This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007539918

Version: 2014–07–18

Dedication

With love for my granddaughter, Julia, whose face promises me immortality

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope

Go Not with Ruins in Your Mind

Poem from a Train Window

Nor Is the Aim of Man to Stay Beneath a Stone

Joy Is the Grace We Say to God

They Have Not Seen the Stars

This Attic Where the Meadow Greens

Abandon in Place

The Great Man Speaks

Shakespeare the Father, Freud the Son

A Miracle of Popes, All with One Face!

The Bike Repairmen

The East Is Up!

If Peaches Could Be Painters

Once the Years Were Numerous and the Funerals Few

Satchmo Saved!

God Blows the Whistle

The Infirmities of Genius

Farewell Summer

The Dogs of Mesopotamia—Dyed by Spring

Two Impressionists

And Yet the Burning Bush Has Voice

To an Early Morning Darning-Needle Dragonfly

Poem Written on a Train Just Leaving a Small Southern Town

Too Much

There Are No Ghosts in Catholic Spain

I Am God’s Greatest Basking Hound

Doing Is Being

Ode to an Utterance by Norman Corwin, Who Punned the First Line, and Must Suffer the Rest

Nectar and Ambrosia

We Are the Reliquaries of Lost Time

Anybody Who Can Make Great Strawberry Shortcake Can’t Be All Bad

And Have You Seen God’s Birds Collide?

You Can’t Go Home Again, Not Even if You Stay There!

Schliemann

Of What is Past, or Passing, or to Come

Within a Summer Frame

Ode to Ty Cobb, Who Stole First Base from Second

GBS and the Loin of Pork

Let Us Live But Safely, No Bright Flag Be Ours

Everyone’s Got to Be Somewhere

The Past Is the Only Dead Thing That Smells Sweet

Ode to Trivia

Good Shakespeare’s Son, the Typing Ape

Que Bella! The Flagella of the Beasts

Pope Android Seventh

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope

Haunted Computer, Android Pope,

One serves data, the other hope.

The late-night ghosts of man’s dire needs

Are snacks on which computer feeds

To harvest zeros, sum the sums,

Knock something wicked ere it comes,

And drop dumb evil to its knees

With inked electric snickersnees.

While Android Pope takes up from there,

Where physics stops mid-flight, mid-air,

There Papa’s primed electric mind

Grows faith in countries of the blind.

Where mass and gravity bulk huge—

Andromeda its centrifuge—

Or matter dwindles to mere flea,

There Android Pope makes papal tea

To serve to doubtful Thomas me

And thee and thine and thine and thee;

Last suppers his to circuit there

Where physics loses self in air,

And man surprised by large or small

Sees naught beyond the two at all.

That is the moment where, well-met,

Electric Pope/Computer fret

Where stuff gives up its ways and means

And emptiness fills in-betweens

Where label-less the mystery goes

In veils and prides of cosmic snows

Which rationed out by God beyond

Are light-year sea and lake and pond

Which shallow are but drowned in deeps’

Computer mind that finds and keeps

But cannot answer final thirst:

Which, egg or chicken, arrived first?

The primal motive hides in stars

Where astronauts in rocket cars

Will never solve it, so bright Pope

With fireworks inside for hope,

With tapes for tripes, A.C.-D.C.

Speaks metaphors from Galilee

And bakes good bread and serves a wine

That bloods the soul most super-fine

And emptiness fills up with words

Like flocking flights of firebirds

That move and motion, merge and mull

So men gone empty now are full.

Yet, all mysterious remains,

So man stands out in ghosting rains

And makes umbrellas with machines

Half-satisfied with in-betweens,

His life twin mysteries given hope

By Ghost Computer, Android Pope.

Go Not with Ruins in Your Mind

Go not with ruins in your mind

Or beauty fails; Rome’s sun is blind

And catacomb your cold hotel

Where should-be heaven’s could-be hell.

Beware the temblors and the flood

That time hides fast in tourist’s blood

And shambles forth from hidden home

At sight of lost-in-ruins Rome.

Think on your joyless blood, take care,

Rome’s scattered bricks and bones lie there

In every chromosome and gene

Lie all that was, or might have been.

All architectural tombs and thrones

Are tossed to ruin in your bones.

Time earthquakes there all life that grows

And all your future darkness knows,

Take not these inner ruins to Rome,

A sad man wisely stays at home;

For if your melancholy goes

Where all is lost, then your loss grows

And all the dark that self employs

Will teem—so travel then with joys.

Or else in ruins consummate

A death that waited long and late,

And all the burning towns of blood

Will shake and fall from sane and good,

And you with ruined sight will see

A lost and ruined Rome. And thee?

Cracked statue mended by noon’s light

Yet innerscaped with soul’s midnight.

So go not traveling with mood

Or lack of sunlight in your blood,

Such traveling has double cost,

When you and empire both are lost.

