Prayers to Mythos & Other Poems by Jim Glenn Thatcher by Deerbrook Editions

Also by Jim Glenn Thatcher from Deerbrook Editions Lesser Eternities

Prayers to Mythos & Other Poems Jim Glenn Thatcher

deerbrook editions

published by Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 www.deerbrookeditions.com www.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions

Contents

1.Blue Planet Blue Planet 13 To An Unknown River in the Remembered Dream of Another Continent 15 Jade Pass 16 In the North Passage 17 Moment in the History of Flight 18 What I Saw Tonight in the Cold East Over Cumberland 19 Face of the Rain 20 The Things the Chimney Knows 21 Oak Genesis 22 2. The Revisionist The Revisionist 25 Theirs 26 Atavism Again 27 Distant War—One More Day of Flesh and Hope 28 On the Occasion of His Arraignment and Public Humiliation the Tears of Pol Pot 29 “Pre-occupied” 30 The Choice in No Choice 31 Pearls Among Swine? 32 Lament 33 In Spite of All That 34 Epistle to a Deconstructionist 35 Tremor 36 Travelling 37 To Those Intent on Saving the World From Itself, 38 Prayers to Mythos 39 3. This Life, These Lives This Life, These Lives Bastard Legacy of a Wayward Son This Much I Have Come to Know The All-ness of It Everywhere A Small Gathering The Ides of May One A Day’s Journey July 29th, 5.a.m.

45 46 47 49 50 51 52 53 54

Meditation, August 16th 55 Body of Light 56 In This Eye, In This Mind, In This Night 57 Vestiges 58 The Price of a Poem on This Hard Night in November 59 Passing Me By 60 Deer Fly 61 4. This Poem Rising This Poem Rising 65 Poem of the Six-Line Solipsist 66 Ontology of the Persona 67 On Being Matter-Of-Fact 68 When the Words of This Page Have Formed 69 From the Notes 70 What Does it Mean? (The Sage Jim-Tzu Talks to Himself ) 71 Three Ways 72 Poem From a False-Poet Daimon 73 I Am Becoming Prolific 74 Incantation 75 Acknowledgments 77 About the Poet 78

To Mickie, Jeff and Charlessa and Jasmine and Jaylen Thatcher My longest friendshipsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Rich Corozine Don and Carol Kale And to all my other friends whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve known me long enough to know that each line here found itself as it rose into meaning

Prayers to Mythos & Other Poems

Blue Planet

Behold the earth, blue-green and distant; A sensual, ripe, imperfect orb of paradise, Like a voluptuous dreamer Curled in the mists of its longings, Floating in a deep and cobalt blackness Filled with scattered incandescent worlds. The breathing clouds billow, alive with possibility. The white poles in their purity Surrounded by blue-green depths surging with life; The great ocean urge turning the slow wheeling Of libidinous eons in the endless Circling and welling of her currents and streams. Continents curled like lovers, yang to yin in conjugal dance: Curve of Asia to the rump of Europe, Horn of Africa to the groin of Arabia, Tongue of Sicily to the toe of Italy; The long, licking reach of Aleutia toward Kamchatka, Cleft of Nile flowing near the parted Rift of Africa; Americas like incestuous acrobats, joined at the isthmus umbilical— And then, closer, the vast cloacal womb of Amazonia And the spine of Andes arching forever toward Asia. Follow the roll and canyons of the Pacific floor Three thousand miles westward from the precipice of Peru And see—look closely now—once again— The spectral under-sea geography of South America; Line for line, range for range, Dilating in chthonic longing Toward the hot and feral haunch of Australia. Down the great sea bottoms, Atlantic and Pacific, In the deepest furrows of the deep, Longitudinal fissures swell and open like labia, Birthing forth red and molten lava In a continuous orgasmic flow of gestation; An endless rebirth and regeneration, Spreading the globe unceasingly open To drift and fold forever back upon itself In new and ever-changing forms;

Continents rising and moving and sinking, Oceans spreading and flooding and shrinking: An old world endlessly dying, A new world coming ever into being. Matter enlivened into perpetual becoming; Sentience drifting in the dream of desire, Floating forever through an endless dreaming Of genesis and metamorphosis, Of fecundity and fire . . .

To An Unknown River In The Remembered Dream of Another Continent Wake by this river which in mind is kin to all rivers flowing from our ancient scattered gatheringsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Oxus, Tiber, Rhine, Euphrates . . . Look, with all of your being, into the slow, sweeping waters, and in the long, indolent undulations of the eel weed waving down its depths, hear, in the silent waiting senses behind your clear and naked eye the sound of a flute being played to the god who once lived there.

Jade Pass

From the sun-warm vantage Of my ridge, I wait and watch Jade light falling Through the hardwood canopy Of the next pass: Two bluffs, low, stone-faced, Sheer on either side. A wide hollow where ride Three men spread singly, Faces apart and distant; alert, Yet inward, wary. Turned To some secret of the interior... Pack animals trailing In a dim line behind, Fading back Into a long green gloom . . . From this distance, near yet far, Their movements a muffled stillness. Faces unknowable, hidden in This long depth of shadow and light; Motives uncharted; bearing Message or malice, Usurpers in this dream. There is purpose here; Nothing else is known. ,

In The North Passage

In the North Passage distant gulls hang like harpies, hovering down from the east, coasting the buffeting silences of a shadowing wind, their cries lost falling away backward into the stark distances of a bleak and alien sky. Lines of firs along low headlands stand like skeletal fish schooled in death, exiled from their element, noses down to the stone surfaces beneath them, lost forever from their irredeemable origin. Old years drowning in the black surf, the booming dreadful monotony of the waves running toward the beach, gravel clattering in their outward sweep like the sound of bones clattering . . . Like old selves wandering marooned from memory; old lives drowning in a calendar of seas.

