EXPANSIVE POETRY ONLINE
A Journal of Contemporary Arts 

 

 

POEMS

by

Frederick Turner
____________

 

ARCHIVES Turner EPO Poems Prior to 2023

 

TURN AGAIN

   (excerpt)

Webmaster's introductory note:  A while back, Frederick Turner told me that he was working on another longpoem.  I asked if it was to be another epic akin to his extraordinary quartet (New World,  Genesis, Apocalypse, and The Return).  He hedged, seemed embarrassed.  "No.  It's more to do with my life and upbringing.  Now, I don't really want it to be autobiography, more of an intellectual history -- where I came from."  He felt genuinely shy about letting out personal details, feeling that far too many poets expend their energy in outbursts of autobiographical raving.  This is true, of course. Library shelves and bookstores are littered with such, especially from the last fifty years, and usually written by someone too young to appreciate their own material.  I've always wondered how a 30-year-old poet could conclude that anybody would be interested in his or her story (a short life along a predictable path from diapers to that first sexual experience to the trauma of frustrated ambition).  That's not a worry with Frederick Turner, who is far too old to waste time on such nonsense.  And besides, his parentage, upbringing, and accompanying international sojourns would be fascinating all by themselves.  But, as Frederick said he intended, there's so much more to Turn Again, a modest portion of which Expansive Poetry Online is proud to present to its readers.  Turn Again is indeed part autobiography, part biography (of a wide range of characters), and part intellectual history -- where Fred came from to lifelong interests and writing verse. As its subtitle says, it's also an inquiry into meaning. Enjoy.  

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TURN AGAIN

      An Inquiry into Meaning

                               I.

I, number one, the eye who sees this--aye,
That one.--Ai, what of him, poor stammerer?
That I-land islander: one needs to dwell
On him awhile. For all else fails me now,
Having been said and done, or failed in trying--
Trying to turn my givens into Spring.
It seems that I was always ever turning,
To never turn where turners turned before me,
Honoring their originality.
So I was always lost, but Lost's a country
That kin of mine had mined and made their own,
A state of mind that's all that I call mine,
Not minding being lost, for that is time.

Trace, then, retrace the turnings of the ways
This maze of words amazedly first wove.
"Vey" was my first word for myself, it meant
My shy and secret turn inside myself
To where the rich dark sweetstuff lay, so like
The warm flow ready from the veined white source,
That pillow of the world where I would sleep.
But not the same; that inner liquor brewed
And fizzed with what I later called ideas.

Mummy and Daddy and the red-haired child
Who was the center of the world, we lived
Inside a cubby-hole on four red wheels
I can't remember, but perhaps I do.
But that's what's doing the remembering:
That Mumbering, the bundled slumbering
Rocked in the ocean of identity,
That always was the sentience that sees. 

Always the traveler, I, travailer,
Used that packed self as stores to rummage in
For something that would serve at the next passage,
But never fathomed that it was a land
Worth fathoming and sounding for itself.
An aion, eon, in a weekend bag,
A blood-begetting marrow in the bone,
An ocean in a suitcase! What strange islands
Basked there in their moonlight oddity?
The dreams, unquestionably mine, were snapshots
Taken, and lost at once, of Mare Nostrum,
An inner ocean for an odyssey.

This could not be a novelistic thing.
One thing that fierce self knew was that it never
Would or could be compassed by a Freud
However wise (as my dead friend, Fred Feirstein,
The psychoanalyst, knew well at once).
Nor was it socially-constructed--how,
Stranger always, could a soul like this
Accrete a social exoskeleton?
These bones grew by themselves, their anecdote
Fitted no model, but cannibalized models.
I must swim, like a shark, or I would drown;
I ate my way through patterns of the mind.

Mind you, I don't much like that self, I say.
It still too much reminds me of my mother,
Greedy Edie, as she called herself,
The rebel of the Davis family.
Rebellion is such a waste of time:
This drought that drives me inward is a glut
Of all the narcissistic rage out there.
But hers were the sweet breasts that built my bones.

The red wheels were the Gipsy caravan's
We lived in in the last years of the war.
Edie and Vic are dead, and I can't ask them
If they were red, or did my fancy paint them?
That light falls now upon a planet seventy-seven
Light years away, the far edge of my being.
I can't run after it to catch it now.

Red, though, was the map of Britain in
The advert for the English driving school
Pasted inside the tiny post-office
Whose Welsh arms held a steering-wheel beneath
The wise longheaded cranium of Scotland.
And we were Reds then--both the families
Had cut us off, and Vic refused to fight,
But dug up unexploded German bombs
With poets, pacifists, philosophers.
Edie, a long-limbed girl, worked in the fields.

And then, quite suddenly, there was my brother.
Bobby, as he would boast, was born in a field.
And so it was a little family.
Edie cooked porridge on the glowing stove,
I tried to milk the happy bull next door,
Bob's big white face went grieved when I would pinch him--
I pinched him out of love though, and he knew it;
Bob ever since can smile and frown at once.

One little slip disabling the fuse
Could have destroyed it all, for Paradise
Is built upon the knife-edge of a cliff. 

Oh Vic. His black hair curly in my hands
When he would bear me, howdah'd on his shoulders,
And snort his trunk when I would spur him on--
How he'd extract a thruppence from my ear,
And read us stories every night forever!
But that was later, in St.Leonard's, while
After the war he learned his craft in London,
We in his mother's flat beside the sea.

How quickly this becomes biography!
The poet's life--what interest in that?
As if the holy child were singled out,
Or special virtue raised him above others,
Or some key factor in his upbringing
Were replicable, and should now be taught,
Or worse, why read the hard and puzzling poetry
When you can peck the life that it's about,
Or worse still, you seduce his mana
And take it for your own, its conqueror.
There's only one secret ingredient,
And that is what this late foray will seek. 

I've seen so many poets spend at once
The magic of their childhood and their self,
The nectar of their lost virginity,
The glamor of their early recognition;
And spend another thirty years in reruns,
Drugs and divorces and self-plagiarism,
Seeking the lost sources of their Nile.
I thought me wise to hoard and hide my story:
This is for those who brook my own denial.

For this is about something different.
It is the self, that archipelago
We all contain--that merits human rights,
That blossoms unto death with fertile dreams,
That promises and keeps its promises,
That seeks the truth in all its bizarre ways;
Poets contain it no more than do others.
But poets are technicians of the craft
That can explore it, mariners whose knots
And sheets and splices hoist the winds
That sweep the waters of the inner ocean;
Whose compass, cross-staff, astrolabe, and plummet
Can fix coordinates and sound the grounds.
Let this be then a chart, a log, a pattern,
An old-time rutter for a further search:
The sketches of those coasts just aides-memoires
That curious natives wave from as we pass.

Don't get Wordsworthian. The worth of words
Is not here to describe, but be, the soul.
The forces in between the chess-pieces
Create the pieces, new in every game.
Grammar can carve and graph and program
The footholds of the baby synapses
That form the net that catches memory.

Vic was a punster. In his later days
He'd get one off, then with his tongue would thrust
His dentures out to make an Alien grin;
His eyes would gleam, and Edie would join in.
Mater and pater, matter yes and pattern,
Making a new graft in the ancient tree,
Espaliered the fresh scion with the stock
And wove me to a web of poetry.
(Their proto-Indo-European game
Would get more multilingual by and by,
And Vic would pun in Bantu in his cups,
Mating his language with its ancient kin,
Drawing back lines together separated
By myriad eras of linguistic time;
And ancient roots would diddle with their cousins,
Incest, he said, making the heart grow fonder.)

Feelings. The radiant yellow of a wave of joy,
Cuddled and full of honey sharp as dream,
Almost too dangerous to be endured
Because, being come, it could be snatched away.
Joy was an opening door, a garden where
Amid all flowers there was one special flower.

--And rage so red my skin would sear and sting
And my small teeth so itched and itched to bite!
(I bit a teacher once who'd clenched my wrist
To take me to the cold grey headmistress.)
Rage full of grief that they would steal my Fredness:
They did not understand the inner me!
I couldn't say my word, I didn't know it,
They wouldn't let me find it, give me time.
I'd hurt them, hurt them all, the rotten rotters.
Yes, rage was such a swollen glowing pleasure.

