Querying The Ghoul
At this dead, revenant, occultically black hour of 4 a.m.-- affrighted neck of the vampyre’s killing spree, lonely sanctus of long-lost matins -- here I am alive and happy in the depths of a wild world, waving my blue flag at the far tresses of Hurricane (or Tropical Storm) Ophelia swirling overhead. The sky slowly, undangerously but with great prescience swirls something of her her vacant smile into my thoughts today, or lifts my thoughts into her bittersweet bower, querying of love in the beyond. Are we at last one there, on that final, unshored bed? The sky not dangerous, not yet, they don’t know where Ophelia is to track, she just lingers offshore Cape Canaveral, the growing ghost of loves lost, present and to come, waves of that impossible bourne crashing on the shores of Flagler County, jostling the pier with harder certainties, washing much away ...
***
Dan Barry queries the dead in “Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street,” posted on yesterday’s NYTimes online:
In the downtown business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank automated teller machine, across from a parking garage offering “early bird” rates: a corpse. Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.
Six National Guardsmen walked up to it on Tuesday afternoon and two blessed themselves with the sign of the cross. One soldier took a parting snapshot like some visiting conventioneer, and they walked away. New Orleans, September 2005.
Hours passed, the dusk of curfew crept, the body remained. A Louisiana state trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of several in that area. The police marked it with traffic cones maybe four days ago, he said, and then he joked that if you wanted to kill someone here, this was a good time.
Night came, then this morning, then noon, and another sun beat down on a dead son of the Crescent City.
That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week’s hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.
Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet. ...
***
“Everyone has a dead guy story,” sd. an NPR reporter as he related his own, about seeing a dead guy on the porch of a Creole cottage where there was no sound but that of the wind chimes on the porch. Query the dead, that silence: In this pause between awful events and their dread, eventual consquence, let us take those corpses as spectral, potent, eloquent, strange: the dread face of the the times, of an awfulness we can neither accept nor refuse. And as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, murdered king of Denmark, stalks the frozen ramparts of black-watch three-bells Elsinore, so I observe those blue residents of drowned New Awleans, floating like the hair of Ophelia; and, as Horatio would of such prescient visitations, declare them “... harbiners preceding still the fates / And prologue to the omen coming on.” (Hamlet I, i).
Neumann: “The world of symbols forms the bridge between a consciousness struggling to emancipate and systemize itself, and the collective unconscious with its transpersonal contents. So long as the world exists and continues to operate through the various rituals, cults, myths, religion, and art, it prevents the two worlds from falling apart, partly because, owing to the effect of the symbol, one side of the psychic system continually influences the other side and sets up a dialectical relationship between the two.” (Origins and History of Consciousness, 365)
Yes, but what happens when that bridge falters and fails? Is too weak, having lost the tenons of language and an identifiable culture? When the religion has no vitality, when the angels are mute? When the father dies, burdening mothers with the impossible task of raising sons up by their jockstraps out of the fury of rut?
Bridge yes, “of harp and altar fused” (Hart Crane); naked spine of the mediatrix, that heart-shaped ass, walking out of the room into the blue morents of infinte night. But an infernal bridge, not literal, not linear, not even a likeable one: awful and awesome, a dread passage which demands more than I have ever had the balls to do, to say.
Bonier, perhaps. Anne Carson, in her daringly evanescent Eros The Bittersweet: “The English word ‘symbol’ is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone
carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning. A metaphor is a species of symbol. So is a lover.” Bony truths jointed by their impossible, other-warding hearts, “whole and not whole, connected-separate, consonant-dissonant.” (Heraclitus)
One of the etymological Gaelic roots of pal Oran is Jodras, to query: the mythologem of Columba digging up the head of his buried friend after three days in the foundations of his abbey is the image here -- Columba is curious to know of what really lies below, or beyond; despite his deep grounding in scripture, he wants to hear the words from his friend Oran’s mouth. But like Orpheus who is too needy for the sound of his dead wife, emerging from Tartarus with him, so the words Columba receives from the ghoul are not what he desires or expects. Do we really want to know, or do we just want comfort?
We query the dead for news of what’s ahead, both in the invisible bourne beyond the grave as well as omen of our own times. Last night my wife and I watched the National Geographic special on 9/11 on videotape -- her father taped it for us -- and we were nailed to our seats as the harrowing narrative was icily retold. (Well, almost retold, my father in law caught the special a half an hour late and then the tape ended abruptly before the two towers fell). Anyway, there was a shot of a fireman coming up the stairs of one of the Towers -- the photographer obviously headed the other way, to safety -- and the look on the young man’s face was one of determined fear -- heading up to the fiery embrace of fate, perhaps, I dunno. But it was a look of a man we know had only a few more minutes to live. The look of a person on the iciest ledge of the living.
Did he also bear the look of our much more uncertain and dangerous future? Did he see not only Iraq but also the face-down corpses brimming the dread bayou soup of New Awleans? That affrighted look of the soon-to-be-newly-dead as prologue to this? I heard that 25,000 body bags being are sent to New Orleans as the waters recede & reveal what could not be saved. My wife sees not much else but emptiness on the other side of these images, as if the tissue holding the knucklebone together had been sundered.
What do we know, though? Should we not ask our dead as Horatio would entreat the ghost of Hamlet’s father?:
I’ll cross it, though it blast me.—Stay, illusion!
If thou hast any sound, or use of voice,
Speak to me:
If there be any good thing to be done,
That may to thee do ease, and, race to me,
Speak to me:
If thou art privy to thy country’s fate,
Which, happily, foreknowing may avoid,
O, speak!
Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,
For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death,
[The cock crows.]
Speak of it:—stay, and speak! (I, i)
***
So speak, dead voices ... what news is there of the infinite world? does it resemble the wild promontory of these words, ferried from the wildest half of the heart?
***
... seldom the laurel wreath is seen
Unmixed with pensive poppies dark;
There’s a light and a shadow in every man
Who at last attains his lifted mark --
Nursing through night the ethereal spark.
Elate he never can be;
He feels that spirits which glad had hailed his worth,
Sleep in oblivion. -- The shark
Glides white through the phosphorous sea.
-- Melville, "Commemoration of A Naval Victory"
__
FRANKLIN JONES
Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology
If I could have lived another year
I could have finished my flying machine,
And become rich and famous.
Hence it is fitting the workman
Who tried to chisel a dove for me
Made it look more like a chicken.
For what is it all but being hatched
And running about the yard
To the day of the block?
Save that a man has an angel’s brain,
And sees the ax from the start?
EPITAPH FOR THE MASTER
Two thirds the way
through an older edition
of Spoon River Anthology
(purchased at an
old bookstore outside Ocala)
I found a newspaper
clipping wedged within:
"Edgar Lee Masters,
81, Famous Poet, Dead."
