A Villanelle for Hard Times

The unending crisis—begun by the cronies of Shrub.
While many of us entrusted our funds to their banks,
those rich right-wingers ran them like old boys’ clubs.

The billions in bailouts were sent to the Wall St. hub
where executives grabbed all that money without any thanks.
This unending crisis—caused by the cronies of Shrub.

Obama was left with the mess from Republican flubs
that allowed one-percent to outrun the rest of the ranks.
Those rich right-wingers ran Wall St. like old boys’ clubs.

The stock market sank in the midst of all the hubbub,
but the CEO’s kept on pulling their big bonus pranks.
This unending crisis—begun by the cronies of Shrub.

As the non-one-percent, we’re worn out clear down to the nub,
with no jobs, no houses, nobody guarding our flanks.
Those rich right-wingers ran companies like old boys’ clubs.

The financial disaster’s worldwide—people even lack grub.
The new Occupation’s by serious folks, not by cranks.
The unending crisis leads back to the cronies of Shrub
who treat the whole world as their private old boy’s club.

—By Deborah Dashow Ruth

After a long stint at the University of California, Berkeley, Deborah Dashow Ruth is now a full time poet and playwright.

* * * *

Build the Apocalypse Inside Your Garage
(a Pantoum)

You build the apocalypse inside your garage,
bolt it together with plastic and duct tape, you’re dreaming.
It’s only a hobby, to see if it’s possible to be God.

You must be profitable to have the right to exist and defraud.
You pay homage to the superheroes painted on your ceiling,
a chapel of façade. Build the apocalypse inside your garage.

Pray for another Harrison Ford to save your from yourself. Applaud
Cowboys & Aliens, or Rise of the Planet of the Apes streaming
into your home. It’s the American way, to see if it’s possible to be God.

Is there life on Mars? You are lonely on a planet overflowing with people, a fraud.
Your body clones itself to keep from dying, to keep up with your lying.
Create your own apocalypse inside your garage.

What is desire, after all, than another name for god. Awed
by money, sex, power and a fast car, you keep on fucking
with your own mirage. It’s only a hobby, you said, you wanted to be God.

You split atoms in your kitchen, start a nuclear reaction on your stove, you tread
too far, blow your wad on cloning the gods, you are crying
for another apocalypse inside your own garage.
It’s only a hobby, you said, you thought you were God.

—By Jules Nyquist

Jules Nyquist of Albuquerque, New Mexico, has a forthcoming book, Appetites: poems on food, drink and sex (with recipes), from Beatlick Press. Meanwhile, check out her blog and website. The title for this poem came from a New York Times headline.

* * * *

Liberty’s Vigil, The Occupy Anthology: 99 Poets among the 99% was edited by Karla Linn Merrifield and Dwain Wilder, and published by Michael Czarnecki of FootHills Publishing.

“Moby-Dick is a novel, but it is also a book of poetry. The beauty of Melville’s sentences is such that it sometimes takes me five minutes or more to make my way through a single page as I reread the words aloud, feeling the rhythms, the shrewdly hidden rhymes, and the miraculous way he manages consonants and vowels. Take, for example, this passage from chapter 51, ‘The Spirit-Spout,’ which picks up with the Pequod just south of St. Helena: ‘while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.’”

Melville consumed Shakespeare. Hart Crane consumed Melville. Here’s the second part of Crane’s great love poem “Voyages” in which he adds his own silver to the sea.

II

—And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,—
Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no eatherly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

Yet the views were magnificent. To one side we had the huge expanse of the Mid-Hudson Valley from Beacon below us to Newburgh across the bridge to Stewart airport clearing a surprisingly large swath of forest across the valley. It was so much larger in scale than any other human structure that I half-expected an alien space ship the size of a city to arrive for a landing. Northwards across the Hudson lay the Marlborough Hills gently rising up from the river. Beyond them: the distinctive wall of the Shawangunk ridge. And dominating the far skyline, half-erased by the faint haziness of distance, the mountain profile of the Catskills’ massive peaks and deep gaps that made the nearer hills look small and rumpled. In those years the Catskills were the unexplored wilderness that lay beyond the reach of my day trips.

