Poems by James A.W. Heffernan

NOLI TIMERE

for Seamus Heaney

On a wall in my daughter Virginia's Brooklyn apartment
hangs a work of art wrought by Deepa Mann-Kler:
a neon sign of faith.

Shining white against a coal-black rectangle of wood,
its words radiate something
darkness will never grasp
even if the plug is pulled,
even if the whole borough's power grid
all at once fails.

Noli timere.
Do not fear,
Have no fear.
Do not wish to fear.
Do not even think of being afraid.

Whatever they might mean in English,
they were the last words Seamus Heaney
texted to his wife Marie from a hospital bed in Dublin
just before he died at the age of 74
on August 30, 2013.

He thus foresaw the dying of the light,
the coming of the night
without fear
and without rage.

Of course he could have tapped out English words
or flashed one final Continental wave
with "ti amo sempre" or "au revoir."
Better still, he could have tapped deep down his well of Irish words:
the language spoken centuries ago
by the fathers of his fathers' fathers' fathers,
before the strangers ripped it from their mouths
tearing out their tongues at the root.

But leaving those roots unstirred.
he fingered instead the tongue
of the much older strangers
who sailed to Britannia two thousand years ago.
and whose words must have struck fear
in everyone who heard them,
whether Celt or Caledonian, Gael or Gaul.

"Timete nos!" The Romans must have said.
Fear us!
"Cedite vel morite!"
Give up or die!

Four centuries later, the Roman Empire died.
Yet its tongue endures
throughout the English-speaking world
in roots that sink so deep
inside the words we speak
that we could sooner wipe away
all traces of our DNA
than rip out all the Latin from our speech.

So "timens" lurks in "timid,"
"lumen" in "luminous,"
And "monumentum" leaves its monument for all to see.

It stands right up there in the nearly final words of Horace,
the ancient Roman poet whose friends and fans included--inter alia--
Augustus, Emperor of Rome.

Horace went out with a flourish.
After writing many poems of many kinds--
odes, epodes, satires, epistles, and the Ars Poetica,
his lyric treatise on the art of poetry--
he proudly told his patron, Maecenas,
"Exegi monumentum aere perennius."
"I have built a monument more lasting than bronze."

The death of Horace was shortly followed by the birth of Christ,
who grew up to build a monument of faith.
One day in the deepest part of Lake Gennesaret
he calmly calmed the fears of Simon Peter
when, having netted scores of fish with James and John,
he felt their overloaded boats were sinking--for his sins.
But in the Roman tongue of St. Jerome, Christ told him,
"Noli timere."

Seamus Heaney never claimed
that he had built a monument of any kind.
But in negating timere,
in echoing Christ,
his own last words
said something bolder:

I have shone a light more lasting than darkness.
It cannot fade.
It will not die.
Have no fear.

October 2021

SEASCAPE

On The Tempest, a construction by Varujan Boghosian

In the center,
A little toy boat tilts skyward
Like Pegasus taking off.

With the blue paint on its grainy wooden hull
worn half away by a thousand voyages around the tub,
with its spindly masts slightly askew
and its two square inches of white cotton sail
caught in a frozen flutter,
it trails a little line of  cotton  string
flung to the wavy air.

Across the base extends a row of wooden triangles
in red and blues rubbed down and almost out
by many hands.
They march along
like the pointed rails of a picket fence
or the teeth of a saw
or the teeth of a shark.
From somewhere above or behind or beneath
This row of wooden peaks,
My eyes hear a voice proclaim
Like God in Genesis:
“Let these be waves.”
And waves are just what they are
In the world you have made.

Honorable Mention, New England Writers Winners’ List 1998
Ekphrasis: A Poetry Journal (Fall-Winter 1999).
The Anthology of New England Writers 9 (1999): 11.
Beauty/Truth: A Journal of Ekphrastic Poetry 1.3 (Fall/Winter 2007)

A DATE WITH THE HYGIENIST

Peering into the moist dark cave of my mouth,
working under the burning white sun of an adjustable lamp,
reaping bits of plaque with a little sharp-hooked scythe,
she lets me count the freckles on her downy cheek,
and see my face reflected in the pupils of each eye
that never looks at mine
but only at the rubble of my teeth and gums.

