Love & Echolocation

Summer 2008, January 2010

Sometimes I write poems where the protagonist is, arguably, a bat experiencing relationship problems.

---

All distance disguised as desire,
all travel disguised as salvation,
when silence passes for separation
and your own voice hums like a distant station —
love, or echolocation?

I have sucked all the nectar from this angular night, I
have caught the quiet moth on the wing —
in blindness descended from blindness unshaken, in
a silhouette dreaming of a destination, in
love or desperation —

When the color was drained from your monochrome film
and you laid it out bare on the table,
trading shapes for shadows, trading shadow for sable,
calling gray-on-gray an exaggeration
was this love or an incantation?

I shout and I witness the edges of things
come boiling back from their old locations,
after one long moment of hesitation —

In the humid air of this alien night,
before we discovered the myth of flight,
your silver shape, in fine gradation,
in a room of lines of demarcation,
was this desire, or isolation?

Predictions Regarding the Prophets

November-December 2009

In the spirit of New Year's predictions, perhaps. This is very close, actually, to being a "Church of Irony" poem, as well as being related to my earlier attempt at shaggy-dog poetry.

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The Prophets will arrive in the dark of night
and set up on street corners in abandoned
industrial districts, and preach in their
quietest voices, offering impossible gods
and cardboard mythologies. They will go unheard
of course, until they are discovered by talent agents,
who for their part we must take to be untalented,
not being able to account for how they happened
to be there, under the sodium haze, when one
let slip a little bit about the end of days,
or for that matter how they got home.

The Prophets will arrive in sunglasses
and spectacular cars with stolen hubcaps, and
say how pleased they are to be here, Dave,
and suggest that the world will end in fire, or
something very much like fire -- it will be difficult
to say how it is different. It will be difficult,
this end of days, but there is not really much to say
about it, and the Prophets will be somewhat evasive.

The Prophets will arrive in disguise
to survey their old haunts, skirting the shrines,
knick-knacks, and tourist kiosks which spring up
around their poorly-defined authenticity. With great care
they will sidle up to stretches of crumbling brick,
load-bearing graffiti, and turpentine grass, and
become still. Adopting impractical lotus postures
in the manner of discarded harbor cranes,
they will align their preposterous costumes
with the background and
disappear.

& I Loved You for the Monster You Could Become --

December 2009

This is a poem about eggs. Eggs and metaphysics. And yes, the title is a bit strange.

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I.
An egg, hatched from the skin of an egg
and an egg sitting on it,
or an eight from two zeroes:
ex nihilo ovum, ex ova nihil.¹
-- Eggs over easy.
Egg-birth of an oviraptor, how
is this allowed?
Imagine these cracks appearing in the womb
and having to destroy the whole world
for a wider one, or only having
to destroy the divider, of one
world from the next, giving birth
to an exit.
II.
City on the edge of the volcano, they say,
"World the ever-hatching egg",
standing on the widening cracks
forced apart by the scratching legs
of the hot iron beast inside the world --
but his blood was stolen from wicked gods,
who burdened with a curse of eternal unbirth
the molten dragon in the hollow earth.
So they walk upon eggshells,
for fear of the mercy of the gods, fearing
the release of the innocent.
Releasing doves & reading stony entrails:
blood-red, they say, when the blood is cool;
blood-red when the blood is hot.
In legend they speak of his crystal wings,
of shimmering patterns on his scarlet form
uncurling in sinuous whorls and rings --
if ever such beauty could dare to be born.
Yet who can explain such a people, who build
in the shadow of destruction? Courage, trembling
on the lip of disaster -- Though I myself spent
seven months living in the barrel of a gun,
seven months playing with flint and steel,
seven months praying for a spark.

---

¹An egg from nothing, nothing from an egg

Out From Babel #3

November 2009

Yet further plumbing of the Babel concept. Genesis is rife with ambiguities. This one is more consciously mythological than the others -- which may be a weakness, I haven't decided.

Led out by the poor deaf beggars of Babel --
the first to recover, the last to be heard.
Struck dumb by the deaf and the children of Babel,
who were not sick, who could not be cured.

In a daze we were driven out, led by the deaf
and the youngest of orphans, grey children
who grew into strange grey angels, from whom
the race of the sphinx are descended.

