A Cherufe Tale

Ay, Pedro de Valdivia, of Extremadura,
Do you miss your granite home?
The Bío Bío shores are flat and muddy waters
And Mapuches lurk in bushes and in loam.

Last night the cry of the Chonchon, tue tue tue,
Called out bad luck for you and Spain.
Do you fear for your fresh-made town of Concepción?
It will survive, as you survived the Atacama plain.

Tomorrow you will drink your gold, molten hot,
And writhe your guts out on a stake.
Your foster son Lautaro is now the native general
And you will die, hidalgo, one betrayed.

The Pillan spirits of this land have anointed you,
Pedro de Valdivia, rude conquistador.
Your small town will one day speak the word
“independence” in the Plaza Mayor.

You were the last of knights, you loved the last of queens,
Your European tale is Spanish no more.
It matters not if once you were of Extremadura,
Cherufe sacrifice; you die a myth Chilean born.

There are so many annotations to this one, that I am just going to link ‘em all to Wikipedia. This one resulted from reading Isabel Allende’s Ines of My Soul, which brought back many memories of hours reading into the stories of the conquistadors. Truly amazing stories, full of gore and ridiculous heroism and unspeakable exploitation and rank stupidity. I had forgotten the story of the conquest of Chile, which didn’t really even end until the 1800’s. Read on for the summary…

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We spent some time today at the park at a Cub Scout event, and I fell asleep on our blanket on the grass, staring up at the maze of intersecting branches, and at the smooth-trunked trees that vaulted to the blue. I was struck by how alike the grasses were, the same shapes and forks and blind reaching for the sun, the way that the water grasses arching over the little stream were hiding tadpoles from my glance, and the way the bigger boughs made the sun dart in and out like flashing flickers on a fish - was something watching us?

It made me think, if trees are just huge grass, then what grows huger still?

If Trees Did Not Stop Growing

The trees are dense with cellulose,
are grasses overgrown. They fork
the sky, they prize the stratosphere

And if they got there, what?
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In Latin, the words for “apple” and for “evil” are similar in the singular (malus—apple, malum—evil) and identical in the plural (mala).

- Wikipedia

This apple from Tajikistan gave birth to all the fruit:
The red ones, gold ones, tart ones, green and russet hues.

Each branch was mated to a branch carried over miles
And honeybees deployed in ranks to stoke the woody fires.

The names themselves are everywheres: from Fuji to Orléans,
Grannies, Coxes, McIntoshes and countless other brands,

Which carry in each half-cut star and in their very style
The memory of Kazakh slopes where first they grew in wild.

The blossoms spread, pink and pale verging on the blue,
Until we had the legends: the gold ones Hera grew;

The one that Eris tossed to Paris, causing wars in Troy;
Immortal orchards grown in eddas, Idun’s deathless joy;

A snow white princess poisoned; Atalanta’s race;
Johnny and all those orchards over which he traipsed;

The tree of knowledge, good and evil, our original sin.
This is quite a burden for fruit to bear within.

We have made the apple ours, and on it grafted history,
And yet the breed runs on, profusions to a tree,

This fruit humanity resents, but loves and needs.
Every apple carries still inside those bitter seeds.

We heft the oak beams, one two three, each count
A sturdy truss; smooth hewn and splintered, blunt
And heavy, painted gaily marbled, dun
And costumeless. By numbers shall we know
Their place, when Southwark greets our lumber load;
The Theatre is no more, and soon we’ll have a Globe.
In Shoreditch now there stands a hole, on lease-
Land Burbage didn’t own. And past the trees,
By open fields, his Men will have a Streete-
Built O, wherein proud Oberon will prance
And Lear cry out his woe; where faery dance
For groundlings’ sake, and Puck plays out his pranks.
We’ll sift the straw and lay it straight on top,
And paint anew the spangled sky aloft
Above proscenium’s boards. We’ll stop
The crowd with good stout rails, so high-pitch boys
Can stain their lips and flounce their tails, and raise
A ruckus to the skies, the center of our noise.
But first, we must dismantle, first we take
Apart. If all the world’s a stage and planks
Are how it’s made, then for our Good Lord’s sake
I hope he spent his seven days as well,
Assembling worlds in beams of thirty ells,
A Shakespere for his script, Queen Bess, and all
A-toiling midst the sound of London’s bells.

