Magna Mater

The earth coughs, whispers, dims the house lights, mutely
Allows herself to be discoursed upon
By supercilious aerial commentary.
Ethereal footprints. A gray rose. A sulphur
Yellow. Poetic arrogance of cheap
Chromatic oratory, passively
Lapped up by gulls in all the orchestra seats.
Dramatic denouement. The stage darkens.
Actors depart. The audience stretch their legs
Well-edified. A crass sunset. Seraphic
Repertory played to sell-out crowds.

You know the kind. Always after a day
Obscenely bright. Gay pretty flowers exposing
Their vulvas. At cockshut the ladies fold
Their parasols under the pale silk light.
Cornmeal silk, nacreous and translucent.
Silkscreen posters made for summer stock
With “Teahouse of the August Moon” designs
After a day of punts and parasols
In upstate watering places, summer circuits,
That sort of thing. Pale half-light, summer smoke.

And every evening the earth fetches up
For scientific scrutiny in the sky
By connoisseurs of modern medical lore
Some multi-colored, marbled lung mucosa.
Shouldn’t we be alarmed and consternated?

What does it bode, when our earth, the chaste bride
And consecrated mistress of the heavens,
Thrusting her shameless organs inside out

Like Miley Cyrus on a sailors’ tour,

Parades them with all lack of modesty
Nightly in this absurd burlesque revue
And bawdy show the many call a “sunset”?

Lewd interlude, sandwiched between two peepshows,
Lakeview and fireworks. Stand and salute
The garish flag, all candy and spangles
And ruby blood and glittering worlds, and then
Cheer as the band plays “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
“Courtiers of beauteous freedom” Shakespeare called us,
Our country built on Roman principles
A ship of state for Tudor privateers,
Our pirate flag a burping treasure chest,
Python disgorging undigested bits
Of his bright-colored prey, our mother earth,
Her rifled bowels, her bloody bits of magma,
Strontium, magnesium, aluminum
And suchlike host of boiling poisonous metals
Ignited in the fires of industry
And splayed as Chinese fireworks ’cross the sky,
Metallic ores and mineral pigments quite
Enough to paint a hundred Albert Bierstadts,
All ancient and inviolate sanctity
Of metal or of marble or of men
Extracted, desecrated and displayed
Because a plain old sunset’s not enough
To showcase our imperious dignity,
But we must have parade of looted plunder
Chains from the necks of naked prisoners,
Exploding rockets, gold chrysanthemums
That detonate and fall into the sea.

On days of broken sunshine earth herself
Reeling upon her axis in the throes
Of meteorological dyspepsia
Regales onlookers with a febrile floorshow.
As the clouds part, uncurtaining the night,
Oneiric images imbue the air.
Vast hulls maneuver in the fish-tank gloaming
Like neon tetras and striped zebra fish,
Mouths gaping in the watery halflight.
Argosies, airships, angel-launched flotillas,
Submarine dogfights in the lurid light—
A spark of encephalic lightning in
The boreal jelly of a frigid cloud
Crackling with splintered ice and shards of frost
And flickers of cerebral cruelty
Makes hell’s hot legions melt and dissipates
The swelling turgor of the heat-charged air,
Its frayed caparison of faded azure
Washed in the camphor light of cool blue night.
An eructation—earth replants her cheek
Upon her spinning pillow of stardust
And plummets down the well of spiral sleep.

A silver-skeined or mackerel-clouded sky
Begins to glow with its own inner light
Then flushes heavenly shades of pastel orange—
Evening has brought her sketchbook and her chalks
To the veranda by the lakeside where
She sips, discreetly, from a iced sorbet.
Above a bleak suburban shopping mall’s
Deserted asphalt hatched with painted stripes
The sodium vapor lamps begin to pale
Under the fire of an eerier green—
A “war-of-the-worlds” luster, as in Wells.
Fire and ice: bucolic Armageddon
Already showing on a sky near you.