Moment in the History of Flight

Looming up low over distant coastal trees, an airplane, its presence seeming somehow strange, as though it were floating over the wavering horizon in another timeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; another ageâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Its approach lights glittering like small cold diamonds, hovering at an odd distance; near, yet far, on wings lifted by the soft whisper of an ancient silence; approaching slowly, hanging gently in the grey noon as though suspended in the mystery of its flightâ&#x20AC;Ś.

What I Saw Tonight In The Cold East Over Cumberland

What I saw tonight in the cold East over Cumberland: Low Gemini in its sleeping house. Orion rising to the hunt. Five-pointed Auriga perched on the horn-tip of Hyades-faced Taurus; Pride-bright Mars hectoring Aldebaron; Seven-sistered Pleides adrift of Perseus. Cassiopeia on her vaulted throne The depth of harmony in the drift of time; the hope of drift in the dream of time. The dance of all being in the joy of its dance; the trance of all being in the dream of its trance. The dance of all wonder in the field around me. The joy of my being under the heavens that drown meâ&#x20AC;Ś.

Face of the Rain

As I watched a slow, steady rain on this grey and dismal afternoon, the leaves on the tree outside my window suddenly lifted and roiled for a long moment into wild multitudes in the swift agitation of an unexpected wind, before settling slowly back again, tumbling down through the vicissitudes of their nature; in finding their composure, falling through the thousand expressions of my own myriad faces, my own thousand lives.

The Things the Chimney Knows

A week’s wood fires Demand their fuel And sacrifices Of sweat and boil of blood, The gifts gathered In a joy of chores To keep the Flame, Giver of warmth and dreams. Before the Sun stands Noon full high We start And Sun strikes the oil-brown blade Timing its way down Through applewood worms back into All the fruits of Eden And our afternoon. Shades’ spirit, thin Shadower, Risen cold from the center of light Bid by his sire Sun Darks the Road Hall Under Spring-trying trees And we take a last load of wood In to the Fire. Then, around it later, Its smoke and ours gathered Into the night-beamed Sky and Into our selves. They ask me where I am And I say I’m in love With the Daughter Of the Keeper of the Flame. There are secrets in the smoke, And squatting near the hearth I read changes in the embers And hear the smolder of seasons Passed on in consuming tongues.

Oak Genesis

From the broad bright high-arched branches overhead, the sudden small < snap > of an acorn letting goâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; plummeting down through ticking leaves into pregnant silence and the long plunge earthward through gravityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s passage toward genesis.

The Revisionist

We imagined we saw cities in flames, justice tormenting the unjust, but it was only the delirium of the moment, our own castles burning, something we chose not to recognize as a febrile desire. A solipsistic madness, to have put ourselves in that place. To imagine how it could have been, if only it had been. What kind of arrogance was this? To want to carry a century that wanted to carry the centuries? To want the heroic, to have ached for the tragic, despite all denials? To have so hated the homeland that we would have razed it, plowed it under to eradicate the mockery in the mirror. How long would it have been before our own betrayals began? The first disappearances, the panicked scattering into isolate darkness? To have lived out that underbelly dream of the romance of it. To have remained alive this long in a masochistic fever; hungry, sick, cowering in barns and tenements, empty hands clutching for a cup of bitterness, grasping the emptiness of a vision that has been understood and withheld from probability, and then understood again, and re-understood, ad infinitum, into a shattering of understandings, a junked kaleidoscope, splinters of revelation from a broken toy.

“Theirs”

My people are oppressed by a lack of oppression. They believe themselves blesséd by Willfulness. They are clever with taxes. They are mean with money. They are as intelligent as their government. They do not sleep in the wind. They breed in the rainbow. The fruits of the earth are visited upon them. Apples, peaches, pie in the sky. They know no limits. Whenever they hear the word “culture” they sneer into their conceits. Certainty is theirs. And piousness. Theirs is the purity of the proud barbarian. Theirs is the unmeekly “inherited” earth. Theirs the heritage of Albion and Israel, the perversities of Franks and Goths, of Scots and Welsh and all the West, and now even Holy Mother Russ. Purveyors of life insurance and real estate. Takers-to-task of the weak and unwilling. The mandate is theirs. The bounty is theirs. Theirs is the god of their fathers. They shall not want. Their destiny is manifest. The bananas are theirs. The canal is theirs. The oil is theirs. Theirs is the ascendancy of purpose. Theirs is the knowledge of moral obligation. Theirs is the design for world order. Theirs is the responsibility of the marketplace. Theirs the yen for the dollar. Theirs is the right. The planes are theirs. The troops are theirs. The Absolute Right to All is theirs.

Atavism Again

The gauntlet has been thrown. The pawns are in place, lines drawn in the sand; the map of Arabia webbed out into a great game of tactics. Around the globe, electrons hum with smug pundits oozing self-importance. The armies are ready; the children playing soldiers, their parents alarmed. Breathless, with ill-concealed excitement, the world awaits another war.

*Written on the Peakâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Island - Portland Ferry; August 15, 1990.

Distant War—One More Day Of Flesh And Hope

Somewhere, off on another horizon, where bright dawn rises bleary over “just one more” broken battleground, History wakes, drunk again, in the strange but familiar territory of still another sullen backwater— moans from the mire of its centuries, and rolls in its wallow, lolling in the excrement of meaning— crushing bodies, bones, cities, dreams— Cursing in its cups the fools who goad it into constant agitation— rubs its hungry eyes and rises to devour just one more day of flesh and hope, vanities and greed, lust and gluttony, before floundering once again full circle, falling down dumb and drooling, back into stupor, stagnation, and despair.