August, New Hope, 1961

By Christopher Bernard

The heavy ripening summer,
green in the mountains,
high wheat, sleek corn,
alfalfa massed against the ground,
strawberries, raspberries, black,
peaches almost over-ripe,
tomatoes big and sweet –
a sultry land baking hot
with loam, topsoil, sleep.

The year ripening:
the wind from the north, in snow, rain,
ice, forgotten. Trickles
of moisture tickle the back of your neck.
Nothing tempts like ice-sweat lemonade,
except maybe a plunge 
in a pool under the hickories.
Time stops for weeks.
You never want it to move again.

August the earth in that place slept
and dreamt of a half-forgotten spring,
winter dead, July’s hopes,
as a whisper of coolness slipped inside,
like a drop of water inside a crack.
And under the sultry atmosphere
a breath of ice stole like a knife, 
steely and rare. . . .
Someone now long dead
looked up from her summer book, hesitated, and said,
to no one in particular, “I can feel fall in the air.”

_____
	
Christopher Bernard’s collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence and was named one of the “Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.

What Is the Opposite of Politics?


A shift of rain in the trees.
A snow globe in a sandbox.
My cousin's scuffed knees.

What is the cost of mercy?
A spade of silent rust.
You'll never know if justice
is less refined than dust.

Who is that fellow singing?
I never knew his kind.
You say he's rough and tender.
I hope to live forever
if heaven is his mind.
_____

Christopher Bernard’s most recent book is A Socialist’s Garden of Verses, winner of a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and named one of the “100 Top Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. He is founder and a principal, with Ho Lin, Steven Hill, and Jonah Raskin, of the webzine Caveat Lector.

After

By Christopher Bernard

After all the tweets are done,
and all the posts erased,
and all the insta videos
are drowned in silicon,

and all the newsfeeds freeze 
while panic-scrolling past,
and social media “likes”
are hated – yes! – at last,

and all the influencers
are swallowed  by TikTok,
and every troll is smothered
by every soul they mock,

and every “Facebook friend”
has ghosted all their contacts,
not knowing all their contacts
already ghosted them,

and all the digerati
encrypted and encased are
within a frozen chassis,
a whited sepulchre
where their data asleep forever.

and all the web and net
have smothered all their flies
and fattened like two spiders
till all their pixels died,

and all the household names
have blown to clouds and air,
and drifting smoke and ashes
are all the billionaires

into clouds of musk, 
and hell’s unlocked gates
smother the world’s last jobs
suckered to a mark
and a betraying oracle
and a final dying lark –

you and I, my love, my fair, 
shall hover above their shrines
that no one visits, in
a love that conquers silicon
to a quaint soft-shoe rhythm,
all the screen’s illusions,
and death’s algorithm, 

and there we shall dance
inscribed in these brave lines,
my fairest, sweetest, loveliest one,
till the very end of time.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s latest collection of poems, A Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021.”

Knock Knock:
A Poem for Ukraine

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Ukrainian boy.
I have walked from far,
Over fields of snow
And ice of roads
And cities at war.
I don’t know you.
Are there any with you?
My family is gone,
I don’t know where.
I’m here all alone.
May I come in?
I have a number
On my hand. Can I call?
Not on my land!
There’s a country
Down the road.
Try them there.
It’s far, and I’m cold.

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Ukrainian boy.
Can I come in?
I’m so tired,
And the wind is so cold. . . .
Why are you here?
What is that 
In your eyes? Is it tears?
Is it sadness or fear?
No, it is ice,
It is melting there.
Go down the road.
There is nothing for you here.

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Ukrainian boy.
Can you say where I am?
I saw ghosts on the road,
They looked like my papa,
My mama, my sister,
My brother at home.
Has anything happened to them?
Will you please let me in?
I’m so tired, I don’t think 
I can walk any more.
I can’t feel my hands.
May I come in here?
What is that number
Written out on your hand?
When I call, there is silence 
At the other end.
Come in and rest
On my bed. No, it’s snow . . .
When you sleep you will never
Fear war again.
No, no, I must go,
How will I get home
If now I don’t go?
Come in and rest,
Come in and rest,
Come in and rest
Until you must go . . .  

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Who knocked at our door?
Show yourself if you’re there!

But there was no one there,
Only the sound of the wind,
And the snow in the air.


