Skittish

I remember green pastures and still waters,

Days of delight in the maplewood,
Evening swims in the lifegiving deep,
Flametongues at the campfire singalong,
One eyeopened soulpiercing afternoon
Alone with my savior on a lakeside hill.

But I got older and worldwise and skittish,
Thought about Bible school, decided against it.

My English degrees will teach me to read
The Bible plus Marx,
The Bible plus Butler,
The Bible plus Sartre.
After all, context is everything.
Right?

I learned the maplewood was infested
With mosquitoes and poison ivy,
The pool wasn’t as clean as it looked,
And while it’s ok to observe from a distance,
The campfire itself is much too powerful, 

Too unpredictable to approach.
That lakeside hill?
Just a lake. Just a hill.

My spirit came to believe there never were 

green pastures, still waters.

This world is a wasteland

Where wanderers seek… what?

The Good Life?
True Love?
The American Dream?
A Dignified Death?

We are strangers in the desert,
Each trying not to be the sucker,
Dying of thirst in a dry and weary land.
We form hollow alliances, 

Celebrate hollow victories,
Lament hollow defeats, 

Hunt for some meaning —

Any meaning —
In this dead and deathly place.

So that’s how you catch 

A skittish English major:
I’m a deer panting for water;
you’re the only drink around.
I left the green pastures, and you followed,
Cloaked in clouds on my dark days,
Robed in fire through my infernos,
Always here, always gently calling.

When at last I hear
And fall ashamed,

Depleted at your feet,
You help me up
And hold my head
And give me 

A very long drink.

humility

ten-speed, twelve years old,
too late: downhill, brakes out.

stomach-twisting, wheel-churning freefall
gravel wipeout, then roll into the thistle ditch.

this is humility: humus, the dirt in my mouth, 

the dirt of which I’m formed,

and I don’t have a girlfriend or anything,
but it feels like someone just removed a rib.

 
my mouthdirt is bloodmuddy
my palms are thistleful 
and my mortality has never been sharper, 

never cut deeper than here in this ditch.

but as I try sitting up,
try to assess what’s broken
besides my bike’s brakes,

I discover unforeseen grace.

 
yes, my glasses are twisted,
yes, my blood mingles with manure
on the Kansas gravel,
yes, the shock is past and the sting has started

but I missed the barbwire fence
and meadowlarks are singing
and the horses are running for joy
out in the pasture.

in short, despite all evidence to the contrary,
I find it is still good –
very good –
to be alive.

Veils

You tore the thick and ancient veil
Even as the last pneuma
Was torn from your lungs.
You tore it top to bottom,
Reached what I couldn’t,
Rent the barrier first hung
By my damned rebellion.

You were not veiled
To the pagan executioner
When he heard you shout
At the finish,
And he confessed
The undeniable truth.

I will journey through your meat-veil,
Torn and bloody, 
To reach the holiest of holies –
Attain the unattainable –
Entering by a way unimaginably expensive,
Unimaginably ingenious.

So nail me up beside you,
Drag me deep into icy death,
That I may awaken with you
To new-returned pneuma,
Unveiled and unwrapped,
Exploding from the tomb into life.

To Vincent

I’m so sorry.
We shared much:
Love of God and man,
Wheat fields,
Crows,
Sunflowers,
Self-taught dissatisfaction.
I hope I meet you one day.
(p.s. the tree roots are beautiful
and so alive)

Springbud

Let me bud
Then burst forth
Like a pink treeblossom
In just-spring
When the sky is warming
And the days are lengthening
And the ground is thawed
And the birds eager and amorous
When the old story replays
And all creation gasps
Because it’s shocking
To see death
Spring forth
Into life

Winter

Winter was a surprise,
Arriving suddenly
In the coldest week I can remember,
So cold our basement toilet froze
And the water treatment plant broke
And Andy Reed’s mustache at Arrowhead
Looked like a cluster of bite-sized snotsicles
As Taylor Swift watched from a fogged-up box.

