Van der Leun

At Lindbergh's Grave

Palapalo Ho'omau Church Cemetery, Kipahulu,Southeast Maui

That long green swell that sears my eyes
As I lie in this bed of black stone,
Is it the Irish coast rising in the dawn
Beyond the brushed silver of my blind cowling
Where, throughout the night, I trusted
Not in some desert God's directions,
But in the calibrated compasses of man?

That rushing sound, is it the hordes at Orly,
Swarming past the barriers and lights
To scavenge my Spirit, and lift me up
Into the air that only heroes breath?
Or is it the age-old sigh of sea on stones,
Known to those who pace the shingle
And the swirled black sands that seep
Up from the sea's loom to wrap
Impossible islands in a shawl of waves?

That painting daubed on the chapel's window -
Not the roselined mandala at Chartres
Where flame in glass misprisoned sings -
But a cruder Savior, bearded, browned and popular,
An icon obtainable to plain sight, a trim God
Flat upon the glass in dull gesso limned,
And, when light moves behind it, looking down....
Is this the sign in which, at last, we conquer?

Conquer? I'd laugh the laugh of stones
Had I but eyes to see and lips to breathe.
No, I am content here where man and apes
Together waltzing lie, having done at last
With all horizons, having done at last with sky.

If you would see me now pass by
The small green church where ancient
Banyans looming shade and guard
The tower and the bell which you
May toll for me, or you, or all those
Not yet delivered to the stars and sea.

And then, retreating, heed the trees
Whose tendrilled branches hold but air,
And shadow both the church and stones
Beneath which wait both apes and men,
Who, foolish with their hunger for the air,
Swung branch to branch up all the years
Until, letting go at last, they learned
Through me, at last, to rise.

Sea, stone, tree, ape and Savior.
These now my boon companions are.

Better here, I think, in this dank green
Cartoon of Paradise, this slight-of-hand Eden;

Better here beneath the pumiced stones
Where strangers drop a wreathe from time to time;

Better here than there, hovering over waves,
Alone between the new world and the old,

Trusting in a man-mad compass
To take me home along
The sharp cold blade of air.

Better, much better, here
Where the sound of the waves enfolds
That fire they could never snare.

Victims of the Plague

(for Thom Gunn 1929-2004)

Perhaps our dances, in a thousand years,
will tattooed be as drums,
And our bright minds, forged by fate,
will in the musk of eons drown.

Our souls will all rise glorified
as a pod of whales weaves waves.
Our flesh, once firm, relaxed as stones
that serve to mark our graves.

Our pleasures seen as ancient rites
describable as dreams;
Our voices, in a million years,
insubstantial as starbeams.

Perhaps our minuets, in a billion years,
will as steel stiffened be.
Our arabesques as smooth and gestural
as drowned paintings of the sea.

Our nods but inclinations
of the folds beneath the eyes.
Our plans but vague intentions
of the wind beneath the skies.

Our breath, a transpiration
of dust immured in dust.
Our lives, a visitation
of a rush light drowned in musk.

All these, our words and scattered songs,
May come, in time, to less than naught,
As Mayan blocks of hard hacked stone
Embalm the skin we once sloughed off.

But now, like rattles kept within
A jeweled bone box, our hollowed skin
Is shaken in the rambles of the park
To frighten schoolgirls after dark.

The Beasts Which We Keep

If we held the intent of the beasts which we keep
In far fields and dark valleys, in the pale light of sleep,
In marked shards of clay, in papyrus and parchment,
Beneath the brick hearth, in the marks on old bones,
In the marrow of bones, hitched to the plow of stones
Parting the furrows where our dreams are pale sparks
In the roots of our nerves, sprouting to thoughts,
To the tee-shirt philosophies of cheap magazines,
From the afternoon shows of electronic dreams,
That reveal our blank selves dredged up from sleep.

If we knew the intent of the beasts that we keep,
We would surely sit senseless, and hide from the sun,
And turn on ourselves the unregistered gun.
If we held the intent of the beasts that we keep.

