NECTAR OF STORY

POEMS

TIM J. MYERS

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York

Nectar of Story: Poems

by Tim J. Myers
Copyright 2015
Published by BlazeVOX [books]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without
the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza
Cover Art: The Nazca hummingbird, a geoglyph found in the Nazca Desert, southern Peru;
photo by Cornell Capa, from Magnum Photos
Cover design: Tim J. Myers; composition by Geoffrey Gatza and Ellwood Mills
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-202-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014957784
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INTRODUCTION

A powerful story, whether actual or fantastic, is a landmark in the

psychic world, that human interior so endlessly swept and cross-lit by
darknesses and luminosities. Just as the Aboriginal peoples of
Australia memorized the outcrops, ridges, billabongs, or delta channels
of their homelands--giving each a story--so we too use stories to fix our
cultural and spiritual locations, to know where we are and where we're
going.
But perhaps in some cases this metaphor is too dramatic.
Although many stories are holy places, others are lighter in tone and
design, such as comic tales (though these provide their own kind of
crucial nourishment--and even comedy, of course, can be profound).
From this perspective, stories can perhaps be seen as flowers scattered
across the wilderness of the world. The beauty of a flower is selfevident, our recognition of that beauty instantaneous--but, like bees or
hummingbirds as we seek to live and grow, we can do more than
merely behold the flower of a story: We can enter it, push deep
toward its center and find sustaining nectar there--as well as the pollen
we inadvertently carry away and scatter wherever we go.
And we never know what a story might do as it comes into our
lives. "A narrative line," Eudora Welty says, "is in its deeper sense, of
course, the tracing out of a meaning..."--and I can only add, often of

many meanings. In some cases, a particular story will work in a

conventional way--we'll feel a certain moral insight, for example, or
laugh ourselves clean. But other stories can have less predictable
results. We may heartily dislike a story, or something in a story, and
yet in our negative reactions find different kinds of insight. A story may
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lead us to a sense of irony, or of satire, or of human triumph or

depravity, or even to something like spiritual vision--and some stories,
of course, do all this and more. It's even quite human to react in
different ways, at different times, to the same story. But in general,
stories often go straight to the roots of our being, and keep lifting
meanings up out of our fundamental silence.
As a professional storyteller, I feel all this keenly in my own
experience. I continually put my lips around stories, feel the ghosts of
them trooping through my mouth. And this brings an intimacy that
shapes my life, how I think and feel, how I love and fear. Sometimes I
can feel it shaping my listeners too. My own intimacy with stories,
then, has naturally spilled over into that other most passionate and
fundamental form of verbal intimacy: poetry. The poems in this book
are examples of what I took into me, and what then poured out of me,
when I found myself at the heart of a fascinating story.
Anthropologist Marvin Opler reports that it was customary among
the Apaches, after a night of storytelling, for a listener to paint his face
with red ochre. This showed that the sacredness of the stories was still
with him, still warm in his heart. I can't think of a better way to explain
what I intended these poems to be.
I often feel a forceful desire to make stories more real for myself
by imagining further details; I "enter" the story and look around, trying
to create a whole world out of a single narrative strand. It's as Tolkien
says:
"What really happens is that the storymaker proves a successful
'sub-creator.' He makes a Secondary World which your mind can
enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true'; it accords with the laws
of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were,
inside."
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This has always compelled and delighted me--to go "inside" like

that, and be there, in those strange, amazing places. It's something that,
Paul Zweig says,
"...all stories have...in common: they beckon us out of the visible,
providing alternative lives, modes of possibility."

But when I return, I find an equal longing for some kind of bridge
between visible and invisible, between the story and my actual life. The
paradox of powerful narratives, even the fantastic kind, is that they're
usually so utterly practical, so mysteriously relevant to the world they
sometimes seem blithely to ignore. "If the world were clear, art would
not exist," Camus says; "Art helps us pierce the opacity of the world."
Powerful stories act in exactly this way. Barry Lopez praises the
Inuktitut word for "storyteller," isumataq: "the person who creates the
atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself."
So I always find myself hunting for connections between real and
unreal. Talking animal characters, for example, make me wonder
about animal linguistics; a character who can fly must, to my mind, still
follow certain rules pertaining to the magic of flight. Part of this rather
strange and sometimes silly tendency, I'm sure, is the simple and
overwhelming pleasure it gives my story-making heart. But it's also
related, I think, to our modern spiritual crisis, resembling the problem
Keats faced in writing Endymion as he tried to combine myth and
psychology in the character of Apollo. The question can be stated
simply enough: How can we effectively blend our mythic and spiritual
traditions with our powerful modern sense of realism?

