The Boy Who Remembered Everything

By Edward Paul Alsace

All poets have an obligation to bear witness to the age in which they live. They also have a duty to rejuvenate the traditions of their art and renovate its forms. The epic is an expression of the ideology of empire. In the modern world it has been eclipsed by the popularity of the novel and the epic dimensions of cinematic art. "The Boy Who Remembered Everything" is a lyrical odyssey set against the backdrop of our contemporary understanding of the world. Part one, 'Coming of Age in the Universe', begins in the deep Darwinian past and ends in Einstein's surreal space-time continuum. From a prehistoric hell-scape comparable to Dante's chronicle of the underworld, we watch as human life emerges and great civilizations flourish, culminating in a century of holocaust and world war. Contemporary poetry and its traditional pretensions too often ignore our looming existential dilemma. After passage through a wormhole into a parallel universe, part two, 'Digest of a Soul' begins. This companion piece is a romantic celebration of the world of nature---a vision of harmony printed as developmental milestones in a personal history---from the playful fantasies of childhood to a transcendent vision of the numinous void.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Mar 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781698716336

Edward Paul Alsace

Edward Paul Alsace spent his boyhood as a military "brat" touring castles on the Rhine and strolling down the Champs Elysees.

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Copyright 2024 Edward Paul Alsace.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1631-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1632-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1633-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024900740

