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“This Fabulous Shadow Only the Sea Keeps”

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American Poet Hart Crane (1899-1932)

I’ve always liked the poetry of Hart Crane. To begin with, he was from Cleveland, like me. In 1932, he killed himself by jumping overboard from a steamship sailing the Gulf of Mexico—after he had made an unsuccessful sexual overture to a crew member. This poem is a tribute to Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, Billy Budd, and other tales of the sea.

At Melville’s Tomb

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

The Master

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Gautama Buddha

The following is a section from the Shambhala Pocket Classics edition of Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha as translated by Thomas Byrom. It is called “The Master.”

At the end of the way
The master finds freedom
From desire and sorrow—
Freedom without bounds.

Those who awaken
Never rest in one place.
Like swans, they rise
And leave the lake.

On the air they rise
And fly an invisible course,
Gathering nothing, storing nothing.
Their food is knowledge.
They live upon emptiness.
They have seen how to break free.

Who can follow them?
Only the master.
Such is his purity.

Like a bird,
He rises on the limitless air
And flies an invisible course.
He wishes for nothing.
His food is knowledge.
He lives upon emptiness.
He has broken free.

He is the charioteer.
He has tamed his horses,
Pride and the senses.
Even the gods admire him.

Yielding like the earth,
Joyous and clear like the lake,
Still as a stone at the door,
He is free from life and death.

His thoughts are still.
His words are still.
His work is stillness.
He sees his freedom and is free.

The master surrenders his beliefs.
He sees beyond the end and the beginning.

He cuts all ties.
He gives up all his desires.
He resists all temptations.
And he rises.

And wherever he lives,
In the city or in the country,
In the valley or in the hills,
There is great joy.

Even in the empty forest
He finds joy 
Because he wants nothing.

The Destruction of the Jaguar

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After the Spanish conquistadores conquered the Maya peoples, they published one more work in Maya. It was called The Chilam Balam of Chumayel and consisted of a series of prophetic books looking pessimistically into the future. The poet Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno in The Destruction of the Jaguar wrote a poetic retelling of these prophecies. Below is the prophecy of Ah Kauil Chel:

What has been written
will be fulfilled.
Though you may not comprehend it
though you may not understand it
he will come who knows
how the ages unfold
like the stone steps
on the palace of the governor.
For now
the priests, the prophets
will interpret
what is to be fulfilled,
shall herald with sorrow
the destruction of the jaguar.

On Desolation Peak

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The Fire Watch Tower Atop Desolation Peak

In the summer of 1956, when I was 11 years old, Jack Kerouac spent 63 days manning a fire watch tower in Washington’s North Cascades, atop Desolation Peak. On the Road, which was to be the main source of his fame, followed by The Dharma Bums, were not yet published. The recently published Desolation Peak is a collection of Kerouac’s many writing projects—many of them fragmentary—while he scanned the horizon for fires during those 63 days.

Jack was desperately poor having spent all his money to get to Washington from Mill Valley. He began his job as a fire watcher with a total of 2¢.

This year I have become entranced by Kerouac. Like most of the members of my generation, I read On the Road while I was still in high school, and then stopped there. I have become newly fascinated by his work and am resolved to read all his work that I can find. That assumes I will live long enough, as Jack was a busy boy.

Below is a selection of what Kerouac called his “Desolation Pops.” In form, they resemble traditional Japanese haiku, but they do not adhere to the genre strict rules concerning the number of syllables per line. They’re still interesting. After all, English is a very different language than Japanese.

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

(7)
A stump with sawdust
     —a place
To meditate

(11)
The clouds assume
     as I assume,
Faces of hermits

(24)
There’s nothing there
     because
I don’t care

(36)
Poor gentle flesh—
     there is
No answer

(42)
Wednesday blah
     blah blah—
My mind hurts

(55)
Rig rig rig—
     that’s the rat
On the roof

(59)
I called Hanshan            | A Zen Buddhist recluse
     in the fog—
Silence, it said

(60)
I called—Dipankara        | One of the Buddhas of the past
     instructed me
By saying nothing

(70)
Aurora borealis
     over Mount Hozumeen—
The world is eternal

“A Kind of Solution”

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Invading Vandal Horseman

I have just finished reading Volume II of Thomas Hodgkin’s monumental Italy and Her Invaders, which tells of the Hun and Vandal invasions and the Herulian Mutiny that unseated the last of the Western Roman Emperors in CE 476. In essence, it tells of the painful last twenty-five years of the Empire, during which most of the emperors were murdered in a year or two.

