poetry notebook

Chorus: Did you perhaps transgress beyond this offense?
Prometheus: Yes, I saved mortals from foresight of their doom.
Chorus: What cure did you administer for this affliction?
Prometheus: I put blind hope into their hearts.
Chorus: You bestowed a great benefit on mankind.
Prometheus: I also gave them fire.
Chorus: What! Ephemeral creatures posses the flames?
Prometheus: Yes, and from it they shall learn a thousand arts.
~Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

that the body of light come forth
-——————from the body of fire
And that your eyes come to the surface
———–from the deep wherein they were sunken
~Ezra Pound, “Canto XCI”

Hope and Fire

Demonstration: gasoline poured into water
in a coffee can, a match flame:
look, son, the fire floats.

Slice a lamb’s leg into skewering chunks.
Marinate overnight in vinegar, oil, and herbs.
Wrap your charcoaled skewer in a slice of bread,
pull off the savory flesh, and eat.

Seven year old, Titusville, new house, 1961 c.e.,
the nightmare: Russian Bolsheviks march him
and his family in chains, single file, off to be slaves.

Panic, tears, “Mom! Dad!”
He opens the wrong door.
A furnace flares in darkness.

Rockets explode in the sky
commonplace as airplanes.
“Children, hide under your desks.”

Look! That one made it!
It went up, and up, and up, and up
and disappeared into the sky.
John Glenn was riding on it!

Pismo Beach, charcoal pit,
hot dogs, hamburgers, marshmallows,
where hecatombs in offering to the Gods
are slaughtered, and of these did I partake.

Cuban Missile Crisis, thermonuclear
gun fighters in the hot sun, Vandenberg…
Whoever draws first dies.
Whoever draws last dies.

Section by section, mile by mile,
country highways are widened,
smoothed, turned into Interstate,

Refineries on the Turnpike near Trenton,
giant torches light up the night,
steel mills on the Turnpike near Pittsburgh
open pits of glowing coals.

What was that joke about
cheap Japanese products?
Not enough raw material
to make their own steel…

Sequoia remnant on the Sierra Madres,
giants dancing in summer campfire flames
deep into warm, peaceful nights
funded through the Redstone Arsenal.

A segregated school, a history book (so-called):

The KKK were honorable men
who held their trials in the forest. Sometimes
the criminal was forced to leave the state.

Robert Creel, Alabama Ku Klux Klan, 1964:

“We represent the majority of the people in Alabama
who hate niggerism, Catholicism, Judaisim,
and all the -isms of the whole world,”

except, in fact, Protestantism and racism.

In Selma Dr. King was leading the way
out, away from hatred and stupidity, facing
burning crosses with unyielding peace

until they murdered him.

Walter Cronkite, American death counts above his shoulder,
Napalm-B laid down in a line of bright flame
across the homes of children and babies.

Hòa th??ng Thích Qu?ng ??c soaked
in flaming gasoline, calm, chanting the mantra
of Amitabha Buddha to shame the puppet Di?m:

more power manifest in him than in B-52s
or 1.5 million lbf Saturn V rockets.

Look! They’re walking on the moon!

Song of Degrees Kelvin

The sun is our median of fire
including our own bodies
in the scale of degrees.

Core temperature of a newly formed
supernova neutrino is a hundred
billion degrees kelvin,

our sun only a few thousand, hardly more
than a rocket thrust or molten steel
and less than a nuclear bomb.

Would you have thought that Napalm-B
is hotter than volcanic lava, a stoked
wood fire hotter than gasoline?

Fire is life. Fire is death.
Hope brings fire.
Our manufactured world is built of fire.

The earth comes out of fire
even the air, even the water.
Only space gives rise to fire

rather than fire giving rise to it.
Sparks rise from a struck log
in a redwood campground.

Hopes rise into the arms
of trees who welcome fire
as a friend.

No war without hope
No war without fire
No hope without fear
No fear without hope.

A zero-sum game:
what is gained
equals what is lost.

Modes of the same pitches,
hope, fear, fire, longing
and reaching for the sky.