--And there was terror. Taking me to school
Mummy and I would pass the Nag's Head Pub
Whose sign, a screaming witch gagged with a bridle
Was for the child the total of all fears,
The waking nightmare, casting shades of black
Across the margins of my eyes, all down the street.
Mummy must put her hand over my eyes
And hold my hand as well and not let go.
Yes, Mercatoria Street: the name itself
Still drags a little at the quaking heart.

And grief. Bad Johnny Braybrooks stole my scooter
And when I couldn't find it, how I wept.
"Heartbreak" is not quite it, the heart was sucked
Into my throat and blocked my voice and breath.
The sobs were spasms, sweet blue sugar-lumps,
Loss tearing loose some portal in the self,
Making the future different from the past,
A wet dawn fresh with liberation's tears.

--And there was love. The smell of Bobby's head.
And Daddy doing all the voices in the story.
And Mummy like the hearth at Christmas-time.
And then, one day, we peered into the crib
And in the soft white blanket lay a baby,
Our brand-new sister, like a little rose.

"Joy," "rage" and "terror," "grief" and "love"--
Sounds retroactively applied to what was prior:
Aren't those words a brilliant invention,
Like hers who first found you could eat a snail,
Or put a fire between the stones to cook it?--
And not to speak of bird's-nest soup, or cheese,
Or finding rotted grass-seed-water fun.

Nature is such inventions; they branch out
As "natus" did, to nature, natural,
Stemming from older roots like gnath or gand,
Whose other shoots are genus, generate,
Gender and genital, general and gene;
And in the colder north sprouted as "kind"
And Kinder, kin and kingship, human kind.
My little loves and rages were one tip
Of an immense tree, Barnstock, Yggdrasil,
Asvatta, Yaxche, or the Tree of Life.
Darwin's crude sketch had rediscovered it,
And since then we have seen the superforce
Branching to gravity, the weak and strong,
And then elecromagnetism and all the rest:
Chemistry, crystals, and the living cell.
So nature is the branching of the word.
To name those gods that wrestle us with passion,
The reason of the species, to survive,
Is to make new gods blossom from the old,
A game with more reality than the real.

The old professor lectures here who once
Screamed in his strong restraining mother's arms.
Fred freed and Red no more (though some have read him)
Returns now to the stock where he was born,
The arms that bore him, that would bore him later,
Whose passing later still he could not bear
To feel then, having failed to bear her up
When, on the road, she stumbled and so fell
And got her death-stroke from the bruise she bore.

Fred freed indeed could not do what he list.
I missed a word when I was listing feelings;
The darkest, cruellest word of all, that's shame.
It's haunting in the French, that bitter honte,
Which still is cognate with the sweet honneur;
In German, Scham is shame, and also vulva:
For shame's the birth-canal of all the virtues
Where inter faeces, there, et urinam,
The savior among beasts they say was born.

How strange that shamelessness is worse than shame!
Shame suffered and borne up with is a gift
That every grace can only imitate.
That's what I found, and that made me a poet.
For only when the armor of the self
Was broken, and the spring air could come in
Could I perceive the constant miracle
Of life aware, upon the edge of time.

Honor is shame endured, as Gawain knew,
His stolen girdle, green for life and spring,
Became the noble garter of his order,
And honi soit the badge of honesty:
A nation without shame can have no beauty,
The heartshock of a shame's what gives us being,
The sword drawn from the stock of discipline.

Now Gran-Gran, Violet Witter, lived above us,
The one-time darling of the Scottish stage;
She had decided after all to love us;
I was her favorite, her beau, her page.
On me she wrote the forescript of her calling,
Stage fighting, and the art of public speech:
How to explain without the tension falling,
Letting the other actors each be each.
I saw Blithe Spirit with her, and we shared
Black Magic chocolates at intermission;
What it all meant I neither knew nor cared,
But this was surely some kind of vocation,
A different Freddy with his sly grandmother,
The freeing of the self to be another.

There was a little park two streets away
(The other way than Mercatoria)
Where I would play with pretty blue-eyed Christine
And made a hideout in the shrubbery
Where we were safe and watched the folk go by.

Then Vic was gone. I pined and pined for him.
He was in Africa, gone to prepare
The place we'd join him there, in Mwinilunga.
I didn't understand all that. He'd gone.
I had a dream, a dream I was in bed,
Dreadfully plausible therefore, when then
The ceiling cracked, a great monster broke through,
All black and green and yellow, spikes and horns,
But no clear shape, no sense or meaning in it,
But that it must descend on me, destroy me.
Mummy found me sleepwalking, terrified,
Made me hot milk with cheerful Ovaltine,
And put me back to bed when I was calm.
But I had never waked, didn't remember
The real comfort, but the dread, the dream.
From then on I would use the suffix "-orn,"
For anything that might be terrifying:
To add it to a normal word would make it evil,
Malevolent--and this was poetry.

And then we followed Vic to Africa.
This was the making of my first big question.
Aboard The Union Castle ship Umtali
I think I saw there could be different worlds.
The ship itself was such a world. I pried
Through every nook and clanging cranny of it,
Explored the paneled lounge and smoking-room,
And felt the thrum of the propellors lull me
As I drowsed off inside my cozy bunk.
I was so happy, the adventurer,
Who boldly grasped a stay and stared to windward.

The question deepened one day as I sat
Sheltered from wind beside a funnel-vent:
I learned that if I pressed one eye I saw
Two worlds. So what was I to make of this?
They weren't quite the same. Which one was right?
Was there a difference between what's out there
And what this fellow inside now was seeing?
Did other people see the same world I did?
And what had given me this instrument,
This eye, with its so marvelous precision?
Later, I asked if words were like that too,
And if a word was something in the world.

One morning I awoke and saw an island:
Ascension, it was called. The ship had slowed,
And little wavelets, violet and blue
Danced in the dawn. The peak blazed in the sun.

 

                              II.

Queuing at customs, and a bright new land.
The Blue Train winding its foreshortened snake
Up that so blessèd valley of the Hex
And through the coastal ranges to the veldt,
The locomotive driven by its eight ganged wheels,
Trailing heroic plumes of smoke and steam--
My heart now aches for it, the mythic land,
An empire of quixotic overreaching,
Great Britain swaying one third of the world:
An enterprise to me so innocent,
Grand history so unredeemable.
After the Great Escarpment, the Karoo,
Dinner in the racketing dining car,
The Blue Train flying now through empty land,
Tiketty-tum, tikkety-tum, bound now
For dusty Kimberley through falling dusk,
A pink horizon over distant hills,
And then to climb into the bunk on top,
The railway sheet slick on the dark green leather,
And drowse off to the rhythm of the tracks;
And then to sense a change, and come awake,
The train now slowed to let another by,
Ta-ka-ti-tummm, ta-ka-ti-tummm, and then
To wake again at midnight at some station,
A few quiet conversations on the platform,
The mighty engine breathing as it drinks,
Unwearied in its mantle of warm steam.
And then most magical of all, to wake,
And see a vast dawn land stretch out and yawn,
The window inches from my tousled head. 

This way of telling it, I came to find,
Could make a long-dead world come back to life.
It wasn't dead, it would be always there,
For words have got a most miraculous gift,
To summon all the world to their command
And in our secret bedchamber of mind
Lay out the ancient days untarnished still.

I crossed that desert four times altogether
(And made the ocean passage three more times).
But memory collapses them to one,
So I am lying here, in some cold sense:
Maybe Ascension was the second time,
Maybe the midnight station was the third.
Or could it be that there's a truth that forms
Only across pluralities of times,
Seen in a kind of temporal 3D
As I must see the stanchion on the ship
Twice, to complete its true solidity?
When Wordsworth saw that vast form rise behind him
On Windermere, was that a mere illusion?
Light is not only how we know, they say,
But is the inner substance of all knowns,
For after all, e=mc2,
Matter is but a diamond of crushed light.

