The Last Wave
“Nightmares for the dead are dreams of life.
Not remembering dreaming is dreaming of being dead.”
From Queen of Swords
For Mike
I’m on a ferry with a wife
and two small boys but I’m not sure
where we are going or why. There is an
island out there somewhere and not much else.
The ocean is flat and calm, unnaturally calm
like before an epic storm and the sky is
gradually fading from deep blue to a kind of
greenish color with back edges.
All of us are enjoying an offshore breeze
though we know none of this will last much longer.
When the wind stops, the steam freighter
I am on founders on an unseen rocks between
sandbars. Five Franciscan nuns are kneeling
on the aft deck praying in German as high seas
breech the listing ship. I can see the name
of the boat on last remaining life preservers
painted in black letterings: Amerika as I float
out to sea.
Luckily, the wife and children are no longer
on deck. I can see them waving from another
ferry as emergency flares from several ships
brighten the storm dark skies. I can see the last
of the passengers from Amerika swept overboard
as I float. I feel like a character in Death in Venice
but I don’t know which one.
I’m listening to Mahler 5 in the launch heading
out from shore. At first, the boat handles the waves
remaining upright and moving steadily forward.
My new female friend and I know that soon
the waves will become unmanageable and
the inevitable will follow in the form of that
mythical Last Wave we’ve read about.
The actual drowning happens elsewhere though
I sense the tragic aftermath of the capsizing boats
and all hands and passengers lost in the storm.
The loss I feel most is the death of a child,
the youngest boy, whose loss suggests he might
have been one of my own. My grief is immeasurable
so acute I feel the pain even when I wake up.
I know, then, the death of a child in the dream
was the unexpected death of my best friend
in real life.
Street of Crocodiles Dream Poem
After the banquet, guest appear to be dreaming,
bewitched by before-the-meal cocktails,
four courses with wine, and house special
coffees laced with sweet liqueurs, then
sleep inducing testimonials, including
fawning speeches celebrating the lord and
master of the house.
Guests are jarred awake by sudden noises,
tables knocking, levitating dessert plates,
spirit voices and apparitions like Banquo’s
ghost revisiting. Familiars appear at the side
of the reigning king pro tem, formerly a fearless
warrior now one who has lost his nerve,
made pale by improbable prophecies coming true
in the form of a processional of heir apparents,
that scroll by on the ceiling of the formerly festive
well-heated dining room now as cold as
Hamlet’s father’s tomb.
Outside, on the cobblestones, the inmates
of a sanatorium under the sign of an hourglass
have been released from their cells dressed
for a pasquinade in mufti and bells like
court jesters in a Poe story that doesn’t end
well for the powers that be.
Under night wood carnival barkers are
searching for their side shows, the displaced
animal acts, only finding freak shows and
reptile rooms while the streets are filled with
crocodiles where once a peasant revolt had been.
The soldiers that shoot them are of
the fascist persuasion. Streets are a blood
factory now and no one cares that the king
is dead.
Burning Amy
No death from above
napalm run, no car
crash turned fireball,
no girl in the picture
carrying burning jelly
on her back,
but a working girl
in an argument
gone terribly wrong,
soaked with lighter
fluid and set on
fire,
“My husband is not a
monster,” his wife would
say.
But what kind of man
is he? Burning Amy
on Albany Street;
something from a nightmare
that leads to Westchester Burn
Unit, relived nightly,
something that could never
be forgotten, maybe not a
monster, maybe something worse.
Ralph Steadman’s Milosevic
His neck is elongated to giraffe length,
stretched like his illustrations of Alice’s
red queen, extra flesh for the ruler’s head
to avoid all the offal, decapitations he
has demanded, though, here, in Yugoslavia,
the bodies are all buried in unmarked graves
to be excavated as killing fields, forensic
evidence of a reign of terror even the dictator
cannot bring himself to consider, soiled as
he is dressed in pinstriped suit now a butcher’s
apron covered in human gore and blood,
a vital organ in the lapel where a decorative
flower should be.
Ralph Steadman’s Pepys
“It was a sad noise
to hear our bell….
inscribed in the artist’s
calligraphic hand as Pepys,
the bold Colossus astride
the Thames, writing in his
diary, seeing through taxidermic
eyes; the tolling of the bells
a call to worship or the warning
of tumbrel drivers about to
pass, calling out for the dead
and dying those Black Plague
years their work was never done,
London dusk a suttee fog, corpses
afire, the Bridge, slums, as well.
Ralph Steadman’s John Clare
“May you be a half hour in heaven
before the Devil knows you’re dead.”
Irish Proverb
confined for life within a
stump of some stunted tree
in a Beckett play scene at
end time, only the poet’s head
visible where the tree’s trunk
should be on a mound of sordid
earth and knotted roots, the sky
deathly white, his skin paler
still.
