PIED-PIPER PHILOLOGY: LOVE WORDS
- R. ALLEN SHOAF
- FIRST DIGITAL EDITION 2013
- ISBN: 978-1-938240-63-8
- COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY R. ALLEN SHOAF
- PUBLISHED BY THINKER MEDIA, INC.
- ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
- PIED-PIPER PHILOLOGY
- THE PIED-PIPER’S PIPE
- THE PATHOSOPHICAL PIED-PIPER PHILOLOGIST CONVERSES WITH THE PHILOSOPHICAL POET
- CYCLING OVER THE CONVERTED TRESTLE BRIDGE, IMAGINING STEPHEN C. FOSTER, WE LAMENT THE TRAGEDY OF AMERICAN RACISM
- TRIUMPHANT NOW, SHE SHOOK HER HEAD, IS THE NOISE IN THE LAND
- POETRY’S DEFECTION TO ORDINARINESS, OTHERWISE KNOWN AS MINIMALISM
- STILL A METAPHOR
- AN ESSAY IN AESTHETICS
- SHE DID NOT COLOR INSIDE THE LINES
- THE MYSTERY OF THE GRATUITOUS
- THE BASELESS FABRIC
- I SHARE WITH HER MY VISION OF THE RAINBOW FIDDLER IN A STELLAR NURSERY 500 LIGHT-YEARS FROM EARTH
- THE CHALLENGE OF OBLIVION’S PART IN OUR KNOWLEDGE
- IT WAS MINE
- WE RECITE THE DRUID’S PRAYER
- WE SHARE MY DREAM OF RAGNARÖK
- SHE QUESTIONS ME ON PROSPECTS AND COVERTS
- ON OCCASION WE TALKED ABOUT BEOWULF
- THE BEAST WHO EVOLVED TO DEVOUR WANT, WE AGREED
- NO TIRESIAS SHE
- A MODEL OF SEX (PERHAPS DATED) THAT BROUGHT A SMILE TO HER FACE
- “GLAMOUR” IS A FORM OF “GRAMMAR,” SHE REMINDED ME
- ON THE FEAR OF DEATH
- SHE ARGUED THAT RELIGION IS THE TERROR IT PRETENDS TO PROTECT US FROM
- A RUMOR OF JESUS WE HEARD AND INVESTIGATED
- ON A BABY TAKING HIS FIRST STEPS
- SHE SUGGESTED I WRITE A POEM ABOUT THE GARDEN IN EARLY SPRING
- READING SHAKESPEARE NOW AND THEN MEANT SO MUCH TO BOTH OF US
- RE-READING KING LEAR: ON LIPS
- READING SALVADOR DALÍ: TOGETHER WE ADMIT THE SCANDAL OF THE HAND
- WITCHCRAFT
- SHARISHING (SHE’S GONE NOW)
- SMALL
- POST-PIED-PIPER PHILOLOGY
Pied-Piper Philology
I
The philosopher selects his topicFor the day, a Muse meant for winter’s gloom,To wrest from sleeting particulars A form for a fable for more than a few. Music, he’s heard, is the only solution To the problem he poses: everyone Listens to music. But, he challenges, “This is merely to restate the problemSince music, though articulate, is dumb. “Where is,” he asks, observing the planetWreak havoc in white outside his window,“The Piper who need not apologize?” As if the earth itself retorted aggrievedThe very mountains mocked his query,So it seemed to him, since he understood Division is the engine of all that lives.Furious gales scoured the mountains, As he lowered his gaze, and he felt the cold, Loveless, but pure all around him, and white.He thought again, another log on the fire,“What do we mean, then, when we say, unity? “Is it pure, white lovelessness, coercionOf trillions of crystals by cohorts of cold?When did we ever unite two things
“Without coercion, violence and disregard?The wonder” (he appropriates thaumazein)“Is always the couple that continues, “Aporia insoluble in ordinaryInterrogation of the world we have erectedTo pretend we are creatures not subject to cold.” As if to mock him with providential proofThe winds hammer his roof, walls, and windowsWith force so savage (if clean) he recalls The hour he first understood mortality,That men destroy with far greater gaietyThan they create with. No house is natural. II
“This is how she dies, be it orgasm or torture,Nature unnaturally mailed in the law,Penuried to the part of pleasure and pain, “Where deliver she must more dust to dustLest pleasure should lack the pain, and blood,To entice the beast—homo lupus hominis— “To lick at her wound and so fell the citiesOthers have raised as if they were OtherThan the Animal enamored of Murder.” The wind in his mind bites so bitterly,He fears he has left some aperture unshut,But he calms himself it is only a house.
The last woman to live there talked with him,Her equal, and smiled at him when she died,Mumbling incoherently of life and love— Her lone child killed at her husband’s handWho killed himself with poison to die impure.His Philosopher Queen, he’d smiled, already The day they met and she ceased to weep.She would have chastised him for digressing,And he would have bit his lip in agreement. III
“The Königsberg time-keeper, Kant by name,Once thought for ten years without publishing a word.”He strokes his cheek and returns to the construct, The house, which quivers still with winter,And which, he knows, was a place Kant rarely left,For long, or far (itself a form for a fable). So much happens within. He’d inventedIn his youth a word that, he thought, told, in soundAnd sight alike, the event he felt —inwordly. (They had argued but finally agreedInvention is the phont where th-ought is raised—“But cave,” she would quip, “of Plato’s Error.”) “Inwordly, he conceives,” he posed, “what can’t Utter its destiny any other waySince he is his information and it “Can’t suffer severance from its him (or her)— Inword, she requires not just translationBut her own Pied-Piper Philology.” Easy to comprehend why Kant stayed homeIn a construct he might pretend his ownSince who walks abroad a lexicon incarnate? IV
“Many now hail the Muse Digitalia!Stay at home and surf the world! Careful,Though, of your connection: all that connects “Is not gold (though log’d-on for sure it is).Now our Grail is the unending nexus,To every cataclysm immune, a Pearl “Of feeds directly to the brain, no matter(Pia or otherwise) the price.” “Restrain yourself,”She would have cautioned: “Irony consumes Its consumer until all thought is afterthought.”He pauses to remember her voiceAnd notes that “Memory can’t be replace “By electronic devices: moviesOf her inword, neither programs nor -ware,Are like the snow random and beautiful And fierce.” He lays down his irony for her.Immediately a new facet formsOf the problem he has chosen for the day. V
“Suppose, for argument’s sake, a unitaryBrain of all the neurons at the planet’s Disposal—would the Many then be One? “Would humanity be finished? Plato,Asleep at last? Aristotle, too? and ZenMasters folded in night eternal?” “Sed contra!” a scholastic might exclaim,“From quantity to quality inferenceIs fallible; otherwise, ants would be “The highest form of life on earth—numbersGuarantee their ecology.” And who knowsBut that humans, just so, advance and serve ants? “The problem,” he reminds himself yet again,“Is not numeric, though science dream it were;The problem is other, older than numbers, “The problem is Otherness itself.A man walks into a school and murdersThe girls one by one. Counting is (in) vain.” VI
The tea kettle whistles. He takes the steamBefore he tastes the tea—very cold today.“Tomorrow,” they say, “will be colder still.” “How very accurate the instruments are!Who can dispute that distance from Nature,Prediction and control, are man’s crowning end! “No house is natural and that is best.Who wants to sleep on stone or lap the staleIf water is scarce and rain is missing?” “Down with poets,” he’s heard the multitudes, “Philosophers, too: Technology,”They roar, “is Theology enough for us.” And so he is surrounded by machinesWizardry of yore could never imagine,Much less tool to such pernicious precision. He has heard them shout, “Tear out his tongue,Chop off his hands—let Man the tool-makerHave his revenge.” “Against such missiles What missives might I send,” he muses?“Even Orpheus” (no Orpheus, he) “succumbed—And to rocks that begged forgiveness for harming him. “What Piper for a world in which Robots(Much cheaper than men) can run machinesFlawlessly and constantly—nay, endlessly— “As long as electricity abounds?Since there will always be electricity(Greed requires it), the Pied Piper should sing “For the children, the girls and the boys,Who will never vanish inword the mountain,Since the mountain vanishes inside the machines.” VII
He does not, as a rule, dine at mid-day,But he’s hungry now—the cold, he reckons,Hard to recall a day of late so cold. Childless himself he had always knownSomeone else’s imago he couldn’t be,His own identity quicksilver enough. Still he meditated on childhood a lot,A universal transcending barriers (Perhaps all of them, except division itself). Characteristic of every child, all agree,Is the will to believe, called, negatively,Innocence (“not harming”); damningly, Naïveté. He admitted, freely,In him “A child still lives who sometimes crows,As a small one will, when he topples his blocks, “Thinking especially grand of himself,Happy for ooh’s and aah’s coming his way— Unknowing he plays for adulthood’s curse.” The loss of innocence every culture He consults from the dawn of its script Grieves and laments: tragedy (or satire) Crawls from the crack in the spirit’s crownAnd forks identity with failure’s fangs— “What! You thought a god was he who spoke to you? “It was but an orifice of earth, my son,And you heard yourself from your own gut groanThe end of your life awaits you there.” VIII
Orestes had moved him as much as Oedipus.The Greeks had taught him what we need to know:“Our mothers doom us the moment they bear us, Their love, though real, the face upon the monster’s void.Let no one seek to know the origin,Soon enough comes the panting in death’s embrace.” She used to rejoin, “What must a woman do?”They would argue for hours, at best to conclude,“Allow not nature more than nature needs
Man and woman alike should fill the beasts.”In their embraces, they strove for something moreThan the thrust of glands: they beheld one another— As she gave him to him, he gave her to her,That passion’s pathology might emergePassion that knows forth from both the fluency comes. IX
As always, to think of her was to thinkWith her, and in her, as in another language,Not “foreign” but “neighboreign”—a fiction, yes, But we do not live by bread alone.“There must be some time a fantasy by whichWe surprise the chemistry of carbon, “Else why not indulge living narcosis?Whether alcohol or cocaine, the drug,So the argument runs, makes life bearable “By mixing in death—the trick, we hear, Is in the proportions.” He had waked upIn time to his own appetite for death. He prepared more tea. When he was in schoolMany of his friends had tried some “shit,”Their name for it, and it grieved him to think, “How right they were.” The afternoon sunlight,As it will in winter, paled to thin yellow.Time and he crossed in reverie revenant. X “There are,” he reckons, “many forms of narcosis,Narcissism itself not the least of these,Numbness needed against the pricks of life; “But also the needles deep in the blood”—The moments of youth when he needed sleepHardly at all but ate amounts of food That appalled distinguished elders who deducedOnly a barbarian would consume Like that (and yet he was always hungry). As others learned what energy he burned,They fled far away, but he told storiesOf needles in his blood interminable. “Solitude is neither punishment nor crime,But to sit still to concentrate with needlesIn the blood is like Njál in his Saga, ‘Stritaðist hann við að sitja’: he struggles To sit still (when he does he foresees the burnersWho will arrive to kill his sons and him).” No one, not even she, had understoodHow much it hurt to feel so much lifeInjected into his veins—alone, he cried. Cry he would still, in this decade, his seventh,But no one saw, he was sure of that, for menFlood with hate as they fill with years, and endless Are the ways they tear each other apart(“The smylere with the knyf under the cloke,”As Chaucer had said)—he trusted no man But loved all alike who could teach himFor the wisdom they gave, since he knew that timeDevours us all if our hate doesn’t first. XI “What then would he be who could write a mythTo which men and women would freely assentAs the story for which they would spend their being? “Any religion is too much religion,”He swore to himself, as he lit a candle,“‘Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,’
“As Lucretius had said (‘So many evilsCan religion persuade men to commit’).No, men and women need stories, not creeds; “They need quests, not priests; imagination,Not dogma; re-pairing, not des-pairing;Figuration, not disfigurement. “True, animals we are, one of the Apes.But Power errs to presume that this is all—In this animal evolved also spirit, “And though some prove that they are bestial,Many heed the spirit, answer humane:These to the herd never surrender, “For the narrative of humanityIs resistance, heard through the ages,And the title of tyranny is brief “(Though the number of lives that are lostMeasures the horror and teaches the causeTyranny from the earth must be scourged). “Let unity, then, be an ideal,But not if by blinding and binding,For then Power is ‘god,’ we are agreed, “People are units for grinding Xchains(Women on their knees, children in mine-shafts),And the planet a sarcophagus, “Eater of flesh copulating for corpses— Cupidinous somaticiosis.Either this or a discourse of liberty— “Forged from the urge to rise from foaming seasOf primordial zoa practicing unityUntil a form emerges of fiction “Capable, in idioms of spirit fluent:Freedom is freedom to choose my bond If bound I must be in the time called history; “In the time called story, she is a woman,He is a man, who heed the spell of Yes To bliss the body for the blessing of death.” XII
These words he chose this time—this particularRuin of white. As always, he recorded them,For the next time, in the core of his heart, For the cold is ever, and infinite is space,And night is the day when the stars demandAn account: “I am human, the being who speaks.” The Pied-Piper’s Pipe
Some notes you will hear the rest of your life.Like your skin, they enclose you, seal you inBut also let others caress your song(You learn you need them for the journey ahead).
