December 2007
VOL XV, Issue 12, Number 176
Editor: Klaus J. Gerken
Production Editor: Heather Ferguson
European Editor: Mois Benarroch
Contributing Editors: Michael Collings; Jack R. Wesdorp; Oswald Le Winter
Previous Associate Editors: Igal Koshevoy; Evan Light; Pedro Sena
ISSN 1480-6401
INTRODUCTION
David Sparenberg
THANKSGIVING DAY
CONTENTS
Cammy Thomas
Hot Spots
Let It All Fall
Doll
Sad Bed
Phillip Ellis
Fighting the Fall
A Tower to the Sky
Unfaithful
Vista
White Moths
Daniel Barbiero
GOINGS
1. Water Overcomes Earth
2. Wood Returns to Water
3. Earth Resides in Earth
4. Ice Returns to Water
5. Water Fosters Earth
6. Water Breaks Stone
7. Earth Resides in Water
8. Water Subverts Wood
9. Stone Overcomes Metal
10. Water Displaces Wood
Michael Lee Johnson
Mindful, Mindless, October Date
Forked in Itasca
Jesus Walks
I'm a Riverboat Boy: Poem on Halsted Street
Hanging Together in Minnesota
Bill Millar
VOYAGER
POST SCRIPTUM
Anthony Nannetti
THE FEE FOR KNOWLEDGE
David Sparenberg
THANKSGIVING DAY
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(or the need for repentance from within
the history of our collective trauma)
The Lord God descended.
There was a house,
the house was on fire.
Tears from the eyes
of the Holy of Holies
hissed in the crackling
rage of conflagration.
Blood dripped down
from the wings of angels.
Earth is not heaven;
hell is not far
from the tips of our fingers.
The living Lord God
erupted and said:
"I am Auschwitz
and you are ashes.
I am Hiroshima
and you are dust.
I am extinction
and you are the malicious
toys of oblivion.
I am death today
but you are death's
tryanny of tomorrow."
The Doomsday clock is ticking,
friend. Midnight
is the renunciation of God
in the annihilation of the generations of Adam;
in the massacre of the children of
Hava - a name (Eve) meaning life.
The one who invented
The Bomb - the "A"
for Apocalypse Bomb-
inverted the flowering of consciousness;
shaped humanity into billowing fungus.
The pyromaniac
behind the petroleum of global warming
mocks the venerable
linage of Prometheus. Behold! The dwarf
of greed is gargantuan.
Earth... o Earth!
Earth is not heaven.
Hell is not far
from the tripping of our tongues.
(Confess this much:
We are liars.)
The Lord God
falls in black rain;
we grow in
blood thorns covering halos. Blood
drips down from the candles of angels,
the light of their eyelashes splattered with misery.
Prayers are obscured
by the obscenity of war.
Earth... Earth...
O mother of mercy!
Sweet Dove of Now
the pornography
of burnt offering.
Rabbi! Rabbi! Love's treasury, my
Adonai...
As I lean into your embrace,
where are we? Land of lost?
The street corner?
Earth is not heaven; Eden
the promise of the covenant
of bereavement broken.
Hell is not far
from the crimes in our names.
What are our wishes?
The fragments, the char-bones,
of our abandoned dreams?
(Confess this much:
We have become conjugal
with the angel of death.)
Postscript: Since the end of World War I, that being 1918, less than a
single century past, 160 million human beings have perished in wars
and paramilitary conflicts. Increasingly, the majority of casualties are not
combatants but unarmed civilians. One simple, poignant and to the moment,
example: When the US military illegally and preemptively invaded Iraq
to topple the dictator Saddam Hussein, Saddam fell. But Saddam's
death is one death and over four years, more than a million are war-dead in that single
place of ecocide, of inferno geography.
In the hour of this suffering, in the art of deception, in the age of confusion
and the proliferation of crusading terror, in this year 2000 and 7, as my words
of protest are inscribed here, in the desiccated ink of wounded cherubim, there are
wars, rebellions, mass graves and slaughters, accountable in Africa, Darfur,
Asia, Indonesia, Burma, throughout the Pacific Rim, the Philippines, and in
the Middle East. O Zion! O Bethlehem in Galilee!
