The Midnight Walk of Eben Byers

Grand cemetery, Pittsburgh’s Allegheny
arcs up to a hilltop, where nestled
in a millionaires’ necropolis, stands one,
a perfect replica of a Doric temple,
a steel magnate’s mausoleum. Sunlit,
the dryads seem to converge upon it,
a timeless Aegean day-dream.
Moonlit, it is the uneasy prison
of what remains of Eben Byers. Its stolid doors,
which might try two men’s strength to wedge
them open to a peeping-gap, are weighted
so that a tiny push from inwards hurls
them open. The dark inside is palpable
and seems to thrust back against you.
The best advice, if you find these doors ajar
is to run like hell and do not, do not, look back.

One casket there is lined with lead, they say —
pallbearers once groaned to lift and lower it
from catafalque to hearse to wall-niche.
This one, amid the disapproving Byers all
somehow breaks loose of a Gordian knot
of iron chains and adamantine padlocks,
undoes the patient webwork of melancholic spiders,
and floats, a log on a stream of unseen plasma,
to any place its never-sleeping occupant desires.
Police reports of a roaming black casket are filed
under “Hoaxes,” “Pranks” and “Hallucinations.”

How he emerges from his lead encasement,
whether the lid creaks up on rusted hinges
or whether he oozes out from a mouse-hole
it took him long years to scratch out, no one knows.
They say he mostly walks the graveyard,
striding among the oaks and sycamores.
Nocturnal deer and ’possums flee him
as his heavy tramp cracks pavement
and the flap of his metallic shroud dulls
the night chants of frog and cicada.

His gelid eyes still water in skull sockets;
there is flesh still, though dead since 1932,
on the withered left hand, palm upward
to scan the heavens for sustenance,
for rest assured, that whatever walks,
is hungry. If you scale the fence, you might
just find him on the Butler Street downslope,
amid a cluster of erectile obelisks.
He watched from there and no one saw him
until the last mill died, until the flicker-fire
no longer red-glazed the tombed hillside.
It is said that he is slightly lumen-
escent, that a greenish glow clings
to his felt hat-tip with corpse-hair aureole,
that arcs of small lightning or St. Elmo’s Fire
emit from his bony fingertips.
He runs his good hand on every granite
marker, not reading inscriptions, no:
he feels the butterfly flow of gamma rays
from thorium, sniffs the good whiffs of radon
that please him more than he can say.

To those who have seen him, and not
died screaming, he is known as “Radium Man.”
The steel mill he inherited was less to him
than travel and a good game of golf,
which he played to champion. Let others
build opera houses if only he could outdo
the rest of the magnate class on the course.
And he did: ’06 U.S. Amateur. Until the pain,
his right arm a misery of knotted nerve-fire.
A Yale man, he trusted a Harvard man,
who, bottling the famed success of the cure,
the radium-and-water treatment of Europe,
offered him a sample of RadioThor.
The ultimate in pep and healing, its label said,
This is the cure for the living dead.

By damn, one bottle and he was good as new.
He told friends, and pretty soon the Mayor
of Pittsburgh had drunk a hundred bottles.
There was talk around the leather-chaired club
of renewed and superhuman bedroom feats.
Radiothor came in by the carload.
If one bottle was good, and a hundred
turned Milquetoast into a roaring Don Juan,
why not three bottles a day?
Are we not entitled to the most of the best?

Eben Byers drank fourteen hundred bottles
of Radiothor. In the ensuing collapse and
galloping cancers, parts of his skull gave way
and his jaw ripped free and fell to the floor.
When they darkened the room where his corpse lay
it did not stay dark — his teeth and nails
glowed greenish, and what was left of hair
waved of its own accord like tided seaweed.
His lead-lined coffin made national headlines.

Then silence. Then a decade of the sleep of death.
But radium lived on with its 1600-year half-life;
it forged a new alliance with bone, neuron, sinew, joint.
When atom bombs erupted, his eyes widened.
When Strontium 90 fallout dusted down,
his dry tongue licked his upper canines, craving.
When isotopes lit the hospital skyline, when X-rays
arc’d on and off like fireworks, he sensed, and knew
there was more of what he craved, things new
to the Periodic Table he could one day savor.
When, at a nearby research institute
a pilot breeder reactor created Plutonium,
he knew it was time to set himself in motion.

