I feel like this one requires some explanation. It’s an idea I’ve been thinking about for as long as I can remember, influenced by my recent reading of Rachel Carson, and composed at 3:30 in the morning. I’ve noticed before that late at night my writing changes, this is probably the best example of that phenomenon; I don’t know where it came from, I don’t know where it’s going, It’s just an image - don’t read into it.
The Cavern of the Ocean Tree
He looked out over the blue black flickering sea.
The grey roof above it. The rolling sand. The heartbeat of the waves.
Knelt and unlaced his shoes, placed them on a drift-log.
His socks. His shirt.
The sand was cool. Fine. Dry.
He walked toward the surf, the beach grew firm, ridged.
Moisture pressed out from around his feet.
The foam on his ankles. The eel grass strands pulled along, unwinding.
He submersed and swam. The water cold in its deeps, thickening under the pressure of its vast weight.
And swam. Beyond cresting waves and the reaching headland.
Swam.
Dove and surfaced.
Dove and did not rise, rip tide drawing him under, far down into the cold.
He reached out, flailing, gripped some tuberous passing mass and was jerked below the current.
Floating before the ancient lord of the ocean.
Tentacles splayed, great body still, eyes meeting his in inhuman focus.
Otherness and strength, beast unmet. Awareness like none else in that place.
Ropey limbs en-twisting him, the behemoth dived.
He did not fight the powerful drag down, his mind numbed by depth and cold and water.
Salt burned his eyes. The mirrored undersurface dim. He could not close them for the gazing. Above him, silhouetted, in the currents and undercurrents, schools of fish racing along invisible pathways to all corners of the ocean.
Dived and turned, arc into a rocky shelf. Last light disappeared.
Then air and dripping and thrashing and the ocean’s blood pressed from him to flow down the stone. Released and collapsed.
Light. Glowing rind of life, blue and white. Flowering polyps and skittering shelled things.
Mussels, shining in the phosphoresce their curious mirrored being, hanging from the notched stone above him as he stood.
Stepped with care, cave floor grooved but slick. Waters filled with some lit creature flowing from within.
Chamber narrowed, shortened.
He crouched and slid, facing the myriad fauna of the vault wall.
Walls opened and dropped away, he tumbled and slid.
A basin pulsing with the same light, shallow and wide.
At the center rising a low isle, on it an arbor of the sea.
Kelp rooted to the stone, reaching up, fronds held aloft, barnacles, sea moss, driftwood and starfish, green mottled crabs.
A hundred denizens of the tide.
All alit. All dripping from some crevice far above. All growing, wild with life.
Across the pool a dwelling in the cavern wall.
A being. Calm, pale as the moon. Young as he and small, standing lightly beneath the luminescent branching leaves of the ocean tree.
Her hair dark, long and haggard, cut against dull stone and washed in diatomaceous water. Gown worn, once white.
He waded into the pool, immersed to his knees, stepped on to the isle. She before him in radiance.
Her eyes afire with the violet crystalline fractaling of the eternal sky.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Friday, March 5, 2010
Yesterday’s Cascadian
What is tomorrow
What is today
What is my dreams in the night
What is the gritty wet sand
on the lines of the road
What a place I am not to be
Low in the realm of the
great vehicles of steel and fume,
passing this way to the narrowing dark.
Lying as crucified on the cooling tar
No star-eyed beams come past
No merciful lights to speak my name
No tomorrow promised today
What is today
What is my dreams in the night
What is the gritty wet sand
on the lines of the road
What a place I am not to be
Low in the realm of the
great vehicles of steel and fume,
passing this way to the narrowing dark.
Lying as crucified on the cooling tar
No star-eyed beams come past
No merciful lights to speak my name
No tomorrow promised today
Wrath of Your God
I am a conscript in the host of the Pharaoh.
I am a child of Canaan.
I am a slave in Gomorrah.
And I have felt the wrath of your god.
Content to tend my fields in the turning of the sun
and the flooding of the Nile’s everspring
I was taken to watch over the slave nation of my king,
watch them toil with brick and mortar until their lost son came out of the desert;
and then saw their god bring low my people without mercy.