Another picture: when we crossed the bridge
Over the Lunga river to the town
Of Mwinilunga, after days of driving
Across the huge savannas in our truck
Now scratched and dusty from the red-dirt roads,
I saw a vision like an ancient scene
Out of a story, of the washerwomen,
Black as obsidian in their bright prints,
Singing together, laundering on the rocks,
And we were now at home in Africa.

Today I see what seems to me a truth
That would not be complete without both visions:
The women on the rocks, seen by the child;
And now, data-mined from an old man's mind,
The Biblic-Odyssean pastoral. 

Those years in Mwinilunga were an era
That took wellnigh a third of my short life.
It's tastes and smells that do it always, don't they?
The smell of locusts, turmeric, and honey,
Burnt tires and cumin, orchids, dried-out dung,
Hot sour cassava in a sticky mound,
Black skin and village dogs and smoke and love,
The resin dripped onto the drumhead when
The holy beating of the rites began.

We settled in a village called Kajima,
Near the Angola and the Congo borders
Where the Zambezi takes its first great loop
Gathering force from many other rivers
To crash with monstrous violence down the Falls.
We drove once to the source of the Zambezi
The family silent in the massive trees,
Squelching a little in the fibrous moss
Until we saw it fiercely welling out,
As clear as diamond in the close green light.

Do we do wrong to seek out birthplaces,
A sin to gaze upon our origins?
Are we the heirs of Ham and Oedipus,
Escaped, like Mwindo, Moses and Sanzang
Down the great river of all-washing time?

The Lunga was a branch of the Zambesi,
Itself fed by the lesser Luakela:
Our village lay upon its gentle vale.
My first poem, lost now, had a line "the rushing
Gushing river, that sparkles in the sun."
I taught myself to swim in it. Sometimes
The bank was thick with yellow butterflies.
I loved the way the current bore me on:
Was it the bank that moved so fast, or I?
For me the water did not move at all
Unless I tried to beat against the stream.
Was Heraclitus right? I later asked,
For once you float it's always the same river,
And the banked past would never cease to be.

Pardon the puns. They're part of this odd story.
The current time deplores their currency,
Their lack of backing in a standard gold,
Their arbitrary adventitiousness,
Semantic incest justified by fiat,
Their base coinage fuelled by Gresham's Law,
Their correspondence masked as derivation,
Their plausive lie, like rhyme and anagram.

But do not I now beat against the river?
If time's indeed a branched and branching river,
A double tree of causes and effects,
Why may not wordplay word its wildness well?
Perhaps this incest is the nicest science.

We lived in four grass huts I watched them build,
Reaching up bales of straw to set the thatch.
Vic helped and learned and afterwards they talked,
Cross-legged and chuckling, leaning against the poles,
The scent of Woodbines smoky in the air,
A crate of Castle Lager from the shade,
Men drinking after work as evening fell.

Vic's good Ndembu was a bit antique,
From Charlie White's old grammar from the 'teens,
And in the first days they would laugh at him.
White's fieldwork had described the Ndembu clans,
And Vic at first would ask folk which they were.
They'd think a bit, remember, and look puzzled,
Keep a straight face and tell him, courteously.
Vic was aware that something was amiss:
His nickname, "Sanyinyachi," was too grand
To suit the tone they'd struck; it would translate
As "Father of the Clans." Later he found
That clans went out of vogue ten years ago.
So much for ancient tribal practices.
These chaps were humans, and not archetypes.

When we would drive the ten miles to the town
We'd always pick up every hitchhiker,
And we would sit or lean against the cab
And we would always sing. The song just then
Concerned the local thief, Winston Kariro,
Who'd stolen all the money in a pot
That Mr. Nightingale, the missionary
Had safely buried in his sleeping hut.
Ey! Yo! Kariro! they would sing: poor Mistah
Nightingale no understand the bank.
Some bits of the Ndembu wit I got,
Some only after ten or twenty years.

So language-making turns to anecdotes,
To jokes and instances and travelers' tales:
Those nuggets we deploy to goose a conversation,
And shape the self that tells them afterwards.
It's by such memes the language reproduces,
Memory making members of itself. 

As when Musona, our all-patient cook
Misheard the recipe that Edie gave him
For good steamed pudding nicely laced with jam,
We wanting some reminder of old England.
Wrap it in paper, Edie said, and he
Heard "pepper," with results you can imagine.
Today the dish might be considered chic:
Language, I would learn then if not before,
Invents, and uses us for its inventions.

Or in the tree that overlooked our camp
I saw a bright green Mamba in the crotch
One branch below, between me and the ground.
Musona now took charge, and calmed me down,
Made me inch outward on my limb until
My weight had bent it earthwards, I could hang,
And drop down into his waiting arms.
To go out on a limb is not so bad
When Eve's green friend is coiled about the tree:
We're not doomed always by our former choices.
I sorrowed when he killed it with a hoe. 

Bobby was my conspirator and friend.
Each night we'd whisperingly tell together
(Masked by the village drums and firelit songs)
The great Moon Rocket epic, with its wars
Kazillion billion miles away in space
And the strange planets with their Teratorns
And lumbering Golgoromps and red-eyed Grems.
But we were tender hearted, having slain
Ten thousand enemies in death-ray battles,
And pitied their poor families till we wept,
And so we came up with our great invention;
The Friendly Ray, that turns a foe to friend,
And amped up to the highest setting could
Bring the dead back to life, relieved and grateful.

Bobby was now a scientist already.
Collecting flowers, he pressed them in a book
(Years later, faded petals insubstantial
Would float out from a long unopened story)
And stick them, with their genus and their species
In his small treatise on Rhodesian plants. 

I lived less fastened to reality,
And fortified a giant termite hill
With battlements and weapons of defence.
But thus I learned the termite hierarchy,
The delegation of the hill's main tasks,
And watched them war against the driver ants,
And with my friends, a gang of village boys,
We took our part as apex predators
And munched the juicy queens when they would swarm.

Bobby and I shared in our finest work.
Damming a little stream, the Narufanta,
We shaped a lakeland network of canals
And waterfalls that made a tiny music,
Built villages from the blue local clay,
Planted it all with flowers and twiggy trees,
And added a small working watermill:
The muddiest children then in Africa.

Our branching stories, Bob's taxonomies,
My mamba-tree with its forbidden crotch,
The termite order of command, the flow
Of water through our tiny tributaries--
All these, I think, together with the grammar
That Edie'd taught us as we learned to read,
Cohered into my deepest metaphor,
The tree of life, the tree of how to know.

Memory surges now, harder and harder;
This tree branches, twigs turn to fertile limbs.
The story I'd begun is getting lost,
Losing itself in stories of their own.
How to continue this investigation,
Borne backwards by the current of a life?
What am I seeking with this anyway?
Because all this, the splendid thunderstorms,
Rainbows above the brachistegias,
The little gang of Lunda boys I joined
Led by my quiet and noble friend Sakeru,
Who taught me trapmaking and archery,
The dirty jokes of dear fat Samawika;
Fire creeping through the gold savanna as
The beaters, cheerful, let it do no harm
(That game might have green pasture in the spring),
The wings of water beating from our ankles
Wading across the rapids of Zambezi,
Three children naked in clear racing sluices,
The orchid paradises on the river's islands,
Vic and I running, laughing, chased by hornets;
My job delousing the two oxen hired
By Edie when she tried to plow a field
(My huge pals, Pendeka and Ndeleki),
To get rice-farming going for the village;
The crate of books that came in every month
That we devoured, word-hungry cannibals,
Bread spread with lemon-melon jam I'd eat,
Leaning against the tent-wall with a book;
The monstrous visions in the fever-dream
When I came down with the malaria;
In silent forests, neon-blue irises,
The valleys crimson-scarlet with wild cannas;
The taste of all the Lunda fruits, the moocha,
The sour Nshindwa, and the fragrant guava,
The deep sweet mangoes of Chibwakata--

Because all this, I know, contains the pith
Of some idea that might have power to heal,
Some enterprise an old man might propose
For a new world that soon will be without him.

