On we go with Read-Along with Rest Note :

Poem # 13 :

13.1 : "jungle was a mutiny..." - we are back with fevered Teddy Roosevelt in the Amazon jungle. "mutiny of limbs" - more play with micro/macrocosm. As the jungle is a tangled "mutiny" of tree-limbs, so Teddy's feverish limbs are mutinous (& as Teddy as presidential "representative" American represents a fevered, lost country). "each hypertrope" etc. - see Candice Millard's book again (River of Doubt) on the voracious jungle ecosystem.

13.2 : "death was comedy" - the bizarre hunting/killing mechanisms of various jungle flora & fauna - their predatory quality - pushes the sense that life is cheap. "renounce all vanity" etc. - this environment is teaching TR to recognize the similar forms of malice & brutality which turned the "civilized" world into a jungle too.

13.4 : "jaguar" and "chrysalis" etc. - jaguar as avatar of jungle itself; dangling chrysalis as symbol (related to many others in the poems) of art or poetry - pendant, swaying between sky & earth. In this stanza the unknown & uncanny forces of both are interrelated or fused to some extent.

13.5 : "Fevered"... etc. this fusion - a sort of act of literary magic - is part of TR's fever; it leads him to find metaphorical/symbolic relations, to "poetize" himself. Thus he sees his father as both tree and "oaken volume" and "valid redeemer" (Vladimir Nabokov acronym); his mother as the almond tree with the dangling nest (Mandelstam/Jewish subtext), and all becoming a pendulum-breeze. This may sound rather "fevered" in its own right : but there is a subtextual logic to the lines. If TR is a persona or mask for the poetic speaker, then this narration - about language/jungle/human lostness - is in part a story about the poetic process in general, and in particular about the literary ancestry of the speaker's poetic voice.

13.6 : "Bored then... the planet was enough" - an arcane encounter - wrestling match, chessgame - between nature itself (the jaguar) and poetry ends in a kind of draw. The jaguar pads off, leaving the president in extremis : yet still he mutters, "the planet was enough". This phrase a sort of amalgam of Wallace Stevens with Osip Mandelstam's credo of Acmeism : that one of the deepest motives of poetry is to "humanize" the earth, to domesticate it, help people to recognize their kinship with it and each other, their "at-homeness" in reality. Stevens & Mandelstam came at this from different angles, but paradoxically shared many affinities regarding the (humane) values of the earth.

13.7 : "absolute/checkmate. And he wore a crown..." - in his "defeat" by nature's fierce law (the jaguar) - his willingness to encounter it - the poet/explorer actually wins the crown.

11

 
So much rain toppled on our juggled race
we were as on a distant, moister planet;
blindly we moped along, making a circuit
where we meant to draw a line.  The place

 
was unfit for a pilgrimage.  Bellicose
with bees and bugs, a broken Belgium
(crocus belli, abject, burnt in gloom).
We floundered on - blinkered, morose;

 
we sought a scapegoat for a game of fear
and found one (some fabled hermaphrodite
the sailors fetched - covered in frostbite!);
stumbled ahead... and struck Capella's anchor

 
with our feet.  Somehow we'd hit bottom.
Where was the ship?  Rotating overhead?
The iron itself was tightly filigreed -
cartwheeling polka-dots, a wired A-frame...

 
and lettered there in hieroglyph, we read:
the ship is nought; you must rebuild the ship;
otiose Atlantis, dozing Z (your smoked fillip
of corny Amsterdams) are zeroed, zed;

 
you float upon the Nile (an oozing iris
of desire).  Scattered hoots savored the jungle.
That grim report of some unruly Amazon
jangled our nerves - some angry Pocahontas

 
scrambled the rune for us!  And left a maze
meant to confound.  Umbilical, the strangled
vintage clapped obdurate palms... angled
at unseen light... umbering crazed castaways.

5

 
We softly cribbed the engineer's remains
in a reedy basket in the hold.  The double
lenses of his broken spectacles - what bauble-
manifolded wilderness had they made plain?

 
Worming through the undergrowth, he was
cocooned beneath those spectral bastions -
gray limbs like elephants, the vines' festoons,
a labyrinth of parchment (lost papyrus).

 
And left some papers of his own.  A treatise
on the laws of railroading; some blueprints
for a trestle bridge; A Ratio of Gradients
For Laying of the Track (et cetera)...

 
And (in silhouette between two sheets of wax)
the shadow of a Blue Morpho.  Cindered,
only a remnant - two half-oval (sundered)
wings (Aurora, lanced in parallax).

 
There must have been a hearth somewhere
for Biddle, even he.  Schooled for the line
and junction, he was mapping his emerging;
some immortal longing was that Morpho's sire

 
and fiery heir.  There was a ring, perhaps -
immersed in jungle quicksand, so to seal
ecstatic secrets home; Earth will reveal
streams moseying beneath our serpent-maps.  

 
A leaden box, dropped from Capella's stern,
buries the memoirs in their well-earned element;
borne below widening ripples, which cement
both shores in circles (like a swing's return).