Years later they would return to us, call us by forgotten names,
saying, "I know you, you are the wicked of Babel --
wicked in innocence, wicked in loss -- Go out from this place
before exile finds you." It would be whispered amidst the people
that Babel was among them, Babel the wicked,
which invited destruction. Fearing discovery,

We left Sodom with the lightest of burdens, in the dead night
we fled from Nineveh and Canaan, exile to exile --
we did this, but each did it alone -- exiles among exiles,
speaking in borrowed tongues.

In the desert I wasted for forty days, drunk upon wild honey.
When I was clean I went up to the Mountain of Moria.
On the high path they barred my way, one angel of dust
and the other of fire. "What could you offer in this barren place?
Yea, even that would be returned to you."

~~~

In the valley below Babel lived a tribe of herdsmen,
And among these rough people there were two camps,
The prophets of salvation, with their healing balms,
and the prophets of desire, with their dusky water.

The people drifted from camp to camp
according to their need: a sick man to the healers,
the restless man to the place of unrest. So it was that
each among them traveled the length of the valley many times,
meeting in cheer or in anger, according to the faction they now professed.

Coming down from Babel we were strange to them, and they
gathered around us, and both camps pressed heavily.
In our confusion we drank deeply from both cups; the people
drew back, and approached us no more.

Out From Babel #2

May 2009

More on the Babel problem. See #1

Out from Babel strung like a broken cable –
Up from the burning rubble of a shattered sun –
Jacob's ladder fallen to its lowest rung.
Who called it Babel and kept their tongue?

In the trough of one dune we forgot
the crest of the last. We sang harmony
with the wind and lost each note
before the arrival of the next, and
only in a perfect balance of dusk
could we grasp both day and night…

In those first days of the Annexation,
it was a common sight: two men would greet warmly,
even embrace – but thereafter
gain no understanding. The one
might see his friend turned
to madness, the other mocked viciously
by one trusted, or a foul demon
masquerading as one he loved.

To the observer, both strove patiently,
and with goodwill – yet it would come to blows,
and blood in the public square. And when the fog
was lifted, the terror that followed –

This and other madness consumed us –
The fall of the tower, too:
when one blueprint became, in our fractured eyes,
five hundred clashing structures…
How could it not? I myself capped
the fatal pillar, granite braced by a wooden arch.

Overnight, without knowing, one city became
thousands – each man a lost tribe unto himself.
That the babe still knew it's mother's breast,
We counted as kindness.

Two Days Above Country

March 2009

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In the morning –
I think that you called it morning
With the tallow moon still heavy;

In the morning –
I think that you called it mourning
black, like your raven,

split tongue calling in a jagged voice.
In the darkest unbreakable morning,
I went up to the ridgeline,

red sun spattered
on broken firs.
And below,

in our frail and vaporous house,
full of slow shadows and bent stones,
I drew a hollow map, in the small

of your back –
with suggestions of rivers.
And it was late, late, late

I came down
from Babel,
stepped out into the sound,

and drew blood on the water,
spilled into the setting sun.
In the darkest unbreakable morning

we struck the old moon
with our fallow eyes
in a hollow and vaporous house,
crouched like wolves wary
for the scent of man.

Out from Babel #1

February 2009

In the tradition of finding new perspectives, and with perhaps some debt to Neal Stephenson and Snow Crash (very little, but you should read it anyway).

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Cool tree blowing in a lyric wind,
Babylon choir on an outstretched limb,
Blue sky stretching like a desert hymn
With no color of night or morning.

Like a coward the desert slipped out
from our footsteps and returned
the following night. We carried our water
in mason jars and we slept like masons
and we hummed like open jars,
for we could place no word before another.

Still I treasured most keshrai, meaning waterfowl,
meaning gone from our silted streams and embittered
ponds. Each among us carried one lost
word from the mother tongue, and as must
made other words to cover this,
until his mind was whole and
his throat blank as riverstone.

So one was named Aqueduct and another
bore Arbalest, and we found Song
among six scattered parties, each with no
reckoning of his kin. Aimless we tracked
across unknown spaces, bereft of distances
and times. In the drive to know, one man gave names
to every grain of sand along our path.

These names, too, were lost,
for he perished before we reached the deltas.