Eye

he wanted
to be seen

but he had
not read
the rule

seeing
requires light

but light
burns skin

so he
withdrew

within

once again

Primal Patriarch

he appeared
then her

his son died
murdered by his brother

eventually he died
from her
to the earth

it was his end
but not the end

the hierarchy
arose
from a cut
pruned
from a yellow rose

now he ascends
and descends
toward transcendence

Fact of the Doing Thing

the job
that works
us
is not
the one
we waited
for in fact
the work
we do
is not
the one
we dreamed
of nor trained
for nor interviewed
with nor even
wanted
instead we do
what we do
because we
can do
no other
thing

Return

after each blow
the worm returns
to its rose
to spin silk
for lace
she makes
under the window

Theme of Mittilagart

ein jeder engel ist schrecklich--Rilke

Chris Roberson's "Set the Seas on Fire"

Red Rook Review has just posted its first review.

Forget La Gioconda

the hierarchy of category
begins with alpha's breath

branches off the knowing tree
and tunnels through worm mold

the rose is the snail's end
a breathless line that connects
old Adam to the castaway

categories incarnate
as each initiate contributes
a thread to the maker's lace

so all the Vermeers wait
with frail facticity

to prove omega's line
ends with lace's last design

Method

The chow barks
a snail's portrait

its threefold
sign
triples one round
shell

to read its whorl
is to hear a star gasp

a frozen breath inward

to hear the whorl
is to read a sea-green sea

Sargasso
into a blue
Geist

Her Spring Revolt

vowel revolution
leads to noun resolution

when word-scree
blocked the pass
I brought my spoon
and cereal bowl

and when word-shards
severed the Irish trail
I fetched my fork
and Austrian plate

but when I was late
you flew North
like a headless crow

with neither caw nor care

Abstraction

Rousseau paints green
on the jungle canvas

his yellow parrots
parade on jagged limbs
where jaguars sleep
jade in verdant shadows

mottled leaves dry
from an afternoon rain
and sun-threads reign
over jaundiced puddles

where parrots drink
and the Paraclete
sleeps shuttered
in the jaguar's keep

Mittilagart--the Valkyries Arrive

The first chapter is finished. Eight thousand words exactly as I planned. I intend eighty days to a novel. Writing about life after death is a new one and I am trying to push the magical envelope. I am also trying to "textualize" my dialogue. Let's see if they (the very young editors) can teach an old dog new tricks.

Process D'or

Line ends
your breath

but to breathe
signifies
a four-fold
sign
of green

so exit
timeless
and dream
blue

but do not fall
or fail
for a bruise
re-boots
black

Rimbaud's Color Wheel

The center-word
does not hold
its color-sounds
alone

they swirl
within the sun-threads
first black then white
green then blue

until the red appears
so red that we see
gold

the danger
though is that blue
bruises black
and begins to turn
again

Chicago Lyre

desire
fuels
your blue flame

so do
not blame

the coal man
who fills
the gray bin

or the red brick
that warms
your face

likewise
do not harm
your faithful cow
that kicks the trace

instead embrace
the fire-threads
that embroider
green dreams
with yellow
word-shards
and the inner star
that singes
blue moons

Beckett Beckons

curtain call
and we take
to the boards

we play Beckett
in the round
and we wait

we wait for lights
and applause

we wait
for roses
and cheering
crowds

we wait
for Beckett
on his deepest ground
as we play the round

Mittilagart

I am three thousand words into my new novel and it has taken a strange turn. A Swedish volunteer in the Nordland Division is killed in the Battle of Berlin and taken to Valhalla by Birgit Oiseau, Jacques Oiseau's dead wife. Thus begins the sequel to "Okeanus."

Rose + Snail

the quotidian
is today
and tomorrow
until the end

the end
is no concern
of the snail's
or mine

our task
is to struggle
to the center
of the rose
or breath
at the end
of the line

breathe-signs
signal signatures
signed

only then
will done
be
done
and words
sealed

Die Vergangenheit

I enjoy bonitas
dancing the tango
but when I think
about the petit pendant
I know the après durée
is the proper place to play

Chows Bark Primal Words

to the two Ws-Walt and Wallace


they sing the lyric of the lower man

as black-tongued chows they bark
primordial words like familial hounds

their harried language howls to the languid
lovers of the lower level and like
puritans in their log cabins they pray
for the patriarch's provision of profit

owls observe their shadowed orbs
beneath the New England woods
and doves huddle in their hutch
cooing to the sweet squabs
that squeak tomorrow's sun

their fresh feathers fray
throughout the night's somber
embrace and the moon's frigid light

at dawn a pigeon carries a message
to the sun-knitted in angelic sun-threads

the primal word images god
through the lower ones
and incarnates the quotidian
on parchment

receiving the message on winged tongues
the pilgrims pray for transcendence
but the elect find their wealth
in the moldering soil of the worms

the worms wiggle on hooks of desire
the chow tongues once blackened catch fire

Quarry

to Anschel


my role was ordained

I dig stones
they cement

they are masons
and their measures
are exact

they build
pyramids

each rock
locks
inextricably
to another

Stone Measures

poetry sleeps within the stone
while the stone measures the line

the act on board is made
and the doing
done and now alone

like a castaway
the line moves on
as does the raft
as does the bottle
all three bobbing
up and down, then sink
as the horizon shrinks
and seagulls squeal

we remember it
but we cannot recall it

Red Rook Review

I just launched a new blog to house my reviews of "slipstream" literature. The advance copy of the first book to be reviewed has arrived and I hope to have my review up within the next few weeks. My goal is to write substantial reviews of between 1500 to 2000 words.

My Stylistic Choice

monotones
drone in a gallery

hushed whispers
buzz about without adjectives
and then a laugh

a canvas
seasoned gray
with a violent
splash
of red
hangs
on a wall
painted
egg-shell

a dour Dutch
portrait
of a bowl
of brown eggs
two dead fowl
a tumbled glass
of ruby port

and a Burgermeister's
daughter shedding
a gelid tear
poised
on her blue-green
cheek

Haiku-eins

silent spring-snow gifts
grass sprinkled with pear petals
and doves in silk drifts

GI Home 1968

to Harold and Gene

at first light
fog fragments woods
as three men
find the green clearing

they survey
the square
and stake
stakes
into sallow
soil

they twist
twine
around pine
posts
as a preamble

they shovel
sleep-sand
with sharpened
spades

and
measure
flat feet
with fours
and twos

in this rite
they found
foundations
with first
steps

and slay
snakes
with Parsifal's
spear

White Bears Red Snakes

white bears on white
snow and blue ice
hunger for black
seals with black eyes
sleeping
on green ice
and white snow
when
ice melts
islands appear
and floes
flow
down streams
between the rifts
of the archipelago
south toward ship
lanes where steam
bellows and screws
torque toward green
land and brown land
in the west
green-blue parrots
shriek in dark jungles
where snakes
entwine
between black
limbs
as they shed
red skin

Readers

he writes a poem
she reads his poem
it is not his poem
it is another thing
her poem

she writes a poem
he reads her poem
it is not her poem
it is a new thing
his poem

they write
they read
the message is not their message
the bottle is not their bottle
it is a found thing
a new thing
the lost thing
the bottle

Northwest Passage

to Ms O'Leary


Doctor John Dee
read four thousand books
and spoke
to Annael
in tongues.

She was his muse
and Spenser's virgin queen.

Together they scryed
a darkened way
to a manifest
destiny.

Through chartered
companies
and bartered ships
they struggled
beneath sea-green
ice
and beached
one fateful day
as castaways
in auriferous
Cathay.

Liminal State

The other Oyle is prest out
of the dried Cocus, which is called Copra


Deep down
on the lower level,
beneath the sea-green
breakers, we walk on our head.

At night we dream
of parakeets in palms;
brown-bronze women
dance on yellow sand.

Yesterday we piloted
a silver schooner
through the archipelago
and traded Gaugins
for copra.

We serve the sea-spider;
we breathe through gills.

Tomorrow we hide
in a coral niche
and count starfish
with tattooed eyes.

Friday

I in-dwell within the sea-spider's niche.
Black and spindly, she spreads eight legs
into the nether reach of our aquatic strangeness.
Together we fall toward the star's reach
and embrace beneath the comet's tail.
Together we shuffle on our heads;
our feet slide against the surface's tide.
Anemone and starfish shape our single scar;
the remnant of saturnalian incrustation.

