Donal Bereaved

A Work in Progress 
8

So memory swings on the hinge of time

turns Fridays to Saturdays to Sundays

adds one more day to what was always known

making all of time one day older

and Friday the 1st becomes Saturday the 2nd 

and Donal looked up 1954

and saw it was somewhat as he remembered

a New Year’s party that Friday night

turning into a Saturday when his parents didn’t come home 

and then first light on Sunday the 3rd his mother came home a widow 

& 

after that 

his father no longer existed

except as a photograph

where he was by his motorbike 

with the sidecar

Donal could imagine

another ending

that night his father left for the party

and never came home

that he traveled away

like Odysseus

and

might yet still return

Donal went in search of missing words

casting imagery onto Achilles’ shield

summoning a storm to greet Aeneas

invoking Pound’s Cantos

Dido he knew Carthage personified

Hawaii where Merwin sailed

Venice for Pound

Donal felt the call of his peers

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2025

Donal

A Work in Progress 
7

…in a library aisle 

                         a scroll newly added

telling of Donal standing between two shores

not wanting to get where he thought he was going

he’d surprised that flint eyed black clad boatman coming on board

taking two coins off his own aware eyes 

amazed

for he’d stepped ashore in New York instead 

of where he thought was going

nineteen sixties New York

where he first found love 

then love absent

first realized poems accepted sometimes liked

New York City’s so full of life death spills over its edges 

an overflowing Hippocrene in the West

where river sent candle lit wreaths 

first meet an incoming tide

first light ricochets from windowpanes 

dawn carpet-bombs skyscrapers ahead 

seen from the Staten Island ferry

Christine and Alan were there to see that sight 

before cancer took her away

where death still spills over

Michael March was there sipping espresso

in a coffee house courtyard mid-town Manhattan

Sami Al Banna lived in Butler Hall

Inderjit Badhwar and Shama

Virginia and Jimmy

she was there too

     playing piano in Barnard Hall

         a visitor from Philadelphia 

            H.C.

            but he did not know her then

                 or H.D.

when he stepped ashore, he’d come to New York

Bruce Choppin was there and John Hall

The Who performed Tommy at The Filmore East

when Donal lived in Northumberland

Bruce visited Roughside with Rachel

only a few did that

It was 1969

Gilbert Peaker got mugged on Morningside Heights

John Tukey with a bad back lay across desks 

at an IEA/UNESCO meeting

at Teacher’s College, Columbia University

Forrest Baskett was there from Stanford

Bruce brought together math guys     

statisticians     

computer scientists 

Donal who was a poet

before he was a programmer

for a mighty machine

IBM’s 360/91

Forrest said Assembly Language was too low level

impractical for IEA

he would choose to write FORTRAN

instead

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2025

When in Rome revisited

A Work in Progress 
6

 

 

The three men who ruled strode onto the dais

felon financier and famous for good fortune 

Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey the Great

we saw conjured

before our eyes slyly woven tissues of brazen lies

a new religion resisting definition

mass delusion manufactured by mercenaries

propelled through media 

by a man wanting to conquer Mars

standing next to a would-be Jupiter

an all-white triumvirate fostering fear

with fascist salutes

outrageous demands

a new kind of ism

many shades of truth

peddled by a felon financier and follower

not frightened of consequences when voters speak

intent on dictatorship

on imperial power

one mass produced bibles

acting as a god

another wanted Greenland given in gift

while the third ruled the Senate

distraction and deception ruled by rumor

popular people got paid for podcasts 

everything just a matter of opinion 

in a world where one of the nine 

slipped a trump card into the decision deck 

a get out of jail free card

for breaking the law what the heck

a reusable get-out-of-jail card

used to trump Jack Smith

overt legal power 

immunity

the shape of things to come

awake to the rule of kings

with divine right and then some

for lives can be made forfeit 

estates proscribed

just as was once described

by Sallust

in the time of Caesar’s adopted son

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                         2025

Glenn Hughes: an imaginary lecture

A Work In Progress 
5

Glenn Hughes gave the students some more information about Aldington. 

