The World in the Palm of Your Hand
By Christopher Bernard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As my eyes opened

the sun struck the clock –

a little plastic thing

with a face, round, plain,

given for Christmas by my closest friend.

I moaned a little. “Mmm—let me

sleep a little longer….” It said a minute

or two, but not enough, before seven.
There was nothing special about the clock:

small, functional, foldable, accurate,

it could be slipped into a pocket and carried

easily enough

to the farthest ends of the small blue planet.

It had a delicate but curiously penetrating alarm.
My friend had bought it at a little store

in Chinatown from a teenage gamine-like girl

named Mary Chew, who had a mole

on her chin, perfectly shaped eyes, and a stutter.

Usually she worked only weekends, but

that day had been the first of winter vacation,

and she wanted to earn some extra money

to buy a motorcycle helmet (a surprise)

for her 20-year-old boyfriend, Daniel Chan,

whom no one in her family liked.

“His family is not from Guangzhou,” complained her mother.

Mary’s employer, Charles “Charlie” Wang,

was a little wiry man, all abrupt manner

to his workers, all unctuous simpering

for his customers. He usually paced

the back of the store looking at all

the clocks, but could never remember the time.
He had purchased the clock

as part of a consignment from a saleswoman

named Kelly Smithfield, a tall, big redhead,

born in Modesto, a graduate of Davis,

who had brought it in a case of samples

she showed him one day at the end of October

on a cold call at the Golden Mountain Happy Clock Store.

Kelly was twenty-seven, vaguely desperate –

she waved her hands a lot and laughed too often –

still on probation with the company,

she hadn’t sold a single clock since August,

and nearly fell over when Charlie Wang

bought her entire case. When Charlie

invited her to lunch at the Dragon Palace of Dim Sum –

“You will love their chicken feet!” – well, how could she refuse?

 

Kelly had been given the clock

by her assistant, Amanda Clark,

at the home office in Sacramento.

Amanda was twenty-three,

petite, blond, scattered,

with two years of community college

and aspirations to become a real estate agent,

though she was afraid she may have missed

the height of the market

by a decade or two.

Amanda had gotten the clock

in a case with other clocks –

small-traveling, silent-alarm, valedictory, vanity-table,

of all shapes and designs, from the plainest, like mine,

to luxury, to joke and variety designs:

Dooby-Doo, Bart Simpson, Princess Elsa, Shrek –

a case she had gotten

from the office delivery clerk, Steve Butts,

a middle-aged man who had been downsized

by a local insurance company at the age of 55

and was taken in out of compassion

by the office manager, who knew him

during his glory years as a claims adjuster.
Steve had gotten the case from a warehouse clerk,

José Parra, thirty-two, prematurely balding,

undocumented, who lived in a trailer park

with several men from his village in Guatemala.

He sent half his minimum wage to his family

and sold clocks he had filched from the warehouse

late at night on eBay.

 

A young warehouse worker named Minh Vuh,

a Vietnamese whose parents had been boat people

when they were children, had placed the clock

carefully in the case, with a handful of confetti. Minh

was engaged to a sweet young Laotian

who lived three blocks from his family home.

Their parents were not too happy about that,

so they had to meet secretly after school

and on his work breaks when she was in the neighborhood.

It all felt very romantic. “Like Romeo and Juliet!”

his girlfriend said, giggling. Minh kissed her on her tiny nose.
Minh didn’t remember (he had no reason to), but

he had put that very clock on the

second shelf from the top in column 37 of aisle C

last September

after receiving it in a shipment of similar clocks

off a truck driven by an ageing Filipino

named “Jack” (he had rejected his original name when a young man –

he said he wanted to be “100% American!”

and that meant having a name like Bob or Joe or Bill,

and he thought “Jack” sounded sexy and macho).
Jack had picked up the shipment from a Sacramento wharf

where it had been unpacked from a container

by a young African-American

named Obadiah Washington,

who was in fact a rap artist (the day job was a secret)

and performed at local clubs at night under the name

Dr. Sling.
The container had been hauled off the ship Flower of Seoul

by Ted Anderson, of old Swedish stock, on his last day

before retiring. The container was his last but one.

When he hauled the final container of his career,

his fellow longshoremen smashed a champagne bottle against it

and made a party of it for the next hour on the wharf.

