disenchantment of the sacred wood

 SECOND CHILDHOOD

This is that ancient harvest night.

Hobo curls deep into his nest

of old leaves, with his ghost

of a motherland... everything all right.

The Middle Ages were a second childhood

for homesick gentlemen, broken

by the gears of modern men –

the disenchantment of the sacred wood.

That light-filled limestone in the towns

offered to Mary Theotokos...

or the tart fervor of François

Villon!  Guild banners, pennants, clergy gowns

blazed with a commonality belied

by profiles of sad Synagoga,

goad for theological amnesia.

Her crown askew, her flock must hide.

Mum Quaker Hobo snores now

in a pile of aspen leaves.

Canada poplar sheaves,

he mumbles, to a sunflower (somehow).

She’s Pando in Italian, he dreams.

Largest clone colony

below the surface... maybe

the universe.  A raven-glance beams

at prow of her canoe, slips by.

Your motherland is endless,

someone whispers.  So this mass

of dead leaves limns one breathing aye.

                                                            10.31.19

Who killed Robin Redbreast?

HAGIA SOPHIA

Already the first snow saunters down

at dusk (All Saints’ Day).

Robins nibble cherry

crabapples; waxwings are flown.

Some gray squirrel (squirreled away

in Book Depository?)

broke the back of Sophie’s

jack o’lantern... strange display

splayed into Dia de los Muertes.

So Jeff the Fireman

crossed into a bar (man

overboard).  Barranca... Beatrice...

man who went to live with Indians.

Ghost dance, compadre;

Dennis Banks (hey ey

yo).  Eagle feathers in the grandstands

quoting LBJ, ironically (“treaties”).

Home, home on the range

(small fry).  My ange

d’or – in the abyss, like Cassiopeia’s

fireball.  Wax melted in the wings.

Hamlet, his father’s vortex

seal – lay off that, Tex.

Untouchable guitar strings

(hellhound on my trail).  The man’s

in jail.  A thin blue line

separates the whisper mine

from outer darkness (someone plans

                    *

ahead ahead).  Pumpkin or Trumpkin,

orange oak bolete...

mushroom cloud.  Yeti...

this is the forest primeval (again).

American robins gather by the fire.

In the Bruegel scene –

where the old women

stoke the blaze with bones (ire

smoke-signals, from Columba).

Globilized indifference

in a culture of comforts

– soap bubbles... insubstantial... ah

King of Pumpkins!  How the wax melts!

My soul leans inward

toward your abject & absurd

reward, Coatlicue – so many wolf pelts!

In the bright snow of Siberia

the cold blue fire burns

through bronze lids.  Eyes

turn in your direction...  Selah,

my friend.  La vida es sueño.

Poetry = transcript.

Out of the drowsy crypt

she glances, see... muy bueno.

The double doves of the peacock dome

resolve the red & blue

to violet... so you

are Hagia Sophia (hippodrome).

11.1.17

the angry clown is not your father

HEAVY THINGS

If we look once more at your Topsfield

Aquinas-map, Dante –

that earthy horn of plenty

floored by starry sarabande (sealed

fan of luminous phenomena)

the heavy things of Time

rehearse the Salem crime

with simple weight of rigid clay –

ice-cold, stone-cold, bereft of life.

The line sags from the bridge;

the daughter of a lost age

droops, off-balancing (soul-grief).

Quantum quirks of spooky action

powder another image

for displaced rage

into the time-funnel... dissatisfaction

with oneself provokes a personal despair.

We do not know who’s there.

Halloween is in the air;

brown leaves congeal to pumpkin hair,

the angry clown is not your father

anymore.  O Juliet,

the phony craven despot

crafted no safety net... look further.

A rippling of seashore memory

brings grey gulls to sleep.

The peacock’s eyes gaze deep

as Argo... hold her now, Hagia Sophie.

10.21.16

Quantum integral

BLUE MIDWAY

In the drift of autumn distances

leaves sail their own Pacific

toward a blue midway

air-matrix.  Somewhere East

of Henry’s passionate history

(mercurial Möbius strip

or Klein bottle – just flip

one M to W).  Love’s mystery

refracts – deflected by the rage

for mastery, an infant

flummoxed by ambivalent

shrugs... until the splintered stage

is suddenly quiet, spooky as old age.