 

“He was only nineteen when Pound introduced him to Hilda Doolittle. She was six years older than Aldington.  They were both interested in classical literature and mythology, and they were both poets nurtured by Ezra Pound.  They got married after a honeymoon in Capri when he was 21.  H.D. was a very striking woman!  She looked fragile to the outside world, but inside she was sparkling with joy.  She was like Calypso once you had entered her space.  You could never leave until she let you go once you had started talking to her.  They had been separated about ten years when I was in Paris with them in 1928. They got on very well together then, she said he reminded her of his old pre-war self.  She wrote to me about it after she left Paris.  I was doing a book on the Imagists then and I had wanted to meet her in person.  Babette, my first wife, and I were staying in Aldington’s country cottage in England at that time and I’d come over to Paris to meet H.D.  She normally lived in Switzerland then.”

“It’s just unfortunate that birth control was more hit and miss in those days.  She humiliated Aldington by having a child with another man while he was off fighting in the trenches.  Their own child had been stillborn.  She also competed with her husband as a poet.  She compared herself to Ariadne being abandoned by Theseus in one of her poems.  She told me that Pound visited her once in the maternity hospital and said: 

“My only real criticism is that this is not my child. This tells you how close Pound and H.D. had been when they lived in Philadelphia.  In our screenplay, Pound can be the Bacchus character who rescues Ariadne.  Do you remember the myth?  Theseus had slain the Minotaur and taken Ariadne away by boat but then he abandoned her.  Let’s draw a triangle on the board.”

He took chalk and drew a triangle.  Against the points of the triangle, he wrote the names of Aldington, Pound, and H.D.   

“Now, H.D. compared herself to Ariadne.” He added Ariadne to the same point of the triangle as H.D.  “So. Theseus can go with Aldington and Bacchus with Pound,” he said, adding their names to the board.  Let’s play with this idea a little.  Can we make a screenplay out of it?  Can we embed a mythic story?  Can we be relevant to today’s world?

“I brought up Catullus before.  He once wrote a long poem that embedded the story of Theseus and Ariadne inside another myth, one about a marriage which set the stage for the Trojan War and at the end of his poem he wrote some lines that could be interpreted as highly critical of an impending marriage in Rome, that of old Pompey and Caesar’s young daughter, a marriage to cement the First Triumvirate in the last days of the Roman Republic.

“In his epyllion, Catullus embeds the story of Theseus and Ariadne within the story of Peleus and Thetis.  These are classical myths and less well known today but his, probably small, audience of highly educated readers would have known them well.  The poem starts.” Hughes explained, “by incorporating another famous story, the Argonautica, the one about Jason and Medea.  First, the Argo, supposedly the first wooden ship, on its voyage to Colchis inspires wonder in the nymphs who make themselves visible to the Argonauts.  Catullus envisages nymphs naked to the waist treading water as they admire the ship.  This causes, an Argonaut, Peleus, to fall in love with Thetis, a nymph so beautiful Prometheus was compelled to warn Zeus to leave her alone; it was destined Thetis would have a son who would be mightier than his father.  You’ll remember that turns out to be Achilles.  

"When it occurs, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis is a momentous occasion well attended by the gods.  Catullus would have assumed his audience knew the back story well.  An uninvited guest, Eris, goddess of discord, introduces a golden apple into the festivities inscribed with the words “For the Most Beautiful.”  I think you all know the story.  The resulting Judgement of Paris leads to Helen’s abduction by Paris.  This was revenge for Jason’s abduction of Medea if you believe Herodotus.  The Trojan War that followed soon thereafter led to the death of Achilles, child of Peleus and Thetis.  So, you can see, this poem becomes much more interesting if you understand the allusions Catullus is making.  He concludes by saying that the gods no longer deign to mix with mortals.  