Chasing Images

John Skelton wrote in 1522: That he wolde than make The devyls to quake Lyke a fyerdrake.

August 13, 1961

I see it now: the dappled light
twining through the leaves
of the sweet gum tree,
where Gerald hammered the yellow pine
with nails stolen from homes
purchased on the GI Bill.
I supply our house with apple crates
filled with pulp fiction and comics,
as we retreat from glassy-eyed blonds,
wearing white blouses and pink poodle skirts;
their pony-tails bounce with each Elvis
skitter and roll. We huckleberry our way
through the summer riding the wind surf;
the limbs, lissome and frothy with green sap,
roll and pitch like a raft on the Mississippi.
Wasps buzz past onion-ed ears and skinned knees,
while ants savage the rough bark, sucking nectar
from the bleeding nodes of the sweet gum.
It's a portal, glassed as oblique
as Alice's mirror, and as porous.
Through this gate we walk on our heads
and hide when the hobos pass
under us and the jets stream overhead.
A crisis is brewing in Berlin
and everyone is on alert, except us.
We wait in our silenced space
for the call of the mothers at dusk.

Part of Chapter Three of Vogel #5

Löwe was sitting at his writing table in front of two French windows overlooking the garden and the swimming pool. He held a Cartier fountain pen in his left hand. In front of him was a short stack of white paper made in Italy, which Löwe specially ordered from a shop in Venice. The top page was half covered by his strange, tiny handwriting. To the right was a copy of Plato’s Theaetetus in Greek and further to the right, a stack of blue index cards. Drago took no notice of the books or the writing; he simply placed the tray in front of Löwe, who had pushed his papers further to the right to make room. “It was always like this,” thought Drago. “He is like a baby bird waiting for me to bring his food. When it arrives, he pushes everything away to snap up every morsel. It is like he is starving. What an appetite for such an old man.”

Löwe was hungry as he always was in the morning. He fantasized that his dreams burned up a lot of calories throughout the night. He had been thinking about his dreams when Drago knocked on the door. Last night he had had a strange one. He was fighting in a medieval city against a large foreign army, equipped with war elephants. In the midst of battle, Löwe stood upon an elevated podium and called out to the elephants to come to him until they heard and came, one from the right, one from the left, and one from the center.

“What did it mean?” he asked. An elementary component of dream interpretation was to say the elephants represented a part of him. He suspected they represented three primal sources of power, which he could not control. At the beginning of the dream, they were out of control, destroying men and material, but upon his command, they came to him and stopped.

“Why were there three?” He asked as his mind wondered over the number three. He knew the images had at least two components: meaning, which could be deciphered intellectually; and emotion, which would have to be investigated from the standpoint of its feeling-value.

In other words, to fully comprehend the images he would need to meditate upon the image of the elephant from several viewpoints, a task, which, once begun, seemed quite daunting in its complexity. He rubbed his head, an act which was unconscious, and which signaled he was deep in thought as he let his mind wonder over the image of the elephant, he felt its great size, its color, the stiff hairs of its body protruding from its leathery skin, its smell, its sound as it shifted from right to left on its ponderous legs, larger than tree trunks. He examined the metal and leather harness, which held the platforms onto the three great elephants’ backs and he could see the armored bodies of the archers perched on top of the elephants. He saw the legs of the men sitting on the necks of the large beasts, the wooden handles of the hook in their hands, which they used to turn and guide the great beasts. He imagined the elephants’ pink mouths and their swinging trunk. He asked himself how he felt about the elephant and his first reaction was a feeling of awe at their great size and strength. So how did he control them? What power did he possess to call them?

The dream reminded him of Ganesha; the elephant-headed God of the Hindus, and the first god worshipped at every ceremony, which had the head of an elephant and the body of a round, rotund, overweight man. Accompanying Ganesha are the hooded snakes wrapped around his waist, the lotus, which Ganesha holds in one of its two left hands, an ax, which symbolizes Genesha’s ability to destroy evil, a noose, which emphasizes mankind’s connection to human desire, and the mouse, which provides him with a mode of transportation.

Ganesha was a good sign, thought Löwe, and the appearance of the elephants in his dream was also a strong vision, a message from his unconscious.

Löwe also recognized Ganesha’s duality. He found, or least suspected, a difference between those creatures that bore the head of an animal, such as Ganesha and the Minotaur, and those creatures like fauns and centaurs, which had human heads and animal bodies. He felt that mythological creatures with animal heads were controlled by their natural or animal instincts while those like the centaur and the faun had their human nature controlled by their lower body, which was more basic in its demands and desires. He had not worked out all of the associations and differences, but he suspected a difference. Ganesha, of course, was nothing like the Minotaur, who was rapacious and sadistic.

He immediately thought of a series of dry points, which he had seen in Picasso’s atelier during the war in Paris. He remembered they were called the Vollard Suite and the one, which he remembered vividly almost fifty years after he had seen it, was #68, the Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman. He remembered the day he had visited the atelier. He appeared along with several others for drinks with the Spanish painter. Although he was a German, a soldier, an occupier of Paris, he was on good terms with many of the artists. After all, he was a cultural attaché and his good will allowed many artists in the city to continue their work, to enjoy the patronage of the Third Reich, to sell their art, to receive ample food, and to enjoy their life. Picasso was a Spaniard and Spain was friendly toward Germany. Although Picasso was no friend of Franco and the existing Spanish government, he was willing to meet with Germans who were interested in art in 1941. There were many young, well-educated German officers who were appreciated surrealistic art, even degenerate art, as the Nazi regime called it. Löwe thought the Nazi propaganda against the expressionists and surrealists was ridiculous and he was very interested in Picasso, as well as several others. He was a personal friend of Cocteau and Brasillach and he tried to court as many of the French artists as he could. He had read Breton on surrealism and he obtained a copy of the magazine Minotaure from a friend in Paris, who provided it to him while he was training in Russia in 1934, the year he had met Sartre and Raya. Consequently, when he arrived in Paris as a cultural attaché, one of the first things he did was attempt to see Picasso. It was no problem to find out where the Spaniard lived and he could have easily entered the atelier, but he did not want to use the power at his disposal; instead, he decided to court the Spaniard and play to his ego. When he finally met him, he asked about the Vollard Suite, about the series of dry points, which spanned many years. When Picasso showed him the works, he was immediately attracted to the mythic character, which Picasso was obviously using as an alter ego. Löwe realized immediately that Picasso’s Minotaure was connected to the Dionysian spirit and he began to identify with the lusty representation of the Minotaur. As a result of the strong feeling tone he associated with the creature, Löwe began to investigate the source and quality of his feelings. He now believed that the appearance of Ganesha was similar to those earlier associations with the Minotaur and that his identification with the Minotaur and the appearance of Ganesha were signaling some significant change in his psychic life.

Löwe believed in both physical and spiritual evolution. The spiritual evolution was always a movement toward wholeness and this progression manifested itself to consciousness through images, images sometimes in the form of mandalas. With the appearance of the elephant, he felt his unconscious was trying to signal something to his conscious mind; therefore, he had to use various psychological techniques to learn the meaning of the images. This process was tedious and long in duration. He knew that now the elephant had appeared to his conscious mind it would stay with him for some time. It would stay until he understood its meaning.

“Shall I put this down, sir?” asked Drago, reminding the old man of the present and his hunger.

“Of course. I am sorry, I was lost in thought.”

Drago had the coffee pot in his right hand and a cup and saucer in the left.

“Your food is getting cold.”

“What time is it?”

“It is 8:25.”

“I must hurry. There is so much to do before the journalists arrive.” Löwe said absently, as he began to eat the now cold oatmeal.

Drago poured him a cup of coffee and then put the silver coffee pot down and retired from the room, leaving the man to his thoughts.

As Löwe slowly chewed the oatmeal, he imagined the Minotaur lying on a bed with a woman sprawled across his lap, while the sculptor, another character of the Minotaur saga of Picasso, lay on the other side of the woman, holding a champagne flute in one hand and a swooning woman in his left. The Dionysian atmosphere was so obvious that one had to start from there in the analysis of the sketch. The image of the Minotaur touched a psychological cord and reminded him of his years in Paris before the war, a time of great emotional and intellectual activity for him. Now, another mythical creature had entered the stage, Ganesha, a mixed being as well, full of strength, exuberance, and life. Löwe, though old in body, felt ripeness in his mind and a stirring somewhere in his loins. He was not dead yet.

