Parable
Two children walked along under the moon
On porches of an abandoned palace,
Staircases, columns, haunted by life once
Spent there, its jeweled gables starlight strewn.
The one expressed his heart’s breathless desire:
Ever to live in the place, his days eased
By gracious attendance, and his nights pleased
Wandering the garden, or warmed at the fire.
The other’s voice gently disturbed the air:
“To eyes that daily view the richest gem
It’s brilliant lustre daily grows more dim;
Most treasured is the luxury most rare.
To glimpse and know joy’s momentary flame,
Embrace it’s beauty, set aside it’s pain.”
Pestle Essence
Sorrowing Beauty
Joy of the Grotesque
Intelligence Confused
Arrogant Ignorance
Simple formulae for
vary-colored pills
ground in pestle with mortar
dust for the drink I take
porcelain chalice
Back falling
gossamer night gown flutters
flowered pink gray black
aflutter brown tresses
falling back (eyes roll back)
Sink into the lovely bed of nails
pillow stuffed with fine feathers of glass
all the long afternoon
reading and drinking in my bed
I am at rest
Π in the Sky
Blue sky, good news, empty light.
To shape a cloud, sorrow,
but comforting, and right.
So here you are, faint gray and white.
Young friend, made today, please stay tomorrow
and help to make this proof:
Today one lived who made
your shape — a cloud, aloof
from light, a dazzling shade
hanging unconscious of
its beauty, my own child
arrogant with my love,
unfeeling, undefiled
by introspection, a pouting mist
whose lovely frowns provoke
the affirmation I have missed —
I felt, I thought, I spoke,
I twisted and I turned,
I made, I lost, I learned.
The Power of Sympathy
from Persephone
The low sun was a beneficial hand
That stretched above the lane I walked forlorn,
When I saw at a distance on the land,
Ceres wand’ring the field of broken corn;
Her eyes were downcast — with an aimless pace
She stumbled, weary, on the shattered rows;
The air, so clear and still, mirrored her face —
Spent as her eyes, dumbfounded with her woes;
The world was amber, amber as her grief,
And amber was my own heart loitering there;
I’d lost my loved one, too — and no relief,
No tears, nor songs, nor muttering of prayer
Could succor me, my heart was so undone —
Til I saw Ceres in the Autumn sun.
Psychological Ax
psychological ax
what hand, what design
psychological adz
lathe
cutting all the same
cutting the thing alive
cutting the life
hewing it, shaping it, hewing to shape
the tree the axman one pain one fate
grafting
cut off waste and death
splice life to life
a new, a third life emerges
Green
and golden beyond price