It was a cold night for a concert. There was frost on the windscreen as we got into the car for the short drive to this city church. We drove because we were going to be late, and it was cold, and would be likely to be colder still when the concert was over. I had wondered if part one would be enough. Could Bach and Rameau be enough? Might the musical appetite cope with Mozart and Beethoven too? Were we about to sit down to a large meal, possibly in the wrong order. Can the cheese course be a transcendental experience I wondered? Bach to begin certainly, a substantial starter with one of the mid period keyboard toccatas and two ‘distant’ preludes and fugues, but then a keyboard suite by Rameau?
 
When I listen to Beethoven though I want to hear a work on its own, unencumbered round about with other musics.  A recent experience of several hours driving to hear a single Beethoven symphony has remained close and vivid, and an experience that brought me close to tears. So I imagine that I might only hear Op.110 to make that opening sequence of chords so ominously special. The introduction seems to come from nowhere and does not connect with musical past, except perhaps the composer’s own past. It is as though the pianist puts on a pair of gloves imbued with the spirit of the composer, and these chords appear . . . and what is there that might possibly prepare the listener for the journey that pianist and listener embark upon?  Certainly not the soufflé of Mozart’s K.332.
 
The audience is hardly a smattering of coats, hats and grey hair. There is another piano recital in town tonight and this is but the artist’s preview of a forthcoming concert at a major venue. Our pianist is equipping herself for a prestigious engagement and sensibly recognizes the need to test out the way the programme flows in front of an audience, and in a provincial church where she is not entirely unknown. I admire this resolve and wonder a little at the long-term planning which makes this possible and viable.
 
Now a figure in black walks out from the shadows to stand by her piano. Coming from stage right she places left her hand firmly on the mirror-black case above the keyboard. She looks at her audience briefly, and makes a bow, almost a curtsey, an obeisance to her audience and possibly to those distant spirits who guard the music she is to play. We will not see her face again until the next time she will stand at the piano to acknowledge our applause after the Bach she is about to play. Her slightly more than shoulder-length hair is cut to flow forward as she holds herself to play; her face is often hidden from us, her expression curiously blank. Perhaps she has prepared herself to enter a deep state of concentration that admits no recognition of those sitting just in front of her. Her dress is long and black with a few sparking threads to catch the careful lighting. Without these occasional glimmers her ****** movement would be unnoticeable. As it is the way the light is caught is subtle and quietly playful, though not enough to distract, only remind us that though in black she is wearing the kind of starry sky such as you might perceive in crepuscular time.
 
Thus, we already sense so much before she has played a note there is a firm slightly dogged confidence and reverence here in her approach to instrument and audience. And in the opening bars of the Bach toccata that is manifest; and not just a confidence born out of some strategy against nervousness, but a ritual of welcoming to this music that now spills out into the partially darkened church. The sonorousness and balance of the piano’s tone surprises. It is not a fine piano, but it has qualities that she seems to understand. There is a degree of attentive listening to herself that enables her to control dynamics and act resolutely on the structure of the music. When the slow section of this four-part toccata appears there is a studied gentleness and restraint that belies any ****** led gesture or manner. Her stance and deliberation at the keyboard remain determined and in control, unaltered by the music’s message. She does not pull her body backwards as seems the custom with so many who feel they have to show us they are stroking and coaxing such gentleness and restraint out of the keyboard.
 
As the final fugato of the toccata flows at almost twice the speed I’ve ever heard it, my concentration begins to disengage. It is too fast for me to follow the voices, I miss the entries, and the smudged resonance of the texture hides those details I have grown over so many years to know and love. This is Glen Gould on speed, not the toccata that resides in my musical memory. I am aware of missing so much and my attention floats away into the sound of it all. It seems to be all sound and not the play of music.
 
In this stage of disengagement I sense the tense quality of her right leg pedalling with the tip of a reddish shoe just visible, deft, tiny flicks of movement. She turns her face away from the keyboard frequently, looking away from the keyboard through the choir to the high altar; and for a moment we see her upturned face, a blank face, possibly with little or no make up, no jewellery. A plain young woman, mid to late thirties perhaps, and not a face marked by children or a busy teaching life, but a face focused on knowing this music to a point at which there is almost a detachment, where it becomes independent of her control, flowing momentarily beyond herself.
 
Then she reins the toccata in, reoccupies it; she is seeking closure for herself and for her audience whose attention for a short while has been, as the Quakers say, gathered. Gathered into a degree of silence, when breathing and the body’s sense and presence of itself disappear, momentarily, and musical listening moves from a clock time to a virtual time. There is a slowing down, an opening out, even though in reality’s metronomic time-field there is none.
 
There is a hesitation. With more Bach to follow, should we applaud? With relief after holding the flight of time’s arrow in our consciousness, just for those concluding minutes and seconds we acknowledge and applaud - the beginning of the concert.

--To Elizabeth Robins Pennell


'O mes cheres Mille et Une Nuits!'--Fantasio.