I’ve used that shred
to mark my progress
through his sanctified
cemetery, each poem
a headstone, the verses
a paragraph of ends. Masters’s
own obit stained the pages
for "Henry Tripp"
and "Glanville Calhoun":
"How could they ever
forget my face at my
bedroom window, sitting
helpless amid my golden
cages of singing canaries,
looking at the old court-house?"
Indeed. Even as that book’s
tired cover fades, so dies
a history cooked up
between the River Spoon
and an ordinary, cold hill.
So it went, master, friend,
you who sang so variously
toward that same end.
Sing on, clear river blue,
let me remember his for you.
SKULL MUSIC
My head is also Yours, rude stone,
Bone petra: A vault of verbal
Coins and blue booty, the old slush
Pile of all my days and what You
Make of them. I now believe that
Each event enfolds three cups here:
The tale, its bedding, and the dream
It opens like a door. It’s no
wonder that skulls were set in the
Lintels of barrows, and pitched down
Wells. Nor that I’ve found so many
Here. Each poem is but a tongue both
Back and forward of Your own, my
Totem father, my old stone cross.
May Your bone summit bless this toss.
BLUE BONE BRIDGE
The strong, inwardly quivering bridge
of the mediator has meaning
only where the abyss between God
and us is admitted—:but this very
abyss is full of the darkness of God,
and where someone experiences it,
let him climb down and howl away
inside it (that is more necessary
than crossing it.)
— Rilke, letter to Ilse Jahr, 2/22/23
transl. Stephen Mitchell
When I was 5 my mother took me
to a matinee of “Puss And Boots.”
Two images forever twined in my mind:
in the first, a terrible night thunderstorm
caused a tree to fall on the hero in
an overloud, horrific crash.
In the second a boy jumped
bare-assed into a smiling summer pond.
Terror from the first scene leapt up
in a strange howl, made huge and
loud by the weight of that savage trunk;
a warm delight of the second scene
to lathe my fear in a rich white goo.
On many nights thereafter I’d wake
from nightmares of crashing thunder,
only to press my face to the pillow
and watch myself jump into
warm waters to save a girl.
For all the simple carefree days
which composed my early years—
nurtured and loved by my parents,
safe in suburban neighborhoods—
that dark sweet imagining
kept seizing me like a claw up
from the floor which flicked
me in a pool.
My friend and I built monster
models—Creature From The
Black Lagoon, Dracula, The
Forgotten Prisoner—the two of
us in thrall with the dripping
caverns and rotted cells of
revenants and skeletons.
I found in actual woods
near home and school
a dark sexual joy of
peeking and revealing,
play-acting Mommy and
Daddy not as I knew
but thrilled to guess.
As a child I only guessed at
that blue bone-latticed
land, walking as I did in
relative safety, knowing I
was but a hand away from
some parent’s hand.
Far different was the night
which called me from home into
the tropic lush of my 14th year:
bolder and colder that moon,
wild and intoxicate,
sexual with swollen glands
and aching fingers.
Growing up meant straying
far into that insatiable wood;
a self’s composed from paths
far from home and God.
The musk of crushed oranges
seared up from the rot of ruin
which came on a stormy night
much longer ago, when my God
decreed I craft these craven
images from what I bleed
and perilously need.
How I bandage myself up
from that horrid land
and link back—to the living again
and to a loving hand—is
a complicate return
to a forest night
where a thunder merges
with all the joys down under.
SEA FOREST
Dark life. Confused. Tormented,
incomprehensible and fabulously
rich and beautiful.
-- Tennessee Williams
Huge wood I can neither
resist nor enter. Danger
and wrong the petals
of a heavy blue orchid.
My breakage an artery
hurling toward your breasts.
Elusive verb radiating nouns
like scent. Milky hour of
beachside enactment leading
to death & that float
in blue waters of we.
Ink which disappears
the closer I get to writing
the actual bed. Itch and fever
of the violate child. My war
with the gods of no and without.
Summer afternoons
which build and slake are
still distant; for now, this
high heat which has too
much pressure, like bright
balls clanging against
off every pendulate roll,
heave, sashay. All of it zipped
yet pent, waiting,
plotting, grinding teeth
as the day groins on.
Most difficult angel, You
belong most to the God
inside these raw words. The
poem about sex is a water
horse at noon: the fleet
shade of shadows narrowed
to that hour’s high drone.
A roar like a wave like
a wound like a man
at his meat, grilling over
an unrepentent fire
burning everywhere at once.
A door opens, the blue
mystery resumes
as I tumble down and down
what’s under the heart,
the sky, the summer,
the page, one fin to write
with and endless teeth below.
BOOT BOAT
BOOK BONE
So here I am again,
Lord, astride a falling
surf, riding barebacked
out to you on an
ossuary of white foam:
One night you walked
away from me, “not here”
is inscribed on your
sweet curved ass.
That lass is my taboo and tide,
my voyaging for silk
to white-peaked islands
absent of your pent
and pert, so barbarous
and frothy milk.
Breviary, bestiary,
book in ocean thrown:
each wave I well here
vowels ocean bone,
no line completes the dash--
each blue curved plash
hisses through the motions
of a lover’s foreign tongue,
the first line her last kiss,
the last one all it rung.
OUR DEAD
... Don’t believe that fruits and flowers
consume the numberless unsatisfied dead;
of bitterness and sweetness there remains
a floating infinity around us ...
— Rilke, “The Dead,” transl. A. Poulin Jr.
Our dead line our pockets
with small blue coins;
one side of them bears the
dear mother, the other
a dread skull. If we
could flip the moon
we wouldn’t find a door
or a bared bottom;
rather that eye patiently
counts our days’
undersides pouring
like grains down a glass
and into the world’s
infinite grave. Living our
one day we don’t look back
or forward too far
because the murmurings
rise like a black tongues
from a well we almost
recognize, like dreams.
Hands steady on
the steering wheel, foot not
too heavy on the gas pedal,
we course through the day
from task to task, earning
our bread, finding small
disconsolate pleasures
along the way. The cat in
the window knows our dead
in a different way—less
and more intimately. I doubt
she recalls Buster now
sands in a white jar, that
Himalayan who bulled
about this house
in a continuous yawl
demanding love and food
and berth like a mogul
or a don. Violet occupies
his kingdom not as
a successor but as one
who blooms from the
narrow paths she was
granted, queen now
of the entire house.
I don’t believe she thinks
on Buster the way
my wife recalls how
much he demanded his love,
how frailly constititued
he was so that she had
to watch him so carefully;
Nor as I recall how he’d blithely
leave a nut of shit on
the hallway floor where
I was sure to skid barefooted
at 4 a.m. in the dark on
the way to make coffee.
Where the cat in the window
simply moves in to that absence,
my wife hauls about
a reliquary of desperate love
which hasn’t changed much
in the year since Buster died.