When your mind storm-drains catacomb,

And all seems graveyard rock in Rome—

Tourist, go not.

Stay home.

Stay home!

Poem from a Train Window

I’ve seen a thousand homes go down the tracks

Away, away …

Late night or early morn,

There goes the house, all white, where I was born.

My traveling train

Gives back to me by moon or noontime’s rain

The house, the house, the house

Where I’m reborn again.

As common as sparrows in flight,

There flies by my front porch and me,

Out of sight, out of sight.

We are common together: common house, common weather,

Common boy on a bike on a cool dark night lawn,

Sinking in clover,

Or boy on brick street at dawn, roofing a ball:

Annie over! Annie over!

Where I’ll pop up next, Peoria or Paducah, I don’t know;

All I can say is:

Here I come, here I come,

There I go, there I go!

Always the same boy, bright-eyed as a mouse,

Always the same folks on the porch of that house,

Swinging by in the light,

Drowning deep in the night,

There they drift, there they fly

At the train whistle’s cry:

O good-bye, O good-bye.

Lawn and porch on the run; boy’s face like the sun

Looking up through the rain

As again and again, the boy who was me

Climbs a branch, drops from tree,

But arrives to depart

While his shout cracks my heart.

Lord, does anyone see

All those boys who are me,

And does anyone know all those homes white as snow

That like riverboats glide

In the tide of the train as it takes me away?

Who can say, who can say?

Just my time machine moves

Through the land of my loves,

And more houses and boys and more trees and more lawns

Wait there just ahead in the circling dawns.

A procession of dreams!

O, isn’t God clever?

He’s cloned me in teams.

So? I’ll live here forever!

Nor Is the Aim of Man to Stay Beneath a Stone

They say that we must falter, fail, and fall away

To all that’s lost;

I say the cost is overmuch

I’d spend us better with our will.

The mills of our machine-made gods grind swift not slow,

I with their lightning-arcs and wild illuminations go

To light a path

Not to the grave but walking on the air

On stairs of weather, cloud, and sky.

I would not doom us with those easy repetitions

Of old kettledrumming dooms

I heard from childhood on in dull, drab,

Ideas long since gone to incestuous

Intellectuals’ rooms …

Where they make litanies of night to scare their souls

And turn from birds and skies and stars

To imitate death moles or morbid beetles ticking death

Which if we let them would dig deep in time and keep

Our flesh in most inconsequent black holes.

That’s not my game,

Nor is the aim of man to stay beneath a stone.

To own the universe, our aim. And never die.

That’s mine, and yours, and yours, and yours,

To shame dumb death, leave Earth to dust, tread moon,

Vault Mars, and win the stars with flame …

Or know the reason why.

Joy Is the Grace We Say to God

Joy is the grace we say to God

For His gifts given.

It is the leavening of time,

It splits our bones with lightning,

Fills our marrow

With a harrowing of light

And seeds our blood with sun,

And thus we

Put out the night

And then

Put out the night.

Tears make an end of things;

So weep, yes, weep.

But joy says, after that, not done …

No, not by any means. Not done!

Take breath and shout it out!

That laugh, that cry which says: Begin again,

So all’s reborn, begun!

Now hear this, Eden’s child,

Remember in thy green Earth heaven,

All beauty-shod:

Joy is the grace we say to God.

They Have Not Seen the Stars

They have not seen the stars,

Not one, not one

Of all the creatures on this world

In all the ages since the sands first touched the wind

Not one, not one,

No beast of all the beasts has stood

On meadowland or plain or hill

And known the thrill of looking at those fires;

Our soul admires what they, oh, they, have never known.

Five billion years have flown in turnings of the spheres

But not once in all those years

Has lion, dog, or bird that sweeps the air

Looked there, oh, look. Looked there, ah God, the stars;

Oh, look, look there!

It is as if all time had never been,

Or universe or sun or moon or simple morning light.

Their tragedy was mute and blind, and so remains. Our sight?

Yes, ours? To know now what we are.

But think of it, then choose—now, which?

Born to raw Earth, inhabiting a scene

And all of it, no sooner viewed, erased, gone blind

As if these miracles had never been.

Vast circlings of sounding light, of fire and frost,

And all so quickly seen then quickly lost?

Or us, in fragile flesh, with God’s new eyes

That lift and comprehend and search the skies?

We watch the seasons drifting in the lunar tide

And know the years, remembering what’s died.

Oh, yes, perhaps some birds some nights

Have felt Orion rise and tuned their flights

And turned southward

Because star-charts were printed in their sweet genetic dreams—

Or so it seems.

But, see? But really see and know?

And, knowing, want to touch those fires,

To grow until the mighty brow of man Lamarckian-tall

Knocks earthquakes, striking moon,

Then Mars, then Saturn’s rings;

And, growing, hope to show

All other beasts just how

To fly with dreams instead of ancient wings.

