The World Ends And The Maggots Sing (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

(or Lunar Dirge In April)


1

Jonas Peregrine can’t smoke and can’t drink scotch or wine
And cannot leave his bed
To see and do what others see and do in the streets
What he does see is a restrictive wedge of the sky
(when he shuts his eyes it’s memories
of a thousand skies unrolled like an endless Persian carpet
and not what his window offers)
From his sickroom’s bed
It is his death bed although everybody shrinks from the notion
It’s in their eyes and whimpers and sighs
It’s in the way Jonas Peregrine is regarded
Their solemnity is his death sentence
They play their part and he play his
(he isn’t willing to play the role gracefully but he follows the rules
and only seldom does he mumble obscenities and worse that go unheard)
He knows the bed shall be his last
Because he won’t be moved again
The hospitals won’t have anything more to do with him
It is over he’s been told by his physician
He understands what he’s been told
Jonas Peregrine is lost he has slipped
Towards accepting the inevitable as his own
The status quo of the doomed
(never mind that everyone weeps and promises
not to forget and neglect the memories)
He belongs among the already disregarded
From the ranks of the living and the telephonically available
There aren’t any more words there aren’t any type of words
To make anything worth making out of the situation
When the flesh gives up it’s over
And words have ceased to be words
Words have ceased to have that quicksilver with import
With an assigned role and meaning and color
Origin and destination have been snapped from them
It is then that words return to where they started from
Not easily located in the lungs and the throat
To end up inside the mouth until the sound whistles out
And the noise is made and spent
And an ear several ears catch it and arrange it
So much has gone into it that it can’t be removed again
That’s what its meaning is and how it has acquired it
The ringing of those words is worth cherishing and replaying
The words of the mouth and the heart
The words of the eye and the ear and the face
The words of the streets and rooms and theatres
The words of parks and boardwalks and beaches
The words of hotel rooms and beds and bars and cinemas
The words from books and photographs and memories
The words that can only belong to the living heart
He heard it inside his head and he repeated it
Words are images and sound
A fragment from a stupid old German song comes into his head
The verses roll off his tongue and out of his mouth with gusto
An anonymous song familiar to whores and drunks mostly
Wer Lieb nicht Wein Weib und Gesang
Der bleitbt ein Narr sein Leben Lang
A Hamburg woman named Maria taught him the song
Thirty years back and reckoned now as a wink of the eye
Three decades of everything squared away
By a single flicker of the eyelid
And saliva collects on the tongue and a noise comes into the mouth
The throat the lungs the head the mouth the ear the eye
And the world and I in it beyond and all of it it’s in the song
It was the same woman who warned him
That only whores and drunks were fond of it
Wer Lieb nicht Wein Weib und Gesang
Der bleitbt ein Narr sein Leben Lang


