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EUGENE NARRETT |
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EUGENE NARRETT |
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Prof. Eugene Narrett received his B.A. in Art History, and his B.A. and Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature, from Columbia University. He has extensive experience as a teacher, administrator and scholar, who has taught a full range of literature courses and other subjects including “Modern Poetry of Spiritual Seeking” “Ideology and Values of the West from Machiavelli to Post-Modernism,” “Romanticism and the Mystique of Terror,” and “Enduring Themes in Great Literature.” His articles on the situation of Israel and the West have been widely published and many are available on his website, www.israelendtimes.com. He has published four books: Israel and the Endtimes: Writings on the Logic and Surface Turbulence of History; WW III: the War on the Jews; Gathered against Jerusalem; and Israel Awakened: A Chronicle of the Oslo War. The following poems are taken from his collections Truth’s Earthen Face, On the Way to the World to Come and Wanderings of Soul.
from Truth’s Earthen Face
To the silence of an empty room
They hunted me back home:
A cloud that had exhausted rain;
A flower after its completed bounty;
A man past middle age:
Every thing that lost or loses place,
I was.
They’d scented my fact of difference
And marked me down as prey,
For sacred dirt: excised, I made them whole.
I heard the screams of coded condemnation,
Too certain what they meant
To shed the agonies of soul
Whose source I was.
I sit now in a pleasant suburb
Amazed at what I see:
My self, by them defined, an old
Rogue elephant with no place but to die.
Being human, my hero work means
Confronting terror, so I clear my throat
To speak the thing I was.
I see my border guards
As apparitions, from the tower I see
My companies collapsing, and my nation
Shaken like a fine tree in unseasonable storms.
No time for good deliberation,
No time now for soul to know or be
The way I was.
At bay in my garden with restive flowers,
I find harvest’s come too soon.
The swarthy sickle man, -- is that he,
Or she, and what the celebration when one feels
So sad? Forget the learned prayer:
Stretch out your hands and rise
The way I was.
There, on the table left, it broke my heart,
Humbly capacious, round and blue and white
Sugar bowl like a palm resting in love
On a child’s head. Just so it rests on its wheel
Once called a ‘lazy Susan,’ sits quietly
Within itself, and is for me without
Words, like my father’s lamp, to my reproach
Lost because humbly, like him, I acted not...
I acted not in time, inhabiting by force
The timeless realm of contemplation: Is that
It then? My grief in its full forms records
The myriad times my spark to no fire flashed,
Leaving the urn, remorse, too warm and beautiful,
For confession’s public form too fine a jewel.
Massive in their dark blush, red going black,
Mom’s spangled bridge of roses, summer-primed
Cast the white daisies into purple shade.
Blue everywhere, and green transformed the sky’s
Compassion white; the honeyed sun dissolved
Into the roses’ brimming cups, and their dew
Crystal showed true uncompromising red
At its work, very close to me and you.
All but alone on the end time’s teeming mall
With my soul of letters and imaged life,
I’m hounded and frail; more precious, then, the call
Of nature’s fertile forms she glorified.
They live, entreating to be held. Enthralled,
We open after their fashion, to the light.
On the snow, squads facing eagerly east,
Asphodel in late March morning light
Lean expectantly to the promised warmth,
Honey-yellow trumpets, lamps of welcome, feast
On the scene they help illuminate, delight,
Their saffron sails spread petals to the storm.
But from the public way, marching through their heart
Come snow-heaped steps, blank mounds where voice should be.
Sorrow collects me, seeing as it felt to her:
Emptiness rising to the brim of things.
Only her soul brought violets, tan and red
Wash of shadows from files of birch on snow,
Miracles passing us, obliquely. “Spring,”
She wrote, a troupe of wine blooms centered there.
As I watched death unbending come to claim
My father, rumors coming true, ideas
Years from being fully known, I learned to pray.
I fixed my thoughts on forebears, ancient ways
Of hope, the need to teach my son what I
Learned not in time. Failing, of course, brought shame
Out like a signature, its mystery face
Showing nothing unacquainted with disgrace.
Disgrace, shame, death and prayer, abilities
Grouped commonly as fish teem in the heart
Of what was made by blessing: this creation
Where we strive and fail at word games, our cries
Rising, where… to mist and skies, to the dark?
