Craft & memory: “Ithaca” by Louise Glück

 Penelope at Her Loom, John William Waterhouse (1912)
Penelope at Her Loom, John William Waterhouse (1912)

A poem about memory, art, trickery, and devotion. Odysseus was away from his kingdom of Ithaka for twenty years. Ten years fighting the Trojan War, another ten struggling to come back after earning the ill-favor of Poseidon. His clever wife Penelope fended off suitors for her hand by weaving a tapestry, telling the suitors she would marry as soon as it was done, then undoing each day’s work in the night.

Ithaca
By Louise Glück

The beloved doesn’t
need to live. The beloved
lives in the head. The loom
is for the suitors, strung up
like a harp with white shroud-thread.

He was two people.
He was the body and the voice, the easy
magnetism of a living man, and then
the unfolding dream or image
shaped by the woman working the loom,
sitting there in a hall filled
with literal-minded men.

As you pity
the deceived sea that tried
to take him away forever
and took only the first,
the actual husband, you must
pity these men: they don’t know
what they’re looking at;
they don’t know that when one loves this way
the shroud becomes a wedding dress.

Trojan War-time poem: “On the Walls”

 Rhina Espaillat
Rhina Espaillat

It’s the gossip-y parts of the Helen of Troy myth that often get lost. Though, in re-re-reading The Iliad there are plenty of moments of character sighing ruefully “I wish I weren’t so into this” and “Player’s gotta play” moments. Other than the Catalog of Ships (made easier when you imagine a cheering room when an ancestor is mentioned), The Iliad remains a good read. The poem below is prosaic but still struck my fancy. My fancy fancy. Can fancies be fancy? “Fancy” kind of loses meaning by the third time you say it in a row. Give it a try.

On the Walls
By Rhina Espaillat

From the first look I knew he was no good.
That perfumed hair, those teeth, those smiling lips
all said, “Come home with me.” I knew I would.

Love? Who can say? Daylight withdrew in strips
along those vaulted archways waiting where
the slaves would hear us whisper on the stair.
Not smart, not interesting — no, not the best
as anything, all talk and fingertips.
The best I left behind; they’re in those ships
nosing your harbor. You can guess the rest.
The heart does what it does, and done is done.

Regret? What for? The future finds its Troys
in every Sparta, and your fate was spun
not by old crones, but pretty girls and boys.

Wartime poem – “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen

 Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Listening & reading stories about the increase of veterans committing suicide evoked the phrase “guttering, choking, drowning” from a poem I could not fully recall. So I looked it up. It’s below. Wilfred Owen was a World War I era poet who died in 1918, killed on the front lines at the age of 25 in the last week of the War.

To save you the trouble (as I had to look it up to verify) “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” is from Horace’s Odes and means “It is sweet and good form to die for your country.”

Dulce Et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Home loam

Several conversations and experiences with friends along the lines of “I’m not where I grew up” have led to these thoughts. I didn’t spend much time on this.

Home loam

My lungs and brain compress when in my hometown.
Every block drizzled with treacle and sour gravy.
Enough! Defy as it saps your bigness down to slavery
Until a forgotten tether tugs and summons you.
Red brown sleeping mouth draws in the box with corded tongues.
Ground fluffed stuffs it shut, you step away with others to quibble over funds.
Cede it all care for nothing,
Eager to get yourself away.
Eat as a guest with caution, deny the soil and stores that
Nourished you. Strive to not let the location of
Death define you. Vainly
Evade that someone’s home loam will compost you.

“The Tornado” by Norman H. Russell

 Phillip Seymour Hoffman as
Phillip Seymour Hoffman as “Dusty” in ‘Twister’, a gloriously stupid movie I’ve seen a dozen times.

I like how the air pressure drops in the center of the poem. Tornadoes make me think of Kansas and the movie “Twister” and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Dusty in that movie. And of how Nature neither cares about us, or wished us malice. It is simply amoral.

The Tornado
By Norman H. Russell

just when he said the tornado
is now located at and moving at miles per hour
the television set went black
black as the sky black as death
black as the hell outside
black as the closet we groped into
falling all down with blankets and dresses
clutching each other our hearts pounding
loud as the pounding of the wind on the windows
gasping for breath holding our breath
like the wind outside roaring and pausing
then the great chunking of the short thunder
imprisoned in the small black animal
of a cloud rushing among the oak trees
went on east we heard it go we heard it talking
to the people in the eastern houses
and we sat still holding each other
still a long time yet in the black closet
slow to come back from the black
from the death in the teeth of the tornado.

There once was a man from Nantucket

There once was a man from Nantucket,
Who wished that he had a bucket.
He carried the sand
In his left and right hands,
And when he got to the end he had nuthin’.

 Leia to Grand Moff Tarkin:
Leia to Grand Moff Tarkin: “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

Batter my heart, three person’d God (Holy Sonnet XIV)

 John Donne, photo from The British Museum
John Donne, photo from The British Museum

I am a born & bred heathen, raised by a former Protestant and a former Catholic who vowed to never raise their kids with superstitions. While I thank them for, among many things, all the free Sundays over the course of my life, I have always found the emotionally-charged religious-themed poetry of John Donne compelling.