Part of that meaning I already knew.
What Vic and Edie came to see in time
Was that this Lunda-Ndembu world was not
At bottom one of status, wealth and power
(As orthodox Red doctrine had maintained)
But was a live (contentious) work of spirit
Whose master-symbols, wakened in their rites,
Were gates between the present and the past
And more, between the all and what's to come.

Their word for master-symbol, sacrament,
Was hard to grasp at first: Chijikijilu.
It literally means the blaze you cut,
The landmark you create to not get lost
When entering an unknown territory.

I had been lost: one day I'd wandered off
And lost my bearings in the great savanna.
Terror came then, like black shade over all,
I knew that if a leopard didn't get me,
The ants would, when exhausted I must sleep.
At random I struck out, heart in my mouth,
And I was lucky, recognized a tree,
And got back safe and didn't say a word.
So if I'd cut a blaze then with my knife
I might have known, and that new territory
Might have been claimed as safe for me, and I
A finder for my tribe, discoverer.
Its fruit-trees and its game might have been ours.

I came to see that words could be a blaze
That carries us beyond the scope of words,
Renders the unsaid said. I came to see
The world as a great game, whose boundary,
The present moment, now enclosed
All the past time there was, the precipice
Whence all new things precipitate and spring.

So a chijikijilu was the gate,
The meta-phore, the thrown-together symbol
Wherewith the world daily invents itself--
Later I saw this marker as the trace,
The place from which one past becomes a many,
The species-branch in Bob's taxonomies,
The tree-crotch with its choice alternatives,
The river with its blue distributaries:
Much later still, the flow of information
As entropy explores affordance-space.

Still, this was all to come. Another gift
To be unpacked was given me back then.
Vic had to drive three hundred dirt-road miles
To get supplies, and he took me along.
And somewhere near Solwezi we drove through
A grove of wild plum-trees, heavy with fruit
Those sweet-sour tiny plums I still remember.
And then it came. A pure astonishment.
Everything seemed to glow in all its detail,
In all its perfect detail in the light:
The fruit, the flowered grass, striated bark,
The various leaves all perfectly constructed--
I knew enough of cell biology
That this degree of order went right down
To molecules, atomic particles--
Insanely, gloriously meticulous!
To build one leaf from scratch would take a nation
Its GDP for thirty years, I thought.
And there it all was, given to us freely.

A further thought, of even greater wonder:
The eye, the inner one, that sees all this,
It's given too, this Fredness, this idea!
Nobody ever noticed this, I thought.
I'm going to have to find a way to tell it.

 

                            III.

Rene was maybe three when we first came.
They named the poor girl Nyamahemba, meaning
"She Who Cries And Must Be Carried," but
She soon became for me a mystery.
Elvish or pixieish, her girly mischief
Was somehow deeper than our doggish boyness.
And she befriended Dora, a deaf-mute,
And widely thought to be a changeling
Or half-wit, with her sallow-faced remoteness.
Rene and she became inseparable;
How they communicated I don't know,
A kind of body-language, quick and secret
So perfectly and clearly understood.
(In later years Rene would teach dyslexics,
Famously dropped to head-level with them.
She taught one girl to read in just two hours--
I watched. That girl now has a Ph.D.)

So how does muteness bud out into speech?
For me it had to do with femaleness.
Edie had taught me grammar's subtle muscles,
The colors of the words, the dance of letters,
The tree of syntax, and its melody;
But there was something holy, something dreadful
About the crotch, the place of branching
Where ever-dwells its emerald green snake.
Once, in a village, some Ndembu boys
Took me to see a little girl who liked
To show Hers to the little boys. I fled,
But I remembered Christine in the bushes
And knew that this atrocity was sacred. 

I had a dream then, about circumcision.
Ndembu boys must undergo Mukanda,
Where in a thornbush boma in the trees
The boys are stripped and painted so grotesquely
Their very mothers wouldn't recognize them
And are instructed by the gruff old men
And then must suffer in their own dark crotch
And so become a man and be reborn.
I dreamed then that I had suffered all,
And now was brought to me a dark-skinned girl
Dressed all in white, and lovely, for my bride,
Whom I must serve, and she would be my friend.

And so my language formed within my cells,
Or was it that the language formed me there?
Vic read to us each night in the soft roar
That kept the Tilley mantle glowing white;
The actress' son, he voiced the characters
And so I hear them still; and then again
The hours I spent, leaning against the tent,
Rereading all those half-grasped magic stories
Were forming live scars on my synapses
And thus the gene-expression of my I:
Nada the Lily, Allan Quartermain,
Kim, Kidnapped, Tarzan, Peter Pan,
Coral Island, Treasure Island, of course
The requisite Swiss Family Robinson;
Thirty-Nine Steps and gallant Greenmantle,
Cannery Row, Midshipman Hornblower,
The Jungle Books, White Fang, Call of the Wild,
And Conrad yearning for the isle of Java,
Orlando with his brothers in exile,
Professor Challenger in his lost world,
And Prince Hal grieving for his fallen foe;
And Dejah Thoris in her silks and furs,
Dreaming upon her love as her swift flyer
Sped through the thin air of the dying planet.

A shocking diet for a young Red mind.
What were they thinking! There was not a book
That should not now be banned in all good schools.
Ah yes, explorers have a tarnished name; 
We should do what society demands,
We should fit in to the ecology.

But what can I be, other than myself?
I, an invasive species, am a stranger
Wherever I take root. And I don't mind
As long as I am sovereign of my mind.
In every school they sent me to I chafed;
I would bug out at recess and walk home.
I bit no other teachers, though, thank God.

The time had come to leave my Africa.
In Capetown, where we stayed awhile, I saw
Something that hammered in my strangerhood.
Mummy and I were in the upper deck
Of the red bus that I would take to school,
And as we stopped outside a prison yard
I saw two guards beat a black prisoner.

Already I mistrusted white-skinned people:
In remote villages the children sometimes screamed
And hid, to see three little ghosts, all white,
Climb from the truck as if they were alive,
Proving that children too could die, like old ones.
Was I a ghost? The real warm people I
Had known in Mwinilunga all were brown
With shiny shins and lovely curly hair
And laughed and sang and smelt like good thick honey.
The sly old wizard Samatamba would
Invite me to his big hut where his wives
Plied me with honey beer with bees in it,
And that was real and human as it should be.
When we got back to England I would pine
For seven years at losing Africa,
And only words--the poems I was writing--
Could bring it back, make me myself again.

We lived in cold and soot-caked Manchester
Postwar and socialist, beneath the shadow
Always of the Bomb. All through the winters
I never had warm feet. The condensation
Running down the windows of the bus
That took me to my school was pungent yellow,
Stank with the nicotine of others' lungs.
One night my first friends there ganged up on me--
I'd passed the eleven-plus but they had not--
And beat me up outside our boy-scout hut.

A freckled stranger everywhere, I've seen it come
In every new home that was not a home:
In Mwinilunga, where a cruel old woman
Teased me to violence, and I wept and struck,
And Edie beat me publicly, and shame
Has since become my portal to renewal;
And in Ndola, where white neighbor boys
Set on their strongest fighter and then watched
Until, upon my back, but punching still,
They left me, laughing; and in Capetown
When for a fight I won, they would blame me;
In Manchester, defending Bobby, who
Was maybe even wierder than I;
At grammar school it fell on someone else,
Goda the Jew, the soppy sad-faced kid:
I, for my heart just ached, stood up for him. 

Vic's public story was communitas,
The warm equality of mutual trust,
The sacred siblinghood that overcomes
The cold structures of status, wealth, and rank.
His thought is core to all communities
That speak out against inequality.
He forged a family with real love;
But he was fatherless, a unicorn,
The Dürer knight, death at his saddle-bow,
The Peter Pan who flew, but never could
Return to that dear bedroom that he left;
He always felt outside and looking in.

I've known what might be called the business-end
Of that communitas, that dear gemeinschaft.
I saw small girls peck deaf-mute Dora raw.
I saw the little boys at school pass round
A bootlegged copy of the scenes at Auschwitz.
To all my friends who wish that I would join
Some commune in consensus, sorry, I
Am damaged goods, I'm yours, but not your clan's. 

