The Black Islands

        I wrote the first draft of Black Islands almost 40 years ago and spent the last 6 months reviving and revising the the poems and presentation. I'll just give you the title page today and try to remember to add the content bit by bit.

Black  Islands

Robert M. Chute

All that has been lost in America

may be gained in Australis del

Espiritu Santo. It seems as if

God kept the better and the richer

lands to the last…

.

                                                            Petro Quirós (1506)

Between the Solomon's, New Caledonia, and Fiji lies the cluster 

of islands, reefs, shoals, and live volcanoes which Captain Cook, 

with singular inappropriateness, named  the New Hebrides. To the 

confusion of topography, vegetation, and native peoples white man 

has added his destructive genius,so that the archipelago now stands 

unchallenged as one  of the unhealthiest, wildest, most mistreated, 

and the most mismanaged spots on earth.

                                          Oliver: The Pacific Islands (1961)

Well I might as well give you the first page…

Author's Introduction

About thirty-five years ago I read Thomas Harrison's book, Savage Civilization, for me a compelling account of his experience in the Pacific islands known as The New Hebrides. As a consequence I spent hours of reading and research, fitted between preparation for teaching and research in Biology, and wrote a series of poems dealing with the people of those islands.

In an optimistic trial for publication I received encouragement but the suggestion, twice, that some uniformity in the form of the poems would fit the general uniformity of the content. Other interests intervened, some, dealing with the civil-rights movement, indirectly related to the poems since a better term to identify the islands would be Melanesia. How much trouble that pigment has generated in pale minded pale people.

In any case here are the poems approximately 450 years after those island's first recorded european contact. About a year ago they surfaced in my disordered files and I decided to revise them. The form of the originals had no uniformity. These revisions are based on a ten syllable line with the even numbered lines rhymed: the end of each major section a couplet, triplet or even quartet. I offer no defense for this decision since I have none, nor for the omission of punctuation —unless I wanted the reader to have to stop and think from time to time.  

Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia: many islands, tiny islands, black islands.Melanesia, as a geographic, cultural entity, stretches southeasterly from New Guinea and the Solomon's to Fiji. The southern foundry includes New Caledonia but not New Zealand.  It is the Polynesians and Micronesians who are the "noble savages" of South Pacific romance. They are taller, more european in appearance, and, significantly, lighter in color with straight hair. Shades of South Africa and Old Black Joe.                                                      

BACK TO SCHOOL

For the first time I'm attending a course studying poetry: Bob Farnsworth's Modern Irish Poetry begining with Yates who is relatively modern and a necessary background. I am auditing and not participating except for a sentence or statement now and then. In the next session students will discuss Yates' Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the struggling girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He hold her helpless agains this breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening  thighs?

And how can body laid in that white rush

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

A broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead,

                                           Being so caught up

So mastered by the brute blood of the air

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak let her drop?

At least Yates presents the event as a cruel and violent act contributing less to the classical implication that one of the offsprings of the rape, Helen, was not just present at the destruction of Troy but its cause: a classical (in several senses) example of blaming the victim for the crime. An all too familiar attempt at defense in a rape trial. (Helen shouldn't have worn that tight gown — how could I control myself threatened by her "tightened bow" of beauty?). The tightened bow a metaphor from Yates' poem No Second Troy.

A fair example of romanticizing Leda's rape was one of the first things I found when I "goggled" Helen of Troy: a copy of da Vinci's painting of Leda and The Swan. Leda's expression, as she leans naked agains the swan, combines  contemplation and anticipation — and she seems to have the swam well under control. After all this the one poem I wrote, years ago, seems trivial.

Apprehended: White Male

Zeus, moving softly

to not disturbe

Hera murmuring

in her sleep, slips on

   his stocking mask.

prowls the neighborhood,

his white spandex

jogging suit shining

like swan feathers

in the moonlight.

Leda worked late

in the library that night.

Her divine fate

overtakes her

on a path across

the moon-dark park.

Originally published in Exquisite Corpse (ca 1970)

ANOTHER YEAR

                          For The Previous Year

  The Whole I's Parts

Anaxagoras says "the things that are

in the world are not cut off from one 

another as with a hatchet. In everything

there is a portion of everything."  *

Magnified

asterisks

are constellations

as a telescope 

reveals

atomic nebula

stairways 

to heaven

Mobius strips to Hell

and a sand grain

on my beach

a mountain.

Quote from Russell: Wisdom of the West.

                  For The New Year

      Faith

I’ve never found an arrowhead,

one flinty chip f history.

Young Thoreau, they said, if he walked by

some farmer’s fresh plowed field, could just

stoop down and pick one up. As if

the spirit that had shaped them drew them

up to his attention. Stoney bread crumbs

no birds will eat, these points and flakes

led him from the town into the

saving woods and wilderness, marked

the path to a wildness which might

save us all. His faith led him on

to find what he believed. We find, 

he said, what we’re prepared to see.

