Pennsylvania, 1948-1949

The garden of Nature opens.
The grass at the threshold is green.
And an almond tree begins to bloom.

Sunt mihi Dei Acherontis propitii!
Valeat numen triplex Jehovae!
Ignis, aeris, aquae, terrae spiritus,
Salvete!—says the entering guest.

Ariel lives in the palace of an apple tree,
But will not appear, vibrating like a wasp’s wing,
And Mephistopheles, disguised as an abbot
Of the Dominicans or the Franciscans,
Will not descend from a mulberry bush
Onto a pentagram drawn in the black loam of the path.


But a rhododendron walks among the rocks
Shod in leathery leaves and ringing a pink bell.
A hummingbird, a child’s top in the air,
Hovers in one spot, the beating heart of motion.
Impaled on the nail of a black thorn, a grasshopper
Leaks brown fluid from its twitching snout.
And what can he do, the phantom-in-chief,
As he’s been called, more than a magician,
The Socrates of snails, as he’s been called,
Musician of pears, arbiter of orioles, man?
In sculptures and canvases our individuality
Manages to survive. In Nature it perishes.
Let him accompany the coffin of the woodsman
Pushed from a cliff by a mountain demon,
The he-goat with its jutting curl of horn.
Let him visit the graveyard of the whalers
Who drove spears into the flesh of leviathan
And looked for the secret in guts and blubber.
The thrashing subsided, quieted to waves.
Let him unroll the textbooks of alchemists
Who almost found the cipher, thus the scepter.
Then passed away without hands, eyes, or elixir.


Here there is sun. And whoever, as a child,
Believed he could break the repeatable pattern
Of things, if only he understood the pattern,
Is cast down, rots in the skin of others,
Looks with wonder at the colors of the butterfly,
Inexpressible wonder, formless, hostile to art.


To keep the oars from squeaking in their locks,
He binds them with a handkerchief. The dark
Had rushed east from the Rocky Mountains
And settled in the forests of the continent:
Sky full of embers reflected in a cloud,
Flight of herons, trees above a marsh,
The dry stalks in water, livid, black. My boat
Divides the aerial utopias of the mosquitoes
Which rebuild their glowing castles instantly.
A water lily sinks, fizzing, under the boat’s bow.


Now it is night only. The water is ash-gray.
Play, music, but inaudibly! I wait an hour
In the silence, senses tuned to a ******’s lodge.
Then suddenly, a crease in the water, a beast’s
black moon, rounded, ploughing up quickly
from the pond-dark, from the bubbling methanes.
I am not immaterial and never will be.
My scent in the air, my animal smell,
Spreads, rainbow-like, scares the ******:
A sudden splat.
I remained where I was
In the high, soft coffer of the night’s velvet,
Mastering what had come to my senses:
How the four-toed paws worked, how the hair
Shook off water in the muddy tunnel.
It does not know time, hasn’t heard of death,
Is submitted to me because I know I’ll die.


I remember everything. That wedding in Basel,
A touch to the strings of a viola and fruit
In silver bowls. As was the custom in Savoy,
An overturned cup for three pairs of lips,
And the wine spilled. The flames of the candles
Wavery and frail in a breeze from the Rhine.
Her fingers, bones shining through the skin,
Felt out the hooks and clasps of the silk
And the dress opened like a nutshell,
Fell from the turned graininess of the belly.
A chain for the neck rustled without epoch,
In pits where the arms of various creeds
Mingle with bird cries and the red hair of caesars.


Perhaps this is only my own love speaking
Beyond the seventh river. Grit of subjectivity,
Obsession, bar the way to it.
Until a window shutter, dogs in the cold garden,
The whistle of a train, an owl in the firs
Are spared the distortions of memory.
And the grass says: how it was I don’t know.


Splash of a ****** in the American night.
The memory grows larger than my life.
A tin plate, dropped on the irregular red bricks
Of a floor, rattles tinnily forever.
Belinda of the big foot, Julia, Thaïs,
The tufts of their *** shadowed by ribbon.


