ONE GALLON
(i.e., Four Quarts)
SCRAWLMARK PUBLISHING
Moorhead, Minnesota
The FISHHOOK Group
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
One Gallon: Four Quarts
Copyright ©1986
by FISHHOOK and Dennis M. Hammes
All rights reserved.
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Scrawlmark Catalog #DMHQUART.ZIP
ISBN:
LCC Cat. Nr.:
Scrawlmark Publishing
1016 South Third Street
Moorhead, Minnesota 56560-3355
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
for
Dr. Robert Larson, late of BSC
for the Living-Room Sabbaticals
Winter kept us warm.
-- T.S. Eliot
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
A Little Giddy
An empty tent shell, held up to the sky :
So stand my blankets in the morning. Why?
Is it because the Petro-shortage sends
The price of Brylcreem too high for two friends?
Or is it that you think I'll merely woo ya
Without time for a little dabble? Do ya?
Or love too much too much that makes me fickle
When there's but one I tickle, tickle, tickle?
But feathers are as feathers do, of course,
And Pegasus will rise as hard as horse,
Is seldom led and sooner made to drink,
Eats oat bran, sweats, leaves things that start to stink,
And while he swears you're not much of a load,
He picks his teeth, his nose, and every road.
But carry you he will : the saddle horn
You rub while riding is with what he's born;
And if you'd rather walk, he'll mope : he's useless,
Your muddy feet and heavy style excuseless.
Or fear the horse is dated by the cart
That belches gas, is driven by a fart;
Dependent on the ones who want, who use,
And every one of all who shop your dues,
Who'd rather have the manly sort of boys
That make us livestock, marvel at the toys
By which they move from romper room to Bradley
To doing nothing much and rather badly,
Afraid to bark, content to be the fleas
Whose printed money lets them print degrees
In everything their puppy would eschew,
Now one for Michelson, now one for you,
That thus they vote to once and finally larn us
That we will cut the hay, and they, the harness,
Who, lacking heat to rear a central peg,
Content themselves to sniff and raise the leg
Or elevate a puler to a pundit
Who'll woof the hoof as long as they will fund it --
But most in need of roads, and those who send?
You've swapped the horse for just the other end.
Because I do not chase the dome and steeple
I am not curried by the kinds of people
Who say their praise designs what's in the blood
But nonetheless demand my get at stud,
Then blinker it to prove a certain future,
And hamstring to bestow the gift of suture;
Who measure place by whom they can impugn
And stature in the depth of the spittoon :
These are the rulers. Let them buzz and bloat,
Let them redress their grievances, and vote
To nomenclate the world with all their writ,
And watch the other hand fill up with scent.
Were we the timeless spirits they would wish
To cruise agape like certain boneless fish
Whose one commandment is to swim and swallow
Letting the other fill their little hollow,
Whose ectoplasm features a facade
Between sabbaticals they spend with God,
Then all would come in Herakleitic time
And you could have it all by simple mime --
But which, the paragon to emulate,
When each Micawber strives to stand and wait?
What you would do, do now. While you would dare
To lift your hemline, cut your class or hair,
To see or be seen seeing, I grow old
And at the juncture of my trousers, cold.
Oh, what fastidious and proper rage!
That I remark of my, and thus your, age!
But that is nothing, being only bruised
In the exact amount it isn't used :
The first stroke of the plow will tear the field
Far more than subsequent trespasses yield,
Not in the labor, but in making strange,
Nor in the tender, but the total change;
And so we hear the virgin grunt and squeal
And weep and blame, and everything but feel,
Then hold one ever liable because
He's taken everything she ever was.
Let's quit this comedy of decent topics,
And other measurements by pole and tropics
To leap the flaming sun in leaping ditches,
And leave these pentecostal sons-of-itches
Groping their fellows, bawling on the floor,
Then leaping to translate some noise some more,
Indicting what may rise above their ash kind --
Our nearness to the sun will leave them flash blind.
But if you take the route you're born to take
That wants me swordless, Lady of my Lake
Who comes by night to flicker in my lamp,
Whose leaping shadows leave me rather damp,
Then leave by day quite knowing what you came for
(Exactly what I am to take the blame for),
But not exactly how I'm to admit it,
Shit, get off the pot, or just forget it:
To classify offense and tell the lashes
Neither burns, nor hauls another's ashes.
Lady, you think you still pursue a leopard
But we are not a thing you can store, kippered,
Until your purpose swells, not quite fulfilled:
That's botulus, and maimed more than it killed.
A purpose is a thing beyond yourself,
And not collecting knick-knacks for a shelf,
Let alone the scalps of what you meant
Or yards of lists of things that you resent.
A purpose takes your love, not misery,
And damned sight more than you have got for me.
A purpose takes your love and sets it free
(And that is why your love can't conscript me!)
By giving it a work that it can get
Quite independently of other let,
Its own small business, building little homes,
Or trying out for several books of poems.
But you, before you start, wish to be done,
And purpose -- want someone to give you one.
The meanest purpose is to get with child,
And have it 'round although it grows up wild,
Because it proves the girl a real woman,
And anyone can see the child is human.
So in one waning dusk like any other
I caught you looking like your sudden mother,
Spastic in love and purposeless in hate,
Jealous of all she won't appreciate,
If not appreciate, at least possess,
If not to have, then order into mess,
If not to set to rule, then sit to dream
Your will to recapitulate the theme
Fixed upon the turning of your face
While standing in the middle of my place
A compound and confounded wholly ghost.
The will to have you will not have me toast
A will that needs a sucker for its kicks
Or precorrelative on which to fix
In that suspension of the snow, when ice
However it cannot win, is still not nice,
And Easter fiddles with the flint, the choir
Is full of sparrows, but there is no fire :
The only promise I have sworn to keep
Is that the woods are lovely, fly or creep;
And of the season you'd excuse your fear,
We each of us will have it every year
And I've no interest in twice-used means
For life's too short to divvy up with queens.
I am in no way eager to repeat
The parables my students use to cheat
The meaning out of what I said them for;
The clothes no longer wear their emperor
Though most, I grant, find paradise enow
Whenever babes show willingness to bow
To any lesson they have never heard,
Provided it prove living is absurd.
