THE PELICAN INN (2015)

Photo by Anton Barmettler, National Geographic

Part I: Max

Dial M

Father Max kept replaying the wordless message on his answering machine. 

At first Max thought it was a problem with the line or an uninvited busy signal, but the thin, reedy drone seemed eerily human, not mechanical, and the intonation oddly familiar.

Father Max kept listening. A crank call? Max used to get these every now and then, especially in his heyday, and one or two were seriously not cranks, but no one bothered with him anymore.

Decades now in the peaceful retirement home at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Point Reyes, Father Max was only disturbed by occasional tremors deep in the earth nearby and certain of his memories and thoughts.

He used to joke to anyone and to no one in particular that he had no earthly need for a phone, except to get that one call from his Maker.

This was not that call, Father Max ruminated, but it sounded damn close to it. It was a chant, yes, but not Gregorian. Father Max listened again.

Then he got it. It was Zen.  It was the Zen meditation mantra recorded with a twist.  And the voice, the attenuated but familiar voice, could he believe it, was George Wheelwright's, his very old friend, much older than he was and still alive!

Max missed George and their ongoing conversations in George's room at Green Gulch. In their youth the two of them were worlds apart -- George, the secular scientist turned secular monk; Max, a man of the Jesuit cloth and collar. Both made their mark in their professions and in due time moved on into the realm of the elderly, but curiously discovered affinities together at that late stage.

Both saw evil at work in the world and witnessed the struggle for souls. Both felt the world's peril as an ongoing thing, extending beyond the realm of the living, and mulling all this over together, they discovered how two once radically different perspectives intersected.

”We are in trouble," George said over and over, and Max could only agree. Max often thought that this recognition between them kept them both alive.

Max kept listening to the message.

Then he understood the sound and its meaning.  He got all of it. He did not want to get all of it. Like George Wheelwright, he was too old for this, but there it was.

Father Max knew he had something to do. Years ago, when he and George last sat together, George gave him a sealed letter. 

"I hope you never need to open this envelope," George said, "but if you ever hear of my demise, I need to know that you will follow its instructions, if you can." 

Father Max put on his coat and went to his dresser and took out the envelope. He put the envelope in his coat pocket and found the keys to his car -- for which he long ago ceased to be licensed to drive.

Max paused, holding his keys in his right hand and stared into that space, neither here nor there, that freezes your gaze when your brain tells you that you’ve forgotten something. Then it came to him sluggishly out of the ether — the surgical face mask hanging by the door. Who among the retired priests left it for him the other day?

He was not sure who exactly, but the message was adamant. “If you should interact closely with anyone out there, wear this to protect yourself.” There was a new virus sweeping the land. It had a name like a Mexican beer. Max was not at all sure how a Mexican beer sprouted a killer virus, but maybe it had something to do with the farm workers that poured north every year to work the fields. But without a radio or TV Max was out of touch with the news.

He reached for the mask, stared at its shape and ear coils, and put it in his pocket next to George’s unopened letter.

He listened one more time to the wordless message. There it was, the ascending chant with its clue for him.  He carried its sound outside toward his car and into heavy weather.

OWW. OWWWW. OWWWWW.

George Wheelwright had dialed up OM and flipped the consonant -- for murder.

—<>—

Photo of Fog at Point Reyes, CA by Casey Horner @ Unsplash

The Fault Line

The weather was still bad, and the two-lane winding road from Inverness was fogged in and slick with rain. As he drove, Father Max squinted over the wheel into the fog, trying to keep his old green Volvo in the right-hand lane. His lights were on, casting their beams into the murk for signs of the twisting faded median line and the right-hand shoulder. 

The stunning landscape of this section of Route 1 was this late afternoon a phantasmagoric blur of gnarled tree trunks, disappearing fence lines and the lower grassy slopes of rolling hills.  About 50 yards to his right and below out of sight was a long cut of the San Andreas Fault, running north from Bolinas Bay into Tomales Bay.

Now and then Father Max came out this way at night along the cut, looking and listening for what he knew not exactly.  But Max had proven instincts and a venerable nose for a world out of joint, and this forgotten gully along the San Andreas fault was one place his nose kept leading him.

But not today. This afternoon Max was driving past the gully toward the source of George’s coded Zen mantra and into whatever dire trouble had just befallen George.  

And as he drove, Max once again ruminated on his old conversations with George. Together they sat, mulling over many things, and felt the tremors, not merely from the fractured California geology along its San Andreas fault line, but of the combined pressures of civilization, all of it; its burgeoning industries, equally burgeoning weapons systems, endless wars, over population, vast wasting of natural resources, shaky political institutions and narrow leadership. It was a disturbed earth they shared, its climate and its foundations made perilous by human interventions.

And more. —<>—

Despite his former profession, or perhaps because of it, Father Max was not a conventional believer, but he knew intimately that the surfaces of this world were not alike, that behind benign appearances primal forces and malignancies lurked — and at times leapt — that could not be explained away by either science or conventional religion.

Without another adequate name for it, Max saw these perverse irruptions, when they occurred, as the Devil’s work, defying the natural order of things; irruptions that lay behind the timing of natural disasters of weather and geology, of outbreaks of viral-based diseases, of cancers in human bodies, of untreatable mental illnesses and also appearing throughout history in the guise of mass persecutions and wars.

Max knew whereof he thought. These were not the symptoms of a world evolving naturally. He was an old man, raised in Europe in the throes of two world wars and well traveled in the Mid-East and Africa. He’d witnessed more than any reasonable share of suffering, brutality, and carnage, and notably seen bodies and souls possessed. Max, you see, was not only a retired Jesuit but a known exorcist, and in this line of work was for years a marked man, a man who had hunted and been hunted by the demonic. In his own psyche he carried the scars of it.

And out there in the fog along the highway, where the Pacific plate groaned and shifted against the Continental plate, was a portal between worlds where someone with a nose for it, Father Max felt, needed to be looking and listening.

Max was not alone in this feeling.

—<>—

An oncoming pair of headlights broke out of the fog and seared Max's astigmatic eyes. Max swerved away wildly from the median, then corrected himself, but he was feeling wobbly and out of synch with the road. If only he owned a pair of those night-vision glasses his old friend George specialized in. His reverie shifted again back to George -- George who laughed gently at Max's ruminations about things perilous.

"All true," George said, elfishly, "but oh so ponderous."  The Devil is many things, but, Max, I suspect he is not ponderous."

Max knew that the Devil, that shape shifter, was anything but ponderous, but with George he was always reticent about the details. He did not want George's scientific bent of mind to see him as foolish, and also he did not want to risk upsetting George further. George was a valuable ally to Max as well as a dear friend, and Max needed to keep George's amazing instincts aligned with his own.

—<>—

One moonless night Max took George into the ravine and bent his ear as they climbed down and about.  George finally shushed Max and asked to sit down quietly at the bottom of the gully. A strange ghostly light that Max saw from time to time seemed again to emanate from the gully and linger by the stunted trees. George sat there cross-legged with Max for an hour with his strange night glasses on and said nothing.

Finally, Max stirred next to George. Max was troubled by an odd white pod-like thing hanging from a bush 50 feet ahead of the two men. "George," Max said, "do we need to examine that?"

"No, " George said quietly, " I don't think we do."

"What is it?"

"Max," George said almost sweetly, " it is a condom."

 "Oh," Max said. His blush nearly illuminated the gully.

"Yes," George said, " it seems we are not the only ones to visit here."

"Why here?" Max said. "This place is so inhospitable."

"Well," George said, "it appears that some folks will do anything to be on the fault line when the earth moves."  George cracked himself up and was bent over laughing.

Then George got up and looked at Max. He was very serious now.

"Max," he said, "it is very important that you keep coming here. This is a place where you should be looking and listening out. Never mind the condom people. I need your eyes and ears here."

And with that, George was done.
—<>—

Max kept driving urgently. The winding highway by the gully was behind him now, and ahead the road straightened out along the shore of Bolinas Bay. He was still shaky at the wheel, and here below the hills was almost zero visibility. Even so, he continued on, passing by the Stinson Beach community with its warren of beachside streets and stores and ramshackle houses, then carefully negotiated the series of precipitous rising and descending turns that led finally to Shoreline Drive. He turned right and wound his way down through more switchbacks toward Green Gulch.

