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 

Nurse Ratched

By Stephen Mark Hoffman

With grateful acknowledgement to Ken Kesey and Louise Fletcher

Nurse Ratched. The resentful little girl who got revenge on the world by damaging and retarding–mentally, emotionally, physically–every human being she ever contaminated with her prolonged presence, including the large brood of experimental victims (i.e. children) she bore specifically for that purpose. Who honed her terrifying skills of spiritual amputation first in Canadian psychiatric hospitals during her stint as a nurse there, in the days when lobotomy was still practiced and shock therapy was induced by insulin (and where Little Shadow Nelly with the Button on her Belly resided, an little elderly “shadow” woman who picked “shadow” flowers off her bedcovers, and whose natural aversion to bath water was easily countered by enlisting the help of her own mania: “It isn’t real water, Nelly, it’s shadow water!”) then during her long “saintly” life as the Old Woman Who Lived In the Shoe. A practical, down-to-earth woman, the farmer’s wife with a carving knife.

Her father (James Charles Brady, born Dublin, 1876–four years before James Joyce) was a professor of Classics–Latin and ancient Greek, the language of poets, thinkers and statesmen–the persisting and sustaining soil of every live word that still speaks or sings in our throttled, affrighted, darkening, lackluster world. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin University, a majestic institution, Bishop Berkeley’s alma mater, founded in 1517 by the Anglo-Irish, Roman Catholics–like my grandfather–excluded until the late eighteenth century. The equal of Oxford and Cambridge. Elected to Canadian Parliament. Afterwards served until his retirement as director of the National Bureau of Records and Statistics. “He modernized record keeping in Canadian hospitals and prisons” says his obituary.  Heraclitus, Sophocles, Pindar...Michel Foucault?

She read indistinguishable pulp murder-mystery fiction checked out from the public library–strictly on the pot–to ease her digestion, because there was no TV in the bathroom. At least those miserable books were more challenging than Newsweek magazine, which she also devoured on the pot, along with a clear-cut mountainside’s-worth of glossy women’s magazines–Redbook, Lady’s Home Journal, Woman’s Wear Daily–always a slippery sheaf of them as thick as your arm propped on the laundry hamper. Life, Time, Look–the whole spectrum of human experience.

The preponderance of her large brood of children struggle today with Newsweek magazine. Our household contained exactly two sets of hardcover books: the Time-Life picture-book series of glossy nature-“science” photos–cloth-bound magazines really–and my father’s worthy contribution to the family library, the twenty-four volume Encyclopedia Britannica, with its 200-page treatise on the cultivation, production and distribution of cotton and cotton textiles, and its one-inch half-column biographical thumbnail sketch of the poet Charles Cotton, 1630-1687, a contemporary of Andrew Marvell: “Her pitch-black hair, her raven eyes/And a black beauty twixt her thighs....” Here is a strophe from “Epitaph upon M.H.,” a Restoration prostitute:

                                          Pretty she was, and young, and wise,
                                          And in her Calling so precise,
                                          That Industry had made her prove
                                          The sucking School-Mistress  of Love.

Amply larded with pithy apothegms–queer, fussy old grandfather saws. Rare apothegms of pith and airy delicacy: “A glass of curaçao sec is an excellent digestive after a substantial repast.” (See the article “Curaçao,” Encyclopedia Britannica,  Vol. VII–“Constantine Pavlovich” to “Demidov.”)

Who perfected the art of passive-aggressorship and self-lobotomy (inculcated in her children to splendid effect) to nightmare proportions. Who once told me (as I stood, appalled, on the threshold of adulthood and surveyed the ruins, past and future, of all my dreams) with a look of triumphant accomplishment, and yet sincerely and in all friendliness, as if dispensing with a touching gesture of maternal tenderness the most potent remedy in her secret herb chest: “Your problem is that you think too much, Mark. You should get a job where you work so hard you don’t have time to think.” Like nursing, her own prescription for good mental hygiene, or any of the other menial, service-sector jobs to which I and my other siblings were pre-ordained and condemned by her sweet foresight and thoughtfulness, and by her “healthy,” humorous, carefree and dismissive attitude toward comical parents who obsess about “getting their children into the right kindergarten” (as reported by Newsweek). Confident in her absolute, cunningly submissive, sway over my storming, doting, constantly thwarted father, who eventually gave up and submitted to her Senior-Care nursing ministrations. Always ready with a band-aid or a warm bottle to minister to–and encourage–a person’s infantile needs, but stonily silent, and even ruthlessly, tyrannically obtuse and obstructive, to those in whom, tragically, the shy need awoke to gleen more from life than the rec-room amenities, complete with 24-hour TV, and cheap, fattening food she provided to tranquilize as Head Nurse and “meds” dispenser the infantile “patients” of her own little psychiatric ward, diabolically constructed and populated to preserve her own sanity at others expense.

