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Douglas Cate Poem
This dread disease that has afflicted my home,
This malady, this plague on my house;
This making convertible the former quaintness and provincialism thereof
Into something wholly despicable and disgustingly homogeneous,
Yclept "cosmopolitanism," and "worldliness," and "globalization,"
(Or, perhaps "globalism");
That force of rude power that recognizes no potency but that of itself;
The rising tide of puissant, unfocused destruction that threatens to sweep away all, I damn it herewith And herein!
Let it be damned, forever damned!
It is as a marauding force, the soldiery of a vast empire, invading and occupying
My home, my home! O, my poor, beleaguered, inoffensive home!
Nothing was done by it ever to any man, woman or child, but an influx of new citizens
Have poisoned the blood thereof, and the body
And the soul and the mind,
And the now-infected heart!
They eat away at it like some horrid corrosive acid!
These many paths, where once I trod, half of them are gone, stripped of
Their hearty, healthful, verdure and turned into dwelling-places,
Habitations, abodes of the damned for the cosmopolitan hordes who have
Descended en masse upon this once-fair city.
Edifices treasured in my youth are destroyed and swept away,
Leaving behind only the ashen remnant; else transformed into
Something wholly unrecognizable.
Little wharves that lined the verge of the littoral precincts of the community,
These are now wholly disfigured by the dread, ravenous
Affliction of cosmopolitanism and homogeneity.
Where are the streets I used to tread?
Where are the thoroughfares and climes of my remembrance?
Where the environs I most enjoyed, through the breadth of which I
Rambled and cavorted?
'Twas a working port...a place to indolence unknown, and but
Little visited by the scourge of idleness.
Sparta has become Athens, yet I do not rejoice over the Attic change! Would that the artistic and Cosmopolitan Athenian would become the
Toilsome, industrious and warlike Spartan again!
(Never did I think I'd utter those words, but yet I have,
And I would fain reiterate them)
The character of the sun has changed, too...evolved into something
Indistinguishable, hidden, darkened, candlelit and moonlighted.
The sun is a potent, overwhelming sidereal body of aureate light and burning gas; the moon but a turgid, opaque, lacteal and weak thing.
And yet, which one now reigns o'er all that once I loved and in
Which once I was proud to yclept my dwelling-place?
Copyright © Douglas Cate | Year Posted 2017
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Douglas Cate Poem
The poetical books are nearly, by me, complete;
Next follows those once-furled, parchmentlike
Scribal tablets on which were calligraphically
Indited the books classified as
Naught but "prophetical"-
After the major and minor scribes,
The authors of which, and those of the first grouping of the
Newer set of scriptural books:
Those of the evangelical order;
The momentum engendered by the narrative flow:
The alacritous, celeritous, positively propulsive flow:
Of the Bible then stalls out,
Mired in and run aground
Amid the impenetrably deep
Bedrock of the various epistolary, predominantly Pauline books
(Paul, being Mosaic in his inditing of just as many and more books than
Those writ by Moses' own hand, for one has the tally of a mere five or six to his
Luminous credit, whereas the other has something on the order of ten, at least, to his).
Not that those, the Pauline books, are of a very poor quality,
But to segue from the narrative and story, poetry, law,
Prophecy and history and the narrative flow thereof:
To turn from these to abstruse missives
Of a yet abstruser philosophical
Bent, then one finds that one yearns anew for the levitical, mosaical books,
When their perusal of books biblical desists before the gates of the
Sadly boring New Testament-save naturally for the gospels,
Which are themselves poetic and narrative and fast-moving.
Such, at least, is my appraisal of the matter.
Copyright © Douglas Cate | Year Posted 2017
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Douglas Cate Poem
On caparisoned, filleted camels do they
Over the great, soft, tawny sands
Ride;
Unfurled flags and tribal standards flown amidst them,
In the very midst of them-
Of they, who astride great tan camels,
Seem rather scandent and saltant.
These are the irregular, well-armed cavalry of the
"Men In Ambush," for such is the literal translation of their
Nation's cognomen;
And on the sands of the undulant, granular, eminent
Near-Judean wilderness do they ride.
Photographing these from atop the vespertine-hued
Summit of a delivery truck from the nearby
Eminent, circumvallatory, hilly
And fortressed city;
From the very roof of an antiquated bread truck
(Though 'twas then very new by the standards of those bygone days)
Whose radiator is soon to vaporously explode
Amid the oppressive, anhydrous desert heat,
Photographs an American, hatted in the whitest
Of Panama hats, who is a correspondent reporting of wars.
The Arab cavalry ride for locales
Damascene, in order to pursue one's kingly wish
To renew the gardens Cordovan and long-vanished.
Copyright © Douglas Cate | Year Posted 2017
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Douglas Cate Poem
Species sundry sentential
Line the lost lowered loft
Whose weary wayward-ceiled
Roof raises itself over the lot:
The diverse specimen bottles of pharmaceutic potations,
Mortared and mixed as by the Hawthornean sawbones
And apothecary, yclept, poetically rendered: "The Quack Haunted."