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Contents

1st Movement

Coming of Age in the Universe

LIGHT FROM THE DEAD ADVENTURE OF THE PAST

Light From The Dead Adventure Of The Past

The Estrangement Of The Moon

Extravaganza In Gold

Forging The Elements

The Earthquake Era Of Gaia

New Moon Motion

Primordial Soup

Artifacts Of The Labyrinth

The Glacial Tongue Grinds Slowly

Intermesso: Tides shape the seashell

The Monograph

I Read Once In A Book Of Sediment & Shale

The Devil’s Thesaurus

Daybreak In Insect Splendor Hatched

Things Never Seen Before

The Orphan-Monster Enigma

Darwin Down Under

Prehistoric Flower

When My Whole Body Was The World

My Antediluvian Creature

Akin To The Homunculus

Moon Child

Coda: Over the Aeons

My Organismic Other

Time’s Incredible Continent

These Creatures Are My Destiny

Arc

Darwin’s Chronicle

Cannibal Wars

The Fulcrums Of Love

Imago

My Fossil Dreams

My Ancestor Monkey

The Psychoanalysis Of Fire

These Portions Of My Animal

Orphan Of The Wind

NOSTRADAMUS IN THE HOUSE OF DOOM

Hieroglyph

Papyrus

Hieroglyph

Encyclopedia Of Antique Tongues

The Lost Kingdom Of Kush

The Eye Of Horus

The Pharaoh’s Brain X-Rayed

Enigma

Pyramids

Icarus

Helios

Icarus

Greek As The Clouds

Cloud Atlas

My Orphan Bones

Play Fair, Calliope

Dionysus In A Winesack

Apollo Among The Ruins

Plato Condemned Them

Medusa’s Scripture

I, Perseus

Offspring Of The Gorgon

Pegasus

Arcadian Graces

Sappho

Aphrodite Rising

Elysium Growing New Fingers

The Eyes Of Orion

Prometheus

How Alphabets Began

X, Stick-Figure

Before The Writers Of The Bible

X, Stick-Figure

Jargon of Druid & Grail

Talisman

December*

Heloise & Abelard

Rehearsing The Virtues Of Light

Fresco

The Anatomy Of Shadow

Nostradamus In The House Of Doom

The Great Imposter & The Grand Inquisitor

Holy Grotesques

The Quest For Prester John

The Lights Of Timbuktu

Subtitles To The Great Planets

Sunday

Hints From The Moon

Zigzag Zeus

Misspelled, Mercurial

Lord Of The Magic Hammer

Fridays With Aphrodite

Planet Of Mystery

The Music Of The Spheres

Old Microcosmic Me

Man-In-A-Circle

Man-In-The-Circle

Leonardo Dreaming In Pictures

Leonardo’s Infernal Machines

Copernicus

Dark Crimes Of The Moon

The Moon-Tooth

The Masters Of Misrule

Military Heritage

The Emperor Of Spin

Michelangelo’s Creation Of Adam

Nostradamus In The House Of Doom

Down In The Belly Of Shakespeare

Another Earth

Another Earth

Krishna’s Mouth Full Of Stars

The Temple At Mahabalipuran

While The Whole World Slept

The Book Of Tea

Five Dry Leaves

When Elephants Left Footprints On The Heart

Katanga

Quetzacoatl

Amazonia

No Trespassing

Grandfather Moon

Black Kettle’s Flag

Black Bear Speaks

The Haunted Land

Trading Places With The Animals

Shaman Song

The Old Ones

Perfect Snow

Vocabulary

Zygote

IN MY CENTURY

These Words Have Come To Perch Along My Nerves

These Words Have Come To Perch Along My Nerves

The Quilting Bee

The Kitchen Table Project

Fine-Feathered Hearts

Jazzamataz

Just As

The Words Of A Poem Are Everywhere

On The Care & Feeding Of Poets

Perturbations Of The Muse

Into The Keyhole

The Boondoggle Boom & Bust

The Man In The Black Derby Hat

The Boondoggle Boom & Bust

The Engine Of The Age

Scale Of The Beast Arising

Uranium / Cranium

The Cinder Of The Little Skull

Cold War

Old Man Winter

The Eight Betrayals

Zapruder Still-Life

The Riderless Horse

Tecumseh’s Curse

The Changing Of The Guard

Radio Mars

The Gnat

The Awakening

Bohemian Manifesto

Steal This Poem

Wild Bill

Imagine

The Great American Novel

Einstein’s Brain

Cornucopia Trashcan

Earthrise

The Monarchy Of The Moon

Obeying The Leviathan

Coming Attractions

Superman In A Wheelchair

Gargoyle

The Cryogenic Express

Melting-Pot Poem

Barbaric Trades Prevail

Emelda’s Closet

Remembering Samantha

Signs!

