Gerasene Writer's Conference

Fox's Confessor - Chapter Six

2011-11-21T14:05:00.000-08:00

When Father Overbee drank he often thought
Of St. Augustine (“To The Burgundy,
Thence I came…”) but refused to think what brought
Him to such a pass: he knew the company
“The Legless Fox” kept was most nights only
“Me, myself and rye.” So he thought it strange
To have someone other than a barfly
Or transient intrude on his solo binge:
Parishioner or not, encounters made him cringe.

Tonight’s visitor in natty long coat
And pin-striped three-piece was holding in hand
And close to vest a fancy leather tote:
That’s where, thought Father, lawyers keep contained
Such secrets convictions that sins defend…
The priest avoided making eye contact
And turned to his drink as the stranger scanned
The room for signs of life. In fact, he attacked
His beer: shall I be shit-faced tonight, or just shellacked?

Before too long, though, half way through the priest’s
Latest coat of liver stain, the stranger spoke –
Not to him – to imaginary guests –
Or so it seemed. Perhaps the priest mistook
The man for his appearance: homeless folk
Have taken to wearing upscale suits, he thought.
Intrigued, he listened to the stranger talk.
A beer later, the stranger began to shout,
Then looked at – or through – the priest, and quickly ran out.

“There goes the evening’s divertissement…”
The cleric said, and, shrugged to silence, sipped
His glass and munched at a free assortment
Of nuts and snaps at the bar. As he tipped
His glass to drain it, someone lightly tapped
His arm. A fat fellow sat a stool away
And watched the glass the priest held as it dripped
Its final drop into his mouth. “Good day,”
He said. “I’m Lonnie Cash. Are you enjoying your stay?”

“Good day – evening, sir. I’m actually not
A regular guess – I came for the cashews
And stayed for Wilmaukee’s Best. Look at that…
Late fer New Mexico and no excuse.
A bishop-forced vacation – can’t refuse.”
“Are you a priest by name of Father Andy?”
Asked Lonnie barging through the priest’s obtuse
Palaver (Although that’s not quite the way
That he put it later to Peyton: “He was high!”)

“Who needs to know? You can tell Mrs. Conway –“
“Are you a priest?” (Although still dressed in his blacks,
He had his Roman collar stashed away
In his back pocket.) “Whew, this ‘Headless Fox’
Sure’s gotten busy tonight. ‘Matter facks,
I am – or was – or…whaz on your mind, son?”
“We’ve got a guest in Six-sixty-six –
He’s very ill, you see – and a Christian –
And he’d like to have a priest to do confession.”

* * * *
Delirium – dying delirium,
Thought Lytlewood, once more in the lobby.
He pounded on the call-bell like a drum
And Peyton Cash appeared almost instantly
Behind the desk. Or the insanity
Of an old man. “I’d like to take my suite.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Lytlewood. Here’s your key.
I would suggest you take the stairs tonight
As the elevator is cranky – and it might –“

“You expect me to take six flights of stairs?”
“Of course not, Mr. Lytlewood, go straight
On down the hall and there’s elevators
To left and right, but take the one on the right.”
But Lytlewood shot a severe look at
The man. “You damn well know I’ve been before.
Who’s taking care of baggage this late
At night?” Even Peyton Cash – cool cucumber
Extraordinaire – struggled to keep composure.

“We’ll…We’ll have them sent up A.S.A.P….”
“What kind of place you run–“ Whatever else
The aging thug thought he was going to say
Was lost in vertigo and closing walls –
He gripped the desk to ride out the crippling spells
Of nausea, letting fall to the marble floor
The dossier from Music. When the chills
And shakes subsided, Peyton standing there
Beside him, both saw its contents spilled everywhere.

* * * * *
As Father Overbee replayed the scene,
Bizarre and of a piece with how his night
Was shaping up, his presbyterian
Instincts assumed a sober defense of rite
And sacrament: while he agreed, despite
His clodded judgment, to see the sick man,
He told the thumbless fellow – as he spat
Tobacco juice into a brass spittoon –
“Sish sishty-sish, huh? Good nummers for confection…”

“Well, Padre, spurt it can’t hurt spurt can it?”
“I’ll need a hole and stoly oils – a stoles
For extreme inaction – what? Bah! Emmit fit
To drivel meself and get a couple miles
To walk –“ “Oh, don’t sweat spurt the details
There Padre – just spurt go and do your thing.
The little stuff are just the devil’s
Excuse for spurt to make the ol’ purse strings
Of pig tails – or is it honey spurt for the bee stings?

“Shit, I don’t know – the point is spurt…Well, shit,
What was my point?” “The rask of gitting lust
In detools?” "Ex – spurt – actly! Did I hit
The hammer on the tail?" "– I think I mussed
Your name, Mr….?” “Lonnie Cash, your host…
I’m owner of these here praymises, too.”
And Lonnie, pausing half a second, thrust
His hand at Father Overbee and threw
A look at his piled empty glasses. “Want to play through?”

The Fox's Confessor: Chapter Five

2011-11-17T08:33:00.000-08:00

The Burgundy was Lytlewood’s retreat
From larger universes. Renting peace
Of mind, he found his refuge bittersweet –
At once a cure for the common disease
Of life, and sure reminder that when lease
And rent come due, the vacancies remain
The first concern. In its halcyon days
The hotel spilled with bouquets and champagne;
Today, it’s real estate prostitutes Mnemosyne –

A fact the hotel’s current state drove home
As Lonnie drove Lytlewood into view:
The faded facades of dismantled Rome
Could never have filled Caesar with more rue –
Its garish art-deco and neon threw
Enough electricity to trace its dark
Abandoned silhouette. As evening grew
It spread its stain against the sky in stark
Majestic hints of heydays and high water mark.

With tears of practice, Lonnie got the hang
Of driving without thumbs. – But Lytlewood
Soon realized he wasn’t worth a good damn
For carrying bags – This bed is mine I made...
He was left with baggage at the colonnade
That announced The Burgundy’s grand entrance.
As Lonnie went to park in back, he stood
And saw the hotel’s old ways – a sentence
Scrawled above the arch to welcome with faux-pretence:

Check Your Cares At Door, Ye Who Enter Here!
With a short strained sigh tucked under his breath
Against nostalgia, he opened the door
And stepped inside. In crossing underneath
The jamb, he thought he heard the hotel breathe,
Exhaling years and years of quiet years…
The lobby’s marble floor echoed with
His falling steps – like mourning – without tears
He thought – or echoing for years and years. And years…

A furtive movement caught his eye: someone
Retreated into the office behind
The desk – as if to avoid detection.
But Lytlewood was rather disinclined
To follow up. Instead he looked to find
A concierge or bellhop. Then the bar
Recalled him to its modest doors; they dinned
The clank and hum of business, familiar
Enough to guide him back to find his old north star.

He was too weak with his sickness to think
To want his old proclivities: a box
Of choice cigars beneath his arm; a drink
In hand to start the night…Scotch – hold the rocks!
The Burgundy’s bar – called “The Legless Fox” –
Had naturally attracted Lytlewood –
Though few guessed his big shoes would leave the tracks
Of little Reynard behind...And once, I could…
He weakly pushed the swinging doors and stepped inside.

There were only three others in the room:
A bartender toweling a whisky glass
Behind the bar, another pushing broom,
His back to Biggy, and – seeming out of place –
A single patron crouching comatose,
Nursing drinks at the bar’s far end, his mood
As black as his attire. And then a voice
Yanked at Biggy with its unlikelihood.
It’s good to see you again, Mr. Lytlewood.

As Lytlewood knew that the gangster’s life
Was full of strange and bloody things, and one
Was just as soon accustomed to mooncalf
Grotesques, stupid lore and superstition
Of underworld and overlord, as to gun-
Downs and garottes, the sign and sacrament
Of thuggery itself: still, the phenomenon
Appearing now before his eyes was different –
Virgil Strong – not quite spirit, not quite corpulent.

It was Lytlewood, after all, who first
Appealed to Music’s Machiavellian
Propensities, suggesting, worse to worst,
Divine authority cows even villains –
“A taste of blood will only whet the thirst,”
He said to Music, “but feed the will on fear
And even vice and crime are all but forced
To pay the gods respect.” He helped, therefore,
Convert dishonest souls to Music’s strident care.

Oh, sir, the ghost continued, why surprised? –
You act as if the boys had hacked your tongue
Instead of mine. But you must have realized
We’d be waiting here – with spring in step and song
In heart – and ready to bring you along
With us. But Lytlewood simply stared
Down the bar, long and cool. Don’t get us wrong,
Mr. Lytlewood – no expense was spared –
If you’re to die, we’re here to make sure you’re prepared.

It’s Music’s little pastime, Lytlewood
Suspected – testing him around the edges,
To see if age and pleasure had destroyed
His hardness, mollified his ancient grudges
Against the world. If Lytlewood budges,
So Music speculates, then who else might
Betray me? Sham sureties, bogus pledges –
Surely these more than bullets took the fight
Out of Music? Still, there’s something here that’s not quite…

“Say, Virgil, you keep referring to ‘we’
And ‘us’ – but I see only us in the place,”
The gangster thought to say – with levity
To show he’d play it out. Don’t remember us,
Good man? – Remember Eddie the Puss?
That’s Eddie Pusarchik right over there
At Table Eight. Recall how you hopped him
Up on smack and made him rape his mother?
I think he whacked his father, too – for good measure.

Then standing over there by the jukebox –
That’s Tony Romula. No? You had him kill
His brother over phony rotten stocks
In city real estate. Talk about shill
And shell games: A regular Cain and Abel,
Those two. If Jimmy hadn’t played both ends
Against the middle, skimming from the till
On top of all…I always said, you bends
The rules enough and nothing in it recommends.

And Hector “Horsey” Harriman is here –
The stable trainer for Mr. Music’s
Arabians? If I’ve the story clear,
The bookie – Parrish Bowes, was it? – tried to fix
A race in which Achilles’ Heel, Music’s
Prize thoroughbred, was running. Hector slipped
It’s feed a mickey; Bowes slipped him greenbacks;
And didn’t Music have you have Hector strapped
And dragged behind Achilles ‘til his spine was snapped?

Oh, he’s there by the cigarette machine
With Bowes now…What became of Bowes again?
That’s right. Once you got Hector to come clean –
Before his last ride – you “found” Parrish in
Bed, committing fornication
With Mr. Music’s mistress. What a knack
You had for fabricating a fiction.
Didn’t you show him counterfeit Kodaks?
Is that what makes a fellow swallow Clorox and Ajax?

As Virgil Strong continued his catalog
Of Lytlewood’s auld lang syne alumni,
Biggy’s gaze began to drift like fog
From face to ghostly face to – suddenly
He sensed almost simultaneously
Two curious facts: the barkeeps were gone
And, he noticed, during Virgil’s litany
The barfly in the corner tying one on
Was following this one-sided conversation.

…Again involving Mr. Music’s mistress –
What was her name? Oh, hell! (Sorry, Sir!)
But that’s it! Hell – hell – Helen Crosby! Yes!
I’m sure of it. Strong paused. It makes me sore,
I must confess (It’s just a harmless figure
Of speech, Sir, but apologies, of course!)
As I was noting, it’s just like a whore
To fail to keep appointments. This will force
The Master’s hand – and you know how he hates remorse.

“What do you know about Helen Crosby!”
Interrupted Lytlewood. “And who the hell
Are you! I’m dying, as you correctly
Surmised – but look, the joke was going swell
Until you mentioned… Helen.” His voice fell.
“Please tell me. What the hell is this about!”
Exactly so, dear Mr. Lytlewood. Hell.
And we have just the place for down and out
Fatalities like yourself. Let me explain it

By taking all your questions one by one –
No, better yet, let this answer for all:
This cocktail party (which cannot begin
In fact until Ms. Crosby’s arrival)
Is in your honor. For being faithful
To the Master, we’d propose a fitting toast –
Except the whore prevents it – so until
She shows, the Master has but one request:
It would be best to ignore that nosey goddamned priest.

The Fox's Confessor: Chapter Four

2011-11-10T14:00:00.000-08:00

Lost in sorrow’s thickets, the cleric missed
The coming thunder, steel gnawing down
On steel, the grind that crushed and pushed and pressed.
And Lytlewood, abject with abstraction,
Ignored the nearing lights of the station.
In lonely vigil, only Lonnie heard
The train approach the town – its combustion
Now sweeping like fate’s engine forward toward
The platform, a cargo of revelations on board.

The gravity and steel strained to a stop
Before the platform. Nervous clustered knots
Of those awaiting departure took a grip
Of bags and baggage, memories and regret –
And those awaiting arrival of debt
Assumed and endured now scattered to see
Before being seen, hoping to forget
The argument, the tiff, the row, or free
One's conscience from some latest infidelity.

Amid the crowded station’s fervid come
And go, the thick-chested man rose and reached
For baggage overhead. His head went numb
And slumped over – until darkness encroached
Upon his sight and gravity unstitched
His dozing mind in momentary dread.
But catching himself, he stood again, latched
One hand to bag and one upon his head.
His feet felt for the platform with the weight of lead.

Through his faintness Lytlewood thought he saw
An obese figure make its way from shadows –
Waving to him, the man lacked thumbs, his jaw
Hung like a dog’s. In clean accounting rows
The memories started adding up and rose
To meet him – that same fat body hog-tied
With phone cord; that same jaw in twisted throes,
And thumbs jumping from his hands as the blade
Performed precisely: action owed and suffering paid.

The moment Lonnie saw old Lytlewood
He knew that something about him was wrong.
He seemed an apparition as he stood
As if about to faint. “It’s been too long,
Mr. Lytlewood!” His words seemed to hang
Too long before Lytlewood made reply:
“You…what? – why you?” “I’m here to help bring
Your baggage and things to The Burgundy.”
“Lonnie Cash – yes, that’s your name? – I’ve come here to die.”

* * * * * *
“I shit you not, Peyton, it’s what he said,
On God’s honor,” Lonnie explained back at
The hotel. “Also, he said he’d be dead
In hell, he said, before the night was out.”
But Peyton half-listened and, half in doubt,
Regarded Lonnie’s news as if received
Without the bona fides of proper bullshit.
“I think, dear brother, you falsely perceived
(Big words always got to Lonnie) and thus believed.”

“Well, all’s I know is he don’t look so good;
He got these shakes – and driving here I saw
These dizzy spells possess him. Lytlewood
Ain’t Lytlewood is all’s I’m saying now –
He even told me, ‘Take it nice and slow
Through downtown’ – which added a whole half-hour
Because we drove by this old whorehouse so
He could, I don’t know… something to remember,
He said, holding hard the while to some kind of folder.”

When Lonnie finished Peyton began to hum
And think and hum and…. Lonnie blurted, “What!”
The office light was shedding from its dome
Unsettled shadows on Peyton’s balding nut.
He leaned into the cone. “Well look, here’s what
I say we do: if Music’s golden goose
Is getting ready to kick the bucket –
We need some way to find out what that goose
Is going to do and whether it’s meant for us.”