But inside with Winter,
We had abundant snuggles,

Cozy blankets,

Warm baths in the kitchen sink
And clean-boiled water for tea and bottles.

It did not matter that the roads were slick

Or that the courthouse was closed all week;

Winter warmed us all. 

Adventus

You came, not for those full of good cheer,
Or those endowed with generosity and human kindness,
Or those who have learned the True Meaning of Christmas,

But for us who weep under the world's weight,
Who scrape and slave to keep the lights on,
Or have fat retirement accounts and empty hearts,

For the lonesome mother at the kitchen sink
Scrubbing a shitstained onesie and wondering
How everything ended up like this,

For the lovetorn poet
Who has tried for years to see the point of it all --
Any point at all -- and keeps coming up short,

For all who wander in darkness,
Overwhelmed and overwrought,
Outdone by chaos that seems inescapable.

You are the point of this pointless world,
The still center of this swirling mess,
The true promise in a sea of disappointment,
The deliverance of a travailing world,
The only answer that makes any sense,
The way out,
The way up,
The fullness that will cure
Our hollow hearts.

Virtualization

Virtualization

Is a tradeoff:

Not a bad one for computer systems,
But not a great one for people made of meat,
Designed to breathe the same air
And warm the same space
As other people made of meat,
To sweat in summer
And shiver in winter
And love and be loved in person, in the meat.

In my virtualized world
I seek the love of those
Who cannot, will not love me back.
I span time and space and culture
To proliferate trivialities,
To consume carefully curated slices of friends,
To sample the fashionable fears and rage and ambitions
Of a perishing world.

 
How much better to keep my head down
And my eyes open here and now?

To seek connection to flesh and blood where I am,
To see the virtual world for what it is:
A neat trick, but ultimately
An empty simulacrum,

A pale imitation,

An overpromising,

Underdelivering

Distraction from the world God made.

All Saints

For Leslie

I remember the last time we spoke
At the Whole Foods in Cool Springs
And I knew death was at work in you,
But I could hardly see it through your radiant light.

You read me a few poems from the book
You would just barely live to see in print
And I promised to preorder it
And you listened to some of my poems, too,
And were so generous and kind in your comments
And now you have permanently breached the veil
And I’m here serving out the rest of my own death sentence.

But I smile to picture how you’ll welcome me –
How you’ll welcome us all –
As we trickle in by ones and twos
Or flood in all at once with a shout and a trumpet
And it will be just like that
February day in Lancaster
When you smiled so wide and warm up front
And eagerly told us of all the joys that waited.

Old English Poetry: A Modest Bibliography

For those who would love to explore Old English poetry beyond Beowulf but don't know where to look, here are some suggestions:

Physical Books:

• The Complete Old English Poems, by Craig Williamson, March 3, 2017 - If you've just GOT to catch 'em all!
• Old English Poetry: An Anthology, by R. M. Liuzza, March 26, 2014 - A good, poetic translation of the most important Old English texts.
• Anglo-Saxon Poetry, by S. A. J. Bradley, February 15, 1995 - A well-regarded prose translation of the major Old English texts, by codex.
• The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, by Greg Delanty (Editor), Michael Matto (Editor), Seamus Heaney (Foreword), April 9, 2012 - Modern poets take on ancient poems
• An Anthology of Old English Poetry, by Charles William Kennedy, Dec 31, 1960 - much beloved by the previous generation of English students; out of print, but available used

Online Sources:

• The entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry is online in the original language at https://sacred-texts.com/neu/ascp/index.htm.
• Translations of nearly 80% of the corpus can be found at https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/.
• The Exeter Book Anthology, Israel Gollancz, (Poems 1-8, parallel Anglo-Saxon / Modern English): https://archive.org/details/publicationsorig104earluoft/page/n5/mode/2up
• The Old English Reader is online in the original with side-by-side textual notes and glossary at www.oereader.ca

Nearly There

I know your breathing,

The sweep of your back,

The proper way to tuck you in,

So why do the six inches

Of bed between us

Feel like six thousand miles?

