{"id":65,"date":"2007-11-29T16:24:11","date_gmt":"2007-11-29T22:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/?page_id=65"},"modified":"2026-06-24T13:34:50","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T18:34:50","slug":"poems-and-rants","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/poems-and-rants\/","title":{"rendered":"poems"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>top of the page<\/p>\n

Electronic publications:<\/strong>
\n“Bryan’s Ragtime Stride”<\/a> Friends of Scott Joplin, January 13, 2020.
\n“Nineteenth”<\/a> The PIker Press,<\/em> June 14, 2021.
\n“Farm Road Entropy”<\/a> The Piker Press<\/em> July 19, 2021
\n“Deep Ecology”<\/a> Better Than Starbucks,<\/em> August 2021*
\n“Mnemonic”<\/a> Eunoia Review,<\/em> August 4, 2021.
\n“Great River Road”<\/a> Eunoia Review,<\/em> August 5, 2021.
\n“West”<\/a> Eunoia Review,<\/em> August 5, 2021.
\n“Zapper”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> August 16, 2021.
\n“Poem in August”<\/a> The New Verse News,<\/em> August 30, 2021.
\n“Colloquy With Dean Rader and Emily . . . .”<\/a> Litbreak Magazine, <\/em>September 18, 2021
\n“Events of !939”<\/a> Litbreak Magazine, <\/em>September 18, 2021
\n“Nomad Country”<\/a> Litbreak Magazine, <\/em>September 18, 2021
\n“Lament for the Makers”<\/a> Litbreak Magazine, <\/em>September 18, 2021
\n“After Implosion”<\/a> The Piker Press, <\/em>September 20, 2021
\n“End of the World”<\/a> The Piker Press,\u00a0<\/em>October 18, 2021
\n“Pandemics, So Called”<\/a> The New Verse News,<\/em> November 8, 2021.
\n“Anthropocene”<\/a> The Piker Press,\u00a0<\/em>November 15, 2021
\n“Duncan and Brady”<\/a> The New Verse News,<\/em> November 19, 2021; reprinted in CulturMag,<\/a> December 1, 2021.
\n“Springtime 2019”<\/a> The Piker Press,\u00a0<\/em>December 13, 2021
\n“Long Homestead in Winter,”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> January 17, 2022. Reprints in O’Henry<\/a> and Pinestraw<\/a>.
\n“Three Eco Reflection Poems”<\/a> Lothlorien Poetry Journal,<\/em> January 30, 2022.
\n“The Alpine,” <\/a>The Piker Press,<\/em> February 14, 2022
\n“Bayboro Harbor 1999”<\/a> Raw Art Review,<\/em>SUMMER\/FALL, 2021, pp. 129-130
\n“Silverback<\/a>” The Piker Press,<\/em> March 21, 2022
\n“Chain of Rocks”<\/a>The Piker Press,<\/em> April 18, 2022
\n“Pure Onionhood”<\/a>The Piker Press,<\/em> June 27, 2022
\n“27 Club”<\/a>The Piker Press<\/em> July 25, 2022
\n“Field of Dreams, 2022”<\/a> New Verse News,<\/em> August 14, 2022
\n“Greek to Us”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> August 29, 2022
\n“Wind in the Willow”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> September 26, 2922
\n“Moonshadow”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> October 24, 2022.
\n“Searching for Am\u00e9d\u00e9”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> November 21, 2022.
\n“Penguin Provender”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> December 19, 2022.
\n“Recuerdo”<\/a> New Verse News,<\/em> December 23, 2022.
\nJohann’s Boy<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> January 9, 2022.
\n“Winter Cyclone Haiku,” “Johann’s Boy”<\/a> Verse Virtual,<\/em> February 2023.
\n“Oil Patch, 1980”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> February 27, 2023.
\n“Against Melancholy”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> March 27, 2023.
\n“Animal Counsel”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> April 24, 2023.
\n“May Day”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> May 8, 2023.
\n“Earthrise”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> June 19, 2023.
\n“Almost Ghazal for Them Cowbirds”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> July 17, 2023.
\n“Microaggressions”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> August 21, 2023.
\n“In the Name of Heaven”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> September 25, 2023.
\n“Towards an Unaesthetic”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> October 23, 2023.
\n“More than Macaronic”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> November 20, 2023.
\n“Epiphany at the St. Louis Art Museum”<\/a> The Piker Press,<\/em> December 18, 2023.<\/p>\n

*featured poem<\/p>\n

Watch this space for forthcoming electronic publications.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Selected Print Publications<\/strong><\/p>\n

“I have heard of this book already,” said Don Quixote, “and verily and on my conscience I thought it had been by this time burned to ashes as useless . . . .”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

*High Wire Man . . .<\/span>
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

High Wire Man<\/a>\u00a0\u00b7 To a Woman, Singing\u00a0\u00b7 Under Construction<\/a>\u00a0\u00b7 In Durham, Living on the Margin\u00a0\u00b7 Wittgenstein’s Lion<\/a>\u00a0\u00b7 Fu\u00feark\u00a0\u00b7 Homunculus\u00a0\u00b7 Philosopher\u00a0\u00b7 Murder Sonata\u00a0\u00b7 Vocalise\u00a0\u00b7 No Thanks\u00a0\u00b7 Bach’s Retraction<\/a>\u00a0\u00b7 Symposium\u00a0\u00b7 Take the Hard Road Home\u00a0\u00b7 Heart of Flight<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*Trilobite Press has been sold to Triangle Nonprofit Publishing, whose website is a work in progress. If you’d like a copy of High Wire Man, write here<\/a>, or write the author at longjulian@gmail.com.<\/p>\n