--Or so a later story that I told myself
Explained what I've become. Perhaps more likely,
My fancy language, learned out of the books,
Persuaded other kids that I was snooty,
Trying to claim a place I didn't merit,
And this big pudgy awkward freckled boy
Was an excrescence from an alien world,
Or worse, gone over to the enemy,
The parents' generation and its rules.
Did they believe that I was laughing at them?
Perhaps I was the hostile one, who breaks
The dear communion of humanity.
I paint myself the victim, and I see
There is no cruelty like that of a victim.

And all this, I see now, was liberation.
My soul need not be socially-constructed;
At base, I have no need of validation.
I will help out but I will not be owned.
My gaucheness, clumsy linkischness, my folly,
My blinkeredness against conspiracies,
My tendency to blurt out what I think,
All these from time to time have torn from me
My self-respect and left me naked, shamed;
And then in nakedness alone and shame
Can I true-feel the miracle of the world.
Identity for me is not wherein I share,
But where I differ from all roots that grew me.

And friends I did have, one-on one, wherever
There was a time to get to know somebody:
Of course Sakeru with his wise brown eyes,
Teaching me how to make and shoot a bow,
Roasting a goat's head on an open fire,
The muscle of the ear the choicest part;
Lynn Carneson in Capetown--hand in hand
We'd close our eyes and teleport to Mars
And open them to look into each other.
(Her dad, another Fred, would be arrested
And be a prisoner of the Treason Trials,
And Vic brought him a coat and chocolate
When he was stuck in jail and bitter cold);
And gentle shy Slim Walker, Johnny Clarke
With whom I peeled with sunburn in Provence
And hitch-hiked over Europe in our teens,
The funniest of all, John Derbyshire,
John Levi, comicly lugubrious,
And Ted Holt, with his splendid foreign accents,
And Lucy Bate, and Joe, and black-eyed Sophie.

But all these friendships were, it seems to me,
Outside the crowd and in parentheses,
Hitchhiker friendships, instant recognitions,
Island shards of a shattered continent.
None was a "damned compact majority"--
Vic's phrase, quoted from his beloved Ibsen.

But doesn't language hold us all together?
For better or for worse? And then divide us
With misologic, vicious coinages,
The surfacings of ancient crimes and lies?
How can the poet purify the tribe?
How can the soul find its true poetry?

This book is not about a person's life
(To make the point again). It is a voyage
Of discovery, to find the secret source
Whereby all language irrigates the world,
The act of generation and the crotch
Where budding meaning bursts out from the past--
In one man's life, the details not important,
Except as pointers to the lives of others.
My alienations maybe serve the purpose
Of isolation for experiment,
Removing certain social explanations
For the deep mystery we all endure.
Perhaps it's not society that makes
Our meanings, casts them into words;
Perhaps our language generates our lives,
Its thought each conversation that we have,
Each word a neuron in its vast old brain,
Each usage but the firing of a synapse.
And our societies consume the meanings
And turn them into tools and ads and jails.
By language I mean not just words, but music,
Dance and image; homely recipes,
Temples and games and stages: it's the garden
That must be always lost if it would grow.

I always stammered when I was a child:
I knew the word was there but would not come,
And so I came to feel it as a presence,
Perhaps as artists know the noble image
Embedded in the stone or floating there
Upon the empty canvas or the stage,
Or as the mystics know the voice of God.

Something had happened there in Africa.
The brave young communists--that loving pair,
The dialectical materialists,
The cynics about status, rank and power,
The class warriors and lovers of the People--
Had found the People knew some things they didn't,
And operated from another world entirely.
Ndembu people lived a world of spirits--
No, not Platonic forms (which after all
Are only jumped-up generalizations),
But vital whorls of deep embodied meaning, 
Dim currents of intentionality
Lit by the dwelling presence of the dead.
And in our rites and holidays the living may
Turn to that living story and be healed.
Time was not, then, an exile from the real
But was reality itself: not ruled
By an external law, but law-creating;
Not teleological, but teleogenic.
Persons were not results of social forces
Or in their hearts members of race or class.
Structure was blessed by laughing antistructure,
There was authority that was not power
Or status, rank, or birth or privilege--
That need not be sadistic or unjust.
There was a space where humans, face to face
Could see themselves each in the other's eyes.

And I had had my vision of the plum-trees,
That was a dagger in the heart of any
Philosophy of mechanistic order:
That revealed nature supernaturing,
And what I'd later phrase as the divine
Embodied in its own metabolism.

Meanwhile we'd joined the Manchester
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
We painted signs and decorated floats
And Edie was the local secretary;
And I remember one great rally there,
The march, the speeches, the comradery,
And though I tried to smile and feel the comfort
Of being where everybody thought the same,
I sensed some cold inhuman stink in it,
Not the dear smell of human sweat and hair,
But some metallic, alien, rotten thing,
Some foul dishonesty or cruelty
Masked over by its solidarity.
There was a monstrous woman, Molly Mandle,
Who ran the Party headquarters in Salford,
And scared me with her niceness and her rage.

Edie found out the funding came from Moscow
And Stalin's tanks roared into Budapest. 

And so we sought in wintry Manchester
Some echo of the true communitas
We knew in Zambia, and so we found,
Of all the many Christianities
The one most pagan and most ritual,
Most incarnational--the Catholic Church.

Morning Mass in the icy smog of Stockport,
Breakfastless visions of the nave, consumed
In the green tendrils of the growing Spirit,
The infinite gravity of the Host within
Sucking all selfness inward to its heart--
Ah, mass indeed, whither all light was drawn!
And new vocabularies opened up
Within that strange book of the catechism,
The bright upright orthogonals of Thomas,
The shame-blessed inner turnings of Augustine,
The tears of pierced Teresa and Ignatius,
And Hopkins, overwhelming to this poet,
Word-mystic, wing of uni-verse wild-wheeling;
His Celtic lilt, his Anglo-Saxon bones,
His ancient echo of latinity.

At school John Armstrong, maestro, my true maestro,
Led me through Milton, Shakespeare, Eliot;
And so emerged my next consuming thought.
It was of Time itself, that every question
Could be pursued into most fertile ground
If we could find right words to speak of Time.
Milton was asking how did time begin;
Shakespeare, how time created and destroyed;
Eliot, how time could damn or save the soul. 

And my first take on it, I think, was quite mistaken.
"Time hath transfixed the flourish set on youth"
Wrote Shakespeare, and I saw the rebus in it,
Youth's last looped "h" shorn by time's axial scythe:
Time was the enemy that poets fought.
But what I did not see was that the spear
That pierces beauty is what makes its meaning.
By time is conquered time, said Eliot,
And Milton's Fall becomes the whole world's Spring.
A Christianity that Plato formed
Then ruled my passions for a dozen years,
And he born inter faeces et urinam
Was hidden from me by Eternity.

The Word I sought was yet to come to me.


 

 

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____________
 

 

ON THE KARATE KATA*

A kata is a living being
Between the heaven and the earth.
A kata is a way of seeing,
An estimation of your worth.

A kata lives in many minds
Whose bodies it has made its own.
A kata changes what it finds
In the three hundred years it's grown.

This dance makes conflict into art
And places wisdom in the fists,
Halts fights before the fight can start,
Makes friends out of antagonists.

A kata is a net of rhyme,
Catching the moment in its mesh.
A kata takes control of time,
Embodies spirit in the flesh.

We are the kata's servants, who
Beyond the call of loss and win,
Learn from the form what we should do,
And pass on its deep discipline.

            *Commissioned 2022 by the JKA (Japanese Karate Association)
              and recited at the USA National Championships.

 

 

 

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____________
 

THE CAMOUFLAGE NETTING

Make us a camouflage netting to catch the love of the world,
A quilt to warm the cold limbs of the motherless soldiers,
A screen against the eyes that yearn for the body they murdered,
A fabric of old rags and torn-up garments the children grew out of;

Make us a carpet of words to bear the blows of the world,
A coat of colors that hides the strength of our noble intent,
A dark hermetic document listing the lives of the murdered,
A shroud to decently cover the grotesque forms of the murderers,

A veil of eloquent light to bless the new wedding of peoples.