P-T-S-D

Autopsy For A Rag Doll

The Bottom-Line

Long Story Short

Madison Avenue Jingle

The Architecture Of Greed

Revisiting The Nightmare

The God Who Forgot Himself

Poem For The Homeless

At The Barricades

After Doctor Kevorkian

Neon Utopian Nowhere

Superman In A Wheelchair

Found Poem For The Lost

The Human Face

Sound-Bytes

On The Evening News

The President Swats A Fly

Hazard Corners

On The Evening News

The Land Where Nothing Happens

Headlines From The Times

My Country

Test Pattern Staccato

Inside The Black Box

When All The Talking Heads Come Out

The Needle’s Eye

This Is News-Wag

Slam For The Standing Dead

Listening To The Short-Wave Radio

Equator Of Anguish

Child-Soldier

The Meter Of Fate

City Graffiti

Flight Number 11

Apollo Object

Approximations Of Zero

On The Front Page Of The Paper Today

The Bully Pulpit

Rummy’s Metric

Military Metaphysics

Full Spectrum Dominance

Operation Mom & Apple Pie

When Bozo Went To Washington

In My Comfort Zone

Whistleblower

The Gyre At The End Of The World

Best Things

The Vanishing Of The Bees

The Studied Symmetry Of Hollow Bones

Elegy For A Polar Bear

The Great White Hunter

Ptolemy’s Oasis

The Halloween Party

Pan’s Wanton Frolic

The Dark Art Of Washing The Hands

Into The Waste Places

Dead Zone

What The Sea Took Away

If I Could Send A Grief To God

The Gyre At The End Of The World

Supercell

Believe Too Soon

A Million Godzillas

In My Century

The Looking-Glass

On A Globe & Hanging Garden

THE SYNTHESIS OF LIGHT

PROEM: Enigma of Earth

Like You

Myriad

Adagio To Light

The Synthesis Of Light

Sacred Geometry

If I Were God Weeding My Garden

In A Universe That Keeps Expanding

The Blue Trace Glow Of My Electric Muse

Table Of Philosophers

Countdowns Begin At Minus Ten

The Periodic Table

The Theory Of Everything

Tomorrow

Coming Of Age In The Universe

Night Watch

Nameless We Are Born

Robot Polaris

Einstein’s Forgotten Corollaries

Home Sweet Planet

Random Memorandum

Apprehensions Of Phantom Starlight

Half-Life

Visitors To Earth

Brainstorm

The Sleeper In His Dream-House

Renouncing My Disguises

Harlequinade

The Boy Who Remembered Everything

FINALE: Slant Shafts of Light

Realms Of My Disquiet

Time’s Spoils

Conversation With A Skeleton

Insomnia

Lapses Of The Muse

Compost

My Heart’s Erratum

Drink Deeply Of These Colors

Stranger At My Threshold

My Grieving Sphinx

Sweet Nerve Nirvana

The Formula For Light

O, The Perfect Poetic

At The Threshold Of Silence

On The Tips Of Tongues

Vanishing Point

Gyro

The Bottom Of The World

The Myth Of Myself

Death Kept Its Promise

These Atoms That I Am

Wormholes

ENVOI: Stardust in Our Bones

2nd Movement

DIGEST OF A SOUL

ELYSIUM OVER MY SHOULDER

The Ledger

Barefoot Boy

Grandmother’s Kitchen

The Ledger

Indian Rock

The Riddle

The Old Springhouse

What Your Grandfather Knew

Under The Moon & The Morning Star

The Legend Of Uncle Clifford

My Father’s Old Toolbox

No Sweat

Poem Of The First Water

Martyrs To A Bygone Star

Why The Robin’s Breast Is Red

Images Held In Trust

Memento Mori

Nothing Important Really

Inertia Of Earth

The End Of The World

Souls Of The Dead That Dwell In Me

Sonata Of Stone

Above The Tree-Line

Elysium Over My Shoulder

African Sketchbook

Passing Through The Looking-Glass

The Bus From Mbale

All The Drums Of Africa

The Clouds Drift Down Forever To The Sky

This Boy Who Comes With Lemons

Out Of The Eggs Of Ants

Termitarium

Tawny Kings In Limbo

The Mountains Of The Moon

Along The Congo

The Voice Of America

After The Coup

Under Big Daddy*

The Remnants Of The Night

Cry Of Small Desert Birds

Among Desert Thorns

I Heard In The Midst Of Noises

Albert Schweitzer’s Childhood

Xhosa Man

African Plainsong

Of Shells & Kites & Ivory Kings

ORPHEUS ON THE HUDSON

Poet Of The Laundromat

Ode To A Typewriter

Hack Hack Ala Kerouac

Mister Ginsberg In The Mens Room

I Had A Giant Dream Last Night

All Winter Long It Was Poe

Laugharne

Amherst

# 4 Patchin Place

Fixer Of Vertigo

Bukowski & Company

Writer’s Cramp

The Muse Of Booze

Submission To The Muse

On Being Rejected

Orpheus On The Hudson

Poetry Is A Call To Being

Digest Of A Soul

Poet Of The Laundromat

Self-Addressed Envelop

Garden Varieties

In The Belly Of The Big Bear

Garage Sale

Gone Fishin’