Once on a time
There was a little boy:  a master-mage
By virtue of a Book
Of magic--O, so magical it filled
His life with visionary pomps
Processional!  And Powers
Passed with him where he passed.  And Thrones
And Dominations, glaived and plumed and mailed,
Thronged in the criss-cross streets,
The palaces pell-mell with playing-fields,
Domes, cloisters, dungeons, caverns, tents, arcades,
Of the unseen, silent City, in his soul
Pavilioned jealously, and hid
As in the dusk, profound,
Green stillnesses of some enchanted mere.--

I shut mine eyes . . . And lo!
A flickering ****** of memory that floats
Upon the face of a pool of darkness five
And thirty dead years deep,
Antic in girlish broideries
And skirts and silly shoes with straps
And a broad-ribanded leghorn, he walks
Plain in the shadow of a church
(St. Michael's:  in whose brazen call
To curfew his first wails of wrath were whelmed),
Sedate for all his haste
To be at home; and, nestled in his arm,
Inciting still to quiet and solitude,
Boarded in sober drab,
With small, square, agitating cuts
Let in a-top of the double-columned, close,
Quakerlike print, a Book! . . .
What but that blessed brief
Of what is gallantest and best
In all the full-shelved Libraries of Romance?
The Book of rocs,
Sandalwood, ivory, turbans, ambergris,
Cream-tarts, and lettered apes, and calendars,
And ghouls, and genies--O, so huge
They might have overed the tall Minster Tower
Hands down, as schoolboys take a post!
In truth, the Book of Camaralzaman,
Schemselnihar and Sindbad, Scheherezade
The peerless, Bedreddin, Badroulbadour,
Cairo and Serendib and Candahar,
And Caspian, and the dim, terrific bulk--
Ice-ribbed, fiend-visited, isled in spells and storms--
Of Kaf! . . . That centre of miracles,
The sole, unparalleled Arabian Nights!

Old friends I had a-many--kindly and grim
Familiars, cronies quaint
And goblin!  Never a Wood but housed
Some morrice of dainty dapperlings.  No Brook
But had his nunnery
Of green-haired, silvry-curving sprites,
To cabin in his grots, and pace
His lilied margents.  Every lone Hillside
Might open upon Elf-Land.  Every Stalk
That curled about a Bean-stick was of the breed
Of that live ladder by whose delicate rungs
You climbed beyond the clouds, and found
The Farm-House where the Ogre, gorged
And drowsy, from his great oak chair,
Among the flitches and pewters at the fire,
Called for his Faery Harp.  And in it flew,
And, perching on the kitchen table, sang
Jocund and jubilant, with a sound
Of those gay, golden-vowered madrigals
The shy thrush at mid-May
Flutes from wet orchards flushed with the triumphing dawn;
Or blackbirds rioting as they listened still,
In old-world woodlands rapt with an old-world spring,
For Pan's own whistle, savage and rich and lewd,
And mocked him call for call!

I could not pass
The half-door where the cobbler sat in view
Nor figure me the wizen Leprechaun,
In square-cut, faded reds and buckle-shoes,
Bent at his work in the hedge-side, and know
Just how he tapped his brogue, and twitched
His wax-end this and that way, both with wrists
And elbows.  In the rich June fields,
Where the ripe clover drew the bees,
And the tall quakers trembled, and the West Wind
Lolled his half-holiday away
Beside me lolling and lounging through my own,
'Twas good to follow the Miller's Youngest Son
On his white horse along the leafy lanes;
For at his stirrup linked and ran,
Not cynical and trapesing, as he loped
From wall to wall above the espaliers,
But in the bravest tops
That market-town, a town of tops, could show:
Bold, subtle, adventurous, his tail
A banner flaunted in disdain
Of human stratagems and shifts:
King over All the Catlands, present and past
And future, that moustached
Artificer of fortunes, ****-in-Boots!
Or Bluebeard's Closet, with its plenishing
Of meat-hooks, sawdust, blood,
And wives that hung like fresh-dressed carcases--
Odd-fangled, most a butcher's, part
A faery chamber hazily seen
And hazily figured--on dark afternoons
And windy nights was visiting of the best.
Then, too, the pelt of hoofs
Out in the roaring darkness told
Of Herne the Hunter in his antlered helm
Galloping, as with despatches from the Pit,
Between his hell-born Hounds.
And Rip Van Winkle . . . often I lurked to hear,
Outside the long, low timbered, tarry wall,
The mutter and rumble of the trolling bowls
Down the lean plank, before they fluttered the pins;
For, listening, I could help him play
His wonderful game,
In those blue, booming hills, with Mariners
Refreshed from kegs not coopered in this our world.

But what were these so near,
So neighbourly fancies to the spell that brought
The run of Ali Baba's Cave
Just for the saying 'Open Sesame,'
With gold to measure, peck by peck,
In round, brown wooden stoups
You borrowed at the chandler's? . . . Or one time
Made you Aladdin's friend at school,
Free of his Garden of Jewels, Ring and Lamp
In perfect trim? . . . Or Ladies, fair
For all the embrowning scars in their white *******
Went labouring under some dread ordinance,
Which made them whip, and bitterly cry the while,
Strange Curs that cried as they,
Till there was never a Black ***** of all
Your consorting but might have gone
Spell-driven miserably for crimes
Done in the pride of womanhood and desire . . .
Or at the ghostliest altitudes of night,
While you lay wondering and acold,
Your sense was fearfully purged; and soon
Queen Labe, abominable and dear,
Rose from your side, opened the Box of Doom,
Scattered the yellow powder (which I saw
Like sulphur at the Docks in bulk),
And muttered certain words you could not hear;
And there! a living stream,
The brook you bathed in, with its weeds and flags
And cresses, glittered and sang
Out of the hearthrug over the nakedness,
Fair-scrubbed and decent, of your bedroom floor! . . .