He felt the images of the elephant signified a feeling of strength, a solidity of mind and concentration. He reached for the stack of blue index cards and wrote the words: Ganesha, Dionysus, Minotaure, Picasso, and Elephant. He would have to explore each name and meditate upon them. He had had a long experience with dreams and dream analysis and he knew the dream was the via regia to his unconscious mind and that once this passageway was opened, unlimited images would force their way into his conscious mind, just as water would flow from the earth to the surface at a spring. He imagined himself dipping a gourd into a spring.

Freedom is Between the Notes

poetry blooms on the paths of faery


Mr. and Mrs. Stevens select a black Steinway
for their sun room in anticipation of summer.
Like a black bird it awaits the sirens
that sing operettas on the west side
between the ice-cream vendor from Venice
and the jeweler from Charleville.
After the thaw, silent summer arrives
and Mrs. Stevens takes a steam train alone
to the Poconos and Mr. Stevens remains
in the city to advocate for the insureds
and play the piano. For seven hours straight
the first night he scratches the ivory keys
like a snowcat against Orpheus' tree.
And so proceeds the solstice quotidian;
the infinitesimal gesture of their separation:
Mrs. Stevens golfs and Mr. Stevens plays.
Once, however, he pauses to erase a moist circle
left by his highball glass and Mrs. Stevens writes
requesting more money. He begrudgingly wires
her five dollars. On another day, he puzzles
out the latest Schoenberg and she buys
a dress. In August rain falls on Manhattan
island and the water drains into the sea.
Most days though, Mr. Stevens pilots
a skiff between the keys of half-notes
that litter the green waters of the archipelago.

Insels

Islands of ice.
Electrical veins at night
silhouette brave borders
and slender shores. Stages
of yellow boards to play
the jester or the king,
while leviathans patrol
gulf streams and Catalinas
painted midnight-blue
hunt the darkness for Shelley's
monster preserved on a floe.

Anecdote of the Psyche

No continents exist in the summer islands.
Instead the islands in-dwell in the castaway's gray iris,
where white sharks circle beneath a beached raft
that lists left in a lissome jolt with each azure wave
and parakeets with blue and green wings pinion a tattoo
at retreat toward a swiss-ed psyche. Landfall
stretches the comet's tail and a maitre'd arrives
and recites French, while the barefoot castaway stands
on warm sand beside a chaise longue marked reserved.
In that internal archipelago a snowcat purrs
in an apple-barreled rum in the castaway's daiquiri,
informing him that the first island begats the second
and the second births the third, and the fourth
mirrors the first and the first awakens a fifth
and there is no end nor order outside the rhythm
of the islands and no sound except the drone of a Hellcat,
scouting off the mid-way, and the pilot's hand vibrating on the stick
as icebergs calve from green glaciers in the north.

Archipelago

The castaway sails between the northern islands
and mines a frozen continent with his art
like the earthworm mulls mold in Darwin's garden.

Anecdote of the Garden

Krazy Kat's fur is black
like the bruised wing of a crow.

Firecat is red
like the speckled eye
of a peacock's feather.

Krazy Kat appeared first,
like Abel, in the world.

Firecat will arrive later,
the last one before the end.

Firecat and Krazy Kat share
the silky sand of his garden.

Krazy Kat slumbers in the shrubs
in the doomed darkness of dusk,
while Firecat doozes on the grate.

Another mediates the in-between;
Snowcat purrs under the red rushes
beyond the bed of purple irises.

Snowcat loves Krazy Kat and Firecat.

Snowcat exists in perpetual winter;
she is the queen of snow
that blows from ether.

Snowcat cannot purr; her throat
is blocked; the glottal stop
is wrecked. Instead, she listens
while Firecat and Krazy Kat sing
a stone-song
trending toward harmony.

Paraclytus

The poem sags
from definition.
It is invisible
to all but the unseen,
who are only seen
by the invisible;
heard only
because
winged tongues
sometimes scratch
then erase
inked messages.

Milieu

this experience constitutes a world


The crystal sand in the stained
box
dwells within the snail's memory
of the castaway
who walked on his head.

Shipwrecked
yet again in the space
between the quietude of play
and the quotidian
worm mold, he scribbles
on Egyptian papyrus
an anecdote of a black
chow
that fetches an artifact
of glued feathers
and glittering leviathan bones.

Pete's Dead

It
flies on blue
and green
wings
from the chair
to the couch.
I shoot
a wooden arrow
with a rubber
tip
and strike
it dead.
Eros
weeps,
as we bury it
in a red
and black
matchbox
in the brown yard
behind the white
house.

White Worm

Dwelling in the black,
the white worm called
out: some say white
orders, while chaos'
shadow destroys.
But the circumference
soon centers
that noirish truth.
The worm blanched
by the dark
is no more stable
than a crease
of light
over a lake
on a summer night
or a pursed
lip over her ear.

Wir Lagen and Worms

I have been thinking a lot about earthworms and for some reason, this morning, the worms reminded me of one of my favorite Paul Celan poems. It is entitled:


Wir Lagen.


by Paul Celan
translated by Keith Harvey



We lay
already deep in the shrubs, when you
finally crawled along
but we could not
darken over to you:
it ruled
light constraint.


Wir lagen
schon tief in der Macchia, als du
endlich herankrochst
Doch konnten wir nicht
hinuberdunkeln zu dir:
Es herrschte
Lichtzwang

Night-soil

The night-soil
of Darwin's
worms
is saltier
than Persian
caviar;
whereas,
Rumi's poetry
swallows
smoother
than a Gulf
oyster
in November.

The Worms

The snails slumber
in the shade
of the rose leaf,
while the worms
below
churn black soil
like the steel
propeller
of a gray cruiser
furrows
green waves
in the southern sea.

Leaping Poetry and Primordial Words

I just finished reading Robert Bly's "Leaping Poetry, an Idea with Poems and Translations." In the work Bly attempts to explain what is happening in the poetry of Lorca and Neruda, Rilke, and the surrealists. Lorca tried to describe the phenomena himself in his brilliant book "Duende." Edward Hirsch picked up the thread in his book, "The Demon and the Angel." Paul Celan tried to explain it in his short prose pieces; just as Heidegger did in his work on poetry and Holderlin. Wallace Stevens wrote from it and tried to articulate it. Henry Corbin found it in the Iranian poets and called it the Mundus Imaginalis. What is it, then?

Bly says that it is the "leap" within the poem from the conscious to unconscious mind. But what it really is, is man, the myth-maker, making soul. Soul is made by man through his exploration of the unconscious contents of the world in a valiant attempt to make conscious what is unconscious. Soul-making is the evolution of myth through man's intense identification with his body and the surrounding nature. It is this action of evolving which occurs in Wallace Steven's poem "Anecdote of a Jar" and it is Paul Celan's groping in the dark to reach the other. It is the metaphor for the incarnation of god in man.

I wrote "Petroglyphs" as an expression of my struggle to understand the numinous feeling I received when reading certain poets--Rilke and Celan, in particular. I felt that this feeling arose from their use of certain images that contained the archetypal seeds of primal emotions. I called these images the "primordial word" and associated the "primordial word" with the word Logos. Logos is the creative force implicit in the creation of the Christian mythos. In my terminology the primordial word contains a primal emotion that connects us to an archetypal emotion. Consequently, the primal word functions as a portal that takes us to the Mundus Imaginalis--that mid-world between the conscious and the unconscious mind. It is the mid-world where great poetry resides. Shakespeare was a master of it. Ted Hughes understood and used it. Lorca had it, just as Celan and Rilke do. Bly reaches for and worships it. Therefore it is the "leap" that turns the stone of image that contains the poem.

Shamans, priests, and myth-makers depend upon the primal word to enter the Mundus Imaginalis. It is in that state that visions reside and the collective consciousness flows like a river. The entry way always demands a ritual. Surrealists use automatic writing; shamans use trances and self-inflicted illnesses; mystics use hunger and prayer; Sufis whirl; poets and Freudians associate. No matter the process, the goal is the same--to reach the mid-way, the Mundus Imaginalis--to tap into the collective unconscious to share the vision of the world and the language of the angels.

