Fast Day 300 March 2 2013 { Beautiful Sparks of God }

Vesuvius Erupting Soon After The Landings At Salerno, March, 1944

Beautiful Sparks of God

funeral home collage of history,
unsure whether we be bound or free;
ruins, fossils,
fire-drinkers of the dew:
Vesuvius erupts
and world war, too.

I go through the tomes for what I may see,
and find the works of the old Livy;
beauty ejecta
a baleful rain yields!
not in Elysium
but Phelgræean fields!

photos and videos, like leaves on a tree,
bold brushstrokes of vanish’t conspiracy;
buried in ash
the soot of noon-day,
pyroclastic x-flow
in the streets of Pompeii !

---
notes

I have found the usual ways of talking about the separation from a loved one are awfully opaque and trivial to express what I feel. I am still trying to express it.
My father was at Salerno. Soon after, the volcano Vesuvius erupted.

Beautiful sparks of God   -   "Freude,  schoener Gotterfunken" from Ode to Joy
world war, too  -   world war II
Livy  -    Titus Livius observed the eruption of Vesuvius which buried Pompeii
ejecta    -    things ejected and thrown by the eruption...   I seem to remember Livy was sitting on a boat in the bay watching the spectacle, and probably dodging ejecta.
Phelgræean    -    sulphurous fields, the opposite of Elysium
x-flow   -     extreme flow

we are buried in our remembrances: photos, videos, souvenirs. The soot of noon-day is darkness at noon.
There is an end and the promise of an archaeological beginning in the future.

Fast Day 255 April 22 2012 {On Meeting Neighbor Knowles In The Cemetery}

On Meeting Neighbor Knowles In The Cemetery

We walked to a primeval grove
of a ripeness passed beyond its time:
Absalom Vandever four-square stood
a funeral obelisk inscribed,
cut with the names of all his wives
and their progeny of his despair:
Afra was the first
who bore James of the three days:
she died in ’75, and the child
followed soon thereafter in the last
two of his toll of days:
he knew, Absalom thought, and inscribed
upon the  face of stone:
The face of God is the first delight!
And the only delight for thee!

On each remaining triune face
was a woman’s name and a child’s
who was born to pass right on,
at least by the testament of this granite here!
Four wives, five children, the last were twins
a final paradox to Mr. Vandever
not fathoming fruit and multiplycation
combined with a cursed division...
Neighbor Knowles says no tomb of Absalom
is hereabouts and no one kens  his farm;
maybe all knowledge has disappeared…
or folks fear the bane of lecher death
that could not wait, and hied them all
to his dance in the Puttygut Road cemetery.

“Being in troubled times, I wonder
what will break the spell
of this profound despair of mine,
this my titanic hell!”


--
notes


True experience...
I use the word "triune" because there are 3 remaining faces; this may be illogical from a certain point of view.
It is sad.

Fast Day 218 August 5 2011 {In the Ball-Park of the Madding Crowd}

In the Ball-Park of the Madding Crowd

In Mary Roberts Rinehart’s Yellow Room,
Shiva woke up after taking a snooze;
so there was a young girl dead, just one,
and Floyd the sheriff drove to the cottage
old man Spencer had bought in thirty-eight
before the war, before his own death.

Mrs. Spencer closed her eyes, exhausted;
her daughter, Carol, who’d lost her lover
in the war, resented digitalis,
mother’s med,
mother peevish, invalidish...
lost her lover in the war,

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Age Atomica
was about a full month away; it was
June of the year Nineteen Forty-Five;
In July Trinity fathered Fat Man and Little Boy
and Shiva was the Destroyer of Worlds!
and Shiva was in the house, the big house!

Mrs. Spencer sipped her scotch and soda
and dreamed of her son, Greg, coming home on
a thirty day to be decorated
by FDR himself,
the President…
and a dead girl in the Yellow Room.