Peace to the princesses under the tamarisks.
Desert winds beat against their painted eyelids.
Before the body was wrapped in bandelettes,
Before wheat fell asleep in the tomb,
Before stone fell silent, and there was only pity.


Yesterday a snake crossed the road at dusk.
Crushed by a tire, it writhed on the asphalt.
We are both the snake and the wheel.
There are two dimensions. Here is the unattainable
Truth of being, here, at the edge of lasting
and not lasting. Where the parallel lines intersect,
Time lifted above time by time.


Before the butterfly and its color, he, numb,
Formless, feels his fear, he, unattainable.
For what is a butterfly without Julia and Thaïs?
And what is Julia without a butterfly’s down
In her eyes, her hair, the smooth grain of her belly?
The kingdom, you say. We do not belong to it,
And still, in the same instant, we belong.
For how long will a nonsensical Poland
Where poets write of their emotions as if
They had a contract of limited liability
Suffice? I want not poetry, but a new diction,
Because only it might allow us to express
A new tenderness and save us from a law
That is not our law, from necessity
Which is not ours, even if we take its name.


From broken armor, from eyes stricken
By the command of time and taken back
Into the jurisdiction of mold and fermentation,
We draw our hope. Yes, to gather in an image
The furriness of the ******, the smell of rushes,
And the wrinkles of a hand holding a pitcher
From which wine trickles. Why cry out
That a sense of history destroys our substance
If it, precisely, is offered to our powers,
A muse of our gray-haired father, Herodotus,
As our arm and our instrument, though
It is not easy to use it, to strengthen it
So that, like a plumb with a pure gold center,
It will serve again to rescue human beings.


With such reflections I pushed a rowboat,
In the middle of the continent, through tangled stalks,
In my mind an image of the waves of two oceans
And the slow rocking of a guard-ship’s lantern.
Aware that at this moment I—and not only I—
Keep, as in a seed, the unnamed future.
And then a rhythmic appeal composed itself,
Alien to the moth with its whirring of silk:


O City, O Society, O Capital,
We have seen your steaming entrails.
You will no longer be what you have been.
Your songs no longer gratify our hearts.


Steel, cement, lime, law, ordinance,
We have worshipped you too long,
You were for us a goal and a defense,
Ours was your glory and your shame.


And where was the covenant broken?
Was it in the fires of war, the incandescent sky?
Or at twilight, as the towers fly past, when one looked
From the train across a desert of tracks

To a window out past the maneuvering locomotives
Where a girl examines her narrow, moody face
In a mirror and ties a ribbon to her hair
Pierced by the sparks of curling papers?


Those walls of yours are shadows of walls,
And your light disappeared forever.
Not the world's monument anymore, an oeuvre of your own
Stands beneath the sun in an altered space.


From stucco and mirrors, glass and paintings,
Tearing aside curtains of silver and cotton,
Comes man, naked and mortal,
Ready for truth, for speech, for wings.


Lament, Republic! Fall to your knees!
The loudspeaker’s spell is discontinued.
Listen! You can hear the clocks ticking.
Your death approaches by his hand.


An oar over my shoulder, I walked from the woods.
A porcupine scolded from the fork of a tree,
A horned owl, not changed by the century,
Not changed by place or time, looked down.
Bubo maximus, from the work of Linnaeus.


America for me has the pelt of a raccoon,
Its eyes are a raccoon’s black binoculars.
A chipmunk flickers in a litter of dry bark
Where ivy and vines tangle in the red soil
At the roots of an arcade of tulip trees.
America’s wings are the color of a cardinal,
Its beak is half-open and a mockingbird trills
From a leafy bush in the sweat-bath of the air.
Its line is the wavy body of a water moccasin
Crossing a river with a grass-like motion,
A rattlesnake, a rubble of dots and speckles,
Coiling under the bloom of a yucca plant.


America is for me the illustrated version
Of childhood tales about the heart of tanglewood,
Told in the evening to the spinning wheel’s hum.
And a violin, shivvying up a square dance,
Plays the fiddles of Lithuania or Flanders.
My dancing partner’s name is Birute Swenson.
She married a Swede, but was born in Kaunas.
Then from the night window a moth flies in
As big as the joined palms of the hands,
With a hue like the transparency of emeralds.


