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A Pindaric Poem

An Epistle to Mr. Cuthbert Jackson This motley piece to you I send, Who always were a faithful friend; Who, if disputes should happen hence, Can best explain the author’s sense; And, anxious for the public weal, Do, what I sing, so often feel. The want of method pray excuse, Allowing for a vapored Muse; Nor to a narrow path confined, Hedge in by rules a roving mind. The child is genuine, you may trace Throughout the sire’s transmitted face. Nothing is stolen: my Muse, though mean, Draws from the spring she finds within; Nor vainly buy what Gildon sells, Poetic buckets for dry wells. School-helps I want, to climb on high, Where all the ancient treasures lie, And there unseen commit a theft On wealth in Greek exchequers left. Then where? from whom? what can I steal, Who only with the moderns deal? This were attempting to put on Raiment from naked bodies won: They safely sing before a thief, They cannot give who want relief; Some few excepted, names well known, And justly laurelled with renown, Whose stamp of genius marks their ware, And theft detects: of theft beware; From More so lashed, example fit, Shun petty larceny in wit. First know, my friend, I do not mean To write a treatise on the spleen; Nor to prescribe when nerves convulse; Nor mend th’ alarum watch, your pulse. If I am right, your question lay, What course I take to drive away The day-mare Spleen, by whose false pleas Men prove mere suicides in ease; And how I do myself demean In stormy world to live serene. When by its magic lantern Spleen With frightful figures spreads life’s scene, And threat’ning prospects urged my fears, A stranger to the luck of heirs; Reason, some quiet to restore, Showed part was substance, shadow more; With Spleen’s dead weight though heavy grown, In life’s rough tide I sunk not down, But swam, ’till Fortune threw a rope, Buoyant on bladders fill’d with hope. I always choose the plainest food To mend viscidity of blood. Hail! water-gruel, healing power, Of easy access to the poor; Thy help love’s confessors implore, And doctors secretly adore; To thee, I fly, by thee dilute— Through veins my blood doth quicker shoot, And by swift current throws off clean Prolific particles of Spleen. I never sick by drinking grow, Nor keep myself a cup too low, And seldom Cloe’s lodgings haunt, Thrifty of spirits, which I want. Hunting I reckon very good To brace the nerves, and stir the blood: But after no field-honors itch, Achieved by leaping hedge and ditch, While Spleen lies soft relaxed in bed, Or o’er coal fires inclines the head, Hygeia’s sons with hound and horn, And jovial cry awake the morn. * * * To cure the mind’s wrong bias, Spleen, Some recommended the bowling-green; Some, hilly walks; all, exercise; Fling but a stone, the giant dies; Laugh and be well. Monkeys have been Extreme good doctors for the Spleen; And kitten, if the humor hit, Has harlequinned away the fit. * * * If spleen-fogs rise at close of day, I clear my evening with a play, Or to some concert take my way. The company, the shine of lights, The scenes of humor, music’s flights, Adjust and set the soul to rights. Life’s moving pictures, well-wrought plays, To others’ grief attention raise: Here, while the tragic fictions glow, We borrow joy by pitying woe; There gaily comic scenes delight, And hold true mirrors to our sight. Virtue, in charming dress arrayed, Calling the passions to her aid, When moral scenes just actions join, Takes shape, and shows her face divine. * * * Sometimes I dress, with women sit, And chat away the gloomy fit; Quit the stiff garb of serious sense, And wear a gay impertinence, Nor think nor speak with any pains, But lay on fancy’s neck the reins; Talk of unusual swell of waist In maid of honor loosely laced, And beauty borr’wing Spanish red, And loving pair with sep’rate bed, And jewels pawned for loss of game, And then redeemed by loss of fame; Of Kitty (aunt left in the lurch By grave pretence to go to church) Perceived in hack with lover fine, Like Will and Mary on the coin: And thus in modish manner we, In aid of sugar, sweeten tea. Permit, ye fair, your idol form, Which e’en the coldest heart can warm, May with its beauties grace my line, While I bow down before its shrine, And your thronged altars with my lays Perfume, and get by giving praise. With speech so sweet, so sweet a mien, You excommunicate the Spleen. * * *