In mourning we commanded them to depart
but in vengeance pursued
and died when the waters of the treasonous sea came crashing about us.
Yes, I have felt the wrath of your god.
A child, I played among the cedars of my home on the mountain
and ate from the wealth of my inheritance.
My father was summoned to arms against a marauding people
and fought them at Jericho and Ai and Lachish;
aaw our brother’s walls fall before the feet and the swords of a nation of slaves,
returned to my mother no flesh but the brace from his wrist.
Then unto us they came,
ordered by a deity without name to kill our every lamb and child,
to slaughter for the promise of paradise.
Yes, I have felt the wrath of your god.
Burdened and beset, my life burning hell.
I have been imprisoned the entirety of my years in groveling bondage.
I have been raped each night until I bleed unceasingly and no man will touch me.
Beaten and whipped so that I lay in the street for days,
crawling to hide each night from the languid pillagers.
And this day a foreign man came and all left me to demand his new flesh.
In the early morning I saw him flee the city without backward glance
and behind him came a firestorm to consume this wretched place.
Yes, I have felt the wrath of your god.
I am Dresden, Verdun and Nanjing
I am the whore and the fetus
And I have felt the wrath of your god
I am a child of Canaan.
I am a slave in Gomorrah.
And I have felt the wrath of your god.
Content to tend my fields in the turning of the sun
and the flooding of the Nile’s everspring
I was taken to watch over the slave nation of my king,
watch them toil with brick and mortar until their lost son came out of the desert;
and then saw their god bring low my people without mercy.
In mourning we commanded them to depart
but in vengeance pursued
and died when the waters of the treasonous sea came crashing about us.
Yes, I have felt the wrath of your god.
A child, I played among the cedars of my home on the mountain
and ate from the wealth of my inheritance.
My father was summoned to arms against a marauding people
and fought them at Jericho and Ai and Lachish;
aaw our brother’s walls fall before the feet and the swords of a nation of slaves,
returned to my mother no flesh but the brace from his wrist.
Then unto us they came,
ordered by a deity without name to kill our every lamb and child,
to slaughter for the promise of paradise.
Yes, I have felt the wrath of your god.
Burdened and beset, my life burning hell.
I have been imprisoned the entirety of my years in groveling bondage.
I have been raped each night until I bleed unceasingly and no man will touch me.
Beaten and whipped so that I lay in the street for days,
crawling to hide each night from the languid pillagers.
And this day a foreign man came and all left me to demand his new flesh.
In the early morning I saw him flee the city without backward glance
and behind him came a firestorm to consume this wretched place.
Yes, I have felt the wrath of your god.
I am Dresden, Verdun and Nanjing
I am the whore and the fetus
And I have felt the wrath of your god
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Visit to St. Johns
Following my trip to europe one would expect me to be much more relaxed about travel; not so, I remain nervous, irrationally worried and generally extremely stressed about the whole endeavor. This time however, it was not without good reason: my flight from LAX to Santa Fe was canceled due to snow in Santa Fe, and LAX turns out to be the most gargantuan, byzantine airport ever conceived by man. There are something like 7 terminals and no transportation between them except walking, sometimes through the kind of very long tunnels one might expect in a nuclear missile silo. To make a 12 hour experience short, I flew to Albuquerque after 6 hours in LAX and then took a shuttle to St. John’s College. My room turned out to be some sort of designated visitor room, with two bunk-beds, sheets and blankets, and a window that was very difficult to open; my roommates of sorts were a guy from Utah and another from Michigan, reasonable people in most ways.
The main part of the tour was from Thursday morning to Friday afternoon, and consisted of observation of three classes and a seminar, a tour of the campus, free food from the cafeteria, and panel discussions with administrators, (to console parents), and current students (to get real answers to questions like, ‘can you go to school here and be a stoner? - some can, some can’t’, ‘how can a students religious beliefs be communicated during philosophical discussions’ - as long as you aren't arrogant about it you’ll be fine, and ‘we’ve all heard how wonderful St. John’s is, what don’t you like about it’ - it’s isolated, fairly non-diverse, and historical analyses of texts are discouraged). Also on the down side - the ratio of males to females is 60:40, which would be at least reversed should I attend any even nominally religious school; and this isn’t a ‘my chances of getting a girlfriend’ issue, in my experience females are considerably more intelligent and less inane than males.
