THE HEALER

THE HEALER                 

            — for Jan Bogaerts, photographer                                                                                                                                                  

The new year: I slalom to work on back roads,

thinking of whales & the coming extinction—

Rare snow in the folds of Mt. St. Helena:

I can't tell the clouds from mountain or ocean.

Cliffs rocks thaw and tumble and spout

to the middle of the road like noisy children.

I cannot separate the pieces of my life:

artist, teacher, poet, photographer . . . 

Through the camera lens, an empty house

on a steep hillside reflecting blue sky,

arched windows eyeing a cosmic joke.

Grateful for the weak sun,

a grey horse in a pale field

practices for that final sleep.

I think of age and love—not seasonal love—

but loving a cat, a stone, the sky equally.

Nothing readied me for losing my horses in winter.

Telegraph Avenue dusted with the purity of snow,

the homeless dressed in something acceptably white.

Snow turns to the sentience of a rainstorm.

The children write, making comparisons.

The word that comes to mind is hunger—

Light grabs water with a desperation born of darkness,

dancing with its own origins, its own death.

They are hungry for the archaic language deep inside.

Extraordinary light after rain.

The seven-year drought officially ends.

Beneath swollen creekbeds,

the fossil thirst of water, unslaked,

underground rivers older than civilization.

I have trouble staying on the road,

gravity’s uncertain which way to go.

I count my friends among the homeless

who, having nothing, hand me small gifts.

Stuffed toys, polar bears and blue whales.

In the Tenderloin—the River Styx—I seek Daniel,

finding only vacant pools of pavement.

Charon is well paid for his time.

Tracing the coastline with new eyes

reminds me of the time we don’t have.

To make up for it, I write letters no one will read.

Through the aperture of memory, I want to say graphos,

for the time when words and pictures weren't separated.

Artist-shamans. A sculptor working with AIDS patients

thought she was inured to death:

each one took its own time sinking in.

The HIV women who are next, won't come to my workshops.

The nature of her work has changed. Artist as healer,

she makes shields of shining copper with faint ciphers.

Today, in San Francisco, the undocumented life

of the 10,000th AIDS victim flickered out—

Each silent vigil, a statistic for the record,

enigmatic obituaries in hometown newspapers,

interred skeletal lines of artifice.

The sculptor stressed the art of saying goodbye—

She miscalculated, thinking she'd have time:

I was so sure he'd live another two months.

She spends her nights fighting the facts.

When someone asked, Who heals the healer?

A photographer said I am a servant of the light.

To serve light, one must also know the darkness.

I am hard at work, unearthing

incandescent ancestors of words

for the time when language took its first gulp of air

and cried out in the night.

I am working hard

to fortify the ramparts of memory

for the time when words fail us.

1/14/93  (rev. 8/4/96)

The Healer (prose, no efile)

POEM TO A MAN LEAVING HIMSELF BEHIND

POEM TO A MAN LEAVING HIMSELF BEHIND

As the plane taxiing out the runway,
a rainbow appeared right in front of the storm.
The plane’s red shark fins slice through the clouds,
as if to sever the rainbow for hope, for the gays,
for the artists, a rainbow for all of us.
Afraid of flying, you eat Mary’s brownies
I smuggled through security,
the plane was delayed and so we had a beer.
We are more than a little intoxicated,
chemicals within, chemicals without.
Last night I heard you whisper thank you for being there
as you turned out my light, kissing me good night
and then sleeping alone. It was not our time for love.
but the love is there nonetheless, yes the pull.
The heart wants what it wants.
Vins says you’re equally gay, I say equally straight.
But we kept kissing each other goodbye anyway,
your hand slipping down my back, skin against skin,
as you said, thank you for being my mother,
my sister, my grandmother, my brother, my...
stopping at the word that won’t rest easily upon lips.
I thought unrequited love was reserved for old plays.
Watching your plane rise, momentary smoke,
my heart in my throat, remembering the plane crash
I witnessed at the Bijlmer, and in Portugal.
Your plane pierces the sky, one moment a black dot,
another, gone forever. Will I ever see you again?
And I think of your fear of flying,
especially after the Dutch airplane disaster,
you said you didn’t want to be buried
in the hinterlands of Leissel,
you wanted to be among friends. And you said,
how lonely you are for no boys will sleep with you,
and the despair that you loved women too.
You get lost at the point between a woman’s breasts.
What I will remember is you rising up from the bath,
all brown and golden, a tawny feline,
something gorgeous to behold.
My eye grabbing that moment in time.
With your photography—the impulses in the moment of taking,
a thief of light, whereas mine is in the taking of images,
without film. A thief of memory.
These are the words of our lives.

