.
The hand extends further on ghost-white fore-arm.
Now at the window comes the tap-tap-tapping
of Death, and wind, and the barren trellis
shakes. Then nothing, and silence, and then
the keening cry from the women inside.

Mineral Beauty

An exquisite poem about the beauty of the inanimate by the great Barbara A. Holland.

WHEN STONES HAVE SHED THEIR SKINS

by Barbara A. Holland

Who can say there are no souls in stones,
and who can look at Kunzite

and say that they have bodies,

gauze ripped from the garments of the sun,
a plumage shed by luminous

transparent birds, spent splinters of the morning,

mineral and miracle, held at its climax
in a sheath of stone,

gossamer against its ending?

Youth, northern, frangible inside

drops of blue opal as if dawn had bled
its earliest moments, as if clots of sky
concealed in stone, had been preserved
before the daylight killed it;

all the weathers of the world in quartz;

mist depths of white sand shallows in aquamarine
on frost of breath inside a shell of stone

take life from light and strain at carapace

until the day its long endurance breaks

before eternal pressure from within,

Who would be surprised? Not even God

would have expected it!

What must the winds bear up
when stones have hatched:
what wings shall fan

the cold fires of the stars

or beat to warmth the white
heart of the moon

when stones have shed their skins?

Squanto's Wind (Revised)

Boston's John Hancock Tower, constructed in the 1970s, was one of the world's worst architectural disasters. The foundation undermined adjacent buildings, and ten thousand window panes began popping out and falling onto pedestrians below; and the whole building swayed sickeningly in the wind. In this poem I recount some of the building's disastrous details, and speculate about whether some angry Native American spirit might be getting even with Boston. I invoke Squanto, the first Native American to greet the arriving Puritans. By one of the most bizarre coincidences in all history, Squanto had previously been captured, enslaved, and gone to Europe and back, so that he was able to greet the arriving colonists with the words, "Welcome, Englishmen!"
I did a little digital art piece for this too, combining Squanto's portrait with the cursed tower.

Squanto’s Wind

A ruffian wind
content till now to move
through barricades of steel
to tug of sea,
forgetful of forest and creek,
rears up at last,

howls No emphatically
at the Hancock tower,
a block as gray as greed,
lunging from bedrock to sky.

The primal No acquires more force,
plucks glass like seeds
from a ruptured grape.
The window panes explode —a million shards
of architectural sneeze
scattered by gravity
to punctuate the streets
with gleaming arrowheads,
obsidian spears,
black tomahawks
of dispossession. 

What Manitou is this
who shakes his fist
at the barons of finance?
Whatever happened to
“Welcome, Englishmen!”
(the first words spoken
by Native to Puritan)?

The engineers move in,
revise their blueprints
while covered walkways
protect pedestrians
from Hancock’s continued
     defenestration.

Months pass, and yet
a lingering wind remains,
circling the sheltered walks,
lapping at plywood sheets,
a sourceless gale
that ruffles Bostonians
with its reiterated cry,
not on this land you don’t.

On really windy days
the whole tower sways
and workers turn green
from motion sickness.

Millions are spent
on a countersliding bed
of lubricated lead
to gyro the floor to apparent
stillness; millions more
from the slap-suited builders
on fifteen hundred tons
of diagonal braces,
all to to stop
the whole ziggurat
from an inevitable topple,
should just one wind,
at just one angle
bring everything down
in a snarl of pretzeled girders.

Finally all ten thousand panes
are one by one, removed
and one by one replaced. 

Is Squanto satisfied
that the tower was sold,
that the new owners slid
to bankruptcy (at least
on paper), though bankers slide
from one debacle to another
and earn baronial bonuses? 

No! His feathered face frowns
on clouded-over golf days.
His never-tiring gusts divert
the errant baseball, ensuring
decades of home-game dejection. 

It will take more than
double-dug foundations,
wind-tunnel-tested
new window panes,
to still these vectors of rage.

Token pow-wows at shopping malls
and suburban parks
do not fool old Squanto:
sharp-dealing and inhospitable,
Boston must pay!

Revised 5/12/2012

Music is Poetry Too with Augustin Hadelich

Augustin Hadelich played the Beethoven Concerto last night in Providence for the RI Philharmonic. Here he is in the finale to the Dvorak Violin Concerto. Amazing!

