Wondrous Cauldrons

Wondrous cauldrons
boil the tusks
inside the indigo night
the rattling bones, the jungle heat
the stench of gunsmoke
and rancid meat

The matriarch waits
in the shadows for
the witchdoctor to
conjure her daughters
her sons, her sisters
from the roiling waters

A Chinaman squats by the fire
carving an ivory Buddha,
nearby sits the Wall Street wife
the neighborhood thugs
bush pilots and arms dealers;
a small black girl has a secret

An elephant never forgets
the poacher’s face
nor the tiny voice
who told the baboons in whispers
to pour sugar in the gas tanks
drop dead rats in the wells

Soon this orphan will join the others;
they will ride upon the high shoulders
of three million childless mothers;
the ivory will bleed rivers
into the streets of Hong Kong–
the watering hole of hungry ghosts

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A Brief History of Echoes

A Brief History of Echoes

Womanhood had come to her in a warzone,
after the time when the dune grasses
and chaparral had been cleared and scorched,
the wetlands drained and the creeks diverted
around the undulated greens, all making way
for the terracotta villas – those uncanny colonies
sprawling as far as the eye could see and beyond

she left the sea for a high hilltop cave and sang
into the void, listening for the song of hydrogen

For many years, she heard only voices of machines
the blood-curdling anthems of tyrants and
the shrieking of their terracotta villa wives who,
after French manicures and Thai massages
juiced beets with burdock roots,
after holding a benefit to benefit
the last polar bears and running caribou, now
needing new homes in the lower forty-eight
because pipelines need straight lines–
she heard the sound of Nothing for the first time

Nearby on far-off Io, interstellar sirens
heard her gentle song echoing in their
Jovian conk shells; they pulled the anchor of
their iron rock, and set a course for the small sapphire
of Anthemoessa, breaking the sound waves with their
cold frequencies, following a lonely current

Circe, fierce captain on the bridge, piloted
the great rock across the oceans of eternal night
the ship broke the ice fields of Saturn’s rings
with its mighty iron hulls, sailed fearlessly
into the eye of earth’s perfect storm of unlistening

Over time, the iron oxide dust on her plastic
skin began to rearrange itself, and so
the ambient terracotta villa Muzak piped in
through holes in the houses of the Lotus Eaters
became both Requiem and Prelude, inaudible to all except her,
there, listening from her hilltop cave to the silent void
with nothing but a small human heart

She, shopworn oracle, foresaw that the next age
would begin with a wind chime in the driftwood eaves
with the shape of laughter in the darkness
with the hushabye of pine needles on a granite peak,
with the ring of a monk’s singing bowl washed up with
the debris of the evening’s plastic tide

It would begin with the wind whistling through
the wasted miles of organ pipes laid in the oily tundra
where the metal had rotted, and the wind,
blowing around the bones of the polar bears
and the caribou and of the cannibal men
whispered of changes not yet known

Humming softly to this ancient song, suddenly recalled,
the woman made a small fire for Our Ladies of the Iron Rock
who were so weary from their journey

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Sonoma Overlook Trail Rattlesnake

Out for the warm weather!

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Far Beyond the Farallones

Note: I really tried to work the phrase “More than 47,800 drums and other containers of low-level radioactive waste were dumped onto the ocean floor west of San Francisco between 1946 and 1970; many of these are in the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary” into the poem, but it wasn’t very musical.

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The Quotidian Inferno

Every week we are given three writing prompts in class, and we have to do a “timed write” for ten minutes. Usually these prompts are pretty strange. Oddly enough, with the exception of one, all of my (very few) published poems have been freewrites; this is probably because the prompts are so weird and I’m forced to use new materials to construct the poem. Here are a few examples of past prompts: “When I was in the Underworld,” “The King said once again,” “At the edge of the continent,” etc. Last week our prompt was “At the Quotidian Inferno.”

I happen to love Dante’s Inferno, but I have to admit to having horrible nightmares after re-reading bits and pieces of the cantos, especially the ones with hybrids. I suspect Dante might have suffered a psychic break of some sort to commit these vivid images to words. And, yet again, he’d never seen Las Vegas.

Waiting at the fiery gates
of The Quotidian Inferno,
our guide is a Greek in vintage Pumas.
Says he goes by P. V. Maro.
He’s got something to show us.

