And charmed a way for her people
Out of holocaust
The Jews weren’t annihilated in Persia after all
She thwarted schemes; they didn’t perish
But their defense went on the offensive
And the almost-annihilated became annihilators
Esther spoke up again and
(Please God, in time to stop the wheel
Of blood feud revenge cycles from turning)
Decreed instead another party
To turn mourning into dancing
Replacing war with a holiday
(Teaching us not to fight for salvation
But to dance for it)
Esther I think had a wicked sense of humor
A gallows humor
And God seems to have a gallows humor too
Giving us the gift of just one certainty—
A certain death—
Then spinning a Resurrection tale
We are invited to believe
In a scarlet thread and a golden dawn
Thorny crown and crystal throne
Bloodied crossbeam and rolled away stone
God is Absurd
Which is perhaps why I—the only way I could—
Believe
Only in a dancing Jester God, a Jokester with the Perfect Prank:
To love us, each and every fucking one
Alleluia
Paul W. Child
World Diverted
Earth takes us in awhile as transient guests;
we live by habit, which we must unlearn.
Anna Akhmatova, “There Are Four of Us”
(translated by Stanley Kunitz)
The river where the Sioux boys dashed the carp
upon the rocks because they were trash fish
was dammed up and diverted.
The boys I feared and envied
not because they were Sioux boys
but because they skipped school,
fishing irreligious all day long,
are dead in gunfights now, parched with thirst from type 2 diabetes,
cirrhotic in the penitentiary,
reading Zane Grey pulp with yellowing eyes.
The house I lived in as a boy
in the South Dakota town of trains and steeples,
came down in a maul of clattering hammers,
clutter of grey plaster, laths, and horsehair,
a house so broken by the generations
of Irish bully-boys and coal-haired shy colleens long-dead
I doubt that anyone even noticed
the hole I bored with penknife in the bedroom wall
to watch my virgin aunt Peg in the bath
while the world took turns,
a peephole moon cast shadows on the snow,
and icicles wept out their days upon the muntins.
The cathedral school in which I learned my Latin and long lessons,
timid as a chapel mouse beneath the towering eyes
of black and frowning nuns,
closed when the young priest
with the shock of chestnut hair
whom in my genuflections I tried so hard to please
but whose eye always narrowed
on my pretty little brother,
was sent for some mysterious reason back to Flandreau,
with the last tall nun on the last day
when I slammed down the lid
of the long-suffering wooden desk
at the last 3:30 bell and raced down to the river
to watch the Sioux boys dash the heads of carp
upon the rocks, the shattered orange-pink scales,
the cloy of fish-slick stones and slip of mucus,
tangled filament and hooks, sad, broken lips.
If you look for the old cathedral school, the house, the boys,
you will not find them where they were
in their accustomed places in that northern town.
If you look tonight for the cold winter moon,
you will not find it where you left it,
shining on the trainyards and the roofs of rooming houses.
And if you look for me tomorrow,
you will not find me who I was.
The world has unlearned all of its long habits.
I never was the world’s guest; the world was mine.
The Fault, Dear Brutus
The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars
but in our cells, ghost ships shuttling our wills
upon the busy enzymatic tides
to the far outposts of the bone and nerve.
My cunning and my hatred of smug men,
that balding, simpering queen of Bithynia
whom Nicomedes pinned down on his couch,
a despot lubricate with Asian spittle,
the great man twittering like a conquering moth,
were stitched into my chromosomes at birth,
a hate so great that even as a boy
I took on Sulla’s brat in fisticuffs
and would have kicked his shins and blacked his eye
if our tutor had not separated us.
And now while we fret idle, driftwood fools,
this ponce plays pretty at the falling sickness,
foaming at the mouth, when it’s convenient,
knowing that a strapping young centurion
will force his sword between his yellowed dentures
to keep the prick from biting off his tongue.
And this is Rome?
Friend, the things that we might do together,
I, jackal-headed, dangerous, and you,
a handsome man born in a wicked world
where beauty cruelly tyrannizes men;
I, busy in the history of knives
while Porcia stabs your palate with her tongue
and twists her fingers in your glossy curls.
This temporizing will no longer do,
for scheming with slack nerve is impotent,
and beauty has responsibilities.
