The Greatest Show on Earth

Sorry this is so bleak and pessimistic...I guess I am in a mood.

The Greatest Show on Earth

"God was led infallibly by his wisdom and by his goodness to create the world through his power, and to give it the best possible form..."
-Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy


The curtain opens on a crowded stage,
A troupe of players draped in rags as fools,
Their faces twisted in distorted masks,
With bulging crotches or with parted skirts.
Yet wizened, age-bent, crippled by the years,
The centuries that they have lived and bred
Within a haze of pheromones and lust,
Though never draining their virility.

Now watch them stumble, drunken lechers all,
And weave across the stage, more crowded still,
As by the minute more and more walk on,
Crawl over, stand erect, and pound their chests.
And soon one trips and falls, a quadruped again,
Returning to the origins it never left.
Then others trip, making a roiling mass
Of limbs and genitalia, boiling pile of flesh,
Rising and extending in a self-spawned swirl
Of replication for the sweaty glee,
The hint and glimpse of immortality
Within the climax and the little death.

But underneath their beastly grunts and groans,
The sounds of screams and angry cries grow loud.
For here and there, the orgiastic waves
Are parted by the fists and flailing clubs
Of two, then three, then hundreds locked in war,
Their throats torn open by their battle cries--
The mass of flesh divided half and half:
Two parts, one whole: the ecstasy of blood.

And Death, a shady figure draped in bones and skins,
Is striding on to stand at center stage.
It gazes out, though lacking face or eyes,
Then turns its body, points to where the farce
Has entered into this, the final act.

For now two streams are spreading from the pile,
One red, one white, both draining life away.
Yet still the bodies pile higher, farther out,
The overflowing flesh collapsing on itself,
The forms devolving in their lust and war
And spilling over from the stage's edge.

The stage’s wood and metal groan beneath the weight,
The rafters shake and creak, the floor grows weak,
And flames break out behind the scenes:
The whole theater is about to fall
Upon the heads and humping, thumping forms
Now next to formless, shapeless shades like Death,
Amoebas swimming in the viscous streams...

Until the curtain falls, and silence reigns,
And everything is stillness once again.
The curtain quivers, but the troupe has gone...
There is no encore, for the show is done.


Image credit: Andreas Praefcke, from Wikimedia Commons, under a Creative Commons License.

Cardinal

Cardinal

Red red red! O glory of life!
My veins and arteries flutter,
My heart drinks you and spits you out
Like some wine aged to perfection.
The tops of rainbows shine with you,
And roses blush at your sweet kiss.
The fires of stars, the face of Mars,
The core of this planet of ours
Burn and explode to show your ire
Through cosmic spaces, dark and cold.

O red, these reflections are dim,
Mere embers long buried in ash.
What of that spark that once went BANG!
And threw off the spectrum of light,
A particle hidden within
Each frenzied atom as it fled?
Fear not, rage not: your spark lives on,
Is tended and held like a gem.

When first, in that moment long gone,
The universe opened its eyes,
That sparkling shard took a shape
And spread two feathered wings to fly
With black-mask face and orange beak,
Bearing this treasure with a song.
So now, if the sun strikes the breast
Of this avatar in the air,
The past becomes present, alive,
And promises wonders to come.

It is time: gather ’round this crook
Of a blooming dogwood’s thin branch.
The wind watches, holding its breath,
The sun brightens, peeking through leaves.
For here in this nest an egg cracks:
First sign of a color reborn.

Image credit: U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, from Wikimedia Commons, under public domain.

Religion: End It or Enlighten It?

Religion: End It or Enlighten It?


I have wrestled for years with an interest in religions, from an outsider's perspective, that vies with an equally strong dislike and distrust of it. I waver between these two poles, often depending on what I read (say, Richard Dawkins vs. the Dalai Lama), and I can never settle that final question: Should religion be tolerated or terminated?

It is a troubling question. The hardest part is that being skeptical by nature, I have no problem seeing the fantastical and placating aspects of religion, the way it helps people feel good about themselves in a big, scary universe, while recognizing the ways that it can contribute to personal happiness--albeit at a greater price. So, looking at it through skeptical goggles, it seems silly at first blush to think something like religion could be all that dangerous or bad or harmful...