“Remember that Music demands his men
Have to be registered Catholics to play?”
Continued Peyton. “He held confession
A good way to keep his men honest and fey
For blood." “Fey?” “Shut up, Lonnie, and listen –
So Music kept on his payroll a real,
Honest-to-God priest who heard all the sin
And nonsense of Music’s men. Then he’d squeal
Afterwards to Music. The trick would never fail.”

“What trick?” “Oh, Lonnie, clam it, for Christ’s sakes!
The trick was to confess and keep close tabs
Ensuring no one came with higher stakes
To Music’s table. Nothing up for grabs –
You see? You put a fear of God in rubes
And they won’t play you for one, or abuse
Your confidence. So we find a priest that gabs;
We make it so he don't know it, set him loose
On old Lytlewood – and if he doesn’t refuse

He’ll have to be thinking Music's being thorough –
And maybe he’s dying for sure – well, will
He refuse a priest? One way or not, we’ll know
If Mr. Biggy Lytlewood is ill
To death.” “And where’ll I find a priest that will
Want to?” Peyton smiled wide. “Well, as I see….
That rummy from St. Placid’s fits the bill –
And it so happens that he’s currently
Buying up the bar. He goes by Father Andy.”

The Fox's Confessor: Chapter Three

2011-11-07T07:57:00.000-08:00

“Holy shit. That’s what we are, my dear friends
In Christ” – Father Andrew Overbee sat back
From pen and desk. Holy Shit? That depends
On more distinctions than thy rhetoric
Hath dreamed, he thought, No, no. Better to stick
To boilerplate, Andrew, and besides, it sounds
All too Protestant… He knew his homiletic
Style already put him well out of bounds
With Bishop Linseed and his diocesan hounds.

So Father Overbee killed his sermon
For Sunday in utero, crossing out
Its only sentence. Best goddamned line on
Things in a while. But wasn’t meant to be,
He thought as he cast his gaze at
A page torn from Time he’d tacked to his wall –
The famous Holbein sketch of Dean John Colet –
The softened eyes affixed, half-skeptical,
As if gauging the grill of a confessional.

Instead of starting over, Father Andrew
Blew flatulent ruminations from his lips.
He rolled his eyes, paused, and suddenly threw
Down his pen. He looked at his fingertips
And joined them – then let the steeple collapse.
Leaping up, he took, in three strident bounds,
The distance from his chair to his relapse:
The beer can’s hatching crack – this best of sounds!
Thought Father Andrew – provided motive and grounds

For his recovering recovery
From alcoholism. He downed the can
In three hungry gulps, then belched: "Oh-verr-bee-
You-lush"" He knew that his next confession
Would include a Budweiser commission
And half a case of Milwaukee’s Best
Beforehand, to muster up enough spin
To twirl around the usual manifest
Of sins – to save, of course, his mortal best for last.

So Father Overbee began to move
From room to room, wandering the rectory
In search of ideas to rescue and love,
To mollycoddle in discovery,
And raise the blade of reality
(As Abraham would unbloodied Isaac)
Above his intellect: Thursday's homily
Of fear and trembling – mental disconnect –
And fear and loathing –Deny! – usually to redact

On Sunday morning: In his years (the last
Eleven at his current assignment –
The moribund St. Placid’s) as a priest
For God’s Rabble, Father Overbee spent
His time interring old ground for talent
He may or may not have buried alive.
The Long Ago of youthful resentment
Had softened into middle-aged reprieve
Confirmed with liquor – all the better to believe.

It was a bargain he made with his flock:
The parishioners keep a friendly distance
And, playing the equidistant cleric,
He guarantees some kind of real presence
By keeping faith in words, an allegiance
That split infinitives into sermons
And baptized syntax with sly inference.
Yet even as God’s shadow determines
The form, he thought, matter’s meaning dims the world with sins.

The solipsism was never his style
But he had separated himself from
The world, pursuing faith in partial exile.
His library consoled – but played it dumb
When critical interrogations came
And knocked on his door. His caged parakeet,
Jeremiah, waited, perched in the front room.
Preparing Father, this shrill paraclete
Enthralling souls that came in off the street. Twit tweet!

Twit tweet! The song sung now pulled him up short –
For day had long since concluded its terms.
Who should want counsel now?! With a brusque snort
He reluctantly dropped everything: the forms
And manners of life, mysterious charms
Of social survival; due sacrifice
To quotidian gods; liturgical norms
For ordinary life – which all suffice
To say his fellow man became his daily cross.

The knock foretold fulfilled the prophecy
Of Jeremiah’s song – announcing each guest
A ghost of grief for Father Overbee.
Half-heartedly hiding his mild disgust
He met Mrs. Conway, parish liturgist
And secretary. Halting her entrance,
He quickly stepped out on the porch and made fast
The door behind him, stealing a quick glance
At something she was holding in her vein-blue hands.

“A good evening to you, Father Andy,”
She said. And her sour-tart smirk said in turn,
I piss you off when I call you that, don’t I?
“And to you,” he replied. “And your concern?”
“Oh, well, I just wanted to come and return
This bit of mail I’d taken home by…chance.”
As he took it he noticed it was torn.
“I think it’s something of some importance,”
She added as he saw the seal, “– from His Excellence.”

He waited for Mrs. Conway to leave
Before attending to the envelope.
Prepared for all, he was not so naïve
To think its contents held any good hope
To come: it was, after all, the Bishop.
Upon a careful read, he went inside,
Retrieved a beer and came back to the stoop.
The Six O’Clock – its whistle opened wide –
Resounded in the distance. He sat down and cried.

The Fox's Confessor - Chapter Two

2011-11-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

“Holy shit…” Biggy groaned, his eyes shut tight,
His mind in momentary suspension
Before resuming gravity’s upward float –
For he was dreaming of resurrection
And drowning, day and night, a rising sun,
And light and light…His hooded lids snapped wide
To see the first golden tendrils of dawn
Unfold across the rooftops. From his bed
He tried to consider which kingdoms to divide.

But something was wrong. Had he but believed,
Body and soul, in the body and soul,
And not the body only, he might have lived
To see his life in more than terms of will.
But it came to pass that the world was ill-
Conceived this morning. Lytlewood awoke
And found the world the way he left it – still
One fact, but now divorced, as if it broke
From his will, amputated in a single stroke.

He raised his skull from his pillow, a head
Burnished in laurels of foxfire crimson
And balding in corruption, noble, staid
As Caesar’s bust. But the latter season
Of his pate belied the high green of June
That flourished, trunk and limb, beneath his clothes.
Still, as he swung his feet from bed linen
To floor, with shaking nausea bile rose
To meet his false youth with age, his vain works with days

Long passed. “Today I die,” said Lytlewood
To his burnt reflection in the smoked glass
Surmounting his nightstand. Half out of bed
He hunched and stretched his hand where a small mess
Of sleeping pills had spilled. The half-darkness
Half-hindered his search for the telephone.
His hands concieved receiver and mouthpiece
Plucked from the cradle. Clenched at like a bone,
He put it to his ear and, not waiting for a tone,

He dialed. Waited. And spoke like one
Who learned to talk to himself, one marooned
With his own voice for more than a million
Seasons. “Yes. I want you to go and find
Two airplane tickets to Miami and
The cleanest whore in town. I need to go
Away awhile… What? I see. A demand.
Not a request. Well. Music would know.”
He hung up and woke up: Where Music sends, I go.

Biggy Lytlewood was not one to call
Rapacious, but he knew how to “acquire.”
The Money – not some, not even most – but all
Was his task as underworld stockbroker:
Attracting attention among the higher
Dominions, thrones and powers, Reynard Lytlewood –
His name before his name became bigger –
Determined his own course, for bad or good,
Relieved a man of his gold as any stone of blood.

He took a comet’s path in his career
Among the other orbiting bodies
And watched from his own insulated sphere
The rise and fall, the wax and wane, surcease
And excess, this universe of chaos.
To his game surprise, he survived, and thrived
To see that murder, bribes, and rank abuse
Of power, sex and money, had moved
His orbit into circles more and more depraved.

Of these, none had more perfect compass than
The machinations of Frankie Music –
His was a total system: he the sun
Around which revolved Lytlewood’s logic
Of tally sheets and body-counts. In quick
Succession Lytlewood rose through the ranks
Of Music’s syndicate. His bailiwick
Was making Music the Baron of Banks
And himself, touched as Midas, horrid as the Sphinx.

It was the face of that deceitful god
Of waste and nothing, that blood-lusty beast
Of riddle and mirage, which now with stolid
Expression stared at itself, holding fast
Its gaze upon the bathroom mirror, cast
Out deep (and thus in deep) to find the cause
Of sickness. Impassive as a clenched fist
He knuckled up the passing pain, his face
Unmoved, its golden whiskers creasing time’s increase.

When pain subsided, it left Lytlewood
In weary contemplation: what to do
Now that mortality had come and stood
Beside him? Say farewell? Miami grew
Insignificant – and whores the more so.
He doused his face and neck from the basin
Of shaving water. Suddenly he knew
Where he would go – a place half way between
Where we would be going and where he had been….

“You’re all set, Mr. Lytlewood. Your train
Arrives in town a little after six –
About sundown. At the station a man
From the hotel’s due to pick you up and fix
You up in penthouse suite Six-sixty Six,
As you requested.” Meyer, his chauffer –
Efficient and discreet, handed tickets
To Biggy, sitting in back. Over his shoulder,
Meyer spoke the way he drove – with purpose. “This folder

“As well, is from Mr. Music.” He passed
It back. But Lytlewood already knew
What the file read: Assignment – his last.
So what did it matter which stone he drew
The blood from this time? He guessed his would flow
Soon enough…. But we leave to meditate
On his yesterday and his tomorrow
One whose will is lost to a present state –
To meet another lost in time’s eternal debate.

Photosource

The Fox's Confessor - Chapter One

2011-11-03T07:39:00.000-07:00

It is told, then, that Musciatto Franzesi, being from a very rich and considerable merchant in France become a knight...
-Boccaccio, The Decameron, First Tale, First Day

“Holy shit! Lytlewood’s coming to town!”
Lonnie Cash’s huff-puffing bulk almost
Reached the room and his brother Peyton’s frown
Before his fat squeal filled up and crossed
The office doorway. His brother was lost
In thought, his exquisitely thin fingers
Drumming desktop for some sullen sunk cost
The way a hunted animal lingers
With haunting hungers in shadow’s hidden dangers.

“Yeah, Lonnie, he’s coming alright – I heard
About it this morning. One of Frankie
Music’s men had rung in an early bird
Reservation,” Peyton said, his lanky
Frame rising slowly, painfully, frankly,
To greet his brother with the same cool regard
Lonnie’s perpetual anxiety
Always – the way Peyton saw things – incurred.
He watched as the word reservation registered

Within the sallow jowls and sag-heaping jaw
Lonnie would bounce and jounce with confidence
Like pistons as he worked a plug of chew
Embalmed in Juicy-Fruit. His countenance
Made counterfeits of intelligence,
Dismaying his friends, surprising his foes,
And disgusting, with thick-headed offence,
His brother – so it was that Peyton was
Fond of slapping Lonnie’s fat face with good bad news.

“Reservation?” Lonnie repeated. “Here?
“At The Burgundy?” “Where else?” Peyton said,
And pretended more quietly, “My fear
Is that our Mr. Biggy Lytlewood
Wants someone’s due – Music never yet did
Send Biggy but the business required
A heavy hand’s caress, some smarts – and blood.”
The piston in Lonne’s jaw devoured
The news fiercely – then froze his face as he inquired:

“But why…The Burgundy?” A seven-story
Red-brick affair, old as sin, the inn was built
By hands long-lost in graft’s deep pockets; hard
And fast and ramshackle to a fault –
It stood in comic pride, almost at a tilt.
Each room dirty with money’s satin sheets
And ghosting dirty looks from shades of guilt
Down in the crawling business of the streets
Prefigured shapes of darker days and lamp-lit nights.

By the blood-red of its own furnaced brick,
It was then rechristened – and not too long
After Peyton Cash had made specific
Arrangements to get its gain for a song:
The Singerman Arms, owned by Virgil Strong,
Became relinquished compensation for
Arrears to Frankie Music’s sturm und drang.
(Some say Strong’s coffered corpse still minds the store,
Inspiring the Cash brothers to filthier lucre.)

The brothers held court in the dingy nook
Behind the registration desk, itself
Bare but for a leather-bound ledger book
Spilling pages from a cracked spine, each leaf
Holding sacred secret history – no shelf
Of Shakespeare could story such confessions.
Biggy Lytlewood’s own tale had its life
Reserved in The Burgundy’s discrete lessons
Of quick columnar writ and dead letter questions.

“Lytlewood will be on the evening train,”
Said Peyton as he rolled a cigarette
With barely a pinch of weed stuck between
His fingers. “So I’d just as soon as bet
A pin as wage his train is coming late.”
In one motion he lit and took a drag,
Exhaling, “so… be… early.” And he let
The words – a heavy caution – hang like fog
In smoke between them. With no hope for epilogue

The falling silence bore up each second
The office clock was chipping off like ice.
“Sweet Jesus! Peyton – I hadn’t reckoned
We’d see Biggy’s ugly fox of a face
So soon after…after…” And he held his
Hands up – four digits apiece. Each lacked a thumb.
He’d submitted them, a small sacrifice
To Music’s men for dues to something dumb
Of Peyton’s doing: unpaid interest on a sum

Of loans to keep the Cashes’ solvent grasp
On Burgundy’s lease. “You’re going to hold
That on me ‘til death comes for my last gasp,
And no doubt after,” said Peyton. His cold
Sneer of fraternal hate only retailed
The wholesale hurt his brother tried to fling
At him with a wit he rarely revealed:
“You know, Peyton, there’s not a goddam thing
A man less than an ape can hope to be holding

At day’s end.” Sunlight, oily and urban,
Had seeped down through the city’s upper spheres
To bleed the hotel’s dirty blinds and span
Their gridlines across Lonnie’s face. Faint tears
Angered his grey eyes to black, and shudders
Of past pain held him a moment beyond
The surety of hatred the brothers
Made in compact, contracting like hot wind
From furnace lungs that waits for the tongue to expand.

But let’s now leave in uneasy conference
The brothers – unable to speak or know
Their own minds in confident alliance –
And further shape what will come tomorrow
By glancing back at yesterday’s afterglow:
See, already dawn ignites the daily lamp
A final time, should time alone allow,
For Mr. Biggy Lytlewood - his limp
And sleeping form begins to stir to life’s contretemps …

Epithalamium: Twenty-fourth Hour

2011-08-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

Oh, muse, did you call back to say you’re well?
My singing ends, I know, much too self-conscious -
Invoking music’s mirrors with selfish spells.
My friends, I run the risk of Narcissus,
But agitate his placid pool –
And pray this paltry poem's shallow puddles
Reflects the truth you’ve tapped with love in deeper wells.