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Neither, to my mind, can be denied. As evidence, consider the

now-famous statement by Einstein that "The gift of fantasy has meant
more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge"--and Ursula
LeGuin's assertion that "There have been great societies that did not
use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories."
So I often go into stories and imagine realistic "infrastructures" to
support them, seeking to balance the story's deeper truth with the
realities of my society and my own psyche. Sometimes such musings
lead nowhere; I have to remind myself that "it's just a story." But
sometimes they lead to fruitful extensions of the stories. Many of these
poems are such extensions.
I suppose what moves me most, though--aside from the pure
gorgeousness so many stories grant us--is, again, how real they already
are, just as they've been told. Anyone who thinks about art knows this
paradox, and feels, with Picasso, that "Art is a lie that tells the truth." In
the stories I tell, art's gracious mystery seems to go even further, since
so many of them are based squarely on the most improbable fantasies.
And yet that seems, somehow, only to clear away irrelevance, to offer
glimpses of fundamental truths. I think of Kipling's statement that
"...fiction is Truth's elder sister."
And it's strange for me, as a twenty-first-century American, to feel
the astounding immediacy of what are often ancient and sometimes
seemingly obscure tales, and to watch how images, ideas, and
archetypes keep repeating themselves in the ongoing flow of human
culture. It's as if some form of chaos theory also governs the
relationships between our wildly varied lives and the wildly varied
stories we tell each other. At the moment, for example, a lot of people
in my culture are forking over good money for books, videos, trinkets
and whatnot about angels--those ancient and certainly pre-Christian
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figures--in a spiritual fad that nonetheless demonstrates how powerfully

stories and figures from stories can move us.
This is not to say the influence is always positive; sometimes it's
quite the contrary, as we in the West have seen in certain cases where,
for example, biblical stories are concerned. But as deep a thinker as
Rilke could believe in angelic presences. And it strikes me as true
miracle that the real world we all live in, with its city centers and
farmfields, its pigeons huddled on stone facades, its dams and suburbs
and landfills, its offices, churches and temples, its villages and windblown litter, its addicts, bus-drivers and business people, its mountains
and beaches, nursery schools and factories--that in this enormous,
uneven, lovely, and sometimes bleak place, human beings should so
often be visited by powerful and compelling images such as we find in
stories. We might almost believe that these images themselves are
invisible beings whose aim is to teach, strengthen and purify us.
The Chaga people of Africa, I've read, teach their children that
songs are "a means of controlling the emotions," a practice, the writer
says, also common to Native Americans. In some ways our
contemporary American culture is in a similar state--like someone
losing control of himself. Stories are one form of the song we sing to
find balance and inner peace. And this can be as true for "negative"
stories as for "positive" ones. Consider some of our modern urban
legends--like the one about Liz Claiborne creating perfumes designed
specifically not to smell good on African-Americans, or the one about
Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker creating be-bop specifically so
white musicians couldn't play it. As unlikely as these stories are, they
reflect some deep truths--and deep emotions--about race in America.
They can be a way of facing the problem, a necessary step in the
process of regaining our balance.
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I don't mean, of course, that we should indulge our collective urge

to fantasy without restraint; many of us waste our lives or sin heinously
because we've given ourselves too readily to airy narrative constructs.
Self-righteous war-mongering, the Inquisition, and the Heaven's Gate
suicides are salient examples. Stories are ways of looking at life--but
they're not life itself, and they're far from infallible. In my head, I have
no trouble distinguishing these fictions from the real world. But in my
heart I'm often richly confused, and it's that confusion I can learn from.
Modern Americans have only recently begun to show renewed
interest in traditional storytelling, though most of us even now have
little or no experience with it. But human beings are storytelling
animals; our love for telling and hearing stories is endless. And with so
much besetting us at this point in history, it's an especially good time, I
think, to walk again what storyteller and writer Joseph Bruchac calls
"the roads of breath," to explore the way stories let us think, feel, and
examine our lives--often with far more depth and freedom than direct
rational analysis allows. My friend Wally Ingebritson says it another
way--that we must "re-enchant the word." As I put this volume together,
for example, I was surprised at how often some of these stories led me
to crucial ruminations about existence, death and immortality--topics
that haunt us today as surely as they ever have. The poems became
intense personal projections and continuations of the stories, the kind
we all discover and construct, individually or in groups, when stories get
down into us and begin to work--and which can thereby become a basis
for something else we certainly need more of right now: shared civic
life.
Beyond that I can only quote Tolkien once more, who in Tree and

Leaf wrote words I've come back to again and again: "Fairy [s]tories,"
he says, deny "...(in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal
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final defeat...giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the
world, poignant as grief."
A final note: These forms of the stories, on leftside facing pages,
are of course unsatisfying to me, given that they're only tight, hard
seeds--not the flowering trees I try to make them when I stand before a
group to tell. The "stories" in this book are really only departure
points, not to be confused with the wild, unpredictable, and charged
utterances that emerge when we're "beckon[ed] out of the visible"--that
is, when a good storyteller and a good audience come together for this
most spontaneous and social of rituals.