The music insists that you share your gift,Though outcast your life long, in tatters hated,Your sound is the clarion that tempersWith desire wholly their own the air they breathe.
Once to have heard you is never to doubtThe body is no border of limitsOn yearning for completion imaginedAs singer and song both two and one—
They follow you to follow themselvesTo their dream of waking in daybreak forever,Not in denial of death but the callOf life heard in your pipe as soon as you play.
This is the art in the Pied-Piper’s pipe.And, if we fear it, as we know we do,We fear in ourselves the art of our kind,Which is to transmutate fear into song.
The consequence otherwise is silence,Not just the absence but the death of chords—The cynic’s black hole, the assassin’s missile,The dictator’s drone, the two-timer’s twaddle.
We must learn to sing—our body’s birthright.Let us heed the Piper while we still can:Fear is energy imprisoned in ill;Song is embracing empowers us all. The Pathosophical Pied-Piper Philologist Converses with the Philosophical Poet Nietzsche was first, it’s true, but I didn’t know that when I unlocked the door. I walked through the hallssomewhere between anguish and awe, studying the busts that line the crumbling walls as far as the eye can see. I thought it only politeto visit each oneand pay homage due,but I tired before I reached the dividing arch—and rested on a broken though shining marble.
I retrieved my pipe, gently tested every stop,and began to play, drawing every breath from deeper than I ever remembered,as if it belonged to the genius of the place.
Surprised by her question, I was not frightened—I had so many of my own.I recall feelings of reliefthat I was not alone in so vast a hall.
“Why are you here? Ruins like these no longer sigh.”
“I have come to listen to your oldest wordssince I must find a way to free—” “You would wake us, then? Say you did. You would not comprehend.”
“But I have to try. Invention is all that remains—and you…you are awake…”
“So it seems to you,pathosopher?—so you call yourself?”
“Yes, the ‘suffering of wisdom’ more than the ‘love of wisdom’—that is what I know. No words—”
“Agreed, no words, that we knew, too, but… there is no syllable as pure as your desire,not in old words, not even in our old words.”
“Do we then just lie atop the corpsesbreathing history, dust and ironyof incalculable copulas,transient pleasures, insatiable and unsatiated?”
“Is there anything else?”
“How!? How? How? How can you, all of you, of all who have lived, ask such a question?Do you amuse yourself? Do you tempt mefor your amusement? Is one of you keeping score, etching my fears into the wall?Would my tears were as hot as my furyto burn your hands but first your eyes!”
“Is this, then, the pathosopher? Are you not just one more bone-sack of impatience and stupidity? Man-being unchanged?”
“If unchanged, then look at yourselves.”
“True.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
“No, but what we have to say, to that men will not listen,preferring death to life,unknowing what they call lifeis death in disguise, appetite—petition pleading for pleasure—poison sugared in self-deception…”
“Do you hate life so much? Just another religion robbing the poor of their livesas they pretend to lifewith the lies they’re told?”
“No, we do not hate life and from the beginningnever restingwe sought antidotes to creeds: creeds are the breeders of hatred, pestilential.We do not hate—even creeds.”
“But what purpose, then? If men do not listen—” “Then we are to blame, you cry?”“Yes, that is the pathosopher’s cry.I tell you, I told you, I have come to listen—”
“To our oldest words—”
“Yes, pathosophy listens,leaning my ear to the other before me—the suffering of wisdom—for power is addictionand the powerful are ill, diseased with hate and greed,and there is no healing, only herding of the poor, the hungry, and the haltinto death chambers they call homes or ICUs—cancer, incest, abuse,processed morality, processed mortality.”
“Then, pathosopher, listen, if you dare. The oldest of words is health which none of youunderstands in your arrogance disdaining life for copies of death(as if nature were deceived)which only healto breed more ill. Nature is not deceived. You, only you, pretend to life you do not own and never shall. You treat a gift as if it were your right, your possession,ignoring truths that,like earthquakes, tsunamis,will have their say, when they will, no matter what you think…or do…or weep.” “And tell me,how does this differ from any other dogma—from some mad-dog ruseabstruse to defraud by hawking a part as if it were all, not apart fromthe forgery of the wholeyou’re passing?What is to prevent the scorn greed and hate have ready always?”
“Look around you. Look. What do you see?”
Surprised again, I paused.
All had changed. A gloom deep as any night I have known yet illumined by blood-red bolts of silent lightening surrounded me so that I saw not one of my limbs nor my pipe.
“Imagine, pathosopher, your profoundest prayer,your most selfless charity, your deepest affection, the good so primal you would lay downgladly your life for it, and ask yourself, pathosopher, this question, this question—one:‘What good would I do, what good would I be,without my body’?”
My hands I saw first as though they belonged to the bloody gloom, and my voice I heardas from a distance yet just beside me as I asked,
“You…you, too, are you not…?a pathosopher, too?—the next oldest…”
A sudden noisediverts me:I hear I think laughing,and I turn, tremblingI find…around me gathering in great throngs men and women and children it seemswithout numberask me to pipe that they may dance. Cycling over the Converted Trestle Bridge, Imagining Stephen C. Foster, We Lament the Tragedy of American Racism
Quiet isn’t the absence of sound(quiet isn’t absence at all),quiet is the presence of soundanticipated,as the self is presumedby the boundary of the bodylike a phantom limb of the complete individual unable to accept the trauma of division—inauguration of death:the Angel in repose upon the dark white riverrolling with life and its perilinescapable, edged with pleasuressenses so slaver for they forget pleasures are dreams where the cuts didn’t heal and lips disgorge liquors of longingas cries awaken the Angel to restore the quiet life claims is its own to disrupt,as if life somehow were not itself just another swell and lap lap and swell“way down upon the ‘Swanee’ River.” Triumphant Now, She Shook Her Head, Is the Noise in the Land
Man is indeed crazy. He cannot make a worm but will be making gods by the dozens. Michel de Montaigne My heart breaks once again to see the wounds That we thought had healed erupt into flamesMen cannot extinguish and gods cannot explain—O, we die very young, old as we are,Refusing as we do poetry’s chrism.
We close our ears to the name it whispersThinking to flee the doom we just provoked,Which accelerates its feeding on usNow that we pretend it does not existSince some button hissed we need not listen.
Triumphant now is the noise in the landAnd with our feelings we have fattened it:Fear is the virus that cannot be foiledSince it evolves through its victim mutatingInto the ignorance on which it feeds. Poetry’s Defection to Ordinariness, Otherwise Known as Minimalism
Everything must be small (smaller, if possible).The opposite of small is not large or expansive.It is preciousness (I might have said preciosité,But that would be precious, one of the signsThat poetry can only talk to itselfAbout the shattered compact she left behind).
Now the razor and the shaving mirrorAre the arms of Achilles, and the shieldIs any prophylaxis lying to hand. Helen is a thing of air and plastic.… You write as though a poem were statuarySinking in murky water. All you can mouthIs the moan of desolation you feel At losing a form fleetingly yours.You never consider diving for it. That would be action, even perhaps Heroic action. Better to equivocate In the vowels of obscurity Announcing a fate long since familiar.
Helen is a thing of air and plastic Who can be found in every city pool Pretending she doesn’t know her measurements.…
From such simulacra poetry flees.
For its exercises of despair The audiences shrink to an eliteInsecure except for their posture Of defenders of that for which defense Means the cause is lost already, in the dark Awaiting a doom of light, a people’s eyes.
If any new (not news) is to erupt From this holocaust it will not be The play of light on the priceless vase She broke before she finally stormed away, For that is a story, however human,Very old, nor will it be the latest Cartoon able to leap a billion dollarsIn a single bound.
It will be much lessExpected, an emergency no one Notices until the precise moment When minimalism catalogs her last Stray hair from the pillow where she criedWhen he snapped there must be more to life than this. Still a Metaphor
Consider the Cottonwood in my backyard.Nearly 80 feet high, its canopySpreads over three contiguous lots—In full leaf it casts heroical shade.All its branches strive for the sun, to feed,And those lower on the trunk quickly die:No light — they starve, crack, crumble, and fall.
It would be easy to make a videoOr take a sequence of black-and-white stills—You could even record a dying limb’s crack(And surprise yourself at how loud it sounds)—But there is also something to be saidFor poetry in such a fall as this.That life means death is still a metaphor. An Essay in Aesthetics
I cherish the song that tells my storyAs if the writer knew where I’d slept,How hungry I’d gone, how cold it was,And even the number of tears I’d wept.
Some times we assume the only artIs some stuff or bother we don’t understand,But it may be truer to life to sayArt is what we know we may next-to-stand. She Did Not Color Inside the Lines
Mockery and scorn boast a lexiconAlmost as rich as sexual slur’s,So satisfied are we to humiliate—We exhaust invention’s blackest seamWherever we find the ore of hatred.Nor need we prospect far or longTo mine the idealism that aspiresTo color the world inside the lines,The tendermost fuel of human hatred.
