Books, by Benjamin Hummel

Railing at M'lady

I'm incensed with you, Vincent

            But adore your poetry, your gift

The gemmy words studding

            The pages where I've found them

Irish waters by a Cornish prow

            Sonnets by the dozen.

You are to me, an historical anomaly

            1916 girls should be pure and demure

Not given to lovers chasing them

            To Paris, or back and forth across the Channel!

Ah, curse wealth and privilege, fame and fortune,

            Skill with the mouth, tongue and pen,

Why must they so inevitably lead to abandon? 

            Wherefore Anais Nin?

Damn it, poet!  I'm sure I would've been among

            The manly crowd admiring, longing, lusting

After your red, red lips, your flaming tresses.  Perhaps even, scaling that tower,

            I'd have shared in your collective social malaises, Millay.

I refuse to read your biographies because

            I'm jealous, out of season, out of time,

I want Paris, too, the cafes, the words

            Glittering like dark red wine in crystal stems,

And tall, strong Nordic companions

            Wearing crowns of red and gold or onyx

Like the shepherdess of Shulam.

            You died before I was conceived! 

                        But I've snitched snippets of your life

In the Borders stacks, furtively reading in the middle

            Looking at the pictures, an undisciplined hack. 

Your rhyme and rhythm enrapture me, wile’d flapper!

            And I wish I had been on the field then

I'd've won your heart, composed you verse

            To show you how, impossibly, I understood!

I know!  My blood is as red, my words as good.

            That I can love and long with the

Best of them -  with you!      

                                    For you. 

But I have nothing to commend me

            No one knows these words, my languages

Are all foreign, oriental, scented with cloves and

Black pepper, cinnamon and tea, I have no proper degree

No peerage, no land, or horses, houses, industries.

            I've not been to Paris, I haven't known women. 

Only jungle and granite, and deep blue saltwater. 

Your price is ever beyond my means, as are all the beautiful

            Ones, the brilliant ones, the red lipped ones, catching the eye

With hooks and tearing the heart, provoking love.

            And all I am able to do is pound out my longing

In words that tumble, and do not flow like the streams from your mouth. 

            You did some pounding, too, perchance.  But you had fulfillment right

There!  Why were you not happy with your English god and all

            His sycophants?  The lesser gods before and after? 

And here I am all out of time

            My white charger pawing sand, proud silver

Armor dulled by corroding air, chipped sword in hand

            Seeking a flat horizon for the damsel in distress.

Chivalry did not die with Alfred Lord, that Quixotic Victorian,

            But my sword, my pen are impotent.

Failing even now to rescue the living

            Sending for the dead 

For places in the realms of vision

            Where dreams succeed, dragons are slain. 

Pity, they are so soft

            Rather they were as real as pain.

IN THE GARDEN OF ALLAH 2/5/97

The poets all expound
How fleeting are the pleasures
Of this, our dew like existence
And further how momentary
Are its pains.
Yet Allah in his hidden mirth
Mysteriously drops the cool golden
Moments like sweet tropic rain
In wastes of heated heaving salt.

How is it then, that mere
Children do so exquisitely enjoy
The mornings of life
While we in our maturing age
So better knowing
Cannot sense a thing
Quaffing greedily our anesthetic
All for fear of pain not yet felt.

Tell me further too
How pleasure could be
Greater than to lie on cool yellow
Stone by water as glass
Undisturbed by the gentle globe's
Ponderous rotation into dawn
And drink through half open lids
Lately sleeping
The mango light of a new sun.

Blue green air fresh with
The sharpness of earth waking
Ears full of the sea sound of
This liquid in which we breathe
The slow and languorous swimmer's
Stretch of immature limbs
The murmuring laughter of
Friend's conversation close to hand.

Limestone urns immovably immense
Glowing like lamps in the horizontal rays
Softly muting their flaming source's fiery power
And beyond the garden wall's mothering security
The world waits in wonder begging our eye behold it.