Epithalamium: Twenty-third Hour

2011-08-17T13:38:00.000-07:00

Wisconsin is middle earth to a child;
Its intercessory night shines with light
Once day is put away – a treasury filled
With gold that keeps the promise of its weight
Long after the sun’s tabernacle door
Has closed, and long before
Night’s temple curtain falls, expanding time
And multiplying stars in dark divide
Allowing God’s reprieve – a prayer – to climb
The planes and angles of contemplation
As each constellation
Is held by beauty’s will. Let it be done:
As two souls join in revolution, conferred
In tight orbit around their nuptial word,
They give their starry multitude but one
Fixed house of heaven, one configuration
Incandescent as love – the mystical rose
Nature cannot see but knows to be the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Twenty-second Hour

2011-08-10T14:13:00.000-07:00

Well, look at the time. If we die alone
It’s justice that we should. The century
That passed has gone as deep and clear to bone,
And tells us to stifle, hush and bury
Our little homicides of heart and soul
Despite the yawning hole
That cannot be argued away. The child
Is deaf to sloganeering vitriol,
Knowing only life and love, both defiled
By minds divorced from heaven, wedding hell
To queered political
Predilections Cain possessed to murder
His brother’s duty, giving birth to rights
Without responsibility. Love waits,
Though, patient for assent from the mother
To receive mankind’s universal face
Fathered in time and space.
We do not die alone and we know this –
For death by nature cannot turn the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Twenty-first Hour

2011-08-05T09:36:00.000-07:00

The beauty of night is merely darkness
For those who never bother with the stars
Beyond the first – Lucifer nèe Venus,
A distant sun of indistinct desires
That serves as dusk’s out-riding fugitive.
Its light is meant to give
Some dim indication of sullen gloom.
But rising moon and fulgent stars contrive
To arbitrate the glory bride and groom
Will bless with seed and womb.
The moon resets her jewel within night’s crown;
Ascending, silver-throned, a queen who grants
These newest lovers light’s discrete romance,
And grave regard commingles with light renown,
Reflecting pools of joy with deeper joy.
The moon is love’s envoy
And magnifies the mysteries of darkness –
Which nature cannot solve without the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Twentieth Hour

2011-08-02T07:54:00.001-07:00

Peeper frogs intone a choired serenade,
A final refrain to hush the bonfires,
Last guests lingering in toadstool promenade,
Until each echo expires and retires
In search of rest with the imitation dead
Who take the night to bed.
The bride and groom, though, rise to their heaven,
Awake, alone, and led
Along candled corridors to a shrine
Of their making, where private hymns rehearse
Entwining wreath and thyrse,
And vows that made a debt are paid with pleasure.
So rain will fall to rescue wasted lands
From drought, and fuel the seedling’s green demands -
The swelling promise, a loving partner
In God’s creation, gift of soil and root,
From sprout to rigid shoot.
Imprisoned outer darkness knows but this –
Its nature can't be free without the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Nineteenth Hour

2011-07-21T09:55:00.002-07:00

At night yesterday’s nearer than tomorrow –
Perhaps because the sundown sadness of grief
Bristles chill against the skin, a sorrow
You own up to the way a summer leaf
Will blush and betray its autumn destiny
(The fall is sanctity
Writ large). The fading colors argue sleep…
And stars will blink their maps of unity
To brave the cries and whispers that would keep
Awake with unwarranted vigilance
The doubts that had long since
Been put to bed. This dark margin is slight
But draws out from hearts the poison of distance
And cradles moments that make the difference
Between passing hours and constant moonlight.
The moon wears her light like a wedding gown
And slowly dresses down
From sky to earth – and to what darkness is
Denied by its nature without the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Eighteenth Hour

2011-07-19T10:20:00.001-07:00

All day, the wit of wine and laughing friends
Were joy’s company on the sun’s journey.
But as these light things have their own ends,
Allow yourselves the means of intimacy –
A whisky bottle, cigarettes, a kiss
And roads to reminisce,
The country rides and city boulevards
Where public courtship serves love’s interstice.
Again, art assaults what modesty guards…
Original touches sing a sweet refrain –
On parched hearts, a soft rain;
The simple gesture casts a cooling shadow,
The kind that’s welcomed in desert places.
Such expressions appear as oases -
Amid empty eternities, they flow
With fertile faith and overspill with mirth
Because on all the earth
No other night unlocks the stars like this.
Indeed, the world’s dark nature finds no key of grace.

Epithalamium: Seventeenth Hour

2011-07-18T10:11:00.000-07:00

How brief the golden moment’s occasion
Before its passage into iron age…
The dew has put the pearl on day’s horizon.
Minting hill and field in rarity’s coinage,
Day pays its dues to night, its tax to peace,
Its rent to stars set loose
Within a pastured sky. A sad note more
Of merry tunes and good talk slips the crease
Of dooryard darkness, and fades out before
Spying evening creeps through western windows.
The descending dusk slows
Events and points up violets and nightshades –
A solitary vase arranged just so
Beside the bed where bride and groom go
To pay the mutual debt of maidenhead’s
Incorporation. Perfect honor rules
Their contract, more than jewels
And gold, though the tawdry world can't know this,
Its nature all out of tune with the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Sixteenth Hour

2011-07-01T06:31:00.001-07:00

The pastured cattle stomp for stanchions; sheep
At hilly intervals are clouds in green
Euphoria; both endure the tired creep
Of shadows that thread the remnant sunshine.
The moments mount a shadow’s blade of grass
And leave a bent sadness
Beneath every hoof print. The steps away
From night begin their count. The drowsy guests drink
As they have all day. The near heavens thank
Their host, this perfect day,
With early starlight from one that loves to make
Her presence known as harbinger of night.
The moon and Milky Way corral their light
In every window. Farmer’s hoe and rake
Can take their rest at last. The harvests wait
For plow to cultivate
Tomorrow’s fruit – what will come just to this –
That nature’s fertile soil turns by the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Fifteenth Hour

2011-06-28T10:39:00.000-07:00

At day's decline, we're all Pelagians;

We wind our clocks too tight. Supposing loss
Of creature, evening’s shade, we look across
The stark Manichean meridians
And hemispheres that helve the truth in two –
Our maps and minutes grow
As long as compass roses will. The feast’s
Time-honored guest, the bishop of Hippo,
Retraces autumn’s landscape, charting east’s
Determined west, the one that bridges sun
And sky. If there’s a sudden end to summer,
The season has its own patron father,
The sainted sinner whose confession won
The hour and still carries the day for brides:
No dark nor sea divides
The flesh – for love’s new land is found with this –
Nature’s compass – calibrated by the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Fourteenth Hour

2011-06-27T12:58:00.000-07:00

This day unseals the door to a hidden path
That brings you to a garden’s grafted branch,
Adopted vines that ripen fruit by oath
And, pouring pure from heart and vessel, quench
The thirst: the day is given memory
To speak with antiquity –
Like Greeks, we break fast with feast, splash drink with song,
And dance with laughter, leavening moiety
Of minutes into countless moments, feeding
Hilarity’s mind with frothy melody.
The crust of levity
Sops the soup of charm and saucy wit. The meat
Is celebration’s common cause: a dance
With the bride (the groom, accosted by aunts
And cornered by cousins, never gets to eat).
Like novice Bacchae, boys patrol, picking up
Neglected glass and cup
And down each, loathe to waste what comes to this –
That nature drinks its sunset song in the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Thirteenth Hour

2011-06-24T07:38:00.000-07:00

The twelfth bell chimes with the first “Oremus”
To signify that holy silence stays
The same for Isaac as for Lazarus –
And rattles in the rib-cage, in Adam’s case,
With eye to eye proposing heart to heart
To make complete the part
In her, in him, that would not die alone
If it could be helped. So lads might court
A princess, less to claim her mundane throne
And more to seat and crown her bridled hand
In eternity’s band
Of gold - and chronicles of flesh and kings
Might be condemned to realms of “Name & Date,”
But love’s alliance ratifies the state
By gratifying God’s own fiat of things –
The solemn quotidian of haunted saints
Who, watching, whisper hints
Which lover and beloved see as this –
That nature’s chamber opens with the key of grace….

Epithalamium: Twelfth Hour

2011-06-22T07:05:00.000-07:00

Philosophy unlocks the temple gates
That poetry paints in paneled pictures.
So theology ushers in with rites
The unity of alien natures:
Let nave and vestry breathe an air refined
By doctrine first defined
Upon the windy shores of Galilee;
Let shadows disappear, become confined
Within the noon’s well practiced liturgy.
Here, light is known again! Let God provide
Moriah’s mountainside
Another savage grace, a covenant
Of changed names once more promising offspring -
A summary of sand and stars accounting
The dividends in mystery’s own quotient.
Then close the gates and toll the steeple bell
To tell to all in hell
That the bond prevails today because of this –
Nature’s heart is locked in love by the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Eleventh Hour

2011-06-21T07:07:00.000-07:00

While woman’s rites are life’s passage, selfless
As sunrise – man produces art to find
Proper reference to himself. Her noblesse
Oblige defined, man finds his mate in mind
And body, wholly immolating self
To win a better half.
Thus woman’s soul will lead a man to feed
On tempered speech that hopes for love in faith.
His temple’s rooted in her maidenhead.
His stylus learns to speak her tablet wax
While both inscribe the text.
As poets find authentic depth and rule
Within the margins of whitest vellum,
So script is honed. Her love’s regular school
Improves his mind by its curriculum.
Yes, woman is sunrise and sunset, and man
Matriculates within
Her golden walls and campus to learn this –
That nature unlocks the truth with the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Tenth Hour

2011-06-20T10:09:00.001-07:00

Were we clever gods, we could take and make
Our songs of songs from fashioned battle-shield
And spear, with heads and limbs on barb and pike,
And love erotic as a battlefield.
If we could be bold to speak of conquest,
What soft breath would caress
The ears of doubt, surmounting lip and eyes
In body language silent tongues discussed
With prayer? We'd know a peace without disguise,
Collecting royalties
Where marriage country’s pastures, barns and fields
Hold pregnant harvest; the kingdom’s country mile
Holds court between the hayrick and round bale;
The plough’s yield holds back beaten swords' returns;
And God alone suffices in the wheat
That man takes and men eat
Piece by piece to know that peace is found in this –
That nature’s harmonized within the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Ninth Hour

2011-06-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

Presence of all color and its absence –
These are the principles of matrimony
That we dress between sixes and sevens,
And to the nines. So, the ceremony
Contributes flesh to words that spell and sound
A candid gown’s profound
Renunciation of anything less
Than love’s everything. But groom assumes his ground.
Declaring dark, his counterpoint’s address,
He dons a funeral suit this sober morning,
Joyfully informing
His death to the world in whole cloth and prayers
Offered in the sanctuary of a vow,
A promised place from which all graces flow,
A rock that issues manifest waters
And sets a desert spinning rainbow hues
That restless love pursues
In light and shade, both staked and claimed by this –
That nature dresses by the color key of grace.

Epithalamium: Eighth Hour

2011-06-16T07:08:00.000-07:00

Village weddings are complex affairs –
Most kindly described as “political.”
Once fiddlers get their pay, they'll put on airs
To quilt the planks with quadrille, waltz and reel,
And play the summer chimneys from their swallows,
Dead men from their gallows,
And old folk back to darling dreams of youth.
The fife, the bohdran, squeezebox and banjos
Rouse “The Mad Buckgoat” to jigs, and tell truth
To “Priest in His Boots” with “Aileen Aroon”
To dance up “A Scot’s Tune.”
The farmer boys hum them all, running apace
From graveyard to church steps, except today
A holy hush recalls them from their play…
They blush dumb with looks to see the bride’s face,
Prepared at last, bouquet for anchor, fast
And firm before a last
Glance to the choir loft where voice joins voice to this
That sings to find its nature by the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Seventh Hour

2011-06-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

Midmorning tea and toast with marmalade
Will bolster bride and groom against a rampage
Of taffeta and tuxes; snakes to braid;
Slacks to press; and hangovers to manage –
White noise of detail, white heat of minutiae
(A great-great-aunt’s fuchsia
Pantsuit provokes the bride to sudden tears) –
Such lapses are the comic lacunae
Which stuff the pillow full of talk for years
And show how the sun's sacramental rise
Can cast all enterprise
In half a shadow, man’s own breaks and faults.
But swelled to hear the weather’s good report,
These hurricanes at loose ends fly apart
And calm falls like wind on water. Time halts.
The bride is rising to the occasion
Without hesitation.
Her heart’s red-letter day finds her peace in this –
That human nature’s voice can reach the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Sixth Hour

2011-06-09T10:32:00.000-07:00

Forgive the intrusion – I imagine
This morning like love’s first day, wide awake
For Eve to give her sinless eyes to creation,
Her temple’s tapers conning Eden’s book
To learn its joys before the fruits of sadness
Queered her into Venus,
And marred men into warring, whoring gods.
Today, though, fruit's made wine, the wine is choice,
And well-stocked this day of hours. So, fused bloods
Supply a sharing cup, cohere like flesh –
Restoring Adam's wish
To inherit everything names can speak;
Adorning Eve - her old glories return,
A harvest borne in leaner years, reborn
Through primrose promise, labor’s golden yoke.
So now you’re wide awake
To mix your sweat and blood - they come to this
When linking natures grasp and turn the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Fifth Hour

2011-06-08T09:29:00.001-07:00

The birds that lose their winged self in song
Build their nest from a phoenix melody.
In God’s blue beard, they tangle up their song
With psalms that pinion clay’s theogony
And let earth rise to survey time’s estate:
Aurora married late
Or Tithonus too early, but the birds
Prefer perforce to kindle their own light.
The poets are clever to feather words
(Hardy darkened his century with a thrush
And Shelly sought to rush
His lark through gravity’s legislation),
But these are solitary fictions of
Lost hearts. Today, we look for David’s dove,
Like Keats’ midnight minstrel, lost in translation,
But raised to salvation
By eagle’s wings and robin’s throat for this –
That nature sings up morning in the key of grace.

Epithalamium: Fourth Hour

2011-06-07T08:26:00.000-07:00

With snake-like charm, the Kickapoo meanders
The driftless virginity of Wisconsin;
This place which faced the stare-down of glaciers
Remains geology’s lode and touchstone.
The tannic river mellows morning’s mint
And gives a golden hint
To sunlight’s fuller karat. There’s a ring
Of lichen on every pine – promises meant
To be kept by time. The seasons bring
Their own gifts to your marriage, and the land
Gives your own promise ground –
Surprising bluffs aproned in shady green shaws.
The fields raise up suddenly all there – then
Drop to valleys of morning mist where crows
Are calling, rusty, raw,
Carving cold through fog, giving voice to this –
That antiphonic nature scales the keys of grace.

Epithalamium: Third Hour

2011-06-06T07:57:00.001-07:00

Indicative bees punctuate fields, fed
On sunlight’s imperative, becoming force
Enough to tender rain’s subjunctive mood...
Might there be an interrogative universe
Without love? The answers are in full flower,
Deep among the clover
Cropped up, nodding to August's morning sun –
Purling petaled heels with names: Virgin’s Bower
Borders day with Canada-Columbine
And Dame’s Rocket shoots her perennial works
Along wood’s edge where Flax
Is patching Dutchman’s Breeches and weaving
The Touch-Me-Nots to tease the Nipplewort;
Forget-Me-Not is Adder’s-Mouth’s retort
To Lamb’s Quarters and Pearly Everlasting.
But Jack-in-the-Pulpit’s sermon summons us
To Grass-in-Parnassus:
“Gather bouquets and boutonnières for this –
That nature best pronunciation key is grace.”

