When the air is still troubled
And its space hasn’t been displaced
By excited titters of dry gas,
While the ghost of expelled breath
Still hovers in the heated zephyr,
A prediction of turbulence to come
If only every four hundred years.
Like the Phoenix
I rise to greet you,
So stubborn, needful, greedy, determined
To devour you with darkness
While you blind me with light
You’ll remember this battle…
Through the dry ice of concentric hells,
As hoary as snowbound Leningrad
You’ll remember this battle…
How exhausted, my love,
Will we be
In the end?
Loving Mathilde
This is the first day,
Of the rest of my life,
Loving Mathilde,
Born Juneteenth Day
The nineteenth of June, 2008
At two-forty-five P.M.,
Seven pounds, eight ounces
Not made of sugar and spice
But the stuff of American
African, Indian and French
Wine country dreams,
Our little cocktail girl
In a global world
Destined to love
More than we ever dreamed.
Our miracle of authenticity
Sapphire eyes wide shut
Surveying her realm
Serene in Perfection
Not even breathless
From her nine month journey
From non-being to true being
Rising fresh from birth waters
With the beauty of the anointed
All new, even surpassing
Newness to invention itself
Beyond mere reincarnation
Into a work of art
Open your lynx eyes
Mathilde, wave to your followers
Ring in an era which begins
With you and your forbearers
How much do you do already know?
You were not born yesterday,
You are a fossil,
Still carrying in your soul
The sublimity of former lives
In which creatures lurk
who Float from age to age
The past and the future
Coagulate in your blood
Rich and prancing with experience
Annotated with ancestors;
War and Peace
Religion and martyrs
Heroes and Loyalists
Rulers and Rebels
You are all yet none
Of the above, Mathilde
Rising like Venus
From the sea shell of the Universe.
Your baby face like
The ocean’s endurable fascination,
Changing each second, imposing
Irresistible contemplation?
Nothing has the power
To hurt you except
For what power
You give fear
And you shall give none,
As long as I live, loving,
Mathilde, on the first day
Of the rest of my life.
—June 19, 2008
Mathilde
Mathilde ran across the sand
With a daisy in her hand,
Stubbed her toe which made her cry
Loud enough to wonder why,
One should never question pain,
But get up and try again,
You will find a lesson there
Hurt is often Beauty’s dare.
—June 20, 2008
Mathilde: History Lesson
A bunch of slave holders,
Yearning to be free to own
A nation of Africans
Deported from their homeland,
Made the American Revolution
Which preserved the economy of unpaid
Labor capitalism and defended slavery
By preventing King George from abolishing
It in the American colonies
Which killed a lot of Englishmen,
So that they could then proceed with
The genocide of the remnants of the
Indian tribes by moving westward,
Conquering the fruited plains which
Belonged to Mexico in order to achieve
Our sacred Anglo-Saxon birthright to freedom.
—June 29, 2008
Mathilde II
Your birthday falls,
On Juneteenth,
The nineteenth of June,
The day in 1865,
That word of freedom,
Reached American slaves.
Their descendants therefore celebrate
The day they call Juneteenth
As Emancipation day
Because love of a country
Begins with attachment
To Memory.
—June 28, 2008
Mathilde III
A dog and a cat and a bat and a rat
Chased a little brown bug that sat
On a trembling leaf on a tree.
“You better not mess with me”
Said the fat brown bug to the bat
“I sting like a bee,
Much bigger and stronger than thee”
“Oh, I see,” said the bat
“You think you are a bee in a tree,
And that you can escape me,
But unlike the dog and the cat and the rat,
I can fly which they can NOT
Which puts you in a spot!
If you try to fly, you will see why”
But the very smart brown bug
Thought the worse that could ensue
Was to fail to fly to the sky
So he squeezed his eyes shut
And wished himself aloof,
And indeed, he did succeed
The little brown bug became
A yellow and black dragonfly
Which left the bat holding
The cat in a sack
And what about that!
—June 21, 2008
One Hundred And Ten Weeks
One hundred and ten weeks since
You burst onto the universe
And already you can pull
On your socks, fasten your shoes,
Take off your overalls and
Remove a cherry pit.
