Lament for a Fallen Son

  

O my Yianni my noble pallikar

So young and brave so tall and strong

Your footstep silent as the wolf

Your bearing lordly as the lion

O my cypress with roots so deep

O my drink of water cold and pure

O my radiant cross atop our shining church

You were my moon and stars that brightened night

You were the sun that warmed my every day

Your fathomless eyes so blue so keen

Your eyebrows dark and arched and proud

Your curly hair so thick so strong

Where nightingales could make their nests

To sing your praises endlessly

You were my chandelier of trembling jewels

That made our nights brighter than fire

You were my marble church with dome so fine

That we shall never see completed

And when you walked

It was as if a leaf danced with the wind

And I still hear the silence of your song

And when you came to sit with us

It was as if an eagle nestled down upon its crag

O my sweet child my shining crown

You fell defending our honor and our name

And when you fell you broke our hearts

And plunged our home into an everlasting gloom

I kiss your eyes my son and close them now

With silver coins

(Maniot Mirologia translated and adapted from the Greek…

Usually recited by old women who spontaneously created

the dirges and chanted the words at gravesides. Recordings

were made of some of these farewells for posterity…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tuna   

 

He once knew a fisherman VFW friend of his

Who was paid $27,500 dollars for one fish

It was a monster - came in at 1016 pounds

Might be a record he thought!

Caught off the ‘banks’ in the freezing Atlantic

 

A Japanese money boat 

Watched him battle it for almost seven hours

Before it finally gave it up

He abled it over and lashed it to his 30-foot Rebecca W

It was too big to hoist up into the boat

 

The Japs came on board to check it out

One of them was a big son-of-a-bitch toting a side-arm

But they just wanted to bargain

They bought over a portable winch-scale

And hoisted the fish out of the water for the poundage

They paid him cash-money - US hundred-dollar bills

 

After they left

He hid all those bills in the bottom of his bait barrel

Because the Coast Guard was nosing around

It took him and his wife two weeks to get rid of most of the smell

Before they drove down to five Portland banks

And bought five $5-Thousand Dollar CD's for themselves

And their three kids

 

 

 

 

              

              A Letter to My Grandson and to Myself

                                                                                                   

                     You wanted to know of the "Agnostos" - Greek for the "Unknown"

 If or when you achieve that total and absolute cessation of the thought process, (it will be very brief)… you might become extremely frightened with the sensation of being completely and totally alone within this entire panoply you think you see played out above... in that celestial firmament overwhelming your senses… you, the only living entity… this pinprick of brilliant light centered on your forehead just above your eyes… and your “alter-ego” god-light… up there beside you in this parallel universe of quint-trillion light-points flowing beyond infinity…. Every one of your sensibilities will cease to function for the briefest of moments… If you make it, you will be terrified with the magnitude of what you will have achieved… Your ‘absolute nothingness’ will scare the hell out of you… This is what you wanted to experience… to “feel”… absolute and total fear… ( not “think afraid” but “feel afraid”)… there is a difference… You will have discarded every thought, every truth, every falsehood, every desire…every “why this” and “why that”… every reason for living… for being “alive”… Sylvia Plath couldn’t handle it and she killed herself… but like many others, she used the crutch of drugs to get there and that doesn’t count… It must be pure ”you” and only “you”… with no fake hypocritical or supernatural help… And when you come back, all your senses will have been re-tuned (like a bad piano suddenly sounding Steinway)… You will ”know” your children when you hold them…”know” your wife when you make love to her… “know“ the agony of your mother as she birthed you… “sense” every human, animal and inanimate contact so much more intimately… and on those mundane occasions throughout the rest of your long life… hopefully you will find another quiet moment to revisit that brief encounter with “the Agnostos” when you are “down”… and hopefully there will be a few more of those moments… but you will remember that incredible first contact with your “trueness”… your ”real” "unself"… and flow unafraid with the inevitable tides of the boredom of life... As for the other, the “me”… the one that studied with Vithaldas who taught a form of Yoga called Hatha… Poses the body assumes and holds for long periods named after animals and other objects… Lion pose… Snake… Bird… Bridge… Half-Moon, etc…  They are simply exercises… in preparation for the meditative posture of the Lotus which he taught you but for some reason never practiced the meditation himself because spiritually he was still a child… but you, you have realized those brief moments of “nothingness” a very few times in your 87 years… mostly on your island on a moonless night when you really “felt, sensed, understood” the enormity of space and how insignificant you were relative to it… and it did terrify…

When you were twenty and had your first “encounter” you became so frightened that you lost it for a few weeks and was hospitalized… Some of it had to do with experiences you suffered almost 70 years ago and a lot of kids suffer today in that miserable medieval land and after they come home… But it was cathartic and now when you are “down” especially now that the time you have left is meager, you still manage to float up there occasionally and are “re-tuned” for a few brief seconds… That’s all that matters… those few brief seconds when your mind stops its incessant badgering and questioning and you become really “YOU”… out there among the enormity of it all… all those countless myriads of universal pin-pricks of light which, with a few close-by exceptions… you and every human being who has ever lived on this planet since Donald Johanson’s “Lucy” birthed her baby more than ten thousand years ago and stood up on that rock in the Abyssinian savanna, no human being living or dead, NEVER EVER has seen that magnificent “fire which severs day from night”… as most of Shakespeare’s vision of light years of celestial sky-fire hasn’t reached us yet and will probably never reach our dying planet...

