Verdigris By Dennis Weiser * * * * * SMASHWORDS EDITION Copyright 2012 by Dennis Weiser * * * * * Thank you for downloading this eBook. Tell your friends about it. If you enjoyed this book, you might also like Escape Artist. Discover other titles by Dennis Weiser at Smashwords. Table of Contents Preface to Verdigris 1 At Blayney’s Metaphor Hidden Song Leira Elian Gonzales Fenris Mother, May I? Arab Spring Fire Thunderbolt I Am an Old Man Prometheus The Waves Winds and Sands How Often in My Dreams Columbine No Time for Hatred’s Wars If I Spend My Life On the Down Side Elegy for Todd Second Sight Mount of Olives Water or Wave Verdigris 2 WINE-DARK-SEA Original Preface About the Author Preface to VERDIGRIS In 2002, when I had as yet published no books of poetry, my friend Laura Gage arranged with local printer Dave Johnson to publish a small edition of my work, basically a Christmas present for members of my family. It was called Verdigris: Selected Writings and included an assortment of poems from the nine volumes I had assembled, a novella and a few short pieces of fiction. The contents featured six titled sections and I wrote a preface for each one. I have used the title and title poem again. Leon Wilkerson—with whom I did my first independent study of poetry at Westminster—liked it so much he took me to dinner at the Palace Hotel in Fulton to tell me. David Ray once told me it was the best poem I’d ever written. Of course, he’d only seen a handful of my poems. Still, I hope he’s wrong. Though I concentrate on novels today, I’m still writing poetry. In that little edition’s original “Preface: To My Family” I wrote: Anyone who calls himself an “artist” is of course taking a liberty—and a chance. No one who labors in these fields can ever be sure of having attained his goal. To think otherwise is to risk presuming the judgment of history and time—probably a delusion. Yet, every serious artist takes such a risk, and bets on himself. So I have done, or attempted to do these many long years: with how much success, right or justice you may judge for yourselves. I have since written WINE-DARK-SEA and include its original preface below. 1 AT BLAYNEY’S Believing love to be Calypso’s isle, Sleepily, I swung downstairs to the dance. How I longed, like a scientist sunning himself with a drink, to be a prisoner of her magic rhythms. I have always suspected—had I been Odysseus— I would have stayed by Calypso’s side. Penelope would have grown old and died, cursing my name forever. Or better: surviving her sorrow, finding another way, new life, perhaps even great happiness. Who knows how the real stories end? I watched the whirling gyrations of bulging bellies like a geometer awhile, and saw in the sweat of breasts and smiles that everyone felt he was seeing love. Entranced! As beasts of the field with cud and cloud, they were entranced. And I said to myself with a laugh: “It is only divine when I do it.” I understood how his men had changed into the swine they really were. Wearily raising my bones above my failings, determined to survive and find real love, I floated past these frail shores to the exit. METAPHOR (for Barbara Damron) Metaphor’s a mommy with her brood of changeling children, each one a protean prodigy prodigiously transforming. They chase themselves through a series of shapes like facial lines over the years, rivulets of tears, torrents of laughter that shake you from sleep. Somewhere between the maudlin and sublime, driven to assume these forms, trembling, my skin due to erupt, I hang by the skin of my teeth and I let go. Hair stiffens on the back of my neck, I sprout feathers or scales. From fish to fowl I flee until, finding asylum in a kernel of corn, I am lifted, snatched by her hungry beak. My own mother swallows me whole. Nine months later I am born. HIDDEN SONG Dazed by concept and design that metes out pleasure with a measure the soul understands (not quite knowing how or why these spaces define), we seek a soaring life, some sign in concrete, plexiglass and steel which, like a particular face, in silent structure hidden architecture's song of portico and vestibule a space to show us we belong. LEIRA (for John Durham) Savage artist who growls at my bones before a cave-hole where swelling night spits stars like teeth into a groaned expanse and fires bloom across a misted field: Eat you rocks? Have you such sullen pride to loom with hateful leer about cave walls, brandishing ghostly fears like threats of doom at me, Bruise? To dance upon dead stones? Dare you dream? Or lingering consume along a firelit death of fingers bison