2

 
...and he found an old map of the Amapa :
9-foot granite blocks, in a jagged circle,
measuring the winter solstice.  Oro
Pendula wove aviaries overhead.

 
Daring souls drag freedom by the arms,
prong fandangos on the knife of the abyss.
Let prudent beards go mumble otherwheres -
these follow out their hunches, finger charms,

 
face down their fear.  So Fawcett plunged
into the Amazon.  Lost Civilizations
inaccessible, as usual - ruins
cached behind a mental door (unhinged

 
maybe).  There were two mappemundes :
the paper chart (a tactic of the hunt)
and then that bosky planetarium (bent
above pellucid cranium) that fronds

 
its stars across a secret sky.  Of what
be the substance of celestial cascades?
Which treasury (purled deep in Hades)
lured these earthy spirits from the plot

 
of placid precincts?  Archaeology
of buon governo?  Blind vainglory,
gildered dust?  A just-plausible story
to relate, if they return (all Argo-eyed)?

 
On and on (into an onion of hermetic
union) go the seekers.  Ominous hours
ravel their desires... garlands, lairs
of labyrinth (cthonic Parthenon).

Keep on Readin'-Along-with Rest Note :

Poem #3 :

Pretty simple & straightforward.

3.1 : "Walk with me..." - the "turtle-dove" invoked in poem #1, here (maybe), replies, with a command to the speaker. (Lazarus still "dead to the world.")

3.2 : "empty sounds" - see C. Millard on the sudden crashing noises of the jungle (jolting, scary). Likened here to a walk through poetry.

3.3 : "tock-tock" - the woodpecker reminds the speaker of (crucifying) nails being driven in at the "crossroad". The speaker is a bit unnerved, in the forest. "Nature was judgement." : nature itself crucifies (we are mortal creatures). "Truth - very particular" : cf. phrase in next stanza : "everything got everything else".

3.4 : "torture chamber" : again, see Millard on the Darwinian ferocity of rainforest ecology. "everything got everything else" : the voracious gourmet organisms are very particular. The two senses of "got" - knowledge ("I get it") and acquisition ("I eat it") represent the jungle as ultimate post-Edenic cul de sac. The tree of knowledge has become a poisonous wilderness. Suffering is the sum (the crossroads).

3.5 : "Back, forth..." - represents the "turn" of the (poetic) story. Contrast the arcadian image of the back-forth swingset, its equilibrium. Maybe the goal of the Lazarus-Ulysses journey (home, on earth).

3.6 : "sound was sound" - the same word oscillates (like a swing) between its two meanings, and in doing so, confirms its own "soundness". A sort of provisional answer to the anxieties in #1 & 2 about poetic solipsism - even if it's an unproven assertion. [cf. A = A : Mandelstam's "Acmeist" law of identity - vs. anxious, otherworldly Symbolism.]

3.7 : the murmured assertion of the "voice" - what "might be said" - leads onward to hopeful concluding stanza...

13

 
The jungle was a mutiny of limbs.
He couldn't tell his fingers from the worms.
Each hypertrope's unctuous display deformed
itself incorporating prey.  Screams

 
magnified muteness.  Death was comedy.
He vowed - distended in extremity -
if I return once more to the limpid city
of the living... he would renounce all vanity :

 
habits of monkeys, haughty beastliness,
stubborn querulous gaudy fraudulence,
the bent for quarreling, the indolence,
the time's idolatries... the tide's excess.

 
The jaguar (half animal, half jungle) (or
its spotted shadow) listened.  A chrysalis
hung from an almond tree : a pendulous
appendage (cicada, drowsy bugler).

 
Fevered, his father seemed oaken volume,
valid redeemer; his mother, the almond tree;
and a wind (where there was none) breezed
his crown with their features, like a pendulum

 
of heart-beats.  Bored, then, jaguar padded off.
The former president was bloated cask.
Ground smooth, grown fretted basilisk
of weedy breath.  The planet was enough,

 
he seemed to be chanting, over, over and over.
As if the jaguar and he had parceled out
the river in a double game of go - absolute
checkmate.  And he wore a crown of jungle clover.

11

 
June in the jungle, rain upon the ruins,
sweeping across, doubling back.  Two lines
of riverbanks, but only a single line
for the racehorses, where the race begins

 
and ends.  A bugle set the broncos off.
Sweet gold upstream whets the appetite;
well-wrought, remote, plucked at night
from piranha beds : a treasure-trove.

 
A Hawkwood hosted in the King's own house
is the result.  Rain falls on the mercenaries,
merciless, on the just, unjust : last
evenings tremble on the lips of stars.

 
The forest makes a melancholy lithograph,
sandstone and muddy sentences, the river's
drone.  A cataract in the center wears
down a blind whorl : each palm's a cenotaph.

 
Tangled knolls (the gardener's long gone).
A shrouded cloudbank between earth and sky
stippled with fool's gold for the jubilee.
Holy steeps (lightheaded Magdalen).

 
Between the prudent and the prodigal,
prodigious perspicacity in the minstrel -
in the duck-blind, hunting through hell
with a pilgrim bell (sings well, after all!).

