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The First Fan

READ AT A MEETING OF THE BOSTON BRIC-A-BRAC
CLUB, FEBRUARY 21, 1877

WHEN rose the cry 'Great Pan is dead!'
And Jove's high palace closed its portal,
The fallen gods, before they fled,
Sold out their frippery to a mortal.

'To whom?' you ask. I ask of you.
The answer hardly needs suggestion;
Of course it was the Wandering Jew,--
How could you put me such a question?

A purple robe, a little worn,
The Thunderer deigned himself to offer;
The bearded wanderer laughed in scorn,--
You know he always was a scoffer.

'Vife shillins! 't is a monstrous price;
Say two and six and further talk shun.'

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poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes
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The Broomstick Train; Or, The Return Of The Witches

LOOK out! Look out, boys! Clear the track!
The witches are here! They've all come back!
They hanged them high,--No use! No use!
What cares a witch for a hangman's noose?
They buried them deep, but they wouldn't lie still,
For cats and witches are hard to kill;
They swore they shouldn't and wouldn't die,--
Books said they did, but they lie! they lie!

A couple of hundred years, or so,
They had knocked about in the world below,
When an Essex Deacon dropped in to call,
And a homesick feeling seized them all;
For he came from a place they knew full well,
And many a tale he had to tell.
They longed to visit the haunts of men,
To see the old dwellings they knew again,
And ride on their broomsticks all around
Their wide domain of unhallowed ground.

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poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes
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I Want To Make A Contribution

I want to make a contribution.
I want to leave something on the stairs of the temple
in the dead of the night and steal away like a shadow,
hoping my small gift of a gift is well-received.
That the stars don't think they're wasting their light
to shine down upon it. Nor the wind resent the seeds it carries.
Fifty years of poetry. Painting the picture-music
the darkness pours into my heart and my heart conveys to my ears.
I can taste thousands of wildflowers like eyes in my blood.
I can taste the homelessness of the rogue stars in my tears,
and pull the wounded swords I cull like thorns of the rose
from the stone of my brain that fell in the farmer's field
like a rock through the window of the abyss
and make it clear as Merlin locked in his tower of glass,
that the stars only look fixed from a distance,
up close and intimate as atoms they're in a frenzy of creation
like a cloud of gnats in the last rapture of the sunset
radioactive with the bliss of being alive to know this.
That we're all longing for home in the lap of an expansive awareness
that threw the starmaps away the moment we were born

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poem by Patrick White
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Two Faced Preacher

Writer, hank williams
(e) let me tell you bout a preacher,
With a cane and a long tailed coat, (e7)
Let me (a) tell you bout a preacher,
With a cane and a long tailed (e) coat,
But he (b7) does all his preachin,
With his eyes on the women - (e) folk.
Chorus
(e) send him back, send him back, where he (e7) was be - (a) fore,
Hes a (b7) two-faced man, and we dont want him here no (e) more.
Well he preached about gamblin, said its a sin and its a shame,
Yes he preached about gamblin, said its a sin and its a shame,
But when I met him in a alley, he won my watch and chain.
Repeat chorus
Well he preached about liquor, said leave the stuff alone,
Yes he preached about liquor, said leave the stuff alone,
But then I saw a deacon, totin the preacher home.
Repeat chorus
Well he preached about wedlock, the finest thing in life,
Yes he preached about wedlock, the finest thing in life,

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song performed by Hank Williams
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There's Nothing Cozy About Real Beauty

There’s nothing cozy about real beauty.
That’s why it scares you to death
when you’re around it. You sense
that it disdains to kill you
simply because it knows it can
but that only makes you beg for the knife
even more, even deeper, until
you’ve suffered more death
than you ever knew there was to suffer.
It’s the same with the truth. The truth
isn’t the act of a well-meaning
coffee-table sentiment,
a hundred dollar book
of recycled paper
to help save the Caribou,
an a chequered impressionist table-cloth
with compositionally balanced butter-knives
that have never tasted blood in their lives.
If you can’t hear the shriek
of the red-tailed hawk as it plunges

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poem by Patrick White
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Ten Hours A Day Painting In The Half Wild Fields

Ten hours a day painting in the half wild fields
at Long Bay, eleven miles outside of Westport
for four and a half years without
seeing another human for months in the winter
except when we drove into Perth every six weeks
for smokes and groceries.
A quarter mile of treacherous driveway,
mud, ice, freezing rain, you had to accelerate
just right, and steadily, to keep the car
from sliding back down the hill.
Sometimes two or three attempts
like a long distance Olympic ski jumper
and you standing at the top of the ninety metre hill
so I didn’t kill you going backwards,
one hand on a shovel
planted in a small grey pyramid of rock salt
like a sign of readiness and ownership
that always made me think
this is what an hourglass must look like
when it finally hits bottom.

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poem by Patrick White
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Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

quote by Charles Robert Darwin
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If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed.

quote by William Winwood Reade
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Museum

You're winged and tailed
And made to swim along a dead sea
To be excavated out of an old history
Imaged of a hero in an aesthetic
Made an artefactual relic
And worded in an elderly manuscript
To giggle with somber odour
To be a skeleton at the feast

poem by Indira Renganathan
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Nature Was Drawing Me Along (Septilla / Spanish Septet)

The whole of summer weavers gathered
violets, arum-lilies grew among the reeds
in the swamp, morning glories were like weeds,
some long-tailed widow-birds fluttered,
all day finches sang a twittering song,
vibrant nature was drawing me along
in colours of green, purple, yellow and red.

poem by Gert Strydom
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