Tag: poetry

Posted in Euphrates Voyage

At Nebuchadnezzar’s Quay

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

The Samamaris was making frightful leeway as we rounded the bend towards our moorings at Nebuchadnezzar’s quay. But it lightened somewhat on our approach and Captain McWhirr eased her up as if it were a Sunday family cruise. The storm, fierce as it had been, died down as quickly as it had risen.

“Make off the bowline to the second bollard Mister Spencer.”

“Easy now professor.”

After making fast and shutting down the boiler, we jumped ashore for a look around. It was an ancient mound—or tell—that slowly sloped down into the depths of the river to form the quay. The lower strata was made of baked mud bricks coated with bitumen, some of which were stamped with the seal of Nebuchadnezzar himself. To the Northwest, the mound rose high against the hot afternoon sun. An Arab Shepard stood gazing down at this apparition of a stern-wheel steamer with a wheelhouse that sat on her deck like a little hat on a frumpy British dowager.

Soon, a short guy in a white suit and pith helmet walked up and made an obsequious bow.

“I am Joesph Cairo of the customs office. Would you be the Captain of the steamer Samaramis?”

“I would.”

“The customs office has impounded your vessel due to a minor technical matter regarding…”

“Bakshish?” interrupted McWhirr.

“I wouldn’t put it so indelicately. But there are certain processing costs incurred by the Museum trustees sponsoring this worthy effort to preserve our priceless treasures for the future edification and enrichment of both of our great nations.“

“For the enrichment of somebody anyway.”

Cairo smiled placidly: “I heard you were a man of few but laconic words, Captain McWhirr. Shall we go to my office? It’s just up the promenade.”

McWhirr is well accustomed to Cairo’s ilk. Recent digs and spectacular finds have brought out sleazy shysters to exploit the ignorance of scholars and archeologists. Especially vulnerable to such scams are the rapture tourists, who seek affirmation of scripture by marking the river’s depths, which— as is prophesied in the Book of Revelations—will dry up as a sign of the end times. The chandler in Bagdad enjoys a brisk trade selling sounding gear to these New Age fundamentalists. But these days, all that’s needed is a pool cue, so they may have a point after all. An inch drop will have them speaking in tongues, talking to lizards and enthralled by the thought of total annihilation of a third of humankind. But we were concerned with more prosaic matters regarding the water’s depth. A blow like we had earlier could drive our shallow draft vessel sideways onto the bank, prey to bandits who roam this desert with impunity.

But events that were to unfold cast a new light on the prophesied end-times, and gave us—if not eternal salvation—a hard-won appreciation for the convoluted twists of fate.

We walked up the towpath—or “promenade” as Cairo so generously called it—and came to the customs house. It was no more than a shack of mud brick and bundles of reeds. A guy in a green visor and sleeve garters sat next to a fake banana plant contemplating a calendar. This month’s model was Theda Bara tricked out as the Goddess of the Underworld. Those dark eyes followed me around the shack; eyes that can go from abject terror to ecstatic elation without so much as a smoke break between takes. We paid the gentlemen who were, after all, only playing their parts in the perpetual exchange of vice and virtue; where everything evens out in the end—more or less.

Later, as I lay on the pilot house bunk listening to the eerie keening of jackels far into the night, I could hear the professor intone:

“He set sail; the father set sail,

Enkei the God of Wisdom set sail for the underworld

……the waters of the sea devoured the bow of his boat like wolves.

The waters of the sea struck the stern like lions.”

I flowed downriver. The bleak boatman had abandoned his tiller, leaving me adrift. But I escaped shipwreck and the scene suddenly changed. I gazed into the blue eyes of the glittering goddess. We embraced and kissed. It was a sweet soul kiss that I could still taste when I woke to McWhirr’s hail.

“All hands on deck!”

McWhirr runs a tight ship, even if it is a mode of propulsion he thinks unseemly for a man of working sail.

O. Handy Bey—Director of the Imperial Ottoman Museum, 1888 CE
Screenshot
Posted in Uncategorized

Mesopotamia Voyage

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

“What do you do when you see a gauge rise?”

Professor Budge asked sharply.

“I’d open a valve” I stammered.

“All at once?”

His intensely earnest tone unnerved me. McWhirr had told me how the engineer’s—we called him the Professor—long, solitary hours below decks had gone to his head. Apparently, he was also an amateur linguist and had recently developed a keen interest in ancient Mesopotamian texts. Beyond the maze of pipes, gauges and boilers behind him, a blackboard was mounted on the steel bulkhead on which was written in chalk:

Climb the walls of Uruk, walk its length.

Survey the foundation, study the brickwork.

There—is it not made with oven baked bricks?

Did the Seven Sages not lay its foundations?

The professor went on: “Of course the amount of change in the glass will depend on where the pipe connects to the bottom of the boiler, because there the water column is cooler and gives only a partial…”

“Stations men! We’re in for a dusting!” McWhirr called through the speaking horn.

I rushed up the ladder to see McWhirr squinting through the wheelhouse windows at the dark, lowering clouds. Our boat began to pitch violently in a chop that had suddenly transformed the placid surface of the river into a seething snarl of whitecaps. I’d heard of storms on the Euphrates but, being a strictly blue-water sailor, thought them merely overblown yarns told by salts in the far-flung grog-shops of the globe. But here it was, a veritable hurricane, as if the whole river was pounding against our bows like the fabled flood that crushes walls of stone.

“Steady Mister Budge, it’s only a capful of wind,”

Wrestling the wheel, McWhirr yelled: “Nebuchadnezzar’s Quay is only around the bend. If we can get there before fetching up on a mudbank we’ll be golden. And Mister Spencer, pay heed to the professor. He may have a few bolts loose, but he knows his stuff!”

