La portail (de la Vierge) III

One deciduous April morning inclining bleakly back to February, Maurice de Sully, Bishop of Paris, evoked a vision of a celestial, Olympian cathedral from the damp, bald earth at our feet. For the next thirty-six years, until his death in 1196, he would devote his energy and fortune to this chef-d'œuvre. De Sully was correct, of course. The “parish church of the kings of Europe” must be “transcendante.”

And, so, we began to cut and finish stones. I watched the rough men heave and cart off the original Romanesque church, the Cathedral of St. Etienne founded by Childebert in 528 upon the foundations of a Roman temple to Jupiter. Suddenly, all that had been consecrated was no longer sacred. An eternal lamp became an oddly decorated lantern whose flickering tongue was cold behind a curtain of somber, once sanguine glass.



We had prayed in that church for generations. I had been baptized in the shell of its font as had my wife and our sons and daughters. The old, leaning houses sharing the church wall were removed to create la rue Neuve-Notre-Dame, a road for immediate supplies and later processions. An auberge of great planks had belonged to the parents of my grandfather; distant cousins were peremptorily removed.

I helped clear the ground, passively, stoically.





I may be the last person to have seen the holy well--the spring, la source where earliest inhabitants of this eyelet, this steady barque of land (Fluctuat nec mergitur), this Île de la Cité, worshipped the font of life and its Gardienne--before it was sealed with a great stone, marked with a fish (an alpha), omega and a second alpha (an eye).



And upon that seal was laid the foundation stone blessed with appropriate pomp and promise by Pope Alexander III. I vowed never to forget the sight and taste of the water, and this preoccupation has passed through many intervening centuries.

Behind the altar there is a false tomb
and beneath a Christian name there are thousands
of years of roots writing through stone
and water echoes up vertebrae
which must have been steps
and its light is the juice of emeralds



La portail (de la Vierge) [#29]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

La portail (de la Vierge) IV

No one among us believed in a Father alone for protection or salvation, certainly not a son. We knew our sons too well. We had watched them hurry off to war for adventure. We watched another generation follow Heraclius of Caeserea from the skeleton of the new cathedral in the first promise of 1185 into the maw of a third Crusade.

We knew and understood the secret that would elude archbishhops, bishops and priests for centuries:

Notre Dame de Paris is a woman.

She does not hesitate upon her back, her knees towers, arms open to each side, each palm a chapel. She awaits the seed of heaven; we kneel and rise within, stained and cleansed by light shining through each roseate window stretched across a mother’s ribs. Each cathedral is woman and forest, often constructed over a sacred grove and spring. And from the flickering heart above the altar to the floral intricacies of the door of her womb, the faithful emerge, each born back into the great, deep world.

I have crouched in a savory cathedral like this before waiting
to be born, sipping and sleeping to the thumping
of a big bell beneath the bold
cupolas of a mother’s breasts, absorbing pink stories
from windows of flesh stretched
between ribs, worming
toward a slit at the nape of the twin towers
of her knees.



La portail (de la Vierge) [#29]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

Photograph by Susan Aurinko

* * * * *

La portail (de la Vierge) V

Thousands of declensions before this marble priest and sere, cireux Gothic wall, one could stand here and look over a leg of the Seine to sand flats and meadows and wild orchards.

She offered me water in the palm of her hand; I made a sign and drank. The well would become the belly; each bower, a portal; the great twining trees, touching as innocents, as she and me, a cathedral.

All sleep now, entombed beneath a university, the remains of a medieval cluster, its traffic and trottoirs of mud and flaking stone. We attend beneath the intersection of Rue St. Jacques and Rue Sufflot, just to the west. Perhaps, that is the reason I have always cherished Jardins du Luxembourg.

It was a simple life which passed too quickly. After the Romans, prior to the ascendancy of Christianity and two hundred years before the plague of the Norse invasions, we walked this undefined, undefiled beauty, a natural maze of sprouting trees and rabbit warrens and deer paths [as we would twelve or thirteen centuries later among the tall grasses of the North American frontier].

She gathered apples and flowers; we waited out each winter, counting each death day, then life as it began again. I remember her hair and eyes enough to know that I have not met her again. Or, perhaps, I met her once when I was too young to know that which I knew. She was named for the sacred islet; it was already an old name and passing, remembered only by the passing, toothless as infants. It is a name for a second daughter, Lutèce.



La portail (de la Vierge) [#29]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

Photograph by Susan Aurinko

Title link: "Dance of the Unicorn" by Dizzi X

* * * * *

La portail (de la Vierge) VI

Most recently, I was a friend of Louis Vierne, titular organist of Notre Dame. As a woman I was not his lover but a devoted and empathetic companion. My name was Muriel Charlotte Romée (incidentally, the family name of St. Joan), and, though a maid and a partisan in the resistance, I was neither incarcerated nor immolated. I passed in the bleakest of decades, the 1950s, in a small, furtive, comfortable, nondescript flat. Sere. That is the word I should have used had I been a novelist. I had chosen a life which smelled increasingly of dry books and sherry.

As a man (So many souls were being reborn into the world after the devastation of the Great War, there was much confusion.), I was a pianist who wrote for Piaf and later Montand, and performed with Russian, often Jewish émigrés. I was inspired by their chromatic descensions of each minor chord. Very much like DuChamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” of my youth. I suggested they modulate this into an emotional landscape of far greater continent than the repetitive story of loss and regret. After all, the war and revolutions were over, and they were living in France now. George Gershwin, Russian Jewish by descent and a native of New York City, conferring over champagne and black coffee, agreed. He did not share the brimming darkness or antediluvian wariness of his parents’ compatriots. Gershwin, an American, was totally immersed in the future of our brave--and glamorous--new world.

So much suddenly died with him.

There had been an invitation to visit California, but that would not happen now--not, at least, until a transmigration.

Louis Vierne did not succumb. He was not glamorous. Not at all. Highly educated in music theory and history, he did not acknowledge dark, jagged “improvisations.”

Louis longed for the dusty, golden age of the latter nineteenth century, the apex of intellectuals. His heart was quiet, proper. We would often sit together after his daily mid-afternoon rehearsal. Silent as siblings, sipping. He would not metamorphose into the age of jazz and global industrialization of a new Rome. Subtlety and grace would vanish, he feared. What had not been accomplished by The Great War would certainly be executed now.

Vierne expired in the first days of the last truly European summer.

He did not witness the removal of the stained glass windows from Notre Dame for safe storage two years later. I was present to assist and stood before the pipe organ where he had died (as had been his wish). I touched the octave where his head last rested.

The date is noted in my diary: September 11, 1939 [five days before my father’s twelth birthday].



His companion Muriel died. Decades passed as years. I suddenly became aware of my soul drifting into an adolescent body growing in an anonymous, flat-breasted patch of a society where stone is set upon stone.

The rest of me became a great barrier (as of sand) falling back into the sea this next boy would be inclined to discover.




La portail (de la Vierge) [#29]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

Photographs by Susan Aurinko

Title link: Pierre Cochereau performs one of Louis Vierne's "Pièces de Fantaisie" on the pipe organ of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris.

* * * * *

Exodus, Genesis

And, so, it appears we will sing again,
safe to stand within
the cathedral self, first
and last.

We have been scattered along
a dusty, narrow history,

the stain of ash sewn to our skin.

It is not a foreign name we have carried 
on banners and breast pockets;
it is familial in the oldest languages, a blessing:
baruch, barach, barack.

This is our age of reason.
The gods are relieved.
They never wanted to be worshipped with blood.

