Eric M. Murphy

@ericmmurphy.bsky.social

1699 Followers 838 Following

Birds, Math, Literature, & Airpower. BoD Member @Strategy_Bridge, #Strategy, #Development, #NationalSecurity, #MilitaryAffairs. Repost is not endorsement. Nothing interesting to say.

Come, my brothers, let us govern Canada, let us find our serious heads, let us dump asbestos on the White House, let us make the French talk English, not only here but everywhere, let us torture the Senate individually until they confess, let us purge the New Party, let us encourage the dark races so they'll be lenient when they take over, let us make the CBC talk English, let us all lean in one direction and float down to the coast of Florida, let us have tourism, let us flirt with the enemy, let us smelt pig-iron in our back yards, let us sell snow to under-developed nations, (It is true one of our national leaders was a Roman Catholic?) let us terrorize Alaska, let us unite Church and State, let us not take it lying down, let us have two Governor Generals at the same time, let us have another official language, let us determine what it will be, let us give a Canada Council Fellowship to the most original suggestion, let us teach sex in the home to parents, let us threaten to join the U.S.A. and pull out at the last moment, my brothers, come, our serious heads are waiting for us somewhere like Gladstone bags abandoned after a coup d'état, let us put them on very quickly, let us maintain a stony silence on the St. Lawrence Seaway
The relatives are leaning over, staring expectantly. They moisten their lips with their tongues. I can feel them urging me on. I hold the baby in the air. Heaps of broken bottles glitter in the sun. A small band is playing old fashioned marches. My mother is keeping time by stamping her foot. My father is kissing a woman who keeps waving to somebody else. There are palm trees. The hills are spotted with orange flamboyants and tall billowy clouds move behind them. “Go on, Boy,” I hear somebody say, “Go on.” I keep wondering if it will rain. The sky darkens. There is thunder. “Break his legs,” says one of my aunts, “Now give him a kiss.” I do what I’m told. The trees bend in the bleak tropical wind. The baby did not scream, but I remember that sigh when I reached inside for his tiny lungs and shook them out in the air for the flies. The relatives cheered. It was about that time I gave up. Now, when I answer the phone, his lips are in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is gathered around a familiar face on the pillow; wherever I search I find his feet. He is what is left of my life.
1 Eastern guard tower glints in sunset; convicts rest like lizards on rocks. 2 The piano man is stingy, at 3 A.M. his songs drop like plum. 3 Morning sun slants cell. Drunks stagger like cripple flies On jailhouse floor. 4 To write a blues song is to regiment riots and pluck gems from graves. 5 A bare pecan tree slips a pencil shadow down a moonlit snow slope. 6 The falling snow flakes Cannot blunt the hard aches nor Match the steel stillness. 7 Under moon shadows A tall boy flashes knife and Slices star bright ice. 8 In the August grass Struck by the last rays of sun The cracked teacup screams. 9 Making jazz swing in Seventeen syllables AIN’T No square poet’s job.
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts. Nor the woman in the ambulance Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly — A gift, a love gift Utterly unasked for By a sky Palely and flamily Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes Dulled to a halt under bowlers. O my God, what am I That these late mouths should cry open In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.
For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores, Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good, To sound the constitution of just wars, Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood. Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust, Their usage, pride, admitted within doors; At home, under caved chantries, set in trust, With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs They lie; they lie; secure in the decay Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted, Before the scouring fires of trial-day Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head, Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea Across daubed rock evacuates its dead.
Long long ago when the world was a wild place Planted with bushes and peopled by apes, our Mission Brigade was at work in the jungle.   Hard by the Congo Once, when a foraging detail was active Scouting for green-fly, it came on a grey man, the Last living man, in the branch of a baobab   Stalking a monkey. Earlier men had disposed of, for pleasure, Creatures whose names we scarcely remember— Zebra, rhinoceros, elephants, wart-hog,   Lion, rats, deer. But After the wars had extinguished the cities Only the wild ones were left, half-naked Near the Equator: and here was the last one,   Starved for a monkey. By then the Mission Brigade had encountered Hundreds of such men: and their procedure, History tells us, was only to feed them:   Find them and feed them;
Minute flowers harden. Depend From thin bowing stem; Are white as babies' teeth. With broad leaves, immobile; Are sheath-like, and fat. What have these to do with beauty? They must take you with A fingering odour, clutches the senses, Fills the creases and tightens the wind's seams, As noise does. The plant is equipped. Even then you don't like it. Gradually though Its predatory scent Betters you, forces you, and more than The protected rose creating A sculptured distant adulation For itself. This insinuates, then grapples you, Being hungry; not poised, not gerundive. Hard, and uncrushed, these flowerheads; Like beads, in your palm. You cannot destroy that conquering amorousness Drenches the glands, and starts The belled memory. Glows there, with odour. Memorable as the skin Of a fierce animal.
Words for his ugly mug his Naked exhibitions at windows shaking a Fist at the gapers, his whalish appetite For cold douches and changing lodgings. Words for his black-mouth derisive Engulfing in laughter the sweet-eyed attendance Of aesthetes spreading their marzipan amazement Over his music and nibbling it amazedly off. But no words for the loyal Formations of angels which attended All this in misunderstanding and Despair and finally grimly as Shakespeare Caused himself flee seventeen feet down Through the church-floor into dumb earth touched His ears dead to continue complete In union with the communion of angels.
Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw Forest I slept under rhododendron All night blossoms fell Shivering on a sheet of cardboard Feet stuck in my pack Hands deep in my pockets Barely able to sleep. I remembered when we were in school Sleeping together in a big warm bed We were the youngest lovers When we broke up we were still nineteen. Now our friends are married You teach school back east I dont mind living this way Green hills the long blue beach But sometimes sleeping in the open I think back when I had you. A spring night in Shokoku-ji Eight years ago this May We walked under cherry blossoms At night in an orchard in Oregon. All that I wanted then Is forgotten now, but you. Here in the night In a garden of the old capital I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao I remember your cool body Naked under a summer cotton dress.