bleeding deer whose tiny ears detect meat and lost warmth of sunlight’s yield? ELIAN GONZALES When they drew you out of the sea like an astronaut, as if a gift of providence divine or hero unexpected, long awaited, our longest sacrifices unabated in a land where heroes can no longer shine, we had no idea what we had brought, who did not know your mother was the sea, Little Odysseus, saved from a sea of time, only to be held hostage by entwining arms, sweetly drowning in Calypso’s charms, from war to wandering, a second crime, waving like some sad anemone. FENRIS (for Katy) No kin of any kind have I, daughter or mother, father or son; nor friend beneath a lone chalk moon to sooth my nagging dirty fur and smooth my woe. No sound calls me “brother.” Beneath a marble moon, I am imprisoned by teeth of the sky. Each rock and star jeers at me. I snap, snarl. Not even my fangs can burst these cords, my fetters formed of insubstantial stuff: birdspit, rockroots, fishbreath and cat’s footstep. Behind it all, a woman’s whisper holds the snowy field in place. Nothing to be done but wait…I dream of blood I’ll lap with my long tongue, the blood of gods I cannot help but hate because they loathe to feel my furious will, which only the hammer of god can kill. And so I dream of bounding, long and huge, across the Milky Way to Hamlet’s Mill until, with nightly skill, I’ll see my face and sing my song. MOTHER, MAY I? It’s simple as baking a cake, this country. You take a secret, any secret—the secret of success! The secret of its success is in its heart: steamy, hot, dark and stuffy as an oven. And in the way we all wish to be loved, by everyone, no matter how wealthy, and preferably in sin… It’s hairless as a balloon, this breathtaking way we insist on being praised… We wait so long for the favored smile, the merciful gaze to fall, to be bestowed on us. Then the thunder strikes, we have to go back because we forgot something. ARAB SPRING Like Antigone buried alive by Creon for breaking the law by burying her brother slain on a field of internecine strife or Rosa Luxemburg shot in a car by murderous thugs only posing as police, cruel cowards and faceless men have thoughtlessly torn your sovereign soul from your flesh as carelessly as a man might flick ashes from a cigarette, oblivious of consequences. They will come with thunder, like earthquake and tsunami. Even a fearless wasted poet counting words a world away could recognize your beauty, hardly knowing who you were. What a waste of a Harvard and an Oxford education! After being fucked, used by the Hollywood system, at least Frances Farmer got a lobotomy and a car. —When they stole your life, did they realize they had forfeited their own? their right to rule? Now you have joined an exclusive club along with Gandhi, John, Bobby, Martin, Malcolm… “Benazir Bhutto: Any last words for those left behind?” —Yes. Praise Allah. It is all we have. One world, one life. FIRE The great androgynous maestro who invented sex, Lord knows, has beat hands down whatever puny art might do or even hope to do along its cramped and tiny street where thieves divide the greater part of stunted envy and loose pain, where love is but a stale bouquet and shingles rattle in the rain. THUNDERBOLT (for Kati) Whence comes the artist by his creativity? Is it some great god’s gift to him which, like every accident on earth —power and beauty, wealth and grace, the knowledge that is wisdom’s shroud— comes to man a changeling birth, unexpected as a cloud to swarm or brighten some dim face with sorrow? Or with majesty? In dark nights of the soul it comes, in afternoons the black sun seals his lips, the eye eclipsed and filled with furious forms; each line collapsing in his hand, his mind in fear must mount these myriad songs and teeming images of hideous life. Out of the furnace of the womb, out of the furnace of love they come: images that cry to him of home. I AM AN OLD MAN I am an old man who sits down to pee. What happened to that laughing baby boy? Gout owns my bones, bursitis wants my knee. I sit not daily but regularly enough to wonder what I might enjoy. I am an old man who sits down to pee. Teen cynic whose hard eyes once dared to see that dormant love might yield imagined joy: Gout owns my bones, bursitis wants my knee. At twenty-six, a strapping swain whose spree won naked converts to his hotbed toy, I am an old man who sits down to pee. Blinded by life, sheer serendipity the way you chose your writing to employ. Gout owns my bones, bursitis wants my knee. My Muse has been both kind and cruel to me, compelling me to create and