The thing that walks at midnight, down
from its Doric resting place, is not content
with holding his hand out beggar-like —
for what? Dim manna of the night sky,
massless neutrinos passing through,
the taunting wave-pulse of a magnetar,
the warm hum of cosmic rays,
and just before dawn banishes him to hiding,
the hot half-sun at horizon, a Cyclops eye
from infra red to gamma beaming.

Radium Man wants more.
His left hand clenches, unclenches
as he thinks about the possible feasts
he might have at Chernobyl, quake-
shaken Fukishima, even Three-Mile Island.
His heirs would interfere, or seek
a discreet disinterment and cremation;
the servants who did what he asked
unquestioned, are dead and buried — sad
to say, permanently dead and buried.
He is alone in this. And all he can manage
to utter now, with his truncated face,
is a kind of hunh …… hunh ….. hunh
to the owls and bats and ravens.

Once in a while, his bad arm rises,
an involuntary wave of what’s-the-use
anyway-you’re-dead-now?
Pray you do not see it,
if you chance to come upon him
by his Doric mausoleum
with its gaping-open doors —
the skeletal right hand
that holds aloft, as club or cudgel,
the jawbone of Eben Byers.

The Dresser in Emily's Bedroom

Right there, feet from the bed she died in,
sewn up in tiny fascicle bundles, unread,
not to be read, not to be published,
monoprint chapbooks arranged and re-
arranged to suit intended readers
she was too reticent to speak to,
ever, except from behind a door, ajar.

How they came from her writing table there
(no bigger than a oiuja board),
from planchette pen to folded leaf
stitched shut and mummy-wrapped,
living and smothering just feet from where
a gasp and pen-dab and a foot-tap
telegraphed them into being

How many enwrapped, entombed inside
that oblong moth-proof drawer?
how many survivors of admonition a poet should never ... a lady does not ...
eighteen hundred tightly-wound mortars
she wryly called her “little hymns.”

Emily Dickinson at Amherst,
I in your room as close to fainting
as ever in my adult existence,
at tear-burst, with a strangled cry I dare
not utter. A life, a life’s work,
a soul's compression that one executor
could have tossed away for kindling
or suppressed for jealousy or malice.
But we have you, Emily, we have you always,
your words in a fascicle of stitched stars.

Anniversarius 41: Autumn Dragged Screaming

So where is Autumn?
     It is the week of Halloween
          and — nothing.
The maples are green, oaks green,
     willows even greener,
pines frowning their drooping arms
as if to say, get on with it, already;
the drama is long past over.

Bird flocks rehearse their southern pilgrimage
     but come right back
to feast anew on unchilled worm and beetle.

Damp rain sogs down,
     slime mold slides silently
          on and up the rotting beech trunk.
Mushrooms proliferate
          at an illicit rate.
The spiders are working overtime,
     harvestmen in jitter-skitter,
a Macy’s parade of Daddy-Long-Legs.
Sparrows engorged, squirrels spherical
     with acorn overflow,
eating all and burying nothing.
And the flowers just keep on,
     well, flowering.
Only the birches are shivering,
reading truly the Northern Lights,
the wisping fall of Orionid meteors,
white trunk flagpoles alert, on edge,
expectant pencils stuck in the ground.

It might have gone on this way:
     Indian October
          into Mexican November,
into a luridly Amazon December.
Today the unseasonable yucca plant,
     tomorrow the writhing anaconda!

It might have gone on,
     had not a thirteen-foot truck
somewhere just south of Pittsburgh
slide under an eleven-foot overpass,
the top peeled off like a sardine can.
One dull brown oak leaf escaped it,
     and then a blast
of sumac and willow and locust and maple,
     an Arctic air blast,
dust-devils, the choking lung-clot
     of burning leaf-piles.
And as the oblivious driver
     wends southward, southerly, south,
intending to take the autumn hostage,
he instead cracks open the heavens.
The horizon turns yellow instantly,
    the soft green lap of leaves
becomes the crackle-crisp
chatter of Rattatosk, the gossip squirrel.
Up, up Ygdrassil the World Ash
the singe of Autumn rises.
Red the long carpet in maple grove,
fiery the brush fire burn of euonymous,
yellow the leaf-sky in silhouette by azure.
Come winter, then, if you must,
     come autumn now,
a world-held breath of defiance.
I go, I go, a leaf, in glory.