Yet near at hand to our left we had our own mountains, the Hudson Highlands of Storm King, West Point, and Harriman State Park, the waves of long ridges divided by valley haze on those hot summer days. Though only 1,200 to 1,400 feet tall they looked grand towering over the Hudson River fjord. They seemed to roll on forever to the southwest, as if New Jersey didn’t exist. On the southern horizon lay my favorite illusion: the boxy tower silhouette of Manhattan docked against the continent as if no suburbs lay between the city and these wilds. The miles of extra hiking to reach this view were worth the effort. But we needed a long summer day because we might not get back to the train until seven or eight. Beacon Mountain was a marathon trek.

One day alone on the train I decided to ride an extra stop. My concern was that I’d have to walk several miles across town to reach the trailhead shown on my map at the dead end of a street. The hike up the mountain itself was only two miles. I needn’t have worried. Dozens of black women and children got off in Beacon with me, a demographic noticeably different from the white hikers and village tourists who’d deboarded in Cold Spring. They dispersed out to taxi vans waiting in the parking lot. Appreciating my good luck, I hopped in the front passenger seat of a van, and, curious about all this activity, learned from the driver, a middle-aged black man, that everyone was visiting for Father’s Day at the prisons. There were four in the area. I suppose I remember this moment because I felt stung by my naivity. I fancied myself a savvy Manhattanite, but in my world of writers and editors Upstate meant country houses and weekend getaways. It hadn’t occurred to me on that crowded train that Upstate also meant prisons. Yet the naivity went both ways. The driver knew the dead-end street where he’d drop me off, but not the red trail on my map. He’d never hiked up Beacon Mountain. He’d mowed over four black snakes in his yard, he told me. That had been enough nature for him. How could you live here, I thought to myself, and not want to stand on your own mountain?

My wife wasn’t much of a hiker, either. The name alone—Breakneck Ridge—was enough for her to send me off with my adventure buddies, while she stayed in Manhattan to do coffee and museums with her friends. Yet I was convinced that she could make that two-mile walk up to the fire tower. So later that summer I returned with her in a taxi van. And she did make it to the top, but not without some consternation minutes after starting up the trail when we encountered a sullen teenager firing his rifle straight up at tree leaves. Beacon Mountain wasn’t a park, I realized, where you trusted people to be nice and pick up their litter. These were the back woods where kids did what they’ve always done away from parents and rules. They learned how to smoke and drink and shoot squirrels and who knew what else. Would we be safe? we asked. For a guy holding a rifle, he looked as nonchalant as could be. Yeah, he replied, you should be okay. “Should be” wasn’t the level of reassurance we wanted, but we continued on our planned hike and, fortunately, didn’t hear any more rifle shots. The only others we met were two kids farther up the trail on dirt motorbikes. Their helmets looked huge atop their skinny shoulders. They were mud spattered from head to foot. They hardly nodded as they rode by, slowly weaving among gully rocks. After that, my wife and I stuck to established hiking preserves, such as Minnewaska Start Park, where our encounters with others were always pleasant and exhaust-free.

Years later I conflated my memories of Beacon Mountain into a poem. I wanted to capture the woods noire feeling of that outpost beyond my typical hiking range.

Strange Mountain

The summer after the mountainside smoked
for two months like a cigarette billboard,

I entered through swaying field grasses
that coated my sweaty hands with seeds

and feathered my stiff legs until I reached
the charcoaled elephant tusks

of trees. In the prison town below,
the cabby had never heard of anyone climbing

Strange Mountain: “I’ve mowed four black snakes
on my own lawn. That’s enough outdoors for me”

But I was married then and yearning
for something like the yellow warbler singing under the power line

in a staghorn sumac with antique red velvet horns.
The bird had cinnamon chest stripes as runny as mascara

in a soap opera, but I had no reason
to think him unhappy. I filled myself on fern air

and proceeded to the summit where two turkey vultures
on the fire tower with blistered red heads

leaned into the warm breeze and glided down into the yellow
valley haze. The dragon flies didn’t care about fire:

Cerulean, scarlet, they hovered over flower heads
like needles carrying fresh injections

of spring. I lay down on parched moss that might still be alive
after a good rain. A towhee sang “drink-your-tea.”

Love seemed so simple away from home. That winter
I returned to find the summit puddles frozen clear as windshields.

An older man in a Tyrolean hat clipped his nails
in the frigid cold. He asked, “Did you leave some blood

on the snow down the trail?” “Blood? No,”
I said. She had left without a word.