So, think on this: we’re first! the only ones

Whom God has honored with his rise of suns.

For us as gifts Aldebaran, Centauri, homestead Mars.

Wake up, God says. Look there. Go fetch.

The stars. Oh, Lord, much thanks. The stars!

This Attic Where the Meadow Greens

This attic where the meadow greens

Now keeps itself a world between two worlds,

One world of weather, one of blood and dream.

Its architectural scheme there high above

Was to make heaps and sprawls of silent time

Abide it there to know a slower beat

Than any river street or dogprint lawn.

Here yawns lost yestermorn

When loss and death were yet unborn

And fear, locked in the womb, stopped up its breath

To let it whisper forth some other year.

A gardener lived here once—

My grandpapa whose notion

Was to tend and seed a rooftop sea of grass

And garret-mind it under glass—

A private lawn, each blade an hour, minute, second

Burning bright

Where boys and dogs might meet to fight, or gambol on,

And smile.

And all the while poor beasts below

In stifled traffics come and go.

So, late and drowned in night

Or striking midriff day,

The old man bent to rattletap croquet

And marched between the arching hoops

And found it clever to knock brightly colored balls

That comet-ran forever down our hidden sky.

In meadow-attic, with fanatic skill and ease

He touched to kill wrong destinies with games.

Full joys, fine aims he planned and played above the trees.

Death’s sneeze? was corked! And if dark came some future day

He would be challenged to delay awhile,

Take up croquet, seize mallet,

Stop balloting for night,

Stand bright, know day,

Whack blazing orb-sun, rolling fire,

Lose at croquet to Gramps,

The champ of champs who sent dark down and out away from town.

Toward other years and hours

When high lawn brown and sunk to seed knew weed for flowers.

The games went on till I was ten.

Death, back again, brought grimmer tools

And played Gramps by some older, stricter rules and won.

In mid-June’s bright-noon sun

The croquet stopped in full mid-scene.

We buried old man, mallets, orbs, and hoops in that high green.

That’s years ago.

We rarely visit now in attic meadows where you’d need a plow

To find his treasuring of bones

Or make a measuring of where the ancient joys

Still play themselves on air

For boys.

I only know on days like these

I hear his rushing run above the trees

Where his ghost tells me what life means

From attic where the meadow greens.

Abandon in Place

Three elegies written on visiting the deserted rocket pads at Cape Canaveral

Abandon in Place.

No Further Maintenance Authorized.

Abandon. Turn away your face.

No more the mad high wanderings of thought

You once surmised. Let be!

Wipe out the stars. Put out the skies.

What lived as center to our souls

Now dies—so what?—now dies.

What once as arrow to our thoughts

Which target-ran in blood-fast flow

No longer flies.

Cut off the stars. Slam shut the teeming skies.

Abandon in Place.

Burn out your eyes.

Where firebirds once

Now daubers caulk the seams;

Where firewings flew

To blueprint young men’s dreams,

Now warbler here and osprey weave their nests

From laces lost from off a spaceman’s tread.

The great hearthplace stands cold,

Its Phoenix dead.

No more from out the coals

Bright salamanders burn and gyre,

Only the bright beasts’ skins and restless bones bed here,

And lost the fire.

O, Phoenix, rub thy bones,

No more suspire!

Flint souls, strike mind against wild mind.

Return! Be born of spent desire.

Bright burn. Bright burn!

O mighty God’s voice, shorn,

Give shout next Easter morn. Be born!

(Our prayer calls you to life.)

Reborn of fire!

Abandon in Place.

So the sign says, so the words go.

The show is spent, the fire-walkers gone,

And gone the glow at dawn.

This day? No rockets rise like thunder.

The wonder still remains

In meadows where mound-dwellers not so long ago

Envied the birds, the untouched stars,

And let their touching envy grow.

Machineries stir here with falls of rust;

The lust for space still echoes

In the birds that circle lost in mourning cries

Repeating shouts of crowds long-spent

Whose aching shook the skies.

The sea moves down the shore

In wave on wave full-whispering,

No more. No more.

When will the harvesters return

To gather further wonders as a fuel

And let them burn?

How soon will all of Earth mob round, come here once more

To stop the night,

Put doubt away for good with rocket light?

O soon, O let that day be soon

When midnight blossoms with grand ships

As bright and high as noon.

Prepare the meadows, birds, and mounds,

Old ghosts of rocketmen, arise.

Fling up your ships, your souls, your flesh, your blood,

Your blinding dreams

To fill, refill, and fill again

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’s

Promised and re-promised

Skies.

The Great Man Speaks

(famous last words)

The famous one was there

Like a statue put out upon our loving green.

His wife was mean and talked a lot,

The air was hot with all her talking

Chalking out a line and running along

Her mindless song filled up our ears.

We looked at him. Our mouths were grim.

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