Assignation (A Chinese Translation)

     after a Chinese poem “P’u Sa Man” by Li Yü

The flowers were bright

     (and might have lit my way like lanterns)
but the moon was diffused in light mist.
Cool, but not too cold,
that was the best night to go to my lover.
Trembling I trod the perfumed stones,
step upon step amid the night-blooms.
I held in one hand the golden-threaded shoes,
in the other his scroll of urgent summoning.

South of the newly-painted hall,

in the appointed place I met him.
His face was turned away and upward
as though he searched the moon face
or with his hawk-fierce eye some dove
asleep on a still and leafy branchlet.

At first, I leaned against him, shivering;

my pale arms could not encompass
the sweep of his cloaked broad shoulders.
He made a sound that might have been
my name, or a sighing exhalation.
I said, “I cannot come as often now,
so tonight you must love me twice as hard.”

At Innsmouth Harbor

The catalog of jetsam —
things washed ashore at Innsmouth:
a gnawed-through baby rattle; five
matched silver spoons of serpentine design;
a multitude of basalt pebbles, each
a perfect copy of its brethren, angled
obtuse with the hint of an eye,
black and unseeing (on the obverse,
an alien cuneiform, unreadable),
coins all of an unknown empire;
the rusted machinery of lost umbrellas
(from where since no one ever in Innsmouth
has ever owned or needed one);
clots of dank seaweed and curds of ooze
astir with phosphorescent pulsings;
a human skeleton, a chain, a cinder block;
blue bottle labeled tincture of laudanum,
wrapped in soft velvet with an ivory carving,
priapic secret of a ship captain’s widow;
an octopus impaled with the periscope
of a German U-2 submarine; a map
of the New England coastline inscribed
entirely in Runic letters; a trident,
vertical, twelve feet from top to bottom,
awaiting whoever dares to claim it;
and finally, as always, coats, hats and trousers,
all manner of ladies’ gowns and negligées
cast off on the rocks at Devil’s Reef,
all for the taking if anyone cares.

There is no catalog of flotsam, no list
of the things that will not come to shore:
the ten-lobed all-seeing eyes of the ghosts
of Trilobites, mandarins of the ocean deep;
the wary, watchful ammoniac waiting
of Architeuthis, the giant squid; the pound
and beat of the tide-drum, counting all down
to the world’s end, the sun’s death, the pull
of all into the dark heart of the iron stone
where everything that was and will be comes to rest.

amtrak, business class

riding dead-eyed in an alcoholic glaze to Connecticut,
hours to, hours fro, twenty days a month
(happy that man who rises and walks to his work!)
look at the juggernaut of three-piece suits,
the power ties, the snapping suspenders!
they imagine they own the world
as they ascend into their termite towers
in a manhattan cleared now of the inconvenient poor

the deal, the merger, the acquisition,
(the quick transfer of soaring or falling stock
in secret amid the wheeling and dealing
    for a little personal profit) –
all this produces nothing, not one apple,
    not one steel bolt nor fatting hog,
nothing whatever produced by their labor,
yet richer they grow, richer than
   the gloating emperors of byzantium

tycoon atop his tower of glass, perched
at the peak of world dominion,
has never heard “no” from his employees –
he’s driven everywhere, has but to nod
for a free lunch in the best-appointed spots.
he could not count his possessions,
and his so cleverly taxed that his worth
increases with every filing, oh wonderful,
this thing called oligodemocracy.

imagine his mute astonishment
as he reads in the morning news
that two of his dummy corporations
have hostile-merged him to nullity.
call button pressed, he waits,
but no one comes. his coffee cup,
empty, may show its bottom
for the first time ever. his broker
is theirs now, his law firm, theirs too.
which one of those many women
is his wife now? is one of the others
involved in this distressing affair.

he sighs. there is always the offshore fund,
the stock in those armaments and diamond mines.
there’s nothing left for him now
except to run for The White House.
run, as in, run for the office. it’s his turn, anyway.
in time he could be president of everything:
the justice department, the military (left hand
selling the right hand weapons to use and replace).
it seems only fair: with the mess they’ve made,
they should beg him to make everything right again.

