To My Friends, Season’s Greetings. To My Enemies....

                                        Eggnog spiked with marine spar varnish,
                                        Jackhammer soup with barbed wire garnish,
                                        Bowls of depleted uranium candy
                                        And mildewed wallboard from superstorm Sandy.
                                        Every smokestack belches forth
                                        The blighted curse of the dying north
                                        And the haunted scream of the melting glacier
                                         —Wracked by pain beyond all measure—
                                        Summons ISIS’s violent crew
                                        To mutilate and torture you              
                                        And veil your wife and cut off your head
                                        And make jihad in your marriage bed.

George Washington Bridge

                                    Tinselled with winter light the Hudson falls
                                    Through stone-cliff palisades and fortress walls
                                    Festooned with spider steel from ridge to ridge,
                                    The cobwebs of the falcon-guarded bridge.
                                    The fates that spun it harbor in the sky.
                                    A thirst that would have drunk the river dry
                                    Distills thin streams of water to the earth
                                    Down cold steel cables of an elbow’s girth.
                                    It licks them till they gleam with mother’s pride.
                                    It nestles with sweet ardor in her side.                                  
                                    The earth split open with a thundering sound
                                    And silver clouds rained garlands to the ground.
                                    Nourished with cliff rock and the river flood
                                    It towers in the strength of dragon blood.
                                    Its teeth are swept with coiling winds that twist
                                    Daggers of moisture from the dragon mist.
                                    It spits a lake of silver at its feet
                                    In which its beauty and its daring meet.
                                    It does a swan dive off itself and plunges
                                    Onto the precipice from which it lunges.

                                    8/18/2015

My Island (a Wikipedia short story about real estate and global warming)

Real estate. My island.

I dreamt that after carrying a small clod of dirt next to my heart for several days I nursed the dirt with milk from my breast and that the dirt turned into a beautiful woman with whom I had sex. The woman then told me that she was a daughter of Triton named Kalliste and that when I threw the dirt [the woman?] into the sea it would grow into an island for my descendants to live on. Having thwarted all-powerful fire and the sharp claws of bold-plotting lions and the edge of their terrible teeth I would marry one of the Nereids throned on high and see the fine circle of seats in which the lords of sky and sea would be sitting as they gave me gifts and revealed the future strength of my race.

Lords of the sky and sea. The gods of my fathers. Raiders and pirates. Brave as sons of bitches.

Landforms similar in chest-measurement to my (youthful, nubile) island, still rooted—like a young fig tree* on the bosom of Gaia—in her blooming, terrestrial girlhood (i.e still practically a child in earth-years/geological time):

—Sroh-Plom Mountain, “Virtuous Woman's Breast Mountain,” located close to Senmonorom,     Senmonorom District, Mondulkiri Province, Cambodia.

—Sweet Sixteen, Matthews Range (Ldoinyo Lenkiyio), Laikipia district, Rift Valley Province,    northern Kenya.

—Maiden Paps, twin hills in Caithness, Scotland.

—Pap of Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands.


*Fig-juice by its force (μένος) curdles milk and can fertilize eggs (see Aristotle On the Generation of Animals Bk. II, ch. 3). A strong, mannish girl, sometimes curt with her mother.

                                                              ✴✴✴

Let me describe the rich volcanic soils of my island (practically a child in earth-years) and her thriving vines.

The viticultural pride of the island is the sweet and strong Vinsanto (Italian: “holy wine”) a dessert wine made from the best sun-dried Assyrtiko, Athiri and Aidani grapes and undergoing long barrel aging (up to twenty or twenty-five years for the top cuvées). It matures to a sweet dark amber-orange unctuous dessert wine that has achieved worldwide fame, possessing the standard Assyrtiko aromas of citrus and minerals layered with overtones of nuts, raisins, figs*, honey and tea.

(*See note on fig-juice supra.)

Slideshow (winning photos of my smiling, youthful bride in full blossom):

—Oia.

—Houses built on the edge of the caldera.

