by Harvey Mudd

I paid no mind to the wind and rain;
the clouds, though, these I noticed
for they drifted along the building tops,
and obscured the stars.  Orion,
invisible behind this veil,
had dropped his sword —
somehow I knew this.
But does he carry one ?
— I have forgotten —
or is it something more mundane,
a tire iron, perhaps, or a pen, as I do,
or 5000 kilometers of parachute silk,
the thread that ties me to thee,
linking us, past the ice flows and the oil rigs,
past all the ethical considerations,
past the weeping widow,
“dead,” she said, “we are dead.”
Though I am not.
It’s just a change of profession.

I have become an astronomer
of the heart.  I map stars
that have no names, though I was tempted
to name them all for you.
Romantic silliness
and at my age.

Dante, as he went about finding
his profession, always referred to the woman
he loved as “His Lady.”  But she wasn’t,
so he could not say “my lady.”
Besides, he had no hope.  Nor do I
but I’m less formal
and expect no theology to emerge.

But maps, yes, of dark places and light places.
I find universes within universes.
Some are empty of course,
containing not a book, not a rabbit,
no memory of the Romans, their bridges,
their highways, their brutality,
no wake on the waters
as their warships, oars dipping in unison,
plowed their imperial sea.

But the universe you inhabit,
the empty one’s neighbor, is filled
with wonders, the greatest of them
being you, my lady, but also
with wonderful creatures.
The swift deer, the tusked pig,
a black snake that is sacred to the oracle
of Trophonius, for whom it carried messages,
the bear and the great blue whale,
all these will be safe and unmoving
in the high, black, unmoving firmament.
Even the Andean Condor will be saved
in my cosmology.  I swear to this.

When I die I will be called the Old Tiger,
though why I cannot imagine,
for I’ve not been especially fierce,
but you will find me, ascended,
by the Southern Cross,
a scattering of bright teeth
(the hard parts that do not decay)
and vertebrae, the mark of chordata,
of phylum nostrum.

But for now I am a man.
I have named a constellation after you,
my sweet complex of stars,
but since you reject me,
I will not speak the name.

by Harvey Mudd

Distant mountains,
an ancient uplift of granites,
snow capped, seen glancing
past a woman who is silhouetted
against a world that slips past.

Her neck is slender.  I see the artery
tracing its way, carrying blood
to soul and brain.  Her forehead
unlined, at ease, her lips too.
She is neither young nor old
neither pretty nor ugly.
She is about right,

The train is on time.
It will begin to slow soon
and I will descend on metal steps,
look up and down the platform
but find only strangers.

I have come to this place before,
Time after time, the voyage,
the woman, the impasse.
We are strangers
and will not meet or speak.
And not knowing her,
not loving her, not ever to touch her

seems a loss, a waste.
It is desire, not faith, not ideas,
that sustains the world.

But I’ll get over it.
The train slows.
Marshland appears in the middle distance.

Vegetation dies,
Coal beds form.
A hawk dips its wing.

by Harvey Mudd

Disasters generally come around
with a smug certainty
of their place at the table.
The beloved pet, the brindle cat,
eaten by the coyotes;
or the household gods
carried off by a foul – smelling harpy.
And without so much as a by – your – leave.
Long odds, but it happens.

But that’s the small stuff.
I’d leave my veins uncut
over private calamities, even my own.
The personal, in the larger scheme of things,
is just noise.  I go on.

Consider next the fate of a small city
in the heart of the country,
a city that voted reliably Republican,
with a dozen MacDonalds, a Nissan dealer
who paid for the little league uniforms,
and not a single porn shop,
a city truly “All – American,” ( a term much favored
in America), modest, yet proud, and justifiably.
But out of luck.
It was visited this past spring
by a particularly virulent tornado
that moved through it
like the Reaper Himself
at the helm of a grain harvester.
It cut a six – mile – wide swath
Of death and splinters.
Jesus!  What to think ?
So many Christians!
So much suffering.

We hold out our hands to them.
But if we’ve cut our wrists, our hands go limp,
and there’s not much heavy lifting
or compassionate clasping that we can do.

I go on to the next.  There is a philosophical puzzle
in all this.  To Japan, same year,
to consider the tsunami
that knocked over the bottle
in which the genie slumbered,
a rudeness that pissed it off terribly.
In its tantrum, it showered
the most unpleasant spittle,
tiny splinters of itself, barbed and invisible,
into the cauliflower fields
and the nurseries that grow hyacinths
for the houses of bankers.
The cows ate of it, and how these gentle creatures
cried out at the milkings!
Worse pain than a kidney stone.

But these disasters were natural
(a term much favored in these bad times,
as the planet warms).
Nothing evil nor ill – intentioned in them.
Though in Japan
stupidity, greed, and arrogance,
the Three Stooges of the Apocalypse
had their hands in it.

The question I’ve intended to ask all along
is entirely a human matter,
but one gets distracted by nature’s spectacles,
the tsunamis, the earthquakes and eruptions,
floods and wild fires.
The brindle cat drowned
or the household gods buried in ash
makes good TV.

But to be or not to be is still the question.
To cut one’s veins in a warm bath
is a method not much in favor
in a modern country that’s armed
and pharmaceuticaled to the teeth
like America, but Seneca,
the wisest and most virtuous of Romans,
opted for it.  America, our ancestors at least,
must have admired Seneca, for there are towns
from sea to shining sea named for him.

For Seneca, the disaster
was political, the destruction of the Republic
from within, folly and corruption,
and the evil that men do.

I observe all this,
America in its decline, its wars,
civil and foreign, from France.
The pools of blood where the guillotine
once stood have been scrubbed away.
Best municipal services on the planet.