The sun. It sets. What alien gaze has raised
The welts and bruises on her fair pale skin,
Her gaseous envelope of melting aether
Mottled with industrial moles, the faint
Impression of a bra strap, turquoise veins
And clotted cream and mother’s milk and spider
Veins as intricate as those that mar
The emptiness of interstellar space
With remnants of galactic nebulae?
What spectral presence makes her glow and blush
Coral, and salmon pink, and cinnabar
In carnal and unnatural combinations,
Funereal tints and tinctures culled from dreams?
What voiceless might forbid the sun his sledgehammer
And nudged him, gently, off the edge of night
Where now she trembles in a placeless stare?

The “sky.” The “heavens.” “Space.” Time out of mind
Everyone noised authoritatively
(As if they knew the terrors that spoke)
These simple vocables. But what, I pray,
Is space, and where for pity’s sake does it
Reside, and why in heaven’s name should I
Believe that everything I am, and own
Is “in”—locked in some crystal prism—“space”?
But something leaves its footprints in the sky
And discomposes with its measureless
Reserve and ushering silence earth, the Magna
Mater and the sum of all things “real.”

                         5/15/2012

Exile and Deliverance, Part I: Continent of the Slain

Exiled to the plains states for doctrinal irregularities. Lunar solitudes. Margent lands, earth-platters heaped with sky. At the dilapidated, gem-littered edges of the earth, from serried VHF antennas tethered in the dying light, coruscated rubies like drops of blood on barbed wire:

                                          Low down, the lights of evening rust.
                                                  The television czars
                                          Trampled our rubies into dust
                                                  And hung them up for stars.

                                          For VHF and microwave
                                                  Now, manacled in towers
                                          Of radio transmitters slave
                                                  Those ox-blood beauties, ours.

(Last one to leave the country please turn out the lights.)

Wending my way amid industrial-residential prairie detritus I patroled the boundaries of my prison yard, pastoral solitudes, vast sunset lands, the parks and signories of exile, the vines of Burgundy and milk of France, casting the water of the sky. I wrote “Suburban Eclogue”:

                                          Upon a reef of chimney flues
                                          The solar engine run abreast
                                          Has burst a sealing ring and spews
                                          Nuclear coolant in the west.

                                          A clockwork salad on the wall
                                          Meters time in kilowatt hours
                                          Under a bowl of glass too small
                                          To hold the hemorrhaging sun’s powers.

                                          Crapulous gaiety ensues.
                                          A polyvinyl chloride pipe
                                          Chokes on  a skein of wires and spews
                                          Rainbow spaghetti, colored tripe.
                                                                    (Canto Sixteen)

Coconino county, lit exclusively by moonglow. Moonface smiling indulgently on Offica Bull Pupp’s jail, where Ignatz cools his heels behind a balustrade of prison bars after braining love-struck Krazy Kat with a brick (miniature hearts dribbling out of his ears like marshmallow candy). The moon morphing at moonset into the earth, in balletic mimicry becoming a mesa painted with moonshine, or a multistory adobe dwelling with protruding timbers, or a marquee placard placed among cacti on an easel at the edge of a procenium arch, stage right, a row of footlights illuminating a bleak theatrical space planted with weeds and roadside litter.

And me stretched out bleeding in the dirt behind the footlights, stage left, brained by a block of sky dropping from the flies, love bubbles dribbling out my ears like cotton marshmallow hearts. Me a prostrate heart, limp, inflated wind sock, as large and empty as an airplane hanger, sunset echoes reverberating ceaselessly from one end of the empty hanger to another, dying, ceaselessly dying. Exposed to the cactus spines of my enemies like a lost and anchorless, dejected, wandering party balloon. The dirt: former farmland groomed for a soon-to-be-built industrial park or shopping complex, mischievous municipal morphology. Threatened, dying lands into which my misery melted like a marriage bed, like spring rain, fertile with dispondency. Limed and harrowed, dressed and tilled under the sulphur of a beneficent evening sky.

