A  History of the Azores - Ms, 2005

I. Motives for Writing
II. A History of the Azores
III. Seven Deadly Sins
IV Poems for Paul Klee (1921)
V. Wake Up
VI. Poem Written at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert
 

For my brother Ted

Santa Maria

It’s nine days past the Boxer Day tsunami in Southeast Asia,

four years now since 9/11, last year’s quake in Bam, Iran

entirely forgotten, the war dead mounting in the fertile

crescent, napalm long since defoliated ferns in Vietnam.

I am sober, cold from swimming on New Years’ Day,

but watching the response of fishermen and altar boys

across the world. The ash of Krakatau still soots the air,

the North Pole has slipped its base, and polar bears

scrounge in expeditionary trash. I see Asian countries,

rupees glistening, with Red Cross brigades to sort debris

by elephant. Not one jungle animal was drowned, their

innard anemometers not something they could share.

Only sea gypsies ran from the long, low tide in time.

I see on the news that a woman, Malawati Daud, was

found a hundred miles from shore, eating the fruit

of the sago palm, blessing angels of the apocalypse

who come down for one last kiss. Doctors say she’s

pregnant, her flood child a Feejee mermaid, while

I measure phthalo of the green above a fractured earth,

just as I frame how people cope with thoughts to help.

But I’ll come back to that. I have to introduce my poem,

a set of fugues, not of voices but of places, a catalog

to undermine the best of intelligent design, with its nine

islands, its isolate gloom or joy yet islanded, its love of

Diderot’s Encyclopedia, houses as urns for saying things,

tongues all twisted into coils of DNA, its fading sense

of history, its swells to masculinity, ecstasy of El Greco’s

figures’ fingers bursting into flame, its elegies to life,

its sloppy process of osmosis, or hecatombs of bluefish, 

factories and factory ships gone dizzying or obsolete,

a paean to sugar and wild wheat. I limit the compass of

my questioning for now to what I want to know about

the Holy Ghost that nobody has seen except in greasy

windowpanes in Queens, who’s succored me plenty

since I was twenty, who’s the measure of uncertainty

we seek in Kierkegaard, or the split-second image

of the Yeti in a Modoc valley. Another age will pass,

a whelk shell shed, and a boy, like me, my nephew,

or maybe your own kin, will become a fish again,

a coelacanth, a thing of fire, descending to the sea,

a hunching primate loping away from evolution,

survivor of a population bottleneck when Toba’s

magma wrought a thousand years of winter, vog

and ash as ribbon snakes and trees in Eden froze.

He swims across an inlet, looking for shadows

of his grieving Dad.  Lost to the last tsunami?

Lost to years of shell fishing? Lost to killer bees

or walking catfish? Lost to barracudas or the law?

The chord of the sky today is so B-flat, as light

from a Transit of Venus creeps beneath my door.

I name rivers and a ferryman, enumerate the stars

to brighten moods of diplomats, say a prayer, and

place an obolos on the tongue of the newly dead.

I walk the South Street docks, mouth all pocked

by bitumen and sores, dream monkfish in butter,

in range of where twin towers stood, for rainy

August nights now it’s two strained beams of light

that aim at Alfecca Meridiana, Neptune’s Triton,

the dog star that pines for poet Wampanoags.

Sculptures out at Socrates Park are poor relations 

to the song that rises from the central cistern

of the city, from sleepy people in the Bronx.

You and I were boys with milkweed in our hair,

walking for days to see the rings of Saturn,

or by the Berlin Wall, remember? laying flowers

at Peter Fechter’s grave in Niemandsland. Ted,

when we got to the moon Enceladus, vapors

reeked of ambergris, like the Mary Celeste,

floating off the Azores, not a soul on board,

umbrella squid lurking in gulleys of the deep.

I wore a cross around my neck and Life-in-Death

herself befriended me till you and I would meet.

Remember the Battery bookstall where I bought

the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym? We heard

tell of the Peggy there, sung by Dylan Ransom,

a survivor’s grandson who lives in Winnebagos.

We paint squitchy seascapes of the Hebrides,

dream barren archipelagoes, lagoons on islands

of Korea, talk of the grass at the hanging tree

in Reason Street, of Underground Railroad guides,

Azores youth on Yankee whale boats, Sable Island

wrecks, ship-breaking beaches of Alang in India,

where floods can’t slow tar and fire and creosote.

I laugh out loud to share the story of Castle Hill,

where I read trucking poems in a Cardinals cap,

to crowds grogged out on cheese and Pinot Grigio.

Shetland ponies, Jarrett's jazz, and even Jackie O

was there, her face all cucumber mask and maggots.

