OLYMPIAN CHESS

(screen capture from the film "Jason And The Argonauts")

A whale is swimming
In the wine glass
On the chessboard.
Zeus takes a sip,
Puts the glass back.
The whale, startled,
Thrashes its tail,
Spurts a geyser of wine
From its blow hole.
Unlike Zeus, the whale
Is getting drunk, drunker and drunker
With each breath it takes.

Elsewhere on the board,
The gladiator, angel, duck and frog
Are plotting their escape in whispers.
Zeus, who knows everything,
Finds this amusing
To no end. But he makes a mental note
Not to give the pieces
Consciousness next time.

Across the board, Hera –
Whose mind he cannot read,
Since she’s a woman and his equal –
Cooks up her own plot,
And discusses it
With no one.


-- © 2011 by Jack Veasey

(All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced or duplicated in any form without the author's written permission. )

ABOUT THE ANGELS

(Photo: Engel auf dem Friedhot, Sandramat, Oct. 2006, GNU Free Documentation License)

ABOUT THE ANGELS


Long ago,
Before the New Age vogue for them,
I heard a bearded poet
In a battered leather jacket
Say he “had a thing for them;”
He loved the marble statues of them,
Sad and solemn,
Posed forever among tombstones
In the old Louisiana cemeteries.

More recently, I heard
The spoiled young daughter
Of a well-to-do churchgoer
Say she “hated” them;
Anyone who’d own an image of one
Had no taste. She looked smug
In this judgment.

When I was younger
And more literal,
I pictured them
With feathers; they were men
Whose shoulders sprouted
Giant pigeon wings –- no, gull wings,
All white, made
Of bone and muscle, and yet
Giving off faint light.
I wondered if they made a sound
Like birds.

Now that I have seen them,
I know better
Than to try to fit their likeness
Into words.
All I know
Is that you only call on them
When you are really desperate,
And that the sight of them
Will turn a young man grey,
And that the shattering vibrations
One feels when drenched in their presence
Leave you deeply shaken,
And forever chastened.


-- (C) 2011 by Jack Veasey

(All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced or duplicated in any form without the author's written permission. )

RONEE BLAKLEY

Her voice is low and warm and resonant.
She birthed her first songs during her wild youth.
She had a knack for showing the whole truth,
The edge of which is all timid souls want.

America first saw her in a film
In which a lone wolf would assassinate
Her character. This staged death would create
A haunting image: a deep soul, a struggling will –

That she’d outshine if you should meet her in
The flesh, but she’d still seem larger than life.
She might try other roles, including wife,
But her story would endlessly begin.

“Who is that?” people ask, if she should pass.
Some stars are too bright to stay caught in glass.


-- © 2011 by Jack Veasey

(All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced or duplicated in any form without the author's written permission. )

…AND SOMETIMES Y

I am the first letter
In the Holy Hebrew
Secret name of God.

In that ancient language,
I look like
A tongue of flame –

The kind that hovers
Over someone’s head
Sometimes in paintings

Of the people
Some call “saints”.
In English,

I can be a consonant
Or vowel. But
Vowels in Hebrew

Are not written down –
One has to breathe them out,
For they are a word’s soul.

Consonants provide a shape,
Define the limits,
But you can’t speak out loud

Till the Spirit moves you.
In practice, I am
As much consonant as vowel,

Shaping the fire that
Springs from my own
Spark, and then

Descending like
Hands into wet clay
As it spins. Open

Your arms to the sky
And feel my energy
Come down, infusing
Everything
With both its start
And ending.

The question “Why”
Contains me as
Both breath, and answer.


-- © 2011 by Jack Veasey

(All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced or duplicated in any form without the author's written permission. )

WINTER INSIGHT

A fly on the lip of the glass,
A drink that the room has turned cold;
There’s some contradiction in this.
This season indoors breaks the mold.

You take an intoxicant sip
Of brew grown belatedly strong.
You let the nip soothe your cold throat
And find your voice, but not for long.

The drunken fly’s small life expires.
The flush in your skin will not last.
You sing about seasonal fires
And stay inside, dreaming the past.

The summer to come is far off;
The previous one, just a blur.
Your song terminates in a cough,
And you feel worse off than you were.

You know no other moment will provide
Relief that – though you can’t reach it – you crave.
It’s more than a dark lull in the year’s ride.
This quick flash of the wings is all we have.


