Three Poems for the End of April

The Dark-Skinned Woman 

at the Sarajevo Seder Table

Like Shakespeare’s Dark Lady she poses a problem.

If she was a servant only, why did she take so prominent a place?

If she was a woman like the Queen of Sheba or Dalilah, whom did she seduce?

Is she rather like our Hadassah, Secret Queen of the night?

William’s muse was an Italian or Sefardi beauty, a Belmont girl.

We find her celebrated in the Song that is Solomon’s.

No problem there: she is the Shekinah, hidden amongst us.

 The Clinamen and the Chinamen

Nothing is ever straightforward, except a lie.

Deceptions are best when almost true, soft

And sweet, dulcet melodies, ever so sly,

Ever so slight, a feather breathed aloft

To tickle the fancy: as we are, out of the East,

Long held in suspicion, subtle in wit,

Never trusted, kept apart, in feast

Indulged, in fear and famine expelled or killed.

To survive, we have swerved, our rhetoric gently curved

Like an alphabet covered in history round the sound

Of someone speaking gibberish to the moon, unobserved

In the shadows, outlandish revenant of ancient time

When nothing meant what it said and truth was a crime,

Except the people who lie hidden underground.

Back to Cuba

I told my mother I was going to Oriente Provence

to fight with Fidel: she said do you want peanut butter

sandwiches or tuna fish.  It was hard to decide,

so I stayed at home and read the news.  Then one night

my father came: Listen to this: the radio announcer cried:

Havana has fallen, the Communists have taken over

the casinos, the whorehouses and the bus lines: Viva

La Revolucion!  So Batista was no more.

I think now I should have said peanut butter and gone

to fight, or maybe tuna fish.  How can one decide?

Genesis

On the Origins of Ourselves

Human infants, unlike most other creatures, are unformed and virtually helpless, with little or no control over their own bodies or emotions.  They do not know where they begin or their mothers end, and have nmo sense of the outside versus the insides of their selves.  It has been said that they are born as external foetuses and their environment is a virtual external uterus.

In nine months of growth the foetus regresses to an earlier stage

Than almost any creature, bones ill-formed, nerves

Not yet strung and webbed, muscles weak,

Unable to move or see; any other animal age

For age can stand and move, press into the curves

Of its mother, and quickly find itself, within a week

It begins to follow, imitate and assert

Itself, while we, wee things, do not have the sense of being selves.

A mother bear licks her cub into shape, a cat enfolds her kitten into a creeping creature, a puppy already flops across the floor.  A giraffe or an elephant drops its new-born to awaken it, and guides its wobbly legs into a sort of independence, and little time is needed to achieve the age when habits and awareness may be learned.  But the human child is unprepared to absorb the significance of words or gestures, unless pressed into shape by a mother who may not be mature enough to enter into the necessary gaze.  The baby desires what it cannot have or know what it is missing.  At best it babbles, plays and begins to invent a language which the parent must learn and repeat.  The infant creates and acculturates its social world, and rages against its inabioity or unwillingness to serve tis every need.

They are like dust and exert

No presence in the world, which yet has to be formed,

Articulated other than ourselves,

Neither inside nor outside, a gormless jelly

Of unconsciousness, aware at best of something

Pressing in on us to keep us whole, warmed

Against the void of chaos; we are belly

And hunger, excretion and desire, a sting

And fright, not yet able to scream and rage,

Mere frustration and wordlessness, like elves

Who swallow earth through tunnels they create,

Having neither traction or friction, dream or fiction.

Wild children without language were thought to invent the original tongue, until it was discovered they had no memories to hold on to.  To have no senses which coordinate experience is to be a present without past or future, an appearance without illusion or dreaming. Until there is a space between what is perceived and what is articulated, there can be no metaphors or language.  Then, suddenly unexpectedly, one is born, not again or for the first time, but simply thrown out into the world.

Not even Helen Keller before she knew the name

Of water on her fingers, or distinguished skin

From stones; nor any wild boy without language,

When everything is always the same and never sure.

The world is an external uterus, a swirl

Erotic feelings, a longing for what cannot be,

A nothing turned in upon itself, until it learns

The sensation of something that is not there,

And absence becomes a cipher, a symbol, figure

And mark of presence in the abyss of self

And otherness, the metaphor of grief.

In the supermarket, a little boy reaches out for bright sparkly packets, and his mother pulls him way.  He reaches again from his trolley-seat. “Mmm”, he says, and again nore insistently “mm-mm-mmm-mm.”  He is trying to say something for the first time.  He wants his mom to let him reach out for something but he cannot say what it is or exactly what he wants to do and only knows in some sort of a way that she is is not part of himself, not answering him, keeping him away, separating herself from him and th e world oyut there he wants.  He is more and less than he was, not all together, not all there, and and something he does not know surges up and out of him: mm-mumm-mm. A word, a world is born./

This the myth of an eternal violation,

The first inkling of the cosmic thief

Who steals the thunder from the clouds, a finger

Inside the mouth, a nipple long denied,

Imposture of denial and abandonment,

The cry of rage at last and satisfaction,

Mm-mm-mm, to suckle and to spurn

What will not be a loving part of the self,

A sacrifice of unity and love, anger spent

That brings exhaustion, sleep and dreams,

Mm—mummum—mummy.