This poem’s subject is, of course, not the mountain but the the dissolution of my marriage. That happened in 1996 upon my leaving Manhattan for a Catskills log cabin. For a long time afterward, this breakup felt like the greatest failure of my life. My wife and I hadn’t cheated or hated each other or been anything less than best friends. But I’d been gripped by the desire to leave the city and start fresh in the mountains. And, other than me, she had no reason to follow, not with a good career, a nice apartment, and her family and friends in the city. A lifelong Manhattanite, she hadn’t even learned how to drive. She didn’t share my fantasies for a dark and moldy cabin with a wood stove for winter perched among hemlocks above a stream with a footbridge out to the road. So I’d been forced to choose the cabin over her, a decision both terrible and right.

Sixteen years later I no longer felt any failure, only the triumph of making such a bold change to pursue my Thoreauvian dream. My former wife and I became dear old friends who recognized how differently we were wired. The desire to live in the mountains had probably been planted in me on boyhood family camping trips to Maine that led to Boy Scouts and teenage backpacks on the Appalachian Trail followed by college adventures in the High Sierras. Once I’d thoroughly explored the Hudson Highlands, the Catskills seemed like an obvious next step. Marriages, I’d come to believe, were relationships that got renegotiated as people underwent major life changes. Mine hadn’t failed. It had been replaced by a country/city friendship. Then, tragically, my former wife had taken her own life after suffering a devastating depression. Over time my grieving gave way to fond memories of our young adulthoods together in Hoboken and Manhattan. The divorce at the end seemed almost incidental, a rite of passage that many go through.

Much as my life has changed since 1996, so has Beacon. The people now getting off the weekend train are art hipsters on their way to DIA Beacon. The main street has galleries, a tea shop, and a glass factory that sells handcrafted vases and bowls. As the town has changed, so has Beacon Mountain. No longer does the trail start from a dead-end street to climb around the back side. In recent years Scenic Hudson has put out a welcome mat at the base of the mountain that looms over town. There’s a parking lot and an information kiosk with maps and historical photos. The popular trail leads a short distance through the woods to the bottom of the meadow-like cut left by the Mount Beacon Incline Railway that once ran straight up the steep mountain front. Scenic Hudson has built a steel staircase that starts up the first three hundred feet of the climb after which the trail turns off into the woods to zig-zag upwards along old paths that ramp this way and that up the hillside. Half-an-hour of steady climbing brings you to the top vista where the brick ruins of the railway cable house still stand and the valley views are breathtaking. Though the higher rear ridgeline of Beacon Mountain blocks the eastern skyline, the whole of the Mid-Hudson Valley off to the Catskills fills the viewshed. The town of Beacon lies directly below in orderly rows of white houses that glint from the sun that arcs over the Highlands.

Under a blissfully mild blue sky the day after Thanksgiving, I must have passed a dozen or two hikers on my way up and found another dozen or two spread around the top flat, which seemed like piazza ruins the way a cement platform emerged in places from the hard dirt that held mud puddles and campfire rings. Years ago a hotel and casino had greeted visitors here at the top of the railway incline. A border of iron fence posts still stood around the promontory rim. Many of the hikers were families with children or teens. Many were couples in their twenties or thirties. Noticing short beards on various young men, I wondered if this might be the NoBro style, a suggestion of country hermit without a complete loss of grooming. Woodstock feels so much like a retirement community to me that I fear I’m graying along with it. To be in Beacon where the world was still young, as I’d been young when I first explored these mountains, felt both nostalgic and rejuvenating. Beacon Mountain had become a festive park. It was no longer Strange Mountain seen through the eyes of divorce.

The fire tower stood farther back on the higher ridgeline another half hour’s walk away. I passed only a few hikers, but reflected on how much like Breckneck Ridge and Harriman Park these well marked trails seemed. Given the existing network of old dirt roads that offered trail routes, this place was a natural haven for hikers. The antenna towers clustered on the nearby summit didn’t intrude. (What I call Beacon Mountain is on maps two mountains, North Beacon with the antenna and South Beacon with the fire tower.) Overlook Mountain above Woodstock may be the model for what Beacon Mountain is becoming. Old timers have told me that they can remember when nobody went up Overlook except for the fire warden in his jeep, stopping along the way to bag rattlesnakes he brought home for dinner, and kids like themselves eager to sneak into the hotel ruins that still stood in the Sixties. Now those ruins are a concrete shell of their former selves. But Overlook has become the most popular hike in the Catskills, drawing hundreds on summer weekends to enjoy perhaps the finest views in the Hudson Valley. That panorama swings around from the Catskills to Albany to the Berkshires to the Hudson Highlands to High Point, New Jersey, a speck of a monument tower on the horizon. The rattlesnakes, now a protected species, go home as iPhone photos. Everyone is friendly and considerate of the natural surroundings. Weekend volunteers in khaki shirts set up an information table by the fire tower and answer questions. Picnickers sit at the tables, mountain bikers dismount for water breaks, area residents climb the tower to see if they can spot their homes amid the forest blanketing the valley. Overlook Mountain is Woodstock’s Central Park.