& so he takes Path P

(which intersects roughly

at X) to make a mirror-image

of her wounded face – the child

she was, and is, always

(beneath time-tears, nail-

scars... Hen’s self-betrayals, chilled

on wheels).  Meanwhile, in soft Atlantic

Delft, deft delvers deal

a double-diamond parallel –

quick Jackie-Joanie seesaw flick

like Leo flipped a Lei by 

Oahu Gal in Galilee.

Sol sighs, it’s only Me.

Love’s integral resolves in sky.

10.22.15

Gazebo at Swan Point Cemetery, Providence

Jesus Thoughts (3) : Day of the Dead

Halloween.  Day of the Dead.   Strange carnival abolishing time & space, life & death, the living, the undead - by way of twilight parades of kids en masque, costumes from other times, other planets. Thinking as I walked home from work today of T.S. Eliot's line from Four Quartets : "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."   & of the famous phrase of Pascal : "Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m'affraie." (The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.)

These came to mind today as I had been pondering (& bloggifying) the riddle of resurrection.  If there are countless earth-like planets out there, circuiting a zillion stars - and even if, as Giordano Bruno speculated, God has sent his cosmic "Son" in some fashion to redeem those myriad worlds - still, on the Day of the Dead, that infinity, that vastness, can project a melancholy image : chill the bones a little, when we think of all that space as a theater of final separation from everyone we love & keep near.

Yet there is something bracing in the effort to imagine that daunting "very much reality".  Jeffrey Schnapp, in his book on Dante (The transfiguration of history at the center of Dante's Paradise), describes how Justinian's architects laid out the mosaics in the Ravenna church at St. Apollinare in Classe - & how Dante figured their design in his Paradiso.  Over the image of the martyr-saint (Apollinare) hovers a tremendous cross-in-circle, composed of 99 stars, with a small face of Christ at its center : representing both the resurrection-body of Christ - prefigured in the Gospel narrative of the Transfiguration - and the eschatological "sign of the Son of Man" which was to appear in the heavens at the Day of Judgement.  In the church, the sacrament of the Eucharist, performed at the altar over the fragmentary relics of the saint, enacts a communion of transfigurement : the body of Christ becomes bread and wine, becomes the collective Body of Christ (the Church itself, the "communion of saints"), and finally becomes the unimaginable "resurrection-body", when "in the twinkling of an eye, we shall all be changed" (St. Paul).

& when we circle back to the logical foundation-stones of this "Way", which I sketched very casually in the first section of this thread - that is, when we keep in mind the concept of God's creative Mind & Being as the origin of the universe which we inhabit (as in a dream) - then suddenly the idea of death's finality, the threat of remote separation from those we love - is modified.  We recognize the limitations of our human vision : we acknowledge the brevity & fragility of our lives within the framework of eternity & infinite space : in an almost Buddhist or Hindu or Zen state of mind, we behold the road of infinite experience stretching out before the soul.  But most of all, we sense, in the love-beauty-joy that we have actually experienced in this world (somehow manifested out of nothing at all) - we sense a promise of future happiness, we feel the warmth, the smile of a cosmic victory hidden within the suffering at hand.  (Relativity & quantum physics have begun to alter our sense of mystery in this regard : things are seldom what they seem.  What seems infinitely remote may actually be too close to perceive; what we thought was matter might actually be mind; life might indeed be more like Poe's "dream within a dream" - to quote a well-known Halloween author).

It's intriguing to remember that behind the stodgy old stone walls of ancient churches, people are gathering for a rite of communion which is indeed a kind of pantomime, a mystery play, representing the transfiguration of the "body of death" (the body we know so well) into the body of Christ - the holy fellowship of spiritual glee : that is, the grace of an intellectual perception of shared life beyond death, when "Death itself shall die" : and then "Death, where is thy sting?"  And "Death is swallowed up in victory."

Here's a Halloween poem I wrote years ago, which glances at some of these things :

Halloween.  The sun’s already down.
Everywhere leaves are gathering,
lightly rustling and shivering,
their ruddy bloom already fading,
the sun’s dry wine drunk to the dregs.
 
The neighborhood grows anonymous.
Soon the small ghosts will appear,
flickering and half–transparent
under the streetlights, costumed
for space travel, or the Middle Ages.
 