The beaten child, the doll missing a leg,The bones so fragile that never straighten,The mutilated girl … arouse in someThe Why that hatred smelts in mockery—Who are you to care at your plate so full?
This, we know, is the dialectic,The glove inside out: try to redress it,Your hand gets caught all the same and dirty.
Beyond the mockery, beyond the scorn,In the stillness where humanity heals,The question scars the caring conscience,Who, if I color inside them, drew the lines?
Every idio(t)logue, salivating, baresHis teeth to snarl his answer, “God … or the devil”(“My God, that is, your devil”). Should you object—“Your authority?” — your status as objectIs at once secure. Thus, objectified,You may die. The TelefornicatorsWill sigh as one, on all the channels,“Well, he would not obey! What can we do?”—Your death just another casualtyIn the Godheads War (on all the channels!)Now some three or four millennia old.
Irony, a species of dialectic,Only goes so far; like a band shorterThan at first you thought, it cartoons you back:No one is not dirty and none is clean.Check under the nails of the smiler’s lustNever hidden so well you cannot seeThe flakes and fragments of recent victims.
Necessary, then, to admit the truth,Life is lived outside the lines, where you drawYourself the figures of your fate, the faceYou will turn for others to see when you own,“I can say no more. These were my pigments.I mixed them myself with my own body.Whosever the lines, these drawings are mine.” The Mystery of the Gratuitous For the fruitfulness of a gift is the only gratitude for the gift. Meister Eckhart I often learn an aria by ear.My grandfather’s talent passed down to me.The experience arouses a fearOnly madmen, children, and saints can see. It emanates from deep within my breastAnd dyes my skin with the soot of corpses:Its ghastly likeness long ago confessedTo catastrophic metamorphosis. Knowledge so old it might be star storiesOppresses the spirit with purest fact:Chance is the motor of categoriesThat arbitrate the equity of lack — Each receives just enough to understandThe gifted without gratitude must be damned. The Baseless Fabric
I watched him slay the wounded horse with a tubeof shining dark blue metal, a needleimprobable until the horse ceased at onceto spasm and whine. The few of us fled.
When we reached the edifice each of us gasped—no structure so high in all our lives,no fabric so smooth, to put glass to shame—and yet other escape nowhere in sight.
We could hear their beasts and could wait no longer.Suddenly alone I reached out and the walllike a curtain yielded to my graspand I began to climb hand over hand
on either side of me materialso hard and bright I could scarcely believethe baseless fabric welcoming my handsas higher and higher I breathlessly
climbed to the summit I could no way make out—I dare not look down, but looking upwardI could not endure for fear so namelessI began to weep and cry out for mercy.
I heard a voice summon me, and I turned but instantly the fabric turned itselfto metal again, or even harder,and I knew I must fall, but I reached in
and the baseless fabric met my hand againas I listened to the voice irenic say“You have fallen far enough—cease to climb.Ascend now and rest. Your trial begins.” I Share with Her My Vision of the Rainbow Fiddler in a Stellar Nursery 500 Light-years from Earth
Weeping with the tears of the banished cloudsIn the furies of wind disappearing,The Rainbow Fiddler tunes his instrumentTo play for the Knights of the Sun and the Moon
Who mount their Dragons once more assumingThis is the ride, their last, into the tomb,The garden once where they opened their eyesTo the Light and Lore of the world ascending —
The Fiddler remembers he played for themWhen the Cosmos sang there may be Life,And he knows he will somewhere play againWhen the tomb is sealed in its womb of dust. The Challenge of Oblivion’s Part in Our Knowledge
Every concept arises from the likening of unlike things (Jeder Begriff entsteht durch Gleichsetzen des Nicht-Gleichen). … and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects (durch ein Vergessen des Unterscheidenden gebildet). Friedrich Nietzsche
The oak far enough from its apparentCenter of gravity leans out towards meThat I remember the lightning strikeWhich anticipated my arrival.
I see its jagged edges split the nightAnd I hear the crackle of coincidence.I look for a way out—again, none appears.Thicket surrounds me. The air reeks of scorch.
I was here before. Did we part that day?I should remember. I am part of it.If I depart by this oak tonight, may I Forget I have forgotten to impart?
Or must I return until I can playOblivion’s part as well as my own? It Was Mine Deep in my dream yet fully awake,I saw them, at first in shock and terror,The heads of men on the bodies of fish.
I was walking along the beach hardly awareOf the roar of the waves in the blustery windWhen I saw an object I feared was a corpse.
But when I turned to it, it disappeared,A great white sail filling its place, stretching,It seemed, to the horizon or beyond.
I started to run to furl the sail,Afraid it would vanish, too, a phantom,Before I could decode its secret glyphs,
But then, just to the side of it, I saw them: Three fish with the heads of men seeming asleep—And I crashed into the wall of my disbelief.
Slowly the one nearest me opened its eyesAnd, gazing at me, started to sing lyricsI cannot remember, to my relentless sorrow.
I next saw him in bed with his lover,A woman so desirable I wept,The surgery having restored his body
Which gleamed alabaster eros, manhoodSo complete nature might rejoice in itAnd the woman drink it deliriously.
But when he turned to kiss her perfect lips,I could see the hole the surgery had leftJust below his neck between his shoulders
Where gills and lungs flanked his spine ghostly white,Breathing for him otherwise impossible.As they entwined, their bliss embraced, I dove
And light engulfed me effulgent but soft. My blindness waked me, and I cried out forlorn,But then I felt my body and it was mine. We Recite the Druid’s Prayer
May the love and light of truth spire their wayThrough the fall-iage of life until the end of time …
May the rivers of renewal find their levelsWherever the cosmos promises life …
May the caprice of being celebrateInfinities gods of ours can not copy …
May the incomprehensible sum of spaceFoil our presumption that we are needed …
May the faintness of our voices teach us To listen to life as if it were now …
All this we pray that we may leave in peace. We Share My Dream of Ragnarök
The first step stands in the midst of the TreeAbout head high, with the slightest of slopes.Who would ever dream, I wondered as I neared, Ascending such stairs not made for mankind?
As the steps emerge from the top of the Tree,Their surface translucent in the winter sun,Ivory so ancient of a knife-hilt gleamingScarcely reflects the burnish of the bones.
Did Thor, I wonder, defy the Giants here,Climbing the arms of a hero of theirs?The end invisible haunts with horizonsVast as mortality’s incomprehension.
Only a god who lifts the Serpent, WormOf All Earth, Midgarðsörmr, Jörmungandr,Dares accept the challenge from Yggdrasil:“Think these stairs you see are one of my roots,
To which of the Worlds Nine you do not know,But when you own your quest and name your doom,Fail not wisdom’s summons to re-nascence— To die of beauty is to once have lived.” She Questions Me on Prospects and Coverts
We are animals. We must not forget.There are times we must hide to save our lives.There are times we must play to save our spirits.
The covert where we hide is not just safe.It is a place we remember withoutRemembering we were ever there.
The field where we play resounds with joy.Even by ourselves we were never alone.Together we made the terror our home. On Occasion We Talked About Beowulf
The poet is not the serpent of truthTo strike at boasters’ provocative lies,Nor is he the dragon of plangent ruthTo breathe in tears his fire for all that dies.
The poet is the voice that named the Wyrm,Older than the slime from which it emerged,His core the cave where the copula yearnedTo make the mystery both hymn and dirge.
Wyrd is Becoming no hero imagines,The Wyrm in the rocks he fights in his dreams,But the liquor of verse from these enchanted enginesBinds his red-gold wound in the saga’s seams. The Beast Who Evolved to Devour Want, We Agreed
The story of a word is wonderful to tellAnd hear the mysteries that orbit about it,Clarity that flows from illumination
Of a dark you did not imagine untilYou felt it seep into your mind and heartOn seeing the abyss from which the word
Dehisced and seeded into human history.Take a word that often means erotic desire—Or any of its myriad multiples
Neoning their way through the cities of night—And consider its betrayal of our bodies:Want’s primordial meaning is emptiness.
Once it may have sounded like gurgle-wailingOf a wounded beast (in a tar-pit, perhaps?)Curdling the air for predators’ ears and glands.
If now a grunt for instant gratification—Strip joints, porn sites, private clubs, limousines—We might want to watch out for today’s tar-pits.
Want is not something you take wantonlyHowever much you want only to be yourself(As the saying goes): “want only” cuts two ways,
Exposing your lust as you seek to be justWho you are in a world weeping with want(Emptiness that will never be fed)
Where the lack you want only to fillIs a black hole you never imagined(Exclusivity its event horizon)—
When you sate your want, someone else whimpersThe last breath of the last longing of a lost life,The knell of want on an orb so copious
(Even insects are full of nutrition)That the heart must break (or leak its indifference)At the waste of life surrounding our want.
Listen to the word—fill your mouth and throat with it—And as your lips expand with the vowel and nasal,Swell the cavity everyone wants to satiate.
Or say it in French where “I want” is “Je veux.”That is the gurgle-wailing in everyone’s throat,The bleating (vurrr) of the beast trapped by want.
And try to remember we once were beastsDescending from the trees to walk the savannaWhere we learned from the wolf to hunt in packs
And care for our young by sharing that becameOver eons of suffering humane.Remember: ever more upright we stood,
Until one day one of us stammered, “Who are we?”And those wanting to listen quietly heard:“You are the beast who wants to devour want.” No Tiresias She
“si se non noverit” (yes, if does not know himself) Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.348
Home from work the other day, in the kitchen,She looks out the window at two snakesAmidst the citrus, aloes, and cameliasCoupling in a savage two-headed danceBlack on black slithering, a knot of sex.
She lunges to escape. He entwines her.Their mouths fall open, their heads like bullets(Tireless repeaters) — she will not submitUntil he proves he will outlast herIn a game where winning looks like losing.
She told me she once saw a hawk swoop one up …Now a pair breeding — just as shocking.The seer told the boy’s mother that NarcissusWould live long “if he does not know himself” —The skin of such knowledge who would not cast off? A Model of Sex (Perhaps Dated) That Brought a Smile to her Face
G. B. Shaw once complainedsex should be relegated to the youngwhile everyone else (adults, of course)went about other business, no longer burdened by such a chore.
An oddity of history, most would say,from a time when victims like Shaw(or Housman) were numerousbecause pleasure was counted a sinand must slither in the gutter.
Today porn is our number onerecession-proof industry, and we all know we must enjoy ourselves.But millennia of self-loathinghave made us forgetful.
