Esther Cameron



Esther Cameron is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in Bellowing Ark, The Antigosh Review, Poetry, Hunger, The Lyric, The Blue Unicorn, American Writing, Troubadour, and many other journals, as well as on the Poetry Porch  and Iambs And Trochees websites.  Her blank-verse epic on the ecological crisis, The Consciousness of Earth, was published in installments by Bellowing Ark and is forthcoming in book form with Multicultural Books. Bellowing Ark  has also published Cameron's The World's Last Rose, which is currently the Featured Work on The HyperTexts.  The Antigonish Review’s website has archived several of her essays, including “‘Earthwake’ and Its Sources,” at www.antigonishreview.com/bi-126/126-esthercameron.html. She also edits a poetry magazine, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, and a multifaceted website, Point and Circumference, online at www.pointandcircumference.com.

Esther Cameron has two featured works published elsewhere on The HyperTexts:

Prophecy
a corona of sonnets
in memory of Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972)
and Paul Celan (1920-1970)

The World's Last Rose
Sonnets for the Prince of Twilight
a poetic tribute to Paul Celan (1920-1970)

The following poems represent a poetic trajectory which links the Berkeley of the ‘60's with the Jerusalem of the ‘80's and the America of the 90's and afterward. Cameron writes that the 1971 sonnet sequence "Nouvelles Chimeres" premiered here (it is also forthcoming in The Romantic Quarterly) is closely related to The World's Last Rose: "'Nouvelles Chimeres' was written at the moment of breakthrough; The World's Last Rose, written 24 years later, is an extended reflection on that experience, its circumstances and implications."



Pas De Deux

A formal poem is a pas de deux
Where the one partner, with all he requires,
Is form; the other is the poet, you,
With your perceptions, memories, and desires;
Where each learns her capacity, and fires
The other on and on to ever-varied
Displays; but all is spoiled if either tires
Or lets himself be overwhelmed or carried.

And yet there are those lovely leans and lifts
Where mate on mate all will-lessly reclines
Or the balance of their strength more subtly shifts,
Those pauses eye to eye, where one divines
The Other not as something in the way
But deepest Self, and what one wanted most to say.


 
Archaeophobia
   (or, Write as you speak)

The Time Police won't let you say
A word that smacks of yesterday,
A word that rings as if you read it,
Let alone gives your readers credit
For reading. No, it's got to sound
Just like the language that is found
In conversation ... Where? Well, not,
Of course, in the speech of those who blot
Their sentences with "Like" and "Wow"
Or expletives from "Holy cow"
To "[blank]," nor those whose grammar's poor,
(For this, you see, is Litrachoor),
Or who prevaricate or bargain
In New Age or professional jargon,
Or who (intending to amuse
Themselves and friends) will sometimes choose
Quaint idioms: "forsooth," "alas,"
Such wags will say, but that won't pass
The Time Police. Then who shall teach
The standard of Colloquial Speech?
Look: buy our magazine and see
How people talk -- in Poetry.



In Defense of Archaism

It is our common language with the dead,
whose hopes and fears, whose wonder and dismay
are left, in words like consecrated bread,
to strengthen us for what we have to say.
It is our pledge, moreover, to the unborn
that we will leave them something of the past,
not cast them disinherited, forlorn,
speechless, upon an earth we have laid waste.
With novelty we are glutted, dazed, and blind,
we see a thing and know not what it means,
being to our own moment so confined
we lack the sense that in time's recess gleams.
Nor have the common people any say
in faithless speech, that knows not yesterday.



Sukkot

1.
These golden days suspended in mid-fall
favor the shelters we are bound to rear
in keeping of our ancient festival,
roofed open to the common roof we share
with creatures that know only earth and air,
rejoicing in a freedom which we call
our own, while time and chance our shelters spare,
braving the fact that we are vulnerable.
Thus at our ease, thus held and hazarded,
we entertain the great demanding dead
amid the fruits of labor and the earth.
Shekhinah, may the spirit that's here housed
and hearkened, through the wintertime stay roused
to courage and to dark-defying mirth.

