by Cauble, Don
On the work farm
A newborn calf kicks up its heels
& in the distance, across the sea,
past ancient olive trees, I gaze
upon the home of the ancient gods,
snow-capped Mt. Olympus.
A calm blue sea laps the fires
of Ithaca.
Bravo,
there's only ONE truck to unload!
We're spitting dust, stacking
bales of hay high into the barn
—a barn made of concrete,
encircled by guards in towers
& loaded guns; hills,
bright with golden wheat,
rippling to the water's edge.
2
I drag my body to an apple tree
& wipe the sun from my forehead.
Is this the Tree of Life,
of Knowledge, of Good and Evil?
This isn't the tree of my dreams;
this isn't the farm I had in mind!
"Let's go! Let's go!"
barks an impatient guard.
I dig a circle around the tree;
only three thousand more to go....
Chopping corn
War!
We grab our choppers and run.
"Inside, inside!" the two-striper shouts.
They lock all doors; confiscate radios.
The guards wait: ON ALERT.
A storm blows in off the sea.
Even the elements agree:
Clear the air! Revolution is here!
2
Cyprus, her cities bombed
by Turkish fighters,
portends doom for the Greek junta;
and rumors, faster than war planes,
fly inside these prison walls.
In Athens, the army falls
to the people in the streets;
& the old Prime Minister
they recall.
THIS IS OUR CHANCE.
THE KING WILL RETURN AND SET US FREE.
(FOR SURE!)
3
The days come and go.
We go back
To chopping corn.
4
Black crows in a wheat field,
White moon in a blue sky.
On the hill, a circle of goats;
& on the sea a blazing sun.
"Dear Amur," her letter begins
I shake my head in amazement. Naomi has such a strange sense of humor. Just before I left America, we had a long talk together, one of the few times we've ever spoken to each other without pretending we were talking about something else. She told me about a dream she had. In her dream she and I—only she called me Amur—were living with our people in a tribe on the edge of some middle-Eastern desert. We were living as husband and wife and had a small son and another child on the way. I tended animals and worked with her father. We were so much in love with each other, she told me. Our minds and feelings were so closely connected, they seemed to be one, and although I was a quiet man and spoke little, she seemed to always know what I was thinking in my heart. Naomi saw the second child being born but something went wrong, there was some difficulty, and she felt all this pain in her body, and suddenly she was no longer in her body.
She saw me walking in the desert, alone, and weeping.
She had never seen me weep before. I seemed to be looking for something. "Amur, my beloved," she called, "why are you so sad? What are you seeking?"
As if I could hear her voice, I answered: "Naomi is gone."
We sat for a long time in silence and she watched me, not fully understanding my meaning. Suddenly I spoke again. Without taking my eyes from the desert, I said: "I come seeking God. I come to the desert to call upon this God of Our Fathers. This God was the breath between Amur and Naomi. Only she understood Amur. Only she could see into his heart. Now I come seeking HIM."
"Amur, Amur, my beloved," she murmured and reached out to touch me with her hands; her small, warm hands that I had loved so well. "Do not seek Our God in this barren land, my beloved!" she cried. "Look inside to your heart. There, in your heart, God is, even as I am." I swiftly lifted my eyes from the ground, as if hearing a sudden sound in the still desert air.
Aspirations of a poet
or,
a minor urge to explain myself
Heaven's own, ringed servants
& dust in his fiery hair,
& his spirit wrapped in blue
At first, the poet bends the world to his desire. He distorts appearances. The poet nourishes upon his great emptiness. Greed swells his eyes and clutters his bowels. Envy obscures his vision. To hurry, forces him to invent. He loses touch, he stalls and overexposes himself. He plays the Fool, the Beast, the Chosen One. (The ego is a master of disguises, have you not noticed? And I use the male pronoun only for convenience. Man, woman, child: we're all in the same leaky boat.) The poet reminds us how he sees the world in a "special way." (Through his nose, up against the mirror.) He's terribly sensitive, this poet, and you're on thin ice. He craves attention. He's jealous of power and always stares into the light, which causes him to squint perpetually. His words possess secret intimations—clues to his astral whereabouts. (He's usually in the bedroom, second only to God, and out on a limb.) Life turns on him at every corner. He suffers out of neglect and false pride. (It is not yet his time). But, here and there, the great poet catches with his verses a single, shining moment, a glimmer of truth and his individuality, the oneness of all life, the continuous stream of creativity that flows through each of us. He's horrified, delighted, ecstatic. Which is real—this world of appearances, or the mind? And is there a difference? And how do we know? (How do we know anything?) How will the poet escape self-deception? What he is, is what he sees.
*****
To speak directly to your heart (there's only one way), I must write from the heart. When the words come through the heart, try as I may, I cannot force the image. I start out to say, "I love you," and end up in a cosmological fire. One day, at Nafplion, I found a tiny, bright yellow flower in the prison yard. How this tiny flower escaped from being crushed by all the men walking back and forth, I know not. But there it was.
