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| VIOLENCE | DEATH | GODS | WORLD |
Comment at the Burial
of Catherine de Grazia
A report on our condition vis-a-vis the deceased is in order.
The capital loss of three generations of memories is hard to bear.
The memorial deficit must be made up
by our compensatory production.
As for the Gross National Product, it is deviously calculated, foolish,
so that our loss will not appear on the books to affect
this nation's rate of growth, which in reality is seriously touched
by incidents such as the death of our dearly beloved.
For the loss measures who we are and have become.
Gone now is Catherine Lupo de Grazia, born eighty-eight years ago
on Illinois Street, City of Chicago, County of Cook, State of Illinois,
which State, she sang to us children, is "by the rivers gently flowing,"
and whose City commands the Great Lakes, as she displayed them
to us equipped with small shovels and buckets.
She was also called Callida, a rare traditional Sicilian praenomen;
it meant kali or good among the ancient Greeks,
and Kali the wild black Venus of the Sanskrit saga,
and wss called by the boys Katie Lucca, the protected
sister of the prizefighter, Kid Lucca, and too, Kate, very often,
and Mom and Nonny to the myriad, and, in her late, late show,
Curly Kate, joshing the octogenerian with her latest hair-do.
But curly she was when this century began;
then later her brown lustrous hair overlept her waist,
this being a mere sixteen inches around -- until one summer day
during a feminine revolt of the Twenties
and in the Village of Sheridan, she bobbed her hair,
but in her last days it was shaved above the right temple
by the surgeon boring into the high-pressure,
sub-dural-meningeal blood-trap
where she had bumped her head while hanging smooth her dresses
for she never knew but she would need to wear them one day.
(She was of a world to be controlled by saving, not spending.)
She worked in a general store for a while when young,
and then never again for profit -- too bad in a way:
she could have built a fortune as a salesperson of rugs and gems.
She was a woman, was Katie Lucca, who could stare down an Ayatollah.
Now with shyness and boldness she found a different man
to share her fortunes and walk along beside her forever.
She clapped her eyes upon the arrogant bandsman striding along
Milton Avenue, his chin in the air, carrying rolled up in one hand
the day's Tribune and in the other his clarinet,
marrying this world traveller to take her to places far away,
who moved her a few blocks north and nested down firmly,
only heeding the summer steam-engines whistling to Glen Park.
So she had to begin travelling at forty six,
and stepped it up at sixty-four, and
began to jet about in her eighties.
She stopped dancing after marriage because Dad,
he who lies here beside her, did not dance,
but she sang all the tunes of the day, and operas, too,
and had little boys to wind the gramophone
and tinker with the crystal set.
Her mezzo-soprano carried through the rooms
until an unnecessary tonsilectomy interrupted her,
nor later could she hear herself sing. She learned to cook
when she married, became a chef of renown, and let go of the
art as she could see less and chew little and was alone.
She wrote many letters, long on information, terse,
unpunctuated, forceful lines, full of her large character.
Her forehead was straight up, her nose straight-out and full-cut,
her eyes big and brown, her chest husky, her ankles trim.
She was strong and quick and smart as a whip,
alert and crafty as a fox,
nor smoked nor swore nor drank much --
no bad habits to speak of and voted right.
She wanted daughters and bore sons, of whom, whatever their
shenanigans outdoors, she made good housemen,
and was a helpful if willful sister to her friends and dozen belles-filles,
a live-wire to twenty-two grandchildren whose birthdays
she could faithfully account for, so that at least Nonny
was remembering them no matter how far they had wandered,
and she greeted her sixth great-grandchild, Catherine, only weeks ago.
Constrained by infirmities that closed upon her recently,
she found little to do and was bored. Even her photographs,
which she arranged around her as a barricade against
mindlessness, began to dissolve with failing vision and memory.
So she was ready to go, knowing what Dad said when resigned was true: "What else can you do?"
She departed, breathing hard, tight-lipped,
thrusting jaw, a child struggling against
the wind of a wintry street of Chicago.
Blessed have you been in life,
as you have so often claimed;
blessed will you always
live within and be with us.
*******
On Saturday, November 26, 1983 Catherine de Grazia (Mrs Alfred J. de Grazia, Sr.) died. She was buried on Monday at 13:00 hours at the Princeton (N.J.) Cemetary in a common grave with her late husband, Alfred. The oratio printed above was delivered at graveside by Alfred de Grazia (a son) in conjunction with the Episcopalian Service conducted there by her step-grand-daughter, the Rev. Lucia P. Ballantine of St. Luke in the Fields (Manhattan).
