Apples from Shinar - Hyam Plutzik Wesleyan Poetry Program

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and radiance;

      As the locust tree is changed by the wind Time;

      As the wind Time too will lapse, will blow from another quarter—

      Thus you prepare the future for me and my loved ones.

      IF CAUSALITY IS IMPOSSIBLE, GENESIS IS RECURRENT

      The abrupt appearance of a yellow flower

      Out of the perfect nothing, is miraculous.

      The sum of Being, being discontinuous,

      Must presuppose a God-out-of-the-box

      Who makes a primal garden of each garden.

      There is no change, but only re-creation

      One step ahead. As in the cinema

      Upon the screen, all motion is illusory.

      So if your mind were keener and could clinch

      More than its flitting beachhead in the Permanent,

      You’d see a twinkling world flashing and dying

      Projected out of a tireless, winking Eye

      Opening and closing in immensity—

      Creating, with Its look, beside all else

      Always Adamic passion and innocence,

      The bloodred apple or the yellow flower.

      THE OLD WAR

      No one cared for the iron sparrow

      That fell from the sky that quiet day

      With no bird’s voice, a mad beast’s bellow.

      Sparrow, your wing was a broken scar

      As you blundered into the mother-barley.

      Sparrow, how many men did you bear?

      “Ten good men, pilot and gunner—

      Trapped in the whirlpool, held by no hands,

      Twisting from truth with curse and prayer.

      “Ten good men I bore in my belly—

      Not as the mother-barley bears.

      Ten good men I returned to her there.”

       Thunder rolling over the barley!

       Fire swarming high and higher!

      Home again to the barley-mother—

      Ten good sons, pilot and gunner,

      Radioman and bombardier.

      THE PREMONITION

      Trying to imagine a poem of the future,

      I saw a nameless jewel lying

      Lurid on a table of black velvet.

      Light winked there like eyes half-lidded,

      Raying the dark with signals,

      Lunar, mineral, maddening

      As that white night-flower herself,

      And with her delusive chastity.

      Then one said: “I am the poet of the damned.

      My eyes are seared with the darkness that you willed me.

      This jewel is my heart, which I no longer need.”

      JIM DESTERLAND

      As I was fishing off Pondy Point

      Between the tides, the sea so still—

      Only a whisper against the boat—

      No other sound but the scream of a gull,

      I heard the voice you will never hear

      Filling the crannies of the air.

      The doors swung open, the little doors,

      The door, the hatch within the brain,

      And like the bellowing of ruin

      The surf upon the thousand shores

      Swept through me, and the thunder-noise

      Of all the waves of all the seas.

      The doors swung shut, the little doors,

      The door, the hatch within the ear,

      And I was fishing off Pondy Pier,

      And all was as it was before,

      With only the whisper of the swell

      Against the boat, and the cry of a gull.

      I draw a sight from tree to tree

      Crossing this other from knoll to rock,

      To mark the place. Into the sea

      My line falls with an empty hook,

      Yet fools the world. So day and night

      I crouch upon the thwarts and wait.

      There is a roaring in the skies

      The great globes make, and there is the sound

      Of all the atoms whirling round

      That one can hear if one is wise—

      Wiser than most—if one has heard

      The doors, the little doors, swing wide.

      AFTER LOOKING INTO A BOOK BELONGING TO MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER, ELI ELIAKIM PLUTZIK

      I am troubled by the blank fields, the speechless graves.

      Since the names were carved upon wood, there is no word

      For the thousand years that shaped this scribbling fist

      And the eyes staring at strange places and times

      Beyond the veldt dragging to Poland.

      Lovers of words make simple peace with death,

      At last demanding, to close the door to the cold,

      Only Here lies someone.

      Here lie no one and no one, your fathers and mothers.

      THE GEESE

      A miscellaneous screaming that comes from nowhere

      Raises the eyes at last to the moonward-flying

      Squadron of wild-geese arcing the spatial cold.

      Beyond the hunter’s gun or the will’s range

      They press southward, toward the secret marshes

      Where the appointed gunmen mark the crossing

      Of flight and moment. There is no force stronger

      (In the sweep of the monomaniac passion, time)

      Than the will toward destiny, which is death.

      Value the intermediate splendor of birds.

      THE MYTHOS OF SAMUEL HUNTSMAN

      If I should round the corner quickly—

      Or suddenly turn my head—

      I know I’d catch them preparing the scene,

      Painting a tree or hanging the moon,

      Arranging houses and streets exactly

      In the desperate game which is God’s.

      For I have seen through their plausible

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