Those blue coins are minted
of the heaviest gold,
invaluable and desperate
and ours forever. Oblivion
only ferries those riches
into the soil, where, like
offal and oil, we pace our
incessant feet across the
relentless day, that rich
dark our breaded way.
DEAD TREE
The dead stay
dead: ghoulish
fancy passes:
Halloween night
revels in spooky
candles in
dark windows
like a sweet
nougat inside
Horror: fine
for kids and
good for
game adults
but the night
passes into
winter’s yew
month: Beth
at James’s
grave yesterday
with her
sister setting
small pumpkins
inscribed
Happy Halloween
James onto
pale hard turf:
Death for them
so hard and
flat, impenetrable,
nothing coming
up and every
thing in them
going down:
Beth furious
that death
takes all
from her family,
her sister
gone all gray
& unkempt
in her banshee
grief & her
mother there
too looking old,
so terribly
fucking old:
An oak in
our back yard
got hit
by lightning
last summer
in the middle
of the night
jolting us
up in terror
from sleep
& setting
off the alarm
& sending
the cats ass
overteakettle
under the bed:
We didn’t know
the bolt hit
the tree back
then but came
to slowly
as the tree
dropped its
nuts & leaves
and eventually
went bare
as bone: It’s
become this
sad fact
towering
in our back
yard: A
thousand bucks
to cut down
Dan says
so we have
to leave it
there: A
bone cathedral:
I talked
yesterday
with Norman
my old bassplayer
from the
early ‘80s
who took a
$20 thou
paycut to
move back
to Chicago
& help his
stepmother
die from
breast cancer:
He told me
that she
finally died
in late
September
just before
he left for
a week in France:
Now he’s pissed
at his dad
for taking up
with his
wife’s best
friend scant
weeks after
the funeral:
Awash too
with all the
finalities of
death you
just don’t
consider till
it washes
over you
(I never thought
about them
coming form
the morgue
to pick up
the body,
stuffing her
into that
black bag...
Now I can’t
get it out
of my mind):
He’s now
facing Chicago
winter hating
his wineseller
gig & missing
California
& trying to
decide if
he should stay
with his
new girlfriend
whose father
just died too
or flee West:
We laughed
about how
it used to
be when
our greatest worry
was over who
we could get
to suck our
cock next:
O death how
you compose
these days:
The dolphin
one a
cuculattus
cresting dark
headstones:
The kids
came calling
when it got
dark (so much
earlier): Little
ones in dinosaur
hats & pink
princess frillies
barely squeaking
trickertreat:
Many boys in
the latest
Star Wars garb:
A couple of
fat teenage
girls who said
they were
Millennium Barbies:
We didn’t get
any black kids
for a long while,
strange because
they have
so earnestly
& faithfully
plundered
our candy filled
pumpkins in the
past: we wondered
if the murders
here in Mount
Dora last winter
set a chill
on their
venturing forth
to white folks
houses: But
eventually
they came,
young kids with
KMart masks
and slathered
makeup, others
with hasty
costumes (maybe
a mask, maybe
a cape) or
none at all
opening Publix
plastic sacks
& saying more
please more:
I fell asleep
by 9 p.m.
as we watched
“House of Wax”
my revenant
days long dead:
We went to
bed & lay
there for a
moment while
Buster tugged
at the sheets
-- some nipple
ritual from his
earliest days:
O god how
weary we are
of so much
haunting by
old Blicker:
The both of
us feeling
old & weary
like the
dying year:
GUY’S WALL
... Less than a billow of the sea
That at the last do no more roam,
Less than a wave, less than a wave,
This thing that hath no home,
This thing that hath no grave ...
— Fiona MacCleod, “In the Night”
Tonight I sit beneath
a naked mulberry tree
on the stone bench where
Guy’s ashes were interred
a quarter century ago.
Long chimes in that
tree knock their sad sweet
bones, while the moon
swings brilliant over all,
though coldly, prowing
across a raw spring night.
Sitting here is a vantage
on the productions
of myth and mystery,
not so much cynical
as peripheral, bluesy,
bittersweet. Age becalms
the spirit’s buoyant fire
as surely as death
inks a darker fluid
in the pen, a weight
which does not rise
so readily. I do not mean
to criticize the night:
rather, this seat befits
a threshold half in
wonder while the
other half’s cold
with rawer truths.
The bell tower and
standing stones are
all so beautiful, sheeted
as they are in such
blue-white silk-
lovely, yes, even
evanescent, engaged
in one of the oldest,
most fertile dances
the mind can imagine,
can hope, can dream ...
So why then carve a
poem from cold hollows,
brooding over the ashes
of a long-lost, scantily
remembered person I but
briefly called a friend?
Who will know this
bench serves also
as a crypt in
another 25 years?
Who will care? The stones
I sit on which cask
that dark oil
tell me nothing
of the man who once
sat up in the limbs
of this mulberry tree
as the rest of us progressed
below heading for the field,
sending down over us the deep
bass of our childhood God,
reminding—no, telling-us
to be good. The stones cannot
(or won’t) explain to me
why Guy died of cancer
before age 30, scant months
after his wife Judy gave birth
to Jennifer. Stones are honest
but most times mute:
And so I must scan
the edges of the far field
where the wood gets darker
and memories are faulty
but a certain truth
can only be found there ...
I knew Guy but a season
two years before he left us all.
He taught me a little about
tuning a piano. One day we
were up in someone’s hot
attic sweating under the hood
of an old upright. You have
to feel the pitch, Guy
told me. If you think about
whether the string you’ve
plucked is sharp or flat,
you’ll never get it tuned.
And then he showed
me how, weaving his tuning
hammer up and down
the loom of strings
like a sonorous Thor.
He couldn’t really explain
it-never enough for me
to learn—but he always got
it right. And when he
finished he played Billy Joel’s
“The Piano Man,” grandly,
rolling up and down the keys
with authority, harmonizing
the bent quiver of the piano
to the arrows of that song.
Guy had a frantic pulse
for life, for making everything
count. Some ambivalent
genius drove him to seek
the spirit’s moony suburbs
halfway between nirvana
and New Jersey. One night
we walked in the woods
over there smoking pot
and talking New Age
phantasmagoria.
He showed me a railway
tunnel which had
long collapsed. We
crept into that dark
until we came upon
a rubble pile. Anybody
home? He boomed to
the devas on the other side.
Surely we’d manifest
a potato god or the
queen of cherry bloom.
Instead there was a crash
of glass and a terrible,
ball-curdling shriek;
we hauled ass out of there
terrified and giggling,
the air behind us shredded
by the nails of whatever
was and was not back in there.
It really happened, though
I doubt tonight it could have.
Only Guy can concur with me,
and he is in the stone.
Guy argued long that summer
about whether the formal
event we were planning
should be called a party or a festival.
