Poemunity — your poem community

At the age of nine, Pa drove me to the river. The pastor & deacons awaited. I donned a white robe, transparent, self-conscious of my fresh nubs. Father Jonas reached beneath me, placed a hand over my nose & mouth. I resisted. He pushed me hard until my feet released & rose to the surface, like a corpse. I cried afterward, cold & clammy, wet hair plaited back. All the men thought I was full of the Holy Ghost.

She could be any woman at all, caught off-guard on-guard. With her hands stroking or strangling and maybe with her intentions half-interred. But she is as she is. Her gaze is always filing away at its cord. And what she's really after is you to love her. She forgets who she is. She could be so small she almost has no smell. She feels like anyone at all. When you walk up to her, she keeps quite still, but what she answers to is never loud enough to know. Eaten away by outwardness, her eyes are empty. They could be watching you or not. They work indifferently, like lit-up glass and if you ask why she won't speak, why should she? When what she really wants is silence. You know what women are like: Kay, Moira, Sandra. They move through a dark room, peering round under the hoods of their names. Alcestis, Clytemnestra. She could be either of those. She scarcely knows. She goes on thinking something just over your shoulder. This could be the last night before you lose her. But what's the use of saying one thing or another. When what she's really after is you to love her.

Good God! What did I dream last night? I dreamt I was the moon. I woke and found myself still asleep. It was like this: my face misted up from inside And I came and went at will through a little peephole. I had no voice, no mouth, nothing to express my trouble, except my shadows leaning downhill, not quite parallel. Something needs to be said to describe my moonlight. Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer. Made almost of water, which has strictly speaking No feature, but a kind of counter-light, call it insight. Like in woods, when they jostle their hooded shapes, Their heads congealed together, having murdered each other, There are moon-beings, sound-beings, such as deer and half-deer Passing through there, whose eyes can pierce through things. I was like that: visible invisible visible invisible. There's no material as variable as moonlight. I was climbing, clinging to the underneath of my bones, thinking: Good God! Who have I been last night?

My bands of silk and miniver Momently grew heavier; The black gauze was beggarly thin; The ermine muffled mouth and chin; I could not suck the moonlight in. Harlequin in lozenges Of love and hate, I walked in these Striped and ragged rigmaroles; Along the pavement my footsoles Trod warily on living coals. Shouldering the thoughts I loathed, In their corrupt disguises clothed, Morality I could not tear From my ribs, to leave them bare Ivory in silver air. There I walked, and there I raged; The spiritual savage caged Within my skeleton, raged afresh To feel, behind a carnal mesh, The clean bones crying in the flesh.

She could be a Norman Rockwell painting, the small girl on my front porch with her eager face, her wind-burned cheeks red as cherries. Her father waits by the curb, ready to rescue his child should danger threaten, his shadow reaching halfway across the yard. I take the booklet from the girl's outstretched hand, peruse the color photos of candy bars and caramel-coated popcorn, pretend to read it. I have no use for what she's selling, but I can count the freckles on her nose, the scars like fat worms on knobby knees that ought to be covered on a cold day like this, when the wind is blowing and the trees are losing their grip on the last of their leaves.I'll take two of these and one of those, I say, pointing, thinking I won't eat them, but I probably will. It's worth the coming calories to see her joy, how hard she works to spell my name right, taking down my information. Then she turns and gives a thumbs-up sign to her father, who grins like an outfielder to whom the ball has finally come—his heart like a glove, opening.

Because the eye has a short shadow or it is hard to see over heads in the crowd? If everyone else seems smarter but you need your own secret? If mystery was never your friend? If one way could satisfy the infinite heart of the heavens? If you liked the king on his golden throne more than the villagers carrying baskets of lemons? If you wanted to be sure his guards would admit you to the party? The boy with the broken pencil scrapes his little knife against the lead turning and turning it as a point emerges from the wood again If he would believe his life is like that he would not follow his father into war