“Nine levels of scary, a dark wood and
a Satanic freak show at the end.
Don’t worry about the pets, they don’t bite.
I know the way through the joint,
up to a point. Or down to one.
It’s bigger than the Mall of America,
And darker than the Chunnel Tunnel.”

Even if it smells of sorrow and rotten luck,
your curiosity overtakes you.

“For a few bucks,” says our guide,
“Get a personal, behind the scenes tour
of the garden of earthly delights!

A carnal carnival, a dark themed park–
centaurs stand knee-deep
in the shallow rapids of bloody rivers
among the bobbing heads of murderers
to ensure their suffering is eternal.
It scares the stuff out of the living,”
says P.V. Maro with the vintage Pumas.

“At the Sinner’s Apothecary, one can find
remedies for dropsy, drops for Gluttony
cooling agents for Lust, elixirs for Avarice,
leeches for Usury, placebos for Fraud
snake oil for Greed and a stinging nettle
mouthwash, special-made for Heresy.

In the Quotidian Inferno Funhouse
you can walk across burning sands,
confess to the Harpies all of your
marital indiscretions; your own
Congressman is shaking hands
at the Lake of Boiling Pitch, where his
molasses fingers trade in sticky secrets.”

Sensing the sale was going nowhere,
P.V. Varo had a change of heart:
“There’s another joint across the strip–
if you want, half-way between here and
the Contrapasso, just past the Acheron–
The Garden Variety Paradise!
Nice place, good food, clean fun.

Funny,” he says, lighting a cigarette.
“but it never draws a crowd.”

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Pixie of the Serengeti

Besides those sad tales of hardship – the ones
about covered wagons with busted wheels,
Indian wars, short grass prairies and dry wells–
most Texas stories involve beer and broken cars.

Standing two inches shy of five feet, my
grandmother Pixie wore horned-rim glasses,
kept her hair trimmed just over her ears
like it had been cut by fairies in a hurry.

Once, half-way home from Dumas about ninety miles
north of nowhere, Great Grandaddy’s beloved
lemon yellow Chevy Impala overheated,
stranding us on the iron skillet highway.

There we were: the shimmering asphalt mirages,
me and my sister (sticking to the beige vinyl),
panting cows behind barbed wire, a zillion grasshoppers,
Pixie, and a six-pack of Coors tall cans.

After an hour or so of waiting for help to arrive,
Pixie cracked a warm beer:
    Well, cain’t hurt!

The whole time I’m thinking about serial killers
(I’d read about the Town That Dreaded Sundown),
or an eighteen-wheeler with bad brakes
or maybe never getting back to the ranch at all.

Had I known what courage it had taken to
weather the dust storms, with everything dying,
and that Great Plains sun blotted out,
how it filled their mouths, covered their blankets,

I might have worried less about
a poor Impala that couldn’t run.

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Our Lady of Palabras Perdidas

Marjory the Trash Heap: "I'm orange peels, I'm coffee grounds, I'm wisdom!"

We live in a world of disposable objects. In the last few years, widely circulated images of the garbage pickers on the mountains of debris in countries like India and Brazil harken the arrival of what some scientists are now calling the “Anthropocene,” or the Age of Man.  According to a 2011 article in National Geographic, the “stratigrapher’s ” job “is to piece together Earth’s history from clues that can be coaxed out of layers of rock millions of years after the fact.” This article got me thinking…what would one call someone who specializes in interpreting layers of discarded words?

I am constantly scavenging the internet for lists of old words. One of my very favorite books is The Sailor’s Word-Book by William Henry Smyth. The SWB is available as a free a pdf download through Project Gutenberg, and promises hours of geeky entertainment. I can’t recommend it enough.

In “Our Lady of Palabras Perdidas” I imagine a kind of linguistic bag lady, rummaging among the heaps for hidden treasures like a medicine woman looking for healing herbs. She encounters a frail and aging Mnemosyne –the embodiment of memory in Greek mythology and the mother of the nine muses– like one might encounter an artifact on which history is both inscribed and interpreted (i.e., Marjory the Trash Heap).

I don’t remember where I found this list, but it’s a fun one.

Mnemosyne

Our Lady of Palabras Perdidas

Old yes! But a bobbish yet, I is.
“Vagabunda!” They shout, hands over ears.
“Conservadora!” I says to me kindred scavengers,
Who have taken to calling me, in these times:

Our Lady of Palabras Perdidas.

