The Hammer and the Dance 
  
 The hammer and the dance
 in this atlas of the world,
 in the season of pandemic,
 like two stanchions on a court;
 between, a tightening line
 like the imaginary line
 on the cartographer’s expedient chart,
 on one side, the dutiful girls,
 on the other, boys in masks;
 around them hung a wall of distance
 that surrounds them like a fort;
 at their feet, forgotten tasks.
  
 And the hammer beats the time
 for the young ones as they dance.
  
 What of the future? What of the past?
 What of the present? You may well ask.
 There was something to be done
 now forever left undone.
 Where there once appeared a mask,
 now a flawed map hides its face
 in a hand scarred by this place;
 now there is a face of ash.
  
 And the hammer beats the time
 for the young ones as they dance.
  
 Deep inside the twisting globe
 opens up a burning robe.
 And tonight the silence hurls
 into darkness its moot sign
 like a banner never furled,
 like the alchemist’s alembic
 charred with his defeated gold,
 like the future’s gathering dark
 and the iron in the heart.
  
 And the hammer beats the time
 for the young ones as they dance.
  
 Spiritus
  
 When you see it, you will know.
 The shaky camera, the kneeling
 men in midnight blue:
 they look at first as though
 they are praying, pious
 as three altar boys,
 caught in an innocuous crime, perhaps
 stealing holy wafers or consecrated wine.
 But they are not.
  
 The shaking camera stops,
 and you hold in your breath,
 like clutching at a hand,
 not quite believing that you see
 what it is you think you see.
  
 Underneath their knees,
 in the brutal sun,
 a dark form. And a voice from the feed:
 "I can't breathe, I can't
 breathe! I can't breathe! I
 can't breathe!" For four minutes and
 forty-six seconds,
 as the altar boys pray
 in the shouting glare.
 Then it stops. The video
 stops. The voice stops. The praying 
 stops. The breathing 
 stops  And you breathe, 
 too late. But you seethe, you seethe.
  
 _____
  
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new collection of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will appear in the fall of 2020.
   

Two Poems

by Christopher Bernard

 Urbi et orbi
 
Myself, I prefer a city with no one in it,
or, if not exactly no one, only a few.
 
It’s like being in an enormous sculpture garden,
immense minimalist slabs
of glass and concrete throwing shadows
dark as poetry across streets grown modest
with stillness and opening trustingly as a child’s hand.
The few people there look less grotesque
when teased out of the crowd –
the way a solitary farmer turning his field,
a pair of friends or lovers, a daydreaming
hiker, seen in a summer countryscape
between bays of woods and folds
of pastureland and field, under
an ingenuously immense sky
make the dignity of humankind,
its vulnerable nobility,
palpable, and not the poorly spun joke
it seems so often
in a city hysterical, delirious, and crammed.
 
No: our monuments, our things,
the traces of care in the woodwork,
the shadow of a mind molded from a sun –
tools and toys and trinkets, engines and edifices,
the shape of a hand on a prehistoric cave wall,
a flute played shyly on a Sunday morning –
make me less ashamed of being human.
 
I wander the empty city like a hunter
in a wilderness, except that I have found
the object of my hunt, and hold it close
inside my coat, where I can feel its heart
beating, and its warmth, and its wings.


*****
 
The Coyotes of North Beach
 
Sunset, spring: a strange wailing
rises from the gorge under our house
cautiously balanced on a cliff edge
as on a knife
above a valley where coyotes are gathering.
Strange indeed for a city
(our neighborhood, part declivity, part escarpment,
is strange enough for any city).
But maybe not strange for a city
largely emptied from a malady
emptying much of the world –
and giving meaning to the "pan" 
in panache, panama, pancake, panjandrum,
Panglossion, Pandragon, pandemic –
and so giving way to wilderness
seeping back into the streets,
crows appraising the roof tops,
mountain sheep strolling about in Wales,
curious spiders measuring bus shelters
with their delicate silks,
coyotes gathering at cross streets
and dancing in the glimmering streetlights
as they flicker on in the dusk
and making their coyote-like noisings,
as sweet as they are uncanny,
in the city's deepening twilight.
 
