POEM: A GATHERING OF POEMS AND BRIEF BOOK REPORT

 

Deadman’s Hour

Down to the past.

Down to the down,

at last.

Down to where

the red rust seals

what once was held

a lifetime’s weal.

Beneath the stone

and chafing sands—

down to the past.

Down to the down,

at last.

 

The Meeting

You never expected

to see yourself

on the page—ugly,

yet beautifully written.

Or on the canvas,

drawn in shadows

cut with knives.

Or the song’s refrain,

scored in tones

chilled with twilight.

You never expected

to see yourself,

at all.

  

Laughing At Volcanoes

Don’t step on a crack,

Or tip the sugar spoon.

Don’t think of any number,

Or pop a red balloon.

 

Remember to always say your prayers,

But play long the afternoon.

And carry a white rabbit’s foot

When whistling at the moon.

 

Don’t take a penny for a dime,

Or walk backwards through the room.

Don’t sip potions or steal the egg,

Or touch the witch’s broom.

 

Cross your fingers and double knot

When threading the ancient loom.

But fill your chalice full with wine

And toast the bride and groom.

 

Then rock the cradle slowly.

Copy well that ageless rune.

Then take the child into your arms

And sing the holy tune.

 

Finally,

Gather ashes only when the crow calls.

Read well that parchment doom.

Then write your name on the other page

And laugh at the gathering gloom.

 

News of the World #18

Talking to yourself walking through the door.

Roll with the punches, toting up the score.

News of the world now, strange flags will unfurl—

Bodies hit the pavement, soon they’ll uncurl.

 

Those rivers keep rising and still you ask

what’s missing before and after your task.

Busy are highways, more busy the path

that leads from the way and soon fills with wrath.

 

This roiling of clouds and scaling of sin

breaks both the stone and the sweet mandolin.

Mountains breathe ash now while moths dream of flames.

Who in this time will give seasons their names?

.....

“Kill all the monkeys!” screams brave mastodon.

“Something's peculiar among their new spawn...."

We ward our bones now so we'll get along

(mostly in churches and old-timey songs).

 

It’s a sign of the times our salads will grow

deep in the land of perpetual snow.

Our menus now come with radiant cukes

and our subs now come with bigger, fresh nukes.

.....

I once heard it said: "Good comes while you wait."

(Though cuing in lines soon ends that debate.)

We’ve run of patience and magic and charm.

Will taking a number keep us from harm?

 

RHINOS NEW DODOS! It’s made the front page!

We don’t need comets from Jurassic’s age.

We’re doing quite well in raising our Cain

(in fields not so far from Eden’s lost plain).

 

Will something borrowed become something blue,

when icebergs calve and volcanoes spew?

We’ve stood at this altar for far too long.

Weddings, like funerals, need more than a song.

 

With continents drifting, so what’s the plan?

Do we build bridges or blow up more ‘stans?

Where once we stood bravely answering stars,

now we duck questions while sitting in bars.

…..

Cathedrals of stone or castles of sand

will both break the same in a quaking land.

While long-necked monarchs are drawn out on frames,

it’s those who have wings that are drawn to flames.

 

I’m all for choirs, so don’t get me wrong!

But too many voices can’t sing along.

I won’t let on when they’re way out of tune.

(They should try playing with long-handled spoons.)

THERE'RE SINK HOLE IN CHURCHES! On holy ground.

Those huddled in hassocks stumble around.

We need to steer them away from the Gates,

else those in charge will start raising their rates.

.....

Yes, it’s still Trump. Our hair is on fire!

(He’s but the angel we all desire.)

Be careful wishing: when something is wrought,

sometimes in getting we lose what we got.

…..

When leaders praise soldiers neck deep in mud.

It’s time to anoint our temples in blood.

With augurs a-plenty, what can go wrong?

(Will frogs sing choir while birds croak along?)

 

And who with their skin, its harsh wounds beneath,

prays to their guards to stand down their beliefs? 

Where falls the sun in such radiant dark? 

Must flesh and the heart acknowledge the mark?

….. 

Children in cages look pretty and neat,

lined up in rows for government meat;

lined up for photos, for bar codes and spam.

Soon they’ll make mincemeat that we call a ham.

 

Babies will cry at the darnedest of sounds—

from tinker’s new toys to live mortar rounds.

We prep them from birth to stand on two feet.

How will we tell them it’s time to retreat?