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Peace shouldn’t be quiet, clouds soft and pliant,
A mellow sky scene in blue.
Peace should be blaring, a jazz band past caring,
A squabble of children and you.
The clangor of pots, your eyes full of spots,
Buttercups growing in dew.
Peace is invention, it’s sustained attention,
It’s chemistry going kaboom.
It’s racing of go karts and artichoke hearts
And farming in Kalamazoo.

It’s silence as well, but the silence of bells
The moment they still for a few;
An aftershock sound that echoes around
And gives way to rush and to hue.
It’s not smug inertia, safe from what hurts ya;
Pain is what gives us the glue.
It’s temperate intemperance, all quantum events,
Mosquitoes buzzing canoes.
A whole raucous party, that’s peace’s priority:
Space to be scattered and true.

OK, I lied. It’s not a song. It’s more of a jam session. Since it wasn’t fully grown and looked likely to have warts even upon attaining adulthood, I named it “Polliwog.” Drum tracks, bass, acoustic, two electrics, and the piano all piled onto a standard blues progression played really fast.

Basically, I slammed together three different blues riffs I like to jam with, two for guitar and one for piano. They were originally all in different keys, but I piled ‘em all into one. If you want to add to the cacophony, it’s in E.

Well, I just wasted like three or four hours trying to record a song, but something is off in my recording setup and everything sounds incredibly noisy. I can’t pinpoint what the problem is, so I am giving up.

That means that I am cheating today, which is bad, given that I missed two weeks of posting something for the Sunday Poem/Song — one to the blog being down and one to illness. But oh well, that’s what backlogs are for.

This song is on After the Flood, and was also the title track to a separate album that I put together but never finished recording. I wrote it after driving cross-country to attend a friend’s wedding. And all you get is the lyrics — you’ll have to pick up the CD to get the actual song.

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My daughter has a science project she has to do. It involved testing various substances to see whether they were acid or base, using a stinky cabbage juice concoction. We did the experiments on the kitchen table this evening…

Science Homework

Cabbage juice and acid a pinkish fluid make.
Cabbage juice staying blue means you found a base.
Cabbage juice with bleach, though, is turning green;
Heavens! A chemical reaction unforeseen.

Glasses strewn on kitchen table, tablespoons of love,
Careful mixing of antacids and the smelly stuff;
We tolerate the messes and hope nothing explodes
For sake of experiments further down the road.

Avogadro’s number has nothing much to tell us
Here on a Sunday while younger brother’s jealous.
“I want to blow stuff up!” he says; someday his chance will come.
Meanwhile, I ladle cabbage juice into a poem.

If only we each got six glasses for our mixtures.
But all our lives are made of tests that became our fixtures.
Hypothesize, trial run, measure and record;
You take the acid, form your base, and keep on moving forward.

10 Dimension all your variables, figure out their sides.
20 Remark, perhaps, on how data twirls across divides.
30 Print a hello world, as if the world could not read cursive;
40 Go to thirty, looped but still printed, not recursive.
50 For once you have some code that doesn’t do much else,
60 Next you’ll want to make it special, of yourself.
70 Data will be read, perhaps, or Fibonacci spun,
80 While you tally figures until the job is done.
90 Poke a byte, peek a bit, nybble ‘til you’re through,
100 End with too few memories, dimensions still unused.


We have no more Sargasso Sea:
We’ve lost the tales from Argosy,
Of giant jewfish swallowing divers
And ghost ship press gangs snaring live ones.
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