—View of Imerovigli, example of Cycladic architecture.

White wines from the island are extremely dry with a strong citrus scent and mineral and iodide salt aromas contributed by the ashy volcanic soil, whereas barrel aging gives to some of the white wines a slight frankincense aroma, much like Vinsanto. It is not easy to be a winegrower in Santorini. The hot and dry conditions give the soil a very low productivity. The yield per acre is only 10 to 20 percent of the yields that are common in France or California. The island's wines are standardised and protected by the “Vinsanto” and “Santorini” OPAP designations of origin.

Volcanic rocks present from the prior eruptions feature olivine and have a small presence of hornblende.

It may not be easy to be a winegrower in Santorini. It is never easy to be the aging husband of a young bride. But the breasts of the land are so piercingly sweet how can you not want to cradle them in the palms of your hands and gently pump them with your fingers, sucking their green sap, their immature nectar, their sour honey into your dry, aging mouth?

                                                              ✴✴✴

Let me tell you about my island’s highest mountain (and its god) Baekdu Mountain.

There are a number of monuments on the North Korean side of the mountain. Baekdu Spa is a natural spring and is used for bottled water. Pegae Hill is a camp site of the Korean People's Army (Hangul, Hanja) led by Kim Il-sung during Korea’s struggle against Japanese colonial rule. There are also a number of secret camps which are now open to the public for fun and amusement thanks to Kim Il-sung’s fun-loving grandson Kim Jong-un. There are (were) several waterfalls, including the Hyongje Falls which splits (alas, once split) into two separate falls about a third of the way from the top. Don’t miss the People’s Waterslide Themepark Glorious Victory Amusement City with waterslides built into the concrete spillways of the Hyongje Falls hydroelectric dam.

My island’s mountain was first recorded in the Chinese classic text Shan Hai Jing with the name Buxian Shan (the Mountain with God). It is also called Shanshan Daling (the Big Big Big Mountain) in the Canonical Book of the Eastern Han Dynasty. In the Second Canonical Book of the Tang Dynasty, it was called Taibai Shan (the Grand Old White Mountain). The current Chinese name Changbai Shan (perpetually white mountain) was first used in the Liao Dynasty (907–1125) and then the Jurchen Jin Dynasty (1115–1234).

The Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234) bestowed the title “the King Who Makes the Nation Prosperous and Answers with Miracles” (Xingguo Lingying Wang) on the mountain god in 1172 and it [he?] was promoted to “the Emperor Who Cleared the Sky with Tremendous Sagehood” (Kaitian Hongsheng Emperor) in 1193.

The area is a known habitat for tigers, bears, leopards, wolves, and wild boars. Deer in the mountain forests, which cover the mountain up to about 2000 metres, are of the Paekdusan roe deer kind. Many wild birds such as black grouse, owls, and woodpeckers are known to inhabit the area. The mountain has been identified by BirdLife International as an Important Bird Area (IBA) because it supports a population of scaly-sided mergansers.

(My island happens to be positively chirping with IBA’s—Important Bird Areas. As in a Hieronymous Bosch landscape vessels row through the sky with stately oars, a beet-cheeked Flemish huswife at the tiller, avian aeroscaphes, cranes, geese wend their way across my island’s bright empyrean.)

Sixteen peaks exceeding 2,500 m (8,200 ft) line the caldera rim surrounding Heaven Lake. Water flows north out of the lake, and near the outlet there is a 70 metre (230 ft) waterfall. The mountain is the source of the Songhua, Tumen and Yalu rivers, over which U.S. Army General Charles Hartwell Bonesteel III and Marine Corps Colonel Lewis Burwell “Chesty” Puller, hero of Chosin Reservoir, both brave as sons of bitches, pushed the Red Chinese in 1953. The central section of the mountain rises about 3 mm every year, due to rising levels of magma below the central part of the mountain. The highest peak, called Janggun Peak, is covered in snow about eight months of the year. The modern names of the mountain in Chinese and Korean come from the Sushen or Proto-Jurchen language of the Manchu peoples. Its modern Manchu name is Golmin Šanggiyan Alin or White Mountain. Similarly, its Mongolian name is Ondor Tsagaan Aula, the Lofty White Mountain.

