Andrew Reiff completed a study of American voyages, "Restorations of the Golden Age in New World Discoveries," the first chapter of which appeared as "The Loss of the Golden Age," and a book of verse constructing an American Calendar, called "A Calendar of Poems, Encouragements for Such as Shall Have Intention to Be Undertakers in the Planting," which title indexes his later writing.

 




A Vocabulary of the Opposite
 
When you travel outside the galaxy it doesn’t help to be reading the Grand Inquisitor.  Snozzle the pyknic profile, bind suction cups on the dash, plunder the beats of a heart.  Suetonius on Caligula don't do justice to empire. Not enough, never enough. So the American light, American phone, American freedom, not light and freedom in themselves. The one species decreasing, that Ruben Dario made of Alexander exploding at night Alexander, Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar. Of course that peppermint jelly was naive, since the imperia visited all kingdoms, states and nations of the world. Are we judged by the light of our worst acts? Presidents add up to conspiracy. This wouldn't cross the water any more than a book sent into space embossed in asbestos on the outer shell of its craft.
 
The wounds of that symbol the rose
are gliding to the lump of a beating heart.
 
There is an awful lot of orphan blood on flowers. All pieces of this contradiction, some stated and open, - where my Freudian, are you? - end in Summer, the native spring and summer, where "The Snake," ought to tell us what we have in store in the coming mist and fogbound bush, allegories submerged. Call it Paragory. The trouble is that the contradictions are  repressed, national memories as much as personal where the snake is squeezing his eye. Not really kundalini, this rush of dreams. Run snake run. If somehow in our relations we would see what has been projected upon us in the making of the new world, Britons you stay too long. Quickly aboard bestow you.
 
Still life bookmarks paged into these satires, carved into a sideboard at the Folger, a 1584 London maple chest saying, GIVE THE GLORIE TO GOD  ALLONNE,  sullied and doubted when the enemies of GLORIE took over civilization, American light, liberty, the chest mocked in the portmanteau of fictional Orcs that Hesper is singing, I love you, I love you, a little like the dream princess, except merchants dream of new Americas...nose the Bermudas, ravish Virginia, as Thomas Randolph says. This cover, taken off, stolen from Allen Ginsburg on a boxcar somewhere pressing nudely on the honey tube so convinced the radio tech when he read it read that he bought the book, but there the values are two edged with everything else. Would they produced a falling off of stretch on the stalk of sexual colonialism? There is a heavy sex in the colonial navy, air force drones of the digital. New ordo from above, plastic USAs out west producing sex organs. Not that these cannot be as vulgar as a Volkswagen Puppy in production, or corpses sprouting out in the snow in winter that come up with crocuses.
 
Spring to the arms of burlap,
poke a stitching, jam a smock.
Nothing must be covered up. 
 
Behemoths possible blew up a Hometown here and there. Somebody burned down the A&P. Violence was explicit, the last militia heard as Dixie drove her eyelids together. That and some others came from Fayetteville, home of Fort Bragg like two haboobs, the neck of  the goose, I cut off here. Savages in the sanctum of a commercial, heart of the Reader's Digest Playboy Girl, it sounds like TV digital wrapped in one, the world's largest most experienced erogenous zone. The digital came roaring, became the mind numbing drug more exciting than life itself. Which surely the rushing grass has some. Skipping back and forth the six months get the drift, Americans pursue happiness in the skirts of their liberty. The sunkist hair gives it away for orange juice. The golden age of orange juice, a synthetic. That's when people said,
 
I love you Democracy.
 