At the I and Thou Coffeehouse, Haight Street, 1967

the fourth pot of same-leaf tea
sustains us, dilute to green
then yellow, then but
a Taoist ghost of a beverage

we linger over poems,
over long talks of world-end
napalm politics
inconceivable here
where barefoot runaways
make love to passing strangers

there is food—
we make our morsels last
(Laura forgives our raw-bone budgets)--
insidious caterpillars
pose as donuts—

eye-food is on the walls,
dubious art muraled
by blurred visionaries,
and Donovan sings.

Poet Goodman is there with freshly
laundered hair
waiting for love, or a good review,
and poet David somewhere
between last night’s acid
and tomorrow's poem.

morning people for the
quarter-hour cup
each to his sole solace/
smiling
Isabell with half New England
in her shawl
comes in without opening the door—
she has studied with Jung
and now rarified to archetype
she is incorporeal —
someone asks Jonathan North what sign are you?

Stop, he says. Go. Keep off the grass.
Donovan and the gypsy boy are
trying for the sun
and back in the corner
exacto knife flourishes
as Wes Wilson cuts screens
for a Fillmore concert

the psychedelic letters
twisting and bleeding,
arcing to leaf-curve
smoke billow, Beardsley twist

Outside in unrelenting sun
the citizens elect a mayor
whose vision of a city,
beadless and beardless,
he means to deliver.
The police glance in
but do not enter:

their eyes seem to count us,
weigh the threat
of beads and incense.
They see how many of us
have books and know how to use them.
Our days are numbered.

Eldorado

This poem was drafted at Edinboro, PA, many years ago. It resisted completion. Poe's poem of the same title was in my head, and there was a vision of a mysterious city rising from the ice of Edinboro Lake, but nothing could reconcile the Conquistador setting of Poe's poem with the cold, glacial lake of Edinboro, a chill winter night with the trees covered with an edging of snow, the lake frozen. The poem remains so intensely personal, so much about one unnamed passion, that I still do not know what to make of it. Yet it will give me no peace until I have worked the gold out of it.


I searched the angry street
and the dismal forest gloom,
I spanned the globe, and yet
no one has shown me Eldorado!
Who, gaily bedight,
has seen the golden walls,
its ingot walks,
in the soft effuse
of a Mexican sunset?
Who, amid the mango groves
and phosphorescent parrots
shall tread the wayward avenues
of burnished gold,
beneath a golder moon?
Are they dead, those feathered, tawny men,
those speakers of Mayan tongues,
those carvers of
all-but-unreadable stones?
Who has closed the great earth
and silenced the horns
of Eldorado?
Who has been there and returned? —
madmen and dreamers!

One night on the shore of a lake,
(a Northern lake, no hint of summer!)
as I lay
in a bed of warm, expiring leaves
a low voice whispered:
Silence is the road to Eldorado...

Then, one December night
we walked, we two
(I thought you were the one foretold)
on an incredible avenue
of snow-filled trees
cupolas filled with myriad crystals,
the lake
a fractal fractured spiderweb of ice
and there, in that unbroken loneliness
of snows
in a stillness so still
we could hear the trees inhale,
we watched, touched finger to finger,
as on the frozen lake three spires arose
and out of the ice great glimmering stones
climbed up. The moon blushed. The breeze
caught its breath. It had always been there
and had only to be called
by the stillness of two not speaking,
falling into the abyss of dead irises
and conjunct heartbeat. Eldorado!


How long did it remain there,
where any passing stranger might
have stepped beyond its threshhold
into glory and untold riches?

Only so long as we said nothing
did it burn the backs of our eyes,
gilding our brains with memories.
And only so long as I never said
I loved you, was it as real as this,
as tangible as mirror glass, as cold
as frozen steel, and yet as barred from us
as though a dragon flamed up
between us and El Dorado.



2
Call it Eldorado,
city of dread truth and light, harbor of the mind,
city built out yet built by no one.
If I show you my Eldorado, make clear its walls
and towers from the fog, would you step into it?
Can it be real
while being all that you ever dreamt?
Is its wealth in ingot and bullion,
in dead weight a dead man may carry?
Or is it the city of Ideal Men,
whose treasure is that all who inhabit it
are inherently good, virtue’s automatons,
soldiers valiant and uncorruptible?