“These . . . ,” said the priest, “do not deserve to be burned like the others . . . , being intellectual books that can hurt no one.”<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church . . .<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This collection includes 80 poems. Here are some selections. American Pie<\/a>\u00a0\u00b7 Autumn Catalogue<\/a>\u00a0\u00b7 Train to Dallas<\/a>\u00a0\u00b7 Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church<\/a>\u00a0\u00b7 Flatbush Waltz<\/a>\u00a0\u00b7 The Echoing Green<\/a> \u00b7 Obiter Dictum<\/a>\u00a0\u00b7 Pressmen<\/a>\u00a0\u00b7 Salvationists Escaping<\/a>\u00a0\u00b7 From a Further Room<\/a> \u00b7 Christmas Eve<\/a> \u00b7 Streams of Mercy<\/a> \u00b7 In sure and Certain Hope<\/a> \u00b7 Weymouth Woods<\/a> \u00b7 Monumental History<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

American Pie<\/span><\/p>\n

Janis Joplin was a tough
\nlittle Texas girl, you said
\nwho busted her butt to be a star
\nbut if there was ever any music it disappeared.
\nMaybe we never heard it anyway.<\/p>\n

If there was ever any music
\nI lost it at the Eagle cafe
\nwhere lunch was Theresa Brewer
\nand my friend Jack Benny Cunningham’s yellow boot
\ncame down on the neck of a little Mexican
\nwe’d called a wetback–
\nwe could have killed him.<\/p>\n

The week before, we’d killed a deer
\ntrapped him in the headlights, bird-dogging
\nin my granddaddy’s old Dodge. Then we were
\non him with pocketknives, and the more he
\nstruggled the more we cut, until
\nhe stopped.<\/p>\n

But I think Janis Joplin died of hype
\nand when the music disappeared behind
\nnight-slapping windshields from Newark to Saigon
\nwe didn’t understand. All we ever wanted
\nwas to get there.<\/p>\n

Have you outstripped the rest?
\nAre you the President?<\/i><\/p>\n

Out on the road
\nYou’ve got nothing left to lose, born again
\nand amplified, faster than Richard Petty
\ndrop-kicked through the goal posts of life.<\/p>\n

[First published in New Texas 1998,<\/i> 1999] <\/span><\/p>\n

top of the page<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Autumn Catalogue<\/span><\/p>\n

Bravely
\nas the light flies
\nI tell you how my heart breaks
\nfor one red maple
\non a hill in South Carolina
\nand for a redtail hawk
\nhow autumn tramped that country
\nin dirt feet, keening
\nlike an old song. I reason<\/p>\n

that things are most themselves
\nin autumn when at four o’clock
\nthe sun from high cirrus cuts
\ntall poplars.
\nTheir yellow hands holding the blades
\nthey abide the time
\nover farms
\nand country roads. My hand<\/p>\n

translucent as I
\nwrite by this window
\ndisplays its architectonic–
\ntendons slide along the knuckles
\ngently lift the net of veins
\nwhere the life goes home, and I recall
\nhow soft your eyes are sometimes. If<\/p>\n

my character likewise
\nshould be exposed
\nit would be found a somewhat overbloomed
\nperpetual. But if found at best
\nI think I could hollow out my bones
\nwait with the redtail hawk
\nin a known spiral upwards, all
\nutterance suspended. Glaciers snap<\/p>\n

quite suddenly
\nmy hair is white, a hawk cries
\nwestward.<\/p>\n

[First published in Weymouth:An Anthology of Poetry Edited by Sam Ragan,<\/i> 1987]<\/span><\/p>\n

top of the page<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Train to Dallas<\/span><\/p>\n

As I have moralized it
\nwe rode through grey
\nDecember pastures
\nhalf-steamed windows
\nof our coach revealed
\nblack against them here and there
\nmesquite, post oak, scrub cedar. I
\nnodding into Lear, as Kent
\ninto wheels turning, kept the
\nseason in the stocks.<\/p>\n

Dead father, please come back!
\nI, too, would lead you by the hand–<\/i><\/p>\n

Look there!<\/i> cried the old mad king
\nclosing Cordelia’s eye, a door
\nto tombs in Leicester whence he went
\nthat day the rails beneath me throbbed
\nas though they were the joists of heaven.<\/p>\n

There is a grief of old men, saturnine
\nas Texas winter towards the solstice–
\nmy grief too, borne inward as the death of God.
\nThe oldest have borne most, been comfortless
\nincapable; my grief to search for fathers I had wronged
\nby too much love.<\/p>\n

[First published in Pembroke Magazine<\/i> 1978]<\/span><\/p>\n

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Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s good to be here, Lord,
\neven if you’re not, even if all
\nthat’s behind the crucifix
\nis the eastern wall.<\/p>\n

Chrysostom says it takes two.
\nI’m never sure that angel on the back bench
\nknows anything, sitting there with his big square
\nwings folded, reading the editorials.<\/p>\n

I’ve seen his kind streak across the sky
\nnow and again, bound for races or baseball,
\nthrown a few high thoughts their way,
\nbut I don’t really want their life.<\/p>\n

Not that here is an easy place.
\nMy clothes are too tight. I worry. Sometimes
\nI get depressed. But what if I stopped
\nin this place just to get my messages?<\/p>\n

This here,<\/i> this room into which I speak
\nis quite enough height for me, and maybe
\nsomeday we’ll all of us get the message. Home,
\nthis is home, with its not very permanent light.<\/p>\n

Here or nowhere, me or nobody–<\/p>\n

it’s well.<\/p>\n

[First published in Windhover,<\/i> January 2001]<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n

Flatbush Waltz<\/span><\/p>\n

In a book he called Thad Stem’s First Reader,<\/em> the author recalls his first love, a young woman named Rose Blatz, who taught him a few words of Yiddish, and whom he characterizes fondly as the ninth candle of the Hanukkah menorah. Of the ninth candle, Leo Rosten observes that it stands taller than the rest, being the candle from which the other eight candles are lit, one for each day of the feast, and symbolizing that one can give love and light to others without losing any of one’s own radiance. Jessica is Shakespeare’s Jessica, in The Merchant of Venice,<\/em> who might have had Andy Statman’s Flatbush Waltz<\/em> in mind, when she said, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music . . .<\/p>\n