Who is to remember fat Joey
swiping from the ice wagon and
twisting his foot, whom I
led off into the alley and held his ice
while he rubbed his ankle? Who will help
my brother to feel the cold
black bars of the iron rail
in the hot summer afternoon shade
that we sat on and swung from and
rubbed rust onto our corduroys
from our reddened hands
while waiting for Dad.
Who will mourn my wife
when she dies if I die before?
Too, who will mourn my parents
and their parents and their sisters and aunts?
Who will be around to love
the children and the house where they were reared?
And the old books and scarred desk,
who will serve the living.
Nobody but D.N. herself will remember
the kiss on her nose on the bridge.
No one but A.E. the slippery bodies
off the rocks by Lake Shore Drive.
To whom can X turn to tell of her love.
Go away with your trillion stars and
expanding universe, have you ever realized
the trillion electric signals in the
boundless space inside a person?
All of them oneself.
Not detached space.
And how wonderful, too,
that a life must go on, vanish, and be replaced
by parallel systems only partly related.
To hell with the flesh. Our brawn
makes the will give way to unconsciousness.
The fortress of the memoried beloved
has to be defended by means beyond belief.
The love of life is not at all
what children think it to be.
The pride of flesh and fear of pain
surrenders as age moves in
when stronger reasons call and
cut the heart from the arteries of selfishness,
so one swells and aches with the fullness
of those who lived in his body's loves and rages.
And lived in his brain.
But now those who live in oneself
wouldn't live at all except in oneself once gone.
Issue me ten insurance policies,
term insurance they must be.
No -- better to sing in folk songs
that generalize at the least
though they cannot speak of her
and him particularly.
Who's to celebrate, mourn, love, think
of the departed once I'm gone,
it's my most useful function I now think as
countless ancestors have thought as they aged.
So, solved is the problem, and
do not try to involve me
in the service of the living,
granted they own my deepest sentiments,
secret experience, and private knowledge.
My duty is to the dead.
After so long alive your dying was
habitude that will not leave me
all my senses still are hurt,
sight dimmed, ears plugged, breath stale,
gait dragging, appetite unappeaseable,
it was not supposed to be this way.
I was to burst into tears, cry out,
look solemn and close your bank account,
pray for your soul
collect real and virtual insurance and
the solace owed to me for you.
I was not supposed to be lessened,
diminished, apathetic, a
sapling bent below a massive tree
I resent the love I bore for yu
for see now what you've made of me,
a young plant smothering
in your dense foliage.
His companions of life they sometimes died,
and he would not let them pass without a word --
spoken, written, often only thought.
Certain things about death concerned him.
Not that death happened, for a world
without death would require of one
an infinite capacity not to be bored.
Only gods are so stupid as not to be bored,
so a total design of the world would be needed.
But what of the sense of losing time,
all the time invested in them in their lives, lost.
Not the hereafter which he long before discounted
and consigned to nurses, children, and psychopathologists.
But the pain that gnawed at some and not others.
Call death the pleasure of Tristan or Freud's thanatos,
if it didn't take its pleasure on good people.
I've always wondered, "Why can't the bad people die?"
But Jesus Christ wondered at this too a lot.
Hate and coldness skipped in glee like Hitler in Paris
when death triumphed. Love, the most lovable
of human traits, was punished most.
But then there is also the bottom line
for this puritan and bookkeeping soul:
death was so great a peculator,
confiscating from each genration
its most precious assets, what was in
a person's mind and soul.
In a single lost breath, a great fortune
of the world flies out the window.
Song of the son of man is this
that some of us learn so much
and much more and then die,
and face as we learn the more
and as we die the young destroyers,
whether complacent or raging,
who know so little,
so that, on the average,
over all of history,
more dies out than is learned.
and if half the time,
we know more than before,
it is for reasons that have
little to do with the generations.
Sometimes the old, who know,
leave more than can be destroyed,
sometimes less. There is a cycle
to be added to all cycles,
two hundred million sperm
four billion times a week,
a few million older people
whose trillions of sperms of knoweldge
are on the way to eternal loss,
for man is more profligate than nature.
When a loved one dies
life's meaning fails by its part
and life is a coral of loves,
dead ones, replaced ones,those
newly arriving crying "present."