The container with the clocks inside got a splash of the champagne,

but was otherwise undamaged by the festivities.

 

The Flower of Seoul had carried the container

across the Pacific the week before.

The ship was manned by a small crew,

most of them young Indonesians, and piloted

by a Taiwanese captain named Jiang-Ji Li,

forty-five, with a family of six girls at home

and a nagging wife who made the boredom of sea life

seem like an endless vacation by contrast.

Getting his girls married, however,

was another matter: the eldest

had been poisoned by “women’s liberation”

(as he still called it) and wanted to become a captain

like her father. Why couldn’t she have been a boy?

These thoughts had made the crossing

an onerous one for Captain Li,

especially the prospect of going back:

the Flower of Seoul would be making a week-long stop,

after picking up timber in Portland,

at Taipei.

The clock had sat for the entire trip,

unseen in its dark container,

its hands set at the traditional 10:10.

 

n the port city of Busan, South Korea,

the container with my clock in it

(though, of course, it was not yet my clock –

would it ever be, really? Is ownership

of anything, let alone a clock,

time’s strict and impartial measurer,

by a limited and mortal being like man

even possible? That is a delicate

philosophical question

that we can not, alas, pursue here),

that container had been placed on the deck

of the Flower of Seoul

with two dozen other similar containers

of different colors and sidings –

some corrugated, some smooth –

with the result that the ship looked like a father

so overburdened with packages

he was likely to fall down,

by a longshoreman named Kim Dong-hyun,

twenty-eight (a little fat fellow

who loved dakon kim-chi so much

his mother gave him a case every year

for Gujeong),

using a crane

to lift it from a semi driven by a driver

named Kim Ji-hoon (no relation), a tall, skinny fellow

of thirty-three,

who still lived with his parents

and played computer games on the weekends,

driving his mother to despair about ever having

grandchildren.

He had driven the truck

from a small factory outside Seoul,

where he had stopped by for the clock consignment,

up near the border

(it was a long drive not helped

by the bad heat wave and the endless traffic –

the highway was becoming a continuous traffic jam,

but no one in Seoul wanted to pay for improvements,

so Ji-hoon just growled and daydreamed about the next version

of WarCraft, supposed to be coming out in August).
A young woman – a sixteen-year-old named Song-hi

with long hair and fat cheeks and a pert expression –

had packed the clock in the consignment box

after taking it from the end of the assembly line

where it had been checked for quality by a grim matron

named Yun, who had a drunken husband,

two ungrateful children and a spoiled cat,

the only creature in the world she felt understood her.

The clock had been assembled

by half a dozen other girls, all wearing the same uniform.

Chimin, whose face was a perfectly flat oval

and always rode her bike to work,

added the swivel stands to the clocks.

Soyon, who was always sad

and never talked about her home life,

put in the inner workings of the clocks

and the battery receivers:

the little drawer that poked out of

the clock’s plastic case.

Subin, who liked to clown and make practical jokes,

attached the minute and hour hands, and “sweeps”

(i.e., second hands), when they had them, to the clocks.

Hayun, who was very tall and very proud

(actually, her unusual height made her painfully self-conscious),

added the white face to each clock. Once,

she had been so distracted,

she had put the faces in upside down

for more than 20 clocks.

Nobody down the line noticed until Mrs. Yun, of quality control,

saw them and had a meltdown,

and threatened to fire everybody.

That was a bad day for Hayun!
Chi’u, who was so short she

disappeared under the assembly line

when she stepped off her stool,

put in the oscillating mechanism

that ran the clock.

Hyechin, who, for some reason,

no one liked and everyone made fun of,

put in the alarm.
The girls got the parts from the other side of the factory,

where they were made by two men and a woman:

Chunyong, fifty-five, who dyed his hair,

was the lead craftsman

amd made the clock oscillators.

Songmin, his first assistant,

a stiff young man – the first of his family

not to have to work in the fields –

crafted the cases.

Yuchin was the first woman in the factory

to have made it into “craft”: she had a small tattoo

of a periwinkle on her left inner wrist,

and was considered quite wild,

but that was all right by Chunyong,

her manager,

because she was so talented.

She crafted the clock faces,

arms and sweeps,

based on her own designs.

