Next ten stanzas of Deutschland Sommer 2008

XXI

Interpret
loneliness
and obsession
with greed
as a father
fails
to flee
poverty.

The patrimony
places form
against
a strategy
of lifelong
worthlessness.


XXII

Paulus
born
during Prussia's
rise
serves
culture's norms.


Cannibalism
exists
in shining ranks
as winter
falls
like wolves
on dying sheep.


XXIII

As Scholl's father,
Paulus creates
the white rose.
His fear
flings
the three hundred thousand
to their fate
and emboldened students
say what others dare not.

Personal fear
subjected to madness
threads
the string
of heresy.

What did he fear?
Frozen steppes,
Russian camps,
or a madman's rage.
Did he imagine
the blade falling
onto children's necks?

XXIV

He defended
beyond human limit.
Weakness
caused him
to wait
as dying men
scraped
flesh
from bones.

XXV

Fear brings bravery,
as a man screams
and pounds his fist
against fist.

XXVI

Childhood traumas
birth
these men
of the present,
who obsess
over
the hidden past.


XXVII


He defends order
in a chaotic rant,
the other
stands
ordered
in chaos.

Severed heads
shine
and spurt
blood,
as leaflets fall
from Liberators.

XXVIII

Constructed dreams
stand
as long
as dreamers sleep.

Awake the dreamer
with the real.

XXIX

Madness protects
the most fearful
in an ordered
amber.

XXX

The guillotine
severs
light from dark,
shuts the eyes,
and stills all thoughts.

Sharpened
and efficient
it falls
like entropy,
as the discarded corpse
begins the journey
anew.

Next Ten Paragraphs---Deutschland Sommer 2008

XI

Can I not release
the arrow from the composite bow
and drive the iron shaft
deep into the stag’s
crimson flesh?

XII

Drinking weissen Bier
mixed with lemonade
on Zurich’s boulevard,
I feel the girl’s brown hand
on my back
pushing me north
toward Suttgart’s
valley and Freud’s
dark tunnel.

XIII

Wolves run in the Schwarzwald.
While time ticks away,
wolf-girls in Dirndls
dance down wind
of the lone wolf.

XIV

A cannibal sees only edible parts;
wolf-girls seek status in the pack.
Will the ordered
share the same plane with daemons?

XV

Do not seek the cannibal’s
soul in his eyes.
He sees only flesh
and tastes only blood.

XVI

The Paulus effect
defines the fact
that honorable men
receive lies from weak men
humbled by the reality
of their lives.

Business
corrupts us
and wolf-girls
bind us,
as ravens
stay our hand.

XVII

The snail slides
along the frozen edge
of the fennel’s
leaf as the funicular
flees the flatland.

Wolf-girls follow
the scent of the raven’s wing
and light a candle
in Montmartre.

XVIII

The brightest persona
hides the darkest shadow.

XIX

From Dali
he stole the snail
and from Jung
he followed the raven
to the wolf’s door.

He lived alone
in a world
growing darker.

XX

Deutschland soured
the madness
in his blood.

He left the cannibal
hungering for more,
as the wolf-girl
descended
into his shadow’s
ruthless
solitude.

Deutschland Sommer 2008

I just returned from Germany, where I had a burst of poetical energy. The result is a very long poem, influenced by my eternal fascination with the theme of order verses chaos. Here is the first ten parts.

Deutschland Sommer 2008

to Detlef

I

In a moment of doing,
the anxiety
of not doing
arrests
a dangerous
and restless sigh.

II

Chaos balances
a guilty respite
beneath lacquered trees,
forged out of gray
stones
on an estate
in Frankfurt.

Porsches parked
placidly
under linden trees
await the patrons
of the sculpture garden.

Deutschland defeats Portugal
in a solid press
against the goal,
unexpected by the Latins
with their vibrant stance.

Turkey awaits their turn.

III

Dynamic chaos
as quality
espouses darkness,
while a static embrace
affects the old regime
years before the Chancellor.

Bismarck creates a social order,
which challenges the Victorians.

IV

The white rose stands
against the stones
of the Mariensplatz,
while rain
falls on Bogenhausen
greening the oily boots
with slime.

The waitress in the dirndl
howls like a wolf
and for the first time
the sign of the wolf-girl
appears as a sigil
in the sky.

V

The city of the white rose
awaits the return
of Celan’s bane
and Grass
twists
history’s verdict
with slick
refusals.

VI

Balance
as theme
resides
in most dreams;
its images
speak real
words
in existence’s fantasy.

VII

Parker Posey
told me
in a dream
to read Pirsig’s Lila
and I did,
thus the flow
from the center
toward the surface
forces me to ford
the unconscious
stream
that wets
my leg.

VIII

The museum
featured the myth
of Marsyas,
an old theme,
that reminds me
the puer
reeks of dynamic
quality,
while the Senex
sinks
into static mud
and stinks like
a sty
before it hardens
into rock
that forms
the base for all launches
into primal space.