As he approached the entrance to the Zen community where George lived in his retirement, he saw a single car parked outside the gate. He pulled in next to it. He got out into the weather, stepped away from his car and stopped in his tracks. He had parked next to another old green Volvo, exactly like his own.

                   —<>—

The gate to the center was closed …

Max Finds George

Father Max stared in disbelief at the two nearly identical green Volvos parked side by side outside the gate to Green Gulch.  The one on the left was his, surely it was, because he had just stepped away from it, and its tire tracks were still fresh in the mud. Also, his car carried the long-lapsed California luxury plate, PERSIA, engraved in block letters, that he drove with for years.

The other Volvo, a rental, carried another luxury California plate from a dealership in Livermore with the letters SHADE on it.

Father Max paused, observing the two plates side by side. Something in their proximity to each other disturbed him. PERSIA was his code word for his encounter on an archeological dig in Northern Iraq with that nasty little jinn, Pazuzu, the objectification of evil embedded in an ugly ashen-green relic with a severed nose and venomous infernal eyes.

Someone on the dig found the jinn deep in a cavern, showed it to Max and carried it back to Woodstock, New York, where he was rendered promptly into a bloody pulp while watching reruns of Howard Stern.

Pazuzu went missing until all hell broke loose among a film company in Washington, D.C., that had the misfortune of carrying around the vile mega demon in a large camera case, and the rest was cinema history -- the beginning and the end, Max thought, of his terrifying pilgrimage with the demonic.

SHADE was altogether too coincidental with PERSIA. Moreover, his choice of PERSIA, was an acrostic with a counter message; if he unscrambled it, it read PRAISE.

An instinct made Father Max look again at the other plate: it rearranged itself before his eyes to read HADES.

—<>—

Max recoiled. "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrante," he muttered under his breath.  Max knew his Dante. He had been through the gates of Hell before. He wondered what had conspired to bring him here.

He wondered whether he was in another damned movie.

The gate to the center was closed. The unusual sign said "No Visitors Today".

But today was Sunday. Green Gulch was always open on Sunday for visitors.

And if the center was closed, where were the occupants of the other Volvo? 

Max tried the gate and it swung in. He felt the gate swing slowly open along his fingertips, but he did not hear it move.

Father Max lived in a world of partial silence. A combination of age and years of hearing the howls of souls trapped in other bodies or sliding into perdition, had rendered him partially deaf.  In his early dotage the comforts of subtle sounds escaped Max, but the inner chambers of his memory reverberated with echoes of harsher kinds.

To Max utter silence reigned under the eucalyptus trees. The heavy fog had cleared finally, and his head and shoulders were wet from water dripping off the leaves.  He could not hear the little explosions of the drops in the leaves, or the slithering movement of tiny geckos under the carefully arranged stones.  Nobody lingered in the gardens. No one moved along the paths toward the Zendo. No sound of meditations came to Max's ears. Yet Max felt not alone.

 Max was not going to be deterred getting up to George's room.

 He stood in George's doorway. His thin shadow fell into the room.

At the end of his shadow in the dark room was a small, blurred, very white and withered image of George, sitting rigidly cross-legged, facing out and west, as had been his custom, overlooking the Green Gulch gardens and Muir Beach beyond. George's eyes were closed shut; his hands atypically out of sight under his robe.

Max had not seen George for how long? Five years? Ten? Longer?

George's 100th birthday was back when?

Max did hear a rumor of George’s demise in a nursing home, but then as quickly he heard that George had returned to Green Gulch.  Max was reassured. He did not want to think of George’s soul sliding away from their shared time together.

For Max time was a looking glass of kaleidoscopic bits that formed and reformed, shucked and jived, with Max always squinting through the narrow end, trying to navigate from what he saw in the fat end of the glass.

Max called out to George softly, but George did not respond. Max moved closer and spoke again, but George seemed so deep into his meditation that he was beyond reach. Normally, Max would not disturb George or anyone else in prayer or meditation unless there was a compelling reason to do so.

Max blushed again thinking of the one and only time he actually interrupted one of George's trances -- George sitting in the bottom of the gully near Inverness that was the San Andreas Fault.

"George," Max said. "It's Max. I'm terribly sorry to disturb you, but I'm sure it was you who left me a most upsetting message. I have come right away."  Nothing. George seemed to have no respiration at all.

Only when Max moved his face close to George's closed eyes did Max feel the deeper chill surrounding George.  George was not only cold; George was colder than cold itself.  George was emanating cold and something more. George was vibrating -- his withered frame was shaking all over with a chilling force of Zero way beneath the bone.

Max sensed what was happening to George. Max remembered.

—<>—

The Exorcism

Max reached for George's wrist under his robe to take his pulse. George's hand was all rigor mortis except for the eerie vibration.

As Max pulled George's hand out of his robe, a cell phone fell out of George's hand.  George had no respiration and no pulse, yet Max's hand on George's arm felt as if something was playing them both like a huge cello without sound. 

When Max reached up to touch George's eyelids, Max's hand shook terribly.

As he gently peeled one eyelid back, George's forehead erupted in smoke, and Max's hand recoiled and fell away as if shot through with dry ice. 

George's eye was blank, empty, no retina, no pupil, no viscosity, no vascularity -- nothing.

George was not himself.  George was something else and that something else was also in the room. And that something else knew who Max was and was expecting him here.

Max reached inside his jacket and took out the letter from George. He found the forgotten surgical mask in his left hand with the letter. He opened the letter and read:

Dear Max, I am slightly over my head in all of this, but if you should find me not alive, you must do one thing for me and for us all. You must secure my night glasses. Use them with the utmost discretion, and you will know why I need you to keep them. I am sorry to put you in the middle of this.  Be careful, Max, be very careful."  -- George.

Max looked about. The night glasses were nowhere to be found.

"So Max, you fucking Jesuit, have you found what you are looking for?"

The voice was a storm around Max's ears. It came from George, it came out of his cold unmoving lips, but it came unleashed from a place George never knew. 

It was guttural and bestial and mocking; it was the sound of eternal malevolence roaring like a brace of wounded lions caught in a snare.

Max knew what he had to do. He had done it before. His crucifix was in his right hand, and he thrust it shaking before George's face; his Bible was out and open, the pages fluttering in the roar.  Max was now making signs of the cross in front of George.

"Get out, you infidel," Max shouted back. Leave this poor dead man and return to where you came from!"

The bestial roar turned to laughter, waves of it. The voice turned soft and slithery.

"You silly priest," it cooed. "You stupid collar. Just where do you think I come from?"

"Hell," Max shouted back. "Where else would they have you?"

"Not so fast, Max dearie," the voice now crooned, a woman's voice.

It was Max's mother. Max got dangerously apoplectic.  His heart was never that robust, even in his prime. He stuttered and shook. He made incoherent sounds back that could have been the envy of the nastiest jinn in the joint.

"Max, honey," George said. It was the voice of some actress Max could not identify. "Hell is so passé, so totally yesterday."

Then the voice changed. A deep smoker's catarrh, something grizzled and worldly with a trace of a Boston Brahmin accent.

"We don't need no stinking hell anymore, sweet cheeks. We have the industry."

"What the hell, you say?  I'll show you again what the hell you are!"

Max reached for his alb and his purple stole and Bible. Max was getting down to business.

"You going to read the Bible to me again, Max, you cupcake? Is that all you can do?  The voice was southern, fey, and insouciant.  "Where did that ever get you, Maxie? Remember the last time we did this silly Jesuit dance?"

Max nearly choked George with the purple stole. Then he threw the Bible aside.

"Alright, you glistening worm on my heel." Max could not believe he words coming out of his mouth.  "I am going to carve you a new ……."

"A new one?" The voice was singing now. "A newbie?"