Science - A Poem by Sarah Helen Whitman

While the dull fates sit nodding at their loom,

Benumbed and drowsy with its ceaseless boom,
I hear, as in a dream, the monody
Of life's tumultuous, ever-ebbing sea;
The iron tramp of armies hurrying by
Forever and forever but to die;
The tragedies of time, the dreary years,
The frantic carnival of hopes and fears,
The wild waltz-music wailing through the gloom,
The slow death-agonies, the yawning tomb,
The loved ones lost forever to our sight,
In the wild waste of chaos and old night;
Earth's long, long dream of martyrdom and pain;
No God in heaven to rend the welded chain
Of endless evolution!
                                               Is this all?
And mole-eyed "Science," gloating over bones,
The skulls of monkeys and the Age of Stones,
Blinks at the golden lamps that light the hall
Of dusty death, and answers: "It is all."
This poem is by Providence's most famous poet, one-time fiancee of Edgar Allan Poe.

September in Gotham

This is the only poem I have been able to write about 9/11. It is the darkest shadow in my 40-poem Anniversarius cycle.

SEPTEMBER IN GOTHAM

This is New York, and fall

     has caught us unawares.

From Palisade bus I view

     the gap-toothed skyline,

a forest whose tallest trees

     are suddenly missing.

In Gotham, they say,

strange breezes from the south

make certain elders remember

downwind from the death camps.

There is talk of stolen watches

from shops beneath the rubble,

the discovery daily

     of severed limbs.

Month’s end, I walk all day

     in midtown,

with shoppers determined

to do something normal,

eat Szechuan lunch, browse

books, consider new software.

Like many others around me,

I pick things up from the counter,

     then put them back —

everyday urges seem so trivial.

There is not one note of music.

People keep stopping

     to stare nervously

     at the Empire State,

     like frightened squirrels

     in the shadow

     of a threatened sequoia.

The sycamores in Bryant Park

beam back the sun,

     an interrupted medley

     of overhanging clouds

     that pause, then part,

     then scud away.

Seedpods of honey locust fall,

curl brown like overdone toast

     on the pavement,

but the delicate leaves remain above,

     still adamant green.

It is not till night,

     till I turn the corner on Lexington

     and spy the dark hunched shell

     of the Gramercy Park Armory,

that I see the leaves of this autumn,

     its feuilles morts,

taped to treetrunks, walls and windows,

     tied to a chain link fence,

     row on row to the end of seeing,

flapping in rainstorm,  tattered, tearing,

soon to be ankle deep in the gutter —

these album-leaves of anguish

burst forth with human colors —

faces brown and pink and salmon,

oak and ash and ebony,

the rainbow of human flesh,

     of eyeflash —

visages still in their conquering twenties,

snapshot in happy moments,

    embracing their brides,

          babies on knees,

license, yearbook, graduation photos,

smiling at beach or barbecue,

ink fading or bleeding now

     in the sky’s abundant tearfall.

In the language we use

for the recovery of wayward pets,

these posters beg the impossible:

IF ANYONE HAS SEEN HER —

     MISSING   —   MISSING

LEFT SHOULDER SCAR —

A DOLPHIN TATTOO —

MISSING     —     MISSING

HAVE YOU SEEN ME?—

MISSING   —   MISSING

PLEASE FIND ME

MISSING  —   MISSING

WORLD TRADE CENTER

—September 30, 2001, New York City

In Prague, A Tree of Many Colors

When the Czech student Jan Palach set fire to himself to protest the Soviet invasion of his country, I wrote this poem in his honor. It was not until very recently that we had any details about his death in the West; I had never even seen his picture until this year. The square where he committed suicide is now named after him, and the Communist government fell in 1989 during "Palach Week," a period of protest and turmoil over which his spirit certainly presided. He was 21, a student of philosophy. My poem suffered from lack of details. In 1996, I learned about the students' resistance to the invaders and worked that into the poem; now, in 2011, I know more and can make this poem more of a narrative. And I have finally given a coherent voice to the real narrator of the poem: a linden tree in Prague.
This poem is Number 2 in my new edition of Anniversarius: The Book of Autumn, a 40-poem cycle soon to be published.
New note: I have just revised this poem again, adding more details about the Linden tree, which, it turns out, is the national emblem of Czechoslovakia (!): the Muse once again led me to the one and only tree that I could have used. I have also retitled the poem, "The Linden Tree in Prague."

THE LINDEN TREE IN PRAGUE

for Jan Palach, Czech martyr,
who set himself on fire January 16, 1969
to protest the occupation of his country

1

Linden in Prague’s Museum Square:

I was born, I was sown

of mother and father trees in some forest.

I screamed as the sun troped me out of the earth,

grew slowly in the shadows of tall buildings.

thrust out my blossoms at the hope of spring,

Years passed; I grew protective rings

around me. Exhorted into summer by sun

and the bacchanal of squirrels, I owe each year

millions of leaf-deaths and resurrections.