Why not establish a home in the neon heat
Of Nature? Is it not enough, the labor of autumn,
Of winter and spring and withering summer?
You will hear not one word spoken of the court
of Sigismund Augustus on the banks of the Delaware River.
The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys is not needed.
Herodotus will repose on his shelf, uncut.
And the rose only, a ****** symbol,
Symbol of love and superterrestrial beauty,
Will open a chasm deeper than your knowledge.
About it we find a song in a dream:


Inside the rose
Are houses of gold,
black isobars, streams of cold.
Dawn touches her finger to the edge of the Alps
And evening streams down to the bays of the sea.


If anyone dies inside the rose,
They carry him down the purple-red road
In a procession of clocks all wrapped in folds.
They light up the petals of grottoes with torches.
They bury him there where color begins,
At the source of the sighing,
Inside the rose.


Let names of months mean only what they mean.
Let the Aurora’s cannons be heard in none
Of them, or the tread of young rebels marching.
We might, at best, keep some kind of souvenir,
Preserved like a fan in a garret. Why not
Sit down at a rough country table and compose
An ode in the old manner, as in the old times
Chasing a beetle with the nib of our pen?

the fog
is home
to me.

I close my eyes,
I am still standing in Santiago Chile.
business people are
rushing back from the lunch break.
the outside restaurants
teaming with customers.
I look up,
the Andes Mountains are head of me
a weak pink fog veils them.
my mom turns to me,
‘honey, that’s pollution’
I’m glad we have the real fog
back home

I close my eyes,
I’m flying back from Atlanta Georgia.
my fellow San Franciscans and I
waiting to see our home, I almost tear up.
our water had gone out that Atlanta summer
and I remember there wasn’t a day under 105 there.
the fog looks so tasty
like I would be fully
refreshed and rehydrated
after only one bite.

I close my eyes,
I’m living in Boston for five weeks.
a storm passes by now and again.
the east coasters complain that
the fog is ruining their city’s
sunny reputation.
the southerners complain
that summer isn’t actually there.
I just smile and smoke,
I love watching the smoke drift into the fog
mingle, then disappear.

I close my eyes
I am standing in Rome
my family- taking cover in a store overhang
there was heavy rains and over cast
, but no fog ever descended for a meet and greet
on that day.

I close my eyes ,
I am looking at the tall slender buildings in Vietnam
along side the main highway of ** Chi-Man city
it is overcast- the storm last night brought down
a tree, crushing a poor shop with a sheet metal roof.
the overcast hangs, and I am feeling
a little nostalgia for home

I open my eyes,
I am back in the sunset district.
I’m laying on my reservoir,
looking out at the Pacific Ocean.
the wind blows inland
whatever weather on the westward horizon
blows in in a couple of hours
the fog sits at the horizon gathering itself up
for it’s long strut to the beach
and I wave to my old friend
it’s good to be home.

The three of us had been travelling
For weeks, and were getting tired,
We’d taken pictures of everything
And our visas had expired,
We got a room in a gloomy house
And we settled down to wait,
For Julie wanted to sleep a lot
While Francis stood at the gate.

For he was the moody, restless one,
And wanted to travel back,
I was just glad to settle down
And dump my heavy pack,
I took a seat at the window ledge
And I read a magazine,
While Julie said that the light was bad,
‘You’ll ruin your vision, Dean!’

It certainly was a gloomy room
And the walls were painted brown,
We’d had to look for the cheapest in
An ancient part of town,
The concierge was a Capuchin
With a tonsure and a cross,
I felt like I had to bow to him
As he passed the keys across.

The room had merely a single bulb
That would only work at night,
And then, it had such a feeble beam
You could hardly call it bright,
But when it lit we could see at last
On the further, darkest wall,
There hung a dusty old painting that
We hadn’t seen before.

It blended in with the wall behind
For the tones were shades of brown,
The face of an old Franciscan who
Was looking sadly down,
But in his eyes was a faint surprise
As of one with mystic deeps,
And Francis said that it turned his head,
‘Those eyes give me the creeps!’