The distinction would decide
how much much booze
would be allowed, and when:
perhaps it was a silly point,
but Guy took it to the lists
as fiercely as he whirled
that tuning hammer. Maybe
he just wanted to win the
argument, but he seemed
struck by a certainty none of
us quite fathomed. I surely
didn’t know, just turned 21,
half of my father’s making,
half of a something far from home
which strummed its blue guitar.
Guy lost that argument,
at least in the first sense
of things; that hot midsummer
day was the first of many
festivals celebrated here
round and down the years.
We set a wood tripod in
the middle of the field and
laced it round with bright ribbons.
I played guitar and my buddy
Dave mandolin as revelers jigged
their best in clouds of gnats
beneath a feral, summer sun.
What else transpired? Why
does that day dim so fast
and what followed stay in
focus in this sere, cold light?
At dusk we drank May
wine with wild strawberries
up in the house, listening
to Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
It was all we thought a festival
should be and none of what
we knew, a culmination of
adjacent, airy enough dreams,
formalized into a dance
beneath the hottest,
brightest light of all. Over
the years the tripod was
replaced by standing stones,
and the festivals got bigger
and somehow sweeter:
equinoxes and solstices,
from Samhain to May Day
and back, attended by hundreds,
each devotee of a different
spectra of our faith:
neo-pagan, neo-Christian,
wiccan, vegan, Buddhist,
tattooist, biker, blancher,
blickerer, blueist, each
blaring their reformed
taboos, bedecked
in robes and wreaths and
and cha-cha-cha tutus.
This place has become
a capital of bucolic
whims whirling round
the eminently silent stone:
But you and I, Guy, we
were there for the first one,
peripheral to what my father made
but central to its darker twin.
For as good as all festivals go,
you had wanted more-
something closer to the
world’s more fecund crotch—
and madly, so did I. The day had
been too church-like, too blanched
in that too-bright summer sun.
Two glasses of May wine
couldn’t do the job:
Some other, redder impulse
was needed for our fire,
an ire which only could be found
long after the white one
went down. And so a
dissident faction of that festival
drove over to Guy’s house
to do the party part,
blasting Bruce Springsteen
on the stereo, pounding
shots of Rebel Yell with
our tall-necked Buds. As we
hooted and hammered
and blasted that party jive,
Guy’s brown eyes were like
ebonies of that other music
beyond the ribboned field,
burning, perhaps, with
the soul’s pagan fire.
Or maybe it was cancer.
Whatever Guy might say
of that night, or how
I might remember it,
tonight I believe I’d seen
my patient, my dark mentor.
For I wanted more.
And so later that night Guy
passed me to a crazed cousin
who lived in a house
on the Delaware. I don’t
remember much of what followed
except she was dark in some
folded-in, sad way, and
that her welcome had
to it a sort of ritual clench,
the birth-grapple of
the dark-hottest booze.
The next day as I made
my retreat — shrill trumpets
of a hangover blaring
in my brain pan —
I looked out a window
on the porch to see
black water flowing
almost under the house.
River house, river
witch, bestowing on
me a dark river’s blessing,
carrying me away
at the end of that summer
25 years ago. I was
not ready for the New Age,
not with the big night
music playing so loudly
in my ears. The party kept me
from the festivals for many
years; tonight, again, I
try to return, and end up
here in the borderlands.
I thank you, Guy,
wherever you are among
this night’s windy shades,
for teaching me about what’s
been tempered between the
two faces of the dance.
We yearn and burn,
our sight is split; the view
can kill us or bless us,
be coffin to our ecstasies
or currah us to shore. I’m
not sure you had a choice,
Guy, but I thank you for
making one possible for me,
your shade my trusty door ...
Yes my friend, tonight things
are good. Before me the pond
stares back at the moon with
its black mirror and the standing
stones choir pale homages
in the field. Up in the house my
father and the others are drinking
a Scotch before heading to the field
to celebrate Wesak, the Buddhist
festival of the high Taurus moon.
Tonight, only a few folks are here
— smaller even than the baker’s
dozen of New Age hopefuls
who tried with us to manifest
the sea from a glass of May wine
back in ‘78—but enough.
For wherever two or more
gather to plead human alms
from immensity, a least
a spark of it wilds through
into the mortal bone.
Soon, Guy, I must go and
join my ragged voice to
that prayer, but before
then I want to tell you a few
things, since it will be awhile
before I sit with you again.
I’ve heard your daughter is
now out of college and Judy
is happy in her way down
in Miami-No Jersey charms
for her! Second, my wife
and I emerge from our dark
hours slowly, perhaps toward
a happy enough future; my party
now at end, perhaps that
festival can begin. Her cat
Buster died last year but
appeared in a dream, saying,
I’m OK now, just wanted
to let you know I had
a good life but I won’t be
coming back again.
—Did you ever let your wife know?
—And finally, my father grouses
at 75 years old that he can’t stop
coming back, long after the day
five years ago he was so certain
he would die. In your time
I’m sure that time comes
soon, too very soon.
That’s about all. We don’t
hardly know how
to tell our stories, Guy,
much less brave an end.
I’m not sure how this poem
will get there. As I listen
to those chimes beating against
each other first calm then wild,
I know they’re all I really
have of you. I wish I
could see half of what I
dream is here, but I’m
grateful you and I
remain where we are, citizens
on either side of a stone wall.
As a cold wind blows indifferently
over us, I think of all the others
whose ashes are also buried here -
AIDS victims, earth mamas,
prodigal boys who couldn’t quite
get home, my dad’s dog Lancelot
beneath a small dolmen next
to the house. There are crypts
beneath the chapel floor
waiting for my father and Fred,
for Albertine who’s just entered hospice,
for the hopefully mixed ashes of
my brother and his wife.
There are plenty of memorials
on this land, too, heaps of stones
in the forest, feathers slung
from limbs, trees planted to
grow where we stopped,
like the weeping cherry
put in last week for a young
woman who killed herself.
So many dead limn this land
with you Guy, fading into the
moon-cast shadows of
oblivion, silent witnesses to
the horde of living who come
back every season to beat drums,
swing crystals, and troop the wood
in search of what, I suspect,
only ashes find by scattering.
Some day I’ll look into that
bell tower door searching
the space my father departed
through, sniffing for a trace
of Borkum Riff or Scotch whiskey,
straining my eyes for a glint
of his laughing blues.
I suspect I won’t see
anything but stones and field
and the wood’s black umbers,
all awash in and resonant with
this same old brilliant bonelight.
And I suspect I will say then
to him as I say to you tonight:
friend, fare thee well, the real world
is carved from your strange hallows.
Your music’s in my bones.
Play me a song Mister Piano Man,
grandly on the ivories
of those chimes.