I've always been somewhat passive when it came to "choosing" events that ultimately shaped the current of my life, believing, like Don Quixote before the Windmills, that Fortune directs my Destiny better than I ever will. So sometimes I find myself in the oddest places. What I thought to be Windmills, turns out to be Giants; and these Giants wear uniforms with a dull metallic eye over their foreheads, so that I won't be deceived.
What would I be doing if not in this Greek prison?
Is this karma or destiny? Or just a twist in the stream?
Often I've wondered how San Juan de la Cruz could have written such cheerful and luminous songs of the Spirit while imprisoned in a castle dungeon.
My question seems meaningless.
I am here.
In other words, Am I not the stream?
*****
Transformations,
diabolical urges &
divine inspiration
As a man and a poet, I would tell you the truth and nothing but the truth. I would show you my deep, heartbeating love for the mystery, the beauty, the stillness, the wonder, the vibrancy, believing this to be my purpose and the purpose of all poetry. But I live as if truth is something Out There. Something that fits all, like a pair of stretch socks. Something that can be put into words and theories like the speed of light, or the cure for the common cold, or the number of angels on the petal of a medieval rose. I live in the past, in ancient imprints—memories that limit and tighten my mind like a surgical ecraseur; or like the Chinese cloth bindings that were once used on the feet of female babies, in order to keep their feet small.
There are moments...there are moments.
But fear gets in my way.
"Come!" I would say to truth. I would face my fears. I would drop all my pretenses. But they go too deep, too close, to
my heart. Deeper than my meditations; deeper than my realizations. I still love the drama more than stillness. I love the excitement more than silence. Even enlightenment is something you do, something you achieve. Even Now is something you experience and hold onto in your mind. Something you control. I live in fear, but I will not acknowledge this. That would be unmanly. I need safety, but that does not fit into my image of a poet. Within me abides a great power: the power of tenderness and kindness and honesty, and the power of letting others be. But I will not acknowledge this. This power lies in wait behind the images that I fear so greatly. The images of separateness and death, pain and loss. I feel caught in a drama and I do not recognize the actor I play. I see the dreaming of the world but do not know the dreamer.
*****
Angelina and I are walking together by a stream in a quiet wood. We're holding hands and laughing. Suddenly, a deer appears before us. A lovely, magical deer. This magical deer will answer any question we desire to ask. We must ask quickly, without a moment's hesitation. I know exactly what I want to know. "What is the meaning of my life?" Instantly there appear before me two open hands, large hands like my own, filled with ashes.
I wake up. I'm in my bed in a Greek prison. I feel alive, happy. The handful of ashes does not sadden me. They do not intimate my death or loss or annihilation. I understand this image represents a process of purification, of cleansing; the refinement of gross experience. Like Rumi, I have entered the divine fire. Like Ramprasad, I can say: "I have offered my gift." I have harvested the wisdom of my human experience. I have increased my knowledge (and the knowledge of all beings) and now I'm going home.
Kassandra, Greece, 1974
The days come and go
In the orchards, Greek prisoners gather shiny red apples into big piles and haul them off to feed the pigs. We stuff our pockets full as we pass the apple trees on our way to the cornfields, the guards turning their heads and pretending not to see. It's October, the days clear and warm with mellow sunlight. After we harvest the corn—the scrawniest, wormiest bunch of ears I've ever seen—the prison cows munch their way haphazardly through the rows. We follow the cows with our choppers, knocking over the dead stalks and piling them into huge stacks and then burning the fields. The good ears we find, we roast in the burning coals. Coming back inside each day, we plunder the pear trees growing near our path, robbing them of their low-hanging fruit as the guards swear and shout at us that these pears are no good. One day, I realize that the two black-and-white storks have gone. Each spring they return to the farm, to mate in a large nest they built on the roof of the supply barn. I smile, remembering their graceful flights across the valley.
The nights turn cold. A small wood burner is all we have for heat in the room, and before winter is out, we won't be able to go near the damn thing, it'll be smoking so badly. The guards allow us one sack of firewood each day and an armful of corn cobs for kindling. Last winter, a big snow fell on Kassandra, a peninsula on the Aegean Sea, not far from Thessaloniki in the northern district of Macedonia. It got so cold on the work farm that the foreigners broke up their bed boards and threw the pieces into the stove, along with bars of olive oil prison soap, books, anything that would burn. It's forbidden to cook on the wood stove. But, as soon as the guards lock the doors in the evening, we cook everything from brown rice, to Italian spaghetti with savory sauce, to English puddings.
On Thanksgiving, the American consul in Thessaloniki shows up with a roasted turkey and stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie. There are six of us Americans at Kassandra. I share turkey and a piece of pie with Alex Demianenko, who was born in Montreal, just a few weeks after his parents arrived in Canada from the Ukraine during the war years. Still, it seems a bit strange, eating Thanksgiving dinner in a room with "foreigners."