No one is fresh and whole
once a love has died.
But no life is less in meaning
if the part has been replaced.
(June 21, 1983)
Whiffs of air, a shot of drug, a tube of soup,
a white-breasted meter-maid intruding now and then --
intensive care -- to confirm her readings of your organs.
Their prognosis for you is poor you must know.
You don't speak at all well, though you may perceive,
while your intakes and outputs are disordered.
Your heart stands brave above it all,
like a proud cock refusing the falling night.
How I wish you might know of our plan for you:
That you shall be forthwith removed herefrom,
and placed upon your porch above the greening bushes,
overseen by a nervous flitting finch in the beams,
there to sit and listen while Immanuel speaks
of claims and confirmations in words so deep and drawn out
that in between them you plan how you will shape
a bust in stone, and next time play that passage piu adagio.
Fingering the fiddleneck and banging the chisel,
just and nice your big hands were
that shook my big hands roughly.
Your pot of tea is pouring
interminably into our china cups and, yes,
there was something else -- cold white wine of Canaan --
to fetch from the kitchen, but you said "Wait,
one moment, I want to hear this, what did you say?"
I shame to think of injustices done you,
munching buttered cakes and crackers with cheese,
boasting of stalking and snaring man's mind
as the very quarry was serving the hunters' breakfast.
Stroking celestial harmonies from your varnished box
and chipping life into becoming, feeding the animals,
then taking up the phone protectively, "One moment,
one moment, Immanuel is on the line,"
if he wanted to be on the line.
But I did kiss you, did I not, and hugged you, too,
whenever arose the chance in coming or going.
Don't get up; sip your own, your own cup of tea.
Why should it be yours to close the doors, draw the blinds,
bury the dead, argue the law, pay the taxes,
comb the archives, fight the battle, placate friends,
watch Hector's body being dragged around the Trojan walls?
Did you not earn your porch of peace even before the 1950 War began?
Sacrifices so many that not to utter the word was your greatest sacrifice.
Your modest scoffing will not avail
as we burn down the skyscraper of your pyre,
each floor a blazing bargain for
your first good, next good, and thereafter.
We have taken the matter out of your hands.
The last chord is not yours to sound.
When the guests set down their cups and leave,
you are to be held close by your loved one
while your ghost rises lightly through the thick dusk air of summer.
Professor Alfred de Grazia
Rue de Liberation
Saignon, Luberon, France
January 16, 1994
Dear Madame Lussier,
Our mutual friend, Hannah Blitzen, suggested that your peerless experience in the world of publishing might be brought to bear on an unusual project in which I am engaged. I would be much obliged if you would consider the potential merits of a book that I propose to assemble and edit, entitled "Death by Forty."
It may be unnecessary to explain that the book is intended as a memorial to the very many creative geniuses in recent years who have succumbed to the plague of A.I.D.S., and as a consolation to those who are afflicted with A.I.D.S. and the H.I.V. virus that precedes the full onslaught of the disease. Perhaps the friends and relatives of the victims will be just as apt to derive comfort from the book.
A list of persons eligible for inclusion is appended. None of them fell victim to A.I.D.S.
With all good wishes, I am, my dear Madame Lussier,
Faithfully yours,
????????????????
"Does not all history consist of making the dead speak as well as, and at times better than, they would have been able to do themselves alive?"
Joseph de Maistre
DEATH BY FORTY
Death respects no person. It is a universal equalizer. Still it has various ways of befalling one, so as to make everyone's dying different, although proceeding to the same switch-off of the brain. It has various causes, too, leading to the same end. Ranging from violent incident to most attenuated indirection, death can be considered to be always at the hands of others. Too, death can be always rationalized as in some way occasioned by the dying.
Death in the prime of life, in the middle of the stream, in the ecstatic throes of creation, maintains a special poignancy. Such is the impact of this list of creative men and women who died before attaining the age of forty years. It calls up from history some of the genius that has succumbed to early death, and suggests that someone with the calling tell of how the illustrious lived and, without stinting detail, how they died, and, in each case, to point to some excerpt of their work, whether in fiction, poetry, the sciences, music, speech, drama, dance, philosophy, or another field of discovery and creation, that reveals a concern with death.
Among them are several who are wicked, several who are not geniuses, and not heroic. There are reasons for carrying these exceptions, fame (or notoriety) being one of them. Military leadership edges into the group, also. The Nazi holocaust was a murderous devastation of budding genius. Poets here are many; poets die young, they say. But statesmen, business tycoons, and academicians fruit old and die older.
