Reawaken Slumbering Beast
To reawaken slumbering beast
To reinvest in paying mind
Revivify what was deceased
Release the flow, or press the grind
To render music from the void
To shake it til you hear a hum
To crush this life twixt fing and thumb
The blandeur of it all
The lines grow small
No heft
Is left
Keep
Sleep
Reconciliation, Submission, Delight
Mortality begets morality
and hosts of things that must be measured and assessed;
Knowing nature does its worst
leads us to care for what is best.
If this were Eden and life had nor term nor tether
a clockless paradise of faultless weather
We would not need morals
to help us get along together
to adjudicate our quarrels
and nevermore would we require
a bumbershoo, warm mukluks, a cozy fire.
No hearths in paradise
no wasting of the old, no struggle between women and men,
no drama, no penalty, no prize.
What pleasure, then?
Religious Poem
I stare into the empty well
while hoping to provoke my thirst;
But neither water nor desire
consent to manifesting first.
So, not unsatisfied, merely in pain,
I turn to search the landscape for
another means to shake the tree –
a more inspiring metaphor.
I shake the tree, then. What may fall
down from the branches and the leaves?
I hear vague rustling – that is all –
and vaguely rustling, something grieves.
There is no locus to my grief,
no reference point, no map, no chart,
despite the efforts of my brain
to pull the puling pain apart.
In search of metaphoric cures,
I stagger on from post to post,
and make the bootless, fruitless tour
a fading metaphoric ghost.
One day awaking from this stupor,
not needing to equivocate
I will directly live my life,
I will directly feel my fate.
But then I will not live apart,
nor will I be a part of Whole,
undifferentiated as the heart
and substance of the Oversoul.
Red Ink
In the nineteen fifties even the junkies
wore jackets and ties
I saw a photo essay from LIFE
magazine showing a lady
in a car coat hugging
two guys who were
crying because they’d
ruined their lives
In the nineteen sixties even the lawyers
wore beads and hippie trash
talked hip, toked. This
is no photo essay, this
is memory talking.
And memory again says in the nineteen seventies
we all dressed like clowns
floppy collars, clunky heels,
fabrics in big flowers you’d
sweat your brains out
My favorite sweater was Isis
flying on the back of Osiris
with little pyramids below
In the nineteen eighties we were
divided by the valley of the shadow of death
On one side the skulls of
the dead, on the other side
people happy to be divided by
the shadow of death
Everybody was smiling
In the nineteen nineties even the dead
wear jackets and ties
for fear the first sign of
non-conformity will cost them
their place among the damned.
Reflection on Thirty-nine
Melancholy is a charming punk
next to Despair,
the leper who desiccates whatever he touches.
You know him,
you have been wrestling with in the dirt
for years and years.
I think you are winning the match,
at least for now,
but the victory, tentative as it is,
has cost you.
Now you appear to the world and to yourself
a stoop-shouldered clerk,
balding and overweight,
but I can’t help observing,
even as you shuffle down the street
in shoes that were cheap
before they achieved their present state of maturity,
you sing to yourself,
“Bright morning stars are rising!
Day is breaking in my soul!”
So at the beginning of your thirty-ninth year,
you should be proud, after all.
You should be congratulated.
The Return of Queen Persephone to her Realm
from Persephone
I’ve discovered you, Beloved,
Where I never thought I could —
Everyplace where there is Beauty,
Everyplace where there is Good.
I had thought I lived in Sorrow,
Now I find I live in Love —
Love, which like an airy mantle
Covers mountain, sea and grove,
Love, which like an airy mantle
Round about my shoulder lies,
Softly guarding, without weighing,
Softly as an infant sighs.
We are one today, Beloved,
Today, forever, together, apart;
We are united, celebrated —
A triumph of the loving heart.
Return Waltz
How can the clouds know
what they are proud of?
How can a man know
why he’s ashamed?
Who calls the clouds down?
Working is weeping.
Light breaks through heart aches.
Light breaks the heart.
Hues of the sunset,
hues of our sorrow,
amber, then salmon,
cobalt, then black.
These tales the clouds tell.
We rise to read them,
rise in the sunshine,
fall with the sun.
Rodeo
There is a blood chase in the blood
that pursues and thirsts, silly as a goose
(a chase that a capillary could
contain in the Universe) letting loose
a Golden Calf to fix with hemp
and burn with iron
and straddle-stride-from triumphant
UNDER SIX SECONDS — fix with iron
ring with hemp triumphant
Trumpet Triumphant
That the walls of the Capillary
should resound
That all, ALL should bow down —
the Winner of the Chase,
Confounder of the Calf,
(grins and beers all around.)
To Rosamund
after Chaucer
from Persephone
Lady, you are of beauty the sole shrine
As far as circled is the world around.
For as the crystal glorious you shine,
And like the ruby are your cheeks so round:
That at a revel, when I see you dance,
It is an ointment unto my heart’s wound,
Though you do me no slightest dalliance.
For though I weep the tears to fill the skies,
Yet that my woe may not my heart confound;
Your wind-song voice with which you melodize
Maketh my heart with joy and bliss abound.
So genteelly I live, though love’s slave-bond,
That to myself I say, in my penance,
“Sufficeth me to love you, Rosamond,
Though you show me no slightest dalliance.”
Never was food immersed in pungent sauce
As I in love am so immersed and drowned;
So I devine how my soul’s shield’s embossed:
“Here is Tristan a second time reborn.”
My love will not be cooled, nor ardor numbed;
Ever I burn in love’s perfumed furnace.
Do what you will, I will your thrall be found,
Though you show me no slightest dalliance.