This is that ancient harvest night.
Harvest of time, harvest of souls.
Tonight the years are buried quietly
under a shroud of old leaves, and I
am a child too, standing at the door.

Myself included.

Halloween.  The sun’s already down.
Everywhere leaves are gathering,
lightly rustling and shivering,
their ruddy bloom already fading,
the sun’s dry wine drunk to the dregs.

 
The neighborhood grows anonymous.
Soon the small ghosts will appear,
flickering and half–transparent
under the streetlights, costumed
for space travel, or the Middle Ages.

 
This is that ancient harvest night.
Harvest of time, harvest of souls.
Tonight the years are buried quietly
under a shroud of old leaves, and I
am a child too, standing at the door.

It's Everywoman, Everyman. It's you, me, it's Berkeley in Paradise... the Son of Man, the Imago. It's All Souls' Eve (& Happy Halloween).

Happy Halloween, everyone. I don't personally celebrate this holiday as I am allergic to salt. However, my black cat, Pushkin, is in protective custody, thank you for asking, everyone. & I mean everyone, you literary mutts out there included.

I thought this might be an appropriate time & place to post an interview I did with Ron Duluth, of Duluth, MN, back in the early 70s, which was also, as some of us are old enough to recall, a time of stress and crisis, especially for cats. It was published in the little magazine Little Duluth Magazine in 1975. I reprint here without permission from Ron, because he was always borrowing my toothbrush anyway, yecck. Happy Halloween to you too, Ron.

RD : Welcome to Duluth, Henry.

HG : Thanks, Ron. Are you speaking geographically or personally?

RD : Excuse me?

HG : I mean, do you mean by that, Welcome to (Ron) Duluth, ie. welcome into my personal presence, or, do you mean, Welcome to Duluth, my home town?

RD : Let's move on. Welcome, period, Henry. And I mean that.

HG : Thanks. You're welcome, too.

RD : OK. [takes sip of Doobie-Duluth, a local brew] I'd like to start by asking you about the portable chess board you carry around with you on reading tours. Can you tell us something about this? It's rather unusual. I wish I could print an image of it here, for future blog readers, but unfortunately, it's only 1975, and we'll both soon be in the nursing home if not Duluth Frozen People's Cemetery.

HG : Geez, Ron, you talk like it was Halloween, or something. Let's cut the gloom & doom. I don't really care if it's 1975 or 1597; in either case, neither of us knows Shakespeare on a first-name basis.

RD : That's true. Though I did pour him a brewskie last week over at Glug-Glugg's.

HG : He is some writer, huh? Have you had a close look at my chessboard? Check the pieces.

RD : How do you tell them apart? They all look like. . . kind of chunky pawns.

HG : It's a cheese board, Ron. Pawns, cheddar; rooks, swiss; knights, havarti; bishops, provolone, what else; queen, emmenthaler; king, blue cheese, it goes without saying.

RD : Do you actually know anything about cheese, Henry? There are more distinctive cheeses out there.

HG : I find that these standard grocery-store breeds have longer shelf-life, or board-life, if you will. Chess is a slow, stinkin' bloody war game.

RD : Don't I know it. It's how we get through the long winters here in northern Vermont.

HG : I thought we were in Duluth. Minnesota.

RD : Let's move on. I read a poem of yours about a year ago in Hoppers Bizarre, the one Lindy Spelling edits out of Grasshopper, ND. The last line has stuck with me over the 7 or 8 years since I read it:

"I spread my word around, mingled with wine and cheese."

Now on the surface, this is a very bland, slightly stupid sentence, if you don't mind my saying. But it refused to be ejected from the rooming house of my brain, for some reason, even though the rent came due long before I was even born. I thought of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, sending darting glances of animal heat across the Reading Room at Doddery House, Cambridge : poetry mingling with cocktail snacks, poetry moving out of its ivory tower into its ebony bower, into its limousine, into its chopper. What you seem to be saying, in this ultimate, rather than penultimate, line, is that poetry is not an arcane autonomous pursuit, like chess, for instance, but something far more complexly (new word, for me!) implicated (big word, for me!) in everyday emotional give-and-take of love-burnt lovebirds everywhere.

HG : Gotta hand it to you, Duluth; you must have labored over these questions all night long.

RD : Are you implying something about Cindy & me?