Sing to me about the wild
betweens and how to love
the living wonder there. Voices
are now weaving in the bell
tower; the ceremony’s
begun. Will you play Buddha
for me tonight, old friend,
high up in that mulberry tree,
and you add your deep voice
to our still-human weave?
Will you bless us with
what you’ve earned
among the ancient stone?
And will you keep tuning
this heart of mine with
what’s strung between
the cold embrace of this stone
and the dream which praises all?
***
Dan Barry queries the dead in “Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street,” posted on yesterday’s NYTimes online:
In the downtown business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank automated teller machine, across from a parking garage offering “early bird” rates: a corpse. Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor mortis.
Six National Guardsmen walked up to it on Tuesday afternoon and two blessed themselves with the sign of the cross. One soldier took a parting snapshot like some visiting conventioneer, and they walked away. New Orleans, September 2005.
Hours passed, the dusk of curfew crept, the body remained. A Louisiana state trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of several in that area. The police marked it with traffic cones maybe four days ago, he said, and then he joked that if you wanted to kill someone here, this was a good time.
Night came, then this morning, then noon, and another sun beat down on a dead son of the Crescent City.
That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week’s hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.
Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged: pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet. ...
***
“Everyone has a dead guy story,” sd. an NPR reporter as he related his own, about seeing a dead guy on the porch of a Creole cottage where there was no sound but that of the wind chimes on the porch. Query the dead, that silence: In this pause between awful events and their dread, eventual consquence, let us take those corpses as spectral, potent, eloquent, strange: the dread face of the the times, of an awfulness we can neither accept nor refuse. And as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, murdered king of Denmark, stalks the frozen ramparts of black-watch three-bells Elsinore, so I observe those blue residents of drowned New Awleans, floating like the hair of Ophelia; and, as Horatio would of such prescient visitations, declare them “... harbiners preceding still the fates / And prologue to the omen coming on.” (Hamlet I, i).
Neumann: “The world of symbols forms the bridge between a consciousness struggling to emancipate and systemize itself, and the collective unconscious with its transpersonal contents. So long as the world exists and continues to operate through the various rituals, cults, myths, religion, and art, it prevents the two worlds from falling apart, partly because, owing to the effect of the symbol, one side of the psychic system continually influences the other side and sets up a dialectical relationship between the two.” (Origins and History of Consciousness, 365)
Yes, but what happens when that bridge falters and fails? Is too weak, having lost the tenons of language and an identifiable culture? When the religion has no vitality, when the angels are mute? When the father dies, burdening mothers with the impossible task of raising sons up by their jockstraps out of the fury of rut?
Bridge yes, “of harp and altar fused” (Hart Crane); naked spine of the mediatrix, that heart-shaped ass, walking out of the room into the blue morents of infinte night. But an infernal bridge, not literal, not linear, not even a likeable one: awful and awesome, a dread passage which demands more than I have ever had the balls to do, to say.
Bonier, perhaps. Anne Carson, in her daringly evanescent Eros The Bittersweet: “The English word ‘symbol’ is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone
carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning. A metaphor is a species of symbol. So is a lover.” Bony truths jointed by their impossible, other-warding hearts, “whole and not whole, connected-separate, consonant-dissonant.” (Heraclitus)
One of the etymological Gaelic roots of pal Oran is Jodras, to query: the mythologem of Columba digging up the head of his buried friend after three days in the foundations of his abbey is the image here -- Columba is curious to know of what really lies below, or beyond; despite his deep grounding in scripture, he wants to hear the words from his friend Oran’s mouth. But like Orpheus who is too needy for the sound of his dead wife, emerging from Tartarus with him, so the words Columba receives from the ghoul are not what he desires or expects. Do we really want to know, or do we just want comfort?
We query the dead for news of what’s ahead, both in the invisible bourne beyond the grave as well as omen of our own times. Last night my wife and I watched the National Geographic special on 9/11 on videotape -- her father taped it for us -- and we were nailed to our seats as the harrowing narrative was icily retold. (Well, almost retold, my father in law caught the special a half an hour late and then the tape ended abruptly before the two towers fell). Anyway, there was a shot of a fireman coming up the stairs of one of the Towers -- the photographer obviously headed the other way, to safety -- and the look on the young man’s face was one of determined fear -- heading up to the fiery embrace of fate, perhaps, I dunno. But it was a look of a man we know had only a few more minutes to live. The look of a person on the iciest ledge of the living.
Did he also bear the look of our much more uncertain and dangerous future? Did he see not only Iraq but also the face-down corpses brimming the dread bayou soup of New Awleans? That affrighted look of the soon-to-be-newly-dead as prologue to this? I heard that 25,000 body bags being are sent to New Orleans as the waters recede & reveal what could not be saved. My wife sees not much else but emptiness on the other side of these images, as if the tissue holding the knucklebone together had been sundered.
What do we know, though? Should we not ask our dead as Horatio would entreat the ghost of Hamlet’s father?:
I’ll cross it, though it blast me.—Stay, illusion!
If thou hast any sound, or use of voice,
Speak to me:
If there be any good thing to be done,
That may to thee do ease, and, race to me,
Speak to me:
If thou art privy to thy country’s fate,
Which, happily, foreknowing may avoid,
O, speak!
Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,
For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death,
[The cock crows.]
Speak of it:—stay, and speak! (I, i)
***
So speak, dead voices ... what news is there of the infinite world? does it resemble the wild promontory of these words, ferried from the wildest half of the heart?
***
... seldom the laurel wreath is seen
Unmixed with pensive poppies dark;
There’s a light and a shadow in every man
Who at last attains his lifted mark --
Nursing through night the ethereal spark.
Elate he never can be;
He feels that spirits which glad had hailed his worth,
Sleep in oblivion. -- The shark
Glides white through the phosphorous sea.
-- Melville, "Commemoration of A Naval Victory"
__
FRANKLIN JONES
Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology
If I could have lived another year
I could have finished my flying machine,
And become rich and famous.
Hence it is fitting the workman
Who tried to chisel a dove for me
Made it look more like a chicken.
For what is it all but being hatched
And running about the yard
To the day of the block?
Save that a man has an angel’s brain,
And sees the ax from the start?
EPITAPH FOR THE MASTER
Two thirds the way
through an older edition
of Spoon River Anthology
(purchased at an
old bookstore outside Ocala)
I found a newspaper
clipping wedged within:
"Edgar Lee Masters,
81, Famous Poet, Dead."
I’ve used that shred
to mark my progress
through his sanctified
cemetery, each poem
a headstone, the verses
a paragraph of ends. Masters’s
own obit stained the pages
for "Henry Tripp"
and "Glanville Calhoun":
"How could they ever
forget my face at my
bedroom window, sitting
helpless amid my golden
cages of singing canaries,
looking at the old court-house?"
Indeed. Even as that book’s
tired cover fades, so dies
a history cooked up
between the River Spoon
and an ordinary, cold hill.
