Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round In Robot Towns Read online

  For I was spun from spider hands

  And misconceived in Usher Lands,

  And all of Edgar’s nightmares mine

  And Em’s dust-heart my valentine.

  Thus mute old maid and maniac

  Then birthed me forth to cataract—

  That whirlpool sucked to darkest star

  Where all the unborn children are.

  So I was torn from maelstrom flesh

  And saw in X-ray warp and mesh

  A sigh of polar-region breath

  That whispered skull-and-socket death.

  Em could not stop for Death, so Poe

  Meandered graveyards to and fro

  And laid his tombstone marble bride

  As Jekyll copulated Hyde

  And birthed a panic-terror son.

  And thus was I, mid-night, begun.

  Lo, the Ghost of Our Least Favorite Uncle

  not exactly a funeral oration

  * * *

  Lo, the ghost of our least favorite Uncle!

  For he drank and he fell and he swore.

  We could hardly wait up for his death knell,

  When it came we said: “Great! What a bore!”

  We could hardly hold breath for his funeral,

  And we rushed him pellmell to the green,

  And we buried him most uncontritely,

  In the fastest performance yet seen.

  And we danced a pig-jig in the summer

  And we laughed when we thought of next fall

  When our mostly unfavorite Uncle

  Would not be around us at all!

  And we drove in a flash and a flurry

  In a hurry of motor to town

  To celebrate Uncle’s entombment

  With dandelion wine all around.

  But our smiles and our joys were foreshortened

  As soon after that burial day

  A ghost that resembled our Uncle

  Arrived one dark midnight to stay.

  My grandma found him in the coal-bin

  With his scuppers full up on noon wine,

  And my grandpa spied him in the attic

  Where the weather of ancient was fine.

  And me-myself-I saw him hanging

  On a hook in the closet full-length,

  And my brother swore Unk was ghost-monkey

  Who swarmed the night oak-tree for strength.

  At dusk when the old apples rattled

  Torn loose by the wind, tossed to roof,

  They ran like a caper of ghost-feet

  And stomped on the dark earth like hoof.

  Whatever the sound, that was Uncle,

  Whatever the whisper or breath;

  If a mouse came for cheese in the pantry

  It was a small visit from Death.

  Or late nights when the ice dripped from icebox

  To fall in the drip-pan below

  And our dog lapped the clear snowy waters,

  Those sounds were my Uncle, I know.

  And when wind turned a corner of Nowhere

  And leaned on our house for a rest,

  All those creakings and groanings of timber

  Were the death throes of Uncle, unblessed.

  So one night I got up with a candle

  And crept to the foot of the stair,

  And saw huddled there in each shadow

  A lurk that old Death had put there.

  So I revved up my shouter and screamer

  To shake dust from the eaves to the bin

  And I yelled: “Get! Go! Leave with your hauntings!

  Go bury yourself, Uncle Sin!”

  And the creeps and the shades and the shambles

  Gave a shake and a mourn and a yawn

  And with moaning, ochoning, lamenting

  Ran off down the red crack of dawn.

  And the household, aroused in their bedclothes,

  Who’d heard this small boychild’s uproar,

  Sat up with wild smiles and applauded

  Or beat their old canes on the floor.

  And from that night to this: no more hauntings,

  And my family lived just to boast

  That a twelve-year-old boy with a loud mouth

  Had slaughtered the pale family ghost.

  Where my clamor was always a nuisance

  And my loudness was always a sin,

  I’m now the loud pal, pride, and pleasure

  Of my soft-spoken kith and mute kin.

  That Son of Richard III

  Moby Dick was two books written between February 1850 and August 1851. The first book did not contain Ahab. It may not, except incidentally, have contained Moby Dick. Somewhere along the way to writing a book about the Whale Fishery, Melville found and bought a seven-volume set of Shakespeare’s plays. He reported on his find to his editor:

  It is an edition in glorious great type, every letter whereof is a soldier, the top of every ‘t’ like a musket barrel. I am mad to think how minute a cause has prevented me hitherto from reading Shakespeare. But until now any copy that was come-at-able to me happened to be a vile small print unendurable to my eyes which are tender as young sperms. But chancing to fall in with this glorious edition, I now exult over it, page by page. Whereupon, Melville tossed his first version of The Whale overboard and vomited forth the novel that we now know as Moby Dick.

  * * *

  At first there were but whales

  And now a Whale.

  At first there was but sea and tides by night

  But now the fountains of Versailles somehow set sail

  And sprinkled all the vasty deeps at three a.m.

  With souls’ pure jets.

  At first there was no captain to the ship

  Which, named Pequod,

  Set sail for destinations, not for God.

  But: God obtruded, rose and blew his breath

  And Ahab rose, full born, to follow Death,

  Know dark opinions,

  Seek in the strangest salt dominions for one Beast

  And from what was a simple-minded breakfast,

  O Jesus mild and tempered sweetmeats,

  Now a Feast!

  How came it so?