 

We’re parents in plenty, the world in our palms.

(We'd given away the last of our qualms.)

Packing for travel, a fun get-away,

we’ve no one to tell us that we can’t stay.

…..

When are they landing, those saucers in skies?

And what will we say if aliens cry?

Are there no rules, no universal laws?

Has God not provided our sunset clause?

 

They’re planning right now to cool down the joint.

(Who'll remember there was ever a point?)

A woman steals moths and pins them for art—

and we’re the species that calls itself smart?

…..

When digging for veins found under the sea,

lonely and frightened is one way to be.

There’re veins filled with oil, still others with blood.

The difference remains much clearer than mud.

 

So, nod to the headlines, nod to the dead,

nod to the preachers who read what’s been read.

Why keep on saving when souls are for sale,

when even old Ahab can smile on the whale?

 

Tea Garden

Like two leaves and a bud

plucked soft-fingered

from a bush—bent-backed,

she asks for a moment of your time.

And the fragrant breath of India

is in the air.

 

Tempest

Swirl of wind

in the street—

you're caught up

with the leaves! 

 

FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, I’ve taken pennies instead of dimes. I have jars and shoe boxes full of the coppery coins all over the place—behind stacks of records, at the back of closet shelves, in the basement underneath old lawn furniture. I don't know why I keep the things; they're not legal tender, anymore. No more penny candies, I guess. 

It seems I've taken the least valuable things in life and left behind the most precious. Hence the above rusty lunchbox half-full of musings and mislaid moments. What I've done or not done may or may not be found inside the faded outlines of a word arc or a metaphor; they're becoming discreet and smudged, and increasingly illegible. Even to me.

Well, we all feel this way from time to time, I suppose, like the cake we're eating is stale and all our joys have become grey and distant like perfume fading in an empty room. But glum should be a mood, not a lifestyle! So, while I was super grumpy when I wrote "NoW #18" a few years ago, I'd like to think "Laughing at Volcanoes" offers a bit of a rebuttal with its playful tone and generally well-wishing (here's to wishing!) sentiment. As usual, enjoy these mothballed oldies and some newbies. (If not, I'll re-bury them in the backyard along with the rest of my dreams from a misspent youth.)👦

 

AND SPEAKING OF DREAMS, I hardly ever have any about flying, like a bird or even in a plane. I recall one time where I did a kind of 'surfing' in the air as a ran down a dream hill, slowly lifting off the ground, clumsy as a gander lumbering in its run to get airborne. I do recall other dreams where I seem to be attached to the wall of a well facing the centre, weightless with a pleasant vertigo and perfectly content being there. (Cue the "return-to-womb" hypothesis.) Otherwise, in the rest of my dreams I seem to plod about on terra firma wearing out shoe leather.

I daydream about paragliding or flying in a glider, but that’s really just  falling, isn’t it, albeit at different speeds and trajectories? And I don’t speculate what it would be like to fly around with a rocket-pack strapped on my back; I envision a smoking crater at the end of a very short flight. Leaping off of tall buildings in a fixed-wing batman glide-suit thingy is not for me either. Definitely! And flying in aluminum death tubes at 30,000 feet is also not for me; I believe in gremlins. Doesn't everyone? 

Perhaps being shot out of cannon would give me a sense of flying for a few seconds until I hit the net. That’s as close I’ll ever come to experiencing weightlessness, since I won’t be booking a Virgin Galactic rocket flight any time soon. (Those lucky billionaires! Gosh! What lives they lead!) 

I occasionally try imagining life as a fish, floating about my days in some sunny lagoon, but I usually end up drowning. It’s the same problem of logistics when I try thinking like a bird—the ground keeps rushing up at me! (Though I do like imagining guano-bombing all those car roofs baking in the hot sun over at the mall’s parking lot. Fun times!) Hot-air ballooning? Yes. But what goes up must come down. So, as far as heavier-than-air flight goes, I'll stay mostly as an observer of things airborne.

 

One thing I like watching are seagulls at the beach when they have a strong offshore wind to contend with. They hover overhead, wing feathers ruffling madly, their white bodies buffeted by blustery gusts, yet they remain in the air, patient and determined, riding out the contrary breezes while they scan the beach below for food or perch.