You can make yourself understood
With “no,” “next,” and “she’s not here,”
Know who you are with “me,” “mine”
And “yours” and who “mummy” is
And “Daddy” and “Bobby” and “Toto”
What departure is “bye-bye” with a wave,
What arrival is with a kiss, what hurt is
And even the lack of pain; “no bobo”
Eyes wide open to the world, you can
Navigate a tree, a curbstone, a puddle,
Propelled forward on legs that have
Just learned what vertical motion is.
Wheeling forward to embrace the world,
The leaf of a tree
Studied with the concentration of
A nuclear scientist, the universe is yours,
Delivered unto your churning limbs
Small hands, avid eyes, perfect
Body and brave heart
All the amazing total of
One hundred and ten weeks of
Mathilde’s worldly existence,
And in French.
—June 19 2011
La Chenillere I
You
Celebrate well
In all seasons,
Like one good wine
Summer light,
Low and tender,
Powdered and delicate,
Linden-tree leaves trembling,
I saw
Three wild swans
The o
ther day,
Two white and
One black.
Summer light,
Low and tender,
Floating in silence,
Only low flying
Swallows and
Now and again a
Wild duck or
A swamp gull
Water skiing.
Summer light,
Low and tender,
Quiet, black,
Non-reflecting water,
Fretted with
Silver coins.
We’ve been having
Rainstorms with
Bursts of sunshine.
Summer light,
Low and tender,
Suddenly
The sky darkens like a rash,
Then, as suddenly,
A burst of yellow,
A spotlight
Casting long and navy shadows
On white stone walls.
You
Celebrate well
In all seasons,
Like one good wine.
La Chenillère II
You
Celebrate well
In all seasons,
Like one good wine
But you are best
Now,
In November,
Cracked like Chinese porcelain,
Brittle as blown crystal,
Swept with curling leaves
Scattered like hysterical kisses
That have lost their power to convince,
Covered with naked vines
That have lost the regency of love,
Revealing a permanent paradisiacal embrace
Of cloying tentacles.
You are best
Now,
In November
When bullets riffle and rattle the dawn,
And quail and partridge scream,
Hunted by beasts of both sorts,
Treading the flesh and bone of pine cones underfoot,
When rid of that vulgar summer green blanket
That molds and softens like a woman’s make-up.
Nude, you rest under the rapt and skeletal gaze of winter,
Under the same futile and furious scrutiny
That one day one turns on one’s own life
At the point
Where
It begins
To end.
La Chenillère III
Four little brown boys playing in the sun,
Romping on the wide green lawn sprinkled
With corn flowers, the pond swollen
Under droplets of light, the deep green
Line of Montrichard forest forming a blue haze.
French and English tickle each other,
In phrases and cries, gibberish and shouts,
As strong thin legs rush by hedges,
Circle around oak trees and into the rushes and pines
Oblivious of needles, nettles and poison ivy.
No longer four separate supple bodies
But one interlaced mass of young flesh,
And perhaps a football, I don’t recall,
I remember the red rowboat inscribed Beetle
Lying wet and shiny on a bed of moss.
The swans who think they have the run
Of the pond, sing and whistle love songs
Chirp about their right of way in traffic supple,
But the children pay no heed until
The Black Swan glides by
Regal and male cursing in loud shrieks
For quiet and sex from his females
The rioting bodies not understanding,
Go on playing and squealing oblivious
To the swan’s songs of rutting
Above their romping and shoving
Lies the vault of a perfect summer day
In chateau, country, the Loire, a chorus
Of white limestone in architectural musicality
Chaumont, Ambroise, Chambord, Blois
All have their bloody stories stabbing the
Centuries when peasants and kings
Romped like those four beyond in the sunshine
And still believed in Divine Right
We have work to do but we procrastinate
Our drowsy eyes hardly open after lunch
Pinning for a Negre to do our work
To edit the verses and draw the milk and honey
From the lazy afternoon that never ends
Except to leave the children’s hoops and hollers
That rebound from oak to oak like
Butterflies from flower to flower
How will they remember this taste of France
These American brothers nurtured on
A billion of hamburgers - hold the ketchup
They are so different yet so alike,
these Multi-toned cousins, their working mothers
Sitting in the shade with mint and lemonade
And Chloe murmuring mantras: “A Rose!”