1/7/93
SFO
First draft

Each Seeking the Other (no efile)

Journal entry, 1/4/93, San Francisco, with John McBride, Jan Bogaerts

1/4/93 I spent last evening with John McBride and Ken Bullock drinking wine and in Enrico‘s. John gave us the key to his uncle’s house on and we wound up hanging out in the Mission district going to used bookstores. I got a full length man’s tweed coat for six dollars. It’s freezing, I relish the warmth.

Jan went off on his own into the night. We didn’t have a preset time to meet up, he had no key so it was a bit touch and go. I’m sleepy, crabby, not particularly interested in either John nor Jan. But John looks better and better these days, he will never leave the memory of his exwife behind. I’m feeling a bit jaded these days myself. Confusion has fled and I am left with sheer crabbiness. 

We staggered around Washington Square afterward, and I was definitely feeling the wine, we were listing a bit. I was esconced between John and Ken so I wouldn’t get lost. We were laying hands upon each other quite a bit at Enrico‘s. Like raccoons at the cat bowl.  

Most likely it was the wine but John didn’t just put his arm around me to steady me, and I still can’t tell if there’s interest, or it’s merely politeness. John was looking particularly attractive, but it didn’t do anything for me. Timing is everything. And John tells me that Enrico‘s is where, after a couple of “far out motherfuckers,” which is a deadly cocktail, John proposed to Marianna Rexroth. It didn’t end well. Kenneth didn’t like him, mad their life miserable.

The trouble with all this attraction stuff is that once acted upon, you cannot go back to being friends, no matter what they say. There’s an easiness that flees when we become lovers. I thought love was supposed to draw people closer together. Instead, the walls grow higher. Maybe there something wrong with me that it happens so. 

I’m sorry for the vast gulf between Jan and me, I know there’s nothing I can do, after the fact. Again he tells me I’m so beautiful and that I should believe it. I’m perplexed. He takes myriad photos of me that I will never see.

After a meal, some harmony is restored, something that was there before all this craziness started, resurfaces. Friendship abides. We have a shared history to anchor us, when I stayed with him in Lissel, and Vins. We are torn between virtual realities. He was so pleased by my photo proofs, they’re not the best that I’ve ever done, but I just don’t have the time to work on them. 

Ah yes, the interim between shifts, we are off again to Enrico‘s. Who knows where it will take us this time? I may wind up coming home alone. I walk on, Jan photographs Columbus Street from inside Enrico‘s, I feel at home, the waiter recognizes me from last night. Ken is a few minutes behind me. 

Ken and I managed to kill off most of a bottle of Beaujolais before Jan returns. He has shot over three rolls in less than 45 minutes. I thought I was fast. But he has a sweet and stealthy Leica camera. Ken tottered off, and we headEd for the Saloon. I have been inside more bars during the past two weeks than I have in an entire lifetime.

Jan is working the crowd. I am alone, but not alone—which is an interesting phenomenon. He is very good at working his way into people’s psyches. He both charms and disarms. He will do anything to get the photo. I watched him get right into the singer’s face, rhythm and blues, heavy on the rhythm.

It truly is interesting hanging out with him. I can observe in a way not necessarily available to me if I was on my own. He’s like a satellite knight. The world really is a stage. Some drunks turn up, break the 4th wall. 

Before dinner, we tore down the walls that had risen between us. Jan said, I am a servant of the light. We talked about the stories of who, and what we are. We were in agreement that we have met in previous lives, that everything is circular. He said, you don’t have to explain it to me, I know. 

We listen to 60s music and have trouble with our relative age. Are we 40 and 44, or are we 20 and 24? How ironic, he’s the same age as Bob, my old boyfriend. He tells me about Mark’s story, how his father came home looking for his wife and she was upstairs, dead, having killed her daughter as well. Mark was only six when this happened.