Therapy

The point is a whole
and contains no points.
A line is a series of points.
Two points and a line begins.
We sat, two points,
three days a week
for twelve years
talking. We formed
two lines at right angles,
an analyst and an analysand.
Lines have no breath;
they sigh breathless.
from their silence.
Worlds form
from the angularity
of their sound
like a mound
of dirt above
a mole's hole.

Mauryad

The Zero
swiveled
from the sun
and sprayed
lead
from Pittsburgh
into the round
fuselage
of the Grauman
Hellcat.
Maury
from Tucson
jumped
through the flames
into a darkening sky
black with oily smoke.
His silk chute
snapped
and he jerked,
his jumpboots
dancing
above wisps
of jellied clouds.
His Hellcat
crashed into the sea.
A caesura
before
it cracked the surf
like the claw
of a Baltimore crab.
Maury caught
a silver glint
off a steel strut
as the Zero
turned.
He was alive,
but now a castaway.

The green sea
teemed
with dolphins,
leaping
in the surging
surf
off a pink,
coral atoll.
Beneath,
hammerheads
circled
the sinking Hellcat
and flying fish
spit
upwards
in mirrored
pirouettes,
mocking
the steel
weight
that the sea
transformed
into rust.
Maury invested
his rubber vest
with air
and floated
on his back.
Next stop,
he whispered,
is hell.

No land.
Only an atoll
of pink coral
to rest his head.
Maury sensed
the sharks
and the leviathans
circling below.
One whale
eyed him
with such empathy
that Maury imagined
it wept
for his plight.
His head
grated
against pocked coral
and he grasped
with wrinkled fingers
the mottled
reef
and pulled
himself from the sea.
The moon
now a silver circle
centered
above the pacific
sea
shone
upon his berth
on the atoll.
Safe now,
he said,
"I am hungry."


The atoll stretched
like a withered finger
a kilometer
from east to west,
covered with a skein
of salvaged sand.
The only food
was sand fleas
and gulls' eggs.
Just beyond his reach
fish teemed.


Days passed
and then months.
Now naked
Maury danced
on his coral stage.
Once he found
a black spider
lodged
in a coral niche.
He named it god
and worshiped it.

Eventually,
Maury forgot
the language
of the surface.
He came
to speak
leviathan
and dolphin.
He could even converse
with his sworn enemy
the gulls.
Sometimes
he wore their feathers
to honor their sacrifice.
He rode the fins
of the porpoise
and mosaic shells
of sea turtles.
He grew gills
and slept in caves
deep within the rifts
that ran across the floor
of the sea.

Finally,
Maury walked
on his head,
his webbed feet
firmly against the waves.
He cursed
ships
that cut troughs
in his roof
and submarines
that penetrated
his solitude.
Sometimes,
he visited
the atoll
and coughed
when he breathed
the oily, acrid
air of the surface
and dreamed
of the topsy-turvy
world
of the Hellcat.

Remembering Reading Donleavy

I met them thirty-five years ago when I entered graduate school. They had been there the whole time, of course, but I had been in the History Department, not the English Department, and I didn't know who they were. And then again they were from the area, all local boys, sort-of-- from Lufkin, Nacogdoches, Houston-- and their girls were local too. Tough women from the big thicket or Louisiana. I was from up North near the Red River and not one of them really.

They thought I was rich at first but I wasn't. I lived in an apartment and drove a new car because I had worked in the construction business with my father and I made good money before I transferred in. I had studied at the college in my home town that was later absorbed by the state university before I transferred to the teacher's college, where I learned they ruled the English Department. Counting their girls, there was seven or eight of them and they made the top grades and led the discussions and chose the writers we were supposed to worship.

Like I said I had been in the History Department before graduate school and all my reading had been done in silence . I read most of the modern fiction in the college library by the time I arrived in the graduate program and I preferred European writers. In 1974, my favorites were Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, and Lawrence Durrell. They didn't like those writers; instead, they liked Hemingway and Pynchon, Borges and Vonnegut, Roth and Bellow. I liked those writers, too, but they weren't my favorites.

At the time I arrived I was reading Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden. I also liked science fiction and I tended to read it indiscriminately. I was also studying German and planned to go to Germany as soon as I graduated.

They tended to ignore me at first but slowly they came to see me. It was probably the fight over Lawrence. I argued that Women in Love was one of the greatest novels ever written. When I said it, cat-calls issued from the room and the fight began. However, it was from that fight that the recognitions began. And although I liked the English and the Germans like Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil, I seemed, eventually, to at least qualify for a junior membership in their clique because--here was the nub of it--I was a massive reader. And in the end it was the reading that qualified me to enter their presence. They couldn't deny the reading. It was too palpable, too catholic to be denied.

One night at the local donut shop on North Street at two o'clock in the morning the warring ended when the name J. P. Donleavy was mentioned. Unanimous consent was arrived at when we discussed The Ginger Man. We weren't sure why we liked it. Donleavy's prose was mentioned several times in a vague way. All we knew was that The Ginger Man's prose spoke to our sensibility.

Reading The Ginger Man now, I will tell you it is the poetry, not the prose that attracted us. And I might add that the sex and the bookish life in poverty and the youth also caught our attention.

Does anyone read Donleavy anymore? I haven't heard his name in years but they should. His prose still sparkles. Maybe someone with some clout will read him and then he will be re-discovered.

Incarnation

The imagination
shines
from the center
and incarnates
Abel's flesh.
Through the circle
he knows
the circumference
and the round-ness
of the jar.
From the forest
the unknown
vibrates black
and void;
while within
the sphere
sustains
all light.

While Reading William Carlos William's Autobiography

William Carlos Williams was a physician. From his autobiography I get the sense he was a very good one. He worked long hours saving lives and then he wrote poetry; a lot of poetry. From his autobiography, I gather the poetry informed the medicine and the medicine informed the poetry; just as his friendships informed his poetry or the city of Patterson did. A Jungian would say he lived poetically; just as Heidegger would, who wasn't a Jungian but a philosopher of being and poetry, or better yet as Holderlin wrote and Heidegger explained. The upshot is that poetry is emotion expressed. To live a life of poetry or to live poetically is to express the emotions of being. It is this task which makes people want to be poets; they want to live in the world poetically. So there is the task of being, to be, poetically, in the world of being.

Anecdote of the Center

In a Salon de The
in Algiers
a man in white
instructed the other:
take a linen
sheet of Egyptian
leaf
and a draw a circle
in the center.
Fill it with graphite
from Pennsylvania.
Wait
for the world
to coalesce
around
its circumference.
Then blow
upon its borders
until it inflates
into a white sphere.
When the pressure
equalizes
balance
it like Chaplin's
globe;
rotate it,
do it,
until it holds.

A review of Testimony to the Invisible: Essays on Swedenborg

This volume contains seven essays by diverse but well known thinkers, mystics and poets discussing the importance of an obscure--for most of us--Swedish thinker, Emanuel Swedenborg.

Swedenborg was born in Stockholm in 1688. As Borges states in his essay, "this peerless, solitary man was many men." He was a cabinet builder, a mathematician, a scientist, and inventor. However, and most important to us, he was a mystic. Wilson van Dusen in his essay defines a mystic as "one who experiences God." When Swedenborg was fifty-six an event occurred that Swedenborg called the "discrete degree." From that point on he dedicated himself to the life of the visionary. During the next thirty years--he was quite long-lived--he produced the incredible works that influenced, inter alia, William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Sr., Carlyle, Dostoevsky. Jorge Luis Borges, Czeslaw Milosz, and countless other poets and mystics.

Each one of the essays in this collection sheds a different light on Swedenborg and his influence. For instance,Kathleen Raine's "The Human Face of God" is particularly illuminating. In it she discusses William Blake's dedication to and study of Swedenborg but she also discusses the way Blakes' ideas, influenced by Swedenborg informed the works of Carl Jung and Henry Corbin. Another strong essay in the collection is Eugene Taylor's "Emerson: The Swedenborgian and Transcendentalist Connection." After reading Mr. Taylor's essay, I was reminded of how saturated 19th American literature is with the visionary ideas of Swedenborg and how close to the Mundus Imaginalis such writers as Hawthorne and Melville are.

