Fishing the Sun with the Moon

Reflections

(In original 1985 “Apollo” version, this poem followed, rather than preceded, the two subsequent poems entitled “Reflection.”)

Look, the light is there
Lovely
On the wind that flutters
The leaf
Gently yielding
To the ground
Pulling, pulling
On the moon
Tugging, tugging
On the tide
Sweeping, sweeping
A small fish
Toward the shore
Where waiting
A lone boy
Casts a silver line;
Look, the light is there
How lovely.

P.N.

Reflection

It is true that I have been with men
More Apollonian than you.
They are everywhere
In America–
Large and Golden under
California orange ads–
All of them cloned from
The same sturdy hybrid
Of Celts and Jutes and Angel – faced Saxons,
Bred smooth of any contours.

And I am still dazzled
By my husband’s grace,
Even more so as I see
It shine in the face
Of his child whom I
Have carried in my womb.

But it was not enough and this
Is what you cannot comprehend,
Never having seen yourself
Lying on the bed
After making love to me,
Transformed – but a boy,
His eyes full of all the feeling that chokes
Unspoken in his throat:

You cannot know you are more
Beautiful than any of them;
Believe the looking glass in me.

N.N.

Reflection

A little crab upon the sand
Stepped and walked across my hand;
Two creatures meeting in the sun
Two symbols of a vague someone.

P.N.

Rites

In Solitude
On Father’s Day,
With your own sons and father,
In the garret
He’d imagined
In his patriarchal mind’s eye,
Where you now lived,
Another Jew in exile,
You began to poem
The dream that called
To me
Short distance
Across the ages,
Millenniums between our races.
Somewhere inside me
Stirred those pagan Anglo-Saxons–
Primal
Archetypal–
Wailing at the Walls of Stonehenge.
Somehow
Your ancient Gods touched mine,
Both our feet
In want of planting.

N.N.

An Arab Living In Israel Speaks — June 2nd — Meyer Levin’s Column

“Nobody ever gains–
Not the winner,
Not the loser;
Not the Arab,
Not the Jew;
Not you, not me.
War gives nothing;
Do you hear? Nothing.
What do I want of war?
What do my Children want?
Bread and life,
That’s what we want,
Bread and life.
What good bread
When there is no life?
I ask you, what good?
Why can’t we leave
Each other alone?
So you have your God
And I have mine.
So you live on your side
And I live on mine.
Who is right?
Not even the stars
Can tell us.
Why must we
Be divided
When we can be friends?
Why? Can you tell me why?”

P.N.

The master mirrors the questions of his student
The disciple admires himself in the master’s eyes.

Who sees the truth?

P.N.

Exchange

When you said, “Memsahib?”
And I answered, “Yes?”
Did you understand,
Did our smiles
Speak over strange sounds?

P.N.

Mad at love

Ah Love, with all your heavenly wrath,
Nothing could make me long for you more,
Than your prolonged absence from my path.

Ah Passion, with all your promise yet to pay,
Nothing could make me listen closer,
Than your loud voice beguiling far away.

Ah Man o’ Mine, with your scowls so free,
Nothing could make me sooner see your smiles,
Than your bold teeth gleaming in my memory.

P.N.

Dissolved in the Heat

Dissolved in the heat
Of your integrity
I bow to your rim
As lips to porcelain
A distant limit
Then silently Secretly begin
To eke away.

How comes this
Rare anomaly?
Such scarce china
Fired and cooled
Should cup my Simple herbal brews
Without augmenting
Loss–a level sinking.

Alas ’tis flaw unseen
Coiling delicately
Round the handle
Like a snake
In lair awaiting
With gravity
The liquid molecules of my respect–
English rites
Of etiquette–
To leak through
Coarsened pores.

N.N.

A Native Son Returns

The Mountain came from God,
The God is the Mountain;
This my father told to me,
This to my son shall it be;
And he will pray to Kilimanjaro,
The Shining Spirit will hear his sorrow.

The Mountain is the Life,
The Life is the Mountain’
Upon its peaks live moon and sun,
Along its back the rivers run;
In its forests, waiting, my brother’s fears,
In its lakes, rising, my people’s tears.

The Mountain is the Dream,
The Dream is the Mountain;
With a roar the icecaught leopard will wake,
With a rumble, the base of the throne will shake;
Then, oh then, will the hunters leave our land,
Then, unbound, will Kilimanjaro stand.

P.N.

Strokes of Sun

I
Daily you say
You are staying.

The words are like
My mother’s hands
Upon my livid
Forehead, placating
With their touch as the
Accompanying
Voice is swallowed
To smother its
Treble of fear.

II
Yes, Yes, I cry,
Glad to be soothed
For now, But what
About later?

Impatient child
That I am, I
Long to know the
End of such febrile
Consummation . . .
And whether or
Not I’ll survive.

III
I hear your words,
But the quiver
That holds your voice,
Shot in the arm’s mark,
Cannot ever lie:

Artemis, huntress, Goddess of the Moon
Watches my fever
From night, afar,
And lets run the
Course, in silence.

N.N.

What is it Not

You wait
And you wonder
What you wait for
Will it come
And it won’t
It will never come
And still you wait
And know
It will never come
What you wait for

P.N.

Fourth of July

Make love to me before we speak
And perhaps we shall save a portion
Of that perfect trust our bodies have for
One another when they touch, embrace.
Then there are no ultimatums that
Hang like pendulums of death above
Those caves where we secrete our fears.

In bitter moments I think of how
Little you have given me, our
Realities far too labrynthine for
Territorial extortions or
Any treaties. But the gift of
Your hands opening my thighs has been
Without restraint and I understand that
Our love has never known condition.

N.N.

Pagan Orgy

Come, with your Golden Horn fill me
That I may be your Cornucopeia.

The Viking drinketh from same shape cup
Which he may not replace ’til
Each draught of mead is consumed
For if such orgy cup is placed
Face down, drops perforce are lost.*

When at last the yellow corn
Doth headlong rush, the Viking
May be certain each drop of his own gold
Will fill his chosen vessel
And mighty will be the limb.

Then Unicorns their horns will shed**
And the Sacred Beast will die
But the spirit remaining
Will regenerate inside and
Cornucopeia
overflow with fruit.

N.N.

*An orgy cup, shaped like a bell, must be held upright or placed face down; if not it topples over.
**Legend has it that the Unicorn will die once its horn has been shed.

Afterword, from N.N.

There has been no conscious attempt on my part to imitate the themes and style of my mother’s work. Most of my poems were written one hectic and obsessive Winter before I had ever read her poetry, stashed in a box in the attic for ten years since her death. When my writing “possession” completed itself, I knew I was ready to go upstairs and open that box. Both the similarities and the differences have astonished me; and I know it would have made my mother happy to see that through our poetry, I have become my own self.

For those who believe I take myself too seriously, I would like the final verse in this volume to be a rhyme quipped my by son when he was in the third grade; it is good advice and not out of keeping with witchy thinking:

Black is the color
Of ink from a pen
With Black you can
Write it again and again!

R.C.

Bibliography

Barzini, Luigi. THE ITALIANS, Athenium Publishers, New York, 1964.

Frazer, Sir James George. THE GOLDEN BOUGH, Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, 1922

Graves, Robert. THE WHITE GODDESS, Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1948.

Hamilton, Edith. MYTHOLOGY, Mentor Books, New York, 1940.

Jong, Erica. WITCHES, New American Library, New York, 1981.

Murray, Margaret. THE GOD OF THE WITCHES, Oxford University Press, New York, 1947