The Wonderer

The wonderer takes the ultimate road at night

When most birds except for whippoorwills and owls are silent

When the thornbush blooms its crimson shoots

And blackened roots of fire-falls are moist with salted dews

Of moonless star-lit seas

He has come from his tunnel of woods

Onto night-fields replete with explosions of brilliant flowerings

There is no purpose for this voyage other than the wonderer has reasoned

He is finally alone in this confetti-strewn galactic smear

Spread above in its celestial glory

He must not linger long gazing at this "fire which severs day from night"

As the greatest poet Master Will proclaimed

Because his journey is drawing to a close and he is bent

As the saw-grass sparkling with droplets of sea-mist is bent

His bones and fibers lacerated and detrite

He spies two fireballs slicing through Alpha-Centauri

And lies down on a saturated ledge to wait out the cosmic shower

His eyes close till they are pulsing slits timed to his heart

Those empyrian slashes up there are his epitaph

Written when this field was a sea of gas

The Banker’s Secret

There must be a Borrower...

Banks create the “Money” they lend by simply writing an Accounting Entry

Into the Account of the Borrower...

Every Loan “Creates” a Deposit and the repayment of that Loan “Eliminates” that Deposit...

This is how Banks “Create” money and “Destroy” money...

The Government has absolutely nothing to do with it...

If there were fewer Borrowers... There would be less Government...

The problem is and always has been and always will be... too many Borrowers

And not enough Savers...

Thus too much Government...

So now you know!...

Beautiful Dreamer

He is beyond the narrow valley - he has clawed his way into the dreamery

But this deliberate and medicated journey is now flawed

By the smoky drabness of this last fall day

Before the silencing of snow overtakes and muffles his languor

Wild things seem to fly at him from this bitter-leaden patch of sky

Try as he might to sweep them away - still they come 

Hounding him into a sort of middle conciousness

Not fully aware - not yet swollen with the rudeness of sleep

He sees island spruce bending slightly waiting for inevitable ice

Even though the scrubs of alders he struggles through

Are burnished bright with death of leaf

Their lovely tangled leaves on fire - their sugars spent

He stumbles and is jabbed by lost branches of stiff birch

He is in pain - he is bloodied by their vicious sharpness - he is hurt

He must get help - but who on this massacred island is there for him?

He is ravished by fear - no one will find him - there is no one to help

He has lost his way - where is the middle path? - the one he must take

To return to "life among the living" - so much of this tangled mass of moss

Falling from above is stuffing up his mouth - he cannot breathe

The wild things are crawling into him and biting his insides - he hurts

He is on a gravel beach - he picks up a stone with a starfish frozen into it

A billion years ago - and there are bloated bodies floating now

Carved up by cruiser fire in the pacific straits - eyes eaten by crabs

A totem washed out of an african grave glides on a wavelet toward him

A huge cranberry wave roars up beyond the sea-moss laden ledges

Seas fairy-colored by buoys - brilliant hues of yellow-greens and reds and oranges

Detonate below him and carry him flying above the blood of bodies

Seeping from smashed ships lining the bottom of seething Leyte Gulf

He is in the forest again - its blackness blinds him - he cannot breathe

On this rocky outcrop the ghosts of Sarah Bradford and her eight children

Smother him with hugs and tender kisses - has he come to save them

From the axes of rampaging savages? - They cling to him like sucker-fish

The wilderness suddenly explodes - a great copper-beech crushes down on him

Mud seeps into all his openings - he struggles to free himself from the mush

Cormorants light on the copper's branches and peck at him - why are they here?

So far from their implacable sea - a harbor seal slithers toward him barking softly

It smiles a toothy smile and sucks the smothering mud from out of him

What is this animal doing in the middle of this violent tree-fall?

