NEURO-BIOFEEDBACK WITH MIZPAH AND OTHER POETRY by Bob Zisk

The New Stylus: Issue I

Neuro-Biofeedback with Mizpah

Mnemosyne, mother of memory,
Step out from the leaves of your ancient tree,
Into the waters of clear recollection,
That I may bathe in Verse's pure reflection,
Where, in the ivy-wreathed hollows of earth,
Time and death coil in the moist skin of
birth.

Mnemosyne, mother of memory,
Do not let the inkblot swallow me
As I cling to the strangled serpent's stone,
And shudder at the Satyr's shrill pipe tone,
Fearing loose, twisting auguries of violence
That pack my throat with withered leaves, and silence.

Mnemosyne, mother of memory,
Unstitch my lips and set my spirit free:
Unlock the boney casque of my word-hoard,
And one more time let my heart-strings be heard
Before my fragrant heart-wood is riven,
And the final nails are struck and driven.

---

In the Gap 

There is a knot hole in our picket fence.
Its rim is thinly glazed with an ice skin.
Clear, frosty daylight fills the hole and darkness
Envelops the dank air behind old wood.
It is a double fence. Or more precisely, 
Two rows of pickets with a gap between them.
In that universe round-eared deer mice sleep
And have their babies. Lizards, little skinks,
Bronze and swift footed,  scurry back and forth,
Shining in the light, then vanishing
In that narrow band of lightless refuge,
Where darkness covers them in winter's torpor.
Among the rotting leaves between the fences
And on the hardpacked ground  beside my house, 
Latrodectus, in widow's weeds, devours
Her lovers in post-coital afterglow,
And rolls herself up in a winter ball,
While dark, domestic earwigs clean their nests
And curl up with their mates in cozy warmth
And intimations of a fertile Spring.
Above the pickets, in the naked boughs
Of an old peach tree, dark-eyed juncos flit
Among bare branches, drop to the beige earth,
Snatch an easy meal of hapless bugs,
Then puff out their slate breasts and fly away
Through a pewter sheen of winter light.
Off to one side I stand. Cold air envelops
My sack of bones. Lingering snow-clouds seep into
My joints and rub the tattered cartilage --
Perhaps dull, orthopedic auspices?
Dim premonitions of eroding flesh?
Necrotic auguries of rigor mortis?
A creaking elm sways under an unkindness
Of ravens silhouetted on gnarled boughs.
A pair of collared doves is sipping water,
And I am shivering as a sharp wind
Nibbles at my ears, snags my ribs
On wintry hooks of early morning frost.
My lips and nose are growing numb. I hear
A voice that carries over grinding teeth
Of hacksaw susurrations from the cave
Of restless winds. It is my wife. There's warmth
On her chiming voice, and promises
Of fragrant vapors from within our house,
Where she has brewed a pot of Temple of Heaven,
Steaming green gunpowder. My backbones rattle
And the wind whines. I bid ravens and doves
A frosty godspeed,  and then hurry inside,
Where small jade pellets swell in hot water,
Uncurl in soft eruptions of green scent
That thaw the jagged column of my spine.
Temple of Heaven: O my wife,  my moon!
You brush against me. Warmth from your soft breasts
Drives out January's numbing chill,
And I sit down and sip my tea. In front
Of me the fireplace glows with crackling pine,
And in the ripples of warm air, I close
My eyes in visions of some future time
Beyond the scope and reach of time, when sense
Will sink into a lightless, soundless  cipher
Around which neither cold nor heat, nor rain
Nor snow disturbs unfeeling nothingness,
And we, who used to be, are nevermore,
Just specks of stubble on a razor's edge. 

---

Twilight Music without a Moral 

I waited in an ancient glade,
My greyhound at my side.
On his neck his silver bells made
Music at eventide. 

Fallow deer, spotted bucks,
Stood with their scented does,
And by the gray granite rocks,
My greyhound's music rose 

With fireflies and the rising moon,
And in the violet twilight
The dappled bucks, red and brown, 
Awaited Orion's light. 

