THE EDUCATION OF PARACELSUS

The Education of Paracelsus

For many years I studied
In New York, Chicago, and L.A.,
Seeking to discover
The foundations of medicine:
The body, drugs,
And together their sense of play.
But I could only take so much
Of lectures, notes,
The avoirdupois of words
And laboratory paraphernalia…
The close ups of renal neoplasms,
The variations on anomalies,
Arrhythmias, and valves.
I was restless.
I wanted to say things
That would make strangers cry,
And then laugh their heads off...
Laughing heads all over the floor.
I wanted to say things they'd never forget
About the body, drugs
And together their sense of play.
I continued my travels to
Granada, Hoboken and Wallachia,
Vegas and Shangri La.
I met big doctors among big machines
Making man bit by bit of light,
And country men with little black bags.
I sought out barbers
Who would teach me how to cut hair
And the secret of the perfectly
Trimmed mustache.
I wanted to know of bath keepers
How to make soap
And find the center of sleep.
I asked magicians
How it is possible that by mere
Sleight of hand
Doves disappear in puffs of smoke,
About the Lord Jesus,
And about the great Al Ghazali of Bagdad.
And I prayed of women to love me,
No questions no lies.
I wandered the provinces of the world
Acquiring a taste for the substrata
Of drink, foul mouths, and brawls.
The Spaniards diagnosed me
A learned picaro,
Men on whom a certain decree
Of the heavens has imposed a love
Of the phraseology of gossip and ballads
And a life of wandering...
About the body, drugs
And together their sense of play

The Apotheosis of Scriabin

The claim is
Scriabin never read a book,
Even though he hung for a time
With writers, poets,
And deep, basso type,
Thinkers of the Many and the One.
Moscow was that kind of place...
Affectation, tea, Turkish smokes,
The walking difficult,
Often hazardous, and the snow.
The big words, Scriabin knew,
Were no words at all.
They were just music.
You can't nail Divinity,
Eternity..., Destiny, to the score.
Hence the paradox the Divine Poem,
And the one of Ecstasy,
And then of Fire,
The recognition that words,
Their rhythms and imperfect pitch,
Are questions of resolution,
How much you can pack in
Per square inch.
Hence over and over again:
He succumbs to the enigma of I…
Scriabin wrote in his diary:
"I want to conquer the world
The way a woman takes a man."
He died young. 42.
Music, he knew,
Is made on the belly,
The pulse of it
And the parasites within.

The Dying Montcalm

The Marquis de Montcalm
Had studied -
A child just outside of Nimes -
The anapest, the zeugma,
The anacoluthon...
Of the poets and then the warriors
Of Greece and Rome.
He had been fair on a horse.
And later Madame proudly
Bore him 10 children.
At Fort William Henry,
In the state of New York,
He, along with his native allies,
Had defeated the English.
The terms were right:
The English troops would
March away granted
The honors of war.
But the search for rum
And plunder became a holy quest:
The forest whooping,
As it were a transubstantiation
In the bosom of ancient Gaul…
Saplings crushed under foot,
Blood on the barks of the trees...
Montcalm, master of litotes, whispers:
The massacre is the most
Detestable event in war,
A victory only to the victor's sorrow.
When Montcalm took a hit, a lung shot,
On the Plains of Abraham,
He remained on his horse.
Inside Quebec's walls
Concerned for his men,
He wrote to Brigadier Townsend:
“Feel towards them as they
Have caused me to feel.
Do not let them perceive
They have changed masters.
Be their protector as, you well know,
War itself has protected you and me.”

Migrating Fish 1926 - Paul Klee

When fish migrate,
They move like fish
Across the page,
Proportions of line,
Combinations of tone, harmony,
So many modes, and scale,
Big fish, little fish,
The sighted and the dreaming,
Or the forever blind.
In the 20's
It wasn't easy being a stick figure,
Only a head, a pencil, and a hand.
Still the smell of gas in the air
And everyone to blame.
In order to think, to sleep
You had to turn the brain
Into origami, fold in the shadows,
Just fish on the page.
Forget about the actual
Birds air bound, a child's heart.
You had to forget about
The mountains into which
Many animals go
And few ever return.

C. Perricone: I have had poems published in literary magazines, in print and online, as well as 2 volumes of poetry: 1. A Summer of Monkey Poems, Cummington Press, Omaha, 1996. 2. Footnotes, Boatwhistle Books, London, 2018. I should also like to add: "Playing Catch," which appeared in All Along the Fence, Gibraltar Editions, 2016, a portfolio celebrating the centenary of Harry Duncan's birth; Mr. Duncan was a distinguished art book printer/publisher. Finally, I earned a PhD in philosophy from The City Univ. of NY, Graduate Center, NY, NY and have had philosophy articles and reviews published in professional philosophy journals. I live in New Jersey, USA.