The present decades are witnessing an epidemic of fatal illnesses concentrating upon younger creative men. The epidemic, particularly in the form of an anti-immune deficiency syndrome, threatens a sizeable proportion of outstanding artists and intellectuals. To these, death comes most often lingeringly. It frequently comes carrying social opprobrium. It has sundered human ties of love, and, by casting suspicion of contagion on all sides, bids to erode the fragile levees of affection that contain the indifferent seas of contemporary society.
The book is dedicated to those who are about to die, those who have died, and those of the future who will be affected. It will, we hope, remind them, console them, inspire them, comfort them.
Akhnaton, Egyptian Pharoah, ruled ?1372-?1354 B.C.(also 10th cen.?)
Alexander the Great, conqueror and culture-hero, 356-323 B.C.
Alexander Pushkin, poet, 1799-1837
André Cheniér, poet, 1762-94
Anne Brontë, 1820-49, writer
Anne Frank, diarist, 1929?-45
Arthur Rimbaud, poet, 1854-91
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, illustrator and writer, 1872-98
Bob Marshall, Founder, Wilderness Society, d. 37
Charlotte Brontë, 1816-55, writer
Che Guevara, revolutionary, 1928-67
Frederic Chopin, composer and pianist, 1810-1849
Christopher Marlowe, playwright, 1564-93
Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, 69-30 B.C.
Commodus, Lucius Aelius Aurelius, 161-192, Roman Emperor
Croesus, King of Lydia, 560-546 B.C.
Jan Matzeliger, shoemaking inventor, 1852-1889
Edgar Allen Poe, writer, 1809-49
Emily Jane Brontë, 1818-48, writer
Evariste Gallois, mathematician, 1811-32
Federico Garcia-Lorca, poet, 1898-1936
Flannery O'Connor, writer, 1925-64
Francois Villon, poet, 1431-ca.63
Frank Norris, muckraking Chicago novelist, 1870-1902
Franz Schubert, composer, 1797-1828
Franz Kafka, novelist, 1883- June 3,1924 (41y)
George Gordon Byron, Lord, poet, 1788-1824
Georges Danton, French revolutionary, 1759-94
Georges Bizet, composer, 1838-75
Hart Crane, poet of industrialism, 1899-1932
Heinrich von Kleist, poet, 1777-1811
Henry Purcell, composer, 1659-95
Il Giorgione (Giorgio Barbarelli), painter, 1478-1511
James Dean, actor, 1931-55
Jesus, Christ (Christian Savior), ?4-8 B.C.-?29
Joan of Arc, Saint and military hero, 1412-31
John Keats, poet, 1795-1821
Judith A. Resnick, d.1-28-86, astronaut
Julian the Apostate, Roman Emperor, 331-363
Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), poet, 1846-70
Lou Gehrig, baseball star, 1903-41
Theodore Gericault, painter, 1791-1824
Malcolm X, black reconstructionist leader, 1925-65
Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, 1755-1793
Marilyn Monroe (Norma Jean Mortenson), actress, 1926-62
Tomasso Masaccio, painter, 1401-28
Matthias Grünewald, painter, 1500-30
Maximilien de Robespierre, 1758-94
Nat Turner, leader of American slave revolt, 1800-1831
Nefertiti, Queen of Egypt (mid-13 or 10th cen. B.C.)
Nero, Claudius Caesar Brutus Germanicus, Roman Emperor, 37-68
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), poet, 1772-1801
Olympe de Gouges, revolutionary feminist, 1755?-1793
Percy Byssshe Shelley, poet, 1792-1822
Pico della Mirandola, Count Giovanni, humanist scholar, 1463-94
Raymond Radiguet, novelist, 1903-23
Rupert Brooke, 1887-1915, writer
Steven Crane, short story writer, 1871-1900
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, painter, 1864-1901
Vincent van Gogh, painter, 1853-90
Vincenzo Bellini, composer, 1801-35
Wilfred Owen, poet, 1893-1918
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composer, 1756-91
Yuri Gagarin, astronaut, 1934-68
Samuel John Mills, U.S. missionary, 1783-1818
A shameful death was had by all,
and I should like, if you don't mind,
to stick a finger in the dyke,
to wedge a hard shoe in the door,
exercise you, misculate the proper moves
to help you die a dozen deaths
without a twinge of shame --
I must inform you by the by
of how the others will behave ,
shame upon shame it all adds up
such that death is a transaction
between you and others
never mind the dance with death itself,
a curious and illogical idea of
individualistic ego as if the care of the dying
should be with its cause.