 In fact Americans and Europeans were always front line soldiers, 300 million citizens to protect the great cherry on top the cone, "whole armadoes of carracks to be ballast at her nose." We did not have the luxury of mass movements, individualism to gain liberty as Ukraine, Ruslana, Mayakovsky. We did not have the gulag. No it was like a Captivity, a slow erosion and suffocation. To say we were brainwashed sounds like brainwash, "choke us up with Terra del Fuegoes. (Randolph).  What is brainwash anyway but another construct to distract? All we have a chance to be is separate the disassociatio, running a plumb line from nephilim to Juarez, where everyone who smokes marijuana is complicit in the murder of a hundred thousand Mexicans, as much as the "bystanders" of Dachau. Pot smokers won't like that. It's not a very good time to visit Disneyland when they reverse the d. There is a 'orrible perversity in the  announcements of news disasters, tragedies. The number itself compels perverse rooting for the disaster, the number of people murdered. Then comes the horror. In some sense we grew up in the ruling class. We were being ruled by accident or purpose of birth. All shills pass, eyes right, for empire. Feeling somewhere, somehow not born to join a system of exploitation and slavery 500 years old, one thing was sure, the ruling class taught that it was the oppressed in its own system, so that all arguments to the contrary were greeted with, if it's so bad why come here? That was the basis of ruling class power, to distribute largess from exploitation and slavery, maquiladora cheap labor and resources to establish a base against the rest of the world. Oh, that opprobrium!
 
 There is no reason to say any of this were it not that on the other side of opprobrium, the habit of doing and not doing, thinking and not thinking, a zen prerogative, urges, "Quickly aboard bestow you" (Drayton, Ode to Virginian Voyage). The last four or five years Hungry Hill remained untainted  outside Austin. It made all the difference in this vision not the one we know, since it is of nature, birds, earth, fruit. Trade the ringing songs, the fiery red wealth for "much purslane and wild amaranth" (Colombus' Log-Book, First Voyage). In those times the wood grain of planed boards were considered photographs, pictures of a being that lived in the wood. Wood cuts. Is it trapped there?  Beings in the grain of doors in doctor's offices, anywhere preserved, the cuts joined side by side like the heads of faeries. Not to take the fine point, they could be painted to illustrate. This is maybe going too far into nature.
 
Seeds that grow in the rain and sun
are plucked up by the roots to breathe the heavens.

  
"What do they do at the tops of mountains?"  Before long Erik the Red had his quest for fire, the red gold ring of the North, "the red man dances in the sun." It was a year of blood.

The field of battle was wet with blood
from the hour of dawn and the shining sun,

the poem quotes (Battle of Brunanburh). The old year hardly ended before the new began. Maybe such knowledge comes from living in Latin America, seeing, and hearing voices of Indian peoples over two continents, but it had already begun in the devastation of strip mine and effluent runoffs to the Allegheny, Clarion, Upper Susquehanna rivers of Pennsylvania. Edwardo Galeano's Opening the Vein  had not appeared then, given as a present to President Obama by Hugo Chavez. Chavez was dismissed as a mere Marxist by American authorities, even as Galeano dismissed also  himself in a remarkable acknowledgment of his own humanity. But Chavez says he is first a Christian in that revolution. The Americas inundated Indian peoples. Booty fueled the surge of capital for sugar as it had for gold. It justified their murder. That’s full circle.

Saying Erik the Red lost his son doesn't do justice. Thorvald says, "'the Uniped shot an arrow into my groin,' and then he died." There is no word about what Erik thought, collateral damage, fog of war? Raleigh's oldest son Walter like that is killed in a last abortive assault in 1618 on Spanish garrisons in Guiana. Even though it is long before his death, Raleigh, called the marigold in the sun's eye, seems to fore-write it to Queen Elizabeth in his poems of 1596: "first-born love...Restless desire from my love that proceeded / leave to be and seek heaven by dying, since you, oh you, your own hope have exceeded by too high flying." Sons darkly followed their fathers and nation. But as it turns, sons turn against fathers and nations in this, refusing service to a birth rite of war and domination. They cast lots with Unipeds, no doubt brutal as any other, but underdogs. Latter day to be sure, too late for those who come to a world that reveres its own fall, the status of empire unchanged. Philosophers of this world are offended that the impotent, and the weak are the truly good, like Nietzsche himself, the thing he bespeaks, as are we all, offended everywhere that the "noble aristocrat," the fruit of empire is displaced, against whom "the word 'world' [is used] as an opprobrium." The world is too much with us. Nietzsche's distaste at this inversion (Beyond Good and Evil) fuels resurgence of empire again as much as it did the Third Reich: not gold or sugar, but science become the justification of all victim-experiment animals. So Nietzsche, inspiration of Artificial Intelligence, thought without feeling, says, "It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying 'the wretched alone are good; the poor, impotence, lowly alone are good...and you, the powerful and noble are, on the contrary, the evil" (On the Genealogy of Morals). Empire cannot stand the humble.