 

 

THE IMPALER

Putin in the grief of power
Saw a blue and yellow flower.
So he went and sat on it,
Settled down to take a shit.

But his shit was rich and good
Strengthened with his nation’s food,
So it fertilized the flower,
Which sprang up that very hour,

And it grew into a stake
Sharp as any forge could make;
Putin, angered by its sting
Pressed down harder on the thing;

Now his feet were off the ground,
Raised above all those around;
Nobody could set him free—
No-one had the power but he.

And the more he strained and bled,
Deeper went the stake he’d fed;
Now he is a monument
Raised upon his own contempt.

 

____________

BREASTS

Young mother with two daughters in the store:
Noticing those sweet swells beneath her knit,
I see it suddenly, moved to the core,
How those girls suckled there, and relished it:

A female mammal, specialized to give,
To let another feed upon your body,
The very species thus constrained to live,
Like my own mother, with her little Freddy.

The older girl is bossy with her mother,
And mother is amused, as grownups are;
They keep a careful eye upon the other,
Who’s got her own eye on a candy bar.

We’re civil beings, but underneath it all,
Caught in a sacrificial ritual.

DARK DAY

The roaring creek is full,
White-water by the boulders,
Great bruises swell and roll
Down the long reach's shoulders.

A flash of golden tails
In this deep-running hollow:
Huge carp with silver scales
Have come to feed and wallow.

IN THE BEAUTY BUSH

Out of this mess of sticks
Four golden flowers burst:
Warbler baby chicks,
Each striving to be first.

     __________________

 
 
THE CAMP
A place to stop and look around,
See where the sun stands in the sky,
A rock to sit on. Some dry ground.
Look at the map, if one is by.
Get up and piss beneath a tree.
Now there's a pissing-place to go.
Take off the travel-pack and see
Whether the water's getting low.
You're hungry now. Some bread and oil
Will make this hill an eating-place.
Already you are in the soil.
You feel the sun upon your face.
The ants and flies are gentle here.
They'll take their small part of your peace.
You put aside your care and fear.
The breeze of summer does not cease.
A little nap is welcome now.
The odd dream buries you in you.
You wake under a shifting bough.
It's getting late. This place will do.
The brook down there is quick and clean,
A spot to sit and wash your feet.
You drink and fill up the canteen,
Break out the tent, the old ground-sheet.
When it's all up you have a door,
And that is forward, back is back;
Cardinal points arise, and more:
A space to lay the sleeping-sack.
And then the building of the fire;
The sun goes down, that makes a West;
The firelight sets up a sphere
And makes a home where you can rest.
And now there is a native tongue,
Formed of the brook, the rock, the tree,
The fire, the pissing-place, the long
Wide valley of its poetry.

 

                  __________________

 

LUNCH IN THE CONCOURSE CAFÉ 

On one of my long journeys on the earth,
Itinerant poet with a mobile phone,
I missed a flight, exhausted and alone:
Duty and ego, then, what were they worth?

As I went in, a woman with a pack
Gave me an odd bright look as I sat down.
The waitress brought me pizza, dry and brown.
It seemed that I was lost, with no way back.

I didn't see the hiker stand and go,
But when the waitress brought the check, I saw
It had been paid in full.  A sudden awe
And heart-astounding glory took me so--

A love so swift, anonymous, and pure
This wry old cynic glowed there in his seat:
The grinning waitress showed me the receipt:
Below the quite illegible signature
Just "Jeremiah 31:13."
We cannot know the angels we have seen.

 

NEW YEAR'S EVE

     János Arany

      (translated from the Hungarian by
       Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner)

The old gravedigger is dying:
Let's be merry by his bed!
He who laid to rest so many
Is the next to join the dead.
Come on, boys! Let's toast the nation's
Eight hundred fifty years of yore,
There's no day that I don't miss 'em,
But only fools would hope for more.

But we lived it through, that's certain:
Let's, for what's little left us, make
--Even if it seems contrarian--
Cheer and song to grace the wake.
Come on boys! Let's raise our glasses
To that peace and patience true
Mortals in a year of troubles
Need to start their world anew.

Look how many of us here now
Fate has given rags, not life;
Still, since there is nothing better,
Let us wear them through the strife!
Come on boys! This glass let's offer
For our suffering humankind,
That endures while still believing,
Lives in hope, when hope is blind!

Hear that knock upon the window:
Look, a blind bird hit it there!
In this storm he could take shelter,
But his freedom's in the air.
Come on boys! One for the skulker
Who has no place to lay his head;
On such nights the homeless freeman
Chooses exile for a bed.

What care we the year is over!
Let the throat sing, let the legs dance!
Those who can be moved, let's move 'em,
Because we can, let's take our chance!
Come on, boys! Let's lift our goblets!
Clink them! and may the clinking chime
For those whose names, beyond forgetting,
I cannot speak of in this time.

Let's get drunk! The old year's dying,
Laugh as if we were its heirs--
Though indeed it left us nothing,
Keeping wake for its last hours.
Come on, boys! this glass we offer
For this year that gasps to death,
Memory that lives tomorrow...
Sweet illusion's passing breath.

 

                  __________________

 

STONE
        for Paul Harris

It's held its poise for half a billion years.
The interfaces of its old inclusions
Hear what impacts it and serve as its ears.
Its crystals grow with any chance transfusions;
Its virtue is in this: that it coheres;--

And thus makes time last, so that other things
Have futures to inhabit, infrastructure.
It sets a tone that simply rings and rings
So other resonances draw their picture
Upon its obdurate foretokenings.

Those later forms, those crystal polymers
That claim the name of life, are more impatient.
The stone believes their matings are perverse;
Its aeons make it quietly complacent,
As actual record of the universe.

Between its two chief forms of resonance,
Acoustic shocks that must be compensated
And thermal buzzings that could melt its dance,
It forms a music, old and complicated,
That has its own dark stubborn elegance.

SEPPUKU

I think of Mishima, whose excellence,
Anguished with all the ugliness about him,
Tore loose the lilliputian bonds of sense
And left a world that was more safe without him;

That reincarnate cherry-bloom he wooed,
The quick breath of pure youth in its glory--
That Best must be the enemy of the Good,
And all perfections must be transitory.

There can be no serene peach-emperor,
The people need their food, their laws, their vote;
He burned the withered garland of the war,
And slew his folly with the blow he smote.

For we who honor him must teach and serve
A lesser world that he did not deserve.

THE STORM OF 2021

Down from the north pole this great paw of cold
Has reached out, lunged across the continent,
As in the stadial ice-ages of old,
To bury Texas in its element:
White snow, as pure and virginal as death,
And air as cold as stone, as hard as steel,
So that all creatures that are warmed by breath
Recognize absence as a thing you feel.
This snow is white now, but when all is through,
The oxygen will fall, in flakes of blue.

 

____________________

TO MY FRIEND
      for Petöfi

   by János Arany

(translated from the Hungarian by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner.
Sandor Petöfi was the other great poet of the time. Petöfi died a year later
in the Hungarian revolution of 1849.)


You’re urging me to write some poetry,
And if I could obey, how glad I’d be!
But Pegasus won’t gallop, that damn nag,
Oh no! it toddles, and its hooves just drag.

Last night I settled down to write again,
And got as far as chewing on my pen:
The crows should rip up such a useless horse:
I shouted “giddy-up!” till I was hoarse.

Today I put on your fur hat, to see
If some Petöfi might rub off on me:
I scratched “To him” and “For my friend”—such stuff--
The muse had hiccups and cried out “enough!”

So. Good-for-nothing, then; the reason why?
My heart is full of tumult, as am I.
Its guest arrived, and I must make it fit,
Each little feeling is concerned with it.

Those silly windbag feelings, all astray!
They bump each other in their disarray:
This guest is great—no wonder they’re askew!--
And he is dear to it, for he is you.
 

 

WHO IS THE TRUE AMERICAN?

Two women went to Solomon:
Each claimed the baby as her own.
The wise king issued his decree:
“Divide the child in two,” said he.
One woman wept, resigned her claim:
The mother that deserved the name.