I think it’s the mix of hard-hitting phrases and anguished emotions that hardly seem to do with religious devotion at all, but the basic striving for something external, something beyond the self, and the roiling erotic urges blended in. Okay, maybe that’s hugely what religious urges are based on.

That a supposed monotheistic religion like Christianity ends up as a polytheism (father, son, spirit, Mother/Virgin Mary, angels, saints all available for supernatural help) is amusing. The centuries spent and volumes written by scholars trying to rectify the “mystery” of the Trinity is stupefying. But the desire to gain holy attention and succor from a variety of family & lover roles (including getting “married” to the Church or the Lord) ties into semi-conscious or unconscious needs we all have.

Batter my heart, three person’d God

by John Donne

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Why I will see “Hercules” starring The Rock

 The Nemean Lion with an invulnerable hide. OH MY FUCKING GODS, HERCULES, LOOK OUT!
The Nemean Lion with an invulnerable hide. OH MY FUCKING GODS, HERCULES, LOOK OUT!

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is awesome. He always elevates whatever material he’s given. Brett Ratner is a mediocre director and a dimwit. Despite Ratner, I will probably go see “Hercules”. Why? Four big reasons:

1.) “Conan the Barbarian” is one of the best, knowingly dumb, macho muscle movies ever made. The DVD commentary between director John Milius and Arnold Schwarzenegger is hilarious. The world needs a successor. I doubt it will be this movie, but it’s important to keep hope alive.

2.) I had no interest in the OTHER Hercules movie that came out. Its trailer didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Hercules myths at all.

 Hercules wearing the skin of the Nemean Lion, which apparently shrinks in the wash.
Hercules wearing the skin of the Nemean Lion, which apparently shrinks in the wash.

3.) In contrast, while this looks, at best, dorky – I was pleased to see the trailer showed ACTUAL ELEMENTS from Hercules’ myths including Cerebus, the Hydra, The Erymanthian Boar and Nemean Lion. (“Ah! Good!” I said aloud as these things showed up in the trailer.) Will this Hercules also clean the shit of thousands of animals that fill the Augean Stables by changing the course of a river? I HOPE SO!

4.) Way back in elementary school, I scripted out a film strip rendition of Hercules’ story that I didn’t complete in gifted mutant class (we called it PACE back then, later it was TAG. I don’t know what PACE stood for.) so I have a desire to read/tell his story to this day. He has a reputation as a brute, but actually his saga is more about the wit and might of man overcoming the chthonic amorality of nature. And kicking ass.

Hotel points

In a hotel
I never catch a movie at the start, it is at
Two-thirds left, or half, or fifteen minutes, or credits.
I never take the whole bed. Only half, or the edge.
The stacked pillows on the other side
Unmolested/unadjusted.

Bleach odors prove a person worked through,
Cleaned and folded and smoothed
This bed among dozens or hundreds today.

At times I don’t want her to do extra work,
And hang Do Not Disturb on the door.
More often, to my shame,
I don’t want a pickup, but want
To know another person walked through,
Did their thing, and left.
Like at a home instead of an asylum.

Once I’m in, and set my bags down,
The only laughs are mine.
The only smells are mine.
The only sighs and curses are mine.

The only browsings are mine.
The only detritus mine.
The only heart beating, steady or erratic, is mine.

The only sloth is mine.
The only staring mine.
The only rush of water is mine,
Or my neighbor’s.

 Complimentary bottles of water, complimentary bag of cookies, note from Juanita from Housekeeping.
Complimentary bottles of water, complimentary bag of cookies, note from Juanita from Housekeeping.

Inferno, cannibalism, Taylor Swift, public employee pensions

 Detail of
Detail of “Ugoilno and Archbishop Ruggieri” by Gustave Doré (yes, I have this book).

Two recent dreams the same night. I hope they were separate dreams.

1.) Two men laying on the ground, caked in blood, one gnawing off the ear of the other person who lies passive and closes his eyes every few seconds yielding or savoring getting devoured. Reminiscent of (I had the visual but had to look this up) Ugolino perpetually gnawing on the skull of his nemesis Archbishop Ruggieri in Dante’s Inferno (XXXII, 128-9).

2.) I duck out of a music show in a dignified theater with my dream-logic friend Taylor Swift. We get to the lobby, after a quick commiseration how BORING that show is, Swift starts peppering me with questions about how the public employee pension system works in California. I explain California is not my state, but I can send some info along. We decide a direct message via Twitter will be the best way to convey those links so she’ll see them.

Snort if you want, as if YOU have never had a dream about perpetual cannibalism and chatting economics with Taylor Swift.

 (Left) Ugolino snacking on Archbiship Ruggieri, illustration by Barry Moser. (Right) Taylor Swift.
(Left) Ugolino snacking on Archbiship Ruggieri, illustration by Barry Moser. (Right) Taylor Swift.
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