If you are interested in the visionary experience, I highly recommend this collection of essays. And if you want to experience the clarity of Swedenborg's thoughts I recommend his volume: Heaven and Hell.

Anecdote of a Black Chow

The black chow
was his last dog.
No more dogs
to love; its memory
lives in his sadness.
A vestigial dog
haunts his stoop.
Its bark wakes him
from an afternoon nap.
He finds stiff
black hairs
on splintered
hooks splitting
away from the frame
of the screen door.
He senses its body
in the shadowed room;
he smells its oily pelt.
Its black tongue
lolls from its snout
at dusk
when the snails
cross the sidewalk
to the rose garden.

Mittilagart

I have begun the sequel of my fantasy novel--Okeanus. The working title is Mittilagart, which is medieval High German for the word--earth. The operating quote of the novel is from Bonaventura Francesco Cavalieri, the seventeenth century mathematician: "all solid bodies are the superimposition of an infinite number of planes." The protagonist's name is Kavka; a librarian sent to earth to aid Michelle Tonneur find and capture the blue-black dragon.

The Black Chow

The black chow sleeps
against the door.
Her heavy body an impediment
against entering or exiting.
She is a companion
that cannot be left.
Sometimes he throws
a message in a bottle
into the yard
and she springs
away with a cough.
Her weighted soul
splits the air
and her paws
pounce on the prize.
Freed, he slips
from the house,
sacrificing a message
unread. Now chewed
and wet she deposits
it on the stoop
before she settles
like Cerberus
to guard
a captive
who has fled.

Early Snails

The book-troll rose at five.
Morning frost stained
its windows satin,
as it stood and stared
at the seamless threads
of silver crisscrossing
the sidewalk's gray cement.
It whispered:
"they crossed in the night."
It feared the early snails
who could not decipher
one cellulose
molecule from another.
They chewed relentlessly
on leafy blades and papyrus,
leaving stains and holes
as reminders of their hunger.

Review of Steve Lyons' "Death World"

"Death World" by Steve Lyons is situated at the crossroads of four genres--(1) it is a military science fiction like Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers," Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War," and Gordon Dickinson's "Dorsai;" (2) it is a "deathworld" novel reminiscent of Harry Harrison's Deathworld series; (3) it is the story of a single squad in combat like "Platoon" and "Sands of Iwo Jima;" and (4) it is a horror novel like "Alien" and "Predator."

Irrespective of the genre echoes reverberating throughout the text, it remains true to Warhammer 40K. The usual 40k tropes abound: The troops go to war in the Gothic battle-barges of the Empire. They deal with the inept and sometimes corrupt Imperium commanders. Horror exists at every turn--from the dangers of the corrupting warp to the attack of zombies in the night. Consequently, the novel appeals to both gamers and science fiction fans.

In summary, the novel concerns a squad of Catachan jungle fighters sent into the jungle of Rogar III to assassinate an Ork Boss. The Empire and the Orks are mining Rogar III; however, over the last few months the planet inexplicably has begun to mutate into a death world.

In the Warhammer universe a death world is one that for whatever reason is inhabitable by man.

We learn that Rogar III world is sentient and does not want either the Imperial troops or the Orks on its surface. To rid itself of the invasions, it engineers its nature to become toxic to both humans and Orks.

The beauty of "Death World" lies in the deft way in which Steve Lyons presents the story. He introduces the squad in a straight-forward, no-nonsense way; he focuses on the protagonist--Lorenzo--;and he develops all his characters naturally through the narrative. He preserves the unities and abides by the conventions of his genre.

The story reminded me of some of the movies I loved as a kid--"Operation Burma," "A Walk in the Sun," "Battleground."

If you like "Death World," I also recommend Lucien Soulban's "Desert Raiders," Harry Harrison's "Deathworld," and Dan Abnett's "Double Eagle."

Seething Seesaw--A review of Nathan Long's "Elfslayer"

"Elfslayer" opens in Felix Jaeger's father's Altdorf mansion. After twenty years, Felix and Gotrek have returned to their starting point chronicled in William King's short story, "Geheimnisnacht."

Jaeger's father has a mission for his errant son. The old man is being blackmailed by a Marienburg pirate named Hans Euler and he wants his son to retrieve the incriminating papers. Felix balks at the assignment but he finally agrees to help his father. Meanwhile, Gotrek is down in the dumps, literally, drinking himself into a torpor. As we know from the previous novel "Manslayer," Gotrek missed the evil invasion of Archaon and his chance to face a daemon.

Long quickly alerts us that this novel will be a return to old haunts and a reunion with missing friends, allies, and enemies. It is also a novel replete with Longian themes--drowning, shipwrecks, imprisonment, feckless women, jealousy, bravery, and deception.

Before Felix and Gotrek leave Altdorf, they are attacked by unknown assailants. We soon learn that an old enemy has decided to seek revenge. With the assault, Gotrek begins to awaken from his stupor and the action begins. The two travel to Marienburg pursued by assassins to meet Euler. Felix discovers another enemy in Euler and the plot, as they say, thickens. Before Felix can resolve the problem with Euler, old allies arrive. The wizard Max Schreiber, accompanied by a sorceress and an Elf, offer Gotrek the opportunity to face his glorious end. Felix is torn between serving his father or honoring his oath to Gotrek to be present at his death. He, of course, chooses to stand with Gotrek and they set set off on a quest to save the Empire with Schreiber.

The relic they seek is also being sought by Dark Elves. The action then turns to the sea. From this point, Long engages in what I can only call a melange of Jules Verne steampunk and Sabatini swordplay. He brilliantly describes an underwater city, the Black Ark of the Dark Elves, and the horrors of Dark Elf magic and ritual.

Long has concocted a nightmarish stew of villains and seamlessly presented them to us in a Sabatini-like thriller. He is one of the best writers at the Black Library and I challenge you to find a clunky sentence in the 412 pages of the novel. He ties up all of the plot threads nicely by the end but, of course, he leaves enough plot hanging that we anticipate and yearn for the next chapter of the novel.

Without giving too much away, Long convincingly presents dwarves, skaven, and dark elves. Additionally, never before have we seen a black ark described in such sinister detail.

As you might guess I highly recommend the novel. Not only is it an exciting book but I would postulate that it takes the Gotrek franchise in a new direction. Although Long is a student of William King he is refining King's themes and characters. This observation brings me to the explanation of my title for this review.

The figure in the carpet, as Henry James would say, in this novel is the seesaw. When Felix is up, Gotrek is down and when Gotrek is up, Felix is down, literally. The only time Gotrek is animated is when the likelihood of death and mayhem is near; Felix appreciates the tranquil moments, which in a Gotrek & Felix novel, are very brief indeed. However, Gotrek is the dark submerged animator of the series. It is his strength and resolve that drives the action. Long is aware of this and he consciously builds on it and structures the plot around the "humors" of the two characters in a clear and convincing way.

Finally, if you like this novel, I would suggest Gav Thorpe's "Malekith," Graham McNeill's "Guardian of Ulthuan," William King's "Trollslayer" and "Skavenslayer," and Long's Blackheart Trilogy.

I might also add, that the novels of Sabatini--"Captain Blood" in particular--might also interest you.

Philosophe Blanc

Roasted in winter
the blanched peanuts
attract the philosophe blanc,
a convivial recluse
who hunts book-trolls
and wolf-words.
His search is endless;
his trophies legion.
Each primordial word
trapped in his brass trap
provides flesh
of wet clay
to the silent god,
who becomes conscious
only in the white light
of the wolf-word's howl
or the book-troll's grunt.

Crane's Funeral and Wallace Stevens

Stephen Crane died on June 5, 1900, in Badenweiler, Germany at the age of twenty-eight. His body was then transported to New York, where it was buried on June 28, 1900. At the time of his death, Crane's reputation had waned and few people attended the funeral. One, who did attend, however, was the young Wallace Stevens. The cursory funeral and memorial appalled him and he wrote in his journal that "the whole thing was frightful."

The funeral made a great impression on Stevens. At the time he was struggling with whether he should become a poet full time or work as a journalist. The struggle for Stevens arose from the doing (Hebraism)--making a living, material success, security--verses "falling off the edge"(Hellenism)--reading, studying and writing poetry. In his mind there was something unmanly about writing poetry. A man needed to do things--i.e. have a job and make money.

