Jon Frankel's Blog, page 9

WALKING ON ICE

Walking on ice

I don’t want

To slow down

I don’t want to fall

So I slide along

Going backwards

Watching the face

Of a future tyrant

In a malignant clown

The call of a wall

Who doesn’t belong

Buried in the yard

 

THE ROOM THE BROOM WAS IN

The room the broom was in

Was unswept and the lady wept

Her auburn hair in the last flare

Of sun tied back in a bun

That pinched her face a grimace

So profound no sound was heard

In the house an eon of chaos ensued

Bitter downfall in a pile of glitter

We thought was a knot of stars

 

Black Candles

Black Candles

Curtains blown like sails

Brickface florid with sun

Black candles all around

Tongues blazing in the mirror

Lady, last love lost

You bay the sky you are

Like the music of leaves in autumn

Skittering into piles

ISLE OF DOGS

A NOTE TO THE READER:

 

Isle of Dogs is Volume Two of Drift, a multivolume saga set in a world that was first described in the novel The Man Who Can’t Die (Whiskey Tit, 2016). It is the immediate prequel to the first volume in the series, GAHA: Babes of the Abyss (Whiskey Tit, 2014). GAHA takes place in Los Angeles, in the years 2540-2543. Isle of Dogs takes place mostly in New York and surrounding areas and begins in the year 2500 with the birth of Sargon 4, a character introduced in GAHA. Note that the publication order is not the order in which the books should be read. Isle of Dogs is divided into four parts of approximately equal length.

 

While in most respects Isle of Dogs is a stand-alone novel, it is assumed by the author that the reader will have read GAHA first. The Man Who Can’t Die, set in 2180, has many more details about the world from which Drift arises, a world devastated by climate change and the political, social, and individual responses to that disaster. But it is not necessary to read that book to understand the action of GAHA and Isle of Dogs. Future volumes will complete the story of DRIFT.

from recovered poems

stepping through a field

of marbles, maple trees

on either side and sunlight

sprained on late summer grass

all along Stonewall Point

things you said and did

grew green as daisies in

unruly masses of leaves

lay side-by-side your words

mine with ears of corn

and fireflies the night

I burned and lied about

the peacock bush I never

saw you yawn before

it was a garbage can

flies like christmas lights

dancing on dog shit

but it’s true I love when

sunlight spent on corn

excites this dusty pastel

air and august fills the lungs

Poem for Peggy Billings

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW for Peggy Billings

What did the woman in the window see

What stars did her dark eyes rest upon

Sleepless mind at the pane as it spun

Hands of the world receding, gone

Into the strong memory of the sun

Words dried to ink and a cup of tea

Moon above the curled grass and stubble

Of corn and soybean a luminous bubble

In the wreck of planets a bright ring sang

Nothing could contain that sharp eye

As she bowed down low to walk on the sky

Rising to the glass for this life’s circle rang

Out 90 years, closed the grain of this old tree.

The woman in the window is free.

FOR JOHN M.

Death Bed for John M

My friend, an old ma

Becomes a baby

Swaddled in a sheet

Pale hairless belly ballooning

Blind hands pulling the air

Stub of his penis pierced

With a catheter morphine

Focuses his grey eyes

On the middle air they are

Islands between this shore

And the last dispersing edge

Of galaxies feathered to dust

Behind the lens a disc of memory

Voices asking do you remember

A jolt between naps

Glimpses of the yard roses

Trees he planted as nursery slips

Shade his window black days

Behind ahead a tangle

Of tubes and pills counted out

By his wife who rests a cool

Hand on his forehead, mother.

 

Peggy Billings

Peggy Billings, poet, activist, friend, in her own words, from the afterword to her second book of poems, Red Rooster Crowing. Peggy died yesterday. She was 90. A dear friend and teacher, and they words cannot convey the reality. I met Peggy in 1998 or 1999 and a workshop given by our friend Bridget Meeds. We were ostensibly the teachers, but I learned far more about poetry from Peggy, who only began to write in retirement (forced on her by macular degeneration). One meets extraordinary people sometimes. I have been lucky in that way. Peggy is a star in my firmament. For over twenty years we met periodically in different poetry groups. Of the original group, Ann Silsbee, Inta Ezergailis, and now Peggy are gone. Peggy led a long and significant and soulful life. I have transcribed a portion of her afterword and a couple of poems. Goodnight my dear friend. I will never look upon the stars without seeing you.

WORDS TO THE READER FROM THE WRITER

I WAS BORN AT MIDNIGHT—BETWEEN SEPTEMBER 9 AND SEPTEMBER 10, 1928.

