The Tower

Tumbled stones, golden leaves, bitterbrush blooming yellow,
Broken windows, scattered words, drowned peach orchards, 
Talking river,
Piled stones, embrace of earth, startled deer, quail fly up.
Love forever, the just country, screams in a haunted wood.
JFK no more, the new thing, and that damned thistle 
Eternal in our hearts. 
Cowboy boots, the 1983 Nissan we shot to pieces with 
assault rifles, coffee maker that gave a thousand mornings solace from the rainy dawn.
Old family pictures by the river, bedsheet covered with trout.
My love in the morning garden, hair golden nimbus in the sun.

Tower of tumbled stone. Hewn blocks of white granite
Lie scattered across the grass. We agree, my son and I
Who have slogged through bog gorse and past incurious sheep
We agree that hauling blocks of stone to this hilltop
Is work we are not suited for.

The loveliness of ruins covers all in its gauzy glamour of romance
Yellow roses lie on the cold white stone, 
remembrance of someone’s beautiful boy
Redeem this spot, this windy hilltop 
Looking out on a hundred thousand stones

This windy hilltop was not always a refuge of solitude 
Once it was new, menacing grey in the weak sun
Occupied by red-coated soldiers  
Mechanical messages clattering out from
A tower of oppression, 
A place of fear
An eye of empire watching for invaders who 
Sang the rights of man

A knot of soldiers on this ben and that and the next
All along this rocky gorse bound coast
A whole island under their mechanical surveillance 
Nation circled in code
So quaint, so modern, so now.

Towers of surveillance, glowing eyes in our night 
Secret patterns pass along sightings, investigations, 
Movements of militias, gatherings of disreputable poets,
Caravans of refugees, convoys of drug mules, 
Vegan restaurant workers in black masks, horseless cowboys
Protesting a thing they can’t see beyond its flag
Can’t feel beyond the club and the burn of pepper spray:
Otherwise just librarians and the guy at the DMV, 
Electricity and your student loans, fighter planes and forest fires.
Hard to grasp, difficult to know or to love, 
Resistant to the mind.

The coded balls and flags rise and fall clatter and flutter 
Always watchful. 

Tower of control beating out
The repeated tattoo to a conforming heart
Breasts and genitals of all sizes and descriptions
Acts of unspeakable intimacy stripped of all
Intimacy, turned into a marionette show,
Shadow play of control.
We purchase our own conformity
Counting our Black Friday good fortune
As we are robbed in mechanical servitude
Catalogued by our browsers as the drones come
Bringing groceries, hell fire, Chinese food, 
Messages from the dead and the disappeared
Reappearing forever on Facebook. 

Tower of wonders drawing us from our castle
Rising above stone maze of streets, seven stories above the city,
Illusions, projections, mysteries, simulations,
Lightning orbs, mirrors of deception 
Transforming us into Neanderthal or manga sumo samurai
Unstable bridges of swirling light, going nowhere
Impossible to stand upright
Things impossible to name
Ephemeral marvels, transient miracles
Mind dazzlers, eye foolers
Capturing the unreal city 
Unawares

Tower of faith, lighthouse of my youth glimmering luminous 
Across heart’s horizon, now invisible as the earthly Pacific
Thundering on distant headlands, almost I see it at times
Feel almost the tidal pull that drew me from the pew
Down the aisle give testimony make right offer myself
Living sacrifice commit to carry the Word to far peoples
Who had only heard from Methodists or from papists
Who had no sure concept of the importance of all-you-can-eat 
Buffets after the morning service, or voting Republican.
Who had only the Word in their own heart language, ignorant of God’s English
Who had no red white blue baseball caps, no snowmobile jet ski video games
Or many other blessings of the Lord, had only

Bread water each other

But why should I trivialize, what is laughable about
Comfort, community, the humanity
I felt singing together, psalms rising round my heart 
In a surging tide, lifting prayers toward the sky
Where are such comforts now found, 
Children at play on the field, the sound of laughter
Good smells from the fellowship hall kitchen
Smiles from the old people, gardening tips, 
Politics absent from my memory, 
How could there be any
Politics in that city we were looking for?

That sea of faith stretched round 
Our hearts is now awash with micro-plastic patriotism, 
Discarded lies, detritus of food court moneychangers
Cheap pop praise electronic fills the holy places where 
Wolves come to pray, where burdens are bound to 
Human souls, chains forged strong for commercial gain, 
Building fund, car salesman preacher’s fraudulent handshake
The shepherd hungry for lamb chops.
Ya’ll come over for dinner now, or we can all go out
To the outback steakhouse and spend week’s wages 
For indigestion and try to forget the pangs of spiritual famine.