[In a doggerel rhythm, like a slow waltz<\/em>]<\/p>\n

Kings and queens in their limousines,
\nlike these in their threadbare velveteens
\nwere pearls that we stitched da da dum
\nda da dum
\nand now our dance is plain as boards
\nbut our feet still turn as we sway, da da dum
\nwe are sober as sawdust, flat as shirts
\nbut we flame as we step, we shine, da da dum.<\/p>\n

Dum da da dum two three dum each tink
\nof the mandolin drums to the fiddler’s tune
\ncurling and sad and sweet da da dum
\nlike Hanukkah candles or wine from a spoon.
\nWhen in sweeps Jessica nee Rose Blatz
\nninth of the candles, or first, da da dum,
\nshe shines in full measure, out-darking the time,
\nthe fiddle bow stitching up skeins of pearls
\nto the music she steps, da da dum da da dum.
\nCome along you squires, you easy riders
\nmadonnas with chutzpah and pizzazz,
\nput an ear to the witness, eye to the shine,
\nput your foot, mark the music, it droppeth
\nlike rain.<\/p>\n

This sad sweet waltz is a journey somewhere–
\nbeyond some long march, out past the last prayer,
\nthe last mitzvah waiteth with Jessica there.<\/p>\n

Dance is commanded, no wallflowers here,
\nthey shall dance in Jerusalem all, next year.<\/p>\n

[First published in Windhover,<\/em> January 2001]<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Echoing Green<\/span><\/p>\n

As many times upon the running lawn,
\nThe spangled night of iris-fragrant spring
\nWas the various and populated town
\nOf our first knowledge of near everything.
\nNo tigers prowled about in that first world,
\nNo spiders in the fragrant lotus there;
\nAround our rose-tree house a serpent curled
\nBenign and fructed sleeper, centered fair.
\nWe played creation round about its head
\nMagicked friendship from the tuneful skies
\nAnd being spectral, chaos shrank and fled
\nFinding the darkness deep as we were wise.
\nNow, having lost the mothering gift of play
\nWe strain at common love the livelong day.<\/p>\n

[First published in The Sewanee Review,<\/em> Spring 1972]<\/span><\/p>\n

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Obiter dictum<\/span><\/p>\n

It was five a. m., the papers say
\nwhen you slipped away in your sleep.
\nIt must have been a quiet departure
\nunlike you, who were seldom at a loss for
\nwords. I’m damn sorry I missed your funeral,
\nsorrier to have missed your conversation
\nall these years.<\/p>\n

Not that you were unquiet–
\nyou held it in and wept, if you wept,
\nin a place apart (not unlike the rest of us either
\nwearing charity like a millstone). I often found
\nyou behind your old Underwood at the paper
\nbanging away with two fingers at that old devil
\nlanguage. I learned from you never to use the
\nword rue or to put a comma at the end of a line,
\nlearned to value some common truths, like the
\nway you always asked, “How you feelin’?”
\nand probably meant it. I miss you no more
\ntoday than during ten years silence
\nthough the thought of you grows hollow.<\/p>\n

You were a sociable man. I found it
\neasy to love you
\nand knew you loved me because I knew you to hate me
\nonce. I had seen a weakness you couldn’t abide–
\nthe circumstance no longer matters, but the truth
\ncan’t be left out. Like the memory of torn pride<\/p>\n

whatever we carry of others in us,
\nstays.<\/p>\n

[First published in New Texas 1998,<\/i> January 1999]<\/span><\/p>\n

top of the page<\/a><\/p>\n

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Pressmen<\/span><\/p>\n

It is late. I sit at a long deal table
\nin an upstairs cafe across from the paper
\nand watch the pressmen come in from their shift.
\nWe will drink coffee for a while. Again I will think
\nI know why they wear those squat little hats
\nfolded from newsprint, why they do not
\ntake them off–then we will go.<\/p>\n

The hats are a disguise to make themselves
\npressmen, like gunnery sergeants or stevedores–
\na disguise and a badge. “We are men,” they say,
\n“who tend a machine, feet sunk in fifty-foot rock
\nand long as a football field, that rips words from air
\nas it whirrs like a saw, eats ink, tree trunks, arms.”
\nMost have fingers missing, some have more.<\/p>\n

One tips back his chair and tells a story about his son,
\npushes the hat back on his balding head and scratches;
\nanother tips the hat forward, tells of an argument
\nwith his wife, as if to say, “You know how women are.”
\nHere, at the end of their shift, they still need to wear the hats–
\neven as they wrap the arms of their minds around each other,
\nbecause they are men with stories they do not
\nentirely wish to tell.<\/p>\n

And that is because they aren’t really pressmen at all.
\nOne is a breaker of horses, who carries a fire in his belly
\nthat drives him to make subjects of hammers, automobiles,
\nhis lawn mower. Another is drunk on God. In the dark
\nhours away from the press, God visits him. They smoke
\na calumet together, tell lies and love the lies they tell
\nas though they were incense drifting up from sacrifice.<\/p>\n

The central one, he to whom others defer, will one day be buried
\nwith his weapons. When centuries lift the broadsword from his ribs,
\nthey will find him to have stood seven feet tall. And the small
\none at the fringe of the group, the dark one who smiles a lot–
\nno one knows he loves a woman who sang to him once in Greek.
\nA luthier, he sleeps in the grain of true and high harmonics
\na sheet of spruce thin as a plectrum crushed to his ear.<\/p>\n

[First published in Windhover<\/i> January 2001]<\/span><\/p>\n

top of the page<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Salvationists Escaping<\/span><\/p>\n