We pick olives in the crisp, early mornings of November and in the drizzling December rains, and we snack on wild blackberries growing in the hills among the oldest olive trees near the sea. One guard tries to warn us that these berries are poisonous. (Even as he's telling us this, in the distance we see the gun guard stuffing berries into his mouth.) Dhembirazi, we go to great lengths to smuggle the poison blackberries inside so that we can eat them with yogurt or milk.
The early morning sky never ceases to amaze me with its breathtaking changes, as the sun breaks over the curtain of clouds above the valley. On a clear day, I can even catch a glimpse of Mt. Olympus—that old snow-capped rascal—just across the sea. We take a short break from picking olives and I gaze without pity or regret upon this blue Aegean Sea, knowing I shall probably never see this beautiful land again. Already this country seems like a memory to me.
The whole room turns to light
Alex Demianenko quietly paints a picture of a prisoner in his stonewall cell, as the prisoner meditates on a book. A shaft of light streams through the bars of the prisoner's small window. He could almost be a monk in some monastery cell. As Demianenko quietly paints, Keith Guellow writes a letter to his friends in Amsterdam. Across from us, on the other side of the room, four men gamble with cards—handmade cards that the ever-watchful guards missed in their last search. The guards also missed the camera smuggled in by Whitmore, when his sister came to visit him. (That's me in the center, wearing a tattered straw hat, next to Australian Mike, and the old fellow from Pakistan.) At the moment, I'm sitting cross-legged on my bed. A few minutes ago I took a shower. A rare shower, you can bet, because the only water we have is so incredibly cold. Yet my body feels warm, comfortable, quiet. All day I've been pondering the words of the Russian writer Solzhenitsyn in Gulag Archipelago. "Every human being has a point of view—Every human being is the Center of the Universe."
Suddenly, my thoughts stop.
Just like that.
The whole room becomes instantly, totally luminous. Not like other nights, when I've experienced the room as a gradual, brightening glow. Tonight it's like an explosion or a cosmic dance. It's like nothing I've ever known before. It's like the heavens opened up, if you can imagine that. The brightness fills the whole room, everyone and everything, and then everyone and everything seems translucent, everything appears radiant, clear, and I am filled with this tremendous, superloving energy, this unlimited joy. Everything around me contains this energy. I am not in a trance. My mind has not gone blank. Yet the few thoughts that come and go seem like strands or wisps of thin clouds across an empty sky. How long this illumination lasts, I do not know. A moment. Ten minutes. Perhaps twenty. The light seems to go on and on and I have no sense of time or fatigue or incompleteness. I feel so alive and joyful, humming with love.
That night of stars
Let me remember THAT NIGHT
OF STARS over the Aegean Sea,
& the Scorpions (those awful
Scorpions!) that slept
Beneath the rocks in our garden,
& let me remember (this one
time only)
Before we are swept away into
Eternity after eternity,
Just how your arms enCircled me,
& the air was quiet THAT NIGHT
OF STARS over the Aegean Sea
Total fire, at last
1975-1981
§
I think marriage is the hottest furnace of the
spirit today.
—Leonard Cohen
§
Remember,
I was here, and you were here,
and together we made a world.
—David Whyte
"The Poet As Husband"
Total fire
I enter the sweet passage to your womb
and merge with the flow of your blood.
I come home to your love,
and my birth is remembered in the singing
of your nerves.
I enter the dark passage to your womb
and the way feels deep and unknown.
I have no protection but your love,
and the joyous cry of your heart.
/> I enter the sacred passage to your womb
and leave all thoughts behind.
I know only your love,
and love's mercy ever-shining in your eyes.
I enter the burning passage to your womb
and my ashes mingle with your ashes.
I live in your love,
and I shall love you forever and forever.
Portland, Oregon
October 1975
All those years
From This Passing World / Journey from a Greek Prison
Naomi sipped her lukewarm coffee. A half-smoked cigarette lay burning in the ashtray. Earlier, she had turned on the radio to her favorite country music station, but now she hardly hears the words to the song. Willie Nelson singing about blue eyes crying in the rain. Did she know anyone with blue eyes? Oh, yes, Melina Foster. She and Melina didn't get along very well. Naomi had tried to be friends with her. A best friend, like a sister. But they never did anything together. Never went anywhere together. Not even to a movie. Melina would call when she wanted help with her hair. It was always when she needed something. Never just to chit-chat. Never just to be friends. Melina reminded Naomi of her mother. They were both wiry, sensitive, nervy women with sharp edges. They both had a flair for drama. Her mother getting into a drunken rage at Clyde and throwing the dishes across the room and smashing them. Not the good ones of course. The good dishes she kept in the china cabinet. It had been so different with her real dad. Her real dad died when she was eight. They were living in Idaho then. He got caught out in his truck in a blizzard. He tried to keep warm using the truck heater. They say he died of carbon monoxide.