2.
This hut, three-sided like the letter Beit,
roofed with palms and stars, full-charged inside
with what is harvested, this spirit-crate
that floated down to me on history's tide:
with what frail confidence it seems to ride
beside the armored concrete-anchored craft
in which as children of this time we hide,
although the hut may see them sink abaft
and still bob lightly onward. Now this thought
comforts my obsolete humanity,
so overbulked by ingenuity
it often feels itself a thing of naught.
Form is the house of spirit. Till this shell
ride hollow, here I live and here I dwell.


 
Artifact

Silence. The moving facets of the stream
contemplated for irony. I would not have it said
I spun this, gray on silver,
out of mere
self. Rather

a hemisphere, open, a bowl
or cup, with twig
and leaf, twine
and tendril -- some fraction
of the dissolving forest.

                                            1968



Nouvelles Chimeres
1. Dulcinea

Falcon, fly where you will! I know the way:
A feather, a drop of blood each thousand-year,
And I'll find out your track in oceans drear,
And steer through all the dolphin-crowded bays.
Though but a leaf, a snake, a bird betray
Which way you turned, surmising no one near,
Yet I will climb to where your eagles veer
And sing your star at morning and noonday --

Dawn breaks. I feel the movement of the wind,
I stand on peak or on wave-cleaving prow,
Foam-, cloud-white garments flutter out behind.
Image of victory, en route from one
Show to the next -- the waves like barkers run --
But if I live or not, I do not know.
 
2. Giovanni

Look on the mirror which I hold for you,
Not on my face, which is not fair to see:
It is the dark waste where no man may be,
The wandering tomb, the sprig of withered rue.
Don’t look behind you, as the poets do,
Else my reflection never shall you see,
But this time, please, refrain from killing me:
It is my false reflection that is true.

Yes, that mirage along the ashen curve
of hill, called by my name: it is the light
That now is faded from a poor man's face
Coming to meet you where the highway swerves,
The road, the crumpled wreckage sinks from sight,
And you are rising into light's blind space.
 
3. Legend

Yes, there dwells a monster in this stone,
But you shall slay him. Enter without fear.
The inward path you shall find out alone,
After the deed the outward way lies clear.
Above the door there hangs a spiderweb,
But brush it not aside as you go by;
See in your hollow hand the ball of thread:
Arachne, Ariadne -- it is I.

It is the castle of enchambered Grief.
Enchanted songs in jeweled silence stand
Along the walls, and stare with strangers’ eyes,
But in the vaults there grows the herb Belief.
Descend, and pluck it with a reverent hand,
And in the joy of manly stature rise.
 
4. Proserpina

I am the bee that plies the fallow rose,
Yet nonetheless my mother’s name bear I:
Call it not harsh though many summers die,
Though many times the hollow petals close
Before the nightingale bleeds to the thorn
A sigh of embers wasted in the night
Because the watchful votaress was not born:
All hovers in this humming of the light.

I sing the pain of her who bore me, and
lay long in darkness, dreamed me lost for good,
Of him who long ago, with trusting hand
Laid on the world, touched stone and missed the wood:
The shining letters on the Darkened Light -
I kiss them, as he kissed the words, good night.
 
5.

BE DAVID, not Actaeon; for the hounds
That kenneled near Diana's spring have fled,
They howl around Goliath's feet instead;
It is the iron, and not the wood, resounds.
Artemis' magic fails. Her orb still rounds
And shrinks, but moonlight in the streets lies dead.
Scarred is the sacred face with impious tread:
Therefore the tides of hell have burst hell's bounds,

And fiercely bright and ominous dawns this day.
See there a forest shrine: the votaress
Comes out to greet the traveler on his way
Toward meetings darkened to a woman's guess --
Desiring but to hear a tale, and bless
Some hero's arms against the oncoming fray.
 