Over the two days I attended freshman lab, math, and seminar (Plato’s Phaedrus) and junior language (french), as well as spending copious amounts of time reading, I finished Fight Club, Waiting for Godot, and Brave New World. Final opinions: Fight Club is brutal, ugly, and ultimately very different from the movie, Waiting for Godot was interesting, but I don’t think I understood much of it, Brave New World was a work of genius, superior to 1984 in almost every way; it is much more realistic, and thus much more terrifying. Of the classes, I was immensely impressed, genuine intellectual discussion occurred in almost every class (the math was just math, but it was a good math, as in they learn straight from Euclid’s text). The seminar was especially fascinating, though I think the discussion fell short of the text, they could have explored the soul of good speech but instead got side-tracked into an argument over the nature of the dialectic and the rhetorical, mostly because one of the four main speakers (from which 80% of the conversation came) was kind of stupid and long-winded.
Overall the trip was effective, I feel like a got a good sense of how the college works, what class is really like and the general atmosphere of the student body. Financial aid remains a critical factor in my decision, as will my visit (yet to be arranged) to Seattle University.
The main part of the tour was from Thursday morning to Friday afternoon, and consisted of observation of three classes and a seminar, a tour of the campus, free food from the cafeteria, and panel discussions with administrators, (to console parents), and current students (to get real answers to questions like, ‘can you go to school here and be a stoner? - some can, some can’t’, ‘how can a students religious beliefs be communicated during philosophical discussions’ - as long as you aren't arrogant about it you’ll be fine, and ‘we’ve all heard how wonderful St. John’s is, what don’t you like about it’ - it’s isolated, fairly non-diverse, and historical analyses of texts are discouraged). Also on the down side - the ratio of males to females is 60:40, which would be at least reversed should I attend any even nominally religious school; and this isn’t a ‘my chances of getting a girlfriend’ issue, in my experience females are considerably more intelligent and less inane than males.
Over the two days I attended freshman lab, math, and seminar (Plato’s Phaedrus) and junior language (french), as well as spending copious amounts of time reading, I finished Fight Club, Waiting for Godot, and Brave New World. Final opinions: Fight Club is brutal, ugly, and ultimately very different from the movie, Waiting for Godot was interesting, but I don’t think I understood much of it, Brave New World was a work of genius, superior to 1984 in almost every way; it is much more realistic, and thus much more terrifying. Of the classes, I was immensely impressed, genuine intellectual discussion occurred in almost every class (the math was just math, but it was a good math, as in they learn straight from Euclid’s text). The seminar was especially fascinating, though I think the discussion fell short of the text, they could have explored the soul of good speech but instead got side-tracked into an argument over the nature of the dialectic and the rhetorical, mostly because one of the four main speakers (from which 80% of the conversation came) was kind of stupid and long-winded.
Overall the trip was effective, I feel like a got a good sense of how the college works, what class is really like and the general atmosphere of the student body. Financial aid remains a critical factor in my decision, as will my visit (yet to be arranged) to Seattle University.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Snowmobile Halo Blues
To all who are in despair
Run
Make haste for the mountains
Taste the sweet pine air and the icy waters
Feel the grinding of the ages in the buckling stone
To all who see the inescapable nature of man
Flee
Take flight as the lesser birds to soar high beyond the reach of dread victory
Fly into the blue until the air in your bones is heavy
Until you gasp and all about you is ice and stone
A world beyond all that man can bend
Exist in that tenuous balance
All the energies of the human spirit expending themselves into the fine and dusty earth
Run
Make haste for the mountains
Taste the sweet pine air and the icy waters
Feel the grinding of the ages in the buckling stone
To all who see the inescapable nature of man
Flee
Take flight as the lesser birds to soar high beyond the reach of dread victory
Fly into the blue until the air in your bones is heavy
Until you gasp and all about you is ice and stone
A world beyond all that man can bend
Exist in that tenuous balance
All the energies of the human spirit expending themselves into the fine and dusty earth
A couple forgotten poems
somehow these were never posted, posted only to facebook or written and never typed. they are both from last summer.