But Beacon Mountain hasn’t gotten there yet. Gentrification happens in fits and starts. The trail brought me up around the summit slabs to my first close view of the fire tower, a rusted wreck shorn of its roof so that the four corners of the lookout cab stabbed upwards at the blue sky. Not even at its worst had the Overlook tower looked that bad. This was the equivalent of a junked jalopy left out in the woods for decades after the mice had eaten the seats and the windshield had ground to dust. Yet several boys stood at the top. A trio of young mothers in sweatshirts watched after more boys on the summit bedrock. A young uncle waved down from the roofless window. When everyone returned to the bottom they gathered for group photos. The tower may have been derelict, but the atmosphere was festive. On the dirt to the side of the summit slabs lay a rack of silver-painted metal bars, replacement parts for the tower. No longer was this an outpost for outlaws.

It had been almost twenty years since I’d stood in this spot. I felt that whirl of what I remembered and what I didn’t. Manhattan was still docked against the horizon. In the other direction the bedrock slabs ramped downwards towards the small blue reservoir pocketed between the summits. In the past the route had led me past the reservoir and up the slabs to the tower. There were dark water puddles in the small tubs of bedrock that had been “frozen clear as windshields” in my poem. Yet this bedrock was noticeably different from what I’d grown accustomed to in the Catskills. It was more like the outcroppings in Central Park, a glinty rough rock unlike the Catskills bluestone that could be smooth as sidewalks. The Catskills were an ancient river delta uplifted into a plateau that has been carved by streams and Ice Age glaciers, while the much older Hudson Highlands were the worn down nubs of mountains once like the Rockies. Even the dirt seemed different, harder and yellower on Beacon Mountain. I’d been away long enough to notice such things.

Another pair of boys had ascended the tower. One his way down the metal stairs one called out to his father standing on the slabs below in windbreaker and ball hat. Not being a father myself, I melted with sentiment upon hearing their exchange.

“Dad, Dad, that was the scariest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Scarier than the Cyclone?”

“Much scarier.”

What further argument needs to be made about the value of preserving wild places? They are the settings for us to experience our fullness as human beings.

I took my turn up in the tower cab. The rusted sides aerated with what might have been bullet holes didn’t provide reassurance, but the metal grates of the steps and cab floor were very secure and probably newer. The views were magnificent. The Hudson Highlands extended in waves of black ridgetops divided by valleys of thin haze under the low afternoon sun, a mysterious scene worthy of a Chinese painting. To the north the Catskills owned the skyline with their profile I now knew so well. What I hadn’t remembered was how dramatically Beacon Mountain stood as the final cornerstone at this end of the Highlands, the tallest peak of them all, as the landscape to the east dropped down into rolling valleys of brown autumn forest. Loyal as I am to Overlook, I had to admit that this view was one of the best of the Hudson Valley, stretching from Manhattan to the Catskills, both ends of my adult life. Beacon Mountain had gotten its name during the American Revolution as the spot where wooden pyres would be lit as signal fires to warn of the British sailing upriver. A century earlier, in 1683, Francis Rombout had stood on this summit to purchase from the local Wappingers tribe, “all that he could see,” establishing the Rombout Patent that underlies land ownership to this day. Standing on the tower amid such scenery, I found it easy to feel the elevated sweep of history.

Then I happened to look straight down from the roofless window to the summit bedrock. Spray painted on the gray rock in taxi cab yellow was a big penis. It had been drawn with a few deft lines and curves but didn’t lack for details. Two twenty-pound balls. A straight shaft. Even the small slit at the tip out of which flew a billowing yellow flag of sperm. I was shocked. Especially by the sperm, which suggested that internet porn has pushed us past another boundary in taste. No longer were graffiti penises crude enough. Now they had to be firing their cannons as well. Yet, privately, I also had to smile. The ne’er-do-well spirit of Beacon Mountain still had a foothold. Strange Mountain hadn’t been fully civilized into a park. The graffitiest who’d drawn this dong with a few confident strokes from his spray can had signed his work: “USA.” Why not? Let us all be proud to be Americans.