(These were first OK’d by upper management, of course –

that was one of the reasons they had hired her:

design and craft in one person, with only one salary!

The clocks sold consistently, especially in the American market,

so “UM” was content.)
Songmin and Yuchin got the polystyrene they used

from bins of plastic parts

that had been delivered by

Kwon Young-sik, who had only one eye,

from a bad accident on his last

delivery job (it had not been his fault;

he had left because he thought that it would bring even worse bad luck,

after his accident, to stay).

The parts had been made in the big

National Plastic Co. Ltd. plant

on the other side of Seoul.

Much of the plastic was recycled

from toys, hardware tools, and other clocks.
Chunyong had gotten the quartz for the

oscillator crystal that runs my clock

(I guess I can call it mine, now)

from a bin where the crystals were packed

in small boxes

after delivery by Park Ye-jun,

a short, fiery man with bad breath

(he lived on garlic for breakfast, lunch and dinner),

from the mines of Tae Wha,

near Chungju, half way between Seoul and Busan.
The quartz from which the mechanism of my clock was made

had been mined from the earth there

by a very young man named Ahn Min-kyu,

eighteen years old, just out of school.

His family had been fishermen from time immemorial,

and he had planned on being a fisherman too,

when the fish stocks of his seashore village

disappeared one day –

it was thought because of pollution from the North –

so he had to change plans and, instead of probing the ocean

for a living, probed the earth, as there were jobs

at the booming Tae Wha Mine.

So he left his village

and went to Chungju

and learned to dig the earth

for minerals. Then one day,

in a poorly lit tunnel,

smelling of sulfur and damp,

he dug out, with his pick

(the machinery was down, as so often),

a clump of quartz – several million years old,

formed by magma thrusting

from deep within the earth –

the mine was along the rim of fire that followed

the edge of the northern Pacific

from America to Asia,

and made volcanoes erupt

and quakes shake the earth

(a smaller quake had woken me

not long after I was given the clock) –

a clump of quartz that had been deposited

in milky white crystals

with other rocks, from fire and river and wind,

in the dark earth.

He placed it, using his shovel, into the cart,

and the cart rolled away to the surface

and the sunlight,

then he turned back to the wall of rock

with his pick, and swung.
And that is the list of people to whom I am indebted

for the appearance on my bed table of the little alarm clock.

The list could go on –

there is really no reason to stop here:

What about the parents, and the grandparents, on and on,

of all those people who at one point or another

touched or handled or carried the clock, or

what would later become the clock?

What about their siblings, uncles, aunts,

cousins, teachers, friends?

What about the original inventor of the very first clock?

And who, or what, invented him?
One could go on and on. And on and on,

without end.
And that is just for the clock I looked at

when I woke up that morning.

What if I had to do the same thing

for everything else in my life?

The mind suddenly flies off

like a flock of startled crows,

shredding the air with caws . . .
I woke.

It was the alarm,

its shriek

telling me “get up! get up!”

_____
Christopher Bernard is author of A Spy in the Ruins, In the American Night, and The Rose Shipwreck. He is also co-editor of Caveat Lector. His poetry can be found at his blog, “The Bog of St. Philinte.”
Image from: Alarm Clock Wallpaper

The Invention of Fire
By Christopher Bernard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One day I heard on a street of this city –

billionnaire ville of high tech and IT,

cultured pearl of Silicon Valley,

capital of the 21st century,

San Francisco of the crazed and the crazy –

a man laugh out, “Whatever you do,

or think you can do, there’s one thing you can’t do:

you can’t disinvent technology!”




But, darling, what if we could, you and me,

undo the long golden chain of human

marvels and practical disasters, back

to the wild dawn of it all? What if we could

unpave, unpollute, unpoison the world

that we are destroying with our civilized life,

that Frankenstein’s monster of terror and sweat?




—The cell phone suddenly melts in my hand

like a Milky Way left too long in the sun.




The laptop wrinkles like an autumn leaf,




the desktop goes up in a puff of smoke

at the sparrow’s pass of a magician’s wand,

goes up with a smell of burning wood.




Servers curdle like bottles of milk.




GPS goes out like a light.



Monitors line up like dead fish on the sand.