  That from such crumbs tossed forth at morning

  Such great nightmare terrors grow,

  What was a cat-toy lost upon old summer lawns

  Has through one season grown to monster size

  To panic-color all gray Melville’s dawns?

  Why, Willie happened by!

  That is the end, the explanation, and the all.

  As blind almost as Homer, Herman never read

  The good or bad or in-between Othello

  The dead put down by Richard Third,

  lago’s boast,

  Never, gone out at midnight in his mind,

  Had Ahab with a small a

  Stumbled and fallen blind against

  Mad Hamlet’s father’s murdered ghost.

  But now, in seven volumes of large size

  And large, O gods, the font of type,

  The words, the trumpetings of metaphor and doom:

  All that was microscopic filled his room,

  All that had filled his room now filled his mind

  From south to west then east and now the panicked North.

  Shakespeare beneath his window gave his shout:

  “O Lazarus! Herman Melville! truly come ye forth!

  And what’s that with you?

  Dreadful gossamer?

  Funeral wake? or Arctic veil?”

  “What, this? Why, Jesus lily-of-the-valley breath,

  It seems to be …

  A Whale!”

  And what a whale! A trueborn Beast of God.

  Shakespeare stood back away

  As Herman trod a path and made a launching-spot, a maze

  Wherein to lose then find titanic Moby

  And then send him down the ways!

  And then an ancient King came forth to stand with Will

  And call a
long the tide of Time down hill along the wind

  And tear his beard and rend his sanity,

  Disclaim his daughters, curse all midnight Fates.

  So Lear and his progenitor gave cry

  And from an Arctic miracle of waters

  A white shape formed to panic and to most delicious fright,

  A whale like all Antarctica, dread avalanche of dawn at night

  Ribbed, skinned, then stuffed with lights and soul filched out of Lear

  Sailed, submarine, through Richard Third’s wild dreams,

  Touched Verne, and maddened Freud and kept our schemes,

  Those schemes American which were, while awed,

  To question all the malt that Milton drank while sipping God.

  God, Nature, Space, all Time, now stand aside, we said.

  The Whale, in answer, gasping, fluming Universal breath

  Rushed at us like a marbled tomb, his spout one bloody fount of Death.

  And rammed and sank our hubris, fluked our pride.

  The waters shut and closed on all who died that day on the Pequod.

  So the American men, each one proclaimed self-king

  Took their blasphemies beneath the monstrous watering

  While Ahab wrapped in hemp upon his cumbrous bride

  Still beckoning to us to follow, worry, harrow

  Those tracks that watery vanish on the instant trod,

  With one last outraged cry, a fisting wave,

  Sank from our view with God.

  So Melville in his inner deeps did dive

  To find the shroud, the ghost, the thing alive

  In all the flesh that, aged, shadowed, dead

  Most wanted issue, to be found, known, read,

  And on the lawns of Avon took his stance

  To join the Bard in festive, antic dance.

  And to the morning window of old Will

  As morn came up and dusk went down the sill

  Cried out, O Lazarus William Shakespeare,

  Come you forth in whale!

  And Will all fleshed in marble white

  Could not prevail against such summonings and taunts,

  And slid him forth in size for jaunts to break a continent,

  Sink Armadas in the tides.

  So Shakespeare glides forever in dread comet tails

  That shine the Deeps,

  He prowls that mutual subterrane

  Where Melville/God’s truth starts and wakes from murdered sleeps.

  Thus from his antique caul, his bloody veil

  Old Willie William, long gone dust in jail,

  Was clamored forth to freedom in a Whale

  That swam all thunders, rumors, plunders in the morn,

  Insurance that good Shakespeare, now reborn,

  Would live two lives, the one he’d had before

  But now another chance to make less More.

  From blubbers, metals, renderings he rose

  To dress plain-suited Melville in fresh clothes,

  Such clothes as foreskin whale-prick metaphors can make and sell,

  Illumine Heaven and relight the coals of Hell.

  So Shakespeare, boned and fleshed and marrowed deep

  Did waken Melville from whale-industries of sleep

  To run on water, burn St. Elmo’s fires,

  And shape cathedral spires from Moby’s titan rib-cage tossed to shore

  And again and again from less make feasts of More.

  What was mere oil of spermaceti now became

  Anointments for a Papal brow in Sweet Christ’s name

  Pronounced from drippings of fused universal mask and face,

  What first was simple journeying became a Chase.

  So off and round the world ran two men, wild,

  Skinned in one Lazarus flesh, one loud, one mild,

  Each summoning the other,

  And neither knowing which was elder, therefore evil-wiser brother

  Until—Flukes out! black blood!

  From mutual toil

  They brought a miracle of fish to boil;

  Like God who spoke and uttered Light,

  These twins in unison said Night

  And there was Night;

  That night in which great panics birthed and hid,

  That dawnless hour from which old Moby slid

  And knocked the world half off its axis into awe

  And all because Dear Willie stuck his metaphor down Herman’s craw!