We hardly remember the least even of our embraces without neglectingwhy we were there:likeness in pleasure bespeaksthe pleasure of likeness—we, not I. “Glamour” is a Form of “Grammar,” She Reminded Me
The light of a summer eveningshimmers through golden greenand quivers like a child in wonderat what it’s never seen. Too easily we forgetthat at first truth’s a fableso innocence may learn to endure the surrounding Babel. When experience curses the lightand swears every truth’s a lie,too easily we forgetnot every sentence begins with “I.” On the Fear of Death
Death is the mother of beauty Wallace Stevens
The Pied-Piper Philologist, purestOf his kind, attends the extravaganceOf words, in form, order, and heartful sound.
The sound resounding sounds the sound of feeling,The shelf of surprise in the sea of fearThat swallows those who refuse to listen
To the intervals between life and death—This is no exile, this is here and now,And because you die, you may live in this love.
You must not curse death, although you fear it.Look around you: every life relies on deathTo feed the tissues that entwixt the soul.
We clamor against the injustice of itAs if we somehow knew what justice isIn a cosmos of innumerable stars
Where quantum probabilities producePhenomena our brains process as real,Beside others, which to see, would unworld us
(Our world is ours more than we comprehend)—It cannot hurt to sing, dance, and give thanksFor what is ours by no entitlement.
And think of those who taught us to celebrate.Though they went deaf or blind or starved still young,They heard the intervals, this harmony …
In my rose garden I have thirty shrubs,And I have watched thousands of roses dieAs I longed for the one, the perfect rose,
Throughout my body aching for the beautyThat would not betray me, like mere pleasure,But would hold my breath in the enduring kiss
Plucked up by the roots from the crack of doom,And I have laughed at myself, the fool I am,For wanting what only wanting can want.
Folded in my partner’s body, I feelA sweetmeat of peace infinitely finite(As I sometimes think), inconsolable
That life must life from the two of us pull,Until we sleep, and in my dream I hearThe unmistakable music that is my own—
My own body, my own sex, my soil, my heart …And when I wake, on my lips one prayer only:May the death of fear precede mine. Amen. She Argued that Religion is the Terror It Pretends to Protect Us From
There’s a place in what we call the heart(Feeling for which we have no better name)We reserve for the smallest, quietest partWe long to protect from the endless blameThat flows through life like death through war,Leaving none but the victim to abhor.
Order without sacrifice cannot lastBut sacrifice without love cannot speak(The bellowing of a beast that has no pastNor any future of desire to seek)—Purest of all rites the world calls sacred:Murdering those who mirror our hatred.
Since language first crawled from out of our cavesWe’ve cried out for the wonder that knotsIn consciousness life and death as if slavesEach to the other’s reading of the lots,Which, like tears of the tortured, flood the globeAnd tell no lies but the truth in the probe.
Patterns’ randomness shocks us with strange persuasion.In a world of both-and, not either-or,You may abuse the singular relation(Bleed the paradox for all it may store),But in good time your spectre will ariseTo fill the space behind your empty eyes,
For religion, the Philologist knows,Means “to bind,” and from this bondage no manEscapes who doesn’t hand over what he owes(Though many try, yet they learn they never can):He must surrender his life another’s loveAnd welcome death the gift he’s dreaming of. A Rumor of Jesus We Heard and Investigated
Memory flows like blood from a wound.Stanching does slow but never stops the vein:it takes a lifetime to die, more or less.
Primordial, the wound spares no one.The customary agents, drink and drugs,have no effect but to make matters worse.
Look down at your hands or, maybe, your sex;feel eons of experiment in decay —how few your years, how enormous your lust.
The rage your civilization tells youyou should not feel boils your organs in scumthat peels from you like original skin
so hot you dare not touch lest you exposeyourself to shame, consciousness leaking,although you know it is everyone’s stain;
even the saint eats his words, “I hunger,”and finds no spot to relieve himselfbut his own immortal, putrescent soul —
practically infinite the books thus filled,the whole world over, with legends of sinmore exciting than the penances that follow
(unless, indeed, these should wallow in gore,limbs in pieces, and the sweet smell of sexdevoted to pain and sordid arousal).
“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani”is the cry from the cross everyone bearswho cannot forget the child each once was,
that creature dead now for decades of liesyou told just to get by … just to get by ….All your wealth will not that child resurrect,
nor do you even know how to weep for itso far have you wandered from love’s pure muck,the stuff you laugh at the child understands
“for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”What else could he do, looking around him,droves of haters eating each other’s lives?
“This is my body … .” His followers complained“Lord , this saying is hard,” but they ateand believed and tried to hunger the way
he taught them to hunger — for god, not goods.Little could they foresee how they would failin a future where faith vomits in the streets,
hope is castrated on the White Oak tree,charity is a ruse to hoard more wealth …and memory flows like blood from a wound
(stanching does slow but never stops the vein:it takes a lifetime to die, more or less) —remains our mother to enwomb us all. On a Baby Taking his First Steps Everyone’s seen a baby learning to walk,nothing special there, maybe a tweet.
(The cynic tweets: too many babies as it is.And who can argue with the cynic?)
So intent, though, I couldn’t help notice, As he neared the end of his adventure, how he held out his hand to his mother, who folded his fingers gently in hers to help him finish his quest—and feel her praise.
He who could incant the son in his eyes,as he turned his face to meet his mother’s,hearing her voice softly tremble with joy,would liberate language from Babel’s curse.
The incantation would transfigure history,this wilderness of misery no more:
landscapes of light illuminating love,laughter of love to allay our longing,triumphs of transcending tyrannies of time,proscenia precise for playing our parts,webs of wonder eternity inweaving,the end of enmity from envy’s error—
the chords
of our seaming that bind us freeto divine our demons for death our life. She Suggested I Write a Poem About the Garden in Early Spring
Pruning is a lesson useful to learn,As gardens are schools we should not spurn.
Many are the scripts we can pause to read—None so enlightening as the meanest seed.
Threads of green weave gowns of glory to shameWinter’s erasure of modesty’s name;
Life as precious as the eye of a wrenDares assert its right to triumph again;
A seeming stick so plain any might laughCome two more months bears heaven’s autograph.
We master so much less than we suppose—Grafting slips on enchantments nature grows. Reading Shakespeare Now and Then Meant So Much to Both of Us
Weird are the ways of words, even wayward.
Sidera, Latin for “star,” gives riseto our “desire”—“to desire” is to dance with starsacross the abyss inscrutable otherwise in present time.
What if stars exist solelyto provide a wayword for human longing?
For now, leave cynics to sputter in their fury.
And “consider” (another word from sidera)that longing and “deeming” alike, though often at odds,weave our lives in interstellar fusionof folds of space that unite us and divide usat one and the same time—as if Plato did not errand troubled stars in the toils of time are we all.
Incompletion, it must follow, is our elemental.
Slay number as we might, two distincts, division noneremains a sum of love beyond our ken, if proper to our kind:
to give away yourself keeps yourself still (this is not the worst),
and when by love’s wit we learn to hear with eyeswe may at last see Cordelia feelingly. Re-reading King Lear: On Lips
Blood their beauty, they open in ecstasyOr savagery—sometimes both at once,Kiss or bite you learn only afterwardsAnd even then you may mistake the mark.
We long to taste them—and ages of scumMen and women both have mixed, magiciansQuesting for the trick, cosmetic toxinNo one can resist and no one can survive.
Desire forgets, the closer it comes,The awful orifice all depend on,Promise of inwardness, the mine of love,The sink of self … sucking … life … sucking
(Hence philology discovers the rootOf female in dhē(i) > dhē-mnā, “to suck,” Primal rite, abyss of transcendence,Of derivativeness both wound and wonder).
Perilous to trust those who trumpetThey rise above the constant enticement.The fears that boil in bellies that shriveledSpew forth defilements none can endure,
Not even the lips through which they erupt,Which eventually sag with slobberNastier than shit—the stool of self-righteousness—As if we did not, all of us, drop from lips,
When, though there was good sport at our getting,We do not escape the old, mad king’s truth:We came crying hither. Thou know’st, the first Time that we smell the air, we wawl and cry.
When we are born, we cry that we are comeTo this great stage of fools. Through lips we come,Of lips are we formed, our labial body.Touch them and feel how penetrable you are
Or else you but slenderly know yourselfStarving to an O without a figure,A Naught of lips that no longer performTheir part, parting to love and be silent. Reading Salvador Dalí: Together We Admit the Scandal of the Hand
Not everything requires sharpening teeth.(To orality we affix an em.)Nature draws from a random underneathTissue to finger the scandalous limb.
The hand is the other for either sex.The genius of touch lies in the caress.When satiety can do no more but vex,We reach out to share our mortal duress.
Innocence alone intuits very well(Condescend if we must) that solitude,Though part of life, is frequently hell,While hands are made for giving love its mood.
Witchcraft
Her hand glistening with anatomy,She shapes the medium to her satisfactionIndulging its demands if she sensesDoing so will release greater energyTo prolong the making and improve it …Until the heat rages (but does not hurt)And all her elixirs, her purest spirits,Must inundate the shape of her desireTo prevent it from surviving her,A monument to her fallible charms. Sharishing (She’s Gone Now)
They’ll abuse you when you invent a word(They rarely read the Paradiso, it’s clear),Therefore I sharpen both, courage and quill.
I have loved poetry in English my life long,Reading Milton and Shakespeare as a boyWho heard words like thunder in distant storms
And shook at times until I had to weepOr burst with the tempest they roused in my heart …While all around me others laughed and tongued
Giggling girls seeking good times and the thrillOf power they’d never have again over thoseWho’d promise anything to get them some.
I spent my youth afraid of women(You would not believe) under religion’s axOf guilt at feeling I was some body.
In my dreams I met her, a woman for me,No madonna, no whore, just a woman,For me, who would not mock or mother me.
This I have called sharishing, and I knowIt’s all in my mind — a fantasy, yes —Nor is any woman anywhere to blame.
My imagination, by its own excessHobbled, too lame to flee its own fire, Too male to leash its furious desire,
Reaches for someone who doesn’t exist.But if she did … she’d show me her man My woman as I’d show her my woman her man. Small
Entire affection hateth nicer hands. Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene I. viii. 40. 3
I don’t know anything about homo sapiens,But I’ve had some practice being human,And here are a few of the things I’ve learned.
If you ascend the Jungfraujoch and standFacing west northwest, in the consummate light,You’re actually looking at most of France.
You may find yourself snorting, “What the …?”But I can explain, just give me a chance —I’ve already admitted what I do not know.
Being human means understanding this:You’re small. Fly as high as Icarus,You’re still small (can you count a light year?).
Build the biggest machine imaginable,Design a pill for constant copulation,Clone yourself until you’ve disappeared — You’re small. Is it any wonder we loveComic-book super-heroes the way we do?Even Croesus Cyrus made ascend the pyre,
Prayers to Apollo not changing a thing.And what are gods but men who are not small?And super-heroes are just this season’s gods.
I don’t know anything about homo sapiens,But being human requires lots of practiceAt learning to love the all out of small. Post-Pied-Piper Philology
All are agreed destruction is not enough:Debris and detritus, sewers of blood,Screams, cries, and wails of the mutilated,Hunger’s sick irremovable mask—Something is missing still. DesecrationBleaks across the desolation, a sludgeOf pus, tears, and syrupy mockery spitOozing into every pore of any lifeWith energy left to imagine love.