destroy. I am an old man who sits down to pee. Gout owns my bones, bursitis wants my knee. PROMETHEUS He saw what had to be done. How, like undulating ripples of light, man’s fear broke endlessly insatiable. So he gave the sun into their keeping, knowing they could not hold it in their hands without getting burned. Feeling that dumb superstitious fear, grown willful and sure in public glare, he knew what had to be suffered. So science was born, born to the cry of a vulture eating a Titan’s liver. So much for man’s side of the story. What of the gods, the Great Thunderer? His just punishment, chained to the rock —this wasn’t all Prometheus saw. Even fire wasn’t at the bottom of it. The real reason Zeus punished his sister’s son was the foresight he possessed to unnatural degree, greater than Zeus’ own, and the way he flaunted it, and his unnatural love of it. THE WAVES (for J.H.) Moon-drowned I swam below the somber waves where dwindling ripples cannot reach and sharks hold fast to half-remembered light. I plunged and plummeted through night turned sleep. I craved your watery speech unlearned: it is the Sea, not Christ that saves. For we can only rise and drown and fall when ghostly love surrounds us all. Our deaths dream doings, striving things to teach us after all we do not live in graves. Moonlight revealed, despite my awful fear, your risen body floating near. WINDS AND SANDS Winds of the body and sands of the mind Fashion of flesh a mirror to the soul The soul sees, though the heart is deaf and blind. Blow back the world that young men hope to find, For fear and failure both must take their toll: Winds of the body and sands of the mind. Congealing mists leave agonies behind Whose magical sheer power to unroll The soul sees, though the heart is deaf and blind. Whisper those endless melodies that bind Man’s changing nature to his only goal: Winds of the body and sands of the mind. The sky is oversexed, so time must grind Love’s hour-glass to one bright burning coal The soul sees, though the heart is deaf and blind. Discovering, conceal a world that’s signed By deeds whose kind vain truth still makes us whole: Winds of the body and sands of the mind The soul sees, though the heart is deaf and blind. HOW OFTEN IN MY DREAMS How often in my dreams you say “Hello” The only way you can, with paws and tongue, Your nudging head deliberate and slow, Cold nose to my hand like a buzzer rung. How good you were when babies came along: You watched beside their cradles like a hawk, You barked and growled, protective, brave and strong When strangers rang our bell. You did not balk. With Zachary as babe and growing boy, Your sweet devotion like your famous snort Proclaimed your loyal heart with love and joy, Skittles Paco-Pookah, Paka for short. I threatened taxidermy as a joke— Yet how I wept and grieved when your heart broke. COLUMBINE For a town that only wanted to feel normal, The gods sure turned a blind eye that day As, in an exercise as purely formal As bombing raid or busman’s holiday, Two boys walked into school and fifteen fell, Never to walk out again—but what the hell. Maybe they saw more clearly than we do How schools are truly democracy’s battlefield, How learning’s more than psychic rack and screw To which the blood of youth will never yield. When none remain to shame, all left to bilk, What absolution’s left, there’s less to say: Thirteen sheep seethed in Kyklops’ milk, Two poster boys for the NRA. NO TIME FOR HATRED’S WARS No time for hatred’s wars, my life’s a cheat Of business, bother, boredom, worry, woe. I mind all blindness and I watch my feet; I lost my sense of timing long ago. I crave to learn and yearn to memorize That sacred timeless reckoning of your lips, To linger in the Urzeit of your eyes, Scorched fingers at the handles of your hips. To merge in passion, blend, surrender all Like bee and flower, seashore, waking dream In one brief moment’s beautiful, strange fall Transforms what is to what must only seem: Sweet doom, to dedicate my life before Your body’s temple, prostrate on the floor. IF I SPEND MY LIFE If I spend my life writing novels, poems and stories no one ever reads, have I wasted my life? I care more for the story I'm writing than I do for the one I live —is this a bad thing, should I consult a therapist? I have spent my life writing poems and stories, expending time and love and care devising little care machines, minds that will live and breathe on their own. They won't need me anymore after a while. They'll be just fine. One day the teeth will rot in my head, hair fall out, body stop working. Sooner or later, I'll