So it went, master, friend,
you who sang so variously
toward that same end.
Sing on, clear river blue,
let me remember his for you.
SKULL MUSIC
My head is also Yours, rude stone,
Bone petra: A vault of verbal
Coins and blue booty, the old slush
Pile of all my days and what You
Make of them. I now believe that
Each event enfolds three cups here:
The tale, its bedding, and the dream
It opens like a door. It’s no
wonder that skulls were set in the
Lintels of barrows, and pitched down
Wells. Nor that I’ve found so many
Here. Each poem is but a tongue both
Back and forward of Your own, my
Totem father, my old stone cross.
May Your bone summit bless this toss.
BLUE BONE BRIDGE
The strong, inwardly quivering bridge
of the mediator has meaning
only where the abyss between God
and us is admitted—:but this very
abyss is full of the darkness of God,
and where someone experiences it,
let him climb down and howl away
inside it (that is more necessary
than crossing it.)
— Rilke, letter to Ilse Jahr, 2/22/23
transl. Stephen Mitchell
When I was 5 my mother took me
to a matinee of “Puss And Boots.”
Two images forever twined in my mind:
in the first, a terrible night thunderstorm
caused a tree to fall on the hero in
an overloud, horrific crash.
In the second a boy jumped
bare-assed into a smiling summer pond.
Terror from the first scene leapt up
in a strange howl, made huge and
loud by the weight of that savage trunk;
a warm delight of the second scene
to lathe my fear in a rich white goo.
On many nights thereafter I’d wake
from nightmares of crashing thunder,
only to press my face to the pillow
and watch myself jump into
warm waters to save a girl.
For all the simple carefree days
which composed my early years—
nurtured and loved by my parents,
safe in suburban neighborhoods—
that dark sweet imagining
kept seizing me like a claw up
from the floor which flicked
me in a pool.
My friend and I built monster
models—Creature From The
Black Lagoon, Dracula, The
Forgotten Prisoner—the two of
us in thrall with the dripping
caverns and rotted cells of
revenants and skeletons.
I found in actual woods
near home and school
a dark sexual joy of
peeking and revealing,
play-acting Mommy and
Daddy not as I knew
but thrilled to guess.
As a child I only guessed at
that blue bone-latticed
land, walking as I did in
relative safety, knowing I
was but a hand away from
some parent’s hand.
Far different was the night
which called me from home into
the tropic lush of my 14th year:
bolder and colder that moon,
wild and intoxicate,
sexual with swollen glands
and aching fingers.
Growing up meant straying
far into that insatiable wood;
a self’s composed from paths
far from home and God.
The musk of crushed oranges
seared up from the rot of ruin
which came on a stormy night
much longer ago, when my God
decreed I craft these craven
images from what I bleed
and perilously need.
How I bandage myself up
from that horrid land
and link back—to the living again
and to a loving hand—is
a complicate return
to a forest night
where a thunder merges
with all the joys down under.
SEA FOREST
Dark life. Confused. Tormented,
incomprehensible and fabulously
rich and beautiful.
-- Tennessee Williams
Huge wood I can neither
resist nor enter. Danger
and wrong the petals
of a heavy blue orchid.
My breakage an artery
hurling toward your breasts.
Elusive verb radiating nouns
like scent. Milky hour of
beachside enactment leading
to death & that float
in blue waters of we.
Ink which disappears
the closer I get to writing
the actual bed. Itch and fever
of the violate child. My war
with the gods of no and without.
Summer afternoons
which build and slake are
still distant; for now, this
high heat which has too
much pressure, like bright
balls clanging against
off every pendulate roll,
heave, sashay. All of it zipped
yet pent, waiting,
plotting, grinding teeth
as the day groins on.
Most difficult angel, You
belong most to the God
inside these raw words. The
poem about sex is a water
horse at noon: the fleet
shade of shadows narrowed
to that hour’s high drone.
A roar like a wave like
a wound like a man
at his meat, grilling over
an unrepentent fire
burning everywhere at once.
A door opens, the blue
mystery resumes
as I tumble down and down
what’s under the heart,
the sky, the summer,
the page, one fin to write
with and endless teeth below.
BOOT BOAT
BOOK BONE
So here I am again,
Lord, astride a falling
surf, riding barebacked
out to you on an
ossuary of white foam:
One night you walked
away from me, “not here”
is inscribed on your
sweet curved ass.
That lass is my taboo and tide,
my voyaging for silk
to white-peaked islands
absent of your pent
and pert, so barbarous
and frothy milk.
Breviary, bestiary,
book in ocean thrown:
each wave I well here
vowels ocean bone,
no line completes the dash--
each blue curved plash
hisses through the motions
of a lover’s foreign tongue,
the first line her last kiss,
the last one all it rung.
OUR DEAD
... Don’t believe that fruits and flowers
consume the numberless unsatisfied dead;
of bitterness and sweetness there remains
a floating infinity around us ...
— Rilke, “The Dead,” transl. A. Poulin Jr.
Our dead line our pockets
with small blue coins;
one side of them bears the
dear mother, the other
a dread skull. If we
could flip the moon
we wouldn’t find a door
or a bared bottom;
rather that eye patiently
counts our days’
undersides pouring
like grains down a glass
and into the world’s
infinite grave. Living our
one day we don’t look back
or forward too far
because the murmurings
rise like a black tongues
from a well we almost
recognize, like dreams.
Hands steady on
the steering wheel, foot not
too heavy on the gas pedal,
we course through the day
from task to task, earning
our bread, finding small
disconsolate pleasures
along the way. The cat in
the window knows our dead
in a different way—less
and more intimately. I doubt
she recalls Buster now
sands in a white jar, that
Himalayan who bulled
about this house
in a continuous yawl
demanding love and food
and berth like a mogul
or a don. Violet occupies
his kingdom not as
a successor but as one
who blooms from the
narrow paths she was
granted, queen now
of the entire house.
I don’t believe she thinks
on Buster the way
my wife recalls how
much he demanded his love,
how frailly constititued
he was so that she had
to watch him so carefully;
Nor as I recall how he’d blithely
leave a nut of shit on
the hallway floor where
I was sure to skid barefooted
at 4 a.m. in the dark on
the way to make coffee.
Where the cat in the window
simply moves in to that absence,
my wife hauls about
a reliquary of desperate love
which hasn’t changed much
in the year since Buster died.
Those blue coins are minted
of the heaviest gold,
invaluable and desperate
and ours forever. Oblivion
only ferries those riches
into the soil, where, like
offal and oil, we pace our
incessant feet across the
relentless day, that rich
dark our breaded way.