Empedocles would fume, tremble, and explode,They were right, they had always been right:Strife is the origin and the end.But Eris is the same word as Eros—Heart effects of division: strife and love.And what is the difference Philosophy Cannot tell nor the volcano pronounceNor the Sybil in her caves oracular howl?(Perhaps there is none, tyranny cackles.)
Across the wasteland they spy each otherAnd the merest lust ignites their fancyThere may be here a remnant of feelingNot yet coded by tyranny’s data.They make their way through baseness as usual—The feeding frenzy voiding the helpless—To touch some spot that once was forbidden.The spark of pleasure surprises them bothSince pleasure was banned before it was bombed.
And so they fuck, as two human beings Sometimes will—sucking relief so precious—In a world careless of the sufferingThey have to endure. The fucking is sweet But fragile, fragile as it so often is,And no proof against the acid grin On the face of wickedness all round them,Leering at their passion with the uglinessIt smears upon the body’s innocence.
Yet more bombs in what once was a city(Society, a concept long since damned),And explosions delight dealers everywhereWho laugh at the people who dreamed of the good.After the dust, in the caverns of debris,They find two limbs—a man’s arm, one, a woman’s,The other—joined at the hands, fingers entwined,Perhaps in an oath tyranny must loathe,The right of their earth to be as one in words.
END
I
The philosopher selects his topicFor the day, a Muse meant for winter’s gloom,To wrest from sleeting particulars A form for a fable for more than a few. Music, he’s heard, is the only solution To the problem he poses: everyone Listens to music. But, he challenges, “This is merely to restate the problemSince music, though articulate, is dumb. “Where is,” he asks, observing the planetWreak havoc in white outside his window,“The Piper who need not apologize?” As if the earth itself retorted aggrievedThe very mountains mocked his query,So it seemed to him, since he understood Division is the engine of all that lives.Furious gales scoured the mountains, As he lowered his gaze, and he felt the cold, Loveless, but pure all around him, and white.He thought again, another log on the fire,“What do we mean, then, when we say, unity? “Is it pure, white lovelessness, coercionOf trillions of crystals by cohorts of cold?When did we ever unite two things
“Without coercion, violence and disregard?The wonder” (he appropriates thaumazein)“Is always the couple that continues, “Aporia insoluble in ordinaryInterrogation of the world we have erectedTo pretend we are creatures not subject to cold.” As if to mock him with providential proofThe winds hammer his roof, walls, and windowsWith force so savage (if clean) he recalls The hour he first understood mortality,That men destroy with far greater gaietyThan they create with. No house is natural. II
“This is how she dies, be it orgasm or torture,Nature unnaturally mailed in the law,Penuried to the part of pleasure and pain, “Where deliver she must more dust to dustLest pleasure should lack the pain, and blood,To entice the beast—homo lupus hominis— “To lick at her wound and so fell the citiesOthers have raised as if they were OtherThan the Animal enamored of Murder.” The wind in his mind bites so bitterly,He fears he has left some aperture unshut,But he calms himself it is only a house.
The last woman to live there talked with him,Her equal, and smiled at him when she died,Mumbling incoherently of life and love— Her lone child killed at her husband’s handWho killed himself with poison to die impure.His Philosopher Queen, he’d smiled, already The day they met and she ceased to weep.She would have chastised him for digressing,And he would have bit his lip in agreement. III
“The Königsberg time-keeper, Kant by name,Once thought for ten years without publishing a word.”He strokes his cheek and returns to the construct, The house, which quivers still with winter,And which, he knows, was a place Kant rarely left,For long, or far (itself a form for a fable). So much happens within. He’d inventedIn his youth a word that, he thought, told, in soundAnd sight alike, the event he felt —inwordly. (They had argued but finally agreedInvention is the phont where th-ought is raised—“But cave,” she would quip, “of Plato’s Error.”) “Inwordly, he conceives,” he posed, “what can’t Utter its destiny any other waySince he is his information and it “Can’t suffer severance from its him (or her)— Inword, she requires not just translationBut her own Pied-Piper Philology.” Easy to comprehend why Kant stayed homeIn a construct he might pretend his ownSince who walks abroad a lexicon incarnate? IV
“Many now hail the Muse Digitalia!Stay at home and surf the world! Careful,Though, of your connection: all that connects “Is not gold (though log’d-on for sure it is).Now our Grail is the unending nexus,To every cataclysm immune, a Pearl “Of feeds directly to the brain, no matter(Pia or otherwise) the price.” “Restrain yourself,”She would have cautioned: “Irony consumes Its consumer until all thought is afterthought.”He pauses to remember her voiceAnd notes that “Memory can’t be replace “By electronic devices: moviesOf her inword, neither programs nor -ware,Are like the snow random and beautiful And fierce.” He lays down his irony for her.Immediately a new facet formsOf the problem he has chosen for the day. V
“Suppose, for argument’s sake, a unitaryBrain of all the neurons at the planet’s Disposal—would the Many then be One? “Would humanity be finished? Plato,Asleep at last? Aristotle, too? and ZenMasters folded in night eternal?” “Sed contra!” a scholastic might exclaim,“From quantity to quality inferenceIs fallible; otherwise, ants would be “The highest form of life on earth—numbersGuarantee their ecology.” And who knowsBut that humans, just so, advance and serve ants? “The problem,” he reminds himself yet again,“Is not numeric, though science dream it were;The problem is other, older than numbers, “The problem is Otherness itself.A man walks into a school and murdersThe girls one by one. Counting is (in) vain.” VI
The tea kettle whistles. He takes the steamBefore he tastes the tea—very cold today.“Tomorrow,” they say, “will be colder still.” “How very accurate the instruments are!Who can dispute that distance from Nature,Prediction and control, are man’s crowning end! “No house is natural and that is best.Who wants to sleep on stone or lap the staleIf water is scarce and rain is missing?” “Down with poets,” he’s heard the multitudes, “Philosophers, too: Technology,”They roar, “is Theology enough for us.” And so he is surrounded by machinesWizardry of yore could never imagine,Much less tool to such pernicious precision. He has heard them shout, “Tear out his tongue,Chop off his hands—let Man the tool-makerHave his revenge.” “Against such missiles What missives might I send,” he muses?“Even Orpheus” (no Orpheus, he) “succumbed—And to rocks that begged forgiveness for harming him. “What Piper for a world in which Robots(Much cheaper than men) can run machinesFlawlessly and constantly—nay, endlessly— “As long as electricity abounds?Since there will always be electricity(Greed requires it), the Pied Piper should sing “For the children, the girls and the boys,Who will never vanish inword the mountain,Since the mountain vanishes inside the machines.” VII
He does not, as a rule, dine at mid-day,But he’s hungry now—the cold, he reckons,Hard to recall a day of late so cold. Childless himself he had always knownSomeone else’s imago he couldn’t be,His own identity quicksilver enough. Still he meditated on childhood a lot,A universal transcending barriers (Perhaps all of them, except division itself). Characteristic of every child, all agree,Is the will to believe, called, negatively,Innocence (“not harming”); damningly, Naïveté. He admitted, freely,In him “A child still lives who sometimes crows,As a small one will, when he topples his blocks, “Thinking especially grand of himself,Happy for ooh’s and aah’s coming his way— Unknowing he plays for adulthood’s curse.” The loss of innocence every culture He consults from the dawn of its script Grieves and laments: tragedy (or satire) Crawls from the crack in the spirit’s crownAnd forks identity with failure’s fangs— “What! You thought a god was he who spoke to you? “It was but an orifice of earth, my son,And you heard yourself from your own gut groanThe end of your life awaits you there.” VIII
Orestes had moved him as much as Oedipus.The Greeks had taught him what we need to know:“Our mothers doom us the moment they bear us, Their love, though real, the face upon the monster’s void.Let no one seek to know the origin,Soon enough comes the panting in death’s embrace.” She used to rejoin, “What must a woman do?”They would argue for hours, at best to conclude,“Allow not nature more than nature needs
Man and woman alike should fill the beasts.”In their embraces, they strove for something moreThan the thrust of glands: they beheld one another— As she gave him to him, he gave her to her,That passion’s pathology might emergePassion that knows forth from both the fluency comes. IX
As always, to think of her was to thinkWith her, and in her, as in another language,Not “foreign” but “neighboreign”—a fiction, yes, But we do not live by bread alone.“There must be some time a fantasy by whichWe surprise the chemistry of carbon, “Else why not indulge living narcosis?Whether alcohol or cocaine, the drug,So the argument runs, makes life bearable “By mixing in death—the trick, we hear, Is in the proportions.” He had waked upIn time to his own appetite for death. He prepared more tea. When he was in schoolMany of his friends had tried some “shit,”Their name for it, and it grieved him to think, “How right they were.” The afternoon sunlight,As it will in winter, paled to thin yellow.Time and he crossed in reverie revenant. X “There are,” he reckons, “many forms of narcosis,Narcissism itself not the least of these,Numbness needed against the pricks of life; “But also the needles deep in the blood”—The moments of youth when he needed sleepHardly at all but ate amounts of food That appalled distinguished elders who deducedOnly a barbarian would consume Like that (and yet he was always hungry). As others learned what energy he burned,They fled far away, but he told storiesOf needles in his blood interminable. “Solitude is neither punishment nor crime,But to sit still to concentrate with needlesIn the blood is like Njál in his Saga, ‘Stritaðist hann við að sitja’: he struggles To sit still (when he does he foresees the burnersWho will arrive to kill his sons and him).” No one, not even she, had understoodHow much it hurt to feel so much lifeInjected into his veins—alone, he cried. Cry he would still, in this decade, his seventh,But no one saw, he was sure of that, for menFlood with hate as they fill with years, and endless Are the ways they tear each other apart(“The smylere with the knyf under the cloke,”As Chaucer had said)—he trusted no man But loved all alike who could teach himFor the wisdom they gave, since he knew that timeDevours us all if our hate doesn’t first. XI “What then would he be who could write a mythTo which men and women would freely assentAs the story for which they would spend their being? “Any religion is too much religion,”He swore to himself, as he lit a candle,“‘Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,’
“As Lucretius had said (‘So many evilsCan religion persuade men to commit’).No, men and women need stories, not creeds; “They need quests, not priests; imagination,Not dogma; re-pairing, not des-pairing;Figuration, not disfigurement. “True, animals we are, one of the Apes.But Power errs to presume that this is all—In this animal evolved also spirit, “And though some prove that they are bestial,Many heed the spirit, answer humane:These to the herd never surrender, “For the narrative of humanityIs resistance, heard through the ages,And the title of tyranny is brief “(Though the number of lives that are lostMeasures the horror and teaches the causeTyranny from the earth must be scourged). “Let unity, then, be an ideal,But not if by blinding and binding,For then Power is ‘god,’ we are agreed, “People are units for grinding Xchains(Women on their knees, children in mine-shafts),And the planet a sarcophagus, “Eater of flesh copulating for corpses— Cupidinous somaticiosis.Either this or a discourse of liberty— “Forged from the urge to rise from foaming seasOf primordial zoa practicing unityUntil a form emerges of fiction “Capable, in idioms of spirit fluent:Freedom is freedom to choose my bond If bound I must be in the time called history; “In the time called story, she is a woman,He is a man, who heed the spell of Yes To bliss the body for the blessing of death.” XII
These words he chose this time—this particularRuin of white. As always, he recorded them,For the next time, in the core of his heart, For the cold is ever, and infinite is space,And night is the day when the stars demandAn account: “I am human, the being who speaks.” The Pied-Piper’s Pipe
Some notes you will hear the rest of your life.Like your skin, they enclose you, seal you inBut also let others caress your song(You learn you need them for the journey ahead).