Now in August of Twenty-Eleven
the Dow will drop five hundred points;
now Shiva works for Standard & Poor’s!
Can’t CSI all the dead in all our
yellow rooms: Iwo Jima and Darfur;
in the ball-park of the madding crowd.

Mrs. Spencer sat in a white wicker chair
in the sun porch…
after this great war, things will
never, ever be the same;
the future will be bright:
the future when every TV
talking head will know
who killed whom...
the young lady
named Casey perhaps
in the Yellow Room.

--
Reading a murder mystery, The Yellow Room, by Mary Roberts Rinehart in an edition published in 1945.
Thinking how things are in the past and the present.

Casey  - Casey Anthony

--

Fast Day 203 April 23 2011 {At Brandon Plantation, Virginia}

At Brandon Plantation, Virginia

Slavery is gone
but its memory lingers:
potteries ceramic fired in indentured kilns
repeat great odes of naked Greeks and gods.
The childhood of our nation gone,
lapsed in wisteria laden alleys thronged with
anemone and adonis' blood and peony...
a ceaseless wand'ring along the James,
river of our quiescent madness
and river of sacred mud and sand.

The adolescence of the country past,
but still remember the gods and goddesses
who once learnt us with rose-dawn fingers
and lavender stamens and pollen feet!
In the adulthood of our discords,
the eros of our youth inspires!
We yearn resurrection again
and drop the stonewalls of our lives!

--
notes
Easter
At Brandon Plantation along the James River, Virginia.

Life and the Hope of Resurrection defeat the evils of the past...

--

Fast Day 181 November 21 2010 (Armies of the Zanj Slavers)

Armies of the Zanj Slavers

In time sandstorms will blow between our ribs
as sharp and biting as the sighs of love
unrequited do tonight.

The day breaks and the sun uncurls her tail
through eastern wadis like a scorpion
that jumps to strike with heat!

Now my dreams fall away from me like veils
fall from the Tuareg's face, and we ascend
the Niger for Zanj wealth.

Ragtag group of camel mounted slavers!
Ifriqeeya's women shall weep tonight!
My sword named "Division"!


----
notes

The Zanj were black slaves of the early caliphate. The Zanj rebellion - very  much like that of Spartacus in Rome - was a ferocious rebellion which lasted 10 years or more.

This is a poem of Arab slavers in Africa, and there is a progression from the sublime to the nasty business of everyday.

I add this poem this morning, because I was sure my poem 181 was too familiar in its conceptual outline. I could not shake the notion that "cascade of flowers"... and particularly the rhyme! ... was too familiar. Looking back, I found the original form, not about Eve, but love in general.
I hope my Muse has not become a jade, as Swift would have said. So I wrote this this morning. I was always fascinated by the Zanj rebellion, mainly because I never heard of it for most of my life.

Fast Day 178 October 29 2010 {Homecoming}

Homecoming 

-- 
notes
Odysseus = Greek form of Ulysses

Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa = girls Odysseus met on his voyage home.
Penelope =  I assume she is rather like Guinevere, and actually possess lands.... mightr be a warrior queen, too, although we do not go there.
I imagine she holds green lands beyond Dodona.
Agamemnon= was killed after his return home by his wife, Clytemnestra and her lover. He was killed in his bath.



synopsis:  The Greeks went to war in Troy for 10 years. Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, went to war under his obligations to Agamemnon. Odysseus made the god Poseidon mad, so it took him another 10 to get home, where Penelope was waiting, while 100 men sought her hand in marriage. She put them off by saying she would wed when her weaving was done.  By day she wove and at night she unthreaded that which she had done during the day.
---

Penelope sits up late at the loom

that wove the dreams of twenty years,

wondering how to depict the full moon

playing in the wind-chased clouds.

Odysseus sits outside at the gate,

and when the moon filters through the trees,

it paints his skin with stripes, and he

looks feral  as an argent tiger.

Penelope

Look at him…. A wild thing!

Sitting just where he sat

Twenty years ago, wond’ring whether

to take ship and sail to war.

Still we sit here.