You’ve embraced my body and tasted my tears

In the holy darkness;

You’ve seen my deep places,

So why do I feel unseen tonight,

Alone right next to

My closest companion?

Tomorrow there will be

Strong coffee and gentle kisses,

Sunrise together on the porch,

But for tonight 

We’re just two ships

Trying not to wreck in the fog.

After Dover Beach

After Dover Beach

Here’s the truth:

The sea of faith was never full.

Human hearts always wander,

Always grieve, 

Always fear.

That’s what Sophocles heard in the Aegean

And Arnold heard in the Atlantic,

And I hear tonight

In these Kansas River-ripples.

But down by the riverside,

Under the watchful witness

Of old Menninger’s clocktower,

All my senses testify of grace

Poured forth in ways

As familiar as they are new:

Jumping fish,

Waxing moon,

Frog-and-cicada chorus,

Fireflies dancing through the dark.

This is what Arnold missed:

Though faith’s sea

Be a mere mudpuddle,

Surrounded by the clashes 

Of ignorant armies,

Grace is a vast ocean, 

Abounding more each moment,

Dragging us under its riptides,

Plunging us into light so bright

It drowns the looming dark,

Fulfilling promises too good

To be untrue.

Gleanings From Computer Power and Human Reason

 I'm working through Joseph Weizenbaum's classic work, Computer Power and Human Reason. Some parts of it are a bit dry, but others are quite interesting and relevant to computer science today. 

I enjoyed how clearly Weizenbaum explains the universal Turing machine, as well as his low-level account of how computers store and process data. These are essential building blocks in understanding how computers work and why they are so powerful, and Weizenbaum handles them well.

One of the most surprising elements of the book is how relevant Weizenbaum's concerns about artificial intelligence remain today. He is skeptical of the notion that humans are mere input/output devices, and that sufficiently advanced machine intelligence could therefore become equivalent to humans. As he observes, we may be universal Turing machines, but we are also much more than that. 

Here are some quotes that stood out to me.

On programs as expressions of problem-solving: 

A computer is a merciless critic. Therefore the assertion that one understands a thing sufficiently well to be able to program it is, first of all, an assertion that one understands it in very particular terms. In any case, it can be no more than a boast that may well be falsified by experience.

The other side of the coin is the belief that one cannot program anything unless one thoroughly understands it. This misses the truth that programming is, again like any form of writing, more often than not experimental. One programs, just as one writes, not because one understands, but in order to come to understand. Programming is an act of design. To write a program is to legislate the laws for a world one first has to create in imagination. 

Only very rarely does any designer, be he a an architect, a novelist, or whatever, have so coherent a picture of the world emergent in his imagination that he can compose its laws without criticism from that world itself. That is precisely what the computer may provide (108-109).

Computers are maddeningly efficient at stumbling over purely technical, i.e., linguistic, programming errors, but stumbling in a way that disguises the real locus of the trouble, e.g., just which parenthesis was misplaced...

... There is therefore a persistent cry for natural-language, e.g., English, programming systems. Programmers who hold to this belief have probably never tackled a truly difficult problem, and have therefore never felt the need for really deep criticism from the computer (109).

On computer programs as abstract games:

The computer is, of course, a physically embodied machine and, as such, cannot violate natural law. But it is not completely characterized by only its manifest interaction with the real world.

Electrons flow through it, its tapes move, and its lights blink, all in strict obedience to physical law, to be sure and the courses of its internal rivers of electrons are determined by openings and closings of gates, that is, by physical events. But the game the computer plays out is regulated by systems of ideas whose range is bounded only by the limitations of the human imagination. The physically determined bounds on the electronic and mechanical events internal to the computer do not matter for that game--any more than it matters how tightly a chess player grips his bishop or how rapidly he moves it over the board.