The music insists that you share your gift,Though outcast your life long, in tatters hated,Your sound is the clarion that tempersWith desire wholly their own the air they breathe.
Once to have heard you is never to doubtThe body is no border of limitsOn yearning for completion imaginedAs singer and song both two and one—
They follow you to follow themselvesTo their dream of waking in daybreak forever,Not in denial of death but the callOf life heard in your pipe as soon as you play.
This is the art in the Pied-Piper’s pipe.And, if we fear it, as we know we do,We fear in ourselves the art of our kind,Which is to transmutate fear into song.
The consequence otherwise is silence,Not just the absence but the death of chords—The cynic’s black hole, the assassin’s missile,The dictator’s drone, the two-timer’s twaddle.
We must learn to sing—our body’s birthright.Let us heed the Piper while we still can:Fear is energy imprisoned in ill;Song is embracing empowers us all. The Pathosophical Pied-Piper Philologist Converses with the Philosophical Poet Nietzsche was first, it’s true, but I didn’t know that when I unlocked the door. I walked through the hallssomewhere between anguish and awe, studying the busts that line the crumbling walls as far as the eye can see. I thought it only politeto visit each oneand pay homage due,but I tired before I reached the dividing arch—and rested on a broken though shining marble.
I retrieved my pipe, gently tested every stop,and began to play, drawing every breath from deeper than I ever remembered,as if it belonged to the genius of the place.
Surprised by her question, I was not frightened—I had so many of my own.I recall feelings of reliefthat I was not alone in so vast a hall.
“Why are you here? Ruins like these no longer sigh.”
“I have come to listen to your oldest wordssince I must find a way to free—” “You would wake us, then? Say you did. You would not comprehend.”
“But I have to try. Invention is all that remains—and you…you are awake…”
“So it seems to you,pathosopher?—so you call yourself?”
“Yes, the ‘suffering of wisdom’ more than the ‘love of wisdom’—that is what I know. No words—”
“Agreed, no words, that we knew, too, but… there is no syllable as pure as your desire,not in old words, not even in our old words.”
“Do we then just lie atop the corpsesbreathing history, dust and ironyof incalculable copulas,transient pleasures, insatiable and unsatiated?”
“Is there anything else?”
“How!? How? How? How can you, all of you, of all who have lived, ask such a question?Do you amuse yourself? Do you tempt mefor your amusement? Is one of you keeping score, etching my fears into the wall?Would my tears were as hot as my furyto burn your hands but first your eyes!”
“Is this, then, the pathosopher? Are you not just one more bone-sack of impatience and stupidity? Man-being unchanged?”
“If unchanged, then look at yourselves.”
“True.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
“No, but what we have to say, to that men will not listen,preferring death to life,unknowing what they call lifeis death in disguise, appetite—petition pleading for pleasure—poison sugared in self-deception…”
“Do you hate life so much? Just another religion robbing the poor of their livesas they pretend to lifewith the lies they’re told?”
“No, we do not hate life and from the beginningnever restingwe sought antidotes to creeds: creeds are the breeders of hatred, pestilential.We do not hate—even creeds.”
“But what purpose, then? If men do not listen—” “Then we are to blame, you cry?”“Yes, that is the pathosopher’s cry.I tell you, I told you, I have come to listen—”
“To our oldest words—”
“Yes, pathosophy listens,leaning my ear to the other before me—the suffering of wisdom—for power is addictionand the powerful are ill, diseased with hate and greed,and there is no healing, only herding of the poor, the hungry, and the haltinto death chambers they call homes or ICUs—cancer, incest, abuse,processed morality, processed mortality.”
“Then, pathosopher, listen, if you dare. The oldest of words is health which none of youunderstands in your arrogance disdaining life for copies of death(as if nature were deceived)which only healto breed more ill. Nature is not deceived. You, only you, pretend to life you do not own and never shall. You treat a gift as if it were your right, your possession,ignoring truths that,like earthquakes, tsunamis,will have their say, when they will, no matter what you think…or do…or weep.” “And tell me,how does this differ from any other dogma—from some mad-dog ruseabstruse to defraud by hawking a part as if it were all, not apart fromthe forgery of the wholeyou’re passing?What is to prevent the scorn greed and hate have ready always?”
“Look around you. Look. What do you see?”
Surprised again, I paused.
All had changed. A gloom deep as any night I have known yet illumined by blood-red bolts of silent lightening surrounded me so that I saw not one of my limbs nor my pipe.
“Imagine, pathosopher, your profoundest prayer,your most selfless charity, your deepest affection, the good so primal you would lay downgladly your life for it, and ask yourself, pathosopher, this question, this question—one:‘What good would I do, what good would I be,without my body’?”
My hands I saw first as though they belonged to the bloody gloom, and my voice I heardas from a distance yet just beside me as I asked,
“You…you, too, are you not…?a pathosopher, too?—the next oldest…”
A sudden noisediverts me:I hear I think laughing,and I turn, tremblingI find…around me gathering in great throngs men and women and children it seemswithout numberask me to pipe that they may dance. Cycling over the Converted Trestle Bridge, Imagining Stephen C. Foster, We Lament the Tragedy of American Racism
Quiet isn’t the absence of sound(quiet isn’t absence at all),quiet is the presence of soundanticipated,as the self is presumedby the boundary of the bodylike a phantom limb of the complete individual unable to accept the trauma of division—inauguration of death:the Angel in repose upon the dark white riverrolling with life and its perilinescapable, edged with pleasuressenses so slaver for they forget pleasures are dreams where the cuts didn’t heal and lips disgorge liquors of longingas cries awaken the Angel to restore the quiet life claims is its own to disrupt,as if life somehow were not itself just another swell and lap lap and swell“way down upon the ‘Swanee’ River.” Triumphant Now, She Shook Her Head, Is the Noise in the Land
Man is indeed crazy. He cannot make a worm but will be making gods by the dozens. Michel de Montaigne My heart breaks once again to see the wounds That we thought had healed erupt into flamesMen cannot extinguish and gods cannot explain—O, we die very young, old as we are,Refusing as we do poetry’s chrism.
We close our ears to the name it whispersThinking to flee the doom we just provoked,Which accelerates its feeding on usNow that we pretend it does not existSince some button hissed we need not listen.
Triumphant now is the noise in the landAnd with our feelings we have fattened it:Fear is the virus that cannot be foiledSince it evolves through its victim mutatingInto the ignorance on which it feeds. Poetry’s Defection to Ordinariness, Otherwise Known as Minimalism
Everything must be small (smaller, if possible).The opposite of small is not large or expansive.It is preciousness (I might have said preciosité,But that would be precious, one of the signsThat poetry can only talk to itselfAbout the shattered compact she left behind).
Now the razor and the shaving mirrorAre the arms of Achilles, and the shieldIs any prophylaxis lying to hand. Helen is a thing of air and plastic.… You write as though a poem were statuarySinking in murky water. All you can mouthIs the moan of desolation you feel At losing a form fleetingly yours.You never consider diving for it. That would be action, even perhaps Heroic action. Better to equivocate In the vowels of obscurity Announcing a fate long since familiar.
Helen is a thing of air and plastic Who can be found in every city pool Pretending she doesn’t know her measurements.…
From such simulacra poetry flees.
For its exercises of despair The audiences shrink to an eliteInsecure except for their posture Of defenders of that for which defense Means the cause is lost already, in the dark Awaiting a doom of light, a people’s eyes.
If any new (not news) is to erupt From this holocaust it will not be The play of light on the priceless vase She broke before she finally stormed away, For that is a story, however human,Very old, nor will it be the latest Cartoon able to leap a billion dollarsIn a single bound.
It will be much lessExpected, an emergency no one Notices until the precise moment When minimalism catalogs her last Stray hair from the pillow where she criedWhen he snapped there must be more to life than this. Still a Metaphor
Consider the Cottonwood in my backyard.Nearly 80 feet high, its canopySpreads over three contiguous lots—In full leaf it casts heroical shade.All its branches strive for the sun, to feed,And those lower on the trunk quickly die:No light — they starve, crack, crumble, and fall.
It would be easy to make a videoOr take a sequence of black-and-white stills—You could even record a dying limb’s crack(And surprise yourself at how loud it sounds)—But there is also something to be saidFor poetry in such a fall as this.That life means death is still a metaphor. An Essay in Aesthetics
I cherish the song that tells my storyAs if the writer knew where I’d slept,How hungry I’d gone, how cold it was,And even the number of tears I’d wept.
Some times we assume the only artIs some stuff or bother we don’t understand,But it may be truer to life to sayArt is what we know we may next-to-stand. She Did Not Color Inside the Lines
Mockery and scorn boast a lexiconAlmost as rich as sexual slur’s,So satisfied are we to humiliate—We exhaust invention’s blackest seamWherever we find the ore of hatred.Nor need we prospect far or longTo mine the idealism that aspiresTo color the world inside the lines,The tendermost fuel of human hatred.
The beaten child, the doll missing a leg,The bones so fragile that never straighten,The mutilated girl … arouse in someThe Why that hatred smelts in mockery—Who are you to care at your plate so full?
This, we know, is the dialectic,The glove inside out: try to redress it,Your hand gets caught all the same and dirty.
Beyond the mockery, beyond the scorn,In the stillness where humanity heals,The question scars the caring conscience,Who, if I color inside them, drew the lines?
Every idio(t)logue, salivating, baresHis teeth to snarl his answer, “God … or the devil”(“My God, that is, your devil”). Should you object—“Your authority?” — your status as objectIs at once secure. Thus, objectified,You may die. The TelefornicatorsWill sigh as one, on all the channels,“Well, he would not obey! What can we do?”—Your death just another casualtyIn the Godheads War (on all the channels!)Now some three or four millennia old.
Irony, a species of dialectic,Only goes so far; like a band shorterThan at first you thought, it cartoons you back:No one is not dirty and none is clean.Check under the nails of the smiler’s lustNever hidden so well you cannot seeThe flakes and fragments of recent victims.