Jan says he loves Mark’s vulnerability and wants to have sex with him. I say I hope you want to make love as well… Need I remind him that he is in the AIDS capital of the world? He wants to fill this trip with as experiences as possible—soon he will fly home to Amsterdam.

When Jan tells me Mark’s story, I cannot stop the tears from falling, maybe it’s because my own mother tried to commit suicide so many times. Maybe it’s the immediacy of words following between us, across the dinner table, the intimacy of shared meals softens the harshness. Jan says, as a man I know what a man wants, I like to have a cock to hold onto so I won’t fall out of bed. I can’t begin to know what a woman wants.

We wind up in the Castro, at Moby Dick‘s, he’s saying goodbye to his new friends—it is a dead night in North Beach as well. We stumbled into Spec’s on Saroyan Alley, the poet’s bar, I an on home turf. I haven’t been there in years.

Jan wanders off to take photos. I’m sitting at the bar, taking it all in, and it’s OK really, though he claims to be a gay lover, there’s also the heterosexual attraction but he can’t negate it, hence the dilemma. Spec asks me about Herman Berlandt, and how the writing is going, offers me a drink.

Weird, I can sit in a gay bar and feel OK. I am as sexual as I want to be, and I don’t have to worry about fending men off. For Jan, it’s the possibility of an endless meat market, and all I can do is to be a buffer for him. Who’d a thunk that I’d be in such a predicament? Jan thinks I should document the lesbians of Castro Street as my assignment, but I don’t have an interest in lesbians. I am content just to watch him in action. I tell him I am looking for poems, not women.

THE ENTROPHY OF EMPTY ROOMS

THE ENTROPHY OF EMPTY ROOMS                      v.2

                                    —for David & Rose McCaffrey McBride

There's something of that peculiar weight

of age that falls upon us as we

enter the rooms of abandoned houses

as if conversation from another era

abruptly ceased and found tongue again

in the silence after a point well-taken.

What survives us most accurately

are things ordinary and plain:

the particular way everyday objects

resonate with newfound significance.

How a death in the family

anchors us to what is no longer there.

On a coal-stained wall, a sooty relief of a clock,

& the shadowy remains of a crucifix—

as if the silhouettes themselves

Resurrected things not intended

to witness the end of an era—in a cigar box:

post cards from the World's Fair,

snapshots of children, dead horses and cars;

a spring bonnet & veil, matching gloves,

tea china still waiting on the sideboard.

A clouded mirror dreamily eyes

the round face of the sky

& a streetsong of rain escapes

from clogged gutters with a practiced ease

drawn from the nostalgia of the past.

rev. 2/2001

2001 Transfer Magazine #81, spring issue

THE EVIDENCE OF LIGHT

THE EVIDENCE OF LIGHT
—for Jan Bogaerts

When the film in the camera
winds down to the last few exposures
what remains are small pieces of the self
scattered across the globe;
there is less of me returning home each time.
The concept—elusive like the notion
of the camera stealing small pieces of us—
inevitably thins the soul
till it becomes translucent as isinglass.
They say travel toughens the heart,
but the heart is another matter—
each time I begin to believe love is a thing of the past,
some man crosses my path
and I am a fallen Magdalen weeping at his feet,
the carpet of my hair hiding my shame.

Two men contemplate the acute angle of the sun
piercing the dome of City Hall.
There's something of that time of day
when everything is crepuscular in notion,
I am haunted by ordinary light and shadow.
I cannot escape the clutches of a dream
as if reality bent itself towards sleep,
toward the void, the depths from within
where reside broken pieces of the dream
while the truly dead wander the parameters of this house.

Ask me why this matters and I will tell you
I have seen Jesus living in a desk drawer
in this abandoned house full of empty rooms
while those statistics sleeping in Market Street doorways
roll up their sleeping gear each morning
with the sacramental tenderness of priests readying for mass.
What of the thousands dying of the dreaded acronym
no one wants to name?
The homeless spread shrouds over their belongings.

Reduced to numerical equations                                                                    

the layer of humanity stretched thin as ice

at the altar of the streets, prays for oblivion like all the rest.

It is so silent, reminiscent of the many dead, with more to come:

What of their stories? Who will write them, who will listen?

You say they've gained the wisdom and clarity

usually reserved for the aged, and they are not yet old.