We speak of rebellion when the kid is a hellion and the folks are as mild as a spoon. Likewise Republicans born of freethinking lesbians seem like reactors, turncoats on how they were raised. Let me offer another concatenation of this explanation. Think of your mother as one discrete corner of a person with a multiple mental disorder. You're one of the others. One that split off. Not a turncoat then, but the expression

I see my mother, at thirteen, in a village so small it’s never given a name. Monsoon season drying up— steam lifting in full-bodied waves. She chops bắp chuối for the hogs. Her hair dips to the small of her back as if smeared in black and polished to a shine. She wears a deep side-part that splits her hair into two uneven planes. They come to watch her: Americans, Marines, just boys, eighteen or nineteen. With scissor-fingers, they snip the air, point at their helmets and then at her hair. All they want is a small lock— something for a bit of good luck. Days later, my mother is sent to the city for safekeeping. She will return home once, only to be given away to my father. In the pictures, the cake is sweet and round. My mother’s hair which spans the length of her áo dài is long, washed, and uncut.

My familiar ghost again Comes to see what he can see, Critic, son of Conscious Brain, Spying on our privacy. Slam the window, bolt the door, Yet he’ll enter in and stay; In to-morrow’s book he’ll score Indiscretions of to-day. Whispered love and muttered fears, How their echoes fly about! None escape his watchful ears, Every sigh might be a shout. No kind words nor angry cries Turn away this grim spoilsport; No fine lady’s pleading eyes, Neither love, nor hate, nor . . . port. Critic wears no smile of fun, Speaks no word of blame nor praise, Counts our kisses one by one, Notes each gesture, every phrase. My familiar ghost again Stands or squats where suits him best; Critic, son of Conscious Brain, Listens, watches, takes no rest.

Draped in towels, my grandmother sits in a hard-backed chair, a white bowl of soapy water on the floor. She lifts her frail arm, then rests it, gratefully, in her daughter’s palm. Gliding a wet washcloth, my mother’s hand becomes a cloud, and every bruise, a rain- drenched flower.

None of us understands our story better than this nonentity, unconscious slip of nature, nonetheless our common parent dilating at the bottom of the sea. The parent, too, of octopus and pony, of reefs and villages, once it was strange simply for being not a rock itself— not rock, but a blank sleep on a rock shelf. And, deeply sympathetic to the rock, to sea and sea-dust washing through its skin, it knows, although it doesn’t know it knows, that minds and their milieux are all one thing. Some see its way of thinking; most, not yet. Still, one day, just by living, all will find reason enough within themselves to think the single thought forever in its mind.