I was--how many a time!--
That Second Calendar, Son of a King,
On whom 'twas vehemently enjoined,
Pausing at one mysterious door,
To pry no closer, but content his soul
With his kind Forty.  Yet I could not rest
For idleness and ungovernable Fate.
And the Black Horse, which fed on sesame
(That wonder-working word!),
Vouchsafed his back to me, and spread his vans,
And soaring, soaring on
From air to air, came charging to the ground
Sheer, like a lark from the midsummer clouds,
And, shaking me out of the saddle, where I sprawled
Flicked at me with his tail,
And left me blinded, miserable, distraught
(Even as I was in deed,
When doctors came, and odious things were done
On my poor tortured eyes
With lancets; or some evil acid stung
And wrung them like hot sand,
And desperately from room to room
Fumble I must my dark, disconsolate way),
To get to Bagdad how I might.  But there
I met with Merry Ladies.  O you three--
Safie, Amine, Zobeide--when my heart
Forgets you all shall be forgot!
And so we supped, we and the rest,
On wine and roasted lamb, rose-water, dates,
Almonds, pistachios, citrons.  And Haroun
Laughed out of his lordly beard
On Giaffar and Mesrour (I knew the Three
For all their Mossoul habits).  And outside
The Tigris, flowing swift
Like Severn bend for bend, twinkled and gleamed
With broken and wavering shapes of stranger stars;
The vast, blue night
Was murmurous with peris' plumes
And the leathern wings of genies; words of power
Were whispering; and old fishermen,
Casting their nets with prayer, might draw to shore
Dead loveliness:  or a prodigy in scales
Worth in the Caliph's Kitchen pieces of gold:
Or copper vessels, stopped with lead,
Wherein some Squire of Eblis watched and railed,
In durance under potent charactry
Graven by the seal of Solomon the King . . .

Then, as the Book was glassed
In Life as in some olden mirror's quaint,
Bewildering angles, so would Life
Flash light on light back on the Book; and both
Were changed.  Once in a house decayed
From better days, harbouring an errant show
(For all its stories of dry-rot
Were filled with gruesome visitants in wax,
Inhuman, hushed, ghastly with Painted Eyes),
I wandered; and no living soul
Was nearer than the pay-box; and I stared
Upon them staring--staring.  Till at last,
Three sets of rafters from the streets,
I strayed upon a mildewed, rat-run room,
With the two Dancers, horrible and obscene,
Guarding the door:  and there, in a bedroom-set,
Behind a fence of faded crimson cords,
With an aspect of frills
And dimities and dishonoured privacy
That made you hanker and hesitate to look,
A Woman with her litter of Babes--all slain,
All in their nightgowns, all with Painted Eyes
Staring--still staring; so that I turned and ran
As for my neck, but in the street
Took breath.  The same, it seemed,
And yet not all the same, I was to find,
As I went up!  For afterwards,
Whenas I went my round alone--
All day alone--in long, stern, silent streets,
Where I might stretch my hand and take
Whatever I would:  still there were Shapes of Stone,
Motionless, lifelike, frightening--for the Wrath
Had smitten them; but they watched,
This by her melons and figs, that by his rings
And chains and watches, with the hideous gaze,
The Painted Eyes insufferable,
Now, of those grisly images; and I
Pursued my best-beloved quest,
Thrilled with a novel and delicious fear.
So the night fell--with never a lamplighter;
And through the Palace of the King
I groped among the echoes, and I felt
That they were there,
Dreadfully there, the Painted staring Eyes,
Hall after hall . . . Till lo! from far
A Voice!  And in a little while
Two tapers burning!  And the Voice,
Heard in the wondrous Word of God, was--whose?
Whose but Zobeide's,
The lady of my heart, like me
A True Believer, and like me
An outcast thousands of leagues beyond the pale! . . .