The glitter of the city pushes back the invading darkness.

Cavities of desire and grief implode into this room

as we gather the evidence of light for the proconsul.

We need arms to hold us, to stop time—

not just the camera defining angles of light.

1/1/93

STEPPING STONES

STEPPING STONES

Feeling guilty,

for switching lovers so easily,

& used to pain and suffering,

I keep trying to diminish

the definition of love,

as if loveandpain were one thing

etched in stone. Feeling used, I recoiled

when he said, We all use each other,

from the dungeon of his own choosing.

Vera assures me each relationship

is a stepping stone to the next.

Love is sometimes like that—

one day you just fall out of love.

Just

                  like

                                   that.

1993

Journal entry, New Year’s Day, 1993

Journal entry, New Year’s Day, 1993 I dreamed of men pulling moss off the branches of oaks, gathering small green tufts of them. I don’t know what for. It had something to do with the evolution of love and time. Today it is sunny, welcoming after the hard rain. Paul Ellis said Eastside Road was pretty bad last night, he had trouble getting home, and he thought it was going to flood. Deep, distant roar of creeks after the storm, a new day. A new year. I’m catching up on the old year by reading my mail stacked in uneven piles all throughout the house, I have been away since mid-December when photographer Jan Bogaerts arrived from Holland. I’ve been booking venues for him to photograph and researching, making contacts in the gay community for his Granta photography project. It’s been a tumultuous couple of weeks, flirtations gone horribly awry. Jan is all over the place. It’s like he’s in the world’s biggest candy store—men, women, me. He doesn’t care. He’s out there. I’m so out of touch with time, that I’m surprised to find a blurb on my project, I get a mention in the cultural arts newsletter. And all I can think of is that I desperately need to sleep.

LETTER TO JAN, WINTER SOLSTICE

LETTER TO JAN, WINTER SOLSTICE

Fishing without hook or line in the subtle stream,

I practice the act of turning stones,

Turning them again to find clarity within.

The walls become an impassable mountain range,

The past, a crowded bed, a pentagram,

The evolution of friendship, an alluvial veil over bedrock.

These words rippling the muddy pond.

Sometimes in dreams I meet strangers .

The veil lifts, images, fragments, pieces of the puzzle.

But the gift of sight muddied our eyes.

The knowing without words. Do you ken this?

A raised cock, burning sage, fortuning desire

Worshipped in the old way, the longest night.

Tell me where friend ends and lover begins.

The verb  wal, stranger; we are strangers.

If we tear down this wall, will another rise? 

With these words we uncovered old patterns,

In that vulnerability we leaned closer

Towards concentric rippling haloes of light.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

The notes of the shofar horn bring

The strange ramparts tumbling into the sea,

Turning them back into stones of the field.

The dark pools, unfathomable—

Once we were inexorably proud mountains.

The river polishes us down to size.

1992?

rev. 2002 for Transfer Magazine

Journal entry, 12/19/1992 WCW

12/19/1992 I went to a party in Rohnert Park with Mimi Albert, she invited me to go without Jan. It turned out to be a boring event, a good thing I came late. However an airline pilot marooned in the atrium said he was from New Jersey, and asked what we did. Like conjoined twins we both blurted out poets. Attempting to find some common ground, he started telling us about his family doctor—who was a poet. Mimi and I both leaned forward and in the same breath, asked, he wasn’t William Carlos Williams, was he? To which the surprised pilot, John, hitched up his trouser leg to display a scar that the good doctor himself had sewed up when John, at the tender age of eight fell out of an apple tree and filleted his shin.

The Defence of Brownie Mary

 

ESCRITORIO

ESCRITORIO
        Trabaja el mar en mi silencio.  —Neruda

The card you sent from Neruda's study in Valparaiso,
sat three months unread in my mailbox,
signed:…a long way from anywhere.
We couldn't get much farther apart—I must confess,
in a Vienna café, I also composed a card to you in my head.
(What would Freud have made of invisible ink on invisible paper?)
In Budapest, seeking a common idiom, a Rumanian poet
and I try to communicate in a handful of languages—
English, Magyar, Rumanian; the few German words I know,
absorbed one summer 20 years ago, break the ice
until we find a common yezik, or tongue—Russian;
we make apologies in the language of the oppressor.
It seems I always have the wrong tongue in my mouth.