Odd Speculations on the Nature of Time

Signs, Notices and Sayings in New Zealand:

The Inner Meaning of Things and Time

At the end of the day: usually “after all is said and done,” when an action has had time to run its course, and sometimes as “the bottom line”.  Sometimes in the sense of “No use crying over spilled milk” or at other times: “Just get over it and go back to work.”  Hardly ever meaning” “When you have had time to reflect on what happened, you will be able to reco0ncile yourself to it”. Cp “Early days”.

Box of birds.  When things are going right, as they ought to be, and the situation shows no signs of turning bad, then it is a box of birds.  Troubles are contained, chatter is just at the proper level, and you know just where to go when it is time to pick up newly-laid eggs before the predators get in.

Early days yet: Don’t get yourself into a bother until you find out what is going on, why it has been happening and what the consequences will be.  Or “If you think this is bad, wait until you see what happens tomorrow or next week.” 

Easy-peasy: Similar to “piece of cake” but usually with a more sentimental and domestic tinge to its saying, and more prone to ironic implications; often a put down for someone who finds the job onerous and complains a lot.

No Parking At All Times: In America, the street signs say “No Parking At Any Time”.  The difference is more complicated than one assumes: it is not just a matter of when during the week, how often during the day and with what duration you may leav e your vehicle, locked and unattended on the street—since stopping is a different matter, that suggesting that the motor is still running and the driver still in place ready to elave assoon as the situation requires.  In the New Zealand sign what is indicated is that the rules of no parking are operative throughout the week, the day, and with no exceptions, whereas the American regulation seems to stipulate that while parking is generally forbidden the serious infraction happens when a specific evenis in progress, something that could happen not regularly or in a scheduled way, but any time when a ;olice officer deems it appropriate.  For a more metaphysical discussion of how New Zealand laws operate in greater absilutes see the section on “Take one pill three times daily.” 

Not To Be Taken: On bottles of cleaning fluid, where there were once notice such as “Poisonous” or “Not to be Swallowed” or indicated by a skull and cross-bones. What is understood in this warning usually printed on bottles of cleaning fluid or other caustic liquid is “internally.”  Some people might, however, misread the label as cautioning against easy, frivolous and overly frequent usage of the substance, which then would be “abused”.  It hardly be need said that any criminals wandering up and down the aisles in a supermarket in search of things to lift without payment at the pay counter would not need to take the signage as implying that a product should be left on its shelf until such time as payment might be proffered in an appropriate manner to a cashier of the establishment. A more aesthetically-minded customer, of course, might read the waring as pointing out that the item so labelled was there merely for the enjoyment of looking at it, not to be purchased and taken home at all.

Panel-Beater: car repair shop. My father-in-law really liked this when he visited us back in the early 1970s.  It is an old-fashioned designation for a traditional craft before its need was overtaken by electronic and digital instruments. 

Piece of Cake.  Something easy (cf. “easy-peasy’) to do or understand: a sure thing. It may seem to be difficult, complicated and of uncertain outcome, the reality is, if you just cut through the bull and get at it, the results will turn out better than expected and require as little worrying about as effort expended, and yet the person speaking is not to be trusted as a deep-thinker or well-read adviser.

Take One Pill Three Times Daily: Is this the same tablet you have to spit out, dry on the sink, and then put in your mouth again twice later?  This highly metaphysical conundrum baffles the best of chemists and nurses: they mean only take three pills during the day, one at a time at regular intervals of time.  Another similarly abstruse questions springs to mind these days when electrical lights are so easy and inexpensive to use, as to whether “day” includes the night as well; and though the rabbis have grappled with similar questions for ages, not least because in Jewish tradition the day begins at sunset and runs to the late afternoon of the following day-lit period, since I have found it often easiest to keep to strict instructions as to how many hours should intervene between one pill and another and what to do about the suggestion that one should ingest the capsule or tablet two hours before or three hours after eating by taking one of the pills just before bed time (which is usually three hours after a leisurely evening meal) and then at daybreak, upon awakening, allowing plenty of time to go to the gym, come home, dress and prepare for breakfast.  Meanwhile for those with insomnia, it may be best to space out the taking of pills through the night as giving one something to do and think about during those long hours of sleeplessness and thus not having to worry during normal daytime hours when one must work, engage with the family and perform other necessary domestic chores.