Why are they wailing so?
Is it from fear, or loneliness, or need for love?
 
How did the coyotes know
that they are speaking for us? 

*

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020.

April 2020

by Christopher Bernard

We walk the silent streets among monuments

dark as tombs of an ancient time

long forgotten, frozen in silly

selfies and worries

no one can even remember now;

older than memory a time

that ended a mere week ago,

a month, a day, an hour ago.

March was only an hour ago.

March was an eternity ago.

It is spring and the flowers are blossoming everywhere.

Silence passes over the streets

(the sole sound in the neighborhoods,

the operatic bel canto of an endless mockingbird)

like the ripples from a stone that falls

into a neglected pond. They expand

slowly over the besieged city

dark and cool at the bottom of the sky:

over the clumps of office towers,

the chasmed streets, the glistening rails,

the darkened restaurants and bars,

the wordless cafes,

the tidy, disappointed sidewalks,

the hush of missing crowds,

the intersections of empty crosses,

the stillness of the churches

where the bells ring above empty naves,

storefronts closed behind their shields

of plywood painted gray,

white, black, as if to say,

“We are at war, our ships are gray,

our will is black, our hopes are white,”

until they splash the hospitals

and there break

with desperation, grief and fear,

and the stone that is held against fear,

skill, courage, will, the hard

love of a determined yet frightened intent,

arrayed against an insidious invasion

riding the air like gossamer,

defending as with ax and pike

or mangy hides of a long-dead age

and howls of execration and rage,

the pierced wall of the modern town,

what now appalls the world.

Just yesterday, before the stone

fell, life, it was so much simpler . . .

That will be the future’s myth.

Of course it will be a lie.

Life was never simpler.

Man against man, and against woman, was the rule,

commanded by genes, natural selection,

and our bizarre yet entirely human mix

of the irrational and the arrogant.

The world was, as usual, at war

with its silver-stained reflection in the glass.

Humankind was proving

a gorgeous catastrophe for life

on a planet the size of a pebble

slung from a slingshot. We were the crown

virus enthroned in the breath of the world.

And now, in a cruelly fair reverse,

the crown virus has laid siege

to human monumentality

and mortified its pride. The skies

are clear of plane and smog, the clouds

and birds alone inhabit it,

the plains have only farmers cross them,

the mountains do not burn, the woods

are quiet with the stuttering of squirrels,

the tangled skein of interstates

is silent except for insouciant semis

running drink and food to the locked down.

The night is black as ink

strewn with glittering points

we had almost forgotten.

The air, transparent for miles

as glass, stands fresh as morning.

Greenland freezes a film of water

back into ice. The corals

hold their limestone like a breath

beneath a glassy sea.

The city is filled with singing

and archipelagoes of blossoming flowers.

Birds, knowing nothing

but the leaning sun’s ecliptic

and the burnished weathering of the wind,

migrate in their clouds northward,

choiring.

The flowers proclaim that beauty

will always triumph everywhere.

“We must love one another or die,” said the poet.

Then changed his mind to the obvious fact:

“We must love one another and die.”

But this thought undermined his poem.

And so he scrubbed the line, almost

tossed away the poem.

                                      How

we live makes the change beyond

where we bow out of the light;

our choices made, our acts, our words –

these make our meaning and our truth,

our good, our evil:

the stones dropped in a pool,

ripples shivering outward

in growing circles of effect

into infinity,

the moment into eternity,

beyond our little lives more or less forever.

Must we die for the world to live?

This is the question with the forced reply.

If we say to that word “no,”

we are not free from what we know.

_____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020. His third collection of poetry, The Socialist’ Garden of Verses, is slated to appear later this year.

