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: 9780007539956

Version: 2014–07–18

Dedication

Again for Marguerite/Maggie—because of thirty-two years

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Byzantium I Come Not From

What I Do Is Me—For That I Came

I Am the Residue of All My Daughters’ Lives

We March Back to Olympus

Ghost at the Window, Hive on the Hearth

Boy Pope Behold! Dog Bishop See!

I Have a Brother, Mostly Dead

Why Viking Lander, Why the Planet Mars?

We Have Our Arts so We Won’t Die of Truth

I Die, so Dies the World

My Love, She Weeps at Many Things

Death as a Conversation Piece

Remembrance II

J.C.—Summer '28

The Young Galileo Speaks

The Beast Atop the Building, the Tiger on the Stairs

Why Didn’t Someone Tell Me About Crying in the Shower?

Somewhere a Band Is Playing

The Nefertiti – Tut Express

Telephone Friends, in Far Places

Death for Dinner, Doom for Lunch

Out of Dickinson by Poe, or The Only Begotten Son of Emily and Edgar

Lo, the Ghost of Our Least Favorite Uncle

That Son of Richard III

A Poem with a Note: All England Empty, the People Flown

The Syncopated Hunchbacked Man

If Man Is Dead, Then God Is Slain

Thoughts on Visiting the Main Rocket Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral for the First Time

Their Names in Dust, Their Dates in Grass

Long Thoughts on Best-Sellers by Worst People

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

They asked me where I’d choose to run, which favored? Ups? or Downs?

Where robot mice and men, I said, run round in robot towns.

But is that wise? for tin’s a fool and iron has no thought!

Computer mice can find me facts and teach me what I’m not.

But robot all inhuman is, all’s sin with cog and mesh.

Not if we teach the good stuff in, so it can teach our flesh.

There’s nothing wrong with metal-men that better dreams can’t chalk.

I’d find me robot-Plato’s cave if he lived on my block;

And though his eyes electric were, computerized his tongue,

Is that more wrong than Berlioz on LPs harped and sung?

So much electric fills our lives, some bad, some good, some ill.

But look! there Shaw and Shakespeare dance on Channel 7’s sill:

A gift of hearts and minds and eyes to see our dark/light face,

To weigh and balance halos/blights that half-destroy our race;

To midget make our rocket-ships, and squeeze grand Kong down small

Then Giants grow from Shavian seed to taunt, provoke us all.

As man himself a mixture is, rambunctious paradox,

So we must teach our mad machines: stand tall, pull up your socks!

Come run with me, wild children/men, half dires and dooms, half clowns.

Pace robot mice, race robot men, win-lose in robot towns.

Byzantium I Come Not From

Byzantium

I come not from

But from another time and place

Whose race is simple, tried and true;

As boy

I dropped me forth in Illinois,

A name with neither love nor grace

Was Waukegan. There I came from

And not, good friends, Byzantium.

And yet in looking back I see

From topmost part of farthest tree

A land as bright, beloved and blue

As any Yeats found to be true.

The house I lived in, hewn of gold

And on the highest market sold

Was dandelion-minted, made

By spendthrift bees in bee-loud glade.

And then of course our finest wine

Came forth from that same dandelion,

While dandelion was my hair

As bright as all the summer air;

I dipped in rainbarrels for my eyes

And cherries stained my lips, my cries,

My shouts of purest exaltation:

Byzantium? No. That Indian nation

Which made of Indian girls and boys

Spelled forth itself as Illinois.

Yet all the Indian bees did hum:

Byzantium.

So we grew up with mythic dead

To spoon upon midwestern bread

And spread old gods’ bright marmalade

To slake in peanut-butter shade.

Pretending there beneath our sky

That it was Aphrodite’s thigh;

Pretending, too, that Zeus was ours

And Thor fell down in thundershowers.

While by the porch-rail calm and bold

His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold

My grandfather a myth indeed

Did all of Plato supersede;

While Grandmama in rocking-chair

Sewed up the raveled sleeve of care,

Crocheted cool snowflakes rare and bright

To winter us on summer night.

And uncles gathered with their smokes

Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,

And aunts as wise as Delphic maids

Dispensed prophetic lemonades

To boys knelt there as acolytes

On Grecian porch on summer nights.