go completely deaf and blind. But I will have known what it means to spend my life in devotion to the work I love most and I will have the pure joy of spending my life in devotion to the art I love, devising the stories and poems I love. How can I be so sure no one will ever read them? ON THE DOWN SIDE Sometimes it’s no fun being a poet, it’s like the snow that’s falling —you ask the snow if it wants to freeze and fall… it doesn’t have a choice…That choice was made by someone long ago you’re not sure you remember. Nope, it’s not much fun at all. But it was in December you saw snow fall. It’s not all playing with garden hoses and jumping through sprinklers, you know. Sometimes you’re the only one wet. That time someone asked if you wanted a date and it made you think of you-know-who. Then spied the fruit that she was holding out. You know who. Her. The Muse. I mean: she’s so aloof, so cold. You can’t take her garbage out, God knows. She’s no warm body to dry the dishes with or hold. You cannot dry her tears, which freeze even as they fall, hard diamonds she will never let you share. ELEGY FOR TODD (1980-1984) This is the time when only words which cannot find their way to light, like blood beads on the tongue, will do —not enough. Tears are nails that rivet your eyes to this world, especially the invisible parts steadfastly encroaching. In this fashion the world always surpasses itself. In a place where grief is immeasurable as longing is lonely, one only grasps the heavy sudden loss—surely not more than forty pounds, even much less, something a man might easily lift. *** Later, awake you find your hands clutch only dreams and not that shape you so frantically seek. You flail your arms in empty air. He is not there. It is nothing and he is not there. SECOND SIGHT By night, a mirror pressed against my face, I grope along trying to find my way to deeper portion of this slow nightmare reflecting jagged smiling stars like grim teeth where stones no longer bruise my feet. Yet I wade smoothly in a speaking stream and down among the foam of syllables I seek a deeper self, I read my name. Where algaes sex I comb my hair and sling the rippling droplets from my tongue chill rain. A sudden voice, a knock crackles and I am thunderstruck with sophisticated pain: elaborate ease of wind in leaves, wet earth of our curious dying. Through your eyes I see fish swimming past briskly moving shoals like little clouds toward some penumbral rhythm locked in sleep the way that I incline toward walls of space; I try, and fail, to penetrate this dream. For too soon waking, too late trying to rest inside a grassy place where I touch rock and feel grit of sand between my fingers and smell the fragrant wind among blind branches granted miraculously second sight as inching the slow and ecstatic scrawl arches across the heaven one long second, epiphany, God’s strident neon brainstorm, I await in cool dark final light. MOUNT OF OLIVES 1 At the end of our journey at the beginning of our living smoke blows across our faces, some crisis in the corner of my eye. Turn and we behold grown up like a blackening tower: the tree that is called death. 2 Illustrious strong and gentle her leaves like lip-shaped song at verge of sleep blow stilly in shrill wind, clandestinely familiar in their shape. I recollect a secret you set me once to keep. 3 We long to dream as lovers dream awake, their trembling scarce contained throughout the land. New horizons shudder, every eye and hand holds sensuous Nature shattered in her glass that we might see with an untimbered eye as slopes rise gently resonating past, a black scrawl spreading towards the future. 4 Now you and I are seated on the porch as stifling day swarms all around our ears. What would it take to cross the patio, descend three cool stone steps with grassy feet? I love the shade as you long for the light… 5 You hesitate: a trembling of your lips betrays my fear this hour too soon shall pass, an unbetokening. Birds circle the moon, make a ring in passing. Great black birds. Omens—but with a hop and a skip I can touch the trunk and you are at my side though lingering a bit behind. For we were lovers once 6 Once: ours was that trembling that no fear of death could quell—oh that it might be still! Before the thought is out, you take my hand— “And I have come to you so many times in death.” “I didn’t know.” I see the day is gone. 7 “No one is around.” Now such a thought brings God to mind. And with God thoughts of sin like thousands of sweet birds all transgressing air and borne aloft. Now God partakes of feminine and masculine qualities. The female and the male in Him are one. God the Transvestite. Or Hermaphrodite? 