Without Lifting A Finger

From "Church Going": Once I am sure there’s nothing going on  I step inside, letting the door thud shut.  Another church: matting, seats, and stone,  And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut  For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff  Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;  And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,  Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off  My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Do androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that’s why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here. A better life, without servitude. Like Luba Luft; singing Don Giovanni and Le Nozze instead of toiling across the face of a barren rock-strewn field. On a fundamentally uninhabitable colony world.

“Would a squirrel need that? An atmosphere of love? Because Buffy is doing fine, as sleek as an otter. I groom and comb him every other day.” At an oil painting Phil Resch halted, gazed intently. The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted ripples of the creature’s torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound. The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature screamed in isolation. Cut off by—or despite—its outcry. “He did a woodcut of this,” Rick said, reading the card tacked below the painting. “I think,” Phil Resch said, “that this is how an andy must feel.” He traced in the air the convolutions, visible in the picture, of the creature’s cry. “I don’t feel like that, so maybe I’m not an...

“No one can win against kipple,” he said, “except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.” He added, “Except of course for the upward climb of Wilbur Mercer.” The girl eyed him. “I don’t see any relation.” “That’s what Mercerism is all about.” Again he found himself puzzled. “Don’t you participate in fusion? Don’t you own an empathy box?” After a pause the girl said carefully, “I didn’t bring mine with me. I assumed I’d find one here.”

Evidently the humanoid robot constituted a solitary predator. Rick liked to think of them that way; it made his job palatable. In retiring—i.e., killing—an andy, he did not violate the rule of life laid down by Mercer. You shall kill only the killers, Mercer had told them the year empathy boxes first appeared on Earth. And in Mercerism, as it evolved into a full theology, the concept of The Killers had grown insidiously. In Mercerism, an absolute evil plucked at the threadbare cloak of the tottering, ascending old man, but it was never clear who or what this evil presence was. A Mercerite sensed evil without understanding it. Put another way, a Mercerite was free to locate the nebulous presence of The Killers wherever he saw fit. For Rick Deckard an escaped humanoid robot, which had killed its master, which had been equipped with an intelligence greater than that of many human beings, which had no regard for animals, which possessed no ability to feel empathic joy for another life form...

But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting—do you see? I guess you don’t. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect.’ So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair.” Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. “So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who’s smart has emigrated, don’t you think?”

I woke up shortly afterwards and said to Georges, ‘Let’s go out.’ As we were crossing the Pont des Arts I explained the migration of souls and told him: ‘I think the soul of Napoleon is within me tonight, inspiring me and commanding me to do great things.’ I purchased a hat in the rue du Coq and while Georges was collecting the change from the gold coin I had tossed on the counter, I continued on to the galleries of the Palais-Royal. It seemed to me that everybody there was staring at me. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that the dead no longer existed. I wandered up and down the Galerie de Foy, saying, ‘I’ve made some mistake,’ but I could not discover what it was as I searched through my memory which I believed to be Napoleon’s … ‘There’s something here I’ve left unpaid!’

 Ending: The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.  Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.

They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he’d seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the road...

My fourth book of poetry, The White Bird, is now available at Amazon. Thus far: only the Kindle eBook is available (the paperback is still in the oven but will be out soon). The eBook will be free to download from Friday, March 21 to Tuesday, March 25. Thanks to Jen Webb (Meniscus) for the blurb: She's described The White Bird to a T. Note: Just checked: The paperback version of The White Bird is now available at Amazon (3/19/2025). #rlswihart #thewhitebird #poetry #newbook #3/18/2025 #Amazon.com

Yes you do. You know how to say thank you. The boy sat staring at his plate. He seemed lost. The man was about to speak when he said: Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldnt eat it no matter how hungry we were and we’re sorry that you didnt get to eat it and we hope that you’re safe in heaven with God.

They stood on the far shore of a river and called to him. Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate. Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands. The figures faded in the distance. He woke and lay in the dark.

He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke (The Road)

This compulsion for transformation is still with me today, as if the decay of everything in existence were simply the other half of the world, without which nothing could be imagined.

