Conclusion of The Last Cosmonaut
By John Barr / from Opcit at Large
Holidays & Remembrance Days
Poems about Holidays and Celebrations.
The First Pageant, 1915
By John Barr / from this Archive, Holidays & Special Days
The white snows of winter fall into the quiet town.
Families from all directions gather in a field.
Lully Lullay, thou tiny little child.
From Midland to the Hill there is no other sound.
They do not hear the European air
fill with shrapnel, they do not see the dead of the Great War
more than all the dead that ever were–
how nations, like trees in a fellowship of fire,
burst one from another into flame. They do not see
the coming unsettlements of the century:
the protocols of speakeasies, the Crash of 29,
Freud and Marx and Darwin come and all but Darwin
gone. Stalin, Mao and America come
and all but America gone. And then the Bomb.
Our citizens sit in their rooms at night alone,
each tending a porthole of kept light: On pillars of fire
our spacemen rise into a stillness near the moon.
TIME tells the Christmas bell from fosse to fen.
TOWN tells the next from hill to glen.
COME bells the third, to Bethlehem again.
In an emerging peal, fierce carillon,
the great bronzing of the Summon Bell,
the baritone behesting of the Jesus Bell,
the smalling of the Justice Goad: ALL WELL,
they claim, GOOD WILL. And TOWN, TIME, DONE.
Noel
By John Barr/from this Archive, Holidays and Special Days
And there were shepherds abiding in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night.
Luke 2:8
To them Orion was not a huntsman
but a shepherd of the lambent.
Safe from Leo, Lupus, Taurus
his charges followed him to dawn,
counted and content
to know they would persist
when daylight
rendered them no longer visible.
Not souls–not yet–they were signifiers
ready to be metaphors.
The Hove (Memorial Day)
By John Barr / from Poetry Magazine
Such as there was in the littleness of that dawn
could not be this. Not, certainly, the hove
of an invasion fleet from Angleterre,
flotilla wrought of shipwright, chandler, armorer
as if Ice Age breeding stocks were on the move.
The Planners had their weather oracles,
haruspices their entrails. All divined
the red planet aligned, full-moon
visibility, high tides to clear
the beachhead obstacles — but iffy weather.
Gulls glean the wakes. Something of a factory —
diesel and air and the Jersey spirit spark —
of the hydrocarbon Gloriana makes
ungainly way in the valleys of the swells.
The shore emerges quaquaversally.
A Very pistol throats the air. Battlewagons
wheel for the presentation of the agon.
Shades of sherry fill the clouds with light.
Mike boats enter surf’s unscrolling rolls.
Empty jaws agape, the gods take note.
The odors of the offering, so rich
they start saliva flowing, must be painful
for the gods: not preamble for the meal,
the meal itself. Famished
they try to gorge the oily cooking smoke.
Amphibious landings to prevail require
the triumph of the small; circle in circle
perfected on parade grounds of the soul.
Committing an empire to the fire
calls for just-in-time ferocity.
They eat the savage honey. The boys pound sand.
Green eyes gammoning they all pound sand
until for the battle there was nothing left that day
but what the carrion patrols collect
for Paternosterers to sacristy.
They’re strong, these Irish penny whistle songs.
Just the one wild tone working alone
the registers, trying the proper sound
for sorrow. Ours for theirs,
theirs for theirs, ours for ours.
So many shouldering forward, enjambed
now cross the Styx with the ease of smoke
passing through a window screen ... depart
the shapes of things continuing for shapes
supercooled to the stillness of mortmain.
The business of the flag is never done.
It fills in the wind and fails, but never the same
akimbo twice. Each snap a fresh report
from acres of tended lawn
rankled by crosses perfectly plumb.
Centennial Suite
By John Barr / from this Archive, Holidays & Special Days
–For the Bronxville High School Class of 1998
I. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
William Lawrence stepped down from the train
to the boulders and bramble of an abandoned farm.
Expecting little he encountered less: "It was
altogether a desolate and forsaken place."
Nevertheless this businessman with vision climbed
a hill for a better view. He was not the first.
Before him was the hardscrabble farm of the Boltons.
And before them the brick-red brown of Gramatan
and the terrifying alabaster of the Swede
named Bronck (Bronck's Mill, Bronck's River, Bronck's Ville).
And Anne Hutchinson with all her pretty ones.
And the Half Moon, that zany cockleshell
captained by Hudson, another of hard-headed vision.
And before that merely the shyness of the wild
on a neck of land all narrow and enough.
But before that, before all of it was the plundering lip
of the Laurentide Glacier where the mountains go under the sea.
What kind of man sets out to found a town?
By all accounts a good man, a family man
for whom wealth was the use of property,
not just its ownership. And happiness
was prosperity combined with virtue.
The Viking say, Cattle die. Kindred die.
But the good name never dies of one who has done well.
William Lawrence saw a city on a hill.
II. The First Pageant, 1915
The white snows of winter fall into the quiet town.
Families from all directions gather in a field.
Lully Lullay, thou tiny little child.
From Midland to the Hill there is no other sound.
They do not hear the European air
fill with shrapnel, they do not see the dead of the Great War
more than all the dead that ever were–
how nations, like trees in a fellowship of fire,
burst one from another into flame. They do not see
the coming unsettlements of the century:
the protocols of speakeasies, the Crash of 29,
Freud and Marx and Darwin come and all but Darwin
gone. Stalin, Mao and America come
and all but America gone. And then the Bomb.
Our citizens sit in their rooms at night alone,
each tending a porthole of kept light: On pillars of fire
our spacemen rise into a stillness near the moon.
TIME tells the Christmas bell from fosse to fen.