Let them too flourish, hedgehogs in a row
Examining their navels, that they show
A bully world their common backs and bristles
For they are sure the flowers have some thistles,
A fall from grace that is to be abhorred
For that it snapped the umbilical cord,
Who, scared by purpose, wondering at grails
Will lick at all, but mostly under tails;
Who curse the earth to prove they love the sky;
Who'd suck the thumb, but stick it in the eye.
The notion that the soul is born to bathe
Will bolt no lover's coffin to a lathe,
For how can there be any sense of fun
When everything that can be, has been, done
Save waking up one morning as a blank
With nothing but your ignorance to spank?
I'm not indifferent to your bootless plight
(Am not indifferent, or I would not write),
Am not indifferent to your attitude
That what you cannot love, you get to rude,
And you admit to loving nothing much.
And when, if you should find, another such,
Your full agreement that the world is trash
Looks just to you like love, which you think brash
When you observe it in another folk,
And feel superior, and like the joke.
Love is not love, that alters what it know
Or bends to level with what will not grow,
Not love, that only flies in retrospect
And never rises out of ground effect,
But beats its breast in back of every church
And counts it genuflection, that it lurch;
Not love, that creep to mollify the mole:
The love to gallop dares the gopher hole,
But one step is a step too far to reel
For those who want to gallop while they kneel.
For love has pride in self, and knows its worth,
And, ring on ring, expands its early girth
With every bit of world it can make stick,
Including every bit that made it sick,
For love knows evil just as well as good,
Else how protect the lover from the hood?
And let them know, who say that love has "flown,"
Real love is slow as water on a stone,
But tasting here and testing there until
It knows its course, and plunges down the rill
In one great rainbow of a living crash
That, broken as it be, still doesn't crash,
But reassembles in serenity
And, seeing what's to see, accepts the sea.
And let the whole earth heave, that petrophage
Will show your mayfly what it means to rage,
Ignoring your Canute trip and command
By carrying away one grain of sand;
Will dig up all that is no friend to you
And place your ancient crimes on public view
To make your enemy once-common youth
Who knelt with you to nail or sabre-tooth.
So you have found that, for destruction, ice
Need not put one foot forward to suffice.
That's nice. And greater, too; you had to kiss
One step to fire to fathom even this.
Where there were hills, it dug great lakes; it charmed
One river over half a land, for taste;
Of all that's loveable in this, the best
Is that it won't allow you any rest:
It drove our species from its little cave
And turned the woolly mammoth from his grave,
But not to trumpet; just to be a shill
For P.T. Barnum's Little Top, until
At last it smelled so bad the public left
And left old Barnum pretty well bereft.
And this will happen every time the ice
Has got your Weltanschauung in a vice,
And every day and always, through and through,
You don't kiss world because it won't kiss you.
See, love's not just a matter of the thirst;
For world to kiss you, you must kiss it first.
That "universal view" is seldom right:
The real world requires you to fight,
Not only for the little things you want,
But, too, against the savages like Kant,
Who want you to abandon all your love
And settle on the Larger View, "above,"
And then they show you where they keep their balls
By moving into town, infesting walls.
Now, overview is necessary, sure,
But cats are won by ruffling their fur
Not by philosophising maybe that
There could be something in the world called "cat."
And so, at last, we come to little me,
Who wants his scratching just as bad as thee;
Who loves his little world as well as thine,
But has you irked, for he can call it "mine."
And though I want your little feelings spared,
That world can be learned, but not be "shared."
That silliness is said by "social" folks
Who want your being in their little jokes,
For they can't occupy them, think that you,
Because you live, can occupy them, too;
And they will have each minute you can spare,
And, knowing "equal," damned well want their share,
And, if they're pressed, will have it with a knife,
Because their "rights" are "equal" -- to your life.
So, come, and ride my little saddle horn
And I will teach you you were only born
To go about beneath a flagless sky
And you tell all the rest of world why.
I'll cherish all your goodies and your knowledge,
But not the fact you've been to any college,
For I set out to see what I could see,
And so became a university
All by myself. And this is why I won't:
If someone has to say you know, you don't.
I made that little rule as a boy
And it has given none of my friends joy,
But Aristotle said he'd take the world and move it,
And I required the old boy to prove it.
I so required all my former teachers,
My books, my tools, and every sect of preachers;
Most of them let down their guard and hiked it;
Only my tools ever really liked it.
By doing so, you'd not become my tool,
Nor would you end up looking like a fool,
But ignorance is not the bliss it seems,
Not even when it only powers dreams,
For dreams in ignorance are never real,
So, when you dream, mere loss is what you feel
Until you dream what can be done with things,
And then your dreaming puts on giant wings
And ranges the whole world with only you
As pilot-in-command of all you view.
The "universe" is dead without a man
To see it all and wonder what it can,
The Universal Purpose, fallacy:
It has no meaning save it service me.
Stars burn and planets form because they do;
They're nothing 'til they're home to me and you,
And we must cherish them as any home
Before we have to live beneath a dome,
For this is what we have until another
Is well within the grasp of dear Big Brother.
The universe will not outlive its law,
Nor you outlive your seeing what you saw;
Everything you are, you made yourself,
And I am not referring to your pelf;
The universe is dead, and for its goal
It rolls the world into a small, black hole.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Burning the Norton at Both Ends
Why do men with no noise left to eschew
But taking a machine gun to the shoats,
And wanting vehicle for billets-doux,
At last write letters to the deader poets?
Perhaps it beats Four Seasons on kazoo,
And though it may not beat Pinot, it's
Time-consuming, inexpensive, fun,
A wondrous exercise, and overdone,
Though reigning critics never called such games
Since Babel gave a point of view to Genesis
And Einstein did the same for other frames;
Something there is that doesn't love the pen as is
And men since Adam go on naming names,
So now there is this epilogue of Dennis'
That will not keep your children warm in classes
Unless your School Board burns it in their faces.
And it would lilt like Dvorâk, much possessed
By his New World and ours, and all its promise,
But then I start to sing, and I am pressed
For that I follow Anselm, Paul, or Thomas,
And what infinity is perfectly regressed
By which syllables in between what commas
By those who, having ears, have never heard,
No matter who first spoke their favorite word.
