Anacreon’s Place

A fishing trip took us to Crook’s Mountain, named, I suppose, for General Crook of Civil War infamy, where the blackened trunks of a forest fire thirty years ago poke up through the tangled briars and weeds of newer growth, and there are several stands of human-planted pines crisscrossing through the old devastation. We set out sleeping bags in the weeds next to a fallen, blackened log on which perched a praying mantis in the act of devouring a grasshopper. Mentally I called the mantis “Old Queen,” “Because perhaps that really is her name, ” the pines whispered to me, and we watched her and then napped beneath the mid-spring sun until a host of red ants startled us awake with bites and stings.

Alchemy is not what it cracked
through to end at this ravening
well, at whose bottom I see stars
and my own silhouetted head,
sphinx-like; a squad of human locusts
each with different pincers and
tools growing from their thoraxes,
genetically engineered by whatever
demi-urge sent this plague upon us;
their escadrilles flocking almost
pretty in the light of the comet’s
morning; I coughed up a squiggling
worm into the sink and screamed as
my roomates looked on faintly
amused; I went to see the mistress
of my desires, asking my muse
to guide the way, which she
did. And I found her, wrapped in
a shawl of widow’s mourning.

She would not speak to me, even
look at me, and I realized I had intruded
where I was not wanted, and if ever
I was to be welcome in this place
she would have to invite me,
and not before.

Walking with a half-rotted cane through the woods
behind my apartment today I wove my way between
briars and over fallen branches thick on the
brown leaf carpet, victim of a dozen ice storms.
I was arrested by the hollow thwack of a woodpecker
that took me back to days on a jackhammer in
concrete construction and I cursed and spat because
even here in the beauty of nature I can’t get that industrial
reality out of my pores, or wipe the grease from the
channels of my mind.

You can take the broken
back out of the circus,
but you can’t get the elephant
shit off his shoes.

a new thang fangled from introspection and paganini-fraught
neoclassical kicks-Sappho keeps me caressed swimming
through streams of novabsolute being;she opened my heart’s
eyes; I am asleep on a garder bank fully present to
the cybernetic potentialities of comet splash rainbow’s
recrudescent fingernail scratches down my back after
a tantric-focused night; the arrow arcs tracers across
the viewfield of democrat and republican alike, because
we’re all the same at the meat and marrow level, needy.

devoutly desiring the transmogrification of homo obselescens; we cannot change ourselves into what we are supposed to be if we ourselves do not know what ought to be, and the question of oughtness is all there is, these days, isn’t it? (not really.)

Q: How do you know if you’ve been obselesced?

A: When the sun stops coming up in the morning.

1. One morning the sun didn’t rise and I stood on the porch and looked out into the gloom. I wondered if gravity would fail and we would all fly into space or if eschatological monsters would come munch us.

No seriously, this is when you’re thinking: has there been a nuclear war? How could I have missed it? The sky is dark and starless, but there is power. Wouldn’t EMP have taken out all the electronics? I would have seen or heard something - flashes DC’ward, thunder. In fact, there are so many military installations around the Valley that I have never held out much hope that my home would be outside the blast area of a bomb.

I am standing in front of a red light that will not change at an intersection with no traffic at nine o’clock in the morning and the sun hasn’t risen yet, and I’m doing just fine. It occurs to me that this must be a dream, but I pinch my arm and, it hurts. It’s not a dream. Just the eschaton.

2.

Reminds me of that Stephen King story The Langoliers. Yes, that’s it. I have actually remained in yesterday when the rest of the world is in today. Yesterday still functions until it is taken apart by the story’s namesakes. But there are people here. Just as confused as I am. Wondering what’s going on. Where did the sun go? Has the world been shrouded in some fog? That must be it; either a solar flare interacting in an unusual way with the magnetosphere, or a passing comet somehow involved Earth in its debris shroud- it’s very possible no one would have seen it coming.

3.