Her lips are sheeted by a starched white mask
but close enough to kiss
if I could first expel the nickel-plated snake
now sucking up my spit,
and blow away the hook now digging up my plaque:
the buried sediment of all the meals I've had
Since our last date.

Shortly she will sound the depths of my pocked gums:
three millimeters, two, three, three, four
and then a scary five.

Around the molars plugged with silver, crowned with gold,
like brittle columns of an ancient temple patched and propped
by patient archeologists,
she digs right down to bone:

To whatever will be left when  gums are gone,
And I have long since kept my date
With someone else whose work
will bring his face so close to mine
that I could kiss him too--
if only I could break the slender thread
with which he'll sew my mouth
quite shut.

Editors’ Choice, New England Writers Winners’ List 2002
The Anthology of New England Writers 12 (2003): 39.

SURMISE

I think I know why children fear the dark,
And why a moving shadow makes them freeze;
Why pale intruders whisperingly lurk
In curtains rustled by an empty breeze;
Why mouths gone dry cry silently for light
And little eyes grown big with horror stare
At something by the window in the night,
At something they are told cannot be there.

We tell them so. Unsheathing light, we slay
The curtained thing,  and open up its skin:
An empty strip of cloth that we display
To show that nothing’s there.  It’s only wind,
We say to them, and, turning out the light,
We leave them with a nothing--in the dark.

         Bloodroot Literary Magazine, Vol. 2 (2009) 104.

HOMECOMING FROM THE CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL

The taste of fevered pillow night and day
Became my warden, and against the bars,
Black lines upon a mattress bare and gray as pabulum,
The flame of my own torment licked its tongue.
And when I flung myself upon my back
And sucked for breath and tried to stretch my arms,
Electric suns hung just above me burning,
Hovered redly, waiting to descend.

The sky was white-capped on the day they took me out,
And we went sailing in a roofless car.
Beyond the ridge my father’s shoulder made,
I saw the blurry greens that floated by;
I saw the treetops lifting, and I gave my cry
To the rainless clouds of that unending sky.

DEJEUNER  SUR  L’HERBE

For Andrew and Virginia

No shade of Manet stalks the noonday grass.
No seated nude displays her creamy flesh
to feasting eyes of gentlemen in black.
No nymph disturbs the well-trimmed
shrubbery
or dances to the silent strains
of Giorgione’s lute.

Grey skirted, green sweatered,  black wool stockinged
       in the bright cool light of spring.
my wife sits by me on a slatted bench
in St. James’ Park
as we consume our Easter Sunday lunch:
lamb sandwiches with juicy plums and Kit-
Kat bars
washed down with vin quite ordinaire from
plastic cups.

Already fed, our restless chicks--
       aged eight and six--
have skittered off around a bend of shrubs
to watch the ducks patrol the rippling pond
for bits of manna flung by  passing  hands.

All at once, flailing her arms like wings,
Virginia scampers back to tell us
something totally absurd
about the birds
at the pond.

Incredulous, we send her flying off again,
relieved  the birds will keep
her and her brother entertained
while we sit quietly and munch and sip.

But not for long. Again she comes,
this time with Andrew panting in her wake,
to sieze our hands and tug. Surrendering,
we leave our sandwiches and plums and
         plonk
to come along.

As we approach the pond,
where plump blue pigeons waddle on the grassy shore
pecking the ground for seeds, or worms,
or tasty crumbs,
we see three pelicans
all plumed in white.
With curving swanlike necks,
black-tipped folded wings,
and long flat tapering yellow bills,
they stand on great webbed feet. 
Stately, tall and dazzling white,
they supervise the waddling,
pecking, feeding pigeons.
Like guardian angels.

One pelican takes a single step,
and thus bestows its shadow on a pigeon
pecking unawares below its long hooked
yellow bill.

Spurning the  breadcrumbs
held out by a shy little hand,
the pelican opens its bill like a pair of scissors,
snaps it shut on the pigeon’s
head, 
and throws its own head straight
up and back,
like a rearing horse.
The pigeon’s wings now flutter upside down,
Splayed feet claw the air.

