From the archives (April 28, 2000)
_________________________________
Great Charm of Being: A Poetryetc Garland for Douglas Oliver
(1937-2000)
I have [Prynne's] runes framed above my desk as I write, for I keep
it as a charm, alongside a postcard of the cave in which I wrote my
own poem [_In the Cave of Suicession_] and a photo of an ancient
Greek brooch showing two bees mating around a honeycomb.
--Douglas Oliver, Poetryetc post, 27 February 1999
**********
no way to say another loss is less than ruins
runes carved to say that leads us
in to the stark site of being
here no more
but his own words will live on for
some and that's all any of us can ask
buzzing our love of language & its possibilities
--Douglas Barbour
**********
I've just been musing on a lovely story [Doug] told me he had read
in a Renaissance book called _The Feminine Monarchie_.... A beekeeper
once put a Communion wafer at the entrance to his hive in hopes of
increasing honey production. When he later examined the hive, he
discovered--Doug said--that the bees had made a wax cathedral "and
were flying around it sweetly humming."
--Candice Ward
**********
Good to hear Doug Oliver's name at this time, especially so warmly
recollected. Your bee anecdote rang a few bells for me.... There's
a parallel to the one you mention, which I recast as an octet in
1983:
The Sacrament as Charm
When she lifted the hive she discovered
a chapel made by the bees from honeycombs.
The windows, walls, roof and tower
all stood exact in golden miniature.
When she opened the little door she saw
that inside they had set up an altar
for the communion which, to cure them
of a plague, she had hid in their hive.
--Randolph Healy
**********
_In the Cave of Suicession_
Invoked or not, the god will be present.
--Delphic Oracle
...[I]s there a hive mind? As though bees could create a perfect city
of wax, some glorious amalgam of past and future glimpsed within a
melting moment of total hive consciousness, a whole population's
version of an individual human aspiration towards the multiple yet
perfect self.
(Part IV, "St. Paul's Cathedral")
In your darkness you will be amazed when walls of English Intelligence
arise like alleyways of a city whose inky windows shine.
(Part VII, "The Bee")
**********
The Silent Trees (JS)
The scattered quiet is guessed
concourse, tired flooded silence
entangled for an outpost
of calm stem stilled into stream:
obscurely caught easing an
untaught death, bound moves nothing
taller than tree fielding sky.
--Peter Larkin
**********
A poem by Douglas I love--Susan Wheeler:
A Little Night
A word to come lies in a little night
where ash is falling.
The word can't be this "coffin,"
lying in its candour, in its cinders.
Inside, the poet's too lazy in his death
to perform a truth singly. All's ambiguous.
Yet a coffin is blocked in boldly, I see,
under the washing down of night.
The cobalt blue cabinet's cut on a slant
with candelabra making mirrors
along its sides peopling it with mourners,
delegates from the governments of poetry
and from their industries, who appear
only as reflections of shoulders.
Hostility of moths round the candles.
Hostility of mouths still saying "coffin."
The coffin waits in this little night
for the whole day's train.
My own face, visible in the mirrors now,
is a bruise again floating in hints of crystal.
I don't <yearn> towards my shadow, bowing
to it, reaching out to find lost unity;
for if the shadow really touched my finger
untruth would constitute truth, whereas
as Buber knew, the process takes a <Thou.>
Our shadows lack performance;
they are a text created by the dusty mirror:
I do all the touching and my finger
returns with its ashen tip, as you
the reader, when you touch these unreal ashes
find your own finger-tip is clean.
In our candour to be truthful, we're very stern
and talk too much of loss, covering our truths
with ashes--like authoritarian fathers
who damn their sons with an over-strict word,
"You'll never amount to anything."
The word I care about
(it's been lying inside the slant cabinet)
wakes and now performs itself:
The word becomes "Celan," formerly Antschel:
the only poet I have to struggle against
because none wrote more beautifully post-war
of the perfection and terror of crystal.
**********
_In the Cave of Suicession_ (Part V, "The After-Image")
_He catches up the compassion light on some typing paper_.
The flame stays o steady and I am not of it materially, bear no
trace of it on my body; and yet it fills all my mind and
imperceptibly warms me, or gives me unsensed but undeniably
bodily warmth. I feel more melancholy with the light, but that's
not the light's fault....
_Noise of dark barking_.
If a dog came springing along this passage would it think me
frightening enough for it to turn tail? Turn tail, turn tail, o jaws,
let the slaver drop a homeward path. And welcome, new throat of
steady light; we are in your reckhoming and the pantomime
comes soon.
In my mouth the nectar taste, a light
purer even than honey, brighter and whiter
yellow, a celestial colour, lower than the start
of breath in the mind.
**********
Was he doomed
to happiness or not and did it matter. No room for accident
except the slip of the brush.
Slight articulation of a joint
rivets all eyes did she really say
that?
what?
as if every t uncrossed became an l
reducing a dance to a set of poses, a
way of operating
in space.
Reporting all the symptoms. A woman's voice beyond the curtain: "It was
in the groin"
she says.
The remnant of a structure once projected.
What happens outside the known scenario
binds us in affection. As common, Doug, as
a swarm of bees. Music. The whole
restaurant dancing to its own rhythm.
--Mark Weiss
**********
Charm for a Swarm of Bees
_Take up earth in your right hand,
cast it under your right foot,
and say:_
I catch it under foot, I have found it.
Look! Earth has power against all creatures,
against malice and against neglect,
and against the mighty tongue of man.
_Then cast a circle of sand over them,
when they swarm,
and say:_
Settle down, victory-women, down to earth!
Never be wild or fly into the woods.
Ever be mindful of my good
as any man be of hearth and home.
--trans. Candice Ward
ß
**********
_In the Cave of Suicession_ (Part VIII, "Miss B.B. and Skippy")
_The past--how like a field it was!..._
A countryside of walls. That apparently-open field relative to
sunlight grows dusky and narrows as the fecund bee darts
downwards to this inquiry. The bee flies through a passageway
whose walls and ceiling push a woman down to a crouch. Time
consuming. The mountain was empty. Now it fills.
...under the mountain, the able blind, a honey bald, a
phrase, "the dark bee comes to me." In the bee metaphors, not a
dark beast--a honey really.
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