“A shimmering hill,” an Albion Mamelon. Kyrene was built on a chalk cliff.

My island—which was then called Albion—was once inhabited by none but a few giants. These were easily dispatched, the largest one called Goëmagot being tossed over a cliff by my good friend Corineus, never one to let a few ants—or giants—spoil a picnic. (“Bread pasties, tartes, custardes and other delicate jonckettes dipped in honie” says my day planner.) The pleasant situation of the places, the plenty of rivers abounding with fish and the engaging prospect of its woods made myself and company very desirous to fix our habitation there.

                                                                  ✴✴✴

Ancient rock carving on the northwest side of Lake Goblet, a well-rounded volcanic caldera planted on the softly-curving belly of my island some one hundred and eighty kilometers south of the Maiden Paps (or “Sweet Sixteens”). It brims with moisture from the prevailing easterlies. The inscription “What shall we do for our sister who hath no breasts?” is an allusion to the scriptural breasts Faith and Love said to sprout “at the voice of Him who loveth us.”

                                                                  ✴✴✴

Life is hard in a city riddled with temple excavations. Huge stone heads loom in the darkness between the necropolis and the temple of Zeus. Children on BMX bikes hurl Slurpees at a lone man emerging from the corner deli under the shadow of a god’s buttock. Part of my island (a UNESCO World Heritage site) was destroyed in August 2013 by locals to make way for homes and shops. Approximately 200 vaults and tombs were leveled, as well as a section of a viaduct dating to the third century BC. Artifacts were thrown into a nearby river.

In May 2011 a number of objects excavated from my island in 1917 and held in the vault of the National Commercial Bank in Benghazi were stolen. Looters tunneled into the vault and broke into two safes that held the artifacts which were part of the so-called “Benghazi Treasure.” The whereabouts of these objects are currently unknown.

                                                                   ✴✴✴

Major population centers (we are large and contain multitudes): Canterbury. My grandfather’s Dublin. Church Creek, Maryland.

A black rat snake slithers across Maple Dam Road in Church Creek Maryland on the seagrass porches of the Chesapeake Bay.

Very slowly solitude slips round me in St. Stephen's Green. I rest: see pale salmon clouds blossom (Hugh McFadden).

Black rat snake in Maryland. Pale salmon in the sky over Dublin. Coastal sea level rise. Pollute the celestial bed. The wave of Hades breaks over all alike. Greywacke pebbles make up the majority of shingle at Canterbury beach, along with agates, quartz, jaspers and even petrified wood. The pebbles are wack at Birdlings Flat.

An obese land fed fat with an ancient grudge, sinking into the sea. A venomous toad that lives on dungeon vapor. And Aias, who was the most powerful in battle except for Achilles and whom the breath of the unswerving Zephyr conveyed in swift ships to bring back the wife of golden-haired Menelaus from the city of Ilus, walks fields of asphodel. The wave of Hades breaks over all alike. Said that.

Fed fat like ancient grudges indecently plump July plums, so liquidly sweet they wobble on the palm of your hand like fruit-liqueur raindrops, bask on outdoor-stalls in the summer sun: translucent salmon eggs, speckled dinosaur eggs, black amber beauties, pillows of swollen yellow pus cloaked in black crepe. Waves of Hades.

New Orleans neighborhood of Elysian Fields in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Déclassé purgatory where Blanche Dubois lives with Stanley and Stella Kowalski. Flooded by Hurricane Katrina. Jackie Gleason in the Honeymooners. Déclassé purgatory of Bensonhurst Brooklyn. Flooded by a broken sewer main. To the moon Alice.

Jesus jump down.