Flipping the Cat (For Paul)

It was done, once
A day of sailing
On White Bear Lake
We three on an
Ancient leaf green Spirit cat
Darting in and out
Between gull white blunt-nosed
Scows in diaphanous regatta.

Then sandwiches on the
Sandy shore and the grave
Responsibility of time running out
But we did not listen to the
Calm voice of reason or sense
It must be done once more,
The citrus of delight squeezed dry of
Every drop of fleeting joy.

So forth we sallied in a freshening
Breeze, our spirit’s soaring in
The sail as the Spirit Cat flew up
Upon her beam in the gusting
Streams of unlikely Great Plains air.

Little we displaced tropic sailors knew
A buffalo gale was close upon us
Black squall clouds from some continental
Hell scuttling up unseen astern
And high above our shoulders.
The green hull leeward sounded
Like a narwhal seeking mackerel or tuna
And did not resurface, the cat stuttered
And then as slowly as you please, rolled her
Stern to starboard, spilling you and I into
The lake.


Then thrash in the water, and avoid the
Smothering sail, and clutch at
The drifting borrowed baseball cap
God willing I will lose nothing to
This water, life nor brother nor boat
And I called to you, and you to me
As we struggled in the cloying fluid.

The prairie gale was on us then
With whitecaps roaring by
The cat’s tramp becoming an anvil
For the hammer of wind
Driving us shoreward and resisting
Our efforts as we tried twice
To right her, refusing help from
Boaters speeding by to shelter.

We screamed and shivered and burned
Our fingers raw on ropes
Hauling and heaving at the hulls
Not knowing if God had our
End in view, but calling to Him still until
The howling wind beached us
On pill hill peninsula below a rich man’s
Mansion high on the bluff.

We flipped the cat upright finally
Walking the impossible mast up the
Slope, but you were hypothermically chilled
And I was tropically exhausted
Steam rolling from beneath my thick
Skin of black neoprene.
We begged a moment’s shelter from the
Lightning and thunder and
Lashing rain from a juvenile babysitter
Tending the requisite two children
In the great house.


The clouds and rain blow on to unknown regious
As they do over lakes on the edge
Of these Great Plains stretching to the infinite west
And the sun wanly betook itself
Of it’s lazy summer afternoon duties once more.
We put out from our sheltering shore
Quivering still with fear and cold and
The extremities of our exertions.

The cat rode low, taking water in an unseen wound
So gratefully we lashed her to a Sea Doo
For the short ride back to the beach and landing
Passing by to port a turtled blue hull
Keel upright like a fin
Another unfortunate sailor.

And I thanked God for my life,
And for the old Spirit cat,
As I had cried aloud to Him for help
In the midst and asked for mine
And yours and for that old boat, too.

And I thank Him yet
For that birthday sail
I will not forget
For the adventure and the bond
Of brothers whom God
Has privileged to brave
The elements of this earth
Powers of the air and sea
Yet lived to tell the tale of it,
And know His love and ours
The better.

Lovely Bones

White, bone white,
Dry, bone dry,
Here they lie
Amidst the mold
Autumn’s ruby red and gold
All gone by.

Gather them then,
Collect them all
Make of them a pile
A bundle pitiful and small
A girl child’s tibia and femur
A woman’s pelvic saddle
Skull entwined with
Hanks of yet red-gold hair still.

What husband left her there,
Or lover, brother, friend – murderer?
Why should she lie so cold
Upon her bed of old old
Maple tree appendages, mingled
With the sharp needles of pines
Dun dull and brindled brown.

So I will lay my head upon
An empty breast, sprung
Casket of the heart,
Pure enameled cage of hopes
Love now abandoned
Upon a wind of fall
Drifting like descending leaves
Dry and whispering.

I will wonder what children
Might have been
What tanglings amid the
Warm drifts among the trees
Would tint white cheeks
And cause dark eyes
To smolder, lips bruised with
Kisses fierce or nibbles tender.

