July 7, 2003
"Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need? Part 1: Mire Widow's veils of steam rise from the blacktop highway. The sullen air still grieves its loss. Years ago, men drained the swamp to put through the old state road. It receded, but this was simply subterfuge: It doubled back on us and its brackish water seeped into the lowlands of the coastal basins of our minds. We may have burned back the swamp's dense, green canopy, but still its cacophony clutters our thoughts: Billboards, TV commercials, telemarketers, junk mail, spam swamp our awareness: Our identities lost amid its enveloping, virtual foliage: We have been sold the swampland of our impenetrable lives by fast buck artists; we are surrounded by the ersatz mating calls of the mass media, with its sales-pitch stridulations, its croaking come-ons, until the trilling of ubiquitous advertisements pervades our minds like the saturating emanations of crickets, frogs, and nocturnal birds through a summer night. Our own dreams have been diminished, have become as torpid as heat-dazed alligators, Our capacity for introspective thought has grown sluggish in this swamp, Our words, sodden with ennui... sentences slog through censorial silt then sink into aphasic muck -- but this is deceptive: Violence in a swamp comes suddenly and without warning -- then just as rapidly returns to the illusion of stillness. So reports the six o'clock news. The swamps congress of chaos has seized us where we don't live: In the hidden places within us that are kept secret even to ourselves -- There, we have taken to wearing the swamp's green canopy as a cape -- We have adorned ourselves with its small shards of sky like costume jewelry, a shattered sky we have only seen in glimpses through the dark, encompassing tree tops. Beneath the level of our preoccupied perception -- we are perpetually on the prowl, We wear copperheads, cottonmouths and coral snakes like mardi gras beads. Any obstruction we meet along our way only intensifies our coiled aggression. We have a head full of snakes: We hiss at traffic -- We will kill for the territorial imperative of a parking space. Near dawn, we stretch in our sleep, opening our arms, and, in an act unbeknown to ourselves, release a billion humming birds. Such vast numbers of them pour forth from us that they darken the morning sky -- and with the billions upon billions of individual flutterings of their billions upon billion of individually beating wings -- they create such an immense windstorm that it flattens the Walmart on the outskirts of town -- The very structure they drained the wetlands to build. Of course, everyone believes it was a hurricane that caused the carnage, but I know that explanation is only a comforting cover story -- because I saw the towering nimbus, comprised of tiny emerald birds, gather in the treeline then rise from the wilderness of our unlived desires. Part 2: Muck Now: We muck about, searching for an explanation for these perplexing days of terror and endless war, for these treacherous times of ascendant tragedy that have swamped us with anger and apprehension -- But there is not a granule of novelty in this news, all you denizens of history will avow: Only a variation of the same inanities -- that for brutal millennia, after brutal millennia -- the ignorant have attributed to the endless anger of the desert God, of his snit-fit Jihads, of his fever dreams of Armageddon, of his unceasing cosmic conflagrations enacted beneath a limitless sky.... We clutch these desiccated myths close to ourselves, as the swamp silently spreads around us, surrounding and devouring another dying empire, overtaking and covering us like the rock carvings of forgotten gods, now overgrown by jungle foliage. The veritable swamp stands in testament that we are deluded yet again: It whispers from the solemn waters of its black bayous that these unfolding events are unfurling as quickly as hot-house orchids for all the usual reasons, in all the usual ways: Do not look skyward, the swamp suggests, but deep within ourselves: For when we fear the exploration of the bewildering landscape of our own dreams, motives, and desires -- we attribute that wilderness to the actions of others -- and then we set upon one another, killing and being killed, until the moist ground is composted with corpses. We may even kill all of our enemies, but the swamp within cannot be subdued. It has woven our future in wisteria and draped our dreams with Spanish moss. It has sketched our portrait on its canvas of umber; there, our lives limned in lichen, the swamp avers: The impersonal leveling of the everyday narrative of decay may very well be the only omnipresent God. Born in the fury of a gnat-flurry, spontaneously composed and decomposed as an aria of rot by and for singing slime mold, our fate is the fodder of schadenfreude for sea slugs and refulgent mirth for fungus -- while prairie, ocean, tundra, mountain, and swamp swap antidotes of our never ending folly. But you didn't hear any of this from me, I'm far too mired in my own swamp of self-absorption to be allowed in on the joke. * (Excerpt from "The First Elegy," translated by Stephen Mitchell, Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1992) (back) · · · · · ·
America the 'beautiful' on Swans Phil Rockstroh, a self-confessed gasbag monologist, is a poet and a musician who lives in New York City (Manhattan). Rockstroh is co-author, with Chris Chandler, of Protection From All This Safety, (Portals Press, 1997, ISBN: 0916620301). He's had short fiction published in Silver Web Literary Magazine, Thin Ice, Brutarian, and poems included in a few anthologies, such as "From a Bend in the River." Owed royalties galore by various publishers, Phil Rockstroh sent his first contribution to Swans with the queasy relief that he would not be financially compensated for it. Do you wish to share your opinion? We invite your comments. E-mail the Editor. Please include your full name, address and phone number. If we publish your opinion we will only include your name, city, state, and country. Please, feel free to insert a link to this poem on your Web site or to disseminate its URL on your favorite lists, quoting the first stance. However, please DO NOT steal, scavenge or repost this work on the Web without the expressed written authorization of Swans. This material is copyrighted, © Phil Rockstroh 2003. All rights reserved. |
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