The Hindenberg
This early showpiece of the Thousand Year Reich
used 850,000 skins of cattle for hydrogen bags

It is said that the night it burned
the thunder of panicking hooves
drowned the screams of passengers.

As far away as the buttes of Asia,
one old Siberian woman says that merely
the echo of their lowing still stirs

immense winds and whirlwinds. All the small
meadows of Europe remember their grazing,
Cattle‑cars and railway platforms shudder

still at their foreshadowings. Untold cobblers
recall the million seams glued and stitched
on screaming machines before their pockets
held enough hydrogen to kindle a conflagration.

The war on nature begun,
eventually, every country in Europe
and many in Africa and Asia were gutted:

in bombings, in battle, at sea, and in the fires,
filth, and hunger of virulent slave pens:
the outward rendering of ageless accumulations

sucked up from the cities and villages of earth,
and the ruins run in and out of us all,
stretching before and behind
for far more than a Thousand Years.

Unspeakable
Strangers:
Descents into the Dark Self;
Ascent into Light.
poems,
historical sources,
a personal essay on writing them,
and why.

Tallahassee: Anhinga Press, 1995.
http://www.anhinga.org/brock.

cover art, fromThe Nazi Drawings of Mauricio Lasansky

^{For
The Nazi
Drawings of Mauricio Lasansky} Each warped character, roughly mirroring
us, sees through his living space only
part of a face he skillfully distorts
or can't bear. We pass through these eyes
into history uncoiling backwards from
the climacteric of a rhythmically punctuated
orgasm, a violent encephalogram threatening
us, still. These are not malevolent
inventions. They help us not to forget
this sorrow, to the living, is necessary
baptism and catechism, confirming
that to survive these victims means we must
be sired by and born of ravaged fathers
and mothers or be left in the begetting dark.
We cannot turn away from their rending
images of ourselves. Their suffering still
cries out -- to be grasped, to be grieved

................................................................................................................

................................................................................................................
They Asked Him Why

The condor chained to the thief of fire
he devours never asks why sparrows tuft
their nests with down from their throats
or why his is littered with cells of flesh.
Sockets where he dipped his whittled beak
hold abatoirs deep with the ink of sunsets.
My daughters cover their eyes when I open
my sky-blue spheres. Stars. My wife shudders.
They beg for the merciful wax Odysseus gave
his mariners as the sea absorbed red tides:
You curse us with winter vistas. Your fingers
torn off like twigs bleed sap all spring
reminding us of the green cedars of Lebanon.

Forests strive through him. Ax-shouldering men
mount the people smiling snowthroated lullabies
to balm their blue ears. Horned, they sow again,
erupt with evangelists, teachers, cankers.
He breaks into quaking aspen, lindens, ash.
Eyeless Mums and Glads empty each child's sockets
to plant the bulbs of sacred searing ways.
The one-eyed rule from knots far back of their noses,
without depth of field, gutting what they mimic,
maiming the toddler they say leads them, her good eye
twitching. A west wind howls out of Carcassone,
where Romans camped, up a muddy stream, and moans
through scraggly fields until it finds the river
where a dry fountain of song crumbles near the banks
of the ravaged city of light. He falls weeping.
Tongues of ash turning into green flames lick
his eyes and mouth with the book of syllables.

................................................................................................................

The One Moon
     Liberation is not achieved except by perceiving
     the identity of individual spirit with universal spirit . . . .
     Disease not cured by saying the name of the medicine,
     but by taking the medicine. Shankara

Though in our night we seldom see the sun,
the moon empties itself, bearing light.
Every sheet of water reflects the one moon,
which embraces all the moons in all the waters.
But if we come between moon and sun
or the moon and the water, or put things
there, the moon is dark, surfaces shatter,
spiders dance on crackled webs,
and no moon rises from the mudflats.

Our one moon is beyond praise or blame.
Seeing its wakings and wanings we should know
it's there, even when not seen, whether due
to eclipse, rippled surface, or dried pond.
Those who look for light in absences
stumble in turbulent webs, saying, "Your moon
is different from mine, not of the one moon"‑‑
eclipse, drybeds, confusion.

Lakes shimmer, the moons waver, exposed plates
of holograms break, again and again,
and each part still holds all spheres entire,
each smaller piece more faintly.
Then scattered grains forget the tune echoing
the silent symphony, music shatters in slivers,
but the orchestra in its spacious auditorium
far above us, above our praise or blame,
knows only boundaries we imagine or endure.
I would eat these pilferings and be cured.

The Hindenberg This early showpiece of the Thousand Year Reich used 850,000 skins of cattle for hydrogen bags It is said that the night it burned the thunder of panicking hooves drowned the screams of passengers.

As far away as the buttes of Asia, one old Siberian woman says that merely the echo of their lowing still stirs

immense winds and whirlwinds. All the small meadows of Europe remember their grazing, Cattle‑cars and railway platforms shudder

still at their foreshadowings. Untold cobblers recall the million seams glued and stitched on screaming machines before their pockets held enough hydrogen to kindle a conflagration.

The war on nature begun, eventually, every country in Europe and many in Africa and Asia were gutted:

in bombings, in battle, at sea, and in the fires, filth, and hunger of virulent slave pens: the outward rendering of ageless accumulations