Or, sailing to the Isles
Of Khaledan, I spied one evenfall
A black blotch in the sunset; and it grew
Swiftly . . . and grew.  Tearing their beards,
The sailors wept and prayed; but the grave ship,
Deep laden with spiceries and pearls, went mad,
Wrenched the long tiller out of the steersman's hand,
And, turning broadside on,
As the most iron would, was haled and ******
Nearer, and nearer yet;
And, all awash, with horrible lurching leaps
Rushed at that Portent, casting a shadow now
That swallowed sea and sky; and then,
Anchors and nails and bolts
Flew screaming out of her, and with clang on clang,
A noise of fifty stithies, caught at the sides
Of the Magnetic Mountain; and she lay,
A broken bundle of firewood, strown piecemeal
About the waters; and her crew
Passed shrieking, one by one; and I was left
To drown.  All the long night I swam;
But in the morning, O, the smiling coast
Tufted with date-trees, meadowlike,
Skirted with shelving sands!  And a great wave
Cast me ashore; and I was saved alive.
So, giving thanks to God, I dried my clothes,
And, faring inland, in a desert place
I stumbled on an iron ring--
The fellow of fifty built into the Quays:
When, scenting a trap-door,
I dug, and dug; until my biggest blade
Stuck into wood.  And then,
The flight of smooth-hewn, easy-falling stairs,
Sunk in the naked rock!  The cool, clean vault,
So neat with niche on niche it might have been
Our beer-cellar but for the rows
Of brazen urns (like monstrous chemist's jars)
Full to the wide, squat throats
With gold-dust, but a-top
A layer of pickled-walnut-looking things
I knew for olives!  And far, O, far away,
The Princess of China languished!  Far away
Was marriage, with a Vizier and a Chief
Of Eunuchs and the privilege
Of going out at night
To play--unkenned, majestical, secure--
Where the old, brown, friendly river shaped
Like Tigris shore for shore!  Haply a Ghoul
Sat in the churchyard under a frightened moon,
A thighbone in his fist, and glared
At supper with a Lady:  she who took
Her rice with tweezers grain by grain.
Or you might stumble--there by the iron gates
Of the Pump Room--underneath the limes--
Upon Bedreddin in his shirt and drawers,
Just as the civil Genie laid him down.
Or those red-curtained panes,
Whence a tame cornet tenored it throatily
Of beer-pots and spittoons and new long pipes,
Might turn a caravansery's, wherein
You found Noureddin Ali, loftily drunk,
And that fair Persian, bathed in tears,
You'd not have given away
For all the diamonds in the Vale Perilous
You had that dark and disleaved afternoon
Escaped on a roc's claw,
Disguised like Sindbad--but in Christmas beef!
And all the blissful while
The schoolboy satchel at your hip
Was such a bulse of gems as should amaze
Grey-whiskered chapmen drawn
From over Caspian:  yea, the Chief Jewellers
Of Tartary and the bazaars,
Seething with traffic, of enormous Ind.--

Thus cried, thus called aloud, to the child heart
The magian East:  thus the child eyes
Spelled out the wizard message by the light
Of the sober, workaday hours
They saw, week in week out, pass, and still pass
In the sleepy Minster City, folded kind
In ancient Severn's arm,
Amongst her water-meadows and her docks,
Whose floating populace of ships--
Galliots and luggers, light-heeled brigantines,
Bluff barques and rake-hell fore-and-afters--brought
To her very doorsteps and geraniums
The scents of the World's End; the calls
That may not be gainsaid to rise and ride
Like fire on some high errand of the race;
The irresistible appeals
For comradeship that sound
Steadily from the irresistible sea.
Thus the East laughed and whispered, and the tale,
Telling itself anew
In terms of living, labouring life,
Took on the colours, busked it in the wear
Of life that lived and laboured; and Romance,
The Angel-Playmate, raining down
His golden influences
On all I saw, and all I dreamed and did,
Walked with me arm in arm,
Or left me, as one bediademed with straws
And bits of glass, to gladden at my heart
Who had the gift to seek and feel and find
His fiery-hearted presence everywhere.
Even so dear Hesper, bringer of all good things,
Sends the same silver dews
Of happiness down her dim, delighted skies
On some poor collier-hamlet--(mound on mound
Of sifted squalor; here a soot-throated stalk
Sullenly smoking over a row
Of flat-faced hovels; black in the gritty air
A web of rails and wheels and beams; with strings
Of hurtling, tipping trams)--
As on the amorous nightingales
And roses of Shiraz, or the walls and towers
Of Samarcand--the Ineffable--whence you espy
The splendour of Ginnistan's embattled spears,
Like listed lightnings.
Samarcand!
That name of names!  That star-vaned belvedere
Builded against the Chambers of the South!
That outpost on the Infinite!
And behold!
Questing therefrom, you knew not what wild tide
Might overtake you:  for one fringe,
One suburb, is stablished on firm earth; but one
Floats founded vague
In lubberlands delectable--isles of palm
And lotus, fortunate mains, far-shimmering seas,
The promise of wistful hills--
The shining, shifting Sovranties of Dream.

raise ourselves, rouse ourselves, rising to race up versus the sun,
to ferry dock, to catch the first, the 5:10am to the mainland,
which is just an island-too-but-longer,
on the first boat of the workweek, the first leg
of an island to island to island journey-poem, but that
for another morning, unless already writ, but forgot?

the north fork, an herb garden of vegetables and fruits,
family farms & rural suburbs, towns of English & Indian names,
all cheek to jowl, corn rows, tractor museums,
high school football victory banners of a prior year,  
and alas, always fresh, aged-woe reminders,
too many streets, ferries, bridges named for young boys who didn't return from foreign wars and whom we all knew by right sight

me, a summer sojourner, a summer visa, an off-islander,
a Hebrew, living among the native island born hareleggers,^
the Methodists, Quakers, and the rest of a varietal potpourri of "Egyptians," come here by choice, all, living in a paradisal
farmers market, all faiths enjoying seven times seven
years of plenty

Country Road (CR) 48, plainly named, snakes it way to the city,  
a  hundred miles, a hundred miles, as the song says,
to a distant, invisible emerald mecca,
which magically emanates
waves of gravitational pull powerful,
where I heard that human city folk go to do derring do,
battling with numbers, creativity and keenest human instincts,
game playing for a throne that may not even exist

as we go west, the sun sneaks up behind us
spotted in the steve sideview mirror, watching our
winking red tails,
moving away, asking us why, are we somehow dissatisfied,
with the rich purple soil of this little refuge it protects?

