John Logan

There were bees about. From the start I thought The day was apt to hurt. There is a high Hill of sand behind the sea and the kids Were dropping from the top of it like schools Of fish over falls, cracking skulls on skulls. I knew the holiday was hot. I saw The August sun teeming in the bodies Logged along the beach and felt the yearning In the brightly covered parts turning each To each. For lunch I bit the olive meat: A yellow jacket stung me on the tongue. I knelt to spoon and suck the healing sea ... A little girl was digging up canals With her toes, her arm hanging in a cast As white as the belly of a dead fish Whose dead eye looked at her with me, as she Opened her grotesque system to the sea ... I walked away; now quietly I heard A child moaning from a low mound of sand, Abandoned by his friend. The child was tricked, Trapped upon his knees in a shallow pit. (The older ones will say you can get out.) I dug him up. His legs would not unbend. I lifted him and held him in my arms As he wept. Oh I was gnarled as a witch Or warlock by his naked weight, was slowed In the sand to a thief’s gait. When his strength Flowed, he ran, and I rested by the sea ... A girl was there. I saw her drop her hair, Let it fall from the doffed cap to her breasts Tanned and swollen over wine red woolen. A boy, his body blackened by the sun, Rose out of the sand stripping down his limbs With graceful hands. He took his gear and walked Toward the girl in the brown hair and wine And then past me; he brushed her with the soft, Brilliant monster he lugged into the sea ... By this tide I raised a small cairn of stone Light and smooth and clean, and cast the shadow Of a stick in a perfect line along The sand. My own shadow followed then, until I felt the cold swirling at the groin.

Hirto corde gigni quosdam homines proditur, neque alios fortioris esse industriae, sicut Aristomenen Messenium qui trecentos occidit Lacedaemonios ... —Plinii, Naturalis Historia XI. Ixx. The guards sleep they breathe uneven Conversation with the Trees the sharp cicadas And knots of pine the flames Have stirred to talk: their light Shows him rolling in his bonds As if he dragged his bones Again beyond a tall And ghosted mist of blood; He took three hundred lives And will not give his own for capture Even. The smell of searing Hemp and flesh startles As the scream of birds— Should wake the guards of men Or dead. The fire flares and frames A running giant his wrists Caught between his thighs; A burned and awkward god. Once he tried the foxes’ Paths out of the shattered quarry. No way now. One may Kill his hundreds; still No way. How can he live Without his heart. Throw him To the ground and prepare knives! Do they by their hate Or wonder break the breast He shut to fear? Mock Or pray as they cut flesh Crush ribs and lay all open To the alien chill of air? No scream tears From him; the tiny veins Along his eyelid swell And pools of sweat gather at its corners. But they do not see his Slowly swinging eyes. They watch his heart; its brown Hair is whorled and dry.

1 At focus in the national Park’s ellipse a marker Draws tight the guys of Miles, opposite the national Obelisk with its restless oval Peoples who shall be Deeply drawn to its Austerities: or For a moment try the mystery Of the god-like eye, before Our long climb down past relic Schoolboy names and states And one foolish man Climbs up, his death high In his elliptic face. 2 A double highway little Used in early spring Goes to the end of the land Where Washington’s chandeliers Are kept, his beds and chairs, His roped-off relic kitchen Spits, his pans; his floors Are worn underneath the dead Pilgrims’ feet; outside The not-so-visited tomb; And over the field and fence His legendary river: And so I walk although The day is cold for this; I eat a thin slice Of bread and one remarkable Egg perfectly shaped, A perfect oriental por- Celain sheen of white. Suddenly the lost Ghosts of his life Broke from the trees and from the cold Mud pools where he played A boy and set as a man The sand glint of his boot, The flick of his coat on the weeds; His wheels click in the single road.

The surfers beautiful as men can be ride the warm blue green swells and the white sand is alive with girls. Outriggers (double boats) ride the waves back in as the native warriors did. I tried to swim and tried to look, but ended up just going back: a huge, perfect black man at the beach somehow drove me away a block to St. Augustine’s Church. The bodies were giv- ing me a fit and I have come to seek the momentary calm we find sometimes in the musk of Christ (when he was awake and sweat- ing blood as others slept, or like a furious bouncer hustling out the money changers). The bodies of Mary and Christ both still live, we’re told. They’re alive and thus must have dealt with the stress of that long time of turning on to being young. I speak of teens. Fifteen and ten years ago when I first confessed, it was in this same church built then as a gigantic shed where the strange Hawaiian birds (I forgot their names—no matter) flew in and out of the high wood- en rafters like the whimsical winds of grace, and grace gives back to sight what beauty is— as that loveliness at the beach. Now the church has been rebuilt in pointed stone across the street from a much higher new hotel where at lunch I almost spilled and found I could not eat the purple orchid in my drink.