DANCING IN SPACE

The Joffrey Ballet

Zellerbach Hall

University of California, Berkeley

A review by Christopher Bernard

What is greatness – moral, intellectual, artistic? It has a musty, old-fashioned sound, and is not exactly a fashionable idea just now, with our cultural hysterias against “elitism” of any kind, or perhaps ever was in a democratic culture with its sweet, egalitarian shibboleths. Nevertheless, the idea of greatness, saintliness, genius – of a superiority one cannot ignore but only acknowledge with humility and gratitude and admiration, even, in supreme cases, awe – periodically returns, because, like “truth” or “goodness,” it is a value that, however we may pretend we can do without it, at a certain point we discover that we can’t without collapsing into moral incoherence: nihilism, demoralization and despair.

In my own experience, artistic greatness, in particular, is partly discernible by the fact that the subject is more powerful, more beautiful, more astonishing or impressive than I remember it: that painting, this poem, this dance company, that book is more than I assimilated or knew; in some sense is permanently beyond me. It reminds me of what is often meant by “transcendent experience” – “artistic greatness” seems to mean a direct, sensuous experience of transcendence, piercing through the fog of distracted daily living in concentrated brilliance – and thus is an absolute value and not a category of relative merit.

I was provoked to these thoughts partly by the arrival in Berkeley over a recent weekend (and thanks to Cal Performances) of one of the country’s pre-eminent dance companies, a company that has, in the past, shown itself capable of reaching such heights with sometimes intimidating ease – the Joffrey Ballet, based in Chicago and not nearly a regular enough a visitor to the Bay Area and the finely tuned dance audiences we have here. And the company was indeed better than I remembered.

The Joffrey, originally under Robert Joffrey, then Gerald Arpino, and now Ashley Wheater, has mastered a lithe and muscular style of dancing that was on full display throughout a cast in which all of its member are presented as principals.

The performance I saw opened with Christopher Wheeldon’s “Commedia©” (yes, the copyright symbol is part of the title, as with other dances by Wheeldon; is this meant to prevent other choreographers from every using this title for one of their own works? Will someone now copyright “Swan Lake” or “The Nutcracker”? One can only hope they will resist the temptation), a brittlely elegant dance-class piece mimicking the somewhat matte cheeriness of the Stravinsky score it is set to, the clever, if chilly Pulcinella. Never having warmed to the music, I found it hard to warm to the dance, admiring it too from afar, though the contributions of Yumi Kanazawa and Yuki Iwai were noteworthy, and above all that of Brooke Linford, which was of an altogether memorable lightness and grace.

Stephanie Martinez’s “Bliss!”, which followed, set to Dumbarton Oaks, a richer and more complex piece of Stravinsky’s, was a good deal of a looser, less self-conscious affair, spinning between beefcake machismo and winsome femininity, with strong contributions, again, by Iwai and Kawazawa and by Jonathan Dole, and with an almost hilarious riff on muscularity by a stunning Derrick Agnoletti.

If the performance had ended, or peaked, there, at the first intermission, I would have had an interesting afternoon, with some moments to savor and much to have enjoyed. But I wouldn’t have been prepared for what followed.

What followed? “Beyond the Shore” followed. But wait: this is a work, choreographed by Nicholas Blanc (long a staple at the San Francisco Ballet) and co-commissioned by Cal Performances, and so having a special relationship with the Bay Area. The dance is set to a thundering, highly theatrical score by Mason Bates (perhaps best known here for his work, a few years back, with the San Francisco Symphony), “The B-Sides,” originally commissioned by the Symphony. Blanc describes his dance as about “exploration as a metaphor for human nature,” which is certainly a good thought to hang on to as we are thrust into a series of dance adventures, one for each section of the music, as thrilling, compelling and complex as I hope to find in this or any other dance season, climaxing in a profoundly astonishing and deeply moving  pas de deux by Victoria Jaiani and Dylan Guttierez that took me to places dance has not taken me in a very long time indeed, in a section called “Gemini in the Solar Wind.” This was inspired by (and for once, the word is just, for this was in the deepest sense an inspiration) the famous 1960s Gemini spacewalk, recordings of the NASA communications from the walk being cleverly, and oddly movingly, incorporated into the music. The dance was a haunting and vivifying experience, demanding much of the entire company, which met the challenge with limber and dramatic success.