You, red-diaper baby, who never learned to speak
of the self-imposed oppression, once asked,
Would you go underground with me if it came to that?
At the border between San Ysidro and Tijuana,
the red trolley, a flag to tease the bull. Toreador y tragaluz.
I didn't feel the sting of the banderias lodged in my neck,
nor see the angry blood escape the prison of my skin.
La verdad es comun como las piedras del mar.
The menorah, in the dust like a weapon.

A rare sunny afternoon in Amsterdam, a city of refugees—
Language rides the dust motes. We babble in tongues.
The North African, Seidhu and I only have Russian in common.
Moniel, his lover, speaks to him in French.
He drinks beer when his torture scars are hurting him,
Moniel explains to me in English. He is a man living in exile.
She and Vins argue over the role of women in Genesis
—a German edition—in Dutch. Missing the point,
Seidhu quotes passages from the Koran en françois.
I am spared the dogma of the Koran, but not of Islam.
I want a beer, Seidhu asks Vins's permission, I am some man's property;
the Sahara fills this room with the politics of sand.
The phone rings; he slips into Arabic, and something more tribal.
Asylum. I can see the indigo scars where they beat him,
his maw, a square hole devouring the light. Jópa!
The room can't contain so many languages
nor the batillion of beer bottles at the ready. Moniel and I
don't speak of the invisible scars of women.

To the Chilean poet who knows only español y italiano,
I speak a curious pastiche of Russian and Spanish;
transient verbs cross borders without passports or visas.
Some well-meaning friend gives me your latest book,
where I am reduced to the impersonal non-sequitor–you–
not tu, nor the formal usted. Who is nursing revenge
unto the next generation? Did the mountains rise slowly,
the words spill purlblind on the pages of Santiago?
Should I mention–after all these years—
the combination lock on my pack is still set to your birthdate?

Behind these sea walls, the hard labor of my solitude.
Yes, we are a long way from anywhere, cannot escape
the truth, common as the stones of the sea, the raised the wall.
The shofar horn sent the stones tumbling down.
victoriously back into the sea.

11/1992?

The song of Amergin

Scholar/poet Robert Graves, in The White Goddess, wrote, "English poetic education should, really, begin not with the Canterbury Tales, not with The Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with The Song of Amergin." Amergin was the great bard of the Gaels of the pre-Christian era (as was the Welsh poet Taliesin). The poetry of Amergin wasn't committed to writing until after the 5th century A.D. when the Latin alphabet was theoretically introduced to Ireland by St. Patrick. 

This poem has survived in various versions, making Amergin the oldest known western European poet—predating the classic Greek and Roman poets. The Celts originally came from what is now Austria to the Middle East, to the Iberian peninsula, Ireland and beyond. They all relied upon poets to remember their historical and mythological past. 

The Celts committed very little to writing, though they had access to Greek letters, and used the Ogham alphabet. The poets, the bards, and filidhe studied with master teachers (Druids) for 20 or more years, memorizing hundreds of poems. Amergin was a master poet. The Song of Amergin is the poem Amergin chanted when he first set foot on Ireland (his tribe probably migrated from Iberia). 

The poem begins with thirteen statements followed by six questions and an envoi in which advises the People of the Sea to invoke the poet of the sacred Rath (fort) to give them a poem. He will supply the poet with the material, and together they will compose an incantation. The poem was probably a cypher, or mnemonic database of important poems. I think of it as thirteen moons—an ancient cypher or riddle, or the metaphoric naming of things and ideas. 

Am gáeth i mmuir

Am gáeth i m-muir, [wind/ sea

Am tond trethan,

Am fuaim mara,
Am dam secht ndirend, [dam = ox, deer, stag?)
Am séig i n-aill, [séig = hawk, eagle
Am dér gréne,
Am cain lubai,
Am torc ar gail,
Am he i l-lind,
Am loch i m-maig,
Am brí a ndai,
Am bri danae,
Am bri i fodb fras feochtu,
Am dé delbas do chind codnu,


Coiche nod gleith clochur slébe?
Cia on co tagair aesa éscai?
Cia du i l-laig fuiniud gréne?

Ádh mór.


