For Being Somewhere Else

Blackened breezes rustle
Sacred/ olive trees, skies muscled thick.
I took a sight that set me more lost
More sour than seasick.
I see him, knees bloodied,
Face drawn/ down
to earth.
I was being/ once/
Just a man also.
I spied/ by my back down
To my murk/
I cried/ by my own shadow,
But did not cry out,
To interrupt all that too intimate.

.

.

.

When I was a young/ more willful man,
I fasted/ from dawn Friday
Until the last of Easter/ Today
I’m past that/ I would if I could take the families
To the best Italian place,
For sacrificial lamb & blood red wine
& all before that, maybe Grace

 

photo- Alex Whitehouse-Hayward

PROSE FROM A DREAM MAN

 

Grand Hotel Sousse

Sousse Monday, March 15, 1920

This Africa is incredible

. . . Unfortunately, I cannot write coherently to you, for it is all too much. Only sidelights. After cold, heavy weather at sea, a sparkling morning in Algiers. Bright houses and streets, dark green clumps of trees, tall palms’ crowns rising among them. White burnooses, red fezzes, and among these the yellow uniforms of the Tirailleurs d’Afrique, the red of the Spahis, then the Botanical Gardens, an enchanted tropical forest, an Indian vision, holy acvatta trees with gigantic aerial roots like monsters, fantastic dwellings of the gods, enormous in extent, heavy, dark green foliage rustling in the sea wind.

Then thirty hours by rail to Tunis. The Arab city is classical antiquity and Moorish middle ages, Granada and the fairy tale of Baghdad. You no longer think of yourself; you are dissolved in this potpourri which cannot be evaluated, still less described: a Roman column stands here as part of a wall; an old Jewess of unspeakable ugliness goes by in white baggy breeches; a crier with a load of burnooses pushes through the crowd, shouting in gutturals that might have come straight from the canton of Zurich; a patch of deep blue sky, a snow-white mosque dome; a shoemaker busily stitching away at shoes in a small vaulted niche, with a hot, dazzling patch of sunlight on the mat before him; blind musicians with a (hum and tiny three-stringed lute; a beggar who consists of nothing but rags; smoke from oil cakes, and swarms of flies; up above, on a white minaret in the blissful ether, a muezzin sings the midday chant; below, a cool, shady, colonnaded yard with horseshoe portal framed in glazed tiles; on die wall a mangy cat lies in the sun;ia coming and going of red, white, yellow, blue, brown mantles, white turbans, red fezzes, uniforms, faces ranging from white and light yellow to deep black; a shuffling of yellow and red slippers, a noiseless scurrying of naked black feet, and so on and so on.

In the morning the great god rises and fills both horizons with his joy and power, and all living things obey him. At night the moon is so silvery and glows with such divine clarity that no one can doubt the existence of Astarte.

Between Algiers and Tunis He 550 miles of African soil, towering up to the noble and spreading shapes of the great Atlas range, wide valleys and plateaus bursting with grapes and grain, dark green forests of cork oak. Today Horus rose out of distant, pale mountains over an unending green and brown plain, and from tie desert there sprang up a mighty wind which blew out to the dark blue sea. On rolling, gray-green hills yellow-brown remains of whole Roman cities, small flocks of black goats grazing around them, nearby a Bedouin camp with black tents, camels, and donkeys. The train runs into a camel which cannot make up its mind to get off the tracks; the beast is killed; there is a great running up, shrieking, and gesticulating of white-clad figures; and always the sea, now deep blue, now hurting the eyes with its glitter in the sunlight. Out of olive groves and palms and hedges of giant cactus floating in the flickering, sun-shot air rises a snow-white city with divinely white domes and towers, gloriously spread out over a hill. Then comes Sousse, with white walls and towers, the harbor below; beyond the harbor wall the deep blue sea, and in the port lies the sailing ship with two lateen sails which I
once painted!!!!

You stumble over Roman remains; with my cane I dug a piece of Roman pottery out of the ground.

This is all nothing but miserable stammering; I do not know what Africa is really saying to me, but it speaks. Imagine a tremendous sun, air clear as in the highest mountains, a sea bluer than any you have ever seen, all colors of incredible power. In the markets you can still buy the amphorae of antiquity things like that and the moonlll! . . .~Carl Jung; (Memories Dreams and Reflections; Pages 371-372.)

LETTER TO EMMA JUNG FROM NORTH AFRICA (1920)

STARES AND A LOOK

 

 

S T A R E S

Where is the wound that shines?

Well Over 50 years on

Over this  his day, on?

My Back  way against all this memorial day shite  here

I’ll intentionally send me  to a ill-shielded shy there,

Back at  again to that  day where

I’m Far  too young  to fathom,

Or even  notice  yr. crevasse,

Yr  Grande Malaise,

Yr. countdown…Yr. Pass.

It makes me madly think now

It takes  the saddest thing    to tell now..