Past prayer, sonnets were my only conversation.
Did I fail in the garden? Did my apple tree
Die? The heavy, unrelenting fat gray damp,
Thunder always on my edges,
Did it prove me cursed? Like plants,
I feed myself and bring the heavy quiet in,
Replacing terrors of night with warm slow peace
That melts into the heart like honeyed knowledge
Tricking the casuist censor with its sign.
My mother died last year, -- I sure know that.
I haven’t prayed for her enough. The bat
That swarmed my pain-filled evening… was it her
Come back? Can such things be? A punishment
Vivid as scripture, Holy Writ in the air
Sweeping me from home with senses burnt.
I tell him who speaks in my voice -- “I’ll do,
I’ll do,” yet He keeps instructing me. I’ll build
My garden broad and deep, pouring life in it
To watch it sicken, bearing indedible good.
The taunting thunder, and the sunless air,
The neighbor’s empty yard, and his dog’s bark
For my discarded and misplaced effort, here
In ashen earth, in cinders, shards and dark…
“You’ll heal,” says my cogent one; “You’re dying,”
Says my heart. The murmur of contempt grows louder,
Pressing me down like seed sown in despair,
Hashed so deep. Faith, -- is there something to it?
They say, there’s a life and future: keep trying.
What I was or am is buried in the root.
Turning in his morning bed, the gardener
Extends his workman’s soul to the facts of light.
Green truth, flower hues, and bird song restore
His trust, shaken by things in the forms of night,
Creatures in revolt, and the buried heart
Flying out homeless and insistent to face
Your face and fix you with a garden’s mask.
Though its terror’s passed, all things bear its trace.
Prosaic things: lawn mowers, mail trucks,
The full fat light of noon; another year
Seeking its zenith banishes the soul’s demands
For sons returning, it haunts; questions to mock
Your few accomplishments. Yet gardening’s dear
To those that crave rebirth by work of hands.
*
Sometimes an entire day and most of night
Must pass, even with rain, before my peace
Emerges from its inner cell, to face me
With its honey bread and eloquence, thoughts
Handed with words, the timeless soul is brought
To the world of shared things, to living light
From its own pure and sightless realm. God’s truce,
Withheld for reasons hard, falls easily…
To stay with me? Justice, gracious and blind
Would she just give herself to me, a soft
And willing heart, a real dream, a king’s gift
That lifts again, by me abiding life,
As it should be… sweet simple things to find
Where I knew they are: hidden in the heart of grief.
*
from On the Way to the World to Come
If it’s past Seeing
This winter sky my dear bequeathed
To me, this winter sky of mine,
The sky of late and timeless winter
Is like surprising things beautifully sent
In blessing to the blind:
The grays in every veiled form,
The silent trees where birds
Have only just begun to reappear
For the first time of mysteries,
The mysteries of necessary kindnesses
Of grace and wonder we had done without…
You gave me many things
With hidden, graceless grace…
Remembering it never ends
No more than a drowning person
After he or she has drowned
Finds rest from rising, slowly flailing
In the reason of the waves, slowly
Sinking and rising to struggle without mind
Again and again until we reach the ocean
And she takes us in…
Remembering this, remembering you
In what I am never ends
But even in the transient shy sunlight sends
Stray games, each patterned to some miracle
Of memory, -- in darkness we had many
Miracles that measure not
But in expectation taste and rejoice
And live again in mansions called for gold
And several sunlit ways we learned in childhood.
*
The Soul’s Delight
The brave forsythia and I
March slow away toward midnight
And still the sun explodes
In arabesques that from my knees
I wrought in honor to the yellow blaze
Of spring brought to the blue, to the blue deep.
What language does it mean, --
The evergreen against the gold
Before the threatened great old tree
Cascading blossoms white and pink?
The soul’s delight, the pattern
In my fathomless devotion, unseeing eyes I see.
The soul’s delight,
The thunder of a lush apotheosis
I read in fires made from fine matte prints
Many years later by lamps of amethyst
As the inner lights go down
And I remember on my way to sleep.
Somewhere the singing of a thrush…
We will acknowledge Him,
We will pay down our account;
Confronting all we found,
All; in the deep
Acknowledged and revealed
We feel the wheel come round.