— Attributed to Amergin, ca. 500 AD

 Note bene: Old/Middle Irish, from the Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of Takings) FWIW there were no capital letters in Old Irish. Just really fancy ones! The early Irish scribes did invent spaces between words— not to mention the copyright. This is the short ending. I left out the cattle of Tethra. Most of this was compiled before the Internet. Gasp!

Sources: 

Best, Richard, & Bergin, Osborn. The Book of Leinster 1. Dublin 1954. 

Connella, Patrick. The Poems of Amergin. Trans. Ossin. Soc. 5, 1857.
Henry, Patrick. Saoithiulacht na Sean-Gaeilge. Dublin 1978.
Travis, James. Early Celtic Versecraft. Ithaca 1973.

Macalister, R.A. Stewart. Lebor Gabála 5. Dublin 1956. (I think I used this v., from the Lyman collection, ca 1978, Sonoma State University—you could take books off the shelf at random. I lost entire days browsing. Now an appointment is needed which  means you have to know what you’re looking for.) Booklist is from daltai.com

• 2024: Culled from the Internet for your reading pleasure. 
This v. was turned into a triad. 
This site has the full version, as does this site which includes the Medieval glosses. Ignore the Amergin name thing. She doesn’t know WTF she’s talking about. For starters, the inclusion of the h or haich, as my granny would say, should be a major clue that it’s in modern Irish. NOT Old Irish. My grandmother tried to teach me Gaelic League Irish (based on Medieval Insular half-uncial script) with its sí buailte, so I’m semi-illiterate in Middle Irish. During the late 1990s, I took a year of modern Irish and a year of Old Irish at UC Berkeley—which gave me direct access to the University of Cork archives. This guy Michael M. Burch lifted MY crib notes from this site! I was puzzling over the stag and hawk lines which he included in his transliteration. Sébac has changed a bit from Middle Irish.

THE SONG OF AMERGIN 

I am the wind which breathes upon the ocean. 
I am the murmur of the billowing waves of the sea. 
I am the breakers of threatening doom. 
I am the stag of seven tines. 
I am the strength of the ox of seven combats. 
I am the deftness of the griffin 
and the hawk upon the cliffs. 
I am a dewdrop, a tear the sun lets fall. 
I am among the fairest of flowers. 
I am the ruthless wild boar of valor, 
I am the knowledge of salmon in hidden pools. 
I am a vast lake flooding the plain. 
I am the strength of art, a word of science. 
I am a hill where poets walk. 
I am a lure from beyond the world's end. 
I am the point of the lance that hungers for battle. 
I am the one who created in the head the fire 

I am wisdom: who but I cools the head aflame with smoke? 
I am an infant; who but I knows the secret 
of the unhewn dolman? 

Who throws light into the gathering of stones 
on the mountains? 
Who announces the foretold ages of the moon?  
Who teaches the place where sleeps the sun? (if not I?) 

Anonymous (attributed to Amergin), Ireland, 5th c. from Oral Tradition, tr. Robert Graves 

(Note: This version below is a compilation of translations from several ancient sources that caught my eye ( Ahem, pre-Internet). I tried to restore some of the coded information by adding the medieval glosses into the text. But in the classroom, I went back to the original Graves translation. I also include the early medieval Irish version, as it is in the original language.)

I. am a dewdrop, a tear the sun lets fall, 

I am among the fairest of flowers, 

I am the ruthless wild boar of valor, 

I am the knowledge of salmon in hidden pools, 

I am a vast lake flooding the plain, 

I am the strength of art, a word of science, 

I am a hill where poets walk.
I am a lure from beyond the world's end.
I am the point of the lance that hungers for battle. 

I am the one who created in the head the fire. 

I am wisdom; who but I cools the head aflame with smoke?
I am an infant; who but I knows the secret of the unhewn dolmen?
Who throws light into the gathering of stones on the mountains?
Who announces the foretold ages of the moon? 

Who teaches the place where sleeps the sun?
(If not ?)

* * *

Invoke, O People of the Sea, invoke the poet, 

so that he may compose a spell for you.
Who forms weapons in a fortress that nourishes the satire of bards?
Who has sought peace without fear seven times? 