1 Against the low, New York State mountain background, a smokestack sticks up and gives out its snakelike wisp. Thin, stripped win- ter birches pick up the vertical lines. Last night we five watched the white, painted upright bars of steel in an ancient, New York jail called Herkimer (named for a general who lost an arm). Cops threw us against the car. Their marks grow gaudy over me. They burgeon beneath my clothes. I know I give my wound too much thought and time. Gallows loomed outside our sorry solitary cells. “You are in the oldest of our New York jails,” they said. “And we’ve been in books. It’s here they had one of Dreiser’s characters arraigned.” The last one of our company to be hanged we found had chopped her husband up and fed him to the hungry swine. They nudged the wan- ing warmth of his flesh. Each gave him a rooting touch, translating his dregs into the hopes of pigs. And now with their spirited wish and with his round, astonished face, her changed soul still floats about over their small farm near this little New York town. 2 The door bangs shut in the absolute dark. Toilets flush with a great force, and I can hear the old, gentle drunk, my neighbor in the tank, hawk his phlegm and fart. In the early day we line up easily as a cliché for our bread and bowls of gruel. We listen, timeless, for the courthouse bell, play rummy the whole day long and “shoot the moon,” go to bed and jack off to calm down, and scowl harshly, unmanned, at those who were once our friends. The prison of our skins now rises outside and drops in vertical lines before our very eyes. 3 Outdoors again, now we can walk to the Erie Locks (“Highest Lift Locks in the World!”) The old iron bridge has a good bed— cobbles made of wood. Things pass through this town everywhere for it was built in opposite tiers. Two levels of roads on either side the Canal, then two terraces of tracks and higher ranks of beds: roads where trucks lumber awkwardly above the town— like those heavy golden cherubim that try to wing about in the old, Baroque church. The little town—with its Gothic brick bank, Victorian homes with gingerbread frieze and its blasted factories (collapsed, roofs roll- ing back from walls like the lids of eyes)— has died and given up its substance like a hollow duct, smokestack or a pen through which the living stuff flows on. 4 So we walk the long, dead-end track along the shallow, frozen lake where the canal forms a fork (this time of year the locks don’t work). And now and again we look back, for the troopers haunt the five of us out the ledges toward The Locks. (We know they want to hose our bellies and our backs. Or—as they said— “Play the Mambo” on our heads.) We do not yet feel quite free— though the blue and yellow, newly painted posts for ships bloom gaily in the cold, and the bulbs about their bases bulge for spring. Soon the great, iron gates will open out and the first woman-shaped ship, mammoth, silent, will float toward us like a god come back to make us feel only half afraid. Until then, though my friends will be gone from this dry channel of snow and stone, I’ll stay here among the monuments of sheer, brown and gray rock where you can read the names of lovers, sailors and of kids etched in chalk, and in this winter air still keep one hand over my aching ear. Buffalo, March 1967

