Peter Weltner

Fünf Gedichte

 

 

Astypalaia

 

The sun rises on time, but birds aren’t flying

yet. It’s cold for Greece. Thick as fog,

mist obscures the beach, each solid thing

he studies moulded by a shadowed light.

An old, black-clad woman sits on a picnic

bench, rubbing her face with her hands.

Did she sleep on its slats? If the trick

of seeing is not to change what’s seen,

why does he need to know her name?

Whether she’s distraught, sick,

or mad? Or if it’s just some maudlin game

she’s playing, grimy hands on a filthy face?

Perhaps he chose to travel to this island–

tiny, forgotten, with no important gods

or temples–to wash, gritty with sand,

an old woman’s hair. Watch it dry in the air.

Amphorae, trade pots with new borns,

children, twenty-seven hundred, buried

in them. Maybe it’s a child she mourns

for. A castle on a hill, a basilica’s mosaic floor.

The past leads here a ruined life.

The woman wails and weeps and weeps.

She’s likely a fisherman’s wife

or widow, tidy in a white-washed house.

When the gods abandon a place, only pain

survives their ancient ways. Tragedy’s

betrayed, poetry finished, sky-bound, Olympian.

She pounds on the table. Begs in plain English, “Please.”

 

 

 

Eleusis

 

1.

The sun’s submerged in dark, in the sea

or a cavern deep in the earth. Let it be

freed. This is a world without day or season,

a black out as if a war is on, wife,

husband, son, daughter, raped, gone.

This is you, left, at the end of your life.

This is Demeter’s heart, her child lost, a cave

in the earth where a flame’s lit to save

whoever’s mourning from grief.

A sheaf of wheat shown,

barley, a bowl of pomegranate

seeds are all or nearly all that’s known

of the rituals, kept undesecrated,

secret by Eleusis, its sacred way.

 

2.

My parents walked it on a blazing hot day

in June when the Colonels ruled the state

like despots, tyrants, jailing opponents

on barren islands, men, women late

of Athens or Naxos or Rhodes, their dissents,

humanity denied them.

My father found

scattered over untended ground

marble rocks and pebbles, like debris from

a nearby gravel quarry. He picked

two up from beneath a broken column

of a ruined temple, gently kicked

the earth to dislodge a third and pocketed

all three, recalling how I’d said

the best gift he could bring me back

from Greece would be dirt from the rite’s

soil, a relic of its earth.

 

3.

In letters blacker

than jet ink he’d had inscribed the site’s

name on a clear paper weight–Telesterion

of Demeter Eleusis–had it made for his son

in his company’s shop, the three small rocks

secured forever on it by a glue

so strong they’d never break off, in a box

he’d wrapped for me on holiday from college.

 

4.

I’ve a view

of the Pacific from my bedroom, watch the horizon

reunited each night with the sea. The sun’s

been abducted further down than a cave,

deeper than earth. Yet at dawn a priest

will rekindle its fire in a rite that’ll save

it from the dark for another day, released

from Hades.

I could say that in many

less fancy ways or just note what’s easy

to see. It’s long past ghosts at midnight

time and dawn will come in a few

more hours. Reigniting doused light

is what religions mean to do.

But why try to paraphrase dawn? I lost

you twice. I waited in the dark, tossed

out of the bar for drunkenness,

too much wine, too much riot on the dance

floor. So I made up a lie out of distress,

said I saw you go with no backward glance.

 

5.

My dad’s paperweight is old. One pebble

has broken off the plastic, a stoney rebel.

Poetry is animism. I hold in my hand

a chipped rock I’m devoted to, a worn icon

I fondle like a worry bead, the land

my fantasies inhabit as I rub it, the one

I’d have been born in if I could’ve chosen it.

My duty, my pleasure each day are to sit

in the gymnasium, waiting my turn,

while watching Kritias, Lysandros wrestle.

Or I stand in the master’s grove, learning

pouring from him like wine from the vessel

wisdom is. Here, the ripest olive trees

shine in the sun with a light that pleases

me like the glow off boys’ oiled bodies.

Eleusis’ is the next holiday, its rites,

its processions, music, dances, thyme’s bees’

honey to eat, roses, anemones, flights

of finches, waxwings mine to enjoy.

 

6.

Talisman or pebble. I roll it

in my hand. Transcendence.

The magic of anything

the past seems to cling to, dwell in,

like the spirit of a god in a rock or a ring

transfiguring the ordinary, a pen, a pin,

returning Persephone to her mother, her

my father’s shards belonged to, Demeter.