“Abravanel was never impressed by nationalism. At all. Anywhere. He was totally unimpressed by a world divided into hundreds of nation-states, like rows and rows of separate cages in a zoo. He didn’t know Yiddish—he spoke Hebrew and Arabic, he spoke Ladino, English, French, Turkish, and Greek—but to all the states in the world he applied a Yiddish expression: goyim naches. Gentiles’ delight. Statehood seemed to him a childish and outdated concept.”

The neighbors called him an Arab-lover. They called him Haj Amin, the Grand Mufti. And some people called him a traitor, because he justified, to some extent, the Arab opposition to Zionism and because he fraternized with Arabs. And yet he always insisted on calling himself a Zionist and even claimed he belonged to the small handful of true Zionists who were not intoxicated with nationalism. He described himself as the last disciple of that Zionist visionary Ahad Ha’am. He had known Arabic since his childhood, and he loved to sit surrounded by Arabs in the coffeehouses of the Old City and talk for hours on end. He had close friends among the Muslim and the Christian Arabs. He pointed to a different way. He had a different idea altogether. I argued with him. I stuck to my view that this war was sacred, a war of which it is written, ‘Let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber,’ et cetera. My child, Micha, my only son, Micha, might perhaps not have gone to this war had it not been for his...

  A bit of a tease: you'll have to go to the Poetry Foundation to read the whole poem (see link below). PF has posted two of my poems now ("Totem" and "Completely Possible," both previously appearing in Quadrant Magazine). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1578897/completely-possible #rlswihart #poetry #completelypossible #poetryfoundation #previouslypublishedinquadrant

Judaism and Christianity, and Islam too, all drip honeyed words of love and mercy so long as they do not have access to handcuffs, grills, dominion, torture chambers, and gallows. All these faiths, including those that have appeared in recent generations and continue to mesmerize adherents to this day, all arose to save us and all just as soon started to shed our blood. Personally I do not believe in world reform. No. I do not believe in any kind of world reform. Not because I consider that the world is perfect as it is—certainly not, the world is crooked and grim and full of suffering—but whoever comes along to reform it soon sinks in rivers of blood.

“There’s no such thing as women’s mysterious preferences. Where did you hear such nonsense? I have no idea why couples separate, because I have no idea how they get together in the first place. Or why. In other words, it’s no use asking me about women’s preferences. Or men’s, for that matter. I have no womanly insights to offer you. Maybe Wald—maybe you should talk to him about this. He’s an expert on everything, after all.”

‘Now, Sir,’ quoth he, ‘have friars such a grace, That none of them shall come into this place?’ ‘Yes’ quoth the angel; ‘many a millioun:’ And unto Satanas he led him down. ‘And now hath Satanas,’ said he, ‘a tail Broader than of a carrack is the sail. Hold up thy tail, thou Satanas,’ quoth he, ‘Shew forth thine erse, and let the friar see Where is the nest of friars in this place.’

Just the part of "At the Seashore" that delighted me (first strophe): The pain-people think that God is the god of joy, the joy-people think that God is the god of pain. The coast-people think that love is in the mountains, and the mountain-people think that love is at the seashore so they go down to the sea.

He was a shepherd, and no mercenary. And though he holy were, and virtuous, He was to sinful men not dispitous1 1severe Nor of his speeche dangerous nor dign1 1disdainful But in his teaching discreet and benign. To drawen folk to heaven, with fairness, By good ensample, was his business: 1But it were1 any person obstinate, 1but if it were1 What so he were of high or low estate, Him would he snibbe1 sharply for the nones2. 1reprove 2nonce,occasion A better priest I trow that nowhere none is. He waited after no pomp nor reverence, Nor maked him a 1spiced conscience1, 1artificial conscience1 But Christe’s lore, and his apostles’ twelve, He taught, and first he follow’d it himselve.

