SHADOW-DICK

The Moby-Dick (1851, by Herman Melville) reference in Shadowbahn (2017, by Steve Erickson) appears on page 233.

AMERICAN

"There have been years she was confused, and more recent years when she may still have been confused or only pretending to be confused. In the thirteen years since Zema came to America, she has never had any idea that having no idea who she is and having no idea where she belongs makes her more American than anyone."

—page 51, Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson

INKTOPODES

"Inktopodes" #7.

Watercolor, gouache, and India ink on 3" x 3" watercolor paper.

COSMOS and COSMOS ABSTRACT

"Cosmos" by Troy's Work Table.

Sidewalk chalk wash, sidewalk chalk, and chalk pastels on 24" x 36" concrete board.

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"Cosmos Abstract" by Troy's Work Table.

Sidewalk chalk wash, sidewalk chalk, and chalk pastels on 18" x 24" concrete board.

POEMS for LENT • AT JERUSALEM'S GATE

"At Jerusalem's Gate" by Troy's Work Table.

Sidewalk chalk wash, sidewalk chalk, chalk pastels, and charcoal pencil on 12" x 12" concrete board.

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"No light shoots from / his fingertips. / His voice calls down / no fire. / And yet, they say / a fig tree withered / at his word." and "singing Hosanna! / Hosanna! Hosanna! / as if my very life depends upon it." —from "At Jerusalem's Gate" by Nikki Grimes, as found in At Jerusalem's Gate: Poems of Easter

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With Palm Sunday tomorrow, my "Poems for Lent" reading project comes to an end tonight. (Yes, Lent technically runs until Easter day, but I knew I would be using Palm Sunday, and therefore the start of Holy Week, as my ending point.)

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I decided that I wanted a poem with religious themes to end my days of reading poem upon poem, so I chose one of the poems from At Jerusalem's Gate by Nikki Grimes. They are the text of a kid's picture book with beautiful, bold, and brilliantly-colored woodcuts by David Frampton.

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These aren't mostly poems of Easter, but of poems of the Passion and what leads up to Easter.

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This particular poem reflects upon the arrival of Jesus at the gates of Jerusalem and his entry into the holy city.

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I wanted to capture the city itself, but using elements of the Palm Sunday story. Therefore, I opted to reflect the colors of the cloaks thrown down upon the road through the gate. I imagined the New City of Revelation (as shown to John of Patmos), though, and so made twelve gates in which to enter—a gate for each of the tribes of Israel (and the sons of Jacob); a gate for each of the Apostles; the number of perfection (3, representing divinity, multiplied by 4, representing creation)—with ten of those gates bound by stone and iron (representing the Laws), one bound by moon, and one bound by sun.

And, as Nikki Grimes presses a bit against the story of the Passion and asks questions, and allows doubt to make an appearance, all the while returning to a faithful stance in the end; I decided to play a bit, but then likewise return to the simple and the faithfully representational.

POEMS for LENT • TREES LIKE US

"Trees Like Us" by Troy's Work Table.

Sidewalk chalk wash, sidewalk chalk, chalk pastels, and charcoal pencil on 12" x 12" concrete board.

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"a breathing interrupted by a silence / in which the very air is suspended" and "All night the trees whisper sweet nothings / that put us to sleep, then hold us."

—from "Trees Like Us" by Marvin Bell, as found in Poetry for a Midsummer's Night: In the Spirit of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

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I've always been fascinated by anthropomorphized trees—the cedars of Lebanon clapping their hands in the Psalms, the Ents in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, treefolk of the fairy realms.

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Here, in this poem, there is magic.

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I tend to think creation gets saved alongside (and because of) humankind when humanity is redeemed. But this poem switches who is redeemed and who is saved alongside the others. Here it is the trees that pull us along.

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I get the sense that these "trees like us" aren't really like us, however. They feel as indifferent as the trees in the poems of Robinson Jeffers, They may be alive and they may sing us to sleep, but they don't really care about us, in the same way that we don't really care about them.

(Marvin Bell seems to care about the trees, especially since they feature in a few of the poems in this collection, but he seems to be an exception.)

POEMS for LENT • THE DESERT PLACES

"The Desert Places" by Troy's Work Table.

Sidewalk chalk wash, sidewalk chalk, chalk pastels, and charcoal pencil on 12" x 12" concrete board.