The Psychologist Of Houses

Vital Statistics

The Psychologist Of Houses

Chemical Equations

The Darkside Of God

Under A Dark Stair

The Country Of Sticks & Stones

The Land Of Missing & Exploited Children

A Letter To The Undersecretary

The Wrinkled Brain

Worthy Causes

The Hermit

Atonement

My World Too

Getting Better

Beginning All Over

THE LAND OF THE LOST & FOUND

Wonderful Indigo Tapestry

Sleep Lay Long

With Poetry On My Lips

Into My Life Your Raindrop Reaches

Wonderful Indigo Tapestry

The Land Where Love Lies Down

Roughly, Softly

Walk Softly In My Garden

A Little Night Magic

The Mystery Of Elsewhere

Land Of The Lost And Found

A Confrontation With The Sorceress

The Chill Factor

Once Was A Muse

Love Finds A Way

The Beauty Of Her Return

Your Lips On Mine

There Were Birds In The Room This Morning

There Were Birds In The Room This Morning

Heart Of Dove & Wing Of Swallow

A Place Known Only To Lovers

The Parts Of The Flower Exposed

Deja Vu

Without Regrets

Coordinates

Avenue Of Maples

Love Song

My Ballad To Beauty

April Returns

Pressed Petals

Bye-Bye Cocoon

The Secret Of Joy

Once Upon The Curvature Of Space

LIFE ON A SMALL PLANET

Animal Alphabets

Animal Alphabets

An Account Of The Honeybee

Honeycomb Poem

Magicicada

Arboreal Flirtations

Eight Wild Birds Looking For Food

Rural Squirrel

Dharma Drum

Diana’s Mirror

Three Deer Crossings

The Spirit Of Stallions

Hushed Hosannas

The Wild Ponies Of Assateague

Talking To Bears

Whale-Watching In Quebec

The Dog With The Butterfly Nose

The Genealogy Of Grief

The Man In The Moon

Rhyming By The Numbers

Life On A Small Planet

The Hinge Of Morning

Upon Your Lips, Imaginings

Past Lives Revisited

Five Dry Leaves

Loose Leaf

The Hinge Of Morning

The Residue Of Day

Touching Bottom

Topsy Turvy

Fragments Of Camelot

The Rituals Of Night Quicken

Moonlight Motto

Rainspouts Are All Icy

Solstice

Winter Lament

The Autobiography Of Snow

Sixteen Kinds Of Snow

Soft Snow Slow Sinking

The Journey Of A Leaf

Xylem & Phloem

Grass Of Parnassus

Ceaselessly Leafy Spring

Dew On The Insect Dynamno

Invisible Inks

Travelling With Chagall

Detritus

How My Lips Are Forgotten

Mind, Body, World

Time’s Voices Speak Through Me

Darwin’s Circus

Darwin’s Circus

For Gayle ~

To find you I have changed my life.

Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is due the editors & publishers of a wide variety of journals & small presses in which many of these poems, including some earlier versions, first appeared.

A Concise Treasury of Alaska & New York Poets <> Ascent Aspirations <> Advocate <> American Poetry Annual <> Amulet <> Aoife’s Kiss <> Art Times <> Art:Mag <> Atlantic Pacific Press <> Aurorean <> Avalon <> Avocet <> Backstreet <> Bear Creek Haiku <> Beyond Centauri <> Black Book Press <> Black Spring Press <> Blood Moon Rising <> Blue Collar Review <> Blue Unicorn <> California Quarterly <> Caveat Lector <> CC&D <> Ceremony <> Chronogram <> Clark Street Review <> Conceit Magazine <> Concho River <> Cover of Darkness <> Crucible <> Current Accounts <> Darkling Magazine <> Disturbed <> Dream Fantasy International <> Fighting Chance <> Floyd County Moonshine <> FreeXpression <> Haight-Ashbury Literary Review <> Handshake <> HazMat Review <> Hidden Oak <> Homestead Review <> Hungur Magazine <> Ibbetson St. Press <> Iconoclast <> Idiom 23 <> Illumen <> Illuminations <> Innisfree <> Inverted-A <> Johns Hopkins University Press <> Jones Av <> Krax <> Leading Edge <> Licking River Review <> Listening Eye <> Love’s Chance <> Mobius <> Mr. Marquis Museletter <> Narrative Poetry <> Nassau Review <> New Laurel Review <> Nomad’s Choir <> Old Red Kimono <> Paterson Literary Review <> Pegasus <> Pennine Ink <> Pennine Platform <> Plain Spoke <> Plainsongs <> Planet X <> POEM <> Poesia <> Poet’s Esp resso <> Poetalk <> Poetic Hours <> Poetically Penned <> Poetry Motel <> Presa 15 <> Quantum Leap <> Quercus Review <> River Reporter <> Road Not Taken <> Rockford Review <> Sacred Journey <> Sanskrit <> Saranac Review <> Science Editor <> Sensations Magazine <> Ship of Fools <> Society of American Poets <> Society of Classical Poets <> Soul Fountain <> SP Quill Quarterly <> Space & Time <> Star*Line <> Straylight <> Tale Spinners <> Talking River <> Taproot <> Telescope <> Texas Wesleyan University <> The Alembic <> The Awakening Review <> The Chaffin Journal <> The Griffin <> The Journal <> The Leading Edge <> The Listening Eye <> The Lives of Artists <> The Lyric <> The Pen <> The Penwood Review <> The Poet’s Art <> The Poet’s Pen <> The Road Not Taken <> The Shepard <> The Soryteller <> The Taylor Trust <> The Whale Inn Publishing House <> The Writer <> The Writer’s Chronicle <> Thema <> Tribeca Poetry Review <> Trinacria <> Urthona <> Waywanda Review <> Westward Quarterly <> Wisconsin Review <> Write On!! <> Writer’s Block <> Writers’ Journal