Stuck in a stack of old NewYorkers

There’s this raw cartoon drawing;

A mere boy  drawn in black & white

Stands on a step of his own basement,  stares,

He did look down on his own  livid  apocalypse,

His lips, and the caption say

“It’s  A.O.K.”

.

Here is the wound that shines

Tonight, a glint off yr. cracked onyx ring.

I lift it  in my open fist to my lips.

.

.

L  O  O  K

.

Hope  we’re having  a heaven  so

I’ll look all about  &

Daddy can call out, (& it won’t hurt, no)

He’ll look just like he just got home from work:

“There’s my inquisitive young man,” he’d shout.

We’d have it out;

My young man’s mystery,

His young man’s misery.

We’d upheave it out. One Heavy inquiry would unfold

If he mightn’t have killed himself  he might have taught me:

“You gotta take the bite of bitter with the cold”

.

My Mother could steady things when she told me

When I was ready she told me:

“I know, I know,

With time…

We’ll  heal.

He  was  not  well.

They say  that You/

Have his look.

You  know.

You know

I say  ‘You’ll/

Try having my smile’”.

.

.

.

.

For always, again, rest in peace, daddy 3/21/1929-5/29/1959

From author Jim Crace’s “Quarantine”

“After his boyhood years of study at the temple school, steadying the scroffs and holding down the parchments beneath the pointing fingers of the priest, Jesus had learned to match up some of these Aramaic shapes to sounds–the little candelabra of the letter sha, the lightening strike of enn, the falling plough sign of the kaoh. He liked the places on these parchments where scribes were changed. The one who’d stitched his way across the page with wary, threadlike marks passed on his verses to the playful and untidy  one who led his muddy sparrows leave their tracks in undulating lines. Then came the scribe whose writing always toppled backwards, as if the meanings to the words were riding faster than the shapes which soon would fall on to their spines.

“This was a happy ignorance for jesus, only knowing a dozen words amongst so many thousands. He would not want to read as easily as scholars, he told himself, for that would only help to split the meaning from the sound, to divorce the music from the shape. If he could read like his priest could, by simply dragging the forefinger underneath the script and speaking every word he touched as if these were not verses but an endless rote of errands to be run, then the scriptures might become little more than strings of tiny tasks, a list. There’d be no mystery. But in his ignorance, he could both listen to the words of the reader and marvel, too, at the unspoken narrative of shapes, or concentrate not only on the script but also on the spaces in between. God was in the spaces, he was sure. God went to the very edges of the page.”

Author Jim Crace, from “Quarantine”

TRICKLE DOWN VOODOO ANTICS

We say bad things about people who hurt us.

That way they’d let up to haunt & to curse us.

We didn’t dismiss their nonsense,

just cruelly,

We vent  and vanquish their malevolence.

& thus  Renewal.

Try Another Dawn, Against Green Leather, On

I take my ten tablets.

Wash  ’em w/ Irish.

It’s my time

for medicine,

& no time for nonsense.

I’m ready I’ll try to pull hard

for a merciful god.

Finally I’ll try my hand

To move a pen

To move my words

To move me.

.

.

.

.                                  (from 2009, Slainte.)

Mostly Too Costly

When the task  at hand…

When I’m asked to pay & pay

More  attention,

I  say,

It’s mostly  too costly and

It’s evident  one’s needs warrant

Intervention.

.

It’s  ridiculous,  

I’m  impossible,

I’m impervious  to all I’m capable.

IMPALPABLE

  

 

Neruda’s ” impalpable ash”

Chants away/

In the fray of my own tiny ruins.

.

“If I touch/ near the fire/

Impalpable ash..”

Chimes away/

And supports the clearing away  all

Insubstantial,

Makes way to take less blinding steps away

From  cave  to  climax

I’ve come to have left out

Crucial  rescue  tools

From my matutinal

Lost-combination locked bag of tricks.

In touch  information

Out

 

“COULD HAVE” –Wislawa Szymborska

It could have happened

It had to happen./It happened earlier. Later.

Nearer. Farther off.

It happened, but not to you.

You were saved because you were the first.

You were saved because you were the last.

Alone. With others.

On the right. The left.

Because it was raining. Because of the shade.

Because the day was sunny.                                                                                                                     

You were in luck — there was a forest.

You were in luck — there were no trees.

You were in luck — a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,

A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant . . .

So you’re here? Still dizzy from

another dodge, close shave, reprieve?

One hole in the net and you slipped through?

I couldn’t be more shocked or

speechless.

Listen,

how your heart pounds inside me.

Wislawa Szymborska

Submitted: F

GETHEMANE

There ought better be a beacon
on a pacific coast cliff could be
where hope’s light works with a sea horn
where a night light works with a warning
forces & forges the blackest fog & forests

There can be a candle
in a window with enough heat
to fire the hearth
to light one lone solitary stone room
.
(from 2010)
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.”Writing is nothing more than a guided dream” -Jorge Luis Borges