Last month, we sat at a wake for Cape Verde boys

in Melville’s chapel, just up on Johnny Cake Hill,

near Henry the Navigator Park, as Bill the Butcher

read Moby-Dick, where trade in Thai sticks does

better than the fish wharves, where the bones

of Columbus were discovered, before they were

de-fleshed and packed off to Santo Domingo.

I’ve fallen for a waitress at the Old Stone Bank,

her black eyes, like yours, gazing into Neverland.

Under the jaw of a bone shark, brotherly John

rings out shanties for crews who say farewell to

stokeholds, singing Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her!

I dream the nine lakes of Annapurna, camels,

leopards, okapi in Bosch’s Garden of Delights,

cadaver dogs, and ninth-hour midnight sweats

brought on by The Bourne Supremacy, where

my love and I spent years, wading in Cranach’s

pool, supple naked flesh afire, seeking the youth

we couldn’t find in the waters of St. Augustine,

as we raise a girl to tend the world’s lush hedges.

Some days she imitates the wolf child in Truffaut,

at sixteen, quietly crooning Lait, Lait. Today she

says she is writing a poem every day, so I know

my job is done, and I am free to go to the Azores.

São Miguel

Here dairy farms roll down to the lowland kelp,

sweet milk drawn from lolling, free-range cows

and meadows brim with blue hydrangeas. Açores-- 

sea hawks-- climb the winds that sail to the cliffs

of Dover. On São Miguel, I stare at myriad stars:

Albireo, Kraz, and Double Double-- all ascending,

as we men prepare to take a pilgrimage across

the islands, not stopping for the sea but walking

on and through it, climbing seamounts named

for those who lost their lives on 9/11, looking

for Professor Aronnax of Paris, spying a giant

cuttlefish who sucks the silence out of us, in

warm currents that bear us to our middle age,

the Middle Passage slowed but unforgiving,

as human trafficking abounds in Ivory Coast

and on bright red Beijing junks, full of wasted,

aging Maoists above the barnacles and eelgrass.

On this green island, women are trashing corn:

at Sete Cidades, a wandering princess fell in love

with a mountain man, an archangel with a lilt.

Blue sharks cast wide their jaws for krill, and

whatever truth there is in keeping an eye on

Somalia, right here, in Providence, is lost

to the fog at Fogland, a sea once fished by

Narragansett Indians. Politics and poetry-- 

uneasy bedfellows, like Queequeg-Ishmael

under a moth-ridden quilt. I read of Rabelais’s

Sea of Frozen Words, laugh in the bath at Sponge

Bob Square Pants, a cruel joke played on those

who would believe in me. My Pomeranian lies

prone in moonlight, left leg kicking at the sky-- 

I can’t find enough air to breathe, for bellows

that once belonged to lungfish now are mine,

however wizened and grown thin by inactivity,

a broken knee, a telescopic focus on the wrong

things, till at dawn, I know time’s puzzle, love’s

pure furnace, kids at home, hard black sausage.

From one dark Cyclops cave, my world is blind

to blindfish, to tantalizing giganturus, to sea lice

infestations inheriting good, green, insect blood.

A flying squid, corsairs and caravels above him,

squeegees the Atlantic in search of Aztec gold,

hovering on abyssal plains, out of reach but ever

deep-sea feeding in a fracture zone till he shakes

knolls, spurs, or calderas of the Continental shelf.

My grandson, not yet born into this world, wants

to walk the rills and beachcomb for brittle stars,

tin canisters of oil, Sumatran rhino fever pills,

rusted cuckoo clocks, and bow-rails of the Titanic,

just as his grandmother, aged eight, walked pine

cone trails of Acoma, pigmy rattlesnakes hissing

at the dried-up oceans of New Mexico. Blowing

a kokopelli flute, he looks to Pico do Norte, but

no Second Coming comes: no angels, just slave

trade ruts of earth, vast and waterless, a shaman

like a turtle on his back, telling stories till he turns

them into songs, on a day when Earthlings said

they could do away with stars. Today I call Michael,

to see if he’s safe at home from India. He’d seen

the Khajuraho temples, he spoke to Krishnamurti,

he ate bad mangos in Goa, as water seeped across

a cafe floor, not more. Michael, home, and safe!

And after Rajan Ramasamy calls to say his Madras

family is okay, I know those near to me are living.

It hasn’t been the end of nature for all time-- I just

wish there was more I could do. Jesus and John

deflect; they point away from themselves, a guy

exclaimed one day in church, and I, too, deflect;

I point away from myself, towards the better good.

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