No believer, he stole them for love of me,

stones meaningless to him, three ancient

chips from a temple, not rubble, a plea,

unspoken, to love him back, the discontent

he knew when I stayed cold, unchanged,

as if I’d been abducted, estranged,

taken to some nether world, hidden,

me the child, the son he’d had or meant

to have a denizen of the dark, forbidden,

unable to be reborn in flame’s, in corn’s ascent.

 

7.

My father and my mother are slowly walking

on a hot June day, sunglasses on, talking

in whispers, late middle aged, almost

old, the mouth to the cave not far

away from where they pause, their host

for the tour pointing to the place. A car

backfires on the roadway. Then all is silent,

wind, trees, birds, workmen. The sun’s descent

is as quick as after prey a falcon

flies, wings spread out, beak down. So my father

describes it, the light on the horizon

vanishing like a hawk. Yet the dark doesn’t bother

him, nor the stillness. Far away, a flame

flickers–probably, if anything is to explain

it, a light in a window in the distance.

The three stones are safe in his pocket.

He says to his wife he wants to dance

and they do despite the ruins’ quiet.

 

8.

My parents are in their graves now,

or rather their ashes in urns are on show

in the underworld where they’ve been

buried. Eleusis is a myth, part history,

part legend. Wheat sheaves, a fire seen

in the dark. Resurrection. Immortality.

And I, who know nothing about either,

fondle a pebble, child of Demeter,

praying it might be so, the magic

that is bestowed on matter, the body

reborn, transfigured, made new, transfixed

by desire, by a light I’ve yet to see.

 

 

 

Epistle to Rufus Aufidius Marcellinus

 

If still unsatiated, why turn over in bed

away from me, why, my beloved,

are you sleeping so late? It’s morning,

just before dawn. Let’s do it again

as if it were Bacchus’ feast day.

What did the augur a drachma paid for say?

“Beware betraying time. Or wasting it dreaming.

Soon pain will spill its blood on you like rain.”

Consider the glory Jupiter shed

pursuing what we have now, now,

not tomorrow or years far ahead.

Ponder Paris and the terrible row

he caused by delaying until Ilium

to have his way with Helen. How dumb

 

of him, if it’s true, and the stupid rage

of the Greeks. Unsheathed knives

can be used to make love or kill, like Carthage

ravaged, reduced to a salted plain

by the tears Dido shed from the stain,

the wound of departure or Flavia groaning

in an empty bed. We’re soldiers, our lives

owed to Rome by the emperor’s orders.

Let him take them on Armenia’s borders

if it is fated. But, Brundisium, sown

with our seed, let us play like your own

till the day we embark. Wake, Rufus.

Rising from a drunken slumber, be my Dionysus,

like pard or panther uncaged, freed and treasonous.

 

 

 

On Fire: to Diodoros

 

1.

Past midnight, after Die Walküre

at the opera house, Rysanek, Vickers

wild, ecstatic in Act One,

we, too, exhilarated, released by art

from wintery rules, icy laws,

freed by the fable, by love’s

woodland blooming,

early spring’s still snow-bright glare,

incited, oh my brother,

by the heart’s vernal anarchy,

after we had erupted like the others

in the rapt, Dionysian ovation

that followed the Magic Fire’s

final chord and climbed two hills,

Nob and Russian, as fast as we could

to reach the top of Telegraph

where our apartment waited,

aerie high, shack-rickety

perched precariously by stairs

that quit beneath Coit Tower,

after we had devoured a half-quart

of sherry enhanced chocolate chip ice cream,

and slowly, invitingly stripped

before a wide western window that a slip

of wind could shatter or blow out,

kissed, the lights of the Golden Gate

shining lamp-like, frosted, subdued

in November’s clarity, after we’d embraced,

our bodies strung, bow-taut,

arrows pent, ready to rise,

to fly goalward, we saw, by tactile

vision, like two Greeks, perhaps,

myriad new fires burning on the beaches

beyond the bridge throughout the night,

torches set out on the shoreline to greet

the men stepping on its sands from Troy,

from the victory they had won

after they had entered fully armed

their massive, mimicked horse.

 

2.

It was like a ruse, a trick

designed by a transvestite,

an army trying to dress

disguised in inappropriate clothes,

equine mane and tail and hooves.

It was like a hunter wanting to don and wear

an animal’s fur or pelt,

to move, smell, look like it.