Crane's end scared Stevens. Here was a man, who he idolized, dead and without fame or fortune. Crane's renown would come later, like other American poets of the 19th century; however, Stevens was unprepared to write posthumously and consequently he acquiesced to his father's demands and took up first journalism and then the law. Doing conquered not-doing; order overcame chaos.

Failure of Magic

I wrote a fantasy novel a couple of years ago entitled Okeanus, which I sent out to some agents. Unfortunately, they were uninterested. I am now re-writing the book to submit to a novel contest. As I was writing the novel several questions arose concerning magic. Primarily, how do fantasy writers describe the magic? Is it logical? Where does it come from? How is it used? How is it described? To answer the question I began to read with an eye on the magical systems. Once I began to dwell on these questions, I realized most fantasy writers do not deal with it very well. After awhile, I decided that most fantasy writers simply present their magic--their personal fantasies of power--on the plate like a dead fish. Magic for them is a fait accompli, without much explanation. More often than not, their magic arises from a genetic gift or power of the gods or the daemons. I then turned to non-fiction and the biographies of mages, shamans, witches. This study produced better results but ultimately it was not much help. Finally, I decided to base my magical system on learned spells. In other words, words spoken poetically create the power the speaker wields. My archetypal magician is Aaron, Moses' brother. Remember Moses stuttered and depended on Aaron's verbal facility. Also, remember that Aaron performs magic and battles the Pharoah's magicians and that all creation in the Bible springs from the word. Magic in Okeanus then depends upon learning, recitation, repetition and manifestation. Magic is created and imbued with human spirit and human emotion. And, as we all know, heightened emotion is enervating and erratic, spontaneous, and dangerous. Magic should also contain these attributes.

Matthew Arnold's Great Essay

When the doing fails and the Hebraic command
goes unheeded, my right hand quakes
and shivers from fear and I turn toward the other--
the Hellenic release, the sinister side--
and seek solace in the unreal.
The poem contains the not-doing
while alluding to the doing. The script,
a liquid sculpture, stains the page.
Arnold engineered the seesaw;
he saw the necessity in structure
balanced among the ancients. Stevens
picked it up like a fumbled ball
and ran with it, speaking its division
over and over in one guise or another.
He found release in the up and down strokes;
and threaded the needle with its theme
like James and Carlyle before him,
the great Peripatetics.

La Ronde

From the fire comes the shadow.
From the shadow comes the silhouette.
From the silhouette comes the story.
From the story comes the tale.
From the tale comes the myth.
From the myth comes the gods.
From the gods comes man.
From man comes the fire.

Summer 1958

He shot a single round
into the silent wood
on a summer's eve.
The bullet smashed limbs
and something substantial fell
to the shadowed ground--
a great silhouette
shaded gray in the dusk.
He guessed it was a bird.
Night descended
and he thought
he heard weeping
in the woods.
He begged leave
to look
but it was late
and they refused.
The next morning
he searched
for spoor
but found nothing
but fallen limbs,
dead leaves,
and pine needles.
The darkness dressed
a dire drama;
the sun
defined
a summer's day.

Sins of the Father-A review of Gav Thorpe's "Malekith"

I was very anxious to read Gav Thorpe's new novel "Malekith." In fact, I haunted the bookstores until I found one in Austin at Book People. I quickly started it, although I was already two-thirds through a biography of Robert Frost. It was a good read and I quickly submitted a review to Amazon.com. Here is the review.

Although Gav Thorpe's new novel is entitled, "Malekith," its scope is greater than the story of one man. Instead, it delineates the development of the Warhammer world as we know it and recounts the rise and fall of Malekith. In a sense, the story of Malekith is a tragedy rather than an epic. Although the novel has "epic" qualities--the expansion of the elves and the exploration of the unknown world--it is ultimately the story of one man's greed and lust for power. Like Macbeth, a great warrior is lured from the light to the dark by greed and the ministrations of a woman. In Malekith's case it is the greed and ambition of his Mother, Morathi, that taunts him, goads him, and tricks him. Thorpe's Malekith, however, is not one dimensional. Throughout the novel, the reader feels that the means, no matter how despicable, have within Malekith's twisted thinking a logical and noble end--to protect the elves from the Chaos gods. It is this element that raises Thorpe's novel from simply being a good Warhammer story to being a great Warhammer story.

The first novel of the planned trilogy begins with the end of Aenarion and concludes with the death of Bel Shanaar, the Phoenix King. The narrative involves four major set pieces: the expansion of the elves in the east and the alliance with the dwarves; Malekith's exploration of the west and the Chaos waste; Malekith's war against the cultists in Nagarythe; and the betrayal of the Phoenix King.

Thorpe handles the exploration of the east and the establishment of the elven colonies in the old world brilliantly. His description of the dwarven cities is meticulous in its detail. However, the dwarven segment is not simply a side show; it is important to the development of Malekith's character and to the reader's understanding of that character. Although Malekith's anger and ambition are apparent from the beginning of the novel, Malekith truly respects the dwarves and their king. At the end of Part One, Malekith mourns for his lost friend and intends to honor his oath to the Snorri Whitebeard. However, the next section of the novel finds Malekith on his way to the Chaos wastes in the west, where he discovers an ancient city of the Old Ones and discovers a magic circlet that imbues him with new power and insight into the threat of the Chaos gods. From this point on, Malekith moves toward his inevitable fate. His hubris ultimately leads him to the Shrine of Asuryan.

As I read the novel I was struck by several things: the psychological complexity of Malekith's character; the clear detailed descriptions of all the locations; the distinct personality and character of the various Warhammer races; an abiding continuity to Warhammer lore and fluff; and the lucid prose. I have read most of Gav Thorpe's work and I think this may be his best. I am quite anxious to read the second volume of the trilogy.

I highly recommend this novel to both fantasy lovers and gamers. The Warhammer intellectual property is so rich and so developed that it transcends tie-in fiction. With the Time of Legends series, it seems Black Library has decided to up the ante; to create epic works that can proudly compete with any non-IP fantasy fiction. As a companion piece to this work I recommend Graham McNeill's "Guardians of Ulthuan," and "Heldenhammer," Mike Lee and Dan Abnett's Malus Darkblade series, Mike Lee's "Nagash the Sorcerer," and Nathan Long's "Elfslayer."

An Aphorism

Order and doing
purchases peace
for the purblind
who fear idleness.
Age bears sorrow,
silence and sin
through memory--
misplaced then made.
Doing and order
embrace
youth as imagined,
existing in chaos's
grip.
Reconciliation
thinks not
nor dreams.

Fox-clock

Fox-clock has no face,
no hands, no springs,
no gears. And yet, the fox
awakes with the morning sun,
hunts under the moon's mellow light,
dines on chickens, ducks, and eggs,
dozes in the forest's green shadow,
mates in the farmer's glen,
births in a shallow hidden den,
and dies without fear
or imminent dread
of its inevitable end.

Winter Hunts

Wolf-words weary elk-bulls
worrying them until they fall,
their hamstrings sprung,
their feet odd,
and their rhythm dead.
Ground squirrels sleep
silent under leaf and moss,
while bears birth cubs
in shallow caves
and snow blankets
the north face of a higher glen.
Inertia is the greenest god
draining words white.
Gasping glossolalia
surfeits all sentence sense
until the silver thread
of their dying sibilance
stretches as far back
as forward. Only fatigue
traps the line at full stop.
Only spring or hunger
wakes the hibernating beasts.

Will

Wolves hunt in packs
but they weary
of the long chase.
Others never tire.
Their will,
fueled by desire,
drives them on,
until their prey
falls helpless,
its heart
bursting
from the run.

Petroglyphs arrives at Amazon

Sound Considered

Shipwreckt
sits
on the fringe
of the palms’
skirt
and ponders
the sense
and sound
of wind
and surf
surging
against
shore.

Kavka/Jackdaw

The jackdaw,
born Kavka
in Prague,
fractures
a semiotic
chirp
that sounds
Latin
not Greek
and festers
black
like a Chow's
tongue.

Proper Study

Study
red fox
in winter
rather than Caliban,
and discover
what nature
in an unnatural
world
struggles
to be.