What is happening to our planet, Earth, the Earth, the Adamah, is mirrored by
the madness of what we do to one another because of ideologies, fears, hatreds,
propaganda ; and in the advancements of our technologies of murder, our
perversities of torture, and our degenerative, endemic necrophilia. We love the
cool of a spectacular kill! An awesome offing!
But no one of us any longer stands exempt from the consequences of the
politics of death and extinction and the execution of organized crimes against
creation. Conscience and moral discernment can no longer continue powerless,
lest we perish in our impotence before the power-monsters administrating in
the shadows of our humanity. The Frankenstein-work of the inhuman! Us.
We are the horror. We are the anguish. We are the torment and the trauma
we are trapped within. Political terror
is the Amen of the 21st century.
Our choice is clear. The dream of God is encoded into the living structures
of creation and that is the revelation of creation's deep democracy and the
evolution of creation-embodied liberation. This dream of God is self-aware freedom.
And the first freedom is the freedom of experience, which requires life. Conversely,
the betrayal of God is the road to perdition. We have made going to hell a
super highway, paved over with the silenced accusations of screaming blood,
pleading bone, of radioactive dust and mass manufactured ashes. The mouth
of ashes. (Where are we every time we are needed; we who have mastered the machinery
of industrialized, cybernetic death?)
But this globe-imprisoning autobahn is cul-de-sac. It arrives at endgame, at
end tine, in the parking lot of omnicide. Before the final destination, the images
along the way, having long since abandoned the prophetic promise, are spun into
nightmares and the demons in the headlights, before which we are frozen, watch
with the barbaric cruelty of our civilized eyes. We are the fallen
church of ultimate deception.
(Confess this much:
Our souls are in denial.)
Give thanks!
We are the prosperous and not yet
the Savior's body of salvation.
We are not
saving any place or any persons.
Rather,
ours is the communion of betrayal.
Who feels ashamed? Who
is intimate with forgetfulness? Society:
the semiotics of soul loss.
(Confess this much:
We have a lust for damnation:
we are hell-invested.)
The Lord God descended,
crying, like a wounded lion,
like an orphaned lamb,
for the dove of peace.
The whole Earth was in flames.
The dove found no place
to build the nest of Eden. The beatitude
of God was pain. And the pain,
that suffering,
is inconsolable.
November 22, Thanksgiving Day, 2007
Cammy Thomas
Hot Spots
~~~~~~~~~
red blockage
bad passage
matter stuck halfway down
without valium she’s breathless
from fear—it loosens her tongue
about death's pretty fingers
and delicate hat
rot has been seeping
turning everything
and now look at the hot spots
Let It All Fall
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
for S. N. T.
no pie—he hates pie
no jokes—only he tells jokes
no anger—only the ugly are angry
no demands—only the weak make demands
you will sit
let it all fall
you will be quiet
let it all fall
you will fail to guard your children
you will only play what he wants you to play
an all-Bach program
an all black pogrom
and you lost in pearls
beside the choked pond
a daily contest of disaster—
and you sister mother
let it all fall
Doll
~~~~
broken doll
stiff skirt, black braids
how can this cut be fixed
eyes dots of void
can she bend at the waist
can she let life melt her
planet of faded cotton
her hair smelling of holds
gazes at our room of pale people
the plums of our hearts
throbbing invisibly as if
inside the ship's steel hull
Sad Bed
~~~~~~~
I removed the nails
I put clean everything
asterisk of earth
don’t say you can’t sleep
it’s all made for you
every desalinated well
use your eyes
your hands
dig the garden of inexact forms
you may find harm
Phillip Ellis
Fighting the Fall
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These days, it seems to me
that the struggle to be
free of religion,
and to live at peace,
is as futile
and unwinnable
as fighting the fall
that falls after summers.
Some days, it seems to me
I shall fall fallow,
and broken-backed,
into the crackling leaves
that live in drifts
around me,
no longer supple
and green, but deceased.
But still I struggle,
as others struggle
to redeem their race
from the fall to sin
their songs envision,
and I wonder why
I am not lying
when I say the sun shines.
And when it turns autumn,
and when it is time for fall
over all of my life, I shall see
something like freedom
from my schizophrenia
seen only as sinfulness
repaid,
or else as a test of faith.
A Tower to the Sky
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Monody shall not wake the mariner."
Hart Crane
At night, it sights
the ocean
with the beams
of its seeing eye.