HG : Cindy spent the night at my hotel, Ron.

RD : Whaaa???

HG : - but not with me. There was a chess tournament in Duluth this week, didn't she tell you? Cindy is now a Grand Master; she's been invited to San Clemente to play Richard Nixon & that crazy guy Gary Kasper the Friendly Ghost next month. I'm surprised she didn't mention this to you.

RD : She knows how I feel about chess.

HG : Yeah, I know. She beat me too, yesterday. I'm just a Little Master now. This cheese board is just a novelty trick; I don't have the ruthless reptilian aggressive chromosome you really need for this game.

RD : Let's move on. Is poetry political, in your view?

HG : Does the Pope drive a Popomobile?

RD : What are your implying by that statement?

HG : Are you questioning my religious beliefs?

RD : I'm questioning everything. This is an interview. You're supposed to be answering.

HG : Is poetry political? Let me tell a little fable about that. Once, long ago & far away, in the kingdom of Shnoz, the masses were enamoured of Rex Regal & Regatta Special, their very own King & Queen. Rex & Regatta were not only good-looking, they were also well-mannered and well-spoken in any situation. Rex was, moreover, an excellent water-skiier. Regatta was raised in Humble Circumstances, a village not far from Capital, the capital of their nation (Capita); but she knew she could handle the jui-jitsu of social climbing; she put on her velveteen hiking boots and lo & behold became queen of her fair land. There was a poor ugly soft-muscled man in Capita, whose name was Lex Verbosity. He had become the Offical Man of Letters after winning the spelling bee in Capita Junior High three years in a row, an unprecedented achievement for someone with such poor handwriting. Well, Lex decided to become a poet. But in order to do so, he had to win the hand of the Princess of the Dark Wood, whose name was Circe Circuitous (really!). This was just the way they did things in that fair land known to this day as Capita. Well, to make a long story short, Ron, Lex succeeded. He lived in the forest with Circe for 35 years, only to emerge as Pig Laureate 35 years after that. Rex, King of Capita, was mightily alarmed; he sent his entire chessboard into the Dark Wood to capture Circe, but a short time later his army came running & squealing back home, curling their little piggly tails behind them.

RD : Henry, is this somehow related to your poetics?

HG : Did you note the word "chessboard" which appeared in my little fable just related?

RD : I did.

HG : Did you note what happened to the chessboard, Ron?

RD : I did.

HG : What conclusions can you draw from this story? Who is your favorite character, and why? Do you think that Lex did the right thing in marrying the Princess of the Dark Forest? How would you have become a poet differently?

RD : I don't know, to tell the truth.

HG : It's fairly simple. In this country, the United States, Dylan Thomas represents King Rex. Marianne Moore represents Queen Regatta. Sylvia Plath can play Circe. But who is Lex Verbosity? This depends upon how you view the impact of modern art and 20th-century history on poetic productive forces. For most American poets, poetry is a force for retirement, despite the impression, created quite premeditatively, of Wild Boy & Girl romanticism fostered by the likes of Rick Temblor, jing-a-ling poet-cowboy, & the like. But for an extremely astute & rigid avant-garde, the productive forces of poetry have been marshalled for the manufacture of a new and better world, represented by ee cummings, mm eekings, the Doodle Sisters of Paris, France, Ernie Hummingbird, TB Shott, Nozra Bash, and so on. These are the antennae of the rat, if you will, and the alert young minds of our generation - I mean those who dare to resist the cantankerous imposition of middling classy mores throughout the suburban hell which is our world - these young people are standing up together for freedom, and saying We Are The Pepsi Generation! in terms of verse.

RD : And you? Where do you stand, Henry Gould?

HG : I usually sit. But thanks for asking.

If, as John Latta suggested yesterday, writing under a pseudonym or fictive persona sometimes enables free (or freer) expression, then it seems possible that feeling & emotion in poetry might sometimes take authentic form through a "heteronym".

If, in addition, we grant that all language is an artificial construct, a kind of shorthand "dress-up" for an irreducible reality, then, paradoxically, the "truest" expression - what corresponds to the situation most closely - might be such a "fiction of a fiction".

Halloween is coming, oh boy (put on costume; get candy). Curious how a masking ritual precedes the feast-day celebrating community as a symbolic whole (All Souls, All Saints Day).