---

After Winter 

Last Summer's withered asters  stand, white haired,
On brittle stalks that Winter hasn't spared.
I've felt December's icy mortuary 
Freeze hard in the white winds of January.
While woodland thrushes warble their soft trills,
Lean ravens rip the pulp of fresh roadkills.
Soon crisp new leaves will quake with songs of love,
And the soft, throaty moans of the Spring dove
Will coo from her gray, banded neck, and Spring
Will bloom again,  while mourning cloaks take wing,
And in the thawing soil, as croci bloom,
Summer's asters will rise from Winter's womb.

---

February Snow 

This morning, shortly after dawn had broken,
When the snow, deep and undisturbed, still glowed
Pale violet on its breast, I grabbed my shovel
And began to clear a narrow path
Out of my house and past the black iron gate
That opened out into the frozen dawn.
My feet, shod in rubber sandals from Thailand,
Woke me up better than the coffee I'd scarfed down,
And my thoughts turned for a brief drift in time,
To Socrates barefooted in the Grecian
Snow. But soon my nearly four score years
Blew gales of panting breath and icy fog
As my mouth opened, gaping like the cave
Of old Aeolus and his roaring winds.
But this is just old man's hyperbole,
A trickle of late-life testosterone
Seeping through acequias of forgotten
Muscle memory. Before me rabbit feet
Had scored the snow, and I, surprised, held back
My shovel in mid-stroke, as I caught sight
Of a second set of tracks, a large
Feline faintly marking his way through crisp snow.
It was Monty, stepping stealthily
Along the rabbit's track. Everyone's cat,
He was in killer mode as he pursued 
The rabbit through the bush, toward the frozen
Arroyo at the neighborhood's wild edge.
Enough for admiration of lean death --
Moving patiently with the rising sun,
I plunged my shovel through the crunching snow,
And, as the pale disk peered through leafless treetops,
I dug another line of frozen trench,
Just wide enough for my wife's feet to make 
Their tiny way down to her little door
On our pint-sized sky-blue Mitsubishi.
O dawn! O morning! In your frigid silence
The pressing cavalcade of years too few
Does not grow lighter, but their long passage
Lingers in this winter memory's
Long ascent. Though my wife lies asleep
In our warm bed, I press my lips against
The folded sepals of her willing mouth,
As though she were with me in this crisp dream,
And I, her brief cicada, greet the dawn
With creaking shoulders and stiff, grinding knees.
I've cleared a path across the cold snow's bosom,
And it will last until tonight's snowfall,
When we will lie together in the dark night,
And a new storm will bury dawn's hard work. 

---

On the Untimely and Violent Death of Acheta Domesticus 

Little cricket, I swept you from my floor
Clear to the edge of Hades’ somber shore,
Where, crouched among the murky reeds, you sing
A busy tune for those mirthless souls who ring
The thick, paludal mere of River Styx.
Penniless they stand, a pallid mix
Of outstretched arms and spent mortality.
Cast out from an arid maw of penury,
They do hard time: a hundred years they’ll wait
To dare the dog and the adamantine gate.
But you, little cricket, will stow a ride
To the black River of Death’s other side,
Where, in the fold of a garment, you’ll slip
Unnoticed into Hades’ final keep. 

---

Susanna in the Garden of Flesh and Spirit: Time's Labyrinth 

In the cloistered passions of long years
I've cherished  the warm drops of your soft tears.
Often as I wander into the  keep
Of old desire and hungry loss, you weep,
And in the rocking tide of lilting time
The salt of your warm eyes invites my rhyme
To rise from the moist fog of memory,
To sail on curling waves of love's dark sea,
Beyond the cradle of the setting sun,
Far from the roses of the heart's pink dawn. 

---

Twilight Song of the Heart's Hunger 

I sit here, by the cricket's singing stone,
And, in the embers of the setting sun, 

My thighs grow warm, and burn without your hips
Joined to my lap.  Bereft of your pink lips, 

I sit here by the cricket's singing stone,
And ache as the ring-necked doves moan, 

And gray, twilit cicadas shake the gloam,
And lady spiders stretch, and work the loom, 

While I sit by the cricket's singing stone,
And tremble at a lorn owl's bitter tune. 

---

Indian Market: On Hearing a Rock-Musician's Song for His Julia 

I too have written poems for young girls
With honeysuckle mouths, and I have seen
Wilted petals drop from their drooping curls. 

I’ve mourned them (pale and smooth as birchwood burls),
Who thrilled my touch with breasts stiff as baleen:
I too have written poems for young girls. 