After being vaulted into outer space by “Beyond the Shore,” we put on the razz and came back to earth in the concluding, dance, “The Times Are Racing,” by Justin Peck, a choreographer I have had mixed feelings about till now but this time was completely won over. A sneaker dance if there ever was one, this work starts in a throbbing mob cluster of bodies exploding into a swirling disco-thon to a jammy score from Dan Deacon (moving from ironic, to joyous, to hopeful, to joyous, to ironic, from his hit album America) with an array of young dancers who seemed like they’d jettisoned ten years from the assertive maturity of the Blanc, and dressed up, or down, in sports punk togs from Humberto Leon of Opening Ceremony, splashed with defiance – “Fight,” “Rebel,” “Change,” “Obey,” and of course “Defy” – and knocking them flat with a trip-hop stew of dance styles I soon gave up counting. Starting at a race, it only got faster, wilder, crazier, though whittled down at moments to knock-’em-out solos, especially from Edson Barbosa, that knocked out the audience too, till, speeding by like it would never stop, the dance spun out to succeeding heights of crazy, then spun back in on itself, whooshing back into its cluster like a deblossoming flower before collapsing in total exhaustion.

What a dance. What a performance. What a company.

____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020.

The Silence

by Christopher Bernard

The silence seemed delicious. No one would have thought

the streets could be so still.

The whiplash hum of the cables,

slapping and whining in the slots

or clashing, electrically, above the streets,

the moaning and whimper of the busses,

the gnarled complaints of cars,

the arthritic squeal of a truck,

vanished, like the crumpled quiet of barroom talk.

The barroom talk, too, silenced,

with the garrulous, loud Pandora,

the restaurant ramage quietened

to a held breath by the cashiers.

The tap-tap of a single pedestrian.

The whisper of the wind in your ear.

The buzzing of a heavy bumble bee.

The full-throated aria of a mockingbird,

blithely ignoring sheltering in place,

singing his heart out at the top of a tree.

Under the silence, a trembling,

the lifting of a finger

turning in the wind,

like a cock on a weather vane.

West. South. East. North. East.

South. East. South. West. North.

_____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020. His third collection of poetry, The Socialist’ Garden of Verses, is slated to appear later this year.

Eunice Odio (sculpture by Marisel Jiménez; image from Oregon Arts Watch)

AT JOURNEY’S END

The Fire’s Journey

Part IV: The Return

Eunice Odio

Translated by Keith Ekiss with Sonia P. Ticas and Mauricio Espinosa

Tavern Books

A review by Christopher Bernard

            “2ND MAN

            Where, where is the house of your words?

ION

Behind your heart.”

                                    —The Fire’s Journey, Part IV: The Return

Eunice Odio, considered by many the greatest Costa Rican poet of the twentieth century, wrote what we can now see is one of that century’s most remarkable poems – her complex, elusive, deeply imagined epic of creation, The Fire’s Journey. It has taken several generations for Anglophones to be introduced to this extraordinary poem; with the publication of this translation of the epic’s concluding section, we are finally able to get a sense of the full magnitude of Odio’s accomplishment.

To briefly recap: the first three parts of this epic depict, and in some ways enact, the creation of the world from primordial chaos, and of both the poet narrating the epic (introduced in part two) and of the world’s poet-creator, Ion, named after a central character in Plato’s dialogue of the same name in which the philosopher presents his understanding of poetry as a kind of inspired madness and the role of the poet as a necromantic artificer and a tutor, wise in his madness and mad in his wisdom, of the ways of the gods.

The third, hitherto longest, section depicted the heroic making and remaking by Ion and his faithful servant, Dedalus, with the help of a host of gods, of a great cathedral, an edifice against the void that threatens creation at every instant of its existence.