The Texas hills were a haven for red birds. Erik the Red flying around sticks out against the green, but the red bird is a symbol and a bandage. You can mimic his call if you like, not as offensive as calling elk. Nobody thinks you're going to shoot the bird, unless they're twelve. What's for dinner tonight dear? Did you get any cardinals? Instead the houses snoot over the hill and come down its nose like carbuncles. "Where America, the Indies? Oh sir, upon her nose, all o'er embellished...whole armadoes of carracks at her nose" (Comedy of Errors). The tree trunks are snorted, shorted, cut to the knee. You cannot be a nice president of France if you were never a president of France. But if you were never a president of France how will you mourn the aching loss of skies and brown furze nobody is supposed to mourn without deprecating the hill? "Snort out terra incognita?" (Th. Randolph, Hey For Honesty). In the long while after Erik the Red, Sir Walter Raleigh joined the new world folly for gold in Guiana with the death of his son, piracy and his own beheading. He like Erik the Red buried in the new world. They went pathetically hand in hand with St. Branden. Raleigh says You rose into the mountain air and nevermore were seen. I don't know if it answers what children lifting pretty heads from pillowed beds were doing at the tops of mountains, but right up until
 
Once upon a time when it was dead and gone,
when one was enough and too much
to be alive and well in Ameryca, the new found land,
a glory rose up into the head and it was dead.
 
a poem that somehow got completely left out but was primary in the manuscript. Sons of the discoverers came to that end. In 1522 Columbus' son, Diego, Viceroy of the Indies, crippled by these discoveries, with his son Luis, brought slaves together with sugar, worse than death, provoking the first slave rising on his plantation that spread to Santo Domingo and all the Caribbean sugar lands (Opening the Vein, 96). So children born with the reason of being true love, kiss and fly, wake and die. Ophelia, what is it about? Where is my Freudian rabbi, "in a pitiless world and a technological civilization that eludes" (Löwy of Kafka's Amerika), naked force and arbitrary power cover with policing.
 
Distinguish the y from the I where Ameryca mourns its loss, that it never came to be, which failure has nothing to do with America save as idyllic dissent.  I'm trying to explain a fixation from nature, of melons and corn that grew in the six inch deep soil preceded by the March death of the old year, like St. Branden putting out in his curragh gets caught in the light. Did it begin in the poems he speaks, "I come from a land in the far away...where all the ages I have been waiting to be Amerycan?" It was all wrapped in these children being born and flying around.
 
"what do they do at the tops of mountains,
children lifting pretty heads from pillowed beds?"
 
 So they are all children of St Branden who turn the cheek, spiritual children shall we say, who seek another country, full of the mishap called justice. You see how fruitful the allegory is by result, even if there is so much effort in the history of America, the outer one, to find the inner. All the little pretty ones, utopias, Oneidas, so many more in two hundred years than all the world produced in its entirety. Transplant American Essenes didn't last long; they went through variety after variety like rabbits, but we see how it is. If Charlie Rose is for it, who cannot be against it in the nation of abortion, Sodom and the drones. Like they now ask you as you drive to Las Cruces, "are you an American citizen?"
 
The beings, elfs, faeries appear in the wood as literal photosynthesizes of sun and metabolic water. Those little peaks and valleys array their growth. Here is a solution to a problem you never thought existed in wood grain counter tops and doors. It's a good thing we don't use real wood any more to avoid this confrontation with the natural. The roots of plants are analogous to the head in animals. Nature is always saying things we don't want to hear. Wood and stone cry out, triangulating like Bucky Fuller, always triangulating. So to compare the sound of helicopters and planes to
 