Abruptly vanishes the World Wide Web

like a spider’s cobweb catching humans like flies,

and with it the stranglehold of the internet.




A wind picks up over the empty land:

it blows forests of sky dishes away,

flocks of radios, stereophonic herds,

the clotted brainpans of obsessive nerds,

landfills clogged with wireless TVs,

movie cameras, projectors – not those! – yes, those

too – molten flash drives and CPUs,

busses and rockets and snowboards and skis,

rollerblades, Velcro and nonstick pans,

silicon chips reduced to sand,

rare earth metals melting down with smartphones,

the burnt-out husks of intelligent homes,

trains and steamships and telegraphs and sails

crossing the seas like clouds of white whales,

skyscrapers and skylights, iron alloys and glass,

the first lawnmowers smelling of cut grass,

and the central beast at the heart of the wheel:

the million-headed Hydra, the automobile;

the casket elevator, the pick, the spade,

the tackle and hook of a cable of braid,

the IUD, pill, the condom, bidet,

vaginal rings and penis pumps

(the tech of pleasure isn’t spared its lumps),

Glocks and anklets, in vitro wombs,

water-sealed coffins and virtual tombs,

warheads and nylons and nuclear bombs:




the wind of time in reverse sweeping away

everything we invented: the plough, the clock,

the spectacles on the pimpled nose of a monk,

dreadnaughts, all dreading, at long last sunk,

pencil, parchment, typewriter, quill,

propeller, salt cellar, egg-beater, scythe,

horseshoe nail and dentist drill,

uncool change lane and cool Swiss knife:

everything that fell from the war of life

into our far too-clever brains

that are never satisfied and never tire,

back to the beginning of everything until

we lie down again in the mud of a cave

and, snuggling together, as we know best,

disinvent the one we can blame for the rest:

the two sticks that first rubbed together into flames.




See? All gone! It couldn’t be done?

We’ve done it, you and me, in the course

of a little fantasy and, with apologies, verse.

But then, I never needed any of it.

I have needed you, deep as I am in the mire.

Each time we embrace, we invent fire.




_____




Christopher Bernard is author of A Spy in the Ruins, In the American Night, 
and The Rose Shipwreck. He is also co-editor of Caveat Lector. 
His poetry can be found at his blog, “The Bog of St. Philinte.”




Image from Fire Fire Fire.

Imaginary Cartoons: Charlie Hebdo in Heaven

By Christopher Bernard

In the spirit of Charlie Hebdo (= ; – > ), and not being the greatest draftsman in the world, I offer the following “conceptual comics” or “imaginary cartoons.”

1. The five Charlie Hebdo cartoonists who died on January 7, 2015 – Cabu, Charb, Honoré, Tignous, and Wolinski – are in heaven, standing at the foot of the Almighty’s throne. The Archangel Gabriel, looking sullen and embarrassed, is standing with an open ledger and a quill near a sign that reads “Department of Indemnities.” The cartoonists look bewildered and amazed. Cabu speaks: “Could you repeat that again? We get 70 virgins each?”

2. The five cartoonists are in heaven; they have become angels, with halos and wings, and are floating about, cracking up over their new status, pointing and jeering at each other, plucking each other’s halos, looking up each other’s shifts, generally behaving like a bunch of out-of-control scamps. Cabu speaks to a puzzled angel standing nearby: “And then I said, ‘You mean, he does exist!?’”

3. The five cartoonists in heaven, each of them surrounded by 70 virgins: Cabu: “The Old Man sure has a sense of humor.”

4. The murdered cartoonists, surrounded by choirs of angels singing on fluffy clouds, meet in heaven the three dead terrorists killed by the French police. Cabu speaks: “Bet you didn’t expect to see us here.” “No, we get the virgins.” “Instead of the virgins, you get us.” “ … and you get the first read on all of our cartoons forever!” “Oh, I get it. Our heaven – your hell!”