Oh, yes, and I might dream
Why bones must lie here
Unloved, ungathered as dreams
Of love in autumn
Only, only, for a time and times.
Love will one day
Gather these and knit them
As in their mother’s
Womb first they were knitted
Down below in
Deep to depths unknown unknowable.

Ad majorem Dei gloriam,

Wendell Geary Jr.
Fall, 2001

Seeking Arran

Clyde’s coast
Brunei’s shore
To walk them
Again or anon
Though one exists
Only in the heart’s imagination
The other only in memory’s aging eye.

To walk in block booted feet
Arran’s sea belt macadam,
View with my own white orbs
Lockranza’s iron tower,
Staring black socketed toward
The bay, girt round with her
Sward of rain damp green.

And on beyond to the
Twelve Apostle’s solid
White domesticity, deep set glaze
Catching the sun setting
Toward Erin’s Isle
Below the green gray curve
Of Kyntyre’s horizon line.

And on again to where the soughing
Breeze from the Firth echoes
In the arched confines of the cavern
Where lay the Celtic hero
Bruce’s royal head an exile,
As are those who dream of
Thick salt air flowing warm as mother milk
O’er frothy foam on sand beneath
Ecstatically arched palms sighing
In the heat of the tropic night.

And above the cold washed shingle,
Climbing up and up into the highlands
Of this little Scotland, following
A clattering, dun scree track
To where the rills over goarse and heather
Collect in a cold clear lake
Among the mounds of weathered gray rock hills.

And to the end, in the south
Among the scrub pines where
The red deer run,
When exhausted feet find wool warm
Comfort beneath an inn’s eiderdown.

How my feet do fly
Cold and wet, or warm and dry
In my mind’s far seeing eye
Along an island’s shore,
Pan’s land of nevermore,
Arran’s ilse east of Erin
Seeking Eve and love
Among sea palms and singing pines.

Wendell Geary Jr. – February 15, 2001 - III

Between the Worlds

Hot green haze
Fading to bluing gray in
Onrushing tropic dusk
All edged with burning orange in the utter west.

Above these towers now, over
Old Batavia, tier on tier
Clad with the emblem of the verdigris
Mermaid Arabica and her twin tails.

Java, garden of the east all
Jade, Adamite, Chrysoberyl, Chalcedony, Amazonite,
Emerald archipelago between
Never the twain to meet, East and West.

Crossroad of ancient empire
Qin and Brahmin, Dutch and Britannic
Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie
Shell and Exxon Mobile
Lapped by muddy waters
Off mangrove coasts
And orient religions all
Jesuit, Nestorian, mullahs, monks
In saffron robes and red.

But the waves that wash our
Hearts, brothers, sisters, soul fishers
Are azure and sea.

We then, carry his love,
Floating flame burning within the breast
Sailing in light of brilliant blue
Though to shore-bound view
These vessels drift in the foggy gray
Between the worlds.

July 2007 - OC, Singapore

Lost West of Boon Lay

Listening to Dido
And easily, my life is for rent
In sticky heat on hard seats
In smoothly running electric trains
And air conditioned diesel busses
Yellow sunlight, old with afternoon
Black hair, dark almond eyes
Christian cemetery, Islamic, Chinese
Military camps. Air Force. Army. Academy.
Late but not stressed,
Lost, but confident.
Hot, but there is a drying breeze
Alone but complete.
Truly loved and full of peace
Heart full and still
Because you do, Father, you do.

On the bridge between
Choa Chu Kang west and Choa Chu Kang east,
Following a woman over
To discover I’d gotten off too early
By two stops.
And a mosque just down the end of the block,
And carefully cut green grass in the field across,
And I have peace.
What joy, to be lost and late
And not repeating to myself
A litany of the level of personal inadequacy.

Late but whole.
Lost, and still a man,
Listening to love songs
By a woman I’ll never meet.

August, 2007