Does it seek
a sign,
this tower to the sky?
Dawn
finds it fallen
blind,
its eye a rheum
of silent glass. It stands
a wan minatory finger,
taking shape with glass
and stone and steel
as a herald of warning voice,
against whose windows
the men will file
erratically as they pace
a circumscribed dream.
Unfaithful
~~~~~~~~~~
Dancing that night left me weary,
I went and sat down then dozed in our room.
On the stroke of two I awoke:
you were nowhere in the dark,
yet I could hear you whispering.
Somewhere, you were whispering,
the conversation ugly, although
so low I couldn't understand a thing.
Each time you leave the room
I want to follow. Are you going to go
one day, returning only
as a dreadful knocking on a door?
Vista
~~~~~
The distant mountains
against the horizon,
the snow a pallid
band of white.
From whence came the bogongs
that flew here once
in numbers uncounted
and now, at most,
in one hand?
They say that the passage
of passenger pigeons
darkened the sky
with the thunder of wings.
And the snow, too,
shall pass.
White Moths
~~~~~~~~~~~
The deepness
of night
is offset
in the way that they
glimmer in
the light of
the porch globe.
The pallid gecko
hunts them
across the ceiling,
strikes, then
it swallows, thorax
first.
To leave the light
on...
how they fall
through spiralling feet
to the floor
of the porch.
They shall die
this way or that,
by leaving on
the light.
How I shall hate
to see them die;
I turn it off
so they may fly
away.
Daniel Barbiero
GOINGS
~~~~~~
1. Water Overcomes Earth
One month of rain
Overnight, as if to prove
That water is the first
Principle, producing
Hot things, their seeds
Derived from moisture.
Earth floats on water
The roadedge fallen away
Crumbs of blacktop
In the runoff that stood
Fast in debris, piled
At the side of a water-thrown
Maple trunk.
Roots float on earth
Softened to a depth
Where the tree shifts
A squirrel’s nest
Skyside up
A clearing
In the canopy.
Air floats on vapor
An opening between trees
Nourished on steam.
2. Wood Returns to Water
Water in the crotch of the root
Moss in the hollow of the root
Skunk cabbage bright green
Against grey maple trunks.
The water darkened
By leaching tannin
Delays putrefaction
Here where there is
No alchemist
To hurry time.
The trunk is down
Its hylic thickness thins
Into prima materia
The biomuck of tree death.
What is dissolved once
Is dissolved for always—
A middle substance
Resolving leaf litter
And spruce cones
Into a living earth
A humid thing
Vague and fluid
3. Earth Resides in Earth
Water under earth
undisclosed
but to the root
leaf caught in the vortex
(survival is the root of desire)
Leaf litter on the surface
time decomposes into peat
This is all/ nothing else
4. Ice Returns to Water
The Norway spruces alone slope
Under a dull wind
In the absence of
Downcoming snow
Deer tracks widening
In snowmelt
Quickened from the solid
Surging and raised up
Water here is a fictive metal
Clear as fine silver
In which sun and moon dissolve
Inexactly, as all similar analogies
Are inexact
That fix a form
Onto an impression
That graft an argument
Onto an image
Last night’s rain
Remains on the branches
Suspended
Dazzling red at sunrise
Water in its rubedo stage
5. Water Fosters Earth
Even ice has its
Phase of citrinitas—
Tannin yellowed sheet
Milky and opaque
Soft to the touch of a boot
Pushing white bubbles away
Where the vernal pool bottoms
In this depression
Water finds its form
Between stands of black spruce
And red maple
Fixed water released
From the cold crystal
Its balance lies in the symmetry
Of earth and water
The point of greatest tension
Defining the center
Where things cast no shadows
But are themselves shadows cast
A coalescence of mind
In the surrounding pines and oaks
6. Water Breaks Stone
A white-tailed deer startles
Under a canopy of sweetgum
And black oak, the spirit
Of quicksilver evanescent in
The twilight collected
Above this gravel road.
The density of stone and
Transparency of air are held
Together by moisture, by a figure
Of speech in brown fur--
The image of silver liquid
Pooling where the rocks divide.
7. Earth Resides in Water
Through melted snow
The hooded flower,
Spadix in spathe,
Twisted cone of burgundy and
Mottled yellow,
Leaf turned about its axis.
Warmth and odor
Animal-like
The promise of carrion.
