The peregrine’s flight, obscure
From speed the eye can’t clearly see,
Takes life in the air, fast and pure.
The wings of the bumble bee
Carry its rotund yellow and black
With aimless invisibility.
Fish beneath frozen ice lack
Form and color and disappear
When seen and don’t come back.
Words are noise and letters blear —
Their insensatenesses inure
Us to understanding. What’s clear
Is unseen, or if seen, a blur.
Forgetting is memory erosion,
As though sand is being drawn
From a beach by high ocean
Waves. It returns like fall dawn,
Each day a bit dimmer,
But never completely gone.
I am not a strong swimmer
And fear the undertow
More than the shark’s shimmer
Coming at me from below.
I think him an old emotion
I still, but vaguely, know —
Toothless, a dying pet’s devotion.
Two words we couldn’t do without:
Syzygy, when three celestials
Align on their gravitational route,
Momentarily over a billion miles,
Occluding light, eclipsing night,
Like the gnomon on a sun dial.
Chiasmus, the reversal or bight
Of like words in two parallel
Clauses, such as, heaven is bright,
But all is eclipsed in hell.
Oh, the words we spit, spat, spout —
Though we live under their spell,
They can’t cast what life is about.
His own minion in that nation,
He eats like a king, thinks like a stool.
All of his words are defecation.
His actions insipidly cruel,
He pounds his fist on the able,
Whips his army like a mule.
Hacksaw and hammer and Babel
Bang on the running heads
Of corpses on the embalming table.
He dreams of flowing Red,
Of flags and blood, this revelation:
The elimination of the dead
And his exalted exaltation.
I woke to the voice of the Caller
Saying “Call me. It is late.”
Like a Saturday night brawler
I responded with physical hate,
But it was too close, too soon.
(My challenges do not abate.)
I recall the sound, an ear-worm tune,
Like a long undiscovered cancer,
The dire gift of an angel or goon.
It’s too late to become a dancer.
I’m just a word-addled scrawler
With one question and no answer:
Do flying sparrows grow smaller?
Afraid of heights, I climbed a tower
Made of steel and wooden stairs.
At the top I watched clouds cower
From the sun. I whistled ancient airs
As I teetered on a platform
And vultures flew by in pairs.
I existed in the eye of a storm
With no lightning, wind, or rain
Blasting my human form.
I refused to celebrate the pain
That grew inside me on the hour.
I saw myself look down again —
Fall like a meteor shower.
The man, like a trackless train,
Makes his own determined grooves
With the churning of his brain.
Mud up to his axles, he moves
On his earthbound odyssey.
(Not one goddess approves.)
He’ll see the grassy sea
As he sinks into the sand.
“Now,” he cries, “for Persephone!”
A neap tide drowns the land,
While he, chugging into the main,
Discovers himself unmanned,
Rudderless, sane, and insane.
Feb. 2, 2022, was the 100th anniversary of
James Joyce’s Ulysses.