DEAD TREE
The dead stay
dead: ghoulish
fancy passes:
Halloween night
revels in spooky
candles in
dark windows
like a sweet
nougat inside
Horror: fine
for kids and
good for
game adults
but the night
passes into
winter’s yew
month: Beth
at James’s
grave yesterday
with her
sister setting
small pumpkins
inscribed
Happy Halloween
James onto
pale hard turf:
Death for them
so hard and
flat, impenetrable,
nothing coming
up and every
thing in them
going down:
Beth furious
that death
takes all
from her family,
her sister
gone all gray
& unkempt
in her banshee
grief & her
mother there
too looking old,
so terribly
fucking old:
An oak in
our back yard
got hit
by lightning
last summer
in the middle
of the night
jolting us
up in terror
from sleep
& setting
off the alarm
& sending
the cats ass
overteakettle
under the bed:
We didn’t know
the bolt hit
the tree back
then but came
to slowly
as the tree
dropped its
nuts & leaves
and eventually
went bare
as bone: It’s
become this
sad fact
towering
in our back
yard: A
thousand bucks
to cut down
Dan says
so we have
to leave it
there: A
bone cathedral:
I talked
yesterday
with Norman
my old bassplayer
from the
early ‘80s
who took a
$20 thou
paycut to
move back
to Chicago
& help his
stepmother
die from
breast cancer:
He told me
that she
finally died
in late
September
just before
he left for
a week in France:
Now he’s pissed
at his dad
for taking up
with his
wife’s best
friend scant
weeks after
the funeral:
Awash too
with all the
finalities of
death you
just don’t
consider till
it washes
over you
(I never thought
about them
coming form
the morgue
to pick up
the body,
stuffing her
into that
black bag...
Now I can’t
get it out
of my mind):
He’s now
facing Chicago
winter hating
his wineseller
gig & missing
California
& trying to
decide if
he should stay
with his
new girlfriend
whose father
just died too
or flee West:
We laughed
about how
it used to
be when
our greatest worry
was over who
we could get
to suck our
cock next:
O death how
you compose
these days:
The dolphin
one a
cuculattus
cresting dark
headstones:
The kids
came calling
when it got
dark (so much
earlier): Little
ones in dinosaur
hats & pink
princess frillies
barely squeaking
trickertreat:
Many boys in
the latest
Star Wars garb:
A couple of
fat teenage
girls who said
they were
Millennium Barbies:
We didn’t get
any black kids
for a long while,
strange because
they have
so earnestly
& faithfully
plundered
our candy filled
pumpkins in the
past: we wondered
if the murders
here in Mount
Dora last winter
set a chill
on their
venturing forth
to white folks
houses: But
eventually
they came,
young kids with
KMart masks
and slathered
makeup, others
with hasty
costumes (maybe
a mask, maybe
a cape) or
none at all
opening Publix
plastic sacks
& saying more
please more:
I fell asleep
by 9 p.m.
as we watched
“House of Wax”
my revenant
days long dead:
We went to
bed & lay
there for a
moment while
Buster tugged
at the sheets
-- some nipple
ritual from his
earliest days:
O god how
weary we are
of so much
haunting by
old Blicker:
The both of
us feeling
old & weary
like the
dying year:
GUY’S WALL
... Less than a billow of the sea
That at the last do no more roam,
Less than a wave, less than a wave,
This thing that hath no home,
This thing that hath no grave ...
— Fiona MacCleod, “In the Night”
Tonight I sit beneath
a naked mulberry tree
on the stone bench where
Guy’s ashes were interred
a quarter century ago.
Long chimes in that
tree knock their sad sweet
bones, while the moon
swings brilliant over all,
though coldly, prowing
across a raw spring night.
Sitting here is a vantage
on the productions
of myth and mystery,
not so much cynical
as peripheral, bluesy,
bittersweet. Age becalms
the spirit’s buoyant fire
as surely as death
inks a darker fluid
in the pen, a weight
which does not rise
so readily. I do not mean
to criticize the night:
rather, this seat befits
a threshold half in
wonder while the
other half’s cold
with rawer truths.
The bell tower and
standing stones are
all so beautiful, sheeted
as they are in such
blue-white silk-
lovely, yes, even
evanescent, engaged
in one of the oldest,
most fertile dances
the mind can imagine,
can hope, can dream ...
So why then carve a
poem from cold hollows,
brooding over the ashes
of a long-lost, scantily
remembered person I but
briefly called a friend?
Who will know this
bench serves also
as a crypt in
another 25 years?
Who will care? The stones
I sit on which cask
that dark oil
tell me nothing
of the man who once
sat up in the limbs
of this mulberry tree
as the rest of us progressed
below heading for the field,
sending down over us the deep
bass of our childhood God,
reminding—no, telling-us
to be good. The stones cannot
(or won’t) explain to me
why Guy died of cancer
before age 30, scant months
after his wife Judy gave birth
to Jennifer. Stones are honest
but most times mute:
And so I must scan
the edges of the far field
where the wood gets darker
and memories are faulty
but a certain truth
can only be found there ...
I knew Guy but a season
two years before he left us all.
He taught me a little about
tuning a piano. One day we
were up in someone’s hot
attic sweating under the hood
of an old upright. You have
to feel the pitch, Guy
told me. If you think about
whether the string you’ve
plucked is sharp or flat,
you’ll never get it tuned.
And then he showed
me how, weaving his tuning
hammer up and down
the loom of strings
like a sonorous Thor.
He couldn’t really explain
it-never enough for me
to learn—but he always got
it right. And when he
finished he played Billy Joel’s
“The Piano Man,” grandly,
rolling up and down the keys
with authority, harmonizing
the bent quiver of the piano
to the arrows of that song.
Guy had a frantic pulse
for life, for making everything
count. Some ambivalent
genius drove him to seek
the spirit’s moony suburbs
halfway between nirvana
and New Jersey. One night
we walked in the woods
over there smoking pot
and talking New Age
phantasmagoria.
He showed me a railway
tunnel which had
long collapsed. We
crept into that dark
until we came upon
a rubble pile. Anybody
home? He boomed to
the devas on the other side.
Surely we’d manifest
a potato god or the
queen of cherry bloom.
Instead there was a crash
of glass and a terrible,
ball-curdling shriek;
we hauled ass out of there
terrified and giggling,
the air behind us shredded
by the nails of whatever
was and was not back in there.
It really happened, though
I doubt tonight it could have.
Only Guy can concur with me,
and he is in the stone.
Guy argued long that summer
about whether the formal
event we were planning
should be called a party or a festival.
The distinction would decide
how much much booze
would be allowed, and when:
perhaps it was a silly point,
but Guy took it to the lists
as fiercely as he whirled
that tuning hammer. Maybe
he just wanted to win the
argument, but he seemed
struck by a certainty none of
us quite fathomed. I surely
didn’t know, just turned 21,
half of my father’s making,
half of a something far from home
which strummed its blue guitar.
