Photograph by Brian Price |
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by Paul Nelson squats, a granite helmet, short walk from the Lion Gate. Inside, thoughts are bees beneath a chalice. I want constellations, not this gloom. I want Pegasus pacing Ptolemy’s arena, bears trudging …a crab, a scorpion scrabbling a translucent shell, hell, any size moon. After all, eight feet into a Spartan tunnel that women trudged for water during siege, where spies slipped out and back at night, I’d heard a hymn, harmonic in a screen of green flies, and froze, turned back, happy to travel westward toward the future. On Omaha Beach, shawled ancien, Vichy, Resistance, sat beached in half-buried canvas chairs, attended their small dogs and mused on the Channel’s oiled blaze, amused by tourists trudging from the one upright bunker, blinded and speechless, but relieved by romance, the glistering history: a gray, toy fleet positioned with a croupier’s stick on a sea-gray table for forty, tiny red lights for barrel flash, an audio-taped rendition of the volcanic concussion of big guns, loud as the Beginning and hallowed End, bodies washing ashore, boys, men sheared by MP40 machine guns, precise Karabiner 98K’s. I was still thinking of the Pantheon in Rome that Spengler called “the earliest of all mosques,” a hole in its head, a beam shining down over bent men, eyes on geometric patterns in their carpets. There, below one more marble Virgin, Raphael’s and Maria’s shadowed niche, strewn with aging flowers art students toss. They’ve already been in love. The blinding absence overhead flues a warm, ruined mind, the stone floor a hard place for assignation, more resignation …Conrad’s “sacred inertia” like the mendicant Brothers, past awe, way past, shrewder than tourists like me at Normandy, skeptically content in the gaggle hearing the recorded lecture’s overture, ein Schaferhund barking at the sea, June 6, 1944, waking Oberleutenant, who, sleepy, peered through slits in 8 ft. thick concrete at the coming abstraction, 1100 steaming ships before his face turned bright, as if he’d seen Helen. English earphones cackling, a slow flag of miscible causes waving in my stomach, I conjured a mushroom revelation of the Nazi mind snuffing the whole invasion, the tsunami drowning the vines de la Loire, irradiating oyster parks in Bretagne. Einstein told Roosevelt the Germans were close. I remembered so many capitols with severe busts of men revered or despised, some with eyeballs blank with will and “dignitas” …some with pupils drilled, later-minded men, open to the lower world, and bored enough to let light fly in. St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s domes float, light infusing warily the lens of censer-ed atmosphere, smoky transepts where one stares up with chary intention, revealed in the unrevealing glow, like a diver on the deck of the settled Arizona, wraiths trapped inside, sixty feet down, and looking up at loops of stars floating among so many plumeria lei. Every morning more seekers, eyes wide, enter the sway-backed memorial, or wander the decks of The Missouri, as they do San Pietro in Vincoli under stern Moses’ ivory eyes, pupils regressively set with the ferocity of Judgment, lasers in the “world-cavern,” where heroes and wise men speak, blind with premonition. Did Moses daven for revelation, say, the Johnston Island blast? July 9, ’62, 800 miles south of 14,000 crosses in Punchbowl Cemetery? Near midnight, ghoul green light rose into the atmosphere, x-rayed Diamondhead, Waikiki, Ewa and Waianae, then fell in bloody runnels to the sea while the few of us who came to watch sat on our fenders and wept. Doves, cardinals, mynahs sang for dawn. And a child sang on a radio from Waikiki. Perched on sandstone pedestals and ledges in “la salle du frigidarium, gallo-romains du Cluny,” shriven heads, no talking, whacked, toppled from west lintels of Notre Dame, crashing on the stairs, the cobble yard, expressions honest as concrete, seem to be listening, within the perfect acoustics, for their own silence … …maybe some passionate Latin, the Carmina Burana. Patricia Lei Anderson, crowned Miss Hawaii, ’62, at the Waikiki Shell, for being beautifully bland, sang “un bel di,” saw that night’s dawn as glory while well behind the Normandy beachhead from easterly nations, Gastarbeiter, speaking in tongues in tiny, bead-curtained rooms, were breeding again …new, sullen life into the stale fervencies of Europe. Another god rising? In Mumbai? Oberleutnant, in his wheelchair in Dusseldorf, his teeth flowering in a pickle jar, peers into his “gossip’s mirror,” mounted on his window frame, back down the narrow street, counting smocked Turks, arm in arm, swarthy and illiberal, taking a short cut to the morning shift at Opel. All that night I puked in one of the derelict bunkers listing in the sand …suspect, delicious shrimp, snails, vin rouge with mushy cork near Mont-St-Michel. Altered by ammonia, the sweetening remains of my own and others’ urgencies, condoms and sticky shards, a kind of peace rose in the hollowed me, feverishly happy to hobble, coil, shaking, into the back of my ‘66 VW camper bus, to finally sleep off the constant, explosive life of the species. But the next generation came, revving and shrieking, swerving dirt bikes on the sighing dunes till daybreak when another silence came. I boiled coffee, tried bread, watched a pleat-faced crone struggle down the ochre beach, her mutt straining for a puffed gull with a twisted leg, for beer bottles and plastic snack sacs like jellyfish. A man with beret, slowly steering a beat-up green tractor, hauling a rake, rowed sand into waves of wrack and trash, the tines scratching at reaped souls buried there when LSTs jammed in shallows on concrete teeth. I thought of the Greek fleet, hauled out, wallowing for years while Greeks killed each other, bored, in love, waiting for Helen’s gates to open. The guide arrived, barefoot in her park uniform, carrying her pumps, unlocked her attraction and joked, “aus mit, Fritz,” to the crone’s terrier, that replied by cocking his short, white leg of truce, drenching the corner of the epic door. Headed to war, Agamemnon’s cranium burred, rape his lying cause, and justice for his brother. Victorious, home, he bathed in a marble tub. Buses, tumid with sweet-sour diesel, heaved into the lot. Old folks, arm in arm, women with fixed hair, stagger to the graveyard, the bunker, the veterans in peaked Legion caps, embracing, moved to tears to see again the lethal site, who, exhausted, were carried away by Mercedes and Volvo, long, cushioned, air-conditioned caskets within which old pains, like night-blooming cereus on O’ahu opened, flush in the dusk of spirit, under half-moon lamps above each seat, dusk for which I stayed but not another day imagining ships, seeing so many travelers enthralled by a light show, or Oberleutnant’s dove-gray uniform, hung on its tree for these biddables to see, supposing he, stranded inland, pushing his uppers into place, really had no story, no love to tell. The king’s tomb, all that stone overhead, dampened a bus load of teachers from New Hampshire who bought slides of the gates, the tomb, to show on a classroom screen, boring their Seventh Graders, Briseis’ age, barely young for love stories, the boys verging on Patroculus’ charm, busy, busy with the spring trip to D.C., the promised Oval Office. |
Time Line by Dan Ruhrmanty |
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