Tim J. Myers

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NECTAR OF STORY
POEMS

Among the Apocrypha is the story of Daniel

and Susannah, in which the prophet's great powers
of insight were once again active in the service of
good. Daniel, second son of David, was taken with
other gifted Hebrew children to Babylon in 605 B.C.E.
by Nebuchadnezzar, where he was taught "the
learning and tongue of the Chaldeans." But he and
the other young Jews steadfastly refused to become
idolaters. Daniel's prophetic powers, which led him
to visions and the interpretation of dreams,
impressed the successive Babylonian kings he
served, as did, of course, his deliverance from the
lions' den.
But before the consummate vision that
came to him near the end of his life, he was also
able to see into a smaller but equally mysterious
darkness--that of the human heart. Susannah,
accused of promiscuous behavior by the old men
whose advances she'd rejected, brought her countercharges to Daniel, then a high-ranking official in
the Babylonian government. Although she was
outnumbered and had only her word to defend her,
she was vindicated: Daniel ferreted out the truth
and decided the case in her favor.

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W hen Daniel Judged Susannah

I will not say the prophet was a coarse or venal man-but when the elders had threatened that virtuous woman-whose body even in clothing
awoke their lust, made them
sick with love-longing-when they threatened her unless she submit to them,
she refused, accused them in turn,
all was brought to the prophet Daniel,
on whose judgment Susannah was depending-and standing before him she recounted
how the old men, peeking hot-eyed through swaying ferns,
had watched from green shadows as she bathed,
white form in womanly fullness,
breasts, hips, eyes dark and beckoning
(though she thought she was alone),
and Daniel in his wisdom saw through the elders' lies,
rebuked them, confined them, restored to her
the esteem of the people. I will not say
he did less, nor
accuse him of hypocrisy or baser motive.
Only I find it worthwhile to mention
that as he turned to go,
he found himself suddenly possessed
by a vision of water streaming over
her shoulders, her nipples, water
dripping from the arch of a perfect lifted white foot-and for many days this shadowed him
with a sweet and continuous trouble.

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The human craving for stories is satisfied

nowhere in so regular and quotidian a way as in the
daily newspaper, and the almost addictive
attractiveness of "reading the paper" attests to this.
Editors know, in fact, that whatever other functions
a newspaper serves, one of its prime means of
attracting customers is through engaging narrative.
And the newspaper is a strange cornucopia,
representing as it does the immense and
unimaginable range of stories that reality itself
creates. Some are painfully predictable; others
cause even the wildest of writers to throw up their
hands in amazement. In the worlds behind newsprint,
we see much of the astounding variety of human life:
endless jockeying for power, the constant flow of
economic forces, nature jabbing paroxysmally at
civilization, flare-ups of crime or scandal, the strange
dance of diplomacy, the outbreak of riots or war, all
the struggles of greed and love and hatred and the
will to survive--sometimes acts of shining selflessness,
sometimes people like ruinous shadows trying only to
injure or destroy each other--and, of course, ordinary
citizens just trying to live their lives.
This poem is based on a true story I read
years ago, the kind of crime we hear about with
surprising frequency. As I sat with the paper in the
quiet of my house that night, I felt the same
fundamental power all newspaper stories carry, which
I seemed almost to whisper to myself as I read: This
really happened. It could come crashing off
something right into my life, right here, right now.
This is real.

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Reading the Papers at Night

Somewhere in Texas a guy killed lots of people.

Having a beer in the kitchen, I see
how his face in the papers is saying
that a child kept swallowing terror,
ate his own suffering, because
there was nothing else for him to do
and they'd hurt him more if he didn't.
He's grown up now, bones close to the skin,
eyes in sick grim helplessness set.
One he left headless and mutilated,
and a young boy in underwear beside his naked mother.
I check my sons before I go to bed.
They're safe tonight--were not chosen.
Others were:
some to feel the terror driven into them,
one to bear it in his body till it worked his hand.
There's a little boy on our block
with scabs behind his knees.
He hits the other kids a lot,
runs down the street in dirty diapers
as cold rain falls.
And who is it coming toward us now
in a rusted Chevy, driving all night through Kansas,
the chosen one, his knuckles
white against the wheel?

