On a Dreamed Report of Death

We are ready for those who die in wires,
tolled at midnight with little bells.

A dead face is an injected wax
or unbelieved victim of murder.

What does she look like after twenty years,
asleep beneath those moonscape blankets?

Yes, I knew her. Long ago. She is dead?
Only dead again? And only now?

A remarked absence. Emotion vacancy.
Oh, a vague perhaps, perhaps. Regret

for the loss of intelligent laughter.
But the color of our first kiss is faded.

I know the color of my blood is blue.
See it through the crepe of my wrist.

I can’t imagine hers now gone red,
a blue jay turned to cardinal overnight,

then to crow, scribbled with white words,
living on again in description.

Death, an appendage of memory,
a wireworm on the body of a fish

within our grasp, releases its host
for us, to test our flesh with constriction.

We wrench ourselves to be free of it,
and when we are, think only of our pain.

All recollection is a form of lie.
Here, in this city block of wild sand,

the mounds in the front yard are old friends;
only the man I am may tend them.

They sleep beneath the scratching of my rake,
dance into gardens only in my sleep.

I wish her long life beneath the sun.
Perhaps she thinks of me now and then.

WAVES

The night will not give in to dreams.
The blood surges, remembering the beach,
where the wind drove the waves in teams.

What is it that the waves teach --
a vanishing point as ephemeral
as any the sky and the waters reach.

Excess of motion, rising to hurl
against the barricades of air,
falls . . . back into itself unfurls.

Inexorable—that sense in a nightmare
that is terror—the waves think
wave on wave to a deafening tintamarre.

There is no conclusion. Ideas sink
beneath the idea that follows,
visions turn to vision with a blink.

Is that all interpretation allows?
My thoughts ran to other things
as I stood lock-kneed in the shallows.

Whitecaps, feathered like seagull’s wings,
beat themselves in a luscious foam,
and etched the beach with sectioned rings.

And like the white space in a poem,
the troughs between each wave held
true, as line upon line washed home.

Would understanding forces that meld
curve to nested curve, that swell
the inhaling tide, that seamlessly weld

a form to its proportion, tell
me if the surf is a deity’s gift
and not a repeated curse from Hell?

Then the balance—a feather adrift
upon the breeze, cartwheeling down the beach;
how the fretful gusts would lift

it always just beyond the reach
of the sandy slip. I watch it seem
fearless, playful, dodging each
wavelet . . . and so begin to dream.

Equals Infinity

The infinity pool is unbounded
of course and of course

expression itself in the double
description of its single point,

the fisherman’s wet net flung
to catch irregularities of the sea—

our Aegean has never been emptier!
The gold light bends the gold wave

on the tear beading on the lash
where a pencil has left its gash.

We cannot look too closely
at anything (that can’t look back),

without understanding to death
matter not worth knowing or love

or faded images resolved into
a moiré of inconsequence.

We confront the one artist,
questioning his portraiture—

all these faces deftly drawn
by an artist drawing himself.

EPHEMERA

How many evenings in ten years;
most spent—reading aloud, listening—
trying to be conscious of their joy?

Today one child is still only ten.
The other is only, still only five.
Time disappears into their growing.

Sometimes you think that even
to be conscious is not enough—
then you despair, like a castaway,

fingers cupped on the sea’s edge,
afraid to sip when it is the whole sea
you are dying, dying to drink.

Close and Soon

Cutting an uneven swath, he steers
the tractor round his father’s lawn.
As the scraggly grass disappears,
he wonders where the time has gone.

The clouds roll like ingots
of gray iron on a rack, roll
off the sky. The industrial
moan from across the river
accompanies their production.
Once the snow here lay pocked
with cooling ash, a white coke
we rolled into dejected snowmen.
The fat carp were too hungry
to eat food. I would soak bread
in WD 40, pinch it on a hook.
And even now the speedboats go
too fast, as though the sunken
piers and jetties of old concrete
were demolished by the headlines
blaring tragic stupidity. The wake
quickly comes to shore and rolls
back out to cross and pattern
that from the opposing shore,
while ravening carp suck and spit.