And where are my generations? Cheated by a deceitful young bride. Time the all-seeing has found you out. Marriage of water and stone. Time the all-seeping. Polishing your wedding carcanet of river stones. Gray, green and hazel-eyed agates, quartz, jaspers, blond chips of petrified wood. Lunar carbuncles. Painted plums. It ripples like diamond-dust in the low sun, time, scouring the celestial bed with solar pumice.

Flood of memories breached by raw sewage. The thenar of my palm caressing your vulvar fossa. Swollen river channels turbid, muddy. Temple excavations inundated by the sea.

Putting my intrepid resolve to the test I scale the highest Maiden Pap (Mount Nipplecap, standing some thirteen meters proud of her sister Mount Alabaster) scout the surrounding main.

Putting my intrepid resolve to the test. Greek youths, no gunshy neophytes, were wont to dedicate their first hair to the river-godsunblenching unflinchingunwincing sundrenched waters. Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung. My first hair departed long ago for the high seas.

Each man's weird determines his web.

Taking council from the central navel of the tree-clad mother—oracular, eudendrous—I loose the bridle of long-timbered Argo the sea-stallion from his bronze-jawed anchor in the Bay of Harmony and Lucid Reflection (Han Dynasty, 206 BCE–220 CE).

Freshen the gale of songs. Embark on a new adventure. Clean socks! Dry land! No flooded basements!

Birth-strangled babe ditch-delivered by a drab: delivered from swamped ditches in flood-prone coastal plains behold the golden strength of the sun poised glistening at the starting line of another day’s race. We set out for nomad’s country, refuge for white-rumped antelopes, gazelles, hartebeest, asses (not horned asses but those that are called “undrinking”) and the shy giant oryx whose horns grow in the shape of Apollo’s prophetic lyre.

7/31/2015

Spa

Medicine for ailing bodies. Novel neurotherapies. Spa treatments.

Basted in luxury, I feel my skin thicken and coagulate, alligator over with knobs and leathery excrescences. Nothing disturbs my sangfrois, my pluterperfect imperturbability. Not even the outrageous charge on my credit card. Are all spa attendants in New York City East-Asian? The Moonflower, 8 East 41st Street between Fifth Avenue and Madison in Midtown Manhattan. Subsidiary of Syzygy Therapeutics, biotech asset acquisition fund. Phoenix Biogenic. Genetic alterations and rejuvenations by appointment. Skin and face transplants. Peel away the years to a new you. A livid, pocky-faced Filipino manicurist in a lab coat ushers me from a stenciled glass-front lobby with Poland Springs water and airline magazines to the gleaming Pompeian splendor of sweaty marble spa amenities in the bowels of a corporate high-rise. Off-key scents lurk like exotic zoo animals in artificial rainforest settings. A soupçon of wet plaster and tile grout impregnated with mildew and Lysol hides like a shy pacarana under scented paraffin. “There is mold in the saunas, the Jacuzzis malfunction, there are rodent feces, insect pests” said former Spa Castle employee Joon Yung Lee off-camera to Channel 4 investigative reporters. Member of PacPlex, a sports and recreation complex. The hot basalt rocks on my vertebral prominences form a sensory keyboard, a ganglionic archipelago of stepping stones that carry me over the babbling brook of my distractions to a calm lake of stagnant river ooze in which I sink and wallow. Wie nackte Mädchen kommend über Steine (Rilke).  As though the water were talking with pebbles in its mouth (Derek Walcott). You know how submerged stones in a talkative brook are covered with a thin slime of translucent algae, like the epithelium inside the cheek?  My pulsing senses quicken into Nilotic mud amplifiers. I flatten myself bellyward in crocodile-crowded spa linen, alert to the panic of crazed wildebeests.

Rilke. Probably the best poet currently tattooed on a pop singer.

August 2014

Nightjar

Mystical June night swarming with sweet linden-and-locust scents, fireflies. You can almost hear the soft sighing fairy moans of insects in love. Celery, parsley and kitchen rue crowd the shadows where yard meets fence. Meet Master Cobweb and Master Mustardseed, quaint locals. Chalky clouds of spirea glow dim, choke the breath.