*
Tower Songs
I was a bird in a tower
Among many other dedicated
Songs and drops of light, fat-hued
And melting notes from heaven fed
Beyond the day’s capacity with rhyme
Yet only sang atonement, time on time,
Building a temple of simpler design
From what they were and what did them devour.
I was a bird in terror
When they questioned me
And let myself be searched, --
They knew me then – pushed
Back and forth along my clammy perch
Crudded with small bits of fear:
They probed in and applied my pain.
There was nothing good to say or gain;
Their questions never ended:
From them I learned what demons are.
And at the last they said,
‘You’re here forever,’ and then they smiled, -- ‘it’s just a test. ‘
I’m a bird in a tower
That never will come down,
Built for my form by ancestors
Who saw and sang differently than I can;
They always taught me to be kind
But what the world is they forgot
And I, poor melody, had never known
This tower would be my prison home.
Five is the letter of sanctity,
The number five from above completes;
The fifth son came from a concubine,
A kind of dark self-sacrifice…
The fifth time that they questioned me
I sang like the haunted crow or dove
That once I was a man,
And so I was, it’s true: I was human once
Before they made me take their choice, --
That’s what freedom is...
Cross questions made the monster thing
That I appear to be,
Cross questions tied me to the tree
Where sadness drops each face and song, --
The shadow tree of the shadow king…
Keep singing, bird, by the brutal tree,
The monsters never will come down
But to my strengthening misery
Will freshly every spring return.
Deliverance is banned for me,
To enemies my sin is known;
Their minions have laid waste my home:
From bitter depths for sun I yearn.
*
Only Then
Only when we know the night’s grown late
And dawn will fashion us a state
Where loves differently hued and less in heat
Spill golden words into jeweled cups
Given heart to lip to soul, an alchemist…
Only when we sit alone as royalty
Grown old in powers that were matured
Deciding what to give away,
Before the silence and great taking make us pure
We turn the key to sharing what we wear.
When the last deed is signed and sealed
And we have prayed, forgetting such words were
As we have owed, and some not paid;
Just then true speech may be released
And only then these fragments be revealed.
*
The World Made Sense
Stars were shining in the days
My dad took me to the old
Abandoned freight yards downtown;
On Sunday mornings in the spring
Or in the fall when the air was mild
And the sky filled with splendor blue, and sun,
And I knew as simple fact that life was good…
He taught me to put my ear
To the wheel-burnished silvery-blue rail
To hear and know the train’s proclaiming hum.
Because the world he taught
Made place for kindliness and trust, --
What more illusion can there be…
A world of men who helped boys learn,
He told me to wave to the engineers
And sure enough, they smiled and waved to me.
We understood it all; the world made sense.
It even was a world where boys
Exploring a freight car on a wayside track,
A car uncoupled, could find, in wordless wonderment,
Sleeping in the straw a man in crumpled clothes;
Of course he wore a white shirt and dark slacks
In those days, an ordinary looking man,
Uncoupled, quiet, a bit embarrassed.
In those days, even more than now
After the gulf has been and heaven shows,
Men kept their sorrows to themselves
And failure, what greater sorrow-maker
For a man can be then failure’s hard uncoupling?
That was one memorable day
That now may simply live forever.
Everyday grace is what he taught me,
And never used the word.
* * *
from Wanderings of Soul
The Scarecrow
“But as for man, in glory he shall not repose; he is likened to the silenced animals.”
Kids were running through the pumpkins
In their ranks, so jauntily displayed, receiving
All this passion of the fallen leaves,
Their glory strewing the ground, skittering
In the wake of small, fast-moving sneakers
And falling in arabesques behind, a trace
Of the joy that stirred them, stirred many things;
It is all a storm of glory, and it was; and
The tawny earth, hard-packed by so many
Happy visitors, each one forgetful of their histories,
And islanded with patches of green –
For some grass thrives beyond its time;
And since the orchard has a petting farm
With rabbits, roosters, hens, and three
Little piggies each with its own
Painted cardboard house, bearing their names,
Like us, of straw or wood or brick, --
Trompe l’oeil, awaiting its fulfillment
In honor of the learned fiction brayed for kids and foolishness...