Still Another April Poem

Homo Faber

We are thrown into the world unprepared to thrive,

Our organs and our limbs undeveloped, limp and dull,

And everything about us has been retarded: alive

But barely, unlike a creature whose full-formed skull

Slides easily into the universe and quickly joins

The dance of its species, we are miserable

And cannot articulate ourselves, have to invent

A language of concepts and symbols, all alone,

As though society were not yet there, declines

Our cries for help, and drops us like a stone.

Only after we have overcome our pains

And plastered these imaginary wounds,

Do we discover we are not alone

But all along have dwelt inside the tent

Of history and start to read the scrolls of law,

And then the future hearing us responds.

Another April Poem

Appearance and Reality

Every language has its mysteries and secrets,

Hidden cellars beneath the bottom floors

Where it keeps its archives of dreams and ideals,

Labyrinths of darkness and violence,

Beyond reason and common sense,

Deep root cellars underneath etymology,

Archaic caverns where unknown hands scratched their marks,

Moulded shapes out of the tactile stones,

Wore down eons of meaningless,

And only glimpsed at long distances inside sacred scripts:

Neither hieroglyph nor ritual cipher

Nor ideogram, analphabetic forms

Honed to the rhythms of the blood

And pulsations of the underground sea,

Violent, abusive murmurs, hatred and list

Seething in unfathomable darkness and silence.

*****

Strange inscriptions hollowed out of the primeval earth,

With neither sounds or sense, but something else;

Like worms impressing their lives in the soil

Or creatures of phosphorescence in a vent beneath the sea

Whose molecular structures experience sensations

No human has ever known, or sharks or insects that see

Spectacular sights beyond imagination.

Feathers, scales, outlandish and impossible designs,

Grotesque contortions of a mind before the mind,

Black holes that spew forth cosmic thoughts, colours

Invisible, exceeding infra and ultra length,

Dynamic exercises and vessels broken and scattered

Everywhere and nowhere, creating where and when,

As time goes by, without remembering or forgetting,

Living in a present that has neither past nor future,

And always being played again and again

without ever being the same or different.

Another Poem of the Day

The Leopard’s Spots

How hard not to be an American anymore

(which I am still by my passport and my lack of other citizenship)

Because when anyone asks me what such and such means I no longer know

And when they ask me why I am doing such terrible things

I have to admit the president does not consult with me or ask my opinion;

And when people write their letters and essays,

When they speak collectively for or against this or that,

I don’t know what they mean, who they refer to,

And it is implied strongly that I should, I can’t.

If I open my mouth they stare in disbelief at the strange accent,

If I write a few words they glare at the spelling, the syntax,

The allusions they never came across and blame me for being a snob.

I grew up there a long time ago

And for my entire youth I went to school, learned my manners

And framed reality around the streets and trees and hills,

The flow of the seasons and the nature of the wind;

And I long for them intentsly, I dream my dreams over there,

Yet it's now all a foreign place and my family and friends are strangers.

Here, alas, if I walk out of the house and down the drive,

It doesn’t seem real, the buildings are cardboard, the people mere dolls,

The mountains have the wrong shape, the rivers lack all familiar life,

The friendly greetings are absurd, the gestures without meaning,

And my jokes misunderstood. 

This is the bottom of the world where everything is topsy-turvy,

the drains flow backwards, the months have no substance,

and cars drive on the wrong side of the road,

and I have to be like them, pretend I follow the rules,

smile like an idiot, show concern for sports and tools.

If they say G’day, I nod back as though in agreement,

When I am ill I joke with the doctor, the nurse, the ambulance staff.

When they say, You’re history, mate, I listen with deep concern.

So does it end, so does life run out, no more pretence,

And as I am fading away, one eye open, one ear stuffed,

I hear the neighbours whisper one to another, “Know who he was?”

“Never said a word, poor old guy.”  “What a way to go.”

After April Fool

Irony, Ambiguity and the State of the World

The problem is that some people do not believe in the reality of a world-wide terrorist threat connected not through some conspiratorial cabal but in terms of a shared ideology of religious fanaticism, hatred and envy of the west, and a misplaced  fear of what is termed variously colonialism and imperialism, as though they were the same thing. 

 

We live in a world that revels in hate,

An atmosphere of terror, fear and shock.

We look around and think: Too late

To close the windows, shut the lock.

But these so-called moral panics have been around a long time, sometimes connected with the Catholic Church or one of its agencies, such as the Jesuits, or a parodic oppo0nent group, such as the Free Masons, Illuminati or Theosophists.  From the late nineteenth century Europe was plagued by Anarchists and Nihilists, as well as Communists and various versions of Nationalism and Irredentism, many of which led to wars, civil wars, ethnic cleansing and wide-spread massacres.