6.

IS IT THEN TRUE: that he must wander hell
And I in rainless heavens count the rains
That fall on earth's dark furrows, and still in vain
Bind the dark land with many a healing-spell?
What echoes will I hear from that deep well?
To hold the star that lights that ear of grain
My hand grows cold; and will that crust of pain
Wash to the sky-shore as a perfect shell?

No; I am exiled to a puppet-show,
Mocked with a name, gloved to a mad ghost-hand,
Imputed to a voice I do not know
And gesturing what men will not understand:
Yet I will sing, though I see never again
The eternal smile between the poles of pain.

7. Chiaroscura

I ask for sleep, that I may wake again,
Not stare a madness into gentle eyes,
Not as a torrent shall this sorrow rise,
But clear the wine of night be poured for men.
They don’t know what they’re doing, don't see how
The threads as tangling between lip and tongue,
They have not thought of how the night was wrung
To free the trembling orb that rises now.

This thread will hold, wound upon spools of stone,
Those hands will read the patterns which we weave,
This night shall last until the work be done,
These words shall be the grain, shall be the sieve.
We shall not treat with Time. We shall not die.
Blind to the end, we pass the Ancient Eye.

                                                                              1971



An Invitation

We gather here to see
faces from which we need not hide our face,
to hear the sound of honest speech, to share
what dreams have etched upon the sleeping brain,
what the still voice has said, when heavy hours
plunged us to regions of the mind and life
not mentioned in the marketplace: to find
and match the threads of common destinies,
designs grimed over by our thoughtless life --
A sanctuary for the common mind
we seek. Not to compete, but to compare
what we have seen and learned, and to look back
from here upon that world where tangled minds
create the problems they attempt to solve
by doubting one another, doubting love,
the wise imagination, and the word.
For, looking back from here upon that world,
perhaps ways will appear to us, which when
we only struggled in it, did not take
counsel of kindred minds, lay undiscovered;
perhaps, reflecting on the Babeled speech
of various disciplines that make careers,
we shall find out some speech by which to address
each sector of the world's fragmented truth
and bring news of the whole to every part.
We say the mind, once whole, can mend the world.
To mend the mind, that is the task we set.
How many years? How many lives? We do not know;
but each shall bring a thread.

                                                      1975

Published in B'Or Ha-Torah and in Healers

[untitled]

In a dark night I lay in prayer,
while cruel armies gathered round,
for God's arm flashing in the clouds,
for splitting seas; but even more
that one small star of selfless love
might pierce the murk of sordid strife,
that one white flower of mercy pure
might blossom from earth's stony ground.

                                                                             1982

Song

If you must indeed return there, pray speak of me to the cyclamen,
To the lavender flowers on the chinaberry trees,
To the evening star as it gleams in the sky at twilight,
And to the asphodel; for I found none faithful save these.

And it will be when you lift your eyes to the twilight
Sky with the evening star, that you will remember again,
And I will be the evening star to you, and the scent of the chinaberry trees,
And you will not lose your soul amid the sons of men.

                                                                                                    1982



The Sign-Bearer

While passing through the Ben Yehuda Mall
during the Ten Days, I was struck
by one who leaned upon a signboard's pole,

two further signs covered his chest and back:
inscriptions from the Talmud and the Bible
proclaimed it right to love hard work

rather than alms and idle speech and quarrels.
The man stood silent, upright as his staff
save that his neck was bent at a right angle;

he was thin, not young, shabbily clad.
Facing him in a semicircle stood
some ten or twenty people.  Did they laugh,

question, or ponder?  As for me, I strode
too quickly past, stung by some arrogance or pity,
to have studied their expressions, or to have read

all the sayings.  Yet now it seems fitting,
seeing he had the majesty of the absurd,*
to draw from him an image of the poet's velleity
of standing humbly beside his word.

                                                                    1984

Note: "The majesty of the absurd" is from Paul Celan's "Meridian" speech.