If we knew the intent of the beasts that we feed
From couches confessional, in the stone barns of God
Where the soul's soundings echo the light in the sod
To our penitent minds; which illumines our stark
Hearts from within, that dazzles our dark
With His fierce pyrotechnics, with His animate spark
That glows in that womb where all yearning starts,
And yearns for the flare at the top of the arc,
But burns like dead screams flung down in the dark,
Like torches cast deep where drowned Incas decay.

We would know then this life takes place in one day,
That the beasts which we keep are the beasts of our deeds,
Created from dust in the long dusk of God,
That we know the intent of the beasts which we feed.

The Missing

Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know
Within the smoke their ash revolves as snow,
To settle on our skin as fading stars
Dissolve into pure dust at break of day.

At dawn a distant shudder in the earth
Disclosed the fold of fire into steel,
The rumbles not of crossings underground
But screams from out of flowers built from flame.

We stood upon the Heights like men of straw
Transfixed by flames that started in the sky,
And watched them plunging down in death's ballet
To land among those dying deep below.

By noon the band of smoke leaned low
Upon the harbor's skin like some dark shawl,
A pall of smoke that in its curdled crawl
Kept reaching to extend its fatal fall.

The harp strung bridge held up ten thousand souls
Who'd screaming run beneath the paws of death,
As dusted ghosts that lived but were not sure
They lived in light or only in reprieve.

They'd writhed and spun within a storm of smoke
And stumbled out to light and clearer air,
To find upon the river's further shore
That sanctuary is not savored but secured.

The sirens scraped the sky and jets carved arcs
Within a heaven empty of all hope,
And marked its epicenter with one streak
Of black on polished bone where silver stood.

By evening all their ash had settled so
That on the leaves outside my window glowed
Their souls in small bright stars until the rain
Cleaned all that could not be clean again.

We breathed the smoke that bent and crept and crawled.
We learned to hate the smoke that lingered so.
We knew that blood could only answer blood,
And so we yearned to go and not to go.

That last, lost summer faded into ash
Their faces faded as endless autumn flowed
Through chill and heat into the winter sea
Where warships prowled in search of stones.

Within the city, shrines were our resolve.
We placed them where we stood or where they lay.
Upon our bricks and stones their faces loomed
To gaze at us from times beyond repeal.

In time, their ash and smoke became the shapes
Of stories told at dinner, found in books,
Or in the comments made by magazines
For whom the larger issues were of worth.

At first their faces faded with the rains,
The little altars thick with wax were scraped,
But now beneath clear plastic they endure
To remind those passing that we've not escaped.

Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know.

Into the Silence

The last sound heard before the silence
Settled on my flesh in wisps,
Was the shriek of frozen ambulances
Wrapped in sharp, revolving red.
Then the holes in my skull sealed shut,
And on my tongue I heard the tang of brass.

At first a ringing whine rose high and faded far,
Then bells began, each dim and laced with smoke,
And merged with walls of wind upon crisp water,
Blooming high in white, white only, drifts
Of softly falling snow falling softly
Until they blurred the shapes of sound and speech.

The memory remained awhile, and moving lips
Became the shapes of sound I could not see
To read, and all my mind filled not with silence
But with dark brushed on deeper dark
Within which all stars died, and dying gave
A single bloom of sound beyond all song.

It moaned and chittered, groaned and sighed.
It grinned as one at me, inscrutable and blank,
As shells evicted by the sea are spurned
By waves and parch above the dampened sands,
To be polished first by dust, then honed by rain,
Into a whitened replica of stone.

Made new, I loved large gestures,
Marking furrowed face and curl of lip.
I memorized the signing hands that stripped
My half-guessed comprehension bare,
And learned at last to wait upon a glance,
Upon small words quickly scratched on slate.

As days to years enlarged their rule,
All records writ within my skull were smudged,
And songs and music drifted off to send
Pale emblems of their realms as tribute
To the stone that once had formed a throne
Strung with unsensed pleasures shrugged.

All that treasure spent, all gems corroded now,
All metals melded into dust, all trace of walls
Where once the filigreed firebird sang,
And drums of heroes' skins were stunned,
Were but shadows strewn as features faint
As lines of light on planets seen from space.