The Sunken Palace 

The curlew calls in the sycamore tree.
Do you hear it? A boy’s laugh follows.

A rustle of gold flickers over the lake.
The sky is cold and on fire.

Do you see the fair one, the kind one, the holy?
She is not to be seen on the tower.

There is only a shadow to be seen in the arch
And an iron gate as it closes.

He is gone now, and she is not here.
Their story, our story, is over.

The palace of love was a fable. The rain
Fell for long on the meadow.

At the season when the moon was a song in the snow
And the wind was a shout in the mountains,

The ghosts of the palace where the ballroom had drowned
Danced in a lake of shadows.


The Sound of Falling Trees


“There’s no such thing as ‘being a poet.’” 
—T. S. Eliot

It used to be
an almost embarrassing compliment.
If someone called you that, you skipped 
a heartbeat of secret bliss,
as if the most beautiful girl in class
had just blown you a kiss.
Now it is almost an embarrassment.
“Writers in San Francisco,”
New York and L.A. smile to each other
with a wink and a nudge. “Aren’t they all
poets? They can be safely ignored,
left to PEN and AWP,
unless you go in
for the penniest of penny stocks.
They can’t even make themselves any money,
let alone the likes of you and me;
they’re famous only if they die
(I know it sounds bold, but it’s so true) by
a monumentally gaudy suicide.”

It’s not much of a compliment anymore, yet
it is still a kind of destiny, a kind of fate:
a compulsive need to find new words
for old emotions, old and raw,
and make them ring like bells in the winter air—
clear and true and fading into oblivion—
the crash of trees falling deep in the forest
even when there is no one to hear.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s latest collection of poems, A Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021.”

The Dragons of Paris

(Upon reading Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ 
Abuse of Science, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont)

By Christopher Bernard


Once upon a time, 
in the glamorous, notorious City of Lights
that lies across the sinuous Seine
like a seductive odalisque
of reason and sensuality,
beauty, style, good taste, and sense,
there appeared a foul and toxic fog,
a smoke that belched and bound the town
in mental night.
The citizens wandered, stunned and blind
and crying out in random shouts
in words no one could understand:
“Le petit a! Jouissance! Différance!
Pastout! Afemme! Séméiotiké!”
that filled the air all over France
from caves deep down in old Lutéce
(“Mudville,” once called, now called again),
where the Dragons of Paris disbursed, in smog,
dank volumes of mephitic breath.

The Dragons’ names put terror in
the hearts of all good citizens:
Lacan le Gros, Foucault le Mal, 
grinning Baudrillard le Bouffon,
Kristeva la Sorciére,
Jacques Derrida l’Indécidable,
Gilles Deleuze, la Porte Sublime
du Dindon de la Charabia, 
and more, with a host of dragonettes
pursuing the work of their dark masters
cooking in their dens a glorious madness
of chopped dictionaries and tossed 
charlatanry, spiced with cynicism,
that sickened two generations
of impressionable, clueless, half-educated youth,
most of them – hélas! – American.
	
One day two knights rode from the west –
Sir Alan and Sir Jean by name,
“Follow the Science!” writ on one shield,
“Physics to the Rescue!” upon the other –
and bravely stormed the fetid caves
whose floors and walls were lined with texts
with dragon sweat and guano thick,
unreadable, yet cruelly read
by generations of undergrads
and graduate students until they squealed,
“There is no truth, there is no Real,
no good not always already a weapon,
Big Other, subject, sexual relation
(sorry, mom, dad! I never really happened!),
no meaning not infinitely deferred,
no science, objectivity, facts
(“no facts but only interpretations,”
as unholiest St. Fritz of Nietzsche said);
‘Il n’y a rien hors de texte!’; no world,
nothing whatsoever beyond the Word!”
(because, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t get
a degree (in English) so they could teach
in a nice, respectable university, 
and maybe someday get tenure – but then, my friends,
they wouldn’t even get that – poor dears! – in the end).

