John Peck
From "Cantilena Book 1: Cedars of Liban"
35
Came in the panopticon, Bentham's titration,
and the vacuum tube through Raytheon
on into governance, Vannevar Bush's rectifier
enlarging to the firm's wide gaze, he of the Project,
then Memex and on to hyperlinks
as if in penance, his company Lux Dei penetrating tanks
and bunkers and the questionable homes
of mannunkind. At last troubled, he radioed your station -
you we say, as acolytes minding electrons
in magnum mysterium - radioed your haze,
your messaging blitz. We awaits.
And this is no recital for the sake
of itemizing those close-at-hand factors
of both complicity and fascination,
familial, patrilineal, and common
as the shared out-breath, in order prick-a-prick
to secure booster shots for my immune system.
But rather to say that these, Jack, are the trees
that inhibit my view of the woods. At Shaker Hancock,
saw their tools and sales moxie, not the regimental
abandon of their dancing. That spidery hickory hay fork
cupping upward in the hired men's rooms -
unlaced bussel easing light forth - Lebanon,
your mound, tall in heat ripple, we do know you.
36
Samhain, banquet of the Two Ways,
out of deeper colors, into deeper cold,
your franchise: cleaver-shiny
across the Max Beerbohm wish for dignity
in a butternut squash, that whack requiring
mallet-taps to open onto the slickery
gold hoard of reassurances
from the morticians after they've readied skinny
Akhenaten, plum rump trailing a sagging belly,
for the fate of a strung pullet.
Chilly feast around chugalug heat, a half-eaten
beet-root centering the carnage, every plate holy.
One of the thin places, alright! thus for thick folk
a Breughelesque vacation from salaried spooks.
Ezra's cameo in Montale's hand after the Arno
crested in '67 still my bookmark, confessio amantis,
and a gondola freighted with residents rounding
one corner, poling and peering, for no one has yet found
the trashy yellow paperback with diagrams
of infant Osiris and his great twin sister copulating
in the womb: Egypt in Italy, Italy in lower Manhattan,
seeding their royal broth in the muck of some river bank.
Not simply October 1923 Year Two of the New Order
in the here-and-now. That's Vico's old wind-up clock.
37
Sokurov has filmed farewell to Europe at the Winter Palace
in the Hermitage, his tall fool from the eighteenth century,
diplomat in black, no lace, catching aromas from the Dutch
masters,
and at the ball whirling in mazurkas with plumed partners
after which applause for the orchestra and exit down both
wings
of the great stairs, bemedaled sashes, the gartered stream
of the dead in living flood, sideburned Pushkin there, dixit.
Pushpin! the jab going in with feeling, for anything that
was an object
has become a relation drawn out and lingering, for sale
yet ungraspable. John Marriner at Ani was on its track too,
sealing
candle gleam over chant at young Gagik's coronation
beneath the dome's hole, rain misting rubble. Yet it won't do,
staging these reviews - don't ask us what we are screening,
ask us how, if we are lucky, we go blind. For then the knife
hangs,
no one moves, and yet Gretchen must not die. Dismantling
this,
untying the fly, unlacing Smoking Joe Frazier's eight-ounce
gloves,
are stipulated for philosophers from here on out. Tapping
for air
in the fished-out nose cone: Punch through to her!
White embroidery on the furze,
the same on the inch's window, and I have that hostage
to warm and salve for an hour. Late, weirds the crow,
Great. Spate. I shall be loud among the loud
but slur among her sands, and crowd
to the plunge between them, and cleanse, and begin to gnaw.
38
Peter Birkhauser's painting was re-set
only by maximum stretch - the crackled skull
of Pierre Curie suddenly his own, muttering
directions to finding that yellow pulp novel
with the diagrams: something that grotesque,
you flame it, you blame it, but one sure thing is
that at first you won't grock him. In fact, she says so,
his sculpted woman crying out for release -
her pubis had defeated the carver, who notched it
with the scalars of astrolabes and named it
for one of the twelve stellar houses.
At this juncture, though politeness will still pervade,
within the hour everyone with position
will politely vacate. Studious colleagues
and those with a tested voice in the choir: all cleared out,
back to tracking parades of civics
toward its couches and porte-cocheres
of mononucleosis. But abyssal
intelligence inheres not only in Starry Vere
but starry labia, source petals out past
instinct and fumbling hands. Radiation
streaming the life-spans, breeder-reactor, public
reasoning root to leaf from galactic dark.
39
Whoever submits to future unknowns controls
present inconceivables. Orwell knew better
than to put it that way - yet grasping him
also means letting go of supports to maintain
an open balance. Walking on ice with a blowtorch
unafraid of cold immersion. When the temples
of Isis were shuttered by codifiers
of transcendence, they barred entry to Goethe
and to more of my own kit than I knew - his gift
for public administration nowhere in mine
but to him no solace for the sadness and illness
that followed from going into grand harness
and treading out civic oats. For who knows
what that cult encoded of the human future -
each cedar pillar somewhere harbors both
the meme of lightning and resistance to it -
gale force confronted, minutes of it volting
down the tower - or down-up, rivering both ways,
windows blown, blocks in spasm still mortared,
stacked levels and outlooks - the goal, aereated solid -
jellied in seizure jimmying any axis,
too-much enough. But then the everywhere
gossamer of wave brought your inrush. Cunny
of all darks and fire rising in The Dog.