Epithalamium: Second Hour

2011-06-03T09:55:00.000-07:00

Wisconsin is middle earth to a child
Where cock’s crow breaks upon a day, excused
For putting night away – a memory filed
For later. For now, the first light, diffused
Amid the woods, shakes dreams from crotch and limb
To saunter off to tomb
And toy box. Today is a day for brides,
For men to man the clocks at sunlight’s climb
From earth’s coffin-lid. At such times time glides
Through house and hall like wafting coffee’s strength;
And labor’s heft and length
Are measured shadows swallowed up by noon.
By second cups of morning, though, you wake
To courtship’s end. From now on you will take
Just enough sugar to sweeten your spoon
Of cream as light will join
This day that gives itself. It comes to this –
Nature opens up its light with the key of grace.

Epithalamium: First Hour

2011-06-02T14:12:00.000-07:00

(after Spenser )

For Omar and Miriam: August 28, 2004,
Feast of St. Augustine of Hippo

…strong nerves are an advantage
and accurate wrist-watches too
can be a great help.
-W.H. Auden

It used to be you could call up a muse
And laugh a while; or cry in the same breath
To think another, less faithful, would refuse
To comment on the marriage of life and death –
Antony gulled by Cleopatra’s asp,
Heaving breasts, a last gasp.
The modern muse phones in her funeral wreath
With a voice vodka-curried to a rasp.
It used to be Greeks owned heaven and earth
And wedded the twin realms for οἰ πολλοί
In pleasure's coupled joy.
This day, though, sisters replace muses to serve
Greens, breads, meats – all brought in well-wrought vessels.
My friends, marriage never fights, but wrestles
To find its comic feasts. These days, the nerve
You need the tragic graces hold in reserve.
So I pray this poem comes just to this –
That nature sings best when tuned to the key of grace.

Epilogue

2011-04-15T14:04:00.000-07:00

In the beginning was the word…

Carl von Linne had changed his name in time
Arriving much as Abram did at Ab-
Raham, lord of kingdoms, families, and phylum,
Leaving order and to each class a job:
Vindicating Adam’s utter Babel
Of general sinfulness with special grace.
Note Abram’s stamen and Sarah’s pistil:
Love is the word at root that’s left their trace.
Incarnated in each renewed season,
Nativity thus digs for its own dying.
Now, too, these numbered names have sounded song
Even as Eve’s woman joins Adam’s man –

Justifying the names of everything –
Creatures deeded God’s creative dominion.

Zingiber & Zinnia

2011-04-07T14:10:00.000-07:00

Carry my bones with you out of this place.

Zingiber, you edge the east of history
In the cornucopia of your root,
Navigating empire, traversing spice route,
Gaining universal appeal – this story
Is your real horn of plenty: medieval
Belief would see the source of your descent
Exalted in Edenic exodus, sent,
Reprieved and rescued far east of evil.

Zinnia, you edge the west of mystery…
In the asterix of your desert bloom
New worlds of color set their suns in starry
Nativity: Cortez among las mariposas,
In God’s garden plot he saw Adam
Add Joseph's name to the new genesis.

Zizyphus Jujuba

2011-04-04T13:48:00.000-07:00

…he drew up his feet upon the bed, and died.
And he was gathered to his people.

Zizyphus jujuba, your fruit is born
In infant innocence, nestled within
Zion’s crowning hills – a tender flesh to thorn,
You yoke your destiny to the branch of men.
Passions dulled by your fruit, the Lotus Men
Hibernate in dreams, eschewing your thorn,
Undulating in a slow reign within
Souls that die to life and live to be born.

Jacob nominated death’s land at last,
Ushering in the end of the beginning
Just as Adam brought Eden’s conclusion
Under the guise of fruit with thorn that would last
Beyond his children’s fathers by beginning
A generation without conclusion.

Yam & Yarrow Root

2011-03-25T13:48:00.001-07:00

The blessings of thy father are strengthened
with the blessings of his fathers:
until the desires of the everlasting hills should come.

Yams are hunked with earth and hold with nothing sweet,
Although essentially blessed as blood, these boiled
Medicinals that mean to eat at root
Something sown from meaning made manifold:

Yarrow root will reproduce a white flower,
And love loves me not, but withers and drops;
Reproduce another, though, it bleeds fire –
Random as straws dropped in total collapse.

Oracular as itching, yarrow heals
Wounds – the way yams absorb earth’s properties –
Rubbing raw Trojan feet hot on the heels
Of fortune, cooling heels like Achilles’.

Our fathers wear such everlasting crowns,
Their hills topped by chance, blessed by Providence.

Yellowwood & Yew

2011-02-23T10:24:00.000-08:00

…and taking his father’s hand
he tried to lift it from Ephraim’s head…

Yellow woods array in patterns that repeat,
Entangling brittle-branched zigzags of limbs
Lost in familiar double-crosses, split
Like lineages. At issue, the names
Of cladrasis: the older lutea
Withdrawn as merely colored circumstance,
While golden heartwood finds kentuckea
Observe a land of stated permanence.

Old Jacob rested life, thus, his wrestling hands
Declaring Ephraim before Manassas –
Selecting Joseph’s second-born son as
Yews choose to eulogize: each bough depends
Earthward, piercing graveyard flesh, wintered bones
Withdrawn as Yahweh’s own death-interred bones.

Xmas Rose (Christ Herbe)

2011-02-17T14:02:00.000-08:00

Behold as you see, both you and your lands
belong to the Pharao. Take seed and sow the fields.

X-mas rose infiltrates Lenten gardens,
Making Christmas unwind Easter’s rebirth
And torture expectations with silence –
Such are the seasons still beneath the earth.

Rising late, you’re early enough to last
Our winter’s cracked and cankered calendar.
Slowly your striking petals break the fast
Eternity’s observed in time’s empire.

X too marks the garden spot where sorrow bore
Her benefice. Time’s famine brought her low
Evoking flowers from tears. A tiny hand
Reached for, drawing up the black hellebore,
Beholding gifts received with debts to owe,
Enriching Joseph’s seed with promised land.

Xmas Berry Trees

2011-02-11T13:50:00.000-08:00

God sent me before you into Egypt
for your preservation…

X-mas berry trees take the world by storms,
Moving through mango groves and everglade,
Ahead of hurricane’s surging tide –
Successfully florid in invasive terms.

But before this Hollywood berry came,
Emaciated winter, withering thin,
Remembered its December with famine,
Recusing claims to true a new land’s name.

Youth’s fountain ages with each season’s promise.
Thus Ponce De Leon’s Pascua Florida
Renews its tropic tropes with yuletide flora.

Each storm warning blows with signs of Christmas
Endowing violence with nativity –
So Joseph’s virtues weathered sovereignty.

White Horehound

2011-01-31T13:39:00.000-08:00

I thy servant will stay instead of the boy
in the service of my lord...

White horehound bodes a bitter exodus.
Horizon-bound and slave to winter’s ease,
It sees itself the hair shirt of Horus,
Tickling scythe’s demand for easy excuse….

Easy, too, Pharaoh steadies hand and heart,
Hovering over herbs’ biting leaves to hold
Osiris purged in vase and set apart,
Reversing a Jew bought with a Jew sold.

Egypt embedded horehound with importance –
Half the time in hope; in faith to make a guess
Otherwise. So blood takes its fill of sins,
Urging dawn to bloom the day with darkness.

Now bitter as an herb, poor Juda says,
“Death’s my brother the day another dies.”

Wisteria & Walnut Tree

2011-01-28T13:27:00.000-08:00

“Is this your young brother,
of whom you told me?”

Wisteria, the first and last, always
Invades the trellis, pergola and wall –
Succoring selfish suckers with clustered sprays
That, dripping fragrance, fatally strangle
Envied forests of their eastern light: Zi ten
Remands its vanity; each vein-blue vine
Intertwining weathers, bruised blue with rain,
A German tongue-storm that lashes blaue regan.

Walnut trees thus bear up the nuts of Zeus
And hang down in lusty strains of godhead…
Love speaks all languages nevertheless,
Neglecting neither native tongue nor blood,
Underwriting Joseph as the alien
To transcribe Israel’s love for Benjamin.

Violet and Veronica

2011-01-14T10:25:00.000-08:00

And the third day he brought them out of prison
and said, Do as I have said
and you shall live, for I fear God.

Violet, Father Zeus had splayed your purple
In Io’s sorrow, violating her way,
Obliging her to eat your life. Each footfall,
Left you cowed with bruised inconstancy,
Eliciting your obedient grief
To flee a passing god’s momentous might.
Veronica, though, hard pain’s high relief,
Expressed with easy petals a complete
Redress of sorrow’s portrait, facing God –
Obedience, her sunlight’s own reward,
Now again is bearing victory’s return.
In a similar passage, Joseph stored
Corn and kine, restoring Egypt’s common good,
And freed his brothers from their hungry scorn.

Viburnum and Viscum

2011-01-13T07:31:00.000-08:00

And he turned his name,
and called him in the Eyptian tongue,
The saviour of the world.

Viburnum takes its own wayfaring way
In earnest, honest in fen, field or farm,
Burgeoning arrow-true or queered to stray
Unencumbered by season, soil or worm.
Regaled as moments turn with burning suns –
Now hot and high in June, now low and cold
Until November’s trimmed orbit – at once
Met everywhere and everywhere exiled.

Viscum, another such broadcast outcast,
Interprets seasons – intertwines them with myth:
Sticking to sleep’s twiggy limbs, mistletoe’s curled
Confusions kiss around the cursed and blessed
Until Joseph cursed his journey, blessed his wealth,
Met a pharaoh, and dreamed to save the world.

Umbrella Flower

2011-01-12T07:27:00.000-08:00

"The Hebrew servant thou hast brought,

came to me to abuse me."

Umbrella flower, shut within your throat,
Myriad hues await release once spring
Became a captive word, stripped of its coat,
Rendered mute by winter’s wasted making.
Eventually your umbels fall away
Like timbered standards. Still, you would maintain
Legions against a late October’s day
And hold your ground among the autumn slain.

Flowered doctrine leaves a signatory note
Like Adam’s apple choking off the tongue.
Of course, your yawning parasols can cure
Whatever starves the year: by spring your song
Endures the lies that swallowed Putiphar –
Revealing truths that stuck in Egypt’s throat.

January: "If Once You Have Slept on an Island"

2011-01-11T07:34:00.000-08:00

If you wish to avoid foreign collision, you had better abandon the ocean.
-Henry Clay

If once you have slept on an island
You'll never be quite the same…
-Rachel Field

If once you have slept on an island, new
With year, and January’s doorways, windows
Opened out past the beach, in past the curtains,
Then you know how even in sleep the sea
Ceaselessly commutes, surrounding each day
With surf's squared-off epiphany at your door.
You wake and drown in garnets at sunrise,
Awake in cool dampness beneath the sheets,
Missing what it said, but certain of the voice –
That same dampness which whispered you to sleep.
Then you’ll have found this blue and green island
Which surrounds you, split in your eye, sundering
Your time, bringing each weekend on the wind.
From the edge of your bed, edge of the world,
You hear oceans pegging down your corridors
Of slate-grey morning. Here, the faint odor
Of last night’s cooked sole hangs like gentle
Aftermath, and lost quests for old romance
Surge past bluest dreams, creak with the floor joists,
And hiss in the dune grass under the porch...
Thirty-one days hath your island. An un-
Even split – against the shoals on which you dream:
Where it is always winter and the beaches
Always filling with cries, gulled and echoless;
Where departures and arrivals are all the same,
All run to one featureless promontory
Spied from the ferry, and your heart races
Every time you return, each time you go –
And scrub oak and snarled patches of pine find
The primal cling of anticipation’s root
To bald outcrops of rock – old as the new year.

December: "Ice Storm, Maine"

2011-01-10T08:58:00.000-08:00

There is something about winter
which pares things down to their essentials
a bare tree
a black hedge
hold their own stark throne in our hearts.
-Moya Cannon

I
- “Maine always takes place in an ice storm, like an animal revolting against itself...”
- You say to me as two unpaired, wind-scrubbed crows outside our window pick along the fresh-packed tundra of harbor scenes: prosaic villages sidewalks, yards and streets, rendering the year in its annual arrears, thinned out, now thinner still, the only tension found kissing at the heart’s one and only breaking-point, white fields piling up with winter’s paperwork, untended, waiting.
- We turn back to our tea.
- The business on the table is packages and overspent budgets like public confessions rolling out toward the frayed ends of ribbons and scraps of wrapping paper – shavings from a golden bough.
- But another glance outdoors as I churn amber with my spoon:
- Inky in character, each crow, a black pearl harboring icy onslaught in its eye, casts its cares toward a more corvine heaven....
- A murder beyond the pine row; a singular black drill sergeant warding the day on toward the cold country's parade grounds…..
- Cradled in snow drifts, black plumage strikes against the snow (opened-ended parentheses in winter’s paragraphs...

II
And in day’s continuous count down, the December sun’s
Low feast of lights trims back old New England
And her long year’s immoderate growth
To that pure Monhegan island
Of January rock - as if paring away
The isolation of our winter
To the waiting arms of discontent.

III
Waiting. We are waiting now too. So, we wait.
That’s the poor trick we’re learning lately,
As history secretly fashions a cold night
Into the mystery-image of snow’s god
Who falls again to earth, and dead grass
Conceals a cold god in winter solstice,
Discovering simple solace in an ice storm.

IV
And you think again to speak against these rookish souls,
Daring to tease out their cyclic devotion to sacred time)
As if Christmas is not the beginning of the end for death
But only revision of purpose, a return to household chores.
So the year rolls on ignorantly toward sanctuary’s end
But we remain haunted by our bodies, unable to escape
The holy tension of present time, indivisible by years, months or days
Even as the heavens' turquoise crown of stars these last few nights
Is all holocausts -a solemn reaching down with northern lights.

Umbrella Plants

2011-01-07T10:48:00.000-08:00

Why is the partition divided for thee?

Umbrella plants in somber autumn’s room
Mistake themselves for ancient furniture,
But mean to mirror seasons' more secure
Reassurances – how summers resume
Endlessly in squat terra cotta pots.
Leaves that rise will fall. A shadow’s life sustained
Leavens daylight’s entrances – as unfeigned
And inevitable as our own exits.
Pre-possessive creatures, we make our terms
Lie in dusty corners, sheltered in fear.
As we look at death, though, – its cold room confirms
Nature's not potted like a plant – no more
Than Thamar’s womb, enclosing Juda’s house,
Sought to thin the blood of her father-spouse.

Tidy Tips & Tulips

2010-11-16T13:26:00.001-08:00

As soon as he came to his brethren,

they forthwith stript him of his outside coat,

that was of divers colors.

Tidy tips are California’s response
In usual variables, to the manic
Daisies’ uniform stare. Their colors sense
Yesterday. Tomorrow’s their dramatic
Touch condensed in present dreams, magnified
In summer’s evening – autumn’s even more.
Prepared to fall, each flat-tongued tip is tied,
Strung up by dreams that harvest will not bear.