Preface

1

All poets have an obligation to bear witness to the age in which they live, to provide a chronicle of their times. They also have a duty to rejuvenate the traditions of their art and renovate its forms. To blithely ignore the environmental emergency we face, and the interlocking crisis our military metaphysics imposes on any solution, is simply to retreat into magical thinking.

In the modern world, the epic form has been overshadowed by the popularity of the novel and the epic dimensions of cinematic art. Morever, the shift in convention from metered verse to free-verse, reinforced by a discursive style encouraged in a scientific age, has hastened a decline in the readership for poetry in general.

One of the problems confronting any modern epic is its readability, Modern audiences seem to lack the patience or the discipline required to engage in the premiere bardic project unless required by some university curriculum to do so. In an effort to overcome these obstacles, poets have sought new underpinnings for longer poems, mixing lyric techniques with dramatic interludes & passages of prose.

Innovations in epic convention, however, date back to Aristotle. Shakespeare himself assembled short minstrel songs into long poems, and Ovid’s presentation of a series of tales introduced new material which influenced, not only him, but both Dante & Milton as well.

The epic is an expression of the ideology of empire, whether emergent or in eclipse. From the Mahabharata of Imperial India to Beowulf, the Iliad and the Aeneid, to the Divine Comedy of Holy Rome. The earliest examples featured superhuman strongmen or incarnations of gods who rescue their society from downfall. These were later replaced by more fallible, albeit exceptional mortals. During the Christion era, battlefield combat was replaced by the struggle of the soul against evil. Dante’s allegorical journey included a tour through the underworld as well as ascension through the purgatorial spheres of the Ptolemaic universe. Milton, likewise, replaced the desire for all earthly empires for the martyrdom of Christ as the supreme virtue.

In the New World, Whitman showed another way to Calliope’s lofty throne, expanding his first slim edition of Leaves of Grass into a hefty tome. Pound’s Cantos attempts to encompass world civilization from a mythic past to mid-20th century, in free-verse form. And William’s Paterson describes the history of a city in free-verse, interlaced with large blocks of prose, to represent the industrial expansion of the American century.

The classical format bequeathed to Virgil—of a solitary figure engaged in an heroic struggle with national destiny as its theme, and hexameter the only possible form—has been abandoned. Some have argued that a poet’s Complete Works, describing his own personal odyssey, should be regarded as a variety of epic, providing new openings for reimagining what an epic can be.

2

Our way of imagining the world has been shaped by modern science but instead of serving as an inspiration for poetry, helping us reclaim the awe & wonder that moved poets in ages past, an uneasy competition and defensiveness towards it dates back to the Romantics.

A new kind of poetry was needed to translate the findings of science into topics traditionally addressed by poetry. Still, the business of poetry is to achieve escape velocity, transporting the reader from the real world into another via the sonic structure of language. The modernists tried to achieve this by releasing typography from the constraints of traditional forms (based on numerology & medieval cosmology), and letting words free-fall down the space of the page, allowing meaning to re-form in relativistic frames of reference or by imitating the careful observation of the scientific approach.

All this was viewed as a kind of progress. But to say that any form of art evolves, except in the very limited sense that particular skills or techniques may be systematically refined or improved, is like saying that Dadaism represents an improvement over Shakespeare. The question is: what does poetry have to offer in an age dominated by science?

Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot is poetry in its purest form, It is perhaps the best example of Dawkins’ motto: Science is the poetry of reality, The problem is translating the often arcane obscurities of science using the time-honored tools of traditional poetry.

The French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard describes the dilemma succinctly. Words, he asserts, are meant to ‘sing’ or ‘charm’, and do not always coincide with meaning. By contrast, scientific concepts function better when detached from any trace of subjective value. Any synthesis seems impossible. But, according to Einstein, imagination is better than logic, because it is oriented toward mysterious archetypes rooted in human unconscious. So, the thoughts of the pensive man sitting in solitude before his fireplace, return to primal themes, revealing the young child in the old man, and the medieval alchemist behind the engineer.

Bachelard refers to a Copernican revolution in poetry in his discussion of the works of Poe, who he believed stirred up the fundamental dynamics of the imagination by inducing the nightmare feeling of falling in the reader. This represented an existential nausea related to a type of reverie deeply engraved in our inner nature equivalent to placing the dream before reality, evocative of a state-of-being preceding life itself.

3

Off in the corner of our dreams, we sometimes become aware of a kind of observer, calmly and quietly watching the kaleidoscopic display of images unfolding. The structure of the dramatic dream-plot may be nightmarish, psychedelic, or simply vividly eventful. This otherwise silent presence, which may represent a portion of our waking consciousness, sometimes responds with interested detachment or critical comment, reminding us that we are only dreaming. Who this presence is, goes to the heart of our identity.

Coming of Age in the Universe, is a lyrical odyssey set against the backdrop of our contemporary understanding of the formation of the planets out of an iron catastrophe in the stars. Unlike traditional epics, there is no central figure, only a kind of anonymous presence that stands outside & above the narrative, speaking in a sleep-talking, disembodied voice.

The journey begins in the deep Darwinian past—a prehistoric hell-scape comparable to Dante’s chronicle of the torments of the underworld, stripped of its moral dimensions—a panorama of lava-floes, molten rivers, ice-worlds, tectonic upheaval & asteroid bombardment—where primitive life-forms evolve from single-cell creatures into undersea monsters, giant insects & enormous dinosaurs.

Out of this chaotic violence, human life emerged, civilizations flourished and collapsed, from ancient Egypt through Greece & Rome, the Christian era, the Renaissance, and, finally, the so-called discovery of the New World. After centuries of holocaust & war, all this has culminated today in what we call the self-conscious Anthropocene, teetering on the brink of a climate catastrophe. In the background, haunting the modern mind, looms the spectacle of thermonuclear annihilation, rivaling Dante’s horrific vision of Satan, with three heads & six weeping eyes, frozen up to his waste in a vast lens of ice. Whether our species will survive this crossroads in history is the question.

Just as the lyrical sequence begins with a speculative piece on our evolution out of stardust, so our journey concludes with a surreal dilation in the space-time continuum and passage through a worm-hole into a parallel universe.

4

The companion piece to the first movement, Digest of a Soul, is a romantic celebration of the world of nature, a vision of unity and harmony presented as developmental milestones in a personal history, from the playful fantasies of childhood to the transcendent vision of the numinous void, encompassing what Joseph Campbell described as the universal myth of the hero’s trajectory.

The quest, the search, is not for gods or goddesses, whose names are always changing, but for the realization of our own divinity, symbolized by Blake’s heavenly wildflower & Dante’s final vision of the perfect circle of paradise—the world’s majestic harmony of forms experienced by all the creatures who must endure its terrible beauty, surrounded by an essential peace.

New discoveries in astronomy have deepened our cosmological conceptions of the universe. Photographs sent back from the Hubble & Webb telescopes, have quite literally revealed the planet we call home as a heavenly body. All poetry that fails to capture the wonder of an earthrise from the moon is now simply ‘archaic’.

5

All the poems collected here were originally composed as stand-alone, self-contained lyrics written & revised at different times & in different places. Each can be read separately, in random order, or cover-to-cover, as a montage of inspirational moments arranged in an historical sequence. No pretense is made to complete historical accuracy any more than the Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost accurately record the history of the age in which they were written.