Whiskered nightjars, dusk’s whirring bull-roarers, purring, square-eyed beauties the color of charred wood, unscrew their lids, release spook, charm, a child’s captured junebug on the scented air. θελκτηρία: charm, spell, enchantment. Zone of stars. I hereby proclaim a new constellation: the girdle of Aphrodite, celestial goddess. (“Therein are fashioned all manner of allurements” says the Iliad of Aphrodite’s θελκτηρία, her “broidered zone”—“therein is love, therein desire, therein dalliance, beguilement that steals the wits even of the wise.”) Stargazing as lingerie fetish. Look up and all will be revealed. Experience the midsummer night’s enchantment of Aphrodite’s diaphanous garters.

What is “dusk”? No one can say for sure but it has a voice you cannot localize—the plaintive whimper of a nightjar, like the mew of a kitten hungry for milk—but can nevertheless feel on your exposed flesh as if it issued from a cardboard toiletpaper tube. The brush of nightwings against the skin. It flies on marionette wings like a crippled spider, as if double-jointed. Its spindly, bent pinions are marked with white moon-squadron insignia. It manages astonishing feats of spatial agility in aerial love-dance with its prey, small winged insects. A quite extraordinary chicken dance with broken oars. I call it by its European name “nightjar” because at dusk the barky fingers of the trees unscrew the lid on something magical and nightfall comes out. A mere can of whoop ass is a can of derision in comparison to this consummate performance. Night itself issues from the nightjar. Isn’t beauty always jarring, queen of smoke and darkness? Nightfall is no novelty gag. Bust open another can for us tonight, inky darling. Hold still till then dear, on a gnarled branch, in your blanket of scorched-bark feathers.

July 6, 2015

Once Vermeer

                                                      Let the light
                                                      Pour out the door
                                                      Linoleum floor.
                                                      Find the night.

                                                      Once Vermeer
                                                      Polished the floor,
                                                      Measured the light,
                                                      Drove it hard
                                                      Into pearl ear-studs.

                                                      Now it floods
                                                      Out the kitchen door
                                                      And into the yard
                                                      Where it scales the ash
                                                      To disappear
                                                      In his summer-green sash.

                                                      July 4, 2015

Le scaphandre et le papillon

Review of Le scaphandre et le papillon. (“The Diving Bell [sic] and the Butterfly.”) Theme of the movie: we are imprisoned in the murky depths of a hostile element in our flesh-encased diving suits (i.e. our bodies).  French scaphandre: old-fashioned salvage-diver's suit with copper helmet, air hose (lifeline to the true world of imagination and memory) thick rubber skin and leaden shoes. Not a "diving bell." Cocooned in the present within these clumsy “diving suits” (bodies) catastrophic illness—a massive stroke for example—forces a rare few of us to find our butterfly "wings," our past and future. That is, to emerge from the chrysalis of the present into the past and future and transcend death through imagination and memory. This is what happened to Jean-Dominique Bauby, managing editor of Elle magazine, and this movie is his story. Julien Schnabel's cinematic realization is uncluttered, from the painful recreation of Bauby's post-traumatic awakening in a hospital in Berck, Calais, in 1998 to the closing credits, which feature planetary ballet on an epic scale: triumphantly upward-leaping glacial ice filmed in reverse motion to the singing of Joe Strummer and Tom Waits.

2008

On Hearing a Musette in a Rameau Opera

Prancing ponies! High-kicking cancan girls! The skip, step and cha-cha of things! The choreography of time. Space furnished like a wardrobe with cumulus clouds, frilly knee-high petticoats and marching boots. Making a fool of distance, which collapses like an accordion dresser screen painted with Chinese landscapes! O landscape of time in a Rameau opera! From whence did you import your measures? And the stamping, sliding, tumbling objects of the earth, silly creatures of the forest, sky and workshop waiting in a long line at the backstage entrance for an audition—how much did you pay those clubfoot jesters, those upstart hooligan extras to portray time intervals in your opera? And the marble nude in the shrubbery showing her derriere: even she seems like a distillation of quotidian time in a moonlit operatic garden. The seldom-revealed, still backside of time. Her stone buttocks make your optical glands throb with the imminence of motion. Frozen in time, commanded into stillness by a poised orchestra conductor’s baton.