Tulips' pursed lips are soft knots of cordage,
United contraband that's been betrayed
Like Joseph. Sold by envy’s mad demands
In nether-markets, such grist supplied
Pharoah’s cattle futures with ample silage
Secure against folly's random trade winds.

Trembling Aspen

2010-11-09T14:18:00.001-08:00

Then Esau ran to meet his brother,
and embraced him;
and clasping him fast about the neck,
and kissing him, wept.

Trembling aspen’s woodlands crisp their whisper-
Rejoicing leaves like tongue of fire. Each wags
Epiphany’s indelicate clatter,
Multiplying root to crown with bit flags,
Bestirring sovereign stands against biting
Licks of frost and fire. Strengthened by travail
In one and many by incorporating
Nature’s paradox, their patterns prevail.

Growing in faith determined at Esau’s heel,
And in his new name asserted, Israel gained
Something of the trembling sound that aspens
Pronounce – refined by wind and redefined,
Embracing God and brother, born to heal
Nations proclaimed out of flaming catkins.

St. Dabeoc's Heather

2010-11-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

I was a fasted pilgrim,
light-headed, leaving home
to face into my station.
– Seamus Heaney

And Jacob came to Socoth:
Where having built a house, and pitched tents,
he called the name of the place Socoth, that is, Tents.

St. Dabeoc’s heath blankets ben and bog,
Thick and grey as a monk’s hood. Dawn’s faint blush
Daubs the day with druid prayer stroking each crag,
And stone crops out by nature’s broadened brush.
But ageless Dabeoc pitched his mission tents
Everywhere to shade over pagan tones
Of low and highlands, graced with crimson tint
Conveying Lough Derg’s island-stationed stones.

So Jacob’s spontaneous booths and altars
Hallowing the hollow ground around Salem
Eventually canvassed the land of Canaan
And his pilgrim steps painted – from Adam
To Abraham to gospel’s glossed margin –
Hinted shroud’s lament in his tented psalters.

Strawberry Tree

2010-11-04T11:05:00.001-07:00

Thy name shall not be called Jacob but Israel:
For if thou hast been strong against God
How much more shalt thou prevail against men?

Strawberry tree, your fruit’s a second draft
Traducing original sweetness. (The rank
Response on tongue and tooth becomes the graft
Arbutus grasps to its sinewy trunk.)
Wrestling weather’s bitter angels, standing fast
By water’s edge, your unbudging form storms
Eire’s shores but leaves shadeless the English coast,
Revising landscape in religious terms.

Ruddy as blood, outlasting autumn’s length,
Your yield, unyielding to even one taste,
Transubstantiates old sweetness into new strength:
Relentless hands will bite a brother’s heel,
Embracing lust, holding God fast and chaste –
Embodied thus, Jacob's rooted soul is real.

Rush, Reed, Rue & Rye

2010-11-03T10:14:00.000-07:00

“Bring hither stones…”
And they gathering stones together
made a heap, and they ate upon it.
And Laban called it, The witness heap:
and Jacob, The hillock of testimony:
each of them according to the propriety of his language.

Rush and reed would grow to make common cause
Under cover of sensibility
Shared out in the dry sounds that sing a breeze
Heaping harvest’s joy on sheer utility.

Reed and rush would part ways at cutting time,
Each to thatch, caulk, stretch, stitch, bind, rule, report,
Each in its own way, in each its own name,
Discounting discord with waddled rapport.

Rue and rye, though, make a separate peace
Urgent as Jacob and Laban to seed
Evidence of enjoyment beyond use –

Rye and rue, bread of life and herb of grace,
Your bitter loaves heaped-up at Gilead
Engender some sweeter bread to suffice.

Rehderodendron

2010-11-02T08:31:00.000-07:00

Send me away
that I may return into my country,
and to my land.

Rehderodendron, ball-pointed, petalled,
Embroiders nature’s simple page of white –
Hack-turned-nom-de-bloom Alfred Rehder scrawled
Deep for words to dig for weeds and wrote,
Empty-paged and ear to earth, all he heard
Resounding pen with spade. He found the land
Of taxonomy fertile, by weed and word
Discovering names in each Edenic find.
Even now, he survives silence’s seasoned
Nomenclature. Home was his arboretum,
Defining deliverance, and his God
Rooted nature just as Rachel had
Obtained for Joseph a holy freedom
Neither father nor pharaoh could withstand.

November: "Other Voices"

2010-11-01T12:56:00.000-07:00

A tedious season they await
Who hear November at the gate.
-Alexander Pushkin

All saintly, grown half-way from learned girlhood
To full wilt of soul which womanhood achieves,
You jacket life in shocked piping, sullen mood.

One hand’s at time’s doorknob; the other believes
Entrancing exits of a drafty year
Elect what remnants your future receives.

But making progress nor egress, you fear
November is your last chance to induce
The autumn to harvest a fallen tear.

Because you have little time to bemuse
Your heart to handle what has gone before,
You can’t claim grief’s nor candor’s old excuse –

Yet, as the story goes, love was your bete-noir
Foretold as bad weather; and love, the friend
You did not want but could not avoid, the war

Both cold and soft, undeclared yet convened;
A beautiful waking to dawn’s topaz light
But dark betrayal too – the only godsend

You’d had. This month, dressed black to the nines, you might
Make a breakthrough – moving from grey distances
To open spaces where autumn’s geese take flight

In songs of thanksgiving. Other entrances
Replace their exit, other voices fill
Your head. Meanwhile your mourning enhances

That day the phone choked your heart: “We found him... still…
Half his head gone...His hunting rifle close
Beside him...Eyes more certain than futile... “

His love had grown strong; and now his seed tries
To grow as strong within your grief as blood,
To groan from month to month with smothered cries.

Queen Anne's Lace

2010-10-19T11:38:00.000-07:00

The Lord saw my affliction,

Now my husband will love me.

Queen Anne’s Lace shrivels up like a bird’s nest
Under summer’s final drum beat: the spring
Equinox has cast its long-stemmed shadows west.
Evening stirs a cold fingered breeze, touching
Night’s rooted constellations of wild carrot
Adrift in hilltop fields, an adroitly sewn
Nebula of patterned blooms to bear what
Nebulous myths would ring a bleeding queen’s crown,
Eavesdropping Ariadne’s web-stitched finesse –
So pain’s preventive, knit by God within
Leah’s womb, was Israel’s first limb, named Rueben,
Announcing Yahweh’s landscape of largesse,
Christened sterile sin’s quickened antidote:
Elected lead thread of Joseph’s parti-coat.

Quercus & Quince

2010-10-12T13:32:00.001-07:00

But Lia was blear-eyed;
Rachel was well favored,
And of a beautiful countenance.

Quercus endures. This singular sentence
Understates oak’s hard beauty, its late bounty
Embedding lofty reach in eminence.
Rachel, too, would reach late and offer plenty
Ceded so to Jacob but held off by
Uncle Laban’s wether-proofed endurances –
Striking deep in Jacob’s grain – a taste of why
Quinces first soured the tongues of Eden's princes:
Undulate branches worked in ugly gnarls
Intimate cankered Adam’s rotten shame,
Nurturing Rachel’s sweetness from Lia’s blear
Conceptions: God came upon each daughter
Enlarging twelve-fold a picked orchard’s fame –
Sustaining it, root to fruit, all Israel’s.

Pansy, Paris Herb & Pink

2010-10-08T13:21:00.000-07:00

And he saw in his sleep a ladder standing upon the earth
and the top thereof touching heaven;

the angels also of God ascending and descending by it…

Pansy, everywhere your sprout is recalled,
A promised thought renewed in remembrance,
Nodding your head at dawn and dusk, you build
Stems up for an Olympian entrance;
You yawn your face at sun and moon, the same
Paris basks its herb-proffered whorls in, twinned leaves
Arching rung by rung up the air. Its stem
Rise above Himalayan slopes, it saves
Itself, high and rare, in God’s divine air
Soaking the sun’s rise and set with the very
Pink and meat of dreams. So Pinks too cut their
Incarnate teeth on day’s divinity,
Numbered among an avalanche of envoys’
Καιρός! – ΧΡ! in endless alleluias.

Plumbago & Pawpaw

2010-10-04T13:30:00.000-07:00

It was the will of God
that what I sought
came quickly in my way.

Plumbago, what eye has not seen your bloom
Laze along a hill, lighter than the lead
Unearthed in ancient pipe that sluiced your name,
Misleading as Jacob kidding with kid’s hide?
Blind old Isaac believed the things that seem
And died of heartbreak the moment his shade
Grew beyond illusion’s moment in time –
Oblique as leadwort blueing a hillside.

Pawpaw echoes the same native neglect
As named, it can trick out true papaya
With syllabics like a mess of derelict
Pottage such as cleverly bought Esau
At cost to eat a la carte his birthright -
Won by Jacob with Isaac’s appetite.

October: “Pumpkinhead”

2010-10-01T13:13:00.000-07:00

What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?
- Doris Lessing

“No, my brothers, my sisters, some kiss to kill a pumpkin’s
Full moons or boyishly kick them to shattered shards -
Some young things which take crepe and cardboard for skins
To make out pirate hats, robot heads and leopards,
Hold ghostly linen poses and suppose one’s dead kin’s
Plot thickens them in their white-picketed grave yards. . . “
¤
It is October in October country, where
A preachy preacher preaches
With black fashions and a darkly held air
On why God fell for his creatures
And why the Fall is all too cold and rare
For Jack-O’s lantern-jawed features
Too long fermenting in his own sugar.

Here are time’s border lands, where perhaps a pheasant
Will stick its garrishly-ringed neck
From beyond the woods, bejeweled crescent
In quick, flightless, tremulous trek
Through the hunter-harried air, chill, pleasant,
Demanding an awful respect
For mercury’s merciful fall and dissent.

But forget it, Pastor Pumpkinhead. Make the Fall
As darkly, grotesquely comic
As you want, the door in the garden wall
Rusts fast with frost and still will stick
On the hinges of justice – so we all
Retain enough skull flesh to prick
Even consciences rendered skeletal.
¤
“. . .And so, daylight saves its ends like straw fired in paraffin
Replacing a clergy’s empty head inside a pumpkin
For the hollowed-out evenings before every Halloween
To ignite the night with a jagged, opal-fired grin. “

Orchid & Onychium

2010-09-29T13:37:00.001-07:00

Immediately the other coming forth,
held his brother’s foot in his hand…

Orchids hold humanity in rapt regard,
Repaying woman’s steady fondling gaze,
Collecting on man’s madness for beauty, starred
High in botany’s soiled paradise.
Informing roots, the living principle hangs
Down, the same that for eons delivered
Onychium - with fern’s primeval wings
Nesting prehistoric forests’ green-feathered
Yields. Like Isaac, this simple scion breeds
Complexity in opposition. From
Heir to son, crooked stem forever flowers
In air and sun that know no fall, seeds
Under earth until the spores of death’s powers
Make decay the fertile ground for kingdom come.

Oso Berry & Ostrya

2010-09-21T06:45:00.000-07:00

He that came forth first was red,
And hairy like a skin…

Oso berry, bitter tasting but good food-
Stuff for bearing winter’s summary of dreams.
Offered first fruits of spring, by June imbued
Blue and ripe with meat. These Indian plums
Elevate spring’s time to place. Their almond scent
Reveals a sweet lure – a cyanide trace
Redolent as the effort to supplant
Yahweh’s sweetest word with dumb bitterness.

Ostrya, your iron wood serves to suit
Steel’s sharpened ax blade, its handle hewn to hew
Trunk of your trunk – such is wood’s irony.
Rebekah’s silent spring thus summered plenty;
Yahweh gave Isaac Jacob plucking Esau -
A bitter blessing bearing doubled fruit!

New Zealand Flax

2010-09-17T08:01:00.001-07:00

And they digged in the torrent
and found living water.

New Zealand flax embodies the text for
Evening’s glow: like a match head’s spaded flame
Woven into dark, it spreads its texture,
Zealous to burn, beyond the stars. The same
Entreats the swingle’s blade, heckling whole cloth
A gathered netting of exotic clades.
Loosely to equivocate such tangled kith
And kin, there the linen’s weave still abides.

Naturally sourced, Isaac’s vested claims will last,
Drawn tight as names of wells that spill salvation
Forming his challenge and opposition –
Like flaxen fibers after being doused
And ret for choicest fabrics, fought for among
Xenophobic tribes, and knit seamlessly strong.

Neolitsea (White Bolly Gum Tree) & Nyssa (Black Gum Tree)

2010-09-15T10:47:00.001-07:00

“My immortal life is on the point of beginning.”
– last words of St. Andrew Kim Taegon (1821-1846) patron saint of Korea,
martyr and first native born Roman Catholic priest in Korea.
He was tortured and beheaded near Seoul on the Han River.

And he digged again other wells
which the servants of his father Abraham had digged…

Neolitsea, the Hermit Kingdom's
Evangelist, your trinitarian
Overtures are Godhead’s triumph: each leaf’s vein
Leaving wholly holy white bolly gums.

Insular peninsula, Korea
Tortures itself with the blood of martyrs:
Seven years within its silent borders –
Every bit a sign as neolitsea -

Andrew Kim and friends found there world without end.
Nyssa, too, roots destiny to origins;
Yellow and negligible, its bloom begins
Small, but with room to let its limbs expand –

So Isaac resurrected Abram's wadi
And there grew the names on God’s family tree.

2010-09-14T09:13:00.000-07:00

...Abimelech himself said to Isaac:
Depart from us, for thou art become
Much mightier than we.

Marsh pennywort will pay out dividends
As it multiplies interest, its coin-
Rounded leaves dangle thin purse-strings for fronds,
Spreading the inflation of its foreign green,
Hard currency in wetland’s liquid time,
Precious specie preponderating pond
Economies in an aggressive scheme
Necessarily blessed because so fecund.

Now, Abimelech paid out the price of pride
Yammering on about Isaac’s teeming hoard.
What worried him was how fluid the coins
Of the realm devalued in this Hebrew brood.
Renowned as bad pennies, they seemed prepared
To issue greener species from Isaac’s loins.

Magnolia & Myrtle

2010-09-10T09:20:00.000-07:00

And the servant told Isaac all that he had done.
Who brought her into the tent of Sara his mother;
and took her to wife. And he loved her so much,
that it moderated the sorrow which was occasioned by his mother’s death.

- for Lindsay Godsbody

"Magnolia, ur-flower, were you there
Around the greening time of God’s own thumb,
Growing between good and evil, and life or
Nihil, prolocutor to each of them,
Or did your gaudy bloom’s magnificence,
Left-over emblem of Adam’s excess,
Intend to play at sin’s defective instance?"
Asked the good that life was bearing witness...

Myrtle, meanwhile, bears its burden of love’s
“Yes” in life’s tangled weave with such fragrant
Rogations that nature plays the servant
To God and man alike. To each it gives
Living proof that love can grow abundant –
Easing grief in blessed Rebekah’s alcoves.

Lenten Rose and Lily

2010-09-08T13:21:00.001-07:00

And [Rebecca] said to the servant:
Who is that man cometh towards us along the field?
And he said to her: That is my master.
But she quickly took her cloak and covered herself.