The solemn students and professors

stride by with dour looks, eyes locked

into the mysteries of Marx and Engels.

I must pretend to stand up straight.

I must not follow the mocking sun

     and its false revolutions.

I must wait for the ultimate paradise,

world’s daylight redistributed for all.

I tremble as angry gardeners trim

the arrogant beard-branchlets

that fringe my still-adolescent trunk.

I am all passion and impracticality.

My heart-shaped leaves are on my sleeves

as I greedily drink sunlight, give shade

to those below in blossom-fall, exude the scent

that maddens lovers to Unter der Linde mania,

then paint myself in hues of gold and brown,

shedding my currency in one great shrug

as summer ebbs to frost-dawn.

Behaving well, it seems,

is not in my nature, despite those lectures

on dialectics I hear each afternoon

from the open lecture hall’s window.

Much passes beneath my shadow:

across the square, crowds press

to bourgeois marriages and funerals —

the upright grooms go in,

the silver-handled caskets come out,

the church, the state, the people

move on in soot and sorrow, day to day.

On one side, Marx and Engels;

on the other, tradition, and just beyond

my line of sight that monument to Huss,

the great religious martyr. Conflict

divides us like the great Moldau.

We have lived through Kings and Empires,

bad governments and good. Everyone seemed

to think it was getting better last year.

But something has changed now:

Why do these people whisper always?

Why do so many avert their eyes from me?

Why does neighbor spy on his neighbor,

reporting every oddity to the men in black?

Why do I hear the rumble of thunder?

Why does the symphony break off

in the middle of rehearsing Smetana?

Why have the women gone to the cellars?

The earth shakes. Soldiers and tanks everywhere!

The streets are full of Russians and Poles,

Hungarians, Bulgarians, East Germans —

all of East Europe has come to crush us!

Men with fur hats speak swollen, Slavic words.

Death is here. The smell of blood is here.

My roots touch the entrails of the hastily buried.

Anger is everywhere. I hold my leaves,

make camouflage for lovers, conspirators.

Students rip down the street signs

and hide them in my upper boughs —

     the invaders drive in circles

     and cannot find their destinations.

I open my bark for secret messages,

encourage pigeons to carry the word

of where is safe, and who is betrayed.

I guess I am guilty of anti-people

tendencies — who would have thought?

Here comes that student, Jan Palach,

he’s all of twenty-one, dark-haired,

a delicate face meant for poetry,

though worn by the study

of too much philosophy, too young.

He is the ardent one, the solitary dreamer.

And more: he intends to do something.

He and some others have made a vow,

a terrible pact. He will go first.

He is not Jan Huss,

     burned by his fellow citizens

          over the flavor of God:

he is just Jan Palach from Všetaty,

and he will burn in the world’s eyes

because of Philosophy

     (Plato’s tanks crushed

          the Age of Reason).

I am his unindicted ally.

The winter ground is covered still

with the dried leaves of my autumn,

some damp, some dry and worn

    to little more than vein lines.

He scoops them up; he stuffs his coat with them,

fills his cap, book bag and pockets,

fuel and kindling for his mission.

He is the icon of our unhappiness:

he will open like a triptych of gold

into a flame to embarrass the sun.

He opens the can of gasoline,

and before anyone can stop him,

he explodes into a fireball,

a flaring marionette; he whirls three times

then falls into a curled ball

of incendiary horror.

2

Earth gives him no resting place.

     As mourners gather

in ominous groupings,

the men in black dig Palach up,

cremate his already-half-cremated frame

and send the urn off to his mother.

There, in Všetaty, no one is allowed

to give him another burial.

No graveyard dares take the ashes

     for half a decade.

In Prague, Palach’s first grave

Is repossessed. The state deposits there

the corpse of a nameless old woman.

On your way now, nothing to see —

just some old cleaning lady’s grave.

No Martyrs in this cemetery —

I’ll see your papers please.

3

Twenty years on, a crowd will gather

for something called “Jan Palach Week,”

a pretext to take to the streets again,

and one day later,

     the Communist government falls.

Your ashes, Jan Palach, will return in Prague.

I will be beyond returning, for long ago

an angry axe man removed all trees,

to the despair of poets and squirrels,

the better to conduct surveillance

of all the law-abiding citizens.

There, on the spot of his immolation,

a bronze marker, half cross,

     both Catholic and Slav,

lifts out of mosaic’d pavement.

My last root is hidden beneath it,

as leaf by dry leaf, and ash by ash,

my ghost is a receptacle for tears, and memory.

I was there, around and within him.

I, too, exploded for Liberty.

 — October 1969, New York, revised 1986,
rewritten 1996; rewritten 2011