Necessary, then, to admit the truth,Life is lived outside the lines, where you drawYourself the figures of your fate, the faceYou will turn for others to see when you own,“I can say no more. These were my pigments.I mixed them myself with my own body.Whosever the lines, these drawings are mine.” The Mystery of the Gratuitous For the fruitfulness of a gift is the only gratitude for the gift. Meister Eckhart I often learn an aria by ear.My grandfather’s talent passed down to me.The experience arouses a fearOnly madmen, children, and saints can see. It emanates from deep within my breastAnd dyes my skin with the soot of corpses:Its ghastly likeness long ago confessedTo catastrophic metamorphosis. Knowledge so old it might be star storiesOppresses the spirit with purest fact:Chance is the motor of categoriesThat arbitrate the equity of lack — Each receives just enough to understandThe gifted without gratitude must be damned. The Baseless Fabric
I watched him slay the wounded horse with a tubeof shining dark blue metal, a needleimprobable until the horse ceased at onceto spasm and whine. The few of us fled.
When we reached the edifice each of us gasped—no structure so high in all our lives,no fabric so smooth, to put glass to shame—and yet other escape nowhere in sight.
We could hear their beasts and could wait no longer.Suddenly alone I reached out and the walllike a curtain yielded to my graspand I began to climb hand over hand
on either side of me materialso hard and bright I could scarcely believethe baseless fabric welcoming my handsas higher and higher I breathlessly
climbed to the summit I could no way make out—I dare not look down, but looking upwardI could not endure for fear so namelessI began to weep and cry out for mercy.
I heard a voice summon me, and I turned but instantly the fabric turned itselfto metal again, or even harder,and I knew I must fall, but I reached in
and the baseless fabric met my hand againas I listened to the voice irenic say“You have fallen far enough—cease to climb.Ascend now and rest. Your trial begins.” I Share with Her My Vision of the Rainbow Fiddler in a Stellar Nursery 500 Light-years from Earth
Weeping with the tears of the banished cloudsIn the furies of wind disappearing,The Rainbow Fiddler tunes his instrumentTo play for the Knights of the Sun and the Moon
Who mount their Dragons once more assumingThis is the ride, their last, into the tomb,The garden once where they opened their eyesTo the Light and Lore of the world ascending —
The Fiddler remembers he played for themWhen the Cosmos sang there may be Life,And he knows he will somewhere play againWhen the tomb is sealed in its womb of dust. The Challenge of Oblivion’s Part in Our Knowledge
Every concept arises from the likening of unlike things (Jeder Begriff entsteht durch Gleichsetzen des Nicht-Gleichen). … and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects (durch ein Vergessen des Unterscheidenden gebildet). Friedrich Nietzsche
The oak far enough from its apparentCenter of gravity leans out towards meThat I remember the lightning strikeWhich anticipated my arrival.
I see its jagged edges split the nightAnd I hear the crackle of coincidence.I look for a way out—again, none appears.Thicket surrounds me. The air reeks of scorch.
I was here before. Did we part that day?I should remember. I am part of it.If I depart by this oak tonight, may I Forget I have forgotten to impart?
Or must I return until I can playOblivion’s part as well as my own? It Was Mine Deep in my dream yet fully awake,I saw them, at first in shock and terror,The heads of men on the bodies of fish.
I was walking along the beach hardly awareOf the roar of the waves in the blustery windWhen I saw an object I feared was a corpse.
But when I turned to it, it disappeared,A great white sail filling its place, stretching,It seemed, to the horizon or beyond.
I started to run to furl the sail,Afraid it would vanish, too, a phantom,Before I could decode its secret glyphs,
But then, just to the side of it, I saw them: Three fish with the heads of men seeming asleep—And I crashed into the wall of my disbelief.
Slowly the one nearest me opened its eyesAnd, gazing at me, started to sing lyricsI cannot remember, to my relentless sorrow.
I next saw him in bed with his lover,A woman so desirable I wept,The surgery having restored his body
Which gleamed alabaster eros, manhoodSo complete nature might rejoice in itAnd the woman drink it deliriously.
But when he turned to kiss her perfect lips,I could see the hole the surgery had leftJust below his neck between his shoulders
Where gills and lungs flanked his spine ghostly white,Breathing for him otherwise impossible.As they entwined, their bliss embraced, I dove
And light engulfed me effulgent but soft. My blindness waked me, and I cried out forlorn,But then I felt my body and it was mine. We Recite the Druid’s Prayer
May the love and light of truth spire their wayThrough the fall-iage of life until the end of time …
May the rivers of renewal find their levelsWherever the cosmos promises life …
May the caprice of being celebrateInfinities gods of ours can not copy …
May the incomprehensible sum of spaceFoil our presumption that we are needed …
May the faintness of our voices teach us To listen to life as if it were now …
All this we pray that we may leave in peace. We Share My Dream of Ragnarök
The first step stands in the midst of the TreeAbout head high, with the slightest of slopes.Who would ever dream, I wondered as I neared, Ascending such stairs not made for mankind?
As the steps emerge from the top of the Tree,Their surface translucent in the winter sun,Ivory so ancient of a knife-hilt gleamingScarcely reflects the burnish of the bones.
Did Thor, I wonder, defy the Giants here,Climbing the arms of a hero of theirs?The end invisible haunts with horizonsVast as mortality’s incomprehension.
Only a god who lifts the Serpent, WormOf All Earth, Midgarðsörmr, Jörmungandr,Dares accept the challenge from Yggdrasil:“Think these stairs you see are one of my roots,
To which of the Worlds Nine you do not know,But when you own your quest and name your doom,Fail not wisdom’s summons to re-nascence— To die of beauty is to once have lived.” She Questions Me on Prospects and Coverts
We are animals. We must not forget.There are times we must hide to save our lives.There are times we must play to save our spirits.
The covert where we hide is not just safe.It is a place we remember withoutRemembering we were ever there.
The field where we play resounds with joy.Even by ourselves we were never alone.Together we made the terror our home. On Occasion We Talked About Beowulf
The poet is not the serpent of truthTo strike at boasters’ provocative lies,Nor is he the dragon of plangent ruthTo breathe in tears his fire for all that dies.
The poet is the voice that named the Wyrm,Older than the slime from which it emerged,His core the cave where the copula yearnedTo make the mystery both hymn and dirge.
Wyrd is Becoming no hero imagines,The Wyrm in the rocks he fights in his dreams,But the liquor of verse from these enchanted enginesBinds his red-gold wound in the saga’s seams. The Beast Who Evolved to Devour Want, We Agreed
The story of a word is wonderful to tellAnd hear the mysteries that orbit about it,Clarity that flows from illumination
Of a dark you did not imagine untilYou felt it seep into your mind and heartOn seeing the abyss from which the word
Dehisced and seeded into human history.Take a word that often means erotic desire—Or any of its myriad multiples
Neoning their way through the cities of night—And consider its betrayal of our bodies:Want’s primordial meaning is emptiness.
Once it may have sounded like gurgle-wailingOf a wounded beast (in a tar-pit, perhaps?)Curdling the air for predators’ ears and glands.
If now a grunt for instant gratification—Strip joints, porn sites, private clubs, limousines—We might want to watch out for today’s tar-pits.
Want is not something you take wantonlyHowever much you want only to be yourself(As the saying goes): “want only” cuts two ways,
Exposing your lust as you seek to be justWho you are in a world weeping with want(Emptiness that will never be fed)
Where the lack you want only to fillIs a black hole you never imagined(Exclusivity its event horizon)—
When you sate your want, someone else whimpersThe last breath of the last longing of a lost life,The knell of want on an orb so copious
(Even insects are full of nutrition)That the heart must break (or leak its indifference)At the waste of life surrounding our want.
Listen to the word—fill your mouth and throat with it—And as your lips expand with the vowel and nasal,Swell the cavity everyone wants to satiate.
Or say it in French where “I want” is “Je veux.”That is the gurgle-wailing in everyone’s throat,The bleating (vurrr) of the beast trapped by want.
And try to remember we once were beastsDescending from the trees to walk the savannaWhere we learned from the wolf to hunt in packs
And care for our young by sharing that becameOver eons of suffering humane.Remember: ever more upright we stood,
Until one day one of us stammered, “Who are we?”And those wanting to listen quietly heard:“You are the beast who wants to devour want.” No Tiresias She
“si se non noverit” (yes, if does not know himself) Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.348
Home from work the other day, in the kitchen,She looks out the window at two snakesAmidst the citrus, aloes, and cameliasCoupling in a savage two-headed danceBlack on black slithering, a knot of sex.
She lunges to escape. He entwines her.Their mouths fall open, their heads like bullets(Tireless repeaters) — she will not submitUntil he proves he will outlast herIn a game where winning looks like losing.
She told me she once saw a hawk swoop one up …Now a pair breeding — just as shocking.The seer told the boy’s mother that NarcissusWould live long “if he does not know himself” —The skin of such knowledge who would not cast off? A Model of Sex (Perhaps Dated) That Brought a Smile to her Face
G. B. Shaw once complainedsex should be relegated to the youngwhile everyone else (adults, of course)went about other business, no longer burdened by such a chore.
An oddity of history, most would say,from a time when victims like Shaw(or Housman) were numerousbecause pleasure was counted a sinand must slither in the gutter.
Today porn is our number onerecession-proof industry, and we all know we must enjoy ourselves.But millennia of self-loathinghave made us forgetful.
We hardly remember the least even of our embraces without neglectingwhy we were there:likeness in pleasure bespeaksthe pleasure of likeness—we, not I. “Glamour” is a Form of “Grammar,” She Reminded Me
The light of a summer eveningshimmers through golden greenand quivers like a child in wonderat what it’s never seen. Too easily we forgetthat at first truth’s a fableso innocence may learn to endure the surrounding Babel. When experience curses the lightand swears every truth’s a lie,too easily we forgetnot every sentence begins with “I.” On the Fear of Death
Death is the mother of beauty Wallace Stevens
The Pied-Piper Philologist, purestOf his kind, attends the extravaganceOf words, in form, order, and heartful sound.
The sound resounding sounds the sound of feeling,The shelf of surprise in the sea of fearThat swallows those who refuse to listen
To the intervals between life and death—This is no exile, this is here and now,And because you die, you may live in this love.
You must not curse death, although you fear it.Look around you: every life relies on deathTo feed the tissues that entwixt the soul.
We clamor against the injustice of itAs if we somehow knew what justice isIn a cosmos of innumerable stars
Where quantum probabilities producePhenomena our brains process as real,Beside others, which to see, would unworld us
(Our world is ours more than we comprehend)—It cannot hurt to sing, dance, and give thanksFor what is ours by no entitlement.
And think of those who taught us to celebrate.Though they went deaf or blind or starved still young,They heard the intervals, this harmony …
In my rose garden I have thirty shrubs,And I have watched thousands of roses dieAs I longed for the one, the perfect rose,
Throughout my body aching for the beautyThat would not betray me, like mere pleasure,But would hold my breath in the enduring kiss
Plucked up by the roots from the crack of doom,And I have laughed at myself, the fool I am,For wanting what only wanting can want.
