Beyond Our Control

The first thing we saw upon arrival was
the salamander legs and bat black eyes
that emanated from a face of
distant stellar cold light years
that was strangely familiar
from ancient demon-goddess dreams
where eternal fire flares from onyx eyes
and the body hills and valleys whisper
secret messages from defunct deities
that resurrect in your word/dream-made-flesh
world made fresh, reborn but left
still unreachably distanced from our hungry claws
our dry wooden legs, our feet of hot lead
and the unspeakables that have been destroyed by
our insatiable need for
not merely flesh, but a one-way escape into the world of
cosmic words, to burn like the phoenix
firebird and fire-sun town, extended old-time years of
mysterious departures, new stars and endless music
when our neolithicism neos into a final Lascaux NOW
when our geological geos into a new Magritte THEN

The perfect spruce shaded house on the edge of
sub-rural oblivion, where the loud boys
are out in the thaw warm basketball driveways
staring at the raw girls and their confused
parents who are trying to decide if it’s time to
stage an orderly retreat or verbalize a warning
as they try to megathink the relationship between
greasy abandoned keyboards and feeble mountain peaks.
Ancestral valleys, streams, lagoons, earth that says
nothing but means everything, its seas awash with
memories of ancient comers and goers:
all lost islands beneath green eternity.

New season, new eyes, new whys, months of hibernation
and right back into the tragic comedy that is
the too-soon evaporation of wives, lives, prizes into
a past not so remembered as dreamt.
Trying to fashion a new Now out of the sun-bolts
that flash into the third eye
at the center of all our evolutionary divine
primetime crimes, insatiable caverns and
the Roman-Gringo U.S. empire dissolving into
noxious toxicity, cancer on the body electric.
Trying to slide back into pre-everything but
slipping instead into black holes of memory,
Polish sausaging and potato-pancaking through
memorial masquerades that mimic lost moments,
that only return in the himalayas of night. We want
only to sleep in the arms of eternal sunshine,
until the moonless moonlight of forever
washes us in the warmth of happy infinity.

Television tarts throw tantrums for our entertainment.
How about leg-smiles and evening cloud beds instead of
blaring banalities and glaring greedheads, 24/7?
Merging into the deer and wild turkey rebirthing the world,
we forget the inane strangeness of man,
move into a gunless, bombless, swordless world with
the holy animals of love, with the haloed trees and sky.
At night we climb dream-hills to the sun plateaux,
we join the spirit that stirs the stars in their migration into
this infinity that we share, going into spaces where we find
new selves in sand and storms, swimming in the growling wind.
Wife night in the yawn-light approaches our beds
in the black robe of love that contains every color.
Eighty four becomes forty eight, twenty four, as we rebirth into
our own babies, tabula rasa, new into each moment.
Tara-star leads us down paths of enlightenment that
work like waves turning back on themselves,
washing us clean of conceptions of
love and hate, to a perfect neutral state.

Sometimes even here we’ll see a calm Buddha face
in a crowd of wound-up alarm clocks, and we have to
clear off the blackboards and windows of our spirits
and send them back to the school of rockabye baby.
“C’est temps,” our ancient, ancestral voices whisper,
though they chirp like hungry baby birds.
Time to put aside potato famines and guillotines,
mass mental breakdowns and apocalyptic atomic submarines.
Find a forest with a clear path that leads to the hills of
heaven, if you can. Find it in mind or on land.
Let the Lords and Ladies, Kings and Queens play their games,
changing nothing but seeing self-portraits everywhere, they
forget the plow, the prow, the expansion into
the depth of loved eyes, the soaring heights of
history erased by today's irises, poppies, rain, hands, legs
that carry us through the insanity of human conceit
into the why-wherefore-why-not heart of TO BE,
despite the dry, bare ground where no seed
falls, and if it did it would squirm a moment and then
burst into an infinite explosion of rebirth, endlessly
screaming “More, more, more!”