Named the waterfalls? Who will the constellations of fish
of the laughing sea make welcome?
For I, the Druid, who set out the letters in Ogham, 

I, who have sung praises to part combatants, to divide a fleet,
I will approach the Rath of the Sidhe to seek a wise poet.
Together we may create incantations.
For I am the wind of the sea.

This version is from several ancient sources that I compiled for a teaching recipe I developed in the 1980s. I no longer use this version. I prefer the one below.

• (For some prehistory on Irish poetry, see Adze-Heads & Blind Poets: Anthony Raftery—the bardic tradition)

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME

Write down what you need to remember:

I can't slip out of this mode.

I want to enter deeper into the molecular structure of the word,

the double helix spyrocheting through our genes

from the first fires, to the age of light.

And now we can't put out the flame.

It consumes us with a passion

until we are etherized against the stars,

climbing the spiral, exploding,

imploding, dividing, multiplying in geometric ecstasy

until the shining pyramids invert,

become the apex of the hole

that consuming blackness,

that sucks us into it,

that strips molecules from memory.

A hungry cancer feeding on light,

even quarks lose their charm.

We are limited by what we know,

and don't know,

our descent and metaphysical hunger

in the resonating cells, dialectical

notebooks, a brief history of time. 

date? 92?

Chester H. Jones Honorable Mention award

It would be sweet if I could find the award letter, and to figure out which poem!

APPROACHING THE ARGUMENT

APPROACHING THE ARGUMENT

Persistent as the flyswatter, 

already two wasps have fallen;

Sunday promises to be a three-wasp day.

The Protestant bells knell

extolling the piety that is Amsterdam,

and Cartesian logic of canals below sea-level:

who can outmaneuver the sand?

End of summer—the radiant enigma

of sun-warmed bricks yielding

to the icy vault of kitchen windows

still raises apparitions of endless hunger

droning toward our morning's commerce.

With the ceaseless clerical dance peculiar to wasps,

they bless unlikely converts: the empty yellow cup,

the slender black supplications of my pen

­on the familiar altar of paper.

Voraciously they worship stale food odors

with the same dogged zeal I tried to define love—

making such a nuisance of themselves,

the only alternative is a quick and simple death.

At first we tried to warn them; now we too

are indifferent to the tender compound equation

of a glass prison against the pane,

and the sudden freedom into open air.

Escape is temporary; they return,

and each according to the laws of nature,

we respond, sacrificing our daily wasps—

the flotsam of small corpses

in an encroaching sea

of stinging words.

6 Sept. 1992

 Amsterdam

CHRISTMAS IN YAMMOUSSOUKRO, 1991

CHRISTMAS IN YAMMOUSSOUKRO, 1991
       —from photographs by Jan Bogaerts
                      —for Jan

Imagine the basilica of St. Peter

rising from the African jungle

devouring the light of the Ivory Coast

in the village of Yammoussoukro:

this monument, a president's desire

cast in European stone.

Insignificant as an apostrophe against bright marble pillasters

a tall woman crosses the piazza

burning into the retina—

not like the temporary flash

from looking too long at the sun,

but with the dark endurance of counter-suns.

A black child on a white boulder

lays down his small bundle of rags

to observe the camera lens.

Christmas on the Ivory Coast:

the infant who will never sit at the right hand

of Santa Claus, nor learn of the savior's birth in a manger—

The Wasting Disease, an articulate hunger.

Searching for Mecca,

the men of Yammoussoukro

turn their backs on the sun.

It is said: When two elephants fight, the grass loses.

There are no more elephants on the Ivory Coast,

only obscure fetishes of the crocodile—

Africa is a country of families:

here, where the president is God,

a basilica inexorably rises from the jungle;

the massive arms of the portico—

comprehensible as the moon—

embrace only the air.

9/92

Liessel, The Netherlands

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION (short v.)

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION   
     from  Jan Bogaart's photos, Eindhoven

In the football stadium, a congregation of clergy in drag.

Sequence cut to championship fucking finals

in the south of Catholic Holland,

(where else, says Jan, the photographer.)

Used rubbers hanging from the numbered pegs

as contestants candidly look on. 

Everyone's masked for the ball,

even the hookers smoking in the wings.

One wears a chador, naked from the waist down,

well-dressed in nylons and heels,

the star whore in the gurney

chalks up 187 men—all in a night's work.