this soil, blessed, brings forth the babies of summer,
truly a fruited plain cornucopia, the famed potatoes,
fresh eggs, for sale by unseen and oft unattended hands,
plant it and it will come, the peonies flowers, the sod, tomatoes,
the Christmas trees, local duck and fresh caught striped bass,,
over flowing fruit stands endless,
where they debate no politics but only
which fruit will become tomorrow's pies?

and always, first and foremost, the vineyards, the vineyards

not yet six am, sun still too weak, to do the ***** work burn,
fields full of snow white mist lying over man tall vines,
the mist, ground swelling up to the chest level, then north
to the nostrils and head, intoxicating the lungs, the brain,
inculcating the chest with a salve of moisture,
a blend of sea and farm fresh air,
containing the designer's secret arts of earth creation

the fine mist so thick, no different than a snowy white out,
leaves me marveling and a-wonder, why do I leave,
dictated to by boxes on a hardware store calendar?

why not bide and hide in the morn mist,
never will-would we-be found, the vineyards and corn rows,
my protectors, the bay and sound, my natural moats,
is the music of wind + leaves, symphonic insufficient,
isn't the theater of the birds, wild turkeys, families of deer, osprey,
tern, visiting Canadian geese, and the hard to spot, Broadway stars,
those little foxes, wondrous enough?

this guising vineyard mist offers solutions to questions
I should not be asking, especially, primarily,
where is shelter,
for that is asked and answered

(WE ARE!)

The space pioneers, planetary colliders seizing the heavens and placing them on earth, pop pop big bang brain busters that spin galaxies into milky ways and planets into candybars, the alien humanoid reflectors reflecting the sun back into Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

(WE ARE!)

The fire-starters, self-combustion, canvas arsonists. IGNITE! Light the streets on fire with your blood. Explode, implode, and explode again. Pilot to bombardier, we’re dropping bombs like Guernica.

(WE ARE!)

Wild creatures born out of black magic, black mamba, bear your ******* fangs! Be a predator! Find you’re prey, rip it’s ******* guts out, and paint something with them. Then scream, scream so loud that Munch himself would tell you to turn it down a notch.

(WE ARE!)

The creators, the ground shakers, the earth quakers, inventing ideas, gushing thought, and gushing blood because remember, you are alive! Alive with creativity, passion, and energy to create, because we are artists.

Disregarded,  no thanks.
I no longer fall for the pranks.
I withdraw my cash from the bank.
On a scale of one to ten how do I rank?
Poverty stenches & stank.
Stale & untrusted.
Broken,  abandoned,  & undusted.
Defeated,  hobbled, & now rusted.
Felonies & misdeameanors busted.
Lawbreakers, corruded & crusted.

Marry a man with a job & a van.
Who does all that he can.
My secret wish on a shooting star.
To stop getting drunk at the bar.
A walk to his momma's house isn't far.

Work ethics get my kiss.
Employment was my wish.
Success is our bliss.

Like jawbreakers dangerous & senseless.
Civilization settlers & makers.
Pioneers,  homemakers, waiters, bakers, & Quakers.
The towns folk are usually broke.
Different walks of life is no joke.
Occupations & professions of a wife.

What if I had one more eye?
Noble with clarity-
A superior eye.

It would see tomorrow,
Not yet set in stone,
So set apart from the world I know-

Distinctive and discernible,
I envision a procession,
Of time trailed before me.

Enthroned on my brow,
The lone eye would crest,
Possessed with its profound unrest.

Clairvoyant, cunning, beaming eye-
Perched above organs of trivial nature,
Adorned, a crown that never cries,
It knows no regretful quakers.

How magnificent!
It would be,
To see so clearly,
To amend early,
To haven from horror,
To have an aura,
Of the triumphs yet to unfold,
If only an eye that bold,
Were part of me.

my own mind
robs me of serenity
delusions seem real
and fears of the future
seem imminent

a huge weight is lifted
when I trust in a loving power
I do not know what
but it's not me

Quakers call it the Divine Light
Taoists call it the Great Tao
and Yoda called it the force all around us
I choose to call it *Love

They warn us that fever travels in the air,
so women pull the shutters closed and keep
children out of the empty, heady streets.
Grandpa tries to assure me we are safe,
that yellow fever will stop when the ports
close. He never speaks of how the victims suffer,
shuts the curtains against my anxious eyes
as the bodies are removed, but rumors catch
the breezes, too.

Vomiting, bleeding from the nose and mouth,
the eyes yellow, and then victims reach out
in a last fit of delirium, demanding forgiveness
from God’s wrath as He turns them the sallow
shade of the September sun. This is the color
of a body when salvation fractures
from the depths of their souls.

Each day, the count of the dead rises.
My cousin, the milkman, a widow down the block—
all pass within hours. The Quakers deem
this the Almighty’s will, his “rod.” Physicians
bleed the sick, and I think not to rid them of disease,
but to account for sin.

We all hope for frost. I know Grandpa will not leave
the city, but I do not imagine his eyes yellowing,
for pride keeps them clear of exhaustion
and glaze from inviting liquor or laudanum.