Organizationally, it is a hybrid construction of forms varying in style & metrical structure, that collide like shifting tectonic plates to produce a chorus of polyphonic voices with epic dimension. To paraphrase Eliot: …these fragments…are shored against my ruin…

¹st MOVEMENT

COMING

OF

AGE

IN THE

UNIVERSE

Light From The

Dead Adventure

Of The Past

126626.png

Light From The Dead Adventure Of The Past

Light from the dead adventure of the past!

Disaster in a spectacle of dust—

A spectral sight a billion light-years off

Bombards the eye with photons, stellar stuff.

Debris of lost worlds whisper what we are:

Deposits of evolving cosmos come

With galaxies at fingertips and thumb

To take up pure invention in the stars!

Beyond the huge penumbra of a dream,

Emerging from a nerve-end in the night

That curves along a blind-spot to the brain,

Across an arctic cataract—blank—white,

The dark side of the moon moves on the mind

Meeting this page, leaving this poem behind.

The Estrangement Of The Moon

Mastery of man over the stars

And over man, time’s mystery;

Mechanically grinding clockwork

Of the mind’s gigantic gears

Locking, interlocking:

Two human halves,

Two human hemispheres;

Cracked heart,

Split-brain,

Salt atom!

Interminable mountain of anger at

Your lips, nothing

Slivers of flesh

Parted for the sea’s entry,

Slow-motion of the planet up a nerve-end to the eye

Opening out on giant spiral arms!

Whole continents adrift against the waves’

Upheaval & collapse;

Each curved horizon merging,

Ticking, turning…

Serpent of the spine’s divided solstice,

Weightless, enslaved

Like the moon on its chain of earthquake ranges

Rising pacific,

Bearing no name.

Further than the generations of the light

To bring you, out of nothing,

The unfathomable

Shape of O

Hollow, hungry

Baby in the belly with the sea-whorl in its hair,

Thumbprint of the gods upon the newborn heads!

Extravaganza In Gold

All

the atoms

that I am,

every grain of sand

and scattered desert bone,

every substratum layer of rock,

volcanic formations, regions of ice;

every molecule of air and speck of dust,

every miniature creature in a drop of dew,

every hair on my head, every inkling & thought;

every beast with no name, its mane stained with blood,

every flower & feathered bird-song echoing over the world!

every fragment of meteor debris, mineral oil & cloud,

every prehistoric fossil imprint & sea-bottom vent

was forged in the furious foundry of the stars!

every particle left-over from the Big Bang

cooked up in the incandescent core

of a giant iron catastrophe

at the heart of who we are:

black-hole collapsing,

devouring all light,

transmuting

metals

…

The dream of the ancient alchemists

moves through these sentences

on my lips, at the tip

of my tongue

humming

Om

the omniscient

mystic mantra of Man,

breathing all being in One:

each idiosyncratic utterance & grunt,

every saying & song, recycling the sun!

Forging The Elements

Emerging alone in the universe

My embryo ear evolved out of nothing,

The floating black-hole of my eye

Dilating in time…

A fusion-reaction of ionized atoms

Dances in my blood at the center of day,

Shaping the tectonic plates of my heart

And its chambered prehistory…

Magnetically-driven

Cyclonic whirling

Cascading in wavelengths of X-ray decay

Bombarding my brain…

This poem: the remnants of stardust,

Transmuting my voice into white-noise & vision,

Leaving its birthmarks behind

On the night-sea journey

Of me & the seashell

Asleep

Hinged like the moon

Dividing me cell-by-cell.

Primordial forge of the elements roaring in glory,

Collapsing in photon chains:

Quickening matter,

Seeding the planet.

The Earthquake Era Of Gaia

            In the earthquake era of Gaia

            My heart was a lava-river,

Its chambers glowed with flowing pyro-streams;

            My mountain ranges reared their backs

            As meteoric impacts cracked

Exposing molten magma in my dreams.

            Deep layers of subconscious strata

            Evolving into mind & matter

Divided time into two hemispheres;

            Erupting islands in the mist

            Unchained my metamorphosis

Become a little world, a circle squared.

            In lush lagoons & brackish lakes,

            In peat-bog swamps & mossy glades

My tangled ganglia took root & flowered;

            On jungle floors my nerve-ends burned

            Miasmal gloom & giant ferns

Irradiated by a solar shower.