(Aye,) Haunted and hunted he was, by that vile old crone,
Whose life he did not decrease one iota nor span,
With the ingested application of one of his odious elixirs,
By the harridan so quaffed.
Yet, the obstreperous host of the soldierly soldiery of dozens of nations,
Yclept herein by the appellation, "Plagiarism," they fairly encroach upon
The tableau naught but ominously.
And thus ominous be also the tone of this,
Which 'tis my most perfervid and prayerful hope that
'Tis utterly unclassifiable, unidentified and unidentifiable.
I do not care for the onerousness of being pinned down,
For living up to the hoary and draconian standards of the vast
Collect of poetry-of poetries.
This I will not brook.
(But before I end this ebullient and elliptical encomium,
I must turn once again to that species of alliterativeness that
Provided the nutriment for it and me: the "grist for my mill,"
As the archaic idiom has it: )
Therefore, these things
Have henceforth
Come casually
To their
End.
Copyright © Douglas Cate | Year Posted 2017
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Douglas Cate Poem
As rains and the torrentialest of snows plummet,
Filling all the skies and the area interstitial to earth and sky
With a frenzy of flying flakes;
As gusty winds doth blow and toss the flakes this way and that;
As torrents true amid the most rending species of gale
Dash themselves bitterly and self-destructively
Against this crude roof,
It is of my hodiernal solitariness,
My aloneness and lonesomeness,
My singleness, and plural,
Romantic stationariness that I must needs
And peradventure speak:
Yet, firstly, permit us all to sit still and our selves
Stationary, silent and still; and silence that intruding music
So ominous yet banal, tinny and slight:
Lighthearted 'tis it, as well:
That which plainly portends our overwhelming destruction,
And that of all our cogitation, cognition, concentration
And composition, with its overmuch resonant yet tinniest
Intrusiveness.
So allow to be it thus and summarily silenced-
Now, that's better.
A man can listen to himself think again;
He can form cognitive thought and appreciation thereof.
Therefor, that music silenced and my concentrative powers
Revived: As a blade at the whetstone, resharpened:
I can keep on with the prosody and poesy of my plight,
But...
Copyright © Douglas Cate | Year Posted 2017
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Douglas Cate Poem
Ere ever I send to her;
She whom I love;
Any of the apologies and explanations of most bittersweet love:
An accounting of those regrets and remorses that I have,
My fooleries and follies and fallacies, fair as well as fell and foul,
That I discharged;
Ere I ever send to her, in epistolary form,
Or else that poetic and psalmic,
Those words of love yet regret that I wish and long most
To discharge unto her, so that her brassed-over heart,
Now encased with bitterest, steeliest, most impenetrable and sharpest
Shapen steel touching me, concerning me, regarding me;
She black of heart with reference to me;
So that her cold unforgiveness might at long last come to an end;
So that this everlasting winter of her hatred, fear, anger, and unforgiveness
Might cease and because spring and summer anew,
For all these reasons and more, I,
On this, the thirty-fifth anniversary of my hardly sainted nativity,
I await her, and her apologetic, explanatory, reconciling and/or
Forgiving remarks,
Her little lovely epistolary lucubrations or inditings of a
Reconciled love,
Because I have a weak and almost extinguished hope that
Perhaps her gift in remembrance of my nativity
(Of which she has more than her sufficiency of knowledge)
Will be the delivery unto me of those remarks abovementioned.
So, though I may pine and long and yearn to send my love
A gift of my own on this day,
So that we might finally see the twilight of this long estrangement of ours,
I will not, not until and unless I see that she hath sent me nothing
And said to me, even less.
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Douglas Cate Poem
Scribal notions these, and oh so sorrowful,
But, despite their seeming poignance they are not additionally puissant, no.
I have seem them, wrapped in warmed and moist leaves:
No, not the leaves as pages of books, as duodecimos and folios and so forth, no:
I speak of leaves arboreal and nemoral, sylvan leaves: The leaves of trees.
It is as if they are in a room or space similar to that foggy one in which Turks,
Who supposedly originated it, and whose name the thing bears, are stereotypically said to
At whiles sit;
Yes, the bath of the Turks, the sweat and steam room as you and I call it,
This is the room I envisage for the leaves of trees that wrap themselves
And entwine themselves lovingly and crushingly-
Like a slithering, forked-tongued footless animal serpentine-
Constricting the parchment pages of the poetries I have written.
Some are elegiac, yes....but, are all?
Is this some new veil of bereavement I festoon the genizah of my poetry with?
It seems not so, but as the rigors of the Philistine warriors adust:
Plastered with the adhesive greyish-white, tawny-hued dust of those Neareastern sands over which they tramped and trod, with that heavy, booted tread of footed dread;
Or if not from beneath their heavy, iron-shod feet, then perhaps
Emanating from the formerly occluded oriels of Judean homes lately
Opened, from which to fling great handfuls of dust from woven baskets by stalwart and unafraid Jewesses, the equally soldierly and fearless wives of the men who made up the armies of the hated invader, new to the Judean lands,
As their foot-sore trials and travails; though given their slaughterous and ignorant, wicked character, a travail thrice-warranted, four times deserved;
So then am I and my poetry.