Can it be visible to you?
Could you address them
if you have killed your heroes?
If you are so unlike the graven greats
on the walls of El Dorado,
would you know them as brethren?
Would mothers, sisters, brides and daughters
of this proud Atlantis hail you,
or avert their eyes in loathing?


Shall not this city recede from us, then?
No matter how sharp the vision, each step
toward it takes us astray or backwards.
In silence we see it clear; in speech
it grows dim and cloaks itself in fog.
If I say nothing, my hand can almost reach
to the edge of one great turreted tower.
And yet, because I love you, I say
“There is nothing there, no city.
The sun on the ice makes fools of us.
Our eyes are not to be trusted. At home,
beside our fire, beneath the blankets
of an oblivious bed, is what is real.
My hand on neck-nape, on shoulder;
your hand as I raise it to palm-kiss;
these things are gold and silver.”


Gone the city. Not one gold flake have I
to prove it ever existed. And just as gone
the ice-blind illusion of loving:
you no more knew me than you knew
a maple’s groan in the frosted air.
I have no token of your having lived.

Pastoral Symphony

Some lines, updated, based on hearing the last movement of Beethoven's Symphony No 6 (Pastoral).

A shepherd flute plays serenades
against the turn and fall of stars,
the ripple of Boreal curtains of light,
the concord and peace of Nature.
In the pre-dawn stillness,
hills hymn the galaxies,
soothing and cooling the molten core,
sealing the slumber of Titans
within their adamantine cells.
This earth suffices. To live alone
upon it — suffices. Let gods and Titans
remain in stasis and torpor’d sleep.
Up here, whatever touching
of life to life is given — suffices.
Life in itself — suffices.
The universe is a song unfolding —
ah, joy! to be the witness of it!

 

Calling All Poets Laureate

A Texan amendment
to the arts budget
surprises everyone:
a Poetry Lodge
in the nation’s capital.

The artist’s rendering
is out of Beowulf:
a great mead hall

on the National Mall,
where bards convene,
drink tankards of ale,
and pot after pot
of exotic tea.
Workshops and readings
around the clock;

marathons even,

for those who can stand it.

It opened this month,
yet something is wrong
with this Tudor palace.
The Poet Laureate
is already in there,
and won’t come out.
The laureates of states,
of cities and colleges,
have come, and entered.

Busloads of applicants

push at the double doors

waving their MFA diplomas.
In they go by the thousands. 

There’s a stage in the middle,
and an open mic,
yet no poets come forward.
They are stuck to the walls,
feet locked on the carpet.
Wallpaper grabs them
like vampire Velcro.

A giant eye glares
through the leaded glass
window. The place is packed,

a web of younger poets

undulating like tapestry,

the older poets in groups
like the Elgin marbles,

pushing forward

but going nowhere.

The voice on high intones:
Just as we intended.
Poet Motels:
Poets check in,

but they don’t check out.

Anna Akhmatova: I'm Like A River

Poet Anna Akhmatova braved it out in Soviet Russia when she could have fled, as many others did, to Romantic, if impoverished, exile. She endured the Stalin years, and was terrorized and spied upon. Friends vanished, and her son was arrested and killed. In this severe little self-analytical poem, Akhmatova accuses and defends herself. She knows that her work was her life's end. This is my own adaptation from the Russian original.


I'm like a river
this heartless epoch turned
from its accustomed bed.
Strayed from its shores
this changeling life of mine
runs off into a channel.
What sights I’ve missed,
absent at curtain time,
nor there when the house lights dim.
A legion of friends
I never chanced to meet.
Native of only one abode —
city I could sleepwalk
and never lose my way —
my tears preventing eyes
from seeing the dreamt-of
skylines of foreigners!
And all the poems I never wrote
stalk me, a secret chorus
accusing me, biding the day
they’ll strangle me.
Beginnings I know,
and endings too,
and living death,
and that which I’ll not,
if you please, recall.
Now there’s a woman
who’s assumed my place;
usurping my name, she leaves
me only diminutives to end
my poems with: I’ll do the best I know with them.
Even the grave appointed me
is not my own.
Yet if I could escape my life,
looking straight back at what I am,
I should at last be envious.