The crisis is always the same.
\nWhat if, after collecting coats and toys
\nTV sets, gratuitous old shoes, we should slip
\nbroke and walking out of Sherman’s Atlanta
\nbarely ahead of gangrenous caissons and burning?<\/p>\n

And suppose the children were not
\nthe same every year with surprised grandmothers
\ngetting canned goods and hand me downs, but refugees
\nwith swollen bellies begging the roadside
\nand sooty fingers plucking our penniless sleeves.<\/p>\n

It has somehow to start elsewhere.
\nThe world I make love to has always
\nhad your skin. Its roots and contours
\nswim in your sea, telling each other touching
\nall the things that are told.<\/p>\n

Yet there is always that other, sometimes
\nso much of it we die for a while or a lifetime
\n(once as a child I caught the same
\ntiny fish forty-seven times). In Sherman’s fires
\nwe swim, tiny fish in buffalo grass.<\/p>\n

Love because you must before the world wakes
\nto the dead city and everything gone but smoke.
\nTug at each other’s coatsleeves. Do not let go–
\nas though there were someone to forgive the burning
\nas though there were someone to love us but ourselves.<\/i><\/p>\n

[First published in New North Carolina Poetry, The Eighties,<\/i> Edited by Stephen E. Smith, 1982]<\/span><\/p>\n

top of the page<\/a><\/p>\n

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From a Further Room<\/span>
\n—for Dona and Rob Anderson<\/em><\/p>\n

“But is it really
\nmusic?” you complained.<\/p>\n

We were talking of Stan Rogers, coming out
\nwith new tunes even though he’s dead, music
\n(or not) mostly made at the engineer’s board.<\/p>\n

I thought of dour old Mennonite women
\non hand at the fair in Iowa City
\nlike my Swedish grandmother, long since moved away.
\nNew music made them stiff last year. ‘I’m here,
\nbut I don’t like it,’ their demeanor seemed to say.
\nNew gospel, slick as TV, gave them nothing to pat their
\nfeet to.<\/p>\n

Earlier, we had talked of your new house in Door County,
\nseen photos of friends on a friendly beach. Rob mused, “We
\nwrote three books together,” pointing out one of them. Then
\nwe talked some more about land and trees and water,
\nI still thinking of “Paradise” and saying
\nfretfully how we blow whole mountains away
\nand think to make it good by planting grass.<\/p>\n

If new music fails perhaps it lacks something
\nof the earth we know. Gordon Bok sings of weather
\nI can only imagine, being southern; yet his voice, recorded
\nfills a room, sonorous as woodsmoke. Listening, I almost think
\nI’ll be a Maine man too. Rogers, doubly absent, sings of Nova Scotia
\n—but the rhythm is a Texas two-step.<\/p>\n

So if music pegs us to known earth, maybe new music
\nreminds us how we are sometimes tied to objects of desire
\nwe don’t understand. A damsel with a dulcimer
\nin a vision once I saw . . . heard melodies are sweet,
\nbut those unheard are sweeter,<\/em> as once in Taos
\nI watched a young woman dance alone
\nin herself, complete—<\/p>\n

taking, as she did, space meant for a hundred.
\nNew music surprises us, arrives all at once in the air
\nfrom nowhere we had ever expected to go. Sometimes
\nwe don’t like it, but this year the Mennonites rocked
\nto the strains of “I’ll Fly Away”—<\/p>\n

and perhaps all music is new,
\nlike sleep on the westbound porch
\nat my Swedish grandmother’s house in Las Cruces
\nwhere the Santa Fe whistled hollow and high.<\/p>\n

Nuzzled as close to some heart of it as we can get,
\nwe sometimes write books, cook risotto, argue—
\ntake naps in the moonlight while somebody<\/p>\n

not present calls the tune.<\/p>\n

[First published as a broadside by Backroom Window Press, 2011]<\/span><\/p>\n

top of the page<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

High Wire Man<\/span><\/p>\n

He starts at dawn.
\nFrom a hill above a tiny
\nFrench village a wire stretches up
\nover cottages parti-colored, harlequinesque
\na single steeple, tall beeches swaying.
\nHe walks at first like a tumbler, leaping
\nand changing his feet, turning cartwheels
\nabout the pole that balances–one false turn
\nbut he catches himself last instant before
\ndead weight–and then the long stride
\nover the housetops, each step centered
\nafresh.<\/p>\n

Do we really hope he falls–
\nIsn’t it the overcoming that thrills
\neach step an overcoming not of death
\nbut of something like slavery, on the wire
\nto fail beyond shame? We imagine fear of
\nbroken bones and agony, death of deaths
\nby violence, but ask him and he’ll tell you
\nhe is at home on the wire. Think of the pole
\nthe balancing, the purity of it. Any life
\nhe loses isn’t his own.<\/p>\n

From his heart stretches another wire
\ntugging towards the hard planet–
\nwhat he risks is loss of height, but in
\nthe end the heart implodes, wires run to ground
\nover a little stile, step foot in a field of folk.
\nWe cheer and weep–ask and he’ll tell you
\nhe was at home on the wire.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n

Under Construction<\/span>
\n–at the MoMA in 1983<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

What did Rilke mean
\n\u00abyou must change your life\u00bb<\/i>
\nthat a dead god speaks
\nthrough a broken statue?
\nor that the statue, mutilated, is
\nthe god, absences noted–<\/p>\n

here in the MoMA the issue is
\nsimpler, most of the galleries closed.
\nA rope separates me from The Starry Night
\nwhose “careful use of line, space, and spiral
\n. . . creates a sense of reckless speed.” It is
\nnonetheless a small canvas. The cypress
\nin the foreground enflames less than
\nobserves, a lonely spectator almost outside
\nthe rope with me. Van Gogh needed a wall.<\/p>\n