What else can be said about this little neglected group, now of six?
What of this sextet can be said, can be testified, can be commented?
Rememberable as the least of these poetries, is a jocular, paragrammatic little epigram I once conceived of
('Twas anent a plumber's apprentice and a class he attended to learn the disciplines of the trade):
Which went as follows: "I always COMET in class."
To the which all sorts of risibility should have thus attended, but,
Being, as all my works yet, neglected, I shouldn't think that laughter of
Any kind will ever accompany it.
Yet, that is the exceedingly concise, jocular tale;
And so, I add to it by saying:
"If you can not comment on these my group of poetries, then can't you at least COMET on them?"
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Douglas Cate Poem
If I only could see that which is beyond the pale of the limitation of
The complexity with which things espial are thus espied.
If the round pasty pastry-
Complete with its rind of crispy, golden-brown, flaky crust,
And the alabastrine creaminess contained both without and within-
Therein, or in here, or wherever is the place where all the modes
And analogues and apotheoses of figurative speech,
And the metaphors and similes and symbols true that they prove to be,
Are housed; within that tremulous sphere, wheeling frenetically in some
Gaseous void out there, beyond the pale of the furthest star,
Beyond the realms charted by stellar cartographies,
In that otherness that is also nothingness,
In the dread, dead void between sidereal bodies coruscating in
The caliginous eternal night of the blank emptiness of space;
In that dim spatiality, where all the metaphors that we use eventually go;
To that endless address whence no man and no thing ever returns,
From that dread and dun locus on which we have assayed to focus;
I say from that there is no repair, nor remove.
Once one is there, that is their address until time indefinite.
Still, if only I could glimpse that which lies beyond the limitations of
Our somehow magnificent, yet insignificant imaginations...
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Douglas Cate Poem
As I stood before the porcelaneous basin,
And streamed into its already uric and xanthous-stained depths,
A stain, a sight and a liquid yet yellower and more urinary;
And as cloudiness, not of mind, but of that which is uric attended the
Deposition, a thought occurred unto me, and it poetically and psalmically
Collected and gathered and arranged itself, so that it was as follows:
Does she of a morning stand before some wicked ablutionary sink,
That vile whorish slattern who devoutly believes that only dulcet voices
Emanate from the mouths of the damned in the pits of the lowest Hell?
What fell and foul rites does she with hands cleansed with foulest,
Blackest, evilest water; which of these wickednesses does she perform
And practice, she who washes her hands in the black-flowing waters of
The Stygian pit?
Who is this damned damsel, dame, and maiden fell and foul and not a bit
Fair, who as a fool believes that there are melodious voices echoing in a
Mellifluous and delightful chorus in the lowest pits of Hell?
Though I doubt not that therein there be many an ungodly maiden:
Indeed, the blackest, foulest, ungodliest of fell and evildoing maidens:
Plaguing and blighting the very pits of Hell, who is to say that their
Feminity alone endows unto them a felicity and a melodiousness of tone?
That is doubtless the (unsound) thought that crept into the very
Black heart of she who wrote those foul, foolish words;
But to me, not even the godliest or the goodliest of men,
But inditing ever of good with heart, and tongue and mind and pen,
For such is the great purpose of art such as this, no?
Withal, to me, she spoke of foolery, and of folly.
Lest she be speaking facetiously, in her daft assessment
Of foulest Sheol, she surely was wrong.
Wronger than wrong, if such a thing ever be.
And in my mind, as I urinated, I thought these poetic, psalmic thoughts.
And, though there be hundreds of characters and spaces remaining,
Touching this and that and all things else
And any number and all manner of good
Or e'en fell and foul
Matters, I haven't a word else to say.
The poem is expended, completed, done today
And so am I, with it at least, I must say.
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Douglas Cate Poem
Earlier in the month but lately begun,
(Or was it perhaps the last one, the one before-November?
I know of a surety that it was a time uncoated by congeries
Of most alabastrine snow, and that that which is blanketing
All now, it was not present then. The abundant
Cleanness and glaringly white cleanliness of snow's earthward fall:
This plummeting and deposition of the flakes that seem as
Deific dandruff, else manna or some snowlike thing that
Depends from out the pregnant, grey, ominous clouds
That encroach as a marauding soldiery does on these
Brumous days in this niveous, frore portion of the
Twelvemonth whereat and wherein man has to contend
And pit himself against the snowy flakes.
Yet, the ground being filthy with dirt,
And the cleanliness of snow being nowhere,
'Twas almost certainly in the bleak, but snowless November),
I ope narrowly the door of one of my brethren's truck,
Yet, though 'twas warm, occlusion proved impossible,
And still the door hung ajar despite all my most and best efforts to
Seize it shut and close it.
Yet now the snows are covering it, coating it...
And still it remains unvisited, yet perhaps when my brother
Repairs outside to see it, to step into and drive it,
Perhaps when he notices the ajar door,
Then mayhap he will think the snow somehow was the cause of the
Maloccluded door.
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