-- © 2011 by Jack Veasey

(All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced or duplicated in any form without the author's written permission. )

A BALMY NIGHT IN WINTER

Warning: this story uses crude language, discusses private body parts, and is likely to upset prudes and the humor-impaired.

***

I had an adventure last night. You might not think the bathroom is a likely setting for an adventure, but as they say, shit happens.

When I got home, I was troubled by two distinct discomforts.

First, I felt like I had hemorrhoids. You know -- that itch, that feeling unclean down there, that need to give yourself a good wipe.

I also had pain in my lower back.

I was tired from sitting all day, which I’m sure had everything to do with both kinds of discomfort.

So I headed for the bathroom to get some relief.

First, I gave myself a good, cleansing, cool, wet wipe. Ahhhhhhhh.

Then, I grabbed a tube of Icy Hot and squirted some on the two middle fingers of my left hand.

Then, fatigue affected my brain. Instead of switching to low back mode, my brain remained in asshole mode.

I didn’t realize until after I’d done it that I had mistakenly wiped the Icy Hot on my tender asshole. I didn’t realize it, in other words, until my tender asshole was on fire.

Calling 911 is no help when your asshole is on fire. First of all, they’d just laugh at you. Plus, you’d need a very small fire truck that could climb stairs, and firemen and hoses as proportionately small in relation to you as, say, Tokyo is to Godzilla. So much for my fantasies of being rescued by a firefighter with a huge hose.

I grabbed another cool wet wipe and tried to clean off the blazing ointment. However, being wet, the wipe caused the ointment still on my hands to immediately soak through and, so to speak, fan the flames. So I tried using yet another wipe to get the ointment off of my hand.

Then, still burning, I pulled up my pants and went downstairs, where my partner was watching YouTube choral videos under headphones. I was now falling apart laughing, and it suddenly seemed more important to share this experience than to stop it.

Soon we were both helplessly cracking up as puffs of smoke rose from my incandescent bottom like signals designed to send a message to the Indian in the Village People.

“How,” you may ask, did we solve this problem?

We didn’t. In about another minute, the sensation calmed down to a not unpleasant warmth – or I got used to it, I’m not sure which. It was at worst a curious distraction from the Buffy reruns with which I spent the rest of the evening. Somebody kinky might even develop a taste for the sensation.

I think it’ll take awhile, though, before I can convince my partner to try it as a lubricant.


-- © 2010 by Jack Veasey

(All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced or duplicated in any form without the author's written permission. )

AT LAND

(Maya Deren)


AT LAND

The 1944 film by Maya Deren

The title
Is a gag, of course.
When someone says
That he’s “at sea,”
He means that he’s
Not in his element.
What if you were of sea, but
At land?

We begin with waves,
Then we see the woman
Washed up,
Coughed out of the sea
Onto the sand;
On her back, wide-eyed,
She watches gulls
Wheel overhead
Like buzzards.

She hoists herself up
On a ladder of
Driftwood, as if
Climbing a dead tree --
Not trying
To reach for the sky, but just
Peering through leaves.

She sees
A long banquet table.
Men and women seated
All along both sides of it,
Talking, laughing,
And smoking.
She crawls up
On the white tablecloth,
Slithers among them.
They don’t see her.
They keep up
Their conversation.
She crawls on.
Somehow she doesn’t
Spill their glasses.

At the far end of the table
Lies a chessboard.
Just before she reaches it,
The man using it rises,
Leaves his place.
She looks at it
As if not comprehending
What a chessboard
Might be for.
Didn’t they have chess
Undersea? The pieces
Now move by
Themselves;
Her eyes follow their sliding.
One knocks another
Off of the board,
Off of the table; it falls through a hole
In the rock below
Into the sea.

She follows it down,
Her bare feet finding
Stone
Heated by sun,
Moistened by waves.
She probably
Is not aware
That what she follows
Would be called
“A pawn,” or of anything
That the word “pawn” implies --
This mermaid we’ve mistaken
For a woman.

The story will go on,
Such as it is.
Witnesses will argue later
Over what it meant.
The wiser ones will see
The beauty in it.


-- © 2010 by Jack Veasey

(All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced or duplicated in any form without the author's written permission. )

I'm eternally grateful to my late teacher, Alexandra Grilikhes, for introducing me to Maya Deren's work many years ago (among other things).

For more information about the brilliant filmmaker/actress/dancer/theorist Maya Deren, read her Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Deren

For those who haven't seen the film, here it is, as generously posted on Google Video. It's about 15 minutes long, and well worth the investment of time. It's absolutely beautiful.