Mauro Parisi Left More Than His Bicycle

I. On Meeting Mauro Parisi From Cornwall-on-Hudson

Nothing like rage to push the lines forward,
I desperately hoped, days after my breakup with the cellist.
She’d read aloud her eloquent handwritten note,
then slapped my face with its lined paper.

Alone in my cottage, determined to finish my drafts
from hundreds of scraps, I sat rooted at the computer,
ignoring the doe at the window. It stepped forward
to nip the last lily, the garden’s silk trumpet of flame.

I didn’t care, not really, not until Mauro wandered
into my cottage. He’d shown his young daughter
the solar building next door, a site forever unfinished
with tar paper siding, gray insulation leaking like feathers.

But Mauro wasn’t a cynic. His chestnut brown eyes twinkled
with friendliness: he promised his daughter solar power
would one day run her computer, her headphones,
her hair drier, then let her romp in the yard.

In the tall grass she made her own trail. The doe and her fawn
stood upright to pick apples. Mauro asked what I wrote.
“Love poems,” I said, “especially to people I’ve hated.”
“Good,” he replied, “they need it the most.”

He bought my chapbook, my first fan in months.
I signed it to Mauro Parisi, Friend of the Earth.
“What a perfect place to write poetry,” he said.
“I only write when my life is a mess.”

II. Brotherhood of Poets
–Stitched on a Leather Jacket

On stage half-blinded by ceiling rack lights,
I stood at the mike, cold metal close to my teeth.
“Let me read every poet’s nightmare,” I announced
to the sparse crowd upstairs at Valentine’s,
a black cinder block club with one slab of daylight
thrown in the corner. I’d written an epic lament,
“Procrastination,” about surfing Web porn
for a specific blonde with a lizard tattoo,
then disconnecting, reconnecting,
finally receiving e-mails re: mortgages,
penis pumps, car tires, elk, a New Yorker cartoon
from an ex-girlfriend, “I’m told write what you know.
But all I know are writing workshops.”

Under the ceiling rack glare I saw Mauro
dressed for Albany Wordfest in impromptu punk:
a torn strip of police caution tape knotted
half-down his chest like a necktie after a brawl.
Yet Mauro listened, listened, swaying
to a beat in my lines. I’d written this rant
to exorcise my late mother drunk on vermouth,
phoning her demons to denounce Norman Mailer
for stabbing his wife: Authors never wrote anything nice.
Why couldn’t her son be a doctor, a lawyer, an actor on soaps?

In the sparse crowd I focused on Mauro alone,
trusting him to understand why I typed my mother’s
maiden name as my Web surfing password,
wanting him to believe I conquered procrastination.
My last stanza described ripping the modem
phone line from the baseboard like weeding a vine,
snapping off thumb tacks like thorns.
Freed of the Net I poured my hurt into poems.

Mauro listened, listened, fingering his caution tape tie,
half-lidding his eyes to picture my images.
Afterward he pumped warmth into my nervous cold hand:
how glad he was to hear a poem that jumped,
how tired he was of narrative logic.

Mauro, don’t walk that bridge.
Stay with us, stay with our festival of words.

III. Mauro Parisi’s Bicycle Found on the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge

Mauro, wait up! I’ll walk that bridge with you.
This time we’ll reach Beacon, a prison town I once learned.
At the train station taxi vans waited to ferry women
and children on visitors’ day, but the one I caught
dropped me at the base of a mountain, “Strange Mountain,”
I called it in a poem about the end of my marriage.
First, I met a yellow warbler singing under a power line,
its cinnamon striped chest runny as opera mascara;
then two vultures paired on a fire tower,
a fire tower that failed the grove of charred trunks.
But on an open rock crumbly with baked moss
I ate lunch and studied scarlet and blue dragonflies
filled with fresh injections of spring.

Mauro, I need to see you listening to my poem,
your half-lidded eyes hatching those dragonflies.