My whole body sweats from dreams
of corpses the color of tobacco-stained teeth,
blood pouring from eyes like tears, each one dropping
to the ground. I wake up, dizzy in smeared-red sheets,
my nightgown smelling like a mausoleum, but I do not
call for help because I’ve been waiting to look
into the face of God, to see my yellowed city’s reflection.

Ever played rose, bud and thorn? It’s a game where you go around in a group of friends and share what’s happening in your life. A rose is something good, a bud is something hoped for, and a thorn is a problem. Yeah, we’re hopeless oversharers.

My rose today is the weather. I wrote a piece a week ago complaining about the lack of snow in New Haven. The next morning it was 2° with a wind chill of -30°. My roommates gave me the evil eye - like I somehow brought it on. “God doesn’t listen to me.” I ‘d said, defensively.

My thorn is, Anna’s parents are here for a few days and she’s very on edge. She spent yesterday with them but today they’re coming to our suite. I was surprised when I first saw them, they’re straight off the farm (if the farm was in the 1800s). They seemed to huddle together, defensively and consulted each other so quietly that they buzzed like a hive of bees.

Her father, a very tall man, was wearing a plaid flannel shirt under a long, thick, dark gray, Dickies coat (it says Dickies on the pocket) and jeans. He has a medium-long white beard and a black-felt, wideawake hat which he worked slowly in a circle by its brim (I think that would qualify as a comforting gesture).

Her mom, Abeba, the spokesperson for the pair, is a thin woman with mostly gray (used to be brown) hair. She was dressed simply in black high-top shoes, a plain, deep green, floor length dress under a sweater and long, thick, gansey shawl with matching barrette.

When I reached out to take her hand in greeting, she regarded me with a coolness I found unnerving. All the other parents I’ve ever met were friendly, even huggy, on introduction.
“They’re Quakers,” Anna said, (note the “they’re”) like that explained everything. When I looked confused, she reached out her hand, at arm's length, and touched me lightly on the upper arm with her index finger. After a moment she revealed, “That’s a Quaker hug.”

Anna had said they were quiet, “judgy” people - and here they were, in our common room, judging the books on our shelves (With titles like, “this book is gay,” “Good girl complex,” “The big **** *** book”) the clothes on the furniture, the laptops on the floor, the “art” on the walls and the disarray in the kitchen. They kept hat and purse in hand, as if they were expecting a fire drill. They’re a whole new category of houseguests.

At one point, Peter came out of my room, dressed in shorts and t-shirt but drying his hair. Sometimes he showers in my bathroom after working out. He smiled warmly at Anna’s parents and said, “Hi, Peter,” offering his hand to Anna’s father, Milhous (Peter can be very charming when he wants to be). Milhous stood up awkwardly and shook his hand, “Good day,” he said solemnly.  

Anna’s mom however, seeing Peter come out of my room, blushed from top to bottom and gave me a look that was worse than any spoken disapproval. The top of my head seemed to grow warm, but a glance at Anna revealed that she was embarrassed to her core, and my blooming irritation faded.

Imagine living under these passionless despots your whole life? I gave her a smile and moved on emotionally. Her parent's disapproval was so banal it was almost laughable.

Anna’s so happy, hilarious, bold and brilliant - the fact that these dour, sour, saturnine, in-the-margin sodbusters produced her - seems random - one of the wonders of the universe.

Its Louder in the centre,
Enter my nucleus centre,
Blood soak soul with graffiti on its wall,
A wall of sound,
A beat so neat with some emptiness that quakers a note hard to speak.
Whether loud or clear it sometimes shows its neatness, its politeness silences its weakness like war is about to begin.

But louder in the centre come closer, Sense its bullet proof soul listening out for a linking which way road out where.
How dare these intrepid molecules of sound bite words blood flow soak and leak my outer shield,
If all things hidden surely they won't get far but mainly quietly written with out a doubt coming louder from the centre.

Oh but when's this circus to commence?
This circle of life drowned from each day without a change,
No need to sit and crumble no calls for sin.
But louder from the centre you will hear the echo's of its sitting begin.
Not leaving yet no faith from a patriot
A divided wall of large and small, good versus evil with some sort of escape from it all.

Louder from the centre words fog form from a vice versa,
Forming this epicentre a true understanding copied from whatever is on the agenda.
Small leaf's clover covers it all gathering its mud blood dust from this voluminous mess,
Louder in the centre.

Sweet eyes ride upon these lines,
Providing its goodness re energised its epicentre which comes from within to be
Louder in the centre.

O'Reily@22082014

Dear dear Melania,
You came to us as Slovene.
Your anchor hubby has a mania
By which he daily vents his spleen.

Oh dear me, Donald J. T.,
Your mummy's Scottish, your papa's German,
Yet you say "What have you to lose?"
To native folks you treat like vermin.

Yet from these lands they long have hailed,
Many generations shackled and sold,
While you only recently
To our shores have sailed?

Muslims and Mexicans, migrants and mosques,
Catholics, Congregationalists, Quakers and queers:
Oh my, Mr. Trump, you're so **** weird.
Of what exactly must we be afeared?

So Donald, when you talk about your *****,
Please do not wave your hands between us.