8 The garden is intended but for us and thee. I pull you down into the grassy ease, unresisting yet protesting until lips and eyes and hands make blameless declaration: No one is around. 9 Is it a sound? Together we have made a pact of peace eternally. I pull you down that we may fully taste this all-consuming death and bushy love. It is yours, it is mine. All over, it is everyone’s, this death. WATER OR WAVE (for Jakki Cafarelli) Which do you choose, the water or the wave? You jump from place to place, from trough to crest To gain a better glimpse of what you crave When all you truly want is perfect rest. The twilight cock’s crow like your corkscrew heart, The shadow sun to which you will not bow, Deny them as you will, they all impart That you are trapped inside an endless Now. As forks of language cannot lift the sea, The Seer is not seen nor Knower known. The common Self’s immortal unity We share with this great universe alone. If action’s pointless, nothing you can save: Which do you choose, the water or the wave? VERDIGRIS These isles recede in mists I really cannot fathom Those eyes revealing myths I bear to see in dim gray outline all the wild Greek chorus whisper mysteries, adumbrations muted by the roar of rocks and surf with all my weight I long to be where fires wrapped in velvet dreams slip slowly by I really cannot fathom why those isles recede in mists 2 WINE-DARK-SEA Original Preface When Lotte K. Crowder had our eighth grade class read Robert Fitzgerald’s magnificent translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, I fell in love with the verse narrative. Lotte had us read aloud every day for 45 minutes. From the opening chapter, which Fitzgerald delightfully entitled “A Goddess Intervenes,” I was enraptured. The class reading lasted an entire semester, the experience a lifetime, leading me eventually to Kazantzakis’ interpolated sequel and, indirectly perhaps, to a ten-year interlude teaching philosophy. I continued to write poetry, passing on to other people, experiences and things… The idea of retelling Book Nine of Homer’s epic tale (“New Lands and Poseidon’s Son”) from the viewpoint of the Kyklops, Polyphêmos (I just love Fitzgerald’s transliterated spellings!), occurred to me in 2000, a year after a detached retina in my left eye and three subsequent surgeries had left me blind. I produced drafts of sections and set them aside, believing they were mere fragments. My remaining eye worsened and I grew progressively blinder until, by the summer of 2001, I was forced to give up gainful employment: no longer able to perform the tasks for which I’d been hired (all detail work at phone, computer and files requiring greater visual acuity than I could muster). I applied for disability and received it seven months later, in January 2002. One month later, a retinal detachment of my right eye was diagnosed and I went into surgery on Valentine’s Day, 2002. It was a bleak time for me. The onset of blindness so late in life (I was 48) led me to reevaluate my life substantially. Writing became so difficult that I began sending cassette tapes instead of letters. The support of family and friends, loved ones all, permitted this near-drowned, seasick wretch to endure. I determined to remain a parasite and artist, devoting myself with sustained vigor to my first love and true calling. And a funny thing happened: the sobriety for which I had struggled so long without success presented itself to me—as a gift. Blindness and my long struggle to recover from chronic alcoholism informed my reworking of the Kyklops material. Rereading Fitzgerald’s text, I began to see how one might interpret the story differently: the Akhaians barbaric pirates, Odysseus a corporate raider, Polyphêmos a gullible rube and provincial trapped by his identity and the tunnel vision of his own narcissistic solipsism. Out of my own experience perhaps, I began to see in the lonely Kyklops and the rapacious Greek a powerful dual metaphor of America’s own ambivalent identity—and to see myself in both the creature abandoned by his mother to isolation and in the man who abandoned his wife (I had called myself by the Kyklops’ proper name a year earlier in “Poems Lost on the Edge of Sleep”; and I had identified with Odysseus since 8th grade). As fate would have it, my challenge was to assemble the “fragments” in proper order. Typing the pieces (I could touch type with Magnifier), I quickly realized how close to finished the work had been. True, I had to compose another