Five Poems by Dr Ralph Monday

 

The Stag

 

Strangest thing, just before the switchback an

enormous white blur shot across the trail &

crashed into a thicket of wild mountain laurel

fifty feet down the side of the mountain. Thrashing

among the limbs & brambles like some ghost

locomotive, I thought it must be a dog, like a

St. Bernard. Moving closer it was a ghost deer,

albino fur rain-slicked with a black, burgundy

red streaming over its side. A twelve pointed stag &

as I took in the bizarre scene I saw the life-light

flicker & go out of one earth-brown staring eye as it

snorted a final time.

 

In its side, an arrow, struck deep to the heart. I

walked carefully closer, looking back, all around

for the hunter. Nothing. A grave-shrouded calm in

the forest, the jade hemlocks dripped rain on its

body offering final absolution.

 

I bent & pulled the arrow from its frame, expecting a

death lance of machined metal, honed steel razor tip.

Instead, the arrow was made of level-straight sourwood,

crow feathers wound with thin leather strips about the

split end to make it fly true. And the arrow tip. A microlithic

flaked flint that when I ran my thumb across its

edge it sliced like a surgeon’s scalpel & berry-red

droplets dripped from my thumb onto its side.

How could this be? Then, I heard the shaman’s

drums, whether in my own head or pounding

through the forest did not matter. I was one

of them, a Neolithic clothed in furs musing

over the painted deer on the cave walls of Chauvet,

pierced by spears in real life through the weaving of

sympathetic magic.

 

This was the savage call to life, to death, to mate

with the Venus of Willendorf on deep furs &

engender strong sons & daughters—demigods for

the tribe, the hunt on frozen plains for the mastodon, the

tusk-curved woolly mammoth, the great godlike cave bear.

A journey to the underworld & live with the extinct, the

quickened dead & left the modern world behind, the

machined illusion.

 

Thus it is that I scalped the stag, placed the bloodied hide

like a crown upon my head, the horns pointing upward, 12

tips matching the 12 zodiac animal spirits heaven perched,

then bowed & said prayers for the animal essence, the deer’s

soul, sliced open the steel chest, reached into that wild

cavity & took the still warm heart, held it toward the

naples yellow west where the sun had dipped below the

ridge & knew my purpose.

 

I ate. Blood like a wine-dark sea, flesh kin to a cross. This

world dropped away like that setting sun.

I was the Sorcerer of Trois-Frères.

Rhythmic drums sounded through the forest as though the

stag’s heart had again taken up beat.

The procession came in line, two-a-breast, three on either

side carrying a travois. On it, two bodies side by side,

surely a Prince & Princess. Hair long & smooth & dark as

charcoal. They wore copper breastplates, necklaces of bits

of mammoth bone, bear teeth, drilled obsidian & jade & onyx.

The female clothed in a long white dress of worked hide, the

male in shirt & pants the colour of fall grass.

 

They all nodded to me. I took up my place at the head &

led the funeral procession for the royal past the switchback,

into the deep forest toward the sunken sun.

We marched in silence save for the throbbing drums

measuring out the heartbeats of life, walked as two

versions of the same earth come together as shadow

& flesh, bone & bitumen pitch in the red torch light,

numinous bonded psychopomps with the dead, for the

dead, of the dead.

 

All the Dead Spaces

 

The rain always comes when someone passes,

swirling through the dark cedars, raking leaves

away, zephyr harbinger, banshee plucked

from the stars.

 

Rain cold, wet, lifeless grey, casket perched

above that hole in space, no honour

for the corpse, no timé, kudos, empty thoughts

for perished Greeks.

 

She was a whore, elements of her trade

forged in a star’s dying nucleus.

Filling this lonely hole the way that

she took on men to fill her desolate thoughts.

 

She was family. Kin of trees, clouds, moon,

mother’s daughter, brother’s sister, sins

remitted by holiday table.

 

She was a girl, brown legs kissed by summer’s

spell, smile the smell of sunflowers crinkled

at the edge of a field.

 

She was an egg pierced in love’s dark realm

by hunting sperm the way a star throws

off magnetic arms.