Who is our enemy today,

Some anarchist in black attire,

A nihilist whose bomb will slay

A king, archduke, mayor or sire?

When ancient city-states and small kingdoms sent out groups of merchants and craftsmen to start new places to live and work, or to take up residence in strategic and already established towns and regions, these were colonies, extra-territorial entities, more or less tolerated by their hosts.  Some of the empires developed in the Renaissance were built on trading posts, entrepots and enclaves of “national” protection.  Other empires found themselves inheriting sovereignty over the people in whose lands they found themselves sometimes forced to assume control by conquest, or defeating existing power-bases in order to ensure themselves of raw materials, access routes to other regions, and extracting slave labour for use elsewhere in their world-empires.  Rivalry among great empires led to further efforts to gain advantageous balances of power.  Through expansion and conquest, as well as dynastic intrigue, led to internal colonization of Europe, as in the Czarist, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, not all based on any concept of racial or religious domination.

Tomorrow a commie and after that

A fanatical Mahdi, survivalist

Gone mad, or anyone in downturned hat,

In any corner shop: he has a list

And we are on it, near the top.

I therefore no longer travel

To Brussels or Paris or Rome, don’t stop

To check the time, I let time unravel.

It is all very personal, too, when the nature of security and safety change into fear and apprehension. Whatever happens is compared with previous experience, and the warnings given by my elders: Beware of the Cossacks!  Don’t speak to strangers on the street!  Keep your head down low!  Never reveal your name or address!  Be ready, if necessary, to turn your face to the wall and say the final prayer: if you can’t run and hide. Old customs I had put aside and do not grant intellectual assent to nonetheless give comfort in times of crisis.

If anyone walks on this side of the street,

I cross over quickly, and then I dart

Into any open café and seat

Myself  facing the wall.

There is a way of looking at the world, at history and at the self in the world and in history that keeps changing as the world changes and as history changes, even if it never feels as though the self has changed from what it was almost a century ago.  There is a comfort in watching old memories from the silent days, of cinema not because the stories are better or worse, than the nonsense purveyed today, but by the background, inadvertent details, the clothes, the streets, the proximity of nature.  And by the absence of so much that is today disturbing and intrusive, and which, the old films show are totally unnecessary to happiness and meaningfulness in life.  Even in the knowledge that their days and nights were filled with fears of forbidding, their prospects clouded by dangers everywhere, since they were other fears and dangers than our own. 

A part

Of me cowers, a part of me leers,

A part of me laughs at my irrational acts,

But nevertheless I love these fears,

Like everyone else. 

Compromise, temporize, and all sorts of other means of fudging whether for strategic reasons or simply out of laziness are rife, but mostly people fool themselves, trivialize the dangers they are in, and try to dream that all is well with the world, that Pippa will always pass; but just as their secret islands in the sea, hidden enclaves in the mountains, and blind spots in our awareness of who we are, so there are pages we never turn over and and exits we forget to take along this long journey we call life.

We make pacts

With the devil, they say, when we give

In to panic and imagine the world

Beset by terrorist foes: we live

Imaginary lives, like curled

Beasts in a burrow deep below

The ground, gradually blind

And deaf, insensible, with no

Connections left in heart or mind

To anything real. 

That is why, as the argument veers from objectivity to the inner depths of  my being, but figure out a means of working in the dark corners of the world, pretending to myself and others that shadows are substantial, and yet there has always been a protocol of duplicity.  Dichotomies ansd exclusion Zones always harbour doubleness or multi-layered countercurrents: what the enemy rants at reveals what we deny, and how we overlook the obvious that impinges on ouir freedom leaves a pattern of tracks and traces, distortions and uncomfortable anomalies we hold now to be our wisest thoughts.

But what else can

I do, except create a dream that is more

Unreal of peaceful times, when man

And woman lie down together sure

Of everything good, while Nature and God

Twirl around us in a ballet of love,

Soft and fuzzy, warm as blood

In its pulses, hand in glove.

Nothing is so disconcerting as a sense of completeness that really does not convince.

As though it were nothing, all this death

And suffering by fanatical fear and hate,

And all one had to do was catch his breath

And sing a threnody in silence.

Who marries whom, the conduct of the lessons in elementary school, the games played by adolescents, the balls and fetes celebrated, the interior monologues of men and women too ashamed to consult with their elders, this kind of subjectivity and informal behaviour constitute the research we carry out, and hope will yield an understanding of the hatreds that impose themselves on everything we dream to attain.

State

And nation, all unreal, alone or united,

What can otherwise be said, than this:

The only values we abhor—benighted

Nationalism and pompous emptiness.

Secret languages, forgotten scripts, and indecipherable codes undermine all the old certainties of nature and of history.  Just so the unexamined  mind and the literal texts of experience.  Therefore, no matter what the outcome anticipated, the ending is never the same.