Mauro

You were the one I first noticed
In the local coffeehouses
The raconteur
The one with flair and style
The one who loved Merwin
As much as I do

Your were a poet above and below the skin
Down to your tendons and
Out to the tips of your crazed hair

You had the gift of not hurrying
Of pausing line by line
Waiting for the muse to signal
The time to go on

Your hands wove slowly
And you often pointed
With two fingers
Like a renaissance saint
Blessing a benediction

I never knew
That your raconteur’s heart
Had a hollow place
A wound that ate it
From the inside out
Until all your love was gone
And only pain kept beating it

I never knew
That you’d forgotten
That leaves spin in October
And the grass lives a secret green life
Under the snow
The deer forgive the headlights
And the coyote sings for all of us

I never knew
That you’d forgotten
That ‘This too shall pass’

I’d have told you
If you’d flung yourself and fallen
Into my arms
An acquaintance only
But one who loved you nonetheless

* * *

The shallows

Were you born under or over the bulrushes
The steaming streaming waters
Of Tigris and Euphrates
Civilizations of salamanders
Arising in the Moodna Creek

Were you alive and breathing shallowly
As the Hudson bore you along
A weight too slack to bear
A love that must be borne
Sacred and profane and living still

Blood pooled in your lungs
Your brain swelled to immaculate conception
And you breathed the Hudson
And Moodna’s sweet essence
Taking her communion
Impelling her inward
To your grateful throat
Sipping cattails and breezes
That rustled in your ears alone

She tasted like wine and blood
And small things growing

Oh how the bulrushes whispered
And oh how you answered
As you breathed in their light
Breathed them in and bore them to you
Fields of wild sumac filling your eyes
Weighting them yet asking them

Begging your eyes to bear them down
Through the dye-struck stream
To the mother waters where they were struck
By your weighted corpse
Where they were compelled to hold you aloft
As you flew through them
On dying winds

Compelled at last
To course you down to your leaf-filled streams
To whisper your welcome
To your end

To cradle you to your cradle
Of crawdad and Salamander civilizations
Their spots molding your eyes to blindness
Your eyes struck like hammered water
Copper beaten water that flows
Yet does not move
Rustles yet is still
Beaten metal
Furrowed as you plow down to it
Fall through it
Only to arise
To be borne upwards
Through the turbid fluid Moodna essence
Surrounded and suspended and appended
To the clotted casings of life
The scrapings and leavings
Of stream-beds and bulrushes
And only you breezes
And slow trees falling asleep
In the slowly falling light
Gift of every plant that spoke to you in whispers
And died in October

And the sun leaves green in your eyes
And the copper waters bear you down
Past your fallow coffin in your harrowed cemetery

Back to the shallows
The wetlands
The mud lands
Where life seethes
Into ornate filigrees of water striders and damselflies
Back to your shallows that loved you and cradle you still

You were borne out of them by your beloved waters
But the bulrushes whisper your name
And remember you still

I shout crow poetry from a sleep-deprived bridge in auto thunder,
Thinking of Parisi and his darkened theatre.
Considering restraint before the sunrise,
Yet remembering the brevity of human existence
And yearning for the warm freedom of my beautiful lover’s embrace.
She shall leave and return, leave and return–a river of emotional
Power, a capsized boat carried far away.
Yet in this river, there is magic.
Logs return, gulls return, eagles introspect introverted hawks.
Currents of human struggle.

We are ensnared in the satraps of poisoned modernity.
We beat conundrums of confusion and confession.
And the river is a witness to our fervor; a mirror to our passion,
A quiet repository of grief, of joy, of mystery, and constancy.

And will you drag the psychic river of your thoughts–turbulent flow
Of dream fragments or simply drive over the bridge, never pausing,
Repeating the turgid commute into older age when blood cools
And fears are kept like animal husbandry or pets nestled by the hearth?

I do not wish to marry Lethe or the foggy regrets of my past.
But I shall follow ghosts, curiously, until they no longer have ice on their faces.

(This poem first appeared on the Riverspace web site.)

Now I’m caught up in the brand new annotated edition of Hart Crane’s “The Bridge” edited by Lawrence Kramer, a godsend that’s explaining what’s going on. As I suspected, Crane wasn’t indulging in abstract word spinning; he knew exactly what we was saying. I just didn’t know enough to understand him. Now I’m enjoying one “Ah-ha!” after another. I particularly appreciated this footnote by Kramer for it adds to my collection of river impressions. Crane lived for a time in a Brooklyn apartment with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, his muse and icon.