And then with time all that too -- erased,
And sands and seas swarmed over all,
And ruled at last alone a world of frost,
Of ice, of snow, of sheaves of glass,
Until along the farthest strip of polished shore
One distant crystal glinted, gleamed and chimed.

Pure Mathematics

I.

Titanium skaters on lakes of metallic hydrogen
Strew constant curves of crystalline
Isotopes of orange uranium
All about the vacant house.

Enigmas of equations
Slide lattices to rest
In beds of powdered strontium,
Molding energy as form suggests.

In the place of flux we find new forms,
For flux-formed spaces enfold
The charms of magnet's fever
Which conduct the core from pole to pole.

II.

The whiteness of Earth's silence
Is an eye that stares on space.
Orbits chart it ceaselessly,
Etching paradigms of lace.

The inner of Earth's outer
Is a torus twisted twice.
Balloons ascend within it
Painting shadows in the room.

III.

What can the mind of silence hear
Other than a whiteness past recall?
It evolves from our epicenters,
Stretches measureless as sound,
Or is seen as the floor of the void
Where the whine of protons stills
In the drifts of chromium snow,
and gazes on the bones of matter bare.
At times, men in aluminum cloaks
Descend the neutron ladder,
And move in a sleet of particles
Too scintillating for instruments to record.
At times, men in groups descend
Through the smoke of the universe,
To tend the embers, imprison flame.
Their cascading dance sparkles.
We taste the afterimage of events.
Below us, pale and infinitely silent,
The plutonium leaves arabesque
Through radiant silences of solid helium.

IV.

Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths
closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising
from the surface of the pools.

Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and, tapping faintly on the rock,
revealed the edges of the chamber.

Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains,
speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time,
I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm,
as if I had just woken from all water into dream.

The Sentinals

I.
With woven steel hands
Cupped around clear cadenced tones,
Our servants of the infinite
Herald the skein of the sky,
Repeating one announcement,
Sans ornament and instantaneous,
To be etched on eternity's orbit
In a tattoo of silences.
Like torches tossed down
Into unexplored caverns
They dwindle and fade
Till the darkness dissolves them.
"We have arrived at the limits of Earth.
We stand on the edge of Forever.
We are here. We are here.
Are we alone?" In numbers and bits
These messages rise up,
Clambering the ladder out of the pit
Of ignorance and gravity
To float like amber dreams
Along the spine of light.

II.
The disconcerting occurrence
Encountered at the terminus
Of all the mind's parabolas
Is that nothing occurs at all.
Pinwheels of luminous plasma,
Glowing reefs of matter,
Spatter the crests of the darkness
And descend like lamenting specters
Caught in the eddies of shoreless seas.
Their lights, creeping up along
The curve of the continuum, gleam
No more than the two-franc candles
Cupped in crippled, translucent palms
In the grotto of Our Lady at Lourdes.
And thus they too only serve
To dapple, quite briefly, the dark edge
Of that shoreless ocean that consumes
What little light they lend,
And, like some pitch-drenched Pharaoh,
Are damned down to oblivion
By their own command to wait
Sealed in stone for a distant dawn.
All these thoughts and messages
Noted for a nanosecond, memorized
In some splinter of a second,
In tombs of luminous instruments,
Relayed, incorporated, and sent on:
A telegram with no fixed address
Woven out of frozen starlight,
And then to the darkness delivered.

III.
Fantasied fears spun in the circles of flickering campfires.
Mythologies winnowed out of unusual stones, or bone, or bits of bark.
Cosmologies concocted from rats' skulls, corn, and Titanium atoms.
Theologies tortured from the blind, wrung from hints in high cumulus.
All the perceived and imagined stockades raised against Zero:
The face of hoarfrost that blooms in the mirror, the last god,
He who is, the Pure Noun for which there is no adjective,
An orb of vacuum which sees itself as Cosmos, a tendril of unseen smoke,
A word which can never be spoken, the footprints of extinguished stars,
The visage mathematics cannot freeze.