We suffer from the repression of the sublime. —Roberto Assagioli This artist’s sculptured, open box of mahogany (ivory white inside) is strung with vertical and horizontal layers of mus- ical wires that sing when struck, and bits of bright garnet rock tremble where they intersect. These gems flash in the candle light, and before me all my beloved childhood looms up in the humming levels, each one deeper than the other. I tip this sculpted box and my child laughs and moves there in his own time. You’ll hear me moan: Oh, you will hear me moan with all the old, sure pleasure of what I’d thought I’d lost come back again. Why, we have never left our home! On the leather lace fixed about my neck, blue, yellow, red and black African trading beads begin to glow: their colors all weave and newly flow together like translucent and angelic worms. And beneath these my neck is as alive with gentle, white bees as is a woman’s breast. Beside and in the light river figures come on stage exactly as they are needed. I tell you, I conduct my own act! A boy poses so youthfully, so beautifully, his slim arms a graceful arrow over his small, brown head, and he dives! Limbs and body push supple as a whole school of fish. And then his vacant place is taken by another— a man dressed in denim and in boots of red rubber. He is wrenched from the shore and pulled through the fresh, bright stream by a kid who tugs on one of his hands and holds a fishing rod. And, too, this man is dragged in the opposite direction by a red dog on a leash shaking his wet great coat into the stippled light. That man just sashayed: he zigzagged this way and that. The man is me! A bluejay does a dance for us! He hops beside a tree that rises inside of me. He half-glides, his iridescent, blue back striking like a brush of Gauguin on the bare canvas of the air and then: he flies! leaving behind him a small, perfect feather, which I find shades from blue to brown— my brother’s color into mine. Now in the space the diver and the booted fellow left, my brother and I are there fishing together, our poles glinting in the water. My mouth moves. My eyes are alive! I cry to my brother with joy. For that bluejay was a messenger of what I want! Gregory my friend and guide on this voyage seems benign. He brushes my chest and my stretched, naked arms open to the sun with a branch of the fragrant pine. “Be healed,” he chants with each glancing stroke. “Be healed.” The needles prick my skin back into life, and I go down to bathe my feet in the stream. The veins form a light, mottled web along my white ankle. I feel my kinship with the pine, the jay, the luminescent stream and with him—or is it with her, the Mother? Gregory, my oracle, my teacher. He leans there in the door of our tent by the river, his face glowing, hair long and shining as a woman’s, his belly fat with life—pregnant with the two of us: my brother and I, unborn twins who lie entangled in each other’s developing limbs. Soon we will be born! He and I will taste of milk for the very first time! And taste of strawberry pop and of bright bananas. And we will eat, my brother and I, a great, shining, autumn-red apple fallen from our father’s tree as if from the long sky, and you too will taste this apple with us, for we all have the same mother, and her name is Grace.