We ate a couple of sandwiches
And we turned in for the night,
We didn’t think it was worth it but
We still turned out the light,
Then I awoke in the early hours
To the sound of cries and shrieks,
The volume gradually rising
As my skin began to creep.

A sudden flare lit the room in there
From the painting on the wall,
The crackling sound of flames devouring
The monk, I was appalled,
And through the flames I could see those eyes
As they bored into the room,
And then, the crackling disappeared
And the room was plunged in gloom.

There wasn’t a sign of damage to
The painting, or the wall,
But a whisp of sulphur and brimstone
Hung in the air, and overall,
While Francis huddled in terror with
His face as pale as sleet,
And Julie couldn’t stop sobbing then
From underneath her sheet.

We snatched our stuff in the morning
And I handed back the keys,
I said, ‘Just who is that picture of?’
The concierge looked pleased.
‘That’s just one of the Franciscans
Who rebelled against the Pope,
He went to the Inquisition then
And they gave him little hope.’

‘Four of the monks were burned out there
As a lesson to the rest,
St. Francis would have approved, they were
Schismatic, at the best,
This is the town the Inquisition
Righted many a wrong,
They burned the recusant catholics
In the square at Avignon.’

Francis had left before us, he
Refused to wait in there,
He wandered out with his backpack and
Stood waiting in the square,
Just as the petrol tanker rolled,
From a worn and faulty tyre,
And the last I saw, he was standing there
Engulfed in a lake of fire!

David Lewis Paget

Part 1.
Two stories warn sojourners away.

One claims it is a lie,
the other says that's true.

Loyal opposing view,
legally bound by noblesse oblige
and the ever with us, poor, survivors;

we carry on, wayward, in truth, living.

Outlaw and outcast, indentured
deportee, pioneer, settler
war-bred ordinary offspring,
reared rough
to be ready,
armed and ready,

"Big Iron on his hip" gunslinger ready.
Will to **** bred in, warrior stock ready.

The imaginary last days prophecy,
presented to me, sincerely,
sorry, hate to say it, but
you know you do not know these are
my grandchildren's last days, so
do not lie to them, if you cannot lie
to me and walk away thinking I believe
you.
- and ****** if the fool did not begin
- to preach, claim'that his call to us all.

Part 2.
So, quickly does the day arrive, blink.
You are old, and unfinished, incomplete.

Yet, your use of faith by reason is questioned.
Yet, your use of reason by faith is not.
aha
Aitia, we go back aways.
So, scatter-brained and indecisive
as to whether any remedy is worth the umph
to aim and follow through, the old man sighs.

So, squint-eye, slow-breathe, squeeze…

Richard Corey quiet desperation,
Freddie Nietzsche poor luck with the ladies,
Peace, be still.
Let loose, let go,  
confess to believing inspirations arrive on time.
Live now, pay later?
NO no no, now,
and ever
after, the power needed
to fill a cistern
to overflowing, let it rain,
is in the understanding wisdom brings,
for your use in getting the joke.
Right use, mind full, swept away asgone.
This is water. Fluid reality, specifically yours.
Zeus, Epimenides said, and Paul quoted,
in his Unknown God message, totally
in agreement, the entity
we describe as God, the way and life,
is this truth in which we live and breathe,
and have our being.

Part 3.
Information asymmetry

Stacked deck, loaded dice
- let this mind be in you -
Living stories told to hold us safe,
anchored on sound reason, solid

ever present memory, reminding us,
we, the raw material for future victory.

Fitting this military mind, reminding each
of others lost in past wars to end war,
and wars to secure trade
and wars to reset status quo, for a minute.

Then the spirit inspired to take and claim
beholder rights,
peace given to be taken as granted,
let it come upon this mindtimespace.
Beauty or the beast, attention paid
hook, look
beholds a prophet, professing ancient wit,
"hey, spirit in aspiration and inspiration,
prepare to meet thy maker, conspiring,
to settle the hot and cold front clashing
thunderous
grunts and groans,… Activa hits the gut.