Nearby trois demoiselles, huge and histrionic
\nscandalize the room, its neutrality, its spotless
\ntemporariness. The heavy brushstrokes of their thighs
\nare brass fists–the flat planes of their faces slap the air.
\nWhat absence teases here? Art deco furniture
\nBauhaus models, an Escher drawing or two
\nreturn to book–Van Gogh returns to book.
\nOnly the bawdy demoiselles disturb the silence.<\/p>\n

I turn to them, smug as if
\nto say: Be still! We are in charge–
\nsee, we have shouted these others down
\nand nothing will ever be the same.<\/i><\/p>\n

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Wittgenstein\u2019s Lion<\/span><\/p>\n

Wittgenstein . . . made the most interesting
\nmistake about animals I have ever come across.
\nAt the end of the Philosophical Investigations<\/i> he
\nsays that if a lion could talk we wouldn\u2019t be able
\nto understand him.<\/p>\n

\u2014Vicki Hearne<\/p>\n

If some lion were to speak
\n(to say nothing of lions at large)
\nthat one would be a failed beast
\nthin-maned and ugly, lacking among its kind
\nany familial tie to the king of
\nsame.<\/p>\n

A hearer of voices, that
\none would scheme of poetry–
\nin the desert would invent
\nriddles that slouched like athletes
\nthick muscled, gigantic.<\/p>\n

Of course, the lionist culture would fail
\nits pretensions exposed by a skinny Algerian.
\nA postcard mailed from a desert town
\nrequesting copyright, would be returned
\nbecause it arrived without a stamp<\/p>\n

but think of the romp they would have.<\/p>\n

Lionish translations would burgeon–
\nImagine the Nicomachean Ethics roared
\nthe Iliad\u2019s great periods hugely purred
\nthe New Testament conceived
\nas an antelope hunt.<\/p>\n

Soon would arise a tradition
\nof lionist conversation, courtesy having
\nits Leoniglione, politics its Leonavelli
\nverse a Leonighieri, a dolce stile
\na sprezzatura of the leonine.<\/p>\n

In the new lionist Aeneid
\nthe hero remains in Carthage
\nto wed the African queen.
\nHaving conquered the interior
\nthe lovers found instead of Rome
\na belletrist academy<\/p>\n

teaching all subsequent history
\nto keep a civil tongue.<\/p>\n

top of the page<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nBach’s Retraction<\/span><\/p>\n

I made nothing–
\nthat has to be said
\nat first, not the little
\nklavierst\u00fccke so loved by parents
\n(hated by children) not a cantata
\ntoccata, passion, chaconne,
\nnot the great fugue, none of it
\nI made.<\/p>\n

Nor, and this is hard,
\nwas I its instrument–not one breath
\nin the pipes that caused these hands
\nand feet to dance on burnished wood
\nwas mine. I felt that breath,
\nthought it, I suppose, like Pascal’s
\nreed, knew it even for what it was
\n\u00absoli deo gloria\u00bb<\/em> but I never . . .
\nbetter to say, my God,
\nthat it made me.<\/p>\n

And the great fugue?
\nI laid it out, signed it, sought
\nto perfect it, failed; but the heart
\nof it, peace to men of good will–
\ngood will the highest good of all
\nsublime above all other–some profess
\nthey were taught it by a philosopher;
\nI forget his name, a pietist I think,
\nno matter. That was the great
\nfugue, not mine but God’s.<\/p>\n

Had I been its instrument
\nI should have died sooner, incarnate
\nlost in its incarnation, surviving
\nonly as long as memory lasts;
\nbut we know that God’s music (there
\nis the word) sheds its skin like cicadas
\nI used to find as a youngster in Eisenach
\nchoristers whose thousand juicy voices
\nthronged high summer nights. Nor was<\/p>\n

the what the wonder, more nearly the whence–
\nbrilliance of silence unfolding with jeweled speech
\n(don’t believe the philosophers, music is sound)
\nand oh my Lord my God the rush of it, sometimes
\nnot to be borne, the organ bench my only safety,
\nonly calm in the wind that made me crazy!<\/p>\n

The muse first sought me out in the church
\nat Arnstadt; we made music weekdays
\nuntil the council discovered us.
\nAn angelic flute she was, in the antique
\nstyle, God’s voice a violone,
\nwheeling like the planets–I had been
\nto L\u00fcbeck to hear Buxtehude play
\noverstayed my time, neglected my choir . . .<\/p>\n

I’m no good for philosophy. Give me black
\nand white keys, wood diapason, reed diapason,
\ngut, tin, or brass, handy, homely things: I am homesick–
\nalways was homesick–the great fugue
\ntook me home.<\/p>\n

top of the page<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nChristmas Eve<\/span><\/p>\n

Twelve o\u2019clock we keep the feast.
\nLike promise of familiar grief
\nthe time surrounds
\nas carols pour from deepest flutes
\nfor which there are no organs and
\nthe solemn plainsong is as light
\nsuffused in darkness of the one
\nbeginning.<\/p>\n

A boy steps to the pulpit,
\nthe antique ruff at his neck
\nthe type of an antique tongue.
\nHe reads by candlelight an antique tale
\nof a maiden in a garden and a star.
\nAs the miracle is announced in his choirboy
\nVoice, piped in this house to which both it
\nand he belong\u2014there
\nis the breath of God.
\nWe should do well to ask
\nhim where the story
\nbegins. He cannot tell us
\nbut we may discover the child
\nbeneath the altar, find in memory
\nof him or her joy glimpsed down corridors
\nnot closed, merely unopened until now
\nhere in the darkened church
\nhung with rosemary.<\/p>\n

We do not speak of the one beginning
\ncarrying it within as though we stood
\nat daybreak by the sea, naming
\nas we did when we were small
\ncreation\u2019s names, thinking to relearn
\nlanguages of birds, fish, grasses
\nof stars and their spectacular companions
\nin the long and open night, now lost
\nwith the designs of our first parents.<\/p>\n

