16.

Mr. Sartor Ridge speaks:

“When I was not quite seven I had a nightmare

As I so often did. And whenever that happened

I’d crawl out of my bunk and stumble across

The hardwood floor, stagger across the hall

And head for [Mommy’s] bed. She would let me snuggle

Beside her. One time still haunts me. I knew

I had to carefully distinguish her from Dad.

He’d send me packing. No babies in his bed.

He didn’t care if there were monsters in my closet.

He didn’t care if corpses lurked in my bedroom corners.

He would curse me back to my own berth

To ride out the squall in silent trembling.

This one night vividly I remember.

I couldn’t tell one face from the other.

Back and forth around the bed I walked.

Due to the dark, or due to tears, I couldn’t tell

My parents’ faces apart. Pick wrong and be

Sent back alone to hellish visions. Choose right

And salvage all the rest.”

17.

18.

The meantime, the while between a sleep and waking,

And Eve’s first morning: ’twas our source, our dawn * * *

Milton’s Eve speaks. No ewe for sacrifice

Silently led to slaughter * * *

And yet she

Displays an insecure and fleeting self.

Identity will shimmer, no? The heart

Is lambent, fickle, quick * * *

As she recalls

A flagstone path and daffodils ringed

Around the pond, itself fed by a brook

Gurgling from a cave nearby. ’Twas there

She first from unremembered sleep awaked

In wondering bewilderment that such

fine stuff could be. Crawling toward the clear

And placid pool, the mirror of cerulean,

She thought to touch a single cloud. A hand,

An arm stretched reaching out to meet its twin.

Leaning to look still closer down, a shape

Just opposite, below the liquid gleam,

Appeared bending upward. Eve started back.

It started back. The palpable surprise,

Her first frisson, she felt despite the warmth

Of sunlight. Although like the gentle breeze

Soughing through treetops, this thrill presaged all

Intelligible confusion to come

And in no way displeased her. Shape, return!

She hoped. The pleasing shape returned. With me

It comes. With me it goes. With me it stays.    

19.

If I ever get off this Floating Dutch Chick

Der fliegende Holländer

I’m going home and proving to my sons

Just how much I love them.

I’ll be their bosom bosun mate

From the tying of their shoes upward

Into the rigging and cordage.

I’ll teach them the marlinspike’s uses

Like a nautical Nelly. Everything

I loom, I loom it all for you.

20.

The old shellback salt said to me,

“We’re all of us like the sea turtles.

Half of earth and half the other element.

We float somewhere betwixt extremes,

Betwixt hope and horror, around the globe,

Between the poles. There is no believer,

No infidel but two oppositions: in flight,

At rest, at peace and fighting. So if you sing,

Sing of unresolved or incomplete syncretism,

The dynamic of yin and yang eternal,

An umbilical linkage of corpse and God.

Sit back and watch the struggle.

Don’t interfere in life.” 

 21.

Poor Pip, little black blip

Against an infinite sea.

He had trouble from a slip,

Or Lady Luck

Which reminds me of this guy who drowned

In heroin because he couldn’t take

The daily grind or the size of galaxies

And black empty space between the stars

The fact of death. He couldn’t handle it.

Decided sleep was best. To sleep forever.

 28.

Is this your brave idea, Mr. Ridge?

To what lengths or limits will you go?

To build your idol? What terror will you erect

In desperation? What murder will you work

To prove compassion, to ease what human misery?

What babbling tower to Moloch will you raise

In pity’s name? What is temporary evil

Before eternal safety? I’ve seen the hells

The saviors build with cowards who kill

To save their filthy skins.

  

29.

I don’t care for job-holders, those good family folks

Safeguarding private lives, so said the female

Jew running to America. Hannah Arendt saved

By just some Tiffany heiress’ son and Varian Fry,

A Harvard chap. Yet Arendt imagines, I don’t know,

The humble clerks, Uriah Heeps, serving Nazis,

And helping make the Jewish heaps. The rattling

Over cobblestones of tumbrels. Jackboots

Hammer in the hall! And the stiletto’s chilling length –

They’re nothing to the secretary’s scratching pencil

In proscription’s double-entry ledgers. The routine days

Of punching time cards. The vita contemplativa

She would almost impugn, sitting there at Yale

Or Berkeley, Chicago, Princeton or New Haven,

And never blind to Eichmann’s blindness,

Forever feeling the inner fire of mind.   

31.

 – Caliban can always ouster Ariel.

Is that some brand new proof of hell?

– We don’t need any proof for that, Ridge.

Absence needs no evidence.

– No? Then what are we progressing toward, Warwick?

– No one knows where she stops. The sun’s death.

In entropy for sure. But all of your maneuvering, all this bivouacking

Of the soul and bushwhacking of the intellect comes down to one thing:

Greed. You fear death and so invent a deity.

– Deum invenio . . . I’m not sure I do.

– You do, Ridge. You do.

– Did I invent math, space, infinity?

– No. Unfortunately, none of them can come to your rescue.   

And neither, I’m afraid, will your greed. But they may

Make earth a hell for just about everyone else before you’re done.

– I’m sure you believe that, Warwick.

Survival is the best you can imagine. A mitigation.

A little anodyne. An appeasement.

But greed? What’s that? What’s anything? Greed? Greed?

Why take the pain of one more day?

Why steal the air and breathe again?

What do you fear? Let me help you hold your breath in reason! ~

Ridge takes hold of Warwick and begins to choke him. Sailors quickly move to part them.  

32.

The ship is sailing toward a vast upheaval

So strange it seems another universe,

Beyond what may be known of good and evil,

A place of change but not of rot or curse.

The carriage is there, but not the crepe-trimmed hearse.

Each birth without the threat of failing doom –

Profounder than the first. Then its reverse

Is born far richer, we can but presume,

And intermittently another world will bloom.