Lenten rose, your blooms are a tree of wounds,
Ever to green spring’s badge of splendor.
No thorns demanding blood, you take to hands
Too easily, unabashed by candor,
Entreating summer sunlight to embark
Now over soil’s unbuttoned furrows
Replete with shadows - now to raise the work
Of bread and days. A fielded figure narrows
Sight, his hard eyes curse the sweat of sun and dust.
Evening soothes what noon’s blistered hours bleach
Lily-white. Caravans of cool winds crest
Isaac’s soul as love’s slower hooves approach
Like anticipation’s growing susurrus –
Yielding God in lily-veiled hosannas.

Leucothoe and Larch

2010-09-07T08:58:00.000-07:00

ille ferox inmansuetusque precantem
tendentemque manus ad lumina Solis.... - Ovid, Metamorphoses IV.237-238

An exceedingly comely maid, and a most beautiful virgin,
and not known to man: and she went down to spring
and filled her pitcher and was coming back. - Gen. 24:16

Leucothoe, your sunny death is life
Espoused beneath a fragrant, lyric sky.
Ubiquitous yet bashful as your grief,
Clustered like tears, your blossoms modestly
Open, little by little drawing life,
Taken from heaven’s rain-swollen sky.
Happiness stems from the same green as grief,
Obliging doghobble to modesty
Even as it carpets summer with mountain
Larch – ruling forests with Homeric simile.
A promise green or dry, the larch archly
Recalls the servant come back to Haran
Chasing down a virgin whose water jars
Hold an eternity of sand and stars.

King Cup and Knautia

2010-09-02T14:11:00.001-07:00

I am a stranger and a sojourner among you;
give me the right of a buryingplace with you,
that I may bury my wife.

Kingcup quaffs its draughts of sun and rain
In cordial measures. Left flush, it fulfills,
Nodding off until time became Britain,
Gilding swamp and marsh with burgeoning grails.
Caltha palustris enthrones April’s weeds
Until - as Isaac usurped Ishmael’s.
Pregnant deeds - it lops and drops its deadheads.

Knautia, your crimson makes memorial
Nothing so lush as marigold’s marsh. Your grave
Abounds in arid soil with roots that run
Under dusty feet – even as Sarah
Tracked her rest among the Hittites, in foreign
Interment – awaiting faith to come alive
Again, reborn among a foreign flora.

September: "Angeload"

2010-09-01T06:32:00.001-07:00

September blow soft till the fruit’s in the loft. -16th Century Proverb

Angeload, this poem is about you, but is not for you

Because the blush is on the apple, sugar’s rush to cover
Itself with the belabored wane of summer’s fullness;
And fox broom and goldenrod have come to no good
By savaged month’s end as forests blush deeply
At what summer has done to itself in the end:
Trees fill their spatula shapes with sapphires
And colors of the flame - smoky pumpkin and fazed lemon.

But as steadfast as fir and spruce expose their spines,
Green wood’s last opposition unravels to the first of autumn,
It is a wandering time for all who can walk or think...
And fox-terrier and corgi terrorize the warrens, coming back
From Canuck Hill with fur matted in dew and blood while leaves
Hang in snags beneath the belly’s hem, an elegantly stained slip
Shred in some Dianic drama, backlit by moonlight.

The morning air in our room is super-cooled by last night --
A storm front's exorcism -- flushing us from warm beds
To dog-walks among orchard’s golden tents, last asylum
From time’s windy stead. And for instinctual reasons,
The inquisitive whiskers, the assured, anthracitic nose,
The bifurcated eyes, the mane of foxy merriment --
All these assumed the equinox without comment.

Lady, look, light catches your two shades in plain wicker. . .
And see, Jasper, your dog survived the shot-guns and damp duck-
Blinds, never really much of a huntress in the first place. . .
But one eye goes dark like late leaves, the other blue again
This year, for a cold day of atonement to come: high skies
Of cancerous cloud fever the laden land with bronchial rattle
Changing over summer’s someday to autumn’s from now on –

Yet without Angeload, for whom this poem is, but not about.

Kennedia et Kerria or....

2010-08-24T07:15:00.000-07:00

A Brief, Impolitic, and Wholly Botanical Satire
with Theological and Ontological Petals Strewn Throughout,
All Set to the Tune of Flight of the Bumblebee
And
Played on Nero’s Fiddle at 65 MPH
Whilst the Violinist Is
either
A) Driving Completely Soused Over a Rickety Bridge with a Blond Bombshell Who Is Decidedly Not His Wife in the Dead Middle of the Night for God Knows What Reason
or
B) Captaining a Patrol Craft Fast (PCF) in Southeastern Asia from Below Deck and Inhaling Rather Earnestly from the Diesel Fumes-cum-Cannabis Emitting Therefrom.

So the two daughters of Lot were with child by their father.

Kennedia, your ugly unthinking head
Emerges in echoes of faithless Sodom -
Negotiates politic beans with drowned bloom
Navigating your rhetorical blood.

Easy climber, you betray the catholic dead
Deferring an underground birthright with stems
In flower failing to bridge the curse that shames -
Another Brahmin bloom yanked from Irish sod.

Kerria, your florid generation's styled
Epaulettes are doves' wings, an Easter rose
Renewing Sgt. Pepper's purple haze.

Regret's your summer of love. Gomorrah filed
It under nature's war with her own creed
And power lusting for governance of God.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit

2010-08-23T11:51:00.000-07:00

...he was sitting at the door of his tent,
in the very heat of the day.

Jack in the Pulpit’s silent sermon style
Asseverates that forest lore stay concealed.
Chased as ghosts, though, words mean to reckon each tale –
Kissing berry's kith with kin of corm revealed
Names like Iroquois Breadroot, Indian
Turnip, Devil’s Ear and Memory Root;
Hidden truth’s strange covenant with fiction
Enshrines such fertile news in Jack's pulpit.

Pitching his canvas ambo to sermon
Umbrage - noon's deleted shadows - Abraham
Looks for homilies in the parched memory
Pulsing with earth’s asymptotic horizon.
Imagination fails, but news comes to him -
Told from the three oaken rostra of Mambre.

Jamesia

2010-08-19T06:49:00.000-07:00

It did not take me long to discover that it was not for me to make my mark upon the age and having settled that point to my own satisfaction I determined to make it on myself. I said 'I will rule my own spirit and thus be greater than he that taketh the city' ... Edwin James, Letter to John Torrey, March 3, 1854

Melchisedech the king of Salem,

bringing forth bread and wine....

Jamesia, named for Edwin P. James,
Adumbrates his life by its paltry shade.
Memoir writ small, the cloistered cliffbush names
Edwin to his own species’ freedom instead.

Scrambling up the Rockies for a small hold
In history’s granite fissures, botanist
And activist would plant a common field,
Enjoined as crime to victim, priest to feast.

Pre-scientific times would dance with art:
Jerusalem thus trapped in bread and wine
Abstractions Athens’ temples thought divine.

Manumitted by love, though, Edwin’s heart
Emancipated by 1854
Secret Melkizedek’s sacerdotal plenty-more....

Iris, Ixia & Isatis

2010-08-18T11:48:00.000-07:00

And there came a famine in the country:
and Abram went down into Egypt, to sojourn there:

for the famine was very grievous in the land.

Iris rainbows into the arid eye,
Restoring faith in March’s famished space.
Its hungry message eating earth and sky
Sends word to winter - Spring will take its place.

Ixia thereby limits disorder –
Xiphoid leaves unsheathing star-blue petals
In smart alliance. At garden’s border
A chameleon love harvests the nettles.

Isatis, dyed-in-the-wool dyer’s woad,
Stains Abram's faith with Abraham’s asterisks
And heaven holds them in familiar fabrics
That Sarah wears to fool a pharaoh’s pride.
Ishmael’s cashiered threads weep with Hagar’s blood
As Egyptian linen drinks in Isaac’s.

August: "Harbor, Monhegan" *

2010-08-02T09:18:00.000-07:00

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.
–Jeremiah 8::20

Halfway between the hurried-up hills
And the grizzled brine into which
They spill lies Monhegan Harbor.
It exists in maps exactly the same.

And exactly where one would expect,
There, the gulls cluster – on the buoys
Which hide themselves behind a regatta,
Shell-white and bobbing like horse-heads.
Their pitchy prows lift and lunge fiercely,
Each, the edgy knife blade of Old Man
Sea’s dormant rage. But back on shore,

The boy with snap-shot frankness and
January eyes, he too, is exactly
Where one would expect him to be –
Assumed up to his ankles in the hot pitch
Of August. The exhausted smile on
His beautiful face hiding the fury of
This tarry harvest, day’s headlong heat.

From furnace-innards, heart of carnelian,
Soul of sardonyx... The boy is
Descended from the torturous tar-and-
Brine of Monhegan blood (this known
Mostly from the boy’s pert disinterest
In his inherited surroundings, call it
An incendiary peace possessing all

Understanding), yet boyhood itself tires.
So, tar which braces New England’s ancient
Hulls against ice-blue screams of gulls,
Will have to do, as well, to caulk-and-seam
His own Monhegan handsomeness, august
And tending, even now, toward the autumnal.

____________

*Apologies for the size of the image; grateful if someone found a larger version on the Net somewheres!

Doggerel for the opening of Gerasene '10

2010-07-28T09:54:00.000-07:00

[With apologies to everyone who attended and so had to listen to this before they even started drinking.]

Well, here we are again at the shindig called Gerasene,

And yes, it’s the sort of name that starts you wondering who among the illustrious souls at this table will be the first to commit material if not formal heresene.

But take it on faith – nobody here is out to slam God

Which is odd

Because we’re here to talk fiction, and most fiction I can think of off the top of my head which admits the possibility of God’s existence does so in order to examine the ways that God is out to slam us, or at least put us through the wringer a little bit,

Which might tempt one to think that God is a bit of a shit.

But of course, nobody here actually thinks that, so we smile and nod and say “mystery must there be” and nod sagaciously,

And even if we did think it, everybody here knows that if you’re going to lash out at the divine creator of all things, you ought not to do it ungraciously.

So if you’re frustrated with God’s silence in the face of human suffering, you don’t write an angry letter to Rome about it

Instead; you sit down at your friend’s house in La Mesa, California and write a poem about it.

Or perhaps a short story in which a child’s letters to God are returned marked “insufficient postage” as a quiet comment on the hidden costs of prayer

Or a Southern Gothic tragedy about a man who had his right hand bitten off by a German Shepherd who was guarding the local Catholic cemetery and is now consumed with the self-appointed task of preaching about the God who isn’t there.

Hell, you might even knock out a parody profile for Catholic MisMatched

In which you listed your interests as porn, video games, and getting your pious matrimonial itch scratched.

You can do whatever you like here, really –the main thing is that you actually do it –

So that we don’t wind up with our usual closing comment of “I wasn’t really sure when the writer’s conference began, but I do know that it was over before I knew it.”

There is one more thing I’d like to add, and I do it at the risk of coming off as some kind of Jamesian prig,

And it’s this: that if I was setting out to found a Catholic writer’s conference that would attract the best and brightest the world had to offer, I might select as my gathering’s namesake something other than a possessed and consequently suicidal pig.

July: "Lighthouse Dandelions"

2010-07-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

Dry fruits are divided into three types: dehiscent, in which the pericarp splits open to release the seeds; indehiscent, which do not split open; and schizocarpic, in which the fruit splits open but the seeds are not exposed.... Some indehiscent dry fruits are dispersed by the wind, assisted by “wings” (elm) or “parachutes” (dandelion)...
--Ultimate Visual Dictionary, “Dry fruits”

And July comes along, a breezy parenthetical
(To whisper away the dew point with fire's nadir),
With heavy brush stroke, to strike off time's thick, empirical excess.
It declares independence from the other months,
Although as summer's island it unites the year
And clings to brocaded principles of freedom
By floating away in snowy white depictions.

The lighthouse that shimmers there broadcasts
With a dream’s unfinished, unfinishable quality.
Swallowing sun’s great swarm, its buttery shakes
Unhouse an apiary of sweet, open-shuttered light.
To prosecute time’s place, July’s tense, shifting shades
Of ochre, mustard, lemon, saffron, honey and gold
Cascade in shipwrecks of soil and capsized lawns.

Thus, July derives its light from the spill-pattern
Of dandelions -- an arranged dispersal of sorts
That falls like text across a page, the thin dribble of oils
Stretched beneath a sleeved frame: yet positive ochres
And absolute cobalt offer no guide to the craft
Of cloud, their hulls tarred in onyx. Surf-white stone
And storm-black steel stand between flowery syntax

And utter wreckage. A cold high pressure love-tangles
With warmer low pressures; darkness with light; shadow
With sudden change to foreshortened light; wind
With the essence of memory (like limp lighthouses,
Each dandelion wiggles in offshore currents); and day
Emerges from time’s more inner, uncalendared instances --
As between surfeit of weeds and surcease of bloom….

July came along like a parenthetical wind
Because July came along like a brush wet with paint

The time July came along seeding indehiscent light

Call for Submissions

2010-06-29T22:47:00.001-07:00

The 2010 Gerasene Writer's Conference, Second Iteration, Will Take Place Sometime Around July 26. Who's in?

June: "Island Roses"

2010-06-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose...
-Thomas Carew

O great island of my youth, severed neck of land, collared by mottled hayfields, craned
Geography , aging borders of sea , sky, mingling grey... Well, something like that, feigned

And somewhat like summer’s first, slow blush of island roses, full of youthful excess
Embodied in a crimsoned bush, boutonniere for broken-down barns, the boarded-up proof
That dedicated sunlight, blanketing wind with its blank and wizened whiteness,
Was ever the strongest message sent against the hey-nonnies of the marriage season.
It took all summer to whitewash the roaming empire of clapboard and tarred roof.
Meanwhile, June, just back from first-year college, took to the island like a prom queen,
In slow procession, with all of June's munificence and mellow magnitude in season:

There, stretching down either end of her familial island’s embracing shoreline,
Mornings, we would watch sail boats blossom and soar into view on the saw’s edge
Of waves until dusk, trimmed and tacking, grew faint before beach fires like bold sunshine
Struck on scraps of canvas. Arm in arm with first kisses, we reached for night’s face awash
With stars, speculative with amateur wedding plans, beginner’s love, the scurrilous hedge
Of success, until all bets were expectantly off next day. The sea whispered a wish
For flag pole days of coming summer, June’s face prickled with freckles as if awash

At our parting with a broken blush, until later, later, late spring urged the island
On its visitors. June was a girl, yet she took a woman’s time, the rolling approach
Of a long wave tide-stretched as on a loom, always reaching slowly for joy, its diamond
Dislodged lovelessly at last with one more sunny nudge of surf... But I knew June
First as sister to Julius, a classmate in medical school. We’d dive summers and poach
The warming Atlantic for oyster-beds. Scalpeled pearl of day and night’s gauzy moonstone --
These glimmer fitfully from the murky fathoms of my youth, lost as love in June.

On the island, light climbs to its midpoint more beautifully, but never burgeons
Into beauty itself. I have not returned to it these long summers since. The world revolves,
After all, not around the rose bush as axis, but around the steadfast hands of surgeons.
June gave me just one summer, my farewell full of cold, grey sea. But perhaps love took
Up time’s operation with these same false kisses and feigned heart -- as a doctor solves
His problems with narcotic and steel singing their duet where the heart most aches,
Our brief union’s sore gratefulness justifying June, the roses she gave and the time she took.