                 That's the “Agnostos” my boy… That is the “Dread of The Unknown”…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whale*

   

 

He remembers he could smell it before he saw it

What was left of it before the ravens and gulls finished it

Once he even caught a family of coons slipping from the woods

To dine on it - Snuffling and snouting their way

Through the last vestiges of drift-net

 

He recalls a flawless flooding moon last summer

And the wild wind that must have floated it on an exaggerated tide

From some remote deserted cove

A bloated gas-bag still enmeshed - It must have perished terrified

Exhausted by its battle within its prison of fine plastic fiber

 

Now all that was left was a skeletal abstraction

A symmetrical museum piece sculpted by some classical sea-god

Cleansed whitened bleached and anchored by shifting sand and gravel

Its graceful bones strung with trembling threads of weed

And long strands of snake-like kelp dried stiff

 

Fortunately its last breath sucked through its breathing hole

Was unheard by bearded professors from Orono

And do-gooders with winches and yellow poly ropes

Their wenches tearfully attempting to atone for a heartless humanity

That could have allowed this to happen

 

He wondered when he first saw it

How old it was before it died and did it father itself or mother itself?

In other words - Duplicate itself

Has it learned its lesson and is it swimming free again

Sounding in safety beyond the great banks?

 

 

*Repost in memory of another large gentle animal recently washed up

  in similar condition on an island off our Maine coast.

 

 

Please:

There are many government programs that fund the arts: Go to "Arts.gov "

then write to your representatives as I have done to ask for their help in

keeping our Xanga alive

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Coke Brothers*

 

The worst of times was over

It was the best of times – The Spring of 1949

And thanks to the GI Bill, he enrolled in a 7-to-10 PM evening life class

At the Art Students League on West 57^th Street in Manhattan

He had a day job down the street at a small advertising boutique

In a building across from Carnegie Hall that housed theatrical press agents

It was run by a gregarious fellow named Cliff Strohl and his brother Lee

And specialized in promoting upcoming Broadway shows

 

Because he would get to class early as he worked only a short distance away

The League’s director asked him if he wanted a job

Cleaning up the big room after the day class had finished

Scheduling the models and timing the poses and 5-minute breaks…

(10-second warm-up gestures for an hour, then an hour of four 15-minute contours

And finally a full hour of resuming the same seated pose each night for the week)

The instructor Robert Johnson was a WW1 veteran, a great anatomist and draftsman

Who would come in Friday evenings to critique the students’ weekly efforts

 

Trevor and Gerald Johns were jockeys who plied their trade at English tracks after the war

Until Trevor who was older than his brother by a few minutes

Was badly hurt in a terrible pile-up at Ascot and Gerald had to take care of him for months

He was advised they emigrate to America so his brother could be helped

With more advanced care by doctors at one of the large hospitals in New York

They withdrew their considerable savings from a London Bank

And sailed from Liverpool on Cunard’s refitted Queen Mary used as a wartime troop-ship

Arriving in New York in July of 1947

 

Trevor’s injuries were severe and he was constantly medicated with morphine to ease his pain

He became addicted early on and never recovered from the need of the narcotic

Gerald also succumbed to the drug but controlled his habit so he could minister to his brother

They found a flat in the Village a short distance from St Vincent’s Hospital

As they were raised Catholic and thought this would also help Trevor’s recovery

When his brother was hospitalized, Gerald found employment

As an actor in off-Broadway productions at the Phoenix and other smaller venues

In and around lower Manhattan’s humble play-houses

 

During one of his stints as a walk-on at the Phoenix in one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known epics

With Robert Ryan, Hollywood’s favorite heavy as the victorious Roman general Coriolanus

Gerald met Charlton Heston, a friend of John Emery who played Aufidius

Heston told him his wife and he used to work as artists’ models at the League

He thought Gerald because of his unusual stature would fit in very well as a model

For the sketch and painting classes they both posed for a few years before

The next day Gerald went up to 57^th Street with his social security card and the following year

A reasonably-recovered Trevor alternated with his brother on the posing platform

 

 

*My grand-daughter came up with the title for my painting and it is promised to her… Trevor and Gerald can be seen

  at my Xanga photo blog (Click on it for a larger view)… The picture is based on sketches made in the early 1950’s…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Numberings

 

There will come a time in this world

When its amalgamated populace is reduced by Numberings

Inscribed at birth on the inside of the wrist of the left arm.

Perpetual in nature,

Impossible to alter or remove and even in the blackness of night,     

To glow under ultra-violet in response to many sudden ratifications

By an unknown officialdom.

 

Race will cease to exist,

As all new-borns’ DeoxyriboNucleic Acid or DNA

Is unspiralled, intermingled and blended 

By a radical process known as HUP.                                                

A neologism for “Human Unification Process”

Mandated by the Council of All Peoples or CAP,

The ultimate final homonym in an attempt to delay the Extinction.

 

As Earth’s Star struggles to penetrate the carbonized thickening opaqueness

Enveloping the dying planet - Its forests, oceans and plains 

Starved of vital nutrients and a bleak greyness darkening its final hours,

The CAP determines that all HUPs beyond the age of forty

Must be eliminated to allow for those remaining

To breathe increasingly scarce filtered oxygen for temporal survival,

Those most likely to continue to populate the coming age.

 

It is not a difficult task to cull the populace

Because all Numberings are automatically logged at birth into Vulcan

The WSC or World Super Computer.         

Of course, the ten SD’s (Super Directors) are exempted

As Vulcan activates the nano-chips embedded in the Numberings.

A fatal nano-pinch of Preludium courses its way to the brain and the stench

Of world-wide decomposition is unbearable for months on end.

 

So…What else is new in a world eventually bent on collective suicide?

 

 

 

Note: Hopefully my poem is viewed as an irreverent parody... However, the seven

monitoring stations at the top of Hawaii's Mauna Lau volcano have reported the

highest concentration of symbolically important levels of 400 parts per million 

for the first time in 5 million years... Rising emissions from China and India is the

reason given for the spectacular increase...