A computer running under control of a stored program is thus detached from the real world in the same way that every abstract game is. (112)

The computer programmer, however, is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. So, of course, is the designer of any game. But universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs. Moreover, and this is a crucial point, systems so formulated and elaborated act out their programmed scripts. They compliantly obey their laws and vividly exhibit their obedient behavior. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.

One would have to be astonished if Lord Acton's observation that power corrupts were not to apply in an environment in which omnipotence is so easily achievable. It does apply. And the corruption evoked by the computer programmer's omnipotence manifests itself in a form that is instructive in a domain far larger that the immediate environment of the computer (115).

 On the Compulsive Programmer vs. the Professional Programmer:

The compulsive programmer is convinced that life is nothing but a program running on an enormous computer, and that therefore every aspect of life can ultimately be explained in programming terms. Many scientists (again there are notable exceptions) also believe that every aspect of life and nature can finally be explained in exclusively scientific terms. Indeed, as Polany correctly points out, the stability of scientific beliefs is defended by the same devices that protect magical belief systems: 

Any contradiction between a particular scientific notion and the facts of experience will be explained by other scientific notions; there is a ready reserve of possible scientific hypotheses available to explain any conceivable event. . .. within science itself, the stability of theories against experience is maintained by epicyclical reserves which suppress alternative conceptions in the germ.

The professional regards programming as a means toward an end, not as an end in itself. His satisfaction comes from having solved a substantive problem, not from having bent a computer to his will.

[The compulsive programmer's] main interest is, in any case, not in small programs, but in very large, very ambitious systems of programs. Usually the systems he undertakes to build, and on which he works feverishly for perhaps a month or two or three, have very grandiose but extremely imprecisely stated goals. Some examples of these ambitions are: new computer languages to facilitate man-machine communication; a general system that can be taught to play any board game; a system to make it easier for computer experts to write super-systems (this last is a favorite). It is characteristic of many such projects that the programmer can long continue in the conviction that they demand knowledge about nothing but computers, programming, etc. And that knowledge he, of course, commands in abundance (117).

Programming systems can, of course, be built without plan and without knowledge, let alone understanding, of the deep structural issues involved, just as houses, cities, systems of dams, and national economic policies can be similarly hacked together. As a System so constructed begins to get large, however, it also becomes increasingly unstable. When one of its subfunctions fails in an unanticipated way, it may be patched until the manifest trouble disappears. But since there is no general theory of the whole system, the system itself can be only a more or less chaotic aggregate of subsystems whose influence on one another's behavior is discoverable only piecemeal and by experiment. The hacker spends part of his time at the console piling new subsystems onto the structure he has already built -- he calls them "new features" -- and the rest of his time in attempts to account for the way in which substructures already in place misbehave. That is what he and the computer converse about.

The psychological situation the compulsive programmer finds himself in while so engaged is strongly determined by two apparently opposing facts: first, he knows that he can make the computer do anything he wants it to do; and second, the computer constantly displays undeniable evidence of his failures to him. It reproaches him. There is no escaping this bind. The engineer can resign himself to the truth that there are some things he doesn't know. But the programmer moves in a world entirely of his own making. The computer challenges his power, not his knowledge.

Indeed, the compulsive programmer's excitement rises to its highest, most feverish pitch when he is on the trail of a most recalcitrant error, when everything ought to work but the computer nevertheless reproaches him by misbehaving in a number of mysterious, apparently unrelated ways. It is then that the system the programmer has himself created gives every evidence of having taken on a life of its own and, certainly, of having slipped from his control. This too is the point at which the idea that the computer can be "made to do anything" becomes most relevant and most soundly based in reality (119).