Michael Jackson, David Bowie and the Pope all at the mike.

Sequence cut to a small town in Bavaria

where Hitler built a train station for Mussolini,

with love from the good old boys.

What of the gay queen at the carnival,

white face, questioning cartoon eyebrows?

The mist covers the crotch of the valley's shame

gravestones covered with plastic to protect them from winter.

It's a white Bavarian Christmas.

A woman forcefully serenades those gathered,

a nun grimly serves tea. Smiles cost money and time.

They are celebrating the alleged birth of Christ with a vengeance.

The oldest woman of the village perfers t.v. to the villagers

who can blame her? Others watch their homes destroyed.

Michael Jackson's face would support whole villages of old women.

Masked young men come down from the mountains

to beat the villagers so they will fully repent for the occasion,

only the offer of a drink will silence their sticks.

All in good fun, they said, nearly breaking the photographer's hands.

All in good fun, said Hitler as the ovens burned.

Did he drink schnaaps too, his mask more natural;

it took a while to see it slipped only to reveal another mask,

 mirrored beneath into green infinity.

Cowbells, a saint's crozier, unsmiling men fold their arms

in front of tannenbaum; the creche child in a coffin of hay

one man grimaces for the camera,

and other smiles while the fool looks on,

a full complement to the theater of saints.

9/92

Eindhoven, Holland


see longer version
SEVEN VIEWS OF PHOTOS AT AN EXHIBITION  

SEVEN VIEWS OF PHOTOS AT AN EXHIBITION

SEVEN VIEWS OF PHOTOS AT AN EXHIBITION  

                                                            —to photos by Jan Bogaerts

1. In a sports stadium a knot of clergy flowering for the Pope.

Internecine wars dropped for an open-air mass.

Score: Visitors 3. Home 1. All in drag for the Holy Ghost.

2. Sequence cut: Everyone's masked at a charity ball,

even the hookers smoking in the wings.

One wears a chador. Nude from the waist down,

in nylons and heels, the star whore on a gurney

chalks up 187 men—all in a night's work.

Spent condoms dangle from numbered pegs

as contestants candidly look on for the camera.

Whoever has the most jism wins

the Championship Fucking Finals in Catholic Holland.

Where else? shrugs the photographer. (Audience laughs.)

3. Sequence cuts:

Michael Jackson, David Bowie & the Pope all have the crowd in mind.

You can tell by the red light in their eyes. The way they mouth the mike.

The way vestments of color drapes itself onto the walls for the camera lens.

4. Sequence cut to black and white:

A small town in Bavaria,

where Hitler built a train station for Mussolini:

With love, for the Good Old Boys.

Burning into memory’s retina,

color film couldn’t cope with the crime.

Spilled wine appears as black.

What of the gay queen at the carnival,

white face, sad cartoon eyes? So much meat.

5. The mist covers the crotch of the valley's shame.

Gravestones covered in plastic—

protected from winter’s hostile art.

It's a white Bavarian Christmas in Berchtesgaden.

Celebrating the birth of Christ with a vengeance,

a housefrau serenades a captive audience,

a nun grimly serves tea. Smiles cost time and money.

The oldest woman of the village prefers TV to gossiping villagers.

Who can blame her? Others watched their homes destroyed.

Michael Jackson's face would support entire villages of old women.

6. Masked young men come down from the mountains

to beat the villagers so they will fully repent for the occasion,

only the offer of a drink will silence their sticks.

All in good fun, they said, breaking the photographer's hands.

All in good fun, said Hitler as crematoriums burned.

Did he drink schnaaps in a gold-rimmed glass too?

His mask slipped to reveal another mask mirrored beneath green infinity.

Some swear he was God. Some know snow angels melt in spring.

What of the Pope? Michael Jackson’s gone from Black to white.

Horse of a different color. Rainbow of a different name.

7. Cowbells, a saint's crozier, grim men, folded arms

in front of tannenbaum; a crêche child in a coffin of hay.

A man grimaces for the camera,

another smiles while a fool looks on,

a full complement to the theater of saints.

Will they ever escape the mountains?

Verlichting en Belichting. A crucifix of light

repenting for our sins. The camera looks on.

9/92 Eindhoven, Holland


see  PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION  (short v.)