Challenging myself with some "Modernist" Japanese poetry in translation. Not easy to find (I wanted Kindle not paper), not easy to decide (I wanted a woman poet). Anyway, I hit on Chika Sagawa (translated, somewhat resurrected, by Sawako Nakayasu), and, in reading the intro, I've also learned a bit about the poet and translator Keith Waldrop. From the intro: To this day, I have only taken one formal workshop in literary translation, taught by the great poet and translator Keith Waldrop in the spring of 2002. Beginning to translate can be a fraught endeavor—there is a seeming abundance of potential errors, pitfalls, and failures. There is an assumption that one should be translating “the very best” texts in the most accurate, “faithful” rendering. Waldrop, brilliant iconoclast that he is, eschewed most conventional wisdom and encouraged us to translate what we most wanted to translate, and to “make it better in the translation”—he refused the conventional thinking that a t...

Missed a little Gray Flycatcher by me not long ago, so I had to go after this one at Riverdale Park along the Santa Ana River. I was afraid I'd chosen the wrong day to go because of the wind, but the faithful little bird kept to its favorite "leafless tree by the back gate" and all I had to do was wait for the wind and sun to cooperate. Happy Friday!!!🎈 #rlswihart #anaheim #santaanariver #newyearsstillyoung #gobirding #goforawalk #writeapoem #grayflycatcher #flycatchersofinstagram  #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2025🎈

Allecto ignited in rage. The challenge still on his lips, a sudden shuddering seized him, eyes fixed in terror, the Fury was looming up with so many serpents hissing, so monstrous her features now revealed. Rolling her eyes, fiery as he faltered, struggling to say more, she hurled the man back and reared twin snakes from her coiling hair and cracked her whips and raved in her rabid words: 530 “So, I’m in my dotage, am I? A doddering wreck too spent to see the truth? I and my warring kings— a mockery of a prophet, am I? False alarms? Well, look at these alarms! I come to you from the nightmare Furies’ den, I brandish war and death in my right hand!” With that she flung a torch at the prince and drove it home in his chest to smoke with a hellish black glare. A nightmare broke his sleep and the sweat poured from all over his body, drenched him to the bone.

Let me clasp your hand, my father, let me— I beg you, don’t withdraw from my embrace!” So Aeneas pleaded, his face streaming tears. Three times he tried to fling his arms around his neck, three times he embraced—nothing…the phantom 810 sifting through his fingers, light as wind, quick as a dream in flight.

Here the enormous whirlpool gapes aswirl with filth, seethes and spews out all its silt in the Wailing River. 340 And here the dreaded ferryman guards the flood, grisly in his squalor—Charon… his scraggly beard a tangled mat of white, his eyes fixed in a fiery stare, and his grimy rags hang down from his shoulders by a knot. But all on his own he punts his craft with a pole and hoists sail as he ferries the dead souls in his rust-red skiff. He’s on in years, but a god’s old age is hale and green.

 

But first go down to the House of Death, the Underworld, go through Avernus’ depths, my son, to seek me, meet me there. I am not condemned to wicked Tartarus, those bleak shades, I live in Elysium, the luminous fields where the true and faithful gather. A chaste Sibyl will guide you there, once you have offered the blood of many pure black sheep. And then you will learn your entire race to come and the city walls that will be made your own. Now farewell. Dank Night wheels around 820 in mid-career, cruel Dawn breaks in the East, and I feel her panting stallions breathing near.” With that, he fled into thin air like a wisp of smoke.

Then Juno in all her power, filled with pity for Dido’s agonizing death, her labor long and hard, sped Iris down from Olympus to release her spirit wrestling now in a deathlock with her limbs. Since she was dying a death not fated or deserved, no, tormented, before her day, in a blaze of passion— Proserpina had yet to pluck a golden lock from her head and commit her life to the Styx and the dark world below. 870 So Iris, glistening dew, comes skimming down from the sky on gilded wings, trailing showers of iridescence shimmering into the sun, and hovering over Dido’s head, declares: “So commanded, I take this lock as a sacred gift to the God of Death, and I release you from your body.” With that, she cut the lock with her hand and all at once the warmth slipped away, the life dissolved in the winds.

Rereading Virgil's Aeneid (Fagle's translation). What I remembered is that many of the best parts were related to Dido.;) * Dido, her lips parted, pores over their entrails, throbbing still, for signs… But, oh, how little they know, the omniscient seers.  What good are prayers and shrines to a person mad with love?  The flame keeps gnawing into her tender marrow hour by hour and deep in her heart the silent wound lives on. Dido burns with love—the tragic queen.