The mower rattles, drones, whines,
churning the long-neglected grass,
leaving mulch in jagged lines
he scatters with a second pass.

He built three piers: two
on piles sunk into the ooze,
straight, elegant, stable,
and after the spring’s ice
in two-foot thick floes broke,
one of board and steel drums
tipped and bobbed, drawn
each fall onto the riverbank,
lock-chained to a willow tree.
But here he’d sit, grim,
implacable, shaving his acre
and two-thirds, while his son
pulled ten-pounders out,
yipping he couldn’t hear, like I
can’t the foundry throb but know
the sound’s there. I don’t know.
Turtle head he helped, once I’d
waved him down, draw snapping out
swearing, hatcheting the baggy neck
blood spattering his khaki pants.

The biggest part of the back yard
starts as a perfect, shrinking square.
Though he turns each turn hard,
each turn goes wider, mowing air.

Then the things he didn’t know.
Pipe puffed until it dizzied
me—sitting on a stump, staring
at the lights dreaming on glass.
Dancing to chants, speaking in
fragments, chemicals cutting
my blood, at the film that lays
on the eyes like a named color,
we laughed until we thought
laughter would wake the moon,
the heat, the willows, the river,
like barging in on our sleeping
parents would wake their dreams.
And the sticky, aching, itchy
pair shielded by the willow’s
weeps, clothed in humid darkness,
kissing her where I’d never
thought kiss, yipping and moaning,
that tiny furry tightening fist
releasing me from my loneliness.

To square the square, he turns away
to look back, after each side.
It takes him much longer this way,
but his Dad would be better satisfied.

Last night, the mosquitoes took
their meal at her tender skin.
She slapped at them and made words
of the light in the ripples,
gave the Big Dipper seven names.
The dark grew pure, but didn’t scare
her. She could hardly see even
me. She wanted a word for each
sound, each shadow, hungry
for names she thought I gave
to mulberry, nighthawk, cicada.
I made a song about the trees
dropping tears into the river.
Are leaves tree tears? Yes,
and the wind is tree laughter.
That is how you give yourself
to things, close and soon.
Where did I learn that? Cut
grass till it’s done. Welts all
over her body. Not one on me.

Finished, he disengages the blades
and returns the tractor to its shed.
His hands’ buzzing slowly fades.
Off, the engine sings in his head.

Flowering Crab

Scarlet unopened, the buds of flowering crab
bleach out in sunlight, go pale pink and drab.

After the third day, the wind loosens the petals,
and one flutters to the grass and settles.

It works its way through grass down to the soil—
air and water rub it thin as foil.

Between each cell, oxygen convenes,
until the petal of itself is rendered clean.

It dissolves into pattern everywhere;
if grown again to petal it won’t know or care.

Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan

My last few columns have all dealt with pretty heavy stuff — time for a palate cleanser. Kurt Vonnegut fans know that Slaughterhouse Five may be his most famous, and even his best, book. But the most enjoyable, the funniest, the most original, and Slaughterhouse’s predecessor by 10 years, is the interplanetary space romp The Sirens of Titan.

When it was first published, as a Dell paperback, in 1959, most people looking at the cover would have taken it for cheap pulp science fiction. And though Vonnegut revels in his improbable universe full of weird creatures, Martians, and implausible physics, this is a work of a mature writer wrestling with important themes, including the fragility of free will and the apparent chaos of fateful occurrences that everyone experiences, though perhaps not always at this level of cosmic consequence.

The novel begins memorably with the arrival of wealthy, famous Winston Niles Rumford in his own backyard.

There was a crowd. The crowd had gathered because there was going to be a materialization. A man and his dog were going to materialize, were going to appear out of thin air — wispily at first, becoming, finally, as substantial as any man and dog alive.