Let’s make this despot his own haruspex,
his final words not et tu Brute but
my uncoiled entrails tell me that I’ll die
of daggers here upon the Senate steps.
(His self-reflections never trawl too deep.)
I know a vates who is serviceable,
has ominous dates at hand for any month,
and falconer for hire who’ll let his birds
out for a nighttime shrieking. We’ll consult
the almanacs to find the perfect day
when the moon blot out the sun in an eclipse;
the comets, bloody rain, and all the rest
we can manage easily with lasers.
Our will will find some willing conduit,
a scruffy earringed small-town English hack
who’ll make a shilling on the London stage,
and if his Cassius is pimply-faced,
his Brutus snuffling through a crooked septum,
and if we cringe when they fall clumsily
upon their wooden swords, at least they play
at our brave deeds—but only if we act.
Sure, old kings will still go mad upon the moors
and drunken porters piss on Scottish doors
because they do, because they always have,
but if our fate be stranded in the cells,
the blackamoor won’t suffocate his bitch,
those dago teens won’t feel each other up
and kiss themselves to death in the cold tomb,
that moping Danish prig will fail to act,
resort instead to Prozac for his moods.
a trireme stilled in cytoplasmic seas,
if you don’t have the requisite x-y,
I know a woman who is man enough
to make her point by stabbing her own thigh,
a manic vira
go who understands
the hate of tyranny cannot be quenched,
as you must certain find out when she snuffs
the orange coals of her tongue in your pretty mouth.
The Muse I Married
The muse I married, my prophetess and seer,
who once arrested lightning from the gods,
now gossips at the fence with Kathy Kuhar;
sinks to her Slavic ankles in the backyard mud,
her hair tacked up with clothespins;
whinnies out I saids, she saids, he saids
and clucks about the Devlin girl’s behavior.
The mad, divining bride who shook in fits
when random gales of gods blew through her,
now hikes up her skirts at every chance she gets
and dances to amuse the neighbor girls.
Oh where is inspiration when the crazed
Cassandra of North Sawdust Drive
who stood upon a scaffolding of stars and seas
and screeched out oracles
now snores in front of flinty television skies,
her eyes rolled back like clamshells,
while I warm coffee from the day before
and pack the children’s lunchpails?
Oh where is inspiration when the mad suburban sibyl
who, frenzied, read the flights of birds,
hair scratching like barbed wire at the sky,
now gabbles on and on and on and on
with recipes for budget-saving chicken,
bawling halfway up and down our street in self-congratulations,
giddy with the noise of her own tongue?
Or have the gods themselves descended
to shouting out the weather and trifling cures for head lice,
to recipes for scouring sinks and haggling over prices,
to meddling with a pretty girl’s fall from grace?
The gods, I know, will always speak in riddles,
which we may never understand.
But must I scribble down this silly hinny’s chatter
to catch at the divine wind?
Astyanax in Dactyls
Hiding in bellies of airplanes, the wicks of their eyes soaked in petrol, the
Argive terror come once again with the dawn bloody-fingered and wearing white
helmets of tusks stitched together like dominoes made out of shiny-toothed
boars, the blind killers, to topple the topless two towers in a frenzy of
fire the city of commerce and industry, boulevards, subways, and
tony boutiques in an orgy of butchery, huge broken knuckles of
gashed stone and spears of plate glass tall as Trojans, the vast bloody cakes of red
flesh raining down in a glutting of swords while the knees of the towers were
buckling, the Hudson become once again the Scamander still burning, the
sacrifice billowing up to the ravening skies of Manhattan.
Those
breakers of horses some two hundred fell from the floors of the towers to
graved paving stones: Some were pushed by a crush at the windows, some blinded by
smoke smut too stupid to know they had come to the edge, and still other ones
leapt for their lives to their deaths, choking better to drown in the air than to
drown in the wash of the suffocate petrol. Some jumpers held hands as they
drafted down. Friends? perhaps lovers? or two who had shared the same cubicle
twenty-three years without saying hello but determined that though we must
die by ourselves they would not die alone. And the pimply-faced red-headed
boy from the mailroom too shy till this moment to speak to her takes by the
hand the plump married young mother of two from the Bronx and through snaggled teeth
whispers her, “So it is time. Shall we go?”