 

IN JOHN CROWLEY'S NOVEL, Ægypt,* Beau Brachman goes out onto his balcony, one summer morning, kneels on a mat, and does something I’ve never dreamed of doing. He closes his eyes and silently rises in the air, flying over the town of Blackbury Jambs like a genie on a flying carpet! And it’s to Crowley’s credit as a skilled wordsmith that Beau’s “out-of-body” journey is a real as it is imagined. There are ‘two’ Beaus in the scene: One meditating on his balcony and the other soaring like a hawk high above the valleys of Faraway Hills and the massy peaks of Mount Randa. And both are inexorably linked:

“He would go only a short excursion, he thought, being out of practice: would only go out to see, like the woodchucks also newly abroad, like the hawks returning, what had become of the world since he had last got a clear look at it.” (280)

  

From his remote perspective, Beau “apprehended not sights so much as meanings, imports, symmetries and discordances, and he apprehended them the more intensely the further away he got and the darker the air grew…” (281) Dual existences, then, this ‘layering’ of one world atop another, of alternate histories, different ways of seeing the world are major themes in Ægypt (originally called The Solitudes, a title Crowley preferred), and he uses this blurring of reality deftly throughout his novel.

For example, the story's main character, historian Pierce Moffatt, quite by chance disembarks his bus at Blackbury Jambs, having missed a job interview in another town (Characters in Crowley’s novels often undertake journeys that begin or end in unexpected places.) Later at a party, he meets “Rosie”, a character we have met earlier and has an intimate encounter with her. He leaves the next day to wind up his affairs at a New York university where he teaches, returning to “The Jambs” several months later. On his arrival back, he visits the town library and once more encounters “Rosie”, calling her by what he assumes is her married name, “Mrs. Mucho”. (He has been told by his friend Spoffard that Rosie is married to Mike Mucho.) But she tells him her name is “Ryder”, confusing both Pierce and the reader in a short, awkward exchange. Apparently it is a case of mistaken identity. Pierce apologizes for his error and excuses himself, though he's sure they’ve met before. 

 

   John Crowley

Toward the end of the novel, Pierce and the reader learn it was “Rose” (not Rosie) Ryder who he'd met both at the party and later the library. Rose hadn’t remembered him at their second meeting and had been put off when he called her “Mrs. Mucho”, because “Rosie” née Mucho Rassmussen was Mike Mucho's  ex-wife, and Mike was Rose’s current boyfriend! The “Rosie” that Spofford had mentioned (and who Spofford was in love with), by this time, Pierce has met and begun working for, and while his earlier misidentification mistake was made clear in the end, the two women's identities remain oddly blurred in Pierce's mind. He keeps getting them mixed up, like they were superimposed one atop the other or were interchangeable, somehow. For Pierce, both Rosie and Rose were alike in many ways, with their names, their appearance and mannerisms, for example. They are connected to him in ways he is barely conscious of yet.

WHEN WORLD'S COMBINE it gets complicated! 

Pierce’s comic confusion over identities is one example illustrating Crowley’s theme—I’ll call it—of juxtaposition: the blending of two seemingly dissimilar things that, in fact, share traits and connections with each other, like the ‘two’ Beaus, two women, two Egypts, two histories and ways of looking at the world, two realities combined.

 

It's a complex and engaging read and only the first in a series of four related novels that trace Pierce Moffat's search for the elusive Ægypt. I can't wait to start the next one! I’m sure I'll learn there things I didn't know I knew and recover things that were never lost.

_______________________________________

 

*The title, Ægypt, with the “leg” and “bar” typographical details added to the front of the letter “E”, making it read as “A Egypt”, is emblematic of the dual nature of that land as Crowley portrays it, during the course of his novel. “Egypt” is both a historical country and at the same time a mythical one. It is part of the here-and-now as well a place found in the writings of the deceased historical novelist Fellowes Kraft, whose novels have acted as inspiration and guide for Pierce, throughout his life. Kraft’s words, at times, could be those of Crowley:

“Once, the world was not as it has since become.

     It once worked in a different way than it does now, it had a different history and a different future. Its very flesh and bones, the physical laws that governed it, were other than the ones we know.” (340)

 

For, if there is more than one Egypt, then there is more than one world—the world we think of as our reality, and another one that exists interpenetrated with, and penetrating, our own. I took a stab at  this idea in the poem “Two Skies”.    

 

 

 

Crowley, John. Ægypt. London: Gollancz: Orion Publishing Group, 2013. Print.

 

 

Cheers, Jake.