5. The terrorists are tied up and faced with the cartoonists, who menacingly raise their pencils and sketchbooks, ready to draw. They look terrified and whimper, “No! No! Anything but that!” _____

Christopher Bernard is a regular contributor to Synchronized Chaos Magazine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Miracle in Red Bluff

By Christopher Bernard

“It’s Christmas eve,” the burly motel owner said.
“Nobody’s got any rooms.” “Damn all,” said the man.
“It’s all right, Jay,” the wife, hardly a teen, replied,
looking at the owner. “Oh!” He, suddenly sheepish,
saw the problem: nine-months due,
the little body was swollen, a perfect sphere
at her tummy. “Well,” he added reluctantly,
“we’re not supposed to, but there is a corner
we sometimes rent in the garage. It’s not legal,
you know, so we have to charge more…” “More?
Man! For a garage?” sputtered the man.
“We get to sleep on cement?” “No, there’s a cot—
two cots, and blankets, a table, a utility sink,
and a ceiling light.” It was snowing outside.
Jay cursed. “We’ll take it,” he grumbled. “Come on, Myra.”
Myra exhaled. An hour later they were settled
in a cold room half hidden behind a row of cars
under a naked bulb. “If we weren’t black,”
said Jay, “he’d’ve let us sleep in the lobby,
the white bast—!” “Jay, don’t,” said Myra.
“We’ve got a roof for the night.” She heard the wind
blowing the snow down from Shasta’s peak.
“Be thankful, Jay.” “I’ll be
damned first,” he retorted. He pulled a cot
away from the wall. Myra lay very quiet on the other.
“You all right?” he asked. Myra had a scared look
on her face where she lay near the wall. She tried to
pull herself up. “Jay … Jay … oh … Jay ….
I think it … I think it’s …” “Holy shit … Not here, not now…!”

A clutch of teens were passing a joint behind Sal’s.
The snow was still falling, though lighter. “Hey man,
this stuff’s so strong, I can see Santa coming
over Redding.” “That’s no Santa, that’s a drone,
and he’s comin’ after yo’ tight ass.” The others giggled.
Suddenly someone appeared they didn’t know.
He wore a dark raincoat, which didn’t make much sense.
The boys stopped and stared. “It’s a narc,” one whispered.
“Or some transgender weirdo,” another sneered.
It had the figure of a man but a woman’s face,
it spoke softly but locked their eyes with its own:
each thought the figure looked at him alone.
“None of the above,” it smiled. The boys
were suddenly frightened. “Don’t be afraid. I have news.
Across the alley there’s something you should see.”
It pointed to a garage where a light was burning.
“Hey, it’s late, man. And it’s Christmas. I gotta get home.”
“I bring glad tidings. Go. Look. What have you to lose?”
He looked benignantly at them. “Peace to you.” Then he
seemed to disappear. They looked at each other.
“Man, that stuff is strong,” one of them said.
But they went anyway to the garage. A black man and woman
looked up from a little black baby in a towel and a blanket,
and lying in the sink. From a hole in the wall came a sound
of pigeons, their heads looking down. A stray dog
sat nearby, a cat was curled up on the table,
staring silently at the infant,
who lay watching the boys curiously,
in the unfocused way babies have;
seeming to be wondering where he was.
The boys, still high, fell to their knees.

Sometime after, there was a knock,
and three old men, one with a beard,
one with a funny hat, the third with his fingers
covered with shining rings, came in. “I told you
I was right,” said the one with the hat. “He’s the one.”
“How can you tell?” But the first was silent. The ringed
man nodded deeply to the mother. “Please excuse us.
We’ve come a long way to get here.” Myra smiled shyly,
fatigued from the labor, uncertain, yet taking
these strange happenings as they came. The man removed his rings
and placed them near the baby, their brightness
glimmering like his eyes. “Why are you ….?” she asked,
astonished. The man shook his head and smiled.
The two other men also left small offerings—
the most precious items, it seemed, that they possessed:
a vial of cheap perfume, a handful of costume jewelry.
“We cannot stay,” they said, then with a deep
bow to the child, they left. The man with the beard
said to the bewildered parents, “You do not know
who he is? It isn’t for me to say … But you
will know,” then departed.

“What are they
talking about?” said Jay. Myra wearily
shook her head, then took her newborn baby
who was at last beginning to cry, and opening her blouse,
let him feed greedily. Jay went outside—
the snow had stopped, the sky was deep, empty and clear—
and he looked up. The biggest star he had ever seen—
brighter than the moon on the brightest night of the year—
hung like a beacon, brilliant, straight and motionless, above him.