I’ve wound their stranded hair in silky whorls
And marveled at its slender, threaded sheen:
But wilted flowers have dropped from drooping curls. 

Nascent desires have burned in scented swirls,
Throbbing mysteries I could scarcely glean --
And yes, I’ve written poems for young girls. 

I’ve heard the cries of swift, red winged merles,
And, as Fall breathed fire into Summer’s green,
Wilted flowers would drop from dry, drooping curls. 

Beauty, blighted, wails in mournful skirls,
And, in the milling jaws of time, grows lean. 
And though I’ve written poems for young girls,
Wilted petals drop  from their drooping curls. 

---

Late Fall: Planh Late in Life 

Autumn, when the green leaves turn gold and red,
Hovers between time's arc and beauty's loss.
Hummingbirds and butterflies are fleeing,
And the leafstripped boughs sprawl across the sky.
A leaden chill rests on the sunbeams' gold,
And winter gathers on the mountaintops. 

Autumn: when our green leaves turn gold and dead, 
The year's spent growth decays to moldering dross.
Shaggy spruce bark hangs from straight trunks, concealing
Dark mourning cloaks until Spring, when they'll fly
Into the crisp, resurrecting cold
Of sex and death among the vernal dewdrops. 

In scarlet Fall I kiss my lady's head.
Her slender hairs are cold in the crisp frost
Of early morning, and the tears, congealing 
On our cheeks, only signify
It's time to slip ourselves into time's mold,
To stitch our mortcloths for that time when time stops. 

---

Words in Search of a Tune 

Will you go with me to the mountaintop,
Where seashells dot the ground,
And down below mule deer clip clop
Across the pebbled sand? 

No, we'll not climb the mountaintop,
Nor watch  the blood red ball
Of setting sun flare up and drop
Beyond the mauve nightfall. 

We've grown too old for the mountaintop,
For the spangled starlight;
And the  desert moon will not stop
The violet flood of night. 

---

Childhood Scar at Twilight 

In this mid-Autumn twilight I
Sit watching for the evening star.
I rub my head and touch the scar
Under my hair, above my eye. 

The blood was warm. I didn't cry
As the surgeon trimmed my hair
Stanched the bleeding, and wiped me dry.
Now, waiting for the evening star 

I watch as small, swooping bats fly
Across my line of sight, and here
In front of the sliding glass door,
In this mid-Autumn twilight, I
Sit watching for the evening star. 

---

Peach Nectar Near Eden's Gate 

Sitting out back, under my gnarled old peach,
I listen for the sounds of chickadees
And soft feathered wrens in the canopy
Above my head. Gold breasted finches dart
Through filtered beams of early morning light,
And drops of last night's rain fall on my head. 

Striped honeybees are buzzing round my  head,
And scented nectar drips down from the  peach,
Glistening in long, soft rays of gentle light.
Though I can't sing I call the chickadees,
And blue fleshed dragonflies circle and  dart
Through light and shadow, into the  canopy. 

Thin earwigs climb the fruited canopy,
Sometimes dropping onto my bare head.
Two pairs of collared doves wing down and dart
Into the green leaf to suck on a ripe peach.
They startle the plump, perching chickadees,
Who flutter upward  into the morning light. 

I know that darkness will snuff out this light.
There will be no green leaf, no canopy,
No songs, no beating wings of chickadees.
No bees, thick with pollen, will dust my head,
No sighing doves will share a juicy peach,
And earwigs won't crawl where gold finches dart. 

The arrow of the almighty—poisoned dart—
Sickens me in this soft midsummer light,
In the fragrant shroud of this wide peach.
On a sunbeam it pierced  the canopy,
And in the early morning grazed my head,
Unnoticed by wren, finch and chickadees. 

But I will not forsake these chickadees
Nor perish in the venom of death's dart
That punctures the leaves and grazes my head,
Tearing at me in morning's waxing light.
In the green of this sunlit canopy
I will drink the nectar of my fragrant peach. 

Sweet chickadees will leap in golden light.
Dragonflies will dart through the canopy
Over my head: Doves will suck the sweet peach. 

---

Early Autumn Light 

In the crisp sunlight of this Autumn,
In the pied leafstorm of last Summer's fall,
I stand alone in the first golden leaf
Of September's end, and inspire moist pollen
From the cool breezes that blow down the slopes,
Across the open meadows and tall weeds. 