The answers Robert gave are rather nice,
Though whether Frost or Heinlein is a riddle,
For that one flipped a coin for fire or ice
And that one said to leave them to their diddle,
But I've one's love the other proved a vice,
And that it is, with me here in the middle,
But that it's Bo, Jerusalem, or Rome
That tames the screw, I leave you to the poem.
One of the oldest memories I tame
'S the odor of old man, old pipe, and hassock,
Who'd let the lesson lay the praise or blame
Though he would often help with was ist daß, ach!
Then salt and lemon took me; I became
A candle socket, with a numbered cassock.
While Easter morning whittled at the match,
I learned some Latin, and how not to scratch.
There'd be an hundred Fathers neatly phrased
Did I that praying recognised as formal
To which I'm not inclined, though it is praised
When done well by the smoothly epidermal
(One wonders what the shaving has erased),
To thank what's thankable that none was normal,
But were by hope or habit somewhat partial
To disciplines I've learned to class as martial.
The first, of course, my first, official Dad
Who, being recorded, cannot now escape it
That, for better or for verse perused the lad
And told his hand tools how that he would shape it
More catholic than the province that he had,
And given but nine years from me to clay pit
Left parables as better than the outright:
"Catchee fish, you got to hold your mout' right;"
"To teach a dog, be smarter than the dog,"
And "All that glitters isn't all that jingles."
The lessons weren't much for dialog;
At three, I set and nailed a course of shingles,
At four, I blew a blackbird from a log
With one Red Ryder BB, and at Kringle's
Seventh stop, my golden toy exploded
At his face, to blame the gun was loaded.
But what I liked, and so remember, best
Was heeling him while Chip would heel my uncle
And Pepper ranged in stubble to my chest,
His nose to how grouse smell (and how a skunk'll),
The slam, the smell of feathers in the vest,
The gizzard on the cutting board, the dunkle,
The smell of men and Albert, talk of crappies,
And finally, the sheer perfume of Hoppe's.
From the outset Mom insisted on the arts
Because the young must always please their elders
Amphibiously acting out their parts
From Elwood Dowds to Horace Vandergelders;
I'd just time to distinguish grams from quartz,
But none left over for my true love, welders:
Learned, instead, to simulate the quarrel;
Appreciate, but not be, the immoral.
And so, at five, Eulalie's pen and wonkie
Drew Robert's auntie's skirts along the floor,
And taught me keep my toys safe from the honkie
Beside that Prussian noble who, at four,
Explained a Prussian ass remained a donkey
Regardless of how long he'd been on tour.
And then there was an end of further talks:
One day they brought my daddy in a box.
What he had left undone, the Church took up,
Happily teaching guilt and every sin
(And everything was sin, you betcha, yup!).
It needed the confessional to win
A place in heaven for the errant pup,
But I just did not know where to begin,
And so I picked a number, overbid it,
And Father B. accepted that I did it.
Repentance satisfied, I took to life
With all of the aplomb of bears in heat;
Speaking of heat, I tried to dream a wife,
For none would have a boy who wasn't neat
Or spread ideas with a butter knife.
I ogled bosoms from my back-row seat,
Forced baritone of alto for the choir,
And had a chance to simulate desire.
Fresh out of surplice I had to begin
A sophomore in a public miserere
To find my careful Proper wearing thin
As fattened lips were styling me to parry,
And styled a list from Huckleberry Finn
Of words the years had rendered ordinary,
But reading Twain on Twain to learn the joke
Nor taught me humor nor to learn to smoke.
In high school was a different breed of cutie:
All protestant and willing if the time
Was right and the right boy acknowledged beauty;
But I was in the wrong: my latest crime
Was rendering The Team unfit for duty
The day they jumped me in the shower. I'm
The one that answered to a raving head;
It seems The Team stayed home from State instead.
College was shot along with Prexy John;
I agonized for months on when to go,
The color of the coat I should put on,
If I should join the Service of my bro'
And which, for each of them was paragon.
At last I upped and went, a sudden blow,
And gave my hand and oath, in tuus manus.
Nine months later, I departed CONUS.
Germany was fraüleins and dark beer;
Of neither had I had the slightest taste,
But I was to be there a triple year,
And did not plan that either go to waste.
I danced a girl until our eyes were blear;
Two years of her, and then I learned to taste
That parting is but practice for a war
Though I had never been in one before.
I fell to quarrels with my mental state,
But did not let the doctors know what's up;
They diagnosed me opposite my fate
And I decided on another cup.
So I came back to college rather late
With all of my psychoses acting up;
I added numbers to a proper sum,
And fell correcting the curriculum.
But there I met the Girl It Was To Be.
We went to the Spring Prom one lovely night,
Disliked the band, and talked the dawn asea.
My car broke down, and I began to write
This stuff that's made a bigger fool of me
Than one young lady ever did. Despite
All else I took an "Understanding Verse,"
Which gave me form, and maybe nothing worse.
Five Roberts shaped me, two of them in school,
The other three in books the half my days
And usually my nights, for I would drool
The worlds they'd vision and the one they'd praise,
And I thought I could do it, manic fool
Who can't tell "demonstrandum" from "amaze."
Natheless, I liked those worlds better
Than any I could share with a red setter.
Bob Stevenson it was who shaped my verse
From early on; one piece in the fourth grade
Made Christmas Issue, all about a hearse
And Daddy in it. Now that I had made
A proper start, I let that little curse,
The writer's block, be fifteen years my spade.
But then The Girl, and quite another fellow,
One bellum mounted under Montebello.
Bob Larson rode the big iron in the Big One,
Sorties sopranoed heaven if not our choir;
With either stick, was competent to gig one :
Could get Galland say "Geben uns Spitfeuer!"
Or have a science major home to dig one
Despite a school whose sovereign employer
Could sit his crib to moo Camus' absurds
While sitting on the dead, resenting words.
Bob Heinlein showed me worlds, not in space,
Though that is where I usually found them;
He showed me the potential of our race,
And what to do when little people hound them,
And kinds of love, and kinds of love, and face,
And if not be, then how behave around them.
I kept his books for many, many years,
For he, alone, had moved this boy to tears.