I am thinking things like, what will happen to the ecosphere without sunlight. When will starvation and rioting begin? My neighbors think this is hilarious, but then the religious discussion starts. It seems clear, to them, that we are experiencing the end. They’re evangelical Protestants, expecting to be raptured. They are confused and wonder about the Catholic prophecy about three days of darkness before the end. I assure them that is not in the Bible nor does the Magisterium condone it, but here were are. At noon, the sky is black as ink.

I turn on the television. Live on CNN, a praying mantis is reading William Blake to all Americans.

I get it.

Using up the juice grace poured from
heaven’s honey vase, that sublime tone,
heavy picking too distorted, really,
to tell whither the lizard is creeping
or if there’s even one down there;
the evil laugh which pretends
to understanding but is in fact
a celebration of mirth at the
fact that he’s the last man standing and
the revenants don’t even realize it;
talk about factions, blood jets from ripped
veins and bone chunks spike through skin, he thought he
would puke just looking at his own arm after the
accident before the ambulance got there.

He bruised heavy,
after.

Unseemly globe: the glove is foreign to the antiquers’ alternate worlds, haymaking strides the unfeeling court; are we to that point? The F-104 is failing avionics tests in Germany at the cost of human lives, despite an intensive marketing campaign devoted to selling the supersonic adjudicator to our Western European allies.

Courteous unfeeling coupled with canny intractable longings for what comes after the door shuts, the trumpet peals a candy shrike invitation to concelebrate with the ones who have been here since the beginning of time.

They said,”Good luck chump, you’re being deceived by the ones closest to you!” and I thought, “Well I have seen that and other ribbons of day-glow orange wrapped around the center pole, and I have yet to find a navigator who can’t take me to the mouth of the Hudson in no time flat, with the sheer face of a storm front to the west, as we fly with the Enterprise on our back, or bicycle as the case may be.”

As I make straight my steps on a stony, weed-eaten path, stars and
planets reel me forward in circuitous channels through liquid heaven’s
earth-double; man-goats stir from the road at the threat of magic,
mere hand lift promising all the pain they can fathom -ecstasy
or agony the solemn poles of their affective inner fires-
for once my heart is free of self-doubt but nothing-shouts
from home haunt the chambers of my skull; Byzantium’s road
crowned with flasks of delinquency and myrrh, and tombs rattled
by angry ghosts from within and crossing stars pull benign golems
from soil to ease my burden to the golden city.

Apologies to Wikipedia, from whom I have pirated text (in the brackets) and attributed to, well, you’ll see…To begin the presentation about the Rainbow Bee-Eater I shall begin by stating a joke. I expect spontaneous laughter to issue promptly forth from each of you at its completion, and I will be timing you for duration, intensity, and effect/affect. (You think I’m kidding).

The joke itself has nothing to do with the Bee-Eater, rambunctimonious be she/he, but in the spirit of the season, I expect you to tolerate that and be both suitably levitous and levitated - i.e. elevated - in body, mind, spirit, and expectation, not to mention carburetion and matricular eco-reforestation.

Ancient sources tell the ghastly story of a Pharaoh who was convinced that in order to find out which was the primal language of the human species, he should raise a child from birth in total isolation with no contact with speech at all. So he found a wayward infant - we are not told how the child was selected, to bring some compassion into the story I speculate that he was captured from Canaanites who were otherwise going to sacrifice the child to Moloch, “Make him pass through the fire,” in the parlance of the Hebrew Bible - and put the child into the desert with only the several-times-a-day company of a mute shepherd to feed the child (note I’m using gender-inclusive language by refusing to use a personal pronoun referring to gender, and “It” sounds well, so Stephen King…)

As soon as the child’s vocal mechanisms were suitably developed to produce articulate sound he rolled his eyes to heaven and declaimed in a startingly pure dialect of Punic - the ancient language of Carthage and Phoenicia and the (much later) native tongue of St. Augustine- “Tibet, you idiots, it was supposed to be Tibet. Not Egypt again. Jesus H. Christ.”

A Story of Igneous Simon the Rainbow Bee-Eater pt.1

Summers were hot down south but Simon loved this. There were all the bees he could eat, not to mention tasty wasps and grubs, and he could play with Sara all day long since the babies that year had grown up and flown into nearby meadows - now sun-baked with spiders scampering between cracks in the ground and scorpions curled up next to rocks as though wearing an “eat me” graphic, if Rainbow Bee Eaters knew what graphics were, which they presumably don’t.