Ah, well. What of it? What more did I wish?

He has killed one hundred lusty suitors

who would take my torch to warm their beds…

he is devoted to me… or to my dowered lands!

Great meadows beyond Dodona lush,

not like the rocky shores of Ithaca!

Odysseus

Damn! Agamemnon… killed in the bath! Of all places!

Even great Agamemnon gone! – our lives

misplaced from throne room to out-buildings!

Every friend with whom I sailed to Troy

has left this world. I am the only one

remaining. Is this fate? Or accident?

The aegis of the goddess that covers

the porridge of our lives, the layered mush

of steel-cut oats boiling in a pot.

(Odysseus hears the ghost of his mother.)

Anticleia

My son, Odysseus…

O, you were the boy, the very best son!

I waited on your return…

I saw no sails, nor white nor black!

I fell into death, tripped like a orant

of Poseidon missteps and falls into

the cruel maw of the sea unyielding!

I have waited here since the first snows.

(Odysseus cries out faintly. One of Penelope’s ladies  looks out the front door. His father, Autolycus, peers out into the night from his wooden hut by the barn.)

Autolycus

Ha!  Two decades toil!... and now he sits alone!

That bitch! That shrewish and unfaithful wife!

I was here! I saw it all! I am no fool!

She wove not stories of the goddesses

and gods, no themes of the holy erotic!

She wove and embellished lovers’ messages

and pornography of delights upon

that loom to show the lucky prick of the

hundred aristocrats the pleasures she

would bestow…  that very night upon the

panting suitors in their kennels wrapt!

Lady

What disturbs Odysseus?

He sits lonesomely.

If he broods upon

his lady wife’s fidelity…

well, for that I will avouch,

serving here long years.

(Sighing, Odysseus rises and turns to look at the bright window of his palace. Penelope has gone to bed.)

Penelope

It seems that I am always waiting,

we straighten up what men disturb;

like Poseidon they quake the tender earth,

and women wait upon the littoral

to recreate after tidal waves.

(Odysseus enters silently, but she feels his presence fill the vacuum about her. He lays beside her. His skin seems surprisingly harsh, since she has been used to twenty years of lonely linen sheets.

Later, he is sleeping and Penelope thinks in the darkness…)

Penelope

Some things never change…

He has kept in practice. That’s what comes from

hobnobbing with goddesses and witches!

I will not begrudge him Circe

nor the iconic Calypso, for when

a goddess beckons – or a woman with

an unnatural relationship with

herbs and snakes and circles where Faeries dance! –

it is best for man to answer

or they never find safe harbor!

But, Nausicaa! That tawdry little tramp!

a tart!... a whore!... playing at celebrity

and aristocratic ways… the duchess

of drop-my-britches! Men are such fools!

….

Twenty years, and he has not one friend left alive.

Twenty years of a war fought on a foolish whim,

an impulse erotic made disastrous!

There is no going back, and no need to

poison the future with

history’s failures!

I am all there is left. His mother’s gone,

and his father is quite mad, thinking that

he is a young bull living by the barn!

It has been a long, long journey, apart

and together, in joy and in sorrow:

Where is the thread so strong, the dye so bright

to weave the line of this devotion?

Fast Day 160 June 26 2010 {In the Gardens of Metropolis}

The New Tower of Babel in Metropolis

In The Gardens of Metropolis

Between the hands of labor
and the head of tech a chasm dwelt
awaiting some tree-like paroxysm
of nature: a mediator to intercede -
to plant itself within the yawning gap
left fallow within the gardens:

first the kabbala of Rotwang
gave a fruit - the largest of the family,
colour pale next to wall,
colour red next to sun,
set in clay and sprung to life,
a golem like narcissos,
obedient to a malady of Hel
where an entire branch of
a summer day will die;
the fruit has a bitter kernel.