Before he gets to this stark summary of current Rome, he has given us an analog description of the world he lives in by weaving three mythic stories together which reference three heroes, two abductions and a marriage.  Now”, he asked the class: “At the time that Catullus was writing, why was a marriage myth of interest?  We can only surmise but it seems quite likely to me that this poem has something to do with the First Triumvirate taking power in Rome where the deal was sealed with a marriage, the marriage of Caesar’s young daughter to Pompey, a man thirty years older.”

“If Catullus was born in 84 B.C., he would have been 24 at the time of the First Triumvirate in 60 B.C., a political alliance that was confirmed by a marriage.  There are records of Caesar dining at the Verona house of his father.  If his father invited Caesar to dinner and Catullus was present, that would make Catullus privy to the state of Roman politics.  Is it possible he had met Caesar’s daughter?  An interesting thought! Julia was about 18 years old when she married.  At the marriage of Pompey and Caesar’s daughter, Julia, Catullus and his father may have been present.  If they were present the Parcae, the Fates, instead of foretelling the glorious exploits of Achilles during the Trojan War, as in the Catullus epyllion, might now be predicting an imminent Civil War that would replace the Roman Republic with an Empire.  Jason, Peleus and Theseus have transformed into Crassus, the richest man in Rome then, Pompey, a war hero, and Caesar, another hero.  It is the marriage of Pompey and Caesar’s daughter, Julia, that is being celebrated without participation by any of the gods.  Of course, this is just my surmise, but,” and here he stopped to ask his class: “Don’t you think this could make a good movie?”

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                   2025

Notes for a Screenplay

A Work in Progress 
4 

 

Gods were watching who’d win a game of chess, 

in a peaceful Parisian scene below

where sunlight weft its way through plane trees 

pruned to perfect a harmonious light.

an impressionist scene they both thought to say,

watching through windowpanes against their bed

which slipped and slid losing its bedspread,

as they enacted their improvised one-act play.

Sunlight slotted by slanted wood blinds,

shadows painted on a mottled white wall,

hands moving pieces driven by minds,

that probed that parried chess pieces stood tall,

there where they saw them bathed in light below,

Dionysian light such as gods would sow.

 

Then, there and then, when coexistence twined

their eyes engaging passing on the stairs

when he realized composing those lines

vines might climb together never be one

when they exchanged bright words for brief seconds

enough time to enthrall that morning when

a trout stirred for a naiad in the fronds

her image firmly embedded in him

when he saw her in Springtime on those stairs

forever rising upwards till time’s end

kept en prise captivated held so still

put your fingers on your temples find it

where in memory they’ll always exist

a portal to paradise entered in bliss

 

She was nineteen, he was eleven years older,

Aphrodite personified as Babette.

She told how she climbed stairs in Denny Hall

for a tryst with her poetry professor.

I climbed those stairs ninety-four years later,

for classes with Classics Professor James J

Clauss, who also taught cinema and drama,

who gave me an A for a paper that

imagined Glenn Hughes using Catullus'

poem on the marriage of Thetis and Peleus

and the tale of Theseus and Ariadne

to teach a screenplay class about Paris

with Babette meeting Aldington and H.D.

I remember the Sixties and Let It Be.

 

When times were good before that first world war

they rehearsed their honeymoon in Capri,

watching blooms licked wildly by honey bees,

embracing in moonlight living their law.

They got married when he was twenty-one,

it was not so happy as once before,

their child stillborn with nothing to be done.

He joined the Army to face disaster,

in gas mask fighting for France thinking Greek.

Came home not to a warm marital bed,

French poxed by death lacking courtesy,

telling H.D. of Arabella's allure.

When I think of Aldington and H.D. 

I think of the Sixties and Let It Be

 

Let us seek Medea, 

where the sun rises but doesn't set 

where the eye goes on forever never finding

where Medea vanished in the end

like peering back in literary time 

past incunabula that survived,

watching fragments of parchment

scattered by the breeze

vanish down

dry

drought ridden gutters

 

 

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                    2025