The doctor attending to my mother said it was the 9th; my mother said it was the 10th. Since the doctor was known to take a nip or two, and since Mama had given birth to seven sons and another daughter before me, the family leaned toward her version of the night’s events.

I loved being born at midnight—that haunting, mysterious hour. Is this the source of the ache of in-between-ness I have always carried inside, assuring a lifelong search for the other? I have lived my life standing on thresholds, in thin places, a life of walking on edges and narrow ledges.

[….]

Words still surprise me, even frighten me sometimes. As Pearl Harbor did, and the Battle of the Bulge; as the sight of Hiroshima did when I went there in 1952 on my way to Korea. The talk going on inside my head up to then had the accent of the Deep South—its sights and sounds, its images. From 1952, for over a decade, I lived in a different tongue, in completely different sights and sounds. In wartime Pusan, muddy streets with open sewers lined with cardboard shacks, a mother screaming as I passed, shoving at me her dead baby. The bomb-cratered roads and bridges leading to Seoul, streets and narrow alleys filled with rubble. Devastation co-mingled with beauty, ancient palaces and gardens still intact, April’s cherry blossoms. The smell of a steamy noodle shop, the midnight call of the blind masseuse.

Just as I carried Mississippi with me to Korea, I have carried Korea wherever I have been since then. I was drawn back to work out of New York City in the racial justice struggles of the sixties—the Selma march, anti-Klan marches—on into the anti-Vietnam War movement of the seventies, with the tragedies of Kent State and Jackson State, and the women’s movement of the eighties. From the muddy plantation roads of the Delta to Manhattan’s cavernous avenues, this was my world.

As I write this, I am on a country road again, in another old farmhouse, this one in the Finger Lakes region of New York. It’s where I have written these poems. Sleep often eludes me into the late night hours. Like Mark Twain, I try to write myself out of grief, calling on past memories. I invite in Old Talk, a language I used to know, but now barely understand. I invite the ghosts of small creatures burrowing, of obelisks of light. Light enough to stir the doe, startle the sparrows from their nests. I invite the ghosts of dying stars and the shadows of the Bridegroom Tree.

In the thin places in between dark and light, I invite a humming wire, and the mad dog at bay within my brain. I invite in the panther waiting at the back pasture. I invite in the ghosts of my mother’s shoes.

Sometimes I wonder who I am and where I belong. Then I hear a poem, and I know.

–PEGGY BILLINGS 9/10/28-7/19/2019

 

GOODBYE TO THE BRIDEGROOM TREE

November 12, 2013

I watched you fall

where you had stood

planted beside the Bridal Tree

nearly two centuries ago.

 

The sawdust which rose

from where you fell

rode the light drifting down,

covered the circles of your life.

 

It shone like the cosmic dust

forming the rings of Saturn—

the remains of stars and broken moons.

 

 

REVERSE POLARITIES

 

If it is true

that the earth’s magnetic field

is fading,

 

and if it is true

that the cause

lies in the cooling of its inner core of iron,

 

and if it is true

that in consequence,

polarities will shift—

 

north becoming south,

south becoming north,

east and west reversing—

 

then I might be forgiven

when the inner core of me

turns cold,

 

and the images in my head

wander from pole to pole and I don’t know

where I belong,

 

and the frozen fields

outside my second-story window

burn in an aurean light,

 

and the steam locomotive

hisses to a halt and my father steps down

at the end of his run to New Orleans,

 

puzzled by the cold air and neon sky

and the blank whiteness covering everything.

VIBRALUX

Jenny Mae Leffel will never sing again

Her voice is lost in the rafters of heaven

Her notes shower the earth with meteors

The smoke of the verses rises and tears

The syntax disintegrates as time totals

Her careening chariot the smashed wheels

Bent but still turning in the afterglow,

This refuge, this remnant, this echo,

Of crashing symbols and a piercing

Siren above the screech of steel strings

BABYLON SIPPAR, LIBRARIAN

Once the distinction between real and imagined history had been introduced, they began to spend their free time in the library of the Winter Palace. It was overseen by a surly, over-educated Ruler named Babylon Sippar, who, despite his exalted name, dwelt in the Minor ranks of the Rulers, related to Sargon and Renee on one side and the execrated, assassinated Maximilian on the other, by natural crossbreeding and selective cloning.