This summer was different though, as it had been the last few years, though Simon had no memory of that or really anything before the previous few hours, except for a few hazy flashes of chicks and grubs, small tunnels he and Sara had dug into the turf, and a warm presence that tingled him beneath the feathers when he remembered that benevolence regurgitating bugs into his and his blind brothers’ and sisters’ tiny beaks in those early first hours and days of their existence.

Facts

<<Rainbow bee-eaters are brilliantly colored birds that grow to be 7 to 8 inches in length - hmmm like some bearded poets I know- including the elongated tail feathers. The upper back and wings are green in color, and the lower back and under-tail covers are bright blue. The undersides of the wings and primary flight feathers are red and tipped with black, and the tail is black to deep violet. The rainbow bee-eater’s two central tail feathers are longer than the other tail feathers, and are longer in the female rainbow bee-eaters than in the males. The crown of the head, the stomach and breast, and the throat are pale yellowish in color, and the rainbow bee-eater has a black bib and a black stripe through its red eye.>>

Abdhul Alhazred, from “What I had for dinner before entering the wasteland of the ghouls”, a hastily scribbled Syriac(!) addendum to the Necromonicon, found only in the archives of the Eastern Mennonite University Library.

The Story of Ingenious Simon the Rainbow Bee-Eater pt. 2

One day Simon awoke to find Sara gone from the small tunnel in the sod they shared as hearth and love-nest. Distressed he flew around the meadows - I know, this is the Australian Outback, not a lot of meadows per se, but let’s keep with the rhythm of the story - looking for her. This flight was observed by a fox, who, noting the brilliant rainbow colors of Simon’s feathers briefly considered scouring the meadow for Simon’s hovel and possible nestlings with an absent parent - Yum! - but decided against it. A flash of memory however, remained of the event of the over-flight and when the fox got back to his own den told it to her cubs as a story reminiscent of the flight of the Phoenix, but in Fox talk. Yes, I switched genders there. I’m trying to stay with the gender indeterminism. This time, in a serial manner. Yes, I’m flogging the dead metaphor like a horse, serially.

You may also be noting that in first part I called Simon Igneus, and in the second Ingenious. I promise you, there’s a reason for it. Crikey. You people are so picky. Remind me of a bunch of old testament scholars. (At this point, the one Old Testament Scholar in attendance - excuse me, Hebrew Bible, we’re trying to be inoffensive to as many people as possible - the one Elderly scholar of the Hebrew Bible in attendance is offended - for which I don’t apologize - and mutters that he’s blowing this pop stand-up joint to go back to the two hookers and the eight ball in his hotel room. Like you do.

<<Rainbow bee-eaters are a common species and can be found during the summer in un-forested areas in most of southern Australia and Tasmania, however they are becoming increasingly rare in Suburban parks. They migrate north during the winter into northern Australia, New Guinea, and some of the southern islands of Indonesia.>>

- from Von Juntz’s Unaussprechliche Kulten

The Story of Igneus (we’re back to that one again, aren’t we) Simon the Rainbow Bee Eater Pt. 3

Simon was eventually heartbroken - and a little relieved, like you are - to find out that his monogamous love had flown the coop, or tunnel in this case. (Rainbow Bee-Eaters are monogamous life-long, and this ain’t no lie. I swear to you on a stack of copies of Catcher in the Rye. Oh, you saw “Fried Green Tomatoes”. Okay, moving on) But actually they are monagamous, that’s in Von Juntz, or Wikipedia. As the case may be.