A BIT OF FAMILY HISTORY

Thus Was The Tongue Of A Dog Made Useful*

The beggar lay at the rich man's gate.

The rich get richer saving crumbs,

letting beggars hang by their thumbs.

Let the dog's rough tongue grate

the sores on the body of the poor

who lay in pain by a rich man's door.

Safe now calmed by the Heavenly choir

you forget he who left you by his door  

sent his dogs to sooth your sores. 

He burns now in the Devil's fire. 

You don't wet a finger to damp his thirst. 

Who'll say which of you is worst?

  *Cotton Mather: Marginal Christi Americana (1702)

Cotton Mather officiated at the marriage of Thomas Chute

and Mary Curtis in Boston several years before they moved to         

                          Maine.

INVEST IN TIME

With the days getting shorter and me getting longer, it's a little boring around here by the pond so I've decided to occupy myself with a business venture:  Invest In Time.

It may sound a bit risky at first, but no more I'm sure, than having your body frozen and stored until sometime in the future the body can be revived and repaired — in fact much more probable, and safer, I'd say.

All my customers will need, and risk, is a few hundred dollars and faith in the future — and it's really no more complicated than compound interest. The customer will deposit their money with the business, Invest In Time, Inc The company, IIT, will guarantee to hold the fund, earning compounded interest, for as long as necessary until a functional system of time travel has been developed. 

It should not worry the investor that the time period would perhaps involve a century or more for two reasons. (1) By that time the original invested fund will be very substantial indeed. (2) At that time the investor will be transported from the time of the investment to the new present, age (of his or choice) and physical health unchanged. Time Transfers, in they chose, can be returned to their original time but no financial refunds will be allowed.

I of course plan to make an initial investment myself. The legal corporative  documents will provide the mechanism for moving the business from generation to generation.The next time I meet with you I may have the necessary papers so that those interested can sign up and join this venture. 

It may have occurred to you that I am assuming our political and economic system will persist for the period of time required.  If I can encourage a large enough number of people to join the venture I am sure they all will try to do their best to make sure our system does persist.

Robert M. Chute  CEO/IIT     

  Celebrating Dr. Who's 50th.

A NEW FOUND MEMORY

The poems tells most go the story.  The rest you will be able to read in the book, Excuse For Being Here, which Just Write Books will soon be releasing, a mix of Thoreau inspired poems, prose text on Thoreau, perhaps too much of my own biography. The poem tells the truth: a vision of the room in which my father slept in the summer, in the main house keeping a close eye and hand of The Chute Homestead: that vision of the bed, the pillow, the blod spot did appear as I revised the Emerson poem but I don't think my father died of TB, however real the blood spot was.

            Found Memory

2013: I find, read, consider revision

of a poem written 25 years ago.

Emerson Spends A Restless Night: 1831

He woke to her cough, felt the tense

curve of her back, the sharp contraction

of her chest. The dark was all enveloping.

Curtain open he could not sense separation 

from bed-chamber and moonless space.

He knew at the first cough, knew as if

a  window opened and November's

cemetery chill suddenly swept in. He

could not shut his mind to his mother

saying "use cold water for a blood spot

or the cloth will be forever stained."

But in the morning Ellen folds, hides

her handkerchief, an offering to this

new divinity whose mark she knew 

the coldest water would not wash away,

and in her journal wrote "I am the grave's. 

It's seal is set upon me."— and I,

suddenly, or think I suddenly remember —

the blood spot on my father's  pillow

in one of those 1940 years so long ago.

I know I've told you they didn't tell me

he was ill or what the illness was, that,

brought home, I don't recall the funeral

although I must have been there — and yet —

and yet that blood spot has not washed away

as Emerson's mother says "I told you so!"

and Ellen: "Death will have it's offering."

NEW MOON FOR AUTUMN: Oct. 7

         Where Winter Is

December thirty-first we go to bed

at the usual hour. No paper hats, 

no horns

to toot at midnight. 

Others may claim a year ends

a year begins but it's just winter 

settling in.

The movable feasts that mark the cycle 

of our seasons are the night 

the pond freezes

          the day the ice goes out.

The gray cataract skim turns

fall to winter in one night.

Then the year ends.

The ice sheet softens like a wafer

soaked in wine

the pond opens like

a sleeper's eye. That day

the year begins.

In between

winter's more another place than another time.

No Julian or Gregorian reform

can patch the cycle here.

Winter

is its own world where roof ice 

grins at the moon with crystal teeth

shadows strike sun-bleached snow

as an archer's arrows.

      Patience

wears winter out.

      Falstaff's Option  

The meadow mouse stood as tall as it could

on three of it's very short legs, stood it's ground, 

considering a blow to our cat's nose.

Every hair on its body erect to seem as big

as a meadow mouse can, but was still smaller,

relatively, than I would be facing a lion

on the African veldt. The blueberry bush

over their heads became a spreading tree.

Our little cat was too young to realize

its responsibility.Wisely the mouse decided 

to run, discretion the better part of valor.