I dream an archaic woman
\noffers her man child to a star
\nthat it inhabit him, become
\nhis heart, burn fiercely as he burns in life.
\nLater, he will learn the song one sings
\nto the great eland in the three-day hunt
\nrunning sometimes two hundred miles
\nacross the desert, learn the ticking
\nin his chest that is the eland\u2019s reply
\nand finally the prayer one offers
\nto the spirit of one\u2019s animal friend
\n(a person of the early race),
\nwhom one has killed and eaten
\nas one must, begging his pardon
\nas one must. I cannot myself imagine
\nthe speech of elands or a lived experience
\nfor which to converse with beasts
\nis an ordinary occupation
\nnot reserved for saints or children,<\/p>\n

or affect to know the end
\nor seek beginnings in observances,
\ndramatic gestures, when to search
\nthere is ever and again to find
\ndarkness at the edge of flame
\nlast ripple either side of birthdays
\ncoming and going, always in time.
\nLimited by my skin, I must
\nbe just here, discontinuous
\nwith all I seek to know. We have come
\ninto this place and said the mass.
\nAs we break bread the light we pass
\nfrom face to face is Christ and incarnation.
\nYet we do not share the feast with cedars
\nin the nave or squirrels who even now
\nin winter run upon the roof.<\/p>\n

Seeking the focus of supernal action
\nas dancers move within the absolute,
\nthe one beginning waits
\nin silence in a darkened sacristy
\nalways preparing to enter like
\na shadow, like the power of the child
\nin memory revealing, not a liturgy
\nunsaid, but seas and snowfields, places
\nwe once played, crushed mulberries on sidewalks
\nthe porcupine we startled in the wood.
\nTo find the seedbed of events, you must
\nbe empty of events. You have only to run
\nin silence with the eland.<\/p>\n

On Christmas Eve
\nnothing is yet actual.
\nThe created world
\nsleeps with the child
\nnewborn, a gift in time.
\nWe keep the feast.<\/p>\n

As the choir invokes the Lamb of God
\nwe are already lost, each circumstance
\nof giving a translation of beginning
\ninto end. But on this Christmas Eve
\njust here, we walk dreaming down westward
\naisles, beyond the end we know into a time
\nperhaps where gleemen sing, small and having
\nyellow eyes, and panthers breathe down cloisters
\nwarm with cinnamon.<\/p>\n

Just here perhaps and quite by chance,
\npurpled kings flash past us in the chaste and
\ngiven darkness, chaste as though we had kissed
\nbefore we knew that we must die.<\/p>\n

[First published in A Christmas Pudding: A Yuletide Offering,<\/em> 1986]<\/span><\/p>\n

top of the page<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nStreams of Mercy<\/span>
\n?Weymouth Center, January 1978<\/em><\/p>\n

Except a corn of wheat<\/em>
\nfall into the ground and die,<\/em>
\nit abideth alone.<\/em><\/p>\n

Snow in the shrunken wood.
\nWhen it fairs off, as they say here
\nthe season will turn cold.
\nFor weeks now I have found
\nblack husks of wasps in the old house
\ndriven in by the chill\u2014
\nheard their senile dives
\nat windows, thinking that winter
\nwas something they never prepared for.<\/p>\n

Mornings get the better of me now\u2014
\nmy debts forgiven might permit
\nthat I should be alone in San Francisco
\nbut it will not do.
\nI find the space I need
\nin the afternoon, to stir things up
\nbefore my blood burls down like sap
\nwith the weight of other lives.<\/p>\n

Beyond first fringes of trees
\nI jog around a little paddock
\nmeet friends. We laugh
\nand shovel snow a while together\u2014
\nthen I go on. Life is heat, I think
\ngamy with becoming.
\nIn the big meadow low clouds
\ncontinue my breath, Eros among
\nthe ecologies, my body\u2019s exhaust
\nconnecting. Then down a long clay road
\njust covered with thin white dust
\npast pine and poplar smelling of oaksmoke
\nI run like an ostrich
\nfire under my arm.<\/p>\n

I compose a letter to tell you
\nhow I hear your voice
\nin winter silences
\nwhere aunts and uncles hide and seek
\namongst old marriages.
\nNeeding the child I was
\nI design a world in which
\nperhaps we sang Italian songs together
\ntranslated Rilke, whispered in the dark,
\nbut my bubbling wrists (which now
\nespecially do not touch your cheek) remind
\nme that winter gets into us all
\nturning our grave desires to gauds
\nthat light our way as we perfect the past.
\nA boy crouches in early dusk
\nbehind my eyes
\nknowing the center I seek
\nthose to whom I have belonged,
\nbelong. Certain years
\nago I turned Episcopalian
\nstudied Latin, failed at grief.
\nToday, my forty-year-old heart
\nbeats at most one hundred eighty
\nbeats per minute, give or take a few.
\nIt slows a beat a year.<\/p>\n

Now as our faces
\nrecede into museums
\nmy love tells over friends
\nand songs of Schubert, for whose sake
\nI once learned German.
\nI think that all our lives
\nare other lives, when leaving art I strive
\nto master transformations of my will
\nas I spent the summer of my nineteenth
\nyear with Tolstoy, my thirtieth
\nwith Middle English dialects. I have
\ngret wonder, be this light
\nhow that I live\u2014<\/em>
\nA hand in mine fiercely grips my thumb.
\nTwo shadow men we stand,
\nbig and little.<\/p>\n

Back in the meadow
\nwalking now, I reach
\nfor permafrost. I could stop
\nlike Scott\u2019s dogs on an instant\u2014
\nclick\u2014like that, in mid stride,
\nmy muscles blinked into crystals
\nmy eyes unperceiving this long expanse
\nof winter, passionless
\narchitectonic, the skin of the wasp.
\nI think I know his winter.
\nIt is the distance between my hand
\nand yours, the given space we start from.
\nSummers we make ourselves, inside
\nour own winter skins.<\/p>\n