The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one sitting. Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj (pronounced -oy) & the accusative, -on (plural 0ojn). Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative friend & friends. Adjectives end in –a & take plural & accusative endings to agree with things. Ma amiko is my friend. All verbs are regular & have only one form for each tense or mood; they are not altered for person or number. Mi havas bonajn amikojn is simply to say I have good friends. Adverbs end in –e. La bonaj amiko estas ie. The good friend is here. - A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA, has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old Testament &A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto. Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space on board the Voyager spacecraft. - Esperanto is an artificial language constructed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a polish oculist. I first came across Fundamento Esperanto, the text which introduced this system to the world, as I travelled abroad following a somewhat difficult period in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the railway platform just outside Warsaw where I had missed my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit & dark glasses pushed a cart piled high with ripped & weathered volumes— sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing musical scores & outdated physics textbooks, old copies of Life, new smut, an atlas translated, a grammar,The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics, a guide to the rivers & mountains, thesauri, inscrutable musical scores & mimeographed physics books, defective stories, obsolete sex manuals— one of which caught my notice (Dr. Esperanto, Zamenhof’s pen name, translates as He Who Hopes) & since I had time, I traded my used Leaves of Grass for a copy. - Mi amas vin, bela amiko. I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough. There’s a man from Quebec in my head, a friend to the purple martins. Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows. All purple martins are dying or dead. Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest these creatures feel the same levels of doubt & bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity. While driving home from the brewery one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program about purple martins & the next day he set out to build them a house in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything, let alone a house, not to mention a home for somebody else. I’ve never unrolled a blueprint onto a workbench, sunk a post, or sent the neighbor’s kid pedalling off to the store for a bag full of nails. I’ve never waited ten years for a swallow. Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting. Never piped sugar water through colored tubes to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded with strong, tired hands. Never dismantled the entire affair & put it back together again. Still no swallows. I never installed the big light that stays on through the night to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights, never rested on Sunday with a beer on the deck surveying what I had done & what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers. I have never collapsed in abandon. Never prayed. But enough about purple martins. - As we speak, Esperanto is being corrupted by upset languages such as Interlingua, Klingon, Java & various cryptophasic tongues. Our only hope of reversing this trend is to write the Esperanto epic. Through its grandeur & homegrown humility, it will spur men to freeze the mutating patios so the children of our children’s children may dwell in this song & find comfort in its true texture & frame. It’s worth a try. As I imagine it, it ends in the middle of things. Every line of the work is a first & a last line & this is the spring of its action. Of course, there’s a journey & inside that journey, an implicit voyage through the underworld. There’s a bridge made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers; a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors; a digression on shadows; men clapping in fields to scare away crows; an unending list of warships:The Unternehmen, The Impresa, The Muyarchi, Viec Lam, The Przedsiebiorstwo, The Indarka, The Enterprise, L’Entreprise, Entrepeno