The music of the spheres caresses our ears.
The wind off the lake caresses our faces.
So what gives with all the caressing?
The message is clear, not bullhorn rips nor
bulldog nips, nor Bette Davis lips. But,
night sky skin that whispers
secret sacred songs into our bulls eyes.
The reincarnation of a million years of Celtic, Slavic, Mosaic
Beatific, Platonic essences, blossoming red poppies in our
hands, waiting for the right Incarnation to hand them to.

Floating through the night, the soul returns at daybreak.
We begin the journey through guava-oatmeal, cappuccino,
morning still wet with dream memories,
facing another in one of the hundreds of eat-spots
that line these nostalgic streets, these streets of
Falafal and Hot Dogs, Tacos and Bulgarian chicken wraps,
Mongolian barbecue shacks and premature heart attacks.
Loving the old, old ladies with their white hair, skinny legs
that came so far, their eyes reflecting lost desire.
At last having come to terms with Reality, opening up their
minds to realize that every minute counts, they
are incarnations of the Great Mother goddess who dwarfs
even the phallic mountains in her sphere of love.
We begin again and again our-towning it the best we can,
but the play turns to end-game, waiting for Godot,
who still doesn’t come as terrace-overlooking-the-river day
old-man, but instead a cosmic femininity, a presence of
flowers and hills and forests, lakes, ponds, wide acres of
holy lifeblood water, shining out to space.
It wraps its cosmic presence
around each floating soul, newborn but old.

C'est temps for hands and eyes, tongues and bodies stretched
from seed to sea, currents flowing through the body electric,
the mind expanding out of cybernetic screens into the warbling,
warping net of omnipotent time, and farewell to
rhino-crocodile fanged-clawed murdering man-woman,
and good-bye to schizophrenic train wrecks and unsympathetic tsunami,
unbreathable downtowns and the Thornton Wilderless evening news.
Gone the pale pastel rooms festooned with fading family portraits,
antique grandmas papriking red-onioned beef into taste-bud ecstasy,
newborn babies bawling their protests against the sudden light.
School, graduation and the next generations come,
and then they’re gone, sand scattered on the big beach.

We have been carried along by a flood of songs,
mostly in languages we didn’t understand as the audio-visual world
wasn’t our reality, but the melodies played around us as
wind-tree bird-song thunders that brought us back to our real selves,
yet forward and away from our selves too, into a long
immersion in the sensual celebrations of
sub-atomic love down ancient genetic pathways.
We move into nightly real-and-dream-land and march along
the long black highway of history, our voices histrionic and
filled with Finnegan brogues and schmoozing with
Quixotes that joust with the vibrant windmills of memory.

The spirits of our ancestors waft around us,
haunt our whys and why-nots, wherefores and where-nexts,
remind us that soul music is in us all,
and the evening disaster-news has nothing to do with
the neutral universe that neither loves nor hates us.
Simply BEING here on the Galilean earth as it
spins irrevocably through illusionary space and time
is enough, even though the celestial warbling stops before
the great silence at the center, where nothing
but memories take off for their v-shaped migrations into
a south beyond the frozen pole of this poor planet.
Never thinking about asteroids, decreasing planet-weight,
nor black holes that suck up whole living galaxies,
we somehow believe that our cattails and ancient ruins are not
illusions, due to circus stanzas beyond our control.









Hugh Fox, Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University, was a founding member of the Pushcart Prize and was also on the founding board of COSMEP. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, he edited the avant garde litmag Ghost Dance. He is one of the most widely published poets in America. He has numerous books to his credit, including First Fire (Anchor Doubleday Press 1978) and The Collected Poetry of Hugh Fox (World Audience Press 2008). He is a Contributing Editor for Presa Magazine and a longtime reviewer for The Small Press Review.
 
 
Eric Greinke has a Master's Degree in Social Work from Grand Valley State University. He has worked in the Michigan Poets In The Schools Program and was the editor and founder of GVSU's national literary magazine Amaranthus (currently The Grand Valley Review). His poetry, essays, reviews, and literary criticism have been widely published in literary newspapers and magazines. Recent works include Wild Strawberries (Presa Press 2008), Kayak Lessons (Free Books, Inc. 2009), and Catching The Light - 12 Haiku Sequences (with John Elsberg; Cervena Barva Press 2009). He is a Contributing Editor for Presa Magazine. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.