Eclogue 8: Standby

At the base of the navel

she pierces the rind of the orange

with her thumbnail,

slices out an equator

by turning the fruit and the nail

in opposite arcs, as if

she is calibrating

a sextant to measure

the music of the celestial spheres,

relative to the horizon

of her thigh, where

she leverages the citrus,

whose sweetness seeps onto

her snow-pants

in a few small beads that slide off

and fall into the snow,

leaving behind a few tiny craters

in the shadow of her leg,

a moon-colored blue like the light

from a TV screen left on a station

in the interstitial standby of programming

in the belly of the night—that light—

walking home

from a bar at close, midweek,

en route to an early flight,

the streets as empty as on Christmas Day—

assures: you are not alone

in your inability

to sleep in complete darkness.

We don't speak.

The drone of cars and trucks

traveling on a distant highway

past the tree line hangs hushfully

in the air, infused with citrus. Citrus—

this is the scent of winter,

the scent of the remote

awareness of motion,

of consciousness. I keep track

of time by counting the occasional

crow. Peripherally, I know

she eats the orange one segment at a time,

devotionally, as to make no noise.

Five crows. Six.

Her voice emerges as though

with the seventh, as though the seventh,

over the roofs of the cars and trucks, grazing

the tree line, and through the quivering

sketches of branches drawn over

the erasures of previous attempts:

"The navel of the orange

is a conjoined and underdeveloped twin

from a single mutation of a single tree

at a monastery in Brazil almost two centuries ago."

She tosses the rind,

a continuous coil, a still frame

of a corkscrewing bottle rocket

just before it hits the ground.

It begins to rain.

The rain, too, leaves behind tiny craters

in the snow, as if snowing in reverse.

Not knowing how else to say it:

"How improbable is the color orange."

The words linger in the wake of the flight

of a crow—blue standby—echoes of the spheres—

and then I understand

that I have lost count.

John K., the first few weeks of January 2010

Elegy 3: Closest To

The tulips bend

with the weight of their

flowers, reaching

towards the sun

at the windows

that straddle the

mantle, onto which

a few petals

have dropped

among a watercolor

of an Amsterdam canal,

a Chinese opera mask,

old editions: the Aeneid,

Wuthering Heights, an Irish Reader.

Fewer others fallen over

to the tiled hearth,

and fewest yet

fallen to the panels

of the wood floors.

These are closest to the sun.

Something more

than petals is missing

when I find them gone,

picked up and thrown away.

John K., 1/7/10, 4:50-56PM

The Sacred Door, The Sacred Threshold

Beginnings imply endings. And endings imply beginnings. So it goes for the the month of January.

The month is named after one of my favorite gods, a god most humanly and metaphysically figured: Janus, whom the Romans worshipped as the "god of door and gate," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary. The origin of his name attests directly to his divine sovereignty. Janus derives from the Latin ianua, meaning "door," "doorway," or "entrance," and is closely related to ianūs, "covered passage" or "arcade." There is speculation that these two words, in turn, come from *ei-, a most basic of Proto-Indo-European bases signifying "to go." This base also explains the Latin verb "to go," īre.

The usually bearded deity was believed to have twin heads, one facing forward and the other backward, and thus, like a door, looks both ways. (In some depictions, however, the god bears four heads, each facing in the four cardinal directions.) According to myth, Saturn endowed the god with the ability to see both past and present to reward his hospitality. Thusly, Janus was patron of beginnings, cosmic and terrestrial, as well as of human life, new eras, and new enterprises, which could account for his frequent mintage on coins. He was lord over all ranges of portals: first and foremost entrances to domiciles, bridges, arches, and covered passageways. Most famously, Janus watched over the Gates of War in the enclosed and gated archway in the Roman Forum, whose doors were only closed during the rare times of peace.

A clean-shaven Janus as featured on a Roman coin. Image thanks to vroma.org.

While there are gods in other cultures that resemble Janus, such as we see in certain Grecian depictions of Hermes and in Assyrian depictions of the man-fish-headed Oannes, historians assert that Janus has no immediate equivalent in other mythological systems, and thus was an old Italic deity, likely the Etruscan god known as Ani. (I should note, however, that Sir William Betham posited that Janus takes his name from a Mesopotamian name, Uanna, which, in turn, is a variant of the name of Biblical prophet Jonah, or Yonah, meaning "dove.") His ancientness may also explain Janus' high rank in the Roman pantheon, for his surname, divom deus, means "god of gods," which suggests a Jupiterian, or Jovanian, status.

Beginnings, then, are occasions of sanctity. And therefore so are endings. But perhaps also sacred is the ambiguity therein: as inception must in ways be defined by cessation, and as cessation must in ways be defined by inception, we must respect life's liminality, its thresholds. To be human is to be aware of past and future, and, perhaps more important, to know that our present is a constantly moving threshold between the two.

