Each Verse a Vampiric Kiss

"Dante and Virgil in Hell" William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1850

Each Verse a Vampiric Kiss

Virgil! Dante! What help? These sonnets pile
toward heaven like sins, black stains soaking
through pristine robes—here again I’m poking
around in our canon; holy and vile
beside graceful and graceless, mile on mile—
scrolls endless as sky, that azure cloaking
that hides heaven from eyes—they sin, stoking
fires in which to—eternal—burn! No trial . . .

Even this stanza sinks fangs into veins
pulsing iambic! Vampire pen! Suck life
into your inkwell; drink in verse. Our reins
are bit through! Stallion-wild, mimetic strife
speaks itself from fingers numb as rhyme drains
itself of cliché to take its new life.

David M Pitchford
January 2008

Tom Jones’s Lost Survivor

Independent Publishers Group

This is one of the best war novels I’ve ever read. Jones uses very memorable characters to depict a story not merely about war, but also about the psychological impact war has on the soldier and his loved ones when he returns from the field as a survivor. Powerful!

The Ideal of the Artist « nunc-fluens

The Ideal of the Artist « nunc-fluens

I rarely find articles I wish I had written. This is one of those. Very articulate and concise view on the subject. I would give it a gold star if I were in the business of handing out gold stars.

Scavenger

Scavenger

This guy has an all-too-familiar perspective on Christianity. As you can see by my comments to his posts, I quite disagree with it. Fundamentalism is, in my opinion, more dangerous than any other evil on the planet – no matter what religion. I find it pitiful and piteous that such ideas and voices are so prominent. Unexamined faith, in my opinion, is untested and dead faith. Please understand that I am not judging people, per se, but their actions and especially their dogmatic tendencies of intolerance. Being a repentant fundamentalist myself, I find the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” approach quite distasteful, destructive, and anti-Christian. I’m usually easy to suck in to such discussions. And yet, I am quite distressed that people get so stupidly and blindly unreasonable about these matters.

A True Story

The Raptor in Our Basement

Saturday as I’m making homemade pizza at my wife’s request, my son (Ian, 17) takes down the Xmas tree and such. Collecting the tree into its box (it’s fake and really cheap), he takes the box down to the basement. A moment later he’s at my elbow for nearly a full minute—silent—a very unusual occurrence.

He says, “Dave, um, this may sound kind of weird, but . . . there’s a redtail hawk in our basement.”

Skeptic I am, I ask, “You sure about that?”

“Pretty sure,” he replies.

“Are you sure you saw it . . . physically speaking, I mean?”

“It wasn’t—I’m not hallucinating, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“No. Not at all. I meant—was it a vision or a sight?”

“It’s a sight alright,” he says. His laugh is that kind of nervous convulsion that’s hard to pin down as either chortle or giggle. He shifts his feet nervously, but maintains steady eye-contact.

“Okay,” I say, hesitant. “Call Animal Control and report it.”

“What’s their number?”

“Try the yellow pages . . .”

While he tries to figure out how to use a pulp phone book, I sneak down to the basement to take a look. We have a small basement with a cramped crawl space on either side. Most of the quasi-room is taken up by two water heaters and a mammoth but fairly new central air unit and the network of ducts and pipes. The floor is cluttered with what looks like the aftermath of a trailer hit by a twister.

Suddenly WHOOSH—the mottled wings of a raptor beat toward a halt and veer to my left. I’m still on the second to bottom step, gazing down at the shadows. Weak daylight confuses from the window directly across from me—confuses the shadows cast by compact fluorescents; the mottling of the wings speaks more of owl than hawk.

I retreat up the stairs. My son is on the phone, but clicks off when I appear.

“Animal Control is closed for the weekend,” he reports.

Confused, I shrug and mumble something about calling the Southern View police, “use the non-emergency number.”

Meanwhile, I go to the kitchen and pour myself two fingers of Jameson Irish whiskey in a commemorative Chivas glass and ponder portents of birds. In the American Indian tradition, owls are a death omen. Not good. I think back, recall the basement and replay the scene.

“It was marked like an owl,” I tell him.

“No,” Ian shakes his head. “Well—if you say so—but I’m pretty sure it’s no owl. Maybe a different kind of raptor.”

“Yeah,” I take a sip of whiskey, savor it, and nod.

“It didn’t fly right for an owl. It’s flight is too . . . lateral. Owls and falcons have different wing beats . . .”

He’s on the phone now. As I walk past him into our master bedroom to speak to my wife, I hear him give the police his date of birth. Evidently I’m not the only skeptic.

“We have a raptor in the basement,” I tell my wife.

She stares at me blankly from the bed, where she is recuperating from surgery.

“Seriously,” I nod as though it’s the end of the matter.

“Call our friends and find out what omens . . . ask about owls and falcons.”