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Orpheus the minstrel exacted such music

from his lyre, and had sung the blood into so many
cheeks, that no door was ever closed to him. And when
he took the beautiful Eurydice as his wife, his
happiness was complete. But Eurydice, walking in her
garden one day, was stung on the ankle by a little dust
snake and died.
Her husband's sorrow was so violent he could
barely contain it. Vowing to bring her back to the
world of light, Orpheus descended through Acherusia
to the gates of the Land of the Dead, and sang his grief
so powerfully there that even those dread guardians
wept and allowed him to pass. Coming at last to the
thrones of Aidneus (Hades) and his Queen Persephone,
the singer, having disturbed the hosts of the dead
with the passion of music and memory, asked that
Eurydice be allowed to live again, then sang the
death-song he'd made for her. As the song unwound,
the unflinching faces of "they who walk in darkness"-the vengeful Furies--were wet with tears for the
first time since the world began. So achingly
perfect was his music, in fact, that Hades, weeping
with his own love for Persephone, agreed to let
Eurydice return with her husband--on the
condition that Orpheus lead her out of the
underworld without looking back.
But when the desperate young man first
stepped into the light of day, he turned to share it
with Eurydice, not realizing she was still in the
cave. All he could do then was watch her phantom
form slipping back into the depths, as with a fading
cry her pale spirit fell again to its place among the
dead.

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At Night

This lover in the young man's dreams

as he lies fitful:
the shimmering holy lust she visits
upon his young body,
oh unreal! And yet,
and yet,
when paling dawn begins to spread,
unraveling his sleep,
as if Eurydice she draws away,
arms outstretched,
her eyes with shining tears

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Khajuraho, in central India, is famed for its

temples, with twenty-five of the original eighty-five
still standing. The facades of these temples are
covered with some of the finest sculptures ever made.
And Khajuraho--though its carvings taken as a whole
depict and celebrate a stunning variety of human
behaviors and moods--seems to have been from the
beginning a place of sexual union between human and
divine: Stories say that a brahmin's beautiful daughter,
naked as she bathed in a forest pool, was seduced by
the Moon God a thousand years ago, their son the
founder of the dynasty that dominated Khajuraho
and built its temples.
The story of sexual ecstasy opening onto
union with the divine--or simply representing it--is an
old and continually repeated one in India. Rama and
Sita, Krishna and the milkmaids, the worship of the
lingam, and Tantric sexual rites are all considered
transcendent spiritual images or practices and never
mere concupiscence. The story itself is so basic and
universal that, like a Hindu god, it flows easily
into countless versions, avatars of the One. This is
why so many of the carved figures at Khajuraho are
couples wrapped together in various sexual positions,
a general presentation of sex in all its forms--but
also of the searing adoration of lover for beloved,
which is at depth the featureless bliss of God.

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At Khajuraho: A Line from a Guide Book

Above the world of human beings, carved

along a temple frieze by hands now far
beyond the sun's light, they stand: above
frenetic marketplace and dingy square,
above the trampled blossoms and the stores,
above the crowded lanes and river waters:
"the quiet rapture of divine lovers."
Down in the world--to which their loving gazes
never wander--under their feet of stone
made delicate as flesh, bus or car passes
along the street, flies rise from the sand-and, always seeking something, woman, man,
the millions clash or cling or fall asunder:
beneath this rapture of divine lovers.
And here from age to age, money flows
like another Ganga. But for them,
their almond eyes unblinking, bodies posed
in sinuous attraction, her to him,
desire passionate to point of dream,
the world exists so that it may discover
this quiet rapture of divine lovers.
His arm around her doe-like shoulders, and
his hand upon her breast; and she
looks up into his face as if it stood
the moon itself upon her life. And we
glance up at times from all our vanity-for they are more like us than we are, ever,
in quiet rapture, these divine lovers.

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Just after a recent eclipse I read a

newspaper account of the reactions of some South
American tribal people to the darkening of the sun-and realized I was overhearing the deeply important
kind of story we humans tell ourselves when our
world suddenly changes.
During the eclipse, the Associated Press
reported, many Indians in the Andes followed the
traditional practice of lighting fires to warm the
benighted Earth, and, in the belief that a great
moon-puma was trying to devour the sun, sought to
frighten off the beast with various noises, including
the screams of children and the cries of beaten animals.
The ancientness of this belief is attested to,
experts say, by pre-Columbian stone carvings. The
Yuracare, Chiriguano, Mojo, Chiquito, Guarani, Inca,
and other South American peoples all believed in the
voracious moon puma or jaguar. In Central America a
similar belief led to shouting, the beating of drums,
and the building of large fires. Many North American
tribes did the same: "[D]ogs were made to squeal by
twisting their ears or beating them; people shouted,
struck a plank or canoe...babies were taken outside
to howl..."

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