January, in light of such liminality, reminds me of a more epistemological poem I penned over two years ago, called "Winter Gardener," which anticipates, to boot, my upcoming and long overdue "Eclogue 7." Happy New Year, or, Happy Ending of Last Year.

Winter Gardener

No song from the birds.

The starling's course

across the field

carries the whiteness

and the stillness

of the snow.

Dusk. Or dawn.

The winter gardener knows.

John K., 12/10/07

Alcuin at Aa[X]en: Part V

V.

Before the elephant: All war is terrorism,

Alcuin thinks, understanding also

that Charlemagne mastered it. And it explains

horses. Majestic form, yes— the musculature of shoulders,

the ligature to sleep standing up. Speed, size,

these, too, for the war machines. But a history

of war, and therefore a history of man, is the history

of vision. (This is true, also, for primitive

infantry, U Boats, and IEDs.) See, monocularly,

the horse is afforded nearly the circle. 350 degrees.

The full set, of course, is itself nothing short of terror:

to see everything that surrounds you at once,

the burden of sight never pardoned, never lightened,

with some tranche of blindness. Which is why

we witness the damnation of the hammerhead shark,

cursed cephalofoil to school in the day, as the light

of the sun, even filtered in the reaches of the deep sea,

is humiliating, not in the exposure of its grotesquerie,

but in the illumination of the oceanic void. God

gave it no gift of mercy with the night: to hunt alone

in 360 degrees of dark. Void of voids.

Alcuin, in all likelihood, knew nothing

of Sphyrnidae sphyrna, but he was versed

in voids and leviathans, and perhaps could concede

some validity in the proposition that the beasts of

aqua incognita coexisted with God prior to

creatio ex nihilo. Such is to see all.

Charlemagne knew, though, that terror,

like power and faith, and well, most things,

is a continuum. There is the terror of knowing all,

and there is the terror of not knowing some.

The terror of the limited: this is the terror of the horse.

Vision denies the horse a narrow band behind him—

perhaps 3 degrees or so at most, a moderate

occlusion of the past. And vision denies

a thicker band before him—10 minus 3 degrees

or so, a greater obstruction of the future.

Charlemagne so computed, and his elephant—

a gift from the Abbasid caliphate Harun al-Rashid

in Baghdad during some nebulous negotiations

in pursuit in vain of an even more nebulous alliance—

accompanied him on marches. Not its size,

but its sudden size before the eyes of the horse:

they would buck, flee, flail, collapse, and not a few

would die of heart failure, so incomprehensible

the unexpected mass of an elephant striking the retina.

No optic nerve can handle such data overload.

We egregiously underestimate Charlemagne's

understanding of horses, which is to say

of man, if we deem his elephant a secret weapon

against horses, which is to say against men.

Man cannot see most of what flanks him,

which explains inconsistencies in empathy

and the consideration of alternate perspectives.

And can see none of what falls behind him.

This explains his knotted relationship with the past:

the prevailing notion of linear temporality,

the high incidence of OCD (there is no need

for diagnosis; this too is a continuum), the inflated sense

of invincibility, and the universality of complex ritualism.

His stereoscopic vision, further, rendered him expert

of swinging from tree to tree, which gave rise

to his thumb, which in turn pushed forth the advent

of his advanced cortex and, to make a long story short,

his fear of death: the core of his consciousness.

Thusly are horses and men attracted—

the one to run, the other to think of it.

and both to dance in terror and knowing,

Alcuin, before Charlemagne and his elephant.

Man's vulnerable cranium, the horses vulnerable legs.

Charlemagne: elephant, vulnerable eye.

John K., 11/3-12/1/2009

Viaduct (Eclogue 6)

for Jon G.

There is a man

who walks across

the viaduct.

His shadow cast,

another self,

from the street lamps

at this time

when it is late enough—

but not too late.

In the distance,

church bells,

trains. While below,

the cars,

much in the way

of the river:

different, but not

different enough.

In this light enough,

his shadow

now extends

onto the highway

past the point

we can no longer

see. Listen to

the bells,

the trains,

the cars,

but hear most

the footsteps.

It is brave to be afoot.

John K., 11/9/2009, 10:06-10:18 PM

Alcuin at Aa[X]en: Part IV

IV.

The scientific method as formulated by Descartes

has its origins, obviously, in orthopraxy

and has everything to do with God.

Charlemagne's prescribed sequence of motion

makes the fact quite plain: arriving at truth

is a ritual. Charlemagne would unsheathe his sword,

which heavy-hilted blade he was never without,

consider the reflection of the lambent flames

on the metal for awhile, and gently lay it across

his bureau on top of his loosely organized stack

of memos, invoices, and manuscripts.

The emptied sheath still girded to his hip,

Charlemagne would then pace in silence for,

as Alcuin determined, exactly 51 steps.

Yes, Alcuin was a compulsive hoarder of

figures, and is said to have first discovered

(for himself, not for all mankind, to be sure)

that 51, despite its looks, is not a prime number.