Bob Frost was maybe one, the only one,
Who taught me the plain subject, plainer speech
That took the commonplace into the sun,
For everything he wrote, he wrote to teach.
Perhaps not verse, but when the man was done,
I had a crooked line within my reach.
But I was for the tougher points of man,
And set about the course that he began.
Done with Lovelace but not with Lucasta,
Wanting some achievement (also prudence),
Ashamed of spreading cattle parts on pasta,
Bored with fondling bruises, wanting new dents,
Momently forgetting my agnosta,
I put down penury for fencing students
That in fine, I might not have to play
With those who can't tell epic from epée.
For seven years, I found myself a Laker
Fishing for meals and nature to inspire
That never veteran, regimented Quaker
Whom Eliot kept warm by setting fire
The Anthology of the English maker,
While civil office raised her up a squire
Like that bald Caesar who, for savoir faire
Bought friends of men that voted laurels there.
When rustic poetry began to pall
It was at least a place to keep my lab in,
But teeth that sought free tots of eugenol
From any jackpine out-at-elbows rabbin
When parents burst joy's palate with their gall,
Were what left research snug inside the cabin
With neither a sabbatical nor breather
And dirt enough to write my Fourth Degree there.
Some wanted me Objectivist like Rand, it
Didn't matter that her work was large
Enough to find whatever you could brand it
When Atlantean shoulders bore the charge;
Each found his phrase, like every other bandit
Who'll barely quote it, let alone enlarge
It with himself, although he overrates it,
But when he writes it on the world, he hates it.
It is the timid at the clock who quotes art
To help himself to spice, especially sage;
To turn a quaver into something Mozart
Is quicker to piano than to page
And quicker still to him who merely votes art
To satisfy the fragmentary rage
That, if it wish to do much more than pout,
Must have its squeaking discords written out.
Something between a lover and a boss,
This "love of language" told by Wystan Hugh
Is all our craft, this trembling pneumatos,
That though it agonise both me and you
Is too elusive to become a cross
To any gawking fireside Simon who,
Wanting his penny simple as his Host,
Translates insipidly, "The Holy Ghost."
Not one of those, the singing Gerard Manley
Who saw the living word in dappled things
As flames by moths or Livingstone by Stanley
Or Amherst's wordspare hermit wooed her wings.
Pretended converse, Alfred opts for kanly
On the "wrong words" in his four-beat strings,
One, two, one, two.
And through and through his lines
Though Terence cotton woods, he never pines.
Of all of those who took good care of sounds
And left the sense wherever brains could jelly it,
Not least I woe to that confrere of Pound's,
The better craftsman, clerkish Thomas Eliot,
Who sipped with coffee spoons and spit the grounds
Of art gone sullen though it was not smelly yet.
I sometimes fear that I will but repeat
His rubbing of the bones to prove the meat,
And I suppose I should, but for the grace
With which these fathers of my tongue recite
Before I sit to smear my student face
With the banana I may learn to bite
And maybe chew, despite the human race,
To find that age increases appetite
Though, like that first disciple of zazen,
I may not have a single tooth by then.
Two years I stewed in southern North Dakota,
A land so wasted that they burn the books,
And not to heat the water, but the voter;
Where no one dares to marry girls for looks,
So all the pretties moved to Minnesota,
And there they finally learned what really cooks.
Two years, I ran a church's printing press,
And never once looked up a girl's dress.
It had not one damned thing to do with morals,
Or keeping that damned job among the holy,
But everything to do with just the girls,
Who, when not selling Him, were roly-poly;
And so, to keep from starting any quarrels,
I kept quite to myself, if not quite wholly
To the Established Doctrine. And I wrote
So much I hadn't any time to vote.
I finalised my little fencing Belts
By studying the old Ionic reach,
Medieval Japanese, and modern Celts,
Who stole the Elements for pidgin speech
Because Akhaean versions left their welts,
And put them where illiterates could teach
Until I saw them cardinates of man
And everything that saw since time began.
You saw me once in all that time, and drove
From Oregon to tell me of your marriage;
Before you left, your bared her goodies, clove
To me once more for old times' sake (disparage
Not the gift, I!), then you simply hove
Out of my life within a borrowed carriage,
And, taking my dumb heart along with you,
Left me with but one snippy billet-doux.
It did not matter; I took to the pen
Instead of drink, and wrote three hundred sonnets,
And all were you and your want of amen.
You cannot wear them as you would your bonnets
For they don't leave you quite the oxygen
As would a painting of you, say, of Monet's.
And then the damned things pissed off my new wife
Who thought of them that she would burn my life
As well as all my books: she took some stuff
And one small son, and found herself a man
She could control, or so she thought, enough
To front the future with her battle Plan
To be an Indian Artist (I was gruff).
I hope you do not think I am a man
To graduate from fear to halleluia
Without time for a little dabble, do ya?
I live alone, and just the way they found me.
My typewriter is trash; I do computer
With all my writing, files, and games around me.
I wait for you to grow that much the cuter,
For you improved with age, and well astound me
With your beauty, though I'm not your suitor:
The poems I write you take your faults to task,
And offer my reliefs. You didn't ask.
You never did, and that was half your charm
When all my friends were using me for couch;
You never did a single thing to harm
Nor me nor us, but took us both for grouch
When talk would go past doing something warm.
But still you found the world rather "ouch,"
And left us ones despite that agate ring,
Rather than soil our time with any sting.
I did not press you, took instead to books
To learn just how to turn my words to voice;
Philosophers and poets set their hooks
But not for long, for I retained my choice,
And would not spoil my broth with many cooks:
The best of Bacon's that he knew no Joyce.
And nor do I, despite the little Wake;
Forgetting also dumps the bellyache.
Yet you took me like Helen took young Troy,
And all my work may topple for result,
For all my voice is nothing but my joy
When you were here, and all your little fault
Now you are gone and I have got no toy;
My every statement hangs on the penult,
Not over the unnameable I lack,
But in the silly hope that you'll be back.
I'll go to pasture like the early Celt,
Leaving behind my sword and all these runes
To tell you, some day, all I ever felt.