Attracting early flies.
(Even the plant
Lives by deceit,
Lives by desire.)
8. Water Subverts Wood
Purple and pewter, thickwashed
Layer over the ridgeline
Leaving the horizon ambiguous
In the retelling—
Chameleonlike and ungraspable
Wake of the rain
Broken on moss beds
Two inches deep
The moment we are in
Is in time only
To the extent that we
Are in it
To the extent that we
Are five senses temporarily wrapped
In an animal skin
As the wind rises
Carrying the wet smell
Of wood decaying
Orange-red and
Wormholed
9. Stone Overcomes Metal
The sky is closer to us
At this latitude
A part of us
The way many stimuli
Like and unalike
Are bundled into the same
Moment
Striae and cubes upthrust
The pilasters cut
By time into the rockface
Where the hardwoods
Get no footing
This is common iron
Not the iron
We carry within us
Not the shades
Of an earlier life
Emerging from within the talus
Seeping through the rock-clutter
To squat among the wintercress
And jewelweed
A lone Canada goose
Barks overhead
But our eye is to the ground
Blue-eyed grass
In sandy soil
Reading the wormtrails
10. Water Displaces Wood
The spruce needles on the ground
Dissolve slowly, turning amber—
An acid blanket of many parts
Pulled over the mor humus
Receptacle of every past that is not our own
But someday will be,
Fraying at the seams and covering
That something that lives in us
And draws us out into the world
Of air and dirt, of old fictions
That evanesce but will outlive us,
The tellers—water motes
In a column of light
Cutting through the understory
And its sassafras, enveloped in breath
When breath first turns to steam
Under a mottled sky,
Disappearing as we turn toward it.
Michael Lee Johnson
Mindful, Mindless, October Date
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mindful of my lover
running late, as common
as tying your shoestrings;
I'm battered as an armadillos shell;
I put my bands around my emotional body
armor native to myself and walk like a stud
in darkness.
Everything in October has a shade of orange you know--
a hint of witch and goblin.
In the leaves between my naked feet
and toes, as I pace my walk in the parking lot,
I count them--
I count them color chart fragments and bites:
oranges, reds, still mostly greens.
Barefooted the time of the tear, the year-fragmented.
I am male battered in a relationship
tested without my testosterone
no sexual rectification or recharging
of my batteries needed.
I lie limp.
Native to myself--
mindless of my lover running late.
Then she arrives.
Forked in Itasca
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I am so frustrated
I want to chew
the dandruff
out of the internet hair implant
and dislodge it,
for a lost love affair I never cared
about and hardly knew.
Don't tell me about my sentence structure,
I am human in these simple words.
I swear to you I curse.
Then the ram of my affair falls short
frustrating my approach to the world
at my fingertips.
No Yellow Pages here my love.
The dial up of my local connection
is wretched, stuck unincorporated
in the land I approved to live in,
monopolized by Comcast the
robbers of the poor and the humbled.
All I hear is the rambling of the railroad tracks.
I grow numb in my deafness faint with my hearing.
Did I ask for your opinion?
I am a frustrated foreign camper
in my own community.
Of a village I don't live in,
but I love this local village I lie about.
I am estranged.
I tie knots in contradictions
when I travel light and far,
visit home I long for a journey
past where I have never been.
Is this the reason I am lost
forked in between
the poet I think I am
and the working man
my bills dictate?
Jesus Walks
~~~~~~~~~~~
Jesus lives
in a tent
not a temple
coated with blue
velvet sugar
He dances in freedom
of His salvation
with the night and all
days bearing down with sun.
He has billions of ears
hanging from His head
dangling by seashores
listening to incoming prayers.
Sometimes busy hours drive Him
near crazy with buzzing sounds.
He walks near desert bushes
and hears wind tunnels
pushed by pine stinging nettles.
Here in His sacred voice
a whisper and
Pentecostal mind-
confused by hints of
Catholicism and prayers to Mary-
He heals himself in sacred
ponds tossing holy water
over himself--
touching nothing but
humanity He recoils
and finishes his desert
walk somewhat alone.
I'm a Riverboat Boy:
Poem on Halsted Street
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As sure as church bells
Sunday morning, ringing
on Halsted and State Street,
Chicago,
these memories will
be soon forgotten.
I stumble in my life with these words
like broken sentences.