We commit all the things that
we were raised and bred not to do:
vomit publicly peferably in pans urgently proferred,
fart without apology, cough impolitely,
clutch the arms of visitors,,
piss and shit incontinently,
scream, shout furiously,turn our backs,
rip our bonds, spit out food,
rove eyes wildly, pinch tight their lids,
point accusing fingers, denounce and deny,
confess bluntly, apologize excessively
in quavering voice, exude benignity,
and kiss with foul breath,
"Kiss me, Gridley."
The shame of dying is the worst part of it,
occurring because you do not live to die,
and avoid acting like dying except in a horror movie,
so what can be expected if unrehearsed,
shock to you and your unprepared ones,
all who should know better. My idea:
designate your death watch, strangers,
professionals, who will not mind seeing you,
as the star, playing along a tragic farce
with you as you never were,
so physically, psychologically, morally
degenerate.
And then, at the last moment,
Baffle the close and the far-related alike with a
Fat singlet droplet lacrima mortis.
She was brushing flies from his sticky face,
sobbing, muting cries of woe.
Small lizards perked up.
Hot noon glared.
Red rocks paled violet.
Two neighbors had come
and gone to tell the village.
He had descended into the well
to fix a fallen stone
that he had laid when young.
"Maria!" she heard him call,
having dragged himself up.
She saw him, pained and startled,
before he collapsed.
She believed that a viper
had met the strong old man
in the shadows of the well.
Now his clenched gnarled fists
couldn't brandish at the flies.
Pity the mourners, not the dead.
Mourning is worse than dying.
Calculating the sadness and tears,
the forlorn reaching for the dead,
I hardly dare to die. It would be
an imposition upon friend and family.
But they ought esteem more the
trouble I take to outlive them,
to keep them happy and chattering
about my faults:
"What silly thing will he do next?"
(Short of dying, of course,
than which nothing is worse
save the mourning that follows.)
(6 october 1913 - 28 September 1979)
Memorial service, Paterson State College
Livio Catullus Stecchini ---
Beloved child of illicit romance
a boy of lemons and flowers
looking from Catania to the Ionian Sea
harking the threatening Fascist drums
following by way of eight tongues
and all manner of measures
the route of Odysseus,
the royal passages of the pyramids,
the Enlightenment and Disillusionment
of modern man.
Tentmate of the corps of intellectual guards,
he stuck by his post to the very end,
weighing hypotheses,
until, not giving up, mind you,
he turned his face peacefully,
for a respite, and died.
Diminished, the great bear, by then,
so that he might, like a fairy child,
slip through the keyhole of the otherworldly door,
to where all measures cease
to where the few corpuscules --
or are they waves ? --
that sail about in abounding space,
organized in the peculiar human mode,
begin their free swim in eternity, infinity.
Beyond claim is Livio Catullus Stecchini.
Humanists, Catholics, Jews might find a
birthmark there but no sign of manacles.
No groupism, except this, our own
non - group, can identify his body.
What praise, post-mortem, for a man:
That none owns him, noone owned him
Such a great man, without claims and chains,
Never, nor, now, no more, ever.
We, the non-group, assembled once and for all,
attest to him, our man.
He was a professor
but this academy
and others equally distinguished,
were too limited for him.
They can boast that they
gave him a living, but
better ought they boast
that he gave them more
than they were set to handle.
Stoicly he stood
for the puzzled students
to milk his patience.
He had his beloved families
but roared when he sensed
the trap of familial love
and edged out the door
as daily the claims were assembled
for Livio to take care of this and that:
"Where are you going, Livio?"
"To the library --
To bring Immanuel a book --
To see Alfred."
Not really higher claims, but freedom.
He was a man without cliques;
you could take advantage of him.
He was powerfully observant
when his attention was called;
he acknowledged good food
between the artillery booms of his rhetoric.
He was restless, but satisfied for the
moment with whatever he found.
He was generous. His wealth of mind
is distributed around the world now
in my pockets and yours, without usury.
He was full of secrets that he
would give away to any interested party --
secrets of private lives, of history,
of science, of myth, of writings, of books.
He was full of politics
but emptied of actions
because he knew the way
and that none would follow it.