With a thousand bold strokes, Sir Jean and Sir Alan
pierced the hides of the Parisian dragons
(“Mathematical gaffes! Scientific misunderstanding!
Bad logic, worse grammar, bad French and worse English!
Logical dead ends! Arithmetical nonsense! Hang it, just meaningless gibberish!”)
and out of the holes in those green slippery skins
hot air hissed away in a gale o’er the Seine,
and the dragons – the two Jacques, the one Julie,
Jean, Gilles, Michel, and a crowd of others – 
shrieking death cries, flew about in a panic
as they shrank like a frantic mob of balloons,
gnashing and frothing and hopelessly flying
from darkness to darkness – one felt sorry for them,
almost – till they shriveled down to what they had been
all along: a few inches of thin rubber, with mouths
agape, and nothing whatever inside them but air.

Sir Alan and Sir Jean, armor dented and scarred,
swords flecked with balloons punctured, and smeared with ink,
exited the caverns out to the light
and the acclaim of a grateful city. “At last!”
rose the cry on all sides, “We can again see the sun!
We can breathe! We are freed from the impenetrable night
that threatened to destroy us – above all, our minds!”

The two knights, bloodied, exhausted, but victorious, 
took their modest bows. “You are really too kind!”
Then glanced at each other: it wouldn’t do now
to tell these people they were partly to blame
for nursing the dragons with their own folly:
spare the critic and spoil the intellectual.
Don’t get them in the crib, and give them a fight?
When (if!) they grow up, they’ll give you a bite!

At the banquet that followed, they had stories to tell:
close calls with the enemies of thought and light,
genuine creation, and piety for the human:
intellectual pretentiousness in a shotgun wedding
with despotic professional intimidation
fueled, on the one hand, by status anxiety
and, on the other, by narcissistic delight.

Unhappily, they had not gotten
all the dragons in the end:
one sly dragonette from the Balkans fled,
escaping to Slovenia,
his innocent home, where he remains,
cooking his oracles for the next set
of gullible college students, if there are any left!

_____


"Christopher Bernard’s most recent book of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ “Top 100 Indie Boks of 2021.” 

#littlebylittle

(A sequel to “How to Save the World: A New Year’s Resolution”)

By Christopher Bernard

1.

“Little by little” was the phrase
for everything she feared to face, to
keep her quiet, calm, unfazed
despite whatever she must do
that otherwise might make her crazed
with the enormity of the true.

2.

Who was she? A heart of life,
loyal, strong, generous,
kind, true, not without strife,
not perfect yet good, for me, for us.
I save and keep her name. Her love
was stronger than life. She taught me love

3.

Little by little, we can do
what we must do. Strangers, friends,
pull back a little here, just so,
a little now. Prevent the end.
Protect the earth from our dark arts.
Preserve the world with your strong heart.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s latest collection of poems, A Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021.”

How to Save the World: A New Year’s Resolution

By Christopher Bernard

It took me far longer than I wished to win my personal war against tobacco. It took weeks, then months, then years, with many relapses. Several of my principal weaknesses – a blind stubbornness, a willful pride, an almost mystical subjectivity – were at war with each other as much as with my strengths – a fairly clear-eyed honesty with myself and an obstinate common sense. I almost didn’t succeed. But I did, finally. I kicked cigarettes for good. I am profoundly grateful for that. I might not be here if I hadn’t.

And what has that to do with saving the world? I admit it’s a stretch, but let me see if I can show how it might.

I have been following theories of climate change since I first heard the term “global warming” in the mid-1970s. The science seemed compelling, the logic impeccable. Living alone at the time, I cooked most dinners at home: almost every night I would watch a saucepan as the water in it simmered to a rolling boil; it usually took a while, and I soon understood the old saying, “A watched kettle don’t boil.” The example of a frog going to sleep in a kettle of warm water and then being slowly boiled to death before he even noticed what was happening was something I could imagine vividly.

My concerns about the “environment” (I object to this painfully misleading term, since nature does not “environ” us – it is us, down to the marrow of our bones and the thoughts in our minds; I use the word for convenience, but under protest) seemed to be shared by the country at large. The news media reported regularly on pollution and similar issues. The governments of the world seemed to take “environmental matters” seriously, making vague statements of high-minded intent and even passing cautiously worded – some might say, too cautiously worded – laws. Even corporations began advertising something like a sincere concern for something other than their next quarter’s profit. I began to feel what I had not felt in a very long time for our public institutions: hope, even giddy moments of optimism.

