the sawpit

A Halloween Poem

listen with burning hot ears
the sound of clinking metal chimes
we are at the end of an endless marble hallway
flying candle-lit bats are silent shadows
behind the black door bone man arrives
with his ring of infinite skeleton keys
the slender shadow of the spindly intruder
steps between rows of wide doric columns
he walks and creeps, closer and closer
his steps become louder and louder
until a bony hand raps on your door
this sound makes you jump
he attempts to gain entrance into your cell
patient ivory hands scrape at the door
they pull at the shiny brass knob
a long golden key slips into the lock
rusty metal bolts grind and clank
the heavy ebony door moans in agony
slowly it opens wide as bats flutter around
purple and crimson fog envelopes you
it is very quiet for a long, long time
your soul has become transparent
offer your guest some cookies
and say your prayers

Ralph S. DeMarco

This Beautiful Black Marriage

Photograph negative
her black arm: a diving porpoise,
sprawled across the ice-banked pillow.
Head: a sheet of falling water.
Her legs: icicle branches breaking into light.

This woman,
photographed sleeping.
The man,
making the photograph in the acid pan of his brain.
Sleep stain them both,
as if cloudy semen
rubbed shiningly over the surface
will be used to develop their images.

on the desert
the porpoises curl up,
their skeleton teeth are bared by
parched lips;
her sleeping feet
trod on scarabs,
holding the names of the dead
tight in the steady breathing.

This man and woman have married
and travel reciting
chanting
names of missing objects.

They enter a pyramid.
A black butterfly covers the doorway
like a cobweb,
folds around her body,
the snake of its body
closing her lips.
her breasts are stone stairs.
She calls the name, "Isis,"
and waits for the white face to appear.

No one walks in these pyramids at night.
No one walks during
the day.
You walk in that negative time,
the woman's presence filling up the space
as if she were incense; man walks
down the crevices and
hills of her body.
Sounds of the black marriage
are ritual sounds.
Of the porpoises dying on the desert.
The butterfly curtaining the body,
The snake filling the mouth.
The sounds of all the parts coming together
in this one place,
the desert pyramid,
built with the clean historical
ugliness of men dying at work.

If you imagine, friend, that I do not have those
black serpents in the pit of my body,
that I am not crushed in fragments by the tough
butterfly wing
broken and crumpled like a black silk stocking,
if you imagine that my body is not
blackened
burned wood,
then you imagine a false woman.

This marriage could not change me.
Could not change my life.
Not is it that different from any other marriage.
They are all filled with desert journeys,
with Isis who hold us in her terror,
with Horus who will not let us see
the parts of his body joined
but must make us witness them in dark corners,
in bloody confusion;
and yet this black marriage,
as you call it,
has its own beauty.
As the black cat with its rich fur
stretched and gliding smoothly down the tree trunks.
Or the shining black obsidian
pulled out of mines and polished to the cat's eye.
Black as the neat seeds of a watermelon,
or a pool of oil, prisming the light.
Do not despair this "black marriage."
You must let the darkness out of your own body;
acknowledge it
and let it enter your mouth,
taste the historical darkness openly.
Taste your own beautiful death,
see your own photo image,
as x-ray,
Bone bleaching inside the blackening
flesh

Diane Wakoski (8/3/37 — Present)

Blood and the Moon

I
Blessed be this place,
More blessed still this tower;
A bloody, arrogant power
Rose out of the race
Uttering, mastering it,
Rose like these walls from these
Storm-beaten cottages --
In mockery I have set
A powerful emblem up,
And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
In mockery of a time
Half dead at the top.

II
Alexandria's was a beacon tower, and Babylon's
An image of the moving heavens, a log-book of the sun's
journey and the moon's;
And Shelley had his towers, thought's crowned
he called them once.

I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare
This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my
ancestral stair;
That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have
travelled there.