I am watching them churn the last milk they'll ever get from me. They are waiting for me to die; They want to make buttons out of my bones. Where are my sisters and brothers? That tall monk there, loading my uncle, he has a new cap. And that idiot student of his— I never saw that muffler before. Poor uncle, he lets them load him. How sad he is, how tired! I wonder what they'll do with his bones? And that beautiful tail! How many shoelaces will they make of that!
Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles, one a hack's hired prose, I earn me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles, tan, burn to slough off this live of ocean that's self-love. To change your language you must change your life. I cannot right old wrongs. Waves tire of horizon and return. Gulls screech with rusty tongues Above the beached, rotting pirogues, they were a venomous beaked cloud at Charlotteville. One I thought love of country was enough, now, even if I chose, there is no room at the trough. I watch the best minds rot like dogs for scraps of flavour. I am nearing middle age, burnt skin peels from my hand like paper, onion-thin, like Peer Gynt's riddle. At heart there is nothing, not the dread of death. I know to many dead. They're all familiar, all in character, even how they died. On fire, the flesh no longer fears that furnace mouth of earth, that kiln or ashpit of the sun, nor this clouding, unclouding sickle moon withering this beach again like a blank page. All its indifference is a different rage.
When I returned at last from Paris hoofbeats pounded  Over the harsh and unrelenting road; It was cold, the snow high; I was old, and the winter  Sharp, and the dead mid-century sped by In ominous, blurred streaks as, brutish, the wind moaned  Among black branches. I rode through a kind Of graceless winter nature, bled of what looked like life.  My vexing horse threw me. If it was not safe In England yet, or ever, that nowhere beneath the gray  Sky would be much safer seemed very plain.
Nothing remained: Nothing, the wanton name That nightly I rehearsed till led away To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream. In this a huge contagious absence lay, More space than space, over the cloud and slime, Defined but by the encroachments of its sway. Stripped to indifference at the turns of time, Whose end I knew, I woke without desire, And welcomed zero as a paradigm. But now it breaks—images burst with fire Into the quiet sphere where I have bided, Showing the landscape holding yet entire:
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750—1848) astronomer, sister of William; and others. A woman in the shape of a monster a monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them a woman ‘in the snow among the Clocks and instruments or measuring the ground with poles’ in her 98 years to discover 8 comets she whom the moon ruled like us levitating into the night sky riding the polished lenses Galaxies of women, there doing penance for impetuousness ribs chilled in those spaces of the mind An eye, ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’ from the mad webs of Uranusborg encountering the NOVA every impulse of light exploding from the core as life flies out of us Tycho whispering at last ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’ What we see, we see and seeing is changing the light that shrivels a mountain and leaves a man alive Heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body
A Morning to Remember or, E Pluribus Unum This is a morning to say something. This is a really keen morning. All over the world people are gassing about one thing or another. The globe which might easily be taken for a face, or look, Let’s call it the head of a successful novelist grinning thru space, the plots I think we can assume just won’t quit. An awful lot must be happening this morning. Then there are the little people inside the Big Novelist, and spinning on him. They go here and there, Italy, Spain sometimes but that doesn’t matter, the Big Novelist keeps an eye on them. This morning a lot of people started to talk. A lot of them had some pretty nasty things to say. Right! they said Mr. Barber eats Bisto. Ian McIan likes LBJ with manila icing. But no matter what people say this morning the Big Novelist will know about it. Some people say he squints when those astronauts and cosmonuts buzz around his head. The Big Novelist doesn’t like science fiction very much and if he had fingers, some people think, he’d pinch them. (The Adventures, etc. of Daddy, the little novelist asked the Big Novelist, can I climb on your shoulders. No son, Big Novelist said it’s lonely up here
Cover of “Bombs, Bytes, and Spies,” edited by Herbert alon snd Amy Zegart.
“Messieurs, l’huitre étoit bonne. Adieu. Vivez en paix.” —Boileau Secret they are, sealed, annealed, and brainless And solitary as Dickens said, but They have something to say: that there is more Than one way to yield. The first—and the hardest. The most nearly hindered—is when you pull Them off the rocks, a stinking, sawing sedge Sucking them back under the black mud, full Of hermit crabs and their borrowed snailshells, Minnows scattering like superstitions, The surf dragging, and every power Life permits them holding out, holding on For dear life. Sometimes the stones give way first. Before they will, but still we gather them, Even if our hands are bloody as meat,
Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart where you followed our mother to her cold slumber; a second shock boiling its stone to your heart, leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber you from the residence you could not afford: a gold key, your half of a woolen mill, twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford, the love and legal verbiage of another will, boxes of pictures of people I do not know. I touch their cardboard faces. They must go. But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album, hold me. I stop here, where a small boy waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ... for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy or for this velvet lady who cannot smile. Is this your father’s father, this commodore in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile
“Portrait de Femme” AFTER PICASSO I Somewhere between our nervousness and Our admiration, she sits in her portrait —Une femme, with two noses, in a striped blouse, Being poked fun at, feeling doubtless Herself honored by this satirist so famous No one laughs any more, she, the chosen One, of flippered arms and perfunctory fingers, A visage clawed in colors, one heartless Breast a blank circle, on her vase-stem Neck imposed, a brow like Gibraltar’s. Maybe it is Dora Maar—“charming, talented, Vivacious”—composed here on a collapsing Chair between three jokes (on the flesh, On vanity, on painting)—whose iron mouth And clear fixated gaze betray to all The world only the fiercest equanimity.