Transfixed, we do not even try to cup the
children’s eyes.
For like the  watchmen in the ghostly play,
They have already seen
what they would have us see.

The grey wings whirr and flutter
as the other pigeons peck away
in the shadow of the pelicans,
and a trendy couple saunters by--
a bloke and his miniskirted bird--
eating chips from a white paper bag.

With lightning gulp
the tall white bird sucks whirring
wings
right down into the yellow bag that dangles
from its lower bill
till just the clawing feet protrude.

A third gulp takes the feet inside.
And thus the feeding pigeon
becomes the great bird’s food:
a writhing bulge
within its yellow pouch.

The children start a race around the pond
as a white-haired gent in smart blue blazer
throws the ducks a bit of crust
and the tall white stately pelican
quietly digests
its lunch.

TO  ODYSSEUS, WITH AN OAR

“But after you have killed these suitors in your own palace,
either by treachery, or openly with the sharp bronze,
then you must take up your well-shaped oar and go on a journey
until you come to where there are men living who know nothing
of the sea, and who eat food that is not mixed with salt, who never
have known well-shaped oars, which act for ships as wings do.
And I will tell you a very clear proof, and you cannot miss it.
When, as you walk, some other wayfarer happens to meet you,
and says you carry a winnow-fan on your bright shoulder,
then you must plant your well shaped oar in the ground,
and render ceremonious sacrifice to the lord Poseidon . . .”

Teiresias to Odysseus in Hades, Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore,
11.119-130

Sand caulking the seams of your face,
you walk the waves of a desert with an oar
on your shoulder,
bearing it high against the wind
like a naked mast.

Sailless seafarer,
shipless voyager,
the sand is your sea now.
you know its heaves and swells,
its sun-struck crests, its shadowed troughs:
they mock you now and then
by turning blue.

And before you in the waves of burning air
an invisible Penelope
weaves a tapestry of shipmates remembered
and shipmates forgot,
shrouded in the sand of the desert that lies
at the bottom
of the sea.

FREE VERSE

Can anything be more ridiculous
Than binding words in rhyme, as in a truss?
Can anything in poetry be worse
Than that old dog-trot called iambic verse?

Good poetry must be spontaneous,
As Wordsworth long ago instructed us,
And poetry should come as naturally
As leaves uncurling greenly from a tree.

So said John Keats, who like a bird in spring
Instinctively knew how to soar and sing.
Yet even Keats’s birdlike muse sublime
Most often sings within a cage of rhyme.
And even when his verse turns blank, like this,
It carefully preserves its metered gait.

Poor Keats!  Fast manacled to metric rules,
The jingling handcuffs of benighted fools!
If only he had lived in our own time,
He could have spurned all meter and all rhyme.
He could have set his straining voice quite free
To sing just what his heart felt--naturally.

But could he have composed a single poem
Without the beat of meter’s metronome?
And lacking rhymes like hold and told and bold,
Could he have ever minted lines of gold?

We’ll never know,  nor do we need to know,
For now free verse can bravely, boldly go
Where no mere mincing, meter-shackled foot
Could ever lunge, or leap, or spin, or strut.

THE PASSIONATE PHILOLOGIST TO HIS LOVE

Can you conceive a problem more absurd?
Can you imagine just how much I’m stuck? 
In all the English language, crammed with words,
The only verb for what I crave sounds just like yuck.
Oh yes, of course, I know, there’s copulate,
But that’s a verb intransitive, my dear,
Which means I can’t--although my need is great--
Do that to you grammatically, I fear.
So from the lexicon of  Chaucer’s time
I pray you let me ardently revive
A verb whose simple yet seductive chime
Sounds just the note I need: then let us . . .  swyve!
If  I swyve you, and transitively, see?
Then just as surely, you’ll be swyving me. 