second the living and dying god
given to excessive growth as is seen
in maiden plants set in new made borders,
saddle-grafted onto old root stock:
October - bane of Freder - the time
to disburden a tree of fruit
and whip him with a light birch broom,
the straight switch, or the sturdy cane
to remove decaying leaves
to encourage wood's ripening
and maturation of blossom-buds
in next year's spring...
if spring does arrive!

third mutation yet unimagined!
a forcing garden to compel
by artificial means a cultivation
of fruits unnative to these climes;
in houses built of metallic mixtures,
as iron cased with copper, which
produce expansive force unequal
which tends to break
the hothouse glass
in consequence of a twisting
and a torsion
and a racking
in the bars wrought-iron...
so do machine men:
iron boys and iron maidens,
try to gather rosebuds,
but all is liable to rust!

----
----
NOTES
Brought on by viewing the most recent and updated version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis on the night of June 19 2010.
Posted early since I'll be traveling to D.C.

Lang and Thea von Harbou, the writer, told a tale of society where there was antagonism between the hands - labor - and the head - technology & administrative science. It was a tale based on the history of the Industrial Revolution and the Technology revolutions leading into the 20th century. They saw that there must be a mediation between the head and hand, which would be the mediator, yet also the heart, even though "heart" and "mediator" were distinct entities in the film.
The possibilities were first: a type of medieval mysticism and Kabbala applied to science, Rotwang, the inventor, who had sacrificed his right arm in order to create a perfect android, a machine man or robot. He now wore a prosthetic arm covered by a dark glove, foreshadowing Dr. Strangelove, and Lionel Atwill as the village chief of police in Son of Frankenstein.
Second: a Christianity which was based totally upon the mediation of the dichotomy, seemingly leaving out all other doctrines. The Mediator would be an real man, Freder in the movie, and he would come forward in the fullness of time - apparently - and the golden age would be reached. Of course, a good deal of the City, particularly the workers' quarters, would have to be destroyed before this occurred.
Third: a surprise ending, which is actually what happened in Germany. The Mediator's followers became the Men at the dock at Nurnberg, and in the glass case in Tel Aviv.

The studio was UFA, by the way, which may or may not explain my sign in my other blog about OK, UFA!

Hel   deceased mother of Freder, beloved of Rotwang. Also name of the Norse goddess Hel, a goddess of some of the dead.

Fast Day 97 April 11 2009 {Ulysses}

Ulysses Coming Upon His Old Dog, Argos

Ulysses

i am standing by the water's edge,
here i am,
here i am.
i am waiting for the sun to rise,
here i am,
here i am.
i am feeling the wet upon my feet,
it is not cold and I do not wish to move,
for she said she would find me here;
and here i am,
here i am.

i have been gone one thousand years
but here i am,
here i am.
paler than the dewy grass,
here i am,
here i am.
i shall leap into her arms
like a hungry sailor shipwrecked
jumps into discovered isles;
there i'll stay,
there i'll stay.

the wind has dried my naked body
where i stand,
where i stand.
more a reed than any man,
where i stand,
where i bend.
i shall go now to my palace
and seek that scarlet tunic that i love
and let it warm me thoroughly!
where we lay,
where we lay.

Fast Day 96 April 4 2009 {Aunt Serena's Temple at Deir al Bahri}

Aunt Serena's Temple
at Deir Al-Bahri


Hatshepsut, she, egyptian pharoah
built a house of wilderness, a temple
like a folded protein, laced left-handedly
into the cliffs of father-mother Nile,
into the red face of the desert.

Ladies with eyes kohl-laden,
danced with intensity necrotic
at her father's wake; and when he was laid
to rest, all the sands of all the deserts
buried him and she, lady of barriya.

Serena honeymooned on the Nile,
lived in Shepheard's and loved erotic;
ate fustuq in the year nineteen forty-eight
while the fellaheen discovered
hidden temples of long dead queens.

Slim girls and passage to Egypt!
where flows the Nile's aortic
water from the highly placed heart of Ifriqiya!
and sail a felucca above the cataract
to visit at Hatshepsut's palace!