Joe Twichell
(with apologies to my cousin, who is a real poet)

We all friends in Earth's society
No reason to start quaking
The Society of Friends are friends
The Quakers aren't shaking

No Quaking in Rome?
Nor the Sistine Chapel?
Black smoke, White Hope
White smoke, Black Pope

Does this seem dope? Just wait,
White State, Black Faith
Black State, White Fate
The impossible a possibility and a dope bomb

Start with a Quake, make a Quaker
If its a shake, make a shaker
Where's his taker of notes
penned at the Apostolic Nunciature

He heard a friend tell a friend's friend
Its getting late; confess your faith
If you ain't straight, you'll be left by the gate
near the wall with the writing

No thunder nor lightning
while I AM walking and all
In the city of the Monk
Graffiti: Writing on the Wall

what? you seriously gonna row ρ row your boat, gently down the stream? well, aren't you the cherub to my apple's worth of hopes in being my ferryman, replacing charon, when crossing the styx!

it's one of those *edgware road scenarios,
you're walking down it,
popping into a restaurant for a shisha pipe...
and then street preachers prop up...
your girlfriend is half irish, half indian,
and they ask you: you german? you german?
no... wait... am i?
                  i guess there's a physiognomy
aspect in the way i look to others...
        am i german?
                   i ask my girlfriend at the time,
do i look german?
                 i don't know the ****** language...
should i learn the language?
               so these muslim street propagandists
keep egging me on...
       look at the jews... blah blah...
            and i'm thinking...
             my native tongue is polish,
and i'm trying to settle myself in english...
     what's this german bit?
even at school, i hate reciting this, but a history
teacher talking about the second world war
singled me out from the rest of the class...
                "blonde" hair... she didn't spot
i had green, rather than blue eyes...
             this is freaky deeky deep ****,
unconscious forces working against me...
                               the **** did i do?
turn into michael fassbender?
    fast-bartender, or simply futurama's ******?
shoe on head is not enough, when
you're asked to don a stilleto as an earing
dangling on your ear... not the same ****,
and certainly not the same cover...
       my paternal great-grandfather?
spoke 7 languages, was in the MP (military police),
moved to america,
      my mother tried to get in touch...
      i think my family owned portions of the steel
factory that would have allowed my city of
birth to grow into a county-like-capital...
that failed...
                       if i did a gene test
i'd be least surprised to have some german
or mongol, or swede in me...
                                         read the history;
it's just the idea that muslim preachers at
edgware road (where's the edge, and the wear?)
         giving out free korans decided to
consider me german?
    they didn't call my girlfriend at the time
an australian, even though she was raised there...
i was suddenly german...
   i ****** well hope this is not some form of narcissism
that requires: being written about...
         well then... i must be then!
still, what bothers me more is edge-wear rho-
             -and the missing -ad.
                                       ro-                -ad?
    i swear people just establish there is no oa
        or an ao grapheme borrowed from latin...
               they just say: row'd;
     as in the past tense of: i was rowing in a boat,
down the thames.
          clearly you need to gulp down an oyster
to make clarifications to the slight differences
in spelling, to make grand strides in what you mean.
     it's also edge-ware... as in... the edges are
being worn... ware & tear ring any bells
                                          via st. mary-le-bow's?
a bit like saying: quacks? or quakers?
that's the same doctor?
     no, you ******* ponce... it's a play.
on what?
                                                         words!
i really, really either need to start learning
braille, or sign language; people are exhausting
with all their functioning senses,
       and i don't feel like subjecting my tongue
to the treadmill of conversation;
       ****... there's no chance of talking the earth
out of orbit!

Farc chica
de Vene
is velvet
scripture but
a muskrat
that's amore
she's made
for lunch
where canta
is sweet
for laughing
while the
bossa nova
teri was
poolside for
the Quakers
of Mohave

THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT
      RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON

It was...
Oct 5th - 1970.

A Monday.

It was the 278th day
of the year...only

87 days remaining
until the end of the year.

I knew I had to act now.
It was now...or never.

Time? I forget the time.
Time was standing still.

Huge clouds
menaced the horizon

impersonating an Armada
of Spanish Galleons.

Full sail ahead then.
I took a step into my future.

The smiling President drawing
nearer and nearer.

In Nass
the drenched crowed cheered.

In Newbridge now
flocks of children chase the car

like he was some
kinda Piper from Hamelin.

I kept a close eye on
the secret service

all dressed in the same suit
looking like clones

of one another
talking into their sleeves.

My gaze searches and settles
upon him

like the cross-hairs
of a ******'s rifle.

Sure he had called his setter
King Timahoe

after where his folks came from
another American looking for his roots

bolstering the Irish-American vote.

And now here he was
the man himself

in person
the 37th President.

Irish colleens dancing
upon a make-shift stage

in the square
of Kildare.

He's here oh so near
I can see the pores of his skin

a bead of sweat trickles into
that infamous Nixon grin.

Dare I do it now?
My hair falling into my eyes.

My mind flashes back to
1729

when his Quaker ancestors
fled the Emerald Isle.

Three centuries pass by in a second and
we're here

in the middle of
The Vietnam War

and he speaks of
"a passion for peace...preventing war...building peace."

Yeah yeah...sure sure!

Carpet bombing Cambodia
the famous Nixon duplicity

the "credibility gap" opening
between what he says and what he does.

Oh there are protests
he has 5 eggs hurlers.

"Splatsplatsplatsplat and splat!"
Only one near hit.