Beckoning
Neolithic spirits issuing from ancient inks,
hunters and sages calling ethereal of a primeval being,
of aurochs and rhinoceri
and a virgin land fertile with prehistory.
Sagas and myths and glories imagined,
labyrinths ablaze,
runic inscriptions telling of godmen and their battles above the sky.
Winds foretelling gales of ice and stone
to grind this grondian prison into
the earth and forgetful sea;
a nagging pearl of a thought that
beyond the self-abhorrent folly
into which this Teutonic race has twisted
the wild purity of survival calls still.
Beckoning,
reaching out a tendril uncorrupted
to which I could cling
Some hope beyond atonement or justice or penance.
A genesis anew,
man becoming the higher power so long sought.
The lethal severity of the mountain instills
dreams of love lost into the hated night,
a most tangible heart of stone set before me:
symbol of the terror of an Idiot God.
That all these visions, sundered as they are from the gaze of any other,
shall fall with my soul into a lake of fire.
Into ashes and yellowed manuscripts and the insane inane screaming
of ten thousand false prophets.
Islets of Sucia
There are no tall trees on the cape,
terra and arbol tapering into the sea.
In the salt air they grow twisted and wild,
virility so unlike the aged denizens of the mountaintops or the soft density of the forest giants.
Between the tide and bush the stone has worn pitted and en-caved,
overhanging the sunlit waters more wrenching than the most emaciated sculptures of man.
Here is a place to bring your children.
Here is a place to remember.
Beckoning
Neolithic spirits issuing from ancient inks,
hunters and sages calling ethereal of a primeval being,
of aurochs and rhinoceri
and a virgin land fertile with prehistory.
Sagas and myths and glories imagined,
labyrinths ablaze,
runic inscriptions telling of godmen and their battles above the sky.
Winds foretelling gales of ice and stone
to grind this grondian prison into
the earth and forgetful sea;
a nagging pearl of a thought that
beyond the self-abhorrent folly
into which this Teutonic race has twisted
the wild purity of survival calls still.
Beckoning,
reaching out a tendril uncorrupted
to which I could cling
Some hope beyond atonement or justice or penance.
A genesis anew,
man becoming the higher power so long sought.
The lethal severity of the mountain instills
dreams of love lost into the hated night,
a most tangible heart of stone set before me:
symbol of the terror of an Idiot God.
That all these visions, sundered as they are from the gaze of any other,
shall fall with my soul into a lake of fire.
Into ashes and yellowed manuscripts and the insane inane screaming
of ten thousand false prophets.
Islets of Sucia
There are no tall trees on the cape,
terra and arbol tapering into the sea.
In the salt air they grow twisted and wild,
virility so unlike the aged denizens of the mountaintops or the soft density of the forest giants.
Between the tide and bush the stone has worn pitted and en-caved,
overhanging the sunlit waters more wrenching than the most emaciated sculptures of man.
Here is a place to bring your children.
Here is a place to remember.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Fuck you, english majors
It is
You are
I am
Cold, cold to blind the soul
Sea glass smooth where razor edged and rough where polished
Silica returning to the dust from which it was made
It is
Impersonal and immediate and in singularity
Hoar frost in the chasm
Cathedrals beneath the ice
Man’s strangest preservatives in niches in the caverns at the turning of the earth
I wonder how deeply it can be found
How old the sand
How fresh the surf
How long I could scoop handfuls of chilled stone until I find no evidence of my people
Is it
Are you
Am I
Cold as the forests of stone lie crumbling
You are
I am
Cold, cold to blind the soul
Sea glass smooth where razor edged and rough where polished
Silica returning to the dust from which it was made
It is
Impersonal and immediate and in singularity
Hoar frost in the chasm
Cathedrals beneath the ice
Man’s strangest preservatives in niches in the caverns at the turning of the earth
I wonder how deeply it can be found
How old the sand
How fresh the surf
How long I could scoop handfuls of chilled stone until I find no evidence of my people
Is it
Are you
Am I
Cold as the forests of stone lie crumbling
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