There was no benefit to wearing the imperial purple in those last few years. A couple of days ago, I posted a blog in which Apollinaris Sidonius explained why it was no fun in being chosen as emperor.

Those last years of the empire were no fun. Not only were the invading Huns and Vandals brutal, but the empire itself was brutal to its own citizens, taxing them to death to pay for the huge military required to protect the borders.

It makes me think about our own situation. Our problem is not barbarian invasions (unless you don’t particularly like Canadians or Latin Americans), but our seemingly unbridgeable political divisions. The insurrection of January 6, 2021, was, to me, very like Gaiseric and the Vandals’ sack of Rome in CE 455. They may have been barbarians in the end, but they were our very own native-born barbarians. The result, in the end, is no better than the sad end of Rome.

I keep thinking of a poem by the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy entitled:

Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

      The barbarians are due here today.


Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

      Because the barbarians are coming today.
      What’s the point of senators making laws now?
      Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.


Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?

      Because the barbarians are coming today
      and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
      He’s even got a scroll to give him,
      loaded with titles, with imposing names.


Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

      Because the barbarians are coming today
      and things like that dazzle the barbarians.


Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

      Because the barbarians are coming today
      and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.


Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

      Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
      And some of our men just in from the border say
      there are no barbarians any longer.


Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

Beware of Mayan Gods

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The Mayan Goddess Ix Chel

This is a poem about a famous photograph of a Salvadoran refugee and his child found drowned in the Rio Grande while attempting to cross it near Matamoros. Poet Brenda Cárdenas refers to the Mayan goddess Ix Chel in the course of her poem. She bases her work on a drawing by Erik Ricardo de Luna Genel which I have not been able to find. Below is the photograph:

Cien nombres para la muerte:
La hilacha/The Loose Thread

Ix Chel, skeleton moon at her loom,
wipes her furrowed forehead, daddy
longlegs dangling like loose threads
from the corners of her eyes dark as ditches.
She stitches crossbones into skirts,
weaves skulls into blankets she will trade
with travelers. “Mantillas, rebozos!”
she’ll sing unfurling her wares for parents
to wrap around babes she has guided
from their mothers’ oceans to Earth.

Under one moon, a Salvadoran father
and mother cannot wait any longer
in the winding lines of starved
asylum seekers ordered to halt.
So their daughter, not yet two, wraps
her tiny arms around the bough
of papi’s neck, clings to his trunk
as he wades into the big river, swims
strong as salmon, against churning currents.

But when he spills her on the bank, warns
her to wait, and lunges back into the torrent
for mami, the little one panics, follows.
Under one sun, the river carries them
away, defying the border
it never meant to become.

Ix Chel’s waning crescent finds them
first, face down in the mud,
wrapped together in the black shroud
of papi’s shirt. And from her great jug,
holding all the waters of heaven,
she spills storms to wash away
the lines we’ve carved, dug, drilled,
the walls we’ve built in chain link, barbed
wire, concrete, and steel between desert
and desert, river
and river, earth
and earth, between father
and mother, mother and
child
under one moon.

“Rat Among the Pines”

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Poet Roger Reeves at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival

As I have mentioned before, the highlight of my visit to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was the Poetry Pavilion, where I could sit in the cool shade on a hot spring day and listen to some outstanding poets. One of them was Roger Reeves, an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Texas in Austin. The following poem, entitled “Rat Among the Pines” comes from his collection Best Barbarian, a finalist for the National Book Award. It tells in terse poetic language the violence of life in America.