 

She was nothing.

 

Dust to dust—irony in that return since her life

sprang from the gaseous dust of a dying

star, supernova as ultimate ejaculate into

the dark womb of space to gestate for

 

12 million years or more before the planet

seeds took shape and ringed the sun like

a belly’s navel.

 

Came eventually the human race,

ugly bags of mostly water, people

wet inside everywhere like a Vancouver

winter.

 

Reduced now to component

elements tossed out by the dying

star: 4-6 pounds of iron, gold, calcium,

potassium, carbon and a few other trace

elements.

 

Stars to stars, gases to gases,

gazing in at the hole to be filled,

I know why we gaze at the heavens.

We are looking for ourselves.

 

Communion of the Dead

 

The world is November white this morning.

On top of Jellico Mountain driving a F-150

like a steel arrow, no other cars on the interstate.

It is as though the land birthed this daybreak,

wrung from the womb as in the beginning;

mountains to either side jut upward like the

back plates of buried stegosaurus, the air ice

blue, trees black, bitter naked skeletons.

A Peary arctic world, unreal, as though some

mad god severed the veil between the actual,

spit out a sour conjuration calling forth all

the ghosts of the earth to cry for relief.

The ear can almost hear them stirring, there

in the ground, brittle bones a telegraph to

the few that receive the thin message tapped

out in the Morse code of the dead.

 

All these voices crying out from cemetery world.

Tongues before the white man, drumbeats from

buried rock, bones lying with fossils, cymbals

measuring the beat of stilled hearts, flutes played

by vanished lungs—dripping water a metronome

keeping time with smoke signals puffed up like

fogs breathed into bottles. They would phone

the living, for only in memory is vitality injected

into the lost. Here the loam womb pretends for a time

that gestation is imminent—only for the moment

before rubber treads mark out the tracks.

 

Words of the Dead

 

Can you hear the stirrings of the dead?

Listen, they rustle in tombs and graves,

moan and complain from cave and

forest, field and shallow pit.

No matter if the shade has recently

passed or is the tongue of a Sumerian

King, they would invade the land of

the living. They would know the

knotted guts, the caress, recall forgotten

kiss, the flame of the flesh.

The recent departed flit among the pages

of Google, engaged in spirit search,

attempt to cross the veil through Skype,

only to dissolve among grey pixels,

voices lost in speaker static.

Not knowing time, others sang across

telegraph wires, random morse code tappings.

Still others used chiselled stone, papyrus,

hieroglyphs, ornaments of gold, statues

with broken off noses, Christian exorcism

of demons. No matter, the words of the dead

touch only in memory the living. As air they

flit up and away, less than clouds breathed

into a bottle.

 

Will You Raise the Dead

What do you mean?

As a tongue speaker

Will you talk to me?

Will you raise the dead?

 

eyes like the blackened

spit of a grasshopper,

do you truly know

or is it just diseases in your head?

 

Did a razor split your tongue?

Where it waggles in two languages.

Did you scuttle backwards

to magnify your own dung?

 

Will you be like Jesus?

Riding on an ass.

Spoil your own cathedral

mold the communion bread?

 

Say Lazarus talk to me

find only perished ears

know that your resurrection

on vacant bells was rung.

 

Are your empty spaces

a product of malfunctioning muses?

Sung to Antenora who never drank from Lethe

nor saw the golden isle symphonious.

 

Did you manufacture a closing zeitgeist

before the cock crowed three times at dawn?

A cacophony of excuses,

Can you raise the dead?

Dr Ralph Monday is Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., and has published hundreds of poems in over 100 journals. Books: All American Girl and Other Poems, 2014. Empty Houses and American Renditions 2015. A Kindle chapbook Narcissus the Sorcerer, 2015. Bergman’s Island & Other Poems, 2021. The Book of Appalachia, 2023. Humanities textbook, 2018. Vol. 2 expected in 2023. 

Ralph was inducted into the Lincoln Memorial University Literary Hall of Fame last October, 2022. He also won the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival poetry award in 2023.