"I am the viridian swell and the vermilitm tempest. I am surly
beast and have will to rectify murder: my death and other
happenstance makes for ironu with miniatures painted
without sight in a golden locket never opened and not lost
memories of those centuries before whatever instant diseased
and bent with pock marked face to how anger stalls
without any pleasure or even the protest of strangled fowl.
You can watch my stance without eyes and make me move
without legs as I am only flood and tempest unbounded
my schemes ser down as blasphemed physic and truth."
John Colman (1585-1664)
Preface
Prose Poem based on Robert Juet and Sources drawn from the history and environ of New Netherland including that magical land of Human Beings between Ackinsack and Great River in Pavonia.
Personas and Documents
As essential contradiction Edward Wyman, John Colman, Ska Nee, Lord Simon Colman Seymour, sons and daughters and many others speak unfettered as to the layers that time construed from and within the years 1970 to 1570 with reversed spinning globes and fool jugglers with blessed twisted hands. Every voice is luminous: layers of character without particular history struck bells to reach the last comma dividing centuries and millennia.
Chronology was old song without intervals just as we cease to breathe - while habitual schemes dry in our mouths when water lost cannot be had to make red water piss against brown leaves or some beginning reconstruct so we may leap that terrifying wall of birth afier death without obvious conceit drowned too young when spars broken and all the fine gobs driven to starve. Such my daily speech as folly writ as it could last until perdition waxed our skull with vermin.
May 1607, Tuesday
General Description of That Part of the World Called New Netherland.
Sometime in my country
at the outward part of river
wild flowers so fragrant
I stand still not knowing
what I am meeting; so many
and rich the birds I can
scarcely go through them
for their whistling.
Light can hardly be discerned
where they fly; the fox chases
them like fowl: Their notes
salute the ears of travelers
with harmonious discord,
and in every pond and brook,
green silken frogs warble
their un'tuned tunes
to hear a part in this music.
-----
November 2, 1585-1621
John Colman Swims
the Great River Divide
now Called Hudson.
Before New Netherland
When I was a child, I felt murder.
There was blood on the stones that leaked
through the streets into a great flood
I felt waves and I wanted to die and fail.
Mother murdered as l wept.
Vermilion clouds treasured me.
The dagger did not cut my head clean.
The heavens opened to protect my life.
My Lord Jesus saved my opinion and
directed the colors of the winds
from ancient space to keep my breath
whole as I fell down to the rough
gray stones by my homely street.
In my lights Viridian sunset open my doors.
I could not let my life fall down and become one
of those awkward strangers hanging about the shore
and muddy streets for an axe that struck
off the head of my mother as she watched
the vermillion waters of the great river quit.
It was a fever. Mother had died five years
past in Delft. She was ample vision here
as the shadows of her red sand colored eyes
loomed on the horizon so 1 conjured.
Savages covered me.
I saw the face of murder.
I remember how he was struck
down by a rock. He would die
laughing and I would live.
I did not drown. Stuck to the slime
caught in the muddy noose
I was buried in the earth
when l was shaken by furious storm
that blew through my spread hands
as I held back the surge as only light
that is earth green and salmon red
can contain on the edge of the bush
that borders Great River on the East.
That city will be born there.
It will strike us dead.
I live in all my past escapes
as a future specter ready to
roll my calm, damp body white
with death, and my red eyes
alive when I am resurrected in 1970.
Day Two
The tempest struck;
the rocks moved.
They shift as I spin
and I wished for a brief second
that the rocks of littoral of this flooded river
drove out all the sea demons
and bring us back home safe.
I know when I drink
how anyone is safe if they
do wish their own end
before they are struck
with shot, or the axmen
or the executioner shows
fate to the end may you wish
other oaths to keep you safe
at least until your teeth are gone.
If I had died, how would
I have watched Ska Nee
give birth? She had entered
before my enlistments,
Great River had swallowed up
and I would never join the circle
where wise men talked with their
hands and hearts more than words.
I understood it all; every flood
drowns the man who swims
the passage from the isle
across to the tall red stones
shimmer as antimony.
My leg heal.
My arms stretch from the sails
behind to the ones in front.
I get stronger.
She who heals stirs
at my back and Ioins with her fat
rubbed hands and catches my shiver.
She works my legs and sacred parts.
She makes me move as she breaks me out of death.
When my flesh blackens and I with fever shriek
to other savage gods my denial and then yes, I do accept.
Curses shift underneath the river of hands.
The rain pounds my head slows my stroke.
Caught by the cold water
I made me tight when the mist rose from the fire.
Fish will be boiled. I entered the brook and soon
it was hot and the heat slowed breath.
The woman moved her breasts
to my mouth slowly and holding
my jaw, she feeds me that white blue broth.
I am eager. She knows that I
cannot exist with civil people.
I get stronger every day.
Red rolling fire branded clouds before sunrise drift
against the back of my hands
take them into my lives but I did not hurt.
I made it to the broken rocks and lifted
my sore shoulders up to drape my body on red moss.
One small beetle wore his half shell turned over and drifted I
realized and found the brown rocks rose above
the stumps of a forest of drowned trees.
I rushed the shore. I couldn't stop.
Waves pushed at my head. I left Bristol.
I left the skin of streets. I left my older first wife wondering
if she would jump up when she heard my steps
up the path close to the smoke house where
we cured the bacon her father fattened.