They splay at a bend of the road, rifles slung, the shadows minimal, their hands tugging their slings by the upper swivel to ease the routine of the march. They have been moving since morning, and over each has descended that singleness, mournful and comatose, which is the mysterious gift of the march. Their helmets shadow their eyes, their chinstraps dangling. In the raddle of grasses their solitude floats in a drift of identities, a common melancholy. A captain enters the frame at the head of his company. His face flashes. With his left hand he tilts back his helmet, while with his right he draws the length of an elbow across forehead and nose, his stained armpits showing dark. A bracelet flashes behind him. The column recedes, rifles close over the canted belts, moving up, the packed backs vulnerable: (Cut) Late afternoon. In the half-light a handful of blazing sticks, four infantrymen heating mess tins over an eddy of smoke, a fifth on his hams, his eyes upcast from the rim of his metal cup. Nearby a corporal works a patch into the chamber of his rifle; he repeats four syllables and smiles sleepily into the camera. The camera moves to the bivouac area; a group, their meat-cans close to their mouths, spooning the compost, Chinese-fashion, and clowning between mouthfuls. Very close. Their jaws, lightly bearded, the necks in their jacket collars strained in an easy horseplay, the Adam’s apples rapidly raised and released in the human exertion of eating. In deep shadow, the light failing, very close. A private tugs at his boot by the toe and the round of the heel. Deliberately, he draws the boot clear of his foot, sets it aside with deep satisfaction, massages his instep over a maternal thickness of socks. He bends toward the other foot, camera-shy, a half smile breaking; (Cut) It is not yet possible to distinguish the forms behind the camouflage netting. They move in the central darkness of the gun, stacking shells and bringing up powder charges. Only the bulk of the howitzer is sure, the gun-barrel crossing the line of the valley under the tented netting. A village is burning in the valley. In the watery light, smoke deepens over three hearthbeds of brightness. A spire. A siding. A ladder of rooftops. The gun fires. The picture trembles. (Cut) An iron darkening. The hip of a tank darkens a frame, foreshortened, the treads close to the lens, a rushing of hammers, rings. The lens is cleared. A cobbled street. A row of country-houses, walled. A rosebush in the heavy light, blown forward. Dust falls in the afterdraft, a grain at a time. The camera is watchful. A rifleman moves up the frame, his rifle at low port, his shadow buffing the cobbles, crouched. He pauses under the rosebush, his rifle hiked. A second figure breaks through the frame, freezing between the foreground and the far doorway. The man under the rosetree sights carefully. The second man listens. He raises his rifle, barrel backwards, and brings the butt down heavily on the door-panels. The rifle rebounds. He measures a second blow, his teeth bared slightly in a reflex of anxiety. His eye is large. The butt-plate smashes over doorknob and lock, the knocker flies upward once, the panel splinters all at once. The man kicks the door open easily with a booted foot. He listens, bent toward his rifle-sights. He signals to the second man and enters the doorway, stooped like a man entering a cave— (Cut) Brightness through trees. A damascene. At the edge of a clearing, a parked jeep. Two medical corpsmen lash litters to the jeep engine a few hundred yards behind front lines. The litter-poles enter the lens over the arch of the engine. On the litter, a swathed head, a shock of broken hair, motionless, a fall of blankets. The stretcher-bearers vault lightly to their seats and move off at a crawl. Roadmarker: Battalion Aid Station. A corner of charred wall, rubble, glass, timber. Legend: Épicerie . The stretcher-bearers dismount. The film is bad. Presently a gloved hand in a surgeon’s sheath, holding a forceps. Briskly the hand moves over a circlet of maimed flesh noosed in a bloody bandage. A scalpel flashes between the living hand and the human hurt, forcing the rind of the wound, filling the frame. The camera submits, framing the wound like a surgeon’s retractor, its gaze nerveless and saline. The gauzes blacken swiftly, too heavy for the jaws of the forceps.... The surgeon at full figure. A breeze finds the fold of his tunic. In the distance the litter-bearers are leaning for the litter-poles. His eyes hold the optical center of the lens, unanswered. His mouth rejects contemplation, not yet relaxed. His hands are void in their glimmering cicatrix of rubber.

Spoon of O, spoon of nothing, spoon of ankh, spoon of poonss , spoon of the lady at the dressing table, spoon of , spoon of female, spoon of , spoon of war, spoon of the world, spoon of War of the Worlds, spoon of stick figure, spoon of girl, spoon of boy, spoon of spear thrower, spoon of fire, spoon of egg, spoon of egg race, spoon of dish, spoon of ran away with, spoon of ran away with and came back, spoon of never came back, spoon of silver, spoon of gold, spoon of milk, spoon of Saturn, spoon of vulva, spoon of vagina, spoon of Ant, spoon of Bee, spoon of Venus, spoon of Serena, spoon of vugg, spoon of vum, spoon of spider, spoon of sun, spoon of fee, fie, foe, fum. Spoon of everyone. Spoon of the belly. Spoon of the empty belly. Spoon of the full one. Spoon of no one hungry. Spoon for everyone.

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring – When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling. What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning, Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.