We’d been commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania Museum to ship antiquities found by the Punnett excavations upriver at Nippur. Captain McWhirr had taken the opportunity to make a few lira by hauling priceless artifacts down a pirate infested river on the paddle-wheel steamer, the Samaramis.

Map of Nippur

Posted in poetry, Uncategorized

Occident II—-a family history

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

Elongated tars loomed above us. Sherryl, Slim and me played in the sandbox directly under the movie screen. Dad had piled the family into the station wagon to see Moby Dick in 1956. Spars and blocks creaked with the ground swell. Ahab’s wooden leg thumped up the companionway before  he turned to glower over the taffrail, compass in hand as though he’d forgotten it was there. He’s the very image of Saturn, that lugubrious old coot who circumscribes the weary world.

    It was then I first heard the call, a faint echo in the Lydian mode.

And I hear it still, an aging live aboard long in memories and short on time; adrift in a tide race when I could be chilling before the latest remake of the same old sea story, grog in hand. But my mind must ever hie with the kelp’s sinuous curves into deeper soundings West.

Twenty years later I was an ex-con and Laguna Beach body surfer, turning and turning in the barreling beach break, arms outstretched as if in prayer.

 My father turned mystical after Slim slipped LSD into his coffee in 1970 because he could no longer watch Dad physically abuse  Mom when he raged at his lot; on swing shift at an LA chemical plant. After that dose, Dad really softened and began to heed Edgar Cayce’s prophesies about the darkening of the sun and the shifting of the poles–which I imagine are connected somehow.

That’s when I first read the Aeneid. 

Twenty years on, Dad from his wheelchair on the Laguna cliffs, held lookout for whale-spouts on the sun burnished horizon; vexed by demons in his frontal lobe. It was as though we’d switched roles.  I took charge and held a garage sale to clear the place for sale. Like an archaeologist, I dusted off old family relics with a wisk broom that came from our earliest years. Then, in a dream, I found a a copy of the Aeneid under a laurel-shaded altar of plywood at my own yard sale.

I see Aeneas carry his father on his shoulders from burning Troy as his father carries the household gods. I see him descend to Hades to ask his father’s shade the way.

 Sherryl has since passed away. Slim still digs Miles Davis’s Lydian groove and I am left to tell the tale. I was but a boy who saw the hollow face of Saturn on a drive-in movie screen. Just as now, he’s rough-hewn in the rocky cliff as my boat bears away from the foreshore. He limps his sluggish round while, back home, the laurel tree’s shadow circles over the household gods, ever counter to the golden sun.

Posted in Art, Bird poop augury, opera, poetry, politics

Is bird augury really fake news?

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

Drumph is building a tremendous crypt above the 18th green at his Bedminster Golf course with financing from Russian oligarchs. He calls a meeting where the Saudis express interest in exclusive burial plots. The tremendous Drumph Tomb is shown–bottom left–to the assembly. But Tiresias enters to proclaim disquieting omens regarding the end of the ancient Drumph line.

Posted in Saturnius McWhirr stories

Old Hand’s Voyage to the Babylonian Theme Park

Posted on by Dogfish Bay

The bewitching breezes wafting from  the intermediate zone that had vexed our northerly course along the bleak, rocky coast gave way to an absolute calm as we stood off the rank harbor of Virtual Babylon.  It was as though the anchorage were under the spell of some vengeful deity that held the stagnant seaport in irons-a fitful sleep of waking dream.

McWhirr called from the wheelhouse:

“All right, Mister Spencer.”

I let go the anchor. The silence was broken by a low rumble as I paid out 3 fathoms of chain into the muddy bottom of Moloch Bay.

After 2 weeks of foul headwinds and devilishly flukey breezes, we were ready to don shore-going rig for a nice row to an ancient, stone pub at the head of a dilapidated wharf to splice, as they say, the proverbial main-brace.

The melancholy treble of a loon-bot echoed over the still anchorage as McWhirr sat in the bows of the skiff brooding upon the lurid, crimson sea. Not wanting to disturb his meditations, I rowed on.

I’d heard Saturnius McWhirr was a pious man of Quaker stock who had fallen into some branch of the Zoroastrian persuasion. Or was it some Sufic offshoot of Shi’ism whose adherents await the 12th Imam’s return and wander the storm-wracked shores of this world seeking some vestige of a golden age–a relic safeguarded from the literalist creed by occult signs that can be decoded only in the secret halls of pure imagination?

Be that as it may, McWhirr gazed into the offing as the violet light of dusk fell over his weathered brow and said:

“I first heard of the Babylonian Theme Park when but a nipper on my grandfather’s knee. He told me of the Neo-Art Exhibition, the wonders of the Pharmaceutical Pavilion and how he touched the robe of the King of Wall-mart. He told me yarns of how it’s foundations had first been laid in the 21st Century by drones captured during the great cyber wars.”

“But,” continued McWhirr with a tone of caution, “he also told a darker tale. He said the streets were paved with sorrow, the walls built with the grief of mothers who toiled over an illusory harvest, it’s ramparts manned by desiccated souls who invested all their goods in the virtual fun-house of Mammon.”

“Yes sir,” I said though, in my green youth, I could scarce fathom the depths of his narration..

We landed the skiff and walked the cobbled street toward the the ancient, stone pub. Soon, my attention was caught by the droning whirr of something hovering overhead.

Could this be one of the fabled harpies that had long plagued unwary mariners who sail these latitudes–these droning machines of evil and ubiquitous surveillance that kill with rockets as well as with the bland, droning sameness that reduces our citizenry to penile servitude to the sexless god of materialism?

McWhirr drew his cutlass and, slashing at the malignant thing,  thundered:

“Get thee hence, instrument of Satan!”