Even fish, most liquid and hidden, are happy. 
And leaves are content again:

And in the night we dream; and a dream
is a parable of light. 
And we are, as each morning is, 
the first day. 


20 January, 2009



Exodus, Genesis [#28]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

Photograph by Fammerée

* * * * *

Fiat lux

In each beginning we create heaven and earth.
Now the earth appears unformed and void
as darkness upon the face of the deep. And first
light says, Let there be life. And there is life.
And we live, for it is good; and those who do not
believe in life live and act in darkness as if they
can not be seen. And the light is called Day, and
the darkness Night; but there is always light upon
the earth and in heaven. And in the night we
dream; and a dream is a parable of light.
And we are, as each morning is,
the first day.



Fiat lux [#27]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

Photograph by Bob Winsett

* * * * *

The Lost Rimbauds

TU VATES ERIS

Bible-black bound feet, one louder, one
bitten, announce his arrival from a duchy
of virgins, thorned and green
blooded.

Not a sound from the crucifix, and cups and platters crackled
as ancestors prophesy
the past; the air is blue
and doesn't move. There is something fallow in this room's
yellow; and there is milk,
plenty
of milk. A bird shivers in. So much effort
for a crust, but All will sleep soon
enough,
the sky palpitates.

Each day burns more vigorously
than the last, and each day his boots become
more ragged. They are his calendar,
and his summer is almost worn
through.

There has never been a July like this, peasants
boast, unbuttoned as pirates;
and there will never be a July like this again
for Rimbaud, though a flaxen girl, bee
buzzing and mulberried, promises to
return.

He follows her delft blue, blue-eyed
invitation, his adventure big shouldered
beside him. In a clouded glass
among the dead, he does not recognize
himself, for there is only fire and
the flakes of ash which attend
burning.

The milky girl is twittering
at the sash, teasing up skirts
of leaves, squeezing juice from a peel, ready to
spill from her apron where his ham is
warm. She wears her heart
as a ruby; but her smile is not slim
and her fingers do not
attenuate. Dommage. Distance, resistance
excite the urbane hunter.

Still, Renoir would immortalize her.
And DeGas. He would satiate her, rose
et blanc parfumé, her minky pink
undulations. Pissaro, mais on s’en fout
de Pissaro.

Monet. Monet would render her
as a confectioner--
but only a poet with holes in his pockets
eats in her pantry.

Rimbaud has been chosen.
He is a seer, un voyant. He is seventeen years
old and deranging all his senses
(Le Poète se fait voyant par une long, immense et
raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens. Toutes les
formes d'amour, de souffrance, de folie. . . .*)
to pierce generations of Norman parsimony
to the fire of her
ringlets; but he does not see

the cloud in the room
above made up into a bed where no one dies
alone; and he does not see her combing
seeds of Abyssinia from his hair, kissing
the lips of Verlaine from his mouth
and dipping a strawberry into cream
she has saved for him and will save for him
every night as one by one sons
come.

In this hour of hammer ringing, he sees
only one sun bleeding into blades and spoons
of trees and wipes hunger to his mouth
and fragments to his page. All will sleep soon
enough, he palpitates and empties
a second glass. Son petit doigt tremblant
sur sa joue, and the pretty theatre of her
eyes

curtains. She moves silver things
with the quietus of a conjurer and through
the door darkly he vanishes, and the child
of the cloud made up into a bed and
the hundreds of children born from that
Rimbaud hesitate and turn
back.


* Charleville, 15 mai 1871.



The Lost Rimbauds [#26]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

Photograph by Susan Aurinko

* * * * *

The Markets of Remorse

I have spent another morning in the markets
of remorse trying to buy back a single afternoon

I search by the scent of her in September, her distance, her harbor

All I find among reflecting pools is
the eleventh day of our seventh year, and, then, that
is disturbed. Why would
blind feet take from me all that was left
to me

How did she become my Genesis. There were Jerusalems
before her, skin
diaphanous, pink transgressions and brooding
cupolas, inverted bowls
of gold, bowls
of bone; sunlight rearranging
expectations of stone, personifying, passing
over, leaving shadows the size and chill
of footsteps


white, its purpose, its challenge, the wisdom
and strategy of silk
embroidered with silk

a blouse, its curtain, its serene, sudden suggestion


I surrender each coin. I surrender face up:

I want that moment back. I would hurt
myself against the twin idols of her
knees to crack this
intransigence


this same lean

poet and denouement


this confluence of blood

the glow of the hive to the bee


blue and open moutherd to the sea

veiled as I am between stands and sleep


this transhumance of her

the one she promised would be there



The Markets of Remorse [#25]
© 2007 Fammerée


* * * * *

To experience a performance of Markets of Remorse
featuring guest artist Li-Young Lee
please visit:
http://www.reverbnation.com/fammerée
and listen to selection #10.

* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org

* * * * *

Photograph by Susan Aurinko

* * * * *

Imago Undisturbed

Most familiar face, cushioned in folds, blinking
enough to carry upon my breast, gold
clothed, into the dark
regions (she breathes; I imagine that breath
in my mouth), ankle patterned
with fleurs-de-lis, bent as a neck of a swan, one
green leather shoe dangling



The white of her
throat alarmed me: Daphne

slight.
Globes of fruit, too round
to touch, more perfect

than sweet (impeding
our first
footsteps);
barefoot pressed
violets, narcissus and frockenberries
to feed us--lantern-long

lips, all in
a honeycomb of dense shadow and intense
sunlight.

Horses hailed us, May-browned
guardians of the green

fallow drawing rings


of fecund

light. We called
to them,
neighing, feigning


Minoan indolence.
She offered a pink
palm

and pearl-contoured
teeth.
Now, I began to examine
the irregularities

of her face, alarmed
with any
imperfection--
for example:
creases of her forehead
(deeply incised); a venule at the tip
of the nose; a

discoloration.

All my disappointments
settled there--upon her face. As her left
elbow

fell, abandoned
to the hollow of a wall, as her

hair flushed my face, I
retreated further, wrapped
twice in the tunic of all my


scars.
She proffered sorrel
to my lips until her hand was

empty and pink again, pink again.
Sorrel, help me
to forget. I knelt

to our fingertips.
Lips bled milk at the slightest

movement.

Breathless and blouseless, the barque
of her

carried us.

Familial faces converged,
forming the suggestion
of features,

a green name, a wing, an open

hand.
Breast to breast we wed with no other witness
than the story written

forever upon us.


This faint stain is blood from her
lip. I wear it when I walk before
the sky.

I have seen her since--crowned in a pink
and burnished tempera; turn
distractedly, smooth
the paper of a package upon her
lap; sleep,
one hand abandoned, one white hand
touching hair from her cheek



Imago Undisturbed [#24]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org

* * * * *

Photograph by Susan Aurinko

* * * * *

Le défaut de la cuirasse (The Failing of the Armor)

Rebecca is sadder than her spoon. It stirs
and stirs,
but nothing changes and nothing turns
to silver.
Her ring is no longer
the rim of a chalice--its stone is not her
apogee.

I recognize the low cluck, click, cluck of her
heels and a child.
I know each finger holding the horn
of the receiver and the toes that slip
a slim shoe
free. She sips, married to another handsome,
uncoordinated man, intoxicated with
property.
She wants to be pregnant again.

In Normandy, where children of our
children's children chase and seek,
our obsidian remains are obscure
but threaded to roots

as trinkets to a chain. We rise and rive through
any lapse of stone, bone, mouth
of bone to the oak and bramble apse
of our innocence. Her cloak was conifer,
her crown a choir of antlers and branches.
Her chest dictated the rising and fall of all
things, and water became blood
in the font of her.