Eyes open dully - comforted by blindingly brilliant sun filling his room

Breath slows - he has survived yet again - to return to "life among the living"*

In the early sixteen hundreds, Abenaki Indians, harrassed by white settlers killed a woman and her eight children

on an island in Muscongus Bay, Maine                                                                                *Marsden Hartley

The Unconscious Island

The violent island cliffs high out of violet hazes

Brooding in its bulk - A grave of rock and silent now

But for the vague hiss of granite steaming in broken waves

Here where once hoppers flicked across its baldness

This timeless rock is circled by the scavenger

And by-passed by the shag and only the braver piper

Touches occasionally in the quieter coves

And within its gut the frozen trees are stilled

Wrapped up in one another like antiquated lovers

There are no crows to call to - The wrens are gone

The deer and coon have braved the sea to main

And the earth is shattered

Down in the leeward village where seiners once hove to

And the night filled up with raw yelling and laughter

And the birds screamed as fish-heads were slung to the tide

Whiskey once burned the fog out of man's bones

As his warm woman trimmed his beard and washed him down by lamplight

And went to bed with him and laughed softly in the night next to him

As a dog barked somewhere in the mist

And a lamb bleated at the moon

Now the shingles crumbled on the frame and there was stillness

There was a stillness too that long night back when animals and men

Their mates - Birds - All the island creatures

Slept exhausted in the womb-fog sea-lulled into dream

It was then a wind came up to moan the night to sky-black

And burned its lightning deep into a heaving forest world

But the rain did not come

Dawn - Cathedral Wood

What

Are the hand-made ecclesias

Next to cathedral of the pine?

This

A deep forest worship-place

Where bright kliegshafts of sun

Splashing the woodland through with technicolored lens

Hunt

Woodpeckers rattling in the dawn

Hear musical crow-choirs summoning creatures to matins

As the naos

Soaking with salted dews of sea

Sparkles in the effemeral haze

And weeds and growths are moisture-bent

And broken-brittled trees weave among narrowing pines

Arrowing to sky

Opal rockmosses glow

A million-coloured candle flicks

In this translucent-splendoured

Stainglass

Dawn

(Homage to Monhegan Island's magnificent woodlands and 200-foot cliffs some 20 miles

 from the coast of Maine... Vikings visited there a thousand years before Columbus and left

 their markings on Manana Rock)