A MIDNIGHT MEDITATION ON THE  CONTROVERSY  PROVOKED BY THE PLACEMENT OF LARGE ORNAMENTAL BALLS ON A NEW BRIDGE  OVER THE CONNECTICUT RIVER IN HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE

Once upon a midnight eerie,  as  I brooded,  weak  and weary,
On a topic long since grown a crashing bore;
As I brooded, eyes all bleary, wond’ring when this matter dreary
Would forbear to plague and scourge us like a sore,
All at once there came a tapping of a raven faintly rapping,
Rapping  faintly and all quaintly  at my door.
And the talking of this knocking  plain and painfully repeated
To my ancient aching eardrums o’er and o’er,
Was  a mutter like the utterance from  woolly sheepfold  bleated
Ending  primly but quite grimly,  “Nevermore.”

See the new bridge with the balls,
Giant balls!
What a world of impotence their massiveness forestalls!
See them squatting,  squatting,  squatting
On their pillars day and night!
To some they are as ugly as putrescent pumpkins rotting,
While others hail them gaily as a grand baroque delight,
Keeping  up the quarrel  that interminably  falls
From the balls,  balls,  balls,  balls,
         balls,  balls,  balls,
From our wrangling and our jangling o’er the balls.

So I  asked the raven  tapping  as  he lingered,  faintly rapping
In the dreary  darkness  at my chamber door:
Could  we  ever hope to sever in a single bold endeavor
All  the balls from this new monster  we abhor?
Nearly  dead  with dread prostration  at the thought of such castration,
Croaked the raven roundly,  “Nevermore.”

A HIGGLEDY-PIGGLEDY TO END ALL HIGGLEDY-PIGGLEDIES

Higgledy-piggledy,
dimeter dactyls,  the
damnedest of meters, di-
sects what I write.

Polysyllabically,         
how I would love  here to
throw in hexameters
just out of spite.

FLYING FISH

This story is about Virginia's Tidewater,

where fingers of lowland watered by rivers and creeks

reach out into the sea.

In the cool grey light of a late March day

My wife and I were lunching with friends on the patio

Of their great white ante-bellum house

Looking out across a lawn that stretched

Right up to a creek that flows into Mobjack Bay

Which opens in turn to the bay called Chesapeake.

As we sipped white wine, nibbled cheese, and gobbled grapes,

A sudden burst of shrieks assailed our ears

From right above us.

Alex was the first to see

the pair of birds up there:

an osprey clutching an Atlantic croaker in its claws

and a hawk doing its damnedest

to claw the fish away.

Racing through the house

as the shrieking pair flew over it,

we found the croaker

lying on the lawn out front.

Having slipped away from all those claws,

the fish was no more up for grabs

but also halfway into rigor mortis.

Alex might have grabbed it, of course,

and broiled it for our dinner that night,

but that was not his way--

the way of a man who knew how to fish.

He'd cast for trout in New York's Battenkill

and Patagonia's Rio Pico,

but never seen a fish of any kind left on his lawn,

like a tube of the daily news.

So placing the brown-striped, whiskered, barely twitching flesh

upon the bier of an oval platter,

he bore the croaker to the creek and dropped it in.

Ever since the water stirred its fins

Ever since it shivered back to life,

I've often wondered if it ever meditated

On how it felt to fly.

MOURNING STALIN

For Stefan Scher, in memoriam

One afternoon in early March of 1953

when news of Stalin's death reached Budapest,

it stormed the city.

At Stefan's school,

where every classroom door gaped open

so nothing said or done by anyone

could not be overheard and overseen,

every boy was told to stand beside his desk

for five full minutes, silently, in homage to

the Great Leader,

the Gardener of Human Happiness,

the Dear Father,

the Man of Steel.

Like all the others, Steve got up and stood beside his desk

and held his lips locked tight.

But after a minute or two,

Something struck the pond of silence.

Like a pebble dropped behind him he could plainly hear

a giggle.

At once it spread

growing louder and louder

rippling right through Stefan's classroom

through the always open door

into the corridor

through all the other open doors

up and down the stairwell

until at last it convulsed

the whole building,

turning its walls

into heaving bellies.

Aghast, enraged,

The apparatchiks questioned everyone,

badgered everyone,

threatened everyone

and sacked the principal.

But they never ever ever ever learned

who giggled first.

THE DUNCIAD: BOOK THE FIFTH