Peter Weltner

 Poetry 

 

 

A Land Believed to Be Eden

 

1.

Backyard woods, high grass, sumac, milkweed

to chop through, to play soldiers in,

erect pup tents

pitched on pine-needle-prickly packed red clay.

 

A biting November day, black beetles

lumbering under rocks,

dusky moss felt-soft on bark,

musty as a trunk in an attic packed with old things.

 

A dead wren, its feathers merging with the gray

mud on the banks of the creek.  

Ants, a few white grubs,

milky caterpillars, foot-long blood-red worms.

 

A spider knits its web among dew-wet ferns

that glint in a shaft of sunlight.  

Distant threads of clouds wind

upward, dissolving.  Wild ivy, honeysuckle

 

threading in and out of brush, meshed tendrils

thick as a fat man’s fingers.  

Jagged pebbles, round slick

shiny stones scattered on a creek’s shallow bed.

 

2.

Night, the stars off course, the sun in dreamtime

blackening.  Five-toed frogs.  Salamanders

big as hogs.  Bleeding rocks.

Two headed dogs.  Grotesqueries.  Residues of daytime thoughts.

 

A pine tree cracking apart, smoldering,

split by lightning.  Clouds, mist

blowing like veils on the horizon seen

through a shadowy light that got left behind deep into woods.  

 

A creek rippling, leaves rustling in chilling breezes.  

Cowbells past twilight.  The upswell, downswell

of night creatures rustling, insects’ buzzing.

The silvery gleam by the moon of moths flapping their wings.   

 

A snake blithely slithers toward water.  The universe

longing to live forever.  Starlight

seeping through oak, poplar, sycamore,

leaves pallid as grass when it’s covered by a week-old’s snowfall.

 

The carcass of a beaver, its pelt the dappled gray

of mold.  Remember me, the wren

you saw this morning, whenever you

dream of Eden.  Remember me, child, when you grow old.

 

3.

The streets of Memphis are burning

from rage, rioters incited

by racist outsiders.

Tanks crush a revolt in Budapest, Prague.

 

Children no older than I am are dying

in Algeria, Egypt, China.  

In a magazine I see bodies tangled

in barbed wire, loose bricks, charred posts, burnooses.  

 

In the showers after gym, I try not to look

but can’t help seeing.  Every night,

I die from shame.  Every night,

I make promises I know I won’t keep.

 

Eden is the rite of atonement

commanded of Cain.

For his wrath, their pain.  

The fish belly white of boys in the photographs.

 

I rake my father’s lawn, whack a stick at caterpillar

tents, at webs threading through vines.  Sap

clings to my skin, a resiny gum I scrub

off in the bathtub.   Clean as on the first day, I say.  Clean as Adam.

 

 

 

Nietzsche in Turin

 

Stop abusing that horse.  I order you.

Cease whipping it.  Cruelty

is maddening.  Why do

you beat it?  Pity

the poor creature.   Its back

bleeds.   Its hairless haunches

are peeling skin.  Quit attack-

ing it.  What wretches

men are.  Look at me.  I have no friends.  Music

pleases me no more.  I can’t dance.

My spirit is sick.

What ill-gotten fod-

der have you been feeding it?  The hideous trance

life is, the lies it tells.  And I, Dionysos, its god,

 

a boulder in a river, the heights of a mountain,

a tiger raging, a leopard preying, a sleeping lion,

a man who knows no pain

he can’t reign over.  A man of passion,

not bastardly Wagner,

that priest-demented fool of a Parsifal.

Wine, delight best cater

to my tastes.  Symposia.  Feasts.  Call

me a tragic Greek unashamed of life.

Undaunted.  Proud.  Indomitable.  And you, you appall-

ing man, I demand you stop.  Yes.  Truth is strife,

conflict, combat, war.  The eternal

recurrence of the same.  But the beast, that poor beaten

beast.  And I, Dionysos, helpless, a god among men.

Neaniskos

 

It is springtime.  Gethsemane burns with a green fire.

His followers sleep, two snoring, one wheezing,

the youngest whimpering like a dog as it slumbers.

A gentle breeze chills the air with lingering

hints of an icy winter.  The moon is white

and pocked as the bald pate of a Sadducee.