After all (I thought, reasonably enough, surely), despite psychopaths and mass murderers galore, many of them in positions of highest leadership, humanity as a whole is not evil, is not suicidal. If I myself ever became aware I was doing something I knew would kill or seriously injure me and those around me, I would stop what I was doing – or I would at least modify it. As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, I was once addicted to cigarettes; I knew the dangers and, during that same decade, I had reduced my smoking, over many months, from two packs to six modest cigarettes a day. I had not stopped, true, but it was a beginning.

I had no difficulty understanding or accepting the recent theories of global warming (“recent” only for us, of course; the first such theories went back to the nineteenth century, so the “novelty” of our “discoveries” seemed painfully ridiculous). They were among the reasons I have never owned an automobile. I was also persuaded that the human population was dangerously near the earth’s carrying capacity; this is one reason I never had children.

We all know what has happened since the 1970s. I watched with sickening alarm as the fossil fuel companies, with the connivance of members of state and federal governments, began to sow self-serving doubts about the scientific evidence for global warming, much as tobacco companies had done in the 1960s against the evidence for health conditions – lung cancer, emphysema, heart conditions – being caused or worsened by tobacco use.

I recognized the playbook instantly and with a feeling of bitterness. A teenager in the 1960s, I had learned the same lesson over and over: to take anything the government or corporations state with the greatest possible suspicion. I was sick to my soul with an awareness of how profoundly corrupt American society, at least in appearance, had become: if an economic activity made some group of people very wealthy, even though that activity was actively fatal to many, the American political system made it extraordinarily difficult, and sometimes impossible, to stop them.

I was at the same time horrified and unshocked at the turn of events. America was playing a game it has been playing since the founding: rhetorical hypocrisy, proactive rapacity, pragmatic nihilism, murderous effects. Lay waste, transmute, consume, accumulate; repeat.

At the darkening heart of the world we were entering during those decades of Thatcher, Reagan, and the theorists of the University of Chicago school of economics, I saw the ravaging effects of a capitalism without limits being unleashed across our globe. I had no illusions as to where we were heading, though I kept to my private mantra: “We must come around, we must face reality, we must, we will, act. After all, we aren’t suicidal.”

But many of my fears were becoming realities. We now know we were deliberately blinded; going back to the 1950s, when fossil fuel companies first became aware that, as long as global society was powered principally by oil and coal, “global warming” was a likely consequence and might have catastrophic consequences for human society and other life forms on earth, it has been corporate policy to obscure and deny what they already knew, and to keep the rest of us ignorant and blind. Greed, hubris, and a pathological contempt for the rest of humanity, and of life itself, drove them: the sociopathy of the corporation, the psychopathology of the drive for increasing profits at any price, drove the rest. A typically human blend of complacency, selfishness, and denial – something of which we are all, alas, guilty – would work its poison throughout the human system.

It took a long time before I discovered that there was one weak link – indeed it was the weakest link of all – in the chain that binds human society to the capitalist Juggernaut. What drives the psychopathology of capitalism? The need to feed the beast with ever greater profits. But what drives those profits?

We do: you who read this, and I who write it. The most powerful drivers of capitalism are the twin steeds of avaritia et gula – greed and gluttony. But the greed would not be successful if gluttony did not reward it.

Or, to use a more modern word for the latter: “consumerism” – or its humbler name: buying – whether of things or experiences – going to a movie, taking a trip, “going shopping.” Whenever we make an economic transaction – of any kind whatsoever – we feed the beast. Whenever we avoid one, we deprive the beast of food, water, air. We contribute to its conquest, perhaps even to its end.

Is it really so simple? Indeed. And like many a simple thing, it may be impossible to change. Because the cruel and bitter truth is that we are addicted to the paradise of consumption – the mirage of an endless satisfaction of every desire – that capitalism has made possible, and as long as we remain subject to it, we are condemning ourselves to a horrible fate. Because we know that the grip of an addiction is ruthless and relentless; once a person is in that grip, it is only a matter of time before they will destroy themselves and any who come near them.

We are that addict. And our addiction is buying. It is an addiction that is encouraged, even demanded, by our entire society, by our governments, by friends, cohorts, colleagues, family. We don’t even call our society, our culture by those names anymore – we call it “the American economy.” We are buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, and not, really, anything else – at least, anything that really matters. We are, as a whole, unable even to imagine any other way of life; even many of our putative solutions to the climate crisis are based on an illusion that our economies will save us; we must consume differently, but we still will, we still must consume. We make uneasy jokes about it: “Shop till you drop!” But that is because we know it is true, and we can’t stop ourselves. We are in its grip. It flatters us, intoxicates us, makes us always desire more. “Don’t you just love Amazon Prime!” It seems to have us by the throat.