“Crane wrote to his mother on February 10, 1925: ‘I haven’t had 6 hours of solid sleep for three nights, what with the bedlam of bells, grunts, whistles, screams and groans of all the river and harbor buoys, which have kept up an incessant grinding program as noisome as the midnight passing into new year. Just like the mouth of hell, not being able to see six feet from the window and yet hearing all the weird jargon constantly.’ An earlier letter (November 16, 1924) supplies the contrary: ‘All night long there were distant tinglings, buoy bells and siren warnings from river craft. It was like wakening into dream-land in the early dawn—one wondered where one was with only a milky light in the window and that vague music from a hidden world.”

As the organizer of these gathering, I made it my responsibility first to carry out two gallons of apple cider in my daypack to be heated on the restaurant-size kitchen stove and served in mugs with cloves and cinnamon, then to lead the round robin sharing of poems read aloud, a romantic way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Since the lighthouse functions as a B&B, Patrick wasn’t unaccustomed to guests, so he retreated out of our way, until at the end I invited him to read his own writing for us. One year he described the voices he heard in the ice, a captivating account I haven’t forgotten. Thomas Wolfe’s description of the various lights seen in the Hudson brought it to mind. Patrick has revised what he originally read to us. Here are the voices as he hears them now.

Patrick Landewe:

People ask me what I do out here alone on this remote spit of land when the world is frozen. Short answer: I listen. With the addition of ice, the Hudson River’s slow but powerful current is made audible. Large chunks of frozen river move around with the tides, forward and back and forward again, grinding against one another as they flow, creating eerie sounds. A channel marker downstream resounds like a kettle drum each time it is hit by a large ice chunk. In the shallows on the north side of the lighthouse, piles of broken ice pop and crackle as they shift with rising or receding water levels. “The ice talks to you,” some people say.

Alone in winter, I listen and lapse into reveries, trying to decipher the language of ice. Deprived of human conversation, the brain turns towards voluble aspects of its surroundings. Not unlike the way the human eye, wired to recognize faces, looks at lines of woodgrain and sees a face grinning back. The visage of Mary appears to believers on a piece of toast or the devil’s eyes in a cloud of smoke. So too the ear is attuned to the human voice, hearing rumors in a rustle of leaves or long orations in the rainfall. What elaborate sentences are diagrammed by the frost on the window pane, I wonder. The scrawling of frost are mere whispers compared to the muscular epics of river ice. Ice talk must have been on my mind when I dreamt of of a book made of ice. The warmth of my hands and the heat of my breath melted the pages as I read them. When I awoke, I looked out the window and saw reams of river ice stacked by the muscle of the tides, piled in the shallows, shuffled into fractals of the underlying geometry of water molecules. I study the commotions of river ice–indecisive waters, constantly moving, back and forth with the tide, back and forth between liquid intuition and structured crystals, stiffening to commands of nighttime cold, eased by the sun. Whoop gasp moan grunt snore. As the winter chill seeps through my woolen jacket to my ribs, I sense the fierce indifference at the core of this frozen landscape. I snap from my reverie and recall a thought from Carl Sagan: “It takes courage to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotions on it.”

I compiled a makeshift catalogue of ice sounds:
1) puffed-rice breakfast cereal sounds: krack, smack, krunch, kapow. knuckle-breaking comic-book brawl.
2) squeegee-like squeaks like furry little mice complaining about the icy cold.
3) old man noises: For example, one day, while taking a break from ice-sailing, standing with men around a burn barrel at the edge of the ice, hands outstretched towards the fire to keep warm. A sudden noise from the ice interrupted the conversation–a snow-muffled boom underfoot. Everyone looked around at the frozen landscape, then at each other. Someone finally piped up. “Ice fart,” he said. Now, I hear the grumbling of old age, not quite speech but bodily noises, like hunger, groaning with the rough creaking of joints. A few coughs, as the ice complains under the stress of a shrinking tide. When the tide expands, a surge of gurgling and belching, followed by one long sigh.
4) sounds from deep space: High-pitched, ethereal ping, transmitted through the ice sheet like snapping piano wire, like steam-pipes and radiators singing with an ancient boiler. Space-age special effects. A metallic retort, then monolithic silence. The wake of a passing tug jostles the newly-formed half-inch layer of ice on the water. Undulating with each wave, the ice makes a thin, metallic sound. If you ever stood on a railroad platform and listened carefully as a train approached the station, you’d recognize this icy sound as something similar to the high-pitched pings darting through the rails in advance of the train.
5) primal animal motion: After dinner, sitting around the dining table at my neighbor’s house, the dogs’ ears prick up. They leap to the door and bark into the night. They sense something out there in the dark. It’s the river ice, like a large, lumbering beast on the move.