IV.
Our handsome proportions and crafted ornaments evaporate.
All our most comforting music and meters dissolve.
The clapping of frostbitten hands in Antarctic tents continues.
Above us the rictus of universal harmonies lingers.
The new landscape appears: desolate, arid, airless, uninhabitable.
The tendrils of the desert of the senses invade its frontiers,
Guided by hands of ice that caress the belly of the stratosphere,
As far above the chill ionic winds erase the footprints pressed
Into the dust of the moon's untenanted tranquillity.

V.
The waterless waves on that sea without ships
Go outward, roll onward in search of horizons.
The faces in stone keep their futile appointments
With wind and with water, which also have schedules,
That return them to silence in a melding of stars
Here where the tree's roots grope into the air,
Here on the banks of tomorrow as the mind's searching message,
Laden with numbers, with dates, and with data,
Rises up and flies out past the sun to the birth of the stars.

TERRA COGNITA

Of Rwanda, April to July, 1994,
and all that went before and will come after.

Gerard Van der Leun
December, 1995 -- June 2004 | New York City | California |

1.
This rusted field, these shattered skulls, this stained and ancient road
that runs beside the bleached river where carp fatten on brown dugs
and shoals of human offal until, sated, they drowse above the slime.
The place of iron dust expands, and downstream shallows roil
choked with the crocs' warm morning meals -- the flesh-flecked bones
glued with rags and gristle, caught between the pointed teeth
like some vile floss of torn tendons, all breathing flesh consumed.
Upstream our evening's dinner entertainment continues....
Unspeakable acts involving children and machetes
unfold repeatedly until the thin hacking arms cramp,
and fingers are flung into the stream like feathers plucked from birds.
In the still and baking heat, the ears of women, dry and crisp,
whirl in the disinterested wind...and so one turns to go, but still...

They all drift down, they all drift down
            (not leaves in an autumn breeze,
            not in some lyric poem of windblown lace,
            nor Japanese trifle of dank moss and leaves)
drift down like chunks of poaching pork,

until the brain is singed, burnt bare,
flayed open and exhausted of all care,
all sense of rage -- until the phrase
Can you imagine? is answerable
only with one word, No,
and the single image that might impinge
on drowsy lurkers in plush cave chairs
is a jet of blood erupting in a syringe
plunged into an eye, that the seeing beast
blind itself at last with sleep,
and away, turn away, turn away.

Terra Cognita Part 2

2.
Where the silent flame's parabola
sinks to rest on burnished dust,
we wear a golden mirror set
into a sphere of silvered white
wrapped around a skull and kept
so that the mirror hovering low
above the lunar surface might
reflect the Earth that rose against the night.

The blue-black globe breathes with sparks
of light at night, by day is slashed with white
over green and umber swathes which are,
upon closer circumspection, seen
as the familiar edges of our continents.
And so our land becomes landscape.
mapped, measured and made flesh,
forever frozen beyond touch.

The storm-swollen Red Spot of Jupiter
and the swollen iris of a dead man's eye
in the backwash shallows of Lake Victoria are
-- each seen from a proper distance --
the same cold circle shut
to any possible meaning
we may wish to assign to it; a metaphor
without resonance or consequence;
a frame of no fixed reference,
a grid on which we dance as if death
was something perpetually happening to others
on some sound emptied of actors,
and run by robots on the dark side of the moon.

Terra Cognita Part 3

3.
Let me say this again

      To know is not to hold.
      To hold is to release.
      No hands can close on any light,
      nor any light illumine
      what lurks behind your brow.

      Look close, look deep within.
      There is only dark on deeper dark.
      It is obvious. Manifest.
      You are but purposeless matter.
      It is not one. Never one.

      Always it is always,
      now and forever, Zero.
      Your inventions, holy icons
      and philosophies of air,
      will not avail you.

      The machete hacking the child
      into chunks of screaming meat
      is the actual, is the real.
      And this sweet lust lives deep in you.
      without meaning, memory, or care.

      And you know this to be true.