At any rate and true expense, this evening
I’ll return to my candle and my prayer,
Enriched by darkness on its way to victory;
And somehow my soul hears my angel
Carrying a message from God within the cloud,
God above, reaching my somewhat frightened self,
Fearing in loneliness and glad to be called;
He’s saying, ‘no matter; it will be all right:
Have faith!”
And so I will, and so
My visit to the Orchard on its hills
Glorious with apples as only old New England
Or our God provides, to be in goodness
For a while; so I drive down the forest-guarded
Roads, so wonderfully familiar; -- let them be
Years of pain, still the heart has its home
In the world we know; nature gives herself to us,
Stealing, and gradually we give ourselves back
To nature and her God, or so I’ve learned
And the teaching palliates the pain.
It’s here, in this world I’ve come to know
By what its creatures did to me, I’m graced
With nature’s beauty, sweetness in the air
And glory for my hungry innocent’s eyes:
How strange that He should seek me out
For seeing; how strange that all this grace
Brought creatures into industries of pain…
Some day I will explain.
So I drove through the woods
Shattering quietly to colored glories
While I more silent shattering fulfilled,
And came to the graveled dirt drive
And followed into mystery, and arrived
At the base of the hill upon whose breast
Apple trees ascend in graceful waves
Beyond sight, helping this swimmer of wisdom’s stream;
And they ascend, laden with ruddy glory
Yet simple as the clasp of a mother’s
Or father’s hand as they walk you
Cross the gravel parking lot that crunches
Seasonally perfect, fine tuning the fine miracle;
And we go down the shadowed paths
To the petting farm where they’ve built
A three-tiered skyward ramp for the goats;
That’s love, because they love to climb,
As we in our ways sacrifice ourselves
If only to rise, to rise and find
What hands in love provide, --
The heart of cherubim, God’s paradigm,
Reward for the young scapegrace who climbs
To the top where a leather pulley bears
A tin can, top knocked out
That kids can cram an apple in
And crank up, hand by hand on a wheel,
To the happy goat who understands…
And everywhere I turn are groups
Of picnicking children, and lion-hearted ones
Running through the pumpkins in their ranks,
And happy people entering the farm store;
Are they like me on the mountain’s farther side?
Some enter and are gone; others emerge;
They’re coming out with smiles and fragrant cider-donuts
Raised in cinnamon, and jugs of cider
Thick with taste and health, and sweet,
And apple pies and honey jars and apples
Piled into bags, red and white and green
And crowning at the top abundance,
The fragrance pleasing to the Highest Wisdom:
Royalty of grace…
We’re in the store, my soul and I, cool almost as a vault,
Shelves filled with bags of apples in their class:
Jonagold and Empires, Spartan and Macouns,
Red peppers, beans and late tomatoes
Sheltered from the storm, the cold worm
Coming to drive his necessary spike
Into the loving heart of things
As if to someone we were little more
Than an old tubeless tire wedding its nail;
The abundant heart of things
Too full and good for the current plan
To bear it should beat on.
And so the animals and gems of earth
Adorn our complicated selves with old simplicity,
And the soul’s in place with the senses
And God is utterly silent, so near is He…
And there, by the fence where the path
Passes from the company of kids and pumpkins
That makes a season of all saints,
Standing as a guard or a memorial
To the farm beyond, a scarecrow leans
His smiling head and holds so gently out
One well-sleeved arm from which a hand,
Whether relaxed or tired, but with the grace
Of il Magnifico, Lorenzo Medici, has fallen
Into strands of straw, giving up the game,
Perhaps;
Perhaps we’ll strive to hear him,
Giving him his due and us our own
For he is one, like us, who would be heard.
His smile; at the center of it all, --
The swelling hill crowned with branch-laden glory,
Green and red and gold against the gray and blue infinity,
The children running through the pumpkins,
The old tractor pulling a long wagon filled
With bailed hay, and the kids waiting on the platform
To step aboard and enter timelessness
Where we, too, once were home;
The goats that climb; the busy burrowing pigs;
The roosters crowing and reabbits quivering in their fur;
All the ages and forms of what we are
Circling through the store of fruits and bread…
In all this natural sweetness, by the path and rail
He stands, and it all circles on his smile
Cross-stitched in black on his burlap head
With jollier eyes than many of us and ours
Can summon forth from the soul’s well.