[First published in Pembroke Magazine,<\/em> 1981]<\/span><\/p>\n

top of the page<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nIn Sure and Certain Hope<\/span>
\n\u2014I have been very jealous for the Lord.<\/em><\/p>\n

I.
\nLord,
\nI am unable
\nto expect a resurrection.
\nA good many absent
\nnow call from overseas\u2014
\nmostly I don\u2019t answer.<\/p>\n

I loved my grandfather as a slight man
\nof seventy, thin almost transparent
\nwho whistled thinly through his teeth
\nas he sliced pecans with his pocket knife.
\nOnce, before gum disease, heart attacks
\nand the flu pandemic of 1918, his teeth
\nhad been his own. He stood six feet three
\ninches tall, my mother tells me, and weighed
\ntwo hundred pounds. Departed love does not
\nsimply vanish but dies or lives according
\nto the mind\u2019s experience\u2014I almost said
\naccording to whim. If there should be a resurrection
\nwill I see my grandfather again and know him?
\nWill he be as I remember him
\nor the young man I never knew?
\nThe question is naive I realize, but how
\nshall the dead be resurrected? St. Paul says
\nwe shall be changed. Shall we have new bodies then\u2014
\nand if so how is it that it is we
\nwho shall be changed?<\/p>\n

I loved my father, or rather, I loved
\nmy father\u2019s ghost. Dear heart,<\/em> he wrote my mother
\nfrom a tent on Bataan, I set my microscope up
\nin the jungle today. We are trying to deal with sick call\u2013
\nlots of malaria.<\/em> In the citation from the war department
\nI read that he sacrificed himself for his weaker comrades
\non the March to Manila, which he survived. In the newspaper stories
\ndescribing his life\u2019s end (on a sinking ship torpedoed by his comrades)
\nI read how Japanese soldiers clubbed prisoners to death with rifle butts.<\/p>\n

Oh hear us when we cry to thee\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

I should pray for closure, but you did not ask
\nthat I pray for such, only for daily bread.
\nA girl I grew up with, robust, rebellious
\nin the way West Texas gives beauty to some women
\nbecame my friend at college. Marriage broke her
\nbefore cancer. Not long before she died
\nshe told me she had cut down
\nto ten cigarettes a day, her countenance innocent
\nas her morphine-drenched eyes. Suffering, having
\nrefined the souls of many, might still be efficacious
\nbut I am unable to expect a resurrection.<\/p>\n

II.
\nBecause we perish, we are immortal.<\/em>
\nYesterday I downloaded a photograph
\nof earth from space. The globe, familiar
\nfrom childhood as an object of faith
\nnow sheathed in a thin wash of cloud, that breaks
\nhere and there to reveal the outline of a continent,
\nfloats in the small blackness of my computer screen\u2014
\na tolerable blackness, only a little like the silence
\nof eternal space that frightened Pascal. My less
\nthan immortal soul recalls how the cello spoke
\nat Meyerson Symphony Hall, how fajitas tasted for
\nlunch. I should prefer to be resurrected than to prowl
\nthe cycles of Karma with Oedipus, but the zest
\nof common life, the risk and the common loss
\nare as close as I can come to immortality.
\nI expect the predicted ice age to remain an inference
\nin my lifetime, expect that I shall perish before
\nmy civilization and my family, but resurrection
\ngenerally seems not so much the final
\ncause of perishing as an empty falsification<\/p>\n

\u2014anger now is sharp and hard and timeless as a scythe.<\/em><\/p>\n

St. Paul tells me that my corruptible must put on
\nincorruption, in the words of the king\u2019s translators.
\nI think the order of being is otherwise: the incorrupt
\ncorrupts, and nothing may be recalled. We know this
\nand deny the knowledge.<\/p>\n

III.
\nA child stands at a window: looking
\nout or looking in, what is seen is secret.
\nMynheers of Salisbury, recombinant DNA
\npeer through separate windows at the last secret.
\nPerhaps it is the secret of the Dutch countryside
\nstraightened from the North Sea. Perhaps a bell
\ncalls monks to prayer as forests of napalm
\nflower out to the strains of Mozart. Perhaps
\nthe memory lapses into barbarism, a life taken
\nor death sought, pay the life price or not,
\nas Oedipus did\u2014picture and memory drown among ships
\ncities in the Aegean lost like Noah\u2019s flood
\nor the stories one can never remember at parties.
\nSomewhere between my father and grandfather,
\nwhat I have touched and loved and Oedipus shunned
\nis the common\u2014the ayenbite of inwit not
\nconscience so much as a sometimes trivial
\npreoccupation with the details of the tragedy.<\/p>\n

The ayenbite of inwit\u2014<\/em>
\nI compose two letters
\nto be placed in the same bottle.
\nYou were often wrong, I tell my first
\nanonymous pen pal, especially when you
\nset it down that knowledge is easy, well begun.
\nYou opened what you thought was the small
\ndoor to a small room, fairly well lit
\nand you thought you saw a domestic cat
\nsunning itself on a window seat. Perhaps
\nthe tabby was there, but you missed the tiger
\nunder the bed. On one wall you saw a clock
\nand on another a crucifix. You concluded
\nthat all was well. Death was not in the
\nroom at all, only a kind of death ex cathedra.
\nYou were restless and you denied it, heartsick
\nfor God and you denied that too. It was the clock
\nthat comforted you.<\/p>\n

An aggressive student argues passionately
\nthat if Oedipus had acted reasonably
\non the road to Thebes (i.e. refrained from killing
\nLaius, his father) he should thereby have avoided
\nthe horror of his life. We agree that tragedy is the loss
\nof possibility, that freedom is tragedy the instant one acts
\nfor the action closes off all possibility outside itself.
\nI maintain stubbornly that Oedipus acts according
\nto his nature, in which he is not given avoidance
\nthat avoidance remains a possibility only in some
\nworld that Oedipus does not inhabit.<\/p>\n