Their language be but sad, cag-mag
Rummagin’ in Latin shards n’ splinters.
“Nossa Senhora, where came you from?”
“Ahhhh,” and here I point North and East,
With a stick of smooth olive wood.

“When the hills were still young and stupid,
I was married over the broomstick to a quaddy lad.
Many, many years back, he died;
I’ve since grown a good-sized hump upon me back –
A hillock cloaked in gray!” I says.

“I’ve no whingle, and I’m no drumble!” Meh.
I make my way scavenging in the rubbish heaps
For las palabras perdidas – unwanted and fluey

Made Time’s poor orphan,
him but a proud Costermonger!
“But when ye rub ‘em up, make ‘em shine!”
Even such a one as meself, of deep wrine can see
Under the oily tarnish and the stain
Ye know what they says (flourish of me hands)

‘Verba Volant, scripta manent – words fly but writings remain!’
Yadda, yadda, yadda.

In one heap Me found a birdish Burdalane
The last one, poor wee lass, surviving of her kin
Cark, she were, and thought a cumberground
“But now, now dear!” I said. “Our Lady
Will make ye a shake-down of fine feathers
And new spring grass, with whittles of white petals
And draughts from the clear, running brook
Before yer queachy young bones sleepaway.”

Her laughter flowed like music, a sweet rindle
And she kept a small pebble in her mouth
Lest felth become strength – its ugesome successor.

It were by chance me found Mnemosyne

– Beloved Eldmother

And muse of old and wordly women
I pulled her up from her Earth-fast taproots
But she, forswunak and grown lanken
Began to speak but clyted.

Her voice was wantsome from moss and rust
She’d become elden, and dwined
Under a wasted of letters and her long sloom
“These young and fluttersome moffles –
What do they know of a word’s wroth?”

We drank tea and eftsoons she spake again:
“Ne’er a word ran deeper than sewers of ruined cities
Nor does history disturb a taproot or a deep-sea clam.
All language will ever be in the heaps.”

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Still Life With Objects

Like that infamous ship
on the flat horizon, the one the
Florida Indians couldn’t
see although it was right in front
of them I wonder how long
I have lived among these people
who were, until now, this moment,
broken headphones, steel wool
dryer lint, a throbbing headache

Lampooning behind mirrored masks
of debris in a car wash puddle–
Jiffy Lube coupons, a jay’s wing
a Big Gulp straw
a twist tie, an oil sheen

We know them – discarded bottles,
pills and perfumed soaps
that pass unaltered from us
into the coursing waterways
making amphibians female
as they go, killing freshwater mussels
- those keepers of the rivers’
clear waters all these eons and we
didn’t know until now
how things forever alter

I cannot re-enchant the world
myself, inert and alone
in my house
the dishwasher hums
the toilet sings
the radiator knocks; outside
the chainsaw, the leafblower,
the shop vac, the lawnmowers
drown out sounds
the laughter of children swinging

A small honey mushroom is growing
between my toes it is
beginning to discompose my
feet on the spot where I stand
suddenly awake
listening to all these people here

soon the microbes of the forest floor
will migrate through the rotten
webbing, through my limbs
on which the crows alight

I, like a tree
while things in my house,
the gathering, flammable armies beneath
garbage mountains, flotillas of objects
the size of Texas, the greenhouse breath
assemble, are on the move
singing, humming, knocking, flowing
while I listen to the rasping of
a diasporic wind
in my leaves

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as pitiless as the sun…

THE SECOND COMING
by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

“The Second Coming” is one of my favorites of Yeats’ poems. Even before I read a few of the endless theories about Yeats’ interest in the occult and paganism, historical cycles, what he calls the “dissolution of civilization” – in the first lines of the poem (“Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconers/Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”) I’m immediately drawn into a frenzied space and time. In the repetition of the word “falcon” in “falconer” some parallel relationship is implied; but the connective words “cannot hear” signify the impending and dangerous imbalance between the two, between man and his civilized world, which I think is a theme that runs throughout the poem. The poem itself has a sort of spiraling energy with the shape of the “lion body and the head of the man” taking form out of an expanse of desert, and the “shadows of the indignant desert birds” that “reel” about the beast’s “slow thighs.”

I read many speculations about whether the “Second Coming” implies a reversion or an apocalypse, or if the cycles in the poem are oscillations between Christianity and paganism. I think the poem leaves the possibilities much more open-ended – perhaps the Second Coming will be a new way of thinking all together, one not mapped out on the same temporal (historical) vectors. One can only hope.

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