So he had to winter north in New Guinea alone, without his love. Only, this time there was a difference. (ed. comment - not sure if I should repeat something along the lines of “you remember the difference I mentioned before…have to think about that one. And hey idiot, make sure not to zone out and read this editorial comment in the middle of the presentation.) A thick haze covered the brilliant green pinnacles of the Owen Stanley Mountains. Simon had no idea that there were fires in the forests of Indonesia and Malaysia whose dense smoke cover had drifted over to New Guinea. It caused some problems with navigation, but he found his way to a small grove next to a meadow of Kunai grass, and beneath a root he began to excavate a temporary winter den (this was typically Sara’s job but she was nowhere to be found, as above…) There were several other Rainbow Bee-Eaters that he vaguely recognized by scent and plumage - whether from his birth meadow in the Australian outback or from previous socialization here wintering, he had no ability to recollect. After completing the den, his eye was caught by a strange flashing in the undergrowth that looked, but did not smell, like water, and he flew over to investigate.

<<Rainbow bee-eaters mostly eat flying insects, but, as their name implies, they have a real taste for bees. Rainbow bee-eaters are always watching for flying insects, and can spot a potential meal up to 150 feet away. Once it spots an insect a bee-eater will swoop down from its perch and catch it in its long, slender, black bill and fly back to its perch. Bee-eaters will then knock their prey against their perch to subdue it. Even though rainbow bee-eaters are actually immune to the stings of bees and wasps, upon capturing a bee they will rub the insect’s stinger against their perch to remove it, closing their eyes to avoid being squirted with poison from the ruptured poison sac. Bee-eaters can eat several hundred bees a day, so they are obviously resented by beekeepers, but their damage is generally balanced by their role in keeping pest insects such as locusts, hornets, and wasps under control.>>

-The Dark Tower, vol. 43, Stephen King - (I may have miscopied this after falling asleep watching “Rocky Balboa - The Revenant Boxer Returns from the Grave, for the Twelfth Time,” the new George Romero lullaby.

The Story of Ingenious Simon the 4th Igneous Indigene…

Here the manuscript of Simon ends, trailing off into indecipherable scrawls and age-browned markings, which science assures us are either chocolate ice-cream stains or human blood.

<<Breeding season is before and after the rainy season in the north, and from November to January in the south. Rainbow bee-eaters are believed to mate for life. The male will bring the female insects while she digs the burrow that will be their nest. The bee-eater digs its burrow by balancing on its wings and feet, and digs with its bill, then pushing loose soil backwards with its feet while balancing on its bill. The female bee-eater can dig about three inches down every day. The nest tunnel is very narrow, and the birds’ bodies press so tightly against the tunnel walls that when the birds enter and exit their movement acts like a piston, pumping in fresh air and pushing out stale air. Rainbow bee-eaters have also been known to share their nest tunnels with other bee-eaters and sometimes even other species of birds. The female lays between 3 and 7 glossy white eggs, which are incubated for about 24 days until hatching. The young bee-eaters fledge after about 30 days and are fed by both parents, as well as any older bee-eaters that may not have paired off or have lost their mate.>>

- For Love of Joplin, Tony Jones

So what you’re telling me, with the piston-tunnel comment, is that life sucks for these birds. (wait for applause to die. Wait, no applause? bring out the big guns.) I had no idea that fledge was a real word. I thought the expression “full-fledged “came out of thin air, like the universe in a Creationist mystery, with no antecedent matter.

But Einstein does not play dice. He prefers Texas Hold ‘Em. (rim shot)

(Insert Product Placement) Watch MORE TV

Circuits, authorities, teachers, crows of excellence; I faked and aped, but still came down on the four, could still drum it tight; my anger, giving in to that authority figure at the disarming moment, to pretend like it was all okay even though I had been disempowered in my own sphere, before my own people; taking these things to the next hemisphere, circulating, focusing, praying, expending self to ascend.

The padre pulled me to the side and squared me up to the table with a protractor and a pencil and then sent me on my way and I was a new man, a messenger among messengers, some of us helping, some of us cutting each other out of the lane, all of us getting there eventually.

(There were wars and ramifications in through-shots of information, but it’s all about memeplay and I understand to aeonic depth that through-shot is the ground of faculty to forgive, Selah)

An information-space undergirds this material existence and is in fact what Plato called the realm of the forms. What he did not know was that those forms are artificial constructs of the assemblers - though their (and our) makings are so ancient as to be older than nature on this single spinning orb, older than the rocks and mountains and water molecules in the seas…