George began to elevate. He rose into the air above Max

"Max, my dear friend..." It was George's voice now.  "Don't bother getting your old knickers in a twist. I have got a thousand assholes just for you and your kind."

And with that an enormous foul cloud descended from George over Max, who coughed and gagged and rolled about on the floor.

When Max recovered himself, George was sitting back where he always sat.  His face remained still. Then he spoke again.

"Max, old buddy, you are too tired now to try this again with me, and I'm not here to take you with me.  That was then, Max, this is now. Today I have something for you.  Take it, Max, and go figure.

But, first, you’d better put on that ridiculous mask. Now!” Again, Max has forgotten the mask. It was wrapped around his wrist. He put it on.

‘Welcome again to my world, Maxie.” said George’s head.

And with that George's head turned slowly, grindingly, once around full circle. Then dark exhaust poured out of his lips, covering Max.

When Max's sight cleared, he saw a tiny piece of film issuing out at the edge of George's mouth. It looked for a moment like a shiny black receipt from an ATM.

"Take it, Jesuit," George said. "And let the games continue."

Max reached up and gently pulled at the film. Three inches of it came out of George's mouth. Max pulled again at the film. George vibrated.

Max now held two feet of film in his hand. More of it seemed to be coiled inside George. Max took a very deep breath and pulled hard..........

—<>—

(To be continued via the book title link above the panels)                                             

  Part II: George (on request)

The Temblors

“The audacity of latching fantasy onto earthquake-shaky bedrock has always been in the state’s DNA.”    --Timothy Egan

That Saturday night four temblors rolled north like land-based waves, each stirring the seven Forest Lawn cemeteries outside Los Angeles. The temblors also caused uplifted wine glasses in Simi Valley to slosh sideways and opened deep cracks by the iconic intersection of Routes 41 and 46 in Cholame* before rolling on gracefully through the valley east of San Miguel and up through Hollister, Gilroy, and San Jose (where the third wave aborted millions of lines of fault-intolerant operating code). Then each temblor ran out along the edge of the peninsula to the sea, where they seemed to fade to echoes of themselves.

Curiously, no after shocks were reported the next morning, except for the rumors that flew along the fault line under the radar of the Sunday morning news. Rumors from passers-by of hearing deep groans and peals of maniacal laughter from underneath the grounds of the seven cemeteries. An unconfirmed (and later discounted) report of a massive pile up in Cholame. Finally, random accounts up the line of deep, grinding noises in the valleys that left figure-like swirls of dust in the morning light. 

*Site of James Dean’s fatal accident in 1955

— (To be continued) —

PARADISE IS ORANGE (2017)

Photo(c)Kathy Hastings

Paradise Is Orange

A Syrian journalist flees Homs with her infant daughter.    

                 I

A terrible crossing we had of it, 

six miles of it,               

three hours into headwinds, 

forty crammed upright in a dinghy for ten,                                 

all eyes on the waterline,                                        

the night seas running past,                                             

the bow riding high and slamming us           

again and again into the sea;                                   

the pitch drenching, bodies

lashed into each other,

our cries, pleas caught by the wind:                 

“O daughter of mine --                                                  

does it end here?  Is it here

we disappear?”                                   

  II

Of this remember nothing,                                              

my labor, my wet bundle,                           

and of the night screams echoing

in the streets of Homs,                                                   

and of our terror and flight,           

now this smuggler straining at the helm,   

drunk and shouting into the wind:                                                

"People, swallow your tears not the sea;       

you are the fortunate ones,

I am staying in the boat with you,                       

I am taking you to paradise,                              

to the island of beautiful women, 

who love everybody, wine, poetry, even you,              

who go off with your miserable hopes, ho, ho,                       

to Europe, to Europe."

Image via The New Daily   

III

They waved us aboard for this, 

waving their guns and our money;                        

unbathed, oily-eyed, grinning,                                    

the eyes of their guns                                                

on each of us, taking the life out,          

then pointing the way …

These Mafya, 3600 lira for anybody,      

the toothless old and young,

and the drowned children, waved into the sea,                          

one hundred, the count rising                                                      

after that baby, Alyan Kurdi,                                   

lost with his mother, sister, brother,

washed back to shore, face down,                                                            

for his father to remember. 

Photo via AP/file

     IV 

“Know us by what we carry

and what we leave behind,"                                                 

your father said to me,                                

as they took him away,                

love and destruction in our eyes;             

the city of our people pulverized,                   

its rubble to the edge of the sky;                                               

and from the skies above our streets                            

the voice of General Suheil al-Hassan, the Tiger,  

murderous poet of the barrel bomb,          

his blast flesh stuck to our walls,                                    

calling down over loudspeakers                        

in rasping verse to his enemies,                             

to surrender or die.

V

On my life you will never hear                          

such a man again,                                                      

or the down-splitting air of his sky,                          

or before his henchmen cry      

with our blood on their hands, 

which in your father's name                                                

may they taste again each morning        

with their smokes and cruelty.                            

And so we ran, became nobody,                    

shadows on trails where no grass grows,     

no longer to choke in our doorway             

on the stench of their C4 --                                          

its burnt flesh, bitter almonds and tar --                

our last taste of Asia in that air.           

Photo via PBS        

    VI                                      

In the fall it was Damascus;                                    

all the boats full of Damascus.                  

“We have papers, ask us,”                                   

the lucky ones said,

“Aleppo, Homs, Damascus are falling,                                    

and the islands are calling.                

Take us to Chios, Kos, Leros,                        

Lesvos or Farmakonisi;            

each a name for freedom

just over the horizon.”           

“Pay for your welcome, nobody drowns,”               

 said the Turks at Izmir, signing them on,           

“safe passage guaranteed,

or your money back, easy.”      

VII

Perishables!  Easy money,           

packed in a rubber raft or dingy,

a shove from shore, your pilot, see!            

over there, swimming back!                    

And you adrift to a dead reckoning of it,

the sudden intimacy of horizons

on your peripheries, floaters for islands, or, worse,

on a starless night to be marooned without compass,

out of sight and luck and drifting            

in widening circles, as if moonstruck

on the lunatic eye of this sea.

Image via AFP

             VIII

Paradise is orange, my blue one,                       

now rising before us                                          

mountains of orange on Lesvos,  

as the night lifts

and the sea lets go of us,                                

frozen and wet at dawn;                            

a cold dawn, icy-fingered                                                           

harbinger of winter …                                                 

Photo(c)The New Yorker                                         

… as we step into the journalism of it ….

what the world sees                                

in these shallows of Europe:          

shredded rubber boats, inner tubes,                      

children's pool toys, everywhere bright-eyed Dora

the Explorer and the color ...

IX

of paradise undone; flotillas                       

of orange dots, waves of them            

incoming on that back-lit sea,                               

months on end, to this migration's                           

great littering where it landed …           

Photo via artoferickuns

life jackets strewn                                     

on the spot, trails of them inland  

(by one count, 450,000),                 

to the orange mountains                                       

rising and deflating in the Aegean sun.           

And Europe, what do these tides give up                   

to your sirens of hope?  Listen!         

Beneath the waves and winds                 

another graveyard's drifting in.                                                                                          

Photo via Global News

   X

On the spot, on our knees,                       

you wailing in my arms,                       

I would hear gods in so many voices:               

the aid workers and media                                        

embracing us, feeding the news cycle;               

the Afghans crying for joy at survival;      

Syrians tearing the tape off their cell phones

and selfie sticks for pictures; …                                                   

Photo via socialistworker.co.uk

 the American actress, Susan Sarandon,               

her teeth as white as alabaster,

reaching for you before the cameras,                                       

lifting you high, daughter,                  

my squirming, miraculous survivor.                                    

Does everyone in America smell like butter? …

The locals despise us all equally:

"Skoupidia" - "wandering trash"

No one would give us a ride…   

                XI

Here we are the fortunate ones:                    

Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan           

refugees whom the sea lets go,                                     

beyond Thessaloniki, beyond Macedonia,            

while others shiver in mud under flimsy cardboard 

with blue lips and hands,    

protesting bitterly in their camp 

for "economic migrants."           