I distrust all intentionality in these pages
I distrust your acceptance of my making
This broken reed, wrench with rounded jaws, 
Splintered peg, nail in the sandcastle of dreams.
Why should I make it clear for you? 
Why should I make an allegory for you?
Will you understand all my talk of vanished songs, 
Of old stories, birds, the sound of waves?
Will you disregard? Then disregard
Will you make these vague intuitions the predicate 
Of your lies? What would you gain with such tricks,
Such sleight of mind? 

These babbled words are the indescribable bluegold 
Of the sky before dawn, a bare bulb shining out over miles of wheat field
Sagebrush coyotes the quail in their covert
Assign other meaning to them if you can, but know that
They are life in death, life in spite of the machine the eye the drive for profit
Life for my people our people all people
Life for our gardens and our sons, life for our daughters 
Life for old songs fading from the world and blossoming new again
Life in the face of power control subjection.

Tower of profit shining gold in immutable blink of digital eye
Tears of children, loneliness of women, manly anger, human despair
Weighed parceled divvied out by the gram, a hundred thousand
Hogs for slaughter, unearned increment on the Trail of Tears,
Gigantic dams drowning the salmon, prairies turned to dust
For a pocket full of grain. 

Ten thousand years of life – buffalo tongue and fertilizer
The whorehouse for your sister, five dollars for you daughter
(won’t you take a look at her) 
Your son crushed by logs, torn by machines
The young abandoned to meth in the dying towns, cannon fodder
To keep the oil man’s party running high, beaches choked with plastic bags, 
Forest burning on the mountain. 

Honest hunger, honorable poverty, faith of the poor, pride of the simple
Are not for them, not for the tower of profit. For them all night raves with
Russian models, tequila mixed with pills, plastic surgery transformation
Into Artemis Aphrodite Apollo, for them raptor pickup trucks, tickets for the game
Big game safaris, non-stop porn, big thick ribeye steaks, the cup of beer that never runs dry, 
As they try to fill the hollow empty of songs of children, tests of strength, pride of potatoes 
Chiles from the earth, the gnawing fear of what comes after, the knowing that we’ll never 
Quite measure up without our false bravado and our big machines.

The tower of profit sweeps the table in the rigged game
All the gold, all the silver
All the land, all the water 
Your grandmother’s antique table, fossils of ancient sea shells, 
Arrowheads from the plundered field, ancient coins, the song of the loom
Ring of the hammer on the anvil
All must be brought to the tower

The welcoming of new life, graduation pictures, your wedding day,
Ambulance ride on the night when you pass from this place
All must be brought to the tower
Your first kiss, the nipples of your mother’s breast, flowers of regret and Yearning, every river running to the sea
All must be locked in the tower
The sky, light of the sun turned to electricity, the gold on the moon
All belongs to the tower
Elk on the mountain, salmon in the stream, grouse hiding in the wood
All cattle of the tower
All for the rich man’s pleasure
All must be brought to the tower

Build house of mud bricks, of logs, stones from the field
It is not permitted
Catch rainwater, split shingle, become part of the land
It is not allowed. There is a permit, the plan must have 
The stamp of the engineer, the water was already stolen, the bricks -
What does it mean not to believe any more in brick and stone?

The tower is built of plastic lumber, 
Oriented strand board, plastic, paper, substantial as a wasp nest 
In a rotten log. Built in a day by a van fulla Mexicans from Yakima
They sure know how to work, all done overnight, 
I wasn’t payin by the hour. Just a big load from home depot 
and that van fulla Mexicans from Yakima.

The tower is built of burning thatch, 
smoldering roof beams of the old houses
Grandmothers’ tombstones, threads of smashed looms
Cries of children abandoned in the snow
All the things we have let slip through our hands
All the things we have let go

What can I say in the face of such power?
I will tell you what I will tell
I will tell you I have climbed mountains 
Muscles burning upward through the manzanita
To stand at last at an edge of the world
Haloed in dying sunlight against the void below
I will tell you I have walked ancestral sands spangled with starry cockles
I will tell you of ptarmigan hiding in the rocky heather
I will tell you a thousand fragile things, 
Insignificant, weightless, so remote and alive
that towers and unsleeping malice mechanical in the sky 
mean less than nothing
I will tell you of the hydrostatic force behind a thousand dams
I will tell you of their power melting like dirty snow, 
Powerful plans scattering like dry leaves in 
Forests our fathers’ fathers’ fathers walked.
Crowns of flowers shooting up through the snow, migrations of birds
Accumulations of dust in unused rooms
Of you and me, of our love and all that moves the world.

Author: Duncan MacNae

Exiled Gael, scion of the Dust Bowl, dweller within Divine Grace, admirer of mountains, I have made my peace with trout and the starlings. Looking for a river and healing trees. duncanmacduncan5@gmail.com View all posts by Duncan MacNae