Folded in my partner’s body, I feelA sweetmeat of peace infinitely finite(As I sometimes think), inconsolable
That life must life from the two of us pull,Until we sleep, and in my dream I hearThe unmistakable music that is my own—
My own body, my own sex, my soil, my heart …And when I wake, on my lips one prayer only:May the death of fear precede mine. Amen. She Argued that Religion is the Terror It Pretends to Protect Us From
There’s a place in what we call the heart(Feeling for which we have no better name)We reserve for the smallest, quietest partWe long to protect from the endless blameThat flows through life like death through war,Leaving none but the victim to abhor.
Order without sacrifice cannot lastBut sacrifice without love cannot speak(The bellowing of a beast that has no pastNor any future of desire to seek)—Purest of all rites the world calls sacred:Murdering those who mirror our hatred.
Since language first crawled from out of our cavesWe’ve cried out for the wonder that knotsIn consciousness life and death as if slavesEach to the other’s reading of the lots,Which, like tears of the tortured, flood the globeAnd tell no lies but the truth in the probe.
Patterns’ randomness shocks us with strange persuasion.In a world of both-and, not either-or,You may abuse the singular relation(Bleed the paradox for all it may store),But in good time your spectre will ariseTo fill the space behind your empty eyes,
For religion, the Philologist knows,Means “to bind,” and from this bondage no manEscapes who doesn’t hand over what he owes(Though many try, yet they learn they never can):He must surrender his life another’s loveAnd welcome death the gift he’s dreaming of. A Rumor of Jesus We Heard and Investigated
Memory flows like blood from a wound.Stanching does slow but never stops the vein:it takes a lifetime to die, more or less.
Primordial, the wound spares no one.The customary agents, drink and drugs,have no effect but to make matters worse.
Look down at your hands or, maybe, your sex;feel eons of experiment in decay —how few your years, how enormous your lust.
The rage your civilization tells youyou should not feel boils your organs in scumthat peels from you like original skin
so hot you dare not touch lest you exposeyourself to shame, consciousness leaking,although you know it is everyone’s stain;
even the saint eats his words, “I hunger,”and finds no spot to relieve himselfbut his own immortal, putrescent soul —
practically infinite the books thus filled,the whole world over, with legends of sinmore exciting than the penances that follow
(unless, indeed, these should wallow in gore,limbs in pieces, and the sweet smell of sexdevoted to pain and sordid arousal).
“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani”is the cry from the cross everyone bearswho cannot forget the child each once was,
that creature dead now for decades of liesyou told just to get by … just to get by ….All your wealth will not that child resurrect,
nor do you even know how to weep for itso far have you wandered from love’s pure muck,the stuff you laugh at the child understands
“for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”What else could he do, looking around him,droves of haters eating each other’s lives?
“This is my body … .” His followers complained“Lord , this saying is hard,” but they ateand believed and tried to hunger the way
he taught them to hunger — for god, not goods.Little could they foresee how they would failin a future where faith vomits in the streets,
hope is castrated on the White Oak tree,charity is a ruse to hoard more wealth …and memory flows like blood from a wound
(stanching does slow but never stops the vein:it takes a lifetime to die, more or less) —remains our mother to enwomb us all. On a Baby Taking his First Steps Everyone’s seen a baby learning to walk,nothing special there, maybe a tweet.
(The cynic tweets: too many babies as it is.And who can argue with the cynic?)
So intent, though, I couldn’t help notice, As he neared the end of his adventure, how he held out his hand to his mother, who folded his fingers gently in hers to help him finish his quest—and feel her praise.
He who could incant the son in his eyes,as he turned his face to meet his mother’s,hearing her voice softly tremble with joy,would liberate language from Babel’s curse.
The incantation would transfigure history,this wilderness of misery no more:
landscapes of light illuminating love,laughter of love to allay our longing,triumphs of transcending tyrannies of time,proscenia precise for playing our parts,webs of wonder eternity inweaving,the end of enmity from envy’s error—
the chords
of our seaming that bind us freeto divine our demons for death our life. She Suggested I Write a Poem About the Garden in Early Spring
Pruning is a lesson useful to learn,As gardens are schools we should not spurn.
Many are the scripts we can pause to read—None so enlightening as the meanest seed.
Threads of green weave gowns of glory to shameWinter’s erasure of modesty’s name;
Life as precious as the eye of a wrenDares assert its right to triumph again;
A seeming stick so plain any might laughCome two more months bears heaven’s autograph.
We master so much less than we suppose—Grafting slips on enchantments nature grows. Reading Shakespeare Now and Then Meant So Much to Both of Us
Weird are the ways of words, even wayward.
Sidera, Latin for “star,” gives riseto our “desire”—“to desire” is to dance with starsacross the abyss inscrutable otherwise in present time.
What if stars exist solelyto provide a wayword for human longing?
For now, leave cynics to sputter in their fury.
And “consider” (another word from sidera)that longing and “deeming” alike, though often at odds,weave our lives in interstellar fusionof folds of space that unite us and divide usat one and the same time—as if Plato did not errand troubled stars in the toils of time are we all.
Incompletion, it must follow, is our elemental.
Slay number as we might, two distincts, division noneremains a sum of love beyond our ken, if proper to our kind:
to give away yourself keeps yourself still (this is not the worst),
and when by love’s wit we learn to hear with eyeswe may at last see Cordelia feelingly. Re-reading King Lear: On Lips
Blood their beauty, they open in ecstasyOr savagery—sometimes both at once,Kiss or bite you learn only afterwardsAnd even then you may mistake the mark.
We long to taste them—and ages of scumMen and women both have mixed, magiciansQuesting for the trick, cosmetic toxinNo one can resist and no one can survive.
Desire forgets, the closer it comes,The awful orifice all depend on,Promise of inwardness, the mine of love,The sink of self … sucking … life … sucking
(Hence philology discovers the rootOf female in dhē(i) > dhē-mnā, “to suck,” Primal rite, abyss of transcendence,Of derivativeness both wound and wonder).
Perilous to trust those who trumpetThey rise above the constant enticement.The fears that boil in bellies that shriveledSpew forth defilements none can endure,
Not even the lips through which they erupt,Which eventually sag with slobberNastier than shit—the stool of self-righteousness—As if we did not, all of us, drop from lips,
When, though there was good sport at our getting,We do not escape the old, mad king’s truth:We came crying hither. Thou know’st, the first Time that we smell the air, we wawl and cry.
When we are born, we cry that we are comeTo this great stage of fools. Through lips we come,Of lips are we formed, our labial body.Touch them and feel how penetrable you are
Or else you but slenderly know yourselfStarving to an O without a figure,A Naught of lips that no longer performTheir part, parting to love and be silent. Reading Salvador Dalí: Together We Admit the Scandal of the Hand
Not everything requires sharpening teeth.(To orality we affix an em.)Nature draws from a random underneathTissue to finger the scandalous limb.
The hand is the other for either sex.The genius of touch lies in the caress.When satiety can do no more but vex,We reach out to share our mortal duress.
Innocence alone intuits very well(Condescend if we must) that solitude,Though part of life, is frequently hell,While hands are made for giving love its mood.
Witchcraft
Her hand glistening with anatomy,She shapes the medium to her satisfactionIndulging its demands if she sensesDoing so will release greater energyTo prolong the making and improve it …Until the heat rages (but does not hurt)And all her elixirs, her purest spirits,Must inundate the shape of her desireTo prevent it from surviving her,A monument to her fallible charms. Sharishing (She’s Gone Now)
They’ll abuse you when you invent a word(They rarely read the Paradiso, it’s clear),Therefore I sharpen both, courage and quill.
I have loved poetry in English my life long,Reading Milton and Shakespeare as a boyWho heard words like thunder in distant storms
And shook at times until I had to weepOr burst with the tempest they roused in my heart …While all around me others laughed and tongued
Giggling girls seeking good times and the thrillOf power they’d never have again over thoseWho’d promise anything to get them some.
I spent my youth afraid of women(You would not believe) under religion’s axOf guilt at feeling I was some body.
In my dreams I met her, a woman for me,No madonna, no whore, just a woman,For me, who would not mock or mother me.
This I have called sharishing, and I knowIt’s all in my mind — a fantasy, yes —Nor is any woman anywhere to blame.
My imagination, by its own excessHobbled, too lame to flee its own fire, Too male to leash its furious desire,
Reaches for someone who doesn’t exist.But if she did … she’d show me her man My woman as I’d show her my woman her man. Small
Entire affection hateth nicer hands. Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene I. viii. 40. 3
I don’t know anything about homo sapiens,But I’ve had some practice being human,And here are a few of the things I’ve learned.
If you ascend the Jungfraujoch and standFacing west northwest, in the consummate light,You’re actually looking at most of France.
You may find yourself snorting, “What the …?”But I can explain, just give me a chance —I’ve already admitted what I do not know.
Being human means understanding this:You’re small. Fly as high as Icarus,You’re still small (can you count a light year?).
Build the biggest machine imaginable,Design a pill for constant copulation,Clone yourself until you’ve disappeared — You’re small. Is it any wonder we loveComic-book super-heroes the way we do?Even Croesus Cyrus made ascend the pyre,
Prayers to Apollo not changing a thing.And what are gods but men who are not small?And super-heroes are just this season’s gods.
I don’t know anything about homo sapiens,But being human requires lots of practiceAt learning to love the all out of small. Post-Pied-Piper Philology
All are agreed destruction is not enough:Debris and detritus, sewers of blood,Screams, cries, and wails of the mutilated,Hunger’s sick irremovable mask—Something is missing still. DesecrationBleaks across the desolation, a sludgeOf pus, tears, and syrupy mockery spitOozing into every pore of any lifeWith energy left to imagine love.
Empedocles would fume, tremble, and explode,They were right, they had always been right:Strife is the origin and the end.But Eris is the same word as Eros—Heart effects of division: strife and love.And what is the difference Philosophy Cannot tell nor the volcano pronounceNor the Sybil in her caves oracular howl?(Perhaps there is none, tyranny cackles.)
Across the wasteland they spy each otherAnd the merest lust ignites their fancyThere may be here a remnant of feelingNot yet coded by tyranny’s data.They make their way through baseness as usual—The feeding frenzy voiding the helpless—To touch some spot that once was forbidden.The spark of pleasure surprises them bothSince pleasure was banned before it was bombed.
And so they fuck, as two human beings Sometimes will—sucking relief so precious—In a world careless of the sufferingThey have to endure. The fucking is sweet But fragile, fragile as it so often is,And no proof against the acid grin On the face of wickedness all round them,Leering at their passion with the uglinessIt smears upon the body’s innocence.
Yet more bombs in what once was a city(Society, a concept long since damned),And explosions delight dealers everywhereWho laugh at the people who dreamed of the good.After the dust, in the caverns of debris,They find two limbs—a man’s arm, one, a woman’s,The other—joined at the hands, fingers entwined,Perhaps in an oath tyranny must loathe,The right of their earth to be as one in words.
END