Can the priest pretend her body was not
the plan of his cathedral?


Can I pretend her body is not my cathedral?

I have waited through successive deaths.
I have waited until my shoulder hurts;
and autumn makes me anxious.
Trees pretend to root into the humid soil of
heaven. They are confused without their
leaves.
We are all confused.


Do not fear this failing of the armor.

We no longer need tombs to shelter us.

However exquisite a chrysalis, no effigy can
contain a soul's
desire. Yesterday, as you introduced
yourself, you lingered
at my sleeve. Teach me to awaken
you.



Le défaut de la cuirasse [#23]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org

* * * * *

Photograph by Susan Aurinko

* * * * *

Khóra Sfakia (English & Français)

I walk among the whores of Sfakia, the once beautiful
sons and daughters hoarding fragments, lording and ladying
and burning from the altars of their lips all instinct
still migratory.

For them the paths of scree to the promontory
decay at the turning of the sky. They hobble to the one tree
where an attendant is also a boatman and negotiate
a passage back.

I am pressed to vertical
earth, hatless, mapless and without sunglasses.
Golden bellied birds flash in a swift geometry upon lapis
lazuli, and I tremble with the thrill
of superstition: What spirits are these? Whose soul cries
from the mouth of the ass?

Now, the water is a Leviathan
and ready to swallow.
It thrashes about, not content with its containment,
neither convinced nor concerned that lungs
need land.


The whores of Sfakia wheeze and sleep with mouths open
and lamps glaring and garments pressed to their eyes.
If their messiah were to come in the night,
I could not follow, for this is not a Diaspora, and the Son
and the Father are only one half
of one God.

I wonder why the earth supports us. We expect so much
and renew so little.

It's Hero and husband, back and forth and up
and down, scattering bones of aborted destinies.
He first slurred the ancient name
of this place, Khóra Sfakia--The whores of Sfakia, he announced
and everyone laughed, then laughed again and laughed
all the next day.
Now, she and he and I are pinks upon the sand.

We offer our knees to the waves, and Hero calls, and her call
takes the body of a gull.
Each of us awakes from the truth of dreams to the lives
of our own making.


The sea moves her skin and enters me.
I do not fear translucence. I do not fear this pregnancy,
for I am with me.



Khóra Sfakia [#22]
© 2000 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

“Khóra Sfakia ” appears in Lessons of Water & Thirst,
a book of poems by Richard Fammerée.

* * * * *

To experience a performance of Khóra Sfakia
please visit:
http://www.reverbnation.com/fammerée
and listen to selections #6.

* * * * *

Khóra Sfakia

Je marche parmi les whores of Sfakia, la beauté d'autrefois
de ces fils et de ces filles ammassant des fragments, à la pose princière et brûlant de l'autel de leurs lèvres tout reste d'instinct migratoire.

Pour eux les chemins de débris vers le promontoire
disparaissent au tournant du ciel. ils clopinent vers un arbre où un gardien est aussi passeur et négocient leur retour.

Je suis retenu à la terre verticale, sans chapeau, sans carte et sans lunettes de soleil.
Des oiseaux au ventre doré étincellent en une brève géométrie sur le lapis lazuli, et je tremble d'un frisson de superstition: Que sont ces esprits? Quelle âme hurle de la gueule de l'âne?

A présent, l'eau est un Leviathan
prêt a tout avaler.
Il se bat, non content de ce qu'il renferme,
ni convaincu ni soucieux de savoir que les poumons
ont besoin d'une terre.

Les whores of Sfakia sifflent et dorment la bouche ouverte
sous la lumière éblouissante, un tissu posé sur les yeux.
Si leur messie devait venir dans la nuit,
je ne pourrais pas le suivre, car ceci n'est pas une Diaspora, et le Fils et le Père ne sont que la moitié d'un Dieu.
Je me demande pourquoi la terre nous supporte.
Nous attendons tant d'elle et lui offrons si peu.

C'est Héro et le mari qui sautillent d'avant en arrière, de haut en bas dispersant les ossements des destins avortés.
Il fut le premier à souiller l'ancien nom de cet endroit: Khóra Sfakia--Les Whores of Sfakia, proclama t-il. Tout le monde rit puis rit encore et rit le lendemain.
A présent elle lui et moi sommes de petites choses roses
sur le sable.

Nous offrons nos genoux aux vagues et Hero appelle et son appel prend la forme d'une mouette.
Mais leurs vacances s'achèvent et ils n'ont plus le temps de nager.

Chacun de nous s'éveille de la vérité des rêves à la vie que nous bâtissons.

Le mer fait onduler son corps et me pénètre.
Je ne redoute pas la transparence.
Je ne redoute pas cette grossesse car
je suis avec moi.

Anyone Who Journeys

Anyone who journeys this far south, stays in Essaouira long enough to wash underclothes under a cold-water tap in a room Gaughin yellow and indigo tiled, follows the sun slanting trail of Portuguese portals from Bab Lachour to Café Essalem to Cafe Petite France, decides enfin to become a writer.

Perhaps, it is the lure of a private, Bible-black bound journal and ink pen; one elbow on the table; a glass of coffee and hot milk crusted with cinnamon; a glass of water, pure as a prism--untouched; sugar cubes--untouched; an aluminum spoon rivaling silver from a saucer coffee stained, ovaled by equatorial light; intent eyes, the second sip; returning to appropriate a next phrase of wild, little, many-lettered, many-legged words on the vast, white terrain of another page.

Perhaps, it is simply having something to do, coffee after coffee, a short-term purpose--a stick in the earth, a stone, a shadow stick measuring the virginal procession of minutes.

Only Dennis does not want to write. He is from the isle of Jersey; his family has money; and he has no ambition this winter. Happily he sits sipping with 800 pages of Dickens beneath the striped cone of a straw hat bargained for in the suq, the serpentine alleys stinking of piss and smoke, leather, lavender, essences of peppermint, wood shavings, lemon wood, cinnamon, cinders, orange, blood and blood red spices behind us.

We face the salt and froth of the sea, each man wearing a silly hat covering eyes and nose. The women wear dark glasses.

Abdou Khadar does not wear a hat; he is Moroccan. He smokes Marlboro filters. He has his shoes polished for two dirhams by the child with scarred cheeks and jaundiced eyes. He breathes blue smoke: “Two years I have these shoes--,” raising them, shining shoes to the sun.

Robyn, Londoner, junior film editor, adjusts, readjusts the soiled brim of a safari cap: “Abdul, Dennis et moi avons une idée. Nous voudrons--”

“Voudrions--”

“Nous voudrions. . . unie librairie. . . . “

“You’re English. Speak English.”

“We want to make--to organize a sort of library for travelers to exchange books.” Robyn’s neck blushes to the mouth of the striped sailor shirt Dennis wore yesterday to the hamam. His left wrist, cluttered luxuriantly with ornamental bangles, is darker than his hair, shagged summer blond, unwashed.

Unwashed, Kitty, psychiatric nurse from Bristol, sunburning her nose, says, “With my books, I suppose.”

“Where?” [Iris] “Where?”

“Here, where we’re sitting. For an hour everyday. Right, Dennis?”

“No money.”

“No, it’s not for that purpose, Abdul.”

“Be careful. I tell you, be careful. Life is not so open here. The owner of the café--he’s Mafia. If he agrees, then someone else--someone who walks around to look at things--sees what you’re doing, and then in two, three days there’s trouble, perhaps.”