And if I should have ever played the spoons,
Dismiss them from this missive and my belt,
And play me only for my proper tunes,
For I was never much for any mirth
That did not lead somehow to second birth,
For living out a death is not my style
No matter I believe or don't in heaven;
Of the whole project, this is but a mile,
And all of it is much, much more than seven,
So I will come back in a little while,
Nor roll around with rocks and trees and leaven:
What I forget, the world remembers for me
So long as I have no strange gods adore me.
l'envoi
A ship that holds no cargo is a pirate
And so I end this amiable session
Before you, Gentle Reader, become irate;
This is a verse that hasn't any mission;
I took a history, saw how to lyre it.
And though untroubled by atomic fission,
Don Juan must have perished in the storm:
I frankly owe him little but the form.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Dry Salvages
"Things fall apart, and what rough dream
Now slouches toward its Bethlehem?"
The poet quoth,
Who pray the lord his soul to keep
Two million years of stony sleep --
But here are both. 6
What shudder in the soothing loam
Pop forth this child so far from Rome
With other wrongs?
Here from the breccia there pokes
Another of our daddy's jokes,
Who speaks in Taungs. 12
Old fogey. Prodding at the dense,
But who, for all your eloquence
Despises phones:
The eons come, the eons go,
And still, what you want us to know
You write on stones. 18
For thou art rock and fortress, art
In stone the stone that dangled Dart
Across the rand
To come wherever you had drawn
And made your face to shine upon
Your servant's hand. 24
We grunt beneath a contrailed sky
Whose firmament washed Olduvai
And wonder what
Small spark to speak has prodded you
To prod the stupid stoneware to
This polyglot: 30
A flash of light and there was sky
And forty billion grew the eye
So you could see,
But what a lonely sight it was.
(I say it must have been, because
You made it "we.") 36
Four million years, that last day took;
On strata layered like a book
It draws and draws;
We read the image that you wrought
As though you saw it good but not
Quite what it was. 42
At Swartkrans, Folsom, Spy, Lascaux,
We watch the scribbled image grow
Without a curse :
No infant who begrudge a day
To breathe the still-reluctant clay
From dead to verse. 48
We see our teeth begin to shrink
And smaller muscles make us think
Of throwing rocks,
But what is it ties them to bones
And carves new canines out of stones
If not your vox? 54
We tire of tearing at the treat,
So chip the chert to chew the meat
And chop the wood :
Our flint strikes sparks that strike our pants,
But do we beller, slap, and dance?
We cook the food. 60
But nothing in the world enjoys
Your longing for a fellow voice
And you begin
To screw the larynx from a screech:
Oh, hear the adolescent speech
Icumen in. 66
And going out. It hasn't time
To marvel at the clocks of rime.
It is not dumb,
But cannot hear beyond its day
And so you hear the breathless say
"I cannot come," 72
But spare the rod. His back's to you
And yet you grant his reason to
This monk you succored :
Homo though his brow still beetles,
He has clothing, knives, and needles,
But no record, 78
So when the stone strike clay to dust
Poor homo sap knows homo must
Find all again;
But can he save a little creed
He only wants something to lead,
And grows a chin. 84
When puss stops purring, leopardy
Becomes a sudden jeopardy
'Na single bound
And then our food outruns our prattle,
We compose the atlatl,
And tame the hound. 90
The thumbs that stumbled yesterday
Prod clever couples from the clay
To mimic you,
And careful pairing suddenly
Grows triple for the monk he see
The monk he drew: 96
At Altamira and Cougnac
The yellow ocher, rust, and black
Squeeze speech from stone,
While knives that never flinched at bear
Now stutter bracelets of bright hair
About the bone. 102
The bison broke our brace of spears,
And so our new invention rears
A palette full,
And each knows how to hurl the dart
For we have gathered at our art
To shoot the bull. 108
But all things tire, and you of gas,
And rocks fall from the heavens as
You get undressed;
You puncture Arizona, do
Atlantis with the other shoe,
Which floods the rest. 114
It's talked about for days. The ark
Bangs Ararat and all debark,
Increase and double;
Popocatepetl bleeds
And Würm turns as the ice recedes
From all that Babel. 120
Then strange at Jericho the seed
Is separated from the weed,
That like Jack Sprat
We take less time to chase the meat
And, having blessed the Emmer wheat,
Eschew the fat. 126
Familiarity released
The word to perish from the priest
And counsel jilt the
Elders who suggested that
At Ur, they rear the ziggurat
Complete with filter 132
To separate the growing noise
Of bigger rearing smaller boys
From any proof
Their word was answered at your door
And talked until they'd made a floor
Of what was roof. 138
But there we found another way
To press our story into clay
And keep our temper,
And aleph, samech, yod, and gimel,
Meet to curse the weary camel
Nunc et semper. 144
Well, Dad, you write no stupid stuff
Although you have killed cows enough
To fill La Brea,
But, oh, good lord, the verse you make
Can keep me digging, flake by flake,
Per culpa mea: 150
Look over, lord, your straining crew
Whose head bones are connected to
The one that's gone,
Who feel how far the furrows write
And sifting well in order site
The sounding stone 156
For every word since you began
Your madman's divine love of man,
To read the log
You left your offspring that we learn
This lime-deposit, lime-return
Human phizzog. 162
From every stone the story glints:
Earth hasn't been so vocal since
The reeds found Moses,
But having had our day of laws
The fragiler papyrus caws
The day of roses 168
To all but him whose silence hears
The stone that stood a million years
Ago for Lent
Speak in the present that it prove
Who like the worm can learn to love
Our own ascent. 174
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
And I Heard Him Exclaim, 'ere He Hove Out of Sight:
By the shores of Gitche Gumee
Where the Plains get indigestion,
Heaving hills of snowdrifts skyward,
Sat the lonely, twitching Mommee
Where the shining Baba Wawa,
Raptured by the hostage-takings,
Smiling at the executions,
Glorying in lack of sweetness,
Gloating at the latest foulup,
Rolled the world into a ball up
Toward the overwhelming question
In the minds of all the viewers
And the movers and the shakers
And the drawers and the hewers
Dumb before the Polyphemus-
Priest-Cassandra-Uncle-Remus-
Looking-Glass they want to jump in
And the ticking Rabbit follow
Could they find the pill to swallow.