Abenaki Summer

Coming as it did from woods behind his house

The light is unexplained - A first in all these years

A splash of ray now here now there

It flits among thick trunks and spiky scrub - Unwanted and unknown

It cleaves the blackness with its fear

He could not say what stirs him from a fitful sleep to look outside

He waits disoriented - shotgun at the ready in his hands

Watching with soundless breath to see who dares

To sidle to his rear perimeter unwatched since he beached himself

So long ago upon this island land

These barrier woods became his keep-away construct

The barbed impassable remains of violent squalls

A wall of smashed uprooted trees shot through as now

With struggling sun-starved growths - Stacked to an impenetrable mass

Of ancient and invulnerable falls

This sinister light is not from flash - Rather a soft ochre fire

Cast by a lantern or perhaps a tallow torch

The whispered hisses and faint grunts he thinks he hears reflect a distant age

Dissimilar rasp upon his nerves as dim etherials float by

Portaging just past reproach

These travelers have journeyed almost a completed moon

From the sierras of the upper River of the Dead

Its ice unbroken still but softened now by higher sun

The fishers slip their way and slide their slender craft

To a lower and much rougher river run with mud

Unfettered country opens as they ply the Kennebec

Its cataracts and spates replete with sharded ice

A family lost to its niagara - They press on

To branch before they reach the primitive fort

And gain the ponds and streams beyond the splice

They scent the sea in April's temperate dusk

And rush to cross to the long island on the moonless tide

Hard wind forestalls a paddling round to ocean shore

So with gear lashed within canoes - the apparitions move 

Through seething woods to pitch their rough reside

They make their camp below his granite parapet

Among the massive boulders of the gravel beach

Canoes tipped up above highwater - blankets spread and children tucked

They rest - The storm roars on but they're impervious of violence

Beyond the outer reach

Here they will pass warm days drying yellow-tail and cod

Seawater boiled for salt - next winter's sustenance

Is smoked and layered tight between drained kelp and birches' peel

While bronze children splash in gentle surf

Their mothers tie fish bundles onto sturdy carry-packs

As summer sun climbs higher and the sea is rippled up

By fresh southwesters that flush mist-colored hues

Lithe near-naked warriors venture beyond the barrier isles

Their slim canoes outrigged to smooth Penobscot chop

Return with bottoms filled with harpooned blues

All summer the camp pulsates with laughter love and tears

As nature's children work and play beneath earth's dome 

And when first frost begins to wilt the wild cucumber vine

They rake the beach and pack canoes and smother fires

And paddle back to main to climb the hills to home

The rose of dawn has fired up the eastern sky

As gulls and cormorants and crows unleash their strident cries

His reverie is shattered too by the P3 low over the bay

Its engines throttled back in preparation to touch down

Tumultuous reality returns as violated vision dies

Star Ice

He listens to the undulating ice

Diamonded by a solemnity of stars

It cleaves last summer's mackerel sea

It creeps through kelp-stilled glittering shoal

It cracks with music scratched on glacial bars

But for this sound no sound is heard

No startled bird no diesel growl - A penetrating fright

Crawls through ear-holes into pale veins

Buried just under his scalp to flick those sensors birthed

Within this billion-year cauldron now so white

It is here dimension ceases to exist

It is here under this pitiless gaze of celestial eyes

Where terror grips an anchorless flesh

Where ululations sound remorselessly unheard except by him

To lavalize the mind's malaise

Carefully he picks his way across the glistening ledge

His shattered knees barely supportive of his form

Perceptiveness lost to this insensate state

Struck dumb - Incredulous - Why is he here?

What has coerced and driven him to this destructive storm

Of carrion thought? - Of bitter and humiliating rage?

Bound now to harsh and unforgiving blips of light

With no consideration of his wants and needs

He is uncounted - Baffled - Lost inside this stricken dome

Blinded by frozen firmament that sears bituminous night

The Pleasure Domes

The nuns waver in the shimmer an hour before the afternoon rain

Devils dance in the streets

Bunker oil has not been laid as yet to still them

Across the strait - The skies above the mountains of Samaar

Slowly blacken with jungle moisture on its way to join our own

In the shallows - The masts of sunken ships lance skyward to mark their graves

Blown pillboxes rubbled on the beach

Mix with the pristine sand to mark more graves

Occasionally a bloated corpse floats in to be degassed with a forty-five

If it is one of ours - or just left to be exploded by the sun

Sweat soaks us as we line up yet again in the merciless heat

Palm-shade not helping much as we await our turns

Outside the rounded metal hut

It was thrown up less than a week after the town had been secured

Tagalog notices distributed and the hiring of eager applicants begun

Its been four months since the supreme generalissimo returned as promised

Splashing ashore more than once for army moviecams to get it right

One of his first decrees - To build the pleasure domes

Staffed with his docs and medics who now short-arm us all

And also make sure the girls are clean

No blacks are seen in our protracted line

(It would be years before equality's affirmed)

Their own much smaller quonset near the strip is hidden in the bush

On the other side of town - It trembles slightly adding to the thrill

As the Billies and the 38's roar off on useless runs

The nuns? - They come and go oblivious of our long queue

(Embarrassed men and boys)

For there's a nunnery across the way and the nuns of Santa Cruz

Silently they come and go in darkness and in light

To minister to their debilitated flock at their hastily-rebuilt hospital down on Red Beach

After the hills are stabilized and danger's past - Junketing congressmen

The U.S.O and press appear - and the pleasure domes are closed

Infections soar - Rum is poisoned and the economy caves in

The huts are then given to the nuns who have them torn apart

To roof both hospital and nunnery with corrugated sheets