Rat Among the Pines

Terror, tonight

Is the moon
Slipping from a rat’s gray grasp,

Finding its way back
Into the sky, which is America—

A white moon
Leaning on the night’s neck

With its hand in its pocket,
Moon hung calm above

Catastrophe, the police
Breaking the neck of a man

Who had just brushed summer’s
First bead of rain from his eye-

Lashes. Who—knocking a Newport
Against a wrist, watching smoke

Break its head against a brick
Wall—is preparing to die

Unaware they are preparing to die.
Heavy the moon, silly the tasking

Of a rat with delaying death.
Terror, tonight

Is the candor of the earth
Where someone is preparing to die

And the earth receives that dying
With its hands in its pockets.

And the moon that once burnt the silk
Hump of a rat, back in the sky.

And my daughter hiding in the rose
Bushes, asking who, who the sirens

Have come to kill. And someone calling
It beautiful—summer, moon—

And someone dying beneath that beauty,
Which is America.

LA Times Poets: Eloise Klein Healy

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Former Los Angeles Poet Laureate Eloise Klein Healy

As I mentioned in my previous post, what I enjoyed most at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival were the poetry readings at the Poetry Stage sponsored by Small World Books of Venice. One poet that impressed me for her sheer cojones was the 80-year-old Eloise Klein Healy who clawed her way back from aphasia. Let the introduction to her poetry collection Another Phase tell the story:

You cannot understand what you hear or read. You cannot speak or write and be understood. Your use of language has been lost. You speak and write words in a nonsensical manner. You hear what people say, but it makes no sense.

Her post-aphasia collection entitled Another Phase consists of haiku-like five-line poems that discuss her triumph. Below is one of them, entitled “Another Phase,” which lends its title to the collection:

Another Phase

It’s hard for me to read the L.A. Times.
I want to relearn, to refine part of me.
How did my brain twist?
How did the whack of it phase me?
Every page. Every word blank.

The subject of her rehab in the world of poetry is also covered in a poem entitled “Problem”:

Problem

When first I wrote a poem,
I couldn't change anything.
Didn't plan to edit or write another.
“Brain fry” was my reality time.
Step two wasn't there yet.

What I learned from listening to Healy read her poetry and then reading the poems in Another Phase was the woman’s courage and persistence in the face of calamity. She is still a little unsteady on her pins, but I find her to be an inspiration to me. And that’s not something I say about a lot of people.

“The Echo Elf Answers”

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Photo by Ed Weinman

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is best known for his novels. Although I admire them as much as anybody, I now like his poetry even more. His subjects seem to be on the somber side, but I love their simplicity and rugged construction, such as this one:

The Echo Elf Answers

How much shall I love her?
For life, or not long?
“Not long.”

Alas! When forget her?
In years, or by June?
“By June.”

And whom woo I after?
No one, or a throng?
“A throng.”

Of these shall I wed one
Long hence, or quite soon?
“Quite soon.”

And which will my bride be?
The right or the wrong?
“The wrong.”

And my remedy – what kind?
Wealth-wove, or earth-hewn?
“Earth-hewn.”

And ne forhtedon na

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The Tomb of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) in Geneva Switzerland

The title of this post is in Anglo-Saxon from the gravestone of Jorge Luis Borges. It comes from The Battle of Maldon. Translated, it means “Be not afraid.” Toward the end of his life, Borges learned Anglo-Saxon and even studied Old Norse, which is the language of Iceland.

Here is an early poem by Borges (from Fervor de Buenos Aires, 1923) on the subject of death. The translation is by W. S. Merwin.

Remorse for Any Death

Free of memory and hope,
unlimited, abstract, almost future,
the dead body is not somebody: It is death.
Like the God of the mystics,
whom they insist has no attributes,
the dead person is no one everywhere,
is nothing but the loss and absence of the world.
We rob it of everything,
we do not leave it one color, one syllable:
Here is the yard which its eyes no longer take up,
there is the sidewalk where it waylaid its hope.
It might even be thinking
what we are thinking.
We have divided among us, like thieves,
the treasure of nights and days.