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"And she shone yellow and red and matted hair in the light of my eyes. And she sweated in the heat of my breath." and "And when the man returned from the garden, dried-bloody and dirt-filthy and sticky from naming still more animals..." and "And I named the man 'mortal' and I named him 'returned to the dust' and I named all his days 'fruitless and weary.' And when I finally spat him out, I named him a pile of pulped flesh and ground bone and gristle."

—from chapter 2 of The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss

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I'm not quite sure exactly what The Desert Places is. It's not really a novel. It's not really a collection of poems. I suppose it's a series of prose poems that dabble in the mythology and stories of the Old Testament.

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Chapter 2 is the story of the Fall from the viewpoint of a god of some sort, although not the Creator God. Perhaps he is the demiurge of Gnosticism, the Adversary of the book of Job, Satan of Christianity, the serpent in the Garden (although he claims there is no fruit of the tree of good and evil and he is no talking snake). He is obviously operating in his own interest.

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Regardless of the mythos in which Sparks and Kloss are playing and utilizing for their dark take on the stories of Creation and Fall, the Man and the Woman still end up in the same place as they do in the source material: mortal, suffering, "returned to dust," broken, and expelled from "paradise."

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And then there is a devouring, as Kronos to his children. We are in the primordial myths of the Titans. We await the child who will cut open the stomach of the father and rescue his siblings but none is here offered.

POEMS for LENT • LATERAL TIME

"Lateral Time" by Troy's Work Table.

Sidewalk chalk wash, sidewalk chalk, chalk pastels, and charcoal pencil on 12" x 12" concrete board.

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"I'd never held the ashes of a dead man but I'd always wanted to know a famous artist, so I reached out my left hand and she spilled him into my palm. He was flame-white, his flesh dust, he was tiny bones you could play with—they could be doll parts—peaceful in my hands like light."

and

"Now I've begun to write "NO!" on my body parts, small cross-stitched reminders to throw me back and hook another. Tattoo on my right breast, sticker on my colon, scribble of bright blue between my ovaries, hollowed out now of eggs but still handy to balance me out."


—from "Lateral Time" by Maureen Seaton, as found in Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (edited by David Lehman)

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This is a perfect poem for Lent. There is death. There is dust and ashes. There is an embodiment, a celebration of flesh, followed by disintegration and an "en-soul-ment."

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At first, I wasn't sure that this poem would "work." But then I read it again. And again.

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Multiple readings allowed it to resonate. To take on flesh of its own.

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This poem is filled with light.

(Not just the light of the bones, but the light of a television screen, light reflected upon the Hudson river, shimmering air, the light of dawn.)

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This poem is about turning around—not turning back, but turning toward—and it does so through the things of everyday life, the things of the present moment.

POEMS for LENT • XV

"XV" by Troy's Work Table.

Sidewalk chalk wash, sidewalk chalk, chalk pastels, and charcoal pencil on 12" x 12" concrete board.

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"Die Jahre sind nun nicht mehr wie die Wogen / Wenn sie das Meerschiff senken oder heben" and "Die Spiegelwelt in ihren blassen Farben / Erging sich im Verwandeln ohne Lust / Ich wendete mich nieder zu dem Blust" —from "XV" by Walter Benjamin, as found in Sonnets

"No longer do the years resemble waves / When they draw down or life an ocean vessel" and "The mirror world in its pale hues / Did give itself to transformation without joy / Stooping to the water-bloom" —translated from German to English by Carl Skoggard

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Walter Benjamin wrote 73 sonnets in honor and memory of his friend Fritz Heinle after Heinle committed suicide at the start of World War I.

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These sonnets are "love poems" to a friend. They are filled with loss and longing. They are filled with meditations upon death and the passage of time.

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Sometimes translator Carl Skoggard uses archaic English (thee, thou, hadst, dost) to reflect the German that Benjamin was using at the time. I have to trust him that it is more authentic than contemporary terms. (It doesn't happen in this particular sonnet, though.)

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Sonnet XV starts a set of poems that alternate between images of the sea/waves and Spirit/wind. A ship and its sails are being pushed about, blown toward some indeterminate destination.

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Then, as with Heinle's life, the images, the lines, fade away into "deceiving August."