May and Jamie Wyeth

2010-05-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

May: "The Thief"

May is a pious fraud of the almanac.
–James Russell Lowell

Might and may are pigeon feathers which a crow never uses.
No subjunctive bird is he, being real,
All stealth and secret urges around his charcoal-rough edges:
Shears, watches, keys, a brooch and gems stashed to reveal
That what his pinched emerald eye sees is really already his.

**************
His snow-tested hypothesis is proven
By mountains – the broad and open barrow
For his treasures, his rifled and riven
Objects – like Aunt Clois’ silver-plated shears
Without which she must remain immortal,
The final cut to her yard-cloth of years
Awaiting keener edges that narrow

To point a compass-like measurement at
Grandma Penelope’s cameo, hoard-nestled,
Lost these fifty years since a picnic junket
When her lover tied button thread around
It to hang long from a tree-limb. Wrestled
From the wind, the brooch’s depicted eye wound
In a teary glaze of pearl, as if penciled

To trace the sad fire-dance of earth, sky and sun.
Snatched too, Uncle Kronaw’s timepiece, a gilt
Oyster, gaping, its iron moil of gears spun
Out, secreting a cannibalistic rust
At the mouth. Still, its polished gold shows earth’s tilt
In mantled casement and spring-loaded crust
Where the declarative crow’s will still finds fault.

**************
But might is and May becomes his whole world’s undivided sums
(Magpies are meant for doing, not parenthesis)
As morning might turn clouds to crumbs of thick clunky diadems
And maybe the White Mountains' key success is
In unlocking a late spring from the raven-black of his wing.

Illicium & Idesia

2010-04-26T12:35:00.001-07:00

And I will make thee a great nation,
and I will bless thee, and magnfy thy name...
To thy seed I will give this land...

Illicium names the allure that thrills
Leaves into believing their sweet perfume
Like the biting spice that licorice distills
In dulcet essence gives anise its name –
Called like Abram’s call until harvest calls
Irrevocably his rebranded name.
Under God’s tongue, germinant syllables
Make shift Abraham from bloom to blossom.

Idesia’s own blooming multiples
Determine its blossoming silhouette
Each April, halving leafy lobes in two.
So Abram’s old faith would exfoliate
And winter out his laden panicles
In time to father berries from his bough.

Hyacinth & Hyssop

2010-04-20T08:42:00.001-07:00

And he took the wood for the holocaust,
And laid it upon Isaac his son
and he himself carried in his hands fire and a sword.

Hyacinthos, loved by god, by god slain,
Your fatal bruise tattoos your blushing hue.
Ai! Ai! fell the tears of light the god-sun
Cried in lyric grief – inscribed upon you.
Image of grief, divine yet human,
Nearly touching beauty with death, this true
Test of trust suggests what faith’s own stamen
Has loosed: in pure bloodshed the flower grew.

Hyssop, this bitter blood is your bouquet,
Your bunch of green, your clustered, thirsty green,
Soaks the gall so fathers' sons are spared the stain
Suffused by tinder’s tendered holocaust.
Offended nature's stayed hand at noonday
Perspires your aspersions - too weak to cast.

Hazel & Holly on the Barren Heath

2010-04-16T07:15:00.000-07:00

...out of Ur of the Chaldees,
to go into the land of Chanaan.
And they came as far as Haran,
and dwelt there.

Hazel, branch of God’s chosen, splits and bends,
A forked crotch with folksy water-wisdom:
Zigzags not lost, but leashed to loosened hands,
Engaging water-divining baptism -
Lost beneath the sands that first parched Adam.
Holly breaks out there, though; the barren lands
Offering greens and reds to Jerusalem -
Likely emblems: what life wants, blood demands.
Yahweh spies such wizened blood in Abram:
Heath and hands awaiting plow and hoe, his seed’s
Event becomes the first steps of faith from
A place called Ur, the fatherland of gods,
To further fields. There, ripening Canaan plants
His hopes like roots; his veins with vines’ descendants.

Goldenrod & Gagea

2010-04-13T09:23:00.001-07:00

And therefore the name thereof was called Babel,
because there the language of the whole earth
was confounded.

Goldenrod gauging spring’s early roadsides
Ores its idol from a mountain’s mother lode.
Leaning language’s tilted tower, it fades
Down to nothing as its colors corrode.
Errant wanderer, always too far afield,
Naming greed’s grammar first bloom’s attribute,
Relying on the wind to seed the yield
Of April’s tongue once March has fallen mute,
Dead set to die. But grace’s garden cold frames
Gage all that grows by frost’s futility.
All that mankind builds upon death's proud mounds,
God talks back to - Yes, his green thumb confounds,
Espousing yellow star of Bethlehem’s
Announcement: lily’s spring nativity.

Gleditsia & Grape

2010-04-12T10:44:00.000-07:00

Now Noah,

a man of the soil,

was the first to plant a vineyard.

For M. L., in vino amicitia

Gleditsia, your trinity of thorns
Lash out from trunk and low branch to brandish
Engagement with wilderness. Each cluster warns
Deer and hare off. So the world would wish
It found your shade without a penalty
To touch your textured bark, partake of your pod,
Subsist as Christ’s cousin on your honey
Imbuing locusts with a taste for God.
Ararat’s slopes were thus as glad to cede
Grapes their vines, a weave of older testament
Restoring balanced thrift with vintage bliss.
Arbors throve thus on thirsty sediment –
Provided Noah quaffed enough to guess
Exactly what the taste of blood would need.

French Marigold

2010-04-08T06:56:00.001-07:00

While the earth remains,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter,
day and night, shall not cease.

French marigold, corona of the day,
Recall how spring’s word went long unwritten,
Emerged as scribbling winter cribbed away
Notes on ice. Your precious punctuation
Corrects and checks the season's paragraph.
How then do you mark the transitory phrase
Making March idle in its Ides and laugh
Aloud before your maternal sunrise?
Recall how Noah’s spring -the primal one
Insured that God with every season would
Get a fair hearing, numbering spring in turn.
Obliged to time, His count of suns to burn,
Leaves to turn, turning seeds and burning wood,
Dismantled endless night with aural crown.

Fallopia, Fig & Fir

2010-04-06T09:17:00.000-07:00

...and he sent out a raven,
to see if the waters had lessened on the earth.
It flew back and forth
until the waters dried off from the earth.

Fallopia, named for gross anatomy
After the fact – bridging life's livid impotence,
Livening ensoulment's act – your proclivity
Lends a haphazard creeping to garden wall and fence
Of spring. Your frantic surface search for trellis post
Plays out with your taproots across winter’s cold war.
In battle after battle, March was all but lost;
All budding branches become the sun's cover fire
Figuring such reach as Noah’s empty hands had breached
In figs abridged by pigeon’s beak while raven ran
Geocentric skies. Receding seas redefined
First mountain firs poking skyward. While black wings found
Irrevocable wandering, covenanted man
Rooted his seed where bark and branch had first been beached.

April and Jamie Wyeth

2010-04-01T13:39:00.000-07:00

Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote... --Chaucer

Down in the ravine, the first flush of spring
Is always brown, as the ice-carbuncled ground
Breaks itself down, roils and sifts, revealing
An old oak’s tense, textured system of roots,
Like a cut-away illustration of sound
In textbooks, tying itself in thick knots
Of music and silence escaping beyond

The limits of either. In the ravine,
The waters rose like a fortune to come,
The kind that blows in with the rain; between
The fox kit’s noisy eviction -one night
In early spring – and the skunk kittens’ home-
Less situation, the sheltering thatch of root
And dirt, without a family, begins to roam

Outside the shade of topsoil, thick masted
With a trunk, each windy branch, a spar.
Below deck, the clay rusts, sapphire-hued,
Gripping deepest roots, clinging til they creak,
Spoiled with the rubble of fossiled char,
As if to let April’s sea of clouds break
In juvenescent waves over oak, larkspur...

But to say roots have a system is to say
Rain is symmetrical or Shakespeare
Is grammatical. Either way,
The words don’t seem to dig down deep enough,
Don’t seem to tap into the roots of nature,
To take hold of her mantle, the very stuff
Whose month rained and sunned the earth for Chaucer’s

April showers to engender May's subjunctive flowers,

And root declarative nature to her powers.

Iambics for the End of March

2010-03-31T08:49:00.000-07:00

As Red winged blackbirds have made a return
From hinter haunts, Robin, that crimson cock,
Is stepping dandified through basic thoughts
Of lawn, of dandelion, of worms and dirt –
What life was back in August’s august days
Redresses later suns with longer days
And writerly thoughts become agog as herds
Amused and tilting toward the steepled cliffs
Known as Gerasene…

And so, all iambics aside, we return to the thrilling days of yesteryear – good wine, great talk and superb company.

This year, are we heading West, young(ish) men, West, to carry on our backs the “Tradita Sunt” which is Gerasene 2010?

I would like to get a consensus on making the trip to the Lickona Domicile – for planning purposes and such.

We’re looking at July 26-28 as a possible dating for the conference. I’d also like to expand the repertoire to other writers we long may have been thinking about all this long Climate-Change-Busting Winter.

I’m also looking to set up a geographically convenient speaker for the conference.

I’m also very much looking forward to it, howsoever it shapes up.

Please let me know your “writerly thoughts become agog as herds.”

(It takes a poet to quote himself with impunity!)

JOB

European Figwort

2010-03-30T14:14:00.001-07:00

And I will destroy every substance

that I have made, from the face of the earth.

European figwort, like God’s heart crushed
Under evil pressure, served as stop-gaps
Repairing earth’s irruptions while men dashed
Over the moral precipice. Perhaps
Pretending to body’s voice, the soul’s ghost
Entailed abstracted figs from buttocks’ flesh,
And so no physic tends but to herbal dust.
No ends to soothe our hearts, we ache with rash
Flooding such as Noah saw – and such was
Irrigating hell itself. With furrowed brow
God damned man’s scrofulous ass of a face
Worth weathered expressions of divine disgust…
Rage receded, though; a grinning rainbow
Transplanted its prism with a promise.

Ελευθερόκοκκοι

2010-03-29T07:57:00.000-07:00

And I will establish my convenant with thee,
and thou shalt enter into the ark...

Ελευθερόκοκκοι, you too belong to
Life’s garden full of thorny Greek cadence.
Enthralling sunlight, your shade’s a song to
Undo winter’s cruel doing. What radiance
Then hides beneath your shadow-arching stems?
Here, world in seed, your berry’s pithy husk
Eventually drowns in soil or, starving, trims
Relevant thorns to take the soul to task:

Old Noah knew his flooded flight from sin
Contingent on the ark-built indwelling
Of seasons. Other men became their own
Coffined coffers – their own fruit bore them down;
Concluding pride with radiance swelling
Into cataracts, man's grief wept like rain.

Dog Tooth Violet

2010-03-23T07:51:00.000-07:00

And Cain said to the Lord:

My iniquity is greater than that I may deserve pardon.

Dog-tooth violet, your fanged petals deceive
Our eyes. You are no mourning flower – your life
Growls with raining sunlight. So we believe
That straining your deathless bloom you face the grief
Of shades. Your adder’s tongue makes its whispers
Of air, and we begin to hate the doubt
That rings with Easter bells within our prayers.
How full is flesh that cannot do without
Vanity’s violence: Abel suffered harm
In clenching jaws that Cain’s bitter love
Of self had dogged for sacrificial gains.
Like hounds that bite the blood and wilt the veins,
Empty sins’ barking guilt echoes to prove
That God's matter blooms in man’s hang-dog form.

Daphne & The Dove Tree

2010-03-16T06:52:00.000-07:00

"God has granted me more offspring in place of Abel,"

Eve said, "because Cain slew him."

Daphne, shaded daughter, Greek fates ordained
Apollo’s rueful touch would catch up to you.
Plangent envy's plant, divinely disdained,
How victimized you were by love’s ague!

New beauty, green goodness, tragic truth
Each emerges from your soil as foreign
Dove trees do, given wing in mission earth,
Observed as Armand David would Christen:

Virtue's flowering trees, like Abel’s priested gifts,
Extend to God the first born and best kind
Taken from their fields as sweet oblations.

Required, though, was the real thing. God shrifts
Eve’s first branch in first blood of her second -
Emissaries dovetailing into nations.

Cercis & Clematis

2010-03-11T13:37:00.000-08:00

...sin is a demon lurking at the door;
his urge is toward you, yet you can be his master.

Cercis betrays itself in lurid crimson
Every spring; this Judas tree with dry pod
Rattles out a count of coins and bones. So Cain
Commingled blood with such vegetable greed.
Inventing human sacrifice, his cities
Shone like silver pieces in a beggar’s field.

Clematis crept there too by wicker trellis,
Ligaturing serial envy’s cereal yield,
Entering our hearts along a willful path.
Mastered by green thoughts (which God forsook),
Adam’s sons murdered: these twin sins requiring
That purest flesh entwine the roots of wrath.
Inventing pilgrim roads, humans would take
Sojourn beyond rootless earthly wandering.

Black Hellebore

2010-03-10T07:53:00.000-08:00

See! The man has become like one of us,
knowing what is good and what is bad!

Black hellebore on the garden border
Limns the dawn, the first since Eve took offense
At God and stormed out on his green order.
Cross-eyed Adam straddled the garden fence,
Knowing fauna would never draw so near
His nature after snakes had had their way.
Eve thought on those fangs; but the hell she bore
Left her confused, unable to say why
Labor's bread, birth and breath were all the pain
Endemic flesh could bear. So she sought a cure,
Bringing poison's work, a mad medicine
On Adam. Dressing him down, his creator
Ran him eastward out of Eden-town.
Eloping with Eve, he wore the hellebore.

Castor Oil Plant

2010-03-08T13:45:00.000-08:00

...you shall be banned from the soil that opened its mouth
to receive your brother's blood from your hand.

Castor oil plants are universal
As sin. In late 1978,
Social enemy Georgi Markov fell
To an umbrella’s tip in a London street,
Object of brotherly hate once more rehearsed,
Resurrecting Abel’s cry from the earth.
One man has taken aim again, and cursed
In act he roots his will to homicide –
Losing heaven’s harvest, he gains the world’s dirt.
Plenty of nothing stains the working hands
Leaving a cavity in a crushed heart.
Again, man the engineer looks but finds
Nothing to plan man's rest or hide the blood
That signed Cain's contract - ink that never dried.

Black Sassafras

2010-03-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

In toil you shall eat its yield,
all the days of your life.

Black sassafras breaks new ground between stones
Like Adam cultivating his family tree
Around the weeping world. The taproot groans
In forests raining with humidity,
Knuckles down against a fallen landscape
Showing green in its wood from trunk to limb:
As death intones its dying leaf’s dry scrape
So bark and husk, singing nature’s anthem,
Some savor, substitute for cinnamon.
Australia's tree is camphor anecdote
For salvation history: its purchase
Retailed by rock, it flows with water’s increase.
A hymn of life in leaf, this substitute’s
Stuff is like savior’s blood for sinning men.

