Doggerel for the opening of Gerasene '10

[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"

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

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

June: "Island Roses"

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

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

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

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.