And yet – the one thing we also know is that we are never entirely in the grip of anything. And that tiny corner of sanity at the far back of our minds can, at any moment, be accessed and made to prevail; can be used to conquer the beast that seeks to control, enslave, and ultimately destroy us. It is neither easy nor simple nor quick to do this. But human beings are self-directing, self-generating, “self-programming,” though it is in the interests of the powers that be to prove to us otherwise: that we are helpless, strengthless, hopeless, pawns of need, drives, and power. But you and I belong to the species that nature, in her infinite wisdom, or her folly, made free. And that freedom makes us ultimately in control of, and responsible for, our lives. We can conquer even an addiction as deep as this one.

Here is my proposal for a New Year’s resolution for myself and for all of us: to reduce buying in 2022.

Not to end buying. Merely to reduce it.

I have no intention of living like an ascetic, because I know trying to do that will fail. I will rebel against my own good intentions, I will backslide, defiantly. It will even make my bad habits worse.

Did I tell you how I kicked cigarettes? I started small. I was smoking, as I said, two packs a day. For the first month of this experiment in stopping smoking, I actually made myself smoke those two packs a day every single day, even when I didn’t want to,

Then I gradually, over the next year, cut down, one or two cigarettes a month at a time, to one pack a day. Afterward I continued, using the same method of reducing by one cigarette a day each month, till I was down to six cigarettes a day, and at that number I stayed for years.

I hold that everyone should have at least one vice – it keeps you from committing far worse evils. Human beings are not saints, and those who try to become saints often become the worst monsters of all. So I kept smoking, moderately; even my doctor agreed I was not endangering myself too much.

But then, over the years I noticed how the costs of cigarettes, thanks to “sin taxes” (of which my conscience heartily approved) kept creeping up, up, up, until a single pack cost more than twice as much as my daily lunch. This was ridiculous! It was high time to cut back to zero. I concocted a new plan: ease myself off via the vile toxin nicotine itself. I started using various kind of nicotine gum; a cigarette, a piece of gum, a cigarette, a piece of gum, alternating, every day. Another year passed.

Then, one late afternoon, a miracle happened.

I was smoking the fourth or fifth cigarette from a recently purchased pack, and I was struck by an overwhelming sense of disgust at the taste of the tobacco smoke. I crushed the cig, threw it out, and tossed the freshly opened pack into the same trash basket without a qualm. Except for a handful of weakenings over the next few years (I would be struck, out of the blue, by an overwhelming desire for a smoke, purchase a pack, sneak it home, open it (peel off the see-through plastic wrapper, flip open the seductively designed box, unfold the mottled gold sealing paper), pull out the fresh, deliciously smelling cig, then light it up with the serene yellow and blue flame of my old lighter, and voluptuously take a deep inhale – and gag on that same disgust at the awful taste filling mouth, sinuses, throat, lungs, and, with an enormously disappointed shrug, throw both it and pack away into the trash with all the force of bitter disillusionment), since that moment I have not returned to my cigarette addiction since.

Once every few years I still get an urge for a smoke, but I have learned that cigarettes are a waste of time and money; I have learned that smoking a cigar, or the single bowl of a pipe, does the trick, a quarter hour of sybaritic bliss. Then I am free for the next several years.

I have a cigar I bought the other day that I plan to smoke on New Year’s Eve.

The next day, January 1, 2022, I will begin my new resolution: to reduce my buying in 2022. Not painfully, not ascetically. Just a little bit for now. Then, next year, I will reduce it a little more. Again, not too much. I’ll never reduce it entirely till they bury me! And hopefully that won’t be for a long time to come.

And, while thinking of the good work I intend to do in 2022, I’ll be thoroughly enjoying my cigar.

After all, I must have one vice.

Anyway, that’s how I connect quitting cigarettes with saving the world. Because the one way we know the world we live in will end is if we don’t solve the climate crisis.

And both quitting cigarettes and solving the climate crisis are about ending addictions.

So, kind reader: what is your resolution?