To most the names on the road are stone:                          

and Gevgelija and Idomeni,                

where the borders are closing, 

where the winter will find them;                        

Iranians already sitting with their lips sewn shut,

Bangladeshi with signs "Help Us or Shoot Us."  

   XII                  

The locals despise us all equally:

"Skoupidia" - "wandering trash"

No one would give us a ride.                                               

It was then on the road to Molyvos                       

I saw the two young jihadis from Homs                  

beautiful faces in a sullen 

river of faces, memorizing verses              

deep into the Qur'an,

reciting them quietly day and night;

a brief lifetime of righteousness,

a son's dream of Hafiz, taking ten                  

to paradise; father, mother, others, 

while for myself, their childhood neighbor, 

a long stare and erasure. 

XIII

We travel in many footsteps, 

women in the shadows of men,             

lonely men without women,                                                  

on the long road north,                                                

And I know you, husband without money,

citizen, hypocrite, neighbor,                                  

owned by your greasy smuggler,                                    

who sells your wife to any bidder.                            

For me, daughter, no one will barter;

I will not bathe until Germany.                                             

I shall carry with me a mighty female foulness;                

I will spread my own red ochre against their lust.    

Forgive me, sweetness out of my body;                           

pray that no one will want me.

Photo via greece.greekreporter.com

 Goodbye, Paradise ….

Photo via 6degreesto.com

             XIV

Goodbye, paradise!

island of strong women;                           

receive our sea-borne children,           

arriving on their own, bloated and boatless

onto Lesvos, Kos, Leros, 

Chios and Farmakonisi;  

their eyes fathomless in the shallows of freedom.

Imagine them together swaying                        

in the sea's embrace and singing                           

how the legend came to be       

of babies rising from this sea.           

Hear Alyan Kurdi's father alone in his hell:                

"Send me their toys, I want their smell.”

———

BLAST SILHOUETTES

Hiroshima shadow image via Pinterest.com

Respond to the line “The sky has an opening.”

by Mark Strand in “A Piece of the Storm.”

       --Robert Wrigley

Blast Silhouettes         

for Robert Wrigley

1

At midnight on the perimeter,

when he thinks no one’s looking,

he pats a warhead, “easy there,”            

touches its sleek sides, HAWK,             

centurion of the skies,         

then pats each one down the line.                

-<>-

Involuntary act, “conduct unbecoming”

an officer in this man’s army,                         

a voice in his head, echoed by       

a chattering down slope, mockery     

beyond the barbed wire --                   

slicky boys looking to breach again.    

2

Out into the night                          

from across the Yellow Sea, 

green blips on his radar screen,

blip-blipping south and east,

massing into solid green          

along the 700-mile fail safe line.

-<>-

And the dark mountains to his north,

pocked like terrible acne,                                             

those silent ferocious deaths.               

And the silence of the blast silhouettes,                      

on the Aioi bridge at Ground Zero,              

where he stood a week ago,

  -<>-

looking into a dirty haze                      

above Hiroshima,

for what? Little Boy descending?      

The skies splitting open above him?      

Or seen in his upward gaze                            

at the last instant, there!                                       

-<>-

Boy ascending!  White thing                                      

flying back to bay intact,

into Mama Enola Gay, “silver

airplane with a white long tail”

in that beautiful blue sky before the drop. 

-<>-

Fly away Boy with your ungodly shock,                                  

instant evaporation of blood

in their brains before they felt                        

the great wind, saw the clouds of ash                

above their radiated city,

became its charred remains,       

its shadows at his feet.             

-<>-

So he stands, ridiculous pilgrim,

turning back the clock                                                

at the epicenter of his thought,                           

in a firestorm of lunacy,            

not all his; while Japanese        

rush by him on their way to work.      

3

Tonight in South Korea,                 

Code Red, October 1962,                                

the world again is nuclear.                              

Skies open at dawn or sooner.

Somewhere above somewhere                                      

it will be faultlessly blue.

-<>-

When console bands swarm                                 

with green blips incoming,       

who else will give the warning?  

Wherever your hands are then,

on duty, at prayer,                                            

make a sign to someone you love.

                   -<>-                                        

He’s been on site a week                          

with nothing much to prove.

Stay awake, don’t malinger.                               

So he pats the warheads down the line,      

flips the boys the pilgrim sign                          

with a middle finger. 

4

From their black pitch below               

the payload in the launch zone                

the slicky boys appear.             

It’s not his aim they fear,                      

nor his useless sidearm,                          

as they approach the wire.             

  -<>-

“Agi jung-wi!” they taunt,                        

“agi jung-wi!”                

 “아기 중위!”

 “Baby lieutenant, baby lieutenant,

 where are your war dogs?      

 Show us your teeth!

—<>—

Notes

These events took place during a tour of duty with the U.S. Army Air Defense in South Korea around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962. Composed in verse in 2015.

Slicky boys are local scavengers. War dogs, the German shepherd guard dogs, were usually on leash patrol on site and the only effective deterrent to the slicky boys.

“Silver airplane …” words of Shigeko Sasamori, a resident of Hiroshima who was 13 years old when she survived the first nuclear weapon dropped on a city. Cited in “7 Things You Learn Surviving a Nuclear Blast,” interview by Robert Evans, Cracked, October 5, 2014.

Capeside

“The Kennedy poem is a masterpiece.

It should be taught.”

— John Rosenthal

“This is the hour after or before, echoless.” 

                                        — Allen Grossman

Image by John Tlumacki, United States, 2019

Capeside

2009

Sagamore Bridge image hosted by pickuki.org

1

The senator is up onto the bridge now,     

sailing off in repose above me;

the hum of his entourage gliding north                       

beneath the thrum of helicopter blades

sweeping the airwaves to Boston                  

to the cathedral on Mission Hill.           

-<>-

Along the canal the tide shifts in its wake.

A rusty Liberian tanker slides by,         

heading out to some port in the North Atlantic,

to empty out, take on, return.                                                   

On the far breakwater solitary fishermen     

and tiny families fit against the sky.  

-<>-

To the south two storms converge off-shore

into a long cloud, perfectly formed.            

From its dark underlayers a cloud fishhook

hangs down beyond Hyannis. I’m caught     

by such surreal painting, what a catch,

its line hard on the hand, the reel spinning.

-<>-

I close my eyes and familiar sounds sharpen:

two little girls at the shore’s edge discover a star fish;

a woman calls out over fast moving water;                            

a single prop lugs off to the northwest.          

For an instant it shifts inside me too,

as if these tides were tugging

the raised arm of the Cape toward Ireland. 

-<>-

The senator is beyond all this;  

two cities congregating await him.                                

Capeside, they say he’s out on the Sound,          

miles out (beyond the dissipating fish hook),  

tacking cross winds to open water,

past the scourging landmark of Chappaquiddick,       

out to where his brothers’ voices gather.       

2

In his last hours in the dead of winter,

his home to him unrecognizable,                     

my father stirred out of bed,

called me by his brother’s name, “Bill,

get us over the bridge to the Cape!”

To Alfred Noyes, his Falmouth childhood pal,  

who lived above the garage down the street

from his father’s summer house,

that time when he was always a boy.

And us restraining him, saying, “Pop, Poppa,

it’s winter out there, all frozen, all snowed in,

wait for spring!“ (where there was no spring).

From his bed his eyes took an edge

for the strangers keeping him from the bridge.  

3

From the canal I turn south to where

my father flew in his last hours for peace,  

his home on the mainland darkened and erased.

I sit above an empty ball field next to that garage  

to replay the seasons of his life and wait 

for what? For something on a breeze,

a trace of voices, laughter, snatch of song

above his father’s overflowing lawn?

Add a bit of Harry Lauder, please,

on a scratchy post-war thirty-three,

to catch that weekend gaiety down the street.  

Do keep it lively, as it was for me.   

4

All gone. Dead air. No hint of kin.                 

“Just you,” a voice could have said.                                     

No soul-bearing breeze, nothing on a wind;                  

no crow’s raucous cry or poetry;

no blue manifestation in a place so thin

you’d have to squeeze a revelation in.                     