Then went to bed there to repent

The evils of the innocent

The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears

Said, through the nights and through the years

Not Illinois nor Waukegan

But blither sky and blither sun;

Though mediocre all our Fates

And Mayor not as bright as Yeats

Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum?

Byzantium.

What I Do Is Me—For That I Came

for Gerard Manley Hopkins

What I do is me—for that I came.

What I do is me!

For that I came into the world!

So said Gerard;

So said that gentle Manley Hopkins.

In his poetry and prose he saw the Fates that chose

Him in genetics, then set him free to find his way

Among the sly electric printings in his blood.

God thumbprints thee! he said.

Within your hour of birth

He touches hand to brow, He whorls and softly stamps

The ridges and the symbols of His soul above your eyes!

But in that selfsame hour, full born and shouting

Shocked pronouncements of one’s birth,

In mirrored gaze of midwife, mother, doctor

See that Thumbprint fade and fall away in flesh

So, lost, erased, you seek a lifetime’s days for it

And dig deep to find the sweet instructions there

Put by when God first circuited and printed thee to life:

“Go hence! do this! do that! do yet another thing!

This self is yours! Be it!”

And what is that?! you cry at hearthing breast,

Is there no rest? No, only journeying to be yourself.

And even as the Birthmark vanishes, in seashell ear

Now fading to a sigh, His last words send you in the world:

“Not mother, father, grandfather are you.

Be not another. Be the self I signed you in your blood.

I swarm your flesh with you. Seek that.

And, finding, be what no one else can be.

I leave you gifts of Fate most secret; find no other’s Fate,

For if you do, no grave is deep enough for your despair

No country far enough to hide your loss.

I circumnavigate each cell in you

Your merest molecule is right and true.

Look there for destinies indelible and fine

And rare.

Ten thousand futures share your blood each instant;

Each drop of blood a cloned electric twin of you.

In merest wound on hand read replicas of what I planned and knew

Before your birth, then hid it in your heart.

No part of you that does not snug and hold and hide

The self that you will be if faith abide.

What you do is thee. For that I gave you birth.

Be that. So be the only you that’s truly you on Earth.”

Dear Hopkins. Gentle Manley. Rare Gerard. Fine name.

What we do is us. Because of you. For that we came.

I Am the Residue of All My Daughters’ Lives

Though Queen be gone, the drones come back to hives;

I am the residue of all my daughters’ lives.

I keep their old loves here, I am the friend

Of all the lost, the sad, discarded, gone, made end.

Their husbands are now mine, their lovers keep

In touch with me, they telephone to weep

On loves that, soon as lost, now are my kin.

Somehow the old sins, shunted off, wind up my sin.

I take those loves to lunch. I buy them wine;

Although these boys-grown-men were never mine.

What is this thing in me which, dumb, demands

The keeping up of face, outstretch of hands?

Why must I tend their graveyard with chill stones,

Why say hello to those young bags of bones?

Those scuttled marriages gone sour or dead

Whose ruin runs my blood and cramps my head—

Why should I dine this mortuary gang,

Why not pay out Time’s rope and let them hang?

Because, because, well now, again because—

Mayhap I drown in male’s dread menopause,

And tend to see my face in these I dine

To drink too much of sad lust’s mortal wine.

Oh, women often cry they were sore used

But these boy/men were much the same abused;

If men shunt off the fainter sex with guile

Why, women, daggerless, slay with a smile.

What do these lovers hope to gain from me?

An echo of her flesh now found at tea,

The sounding of her voice but dimly heard

Her beauty ricocheted and drowned, absurd

In maze of old genetics yet there kept,

Some wakening of love that now is slept?

An echo of her voice in some mere phrase,

A flicker of her glance in old beast’s gaze?

They come to find the lamb in lion’s paws,

But something in my laugh now gives them cause

To order more and more and deeply drink,

Though Lovely’s not my name, I clearly think.

Ah, well, to stand for her is not a shame,

And if the echo pleases them, what blame?

Years back I saw an old love’s sire one day,

And round about his smile I saw the fey

Sad, far, lost echoing of one mad year

Which ravened me to frenzies and wild fear.

So if a father’s teeth can cage a cat,

Why here behind my eyes, beneath my hat,

A girl before her time waits to commence—

Young men, I have no heart to cry: Go hence!

So stay awhile and hear her voice in me;

But, please, no tears, no funeral salt at tea!

We March Back to Olympus

Thrown out of Eden

Now we headlong humans

Sinners sinned against

Return.