  A Poem with a Note:

  All England Empty, the People Flown

  * * *

  One hundred years from now, in 2075, all England lies empty.

  Her people have left, gone off to find the sun in Rome, Nairobi, Rio de

  Janeiro, and San Diego, California.

  Left behind in the empty land is one man, a poet.

  He finds that, in Westminster, even the Stone of Scone, upon which most

  of England’s rulers have been crowned, is gone.

  The Royal Family has taken it with them to warmer lands in southern

  climes.

  The poet speaks:

  The Stone, the Stone of Scone, you say?

  They’ve shipped it south to Summer’s Bay?

  Aye, that, that holy rock, that Stone,

  They’ve mailed it off, it’s gone, it’s flown;

  And Westminster, this day at dawn

  Is empty as old Blenheim’s lawn.

  And gone our Kings from winter’s sill,

  And gone our Queens from autumn’s chill,

  And with them vanish common folk

  Who once took winter for a joke,

  But now are summoned by those Souths

  That melt old jokes like ice in mouths;

  And, suntanned, jolly, called by May

  They up and soared their souls away;

  Wild credit cards and borrowed crown

  Have lured and laughed them out of town.

  They’ve gone to tan and tint their flanks

  Midst sunburned Aussies, surfing Yanks,

  And England, left behind alone,

  Has naught to sit on save the Stone,

  But now that’s gone, that’s borrowed, too?

  Yes! And the villages are few

  Where even sparrows come in choirs

  And few the Stonehenge midnight fires

  Of ghosts that gather in to tell

  A mystery of Time and Will

  When monarchs chilled their bums here still

  And did not rule bereft, alone,

  But from the lofty perch of Scone

  Looked out upon a Kipling Land

  Where regal Queens shone up the Strand.

  So then in Westminster I’ll preen

  Where ruddy Rudyard bowed a queen

  And I will walk and snuff the dust

  That once was old Macaulay’s lust

  And tread on Pope, and Johnson know,

  Their relics stashed in vaults below.

  Then when lights dim and dawn’s at hand

  I’ll search about Victoria’s land

  And find me rock and beg a loan

  And chisel me new Scottish Scone

  And haul it down the empty aisle

  And seat me there, Royal Son, awhile.

  And from a snake in winter’s path

  Make up a crown half joy, half wrath

  And place it on my funeral brow

  To cover up my winter snow,

  And wreathe myself with ancient spring

  And name myself the Final King,

  The Ninth and Final Henry here

  In vanished pomps, in melted year,

  And sleep me out on tomb-top there

  A statue on my own hard bier

  To rest before I make the rounds

  As bellman to all London’s towns

  Who pulls the ropes in farflung towers

  To sound the Sad Year’s final hours.

  While to the dead long lost turned clay

  This pledge and p
romise then I’ll say:

  Elizabeths, rare One, mild Two,

  I send this message back to you,

  I’ll keep the Island fast for thee,

  Defenseless she will never be.

  I’ll tread upon the chalky shore

  To toss back Hitler’s men, and more:

  Will sword away the Viking host

  And guard each mineless deep, each coast

  Where only seagulls knife the dawn.

  And I will up and mow the lawn

  At Buckingham, and pull the weed

  And not let England go to seed.

  All this I promise, ladies, dead,

  I to your memory am wed,

  I husband history-gone-to-sleep

  And will your green land roam and keep,

  A single lonely lover I

  My own Armada, fresh and spry

  Will all of Thames’ sweep free of death

  And in the springtime’s vernal breath

  Leap up from chalk cliff with my wings

  And Spitfire-like make harvestings

  Of all Mad Adolf’s Fokker-men

  Who would blood England down again.

  So Army-Navy-R.A.F.

  I’ll poise upon the Dover cliff

  And now be sailor, now be men

  Such as will ne’er be seen again,

  As Churchill spoke them in the blue:

  “So many saved by, God, so few.”

  And when I’ve won the wars of Rose

  I’ll in the Avon round compose

  And rear up Richard, Hamlet doubt,

  Then with them all Time put to rout;

  And saved the land, and saved our seed,

  Do with my dreams a new race breed.

  O little England, lost at sea,

  I give my single self to thee,

  When all and each is gone or dead,

  I stand as shining figurehead

  And shall be King if it need be

  And populate your towns for thee

  With children’s dreams, my memories,

  My Horse Guard phantoms trotting through

  May not disturb one mote of dew,

  Yet jog they will, and off they go

  And Hadrian and Caesar know,

  And cry the Roman Roads at night

  And beckon me to join their fight.

  O One and Two Elizabeths,

  Yours not the only Royal deaths,

  For by you now the whole land lies

  And storms weep out my outraged eyes.

  Enough! I will not burn my mind

  I turn about, away, half blind,

  And on my fresh-cut Stone of Scone

  Write: Britain’s Population? One.

  But that one millions represents,

  The sinners, and the innocents,