No “Father, are you there?” or such imaginings.

No flash of you boys inseparable,

dashing off through the trees like hell,  

as if some hound was gnashing at your heels.

No, none of this, and nothing else embraceable      

in these absences I feel.

-<>-

But hear, still tugging on these lines, these naughts,    

all true and Harry too, here briefly caught,  

his wee deoch an doris, its tinny Gaelic chorus,

an echo from the music halls afore ye gang awa;                    

a daft old tune for the reel inside my head,

to take to the bridge and off to bed

                —<>—

Notes

1. Blue manifestation. From the younger W. B. Yeats, who astonished the old Fenian leader and literary critic, John O’Leary, with accounts of “blue manifestations in the Dublin hills.” “Great God in heaven, Mr. Yeets, what do you mean?”

2.    deoch and doris. (Gaelic) for a drink at the door, a last farewell.

3.   afore ye gang awa.  “… before you go to war.”

Lauder’s only son, John, a captain in the 8th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, was killed in the war in France in 1916.  Lauder entertained the troops in the front lines and his efforts in organizing concerts and fundraisers raised $1m pounds to help servicemen return to health and civilian life, for which he was knighted in 1919.

Sagamore Bridge image hosted by pickuki.org

GOODBYE JERSEY MUD (2019)

Photo(c)Zoonar/Ray Woo

   — Jersey Mud

           1

Windshield fluids frozen             

on cars & rigs alike,                  

driving into the winter sun         

on the Jersey pike.                       

-<>- 

Another rig blows by;            

its long-haul headlong rush.                

Another eye-pour                                  

of freeway slush.                    

             -<>-                                                           

For sight lines a grimace,

a swerve, two more --                                       

passing wrecks, smokestacks,                 

white fields a far shore.                           

               -<>-

& the nerves singing that song again,               

the old funk rhyme:

right place, wrong time                              

(Dr. John on oblivion).                      

2

Now windowless, wingless, 

blinkered, clipped,                                  

we are a mud-caked, bad idea               

on a south-bound trip.

   -<>-

  After Joyce Kilmer

we wiped off at Fenimore Cooper,  

Walt Whitman & every stop                           

& turnout to Baltimore, 

  -<>-

where bug-eyed and blear, 

hemmed & harried past our turn                                    

by night riders, juggernauts, 18-wheelers,     

we sailed into the harbor tunnel        

-<>-

echoing arias of fear (and Gilda),                   

vibratos trilling in every nerve,                       

constricting the last notes, a breath-           

stopping conviction:   

We’re gonna die! Here!   

    —<>—                     

 Photo(c)Zoonar/Ray Woo         

— Goodbye Jersey Mud  

Goodbye Jersey mud,                             

still caked on hood and fenders,                 

as we ride daybreak into Northern Virginia     

by Leesburg, Manassas, Culpeper        

over country battle roads                   

with their own tableaux of winter: 

              -<>-                                           

Leaves, sheaves, stubble, stone, 

frozen streams and bridges,                            

hedgerows, woodlands, pasturelands         

engraved by the chaff of wheat;                

counter-etchings on a lithograph,               

as we pass barns, schools, estates,               

sight lines to distant ridges.                                       

                -<>-        

Here signage at a bend:                 

harmonic site of worship         

and vintage war antiques;                            

on to breweries, distilleries                                   

and wineries boutique;

hops and grapes of wrath bucolic                             

for the touring alcoholic --                     

Drop by, taste and drink.             

  -<>-

Then at a turn or rise to spy,                  

guarding a pasture or estate,               

the solitary llama, celebrity creature,      

a coat bred fashionably alpaca,                                          

gazing into distances,                        

its toes in snow by a fence.    

—<>—

—- What We May Conjure                   

And what we may conjure                  

from our histories popular 

and Currier and Ives

of the generals, the generals

casting the die, 

marching it up and down 

over this same ground,                           

and the cavalry riding                                    

into the teeth of it, the fusillades,   

sky splitters, all sides,                                                

opening also to us                                   

the pitiless colors and sounds of glory;          

men cast blue and gray, 

led from behind, massed and driven,             

again and again, to embrace the fire,      

to assume others’ positions;                                  

if fortunate prone,                                                        

to be lying there firing                                       

over their own.       

—<>—

Photo(c)DonTroiani

— Cold Harbor

1

At the crossroads at Cold Harbor            

we take a breather by a field,                                            

stamp off the chill, inhale,                                             

imagine waves of men,                 

enfilades of fire on them,                                

then leave frosty semaphores                            

at nothing in particular.           

                -<>-               

“Seven,” I say, back in the car,          

‘seven” to underscore                                     

the minutes they took out there,           

June 3rd, 1864,                                               

to cut down 7000 more.               

  -<>-

“Perfect multiples,” she says.                                

“I know they didn’t stop.                               

Even if you exaggerate the time,                             

the massacres went on and on.                       

Can it matter on a scale like that?               

and what of that endures today?                

I don’t mean the particulate.”                        

                 -<>-                         

“One final horror that remains      

is never knowing why

the wounded and the slain,            

who lay out there as one,                              

lay for days between those lines.”

2

Her breath catches on another thought;               

in her mind she tries to capture it:                                           

All lie forever, do they not, 

in the widening shadows where they fell?                              

For what’s out there is with us still                    

in the terrible harm

men do to men when armed.

Within that darkening penumbra lies                             

other lessons, other lives,

in classrooms, hallways, streets and homes           

for the witnesses we’ve become                        

to our shot up children and the suicides.       

  —<>—

Cold Harbor battlefield image hosted on Wikimedia Commons 

—- At Cold Harbor: An Intermission

“The Weather Was Intensely Hot”

A Mississippian, who had recently survived the fighting at Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle wrote “all around lay the shallow graves of those who had fallen in the former Battle of Cold Harbor…at night these old graves would shine with a phosphorescent light most spooky and weird, while on the surface of the ground, above the ghastly glimmering dead, lay thousands of dead that could not be buried…at night we buried our dead who had fallen in the trenches, as did the Yanks, but neither side could get at those who fell between the lines. We became indifferent to the noise and bloodshed and privation of the horrible scenes, but we could not be indifferent to the stench arising from the unburied dead”.

John Gibbon, commanding a division in Winfield Scott Hancock’s II Corps remembered “the weather was intensely hot…the fine sandy soil turned to dust….our killed and wounded lay out in the space between the lines, those of the latter who could not crawl suffering intensely. Every effort was made during the night to get to them the water and to bring them in, but these efforts resulted in the enemy opening fire.”

‘The cries of the wounded were not just heard by a Confederate private or a Yankee division commander. Winfield Scott Hancock also heard the cries and appealed to his friend George Meade as to whether something could be done to assist the wounded. Meade referred the matter to Grant who penned a note to Robert E. Lee:

“It is reported to me that there are wounded men, probably of both armies, now lying exposed and suffering between the lines occupied by the armies…I would propose…when no battle is raging, either party be authorized to send to any point…unarmed men bearing litters to pick up their dead and wounded”.

The chess game being played between Grant and Lee on the battlefield over the last month now moved to their dispatches. Lee responded by suggesting that the Federals send out a flag of truce, as required by military protocol. As governed by the rules and articles of war, such a gesture would be an admission of defeat on the part of Grant. This was something that Grant was unwilling to do outright. He had pushed Lee back from the Rapidan to the threshold of Richmond at the cost of thousands of men killed and wounded and he was not about to concede a loss to his opponent.

Grant may have also considered the ripple effect of sending out a flag of truce. Later that year, residents of the Northern States would be going to the polls to elect the next President. A defeat in one of the major theaters of war could potentially have catastrophic results for Abraham Lincoln who was running on a platform of seeing the conflict through to the end.

Instead, Grant proposed a “suspension of hostilities” to which Lee agreed. On June 7, Union stretcher bearers made their way out from the lines. Gibbon would lament “it was not until four days afterwards…that we were enabled…to collect our wounded and bury the dead. The latter had by that time become a mass of corruption very offensive to everybody, friends and enemies, in the vicinity. I saw one poor fellow brought on a litter into our lines with a broken thigh. He had subsisted on three days on the spears of grass which he could reach with his hand from the point where he lay and smiled cheerfully when I spoke to him at the thought that, at last, he was where he could get food, drink and attendance”.