“But it’s not illegal--”

“But who needs this. You want a book I have, ask me.” Abdou grins to a chorus of placid faces seeking or avoiding the sun.

“Why make things different? We are sitting here; here is the sun; no one bothers anyone--,” Ute deranging her prawn pink day pack for a slim, teal blue tin of Nivea.

My face is distended in two, large, blue lenses. I yearn for her substantial Death in Venice.

Kitty lifts and lowers her chin as if securing a violin: “Nicholas Nickleby does not go into this library.”

Dennis, fisherman red, raises a British grimace.

Martin’s bad eye wanders enthusiastically. He motions to the water: half coffee, half milk. “It will rain today or tomorrow.”

“How do you know?” Kitty thrusts her punished nose to a last slat of virile light. “How do you know?”

A muezzin erupts from a football field loudspeaker. Abdou snaps open a brushed-chrome lighter, laughs, tap, tap, taps the tip of a fresh cigarette to the table, mulatto-milk puddled: “Merde.”

“Like a Virgin” is cut midchorus. Allah confuses all conversation. Veiled women walking in threes are vindicated.

We survey the square, we veterans of the seaport town.

David unbuttons his shirt to graying, ginger-freckled breasts. He was here in ‘68. He remembers Hendrix at Diabat.

Did you notice how quiet it is today? The police arrested all the hustlers--first thing this morning. There was fight between seven dealers last night. Someone was killed in the Kasbah Sqala. Hari told me. Now, there’s no hash anywhere. It’s dry as Iowa. Everyone’s going to Marrakech.”

“When?” Martin mouths.

“I don’t care.” Clea slurs fig liquor into her coffee.

“Ah, the airport authors!” spits Kamel of the leather shop through belt brown teeth.

Christopher and Chloe, Catholics from New Jersey, wrapped as Berber twins, guide a rust red bicycle strapped with striped, cornucopian baskets.

Iris: “Do you realize that child cooks every meal--”

Kitty: “He’s a swine. He was a swine last year, and he’s a swine this year. Does he still varnish his fingernails? I’m sure Père Claude must find that most interesting.”

Ute chortles.

Clea’s cough ruminates into a rattle. ”There are only two questions, David: Did you have a happy childhood? and What is your birthsign?” Tap, tap [spoon to glass].

“Well? Ute’s lips remain parted.

“Scorpio. And my childhood was very abusive.”

“No, not you, David.” Her cigarette is delicious. “You’re a Leo, aren’t you?’

David purrs.

Hari prowls toward our table, untangling hennaed hair oiled into long ringlets.

Clea holds large, laboratory white teeth together approximating a smile. A fine middle finger steadies predatory glasses.

The young Moroccans watch us. They do not understand this wandering from café to café. In the heat they cross to Mogador, the purple island, or camp in Diabat at the end of the crescent of hot sand. Why just sit like that all day, they wonder, with the little books and cheap pens?

But they know nothing of Hemingway or moveable feasts or the pleasures of lost generations.



Anyone Who Journeys [#21]
© 2000 Fammerée


* * * * *

To experience a performance of "Anyone Who Journeys,"
please visit:
http://www.myspace.com/fammereepoems
and listen to selections #5 & 6 (upper right corner).

* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

“Anyone Who Journeys ” appears in Lessons of Water & Thirst,
a book of poems by Richard Fammerée.

* * * * *

Again St

And Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled
with him until the breaking of the day. When
the man saw that he did not prevail against
Jacob, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and
Jacob's thigh was put out of joint as he wrestled
with him. Then he said, "Let me go, for the day
is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you
go, unless you bless me." And he said to him,
"What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob."
Then he said, "Your name shall no longer be
called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven
with God and with men, and have
prevailed. . . ."
- Genesis 32.24

Ten enemies cannot harm a person as he can
harm himself.
- Mother



On Again St the chosen who've embraced fear
and wrestled themselves down are wrestling
someone else now and it's getting nasty,
but it doesn't matter, because once someone's
lost to himself,

he's lost.

And he gets mean, really
mean. He may appear kind, generous,
gregarious, but when someone's lost
to himself, he gets mean and stays mean
until his mouth clamps
shut.

Then he's dead, just like he was when he was
alive, ignoring the sky and experiencing
the earth one worm

at a time.

And there's no heaven for these dead.
If the soul is rigid when the body sloughs
away, how can it expect to flutter and play
among angels.


On AgainSt the lost learn to accommodate
despair, but their teeth are worn
down, I want someone else to pay or someone else's
wife and no one else to live
a bigger life.

That dirty little prophecy hit me once when
I wasn't looking.

I lost this tooth.

It doesn't matter; I can still recite.

There's only one contest, one worm and one
apple: If the heart begins to rot everything
follows;
and if the heart begins to replenish, everything
follows.



Again St [#20]
© 2004 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org

* * * * *

La dernière fois

glass diaphanous
blood burned circa
7th century phial she
yearns for the red
for the music the cobbled street’s
final sunlit
hour every hesitation
a flaming sword at the gates and now there is
the Seine to cross

green glass church looming

one last white column Baudelaire Maupassant Zola
the Temple which is France the caryatides every woman carrying all
the other side of the reflecting the contortionist painted

the monumented minueted Champs
Elysée the ceremony of swords and fire at the end men bending trees
ready the forest forever turning
but she was not she for whom my soul awaits

glinting her hair the glare the glamor of the Louvre
I continue
beneath gargoyles, beneath Gorgons searching for Eurydice’s
raven hair traced with violets

In Violet the first draft cartooned onto a paper table cloth
wine spills night cast
as a bicycle’s shadow bending up the curb stone

4 AM wishing to not disturb the wraiths and deities
the church a tomb

I should have crept from the room down the five flights
and crossed the river that is what
I would have done twenty years before five hundred and twenty
years before that is what I did and now I am here again
and she is not and night lay
facing me



La dernière fois [#19]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

Aislinn

Upon the throne of my knees
in the first glorious year of your hair,
each tooth shone as a myth polished by
the Gaelic of your people
gathered in a cold, uncertain
kitchen.


Now, the clan is less
enchanted. You smell of small
defeats, Gaulois and abstractions. Two
Naples yellow streaks elevate your sleeve, and
your wrist, far too delicate for yet another engagement, is
wan as the milk in your
coffee, curdling aspirations in the heart
of a nineteen year old.


You made each leaf promise. You made
my sleeve promise.

We crossed the Quigley’s rye and passed through
the valley of the shadow of white and ribbed
windows, God-dappled, still
appling.

Distinct as an earlier chapter, I remembered crossing
myself, prepared to bleed as the sun upon the velvet inclination
of your knee, so greenly gathering.

It is the way of long traditions, this building upon
previous episodes, so that an informed reader, a God, for example,
would recognize the little girl and the reason she blessed the oriflamme
disguised as poet disguised as revenant.



Aislinn [#18]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org

* * * * *

Pregnant

I am pregnant and I am not embarrassed, and I refuse
to defend myself before the disappointed.
My babies have not been fathered by the patriarchy,
but they are not bastards.
I am not busy in commerce--I am not a landlord
or collector, but they will never be abandoned.

I am going to live in a forest where moss bathes my toes
and makes slippers for trees and pillows of stones;
I am going to deny concrete and its fumes;
I am going to swim every swell of my heart; for it is good
for my babies.
I am going to learn not to worry.
I am going to learn to listen to my fingers
and dismember every gate which does not allow the seeds
of wind and rain and light.