I’m not the first person to listen to river ice and try to describe its noise. The naturalist John Burroughs heard a slumbering ice-god, snoring and grunting, with the occasional thunderbolt leaping forth. Or a gigantic phantom skater, “one who covers a mile at a stride and makes the crystal floor ring beneath him.” The ice groans to the rise and the fall of the tide. It resounds to the daytime expansion and nighttime contraction of temperature changes. Tugs are brought to a standstill. Buoys are pulled off their moorings. The ice doesn’t care, and I am glad of it. It speaks a naked voice, like someone, having reached the end of a lifetime and seen it all, shrugs off worry.

The Wreck of the Circus Train

Couplings buckled, cracked, collapsed,
And all reared, wheels and steel
Pawing and leaping above the plain,

And fell down totally, a crash
Deep in the rising surf of dust,
As temples into their cellars crash.

Dust flattened across the silence
That follows the end of anything,
Drifted into cracks of wreckage.

But motion remained, a girder
Found gravity and shifted, a wheel
Turned lazily, turning, turning,

And life remained, at work to
Detain spirit: three lions, one
Male with wide masculine mane,

Two female, short, strong, emerged
And looked quickly over the ruin,
Turned and moved toward the hills.

Here’s my poem from Love in the City of Grudges.

One Night in Kingman, Arizona

On the bungalow motel’s cave like stucco ceiling
lizards ran loose. A black-and-white RCA made
this evening’s train wreck look like vintage history.
But we’d seen it for ourselves beyond city limits:
freight cars toppled down track embankments,
still coupled on their sides. Belly smoke rose
to shroud the moon, a coal-faced monk pondering
the damage. Small fires burned beside the tracks,
as if gypsies camped to scavenge after daybreak.
Chickens soldiered through our low beams
toward desert blackness. Defying cruiser tops
spinning red, we stoked our hash bowl, knowing
we’d never see such sights again. We’d heard
radio preachers warn the sky itself would burn.
Nothing shown on TV later could tame this land.

Zuccotti

Following the dispossessed,
I never looked up at what blocked the sun
from warming the rebel camp,
The shadow of a country
that lost its spine that day,
Consumed by smoke and zealotry.

The commotion of perfect union
is a querulous debate
Of powdered wig lawyers and bankers
Devoted to starving the locals.

But we know the way to the trenches,
the underground maze of the city’s heart.
Rats one day, rebels the next
Against a free market engine
Eating its own

Using our knives and forks,
Our tables and chairs
Evicting us en masse to the street
Where every victory grows.

* * *

Confrontation

“Hey excuse me buddy
yer in the bike path!”

“Yea! Well how man times
you been in my lane,”

We barked by way of introduction
till we settled on common ground:

The Mets suck, the furious need.

* * *

Crows

It was a rainy period
And the rolling fog bred dark vigor.

There was a warning
But TV was much more fun,
Its denizens vain,
Intolerant of freedom.

This period of unspecified tint
held no moral character.

It was a time to roll out
Christmas in July.
So all the kids knew
What they were missing.
Except the rich who garnished gold.

It was a time of slavery
and a god who condoned,
Condemned the intellectual,
starved out the poor.

A junkie’s corpse,
a pile of dead crows at its feet.
An era defaced
By dissolute men
Who chose to bow, not stand.

* * *

Teach Your Children

To hell with that Graham Nash song
This is fuckin’ war!

So before we’re all soiling ourselves
We best take to the streets
And teach these kids
A thing or two
About anarchy and Molotov.

With nothing to lose
These kids need tutors,
mentors. Guidance from the franchise
that freed an entire people.

Our last stand isn’t a tourist event
but a force against common peril.

* * *

#occupypoems

Only a god with binoculars
Could be so far removed
from these streets. Especially now,
with Americans on every corner
Marching through the world.

The goal is space. Take up the roads they ride on.
Don’t teach their kids. Don’t
fix their pipes or put out their fires.
Don’t drive their ransom home

Or they’ll buy us cheap
And say they created 64 million jobs.
Bullshit! We’re slaves! The republic
has been trending such and for quite a while now

We’ve known about the lords ‘n ladies
doubling down – buying both sides of the isle
until the three are now one under God.

When the money’s gone shit
and the food’s gone rotten
You never know when
Those Mad Max movies
will come true.