Swift beating on his breast in sibylline frenzy blind
Because the heart in his blood-sodden breast had dragged
him down into mankind,
Goldsmith deliberately sipping at the honey-pot of his mind,

And haughtier-headed Burke that proved the State a tree,
That this unconquerable labyrinth of the birds,
century after century,
Cast but dead leaves to mathematical equality;

And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream,
That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world,
its farrow that so solid seem,
Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme;

Saeva Indignatio and the labourer's hire,
The strength that gives our blood and state magnanimity
of its own desire;
Everything that is not God consumed with intellectual fire.

III
The purity of the unclouded moon
Has flung its arrowy shaft upon the floor.
Seven centuries have passed and it is pure,
The blood of innocence has left no stain.
There, on blood-saturated ground, have stood
Soldier, assassin, executioner.
Whether for daily pittance or in blind fear
Or out of abstract hatred, and shed blood,
But could not cast a single jet thereon.
Odour of blood on the ancestral stair!
And we that have shed none must gather there
And clamour in drunken frenzy for the moon.

IV
Upon the dusty, glittering windows cling,
And seem to cling upon the moonlit skies,
Tortoiseshell butterflies, peacock butterflies,
A couple of night-moths are on the wing.
Is every modern nation like the tower,
Half dead at the top? No matter what I said,
For wisdom is the property of the dead,
A something incompatible with life; and power,
Like everything that has the stain of blood,
A property of the living; but no stain
Can come upon the visage of the moon
When it has looked in glory from a cloud.

William Butler Yeats from The Winding Stairs and Other Poems

The Faerie Queene Revisited

Suddenly the ground shook, the aire felt dead,
    An ugly brutish Beast charged through the field.
    Loathsome and stinking, it scowled and then said,
    "I see from the cursed Crosse on your shielde,
    Your Holy pact with the Lord has been sealed.
    May my sword release your imprisoned mind,
    The new light of worldly Truth shall not yield!"
    Yet the Gallant knight did not fear his kind.
Said he, "My foul foe, no doubt in me shall ye find!"

The sight of this Beast made Redcrosse quite ill,
    A long rusty saber it tightly held.
    Its wretched voice gave the knight such a chill,
    "O the Earth is round and extremely old:
    First it was boiling hot, then it got cold!
    Man has evolved from lowly sea creatures:
    At first, meek as snails, then like lions bold.
    None of this knowledge is taught by preachers,
As for me, Logic and Science are my teachers!"

The horrible Heathen began charging,
    His sharp evil sword swinging to and fro.
    Though this dreadful sight seems most alarming,
    Any fear in Sir Redcrosse did not show.
    Quickly the knight blocked the ungodly blow,
    And pierced the Heathen's thick hairy hide.
    It fell to the ground cawing like a crow.
The Gentle Holy knight could have taken on five!

by Ralph DeMarco
Apologies to Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

The Bees (I)

What was I to do, I, born
when the gods were dead,
and my insufferable youth
spent searching between cracks?
It was my role, and because of it
I felt so desolate.

One bee plus one bee
does not make two bees of light
or two bees of darkness:
it makes a solar system,
a house of topaz,
a dangerous caress.

The first concern of amber
is two golden bees
and tied to those same bees
each day’s sun travels:
I rage at revealing so many
of my ridiculous secrets.

They go on chasing me questioning
my relationship with cats,
how I found the rainbow’s arc,
why the worthy chestnuts
show themselves as hedgehogs,
and above all for me to say
what the toads think of me,
the creatures hidden
beneath the wood’s fragrance
or in the bubbles of concrete.

The truth is that among the knowers
I owned to a unique ignorance
and among those who might know less
I was always a little less knowing
and so little was my knowledge
that I learned wisdom.

From Fin de Mundo
by Pablo Neruda

The Spell of the Yukon

The winter! the brightness that blinds you,
The white land locked tight as a drum,
The cold fear that follows and finds you,
The silence that bludgeons you dumb.
The snows that are older than history,
The woods where the weird shadows slant;
The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,
I've bade 'em good-by -- but I can't.

From The Spell of the Yukon
by Robert Service