The Unwritten Poem

The poem I have not yet written
       whose first line would be the doorsill
       to another space

The poem I have not written yet
       whose form would be that space domed for meeting
       filled with its own darklight
       like the shine from invisible candles

The poem I have not written
       whose words would be humans met
       in understanding

The poem not yet written
        whose voice would be the inner voice of all

that poem
I would send you

                                   1984



Poets in Law School

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.--Shelley

We take to law because our love has failed.
We study how to sue instead of sing.
We still plead; but our pleadings have a sting:
They're meant not to reach out, but to be hurled.
Farewell, the uncorrupted word that held
In visionary light each common thing,
That fitted symbolism like a ring
Upon the hand of the abandoned world.

Here we avoid each other's eyes in shame,
Learning our lawyer tricks, earning the blame
For half the evils of this addled time.
Wish that other folks had valued us
When we spoke to them in truth and trust.
They cast out reason, when they turned from rhyme.

                                                                                               1992
Published in Word of Mouth and Mad Poets Review



Sestina of the October Rain

There is that sound in the sound of rain outside
That bids me to speak, what time I wake in sorrow
Before dawn, for thinking of that lady
Whose servant I would be, though she is poor
And for many days I have had of her no sign
That she remembers me in her distant tower.

Long have I known she is prisoned in the tower
And those who would serve her must roam outside
To receive on their brows, as the sign
Of her favor, the tracings of stubborn sorrow,
Sole livery of those who love the poor
And keep faith with them and their constant lady.

In this time she has few who call her lady:
The powers and principalities do so tower
Over all, systematically making poor
All who by will or hap remain outside
Their dominion; their minions sneer at sorrow
And count it folly to believe a sign.

The scored serpent, that is their only sign.
They strenuously boast there is no lady
It cannot charm, no tort or sorrow
It cannot compensate, no lofty tower
Of troth it cannot throw down. They sweep outside,
Mechanically, the refuse of the poor.

They have drawn from her even the hearts of the poor,
Who watch the strutting potentate's every sign,
Hypnotized by a glittering outside
Into spurning the counsel of the lady
And flocking round the foot of the dark tower,
As those whom fear and hunger rule more than sorrow.

For these in the early morning hours I sorrow,
And for many a one who dared be poor
Until a beam from the searchlight in the tower
Fell on them; then they fled, forgetting the sign
They had received, alleging fear that the lady
Would draw them, with arms of remorse, inside.

The rain outside is still. I have spoken my sorrow.
Lady, remember me among your poor
And make my name a sign against the tower.

                                                                                   1994

Love's Catechism

That water may be taught to flow uphill,
The sun to rise out of the western ground;
That lively ichors from cold stones distill,
That our lost years may somewhere yet be found;
That roses blossom at the arctic pole,
That freshets purl across the desert path,
The swift-sent arrow will not find the goal,
Nor the slow tortoise feel Achilles' wrath;
That there may be two hills without a dale,
That lions may be taught to draw the plow,
That moth-wings make invulnerable mail,
That war-ships founder on a drowned man's brow:
All these false things true lovers must believe,
For the world wears worse, when these illusions leave.

                                                                                                    1995

From The World's Last Rose: Sonnets to the Prince of Twilight; first published in Inverted-A Horn



Two Sonnets from the Texas Coast (I)
Earth, when it bore the restless soul of Man
And nursed its growth, was beauty-full with forms
Intricate as plankton and enormous
As whales, ornately and austerely grand
As dune and jungle; air and sea were fanned
By multifarious fin and wing, by storms
Stirred yet not defiled.  And were we born
Merely to meddle with destructive hand?

Not so; for in the soul of man lives on
The memory of all that we have marred.
Our thoughts can from a shinbone, from a shard,
Rebuild body and city.  Could we learn
The nature that is in us to discern,
We are the template of creation.