Part 4.
Old,
old man,
old patterns matching

lining up to be one line atop
another
ever along the edge of both sides
-cave wall reality
flat
flat as Texas when the dust rises
reminding old wombed men of
flattering floral print flour sacks sewn

into everyday dresses nobody wore
to church.

Ever fills never with knowledge,
used to stretch the whole known
bubble of we, this observable realm
of ever changing never
remaining unchanging
while ever expands, changing
being the honest true umph
to now being after before,
morph into this moment,
in my future, you smile.

Commas cause breezes.
I rub my eyes, ideally virally dry

Part 5.
Jah,jah, joke's on me… I know, it's light.
Old man me, says he ain't poor,
he is dependent, and thus
depends,
swings as pendulum do, to and fro.

Test my best reaction time,
draw! Hour after hour, gain the fame,
- expertise
fastest cut, softest touch, listen, is it true?
Old knowns, trusted sources, bow before
the internetwork
of faithful textual search engines.
Fact checking. Pre-defining heresy, as
one such as I say the voice of truth, I hear

as may all actual others thinking thus old
yet, never ever dying ideas that ease,

Fret not. Perfected praise, from the child
in my son, speaking out, from my realm
of perfectly good reason to think we share
mindtimespace and often think together,
unwittingly, i.e. un with knowing how ness.

Lying saints, deceived disciples, cry heresy, blaming
God for all discrepancy
in the ever ready sponsoring
of the innocent and despondent.

Enter brown Franciscans, little grey Dominics,
flying nuns, and holy terror inquisitive tradition,
grace is not free, i.e., Jesus failed.

That's right, so, we had to fix the fools who said
truth known makes free, non free, oath bound minds, every child must pledge actual child
faith wise under God, as in, so, help me,
God is real in any American model child faith.
It don't matter
if every uttered word,
ever swept into a storm
of stories living long, longing
to be told
there's that temptation,
to be led away from,
rise on your own version
of the same truth told,
as all men do, we lie
say we deny the flesh and
feed not the pet lie, oath bound, we do.
We must, when we agree our bubble
becomes all the truth we feel kin'ly so's
to imagine Jesus did not finish destroying
the useless boogie men and witchery wombed men, evil manifested as war's own reason,
first child of pride, father's anointing oil, son.

Cast away your anxious mind, take a line, hold on.

Chreia, as you may know, say things intended to teach.

The man with a grasp on the simple why, why, why
did god make man?

To survive the last days. Ok. To reach ever,
after what? Now,
right. So, immediately…ever after

Feelin' right ghine, noghucking way, but win
just once

Part 6.
Value first.
Worth next, time to attend to price.
What's a unit of human bemusing worth?
Whole thought thread assistance
isisting is isting being in and out at once.
Insisting a will to stand, corrected.
existing yet-i
The authorial reality POV, me
first person to the second I involved

ready reader reading inky slow, each
sigil sign if-if-fine lining the tray,

a dust about a carbon atom thick, taking
form as the other shoe drops, you know.

Tryumphant self insured, we got spares.
ekdotos "published,"
from ek- "out" (see ex-) + didonai "to give"

EEKING OUT A LIVING! that's it.

The first hit. Nothing ever changes,
and where we remain, goes on, that's all


-- Part 7.
Rules for ryhmes crimes and times
evolve along a central point,
once made,

clearly to be seen right through

you imagine, there are more of me,
more of my kind, lacking proof,
have will, may travel, no guns
or other forms of self defense work

in the realm of words, authorized
tele-real, to feel tomorrow from today,

if it all works out this way, one day you
read this line and think,

what it is ain't what a reader thinks,
and the first reader readily agrees, so, what?

Slide passed past outsider angst,
slip into the answer to my accepted
prayer, to be led away from needless leaps,
and delivered from useless endeavors,

given peace that functions as fire does,
a little

-- Part 8.

Provocation --
Authority to prophesy,
it is true,
      there is a lying spirit,
learn-ed prophets study under
-- here there afterrrr
learning to rationalize, y'heah
to call the Bible, any version,
or any locked down revelation
backed by kings and priests,
hear ye
holy secrets only saints learn,
routes out of any hell
aha
our kind stand before kings,
we never once grovel to stand
we must, we exist in this as like
National governing entities,
under girded by ontology myths,

ordained by the triumphant one god.