Alcuin could easily discern Charlemagne's affinity

for the number 3...but 17? This would cause

Alcuin to lose some sleep.

To have a knack for numbers, as we now know,

is to have a knack for God, which knacks

Alcuin had. He kept precise, nay, fastidious

tallies of the local sports teams:

wins, losses, ties, of course, but many other

hieroglyphic statistics such as arrow-to-target ratios

and lance/visor averages. In this, Alcuin anticipated

two of the most important inventions since the death of Christ:

baseball record-keeping and algebra.

Muslim scholars, not so incidentally, were way ahead

of the Europeans on the latter with al-jabr—

"the mending of broken bones," and thus "reunion,"

which allowed for the synthesis

of the rational and the irrational. Through numbers,

surely, but more profoundly, in some great theophanic

insight, through a way of seeing God.

At this point, Charlemagne: Let us retire to the stable.

The King re-sheathed his sword; Alcuin tucked parchments

under his arm. And both were the same gestures.

On their way, the pair picked up a chaliced cocktail to-go,

and, for the sake of the good form, would humor

a servant to escort them through a labyrinthine route,

a different servant and thus a different route each time,

up newel stairs through the curtain walls to the allure,

under which gemmed firmament all men

must disrobe the various fashions and accessories

of disagreement to stand, wonderstruck, as one

to pledge their allegiance to the stars.

Here, Charlemagne would place his drink

in an ope of the crenellations and remove his sword

once more. Then to enact an intricate and elegant

folk dance of swordwork.

There was a Northumbrian rhythm to it, which warmed

Alcuin with nostalgia, though he couldn't fathom

where Charlemagne picked it up so fluently:

accents, as they say, are the greatest

challenge in acquired multilingualism.

So Alcuin watched and could only speculate what

Charlemagne thought each time he swung

the blade in arcs that doubled the man's height;

according to his face, Alcuin concluded,

widows and orphans.

After some time, enough time for some star

to travel some distance larger than any man

could ever hope to count, a heavy-breathed

Charlemagne returned his broadsword

and, no louder than in his voice of conversation,

called for a servant. A different one, of course, quickly

arrived to lead the two down the far curtain

to the stable at the end of the stables,

whose rafters the King had his court architect

adjust to accommodate Abu l'-Abbas:

the Emperor's beloved elephant,

in whose presence Charlemagne would begin

the dance of the tongue, to utter

the language of the puzzle.

Alcuin at Aa[X]en: Part III

III.

Puzzles. Contradictions.

Here we have this churl:

Rex Francorum, Rex Langobardoum, Imperator Romanorum—

for the love of God—who grudgingly slipped into

the chlamys only at the entreaty of Hadrian the Pope.

Never even went back to Rome after the coronation realpolitik.

This man, given to otter skins and tireless activism for

Liberal Arts education. Measuring up to, as disinterment

by the Victorian scientists evaluated, 6.2416 repeating

feet. This man, downright draconian when it came to

the conquest and conversion of the polytheists,

not to mention all the credal manipulations with the

Filoque, the spleenfulness over iconoclasm and the like.

We're discussing some serious standardization:

yes, there were the stable systems of manufacture

along with, for the times, impressive quality control.

But in his dim, hand-cramped scriptoria

we have the birth of the miniscule. And punctuation.

Finally a readable Benedictine rule.

This man who chafes at imperial coronation fancies

himself an administrator. Of all things. In the age

of high Christology, Alcuin settles into

Charlemagne's crude wooden throne.

There was the dance. More like orthopraxy,

if we are to do our due diligence in the matter.

Alcuin did his best to remain modest about it, though,

and I think we can comfortably say he was

successful—even gracious—in his humility.

And had he lived to see Middle English

and Old French he would have been broadly pleased

with the etymology of the word. Humilis,

"on the ground," from humus, "earth." Primary

meanings indicate semantic exactitude with

terra, but, of course, Alcuin understood

(the quickest glance at his palimpsests will assuage

your doubts on this one) that words do not work

this way. Charlemagne right around this time

would take the first steps of his dance,

the dance given to respectful observance of

the holy mysteries of the puzzle.

Yes, technically Alcuin had authored the puzzle:

as Charlemagne saw it was indeed the hand

of Alcuin that made the puzzle appear on the parchment,

but it was the mind of God that made the puzzle appear

in Alcuin's hand. Alcuin didn't disagree. In fact

couldn't, as there was not even available to him

in their day a theory of pure authorial intentionality,

and, if there was, it would have been impious

and therefore head-on heresy. But, in his characteristic

being-ahead-of-his-time, there was likely the smallest

mustard seed in his head about a theologically sound

framework for a trinity of God, man, and imagination

(with, and the etymology works beautifully here,

imagination serving as the Holy Ghost)

that wouldn't have toppled Aristotle's scaffolding

of the first mover, which, incidentally,

is the beginning of physics. Alcuin knew this,

even if he didn't have a word for it: that to be

a theologian is to be a scientist.