Guy lost that argument,
at least in the first sense
of things; that hot midsummer
day was the first of many
festivals celebrated here
round and down the years.
We set a wood tripod in
the middle of the field and
laced it round with bright ribbons.
I played guitar and my buddy
Dave mandolin as revelers jigged
their best in clouds of gnats
beneath a feral, summer sun.
What else transpired? Why
does that day dim so fast
and what followed stay in
focus in this sere, cold light?
At dusk we drank May
wine with wild strawberries
up in the house, listening
to Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
It was all we thought a festival
should be and none of what
we knew, a culmination of
adjacent, airy enough dreams,
formalized into a dance
beneath the hottest,
brightest light of all. Over
the years the tripod was
replaced by standing stones,
and the festivals got bigger
and somehow sweeter:
equinoxes and solstices,
from Samhain to May Day
and back, attended by hundreds,
each devotee of a different
spectra of our faith:
neo-pagan, neo-Christian,
wiccan, vegan, Buddhist,
tattooist, biker, blancher,
blickerer, blueist, each
blaring their reformed
taboos, bedecked
in robes and wreaths and
and cha-cha-cha tutus.
This place has become
a capital of bucolic
whims whirling round
the eminently silent stone:
But you and I, Guy, we
were there for the first one,
peripheral to what my father made
but central to its darker twin.
For as good as all festivals go,
you had wanted more-
something closer to the
world’s more fecund crotch—
and madly, so did I. The day had
been too church-like, too blanched
in that too-bright summer sun.
Two glasses of May wine
couldn’t do the job:
Some other, redder impulse
was needed for our fire,
an ire which only could be found
long after the white one
went down. And so a
dissident faction of that festival
drove over to Guy’s house
to do the party part,
blasting Bruce Springsteen
on the stereo, pounding
shots of Rebel Yell with
our tall-necked Buds. As we
hooted and hammered
and blasted that party jive,
Guy’s brown eyes were like
ebonies of that other music
beyond the ribboned field,
burning, perhaps, with
the soul’s pagan fire.
Or maybe it was cancer.
Whatever Guy might say
of that night, or how
I might remember it,
tonight I believe I’d seen
my patient, my dark mentor.
For I wanted more.
And so later that night Guy
passed me to a crazed cousin
who lived in a house
on the Delaware. I don’t
remember much of what followed
except she was dark in some
folded-in, sad way, and
that her welcome had
to it a sort of ritual clench,
the birth-grapple of
the dark-hottest booze.
The next day as I made
my retreat — shrill trumpets
of a hangover blaring
in my brain pan —
I looked out a window
on the porch to see
black water flowing
almost under the house.
River house, river
witch, bestowing on
me a dark river’s blessing,
carrying me away
at the end of that summer
25 years ago. I was
not ready for the New Age,
not with the big night
music playing so loudly
in my ears. The party kept me
from the festivals for many
years; tonight, again, I
try to return, and end up
here in the borderlands.
I thank you, Guy,
wherever you are among
this night’s windy shades,
for teaching me about what’s
been tempered between the
two faces of the dance.
We yearn and burn,
our sight is split; the view
can kill us or bless us,
be coffin to our ecstasies
or currah us to shore. I’m
not sure you had a choice,
Guy, but I thank you for
making one possible for me,
your shade my trusty door ...
Yes my friend, tonight things
are good. Before me the pond
stares back at the moon with
its black mirror and the standing
stones choir pale homages
in the field. Up in the house my
father and the others are drinking
a Scotch before heading to the field
to celebrate Wesak, the Buddhist
festival of the high Taurus moon.
Tonight, only a few folks are here
— smaller even than the baker’s
dozen of New Age hopefuls
who tried with us to manifest
the sea from a glass of May wine
back in ‘78—but enough.
For wherever two or more
gather to plead human alms
from immensity, a least
a spark of it wilds through
into the mortal bone.
Soon, Guy, I must go and
join my ragged voice to
that prayer, but before
then I want to tell you a few
things, since it will be awhile
before I sit with you again.
I’ve heard your daughter is
now out of college and Judy
is happy in her way down
in Miami-No Jersey charms
for her! Second, my wife
and I emerge from our dark
hours slowly, perhaps toward
a happy enough future; my party
now at end, perhaps that
festival can begin. Her cat
Buster died last year but
appeared in a dream, saying,
I’m OK now, just wanted
to let you know I had
a good life but I won’t be
coming back again.
—Did you ever let your wife know?
—And finally, my father grouses
at 75 years old that he can’t stop
coming back, long after the day
five years ago he was so certain
he would die. In your time
I’m sure that time comes
soon, too very soon.
That’s about all. We don’t
hardly know how
to tell our stories, Guy,
much less brave an end.
I’m not sure how this poem
will get there. As I listen
to those chimes beating against
each other first calm then wild,
I know they’re all I really
have of you. I wish I
could see half of what I
dream is here, but I’m
grateful you and I
remain where we are, citizens
on either side of a stone wall.
As a cold wind blows indifferently
over us, I think of all the others
whose ashes are also buried here -
AIDS victims, earth mamas,
prodigal boys who couldn’t quite
get home, my dad’s dog Lancelot
beneath a small dolmen next
to the house. There are crypts
beneath the chapel floor
waiting for my father and Fred,
for Albertine who’s just entered hospice,
for the hopefully mixed ashes of
my brother and his wife.
There are plenty of memorials
on this land, too, heaps of stones
in the forest, feathers slung
from limbs, trees planted to
grow where we stopped,
like the weeping cherry
put in last week for a young
woman who killed herself.
So many dead limn this land
with you Guy, fading into the
moon-cast shadows of
oblivion, silent witnesses to
the horde of living who come
back every season to beat drums,
swing crystals, and troop the wood
in search of what, I suspect,
only ashes find by scattering.
Some day I’ll look into that
bell tower door searching
the space my father departed
through, sniffing for a trace
of Borkum Riff or Scotch whiskey,
straining my eyes for a glint
of his laughing blues.
I suspect I won’t see
anything but stones and field
and the wood’s black umbers,
all awash in and resonant with
this same old brilliant bonelight.
And I suspect I will say then
to him as I say to you tonight:
friend, fare thee well, the real world
is carved from your strange hallows.
Your music’s in my bones.
Play me a song Mister Piano Man,
grandly on the ivories
of those chimes.
Sing to me about the wild
betweens and how to love
the living wonder there. Voices
are now weaving in the bell
tower; the ceremony’s
begun. Will you play Buddha
for me tonight, old friend,
high up in that mulberry tree,
and you add your deep voice
to our still-human weave?
Will you bless us with
what you’ve earned
among the ancient stone?
And will you keep tuning
this heart of mine with
what’s strung between
the cold embrace of this stone
and the dream which praises all?
posted by Brendan MacOdrum at 6:45 AM
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