40
The busheled ingathering of all lives,
apo kata stasis, restoration
of all the poured-out blood and sap variations:
theology's scoped dream of biology's
crepitant and thrashing slog through aeons
means one long painful birth - and that means origin
in all of its ends, awake. Summary
percolating in the sludge of slow time,
such may be - but if so, then the sludge debt
must be paid up and to the last penny.
This whispers root to the topmost leaf, pulled
cell-wide up the mash capillaries, out
each leaf-thick channel end; green to you,
blue or black to the ant, but in esse
cognitio matutina, sun as the moon face
of rising. Seed to cedar ramifying
up through rucks of cloud ruckled by light
frames morning knowledge irresistibly crowning
from dark eld - against irreversibles
clouding that churn we drank from, a daimon
cranking the lithe line out of Chauvet,
haunch and mane one wire, thus Plato's horde
gulp from their river, the shales bouncing, and
lightning strikes birth sparks upward through smoke.
41
Subtle and more subtle grow the temptations.
I heard this evening evening's aubade, the crush
of radiance in on itself, crumpling worlds
with the pyreia Archimedes may have thrown
at the Fifth Fleet, marsh sea-pinks at dawn.
And heard gongs tapering to hush among slaughters
unreclaimed by the Hoseas. Real meeting
does not spark from these communiqus.
The real heating and cooling, materia medica
into vapor, bleeps flurrying the dead zone,
accelerates the hair-wide choices: adoration
or suicide. Short of that, torpor after wrath,
then rage after torpor, both humiliating -
with the cycles of mucked manhood near,
too near, all the controls. The plighting
between woman and this has not yet chalked
its limit. Teens in the caves painting,
their genius of outering - those firsters blocked
early Balanchine and so go slanting
past my grasp, no artifact but freed movement
balancing the berserking act between
heart and wall. Bog sunset, berry-float sheen,
dollop of early moon in her, I break
as the blurred hulk of the bear wading in to trawl.
42
I heard this morning, waking into the level
red radiance decanting me, the gravel
rolled by basement rivers, basses and baritones
overlapping, steady as a sans-culotte
knitting during windless climbs of the thing
into its slit, herms from harms: male force
yarning out the female demand: Wait!
ductile stretch winnowing the contract: No terms!
neither the underwater monks of dispersed Tibet
nor the choirs of Novgorod, but the singlet
on a runner rippling for the tape at full push
as his core plays his nerve like a string bass,
plucking while sleeving the sheer input ratio
from thrust and mass, swerved up the torque of seed -
not my hang-back when I first went out on the wire
toward a soft hand, not quite hearing, courage slack,
only later past fatigue, its breathing:
I thought you would never come! Thus that rag
across my cock swathing piston thighs home
in this our body opened to blood
at ram speed while every bone bowed:
waking past the Lost Colony, bearing down
without mitigation on the axle's held roar
and therefore not haunting the phantom groves -John Peck: from Cantilena 29
43
- not standing with the two London schoolteachers
who found themselves with Marie Antoinette
and her court dressed as villagers close by
the faux drip-drip watermill, and saw children
trundling hoops with sticks in the same sunlight
that held them all there before the First War,
before Verdun and Wipers. Not haunting
the ghost trunks at origin, not fingering
their shag armor, not craning my neck back
to scan diameter arrays of lit green
in fans interpenetrating. Nor compounding
their gone sap with mystic blood, Milosz's
revelation, primal unity bulbing
from the ruby on the pectoral. Nor blood
coaxed fuller, Faust-mitted engineers
crafting it to throng more redly, thickly,
erythropoietin ginning the mix, poiein
curdling the hearts in racers who keel over
their handlebars: Goethe missed that wrinkle,
poesis of the groves turned into speed sludge
for overtaking origin to replant it,
tail in mouth, yet that circle birthing the nothing
of the unrooted, a rhizome
a-swish in the grab-elegy of conquest.
44
Watching spurts through gaps in the tall sheds
at Jones and Laughlin on Monongahela
at night, efflux rippling those slits, ingots
trundling beneath whams of the sledge, shedding
sparks smeared down water - too early to forget,
too late to keep, gone techne - made distant clangs
my tuning fork for germlines of the unforged:
vulnerable seed like the palm scattering it
must spray untampered if it too is to valley
its line of life. It, and the blundering ages:
nothing less chancy will dress shoulders with altar cloths
still iced by wind off the Cuillins and still warm
from offering the unwithheld. An acorn
pried from its dirt jacket lashes a bullwhip
to one side seeking purchase, to the other
it fans baby leaves, the khaki vest
unhinging across meaty red, a testicle
putting itself to the knife because it was everything
but now bursts in fall-out, the three ages
or seven ages of man kaputt, rife in scarlet,
cut down at the throne. No one knows how the bridge
slides underfoot. How the station, the track
are assigned, and that rocking glide, smeary glass
over steaming roofs passing, day fresh. Not one.