_____
Christopher Bernard is a novelist, poet, editor and journalist living in San Francisco. His books include the novel A Spy in the Ruins; a book of stories, In the American Night; and The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. His novel Voyage to a Phantom City and a new collection of short fiction, Dangerous Stories for Boys, are scheduled for publication in 2015. He is co-editor of Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org) and a regular contributor to Synchronized Chaos Magazine.

Clara Hsu

LATE BLOSSOMS

A review by Christopher Bernard

The First to Escape
Poems by Clara Hsu
The Poetry Hotel Press
134 pp, $18.00

“It is always better, the ‘other world’
where each motion is a still frame,
perfectly all right to linger in.”
—Cafe Delirium

These lines may stand as a motto for the eloquent collection they encapsulate. We are not here the first, nor are we likely to be the last, to escape into the “other world” embodied in Clara Hsu’s poems, where we too can linger, perfectly right in the ever-widening senses of the term. Poems like these are enchantments to spirit us away, partly to help us escape the bitterly real world but above all to give us distance where we can see more clearly that world from which we have, from which we must, escape if we are to breathe, to live. Hsu’s poems are both entrance and egress, a welcoming and a bon voyage, a palpable breath of the morning air crossing our way across the white page, embers of candle ash in the snow.

“Begin with sadness that permeates
since the feverish hands cooled
Looking beyond
it must have been the wind”
—Wandering Night

Often the reader will find here a deep joy, sometimes delicately, sometimes wildly sensual; sometimes homey, domestic, calm; sometimes hard, with the earthy candor of genuine love, the deep affection that spurns euphemism. But sadness, the exhaustions of love and the instability of even the most modest happiness, also has its rights, to say nothing of its sacraments.

There is the questing for the self, that elusive necessity of being:

“the dreamer
doesn’t know it is she who commands
the dream to appear. It is she who has
been wishing. It is she whose wish takes
form tapping code into the great
unknown. It is her words….”
—Wandering Night

Continue reading →

The Choice

By Christopher Bernard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Choice

By Christopher Bernard

The modern world, that devil’s bargain …
—E.M. Cioran

The devil came to a man one day
and told him: “I will grant to you
undreamed of knowledge, wealth and power;
every hope mankind has known
will real become, or seem to be
on the verge of reality
tomorrow or, at the very most,
the next day, marvelously.
You will dominate the earth,
take your first steps toward the stars,
walk on the mountains of the moon,
touch the sands on the plains of Mars,
weigh the ice on Saturn’s moons,
on your fingers wear her rings,
weigh the universe itself
in the scales of your great mind,
measure its length, its breadth, its age,
its time to come, death and old age,
you will be so sage.

You’ll count the smallest elements
that make it up – the quarks, the strings,
the genes, the chromosomes of all things –
and play with them
to make new worlds, new life, new minds –
you’ll learn
the origin of space and time,
the source of life, the cause of thought,
everything that can be known
you, and you alone, will know.

Continue reading →

 

Philip Fried

 

With Angry Love

 

Interrogating Water and other poems

Philip Fried

Salmon Poetry

112 pages

€12.00

 

A review by Christopher Bernard

 

New York poet Philip Fried’s new book of poems has a bitter humor, an angry sarcasm just this side of despair:

 

The multi-chemical Lethal is a classic

And one of America’s best-loved cocktails, due

To its featured role on cable’s Death Row show

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino

—Mixology, a Madrigal

 

But the bitterness is well earned, as every day – and, with the multiversal bedlam of the internet, sometimes every minute – we are granted yet another example of our continuing descent into barbarism and moral chaos.

Fried’s poems often use a device that has become increasingly common in modern culture, both American and European: they take on “the voice of the devil” in an attempt to shake the reader out of their usual passiveness:

 

Galloping with his drum, the singer

Rides in a split second over

Plains that outdistance their tympanum sky,

And all by the song’s power.

Ideology gallops the story.

What values spur the teller?

—Ballad

 

Fried’s poems work their angle and edge from the insanity of our gun-worship:

 

O portable and concealed god, barely visible

As a bulge, yet guardian of halcyon skies

And mountain majesties from your home in a pocket-,

Pancake-style-belt, or shoulder-holster.