Kathleen Marie Hoffman, née Brady: born October 26, 1919, Prince Rupert, British Columbia; died July 23, 2006, Chadron, NE.

MetArt (or: Did I Say Her Name Is George Washington?)

Defoliated MetArt nudes. Agent-oranged vaginas, pits. (Pits, slits. No zits.) Irradiated in a nuclear holocaust. Mutant. Polished. White smooth buttocks bellies beaked like squid. White with the fat of kidneys of wheat. Naked Heva. Orient and immortal. Pointed pubes, tonsured, razored, honed. Effective. Lethal-looking. Jules Verne’s Vingt Milles Lieues Sous les Mers. Beak, claw. Cheeked, cleft. Gill slit? Doe hoof? Gazelle toe. Impala. Chubby toe. Cloven-footed hind, sorel, tickles still the sore. Wounded hart. Doe-y, dewy. Slavic, sloe-eyed, Ukrainian, cornflower-blue, amber honey chestnut hazel umber rose. Periwinkles daisies. Russet downy temples cheekbones (not armpits). Dimples. Lots of dimples. Tender tips.

No “Zemblan mousepits” though. No tinder to light the fuse. Shredded tobacco falling from the snuffbox: none. Sneeze-proof. Hypo-allergenic. “Lush carpet of moss” strangled in the utterance. Fur defeated.

Or I could watch Tomboy-Chan shove ice-cubes up her ass. To divide my cyber-choices inventorially would dizzy the arithmatic of memory (and yet but yaw neither in respect of their quick sail). I feel so–connected.

Sweet innocent Russian girls with all their polymers buffed. Gangly-wristed adolescent devochkas. Dedicated, ready to be shot into space like teenage cosmonauts or hookers. (Verne’s aquanauts: beware.) 18 year-olds. 15 year-olds. 13? 12? Train ‘em young. Tin monkeys. Rumanian child-gymnasts. Eastern bloc. Hairless for smooth adhesion to control surfaces. Machine-body interface. Shiver-sensitive. Trembling technology. Space capsule Eros. Squeeze through the hatch. Grease the pig. Docking procedure. Wince and sing! Squeeling sex pilots for the twenty-first century. Guide you to your nut. (Release, quietus, satisfaction.) Emission control speaking. 10 seconds to jag-off. Shoot the moon.

Then grocery shopping. Counter girl. Puce nails. Cockroach-colored nails, painted. Glazed beetle-brick nails, dark-roasted honey-chocolate skin, dusty, lavender caked, livid wrists, palms. Smoky lips. Hands running my produce over the scanner. Ruby laser lines dissecting kale, plums. Over a glass darkly, floating fruit. Glass-paneled scale, inky pool filled with dark device. Weighed on the abyss. Found wanting.

Filled with dark device. You no like my Engrish? Your base are belong to us. English as she is spoke. Please would paper chuck in wastebin thank you! Passengers will please refrain from flushing toilets while the train is standing in the station I love you.

I paid their ransom, redeemed them from retail hell, ascended with them to glory on the far side of glass-shuttered gates.

Halleluia.

Safe home, I set off on my thrice-weekly cycling adventure in New Jersey. Returned by nightfall, vaulting the bridge on swift-footed Michelins, jaguar paws. (I am Jaguar Paw. This is my forest.) Suspension bridge over the abyss. Hudson River. Inky pool filled with. She was wearing her jewels tonight. She’s a beauty even if her name is George Washington.

Lustrous blue pearls she wears on summer evenings. Lotus blue. Topazes and tourmalines when the sun is setting.

Recipe for a dry martini: steep bottle of vodka two hours in the light of a vermouth-colored moon.

A rare beauty! Did I say her name is George Washington?

Outlaw Probability

Two senses of the word “unusual” (ungewöhnlich; cf. “Wozu Dichter?,” Holzwege, 290): That for which there is a low degree of probability (small chance). That for which there was never any chance (zero probability). “I am,” for example. That for which there was--and is still not--any “chance.”

(There is hope, said Kafka, but not for us. There is hope for those we will be if, and when, we are–for which eventuality there is still, as yet, no chance. I.e., no probability. τύχη, “rainbow chance”--sunshine's olive branch.)

One is the law of probability. The other is the lawlessness of probability. Outlaw probability. I.e., hope.

The unusual: that for which there was never any chance--and for which there is still none. We, myself. “There is hope, but not for us.”

“I am--probably” says outlaw probability, probingly. Outlaw probability is like the full coat of fur without the panther–but not quite without its teeth. The panther hope.

                                          “If the sun and moon did doubt
                                           They’d immediately go out.”
                                                                            (Blake)

Goddess, give us hope. No. Give us hope with teeth.