TOWN tells the next from hill to glen.
COME bells the third, to Bethlehem again.
In an emerging peal, fierce carillon,
the great bronzing of the Summon Bell,
the baritone behesting of the Jesus Bell,
the smalling of the Justice Goad: ALL WELL,
they claim, GOOD WILL. And TOWN, TIME, DONE.
III. That Existential Rodeo Called Manhattan
The next time you're sitting in impacted traffic
(Why should anything change just because the light turns green?)
or that bewildering array of Nor Permitted Here's
(You wanna go right? You can't go right on Madison.),
the next time a gas station says to Sign up. Pay up. Fill up Shut up.
think of a town for those who choose to live away
from concrete canyons, a town that lives within its poise.
The next time a truck impresses 27
startled pedestrians with its ability
to stop on a dime, and cabbies with trace amounts
of English and shattered sensibilities
complain with the indiscriminate honking of horns,
think of a town where you can step down from the train to a
Main Street from another century.
True, owning a home here does mean mastering
the lost logic of plumbing lines in old houses,
toilets that speak like run-on sentences,
how to heat a house without burning it down.
It means learning to love your neighbor's leaf blower
and his son's guitar (Is that a rock band or an earthquake?)
and their dog, a Serbian Mountain Climbing Pest.
But having fought the good fight yet another day–
the sump pump of politics, the tyranny of magnates,
the price elasticity of trouble–can any
other place compare when it's time to come home?
IV. Nothing Has a Right to the Space it Occupies
"What's a century?" the glacier asks. "A crack
in time you couldn't slip a sheet of paper into.
Soon enough the work of your architects
will be a rough, ungoverned wilderness again.
It may be the failure of a drumbeat to be heard
or folly, never in short supply, become abundant
or a spell of extreme disease: and your kind becomes
merely one more marsupialled to extinction.
Wolves will den in the oaken bones of your homes,
your churches unroofed by rain, unsteepled by lightning's jacks.
Soon enough," the glacier says, "the whiskery seas
of hurricane will rise and the mountains go under the sea."
How curious then, when nothing lasts: a town
based on a view of human conduct, a village
as a set of values that survives
from those firstings in the fields of 1898.
Here in the depths of May our high school seniors sit
for the pageant that will take them out of themselves
and into the broader ferches of the world.
Whether to engage the high concerns of state and soul,
or the business of building family and character,
or simply to make of their lives small islands of decency,
they go in the grip of a great story slowly told.
In the manner of large balloons may they, the wicker burden
of our future, rise suspended by our loves.
VETERANS DAY, 1985
By John Barr / from The Hundred Fathom Curve
I come with my sons to this Memorial's
black vectors, pointed with 50,000 names.
Vets–their camouflage fatigues
like faded Christmas decorations–
patrol aimlessly.
Unable to let go of the intensity,
they reminisce or stand silent at the Wailing Wall.
Letters on a clear black field call roll.
They touch them.
They spend a long time reading
Manhattan Morning (9/11)
by John Barr/From The Hundred Fathom Curve
I. The Mirror of Arcadia
You know how it is in August in New York,
Summer over, the populace returns.
From old houses on the Cape
lawyers return to the temperament of neckties.
From chardonnays in island hideaways
traders return, their animus renewed.
From tranquil gossip on the Jersey shore
to idle gossip on the trains, we all return.
You know how it is. The newsboy tends
his hundreds of small relationships,
the Stock Exchange its googles of worm-wired trades.
With doming regularity the shells
of exquisite dynamos pulse power, the wheels
of the city mend and turn, the gear box makes.
In August now September
the city's towers take their turn
an airplane's height above the sparkling plain,
the Hudson folds into the bay's embrace.
High up, the silver pin of a plane catches the sun.
II. The Man Who Was Made Out of Alarm Clocks
Out of the primitive hold of early maps
they come, an anonymity of feet.
Out of unabated wilderness,
kingdoms of vanished shade,
they come to beckoning shores of oblivion.
Out of the white spaces on our maps,
places overwhelmed with what's not there,
they come, the unexplored libido of Arabia,
to the rally of catastrophe.
Men who consider themselves mainsprings of God
think kindness weakness, modesty unnecessary.
Próduce of an undernourished universe,
of things that have no wellness in the level world,
they seek to sunder the turnbuckles of experience.
They have the tools to make car engines
an obstruction, a car a dance of tires.
They understand the flammability of rubber,
the role of concrete in structural collapse.
One not among them, taller by a head,
stands a head closer to God.
A lank man, put together long,
his face is like a slice of chaos.
Steeped in an ancient clandestine,
he is present by being absent.
He is in the business of mystique.
He sings to the faithful who would have
our hearts out whole,
One, two, buckle and do.
He sings the beginnings of songs,
not the centers, never the ends.
One, two, buckle your brother's shoe.
To us he speaks a disconnected gloom.
I mean you harm.
The plane descends with a flattening urgency.
III. The Bone Dance
The air has found its voice, the wind comes in…
two clicks–and a great flower of fame comes out.
It is the season of laws.
Here are the blows of stated time,
the blossoming of de facto
Within the remarkable arena of fire
the persistence of flame provokes more flame.
The fire-softened girders deform,
the grid makes of itself what it will.
It browns and cherries and excoriates.
It reaches pitches to escape.
It yields to the claims of carbon black.
Exploded doors, downhauls of nothingness:
The dark dreaming thing it is to die.
And this is how the heart goes home.
When it rains in heaven
the dead open their parasols like copper hosannas.
The porches resound.
The rain, round-shouldered, warm,
comes in as though it belongs.
The God of entirety arrives.