hundred lines or so but, by that time, I could see the shape of the whole. Wine Dark Sea Polyphêmos! I waken in the dark of my dank cave, the dying embers glowing at my feet, and listen to the railing rain unleashed outside the entrance to my domicile. My flock of sheep and goats huddle in sleep, familiar musty wool smell fills my nose. I recognize the voice that wakens me, though I do not know where it is she’s gone —across the Sea perhaps. It was long ago that my own mother, Thoösa, daughter of Forkys, left me, master of flocks and all my island home. I sit and yawn and listen to the rain that makes the wild grapes grow and turn to wine. My little lamb bleats out a dream of pain. I rise, go to the cave-hole, smell the brine and wonder how I ever came to be. When I was young, first-born beneath the Sun, I'd roam the meadows and the glen and chase the lambkins, ewes and rams until they'd bleat—then I’d relent. Each tree and rock and grass-blade sang my name, I marveled at my image in still pools; I'd run and jump and splash and play and swim. Tiring, I'd lie back on a grassy knoll, lost in pillows of clouds, great ships of fleece, watching them crawl across the blue wide welkin on sweltering summer days. I'd listen to whatever the wind might say until I fell into a honeyed sleep. The gods I only saw in profile then and thought they were monocular like me. I was not always an eater of men… When I was young, my mother bounced me on her knee and let me gaze into that mirror of her eye: ’Twas like the Sea, or a cloudless Sky; until it clouded over and I lost myself in choppy drenching waves and drowning rain as I was drawn into the Maelstrom's Eye, where terror still precariously reigns. Poised between eternity and desire, my eye went blind and all was fire. —She died when I was very young or went across the sea. I don't know why. When I lost her, I should have died… I've always been this way. Once when I was out at play, my mother called me in to hear the great Kyklops Wizard, Têlemos son of Eurymos, make augury. I heard him say how a monster named O Dis-Use would come one day to blind my eye. When I asked why, burst into tears, they only shook their heads. I thought they were lying to punish me for something I had done or failed to do… I promptly forgot it and went back to play, wondering why grown Kyklopês made up such tales. I'd turn my wondrous eye just like a beam to every living thing, holding and magnifying every facet until it rendered up its secrets to me. So passed the years, so many days and nights I scarcely noticed. Kyklopês are a solitary race who live alone in caves atop high mountain peaks. The day came, a cold and fiercely windy day, my mother did not call me in. Hopes dashed, my child perished; I was a Man. Thoösa had fled. Polyphêmos! I waken in the dark in my damp cave, the dying embers radiant at my feet and listen to the heavy knell of rain. The rams and ewes and lambs huddle in sleep before me; I smell their damp wool. How well I know the voice that wakens me, though I do not know where it is she's gone —across the sea perhaps. So long ago… I sit and yawn, listening to the rain that makes the wild grapes grow and turn to wine. My little lamb bleats with a scary dream. I clamber to my feet and smell the brine and wonder how I ever came to be. Before the fire I sit and shake, the drops fall from my nose. I turn my solitary corporate eye within… When I was young, first-born beneath the Sun, I thought the Gods were all one-eyed like me. Each rock and pool and flower called my name. I only saw the Gods in profile then and all the days were different yet the same… My mother died when I was very young. I want—I need—no pity, pity from… We Kyklopês are a solitary race who like to make our home in rocky caves on mountain-tops that scrape the sky where lightning, storms and clouds pass by. We prize our freedom. Kyklopês are no slaves! When I was young, first born beneath the Sun and every day was different yet the same, my mother Thoösa rocked me on her lap. I'd suckle at her breast and burp and nap. When I would wake, she bounced me on her knee, “My Little Poly-Wog,” she'd say. I'd gaze into that Great Brown Crater of an Iris, immense as Seas ruled by a Blue-Maned God, my father, where mirrored I would watch for hours until the mirror clouded: I stared into black space, a starless void, deprived of Moon and Sun; I stared until I was not anyone but Thoösa’s feelings, longings, fears, bright pain were hard-etched in my noggin, soul and brain, and every day so different yet the same. One day when I had grazed my flocks and they had drunk from pristine streams my island Wilderness abounds in, I drove them back up the long grassy slope that leads to my Cave-Home. When I got there— a summer day that I will well remember all my life!