IX

Static quality
traps wolf-girls
in a singular,
sinister madness.

Dynamic quality
points
like an iron-tipped
arrow
shot forward
into the hollow blackness
of the universe.

X

To proceed forward
we must grasp
dangerous toys
like a child.

An Aphorism

Order
and doing
buy peace
for the troubled
who fear
idleness.
Age breeds
idleness,
sorrow,
thought,
silence,
and memory--
lost and found.
Doing
and order
embrace
youth imagined,
living
in chaos's
embrace.
Memory
thinks not,
nor dreams.

Harald Hardradi

In conducting some research for my next book, I spent some time reading about the Norse King Harald Sigurdsson or Harald Hardradi. Three things about him impressed me. One, he was a poet, writing both poetry and sagas; two, he was a traveler and a mercenary, who served in the Varangian Guard in Byzantium and with the Normans in the war against the Arabs in Sicily in 1038; and, three, he possessed an indomitable spirit.

At the age of fifteen, Harald fought with his half-brother, King Olaf the Saint at the battle of Stiklestad. Olaf died in battle and Harald was severely wounded. During his convalescence, he wrote the following poem:

From copse to copse
I crawl and creep
now, worthless.
Who knows
how highly
I'll be prized
some day.

Even in the face of defeat, wounded and hounded, Harald intuits he will be a great man. I find this psychologically and historically interesting primarily because some men blind to their fate and future, facing overwhelming odds and convincing evidence that they are at an end, defeated and despoiled, still have not only hope but the temerity to foresee their future greatness.

Two Short Poems about Circles

Enfleshment

With her back
against mine
the word
enlivens
sound.




The Compass

The steel
point
pierces
a center
and spreads
its legs
until the hollowness
enriches
the nothingness
of something
within the circumference
of the compass'
fleshy reach.

Circle Man

He runs in circles,
while circles turn within me:
wheel upon wheel,
gear meshed into gear,
speared spokes
whirring
in whiteness;
my shadow
dominates
the center
and feeds
off the mechanized
darkness
that times
Time
like a German
metronome.

To Do Not

It has been a long time since I posted here. There is no real reason why; however, I do have some excuses. First, I wrote a story for the Warhammer short story contest, liked it, and then wrote thirty-five thousand words of a Warhammer novel on spec, which I have been serializing to my friends. Second, I wrote a story for the Robert A. Heinlein Centennial contest. In order to do that story justice, I had to re-read a couple of Heinlein novels. Third, I am writing a historical novel about a disaffected Norman Knight that accompanies William the Bastard on his invasion of England in 1066. Fourth, Murder of Crows is putting out a second edition of The White Bull and I have been working with their editors. Fifth, I have become addicted to writing reviews on Amazon. Finally, my poetic muse went underground; however, something floated up from the unconscious this morning. So here it is--"To do not."

The doing
that does
not release
the anxiety
of the not-doing
does not
replace
the experience
of the doing
that does.
To do
that which is done
is the Shaman's
share
of the sleep
that awakes
the bright cusp
of the world
of done, do
and doing.

Repetition

He trapped
himself
within their nylon
fishnet.
Without a clue
he had floundered
up a sandy river
bed, flipping
his fins
frantically
against the course
of his nature,
far removed
from the Anglican Cathedral.
His hook
curved within,
not without,
as he espoused
to all women
he attracted.
They, in blindness,
embraced him
like worms
on this ingrown
barb
while he whined
about nightmares
he dreamed
each night
before curtain call.

An Emerging Theory

I am troubled by the fact that all art is artifice, no matter how hard we try to "keep it real." The beginning of any artistic endeavor soon evolves or devolves into artifice. The artifice arises because of the limitation of our perception, our natural desire to bring order to chaos, the inherent structure of the narrative, and the level of our consciousness. In that regard, the greatest artifice is found at each end of the spectrum of human consciousness. The primitive mind desires magic, whereas the refined consciousness seeks the symbol, the numinous, the archetype. Ironically, the quotidian mind is content to reside in the fact, the so-called real, which is an artifice of culture. As a result of this battle with artifice, which is inevitable, I find myself letting go of the real and moving more to the fantastic. In this movement I find solace in the fiction of Paul Auster, Peter Ackroyd, John Crowley, and Franz Kafka and the poetry of Paul Celan, Bill Knott, Gunter Grass, and Charles Simic.

Snail Silence

The order within him
was so black
it absorbed the sun’s rays.
Bright auras, like moths,
fluttered toward this darkness
until he could no longer
stand the weight
of their anxious
pushing.
In despair,
he cried out to the snail
that slid past on silver thread:
“Why do they press against me so?
What have I done to deserve
such dreadful desire?”