The fourth part depicts the return of Ion and Dedalus and the other creator gods and goddesses (Om, Tiara, Thauma, Efrit, Demon) to the city of humanity to celebrate the creation of the world after a great victory has been achieved (it is not entirely clear what this “victory” is of, or against what, though it may be the victory of creation itself against chaos and nothingess). On their way to the city, they meet a group of men carrying an angel who seems, somewhat ominously, to have been killed by the masters of the city. In a Lazarus-like act, or an allusion to Jesus, they resurrect him:

He is a crippled angel, he is a man;

not a whole man, but broken in pieces;

half a man that rage spun cut by cut,

large in wounds and small in hope . . .

Ion, returning to his human form, hopes to be recognized by his mother, his uncle, and his brothers (curiously, Ion’s father is never referred to directly, though an ultimate being irregularly appearing, called “The Guardian,” may be him), but even his family does not see him for what and who he is (the second brother speaks):

You’re left, mother, with the son

who disturbs you piece by piece;

you’re left with your recovered son

in whom you never rest

the one you love in secret

without joy and without pause;

in whom you whirl, crying in pain.

In consequence, Ion, who, as a creator of the universe, is also the creator of himself, must now reject his family:

            Mother, . . .

            . . .

            Stay in your place,

            Stay there, living, besieged by the dead.

            Stay there, kissing me from within.

            A new word annihilates me,

            another sets me free

            another one is born in me, allowing a new birthing;

            I am become birth-light once again.

            I emerge.

            .  .  .

            I keep on until the end,

            journeying in rapture.

But on their way to the city, the creators make a harsh discovery: though those they meet are eagerly awaiting the coming of the creators to celebrate them and all of creation, Ion and Dedalus are not recognized; they are spurned, laughed at, denied. They then discover the harshest reality of all. The city of men where they hoped to celebrate, and justly be celebrated, has been conquered by an oligarchy of demons: god of the dead Erebos, three-headed Cerberus, Syriac devil Beherit, and Hybris, named not coincidentally for the Greek word for the overweening arrogance that leads to catastrophe. Humanity has been corrupted, and the euphoria of creation is poisoned by the reign of evil.

Ion and Dedalus are cast out of the city. After their long labor creating the universe, they are stripped of joy and pride, mocked, and left destitute in the wilderness:

DEDALUS

Lord, you are sad. You have nothing left

nothing

but your solitude.

.  .  .

ION
You, my populous solitude

my soul’s pluranimous movement,

the thirst that sustains me,

mother, child, my brother pulse,

the bread’s skeleton,

an unbroken visitor

.  .  .

Guarding

keeping watch

at the gates of the earth.

“The return” of the title means different things: Ion’s return to the city of men, his return to human form from his time as spiritual creator, the return to “reality” from the inspired insanity of the rhapsode, a return to darkness after the blazing light of creation.  It is also a kind of return to the primordial questions of existence, to void and chaos confronting the painful articulations of reality, to the adventure of being that is always about to begin.

Thanks to Keith Ekiss and his associates, Anglophone readers now have a chance to be enriched by this strange and challenging poem, Blakean (as the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz recognized) in its range and originality, a myth of origin of endlessly ramifying depth, a spiritual and verbal journey rich with promises of discovery, and a look into human and ahuman reality depicted in a masterpiece that deserves a wide readership in any language. One can only wonder why it has taken so long for us to learn about it. But surely it has been worth the wait, since the result is this masterly translation.

____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020. His third collection of poetry, The Socialist’ Garden of Verses, is slated to appear later this year.

• HOT L CIRCUS

Hot l

Cirque Éloize

Zellerbach Hall

University of California, Berkeley

A review by Christopher Bernard

When is a hotel like a circus? And when is a circus like a hotel?

Both are dreamy places of encounter and chaos where strangers tangle in embrace and flight and our fates are in our hands briefly before they journey on to other lands, and everything is apparently controlled but anything can happen at any time; where lovers meet and lovers part, fortunes are made and fortunes are lost, but only Fortune rules; where the daring young man on the flying trapeze is suddenly an ancient porter bowing for a tip, or the master of ceremonies becomes a harassed maître d’, or a junior maid suddenly saves the show.