                                                          1999

Published in The Neovictorian/Cochlea



Liaison
I have returned from the lonely land of prayer
That waits and thirsts for mercy and for rain.
Could I ever tell you what I found there?

Ads and indifferent faces everywhere
Were all I saw when I got off the plane.
I have returned from the lonely land of prayer.

Before I left some told me to beware
Or blamed the people for their haters' pain.
Could I ever tell you what I found there?

Between the blasts they're searching, those who care,
To find the oil to light the lamp again.
I have returned from the lonely land of prayer:

If on my face you cannot see the glare
Of that light in which history is made plain,
Could I ever tell you what I found there?

To the great city where scare after scare
Ripples the mall, and wealth is on the wane,
I have returned from the lonely land of prayer.
Could I ever tell you what I found there?

                                                                          2003

You Almost Remember
                                                                        Think: your
                                                                        own hand
                                                                        has held this pain-
                                                                        reclaimed, pain
                                                                        requickened portion
                                                                        of habitable earth
                                                                        fast.

                                                                                Paul Celan, 1967

You have half forgotten, you almost remember the dream
Of a native country whose language was joy
Despite the numerous crosses, the wide denial
Of an abundance flowing from the infinite
Founding the city upon the reformed heart
And sustaining the world through one small land.

It always was about this piece of land
Where a people held together by a dream
(Or compressed by surrounding pressures into a heart)
Found, between towering walls, the way to joy
Just for a moment that seemed infinite
Before the jaws of empire closed in denial.

But they could meet denial with denial.
They could pay out, while fleeing from the land,
A long, strong cord of story. The lost is infinite
Possession. In possession of a dream
They did not unlearn how to sing for joy.
Wandering, they carried with them their country's heart.

For their singers had built the temple of the heart.
It stood unshakeably footed on denial.
Swaying with eyes closed they could enter its joy
Though many kin remained behind in the land
At the mercy of those who had stolen the dream
And changed its vision of the Infinite

Into a conqueror's program of infinite
Empire, feeding the victor's insatiable heart,
Merging spirit with the flesh-hued dream
Of the ravisher who heeds no denial
But goes trampling over land after land
To crush the rose of Sharon, all flowers of joy.

As it nears, humans abandon all hope of joy
Unless they are rooted in the infinite
Enough to hold on to this piece of land
With desperate strength, the last strength of the heart,
Even against kin, the captives of denial,
Who would turn possession into our worst dream

There are those in this world who do not dream of joy.
The capacity for denial is infinite.
Abandonments lay waste the world's heart-land.

                                                                                         2003

Fidelio

        after watching a televised modern-dress performance
        by the New York Metropolitan Opera

"Fidelio" is battering in my brain,
Though I could not sing back a single strain
Of all those that stormed in, one evening after
Christmas, with echoes of demonic laughter
Giving the music its Titanic battle,
Spirit singing to drown its own death-rattle.
"Preposterous plot!" the demon-voices say.
"Those sets, costumes, and faces, khaki-grey,
They tell the truth. The music is a lie
To which the modern soul resounds: Nice try.
In wedded love he puts his faith, to boot --
A cause long since divorced from the pursuit
Of social justice. The jailer's daughter knows
How well that little tuft of basil grows
In prison pots. It takes a man unwed,
Proclivities unknown, to crown his head
With the mad garland of a hope like that,
Fit rival to the horned and bell-tipped hat." --
I hear these voices, yet I also see
How love descends into absurdity
As music into deafness; and although
The arias did not thaw my tears to flow
(Whether from my own dullness to the art
Or from the century's chill about my heart),
Somehow the hope imprisoned in me knew
That something was attempting to get through
To it; and I can recognize the dream
That here is manifest in its supreme
Effort to change our lives, as Samson clasped
The pillars, and brought down the house at last.
Too wise to dream it now, we still are fed
On crumbs of this two-centuries-old bread,
The memory of something generous
To which I pray: Great Love, deliver us
Out of the prison of our cold disdain.
Make us the fools we'd have to be to try again.