Our aspiration and pure form he is;
Pink circles of pink cloth like health
Adorn his cheeks, and by way of a cravat,
Or beard, straw thrusts and spills
From the collar of his purple flannel shirt,
Black-checked and stuffed with memories,
Memories of the tree in seed, memories
Grass stores of earth when it goes to sun,
Grass that withers before the reaper can fill his arm
Or the binder tie his sheaf, --
So many to be tied; so many withering;
Yet he endures, and smiles a telling
To us,
His overalls light blue and by the knees
Patched as so many of us need to do or be
With green and red and yellow bursts,
Taking up signs of glory…
His socks of hair-straw legs spilling
Out of his black slippers, attention straight
He stands, except he leans his head,
Smiling all the way for he’s sure of what it is –
Smiling as he leans on his left shoulder.
It’s his left arm, the arm of justice and of might,
The quality where men restrain their grief,
That points to the side, toward the rail
Where many stand and lean, and wait,
And arm from which the mitten hand has dropped,
Letting his essence, which is of earth
Well-gathered, spray out in urgency
And say, ‘it’s just the way it is; please look.’
I saw a blue and white pavilion
Sheltering picnickers for whom His open hand
Is more than enough, it’s everything
For now, and for them, now’s forever;
And I see the goat walking to his height
Where an apple two kids, one black, one white,
Have crammed into the can, drops on its way;
But the goat will wait,
The people still come,
They will come when I no longer count them in this way,
The drive delivering car after car of passengers
Whose time is come to timelessness at harvest time;
And the tractor pauses at the loading station
Where young souls get on, well-guided,
Chrysanthemums fill every crafted red clay pot;
And as the years, cycling, bring these words along,
Trees bud and blossom and dress themselves in glory,
Then give it all away, while people
Pass in and out of the store of delights
Forever making choices where every choice is good:
For seeing, He gave me this...
And the scarecrow’s glad for the post that keeps him
Up so straight, true as his smile,
And keeps his body from betraying him, --
As so many of us find --
In all its pure simplicity of earthly gifts,
And keeps his smiling soul foremost in our mind
And sight, -- and so at harvest time we see him...
At the center he stands and smiles and waves us on
As we pursue, accepting remnants of our miracles,
The charity of earth that forms his guise;
For that, he never needs to move or say a word,
But stand there with his head a little to one side,
His poor thin arm alerting us
To the mysteries inside of which we rest
Like swords waiting to be drawn
But not to fight, not any more,
But raised in victory salute, souls at their best.
No greater wonder till our eyes
Will open one last time, accepting his light dress
As ours, and walk in it forever to the great surprise.
*
Kissing My Door Post, I See
When Nachmanides died, they say
His parents’ graves, till then well-resting
Side by side, waiting for the call to rise,
At the juncture where they touched, split wide
And an eight-branched lamp of gold arose,
Its candles burning before our eyes
As if messiah had finally arrived.
I write, ‘finally,’ – it was near eight hundred years ago.
So if for them it seemed at very long last
What say anyone of us, rambling giddy days
This path of rock and mud and crazy gleams
Scattered off the old, rotating universal
We love to worship in our folly’s praise,
Flirting like animals in mad season
Yet we have no issue, -- nearly all goes waste;
And we’re so high few anymore complain
That every step we dance in fact’s descending
To the ultimate morass, the gray swamp
Above the body-shattering adamant…
The soul’s been drugged and gagged;
How she weeps for us, her degraded flesh.
Surely we have made the throne invisible;
Our public metaphors of joy have lost
The guts of joy’s deep source:
Redemption from blindness, from false striving
And cruelty’s scintillating light,
So easy for the cruel to give a different name;
So we dance on, stuck in our lust on monsters of the deep,
Blind as Ahab, the diving devotees of waste,
Blind with cruelty their masters and mistresses;
So much the acts of public worship;
But the lamp’s similitude stands upon my table,
Eight candles waiting to be touched to light
By the true hand, soon, at the true time when I am able
To see it and receive them in the night,
My ewe within our stable...
Of course I found this corner of the path,
For my name contains the secrets of the lamp;
I’m honoring it with letters come a long way
From the fountain where all letters rise.
My predecessor, my forebear in the holy camp
And mysteries of the Name, don’t seem to last
Very well in our day; -- O, God
Of my salvation! In my heart
How many times I let the honor slide
And went unarmored out my gate