 
Such were snortings that the jaguar heard.
Sortilege, for some, some summer eve.
Yet the lantern swung in the wind, a sieve
for fireflies; the jungle reckoned every word. 

4

 
Some old gaunt John sleeps in the quatrefoil,
his gaping mouth emitting tendrils – visible
glyphs, obscure and untranslatable.
A bronze rain falls, and fades into the jungle.

 
Providence all crumbling concrete.
Dogwoods flourish on the dripping ridge;
the old man stares into their foliage,
so multifarious, so implicate...

 
yet one vine short. (One like an infant cedar,
that, with wavy bowing, flecked the edge
of undulating flocks – uncoiled his rage.)
The shade arched like an echo of its brow.

 
I am a stranger here in Gloucestershire,
he thought.  The cave roared water and light.
Was he the king?  A boy lost in the night?
A shrouded sun shed May-gold everywhere.

 
Well-worn, he remembered the deep waves,
his forsakenness.  A spiraling vireo
climbed above the fanning palm-tornado,
fluting a pathway only the far wing cleaves.

 
Up there, Lazarus seeks your countenance.
Dr. Saturno interprets the age to come.
The maize-god in the arroyo, the slate plum
sail into his hand; and in a trance

 
Lazarus climbs from a log-strewn stream
and frozen moldering.  Maundering
to the cave-door, he blinks, ponderous.
Tendrils clasp his feet.  He shods his dream. 

from something I'm working on these days.

3

 
Walk with me through the jungle, whispered the voice.
The silence seethed with malice.  Bluebirds fled
to the Appalachians.  It seemed he was quite dead
to the world (asleep, perhaps).  He had no choice

 
but to rise to the occasion - otherwise.
There were jays in the trees, and twirling
vireos; there were empty sounds, hurling
hurly-burly Death into his eyes;

 
and the hollow tock-tock of the woodpecker
presaged a resolution at the crossroad
(if he could find that mysterious crossroad).
Nature was judgement.  Truth - very particular

 
(you might say).  In other words, the jungle
was a torture chamber of misunderstanding -
everything got everything else.  Wrong
(suffering the sum of all that wrangling).

 
Back, forth, back, forth... the old swingset
swung so calmly in the morning green.
Do you remember how it whispered, then?
Creaked and whispered, like a crooning pet

 
or paradisal tourniquet.  Sound was sound :
what more is there to say? or might be said,
she murmured (in an undertone) - and led
you down the inarticulate and droning

 
trail.  And so it was.  The jungle thunderclouds
boomed and passed - the sky grew grey, grew light.
Symphonic morning (slow Sibelius) : from night
to day, processional (with cloud-parades).

Col. Fawcett's memoir, compiled by his son (Exploration Fawcett, see below), aside from its terrific descriptions of Amazon & Andes environments, shows an odd mixture of racist & humane attitudes. He debunks a lot of the local myths about the native ["savage"] tribes, praises them, befriends them; yet he echoes some of the typical racialist/colonialist biases of time.

There's also the familiar spiritualist/mythological/speculative gumbo (Ignatius Donnelly-like) about Atlantis, lost worlds, etc. Certain theosophical/speculative themes seem to come as a mythological package, you often find them grouped together.

I want to read Eliz. Bishop's old Time-Life country study of Brazil now, & some other writings.

Heard her read at Brown many years ago (early 70s). We stood face-to-face very close for quite a while at the packed after-reading party. She was very short! Friendly, not a bit pretentious - though as usual I was at a loss for anything to say. (Partly, I think, because I had been a little disappointed in the reading. I should have studied up more beforehand. She recited in such a quiet monotone - had trouble following it.)

& the jungle, the jungle. the stunning array of poisonous, malevolent, preternaturally malicious creatures - insects, spiders, fish, snakes, bats, crocodiles, on & on... the weather. the forest. the constant fear of poison-arrow "savages" (whom Fawcett, unlike the rubber-boomers, gold-hounds & slavers, is able to befriend, it seems, without too much trouble). the unbelievable "life is cheap" attitude, self-punishing, despairing, drunken, fevered (Fawcett depicts over & over) of exploiters & exploited... his own unquenchable hunger to go back there, again & again. 1906-1925. Werner Herzog's movie "Aguirre, Wrath of God" catches a bit of it.

Exploration Fawcett [clearly, from the evidence of this link, there's also a whacko fringe Fawcett-cult] - I can't put it down. Imagine Poe's Pym novel, except in real life, with a great deal more of detailed description & episodes, & the wisdom of experience & humane spirit. It ends with Fawcett's disappearance in the depths of the Amazon jungle. Notebooks compiled by his son - who is looking out his office window in the railroad yard in Lima Peru at the very railroad car his father was riding into the Andes (on his first expedition) the day he (his son) was born, back in London. Very Poe/Borgesian touch, there.

The Amazon (along with Vallejo & the Andes) creeps into the final passages of Forth of July - mingled strangely with The Countess from Minneapolis (ps. that cover image is a painting of Hennepin Ave) & Pushkin's short story "The Queen of Spades".

"...by the shores of great rivers" (Mandelstam)