But the compulsive programmer's pride and elation are very brief. His success consists of his having shown the computer who its master is. And having demonstrated that he can make it do this much, he immediately sets out to make it do even more. Thus the entire cycle begins again. He begins to "improve" his system, say, by making it run faster, or by adding "new features" to it, or by improving the ease with which data can be entered into it and gotten out of it. The act of modifying the then-existing program invariably causes some of its substructures to collapse; they constitute, after all, an amorphous collection of processes whose interactions with one another are virtually fortuitous. His apparently devoted efforts to improve and promote his own creation are really an assault on it, an assault whose only consequence can be to renew his struggle with the computer (120). 

Salvage

 After the shatter,
Shards scattered
In chaos across the floor,
Lodging in cracks,
Sliding under furniture,
Generally making recovery
Unthinkable.

I'd just sweep up,
Start over,
Make it less fragile
Next time around.

But he did not.

He still saw beauty
In each crash-blown sliver
And wanted them back,
No matter the cost.

So he stooped down,
Lower than low,
Reached for each one,
Braved cuts and scrapes,
Bruises and baffling rejection,
To somehow recover
His broken treasure.

Skysong

 Skysong

28 February 2023

He awakens me, for the trillionth time, 

With a lingering kiss,

And, for the trillionth time, I blush, 

Warmth starting in the utter east,

Then radiating up and out.

When he kisses me goodnight,

With one last blush-inducing caress,

I grow cold and lonesome,

Especially in winter

When sharp stars prick the night,

Shrill reminders of what I no longer have.

Summers are better:

He's not gone so long,

And I stow some of his warmth away

Packed in the humidity of the night,

And even the stars get soft around the edges,

Their voices deep and mellow

Under layers of cricket-and-frog-song.

But every single morning, oh! 

His lips are hungry, and so am I,

And he flames up and fills me, 

Warming me from east to west,

Certain as the dawn, of course.

And the wonder is not

That this is the trillionth time

Or even that he's never missed a day,

But that he is 

right here,

right now,

with me.

A Trip to the Cape

 A Trip to the Cape

For Magen, on the occasion of our 19th Valentine’s Day together, in memory of our June 2018 trip to Massachusetts.

Do you remember that day on the Cape, Our children entrusted to young Springers Hiking up a mountain somewhere in Colorado? We drove up the Atlantic coast, Past endless beaches and lovely old lighthouses, Not alone, as I had promised,  But at the tender traveling mercies  Of our friend Chuck, jokester and retired undertaker,

And his remarkably patient wife, Phyllis.

We loved them, of course,

And were grateful for their generous hospitality.

But you had envisioned a New England tour,

Romantic, lovely, free of stresses,

At a leisurely pace through the northeast

In fall when the foliage flamed,

Retiring together to a B&B bed piled with quilts

At the end of the day, hearts and eyes

Sated with goodness, beauty, and sweet company.

I had envisioned the same sort of thing,

But on a budget.

So I allowed my cheapness to defeat

Your best ideas, your earnest desires,

And that is why we were staying on twin beds

In Chuck and Phyllis’s stifling attic guestroom

And riding in the back of their Camry

Along every blessed inch of Cape Cod.

(To say nothing of my storm-dissolved plan

For a romantic Rhode Island getaway

That became a night of pure discomfort,

Trying to sleep on an airport bench in Baltimore.)

It is true that we ate at that cute farm-to table place,

And learned many edifying facts about The Pilgrims,

And some fascinating ones about the undertaking business,

And got out at probably every lighthouse there is on Cape Cod,

And shared the exciting horror of Chuck’s accident in P-Town,

His slow, baffled descent from the tipping restaurant bench,

His head hitting the ground with a sick thud,

And the way the queer servers attended to him so kindly

That he was forced to reassess his opinions of them.

But none of that was very romantic,

And I would have been sorry I ever dragged you along

On this ludicrous, tantalizing mockery of your dream vacation

If it hadn’t been for the reassuring warmth of your hand in mine

And your heartmelting smile in the June sunshine

And the way those American flag earrings brought out the blue in your eyes

And how you fit just right in the crook of my arm

Even at 2 am on a metal bench in the Baltimore airport

When there was no hope of sleep anytime soon.

