Magna Mater (the Great Mother)
By: Stephen Hoffman
Tags: Space, Motherhood, Matter, Otherdoors, Fatherhood

The earth coughs, whispers, dims the house lights, mutely

Allows herself to be discoursed upon

By supercilious aerial commentary,

Ethereal footprints. A gray rose. A sulfur

Yellow. Poetic arrogance of cheap

Chromatic oratory, earnestly

Chronicled in all the orchestra seats.

Dramatic denouement. The stage darkens.

Actors depart. The audience stretch their legs

Well-edified. A crass sunset. Seraphic

Repertory played to sell-out crowds.

You know the kind: always after a day

Obscenely bright. Gay pretty flowers exposing

Their vulvas. At cockshut the ladies fold

Their parasols under the pale silk light.

Cornmeal silk, nacreous and translucent.

Silkscreen posters made for summer stock

With Teahouse of the August Moon designs

After a day of punts and parasols

In upstate watering places, summer circuits,

That sort of thing. Pale half-light. Summer smoke.

And every evening the earth belches up

For educated scrutiny in the sky

Some multi-colored lung effluvia

As cataloged by modern medical science.

Shouldn’t we be alarmed and consternated?

What does it bode, when our earth, the chaste bride

And consecrated mistress of the heavens

Consents to turn her organs inside out

And spread them with all lack of modesty

Nightly in this absurd burlesque revue

And bawdy show the many call a “sunset”?

Lewd interlude, sandwiched between two peepshows,

Lakeview and fireworks. Stand and salute

The garish flag, all candy and spangles

And ruby blood and glittering worlds and then

Cheer as the band plays “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

“Courtiers of beauteous freedom” Shakespeare called us,

Our country built on Roman principles

A ship of state for Tudor privateers,

Our pirate flag a burping treasure chest,

Python disgorging undigested bits

Of his bright-colored prey, our mother earth,

Her rifled bowels, her bloody bits of magma:

Strontium, magnesium, aluminum

And suchlike host of boiling poisonous metals

Ignited in the fires of industry

And splayed as Chinese fireworks ‘cross the sky;

Metallic ores and mineral pigments quite

Enough to paint a hundred Albert Bierstadts;

All ancient and inviolate sanctity

Of metal, or of marble, or of men

Extracted, desecrated and displayed

Because a plain old sunset’s not enough

To showcase our imperious dignity,

We needs must have parade of looted plunder,

Chains from the necks of naked prisoners,

Exploding rockets, gold chrysanthemums

That detonate and fall into the sea.

On days of squall and sunshine earth herself,

Reeling upon her axis in the throes

Of meteorological dyspepsia,

Regales onlookers with a febrile floorshow.

As the clouds part, uncurtaining the night,

Oneiric images imbue the air.

Vast hulls maneuver in the fish-tank gloaming

Like neon tetras and striped zebra fish,

Mouths gaping in the watery halflight.

Argosies, airships, angel-launched flotillas,

Submarine dogfights in the lurid light.

A spark of encephalic lightning in

The boreal jelly of a frigid cloud,

Crackling with splintered ice and shards of frost,

Makes hell’s hot legions melt and dissipates

The swelling turgor of the heat-charged air,

Its frayed caparison of faded azure

Washed in the camphor light of cool blue night.

An eructation — earth replants her cheek

Upon her spinning pillow of stardust

And plummets down the well of spiral sleep.

A silver-skeined or mackerel-clouded sky

Begins to glow with its own inner light

Then flushes heavenly shades of pastel orange.

Evening has brought her sketchbook and her chalks

To the veranda by the lakeside where

She sips, discreetly, from an iced sorbet.

Above a bleak suburban shopping mall’s

Deserted asphalt hatched with painted stripes

The sodium vapor lamps begin to pale

Under the fire of an eerier green —

A “War-of-the-Worlds” luster, as in Wells.

Fire and ice: bucolic Armageddon

Already showing on a sky near you.

The sun. It sets. What alien gaze has raised

The welts and bruises on her fair, pale skin,

Her gaseous envelope of melting aether

Mottled with industrial moles, the faint

Impression of a bra strap, turquoise veins

And clotted cream and mother’s milk and spider

Veins as intricate as those that mar

The emptiness of interstellar space

With remnants of galactic nebulae?

What spectral presence makes her glow and blush

Coral, and salmon pink, and cinnabar

In carnal and unnatural combinations,

Funereal tints and tinctures culled from dreams?

What voiceless might forbid the sun his sledgehammer

And nudged him, gently, off the edge of night

Where now she trembles in a placeless stare?

The “sky.” The “heavens.” “Space.” Time out of mind

Everyone noised authoritatively

(As if they knew of that of which they spoke)

These simple vocables. But what, I pray,

Is space? And where for pity’s sake does it

Reside? And why in heaven’s name should I

Believe that everything I am, and own,

Is “in” — locked in its crystal prism — “space”?

But something leaves its footprints in the sky

And discomposes with its measureless

Reserve and ushering silence earth, the Magna

Mater and the sum of all things “real.”