I walk out to find Ian scratching his head and staring blankly as though wondering whether he is dreaming or awake.

“Call Fishel and have him ask his parents what it means,” I tell him. Gives him something to do so he won’t drive himself crazy with speculations.

“They said an officer is on the way,” he mumbles, thumbing his cell phone.

My wife emerges from the bedroom in her yoga pants and a Victoria’s Secret pajama top. She looks at Ian questioningly, and then at me with a more demanding question.

“I saw it,” I nod.

“What is it?” She asks.

“I’m no ornithologist,” I shrug. I take another sip of whiskey and contemplate another venture to the basement.

“What do you think it is?” She asks, not gently.

“I’m just hoping it’s not an owl,” I tell her. “In American Native lore, that means someone in the household will die soon.”

“Who?” She turns 90-bright in paper terms.

“Nobody,” I shake my head.

“It flies wrong to be an owl. It’s some kind of falcon—peregrine maybe.”

“I can’t tell,” Ian cuts in, pushing our digital camera at me.

I look at the little two-inch screen and feel a frown crease my brow and twitch my beard. The picture is not satisfactory. It reveals a glowing eye and an ambiguous bird of prey sitting atop a box.

“I don’t know,” I say, handing the camera to my wife. “Looks like it could be an owl—or just a falcon with its feathers ruffled to look bigger.”

“How big is it?” She asks.

“A bit bigger than a pigeon. Wingspread maybe three or four feet . . .”

The doorbell sounds and our Pomeranian goes running and barking to the front door.

“Bet this is a new one for you,” I greet the officer.

“We’ll see,” he says. He’s obviously skeptical. It occurs to me now that the whiskey on my breath might not help that.

A few minutes later he emerges from the stairwell looking both sheepish and confused. He’s talking on his radio.

“Animal Control is on the way,” he tells us. His clipped speech matches the military cut of his hair and I wonder if he is recently returned from Iraq.

” . . . basement is a metaphor for the unconscious,” Ian touches my elbow to be certain I’m listening. “A hawk symbolizes some heroic deed or quality.”

“The only heroic deed I’m interested in at the moment is getting that poor little raptor out of there.”

“Any idea how long he’s been down there?” Asks the officer.

“He’s pretty active for being there more than a day. I was just down there a few days ago for something, and he didn’t show himself.”

The dog barks as two of our animal lover friends and another officer show up simultaneously. After greetings among all the people, and, of course, our dog, I escort the two friends down to the basement.

“Oh my god,” says the silver-haired woman, awed and delighted. “That’s a kestrel.”

“A kestrel?” I repeat blankly.

From its perch on the window sill, it flies straight at me, but then veers to double back around the water heater to the left and then into the crawlspace on that side. So enraptured by the simple word “kestrel” and the majesty, the sheer grace of the thing, I forget to flinch or be intimidated by its strafing.

After a moment of hiding in the shadows, it returns to the sill to perch and gaze out the grubby glass pane. Absurdly, I think of Chillon and Lord Byron.

By the time I’ve noted the raptor’s markings and can keep a clear picture of it in my mind, I return to the front room; the Animal officer is here with a green net on a six-foot aluminum handle.

“A butterfly net?” I muse. And lines crawl up through the darkness of my unconscious:

For him my soul was sorely moved;
And truly might it be distrest
To see such bird in such a nest;
For he was beautiful as day—
(When day was beautiful to me
As to young eagles, being free) —

“I’m sure it’s a bit more stout than that,” says my shorter, stocky friend of mixed Italian and Hispanic heritage. His fierce blue eyes are sure as the wind and sky outside—you’d guess him from that glance to be the Taurus he is.

After a few more minutes, the officers emerge from the basement to ask if there are alternative routes into the crawl space. Luckily, I forget the obvious route and deny that there is other access; later I’ll recall that only a thin wall of gypsum separates that crawl from our sunken family room.

“You know what?” I finally come to a decision. “There are three panes in that basement window. The east-most pane has been cracked for years. What if we just knock that out and let him find his way to freedom?”

“Fine by me,” replies the Animal Control officer. “Thanks for bringing me out for this. Never seen one in a basement before.”

As he leaves, Ian begs me for the small aluminum bat I’ve grabbed from beside my bedroom dresser. Smiling, I hand it to him.

“Poke it inward with the end of the bat, please,” I tell him. “We’ll need to clean up the glass, so we don’t need a slugger here. A bunt will do.”

“A bunting for a kestrel?” Laughs the silver-haired guest.

They stay outside and watch to see if the kestrel finds his way out.

Meanwhile, I return to find the police officers bidding my wife adieu and complimenting the smell of our dinner cooking.

Running in, I rescue that pizza at the dark stage just short of burning.

“It’s a good omen,” I mutter around a slice of homemade pizza, then toast the silly kestrel in my basement.