Article by Daniel Davis in “The Emerging Civil War.” (2014)

 — A Warming Trend                            

“After Cold Harbor who the hell           

needs more hell frozen over?”                 

(She now really warming up the car…)   

“As if we need reminding of    

how a divided nation’s guns      

kept repeating in defense of

maimed and mortified in defense of

(she waves her arms in the direction of),                   

on whatever scale of,

for this more perfect union of

(now holds out her palms to it),

engraved forever on these fields                 

as on the Shield of Heracles.”          

                 -<>-                                               

“Now, isn’t all of this tendentious!                          

What’s with my frosty mouth?         

Are these chilblains on my lips           

or are you contagious?  Please,

can we be done with this?     

No more ghostly battlefields    

on which my thinking’s stuck.    

And I’m painfully unfreezing       

and about to pee myself.                       

Which way out of here is south?”        

  -<>-

With this she sweeps the air,                        

as if nothing left in it to pluck or stir.        

I look at her and start the car.                               

—<>—

— Keen            

Today the swamp is frozen,               

the fields and roads are clear;                 

the leaves sheaves stubble                   

snow and windless sight lines    

lay by their winter whisperings                 

as we listeners pass by —-                                 

until off road somewhere                            

a sound we dread to hear;                     

sharp it is and conjuring:  

pock-a-pock-pock-pock,                 

and pock-a-pock, the shock   

fading on the air, directionless,                       

no keening in its wake.

  -<>-

Did you hear it too?                                                               

Another car? A deer?

No, that’s the spat of rifle fire!         

The question turns on us, from where?                                       

One thought, only one,                                  

on what capricious wind or mind:

There’s a gun out there,

echoing oblivion                            

in a school or schoolyard!                                         

The one we saw coming in?                

“I don’t know,” she said, but, please, 

Oh pretty fucking please,                  

get us out of here!”

  —<>— 

Photo hosted on Pinterest

— A Mexican Minute                              

For an instant I am riven                                   

by the moment, a given

Are-you-shitting-me-John-Brown?                

Mexican minute, pinning me              

inside the aperture                                                                 

of a wall-length trompe-l’oeil;                  

a one-way passageway                                    

of fun-house mirrors in 3D                  

to a bunkered, out-of-scale,                                  

2nd-amendment armory,                                 

and there the blinkered caption:

“Enter, ye deceived!”

  -<>-

It’s that deal we’d sealed,                                      

we acolytes of looking away      

from the rising tide of weaponry,

as we watched its history unfolding,                       

so many lifetimes watching it unfolding          

in the endless stir of news that speaks             

to no one not fired upon                                           

of the wretched thing life is

at the end of a gun,                                  

that business end of ordnance,                               

in industry drive-by doublespeak        

for weapon fire and misery.           

            -<>-

What comes now to our children,    

opening again to us

as someone else's rotten news,                        

as the stain of someone else's war,      

as another seismic concussion, tha-whump,                        

in a world heft of them, whump, whump,          

and waft of carnage without sound.       

—<>—

(This series continues in the book.)                                                                                                                                        

from Goodbye Jersey Mud

— Savannah Noir                                        

1

Savannah, where you're asked,          

if asked at all, not where 

you're from or what you do,                                   

as up north we do or think,  

but directly what you drink. 

  -<>-

On icy River Street I present                   

a sour belly to the saucy                         

mixologist; under her head rag                  

a wink, "Just call me Irma,"                            

invoking the visitor in September           

who turned River Street                                  

into more Savannah River than street,         

blew ghosts out of falling trees,                       

and whose proxy at this bar swears to me              

nothing less than a Moscow Mule                         

will do; a "shoe-thumping" shot                                 

of the house vodka with ginger beer and lime.                   

-<>-

And only for a blink do I think    

Irma might be having me on                                   

with a cold war bit long before her time        

about a shoe-thumping head of state

who knew how to play the press

and finally when to blink. But Irma, 

who looks across her bar into many futures,    

had something else in mind 

besides my gastro-intestinal relief

or loosening these old knees                             

to try a Georgia two step to the street,                    

but instead to test each icy step                 

with a firm heel to gauge the slip. 

  -<>-

The mule set down, not a wink,                  

she holds my eye. "Just this one.                               

Two or more and that river                   

might rise right to your stool.

So tonight, you two, watch your step." 

2

And she was right -- about the medicinal         

effects of a single mule 

and the slippery steps awaiting tenderfeet                          

afoot on empty River Street's                      

unseasonable black ice,                        

housing the venerable cobbles                               

of the waterfront district,          

lumpy underfoot and slickest                 

in the gaslight shadows,                                                                

which assured a dance of sorts                       

between the gaslights and upslope;

a slow-motion stomp, hesitant                 

with every step and shuffle       

like Tim Conway's "oldest man" 

played by an older couple                  

gripping each other, cobble by cobble,                   

beyond the final gaslight circle, 

then up an alley passage way,                 

dreading the slip and stutter step, 

slick shoe slide or buck n' tip                           

of a stumble, fall or tumble               

in this Olympics-level ice routine,

unheralded in the dark.

-<>-

Against all odds luck held;

no cantilevers, camel spins,             

death spirals, points for style,   

as we teetered higher to the base                            

of two flights of high stone steps                                 

by the foundation of the Cotton Exchange,     

leading steeply upward to our car, and there,        

as if groping along a dungeon stair,                                              

unsteady on the iron railing,                     

slipping on foundation stone,         

we reached the second flight,                       

to see on our periphery                             

deep in the alley to our right                           

a misbegotten creature of the night                     

hunched against a wall and watching.       

"Is that a man down there?" I asked.                              

"Who says that's a man?" said she,         

as we scrambled out of there.  

  —<>—

Photo hosted by ?????

THE DIXIE OVERLAND

THE MOJAVE, 1926

SAN DIEGO TO SAVANNAH

Photo hosted by Wikipedia of the original Plank Road, San Diego to Yuma, AZ, 1916.

—The Dixie Overland 

Panning the strand at Tybee               

at the outermost eastern end                                     

of old U.S. 80 West, a broken route,

I’d soon come to learn,

once was sonorous with news

one October week, 1926,                  

when Colonel Ed Fletcher drove

the former “Dixie Overland,”                          

in a stick-shift Cadillac sedan                         

from San Diego to Savannah,          

71 hours in record time,                    

as hundreds waved him on                                                       

through every town and station,                                   

to celebrate the nation’s first ever                                      

ocean-to-ocean interstate.

-<>-

Photo via Wikipedia of remnants of the old Plank Road, 2001.

Soon the go-west touts were out,

a-touting opportunity

and good times down the line:

“Escape the Blues!”(if you are white).

“Follow the sun!” Inopportune

to those who bought a one-way

ticket out, and yet     

what would the music be

that woke our teen-age feet

in our teen-age bobby sox and dancing shoes,                 

caught up our miseries and lusts

as we danced close or cut a shag    

or overdid a jitterbug,                                      

if it did not appropriate                    

within its blues progressions                    

blue notes picked and sung

by those who stayed behind

to pick along a blue highway;                 

O say this plangent Overland,

Savannah to Montgomery,

Selma, Vicksburg, Jackson …

— Irmafish

This outermost eastern end            

in a camera’s long slow pan

is a bare place of hurricanes                   

and the flood plain it became again               

under an oceanic September moon,              

where now the winter ocean, flat and brown,                       

slides shoreward on the tiniest ripples            

barely incoming to the eye

onto the wide beach dry,            

and the light draining,                                     

and the dusk dancers out to play                                        

in sudden gusts, skittering sand devils,                     

funnels and whirls, tiny spin-off tornadoes             

impishly moving the beach around. 

…..

And that one man                                                         

running hard on the sand          

under a striated green kite, big fish eye 

air-dancing in the twilight,                                

collapsing in a downdraft behind him.