POEMS for LENT • THE HAND HAS TWENTY-SEVEN BONES

"The Hand Has Twenty-Seven Bones" by Troy's Work Table.

Sidewalk chalk wash, sidewalk chalk, chalk pastels, and charcoal pencil on 12" x 12" concrete board.

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"1. I make my faith in my hands. A writer can declare faith in nothing but must bear faith in her hands. Hands are the inventors of language. We make words for what we must do. Our words are made of hands."

and

"19. There are twenty-seven bones in the hand and twenty-seven protons in the nucleus of an atom of cobalt. Cobalt blue. Our hands are the masters of our blues. How many times have I given up my head for them to hold? "

—from "The Hand Has Twenty-Seven Bones" by Natalie Diaz, as found in the "Faith" issue of Tin House (17:3)

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Sometimes, contemporary "list" prose poems appear to be nonsense that has been strung together. Not so in the case of this poem. Here, the twenty-seven "aphorisms," one for each bone of the hand, are all related to hands in either a universal "definition" or in a personal "reflection." (Or sometimes simultaneously both.)

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The beauty comes in the punch-line of the poem, revealed through a slow build: a play on the notion of being created in the image of God.

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This poem is truly a joy to read as it makes its case. It skirts what many may consider both profane and sacred throughout its lines, but really falls on the side of the latter.

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It is a prayer of thanksgiving.

POEMS for LENT • ODE to HEPHAESTUS

"Ode to Hephaestus" by Troy's Work Table.

Sidewalk chalk wash, sidewalk chalk, chalk pastels, and charcoal pencil on 12" x 12" concrete board.

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"about circuitously walking / toward an injured crow / with a tire iron called Mercy." —from "Ode to Hephaestus, the Blacksmith Who Makes Lightning Bolts and Is Married to Aphrodite but Is Ugly" by Dan Chelotti, as found in x

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We are shaped by perception and perspective.

Even the title of the poem alludes to this. Hephaestus is ugly, yet he has the goddess of beauty and love for his wife. (Although the marriage is problematic.)  Hephaestus is ugly, yet he is capable of fashioning lightning bolts to be used as weapons by the other gods. (And, once again his relationship to those other gods is problematic.)

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What may look like cruelty to one may be another's mercy. Like the story of Hephaestus, we don't have enough of the story here to properly judge. (Things are potentially problematic.) With what we do have, the story rings true. (Although it may indeed be problematic.)

What do perception and perspective look like when shaped by only a minimum of information? What do they look like in the midst of ambiguity?

POEMS for LENT • THE CAGED EAGLE'S DEATH DREAM

"The Caged Eagle's Death Dream" by Troy's Work Table.

Sidewalk chalk wash, sidewalk chalk, chalk pastels, and charcoal pencil on 12" x 12" concrete board.

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"Where meteors make green fire and die, the ocean dropping westward to the girdle of the pearls of dawn"

and

"It saw, according to the sight of its kind, the archetype / Body of life a beaked carnivorous desire / Self-upheld on storm-broad wings: but the eyes / Were spouts of blood; the eyes were gashed out; dark blood / Ran from the ruinous eye-pits to the hook of the beak / And rained on the waste spaces of empty heaven."

—from "The Caged Eagle's Death Dream" (from Cawdor) by Robinson Jeffers, as found in Cawdor and Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems

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I knew I was going to have to get Jeffers in here, but I was worried about how to do it. First, his work is so dark and heavy-laden with indifference to humankind and its cultures, governments, and monuments. He makes my misanthropy look downright amateurish. Second, his body of work is so immense I found it hard to hone in one poem. But I decided to focus on one of the shorter pieces from an earlier work, which allowed him to be at the peak of his writing and not yet "destroyed" by the "isms" and slaughter of World War II.

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I not going to pretend to even be able to touch his long lines, his (un)holy lifting up of nature at the expense of humankind, the images that tumble over one another.

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There is no glory in death here. There is no real fear of death, either. (There is weeping on the part of Michal, though, when George retrieves the revolver and shoots the eagle in its cage. It's "on scene" and its quick. (We can almost miss it, if it wasn't for the dead bird's dreaming.))

Death is.

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The phantom of the eagle is as though Icarus, although it welcomes being burned up by the sun ("it's father") when it flies too close, ending up as "peace like a white fawn in a dell of fire."

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There is no falling back to earth from the heavens here. There is no.