            In sediment, compacted down

            My brain-bark buried underground

Become a luminous lump of anthracite;

            Deposits of decaying leaves

            Compressed into a compost heap

That fossilized the synthesis of light.

            Meiosis in the molecule:

            A microscopic chronicle

Comingling blood & iron in the slime

            Formed relics of my proto-self,

            An organism, single-celled

Sunk in the ocean-bottom of deep-time.

            My phantom creatures each destroyed,

            Doomed by a massive asteroid,

Their dumbstruck features vanished in a wink;

            The remnants of their monstrous bones

            Imprinted epitaphs in stone

Beneath a cratered moon, now long extinct.

            Upon the tips of glacial tongues

            Pangea lifts its epic song,

Upheaval heaves a giant seismic sigh;

            Magnetic lines from pole to pole,

            Align my spine, unroll my soul

Revolving round the orbit of my eye.

New Moon Motion

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Primordial Soup

Gia’s foot-lamp & sirens, her nautilus & conch,

Her soft-body shape-shifting chamber of shells,

Her algae protists drowning in tidal pools,

Her hemisphere & turning eye sifted through siphoning bivalves,

Gills & whorls & concentric brachiate filaments—

Ancestral fish-roe & trembling false-feet,

Micro-meiosis ooze & eve of protozoa,

Seahorse & starfish solstice & crab-like aurora

Anatomies of ammonites & anemone creatures,

Evolving in miniature mimicry of spiral storms;

Scales & sponges born in rank slime, streamlining spines,

Single-cell animalcules, dividing cells of kelp,

Fingerlings inching toward the sand-grain brink;

Voyages of slipper & purse, urchin & nymph

Charming a tropical atoll…

Pangea’s lava-river fused in a field of force,

Erosion of slate-gray waves by the sea-cave wall;

Gravity’s backbone giving way in stratified layers,

Tectonic landmass of canyon & cauldron caldera

Rearing up tabletop chimney-rock ranges in island chains,

Hauling in dazzling riches & touches of Midas’ ore—

Era of calving glacier & crisscross globular cluster,

Climbing vines & cloud-forest mists over lost lagoons;

Pyro-upheaval & chaos of rainbow realms!

Supernova remains & uranium decay

In REM-state image of Ur-metamorphosis!

Mind-maw to brain-bark, yielding to birthmark aeons!

Parallel ice-floe, impossible worlds!

Bight of the moon like a pitiless tooth!

Medusa tentacles stinging the muddle awake!

Artifacts Of The Labyrinth

(after Bachelard)

The world is an immense daydream,

A vast imagination of sleeping forms;

Each primordial pseudo-self worked out

In seashell creatures washed ashore…

Micro-protozoa & dwarf chimera

At play in a still-life trial-and-error;

A museum of phantasmal fossil debris

At the millennial speed of the millipede

Anatomies of animalcules

Foreshadowed in shallow tidal pools;

The smooth-muscle chambers of the heart.

Slowly recycled out of dying stars

Portents of periwinkle in rough-cast molds,

Delicate sundials & Venus comb.

Bellerphon’s horse & Neptune’s moon-shaped sails;

Jellyfish genitals & assemblies of cells.

Among the artifacts of the labyrinth

The primitive imprint of the hyacinth;

Vestiges of tympanum, dendrite & tongue

Prefigured in the kingdom of the sponge

Prototypes of earlobe, iris & eye

Evolving over geologic time

Preparing the way for a sea-change

Dominating the flowering coral brain

After so many attempts, these hints emerge

From ancient ferns & the bones of birds,

From vertebrae, bi-valve & naked nerve

This spectacle, this vertigo of words.

The Glacial Tongue Grinds Slowly

                    Foreshadowed, in slow-motion,

                    The destiny of earth,

                    An epoch of ill-omen

                    Speaks edicts at its mouth,

                    As continent tectonics

                    Unchain the links of time—

                    A tragedy, an epic

                    Is written out in rime.

                    Dawn on a falling planet

                    Adrift in star debris,

                    Played out in cooling granite