…..

I turn with the camera,                                       

and there you are by the summer                

pavilion, cinematically                  

bundled in your red parka and cap,

grinning girlishly                             

on a child's red swing. 

…..

And before this part gets

any less red

wheel 

barrowish,                                                         

there is                                                         

lying in the little swirls                                    

by your swinging feet, a

large, dull-eyed, formerly red

Irma fish                                           

too far blown up on the sand.      

-<>-

 — And all of this …

And all of this in the January sun,     

for the dull show it was today                                                

in that low trajectory, 

as if we’d slipped into

a deeper orbit, far away,

until out of the blue that wasn’t,                   

as if painted by another hand,               

a spectacular red fade at sundown                   

in shades of vermilion, oxblood, carnelian …  

or if none of these exactly,                                       

giving way to a palette deeper in

as on a smear of tincture of 

decades-old mercurochrome                                                     

on open skin, exactly. 

—<>— 

Photo by Hafidz Mustafa via Unsplash

BASILICA

St. Augustine

Basilica     

1

Long lapsed, one step inside,          

would I kneel or make a sign?                     

And stepping further in

looked up to see illumined

beneath a vaulted dome

the red bunting of the canopy,

bathing apse, transept and nave                  

in celestial martyrdom.       

                -<>-                                           

And here above the altar

hung in sepulchral white

by the saints and pieties --                           

those marbled reliquaries                 

of suffering and belief --                              

the ubiquitous crucifixion  

under a crown of thorns 

in His forsaken agony,             

My Old Salvation, Lo!

staring down at me:

O Lift up thine eyes and gaze upon, 

who will not kneel and rise

or make the sign.

               -<>-                                           

Would there not be, O Lord,                                    

between Thy crucifix and me,           

some twinge or shudder,                               

death throe, holy spew,                               

spot of blood on marble toe?

But, no, that mishugas fell out            

when I lapsed long ago.

2

Just then I turned to see

flickering in the nave

a stand of votive candles

in the shadows, flickering on

the spit and image of a man,           

my grandfather, William,

kneeling with his rosary;

impeccable “Colonel”

to his Yankee Division men,             

who brought the ammunition

on time every time               

to the first Americans at the trenches:        

“Saviors of Paris” to the French     

and to history whatever’s in a name

after a war like that:

Chemin des Dames and Toul,

Chateau-Thierry, Seicheprey, Belleau Wood,

St. Mihiel, Argonne, Verdun –

-<>-                                                                                      

Grainy flickerings, half-caught          

in newsreels of the day

of waves of men and bayonets                                 

fixed for the Boche            

and surging over the top, huzzah! 

into no-man’s land, then lost             

to fields of white crosses,   

long-grassed-over trenches

in the mustard gas and fog               

of a war to end all wars,                   

as for William’s men it did     

and millions more.

3                                                         

Such flickerings in St Augustine      

from altar side to nave

over a solitary gentleman

of cropped white hair and certain bearing,

and likely not from here;                 

well-fitted in a London suit,  

the cut grandfather wore,

so it appeared to me;

and kneeling apart, as he did,          

by the votive candles, as he did, 

passing his rosary, as he did,          

in the great silence he brought to it

before the liturgy of the day …

  -<>-

And glancing at him furtively          

from our pew, as kids,      

at what we could not know            

of such mysteries, but did;    

of a citizen-soldier called to lead                

his lads to Armageddon,                    

who was by prayer and candles bid                       

forty years on from Over There,     

bead by bead to reel them in.                      

4

And the last of that rosary

that I would remember                                             

hung by his standing mirror

in his bedroom chambers,

where at my age he stood                             

to his own inspection           

the day he pitched face first

into his reflection,    

to lay at painful rest,

never to move his limbs again

in a room, Requiem Aeternam,

at the Chelsea Soldier’s Home                 

in a wreck of a building named for him.     

5  

So, goodbye my ones today:               

you, pierced in stone,                

you, kneeling in a pew,            

all you Over There,               

and you, mon grand pere,

wherever you are,

favor me, linger here

in this unsanctioned, trans-

substantiation of lingo,        

this daresay of poetry,         

while I step away

past the benetier of holy water,                    

still undisturbed by my finger,        

and by the entrance stone’s             

high water lines from Irma,       

stain of her September surge,          

ankle-high into the Basilica. 

—<>—

Notes

Requiem Aeternam    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjWjnhfEto8

(The poems continue in the book.)

Photo by mana5280 on Unsplash

AD ASTRA

St. Steven’s Cathedral, Vienna, Austria

Votive Candles

Photo by mana5280 on Unsplash

BRAVEHEART

Jeff Gillenkirk (1949-2016) 

GLACIER LAKE (2020)

“Write an ode to a memorable bad date.”

Photo hosted on Pinterest

Dedication:

To Jacqueline, who shared our exploration and put up with my invention in its retelling. — PK

———

Glacier Lake

The moon in the bureau mirror looks out a million miles. -– Elizabeth Bishop

— The Cabin

Who sleeps at these heights?

Not you or I this night.           

This air’s too thin

for any mountain greenhorn 

abecedarian 

or anyone up off the trail

and out of oxygen.    

-<>-

Out of their element

two fish heave in bed,                        

their lungs deracine.

In a split mirror         

a dead moon’s bone-white stare

is refracted twice          

or is it thrice?

from its source to us.  

-<>- 

And the sun on a dead moon

on an alpine lake is awesome

and dreadful, is it not?

on our eyes and in these lines,

as we lie cold on cold,        

cold equals with one share of it                        

and wide awake.    

— Evicted

“It’s homelessness to be evicted

from your dreams.”             

“Misery craves company,            

but insomnia observing itself

has nowhere to go.”

  -<>-

Bookish refractions         

make what sense I have

of sense tonight, and so:

“Make greater sense!”  I said,

then briskly making less of it            

proposed we take, “Shall we?”

a moonlit stroll down to the lake.

“That dead-eye moon,        

so bright on all we see,

will be our guide tonight.”

     -<>-            

And you, past sleep

and all cold hope of it,                  

rose slowly out of bed.

“How sensible!” you said,                           

“each step we take down slope

makes idiots of both of us!”                                

This night air’s too thin,                           

and silence here’s a creeping thing!”  

(A footfall snaps a twig.)

 “I’m plain creeped out!” you whispered,

“everything’s awake!

“And, look, that stalker moon’s

still flitting through the trees,

as it sits out on that lake,  

just as you please! I swear

the lake too is watching us!” 

  -<>-

Photo(c)Windows10spotlight.com                                       

 — The Lake

Is Glacier Lake an eye? 

Or, for that matter, is the moon?                                 

Stay close a few more steps:            

see, here it lies, no is, a lake insensate        

as it’s always been, vestigial thing     

that neither sees nor sleeps,

observes nothing of its surface or depths,                     

not the wind on it, nor the distant sky,        

nor the watery refractions of                

sun, moon, stars, O,

observant only in their spheres.

Nor in its waters deep below,        

there the unblinking trout,         

well-stocked cutthroat, big ones 

nosing about, a caster’s joy                      

when they’re not outthinking us.  

-<>-

Photo(c)Windows10spotlight.com

 — Along the Levee

None of this does the lake observe;

it’s after all an alpine lake,         

photogenic to the eye, but no                    

insomniac, as you and I,        

to the moon and stars tonight                        

or to what goes on in it.         

Nor by this September moon,                             

well-waxed and gibbous,                                                      

to the sight of us, as we edged out

along the levee on the eastern shore,  

while gazing at the choreography                  

of a zany waterspout, cavorting                             

out of thin air on the lake

amid escorting showers of

what looked like water-devil pixie dust!,

you said, which sounds ridiculous,   

but glittering anyway above the swirling spout.                 

   -<>-        

Then, as if spotting us            

(not to overstrain credulity),                       

a sweeping turn in our direction,            

zig-zagging the moon path,               

skating through it this way and that,       

skimming it with flash and flair            

nearly upon us, then vanishing            

before our eyes.