Surely, I reason in my second letter,
\nyou would not vouchsafe me the sharpness of thought
\nonly to deceive my credulous nature. Surely some
\ngrace transcends my particularity. Wisdom
\n(or perhaps Copernicus) teaches that the earth
\nroams restless in the empty firmament, but surely
\nsome heaven obtains, not unlike the small blackness
\nof my computer screen, where speculum mentis
\nturns out a true cosmology, and the wished planet
\nturns home. The reply begins: Dear heart\u2014
\nThat which is somewhere possible could maybe be
\na resurrected savior . . . .<\/em><\/p>\n

IV.
\nPeace carries with it,<\/em> says Whitehead,
\na surpassing of personality\u2014<\/em>somewhere before
\nthe tragedy starts, we learn the world, or rather
\npose it to ourselves as a thing to be done
\na set of occasions to be sought. A harmony
\nof harmonies attends the perishing
\nof that neurotic focus of attention
\nthat was the occasion of our first being,
\nbut desire for a second chance is the last infirmity.
\nSome inwit remains to the end, corrupts the child
\none was, a sickness unto birth.<\/p>\n

As I work now in this space before morning
\nI know that unspent grief draws interest, and that
\nis the real death. If I forego this unspeakable monody
\nwho will forgive me, who will pay?<\/p>\n

I compose a third letter, to a friend dead three days
\ninto the new year. I tell him I loved his mind
\neven when it failed. For a while he had hoped
\nagainst hope for remission\u2014he was my priest.<\/p>\n

We said goodbye near the end, and for a brief time
\nI was his priest, too. I put my arms around him as I held
\nhis sickness and my own.<\/p>\n

[First published in Pembroke Magazine,<\/em> 1997]<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/a>
\nWeymouth Woods”<\/span><\/p>\n

A sign at the park\u2019s edge
\nwarns me not to destroy or remove
\nany plant, rock, or mineral.
\nI wonder if water qualifies\u2014
\nassuming a walk in the rain,
\nif I step in a puddle and carry
\nsome water away, am I a thief?<\/p>\n

I wonder if pine cones qualify, being
\ndead. I remove a few pine cones, strands of
\nlongleaf straw, a few giant bull bay leaves,
\nparts of the local decay, as wormy webs catch
\nin my hair, wrap around my ears\u2013all with a
\nwatchful eye out for the ecology police. You never
\nknow when some ardent urban survivalist will
\nround you up and strip search you, looking for
\ncontraband pine cones in your bodily orifices.<\/p>\n

Later, I walk in the big meadow.
\nPaths branch out like fringe from its edges,
\nconnecting\u2013every path joining another,
\npaths through, paths around, all going nowhere.
\nI meet persons on horseback who ask that I speak
\nso that their horses hear my voice.
\nThey like that, the horses, they know then that I
\nam not a monster, that their masters need not
\nsummon the ecology police. One master drives
\na sulky, calls out a cordial hello
\nas he clucks his tongue to his trotter and murmurs,
\n\u201cYou\u2019re all right, baby, you\u2019re all right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Padding along I dream of secret houses
\nwith mysterious inner rooms, entrances and exits
\nverging and merging but leading nowhere. The emotion
\nof my dream is a vague alarm, shot through
\nwith occasional streaks of fear and a queer
\njoy. I think of Martin in his Black Forest hideout,
\nnursing bewilderment at the time that had so scarred
\nhim and dreaming of numinous tropes. But why did even
\nhe call language a house if not to evoke
\nsome strife between nature and culture? The park sign
\ncloses the woods off like a Texas cattle guard.
\n\u201cHuman, step no further!\u201d it orders.<\/p>\n

In the night a spider leaves its mark on my calf.
\nI am thinking of making a sign of my own: \u201cWorms,
\nwoods, insects, all other humanivorous beings, proceed
\nno further! Stay out of my bodily orifices. Make no new
\nones in my skin. Announce yourselves by calling out
\na clear hello.\u201d<\/p>\n

I step to the window to watch
\nthe ecology police and see instead
\nscores of humanivores,
\nplanting signs and fences
\non pine cones, leaf mulch, ant hills\u2014<\/p>\n

\u201cHarvester ants. Do not disturb!\u201d one reads.<\/p>\n

[First published in Pembroke Magazine,<\/em> 2016]<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/a>
\nMonumental History”<\/span><\/p>\n

Here in the knife shop
\nmost folks don\u2019t worry about the past.
\nAugust, and we are a good way out
\nthe Jacksboro highway. The sun kills
\nanything that moves. Locked cars have been
\nknown to explode.<\/p>\n

Next door at the stonecutter\u2019s, though
\nyou hear a story worth a walk
\nthrough goatheads and broken glass
\npast the cur chained up in the daytime
\nwho eyes you and growls down a row of blank
\ntombstones\u2013he\u2019s hit the end of the chain
\ntoo many times.<\/p>\n

Behind the stonecutter\u2019s shack
\nRobert E. Lee sits in a low chair
\nin the bed of a Model A pickup.<\/p>\n

It was the present stonecutter\u2019s
\ngranddaddy, who carved him on order
\nfrom a town in Missouri, drove all
\nthe way up there and had to bring him
\nback, because folks in Missouri wanted
\nLee on a horse.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s still for sale.<\/p>\n

[First published in New Texas,<\/em> 1999]<\/span><\/p>\n

top of the page<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

top of the page Electronic publications: “Bryan’s Ragtime Stride” Friends of Scott Joplin, January 13, 2020. “Nineteenth” The PIker Press, June 14, 2021. “Farm Road Entropy” The Piker Press July 19, 2021 “Deep Ecology” Better Than Starbucks, August 2021* “Mnemonic” … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-65","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/65\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8226,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/65\/revisions\/8226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}