I am so pregnant I cannot see my feet, but my path
leads me.
When a poem comes through me, I embrace its vortex
and adore its apparitions and whisper
every word of its appendages
into song.

And when voices no longer echo
from the bones of my back, sleep makes me a baby
in a belly again.




Pregnant [#17]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org

* * * * *

“Pregnant” appears in Lessons of Water & Thirst,
a book of poems by Richard Fammerée.

* * * * *

Enceinte

Je suis enceinte et je n'ai pas honte, et je
refuse de me défendre devant les désapointés.
Mes bébés n'ont pas été engendrés
par le patriarchat, mais ils ne sont pas des bâtards.
Je ne pratique pas le commerce--
Je ne suis pas propriétaire ou collectionneur,
mais mes enfants ne seront jamais abondonnés.

Je vais vivre dans une forêt où la mousse baigne mes orteils
et fait des chaussons aux arbres et des oreillers aux pierres;
Je refuserai le concret et ses fumées;
Je nagerai sur chaque vague de mon cœur; car c'est bon
pour mes bébés.
Je vais apprendre à ne plus me tourmenter.
Je vais apprendre à écouter mes doigts
et à démembrer chaque porte fermée sur les graines
de vent, de pluie et de lumière.

Je suis si grosse que je ne vois plus mes pieds, mais mon chemin
me guide.
Quand un poème me traverse, j'étreins son tourbillon
et j'adore ses apparitions et murmure
chaque mot de ses appanages
en chanson.

Et quand les voix ne résonneront plus
dans ma moelle, le sommeil me fera
encore un enfant dans le ventre.




Pregnant [#17]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org

* * * * *

“Pregnant” appears in Lessons of Water & Thirst,
a book of poems by Richard Fammerée.

* * * * *

L’obscurité verte

Rue de la Harpe, 5e

Flaubert and blood
oranges, the feet of a forest
at the stream, weak-kneed as
a century of Sundays;
a loping changes the angle of a field burnt
crimson, appled and appling since le moyen age. Leaves, insouciant as seeds
spat, as they were in the beginning,
as a story chosen
to be written, as I am
now. To begin
at the end of
chagrin:


I am the loping. You are
the blood-fed field, holding
back
my hand tooth by
tooth from your obscuritites

your soft socks huddled, formless
in Paris, an Aget



of you upon linen, deranged
angel in a wilderness
of

a
rose
its sheath
iris and iris twice


reveal you
A history of the world lays wide open beside you

a cathedral



in the colors of fables within
the blue
bowl of the sky only the illiterate
can read



L’obscurité verte [#16]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org

* * * * *

Photograph by Susan Aurinko

* * * * *

The Green Christs

I follow my great-grandfather.
He can barely walk and he can barely talk.
He is two years old.

His brother Eugène is already six. Eugène will stay here
in Belgium, and my great-grandfather will marry
a woman in Chicago whose mother wears a mantilla
before the fire in the parlor as horses clop
past toward Halsted Street.

My great-grandfather carries a soiled green bear
whose name is Lala.
The little bear’s red jacket is very red and brocaded.

Eugene and his wife are buried next to the tomb
of his parents. Their names and dates are faint,
and the Christs have turned green.
Where the sun was an egg yolk and now peach, nine
sheep, one donkey and a rooster rehearse for Christmas
eve beneath an apple tree.
My great-grandfather, who last stood in this churchyard
in 1883, is buried alone
with his wife Flora near O’Hare Airport.
Only I know the graves now.

My great-grandfather and Lala stumble toward his mother.
She offers me half a plum from their garden and eats
the other half, then opens another.

She offers half to me and half to her son.
--Shake the tree, Richard, and the fruit which fall is ripe.
And always open a plum before tasting it.
Her fingers are stained and strong and fine. She could
play piano. A neighbor,
the soprano, begins to sing. My great-great-grandmother’s
eyes, sotto voce, focus separately upon the bluing
and swaying.
She has Ruth’s eyes, and she wears no jewelry.

Her last roses are old and big as breakfast bowls.
She plucks a petal between a tall burgundy door
and a tall burgundy window.
--You should have come earlier, then you would have seen them.
They were beautiful--and everywhere.




The Green Christs [#15]
© 2000 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

“The Green Christs” appears in Lessons of Water & Thirst,
a book of poems by Richard Fammerée.

* * * * *

Les Christs verts

Je marche derrière le père de mon grand-père.
Il peut à peine marcher et il peut à peine parler.
Il a deux ans.

Son frère Eugène a déjà six ans. Eugène restera ici
en Belgique, et mon arrière grand-père épousera
à Chicago une femme dont la mère porte une mantille
devant la cheminée du salon alors que trottent des chevaux
un peu plus loin vers Halsted Street.

Mon arrière grand-père tient un petit ours vert, u
n peu souillé, qui s'appelle Lala.
La veste rouge du petit ours est très rouge et brodée.

Eugène et sa femme sont enterrés à côté de la tombe
de ses parents. Les noms et les dates sont à peine lisibles,
et les Christs sont devenus verts.
Là où le soleil était jaune d'oeuf et maintenant pêche, neuf
moutons, une âne et un coq répètent la nuit de noël
sous un pommier.
Mon arrière grand-père qui se tenait dans ce cimetière
pour la dernière fois en 1883, est enterré seul
avec sa femme du côté de O'Hare Airport.
Je suis le seul maintenant à connaître ces tombes.

Mon arrière grand-père et Lala s'avancent en trébuchant
vers sa mère.
Elle m'offre une demi-prune de leur jardin et mange
l'autre moitié, puis en ouvre une autre.
Elle m'en donne une moitié et l'autre à son fils.
- Secoue le prunier, Richard, et le fruit qui tombe est mûr,
mais ouvre toujours une prune avant de la goûter.

Ses doigts sont tâchés et puissants et élégants. Elle pourrait
jouer du piano. Une voisine,
la soprano, commence à chanter.
Les yeux de la mère de mon arrière grand-père,
sotto voce, s'arrêtent à la fois sur le bleuiment
et le tremblement. Elle a les yeux de Ruth,
et ne porte pas de bijoux.

Ses dernières roses sont hardies et grosses comme les bols
du petit déjeuner.
Elle cueille un pétale , entre une grande porte
et une grande fenêtre bordeau.
- Tu aurais dû venir plus tôt et tu les aurais vues.
Elles étaient belles--et il y en avait partout.




Les Christs verts [#15]
© 2000 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

“The Green Christs” appears in Lessons of Water & Thirst,
a book of poems by Richard Fammerée.

* * * * *

A History of Her

I acquire the history of her in each button:
agate and sardius, jacinth and jasper,
emerald, perennial, sapphire, deciduous,
christ and chrysalis clinging to her torso,
entering her in pairs, male and female,
to be reborn from her and generations
of her. Agate (chalcedony) as a worshipper
of silver and the light not yet named
thousands of years prior to a descendant
who would create Jehovah. Jacinth (hyacinth)
I see circling. I choose not to avoid souls
circling; I recite her poetry to them before

bed; I want them to recognize
their mother’s voice.


She is a progression of symbols (enveloped
in velvet and embroidery, read from east to west):
woman and well, a procession of rain, rain
rippling and rattling, words.

There were trees taller than any now, blue as saints
and clouds allowed to arch and cathedral, inspiring
magi, then later artists who would be paid well
to change god.

She is as she was, and their priests and sacrifices
will sometimes be envious.



Before I disperse my bones again to the four corners,
it is time to dispel the ambitious
who would inhabit the vessel of her to participate
in the vessel of us.