Videos show these lost
fallers of Ilium drifting down raglike or fluttering excited, some
playing at somersaults, aerialists frolicking each in performance (though
one woman modestly holds down her skirt to prevent it from splaying in-
decently). Each of them woke by himself to the nightmare of gravity,
rush of an ear-wincing wind as he tore through the awnings of sidewalk ca-
blackness forever, there fallen or thrown by the Argives debauched in their
carnival killings the sirens’ hosanna from Patrick’s Cathedral, the
tocsins exhausted.
But one from the clouds of the ninety-fifth floor in the
office of Marsh and McLennan, professional services, stepped off the
window ledge so nonchalantly he might have been strolling through doors of a
lift. Of all those who fell terrified plunged from the towers that day only
he understood that a falling must fatally follow the building of
towers, that even the towering father whose horse plumes will frighten us
into the bosoms of nurses and wives, knew that even he falls and be-
comes but a chine of raw ox-meat, his wounds kisses puckering from sharp lipsticked
spears and the killer with Greek eye-slits drags him around and around the two
towers behind an orange bulldozer dead.
There was nothing so routine as
rising that day from his desk, to collect all his papers, to walk to the
window as if to remark that the weather looked ominous, step on the
ledge and to fall through the atmosphere, fall without fireman’s net or the
webbed net of fate fixed to catch him, he catching an image reflected in
glass of the towers a boy who had falln from the sky like a dying young
god who was Troy’s other hope.
What did it matter that children are
casualties, paying the tax on their father’s mad vanities? What did it
matter the boys his own age with whom he had been playing just yesterday
baseball upon the acropolis lawn, those two brothers Thymbraeus and
young Antiphantes entwined in the knots of sea pythons because their old
man had called Greeks Greeks?
What did it matter the bitch pathological
liar with barbed wire hair who had screeched out that bloody Achaean hearts
beat in the bellies of planes, who were hopped up on poppers, cantharides,
pills, that among them the son-thirsty son of the man who had dragged the boy’s
father who screamed like an eagle had vowed to avenge his own father’s weak
tears in a moment of womanish sympathy, gotten of woman and
woman himself but born mad to be brutal who found a new faith to give
cause to his bloody psychopathy. What did it matter that she would be
strapped to an altar by sweat-matted Locrians, greased with their spittle, and
raped to the nub?
What
did it matter that just before falling he
saw in his dizzying eyes in a red New York harbor the burning of
water the thousand unsettled who followed like formicant insects with
purpose one man who was bent under burden of piety, man on his
back like a haversack, clutching the hand of a candle-capped boy, the man’s
wife left behind in the orgy of fire become a dead wick of black
carbon returning to fetch her Versace hand bag, while he clutched in the
other the lares, penates, the fond household gods of Algonquians and
old Dutch patroons, Peter Stuyvesant? What did it matter the refugees
willing to risk the horizon, the skyline was riven with masts while the
spires of gods of that city were burning behind them, the falling man
knowing that they too would build up their towers in other walled cities of
wide lanes and tram cars, that they too would tumble down buildings in orgies of
blood to be washed by the sea to the shores of new empires and knowing their
impious jets too would cut the pale throat of the sky, that their hop-headed
warriors would pry the veiled priestess to unholy shards and America
forfeit its right to be tragic?
This was the man of all men who knew
falling that towers will always be raised to be razed until history
waves its last flag, its last widow dies clutching the medals her husband won
falling on alien soil in the last sputtering war until, everything
vertical made horizontal, the earth becomes flat yet again and its
gods are all dead.
Would it have mattered if seeing him falling past
stories a god interfering had reached through the greasy opacus of
ashes, had scooped him from air and then set him down gently in Smyrna two
hundred or five thousand miles away in the fields of white clover and
silos, of gambrel-roofed houses, the tilted green valley where Pleasant Brook
flows through the veins of the poets to mix with the sludge of the Tiber?
Afterwards helmeted rescuers up to their eyes in the ashes of
brokers, accountants, cinereous boys who had shuttled the lunch carts from
story to story, the tarry mascara of blonde secretaries, the
noisome black flies in the dead air of soothsaid September, men carrying
corpses upon their bent backs like rucksacks, could not find him amid all the
potsherds, the broken amphora with pictures of men running naked a-