Is a rose is a rose, damn it!
Don’t say that just because you know
The words and can tear off the pedals
To count the hanging participles for Random House
We are not prisoners of Zorro in full steel
Armor ready to do battle with syntax
Chloe aka Morrison of the wicked eye
Rocks me with her editorial lullaby
Along the trimmed grass and sand & gravel paths
Which all lead in stately procession
To the Poet’s Arbor.
La Chenillère IV
In August 1979, my oak trees fell ill.
Like people they ran fevers,
Turned gray, smelled bad, secreted fluids,
Grew ulcers and gangrene on their leaves
Which turned October Red
Like blood and stuck like glue.
The three-hundred-year-old guardians of my
Country house, the unwavering sentinels
Of my life, six, seven hundred strong
Fell one by one, leaving naked lakes
And raped woods and wounded bowers,
Shadeless life and yawning emptiness.
The doctors came and the gardeners,
The tree surgeons and the horticulturists,
They cut and pricked, injected and drained,
They clipped and treated roots, murmured
Incantations and, in the end, they sighed And wrung their hands and sent their bills.
Oak Blight swept through my life
Like a cyclone, uprooting trees,
Emptying stands, changing the landscape,
Mutilating limbs, destroying perfection.
The tree population of my existence left.
Dry curling leaves ate at my heart.
The virus swept through the countryside
Mounting the Cher and descending the Loire.
Black Death felled domain after domain.
The surgeons’ chain saws wailed in mourning
From Blois to Tours, from Chaumont to
Amboise, leaving my house naked,
My lake unshrouded, my life unframed.
My hallowed oaks, which had stood
Alone and majestic
In their own praise
Since Franfois I,
Fell crashing one by one.
In horror I watched the carnage under the
Strobe lights of summer, then winter, then
Summer again; my eyes, by now
Slid off the cancerous
Trunks and desecrated boughs.
A naked carbuncled beggar,
Franfois I stood, a cuckold leprous husband
Crouched in the crossfire of war
While the enemy advanced, masked and goggled,
Invading the woods,
The stands, the pond, the prairie,
Leaving me without a permanent address.
I wept and prayed and cursed
The plague on my own house.
The peasant
s came and tied
Bouquets of garlic around a dead tree’s waist,
Stuffed human offal into her roots,
Watered it with the urine of pregnant cows,
But my oak trees bled on.
The bucherons arrived and left a burning pyre,
A holocaust of flaming stumps,
Till ashes only remained:
Smoldering and thick with resin and tears
The year I divorced.
Genesis
He brought out
From the secret vault’s sanctuary
Four Books scribed with an
Unknown language using
Strange sumptuous subscriptions,
The characters in the shapes of
All sorts of animals
Representing abridged expressions
Of liturgical language illuminated
In code, cipher and metaphor,
The letters were knotted and
Curved like wheels, or
Plaited and stood like columns
Interwoven like tendrils of incunabula
To protect their secret beginnings
From the curiosity of the
Vulgar and uninitiated
As priests and gurus always do
To enhance their secrets,
Writing in tongues
Obscuring what is simple
With what is necessary
To their livelihood
For God’s sake
Black or white, Hindu
Moslem, Christian, orthodox
Confucian or animalistic,
Every secret held by those men
Who hungrily hold the flame
Warming their chilled and callused
Hands over the fires of sacrificial
Gifts to whatever deity excusing
Whatever abominations necessary
Splendid watchdogs with the friendly
Dialogue of the torturer
On the naked skin of man.
D-Day Requiem
Let famous voices cease
Great Orators be stilled,
Ban the Praise Songs of Children
Listen instead to the silence,
Of white picket fences made of
White crosses stretching along eternity’s beach,
Ordinary men whose voices
Embellish no history book,
Vigorous young men who lost
Their virginity on the sands,
Of Normandy blood warm flesh
Charred against tempered steel,
Mere boys parting the waters
Crawling like crabs onto foreign soil,
Saviors of an idea of Great men
They read about in History 101,
Let famous voices cease
Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released Page 12