(Oh! Do not ask me "What is it?"
Bite the bit about the visit.)
Not so silly was the Mommee,
Turning off the Baba Wawa,
Turning on electric blanket,
Turned out in her Winter Woolens
Did the Minnesota Mommee,
Turned the warm side wool side inside
So to keep the winter outside
Turned the wool side to the skin side
Turned into the Itchee Mommee
Turned the backside to the swampland
Where mosquitos keep returning
To the itchy yummy skin side,
Turning left at Ogalala,
Turned the front side to the Mountains
Where the turning of the falcon
In the gyre by West Wind widened,
Dizzied from the constant turning
Cannot hear the keeper calling
And seems in some risk of falling.
Thus the lonely Itchee Mommee
Turned from shining Baba Wawa
Where the plains get indigestion
To the Mountains of the Mountains
Where the mighty Falling Rocks still
Hunts the rough and ragged rascals
Running bare among the valleys,
Freezing on the windswept ridges,
Having left without a breechclout.
You may ask me how I know it.
Some day I may even tell you.
Thus the lonely Itchee Mommee
Climbed the stairway of the Mountains
Seeking out the ways of wisdom
As a hermit in the channels
Of the Mountains of the Mountains,
Hoping there was no more turning,
Since there was no more of hoping
At the turning of the staring
Sat before the Mighty Carson
By the thermos jug of coffee
Standing there among the papers
Stacked beside the other papers
Leaning on the other papers
Piled atop the other papers
Turning pages of the Digest
Wishing for a Christmas Letter
From the Land of the White Rabbit
Whence these thumping-metered stories,
Whence these legends and traditions
With the odors of the forest,
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of chimneys,
With the honking of the heron
(Like the mighty Archie Goodwin,
His the honking of the Heron),
Whence her son had disappeared to,
In the Land of the White Rabbit,
In the Land of Sky-Blue Waters,
In the Land of Lofty Balsams,
With her Christmas Cheer refreshing.
Should you ask me how I know it,
It was sung throughout the forest
Coming down from high tradition,
Snowing down from printing presses
Turned by priests with ears to voices
Saying how to choose the verses
With their voices from the valleys
(Oh, forgive us our press passes!)
Voices of their congregations
With their knees upon the kneelers
And their noses to the grindstones
In the Land of Lofty Balsams
Offering the sole salvation
And a statue of La Papa
In the simulated pewter
Stuck for sticking on the dashboard
Right beside the plastic Jesus
And the plastic Virgin Mary
(Blessings on thee, dashing dashboard)
That the Chevy does not crash Ford.
Should you ask me how I know it,
It is sung throughout the forest,
Sung by Solemn High Mass Choirs,
Sung in lower punk rock versions,
Taught the child in Bible Classes,
Teaching him to guard adversus
In a book of bedtime stories
Of the lowly folk tradition,
Bound in a Complete Edition.
If you ask me how I know it,
You may hear the forest chirping
Over bleaching bones and jackpines
"This the way of flesh is always."
You may say it is a habit --
And besides I asked the Rabbit.
Thus the words of the White Rabbit
Speaking as he checked his timepiece,
Where we stood in the primeval
Forest that was turning yellow,
Looking down the woodland pathway
Where two roads diverged in parting
Though the one had fewer footprints
In the green and silent woodland.
"It's a bitter pill to swallow,
That the ticking of the heartbeat
Always hail the pathway's ending
Long before the path is trodden,
So we ponder, weak and weary,
As the heartbeat's steady knocking
Drowns the knocking at the chamber
Long before there is a knocking,
Long before the step is taken
That begins the heart-hushed hunting
In the forest of the West Wind,
In the aerie of the eagle,
In the Wind Between the Mountains,
In the place between the planets,
In the space between the atoms,
That one might advance his people!
Thus I must forego the party,
Thus I must forego the wedding,
Thus I must forego the matter,
For the Queen of Hearts commanded
(Listen, you may hear Her ticking,
Ticking in my lily bosom)
And I might be reprimanded."
Plenty was heard in the wood by the hurrying watch of the Rabbit,
As everything flying and creeping and crawling and walking and running
Went with a chirping and mooing and meowing and barking and twittering
(My, what a noise) to the banquet the West Wind had spread in the woodland,
Here in the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Added their bit to the merriment called by the Song of the West Wind,
While the Rabbit caught hold of my sleeve
and continued to stutter his story,
Stood like a Druid of old, with his voice and his ticking prophetic,
To one who had swallowed the pill and was already peripatetic.
"Ye, whose hearts are fresh and simple,
Who believe, that in all ages
Every human heart is human,
Watching at sumer icumen
In must watch it go out also,
Lhude singe the singeing timepiece!"
So the sleekit, cowrin' beastie
With the timepiece in his breastie
Slurred the sote that sate him testy
To a rover
In his Wanderjahr, a German
Mir stechts auch astride my term in
Yellowed words despite the sturm 'n'
Drang'n' of dishevelled vermin
Cherishing some precious sermon
That can find itself a worm in
Russell Stover.
"Ayont the loch the trothin'-feastie
Wachts sa braw an brecht an tastie
Wilt tha' start awa sae hasty
Tu tha sauvor..."
Oh, good lord -- the Rabbit's trystie
Wasn't over.
The Rabbit "It is an ancient care in her
detaineth That stoppeth all her glee
the And grayeth all the hair in her
Strider, And clutcheth so at thee.
and "The ice was here, the ice was there,
setteth The ice were all around:
forth No need aspire to end in fire
the gripe. When ice makes midnight sound!
"It cracked and growled,
and roared and howled
That there was plenty Water,
But it did nothing in the knight,
And nothing for the daughter:
"'Twas Water, Water, everywhere,
In vestibule and sink,
From pulpit, font, and ceiling taunt
Until the gray hare shrink!
"It had its word's worth with the Way
'Til all the Water froze;
Despite the same, the course became
A hobbit, I suppose."
The "Whose words these were, I think I know:
Strider His house was put to pillage, though.
is He will not see me stopping where
spellbound. The watch his words fill up with snow
The loneliest midnight of the hare."