William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk: beheaded 1450 John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester: beheaded 1470 Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers: beheaded 1483 1 Processionals in the exemplary cave, Benediction of shadows. Pomfret. London. The voice fragrant with mannered humility, With an equable contempt for this world, ‘In honorem Trinitatis’. Crash. The head Struck down into a meaty conduit of blood. So these dispose themselves to receive each Pentecostal blow from axe or seraph, Spattering block-straw with mortal residue. Psalteries whine through the empyrean. Fire Flares in the pit, ghosting upon stone Creatures of such rampant state, vacuous Ceremony of possession, restless Habitation, no man’s dwelling-place. 2 For whom do we scrape our tribute of pain— For none but the ritual king? We meditate A rueful mystery; we are dying To satisfy fat Caritas, those Wiped jaws of stone. (Suppose all reconciled By silent music; imagine the future Flashed back at us, like steel against sun, Ultimate recompense.) Recall the cold Of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn, Wakefield, Tewkesbury: fastidious trumpets Shrilling into the ruck; some trampled Acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet, Stuck with strange-postured dead. Recall the wind’s Flurrying, darkness over the human mire. 3 They bespoke doomsday and they meant it by God, their curved metal rimming the low ridge. But few appearances are like this. Once Every five hundred years a comet’s Over-riding stillness might reveal men In such array, livid and featureless, With England crouched beastwise beneath it all. ‘Oh, that old northern business …’ A field After battle utters its own sound Which is like nothing on earth, but is earth. Blindly the questing snail, vulnerable Mole emerge, blindly we lie down, blindly Among carnage the most delicate souls Tup in their marriage-blood, gasping ‘Jesus’. 4 Let mind be more precious than soul; it will not Endure. Soul grasps its price, begs its own peace, Settles with tears and sweat, is possibly Indestructible. That I can believe. Though I would scorn the mere instinct of faith, Expediency of assent, if I dared, What I dare not is a waste history Or void rule. Averroes, old heathen, If only you had been right, if Intellect Itself were absolute law, sufficient grace, Our lives could be a myth of captivity Which we might enter: an unpeopled region Of ever new-fallen snow, a palace blazing With perpetual silence as with torches. 5 As with torches we go, at wild Christmas, When we revel in our atonement Through thirty feasts of unction and slaughter, What is that but the soul’s winter sleep? So many things rest under consummate Justice as though trumpets purified law, Spikenard were the real essence of remorse. The sky gathers up darkness. When we chant ‘Ora, ora pro nobis’ it is not Seraphs who descend to pity but ourselves. Those righteously-accused those vengeful Racked on articulate looms indulge us With lingering shows of pain, a flagrant Tenderness of the damned for their own flesh: 6 My little son, when you could command marvels Without mercy, outstare the wearisome Dragon of sleep, I rejoiced above all— A stranger well-received in your kingdom. On those pristine fields I saw humankind As it was named by the Father; fabulous Beasts rearing in stillness to be blessed. The world’s real cries reached there, turbulence From remote storms, rumour of solitudes, A composed mystery. And so it ends. Some parch for what they were; others are made Blind to all but one vision, their necessity To be reconciled. I believe in my Abandonment, since it is what I have. 7 ‘Prowess, vanity, mutual regard, It seemed I stared at them, they at me. That was the gorgon’s true and mortal gaze: Averted conscience turned against itself.’ A hawk and a hawk-shadow. ‘At noon, As the armies met, each mirrored the other; Neither was outshone. So they flashed and vanished And all that survived them was the stark ground Of this pain. I made no sound, but once I stiffened as though a remote cry Had heralded my name. It was nothing …’ Reddish ice tinged the reeds; dislodged, a few Feathers drifted across; carrion birds Strutted upon the armour of the dead. 8 Not as we are but as we must appear, Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we Desire life but as they would have us live, Set apart in timeless colloquy. So it is required; so we bear witness, Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us, Each distant sphere of harmony forever Poised, unanswerable. If it is without Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or If it is not, all echoes are the same In such eternity. Then tell me, love, How that should comfort us—or anyone Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place, Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

Almost droll in its assault on magisterial, my father’s funeral sermon made me prowl, —agitated—from bean casserole to escarole salad, then taco casserole, and back all afternoon, in thrall to Dad’s every growl, cramped certitude, and corporal wavering lost to shrill sacral cant: The pastoral story was Dad’s own, though, frail as it is: faith and God steamroll death. His wife’s and daughter’s role was to die—a trial of faith, not cruel so much as natural, when the supernatural is, as it was for him, literal. His cloistral withdrawal, according to the minister’s drawl, was grace, and his temporal forfeitures fat collateral on eternity. It felt surreal (can there be a funeral without, now, the word surreal?) to hear Dad’s stoic control and loneliness spiral heavenward on genial praise, real enough for the general, one supposes. An orchestral hymn flared through the stereo’s cloth grill. Cold waves over the deep water roll, we sang, some voices shrill, mine guttural, my brother’s slow as a crawl— our voices one and several, a visceral, not unmagisterial, chorale.

Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm Nor question much That subtle wreath of hair, which crowns my arm; The mystery, the sign, you must not touch, For 'tis my outward soul, Viceroy to that, which then to heaven being gone, Will leave this to control And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution. For if the sinewy thread my brain lets fall Through every part Can tie those parts, and make me one of all, Those hairs which upward grew, and strength and art Have from a better brain, Can better do'it; except she meant that I By this should know my pain, As prisoners then are manacled, when they'are condemn'd to die. Whate'er she meant by'it, bury it with me, For since I am Love's martyr, it might breed idolatry, If into other hands these relics came; As 'twas humility To afford to it all that a soul can do, So, 'tis some bravery, That since you would have none of me, I bury some of you.