He would not set out to do good,
but good would ride on his back.
He would not seize upon a cause,
but would give honest words,
a comforting example, a plan of campaign.
His attention was everywhere.
You must seize his ear and eye.
For when you talk of General MacArthur
he is reliving the disgrace of Alcibiades.
And while you trace the route of Exodus
he is watching the Giants assault Olympus.
You receive your answer,
not where prepared to snare a reply,
but out of an Amazonian jungle,
or the labyrinth of Crete,
or from the back pages of the New York Times.
He could not hate,
agree as he might that,
in every particular,
this one is an evil, or
that is a bad idea.
He turns upon it,
curious, contemplative, even grinning --
it is agreeable, yes,
exterminable in abstraction,
but, remarkable, droll, typical
"as Cicero said when..."
"like the Maori tribes that...
like the Bible which..."
He was a writer of books
who published one,
all to the advantage of the precious pieces
in his manuscripts, articles and notes.
They live the life of the incunnabula,
and bits of papyrus,
the legends, the rumors,
the surviving numbers of baffling series
that he found, distinguished, and appreaciated,
like wild mushrooms of the forest floor.
We must supply the ending:
"Pythagoras said, whom Plato cites,
as Plutarch quotes,
which Stecchini renders --
but here the manuscript breaks off.
And he is right, now as before.
The book is never fully wirtten,
as the play never ends,
except by convention, which insists
upon control of the world,
lest we all die.
If we could control the world,
you would live forever, Livio,
a never-ending book
for us to read,
whose pages of warmth and surprise
move through all cages of time
to all ports of call.
There we visit the gods,
and the fishwives.
Anchors aweigh!
(In memoriam, 22 November 1987)
Nathan Leites, now deceased, we lament:
Stupendous masterpiece of artificial intelligence!
Captious capolavoro di Europa Centrale
Spectral dejà agé graduate student eternal,
freezing grey-garbed in dark grey Chicago
grey on grey against our buildings' stone,
abandoned by his Harold gone East to herald
psycho-socio-political science,
so now sudden Master of the Class,
let to thrust deep down the Freudian alley
of unconscious defenses undermining
with hyper-marxist analytics the class
structures of Nazi ascent to power.
Furrowed brows raised off popping eyes
always surprised behind thick round glass
in an agony of honest intellect out-poured,
intense shrill high voice insists we believe,
yet not, "this is only hypothesis",
what matter perfect-seeming, unquestionable,
from all imaginable standpoint addressed,
unclear proportionate to our descent
from genius on a cataract of caveats, lassoos
tripping bucking verbal mustangs,
hot Wittgenstein!
The lower middle classes, ah, woe, poor
Kleinemenschen, how they suffered in his
analytic structures shown by gesticulation
to be founded upon repulsion at the sodden
mucking about of the sullen lumpenproletariat and
reacting erection as tall as King Kong's
athwart the Empire State Building (then tallest)
and shouting vigorously "Sieg heil!"
Against the obscenity of metaphor
"non-poetic" was he, "quote," "unquote",
his lelf-hand fingers ticking off the air
to one side, shoulder-high, his right side fingers
likewise just a split second later,
the ikonic gesture of an awkward man,
moon-faced in a glistening veil behind the glass,
the most graceful gesture of an ungraceful man,
snapped shut in a double-breasted suit of grey,
as I said, but somewhere trained by someone
Prussian to stand tall and walk straight,
It embarassed me to see him erect amidst a
social gathering stretching his neck like
a fully dressed tom-turkey contemplating
a barnyard of busy fowl to be plucked.
This master chef yet over-baked his crusts,
such that when all was said and done it seemed
he was unmoved, inconsiderate, otiose,
exact pure taste to deny rational standard,
his enjoyment bubbling out of sight inside.
He had small faith in people hence the human
in us had to dig hard to find
people in his people and people in himself.
His social self peeked out only long enough
to show it was alive and perhaps would reappear.
An expert, believer in experts, who told
his Student sitting in Steinway's drug store
on Fifty-seventh street of Chicago,
June 21 of Nineteen Forty-One, that come ninety days
the Soviet Union would collapse for good,
over the graves of Stalin's myriad victims,
disdaining that a people could fight so well
when goaded by a cold, cruel, racist foe.
But would the people of the Union have fought
had their incompetent bueaucratic leaders been alive
and their invaders less ruthless? No one asked.