—Prayer to the Small-Arms Deity

 

to our national narcissism:

 

First, assemble the Manifest Destiny engine,

…

Fasten the Shining City to the Hill,

… With the Leveraged Capital

Rubberband, stretch an elastic liberty

Until it nearly snaps, from sea to sea.

—Grammar as Glue

 

to our infatuation with technology, our paranoias over transgressed borders, our feverish materialism, our dehumescent humanism – but above all, to our scattering moral obeisance to the gods of war, our morphing into the labile dictatorship of terror:

 

We are soliciting bids from a divine

entity for a Full-Protection Covenant,

with renewal options in perpetuity,

to shield the homeland and its future seed.

—The Department of Defense (DoD) Request

for a Covenant (RfC)

 

The language of these poems blends the schizoid paranoia of military officialdom and the meretricious smarminess of corporate diction with the majestic cadences of the King James Version of the Bible (frequently quoted) and the sleek, solemn latin of the Vulgate, in a mashup of dictions meant to shock with awe at the “sinister giddiness” of our official culture.

 

Have you brought forth the Predator Drones? Have you armed them with

Hellfire missiles and fledged them with glycol-weeping wings?

….

Does the Killer Bee fly by your wisdom and initialize its missiles? Does

the DarkStar launch at your command, deployed from invisible havens?

…

Whatsoever is under the whole of heaven is mine.

—On the Record

 

Who is this that comes from the wilderness like pillars of smoke,

perfumed with lambskin and burnt gunpowder?

…

His legs are as pillars of marble, clad in flame-resistant trousers. His head,

crowned with bulletproof Kevlar, is as a watchtower looking toward

Kandahar.

—Canticles

 

Shimmering with anorexic allure,

these supermodels have learned to stroll with intent,

reinventing themselves up from the balls of their feet.

The Lil Saunder Voluminous Total Jacket

seamlessly encloses a lead core,

including the base, in brass or a suitable metal.

—Catwalk

 

Other poems combine street-vetted vernacular with quotes from Thoreau and Emerson, museum-ese with the disingenuous customer-friendliness of instruction cards, Victorian-esque translations from the Greek tragedians with the utterances of a Siri app named Sybil, the thuggish inquisitory of a black-site interrogator, chronicles from the dark ages of the future in the stumbling diction of an anonymous monk, and the prim hysteria of newspaper headlines.

The bitter brilliance of these poems should not hide from us the deep compassion and the furious optimism that burns at their heart. Fried’s poems are a poetry of denunciation and warning, as old as Micah and as new as the whispering drone peering in at your window. The anger of these poems is the anger of love. And a determination to seize mind, heart and body and shove us away from the bloody abyss into which we seem so intent on plunging, as though we believed we shall grow wings if only we fall hard enough.

If I have any criticism of the book, it is that I came away with no clear understanding of Fried’s notion of “the good” – aside from building and molding language into fortresses of intention and villages of words. His vision of our time’s evils is eloquent almost to a fault: I hunger to hear his vision of good – even of our time’s “goodness” (only the dark Pollyannas of cynicism refuse it any goodness at all); I’d like him to occasionally drop the sarcastic mask, the much-dented postmodern shield, and show a glimpse of the naïve spirit without the defensive clutch at cleverness.

Not the least of the ironies associated with this book is that it (like Fried’s previous books) is published by a foreign press – to whom thereby we owe many thanks. The elegant design is grateful to both eye and hand – it’s a handsome production all around. But it is one more nasty little self-imposed humiliation to our seemingly unending national list that this much-needed voice had to go beyond the country’s borders, its ever-shrinking, ever-thinning skin, to find a publisher.

_____

Christopher Bernard is a writer, poet, editor and journalist living in San Francisco. His books include the widely acclaimed novel A Spy in the Ruins; a book of stories, In the American Night; and The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. His work has appeared in many publications, including cultural and arts journalism in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere, and poetry and fiction in literary reviews in the U.S. and U.K. He has also written plays and an opera (libretto and score) that have been produced and radio broadcast in the San Francisco Bay Area. His poetry films have been screened in San Francisco and his poetry and fiction have been nominated for Puschcart Prizes. He is co-editor of Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org) and a regular contributor to Synchronized Chaos Magazine.

 

 

Philip Fried