Gnats swarm over a thin pool of water gathered

from dew.  After a long night’s carousing,

serving feasting legionnaires, wearing no more

than a linen cloth as the centurion who hired

him demanded, a hungry boy picks a fig not yet

ripe or sweet enough to eat.  One of twelve

lies prostrate but fully awake as he shifts

himself onto his knees and continues to pray.

Behind him, soldiers march up a hill, some

laughing, some playfully shaking their spears

like children until chastised by their commander.

Only hares and wolves, deserters, slaves, unruly

barbarians need fear their wrath.  Yet at the first

signs of their approach an owl hoots, a jackal

yips, frogs croak huskily, lizards scurry

over weeds and twigs, bats flap more loudly

than a flock of birds flying, soaring westward,

tree limbs shake and leaves shudder as winds

surge before a storm, the sound of their feet

pounding on clay and rock awakening the sleepers.

The praying man stands up and oddly smiles.

A Judaean peasant dressed in shawl, tunic,

and sandals kisses him.  Another frees his sword.

Tumult.  Mayhem.  What sense to make of it?

Is it abandonment?  Dissolution?  Betrayal

upon betrayal?  The chaos despair lets loose?  

To chase after the others, to save himself,

the boy–-‘neaniskos,’ not precisely ‘young man’—

strips off his linen garment–-a ‘sindon,’ whatever

that word might mean, ‘tunic,’ ‘shirt,’ probably

not ‘loincloth’––as if it were being ripped or torn

off him by a lusting soldier.  As wounds shed blood,

Roman torches drip red sparks onto the ground.

Stark naked, the boy flees, runs, runs faster into

the cover of night, the darkness of Jesus and his story,

and disappears, vanishes for good, as if forever.

Who is he?  Why did he irrupt into Mark’s

gospel only to escape, leave it as a stranger might?

I intend no comparison, analogy, translation,

allegory, or myth.   No similes or metaphors.  

No blasphemy either, though I cherish the heresies

lives conspire with to tell their ordinary stories,

those that happen every day, nothing miraculous

about them.  It is the enigma of why after

Jay died of a soft sarcoma, Bill from shooting

himself in the stomach, John by poisoning his body

with drugs, Luke from a car crash on 441,

so many friends lost to AIDS, too many to name,

the unseen many of history, why they abide, why

those that vanish from us stay after departure

not as ghosts, but lives unfinished at the end of it all.

I know what I claim in its strangeness makes no sense.

It is the inexplicable deep dark dwelling in things,

in moments, that holiness clings to like a lover

and will not let go.  It is the mystery of joy’s

sorrows, the ecstasy of the unknown torn from grief.

It is, yes, you, naked, unclothed, the night you

left me, this senseless semblance, the linen garment

you abandoned I hold now burning in my empty hands.

Bonhoeffer

 

                                                     He blesses

his killers as he climbs the gallow’s stairs, so long

imprisoned, years silenced, protestor, plotter against history’s

vilest tyranny, against its cruel laws.  It is wrong

to murder.  Yet he takes that sin, glory’s

ruin, upon himself.  No, not a saint, not a martyr,

not a holy man, he would insist.

 

                                           Religionless religion.

Enigmatic phrase he used to stir

up debate, feedom of belief, a reason

to question all creeds, to think everything

newly, back to the beginning.

 

What did he see or feel as the noose was placed

around his neck?  What music, if any,

did he hear playing?  Faced

by death, seconds left before he’s killed, did he see

God?  The beatitudes

were all you needed, he’d said.  Was he blessed?  Did he pray

them in the seconds before his end?

 

No one can say.  Solitude’s

what dying is.  You, me, they

who read him later, are trying to comprehend,

to understand what?

 

                                                Religionless religion.

The son

in Mark’s dark vision of his final moments on the cross,

abandoned by his father, forsaken,

cries out like a man in prison

who is guilty of no crime yet condemned to the loss

of his life.

 

                                    What if it was despair

he was silently confessing to?

 

What if it is your dying cry, the prayer

of your unwilling disbelief,

that in the end descends and blesses you?

 

 

 

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 eight 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), The Light of the Sun Become Sea, and most recently Vespers from Point Reyes and Antiquary. Peter was Danse Macabre's 2017 Artist-in-Residence. He and his husband live in San Francisco by the ocean.