I hear and denounce myself in the distance,
mumbling chatter off my lips.
Fragments and chips.
Swearing at the parts of me I can't see;
walking away rapidly from the spiritual thoughts of you.
I am disjointed, separated from my Christian belief.
I feel like I'm at the bottom of sinner's hill
playing with my fiddle, flat fisted and busted.
So you sing in the gospel choir; sang in Holland,
sang in Belgium, from top to bottom,
the maps, continents, atlas are all yours.
I detach myself from these love affairs
drive straight, swiftly,
to Hollywood Casino Aurora.
Fragments and chips.
I guess we gamble in different casinos,
in different corners of God's world,
you with church bingo; and I'm a riverboat boy.
No matter how spiritual I'm once a week,
I can't take you where my poems don't follow me.
Church poems don't cry.
Hanging Together in Minnesota
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Two thousand men on death row
in the state of Texas. I've never
been here, still I'm worrying
myself to death.
Webs of worry travel fast,
scan over my memory bank
back and forth like a copy machine.
I refuse to get out of my bed
I'm covered with burnt dream ashes
held in custody my cobwebbed anxiety
sheets waiting for the on looking armed
system of justice to take me away.
Their loud speakers keep screaming channeled
commands through vibrating my eardrums;
their messages keep cross-firing against my own desires.
There must be a warrant out for my arrest.
I will not listen period. I will shut out the sounds period.
Insanity echoes with stressed sounds.
It's Sunday morning, prayer time, I swear I will block out
the church bells ringing on Franklin Avenue, ringing
at St. Paul's Baptist Church.
Religion confuses me like poetry or prose.
I curse I will hang where Christ used to dangle;
wooden cross-post in a Roman Catholic hole,
or was it protestant reformation?
I'm the thief, not the Savior.
I don't want to die in my worry, my words, stranger in this world alone.
I want to resurrect the dream before the wounds came, and placed me in exile.
Long before the sounds of cell phones came ringing.
There must be a warrant out for my arrest.
Mixed in war, thunder, and sentence fragment.
Bill Millar
VOYAGER
~~~~~~~
I swoop high over hills today
and snicker in a hawk's ear
It falls away,
angling low and fast,
faster than I care
Perhaps it fears me
Briefly,
I feel loss
I gaze long and wide,
seeking other company,
radarscan the ground, then
Arrow down and
past a flocking populace
intent on their business,
oblivious
Briefly,
I feel rage
Should I rip at their
down-bowed faces
with my steely foot?
Smash into the
taut-tight space between the
blades of their stoopy backs?
Wrench them round to
see the electric wisdom
behind my morphean eye?
I flash on then,
past them,
howl like a gale
for the horizon
I eat wind,
chunks of air,
gobbets and rafts of it
I am Icarus returned,
I am the bally Bugaboo,
the golden hello of welcomes,
the heavenly submariner come diving
to torpedo the cargo of
your fears
I perch then,
brooding, on a cloud
Rise,
tempted to that
deeper, darker, rocket blue
Gaze silently, telescopically,
down,
hovering,
beating
slowly,
so slowly,
on solar breath
At peace now
I crash tumbling through
the layers of gas,
laughing,
and gripping
at moonrocks
Surge though cloud,
burst over forest,
roar across plain
Now,
ahead,
is a grey field
winking at me
colourfully
I thunder down
to it
and -
land like a jet
Perhaps
they will be friendly here
Anthony Nannetti
THE FEE FOR KNOWLEDGE
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the beginning, we gave heed to nothing
save the stark discovery of ourselves,
floating like figures in Chagall
or running with jaguars.
How to explain what has happened since?
There is one where SpongeBob and Patrick shiver by a campfire.
Patrick, not dimly, stares up and exclaims,
"Hey. If we're underwater, how can there be a fire ?"
The flame goes out.
All poems copyrighted by their respective authors. Any reproduction of
these poems, without the express written permission of the authors, is
prohibited.
YGDRASIL: A Journal of the Poetic Arts - Copyright (c) 1993 - 2007 by
Klaus J. Gerken.
The official version of this magazine is available on Ygdrasil's
World-Wide Web site http://www.synapse.net/~kgerken. No other
version shall be deemed "authorized" unless downloaded from there.
Distribution is allowed and encouraged as long as the issue is unchanged.
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