Now she descends into oblivion
and becomes an Alzheimer stuffed
toy to plop without much thought into a chair,
to sit all day, slightly askew,
slightly atilt, within an endless hall.

The hieroglyphs of temples!
writ large on limestone walls!
Serena now reverses the archaeology of time
and deconstructs and un-construes the sacred
words, reburying the Temple.

Where has Abu Simbel gone?
Drag the Nile for poor Philae!
All drowned, all buried, like forgotten memories
of Cairo in the postcards of her desire!
Every face is photoshopped.

The Ramesseum that was Serena
receives a cup of sand a day
to bury it again, no more to see bus loads of tourists
with her kohl-laden ancient eyes,
she dreams a language again unknown.



protein folding

notes:this is a poem on my Aunt Serena's experience with Alzheimer's. She had been in Cairo after WW II, having married an army fellow who had spent most of the war in Alexandria.
The image is the beauty of Hatshepsut's temple and all Egyptian antiquity is like the mind of Serena...and now we bury it into the oblivion of Alzheimer's disease.

Hatshepsut: ancient woman pharoah, who built the great temple at Deir Al Bahri . Deir al Bahri is usually translated as "northern monastery",but the name literally means "monastery of the sea".

wilderness: I read "bahri" as meaning "barri" , or "wilderness" - a pun

protein: the temple "folds" back from the Nile into the surrounding cliffs, as does a protein fold - left-handed or right-handed - like a biological fan.

kohl: eye make-up of ancient Egypt

barriya: wilderness again

fustuq: pistachioes

Shepheard's: very famous Brit hotel in Cairo

fellaheen: poor working guys, shoveling around the archaeological excavations

Ifriqiya: Arabic for Africa

felucca: a Nile sail boat

Abu Simbel, Philae: temples rescued from rising waters, and some not

Ramesseum: a temple, palace, or even a large burial place of the Pharoah Ramesses.
Ramesses is the Greek form of Ra Ms, which is the name of Ra, the god, and the root "m(e)s" which means "giving birth". It also is the root for the name of Moses, or Musa.

Fast Day 78 November 29 2008 {Botanical Classification}

Botanical Classification

wild saffron is carthamus, and it is a winged ant;
a calamity to the unwary, and a head rope
of fruity sweat.

the hound's tongue cynoglossum makes for
a giddy drunkard, or a ship reeling full
four sheets out.

ox-eye buys with ready cash, the boupthalmum
brotherhood of evil-eye and fine clothing, dew-laps
of oxen;
the combs of cocks;
the high places of sacrifice...o, I forget!
the meter, the cadence, the marching feet
of botanical madness and desire!

the amianthus is a ring without a stone,
weaver of ropes and weaver of dreams,
nightingale's song.

eglantine is the wild rose, dispersed through meadows far,
vanguard of Assyrians, troop of Darius, heresiarch religion
through Samarkand's paths!

Fast Day 56 June 27 2008 {Cosimi de Medici's Chaplain Sleeps}

Cosimo de Medici's Chaplain Sleeps


At the Council of Basel
I dreamt of your face, thought
I found the smell of your breasts
in a bishop's incense.

Parliament of empty words,
Emperor's anger waxing;
not one cardinal so richly dressed
as you are naked.

Fast Day 52 May 30 2008 {Ancient Stories}

Ancient Stories

A tale told in eternity,
more ancient than any existing thing;
and in it there was every being, either for
a purpose wise,
or the beauty that they bring.

The earth had donned its robe of green
with sleeves weighed down with bowers,
and everywhere was thought of you,
...your princess head...
tiara bound with flowers.

Fast Day 51 May 23, 2008 {Oh, limitless beauty of Alexandria!}

Oh, limitless beauty of Alexandria!
The Eros of the ancient time!
When love runs through the clepsydra of days,
and turns us clockwork and lovely fools!