The Shipwreck's Dream

The shipwreck dreams of Abraham's sacrifice.
He awakens with a cough and these words:
"Abraham walks on the edge of his knife."
Meanwhile, the monkeys gambol in the palms;
the stream rushes to the sea;
snails flourish under red leaves;
and turtles lay eggs in the sand.
The night passes;
the moon wanes;
the mountain's gray silhouette
casts its shadows over the beach.

Snail Math

A mathematical design:
draw
a line
from Alpha to Zed
to illustrate
the silver thread
that shimmers
at dawn,
and marks
the finitude
of the snail's
journey
between the grass
and the leaf.

Island Dwelling

Within the shipwrecked,
the island dwells.

Below clouds salt
a tremulous sky
and coral embraces
gastropods
as jungles
fringe
mountain roots.

Four-fold divinities
gibber like ghosts
on Pentecost
and flying fish
flutter
like ox tongues
on a hot griddle.

The Shipwreck's Agenda

Ten years
from the day
of the shipwreck,
the shipwrecked
gleaned
a glimpse
of a gray sail
on green horizon.
As he cleared
his pale dwelling
of pink shells,
buried bottles,
sour weed
and fetid fish,
he brushed
away the vision
like a fly
near his ear
or an ant
on his leg.

Furnace Talk

To tap
the vein
requires
a pick
and ax,
a shovel
and a crowbar.
Dug-stone,
silent
as ore
out of the furnace,
sighs
sibilant
before the steam.

The Man who Walks on his Head

Even though the year 1967, was dark and disastrous for Paul Celan, it was also a year of doing and creating, of writing and translating; it was a year of poetry that continued and built upon the "breathturn," which he demonstrated in his work produced in 1963 and 1964.

The year began with the publication of the French translation of the presentation he made in Darmstadt in October 1960, upon his receipt of the Georg Buchner Prize. The essay, entitled "The Meridian," is about art generally and poetry specifically. In the essay or speech, Celan writes, inter alia, that "a man who walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, a man who walks on his head sees the sky below, as an abyss."

I postulate that much of Celan's poetry is about the vision of the abyss seen when we adjust our point of view. This adjustment can be drastic--for instance, when we stand on our head--or minor, when we turn our head and gaze out of the far corner of our eye. The change in perspective alters our view and refreshes our vision. This refreshment may be pleasing or shocking. It doesn't matter; it awakens the mind to the strangeness of the new and the different.

When something is new and different, the reader tends to concentrate. It is the concentration or attention that Celan believes the poem seeks. Quoting Kafka, he says: "attention is the natural prayer of the soul." Consequently, is he saying obliquely that poetry is soul-involving? Isn't it true that when soul is activated it grows, strengthens, and deepens. Poetry that arrests our attention, I postulate, deepens soul.

Celan's concept of arrest is described metaphorically as a "breathturn." He writes: "Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way--the way of art--for the sake of just such a turn?"

Paul Celan and Amenta

While re-reading Paul Celan’s book of poetry, Lightduress, I was quite taken with the five line poem-- Die lehmigen Opfergüsse/ the loamy offering downpours. This poem, evocative of fall, seems to turn geography upon its head. From its image cluster I intuited that loam, crawling with snails, formed a ceiling and that a fallen blackberry leaf flies against gravity toward heaven. Consequently, I imagined a world where the earth was above, and heaven was below.

This intriguing and somewhat numinous image seemed familiar. Had I heard it before?

At first, I thought the image came from the I Ching but with a little digging I found it in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. In Amenta, the land of the dead, the earth is above and the sky below. Suddenly, the poem opened up and I had a clue in which to begin my explication of the text.

The Toad

The toad
squatted
in black ooze
as the Nile
flowed.
Empires
expired
and rotted,
attracting green
flies
the toad speared
with a sticky
tongue.

Oskar as Athena; Günter as Zeus

The two sipped their aperitifs; one gazed outward, while the other turned inward. Günter noted a tall, thin woman with dyed blonde hair and red lips entering the brasserie with a short rotund man, wearing a black suit, black tie, and a white shirt. His thinning hair was pulled back and shining from pomade and reflected light. She placed a manicured hand on his round shoulders and pouted. Her nails glimmered red against his gray skin and Günter thought of Athena springing forth from Zeus’ head. Her imagined armor gleamed in the light of the Lipp and he sighed, wishing for her attention. He decided to use her in his novel that was percolating to the surface of his conscious mind. He imagined sitting at his typewriter tapping the scene out beneath the single electric light that hung from his dingy ceiling on the Rue d'Italie. He prayed for the gods of modernism to aid him in his creation.

Paul did not notice the woman; instead, he reflected on the phrase “head-birth;” his black eyes glazed over as he turned his vision inward, tracing the roots of the expression, seeking the source of the myth of the birth of the parthenogenic goddess. He immediately thought of Hermes as mid-wife and imagined Athena, as a reincarnation of Neith, the Egyptian goddess of war, who nursed a crocodile at her breast. Paul was a master of slow-reading and metaphors. Already his mind hopped from stone to stone of the mephitic scree of archaic images that lay submerged in his memory. Already, he was cataloging images to produce a poem of disparate associations. He etched crocodiles and ankhs, goddesses and shields, into a fabric of metaphors to express his vision of being. He sank deeper, looking for original images in the ooze of the Nile. He scraped his poem onto papyrus; he employed hieroglyphs to strike the flint. Embers and sparks flew in the summer night and mosquitos buzzed through the marshes.

Gunter Arrives Before the Flood

The rain stopped for a minute or two and the sun seeped through a break in the clouds to illuminate a slice of the pavement in front of the Brasserie Lipp. Paul experienced a glint of light in the corner of his left eye and raised his head from his notebook to glimpse a momentary illumination in the street. Then, thunder rumbled, shaking the foundation of the old building, and the rain returned in iron sheets.

Before returning to his notes on the shipwrecked, Paul recognized a short figure in a wrinkled beige raincoat running across the wide boulevard. The man, with a large pipe clenched between his teeth, dodged cars and jumped puddles, heading inexorably toward the entrance of the Lipp. It was Günter, late as usual, he thought, running to catch up with a deadline he had already missed.

Günter stopped outside the restaurant, underneath its awnings, and peeled off his wet coat. He shook it several times before he folded it over his left arm. He faced the glass door and Paul watched as Günter’s dark eyes blinked, owl-like, twice behind black horn-rimmed spectacles. The well-lit Lipp and the dark rain-soaked night created a mirror out of the front door and Paul knew Günter could not see into the restaurant. Instead, he stood before the mirror and prepared himself for his late entrance. Gazing at his image, he ran a fat hand through his thick black hair, removed his wooden pipe, and deposited it into the right-hand pocket of his gray suit. Beside the crumpled suit, Günter wore a pale blue shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, gold cufflinks, and scuffed brown shoes. For finishing touches, he rubbed his left hand over his thick Nietzsche-like mustache and pulled the suit forward at the labels, as if to make room for his bullish neck and shoulders.

Once inside, the maître’d moved forward, his hand outstretched, as if Hemingway himself had entered the room. He took Günter’s coat and pulled out the banquette table to allow him to edge onto Paul's left. The two now sat like an old couple, ensconced in their place of honor, near the door. The placement was significant to all cognoscenti; the two mattered. Their place had been earned. The management placed them to see and be seen.

“May I have towel, Maurice?” asked Günter in his heavily accented French.

The maître’d snapped a finger and a middle-aged waiter with thinning hair dyed coal-black rushed forward with a linen towel. Günter rubbed his head down roughly and then asked for Paul’s comb. He pulled the thick hair back in several rough movements. Paul noted his hands were stained black and yellow from ink and nicotine.

“Your hands look as if you have been writing.” Paul said in German.

“I have. But not just writing, though. I am producing a baby, a monstrous baby. It’s something different from anything else I have written.”

The waiter re-appeared and asked if they wanted an aperitif.

Günter said, slapping his meaty hands together, “Let’s have two Kir Royales. I feel like celebrating the head-birth of my baby.”

Paul at the Brasserie Lipp

Paul arrived at Brasserie Lipp around 18:30, about thirty minutes before his agreed meeting with Günter.

As the maître’d seated him in one of the banquettes in the entrance, cold rain drizzled down on the gray sidewalks, driving the tourists back to their hotels. He smiled wryly because he didn’t like tourists, especially American tourists; their congregating in front of the café to soak up the remaining DNA of the lost generation somehow offended him.