And then we have people crashing planes into skyscrapers. Or people killing other people because they are gay, offer abortions, or what have. Plus you add on top the ever-expanding circle of exploitation in the form of sexual abuse, money grubbing, power mongering, etc., etc. It is so easy to see how religion is as poisonous as it might be supportive. It cultivates and encourages a mindset of ignorance, setting for easy answers, not questioning assumptions and "authority." Meekness is encouraged, ignorance is bliss, faith is the key to heaven. Heck, you can even have someone ELSE die for your own sins!!!

Ghost

An old poem...but it still says so much.

Ghost

Hug the air above a candle’s flitting flame
And hold the hand of the shadow it throws;
Feel the presence of whom you love most,
The one who loves most to be yours,
Next to your heart, his heart speaking soft,
As though he were pressed to your breast.
Look into a mirror and see his clouded eyes,
Which once gazed unblinking in yours:
Both reflections clear enough to show your smile,
But one made hollow by the depthless glass.
Hear a whisper in an unfelt wind,
And think that his voice still remains,
Echoes speaking when there’s nothing left to say,
Forever speaking what he always tried to say.
Know he’s there although he wanders far from home,
A haunted ghost who walks the world without a grave.


Image credit: Matt Luttrell, from Wikimedia Commons, under a Creative Commons License.

Two Poems for Spring

Spring is almost here...!


Persephone, lift up your head


Persephone, lift up your head
That wilts with dewy tears;
Return, for from its barren bed
The lily bloom appears.
A golden eagle cuts the sky
To chase the cold away,
And satyrs lift their staffs on high
To call their nymphs to play.
Your shepherds pipe:
The time is ripe
To break the spell
And rise from hell!

The winter’s chains have melted down
As gray gives way to green,
And Hades, grudging, tips his crown--
While spilling tears unseen.
There’s love above and love below,
But life is only here!
O shadowed maiden, hear and know
The budding of the year!
Your shepherds pipe:
The time is ripe
To break the spell
And rise from hell!

Within your mother’s fruitful womb
The seeds of springtime stir,
As you, amidst sepulchral gloom,
Reluctant queen, endure.
The moment’s come; don’t let it flee!
For liberty is brief:
The blossom, smiling bright in glee
Must shortly frown in grief.
Your shepherds pipe:
The time is ripe
To break the spell
And rise from hell!

O never let the minstrels cry
And miss your pure embrace,
For ev’ry heart’s lamenting sigh
Invokes your absent grace.
This verdant garden earth awaits
To feel your tender kiss:
Persephone, your prison’s gates
Have opened unto bliss!
Your shepherds pipe:
The time is ripe
To break the spell
And rise from hell!

What Will Be

What Will Be


She was standing in the kitchen, holding a cup of steaming coffee. The smell was brilliant and bitter, tantalizingly familiar as it pricked her nostrils and her throat. She looked around: brown wooden cupboards and matching pantry, faded flower-patterned linoleum, old-model microwave and toaster on the counter (both white), old-model white stove, humming white refrigerator, two windows in the wall looking into a wooded back yard (one with an empty bird feeder dangling in the center of the glass, hanging from the eave), ceiling fan with three lights….

Everything looked right, felt right. She looked at it all again, furrowing her brow with effort and frustration this time.

She knew it, every last detail, but those details were not coming together for her into a single, solid sense of ownership. They wouldn’t meld together, finally and completely, into the sense of being hers, because she couldn’t get the sense of who she was.

Then she saw a photograph on the lone wall shelf, above the small telephone table: an old man with a ring of white hair around a bald dome, wearing wire-rim eyeglasses on a narrow face, and a woman with fluffy white hair, slightly curled on the tips, full face, and broad smile, a butterfly pin on her collar….

Sheldon. The man was Sheldon. Her Sheldon, her husband. The man she had married back, what was it, 1956…over 50 years now. And that was the same man who she had laid in a grave over five years ago. Or was it closer to 10? She would have to look at the papers in her filing cabinet later.

Yes, the bright-eyed man in the photo was her Sheldon, and she…she was Millicent Bradley Crenshaw, “Millie” to anyone who knew her for more than, say, two minutes.

She breathed a quiet sigh of relief, feeling whole, real again now that she felt at home again, and sat down to read the newspaper from front to back while she sipped her coffee and ate her oatmeal with milk, raisins, and a banana…and a dab of maple syrup.