Worth

I find that I flee

From silence 

And solitude

And even sleep,

Filling their sacred void

With sound and fury,

Talking heads and tiktokers,

Resonant, relentless voices 

Selling wares 

Without worth.

I flee because 

I feel a flame

Flickering in the deep dark,

And I fear it will find me,

Pass over me,

Utterly consume me,

Leaving behind only hints

Of the self I thought I was:

Ashes and dust, 

Without worth.

I flee because

I don’t yet believe

The truth I profess:

A flame is there, yes,

And it consumes, yes,

But it’s there to unbury 

A hidden treasure,

To burn away my dross,

And finally reveal 

All of my worth.

Forty-One

Forty-one looks like

Autumn flames consuming the maples,

The predawn goodmorning 

Of a beautiful woman who loves me,

A circle of smiling friends 

Discussing sin and redemption,

A long afternoon nap,

Cuddles on the couch while the Chiefs

Fight their way to last-minute heartbreak,

Shrimp tacos and chocolate chip cookies,

Perfect gifts wrapped by a seven-year-old,

And bedtime blessings before an early night.

Faces

I cannot look away, these days,

From the face of the moon

Or the face of a newborn baby

Without gazing for a while,

Staring at fresh new glories

Barely veiling ancient ones.

The Ruin: A Fresh Translation

I've always loved "The Ruin," a damaged Anglo-Saxon poem from the Exeter Book. I had occasion to revisit it in April 2021, and I decided to translate it again, for my own pleasure and to help me think through some writing I was doing for The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad. I share it here in hopes that it may amuse and/or edify you.

You can see the original Anglo-Saxon and a different translation of it at this wikipedia page.

Jewel-like is this wallstone,    Fate-broken.
The castle burst;    its giant-work crumbles.
Roofs have fallen,    towers lie in ruin.
The frostgate is riven,     rime on lime,
The storm-refuge in shards,    shorn to disaster,
Eaten from beneath by age.    Earth’s grip holds
The castle’s mighty makers,    withered and gone.
Soil's hard grasp will hold them    until a hundred generations
Of mankind have passed.    Oft this wall endured,
Lichen-grey and red of hue,    in one kingdom after another;
It held up under storms:    Steep, lofty, lost.
It crumbles still, the ...s heaped up
Abide...
Grimly ground ...
... shone, they ...
... clever work, ancient ...
... a ring of dried mud ...
mind ... swift, crafty,
Determined in rings,    bound the high roof
A wire-helmed wall,    ingeniously joined.
Bright were the castle-halls,    many bath-houses,
High treasure-horns,    great troop-sounds,
Many meadhalls,    full of men's joy,
Until that was turned    severely by Fate.
The battle-felled ranged wide,    the pestilence-days came.
Death carried off    rough and ready swordsmen;
Their battlegrounds    became abandoned wastes.
The castle crumbled;    its repairers themselves crumpled to the ground.
Thus, these houses    have collapsed,
And the red arch    is sundered from the tiles,
The pillared-vault's roof.    It has all collapsed,
Broken to bits,    where many a warrior,
Glad-minded and gold-bright,    gleamingly adorned,
Proud and wine-brave,    shone in battle-array.
He looked at loot,    at silver, at stunning gems,
At wealth, at possessions,    at goblet-stones,
At the bright fortress    of a broad kingdom.
The stonecastle stood,    streams brought heat,
A wide spring.    A wall surrounded it all,
Its bright bosom,    where the baths were,
Hot in its heart.    That was convenient.
They let it out...
Over grey stone    the hot streams 
Un- ...
... that ring-pool    hot...
... where the baths were ...
Then is ... 
...-re;    That is a kingly thing
How the ... castle ...