Fast Day 41 March 14, 2008 {Looking Forward to Easter 2008}

Nero's Domus Aurea or Golden House reconstructed at Building Virtual Rome

Looking Forward To Easter 2008

When archaeologists of old delights
will find the ruins of all our ancient kisses
and delve into the warrens of this age
and see the mazed foundation our lives:
reconstruct the murals
replumb the obelisk;
and roof the halls of Herculaneum,
and place the bodies at table encaustic.

Shall they then find our candled nights of love
that sparkled like the radyant rising sun?
and drape the scenes with purple porphry sheets
lest we old pagans contravene their faith?
free us from this prison,
and we shall fly away!
and going up to Galilee to see
anew the universal pulchritude!

Nero's Domus Aurea at present

Fast Day 40 March 8, 2008 {Let Me Die With The Philistines!}

Let Me Die With The Philistines!

Samson went down to Sorek to rest
after fighting an army with an ass
his jawbone swung like a Vietnam chopper
God, he laid 'em low!

Samson found a lady there whose face
shone with paparazzi flashes
and the E news asked if this was love
for Sammie and Delilah.

Samson went down to Gaza
when he could no longer see;
he plied a bunker-buster bomb on
all of Philistee-yaa!

Samson died with all the gods of the cities
seven of suburban Palestine;
Delilah scaped the murderous sermon
since she did not go to Temple!

When we go blind to Gaza,
after we've lost our sight,
we harvest eleven hundred silver drams
for each life destroyed delight!

O bind me with a bowstring!
O bind me with 7 ropes!
Weave my hair within the fustian linen
of the world's winding!

I shall not brake for children
in the temple's daycare;
let the limestone temple be

the eating box of flesh!

We stood upon the stylobate and pushed
mightily against the shaft;
welcome murdering architraves that metast
the future all our past.

Fast Day 33 January 18, 2008 {The Days Are Hot, O, Babylon!}

The days are hot, O Babylon!
'tis cool beneath thy cherry trees.
The sun is gone to azimuth
and with him snatched the breeze.
No celebrations will there be
but just the same old same.
And all the homeless lie in state
where no one knows their name.
The convicts act as warden
madmen alienists disguise,
and people show their TV faces
where no one see their eyes.
The days grow cool, O Babylon!
Take scapegoat of the past
and drive him out beyond the hills,
the evil unsurpassed.
We stand upon our last redoubt
where Lee saw rise the sun,
and watch fraternal disarray
to see if war's begun.
The fall of year, the fall of man
and all the sons of Eve
now driven east of Eden are
and all their mothers grieve.

The days grow dark, O Babylon!
and oedipal perverse
of sons who've killed their mothers dear,
alive upon the earth.
Our madness is our vanity;
our truth informs our lies;
our riches form the gilt entrails
of our Lord of Flies!
Let us jump upon the dance
like maddened maenads all,
and bring the flag which we adore
and spread it for our pall!

Fast Day 23 November 8, 2007 {My Southern Rose}

A day early.

My Southern Rose


The willows stand as stiff daguerrotypes:
Generals of the War
between the States; their beards so full
and majestic in their stance.
They maintain their verdant burden and
bow low in gallant boughs!

chorus
My rose of Maryland! Bloom forever!
The South’s own herbal honey!
The Balm of Appalachia;
sweet liquor of Antietam!



The wild flowers strewn up to the sky;
Soldiers of the war;
eyes bright with youth and filled with hope:
adolescent gods to be;
Within their temples they stand in silent witness,
like reeds in ponds unnumbered.

chorus
My rose of Maryland! Bloom forever!
The South’s own herbal honey!
The Balm of Appalachia;
sweet liquor of Potomac!



We’re coming east from Morgantown,
from the Cumberland.
We stop to eat at Hancock where you can stand
and throw a stone apiece
into Pennsylvania’s green fields
and into West Virginia’s land.

chorus
My rose of Maryland! Bloom forever!
The South’s own herbal honey!
The Balm of Appalachia;
sweet liquor of Patapsco!