Flights of giant bumblebees suck tall weeds
Arrayed haphazardly in the bright Autumn:
The sun casts violet shadows on green slopes,
Where quaking swirls of aspen leaflets fall,
And bees and birds, thick with yellow pollen,
Dart in and out of the resplendent leaf. 

Is this fool's gold where I walk in gold leaf,
And dark eyed sunflowers shine on the yellow weeds?
Blue rayed asters, galaxies of pollen,
Dust me under lapis skies of Autumn,
Where fragile butterflies flutter and fall
Among doomed, turning leaves on mottled slopes. 

Soon the bull elk will bellow on the slopes
And antlered bucks will rattle branch and leaf,
And I will find a way where seasons fall
And rise from skeletons of withered weeds,
And in the fertile mulch of this moist Autumn
I will dust myself in the bee's pollen. 

My skin is newly mined gold, rich with pollen
Blown through the fields and down the slopes,
And I grow rich in the gold dust of Autumn,
And in the banded ore of turning leaf.
I snap long stalks of tall, withered weeds
Whose dry leaves tremble as the dark seeds fall. 

From the gray ridgelines purple shadows fall.
Whispering breezes scatter golden pollen
Across brown tops of lanky, flowering weeds.
Late afternoon casts shadows on dense slopes,
And in a maze of tender, falling leaf,
I take breaths in the rutting air of Autumn. 

The sun is sinking. Night falls on soft slopes.
I am gold pollen on pale, moonlit leaf,
And pearl weeds sip silver moonbeams of Autumn. 

---

Remembering Stacey in a Time When We Were too Young
Ieu sui Arnautz qu'amas l'aura
e cas la lebre ab lo bueu
e nadi contra suberna. 

I came through the unlatched front door and passed
The shower where you and he, locked at the hip,
Found time to share a kiss, and I imagined
A crusted scab that itched while calloused grief,
Muffled in dammed up tears, strangled my heart
In the warm bile of mutual deceit. 

The dim light bulbs cast shadows of deceit
My way and back, as I hurriedly passed
You both. Yes, I ached in my foolish heart.
My eyes could not ignore the grind of hip
And groin in the hot desert of my grief,
Where I was hooked by barbs real, not imagined 

I never forgot. It wasn't pain imagined
Nor was it trickery or self-deceit.
I burned with bitterness and a dumb grief
That even now has not wholly passed.
He liked to say that I wasn't "hip,"
Yet he did not deserve your sovereign heart. 

There was a worm that chiseled through his heart.
There slyness and cocaine nourished imagined
Offense, while he learned stealth and how to hip-
Shoot, and play the Judas goat. Deceit
Took root like vines of poison ivy. Years passed,
While time hardened him and toughened my  grief.

O my wilted rose, my fragrant grief,
Yours was the golden pyxis of my heart,
And through the broadening waters of change passed
A logjam of passion. Yet unimagined
Is the sweetness of sorrows cleansing deceit,
For souls endure, though time break heart and hip. 

After two years, in cowslip and rose hip, 
Among tall oak and maple, that old grief
Was a green thorn in memory: deceit
And kind forgetfulness in Summer's heart,
Where a wounded old love, real, not imagined,
Quickened under the scar of pain now past. 

I'm still not "hip," though time has purged my heart.
So, from red embers of grief I've imagined
Deceit a phoenix rising from a burned past.

---

Youth was not without its moments. Flesh is sweet and tender, and though love may be consumed, it is not destroyed in the burning heart. 

Epigraph: These are the concluding lines, the final tercet of a song by Arnaut Daniel: 

I am Arnaut, who gather the winds,
And hunt the hare from the back of the ox,
And swim against the rising tide.

---

Bob Zisk lives with his wife in Northern New Mexico. He has taught Classical Languages and World Religions, and has had poetry published in English and in Latin. He was Director of Technical Services for NYC's Division of Homeless Housing Development, and has taught courses in Building Stabilization Methods and Materials, and Planning and Zoning Issues. He has authored a wide range of architectural and engineering specifications, as well as project impact assessments. At this time Bob is growing old with his wife, who tells him that despite a resemblance to Pan, he will never look like a Greek god.