The bridge barely curved that connects the terrible with the tender. —Rilke 1 The children play at the Luxembourg fountain. Their small ships catch wind and sail out and come round again. 2 Sometime between 250 and 200 B.C. fishermen and boatmen of the tribe Parisii discovered and built their huts on the largest island in the River Seine. Celtic Lutetia, “Town surround- ed by water,” thus was born there. The island is shaped like a boat— and this figure became a part of the capital’s coat-of-arms. So this was the start of the City first named for its engulfing water (on whose economy it depended), then after the people themselves: members of the tribe of Paris. We listen to these water folk and know they hear us, for we are born out of boats and out of water. The first sound we hear is the heart knocking quiet as a boat docks: and we all dissolve to island, earth and tears later. 3 And into air and fire! Once in the Latin Quarter in a space formed for him by waves of bright loiterers near the shortest street named for the Cat Who Catches Fish— or who (with slight inflection) “sins”— I watched a dark young man, naked to his thin waist, push long plumes of flame into the air above our awed faces raised there. From the sharp heat inside and out, his head and chest glowed in the night with an aura of oil or sweat. Thirsting, he drank again from a sponge of kerosene and breathed out long strings of fire and smoke into the Street of the Harp. Dark ash dropped back upon his face and cap, which lay open on the cobbled road waiting for coins from all who guessed at the mystery in what he’d done. He built a vast pillar of fire as if to guide us, then suddenly stopped, walked across the space, and kissed a reaching child (to bless and heal that amazed head), waved gratefully to us who now filled his cap with alms, and, smiling and burned (I saw scars beneath his raised arm), he sailed up that narrowing street in a wildly bal- looning white shirt we had watched him casually don to cover his vestment of skin. 4 For centuries that old City ended its west boundary in a small archipelago separated from the main island by the Seine’s two arms. It was on one of these small islets that Philip the Fair about the year 1314 had raised up a stake for the grand master, Order of Templars, whom he condemned, then from the palace window watched him burn. These little islands, quickened with their ghost victim’s screams, were joined in the sixteenth century by the decree of Henry Third (and by a great engineering feat Faust could envy) to the main island of the City. This new western tip was given the name of a park, “Vert Galant,” nickname of Henry Fourth: “The Gay old Spark.” Near there I watched in a loud street a white-haired man stand with one foot on the curb, the other in the cobbled street, and play an old mandolin. He was dressed in a black and frayed tuxedo and played with intense passion, sadly, but this desperate, dignified man, transformed by his art and by poverty (his case kept open for money), could not play the mandolin. —He just strummed the same chord again and again and again ... 5 It was also Philip the Fair who created an aristocratic prison air by building the blocks-long Gothic Conciergerie. The best view is from the Right Bank: The Slaughter House Quay (which now is a market for pets). You can see the four recently cleaned towers reflect- ed in the Seine. (At the Seine in fall, beneath the red and gold leaves, you see the rust, mahogany and beige boats gently jostle together at the shore and wait.) On the right: the crenelated Bonbec Tower stays. Bonbec means “babbler,” for this place was used through the centuries as a torture chamber. The right one of the twin towers, Argent, held treasure. Still the gorgeous Horloge Tower on the left corner of the ancient building across from the Bridge of Change houses the giant clock which gave its name to that quay: in its field of blue the many great gold fleurs-de-lys and the two life-sized mythical women, one with a fascicle of wheat, one with a balanced scale raised high in the clock, whose silver chime used to toll the hours for the monarch. (This was melted down in those days when Terror struck.) In this turreted place we have shaved the graceful neck and head of Marie Antoinette, ripped her white, ruffled collar wide and wrapped the cuff of rope about her hands behind her back. We made her face the casual knitting women and men making fists sitting on steps in the “May Court” (where a fresh tree was placed each spring by the lawyers’ clerks!) on her way to the guillotine. Its blade was heavy as primeval stone: she, the chemist Lavoisier, Charlotte Corday, poet and brother André Chénier, Madame du Barry—all 2600 who died, having said their last farewells in the Women‘s Courtyard, twelve per day underneath the blade! and some were disemboweled beside. Was there sometimes an image of beauty in their minds at the last? Perhaps on white sands beside the blue-black sea a matched pair of roan horses galloping together in the bright spume, riderless. Or a nude young man and woman lying together touching in a field of flowers? 6 Nearby on this Island the gargoyles of Notre Dame gawk in ancient horror and some forever gnaw on stone rabbits in the parapets or wail in winged, formal misery outside the set limits of the orthodox Church— all glory happening within the walls where they squat: so hunched, so beaked, so horrorstruck. 7 A wing of the May Courtyard where the condemned waited “Monsieur de Paris” as executioners were named now adjoins the building of glass and light, with no walls, it seems, jewel of Sainte Chapelle, its windows of rose and blue, gold, green, yellow, purple, rising fifty feet: its spire piercing the foliate, layered, many-colored egg of the vault of heaven, showering all the primal hues and shadows given— bright as the truth reflected in a drop of fresh blood or the colors of the body’s inner organs hid- den before the sure explosion of light that hits them at the moment of violent death. —This is a time like that of the sun that once a year, just at the dawn of winter solstice, lights up an ancient Celtic stone grave, striking the bones spread on shelves with all the colors of the flesh. 8 Who can stand these juxtapositions of person and place and time? I walk across the Bridge of Change where I have so often watched by the towers of the Conciergerie. Now, water laves a little higher up the stair from the River to the Quay, hiding some of the steps from me. Boats nudge at the edge. I walk along the Boulevard past the great gold and blue corner clock, the ornate wrought-iron gate and fence of the Place of Justice (its name changed from the time of kings), past the shadow and spire of Sainte Chapelle. I cross the Bridge of Saint Michel into the Latin Quarter. But I do not look for the Street of the Cat Who Fishes or the Street of the Harp. I turn right, wandering a bit, and suddenly, as if by chance, find myself at this street, and here I will wait, for it is our street,Rue Gît le Coeur: Here Lies the Heart. for Roger Aplon—1975

There is a two-headed goat, a four-winged chicken and a sad lamb with seven legs whose complicated little life was spent in Hopland, California. I saw the man with doubled eyes who seemed to watch in me my doubts about my spirit. Will it snag upon this aging flesh? There is a strawberry that grew out of a carrot plant, a blade of grass that lanced through a thick rock, a cornstalk nineteen-feet-two-inches tall grown by George Osborne of Silome, Arkansas. There is something grotesque growing in me I cannot tell. It has been waxing, burgeoning, for a long time. It weighs me down like the chains of the man of Lahore who began collecting links on his naked body until he crawled around the town carrying the last thirteen years of his life six-hundred-seventy pounds. Each link or each lump in me is an offense against love. I want my own lit candle lamp buried in my skull like the Lighthouse Man of Chungking, who could lead the travelers home. Well, I am still a traveler and I don’t know where I live. If my home is here, inside my breast, light it up! And I will invite you in as my first guest.