If there will be another birth, corinthians (isolated
by multiple stories--and I have been one) must abandon
the azure detailed with child.


Are they attempting again to enter through her? Is that
the trembling of her fingers.

That shadow, for example, is not her, though it appears
confident as it was when it navigated the glassy passages
and narrowing passages as my carcass fell, watching
her turn.

Another is returning to marble upon a hill of debris.

What are salt and glass to me.

The cunning of a perfect left foot (which may or may not
have taught me to forgive the transience of dusk).

Each window as hesitation.

Rhyme schemes, an ex-wife, her asthmatic son.


But sleep, a beaded talisman. Our hearts working
as rain, fluttering;

this is probably a marriage, possibly
ours (Why else would I have dreamt it in a forest?). The mouths
are ours as the torque attains its circle,

the bloom of wood marking the turning as our poems do now.




A History of Her [#14]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org

* * * * *

His Father’s Farm

Before Joseph left his father's farm
in Oregon, he descended into a freshly cut
womb where once he had been
cast by the sons of Leah and Bilhah
and Zilpah in Canaan.

His fingers reminisced among root hairs
and serpents and ripped
tubers oozing and smooth
rock
and jagged, ochred
rock and snails in their salty
penumbrae;

but his nails did not immediately
comprehend
tiny beads, rhubarb red and pumpkining
green.

He brushed them and touched an elbow and
forearm.




His Father’s Farm [#13]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org

* * * * *

Blue Avarice

It is not her finger nail polish or every lie we must
tell the concierge or sapphire tiles in the wall of
windows yearning for the other side (which in music
is violet, if blue), the lost coast of the French church
where white has washed away or the single cerulean
breast of the mosque crowning the spice market
or blessings (in the tangible, tenuous form of blossoms)
clinging to iron gates trying to convince a stone building
of something it simply cannot conceive. It is not
the water or sky or their assumed marriage. Assume
nothing, they remind us, our parents now; no others
accompany us crossing borders, carrying everything
we own into a vivid Diaspora. We were left
upon a doorstep of this pilgrims’ world, swaddled
with imaginings while the money was dispersed
to the seven corners of venality: booze, sex, substances,
Vegas, shopping, gorging (and disgorging), faithlessness
(the equivalent of self-deception). Our earthly fathers
are jealous. Mine was. Their predictions were jealous.
In a less familial context I would simply call their ethos
avarice--but painted blue to appear fresh and something
new. We cannot be ingested or exploited, bought or
sold. Not here, not now. We have become aware;
we had to, to survive and grow through stone. And we
believe in forgiveness this month--and why not? It is all
so far away from this stony beach and cold outdoor
shower. We are within as we are without, within
this room this Mediterranean afternoon. I pray for
those pacing the desperate corridor of myopia.

Blue avarice is like good art. It makes us look
and consider; it forces us into renewed palaces,
into eternity, knowing we need not pay a tithe for
this birthright.



Blue Avarice [#12]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

[station IV]

She was overwrought, overweight, the color
she was wearing. Drawn inside the lines
inside the lines, pink, blank and pink.
Her question became an explanation.
She had come to the reading because she had
written a poem for her daughter, now four years
old and beginning to understand.

We nodded, estimating her age.
Twenty, perhaps.
“Do you have the poem with you?” “I always have
the poem with me.”
She held no paper, all peach and
pippin, cheeks and blouse billowing:

“This is called Zoo of Fear.”


[station IV] [#11]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

Intinction

Scene. In the middle of the myth, in the middle of a life

Enter a Poet, buried in the earth every two to three
generations, progressively cleansed of pagan-Judaic-
Christian-Moslem, etc., traditions and increasingly
translucent


Here is my staff and here my shell. I am naked beneath
this skin from stone to sky and back; and you are watching
me lost without you.

You pretend to be a tree. Of course, you do. I have pretended
many names before meeting you; and a tree is an obelisk
covered with hieroglyphs (now indecipherable), but it is
also a root becoming leaves.
Each of us is root becoming leaves.

You, for example, are my rosette. Inside the vaulting of
you, your leaves never lost,

never dying,

having agreed with myself this once not to leave bread
crumbs even though I reach for my pocket when I can’t hear

or feed or feel you. Ophelia.

Fortunately, there is music between sleep.
Fortunately, between kisses between shoulders, your faint
cynicism and shallows cannot protect you.
They only muffle shadows; and shadows may feed on you
but do not feed you. I cannot be a shadow, however
comforting

the obscurity. There you are, and there you are. Your voices


fall at the middle, spreading open upon a flattened spine:
Kiss me between here and here when the light is dark as
my hair.


Words flown or drawn from the womb of every tree, every
turning, every dream of every turning which, of course, is
every woman.

We are grove and spring, patches of words transcribed,
backlit and flickering, heightened by shadows including
the shadows of our last and first meetings and the shadow
of time.

The smudge of your left shoe remains. Its familiarity
encourages me to ask, When do past lives begin? Is this
walk from chapel to leaf to leaf
a beginning, for example?

And, so, as an ewe, I dreamed the eve of the fourth day,
licking at the lip of all waters in the west of an island
(presently England?). I saw a light reflecting softly as if
from a belly receiving a child, and I awoke to the length of
your continent and half globe prominent.

The longing of the eyes for its tail. There may be other
lifetimes (as a blossoming appears each March along the same
measure of branch), but these hours are diffident, too young
to remember the longing of the eyes for the peregrine.

Words rattle and fall, though we chase
and debate and kick to keep them aloft. They do not die
with us;

our child will inherit them as her child will inherit us.


Here is a little, easily illustrated story that can be told
to her: In the church of the Jews the wafer is square;
in the church of the Romans the wafer is round.
In every church the wine is red and the bird white.
Intinction is steeping the body in wine to receive the two
at once. Beneath the dome of sky, the cage of the heart is
square; the skull of the spirit round; the blood red,
the sclera (as albumen) white. Every god and creator
of gods knows this as the first day (before
mythology, before empire, before the dissolution
of empire and its mythologies).


This is what she has taught me, now that she has chosen
and been born to us, and I guard her translucence.



Intinction [#10]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

La dernière fois

within

glass diaphanous
blood burned circa
7th century phial she
yearns for the red
for the music the cobbled street’s
final sunlit
hour every hesitation
a flaming sword at the gates and now there is
the Seine to cross

green glass green church looming

one last white column Baudelaire Maupassant Zola
the Temple which is France the caryatides every woman carrying all
the other side of the reflecting the contortionist painted

the monumented minueted Champs
Elysée the ceremony of swords and fire at the end men bending trees
ready the forest forever turning
but she was not she for whom my soul awaits

sun bushes of gold glinting her hair the glare the glamor of the Louvre
I continue
beneath and beneath gargoyles and Gorgons searching for Eurydice’s
raven hair traced with violets

In Violet the first draft cartooned onto a paper table cloth
wine spills night cast
as a bicycle’s shadow bending up the curb stone

4 AM wishing to not disturb the wraiths and deities
the church a tomb

I should have crept from the room down the five flights
and crossed the river that is what
I would have done twenty years before five hundred and twenty
years before that is what I did and now I am here again
and she is not and night lay
facing me



La dernière fois [#9]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

The Smell of French Books

The smell of French books is particular. It is the bloom
of favorite shoes and pillows plump
with nursing, bells
of etched glass and cream yellowing in the belly of a spoon.

The smell of French books is one candle and three cold
canvases in a crumbling room in Picardy and meadows
beyond the rusting
crucifix, pinking with puberty and wooing the mooing cows.