the wounds of that symbol the rose
 gliding to the lump of a beating heart, 
 
AS the refineries and factories pavE a way to our own coming to pass, there is no need to consider it poetry, or even a vision of the future. Even if they say it is upon us we still do not know. Suppose you had some people inside an iron room with no windows or doors who would all suffocate in their sleep (Lu Xun)? Ruben Dario calls it "Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar," that picture of the United States from the south, Alejandro-Nabucodonosor! A modern version being international war waged by proxy groups against any that resist hegemony, funded to spawn an intellectual terrorism to crack down on dissidents, a form of low intensity civil war with coercive engineered immigration (K. M. Greenhill). Civil war is the natural result of globalization which leads to breakdown of society. U.S. and Turkey destabilize the Balkans and Hungary and Germany, divide the world island, the Eurasian peninsula from the Baltic sea to the Black to create that Intermarium preventing German and Russian unity. So Germany is overrun by other victims of globalization, now instrumentalized as weapons of globalization. Hence the consequences  are used to further the goal. Ophelia is silent about it. It makes you wonder who to talk to.
 
In those days I burned trash outside on top of the rock. The flames would jet up in the wind, but it was all rock and rocks, rocks and sky. There were no apartments. Gradually they came over the ridge, first one or two roofs, then whole houses. But before that, the landlord, inspecting the rolled roofing on the flat surface one time, alerted me to the fact of the roof. Soon I had a lawn chair up there and was lying naked in the morning sun. Even when it was cold it was warm where the bare Chinaberry limbs held only manila fruit. Pretty soon I was up there at night, which is where I first heard the cry of  “The World’s Body,” eclipses so far out of town at first they were only faint echoes. There was no gunfire like where I live now, but moans and cries of the earth. But those
 
red lanterns were shining through the fog.
 
 "Oh wretched land that I am who shall deliver me from this body of death," more obvious now, much more. Sundays, Christmas, while the rest of the states suffered their winter pain, we would take friends and picnic down the valley below. Come February the giant robin migration would begin and with cedar waxwings cheeing everywhere, the ewes were about to lamb. But January was the cruelest month. London, New York, Tokyo, Geneva, Darjeeling describe the stress lines of the new earth skin, Icelandic sagas and Eddas, a cold choice in the cold. But living that close to the elements March made its mystical rebirth, and all the soldiers of life that clung to the bare retama waited with the redbud reborn. The land, the cry of life in early pieces, Alchemycal Rose, "once upon a time when it was dead and gone," worked into colored pictures in the text, a kind of calligram with a musical note, "when your father grows up and your mother grows up...when you love the world." 
 
How can the green know the red? I am what he was within. It wouldn't change anything, not a certainty  to be within what he was without, visible from the interior but not from the exterior. That's the play.
 
The moon has opened up her eyes,
like summer stars so soon they rise.
 
Thirty years of absolute sobriety, with love. Of course these things are said so that my ears hast Thou pierced, as Messiah said. Listening, hearing the revelation, he wakens me morning by morning to listen as one being taught, as when a slave in Israel, offered freedom after seven years, to continue in that service put an ear against a board and the owner pierced the lobe to symbolize his listening to him alone. The sublime writer carries this along from Psalm 40. Lo I come...I delight to do Thy will, O my Elohim: yea, the  law is written in my heart, no certainty, and he knows nothing of the future, only the moment and past revised, amid all failures and regret. Prophetic and at the same time impossible, nobody picking Calendar up forty years later would see anything symbolic in "A Conjunction of Planets," What lovers' open lips we are tonight in time the endless world, our minds unfurled. Symbol is defeated by propaganda, but propaganda cannot eradicate, only neutralize by saying it cannot be understood. These texts prepared the y to overcome the i, a reversal to which we all now have our attention drawn. I think Goya or El Greco said that.
 
Souls in the egg,
so all right world,
Hatch and hatch. 
 
To recognize the underlying shadow government that permeates the body, the digest and purpose forty years later, long after the Calendar was forgotten, would be like Kouhetek come round again, this time brilliant, tail overwhelming the moon, subject of the evening news, like bad weather. We live in such a time as Noah makes a comeback. A vocabulary of the opposite has been formed for
 
ENCOURAGEMENTS
for Such
AS SHALL HAVE INTENTION
To Be UNDERTAKERS IN THE PLANTING
OF THE NEW FOUND LAND.