Tossed from the central sun

We with our own concentric fires

Blaze and burn.

Once at the hub of wakening

And vast starwheel,

For centuries long-lost, and made to feel

Unwanted, orphaned, mindless,

Driven forth to grassless gardens,

Dead and desert sea,

We were shut out by comet grooms like Kepler

Galileo Galilei

Whose short-sight probing light-years

Upped and said:

The Hub’s not here!

So shot man through the head

And worse, each starblind prophet killed a part,

Snugged shut our souls,

Chopped short our reach,

Entombed our living heart.

But now we bastard sons of time

Pronounce ourselves anew

And strike fire-hammer blows

To change tomorrow’s clime, its meteor snows.

Our rocket selfhood grows

To give dull facts a shake, break data down

To climb the Empire State and thundercry the town;

But more! reach up and strike

And claim from Heaven

The Garden we were shunted from,

For now, space-driven

We fit, fix, force and fuse,

Re-hub the systems vast

Respoke starwheel

And at the spiraled core

Plant foot, full fire-shod

And thus saints feel

Or yeast like flesh of God.

We march back to Olympus,

Our plain-bread flesh burns gold!

We clothe ourselves in flame

And trade new myths for old.

The Greek gods christen us

With ghosts of comet swords;

God smiles and names us thus:

“Arise! Run! Fly, my Lords!”

Ghost at the Window, Hive on the Hearth

It was a smother of Time, a crumbling of white;

The night gave way in hysterias trembling to cold,

Grown old and falling apart, let its white heart go

And slow and slow in a withering slide from the dark

The snow fell down and down with no lantern nor spark

Nor star nor moon to show its fracture and fall

Appalling in all its shivering shaken chill dusts

In soft clamors and tremors of panic it touched my sill

Like an old woman begging the storm to keep warm with mere crusts

And make do on my cat-couching hearth

Where a teakettle cinnamon puss kneels and folds

And beholds a soft inner contentment, a bumblebee simmer kept there

Like a hive on the hearth in a honeycomb color of cat

While nibbling the windows and gnawing raw rainspout toes

And flaking the rainbarrel frost there the smothering goes;

A funeral quell passes by in a pageant of lost

And cataracts windowpane eyes with a filming of frost

And sugars the dogs as they yellow-write sums in the snow—

Strange Orient alphabets sprinkled where smiling dogs go.

And the winter’s old bones fall apart in a shatter of white

And I bed with my bumblebee honeycomb cat for the night

And the sound of the snow grows in heart-murmur patterns yet dimmer

And the one thing I hear in deep sleep is the motor of cat:

What sound’s that?

Long-lost summer.

Boy Pope Behold! Dog Bishop See!

Oh, pantry Deeps’ miscellany

Bestirs boy’s victual villainy,

Unwaters mouth of innocence,

Unshucks the soul of reticence;

For in the deeps of snowbin sweets

And hung-banana jungle treats

We wandered as a jump-squirrel boy

To amble, maunder, ponder, toy

With jellies, jams and other pelf

From apple-cherry-berry shelf,

And read the names and wondered how

Clown doughnuts lay in such deep snow;

And took cosmetic chocolate-chips

To draw moustache on virgin lips.

And full of candied avarice

Blacked-out our teeth with licorice,

And grinned like devilled ham at self

Preserved in mirror-jars on shelf

And saw our eyes gone berry-blue

As all the jams this summer grew,

And bright our lips as cherry sins

And ripe our smile as pumpkin grins;

And full our mind of murder/slaughter

But clean our breath as menthol water

That in the dripped night, dark and still

The old dog laps from icebox sill.

Boy Pope behold! Dog Bishop see!

Twin celebrants in dark pantry

Where all the pontiff’s orbs are kept:

Crabapple multitudes, sweet slept.

Confessional the cubby seems

Where dog and boy feed naked dreams

And wash it all in innocence

From parsley/pickle/peppermints,

To in the half-lit wild of dawn

Uncoil in cartwheels on the lawn

And teach drab cats to catnip take

And Christian fasts call forth and break.

Then up the stairs the saved child creeps

And icebox-hid the sly dog sleeps

And none to know their midnight sins

Are stashed and slept in pantry bins.

And what the moral in this lies?

Stop boys. Leash dogs. Swat bugs. Squash flies.

Prohibit such from pantry reach,

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