THE CRITIC PLAY

An archeological report play preserved from the Age of Metaphysics, culminating in the 52nd-62nd Century AD. Based on the fragment (spoken by the female) which is this report’s climax as well as its chief piece of evidence, the rest comprising the denouement. The term “social democrat” is archaic and obscure. Such finely preserved shouts of past passion confirm our dreams for the future. It is our earliest example of the fractal sonnet form (ABCCBDEDFAEFGG) used in series. Archive: Shed Chamber Press, N. Parsonsfield, Maine, 8300 AD. (Diaries, 9993 AD.)

ENTER the critic to speak:

In fractal ruin lies the lay
Buried near my heart.
Now and then I take a line
And toast it with a sip of wine,
Exhuming still another part.
I’ve learned its total on the run
Within the cradle of my mind,
And joined its forces with a pun,
And placed my wisdom at its feet,
To make of it a critic play.
Its author is its heroine,
Who goes away to noble defeat.
So fitting a form’s the fractal sonnet
I must beg to stage my play upon it:

    (Critic stands aside)

ALARUMS --a female enters and speaks:

A social democrat I am not,
My politics of being, incorrect --
That all men are created equal
Seems to me truth endlessly sequeled.
But from the common state I’ll not defect;
I have life from the insubstantial air,

And, with the certainty of a mother,
Find the forgiveness of children most fair.
To construe the world in my own conceit,
A lucum conlucare I have sought,
Stood alone at night among the others,
Made my ballot box a cloaca sweet.
My vote’s been cast in my heart’s darkest part
But that’s what has kept it whole from the start.
 

(The female exits)

Critic as messenger speaks:

Which is to say, little credit’s due me:
I’ve been a messenger sent on his way
Not to heed the angels, nor to deny
They do make it seem joyous enterprise
How better I might spend these, my last days.
I’ve spent my mornings running, taking care
To keep pace with wonders passing brings,
As messengers do who make their way there --
There in the forest where the long road leads,
Where the bright rill runs on the dark green lea --
I’d fly there directly if I had wings;
But the message I carry is dead mens' deeds,
And the cry of the deep is dearly bought
With a song as soft as a young mother's thoughts:

The female speaks:

Let me pause in your shade to sing my song
And climb for a rest upon the great rock
Which blocks my way in the path’s vast middle,
Enshrined on top with a tree; for riddled
With runes in an unknown tongue, it must talk
As trees do, in time, to me. There the worms crawl
Where bright moss gleams on the dark wet stone,
And the flies take wing before my foot falls
From places beneath where fern fronds enfold
Darkness in shade, where shadows are strong.
I have come here now, I know, to atone
For the messages lost, or those left untold;
But stop! Here's a thought so soft and free:
Surely these messages here are for me!

The runes deciphered opened like coffers,
Dispelling balms all about--deep in the trunk,
Bark scarred and dark are words whose offers
Our present day must mock:
"A social democrat I am not" is sunk
In deeply, as though with a rout;
And there where the dark grain shows through the bright,
Once more, more savagely, there’s been hewn out
"A lucum conlucare is what I sought.”
Dark in the shade the shadows offer
"The judgment of children" is in light.
I’ve found them to be, these bark scars, well-wrought
And decided to sink them intact in my song,
Which I hum to myself as I walk along --

Critic:

And now, good friends, I will close with a thought,
The truth of which we have centrally sought
In seminar slow and colloquia broad,
In the bright sunlight and under the sod;
The very best plays are acts of the heart,
And the best among men take the best parts.

                        *    *    *

NARCISSUS

Over a pool of dry dust kneels Narcissus,
Searching in vain for his lost lover’s trust.
Echoes blow hard in time's bitter cold,
Bowling him over like pins with its gusts.

Searching for signs as a true lover must,
Wearing a shirt of regret and remorse,
Tucking his head down inside of his hands,
Gravity rolls him about in its rust.

Soundlessly rising he stumbles about,
Humbled by pain and awakened by shouts;
For floating on high in the darkening wold,
Comes news of the world, an end to the drought.

Fumbling wildly he signals his page:
Narcissus now learns that a letter's been sent,
Where answers unfold while questions are spent
Upon a device he's learned is a stage.

He opens the missive and unties its cache,
And reads there a tale of succor’s dark arts—
Around him the symbols of lightning crash;
The lines of his letter are broken like hearts;

He hears the torrent carrying a tune
He thinks it's the memory of drowning returned.
To all but the hand on his hand he’s immune;
The play on the stage in the wood is adjourned.