Stones were thrown. The wake of the ripples
caught my hands and I was frozen in the water
--------
Follows missing pages to the tale
kept by his descendant Simon Colman
and published in London in 1767
Narratives of New Netherland
The Rage and Dreams of John Colman
On 11 April 1611, the yacht Restless caught the flood and leaving Bristol moorage, my
eyesfixed to the rolls and sway of the hot coals of the morning sky that wept black and
gray ascolor stripped became the texture of a terrified dream recalled. I knew it my
every day a breathdiminished. Every night I stopped to dream the terror of my mother's
murder. I saw widestartled eyes descend from his killing hand to the lever axe and with one downward stroke myown fate as witness. My sister would almost drown in the blood as she nursed from tit and
spit back red froth.
Mother dragged to the ground by Murder who had gone mad became the template for the wooden ships I would
fashion as I lived every day thereafter. I would never forget that deathly face. Mother and Murderer became the same
scream. His mouth and eyes stretched from past to present. Terror would become the maps of my discovered land as
I forgetting their coordinates became thoroughly trapped by that need to right the wrong that made lust mayhem an
anthem for my child eyes and voice.
Now, I am long past that day, a man with eager arms and back strong in the lifting of the sky and the mocking of
God. I cry as in the murderers hall, as now, when I face my own last breathing, everything became black to mold
with green and yellow peals as putrefaction crept through my throat to make my dreams scream again as they hit by
that calamity become the foretaste of terror made and unmade as oath taken for revenge.
Now, back on the docks as we uncoiled the last of the loops that kept us moored to this final place, I stepped up to
the clouds and found myself by magic ten leagues above the deck of this ship. I could see myself from that deck as I
floated both high into that heat and drawn down I fluttered into the limp, cold decay of my own grave.
As I spoke softly to my feeling my bones stretched my legs to discover by their recoil the
magic source that unmakes life as we curse dying we assume before our time.
As I lifted up, my dreams froze as tar does oak. My body as circular cask unraveled into its
steel rings and palsied steps.
As I did every night I again live the theater of my mother's murder. The troll used an axe. He cut her skull into twin
parts and a smaller third while I gathered in her wake watched her fall as the blood ran down her arms. As she
screamed quickly stilled, her blank face death before death caught the rings of my eyes, I was no more after that
motion of iron into bone. I walked backward down the close docks towards the marsh where flowers could be
gathered.
There I made my mother a wreath and bringing it to her bed, as she kept to it in death, the colors of the violence
raped by her dishonor, so they said, kept still the muddy waters that would in my dream bring me to my downing.
We are forty-two men in the company of rats and our own pestilence. Many will suffer that perdition of death on
this journey to the East. Does this dream signify that we will fail to know the pathways to riches and the east?
As I write down this speak I count three silver coins and one bronze piece. They were
my inheritance. They became with melancholy my breed of knowing. I forget it all as I
am covered with the dank sweat of drink and the heat of. I live inside that mask of my
mother. I was nine when murdered by demons or as most say a human beast without
mouth or teeth. He was flame that fire she said that burns from the inside. I will strip
the heat from life. I will keep it out of reach. I will preserve the madness so it can be
released as quiet dust or ashes from the dead.
In this year of our Lord, 16| l, I chart our following winds and tack easy through the
Restless sales as this yacht points West by South West towards the end of the rocks and
the beginning of the sun. Here now, as we gather in our hope, at that space above that
last cloud the English land falls away into the shoals. So many rivers have no bottoms.
So many last words before we murder our self on this great adventure. Perhaps now, I
can forget the dream. Every calm night I suffer its recoil. My father gathers wood for a
fire. Mother speaks her Dutch tongue cursing the night in her drunken fervor. As I
watch her kiss strange hands and opening her eyes, she leaps the fires. Suddenly, caught,
this man, this demon strikes her skull with an axe. She bleeds that face that murder
caught. I cannot forget his scowl. He is a leper of words. His meanings forget themselves
and he escapes into the back farms of Bristol and is heard no more.
As I watch the sea rise up in a storm that would cost us on this first night two of our
crew, I wrote down what I heard when I dreamed or did I dream.
I sleep in the crease of her tawny skin. Her hair is thick with fat covering its base to
show the strength of her neck. She breathes and slowly I can smell the ocean as the flood
rises against those antimony cliffs that stagger down the river towards the bay. Every
heron mocks my shadow as they peek at my path. My legs stronger every hour I rise
faster up the short cliff and standing inside out looking out over the island where wild
beasts keep company with the natives of this place. I am of this place. I cannot leave. I
will die here. There is no ocean lefi to cross. I saw it disappear in that dark dream bred
from my mouth when I sucked at that tea she made from some unknown hemp that
they gathered as flowers.
Tempest
Every storm has no eyes.
How can I see past honorable
journals crafted from memory
and distances we shift
when melancholy stuff us
stopping as desire leaves.
We age even as we young raise up our hard arms
and waving our instrument strut to keep the passion
as some past stupor falls down into its own pail
to denature as fetid stools beguile the beasts and
mock the insects again rides the other stair well
I am a stranger to myself. I did not drown. I caught
the skin of the rocks and cut, my hand burned
I lifted my heart up and pounded Ska Nee
as she opened her wings and flew like that crow
captured from the fantasy and let down into a book
where the chronology of ship and being are charted
for some noble restoration of the wood. Can we plow our
lives back into that life work where as stretching our bowels
we find that our aches are not changed by rich
rooms to fornicate as we quit again those maids with empty
skulls that breed death and pestilence as we speak ourselves to murder
that which has no name but the black spots and yellow eyes
that freeze the jaw into its death and prize.
Any private place can rise up out of waves
or born fi'om a lance drive up the back door
and make certain we can do this all again
swimming from disturbed thunder
to bare brook and standing there naked we repeat
again in some sexless birth. I do not lie.