The Rabbit "Her ghost guest long was borne:
taketh It is the wake, make no mistake,
the bit. That make the girl to mourn,
"Nor spare a sigh." "Not by and by
The Strider Does this cold problem preen:
jerketh it The words of wanwood leafmeal lie
right back. Within the dappled green,
"And those who numbered miles toward sleep
At one stride come to dark
Whose random glot the word will not
Set flame, nor even spark,
"And they have done an hellish thing,
And it will work them woe
That tote the name that strike them lame
Before they ever go,
"And let the Fish that make the dish
But multiply in schools
And shoot the Albatross that cross
Their cuckoo's nest of fools."
The Rabbit "Your words are strong to be a song.
taketh him Do speak of other things:
on a high, Of Christmas sales and Holy Grails,
Of Lords and Hosts and Kings,
"Of marches to the Golden Arches,
Packages with strings,
Or why the shy need never die,
And other favorite things.
and "Take up the White Man's clothing
sheweth And bite his buttered bread:
him The alms of aims you better,
kingdoms. That lisp above the dead,
"'Why brought ye us to Horeb,'
Expel the stinging staff,
And round digestion settle
To weighing out the calf.
"Oh, sweeter than the marriage-feast
'Tis sweeter far to us
To walk together to the kirk
To raise a pious fuss,
"And watch the parson fit the Snake
To balance at his nose,
To render coin and then to join
The breadline where it goes.
"How come you such a cloister-head
Of moss-draped roots and rime?
The world's a bigger oyster bed
To butter, salt, and thyme!"
And sudden, the forest primeval fell hushed at the word that was uttered,
And nothing was heard in the wood but the hurrying whine of the Rabbit:
"Must I relinquish it all, the joy, the hope, the illusion?
Was it for this I have loved, and waited, and worshipped in silence?
Stouter hearts than apostles' have quailed in this terrible winter.
Why does he not come himself, and take the trouble to woo me?"
Until the treacherous watch, to which he confided the secret,
Strove to betray it by crowing and shouting the name of the Rabbit,
The changeable name of the Rabbit designed for belligerent Christians.
Jiujitsu. "Rabbit, this is stupid stuff :
You cry the cow is dead,
Yet eat your biscuit fast enough --
You must have soaked your head.
"You give your chap your bellyache,
So drowsily you crow
Upon the rock what twice the cock
Already let us know.
"He prayeth best who loveth best
All subjects great and small,
And all things bright and beautiful,
And not alone the gall.
"And indeed there will be thyme
Between the bread and meat
But there will not be anything
Unless I take and eat,
"And for the wine I make the mash
And let the credit guess
The echo of what distant drum
The feet make while they press.
"I write the book and make the bread
To lie beneath the bough;
My Grail is at my supper set:
Be off with "thee" -- and thou.
"The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin,
The guests are met, the feast is set,
And I am going in.
"For there there is plenty for all to eat,
And there are plenty of chairs :
And you were invited a long time since.
Now let go -- or I'll kick you downstairs."
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Notes to "Dry Salvages."
The facts are in the public domain.
These notes are designed to be viewed electronically in
one window of a browser, the poem "Dry Salvages" being opened
in another. Works for me.
dmh
THE NOTES:
Title. En apxh hn 'o logos, Jn.1:1, "In the
beginning was the voice."
1-5. "Things... sleep, cf. W.B. Yeats, "The Second
Coming."
3. poet, Yeats.
7. What... wrongs, cf. W.B. Yeats, "Leda and the
Swan," in which a shudder presages the collapse of a
culture.
8. this child, the Taung fossil, of a child, see next;
the fossil itself as issue of the earth in the present.
12. Taungs, Taung, South Africa, site of the first
discovery of Australopithecus africanus, and "tongues,"
cf. II Cor.14.
17. what... stones, cf. Ex.32:15-16, 34:1.
19-24. thou... hand, Ps.31.
19. art in... stone, cf. J. Donne, "God is so
omnipresent that... in an angel, is an angel; in a stone, is
a stone; in a straw, is a straw."
19. Dart, Raymond, in 1924 classified the Taung
child.
26. Olduvai Gorge, South Africa, site of extensive
hominid and prehominid arhcaeological finds.
31-36. A... "we." cf. Gen., and Jn.1:1-14.
37. last day, the creation of man, cf. Gen.
41. you... good, cf. Gen.1:4,10,12,etc.
43. Swartkrans, South Africa; Folsom, in Arizona
and New Mexico; Spy, Belgium; Lascaux, France; sites
of important and extensive finds whose chronology ranges from about
three million years ago very nearly to the present.
49. teeth... shrink, A. robustus and A. boisei
had molars an inch across.
54. vox, Lat. "voice," the proper translation of Gr.
logos; cf. note to title.
56. chert, a coarse flint; with flint and obsidian the
most common material of Paleolithic tools.
64. larynx, the "voice-box," "Adam's Apple"; in early
hominids, it does not drop away sufficiently from the
lower jaw to produce all the phonemes of speech; in
modern man, this migration and size change produces, and
failure prevents, the voice-changes in infancy and
adolescence.
66. Icumen in, from a Medieval English song, "Sumer
is icumen in," the inference is that modern speech is still
"coming in."
72. I... come, refrain of a song by the Medical
Mission Sisters, f. Mat.22:2-14.
73. But... rod, cf. Mat.22:7,12-13.
76. Homo, Lat. "man," the genus to which Archaic,
Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, and Modern man belong; H.
sapiens archaic and H. sapiens neanderthalensis had
heavy brow bones that met over the nose.
80. homo sap, Homo sapiens, Lat. "wise man"; see
prec.
84. grows... chin, H. s. cromagnonensis is
immediately distinguished from all precursors in having
the modern chin.
89. atlatl, a simple device of wood or antler that
extends the throwing arm, and thus the range and power
of the javelin.
91-108. Cro-Magnon was a prolific painter and
sculptor.
97. Altamira, Spain, and Lascaux and Cougnac,
France, are sites particularly rich in Cro-Magnon art,
ranging from 40,000 - 10,000 B.C.
100. While... bear, cf. W.H. Auden's "Under Which
Lyre," "While nerves that never flinched at slaughter /
Are shot to pieces by the shorter / Poems of Donne"; see
also next.