Then later on he formed a rational model of
Stalinoid politburos to conquer the world,
of delicate nuances from a croakaing frog.
The chaotic bundle of neuroses called
democracy could not survive with its crowds
who could not afford psychoanalysis --
all this which I disbelieved from hope.
Indefatigable, unfailing, unerring connoisseur
of the arts of words, of music and paintings.
Secret-clutching private man, the cryptogram
of his heavy tome on Russian ideology
and literature was the ecstasy of experiencing
aesthetics beneath the jouncing bed of Lenin-Stalin
but sorting it all so as to show
there had been no fun in the doing
and was therefore properly paid to do it
by his lucrative anti-communist office
that cried "science" and gave laisser-passer
to the subtlest and flimsiest evidence
of the difference between us and our foe.
He would teach the hangman how to tie his knot.
Never not even in his guru Harold
had one been found to express so absolutely
any form but analysis, socio-,psycho-, whatever.
If you were lucky, in all good humor,
he would tear your work to shreds and
praise you for having created what was worthy to destroy.
He was worth editing, you must already know,
and needed it, his greatest fault being what he felt
he could assume in the best of readers -- not so --
and left large gaps between the lines.
"Homo lupus hominis." wrote he for me later on,
when the shoe was on the other foot, and showed
complicatedly why this would be so
in freudian terms but unfreudian unclarity, which I
intelligized for its intrinsic worth to repay
his apt dissection of my essay in propaganda,
America's Future if England Falls, which was his job
to write at first but foisted upon his student,
unbrooding, unfearful, pragmatist and optimist,
foolishly prone, wot he, to the sin of commitment.
Still this student could never do for him
so well as him for me except
to say just that precisely here.
His Digital Excellency, world-class robotry,
beloved as only bright students can love,
ones indiscriminately spewed from melangistics
of emotions and corrupted smirking, swirling
mental shennanigans of the normal world,
barely filtered by ordering, levelling schools,
encountering a creature intellectually rigorous
and passionately dispassionate, the divine indifference
of science sparking in our primordial dust cloud.
Breathing our breath, yet of a species threatened
with extinction. Could he not have fixed himself
to last forever? So that inhuman memory
would reacheth to the contrary notwithstanding?
(For her memorial service)
Laura never ceased being the pleasant girl
I met two score and three-odd years ago.
"Gal" -- slang, obsolete, as in
"Laura was a great gal!"
Then was we Aided America by Aiding the Allies,
several years ago and constipated peace anon.
"Hey, Laura," as Fletcher might say,
"Remember Bill and Bob,
Emmett, Sidney, Oscar,
Hart, Stud, Ned, Al and all?
We're with you -- Always were, in our own way.
No sexism meant. Remember Priscilla, Kate,
Beattie, Jill, Adele, but I'll stop reciting
this war memorial. We're with you too --
Always were, in our own way."
Everyone says "Why didn't you give me a call?"
But that was your own way:
"Don't call anybody about anything important."
Long did she shield us beneath the American Thing,
Turning the brute into fun to observe,
Watchperson of surficial society
Syzygial with Hollywood and the Hill.
Discombobulating philosophers right and left.
A killing job, as you can see.
There's so many actors,
There's so many pols,
The noted, the famous, the Superstars,
So many media events,
and so many deadlines.
Whence the fingers curl at the keys
and the keys clack like fall's fallen leaves
and the reinforcements fail to arrive in time,
So the head drops,
She died at her typewirter.
When she was young, buxom and jolly
We frolicked midst ye cadaverous news;
we, too, were indisputably young then.
She was enthusiastically in charge
of her sphere and freed from envy about ours:
"You're great!" she has told us
in the latest slang for "great."
Chargé d'Affaires at our World of Yak
before retirement.
As Laura was changing for the better (noone is perfect),
the mean mean world watched
for the weak instant of change,
then called up the seductive option of death.
You're a loss to us losers, Laura. What will we do?
We died a little, too, and
will be catching you on the turn;
the Time is inconsequential
You've had your laughs;
Your problems are over.
SkÖl. Stay well, ol' gal.
(In memoriam)
Harold! Greetings!
Snifting bubbles, are you, this season,
in the land of the tall drinks
Are they pouring you doubles?
Come back to Chicago, Vienna, Nanking.
Sounding like we know it all,
in tones serene as your very own,
We slump in low divans
and hunch over brown tables
Spilling smoothly the news about how
you walked upon the Earth once.