2

Jonas Peregrine laughs at his own words
Jonas Peregrine laughs at his own thoughts
And wishes oh how he wishes it
That he could leave his bed and contact
All libraries and bookshops and anyone who’s ever owned
Any of his books and demand that the lot of them
Be turned over forthwith just on his say so
Without explanations or compensation
Just on his say so and he laughs at the absurdity of it
He laughs at the irony of his imminent death
And whatever else follows death
He laughs at his own absence from among the living
The predicament he finds himself in is ludicrous
(ludicrous being a word that happens to appeal to him
because it rolls so badly off the tongue
And manages to embarrass both the speaker and the listener)
He sees himself leaving and bowing as he does
The rhyme inside his head goes off
There’s a timetable to keep
Turn to the left and turn to the right
There’s a timetable to keep
Turn turn turn turn keep up keep up
It’s the wait which causes the discomfiture
The waiting that is responsible for the word ludicrous cropping up
The absurdity is total and oppressive
It can not be final because
Ignorance and apprehension do not lend the wait any gravity
The sky opens up and lets the wind and the rain through
To soak everything below it
And to make believers out of the incredulous and the fastidious
The absurdity is the enigma
It’s the same as calling out in a dream
A shout in the dark and the ensuing silence
And in the dark a face appears and it swivels about
There’s no doubts as to its being a face
But there’s to be no voice to match the face
Terror is the message that the face coveys
And the terror spreads over the body
Freezing the spine and collar bone and cutting off all respiration
And depriving the limbs of the possibility of movement
And what light there is pivots
And yields a chasm of darkness
A long sleep of nothing but the cold earth and rocks
And the dead night with its dead stars of a desert
That has been a desert since the beginning of time
A desert transformed into songs and voices by wayward winds
And the pairs of hands that write and erase
And rewrite poems no one shall read or hear
Verses of poetry that aren’t poems
But to the poet who sings them
In this desert and in this place and in this fissure
And inside this rock and inside this acorn
And hidden out of sight in the hollow of the oak and the pine
Wrapped as muscle and feather about the gull’s wings
Smoothed and cooled and split into infinitesimal components
To form rows and barrels of waves
Sent to crash and reshape the littoral of landmasses
Unseen and unvisited but by singing poets and dancers
And men with long beards and women with large breasts
There are such poems and nights and days
And women and men and ghosts who sing
And dance at the sound of the words in poems
Poems heard and written nowhere else but in this desert
A desert where thorny plants
And invisible lives alone flourish
A desert where ghosts and salamanders
Share the hollows of bones and skulls
And share the transparency and dull luminosity of the rain
But these are only rumors and promises of things to come
Promises that are rather more like rumors than promises
And the type of rumors poets are known to share
With executioners and priests at the confessional
These are rumors shared with uncommunicative old pensioners
And old seamen without too many years left in them
Old seamen watching the sea on cold wet mornings
Poets are then willing to recite Homer in the original Greek
On such mornings and to such old men poets will sing Homer
(in the absence of life there is nothing to be named
and nothing to grapple with and nothing to replace
and nothing to remember)
The world has turned into an expanse of ice devoid of skies
Enumerate everything the philosopher tells himself
Catalogue it but catalogue for whom
Catalogue it out of spite
Catalogue because not to catalogue it
Would be to deny yourself and what passes for you life
A life that is the stories you’ve told yourself
The stories you’ve made up to erase that other person
Who was born in your place and shared your name
And a goodly portion of your life
Until you discover a way of making up a world
Entirely your own a world entirely to your dimensions
Filled with your own architecture
Peopled and alive with your machines and words
Clocks and landscape and seas and birds and skies
Alive with nights and days of your own shaping
One long dream until the day everything stops
When there is to be no more dreaming
And words won’t matter
Enumerate what you wish the philosopher tells himself
Enumerate what shall never be
Describe the warm undulating green expanses of land and trees
And rivers and mountains and seas
Where there aren’t pirouetting birds and insects drumming
And reptilian magicians doing vanishing tricks
And no dancing butterflies
Embroidering sheets of gossamer with air and light
And no spiders writing messages in mysterious languages
It’s your peculiar conceit to have made up all of it



3

The wait allows nothing and no one to earn any rights to gravity
A dying man cannot scoff at death
Even if he was once a famous philosopher
And the author of difficult books on difficult subjects
Books none but a handful of lunatics and musicians
And chess players read in rainy evenings
When the all the wine is gone and the television
Isn’t showing reruns of The Last Days of Pompeii
Jonas Peregrine can’t smoke and can’t drink scotch or wine
And cannot leave his bed
To see and do what others see and do in the streets
What he does see is a restrictive wedge of the sky
(when he shuts his eyes it’s memories
of a thousand skies unrolled like an endless Persian carpet
and not what his window offers)
The philosophers dies an ordinary death
He hasn’t grown wings and water drowns him
And fire burns him and the lack of air suffocates him
The philosopher dies an ordinary death because he is ordinary
But unlike ordinary mortals he anticipates a horrible end
An end which includes a just and all-knowing and merciful God
And that is too much for his ordinary head
Stuffed with ordinary little ideas about independence
And the biological simplicity of the universe
In the philosopher’s world there is no God
All the theories he’s concocted prove that God can not exist
He doesn’t lament God’s absence
He rejoices in his ordinary simplicity and algebraic tables
The philosopher rejoices in his mortality and the smallness of his heart
He rejoices in his life wasted in quarrels and hatreds
That failed to convince others as he’s failed to convince himself
That man is small because he thinks and lives small
That man is insignificant and hopeless even when thinks he isn’t
The ordinary man lives a life of dread and constant fear
The philosopher has discovered this life for him
He’s studied it and theorized and authored books about it
Nothing in nature is as useless as an ordinary man’s heart
It is Jonas Peregrine who’s made up this conceit
Jonas Peregrine calls it his one grand scheme and discovery
The philosopher can’t smoke and can’t drink scotch or wine
And cannot leave his bed
To see and do what others see and do in the streets
What he does see is a restrictive wedge of the sky
He hasn’t grown wings and water drowns him
And fire burns him and the lack of air suffocates him
The philosopher dies an ordinary death because he is ordinary
Everything worth having is gone
Everything worth knowing is left to the maggots
To dispose of and erase
The maggots will surely silence what remains (what can remain?)
Of the voice inside the fleshless head and lips
The maggots in the skull licking and cleaning the bones
Memories are forfeited by these unobserved creatures of the soil
The world ends and the maggots sing


© J.Noya 2006