Swollen with pity and hate (i.e. love) with its disgruntled taste of infected lung, the taste of death in my mouth. (Tom’s a-cold.) And never ceasing to bleed: leaving blood trails everywhere. Sharp flints, arrows, sprigs of rosemary. St. Stephen, St. Sebastian: a bleeding saint.

Arrah, Christ, a bleeding saint. By Saint Bridgid and Saint Brendan and Saint Catherine. God save Ireland. Clean up after your self.

My made intent: to save the world down to its last sunset reflection.

To concoct a sadness so profound it can swallow in its depths and distill every last dying ember and gemstone of futile animal life out of parks and  playgrounds, hospitals and office buildings, preserving it forever in sealed alembics, and out of the suffocating blanket of sprawling one- and two-story residential townhouses and bedroom communities mantling the earth like a swift-breeding colony of flesh-eating bacteria. These especially, housing their concentrated poignancy of intrepid animal life so tender and useless, haphazard dwellings so indistinguishable they seem to spring from a Home-Depot catalog-heaven of Platonic “house” archetypes.

All of it beautiful and fleeting as a sunset gleam. A reflection in a rain puddle, “specular” land, Platonic mirror-world, as unsubstantial as a cloud wisp. A country that fell from the sky and melts on the lawn like a record hailstone.

To save everyone. The vast pasty sea of throwaway man-and-woman flesh housed in throwaway “life” containers, which they call “houses.” Clapboard shiels. Shantytowns. My enemies. State-of-the-art military, population-deletion technology, best that money can buy, scourge of the earth. Nevertheless “peace”-loving, because they love “life,” which they breed prolifically in houses with a plentiful infusion of video and game feeds, junk food and internet access.

I will have such revenges. I will do such things. What they are, yet I know not.

(O fool, I shall go mad!)

On the road to Dover.

I love you. I love your daughters. Taylor. Amber. Regan. (Regan!)

A thousand uploaded cell-phone snapshots from sea to shining sea, I love my country, framed in the bathroom mirror, America’s daughters, autoportraits, demi-nues, self-publicity, computer-literate, social websites, self-enterprising, adorable.

Unless they all drown first in the Spanish invasion along with their parents. Melt in the Spanish gene-pool. Coconino  county. Puddle on the lawn. Mestizo. European residue wiped from the face of the continent. Contained in a wet face towel. Discarded distillate. My people. A continent that seems to love human sacrifice. Aztec ruins of the Chrysler building. West of the West.  Abendland. Continent of the slain.

The Rape of Aphrodite

                           I
The wind is fair, and tides of sunlit foam
Engage, immesh, retreat and flash again
In liquid foray, like embattled men.
This pulse of spray, this dance of tides, this dome
Of sweet and sea bright air, I call my home;
An exiled slave, till fortune, fate or pen
Secure release, and once more rapt, I ken
My salt and crystal sea, my spirit’s Rome.

                           II
The rape of Aphrodite. A child’s flesh
Polluted by excited sea foam. Dragon
Semen milked from the all-inseminating
Seahorses yoked to Oceanus’ wagon
Coating her calves and ankles with the fresh
Spittle roused by the wrath of the God’s mating.

3/16/2012

The Gift Tattoo

How to distinguish shell pink from shell blue:
Her spilled-milk skin’s both one, the other too.
The skin she lives in is her ocean shell.
Her skin tones ring, smooth as a polished bell.

She is the seasons. Spring strides in her feet.
The motion of her ankles is replete
With stellar distances. Worlds coincide,
Poised in galactic balance, in her stride.

She is a feast of gravity and light.
Upon her bleached white sacrum, left and right,
Two lilac scrolls (gift for her last boyfriend)
Spoil the innocence of her child’s rear end.

But she was tattoo’d by the universe
And is its law and scroll of velum: hers
Onslaught of winter and the year’s surcease,
Return of spring, renewal and increase.

4/5/2012