Amaryllis

2010-03-03T07:47:00.000-08:00

...whatever the man called each of them
would be its name.

Amaryllis - sparkling pastoral moment
Mentioned by Virgil, full of blackened ire -
Adam first spoke your name, the last tenant
Residing where the pagan poets' fire
Yielded blossom's cameo. A brief bloom
Like Eve - your perennial petals entomb
Lacivious pride's pink-prinked nomme de plume
In Eden's own hothouse of deadly perfume.

Divided, conquered, naked, scattered seed!
Amaryllis, emblem of refulgent shame,
Consider how your roots had worked to breed
Everywhere this florid curse, our sorest need:
After selfish want had broken earth for bread,
Evening came, the eighth day. It had no name.

Arctostaphylos

2010-03-02T12:22:00.000-08:00

“He brought them to the man to see what he would call them…”

Ἁρκτοστάφυλος cleaves the hardest tongues,
Riving body’s sound from spirit’s sense.
Call it manzanita, though, and it hangs
There honeyed with art’s apple-tang recompense.

Obtuse as Adam was, could he not see,
Steward and butler of God’s catalog,
This was his only task - to match and marry
Art and science in living analog?

Put that way, each laden limb hangs the cause
Held in that first apple’s bittersweet bite.
Yes, death shined up our parents’ paradise
Leaving time to bear the shriveled berries
Our parents gathered in a better climate --
Suited well to words they were meant to eat.

March and Jamie Wyeth

2010-03-01T14:07:00.000-08:00

Kent House

Late winter days break up these shoals, sea’s crumbled portal
Of rock.
These seed-husks of rain’s ritual,
Cracked and split, spill down sky’s
Cloud-battle to find rest before the war-weathered door
Of Sunday’s locked house...

For all of them, or for a part of all of them, the Kent House
Stands as she (eternally “she” mothering the sea) is door
To shadows, piled hard and sharp, on this wave-high rock;
Her Cape Cod dowry of gables serves as wind’s portal –
She who will rest secure in the stoniness of a lonely March sky;
Her muttering gutters echo winter’s last gasp. A yearly ritual
Of Sundays, now past land, Rockwell’s dream house waves him on.

All the shoreline was a prison for Kent, rapping her door
In a cold, uneasy sleep; all winter’s night long she would rock
The cradle of ocean’s grey desolation to impart all
Her matronly slope of roof, her bosomy porch, blue with sky,
Anticipating the Ides, signal day of ritual
When Rockwell comes at last, resuscitates the house
And Sunday goes by, Mars sinking lower into evening’s sea.

When Rockwell observes his Kent amid the repetition of rock –
The mother of us all. “ And I stand, at birth’s portal,”
Rockwell jests, “’Tis Spring!” Above him, an aquamarine sky
Already floods her pent up rooms. The old ritual
Of removing white slip-covers like cob-webs around the house
Kicks up evidence of mice and summer’s hibernating odor.
This Sunday, before bed, perhaps Rockwell banks a fire with less ash.

The sea throws the last of its icy catch up the beach, the sky
Begins to shed its skin, and as the shoals show off their rich jewel,
An heirloom freshly coated with caretaker’s spit, they unhouse
The scenery’s barnacled, monotonous march: her door
Has waited all winter to yawn at sun’s warmth unlocked from rock.
Changing bed sheets, Rockwell is born again through each room’s portal.
Sun, day, mind and sea all rest as Kent House makes peace with March.

Anthology

2010-02-28T21:03:00.001-08:00

Anthology means "bouquet" in Greek. So about three or four years ago or so, I put together my own anthology in an attempt to marry the two meanings. I'll be posting throughout Lent. Beginning with the prologue...

Anthology - for Elizabeth

Prologue

In the beginning, God created the heavens, and the earth...

Carolus Linneaus was the king of names,
Another Adam giving his assent
Reality in the organized aims
Of science. Studiously, his mind would plant
Lineages with grafted stems of Latin,
Unearthing meaning found in roots of Greek.
Still, signal fragments of that first garden
(Lost in less time than the holy week
In time’s own making)leave us haunted names:
Nomenclature’s power may plant a tree
And reason’s calling may adore the bloom –
Enduring death, may life be left some room
Upon these lines to let love’s mystery
Spring a testament of wholly scriptured rhymes.

"Rent Your Hearts and Not Your Garments"

2010-02-19T04:48:00.000-08:00

This seems as good a way to dive into Lent as any - from St. Cyprian's 'The Lapsed." He was speaking specifically about those who have committed apostasy - but in a certain sense it can apply equally to all who reject Christ through sin. The detail in his writing is exquisite - and draws out Paul's injunction to wear Christ as the only fashion for all seasons. The drawing out of this figure, of course, is fitting for a teacher of rhetoric. As a fascinating side note, his life mirrors St. Augustine's.

Let each one, I entreat you, brethren, confess his confess his sin while he who has sinned is still in this world, while his confession can still be heard, while satisfaction and forgiveness granted through the priests are pleasing to God. Let us turn back to the Lord with our whole heart and, expressing our repentance in deep sorrow, implore God for His mercy. Let our sould bow before Him, let our sorrow be offered to Him in satisfaction, let our hopes rest in Him. He Himself has told us how to ask: Return to me from all your heart, along with fasting and weeping and mourning, and rend your hearts and not your garments. Let us return to the Lord with all our hearts, let us appease His anger and displeasure, by fasting, tears, and lamentations, as He Himself enjoins.

But are we to believe that a man is sorrowing with all his heart, that he is calling on the Lord with fasting, tears and lamentations, when from the very day of his sin he is found dialy at the baths, or after feasting sumptuously and gorging himself to excess he is next day belching with indigestion and never shares any of his food or drink wit those in need? When he goes about laughing cheerfully, how can he be lamenting the state of death he is in? And whereas it is written, You shall not spoil the appearance of your beards, why is he plucking hairs from his beard and making up his face? Is he courting someone's favour when he is out of favour with God?

Or is that lady sighing and sorrowing who spends her time decking herslef out in rich dresses, without a thought fo the 'putting on of Christ' which she has lost; or when she dons such costly ornaments and jewelled necklaces, without a sigh for the lost splendour of holiness with which God once decked her?

For all the foreign garments you put on, for all your silks from China - you are naked still; with whatever gold and pearls and jewels you enhance your beauty, without Christ's beauty you are unsightly still. Dye your hair no more, at least now that you are in mouring; and as for your eyes which you paint up with kohl, let tears, at least now, wash them clean of it. If death had robbed you of one of your dear ones, you would mourn and weep in sorrow; with face neglected, finery laid aside, hair dishevelled, melancholy look and eyes cast down, you would show every sign of grief. Yet now, for shame, when you have lost your very soul and only survive here in a life of spiritual death, walking about in your own corpse - why are you not weeping bitterly and moaning inconsolably? Why do you not hide away, out of shame for your crime, and give yourself up to your grief? Nay, your wounds are even greater, your guilt still deeper; for after sinning you make no atonement, you have fallen and you do not repent.

Amen.

Because It Involves Alcohol

2010-02-15T13:29:00.000-08:00

Today we’d like to wish Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward a happy birthday but unfortunately he’s been dead since 1959.

Nonetheless, this prolific writer would be 127 years young today.

And perhaps he would still be writing – and because of his highly subjunctive longevity, his highly unlikely pen name might have garnered immediate declarative name recognition: Sax Rohmer.

Mr. Rohmer, you see, is the daddy of the devious Dr. Fu Manchu.

And because of this, even by his own day’s standards, Mr. Rohmer was considered politically out of bounds with his depictions of the opium trade and what he coined “the Yellow Peril.”

If only he'd made Fu Manchu a white male - oh, but wait!

In many ways, a writer’s writer, this middle class Englishman made a living on what he penned and like many another writer too heavy for light work and too light for heavy work he never had to go looking for anything else to support himself. He took on all projects – from comedy sketches for music hall performers to short stories and serials for magazines. One of these serials eventually became The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu.

To his defense, Rohmer often visited the Limehouse district in London where he eventaully set the fictional Fu Manchu’s hidehout and where at the time the very real opium dens of the day were full of conniving Chinamen seeking the ruin of souls. You see, he was not arbitrarily picking on people from the orient - although admittedly he was a bit heavy-handed about it.

On the other hand, Rohmer’s vision of a worldwide oriental conspiracy was about 50 years premature.

So no one reads him today – and I’m not sure if that’s a shame or not. What is a true tragic shame is the fact that his second greatest creation – named after his first greatest creation – the Fu Manchu cocktail, has also fallen into disuse.

Rohmer's biographer Clay Van Ash (hard to believe that's a real name, while we're at it!) relates how Rohmer invented the concoction one fine day while visiting the most famous rummery in rumdom – the Myers Rum Distillery of Jamaica in 1932.

Jamaica rum was Sax's favorite drink. In company with Mr. Myers and several members of the staff, he spent the pre-luncheon hour helping to invent the Fu Manchu cocktail. This proved rather difficult, for Sax insisted that it ought to be a mysterious shade of green, but, short of dyestuffs, there is not much which will impart such a color to rum. At the fourteenth attempt they did eventually get it right, but none of them wanted much lunch afterwards. (I understand that this mixture was actually added to the official cocktail list, but I have not been able to find the recipe.).

Whether these were the result of that pre-prandial spree, here are two versions of the drink current in bartending guides – they differ to allow, I presume, for the mood your rum may be in that evening:

Fu Manchu One
Fill glass with ice
1 1/2 oz Dark Rum
1/2 oz Triple Sec
1/2 oz White Creme De Menthe
1/2 oz Lime Juice
Dash of Sugar Syrup
Or 1/4 tsp Sugar
Shake
Strain into chilled glass.

Fu Manchu Two
Fill glass with ice
1 1/2 oz White Rum
1/2 oz Triple Sec
1/2 oz White Creme De Menthe
1/2 Oz. - Rose's Lime Juice
1 Dash - Sugar Syrup
1 Twist - Orange
Combine with ice and stir. Strain and garnish with fruit.

And one more note on this mysterious mystery writer before we leave Limehouse and suspicious facial hair behind – perhaps forever - Mr. Sax Rohmer’s is also a story which belongs in the Life’s Great Ironies Hall of Fame.

He died in 1959 of, yep, you guessed it, the Asian Flu.

Sax Rohmer on the Origins of Fu Manchu, or Why a Ouija Board Is No Substitute for a Good Agent for Keeping Your Books in the Public Eye

"I was a young man and I was ambitious. I had written my first story at seventeen, and I had not written another one; perhaps that was why.

"All the time I thought it would be very nice to be an author; you know the sort of thing that appeals to young men in rooms in a London suburb. I suppose all young men in lodgings want to be writers; the trouble is that there are so many lodgings!

"Looking back on those days I was happy enough. You know Stevenson's line about it being better to travel hopefully that to arrive, though I don't think that's true. It would be much better traveling hopefully if you knew you were going to arrive, some day, somehow, somewhere.

"A few of us shared a studio in Clapham Old Town, and we liked to tell one another what we were going to do when we were famous. We also told our guests. How we managed to entertain I don't know. The piece de resistance was roast potatoes and the other course was shredded wheat. There was beer, of course.

"The illusion of fame never left me even at Clapham station. But don't put that down or you will get lots of Claphamites writing in to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder or something of the sort.

"Well, one of the fellows and I bought a planchette board. We were always asking it questions. I remember I asked it whether I should ever be a success as a writer of fiction, and it said that I would. When I asked it in what direction it answered the one word 'Chinaman.' We asked it again and still the answer was definitely and unmistakenly 'Chinaman.' I couldn't understand it at all for I knew nothing in those days about China or Chinamen.

I must have remembered that when I sat down to write a book some time afterwards. All the usual types had been worked to death and so I lighted on the idea of a Chinaman, and what a Chinaman he was going to be!

"He was to be rather tall and rather gaunt, with a tremendous cranial development as befits a genius. So I began to build him up. Then I thought he ought to have some sort of defect, so I made him have a kind of film over the eyes, as with a bird. It was a new one on medical science and still is, but there it was. He was to be a great linguist---a man who knew every civilised language and many dialects. He was to be absolutely impersonal, not criminal according to his own way of thinking, for he was true to his consuming desire to revoltionise civilisation. He was to be the embodiment of the idea that the East has been gaining knowledge while we have been building machines, the supreme master mind hovering on the border of madness, as so great a genius would.

"That was how I turned him over in my mind. Well, when I began to write, it seemed that I knew the man intimately. He assumed his own shape and there he was. He was a success and has continued so. I have now written seven books about him---the Daily Sketch is to publish the seventh---and from beginning to end and taking everything into account I suppose he has made me about 150,000 pounds.

"He has brought me in a spot of bother as well. When I was in New York some years ago the Chinese students at Columbia University organised a protest and, I believe, went to the Chinese Consul about him; said he misrepresented the Chinese character. All I can say is that Fu Manchu is Fu Manchu. He can't help that; no more than I can.
Well, that's the story of the sinister doctor of the Orient. Next time you see him looking out at you with his inscrutable eyes you will know how he came to be there.
- in an interview with Geraint Goodwin, London, Thursday, May 24, 1934.

Excerpt from Rohmer's Writing:

Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government--which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man. - Nayland Smith to Dr. Petrie, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, Chapter 2.

The Max Rohmer Writing Assignment:

1. This one has less to do with writing and more to do with drinking – but it comes to the same thing – a flexing of your imagination. Create a drink (first on paper, perhaps, to avoid wasting alcohol) based on your favorites characters in literature. The drink should have some bearing on the nature of the character. Thus, an Ahab or a Wolf Larson ought to involve rum – the liquor universally associated with life at sea. On the other hand, the Quentin Compson or the Hazel Motes doesn’t necessarily need to include Bourbon – but be ready to defend your decision to use, instead, for instance, Campari in the case of the QC (because Quentin was a bitter young man) or Chartreuse for the HM (the color, duh!).

2. This one has more to do with writing than drinking – but it too comes to the same thing if you like to drink while you write. Just as James Bond made the vodka martini famous and Dr. Tom More made Gin Fizzes/Vodka and Tang immortal, write a scene (for short story or novel) in which a character makes a new drink – perhaps you could borrow from Assignment #1 – or your own real life experiences. In college, I remember staying up late one Sunday night in my apartment. At the end of one rather open floodgate of a weekend with well-irrigated guests, I wound up with nothing in my bar but root beer and tequila. The result, alas, was never worth repeating - but the name I gave the poisonous impotable lives on: Tequila Mockingbird.

3. This one has equal parts writing and drinking: Ask someone other than a bartender - in fact, someone who knows little or nothing about mixology - to make you a mixed drink. Observe the process, the ad-hoc bartender’s style, quirks, etc. and the finished product. Test the finished product. Chances are they are not adequate. Repeat process as necessary. Throughout the entire proceedings, you should be taking notes which will eventually become a descriptive piece of writing entitled “When the Uninitiated Approach the Bar of Mysteries” or somesuch. Nota Bene: Do not wait until the next day to write. Chances are, your notes will be less accessible than Kubla Khan was to Samuel T. Coleridge upon waking.