They are little worlds both, where we can be whatever we pretend to be, put on glamour and tinsel when we make our entrance to the grand lobby or the big tent, and for a beguiling moment take on the substance of a dream.

In Berkeley over a recent weekend, Montreal’s Cirque Éloize revealed just how much poetry, humor, fantasy, imagination and grace can be mined from these parallels, in Hotel, brought to the Bay Area by Cal Performances, and the company’s 15th original creation, premiered in 2018 to celebrate their 25th anniversary.

Cirque Éloize has been called Cirque de Soleil’s (also headquartered in Montreal) “slimmer, sexier sister,” which is not far off. But what Cirque Éloize is in itself is what counts here: a compact, inventive, multi-talented troupe (they are all, at one point or other, equally skilled acrobats and dancers, actors and impressionists, contortionists and musicians) who can give the impression of a small army of véritables artistes with a distinctly French Canadian aesthetic: alternately sadly tender, old worldly nostalgic, sharply witty, bravely romantic, and robustly pratfally, sometimes within the same few gestures.

I’ll admit that, at the afternoon show I attended, there was a moment near the beginning when I wasn’t sure if there was a bit of scene that wasn’t working out, or a technical glitch, and a couple of minutes passed (an eternity on stage) when the troupe seemed to flounder as bits of pumped-in music whispered and died several times before sounding with complete security. But this was the sole hitch in an otherwise tight performance.

The setting was a hotel lobby with a peripatetic entrance door (moved about on wheels and proving a prop of many uses) and a long bar cum counter at the back under a diamond-shaped alcove and triangles of neon tracing bright lines above the stage. The lobby morphed through a collection of glittering identities: from a 1920s Grand Hotel, to a 1940s lounge for a Gilda-like torch singer, to a disco-fever ballroom from the 70s, to an 80s Jane Fonda gymnasium, before flipping back to its Art Deco roots, with, trooping through it, a cavalcade of archetypes of the modern caravanserai: the swooning lovers, the attentive groom and his glamorous bride, the hotel’s jack-of-all-trades handyman, the mischievous maid, the shady, “chameleon” figure who lurks in all such places where strangers mingle, a pair of twins who confuse everyone, and a maître d’ who imagines himself in control of things no matter how often fate instructs him otherwise.

The meat of the show was series of acts, by turns acrobatically controlled and comically chaotic, building to a series of climaxes, each bettering the last, until the audience was heated to a compound of clapping, whistling, hooting, stamping celebration.

Several moments bear special mention: Cory Marsh’s work on the Cyr wheel (a large hoop, like an over-sized hula hoop, worked from the inside; an act not strictly original, but I haven’t seen it quite so imaginatively choreographed and performed); Vanessa Aviles’ graceful work on “tissu tension,” long rope-like scarves hung from the flies; Jérémy Vitupier’s death-defying (and head-endangering) acrobatics and miming with a piece of luggage at least one person in the audience won’t soon forget; Una Bennett’s wittily risqué work on aerial rope, inspired (and well-timed) trumpet riffs, and a Metropolis-reminding spinning of multiple hula hoops from neck down to shins, commanding a scene where hula hoops reigned, indeed rained; and, helping bind the whole, sizzling vocals by Éléonore Lagacé, especially near the rapturous conclusion, when she commanded as much with guitar as with a voice that surprised the house with an unpredictable (unless one remembers the old phrase: “chaotic, like a Spanish inn”), highly theatrical, deep voiced, and deeply satisfying, swathe of flamenco vocals, sung con mucho duende.

The creative team was led by Cirque Éloize’s president and creative director Jeannot Painchaud and director Emmanual Guillaume, and the atmospheric musical accompaniment, both live and piped in, was composed, arranged, and compiled (including a magical performance, by Antonin Wicky, of one of Chopin’s most exquisite and moving nocturnes) by Éloi Painchaud.

____

Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020.