Over the pool of bright mud stands Narcissus,
Counting the inlets numbered in rhyme,
Gathering strength from the echoes resounding,
Backwards he steps, one step at a time.

Taking the hand that is proffered in silence,
Following blindly, wherever it leads,
Down through the byway and past the great fence,
Narcissus and shade float over the mead.

ALLUSION

Unjustified it seems I did the deed,
Gently ripped the new sown seed; passionless
Gave birth to mind, let destiny proceed
As though it were a flower.

And like a flower there it died
Pressed out between the pages of a book,
A brighter shade, more vital hue
Than death the text alluded to.

VIRUSES
 (The plan)

New snow floats down and covers up the old:
The shadows are deep. I think of viruses’
Dominion over man: they raised him up
In their conceit, and watched him run amok;
They created in him their image divine
(That being then the sole paradigm).
Billenia ago it happened: they
Devised the plan: let apes evolve their high
Domed brows, let ‘sapiens take dominion then,
Let him survive. “As ‘phids to ants they’ll be
To us.” (There were, of course, not yet the aphids,
But they spoke presciently in metaphor,
The language of viruses long ago.)

In a fission they saw it, saw him rise
To Parnassus, test the bonds that bound him,
Discover his own fermentation, his roots;
Saw him finally discovering them
(The viral invasion, the ooze sublime).
They in the deepening pattern’s oldest crypt,
In apocalyptic schism endured,
Preoccupied: “As molds to gravity
They shall be to us, intent on living
Symbiotically, immortal, divine:”
(They saw him in their holy image shine).
In old snow brightened by new, viruses glow.
They wait in the shadows I watch, and they know.

NATURE AND THE HEART

The heart I drew in symmetry I drew
With mind's eye open, and with an open heart.
So in the grass I dragged my rake,
And cut the young shoots down,
Yearling trees that blocked my open-hearted,
Open-minded way, the great symmetrical heart
I'd cut, envisioned in my mind.
I'd place my flowers down beside it low, in flower beds
On either side along its heart-shaped length.
.
What earnest war this Nature wages now
Against this plan of mine to cut a perfect heart
Through sweeps of old asymmetry,
Through swaths of deeper, lovelier stalks
And vines than any I'd make grow.
She makes me feel the power of her mind
In how she grows her trees in clumps
Right where my perfect heart-shaped path would be.
She laughs at flowers grown beside my paths,
She stops the dreaded shears from closing,
Makes all young trees when sprouting fast feel good.
She makes me bleed from scratches as I go,
Cutting my way through her undergrowth.
She would have me know, my Nature would,
A perfect heart was never in her plan.
 

MAGIC M
(String Theory and Spartacus)

Again my clothesline, there, had snapped and fallen down
—like Newton’s apple—leaving strings and quarks and branes
All tangled up with wooden clothespins on the ground!
Disgrace to see the fabric of the Universe with stains
Of grass—and shame to see the lowly particle
Of weak force grow so strong! I wept—and then rebelled:
"I am particle!" I yelled. “I am particle!
And I and I and I am particle!” I yelled
Some more, until I reached the end—eleven times
Invoked the magic matrix, Theory M,
In all degrees of freedom Witten rhymes,
Until the windy gravitons were stemmed.
Then up in perfect symmetry it rose
And hung itself upon the tree—complete with clothes.

THE BLIZZARD
(3/13/93)

In the past the fear
The sky is falling has forewarned
The duplicity of foxes
Or the uselessness of kings:
So it is now, the sky is falling.

Foxes and we cower alike
Under the falling sky;
We are its shadows walking
On blizzard feet.
That which comes in like the lion

Falls down like fleece in the night.
This blizzard, this night of dense security
Is lit with comforts of our past:
Candles, hissing green wood --
How we labored like love to bring it in.

So we confound once again
The duplicity of lions in lambskins,
Messages sent to earth from the gods falling,
Before the lights go out, before the stars return,
Before the fire turns to ashes.
Kissing them good-bye
Under the wide and starless sky
Black but in the light, on ramparts wreaking,
Our blizzard falls on us and bends
Our eyes to ages past again.

And thanks for that belies our fears:
The beauty that is snow befalls
Us all, warms us in its catastrophic glow.
We its candles through the ages
Burn to know the blizzard’s faces.

The sky is falling, light as lace.
In the brace of wind it brings
Is the song the sages sing.
Someone runs to tell the king,
Someone else sits down to sing.

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