Paul was not immune to the allure of past writers’ haunts nor absorbing their DNA. That was why he was at the Lipp rather than some more modest café in his neighborhood. Perhaps that was the real reason why he looked down on the tourists huddling beneath the awning, rain dripping off their noses, waiting for a table that the haughty maître’d may or may not grant them, because he knew he was not much different from them. The only difference, he rationalized, was that he had published a handful of poems in Germany. Somehow that legitimized him, whereas these others were simply that-the others.

As he waited for Günter he extracted a moleskin notebook from the inside pocket of his tweed jacket and a Pelikan fountain pen he bought in a shop in the center of Frankfurt. He was working on something he believed might be important: a metaphysical conceit he thought of while reading Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. He summarized the conceit easily and succinctly: poetry is a message in a bottle, cast into the sea by the poet, to float alone and find its own fate.

Of course, like every conceit, he built upon it and refined it. He even imagined writing a whole series of poems about a shipwrecked and his struggle to live within the confines of a deserted island.

In fact, this morning while shaving he thought of a corollary image, which he thought opened up a new avenue of philosophical development, an avenue which he wanted to discuss with Günter. Suppose a young, idealistic shipwreck throws a bottle into the sea and then over the years forgets about it. He goes about his work on the island, doing everything he can to survive. Years later, he is walking on the beach at dusk, when he sees a glint in the sand. He hurries to it and digs it out with his staff. He uncovers a blue-green glass bottle. He examines it and discovers its mouth is sealed with beeswax; he peels the seal back with his long yellow nails and extracts a piece of rolled bark. On the bark he reads a message in smoky charcoal: “I sailed on the HMS Manifest Destiny in 1952. The ship sank in the China Sea; all hands were lost except me. Shipwrecked.”

The man is startled. He pities the poor man, who, so many years ago, became shipwrecked at the same time as he. A man just like him cast a message into the world but unfortunately his message landed on another deserted island. He wonders if he still lives, and then it dawns on him that he is the shipwrecked. With this realization, his hope crumbles and he begins to sob; tears stream down his face. He is alone and the message in the bottle has “unconcealed” his condition in the world. He is a shipwrecked on a deserted island. The sea surrounds him and marks his boundaries. The sky forms his roof and he is mortal, fated to die alone. The help he waited for will not come. With the truth now revealed, he returns to his life on the island, where he dwells.

Message in a Bottle

The blue message
sealed
in a clear bottle
by a layer
of yellow beeswax
chewed slowly
in the green spring
unconceals
in black winter
my red shipwreck
to the other.

Thoughts on the Primal Word

The primal word arrests our attention when it arrives in our conscious mind unbidden and unexpected. It appears first as glyphs or images that one may understand through emotion.

The primal word once risen exists for a brief moment-like the may fly-in a world similar to Babel, a mythical city where all spoke the language of the one.

The primal word appears as an emotional hieroglyph that the one translates; just as the ancient Egyptian priests translated the hieroglyph into demotic.

The primal word is soaked in emotion and meaning, which the one must distill in order to imbibe and then understand the message intellectually.

The primal word over time and through translation loses its emotional power; however, it may carry an intellectual power thereafter.

Sometimes the primal word is adopted by the one and concretized into a religion or an ideology.

In order to remain authentic the one must avoid the concrete image and seek new appearances of the primal word.

The story of the Babel Tower is an object lesson on the concretization of the primal word. Its destruction is a metaphor for a methodology to revive the emotion and meaning of the word. Sometimes neologisms are necessary to revive thoughts and shatter concrete ideas.

Heidegger's language and Celan's poetry are examples of a movement to make an opening for the primal word and to re-make old language.

Pharos

Pharos
shines
on Ouroboros' tail
and greets
Caesar
in his biremes
and Cleopatra
in her rug.

Die Welt

The world
like bread
is made fresh
each day.
Unleavened
it lasts
no longer
than memory.
Seasoned
with reason
it blackens
and crumbles.

Alexandria

The silver trout,
like a slender thread,
arrows
through an oblong eye
of a brass needle,
and threads
an Egyptian done
to a Greek's doing
beyond the edge
of a Roman sea.

Hiking in Germany

Two strangers stroll
side by side.
Dappled light dances
on raspberry leaves.
Autumn threatens
to turn green into gold.
What thoughts
do they share
when their hands touch
and then recoil
like purple surf
on Ireland's shadowed shore?

Okeanus

I have uploaded my fantasy novel--Okeanus--on HarperCollins new beta site--Authonomy--at http://www.authonomy.com/.

Inked Clay

Silence elevates hermetic supplicants
on feast days and summer solstice.
From dreams they dance
on darkened feet across scree
to the daemon's dire door.
Silver shamans blow rams horns
to succor the winged spirit.
They present him glazed pots
reddened with tattooed sigils,
signifying the poet's primordial words.
He says:
Doing writ, heralds done.
They repeat it
on percussive sand
burned green into glass.
They seal it
like preserves;
the wide mouth of the mason jar
covered with mother's cheese cloth.

56

For his birthday, she gifted
him with a raven fetish,
which, when held,
ensorcelled him
in a shadow
of elder thoughts.
Its shadow spread
and draped
across his shoulders
like Balzac's cloak
cast in bronze
by Rodin,
the French mage.

Poet

He sat and read
his long poems
on a wooden stool
he carved from pine.
His lips purpled
as he scanned
primordial words
and his tongue
shadowed
like a Chow's.

Hunger

He yearned to be seen;
she hungered to be read.
It was as simple as that.
He published a little magazine;
she wrote sinister poems.
It was as simple as that.
He was twenty two and lonely;
she was eighteen and sly.
It was as simple as that.
She became pregnant
and killed herself.
He lived a long life
in her shadow.
It was as simple as that.

The Hunter

qui perd gagne, qui gagne perd
Cocteau

He left on the hunt three days ago,
with three dogs, a bundle of spears,
and a leather bag, hanging at his side.
Now, he sits on a red rock,
watching a crimson sun
sink into a purple sea.
She stood with a child balanced
on her right hip, her left hand
chiding him for waiting so late
in the season; the burnt orange
leaves falling in the background
crowned her strawberry hair,
and freckled brow.
He hesitated,
he now thought,
because he dreaded the killing,
the washing of his spear tips
in the white bull’s blood.
Did she not understand his soul
attached to the dying beast’s
last breath and that the curved hook
left a pain so sharp in his left
arm he saw only black?
With his head bowed,
he turned toward home,
his spears clean and dry,
while the first flakes floated
down and melted on his shoulders.

Wolves

to Julia and Ira

Fifty years ago, she was my sole companion.
When she became sick, they prescribed sulfa drugs,
which damaged her kidneys.
I was alone so they sent me to the woods,
where the old man appeared on a mule,
carrying a rifle in his right hand.
He wore a straw hat and overalls
he ordered from a Sears catalogue.
He chewed tobacco,
while he read the Bible.
There was no place for me,
so I slept on an army cot in the parlor,
where I dreamed of wolves.
Each night I looked deeply into their eyes
and read their thoughts
until finally my eyes turned yellow
and my nose resembled a snout.
For fifty years I have run with the pack.
Not long ago I faltered and fell
and ended up in a hospital,
lying next to a man who was dying.
In a febrile dream a gray wolf ate my liver
and I felt an excruciating pain.
When I awoke my roommate was dead.
The nurses whispered prayers
in Spanish as they removed his body.
When I was alone I sniffed
and caught the rank smell of the wolves
that had come that night and taken him.
I could feel them watching me
with their yellow eyes,
asserting their dominance,
asking when I would give up
and leave the pack.
I barred my teeth
and raised my head
and howled.

Icarus's Lament

At the journey's end
he awoke to find
a pile of feathers
beneath his perch.
The heat
of the summer
solstice
melted the wax
that secured
his ivory pinions,
freeing the crow
feathers
to fall
like frozen flakes
in winter.
Thus his childhood
ended with a failed
experience
of flight.
Days of toil
stretched before him.
Ravens laugh
and crows caw
their ridicule.

Kesselschlacht

The circle closes
and centers
all within.
Soon all food
will be eaten,
all fuel consumed,
all contact
broken.
Then cannibals appear
where men
formerly stood
and fear
stews
flesh
and flays
a flutist's
frame
clean.
Grey bones
and marrow
bleach white
and mix
with snow.