Opposed by the Manichean Heresy,
made use of after all, as fearsome
spiritual weapon,
with which to defend the story churches are.

I sneeze a *** of gnosisnot, it's viral, just
a cold
hard fact, as the old point finder found,
chreia aitia and I and little-i- as inspirations

wisht you a merry life after christ mas was
announced

Peace, on this
Eretz, right ritzy here, the ancientssss life pod,
we developed from, if creative evolution
is not a local solution yet, just wait, let us
as we say in this realm of free association,
breathe, and let patience have her perfecting
function.

Ai, on the battle field, calling all three medics,
Christ, it is as if

Easter, is a season, some times, some places
always perfect outside being in weather,
where I would go, if this were heaven,

and from here, I laugh, when you learn
I learned, yesterday, to invest mystery

Part 9.

Wiseassenine Netflix Dylan grin,

"But there is nothing, really,
nothing to turn-off."

Really, I say, I shared my dreams,
made all my portals open,

tell me more, mister wizard,
when was war your best work?
when you came to bring this sword?
-- imaginations exalting themselves,
-- as corporate monstors are wont to do.

There were a few,
inbetweeners, unstable
in all their ways, accepted
as right by virtue of being self
evidently
standing upright after all's been
said and done,
judgement begun
in the area where Jesus,
has been known to reside,
with his father, since ever,
you imagined it true as it is.

Uniquely your house of God,
find all the words you ever condemned with
and redeem the roughest ghucking foul spells
full of filthy wordcontainers of filthy thoughts,

as are hidden in the deepest recesses under
the vates, come, listen, to the story
'bout a man named Joe Bob,
who's yer uncle, back aways.

Part of what makes you, soul wise

unique to the same degree,
and often more unique
due to fewer shared
chins and noses and the like,
family spirit and image, like,
like, like, like, like, we all
think like
each other thinks,
in the internet common place
attention based economy,
your time paid as attention
to me,
extremely indirectly,
so subtle when I say a million thanks,
you feel the briefest imaginable ASMR.

Kinda, subtle clinch,
nah, nothing, eh.

What does a boy do at four?
Play and dream –
But not one fighting for his life
Good Friday/April/2000/Easter weekend
Early morning
Lying stiff as the bed boards that support him
Eyes rolled back in his head –
You only see the whites
The sheets pulled down at his side
Something attacked him that night
Something came onto him with a terrible fright
The ambulance takes him away
Sirens blaring/tied to a stretcher
Tubes, catheters/no answers
Do a spinal/still unconscious
In a coma
Waiting in doctors’ offices filled with diplomas

It’s like being hit by lightening
That’s the chances of his recovering
Meningitis/Encephalitis
They pull the drapes in the ICU
You recite it
He’ll need to learn to walk again,
to talk, to feed himself
And then –
His cognitive functioning will be extremely limited
And the seizures/and spasms
Can’t believe that this has happened

But this was just the beginning -
Of a lengthy two year stay at Franciscans
Every day at the hospital
While his younger brother stayed with your schizophrenic father
Who just came out of McLean himself
Whose own brain was damaged from mental health
You’ve seen it growing up
And now in your child
Something so horrible it can’t be defined
Something that comes in the night and takes your mind
What does a boy do at four?
Learn to play and dream once more -

Said Herb Caen.

Like all San Franciscans
I hope to go to heaven when I die.
And when I get there
I'll take a look around and say:

It ain't bad
But it ain't San Francisco. :)

Fear of forever forgotten
Fear of sins remembered

Near the Ravens flying
In the bleak December

I walk alone in darkness
Autumn chill, wind in trees

I meditate while walking
Not now on my knees

Franciscans at the church
Aquinas in my room

Guernica as well
At her house Flaming June

            sons soon?

St. Brigitta of Sweden
The Pope confirms her Rule in 1370

Pilgimage to Jerusalem
And death in Rome: July 23, 1373

Visions, ambition, service
Connections to the Franciscans

Translations from a canon
In Linkoping

Brigitta, I have been there too
Of you I sing.