Wecome back to Washington, New York and New Haven;
your train is set to run on time.
You said straight what you saw
without he-haws, oinks or meows,
No winks, curtsies, or knotted fists
No cow-eyes or stony glaze.
Viel Blitzen, kein Donnern,
No "Ho-ho-ho."
Pleasant, agreeable hero of our times,
"if-then" propositions cornucopiously emitted.
Two pounds of value-sharing for all men alive.
Mix one pound of deference, a dash of
income, well-being and safety added to taste,
Be generous with enlightenment.
Now that you're not in it,
More Seasoning is needed.
Some of the gusto is gone.
In-put, out-go.
Hearing the world's secrets and ours nevermore,
You heard them all, and those to come
that we must explicate ourselves.
Thanks for configurating the futuristics.
Please to stay warm at the North Pole
under your gray hair behind your
glasses in your midnight coat.
Your gloves are too thin.
Come again, if you get the chance --
The New Year is here.
So long, Saturn!
(In memoriam, November 7, 1979.)
Who are we to say but
Juergens' friends who call goodbye
and wish some testimony from
the world he leaves and joins concurrently:
Charges on the cosmic spheres should spark,
the electric sun confess its theft of power,
the academic hulks should shiver,
astronomy and physics classes suspend.
Tall sails of new bold abstraction
moved quietly his boat of exigencies
carrying family, offices, friends.
Diffident teacher calmly correcting.
His papers stand in orderly files,
called to attention for the future salute.
Magna cum laude his life's work ends.
Step by step,
death marches in slowly,
Furled flags of life,
no whipping winds,
no colors flashing at the horizon
from North to South,
rolling sombre clouds.
No music for our age.
No six black horses.
No carriage shining.
No blacked-garbed sons.
*
Open the ovens;
wheel in the box.
Death feeds one more time
the primeval holocaust.
Burn the flesh away from
the cold ground around.
Let the ashes drift.
*
Harken far away the bells
of his old village,
that he rang as a child,
and now the bells wheeze
and gasp false in shiny our town.
*
Who can master the going?
He went well,
all things being equal, as they say,
though rarely can it be said;
vast failure of clever humankind,
this business of death-dealing.
*
Dying is like being born:
we have near total lack of control
of what's happening to us
yet a realization that it is important.
*
Death of a musician.
No measures of worth,
from presto to maestoso
goes the metronome.
*
I knew it would happen in January.
I knew it would be icy cold
a blizzard like in old Chicago.
And I knew some damned inconvenience
would mar the perfection of death.
And I knew he would go before her
for the stronger precede the weaker.
(But unknowing the weak are the strong.)
I knew that I knew
sociology and psychology
and I knew physiology and
most dreadful of all -- religion--
comparative sociology and anthropology
of the great horns of screaming masks
and triumphant death shouts.
So what was there to be surprised at?
And how and why sorrow?
*
And when you died
I learned what could
not be done
to die when and
where you pleased.
*
By fifteen minutes it could
have been home and perfect.
By so little it was cold
and bare in a hospital.
An autopsy was granted,
he wouldn't have cared, strange
that he never pretended altruism,
but gave it all as a duty to give.
*
We planned well,
but might have saved our minds
for prayer and scanning heavens.
*
Everything can be right and ready
except the trifle that
can undo it all.
*
By dint of foresight and
all the gear of hospitals
we missed giving you
the concentration and
confrontation of
your dying in peace.
*
Smells of a father
sights of a father
voice and sounds and touch
of a father,
mind of a father, secret life
of a father, family life
of a father, public life,
professional life,
life after death, ah, yes,
only that lacks;
*
embarassment of sons
pride of sons
respect of sons
secureness of sons
superciliousness.
*
Fierce, proud, obstinate,
handsome, clean.
The woodchopper,
the conductor,
the hands and arms that reach out
unlimitedly
to direct, express,
call in, silence, back away,
demand, console, smoothen.
*
moderato assai,
senpre piu forte,
allegro ma serio,
*
ebony tube of the clarinet
sonorous saxophone
der Fliegende Holländer
l'inglesina
nina povera mangiatura
in a persian marketplace
*
diminuendo al fino
life so be it emptied
of one who loved life
imperceptibly gone.
*
Faint harmonics hum that
comeone was calmly, cooly
living a good life and
we didn't recognize
this fact of facts
whilst we were grinning,
grinding away,
we fearfully irritable,
arrogant epigoni.
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