 

THE HARSHEST MORAL LAWS

If you resent the wealth of others, you are a thief in your heart.

If you resent the power of others, you are a tyrant in your heart.

If you resent the loves of others, you are a rapist in your heart.

If you resent the joy of others, you are a torturer in your heart.

If you resent the knowledge of others, you are an Alzheimer’s plaque in your heart.

If you resent the religion of others, you are a crucifier in your heart.

If you resent the race of others, you are a genocide in your heart.

If you resent the beauty of others, you are a monster in your heart.

If you resent the sins of others, you are a greater sinner in your heart.

If you resent the lives of others, you are a murderer in your heart.


          ___________________________

ON THE POLITICAL TURN

The past’s a charnel-house where we go seeking
A bone with rotten flesh enough to chew,
Some moral sadism that still is leaking
Proof that the criminal’s not me, but you.

The past’s a place where giants in the torment
Of loss and death and error would pursue
Some excellence or art unborn and dormant
That might grow up to something wild and new.

When we’re creating nothing, and we know it,
The only way to bear it’s if we knew
Something that cuts the wings from off a poet
And we can put them on as if we flew.

The past’s the place where we seek ancestors
That we can slander as we lick our sores.

PLAGUE MOON

The moon rides close to this plague-ridden planet,
Its great gaunt face looks over the hot land.
We are all mad, as plagues have always made us mad.

We cannot trust what we now think and feel.
The cruelty we do to us and others
Is part of our dark metamorphosis.

But not to be a victim’s not to be a victimizer.
The plague moon is a killer and a fertilizer,
A hunter and and a bringer into birth.

There is a violence in the act that makes us human,
We penetrate and we are penetrated,
We pass through pain, we fall into the world of light,

We open up our eyes and cry.

THE WOKE ONES

What’s wrong with the relief of suffering?
Isn’t the greatest evil pain?
To ask these questions is a foolish thing:
Why answer them again?

Even the brutes will value pain as less
Than loss of life, of liberty,
Of sex, of young, of place, of worthiness
Within their hierarchy.

We’re measured by what we will trade for pain:
This generation has no measure.
What triggers no discomfort in the brain
Is all they have of pleasure.

THE CYTOKINE* STORM

The body’s a seven-gated city
Whose citizens live by a norm,
Competing and sharing, in praise and in pity,
Except in the cytokine storm.

When the guardians designed to defend us
Come to hate those who do not conform,
Then what should befriend us becomes what will end us
In the wrath of the cytokine storm.

With a knee on the throat of his brother
The guardian has turned to the germ,
And the kinsman or lover is marked as the Other
And drowned in the cytokine storm.

When the Right is the poisonous virus,
The Left is what does us more harm;
When the Left is the toxin to fire and inspire us,
The Right is the cytokine storm.

We live in a sickening spiral
Where form is destroyed by reform,
Where the message that’s worst is the one that goes viral,
Unleashing the cytokine storm.

The only recourse in this fever
Is refusal to go with the swarm:
Reject the deceiver, instruct the believer,
And silence the cytokine storm.

*cytokine -- a peptide involved in cellular communication. In a cytokine storm, uncontrolled release causes massive organ damage and often death.


AFTER COVID

What is this creeping from the chrysalis?
An ancient form of life.
What is the purpose of its metamorphosis?
Creation out of strife.

A strange return to cottage industry;
A kind of money-mine;
An odd contemplative philosophy;
Home redesigned as shrine;

A silence in the tumult of the sky;
Cities designed for friends;
Roads turned to streets, walks for the passers-by;
Places not means but ends;

The marketplace become an everywhere;
Work as its own sweet scrip;
All persons servants, everyone an heir;
Wealth made of craftsmanship;

The family come back from its long death;
The person valued for the mind;
Earth breathing now its green and azure breath,
Gardened by humankind;

And now the universe is opened wide,
The bold explorers fly:
Our wings now grown to bear us on the ride
Into the starry sky.

 

        __________________

 

 

THE SUNNY DAY*

This huge bright sky with fleets of flying clouds
Is a grand theater of blue and white,
With giant players among lesser crowds
Walking the world’s stage in the sun’s vast light—

A stage that is a riot of avid green,
Dying and growing, star-scattered with flowers,
Hill beyond hill, a gaudy-painted scene,
Violet-horizoned, dimmed with distant showers;

And far beyond, we know, the blue goes black,
Boiling with shoals of stars still freshly sown,
And worlds invisible, all the way back,
Dragoned perhaps with green life of their own.

And stranger still, behind these eyes that see,
Are inner engines, scale nested in scale,
Seething with wet electrochemistry
In intricate exchange, contest, and sale.

With such enormous gifts, how could we fear
This universe has not the generosity
To give us all we need, preserve what’s dear,
Bring all things to their proper destiny?

For what it says is goodness: love abounding;
Exuberance in play; a merry dance;
A curiosity, odd and astounding;
A kind of self-exploring innocence.

Then will I give my trust to such a being
(Being it is, the “uni” of the “verse”),
And see this as an earnest, guaranteeing
The better outcome always from the worse?

But how did all this richness come to be?
What process brought this drama to the stage?
Ah, it was death, extinction, agony,
A billion branches pruned on every page,

A vast and dreadful storybook of waste,
Stars broken, planets scorched, and species lost,
Languages quite forgotten, tribes erased,
Oceans depopulate by fire or frost.

And all my loves, my friends, my own odd mind
Must surely go that way, into the past,
Into the great darkness that rears up behind
The gorgeous stage where each scene is the last.

Of what strange tissue, then, must my faith be?
First, like all else that paid the final price,
I must thank those that gave their lives for me,
And copy them, and come to sacrifice.

But all there ever was is living still,
Flying in waves of subtle information
Between the stars undying yet, until
It be embodied once more in creation;

Memory’s just a hint of what is stored
Within the body of this theater;
A coin we keep back from the dragon’s hoard
With her permission, redolent of her.

So second, I must learn to take the light
Not as a token, but reality;
And walk its passage with a step as light
As clouds in air, as fleets upon the sea.

Dragon creatrix, mistress of the play,
Who keeps a register of all she’s given,
Agia Sophia, may this shining day
Be for your children but a port of heaven.

         *from More Light, Mundus Artium Press, 2017

        __________________

 

ADDENDUM TO THE REPORT
OF MAJOR TANG HUŎXȊNG,
CULTURAL OFFICER,
 5TH MARS EXPEDITION, 2036

Approach to the abandoned US site
Proved hazardous due to the storm event.
Two hours short of bingo fuel the wind
Slackened enough for visibility.
I and Lieutenant Yueh investigated
What seemed the base’s wrecked command module
As detailed in the field report above.

I add this personal reflection in
Respect for our abandoned predecessors.
It was no satisfaction to us surely
To see their work betrayed by those at home.
We all watched the disruptions of the ‘twenties
And saw the rehabilitation camps set up
In Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia,
We saw the great castrati, Musk and Bezos,
And all the other guilty CEOs
Led through the howling crowds to their confinement;
The show-trials in the Nascar stadiums,
The pictures of the docile boys in school
Dull-eyed and stabilized with Ritalin,
The passage of the social justice laws,
The burning of the banks, the great tribunals
That followed on the wage and price controls.
It seemed to me that we rejoiced too much:
What was a loss to our opponent was
Also a loss to our humanity.

The bodies are recovered, and the data
Logged from their still undamaged field computers.
But as we left the wind veered round a point
And the sand blew fiercely on their aerials,
And a torn sheet of bright titanium
Began to sway and creak, and then the wind
Caught it, and suddenly a rhythmic groan
Began and rose into a somber howl.
It seemed a huge and grieving human voice.

Tell them back home: our enemies who came
And died there, shall be heroes of our own.

 

        __________________

 

PORTRAIT OF A MAN

My friend Fred Feirstein doesn’t lack for nerve:
Six times he’s faced death one way or another,
Stark horrors weathered with a kind of verve,
Drunk yet on poetry: my Jewish brother.

Doing the Lindy with his I.C. nurse,
Shooting a basket with an aneurism,
Writing his headlong, incorrigible verse,
He is a man, a fine anachronism.