It was quiet in the house, the only sounds the occasional turning and shaking of newspaper pages, the clink of metal spoon on porcelain bowl and cup, the slurp of coffee or thin oatmeal. Ages of silence, the quiet morning hours of an old house with one small, slow, simple old inhabitant. The sun rose from the horizon, growing full and confident in its puissance. As it grew stronger, brighter, the thick forest of deep green pine and naked deciduous trees surrounding the house took on a burnished look, steaming away the winter morning’s cold and frost under the sun’s heat. Birds chirped and flitted around in the boughs and branches, hunting for food, singing to pass the time, visiting the empty bird feeder outside of the house’s window just in case there might be a few seeds this time that they had missed the last. Once, for just a few minutes, a doe emerged from the tree line into the backyard, nibbled at a few shrubs that had run wild with neglect, and then disappeared again into the shadows of the forest canopy.

The sights and sounds and signs of life hustled and bustled about on this cold February morning in lower Maine. But inside the small brick house, little was heard besides the few quiet sounds of one woman’s breakfast over the newspaper. Once in a while the house creaked, the gas furnace rattled into life and then clattered into rest, the refrigerator hummed and squirted and farted.

Hours passed, creaking towards noon unnoticed. Millie finished her paper, her cold coffee and sludgy oatmeal, and then went to do the dishes. She remembered, from habit rather than deliberation, that she had to take her pills now that breakfast was finished. First the dishes, one thing after the other, just as it should be…like walking in someone else’s footsteps in the snow. Or like taking a few oddly shaped pills from the proper cell marked for that day, one of the fourteen such cells in the two-rowed plastic pillbox she had in her cupboard.

Millie pulled the faucet arm up to start the water, easing it to the left, and peered out through the window over the sink as the warm water spluttered and splashed against porcelain and steel, against her dry, crinkly hands. The unseen doe was long gone, but there were still a few chickadees and titmice capering about, an occasional cardinal flashing through the green pine boughs dusted with white snow, a blue jay and a squirrel bickering over something near the big oak tree back in the corner where the fence boards had fallen out…oh, probably three or four years ago.

It would be noon in a few more hours, and she would make her lunch and do those dishes and look out of this same window into that same woods-edged backyard. For this moment, though, Millie felt the warm water on her hands and just watched the animals and the light at play outside. Billions of beautiful, delicate little sounds in and out of the old house accompanied the scene, but Millie heard almost none of them.


* * *

Rest Stop

Rest Stop

The night was a dismal bog of black, with tiny pinpricks of light piercing through but doing little to break the darkness. The car’s headlights carved out a small area of substance and existence as Les drove, but none of what they showed so far on the shoulders of Interstate 10 had been worth looking at—tired trees, dying grass, colorless concrete dividers, road signs to nowhere special. The black night had fallen on and filled the world outside of his car. It had somehow managed to spill in through the closed windows and the metal, too. However it made it, the black night was in here with Les, and it whispered to him with the voice of a humming engine and rubber rolling over pavement: SLEEEEEEP, it said.

Les yawned, twisted his neck until he felt the satisfying pop of joints, and then looked down at the car stereo: 1:43. He cursed himself for being in his car, driving, at 1:43 in the morning.

I should be in bed, he thought, huffing out a bemused laugh. Then he thought of Sarasota, stoked his will, and pushed the accelerator down a bit to press on through the murk.

He was tired, but his fatigue was also laced with the heady mixture of adrenaline-alcohol-excitement that he had been jacked up on throughout his week in New Orleans.

Mardi Gras.

Les had been in New Orleans for the entire week once again, his annual ritual ever since college, come hell or high water or work. What was this, his sixth? Seventh? If he tried hard, he probably could remember…but he didn’t feel like trying right now. Instead, he reached up and ran his fingers along the bright bead necklaces hanging around his neck, under his shirt. The few beads that were visible above his collar sparkled in the glow of the dashboard lights as Les rubbed them. He felt the cold, hard plastic balls, one after another, and recalled the rosary his mother had given him once when he was a kid, with the same brown beads as her own, and which he had then lost somewhere with the utmost haste, to her great despair. Staring into the black night, he rubbed these cheaper, more colorful beads and thought—tried to think—back on this latest week-long extravaganza in New Orleans. God it was wonderful, like a cleansing release of one year’s worth of repressed frustration, anxiety, fear, guilt, desire…everything. In his fatigued semi-silliness, Les felt the dying traces of some unnamable, undirected wonder and reverence. His smile slinked along his face a little more, and he let up a little on the accelerator.