It was like bliss devising, if need be,

a marble or a wooden monument,

to assume the flanks and shanks

and loins of the beast,

the body, I mean, that longing might invade,

penetrate, inhabit

a foreign carnality,

not empty, not a mere cavity,

but bloody with the strangeness

of hearts and brains,

offal and lungs,

this thing

of guts and gore,

the excremental,

life-giving mayhem all creatures are made of.

It was as if ecstasy meant to seize its essence

from a palace,

then enflame it, no enemy the excuse for it,

this battle,

but to claim Love’s own,

call it Helen, if you prefer,

the reason for this siege–

the abducted one that lures desire

to become the animal it hides in,

the fabricated horse

that is prophesied

to end the war and form its ravenous fame.

 

3.

And I, say I am Nossis,

brother, lover

in the aftermath

of the final flaring

seen from sea, shipboard,

lying in your arms,

uneasily at peace,

illuminated as we leave

by that great fire,

seeking to catch a glimpse

far away of western torches

that might signal to us

how near to home

we have come at last,

no more headlong

riding the sea

above its black bed,

no longer

plunging through baths

of waves’ crests and clouds’ mist,

the shoreline lights

that will be

a sign to you, to me,

bound together as we are,

that the body, however battered,

is more than a war’s

roaring pyres’

inciting endless mourning.

It is also the torches

placed like beacons

round the windswept ramparts

of an ancient harbor,

lit to salute

the conflagrant heart.

 

4.

Remember

the flares’ flickering

one morning

as we woke early on deck to a sun,

dawn-sailing,

sky-driven,

transporting day over a bay

where its light, the thrill of it

that drives invaders, emblazoned us

like Piraeus’ fortified port

or Attic cities

with the flames we struck

to destroy Troy,

which is to say,

we who desire

are more than alive–

rampant, wanton

though we are–knowing that what

burns inside us,

refined, moulded as it is by fire,

is the gold we try to find

in the peace

that inevitably follows

flesh’s weakness,

sex’s failures,

the mute betrayals

after the fires subside

insisting we search

in the ensuing dark

for chips, fragments,

chains, necklaces,

rings and coins

sparkling like stars at night

among its ruins,

the precious metals, jewels

the body unwillingly surrenders

after all it has fought for and won.

 

5.

Listen, my love. Here is a poem

I found in a book of old Greek

epitaphs at first light this morning:

If you say nothing, Diodoros,

you speak to me my unspeakable name.

Nights are endless in endless winter.

Light your lamp. In its flame, in the toil

of its burning, see why I never can rest.

Glaze your chest and arms with oil.

 

 

 

Two Centurions

 

1.

Forgotten, homesick, hunted by wolf hordes,

I, who have fought in oak forests, under mistletoe,

waged war in Spain, on Parthia’s borders,

heard rumors of how in our sacred city

senators debate as matters of state

whether whores or boys are more pleasurable,

how all gold tributes ought to be theirs

to take, the treasure they have plundered

from foreign intrigues or by our swords,

blasphemers who have made the forum’s streets

flood with the blood of their rivals, a bile

blacker than the Tiber after spring storms, while

the dawn is near, the moon full, I pray by a dying

fire the lives we take today be pleasing to the gods.

 

2.

In winter, against Gaul’s cruel cold, my men

wear the fur and hides of ravenous beasts

that belonged to the Goths they have put

to the sword in forests where we fought

them thicker with trees than Nile’s banks

with reeds, woods without kindness, raucous

at night with the cries of men already dead.

An empire sows confusion like Carthaginian seed

on the people it bleeds, the earth it has salted.

I have heard the hundreds of men I have crucified

pleading to die, like soldiers so hardened by battle

they seek for peace in oblivion. I have watched

their eyes, the despair in them, how like rodents

they scan the skies for signs of circling hawks.

 

 

 

Peter Weltner has published six books of fiction, including The Risk of His Music and How the Body Prays, and, in 2017, The Return of What’s Been Lost, five poetry chapbooks, among them The One-Winged Body and Water’s Eye (both in collaboration with the artist Galen Garwood), and six full length collections of poetry, News from the World at My Birth: A History, The Outerlands, To the Final Cinder, Stone Altars, Late Summer Storm in Early Winter (with photographs and paintings by Galen Garwood), and most recently The Light of the Sun Become Sea.  He and his husband live in San Francisco by the ocean.

 

Danse Macabre was proud to name Peter Weltner our 2017 Artist-in-Residence. Heartfelt thanks to Peter for his generosity in sharing his artistry with us.