And one man protesting
the price of a pint

up'd( for the occasion )to
one shilling and jaysus seven pence.

What's the world
coming to?

School kids waving
their plastic( in slow mo )

American flags
on little plastic sticks.

I raise my flag.
I raise my...voice

shooting my mouth off
with a great shout:

'TRICKY DICKY! TRICKY DICKY!
WOULD YOU BUY A USED CAR FROM THIS MAN!"

Several secret service scowl.
My words hit him...Nixon frowns.

Character assassination.

Mr. McCann
aka "The Bicycle Man!"

curses me
in Irish.

After all he is
my Irish teacher.

D'anam leis an diabhal...Ó Diomasaigh!"
("Your soul to the devil...Dempsey!")

"THE TIME HAS COME TO CALL
A ***** A ****** SHOVEL..."

I yell as
I get a clip around the ear.

McCann holds his hand
over my mouth.

Then suddenly Nixon
is no longer

there.

The hurled words
disappear into the air.

Us school boys
***** damply back to double Maths.

The De La Salle
Academy looming up before us.

Mr. McCann
hoovers near.

I cover both
my ears.

But he only tousles
my hair.

"Ahhh mo amadán beag cróga!"
( "Ahhh my brave little fool!")

"Maith an bhuachaill...maith an bhuachaill!"
( "Good boy...good boy!")

He grins.
Slips me a sixpence.

I sing the new Led Zep
only released that day.

"So now you'd better stop and rebuild all your ruins,
for peace and trust can win the day despite of all your losing."

Being only 12
I had done what had to be done.

My political life
had only just begun.
*

The long forgotten "never-to-be-forgotten" visit made to Hodgestown near Timahoe in the county of Kildare back in the day as we leave the Sixties sadly behind us for the austerity of the '70's and the "Yes we can" of the Sixties begins to loose its lustre.

The Timahoeans are not exactly proud of giving the world Mr. Nixon and stay quite quiet about it. The Kennedy visit was the golden one and Clinton and Reagan had theirs but Tricky Dicky's one has faded into the fog of history.

"Jessamyn West, who has written so eloquently about the background of our family, has said, the Quakers have a passion for peace. My mother was a pacifist. My grandmother was a pacifist. Jessamyn's mother was, her grandmother, her grandfather, going back as far as we know."

President Nixon in the Timahoe graveyard.

Don't know what happened to him then!

"The time has come to call a ***** a ****** shovel. This country is in an undeclared and unexplained war in Vietnam. Our masters have a lot of long and fancy names for it, like escalation and retaliation, but it is a war just the same." - James Reston.

"So now you'd better stop and rebuild all your ruins,
for peace and trust can win the day despite of all your losing."

Led Zeppelin 111 - Immigrant Song.

By: Cedric McClester

Well, I’ll be ******!
Trump and Putin are a sham
Perpetrating a flim-flam
They just shot Uncle Sam!
In Helsinki with a battering ram
Is it necessary to draw a diagram?
In order for you to understand
That all of it must have been preplanned

They met in private
With no notetakers
Under the guise of  peacemakers
Just like your average lawbreakers
Doing their best to throw haymakers
See neither one of them are Quakers
But they’re con men outright fakers
Playing ball like the new Lakers

I blame the one,
But not the both
Cuz Putin didn’t swear an oath
He wants to stymie our growth
And Trump’s playing with half a loaf
For his base which he betroth
But which of them hates us the most
It’s hard to say, yet he’ll still boast

He doesn’t care about us
So he’s betrayed his sacred trust
In order to do what he must
To protect himself and to adjust
Even if we all go bust
Making America how he discussed
Despite the economy being robust
He’s unworthy of our trust







Cedric McClester, Copyright © 2018.  All rights reserved.

the easily "discredited",
or as some would jest,
the ones easily "offended";

i wish it was the same
case for a whitewash,
as it might be toward
the stratum oblique...

had i known a woman prior,
i'd be glad in having nor
knowledge with, or without
a prior...

my only wish?
having been the south,
getting to know the north
was my last wish;

the way i see it,
the epitome of cultural darwinism,
is a man doing *******
on himself,,,

      this second criticism of marxism
really, does, undo the
western social project...
   with its "proto" christianity...

look pretty **** well from
where i'm standing...
   lookw pretty **** well,
for your british thai fathers
and your *******...
mums? quasi mum?
         what are they?
liverpool + manchester = london?

what are you?
         the chant of polish children
regarding the british?

angol! angol! pedał! pedał!

angol! pederast!
           pederast! angol!
sartre lived with his mum,
you i.v.f. mongrel...
   you ******* surrogate
daddy-daddy baby, you *******
homosexual biproduct...
eat that **** thinking it's
swiss chocolate...
                      
  go on! come with it!
          ***-quakers and burp-slippers,
you ******* spice girls
of argument,
             you come with a counter,

you know how i'm going to finish
this night?
rice and some chicken stomachs...
in gravy...
   i was wishing for some chicken hearts
to suit the offal (inner organs)...
  ah... ****;
                 i was really readied to
kiss a transgender person,
while biting off their lips...
to expose the grin,
and ensure there was a
to contended with;
        god... can't you just not admire
the smile?
     hard to think of chelsea  / glasgow
when not thinking of
the frankfurt grin (frankfurtgrinsen).