—a ragged band of small and filthy men were moving all my store of food and goods, cheeses and sweet cream, milk, goats and sheep left in their pens, while I grazed the big rams, a dozen or so men with all on carts laden so heavily the wheels could barely turn. “What,” I bellowed in exasperation, “Would you rob me of all then, friends?” I wondered just what kind of men these were when one sprang forward (a good talker, too, he was) and cried: “Oh no, never! We would never steal from you. But pirates took our ship and we, fearing that they still lurk nearby, were only hiding this stuff, to make it safe from such marauding spirits: brazen, murderous men who serve no gods but their own selfish wills and who would stop at nothing to get their way.” I thought about this, saying nothing, though it seemed that I had heard some such tale or other of corporate plunder, renegade factions, pirates seeking merger with every weak and vulnerable species of man, child, woman, beast and bird; rapacious cannibals knowing neither boundary nor restraint beneath the all-observing gaze of Zeus. It seemed to me that these devils were called “Akhaians”— an ugly name, to be sure. The longer I considered, the more likely it seemed my guest spoke truth. So, with a wave of my hand, I invited them to sit down and dine with me in my home. The truth is: I had not set my orb on any face but that of beasts for years. I longed for human company, for pleasing speech that might remind me of my dam and the father who abandoned me, blue-maned Poseidon himself, Lord of Oceans. Not wanting to brag of my pedigree, I said nothing about my family's celebrity. We Kyklopês make no fuss about such things. We are a democratic tribe, each solitary one of us. “Good fellows,” I said, sitting cross-legged on my cave floor, rolling my rock-door shut against insects and predators of the night oncoming, “Please, sit you down and make your feast with me. We shall pass the time in singing songs, exchanging stories of the worlds we come from.” I introduced myself as “Polyphêmos” and asked my new friends all their names. But their sly spokesman invited me instead to imbibe the ruby mead he'd brought, a gift from Maron son of Euanthós. “Some call me Silenus,” he said. “Or Sinbad. But you may call me Nobodaddy.”—Brazen Liar! He held a wineskin full of smooth-nectar'd brandy. Licking my lips, I longed to taste his nectar, ambrosia from which the Gods spin ecstasy. The greasy man now filled my cup. No sooner had I drained it in one gulp than he replenished me, keeping this up until I swooned and swayed, my great head spinning, walls and firelight whirling in my eye. I soon blacked out nor did I waken of my own accord. Polyphêmos! Startled by rain, its dull refrain outside my cave, I waken in the middle of the night, disoriented, knowing not where I am nor how I came to be…at first. But then the dying embers of my fire on the floor before me warm my feet and I can smell the wet wool of my flock of sheep, the ewes and rams asleep. —I do not like to waken so, I do not like to wake up in the night, although the voice that cries for me is one I know as well as my own shadow in the sun. Sometimes in wind or pelting rain, tall grasses or high-bowered rustling leaves, I seem to hear her plainly calling for me. I listen…but she does not come. If only I could hear her voice again! …How long I slept I cannot say for sure but I awakened screaming out of sleep, a searing, burning pain blazed in my eye, which popped and sizzled, as liquid tears or blood came streaming down my cheeks. “Monsters! Why have you burned my eye, blinding me?” I wailed, crawling on hands and knees. Incensed, drunken and wounded, I lashed out. Sweeping the room with both hands, I seized two men, conspirators in this foul and horrid crime. Maddened (I'm ashamed to say), I devoured them both without really thinking—they tasted like shit!