4 Chthonic Praise-Chants & One Lament (in Mudlark)

 

 

Mudlark

has published 4 Praise-Chants (& One Lament),

from a new manuscript called

Tidal Flats,

for New Year’s Day 2021!

 

 

You can access the poems here.

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A few words about how the praise-chants came about: 

These poems are from a section of the Tidal Flats manuscript called Twenty Chthonic Praise-Chants & One Lament (after Neruda’s first book: Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair).

 

I wrote the bulk of these praise-chants in the fall of 2019, when overwhelming fear and sorrow were constantly moving through me from news about the current mass extinction taking place across the planet.

At the same time, I realized that deep grief is a form of praise for those things we have deeply loved (See Martín Prechtel’s The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief & Praise. With this in mind, the “chants” developed out of my desire to record my own personal ecstasy in the presence of so many things (seemingly) outside the human realm. 

 

 

That ecstasy includes the realm of death—the underworld, the depth of the earth itself, the chthonic, grief and praise—how they burst onto the senses together.

These are dark love poems to the natural world. You can find the ones recently published in Mudlark here.  

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Other praise-chants have previously been published by Cholla Needles, or will appear in upcoming issues of The Banyan Review and The Bitter Oleander.

 

Here’s one that previously appeared in Cholla Needles 48:

 

Honeybee Creator of the Sun Chthonic Praise-Chant

 

Bees in catmint hollows of lamb’s ears pour from the sun’s heart

First there was the hive and then wings pumping the sun into being

The leaf shattered sun-veins slick with sacrificial viscous hemolymph

So many thorax muscles beating wings 230 times per second

                                                                                    incomprehensible

 

Bees in the eyes nose face map the terrain in the brain

Ommatidia light detector that connects word to light connects fear to

            calm connects sight to insight

Ocelli-motion vibration detector of desert paintbrush

Firedark interior to embrace the fire-dark figures lurking inside the mind

My bee necklace folded into Broca’s Area

 

Bee creator of the sun bee alumni of the goldmother at the center

            of the hive

Fine-hair of the pollen-basket that cradles this world’s sex-dust

Tube-Proboscis taproot slips down plumb line to the center of the sun

Tarsal claws cling to hairy stems smooth stems to the narcotic language

            of Jimson Weed  to the Narcoleptic Black Cosmos to the haloed

            extravagance of Mexican Gold Poppies

Bee claws root in the petal’s slide leaving no trace and still able to bear

            the brutal torque of the earth’s turns

 

Dawn dawn and savory bee sound in waves rides the breeze

Antennae cleaners keeps bee-radio free of static

Radio to mars to planets that circle around the Orange Globe Mallow

            petals drooped open

Synesthesia-radio smelling the song of mites dying of old age inside

            a Datura trumpet hearing the mallow’s orange mouth speak

            to the moon

 

Bees the fire sewn into the lining of Pascal’s jacket

Bees the map of the field map of the brain

Bees longing for the sun for their mother

Bees the practicality of compound desire

 

Bee-shit animal smell of the hive of the belly of a creature asleep on

            the earth next to a stone shaped just like that animal

 

Twins in the sun

 

 

Happy New Year!

 

Four Chthonic Praise-Chants and One Lament

 

 

A Short-Short: Blackout on St. John's Avenue

Here's a short-short fiction, part of an interlinked manuscript-in-progress of short fictions called How the World was Made.

It comes from a time living on St. John’s Avenue in Jacksonville, Florida. Massive thunderstorms would shut down the grid in my section of town every summer. There were candles in windows, rats on the phone wires, shadows in doorways.

Mystery & Melancholy of a Street/de Chirico

 

I was also reading a lot of Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo. There were lines bouncing around in my head like:

Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the centuries
and light the axes gleaming with your blood.

I come to speak for your dead mouths...

(from "The Heights of Macchu Picchu", Neruda)

And lines like:

From the Champs Elysées or as the strange
alley of the Moon makes a turn,
my death goes away, my cradle leaves,
and, surrounded by people, alone, cut loose,
my human resemblance turns around
and dispatches its shadows one by one...

(from "October, 1936", Vallejo)

Love song/de Chirico

 

Blackout On St. John’s Avenue

Black out all down the street. Children are ghosts, moving through trees, phone poles. An old woman crouches in the darkness in front of an old folk’s home, smoking. The burning tobacco is trying to become a saint.   

           

Someone is slipping through backyard fences, along the tops of low walls. A girl who was playing hide and seek when all the streetlights went down, forgotten by her friends, quietly follows. They enter the alley behind the old folk’s home and the smell of cafeteria food – soggy okra, boiled meat, stewed carrots – fills the girl with pain. School, tomorrow. But what if the electricity’s still down? What would she do with her life if she didn’t have to go back to school?

           

Down by the river, the one who has been wondering how to go about putting out the eyes of all the children in his neighborhood – to save their innocence – skips a stone across black water.  The Tao Te Ching is right, he thinks, was right all along: “Give up sainthood, renounce wisdom.”   

Soothsayer's Recompense/de Chirico

The girl watches the figure open the back kitchen door of the old folk’s home. This might be a way out, she thinks. It does not occur to her that she might be following in the footsteps of a murderer or rapist. She slips through the closing door.

           

A man plays a harmonica by the river wall. Bearded eels rise up to the surface of the water to listen. The musician is not afraid. He thinks he’s invisible.

The girl follows the figure down a long hall, into a lounge where old men and women sit staring out a large picture window. They could be dead but for the reflection of revolving yellow truck lights shining in their eyes. The figure leans down and kisses an old woman full on the mouth, as if to swallow her. This is not what the girl expected. She feels she is watching something secret, not hers. Is this what death looks like? She runs.

           

Emergency candles shine in windows up and down the street. No one really wants the lights to go back on. Not right this minute. They want to give the manatees time to become mermaids. 
  

Melancholy of a Beautiful Day/de Chirico

The girl runs until she’s out of breath.  She looks down into the slush garbage collecting against the concrete river wall. Is someone waiting at home? A mother, father, sister? She cannot remember. She puts her finger up into the sky, touches the sound of a rat scurrying along the phone wire. 

(Previously published in Quarterly West)