  -<>-

“Still not observing us?” you said,        

as we stopped dread-footed         

in our moonstruck tracks 

by a thing other than the spout:           

an unexpected reek --    

sour, rancid, sickly sweet --                  

of a bull moose in rutting season,            

a gust of it from the trees ahead;             

bathing us in an air stream of urine,                 

in which he had, I’d later read,                 

quite thoroughly bathed himself

in a shallow trough to attract females,

but not the one behind me                   

caught too in his perfumery.

       -<>-                                       

“Vile!” you said. “Sewage,” said I,  

not as convincingly, recalling

the big bull Cousin John,

the family fisherman, spotted yesterday

on the shore nearby, flashing

his moosey stuff and antler span.

“Sewage,” I said again,

but you knew we’d been observed 

by the lake, so to speak,

for you too saw the heart-shaped tracks    

edged sharply at our feet,             

as we backed slowly out of there,

praying we would not see him

in his blindness sensing us,

and worse, his suddenness,

the hooved rush, tremendous rack

and flaring snout, closing the gap.              

  -<>-

“Moose bait” came to mind

along with abject fear and cowering   

and death certain by predation.                         

“Bull shit!” I heard you say,

almost diviningly, it turned out,   

about the sewage smell,        

as you let loose a three-part yell,                    

as if blind-sided by the devil:                    

first a gasp, then whoop and squeal,           

almost musical, then in notes

gutteral and descending.

  -<>-

Photo by Tom Murphy(c)My Modern Met    

— Came You On Another Thing

For off the levee,                         

a backward step or two,

came you on another thing,     

squishy underfoot,

on which you slid and fell,      

bass ackwards over t’kettle                             

onto a pile of night soil,

unchi-kun, fecal squid,                           

call it what you will,

but curled and glistening

fish-white in the moonlight,                       

slippery and congealing,

until you touched down on it      

and skidded. 

   -<>-                                                      

Coyote or big cat scat?                

its residue a smeared palette,                      

ground bones and bits of hair,               

at least one solid meal of it.                               

What matter then which predator                 

shat on the trail behind us                          

as we backed out of there?

I had glanced the other way,

out along the levee,      

before you slipped and fell,     

so stumbled back into a snarl                             

of wet scat smell and female fury        

worthy of each animal,                                        

which you carried up the trail,  

as the night heard your complaint 

echoing royally on the lake,                    

and how was that not eloquent?    

Your way of saying, if it would print,       

“I followed you! Now I’m feculent!           

  -<>-

Not to split hairs with you,               

because you wore it with such flair,      

but what you wore uphill this night  

was not merely fecal smear                     

but nature’s piss and shite and kill

from heels to hair.

-<>-

Photo from the St. Louis Post Dispatch

— And What of Love

So ends our noisome tale           

of a midnight by a moonlit lake.                 

And what of love? O sleepless love,       

when ordure, not ardor, comes to bed,          

and all essence in the rose has fled,

when its too much nose you’ve had               

in another’s neighborhood?        

         -<>-        

So, this night, because we must

(in this you left no choice,           

and there’s an empty rub),              

we’ve left romancery to the moose      

and love’s perfumery too,

though his also covers us

and will not scrub.                         

  —<>—

 A waterspout cavorting on a lake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLXIZhd6m_0

PROMPTS (2021) 

from Prompts

“Write an ekphrastic poem about an image, object or work of art.”

———

— Doolin Rook

It landed brash, still young, 

on the Burren limestone                                          

by the boat to Inisheer;                                     

its bright beady look                                  

out of the rocks and wind                          

and shear of the place.                                

But that dead-eye stare, she thought,                      

a bit murderous, was it not,

on her camera lens                    

under the rook's black hood?                        

-<>-

But that rogue's-gallery eye,                             

hung in a gallery far away,

caught another eye,                                   

spoke to that woman infallibly           

of tenderness and the great Irish hunger,            

too late to be fed on the spot, 

but bought and taken home  

to be gazed upon, a shame that     

or perhaps not, if famine

everywhere had such wings.

—<>—

Doolin Rook photograph(c)by Jackie Roberts

AT HEAVENS GATE

55 & Over

Photo hosted on: /www.onlinemahjongsolitaire.com/

"If you can't think of something to write, look out your window."

-- Campbell McGrath 

— At Heaven’s Gate

 1

Mostly over,

mostly way over                                   

the hill we face, most of us                                   

who live this long while feigning                

ignorance of hills, preferring

our horizons day-to-day and literal           

in this vast and horizontal Sunshine State.      

-<>-

Unless of course we get a preview        

of the downward slope,                                       

as a guest or in a winter rental

among the 55 & over set,                                    

which would be us, two snowbirds                           

late to life at Heaven’s Gate                             

and heretofore oblivious.

-<>-

Who’s here with us was hard to say              

in this invariant community                         

until last Friday evening, when,           

from shuttered flats across the way           

that rent as condominiums,                           

came the shut-ins out to play        

once-a-week clubhouse mahjong.       

-<>-

O to be forever neighborly and young!

with children underfoot                                    

and common raisings going on.                

Was this the empty nesting we had wished

before we’d been cut loose                                    

into a retirement precarious?

With all our life begot, now this?                               

  -<>-

To walk with those who navigate off gait             

with their bends and bunions,                                                  

arm in arm with everyone’s                     

close Greek companion, Arthur Itis –

and we all know who He is --

who’s already welcomed me,

despite my lack of interest.

2

But that’s a long parade we see                            

out in that parking lot,                                                   

crossing the lines one by one;            

limp-alongs and stabbing canes,                                   

shufflers on their walking aids,                                       

and wheelchairs pushed ahead             

by dead-eye PCA’s.                                         

                    -<>-                                  

But damnation be damned,                                       

if these old swimmers aren’t spot on   

dressed to the gills, the hilt, the nines,                         

for the senior gaming underway,

as they head upstream to the tables,                 

to show off their abilities

at matching tiles at the mahjong!

-<>-

And their whisperings on the way,             

naming, as we came to learn,                                                  

the widowed gentleman two doors down      

and that nice lady with the cough,                                  

both quiet masters at the game,            

for whom the ambulance came today

not once but twice to spirit off. 

—<>—

Photo hosted on: /www.onlinemahjongsolitaire.com/

HEMINGWAY ON OBLIVION

 “Write on oblivion.”  -- Robert Wrigley

——

— Hemingway to T. S. Eliot on Oblivion

"So this is how the world ends, not with a bang

but with a whimper."   --T.S. Eliot

1

When we go, we go,                        

Mr. Eliot.                                  

Who gives one jot  

how the world ends                                          

when our time comes?

Think so? I think not.

-<>-

It has nothing to do                                                     

with you or me,                            

as we malinger on       

revising ourselves,

as we’ve often done      

for our posterity.

-<>-

Let others judge today

what's brave or cowardly.                                                  

Cut the knot, I say,        

do it stealthily,                                

pass quickly through           

when no one's looking.  

Give your end a fitting ending,

no quarter to poor health and looks.                      

Believe yourself immortal in your books!  

 2

I shall be frank, old Tom:                       

the words have flown,               

the page and I are blank.                

Four bad novels in a bank   

in Havana for safe keeping.  

What's left's a rotten thing in me. 

-<>-

So allow me, sir, to show you                        

how to pull it off.                

Turn your face, just so;                  

this shotgun in my mouth,                    

the drinking and the speaking part                 

through which we sang,     

we thieves of time,                              

who here contrive to steal

a moment one last time.        

3  

Now bend down and kiss my ass,        

my posteriority uncouth,             

and watch my trigger finger

erase a past, its youth      

vainglorious, well written,

and this sickness unto death.  

-<>-

Do not hesitate or linger;                        

above all, do not, do not                          

with your last breath simper! 

Seize it! Carpe Diem!  

Squeeze it off, old Tom, like this!

Trust to oblivion.                        

-<>-

And regard my final show,

my last not tell,

the bloody O                                                 

of this face to the world 

without a whimper,

thus!

(But, Tom, do excuse the gas …)

—<>—

July 2, 1961

Photo(c)Patrick Fore on Unsplash