—and so I vomited them up—mostly—undigested. When I'd done retching, “Nobodaddy,” I heaved, howling, “Silenus or Sinbad, you will not escape me until I've wreaked my hate and vengeance on you! So, tell me who you really are and why you've done for me who never meant you harm.” But Sinbad was too cagey; he knew better than to open his mouth and give away the place where he was hiding from Polyphêmos's fury! Biding my time, I thought to wait him out. …When rosy dawn arrived, I let my beasts out one at a time, my fingers betwixt each ewe and ram as it passed, to make sure not one brutish man snuck through as I sat blindly by the door. Not until the last ram had departed and well after did I realize that they'd contrived their escape somehow and loaded my fattened herds into their ship like so much cargo—stolen contraband! As their ship pulled away from shore, I heard his voice the wind carried up the mountainside to my burning ears: “Oh, Kyklops! Poly-feeee-mos! How's that eye feel? Better now?” His carrion-eater's laughter subsided; then he continued: “Kyklops! Would you like to know who blinded you? My name's…” And here my blood ran down my spine like icy mountain water, portentous as a Curse: “O-Dis-Use! O-Dis-Use is my name, Laertes' son, the Akhaians' chief corporate raider, who guts cities and who rapes your women, wives and daughters just for fun! I blinded you, Kyklops.—I'm glad what I done to you!” Teeth gnashing, arms outstretched above my head, I cried out to my fellow Kyklopês in their solitary, neighboring, rocky caves: “Kyklopês, help me! Your brother's fallen, his only eye put out by O-Dis-Use, mangy Akhaian! Help me sink his ship with giant boulders before he makes his miserable escape!” Yawning and grumbling, Polyphêmos's brethren stirred sluggishly, complaining from their nests: “Don't bother us! It's time for The Sopranos! If you've been blinded, it's your own damn fault! What's that to do with us? Don't shove your misery in our face. We Kyklopês are a nasty, brutish sort! To be honest, Polyphêmos, we never liked you that much anyway! Now…Goodbye!“ But they heaved some rocks at the departing ship just the same as did I and I heard O-Dis-Use say: “Kaka! Let's git outa here fast! The crazy one-eyed bastard's trying to sink us!” I called upon my father, Great Poseidon, Blue-Maned Lord of Seas and Oceans: “Drown this Sumbitch, Dad! Please, suffocate him and his friends beneath the brine!” So I prayed and prayed the God was swayed as the Greeks beat their retreat without delay. I turn my lonely corporate eye within… and through the flashing pain inside my head I see ruination’s dreams, dark smoldering masses of cities razed and plundered, their towers collapsed to rubble, a burning heap of molten slag. Behold! men squabbling over bloodless tokens, hundreds of battle-flags, each one contending for supremacy, an idol and delusion: it is this, more than any other single factor witnessed, that unleashes ambition, evil and contagion like corporate storm-troopers free to roam the earth, the nature of what's to come’s grim ghastly nightmare. Remembering the prophecy I failed to heed so many years before, Têlemos's warning, my briny tears drip slowly, one by one, from the burned-out socket of my eye, and I see that all is not as I had thought: that the dead, slain, broken suffer not one whit but slumber free of all mutating flux. It is the living who remain that suffer, the mother, babe and boozing comrade suffer. And I see as in a vision, mutely: it is the children of this earth who suffer most. When I was young, first born beneath the Sun, each tree and rock and grass-blade knew my name. I'd romp and tear through meadows, swim and play. Tired, I'd lie back on a grassy hill, Great Billowing Clouds like fleecy sheep for pillows, and listen to whatever the Wind would say. And every day was different yet the same. My mother held me on her lap and bounced me on her knee “My little Poly-Wog,” she said. “Why have you come to be?” I gazed into her big brown eye so like the wine-dark sea. END Thank you for taking the time to read my book. Please take a moment to leave a comment at the site from which you downloaded. If you enjoyed this, you might also like Second Sight. Check me out at Facebook, Twitter and my Crash Dummies blog on writing, literature and literary life at Tumblr. You may also contact me at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/crashdummies. About the Author Former weekly columnist for The Kansas City Business Journal and book reviewer for National Public Radio affiliate KCUR-FM, Dennis Weiser has published poetry, short stories and articles in such venues as New Letters, Chouteau Review and Abramelin: The Journal of Poetry and Magick, as well as several anthologies from Outrider Press. An excerpt from Crash Dummies (“Tzytzyan Ysalane”) won first prize for prose fiction at the Chicago Printers Row Book Fair and was published in Things That Go Bump in the Night (Outrider Press 2004). He recently completed a collection of stories, Beautiful Lies. He is currently writing his third novel, Soul Snatchers of Java.