The Socialist’s Garden of Verses
 
By Christopher Bernard
 
is not of poems made
alone. In man and woman
are hearts of earth and water
where roots of roses tangle
with carrot, yam, potato,
the veins of peach and apple
and the red sweet plump tomato,
the fruits of earth from which all
humanity is made:
faith and hope and charity,
and love of truth and kindness,
belief in good and beauty:
these are the pleasing verses
from which is made the garden
of hope you will engender
after you have closed
this book and put it away.
 
The dragonfly awaits you,
the beetle, ant, and butterfly,
the sun is high over the garden,
the fragrant grasses call to you.
Our work is just beginning,
the earth and sky are waiting.
Take my singing with you
out into the day.
 
_____
Christopher Bernard is founder and co-editor of Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).
“The Socialist’s Garden of Verses” comes from the collection of the same name, which will be published in December 2020 through Regent Press. 

My Children

By Christopher Bernard

I have given my children the kindest gift I could possibly have found for them: the warm security of nonexistence. They will never suffer from disappointment, discouragement, frustration, from failed hope and betrayed love, from the brutality of humanity and the indifference of nature, from the cruel gods of reality. And they will never do evil in their turn—and now we know, without the faintest doubt, that the human species is the most evil of all species—indeed, it is the species through which evil came into the world.

My children, however, will never do the evil they would have been unable to resist had they lived. They will never lie or cheat, steal or offend, wound or kill. The world will not be destroyed from the satisfying of their appetites. No animal will be killed to satisfy one of their whims. No human being’s life will destroyed to satisfy their desire for revenge. They will not leave behind them a path of waste and destruction. They will not grow old or bitter. They will not see the destruction of much they have admired and loved. They will not see their friends and family die, and yet have to live on. They will not live fearing poverty, shame, failure, being found out. They will not fear old age, senility, death. They will not die.

I see their eyes glimmer in the shadows. Are they glimmering from tears? I cannot tell, and they are silent. Perhaps they are tears of sorrow, perhaps they are tears of gratefulness. Or perhaps they are my tears, as I reach my hand out toward them, half regretting my life’s single virtuous deed. But then, parents can be unforgivably selfish.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s next book, a collection of poems called The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will be published in the fall of 2020.

Inside the Locket Is the Face That Loves You

By Christopher Bernard

They started appearing here and there in the city

a few years ago.

Now there are many more.

Like ghosts made of candles in glass

and posies of daisies, peonies, poppies,

the height of a child’s knee.

Some cover half a sidewalk

like scattered baskets of roses

and flicker and stare with a dozen flames in the night,

but most are small, no wider than a bended knee.

Sometimes they include a photo, a drawing,

of the person who died there—

a young black man, an old black woman—

or only a scrawled name.

“We miss you, Darryl!”

“Jimmy: Luv U 4 Eva!”

You can almost hear Jimmy laugh

reading that,

or see Darryl’s cool eyes.

I stop at a woman’s:

among the few flowers and three lit candles

there is a small lace handkerchief,

kept from being blown away

by a heart-shaped locket on a thin chain.

Pedestrians in masks hurry uneasily by.

The traffic passes without incident.

A shred of cloud disperses into thin air.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s latest book of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, will appear in the fall of 2020.

 
 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.