At the tail end of the crowd was a woman who weighed three hundred pounds. She had a goiter, a caramel apple, and a gray little six-year-old girl. She had the little girl by the hand and was jerking her this way and that, like a ball on the end of a rubber band. “Wanda June,” she said, “if you don’t start acting right, I’m never going to take you to a materialization again.”

This materialization takes place every 59 days because having been the first person rich enough to purchase his own private space ship, Rumford, along with his dog Kazak, was caught nine years ago in a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, which, we learn, is one of those places, in this case stretching in a thin strip across the solar system, “where all the different kinds of truths fit together as nicely as the parts in your Daddy’s solar watch.” To this particular materialization, Rumford has invited the other main character in the book.

Malachi Constant is a rake and bon vivant, and the wealthiest man in the world. The admiration the world holds for space traveler Rumford is balanced by the contempt it feels for the arrogant, decadent, and, at least until now, incredibly lucky Constant.

Rumford makes the prediction that Constant will soon be bred like cattle with Rumford’s wife on the planet Mars, fathering a son, and later, after many travels, will be the consort of three of the most beautiful women imaginable on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

In spite of all Constant’s best efforts, Constant does end up on Mars as a combat soldier training for the invasion of Earth. This invasion army is controlled by a form of mind control based on memory erasure, which forces Malachi to kill his best friend, Stony Stevenson.

The novel will eventually take us to Mercury, the home of flat diamond-shaped creatures.

The planet Mercury sings like a crystal goblet.

It sings all the time.

One side of Mercury faces the sun. That side has always faced the sun. That side is a sea of white hot dust.

The other side faces the nothingness of space eternal. That side has always faced the side of space eternal. That side is a forest of giant blue-white crystals, aching cold.

It is the tension between the hot hemisphere of day without end and the cold hemisphere of night without end that makes mercury sing.

Mercury has no atmostphere, so the song it sings is for the sense of touch.

The song is a slow one. Mercury will hold a single note in the song for as long as an earthling millenium. There are those who think that the song was quick, wild, and brilliant once — excruciatingly various. Possibly so.

There are creatures in the deep caves.

The song their planet sings is important to them, for the creatures are nourished by vibrations. They feed on mechanical energy.

The creatures cling to the singing walls of their caves.

In that way, they eat the song of Mercury.

Eventually, we return to Earth, then travel all the way out to Saturn’s moon Titan, where Rumsford can actually enjoy a stable corporeal existence, and Malachi Constant will learn the truth about the three beautiful sirens of Titan.

The Sirens of Titan also includes the arrival of the alien Tralfamadorians, strange creatures that resemble a bathroom plunger, and which will appear in several of Vonnegut’s later books.

It’s not giving away anything to say that the cataclysm of war involved in the Earth invasion, and Malachi Constant’s journey, is ultimately only a link in a chain of circumstances to accomplish a very small result in the cosmic scope of things.

It is, of course, inadequate and probably unfair to call Vonnegut a science fiction writer. Books like Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Cat’s Cradle may feature aliens or improbable things like the latter’s “ice nine,” which can turn the entire world into a block of ice, but they are concerned much more with the human condition — man’s incomprehensible and inevitable cruelty and stupidity, in particular. And, just as importantly, they are all very, very funny.

I grew up on Vonnegut, When he passed away last year, I felt a real and personal sadness, the way I felt about John Lennon’s passing. We all lost a friend, a man who cast a cold and skeptical, but fond, eye on humanity, who saw more clearly than most what is wrong in the world, but never allowed his critique to descend into cynicism or despair.

The Sirens of Titan wears its philosophy very lightly and is the closest thing Vonnegut wrote to a genuine work of pulp science fiction, and it’s all the more enjoyable for that reason.



Other recommended works: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Galapagos, Mother Night, and Welcome to the Monkey House, a wonderful collection of short stories.