The garden of movement. When did movement coarsen, become false? When did it lose its luster and become dingy? Behold motion, new-washed by music. Plunge your body into freshly-laundered space like an arm through the sleeve of a crisp white Sunday linen shirt. I am here. Presto! Now I’m there. It’s as easy as music. Or dancing. The thing in motion is matter daydreaming. Mind made flesh. Wanting without remorse, hungrily, as a petal lunges to the earth, gracefully falling through space as a dancer hurls herself through time from one sequence of movements to another, always falling to a new height which overlooks all the previous history of the dance.

O sound of musettes in a Rameau opera! Sounds I never heard before until now! (Or maybe I heard you in a former life—eighteenth century France, par example, since even my present life feels decidedly ancien régime.) Why has it taken me so long to hear you again, unknown familiar sound? Whose voice are you? To which of these moving things, these gallant moving things stampeding like circus animals through the sky, along the sidewalk, down our department store aisles and tumbling off our desks and out of our kitchen pantries and from the top shelves of our closets, do you belong? Must that thing not stop in its tracks and channel all its energy through its nose in order to make that sound, the sound of a musette? It seems to twist all the diffuse strands of life into a metaphysical circus act. It bristles with obscene chalumeaux. “Some men, when the bagpipe sings in the nose, cannot contain their urine” said the slandered Venetian. It waddles, the vulgar French musette, like a bawdy-looking brown leather duck into the blazing center ring and draws a reedy, whining acrobatic high-wire out of its nose along which an absurd assembly of goofy cartoon characters slide in pompous, stately procession, with heart-breaking precision, solemnity and nonchalance. Like Philippe Petit between the World Trade towers—which no longer exist (like Rameau). Suspended in time like a conductor’s baton,

6/12/2015

Trees

Are trees bodies? Or merely nerve synapses, sky sutures, marshy river deltas with no defined geographical boundaries where night flows into day? Portals between dimensions? In the roots of the elm, earth plants her feet, reaches upward to the sky. In its leaves, the sky palpates with tender fingers the mortal flesh of the beloved, showers the earth with gifts of light and rain. There are no “trees,” only the wedding feast of the marriage of heaven and earth.

Lords and ladies in attendance. Vertumnus and Pomona. Vertumnus has sturdy limbs, split, crackled seams under his knees and smooth, silver, livid-blotchy bark with assorted lesions, knots, burls, cankers, butt swell and minor girdling at the soil line caused by root weevils. Pomona is graceful-limbed, purple-shaded, polished  bronze, with tarnished bosses, light verdigris and a speckled bole. Ruddy-skinned pamplemousses glow like orbed lanterns in the glade. Amid the darkness at the center of the fruittree, the lemon glow of unblinking gapefruit (grapefruit). Wedding in the orchard. Lords and ladies in attendance. Pre-school flower girls in festive leaf, dressed in orange blossom cambric. Tall willowy bridesmaids in peachskin satin sway over the assembled throng, the verdant multitude of earthly foliage.

To Carla Coneely

                             "These are but wild and whirling words, my lord"—Hamlet.

                             My words, they whirl. Now let the whirlwind thresh
                             The kernel from the chaff! I stand the test,
                             I find the center of the storm. My best
                             Monstrous congested nimbus, towering, fresh,
                             Inseminates the cloud-folds of your flesh.
                             A cushion-push, the tremor of a breast,
                             The flutter of a plaice or pilchard pressed
                             Within an ocean trawler’s nylon mesh—
                             Caught in the meshes of my twisted nets,
                             Alive and bound by finger bonds it frets
                             And flounders in the strict embrace of love.
                             Consider yourself warmed! And glisten up:
                             These words that clink like tiddles in a cup
                             Are space debris and lethal miles above.

                             1/16/2015