Baby Sip, as he was called by the staff who cleaned around his uncongenial figure twice a week (there were no dusty tomes on the shelves), was a known libertine, an opium addict and heterosexual, who made no effort to hide either. But he was also schooled at the Basel University Library, one of the largest collections in the world, being somehow immune to the Age of Ignorance, or, as Baby Sip called it, The Age of Willful Stupidity. The habits he acquired there rendered him unemployable to the government or the military, so at Robin’s urging Sargon and Renee assigned him the post of Librarian, a minimal wage to be paid out from the funds accruing to his genome.

With remuneration sufficient to maintain a modest dissipation, he took the post and soon the walls were varnished by his compulsive smoking. In the morning he chain smoked Gauloises straights and downed espresso, clouding the sun that flooded the atrium. In the afternoon he puffed at a hookah and the sweet smell of opium, hashish, and tobacco drifted upward, layering with the dust, until dinner, which he took in his quarters with a cigar and more opium and hashish and sometimes a glass pipe of heroin.

Throughout the day he drank brandy from a snifter, switching to port before dinner, then wine, followed by more brandy, and read promiscuously, devoting his life to a thorough explication, adumbration, and elaboration of Finnegans Wake, which he was convinced was an instructional manual for the raising of the dead. The only interruption he would countenance was sexual. For sex he would do whatever was necessary to obtain consent and achieve consummation. Other than these infrequent but intense sexual adventures his studies could proceed uninterrupted, because no one ever used the library except for the Surrogate, who sent for books, preferring the European novel, of which he approved, as well as children’s books, of which he did not. Then, one day, the children came to destabilize his remarkably balanced existence.

The library was housed in the South Tower, on ten ascending tiers connected by two spiral stairs with iron rails that wound about the atrium in a double helix. Above that soared the steeple. Sargon and Phaedra stood before Babylon Sippur’s modest desk, occupied by a first folio of Audubon’s Quadrupeds of North America and a jagged stack of worn books, Goidelic Glossaries, Early Irish Texts, Etymology of Germanic and Romance Languages, a Dover Edition of Wallace Budge’s Egyptian Book of the Dead, Bruno’s Il Candelaio, Brustein’s Mysteries of Euclid Explained, and on top, torn pieces of paper marking every other page, a leather-bound, gilt-edged edition of Rupert’s translation of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. Behind him was a wall of bookshelves, filled with the library catalogue, dictionaries, biographies and bibliographies, and some books of foreign collection holdings he had managed to procure from booksellers in Geneva and Zurich.

“Sire, we are here to examine some books,” stated Young Sargon, startling Baby Sip out of a revery. He had been sipping a mildly hallucinogenic tea and was imagining he was actually deep inside the earth, deep as the tower above him was tall. He had no idea what was in and what was out. But he knew, upon full waking, that it was Young Sargon who stood before him, with his bastard sister Phaedra. Baby Sip studied the feral girl of whom he had heard so much gossip. Her sexuality shamed him briefly and then he saw it clear, an intense sensual intelligence, beyond her years, which caused an obscure stirring in his groin.

Lowering his eyes, he said, “It is I who should say Sire, Sire. I am here to serve you, it is my job and,” he looked at Phaedra, “my pleasure.” Phaedra’s face was blank, and at that moment quite adult, as she was absorbed by surveying the stacks. The way the tiers rose and stairs spiraled gave the illusion of infinite space, infinite books. “What sorts of books would you like to read? We have tales of Martian travels, the complete, unabridged 17 volume Burton translation of the 1001 Nights. Tier 3 is devoted exclusively to fantasy fiction of all sorts, also young readers and graphic novels.”

“Actually,” said Phaedra, turning her toes in and out and seeming suddenly quite juvenile, forcing his shame to return, “We want real history, not books for stupid little children full of fairy tales. We want the real history of Mars and the origins of the Rulers. Especially the MONS OLYMPUS.”

He was taken aback, but still feeling fuzzy at the edges, as his mind bled into hallucinatory fields, he said, “Mons, indeed. I have heard of the Mons Veneris.”

“We aren’t interested in venerated mons,” she answered.

“Bog’s your uncle! You are young yet, but I would point out that Mounds have been Venerated throughout history. Tip. I’m sure if we exagim the shelves we shall find what you seek.” He reached under the desk and pulled to his lips a long snaking hose, which he puffed a few times. Smoke rising from his mouth, he stood unsteadily and retrieved from the shelf behind him a leather bound catalogue of Winter Palace Library holdings in subjects H-M, History to Mathematics, and handed it to them. “This book was compiled by my predecessor. It includes a finding guide for the maps, a passion of the Old President, your Grand Sire, Sire. Guard it well. The entries indicate tiers, ranges and shelf numbers. To wit, 6-6-6 will be on the 6th floor, 6th range, 6th shelf. Always in that order, floor/range/shelf.”