There is a Livre de Poche beside the bed. I refresh myself
with Pierre Bonnard’s busy virgin in her emerald bath,
then struggle through four more pages.
Little accents fly off like perfumed arrows. From dialogue
I guess the plot and meaning of the story--
as I do in life.

I remember so little grammar, my ceremony of French books
will never change.
It is the lick, lick, lick of a chocolate clock, and I am asleep
before the chiming.



The Smell of French Books [#8]
© 2000 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

“The Smell of French Books ” appears in Lessons of Water & Thirst,
a book of poems by Richard Fammerée.

* * * * *

To experience a performance of The Smell of French Books
please visit:
http://www.reverbnation.com/fammerée
and listen to selections #8.

* * * * *

Livres Français (Français)

L'odeur des livres Français est particulière. Est-ce la senteur
des chaussures favorites et l'oreiller potelé
par l'allaitement, la cloche
d'un verre travaillé et la crême jaunissante
dans le ventre de la cuillère.

L'odeur des livres Français est une bougie et trois toiles
refroidies dans une chambre désolée en Picardie
et des prés pubères au-delà du crucifix rouillant, rosissant
en courtisant les vaches meuglantes.

Il y a un livre de poche près du lit. Je me rafraîchis
avec la Vièrge de Bonnard occupée dans son bain émeraude,
puis me débats tout au long de quatre pages encore.
Les petits accents s'envolent comme des flèches parfumées.
Du dialogue je devine la trame et la signification de l'histoire--
comme je le fais dans la vie.

Je me rappelle si peu de grammaire, ma cérémonie
avec les livres Français ne changera jamais.

Je lèche, lèche, lèche l'horloge en chocolat, et m'endors
avant la sonnerie.



The Smell of French Books [#8]
© 2000 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

“The Smell of French Books ” appears in Lessons of Water & Thirst,
a book of poems by Richard Fammerée.

* * * * *

To experience a performance of The Smell of French Books
please visit:
http://www.reverbnation.com/fammerée
and listen to selections #8.

* * * * *

Shy

In a latter myth of Hyperboreans I became
sculptor and traded everything one
candle could ascertain for a hoof
of marble to form your foot
hesitating upon its twin

You selected anklets and I became poet
to entice the oil and wick of each toe, suddenly
the candelabra, first and last

No longer distracted by gods, their chronicles, the
exegeses (each morning is the same
first miracle), I know

you are all three:

the river of a tree
the delirium of a rose
the maternity of a cloud

and these:

the flame of a fawn
the modesty of truth
the shy blue of a moth, me

wandering Crete and Lydia in search of any
vestige



Shy [#7]
© 2009 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

February - October

She is the woman and ghost of the girl
who pretended in this solitary barn, who gazed
through these slats in the back where I now
sleep. Each restless, standing stalk is the shiver
of her, and the wind is an aunt on her
mother’s side, the one who lost her
husband to light between clouds.

Her body is hillocks, pond and spring, long
planted and greener before. Her spine is
the trysting tree from the time of the
grandparents. It is where they meet
and court. Birds turn and return. Her girls
come back. The wind sails their hair
in three directions: light, silk, conifer.

Before sleep one night she read my spine:
Roots above are as roots below.
We are the same.
I root in your body where our dead wait to be planted.
We pray upside down and right side up like a tree.


We made paths as deer. We crossed hills of lone
apple trees where she remembered orchards.
Thorns were still angry, she was still angry,
and the inland sea swollen.

"All vessels are fragile," she surprised me. "Still, a soul
sails on. There is no night or day or death."

And when two signal, I did not say aloud, from
whatever distance, no end of the world or world
between can prevent them.

The moon became a milky wafer melting in cocoa.
How gentle, how unexpected.

A man and woman eclipsed like that alone
upon a strand, all humanity, all history awaited
our decision.

I told her, "We’ll always be together, but like ghosts,
like this." My hands demonstrated an empty
vessel, a frail cup which would hold nothing
for long.

And, then, of course, the moon was gone.

When she left, as I knew she would [though
I had predicted to Peter that she never would--
after dressing each sad window with lace (a gift
from her French mother) and the raw ceiling
with a lamp (hung by her Welsh father); after
the feverish night she had lain beside me and
sat beside me as I writhed] I was surprised
at my grief and the tears--foreign things, foreign
as time--falling upon my hands.





February - October [#6]
© 2008 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

Eulogia

Above the vindicating sea, rising whitely
from the kitchen’s cold-handled blessing, her pale

cardigan flaps its green gathering
to every field

her husband remembers, forking windrows of wheat
into dry, neat breasts.
He is ancestor and self in that dust-driven moment
his red face meets
the rude wind.


Alice blue school blouses slapping
at clouds and the church
is white and the water surrounding
the forbidden

tarnishes; her skin is forgiving where the water is
silver and the ruin black as a mask
and unapproachable.

Above the weaving of their hair a branch is trembled
for a berry

as the wind would in the blond, open
field.



Where is the end room shuttered with indigo
branches?

From this throne of vernal conceit, milk cold
and bloated, bearing the fallen
spears of pine,
spines upon spines sprite green up above
the rust and mossy stream and insect
clouds--


Dear Mary, soon-to-be-forsaken, Protestant-fingered
wife, provider for the children, proceeds
from the yellow door
of the new kitchen to the tiled hall. Her blind Jack Russell,
sausage pampered, rodent wristed, bounces widely
at a sensation of sullen sunlight among the fuscia, spins
with the grin and abandon of the closely protected.

The green-glassed porch remains narrowly open--
but only to Jack.

A fire is lit in the television room.
Down the long hall, bending to the convalescent
slope of the piebald
hill, she sweeps out each stale
fire, sending anemic wisps into a wind
frantic for the sea.



Leam of light draw near

the writhing in their salmon bodies
at the cloven

rock, lichened and forever keening, steaming,
kneeling, beaded wet and aubergine; screens of golden
leaf set glowing

the wooly sheep pounding nowhere
up the clover.
That last light steels

the partitioned windows of Johnny Byrne’s
Coach & Four and the contiguous stone chapel
up to its cloistered window and the priest’s
residence where Father Mahon once slept
for two weeks without a mattress, for he
was a just man, a generous man--not like this new
cleric, trained in England.
-God help us. Imagine a theatrical society in Cullenglen.
-As if we hadn’t enough nonsense--and especially with
the youth now--
-Well, one can see why the church is having her difficulties.
It all started with that Vatican II.
-I suppose he’ll next be wanting to do away with the Blessed
Sacrament itself--
-God help us.
-Indeed.



Dissembler, cast a furtive stance this side of the glass
in the hollow
bellied banqueting room: the powder of ash breaking
upon the grating, the brown bindings
and green bindings of the mildewing authors, the long,

low-handled swords
impaled upon the papered wall, the palest and finest
portrait of Catherine O’Reilly--Do you
take this fair Aisling--I do, I do--as the light moves,
abandoning her again to the contemplative
twilight of 1914.



Cygnets amplify the sable and viridian,
insignia of faith, for the fading
shall not be forgotten, not here. This night
they awaken to the ripple of Niamh’s

mirror. Here is the bright field
of their gathering, and the shrill
of the silence is the sound of their chorus,
the memory of an intonation, the little whistles

and green stories, the prayers we repeat
in the gethsemane of our hearts.

Twin cygnets, darlings of the water darkling,
what do you know beyond the reflection

of the low stone bridge--



Eulogia [#5]
© 2000 Fammerée


* * * * *

“Eulogia” appears in Lessons of Water & Thirst,
a book of poems by Richard Fammerée.

* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

Evora

In Evora there is a church
and the church was once a mosque
and the mosque was once a church
and the church was once a temple
in the time of the Romans

Behind the altar there is a false tomb
and beneath a Christian name there are thousands of years
of roots writhing through stone
and water echoes up vertebrae which must have been steps
and its light is the juice of emeralds

Now, consider the well that is my throat
and the pool that is my chest

What does one do when a well has been capped
for so many generations?
Is water safe in the stomach?

How did I become addicted to a self-imposed periphery,
its tithes, its prick and its poison?
Can all of this be unlearned in one generation,
one season, one summer?

My grandfathers and grandmothers
and their grandparents meet for the first time in me
I carry them to familiar places
I am their hands, their thighs, their nose,
their eyes, their lips, their teeth, their tongue

How did I become addicted to a self-imposed periphery,
its tithes, its prick and its poison?
Can all of this be unlearned in one generation,
one season, one summer?

I am the voice and the body now
and all that is closed will be opened
and all that hurts will be repaired
and all that sleeps without dreaming will be green again

In Evora there is a church
Inside the church there is a tomb
and inside the tomb there is a cistern
Inside the cistern there is water
and it’s light is the juice of emeralds



Evora [#4]
© 2000 Fammerée


* * * * *

“Evora” appears in Lessons of Water & Thirst,
a book of poems by Richard Fammerée.

* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

To experience the live performance of Evora
with music composed by the artist, please visit:
http://www.reverbnation.com/fammerée
and listen to selection #1.

* * * * *

Photograph by Susan Aurinko

* * * * *

Notes From Above Ground

Ute's bed and flower beds are white.
Strawberries nipple in rows.
I drop one into my drink and it bobs
between ice. The heel of the glass marks
a full circle.

Blossom rings and prettier things painted
onto wood chalk the tongues
of my fingers.
A smudge has dried into a skin
of varnish; and a boar awaits orders.
His tusks are up and his eyes do not blink.
His hair is needles. I can't imagine anyone
having eaten his body.
- Where did you find him?
- He found me. She, too. Most of a Mother
of God is lost. Her left side is gone and
her mouth may as well have been carved
from butter or snow. She survived. The time
of the burnings. She is almost a branch again.

A barrel is pissing upon nasturtiums.

When the sun is most carcinogenic, black

and brown bees fatten on fleshy flowers
as they do every year, as they did
in August, 1942, while my mother, who was
eleven years old in Milwaukee
and twenty years old in Auschwitz,
began to die in both places.

- Do you enjoy my garden?
- It reminds me of a Tarot reading.
- I like random. As one would find in more
primitive places--a little bit like we had in
Essaouira. Ute's toe nails sparkle, but she is not
as tête-à-tête as she had been in Morocco.
Half the sky is smoke
from Nadia's cigarette. Ash sticks to her
cropped copper hair. She is the scent
of our siesta, not the Mosel
nor the vineyards. We sip
Liebfraumilch, and I must witness her
suffering.

- Why is this? My daughter will not listen
to the voice of her illness. She kicks at it and kicks
at it and kicks at it--
I am a house guest. How should I know?
Perhaps, she was a guard once.

Perhaps, she was the guard
who shaved my mother's head and crippled
her right leg.



Notes From Above Ground [#60]
© 1998 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree.com
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

Unterwelt

Thump, thump, thump went Dorothea's
head. She burned with the authority of
a constellation of candles, and then she
didn't. Most people who claim spiritual
powers have thick skin and big bones. She
hadn't. I brushed her fingers surreptitiously
with an insufficient blessing of my beard.

A petty officer offered something and
cigarettes to her wardens. They licked and bit
and exhaled smoke. Our eyes followed their
swallowing. Dorothea waited at the end of
a rope.

"Mmm. . . mmm, . . ." said the Dürer
Madonna, a type who would bear one child
from a disappointing marriage. "Mmm. . .
mmm, . . ." said the other, engineered for
many children from any man.

Both were the color the sun makes on pale
ice.

If the willowy one was a deer, the sneering
officer was the wolf for whom she yearned.
It must be in the blood, this taste for tearing
apart and being torn apart.

They recognize no distinction between sow
and jew, and this allows them to milk, beat, bleed
and feed upon every sinew, I spat and spat
quickly, and gunners from the tower fell.
But two übermen rose up and dragged
Dorothea the length of the wooden buildings
as if it were Christmas afternoon. They ran
and ran and their new sled became
very red.

Six years later, while walking HaYarakon
Street in Tel Aviv, alternately calculating
and praying (as is my way), I was born in
Oak Park, Illinois. This was a clever selection,
modeled, of course, after Hemingway.

Dorothy's primary concern, as she nursed
me in a bedroom of a bungalow, was our
anonymity. Shades were drawn religiously;
one lamp lit the bed red; and lint, busy
as ancestors in a corner of heaven, instructed
me, You are as we were. Her parents, her sisters,
herself as a child hid among silks. Prayers
clung as kisses, but no one has survived.

Her face alternates between a smile and tears
as it did when we were chosen;
but I write, This story must end here, with this
telling, upon the winter of this page.

Why should you always be among strangers?
she overrides my expostulations as she did
when I was her child.

When I died last year in Haifa,
Dorothea greeted me upon the low stone
bridge beyond the forest of our village where
her fingers were always cold.



Unterwelt [#59]
© 1998 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree.com
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

Keeper of the Blindly Glowing

From this rib of leaf I release the girl
from Rainy Lake, ringing again my skinny
Bedouin body with the nest of her
sleeves. She was more lilac than the sky, and I
was braver than any boy
in corduroy. My fist pressed each
victory to the ring of her
pink finger. We squashed every terrible
tributary, avoided depressions
with great steps, subdued the rank and silver
finned corridor; and I, tall
as her bluest button, was keeper of the blindly
glowing hair.

She told me that birds are souls
visiting. We were crossing this street.
Vehicles stopped. Their urgency made me
anxious.
My left hand held her left elbow; my right
hand held her right.
Can you imagine, she asked as if we were
dancing in France. You came from my body.
Her new hair nestled beneath the rampart
of my beard.

A dripping beneath leaves assures me
that wings are less of a burden for her
than arms.

Fingers cannot delay the exodus
of heaven. Faithful and unfaithful
disperse but I remain, keeper of the blindly
glowing.


* For Dorothy Fammerée, my mother, departed December 29, 1990,
and frequently present. The first draft of this poem cradles within
her left arm within the earth.





Keeper of the Blindly Glowing [#3]
© 2008 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *

Longueville

Conspicuous as a sonnet, I pass through
shadows. I do not know their names and
I decide not to count. There are so many
going up the hill and back, alongside the
vein of meadowsweet and loam. They are
a forest. They are a frost. I am their field.
Each ancestor rising one summer higher
in a line, planted along the rutted road
which is now a footpath for fewer and
fewer.

It was a Roman lane, their tomb a mound
sprouting yew and laurel, pregnant two
thousand years. They return to recall as do
their descendants, my ancestors. One day,
my daughter will come here and tell this
story to her grandchildren, and they will
sit within my shade and shiver with
mysteries as she, three months old today,
looks up my tall, deciduous body into
leaves.


* Longueville is a medieval French, now Belgian, village
founded by the Romans, inhabited by my family since
at least the early eighteenth century.





Longueville [#2]
© 2008 Fammerée


* * * * *

Richard Fammerée
fammeree@att.net
director@universeofpoetry.org


* * * * *