101. circlets... bone, cf. Donne, "The Relique;" the
prolific Cro-Magnon scrimshaw of animals on bone tools
and ornaments.
104. so... full, many of the Cro-Magnon paintings
depict the climax of the hunt, with air and animal full of
more spears than there are hunters.
109. gas, whether from verbosity or vulcanism; see
next.
112-120. puncture...Babel. Meteor Crater, Arizona, is
probably not connected with the Atlantic asteroid, that struck
off the coast of South Carolina in about 8500 B.C. triggered
tectonic and vulcanic activity along the Mid Atlantic and
Transatlantic Rifts, at whose junction was Atlantis, a widely-
seafaring island civilisation still legendary in Classical times,
which in the cataclysm sank some 3000 ft. to become the present
Azores Plateau; the resulting tsunami and volcanic rains produced
the "Flood" of Gen.6-9, from which Noah is said to have
escaped in an ark that came to rest on Mount Ararat on the
Turko-Russian border; Popocatepetl is a volcano in Mexico,
whose Aztec-Atlantic civilisations held blood-rituals atop stepped
pyramids; Würm is the name given to the last European glacier,
that slowly melted as the result of Panama's having risen to divert
the way of the Gulf Stream that today warms northern Europe, though
the stanza implies that this resulted from the hot air of Babel,
cf. Gen.11:1-9.
121. Jericho, a Chaldean city ca. 5000 B.C., one of
the first to be founded upon agricultural economy; the
site is in modern Syria; see also next.
125. Emmer wheat, the first variety cultivated, has
a loosely-bound head of about 1/4 the yield of modern
hybrids.
128. The... Elders, a direct quote of Ezek.7:26.
131. Ur, a city, ca. 5000 B.C.; the site is in
southern Mesopotamia.
131. ziggurat, the Mesopotamian temple, a stepped
pyramid, services being held at the peak; some archaeologists
connect all the pyramid cultures as Atlantic in origin and as
commemorating Mount Atlas, the "god who could shake the world
with a shrug," that is now Pico Alto in the Azores (see n. 112).
The filter is an ancient method of air-conditioning
in which a decorative honeycomb of air channels is cast into a
thick concrete block set into windows. The night-cooled block
cools the day air; the sun-warmed block warms incoming air at
night.
137. floor... roof. It is common for one urban
civilisation to build on the ruins of another; e.g., there
are some seven distinct levels at Troy and nine at Jericho.
140. press... clay. The earliest nonpictorial or
alphabetic writing is pressed into clay with a stylus.
142. aleph... gimel, four of the letters of the
Phoenecian-Hebraic alphabet, they are still current, but
no longer cuneiform.
143. curse... camel, cf. T.S. Eliot, "Journey of the
Magi"; the piece remarks the effects of new doctrines on
civilisation, but note that gimel is "camel."
144. Nunc et semper, Lat., from the Liturgy,
sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper," "as it was
in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be."
145-148. Well... make, cf. A.E. Housman, "Terence,
This Is Stupid Stuff," not merely these, but the whole
poem.
147. La Brea, Sp. "the tar," tar pits in southern
California, rich in faunal fossils.
150. Per... mea, Lat. "through my fault." Most
fossil sites are originally exposed by geological faulting,
and a fault on Berkeley campus, University of Southern
California, was named "My Fault" by students who
discovered it, but the phrase is from the Liturgical
contrition.
151. head... gone, cf. the American folk song, "Dry
Bones."
154-156. furrows... stone, cf. A. Tennyson, "Ulysses,"
"and sitting well in order smite / The sounding furrows,"
and the whole.
157. every word, cf. Deut.8:3, Mat.4:4.
162. phizzog, Am. dial. corrup. of "physiognomy,"
"face."
164-165. Earth... Moses, Ex.3:2-4:17 ff., 13:21, 14:21,
16:11-12, 17:5-6, 20:1-18, etc.
165. reeds, Ex.2:3, but in particular the papyrus,
from which paper was made anciently; the first five books
of the Bible, Gen.-Deut., are held to have been written by
Moses.
166-168. laws... roses, the stone tablets of the law,
and T. Lawes, who set to music the poem that begins, "Go,
lovely rose," by E. Waller, who found favor with both
factions in the Puritan revolution against the British
Crown and the Papacy.
167. fragiler, i.e., than stone or clay.
170. The... years, cf. R. Jeffers, "To the
Stonecutters," "Still, stones have stood for a thousand
years, and pained thoughts found / the honey of peace in
old poems."
171. Lent, in the Liturgical calendar, the period from
Ash Wednesday to Easter, in which abstinence and self-betterment
are to be practiced as routine.
172. present, cf. Gr. xarismos, "gift, grace," also
"present" as a condition of time; the syntax means both
this present and the past's own present.
172. prove, the object of this verb is both the
person and the thesis identified by the alternative
grammars of the subsequent clause.
173. like, both "in the manner of," and the
subjunctive conditional of "to like."
173-174. like... ascent, cf. the joke about the worm
who meets another worm while burrowing, declares love,
and is told, "don't be silly; I'm your other end." The
construction requires that the observer's love for the
worm as image of thanatopsis, and his love for his own
condition, including the other, are meant as the object of
"prove" (see n.172a.).
Bibliography.
Biblical material is from one or more of the
following:
1. Van der Hooght, Everardi. Biblia Hebraica, the
"Bagster Polyglot" Bible, Old Testament, edition of 1705.
London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, Ltd. Grand Rapids:
Zondervan Publishing House (1972).
2. Genesius, William. Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to
the Old Testament Scriptures. Tr. Samuel P. Tregelles, ed.,
1846. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing
Company (1949).
3. Nestle, Eberhard. The Greek New Testament, 1904.
Tr. Alfred Marshall: London: Samuel Bagster and Sons,
Ltd.: 1958. The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ, the King James Version, 1611. New
International Version of the New Testament. New York:
New York International Bible Society: 1978. The four
texts in one binding. Grand Rapids: Zondervan
Publishing House: 1968.
4. Wilke, C.G. Clavis Novi Testamenti Philologica,
1851. C.L. Willibald Grimm, ed., 1868. Tr. Joseph Henry
Thayer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament,
1885. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House (22nd
printing, 1982).
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-