He is the world’s most sentimental lover,
An addict quite besotted with his wife,
Able somehow to always rediscover
That mystery he’s worshipped all his life.

A man in honor and unthinking pride,
A mad and indefatigable talker,
A healer always on the patient’s side,
A kvetcher and a generous New Yorker.

To power he’s his own worst enemy,
Neglects the means, and ravens for the ends;
He’s never learned the arts of flattery,
Distrusts the world, and over-trusts his friends.

And in this man there is an innocence
For all his overt cynicism still;
God give me too that fine insouciance,
That man’s, who is so very hard to kill.

And so his chess-game with the patient Reaper
Becomes an easy old familiarity;
To see him play makes everything get deeper:
I cannot say how much he means to me.

 

        __________________

 

 

THE HOMEBOY'S TALE

I was caught drinking from the womantap
And now I’m stripped and put into the pokey.
I’m not so timid though, so sad and anxious,
And now I’m writing—they don’t know I can.

I’m lucky, though, to be in Young-Folk’s Land—
Five of them now in California.
Nine of the ladies now are pregnant, and
I have a chance of being someone’s Dad.

They got a batch of red-hot videos,
And took me off the manwater for days,
So I was jerking like a maniac—
They must have milked a pint for the supplies!

We always get the best of everything:
Government issue, no shit bootleg stuff.
After the 90’s demographic crunch
They knew they’d need more young to serve the old.

The ladies here are pretty nice, I guess.
Last night they all were partying.
The serving-boys went easy cleaning up
And Jimmy told me what was on the news.

It seems we’ve had a boost, and Cal is up
To two mil now, despite the suicides.
But rare-earth stocks are down—more power cuts!—
And even birthing centers won’t be spared.

That shouldn’t faze our pretty little heads.
We eat our soy and look out at the bay
And breathe the fresh clean air, don’t have to shave,
And drink our manwater till duty calls.

But sometimes, though, when I can sneak a peek,
I see the videos the bosses see
(Against the law!) that come down from the sky,
And get the strangest feeling in my groin.

Up there among the asteroids, real men
--Like me!—are building out new worlds,
The women aren’t always in command,
And there’s a thing called friendship there between them.

I have to be more careful. Billy-Joe
Last year went off the manwater for months
And toxic-masc got into him, and then
He touched young Madam Maud and got in trouble,

And now he can’t pee straight and has no balls.

                  __________________

 

TERATORN

I am the dragon who has no companions.
I am the angel who lacks for a mate.
Here, let me tell you how I in the pride of my manhood
Broke all the bonds of humanity--burst through the webworks of fate.
I was the one who turned the key of the chromosome,
Unlocked the art of the ribosome, that great spinner of cells,
Sought and found in the chaos of introns and reduplications
The master paradigms, sunk in their fathomless wells.
Lightly I came to know the pattern of epigenetics,
Form that follows on use,
How the brain twitches the form that its carapace takes,
Letting our history loose,
The genes half buried of mammal and bird and dinosaur,
Still resurrectible, insect and mollusk and shelly crustacean,
Sleeping unwakened for hundreds of millions of years,
Awaiting the call to their second creation.

And I, the first, and maybe the only,
Found the innermost path of pure contemplation
Where the mind, unfellowed and lonely,
Alters the body itself in its self-immolation,
Seeks out the gates of its lost metamorphosis,
Falls into trance and fashions a self-mausoleum,
A stony obdurate chrysalis;
Finds it future encased in its own dark museum.

The internal organs dissolved, and all but the brain
Broke down and liquified, seething with hot transformation—
How can I tell of the pain
And the exquisite spasms of pleasure and wild liberation?
Oh, it was horrible too: for spouts of bodily fluid, unneeded now in the process,
Jetted from me, with clouds of unspeakable gas,
The great gestalt, discarding the dregs of osmosis,
Shrank by two-thirds of its mass.

Two of my vertebrae, each of them bearing a rib
Torn from the breastbone and tipped now with fingerlets,
Clothed themselves out with fine membranes--each mast with a jib--,
Sprang out and away, fibers emerging from spinnerets,
Pulsing with hardening fluid, the cores of the wings.
These now were suddenly pimpled with gooseflesh,
Out of which grew the very strangest of things,
For look, each feather that made up the fletch
Was a dragonfly pinion, the rustly transparent rotor of a cicada.
Some virus back in the Permian doubtless wormed its way in
Carrying DNA wisps from an insect to ravish its Leda,
And leave a trace, a putative unspoken origin.

The ribs remaining thrust out the breastshell and tilted it
Forming an anchor to root
The cable-thick muscles of flight:
A thorax, a keel, like the obdurate bowl of the lute.
And over the green iridescence of saurian skin
A soft and fuzzy white down burst forth like a snowstorm
To cushion and insulate that red firebox within.
All over the fletching and trimming defined a new form,
As the pelvis sprouted a second leg-set, soon covered with pennae
And the old legs thinned and lightened to match it,
And from my maxillary bones emerged a pair of antennae,
All self-governed by the same epigenetical ratchet.

The eyes of the mantis shrimp in rainbowy clusters
Burst from the shell of the brow-ridge and spread to two domes,
Compound, with sixteen photoreceptors,
Vision beyond all human pictures and poems.
Over them hesitate waves of polychromatic diffraction:
The horror that everyone felt when they saw
Was surely a human reaction;
What is called for is awe.

I am alone,
Lost on the island of I,
Stranded and left on the bourn of the known;
All I can do is to fly.

 

 

A “Sonnet” for Leopardi

The cedars’ shadows lengthen on the hill,
The urgent wooing doves forever mourn,
A fountain clatters, music never still,
And I compose in cadences outworn.

Cicadas too contest the water’s song,
Shrilling within the laurel by the wall;
Below, a Maserati howls along
The corniche where the precipice must fall.

And so I write, a live anachronism,
One foot in this age, one in quite another,
Too old to care about the criticism,
And old enough to celebrate a brother:

How could I otherwise, in this hill town
Where Leopardi dreamed his hopeless dreams,
As the warm evening gently settles down,
And “is” resolves itself once more to “seems:”

A prolonged sonnet, stretching out the time
Until the obvious and final rhyme.

                          Recanati, 6/17/ 2019

 

Cake or Death

Two things you never get together,
If you have one, you’ve lost the other.
Free love or happy families,
Banking or aristocracies,
A welfare net or immigration,
Consensus or imagination,
Hostile love or untouched soul,
War in the corals, calm in the shoal,
Free life choice or free religion,
Wrongful tolerance, righteous dudgeon,
Medical progress, equal health,
Social justice, social wealth,
Competition or corruption,
Luxury or reproduction,
Mindfulness or exploration,
Drudgery or automation,
Human freedom, human meaning,
Planet cleaning, planet greening,
Zero- or nonzero-sum,
Kingdom now or kingdom come.

 

 

 

 Smell: A Cosmological Inquiry

 

 

     Yin

 

Why do we humans love the smell of flowers?

How do the flowers know the tastes of bees?

Fruit-scent, food-signal, lacks for us the powers

Of blossom-perfume, meant for bees to please.

 

Does this, then, point to some mysterious freeing?

For why would we prefer a plant-hormone,

The wave and pointer of another being,

The bees’ food-sign and lunch-bell, to our own?

 

The world’s all signalings. There is no matter

That is not old and hibernating signs.

What was once information, photon-chatter,

Is knit into the molecule’s confines.

 

The flower’s sweet and tinted symmetry

Traps something more than just the humble bee.

 

 

     Yang

 

Or is it sex that makes us love the scent

Of flowers more than that of offered food?

The starving lover in his ravishment

Neglects his belly for a greater good.

 

But no. His lady strives, with dainty care,

Dabbing plant-perfume on, to hide or mask

The human sex-smell lest it taint the air,

Denying what her lover did not ask.

 

Is then the virtue-signal more perverse,

More fatally attractive than her lap—

Aping the information-universe

When it entombed its light in matter’s trap?

 

And so the flower-smell, with lying breath,

Offers a fruit that makes a mock of death.

 

 

 

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