The Myth of the Snail

Each day it journeys
from the rose leaf
to the yard's loam
alone.
Without the help of any god,
it carries a shell
that grows evenly
through the years,
marking the limits
of its world.
Its boundary of being
measures the stretch of silver
between the rose leaf
and the grass blade.

Life on the Under Leaf

They emerge from darkness
crawling across the cement
on the way to the rose garden.
They find their way to the under leaf,
where they sleep through the day
to appear at dusk, to work
their way back to the yard
and the trees. Not once
do they repeat their mathematical
purpose nor speak of their twin
that fades into dark history,
nor do they lecture
on verticality
or the ultimate fate
that awaits the horizon.

Vertical until Horizontal

to Ferdinand Hodler


Anxiety rises like the tide,
overflows its banks,
covers the causeway,
and drowns the rose field.
He grabs his board
and rides the waves,
hanging ten, screaming
all the way to the western shore
where bait shops and trailer parks
sit nestled in contentment.
He runs the board ashore
and stands barefoot
in the white sand,
wiggling his toes.
Two pelicans fly to Cuba.
He studies the horizon,
ready to pit his verticality
against its horizonality
until it delivers
him in the end.

Günter’s Secret

With his left hand
stained yellow
from Schwarzer Krauser,
he pounded stone
and smoothed wet clay
into starving nudes
and granite head stones.
This sinister activity,
he later wrote, emerged
from his singular German virtue:
hard work, everyday, to the end.

A Snail's Tale

A snail on a mirror,
smuggled onto a Russian truck,
one snowy night passes
through the American lines.
That morning it had been a Communist;
by nightfall, it crawled from the polished glass
onto a silk table cloth in Salzburg,
speaking German and telling a strange tale.
It said, “there are two snails:
the one that speaks here to you
and the other, my twin, that lives
on the other side of the projection.
In that alternate world of thrown light,
my double slithers on slime
along a razor’s edge of time
that flows in reverse toward Romania,
where snow buries frigid bodies
crumpled on the side of a ditch,
their eyes perfect calcified shells.”

Günter and Paul in Clichy

A break in the gray skies over the gray stones of Montmartre illuminates Sacre Coeur, which shines like a beacon above the snail shaped map of Paris.

Two men walking on the Rue Lepic look up at the beacon. The short, stout one, with a massive black mustache, makes the sign of the cross, while the tall, handsome one, pulls deeply on his cigarette, a Gauloise. They continue down the street, searching for a clean well lit café where they can share an espresso, a cigarette, and a chat about modern German poetry.

They stop in front of a café that the short stout man sniffs. He enters and walks about smelling the kitchen door, the entrance to the toilette, and the bar. He looks under the tables and runs a fat finger along the edge of the window sill. He grunts his acceptance and takes a booth near the window.

A waiter with a vulpine face, arrives with a huff, and frowns when he hears the German accented French of the stout one. He turns to the other who speaks perfect French, showing his disdain for the boche. The stout one ignores the man’s rudeness; he has accepted the French’s hatred of the Germans. Instead, he pulls a small moleskin sketchbook from his pocket of his tweed jacket and a pelican pen and quickly sketches the man’s fox like face with a few clear lines.

The other, the handsome one, extracts a thick wad of folded papers from the inside pocket of his jacket and places them on the table. They order espressos and a carafe of water and place their cigarettes on the table. The stout one pushes his drawing aside and reaches into his left pocket and produces another moleskin notebook. This one is lined and full of scribbles.

The waiter places the coffees in front of them with a bill, which they both ignore. They intend to order another later. The handsome one with the sad dark eyes begins to read in German, while the stout one watches a woman bend over in the doorway of shop across the way to pour some milk into a saucer for a sick kitten mewing on the sidewalk.

A Snail's Pace

The snail steps on command
and slides along the razor’s edge.
Its day’s work ends well and small.
The hare celebrates,
as it rests
on its racing laurels,
waiting for the tortoise
to bisect
the line of slime
that shines
silver in the sun,
reflecting brown fur
and green shell.

Seeking Celan 1968

The gray stone absorbs
her black lace as silver flakes fall
on the cobblestones near the museum.
Her perfumed thighs
spread by his warm fingers
define the degree
of their digress toward the word,
defined against polished phrases
reflected from Venetian glass.
Its sound like a laural leaf
caught in the fall breeze
soars above a serpentine Seine.
Beginning at La Manche
it arrests itself
beneath the bridge
of his mounting distress.

Resolution 2008

The garden though small
needs tending and time,
while we approach
the world though big
by baby steps.
The fear mongers
and the money men
wait in ambush for fools
taking giant frantic footsteps
without speaking the coda,
the key. Mother may I
protects baby’s foot pads
and seals hermetically the innards
of the rusting ship, sunken to lie
next to Jonah’s leviathan,
our twin who sails west
but arrives in the east
three days late and a dollar short
unexpected, unheralded,
undone, and unknown.