Confessional
There is
a price to empathy,
The iron stab
of memories not one's own
That hold
one fast, spiked to other souls
Too often
scourged of solace,
Hanging
thus on pain of others' flesh.
True, it buys
you shares of others'
Joys as
well, but less so all in all,
There
being hurt abundant spread
Like peat
across the mire of the world
And even
others' loves do no more
For them
(as for us all) than shield
Our sensing
somewhat from the
Terrors lodged
within the soul,
A minor
mercy empathy denies,
Insistent
on the ego's deeper joining.
To make
this all one's own perhaps
Is
unwilled ache, encoded in the genes
To secret
purpose, to temper pride
By way of
universal grief and
Shape the
soul to universal penance.
I do not
know. I only hurt.
In the Asian Galleries
So imperturbable an art,
so motionless in plenitude of life,
these porcelains, ivories, jades:
coaxed to patient shapes as though
to work invalid time's remorseless bustle.
Here they sit, having come downriver
(Yangtze of the centuries of forgetfulness)
the
unbusy work of an endlessly busy people
concluded now within these bright vitrines.
No turbulent dance
(strophe and antistrophe of occidental
energy)
motivates these
dragons, lions, rings, and cups,
these riant boys and sedate old men.
I stand here rueful
of my agitated memories
and study stasis,
the ancient, unguent science.
Untitled
Lady,
in your
buoyant brightness
I refine
my wayward light,
shape
wave and particle of
my
vagabond self.
Reflected in your steady sight
I see my own illicit glow
made sane and whole.
Must I renounce such visions?
My conscience tempers
rectitude with hope: It's God
Himself who manufactured light
and said, offhand and unrecorded,
"Let there be eyes."
A Melancholy
I have spread my soul (my childhood's grace)
like jam across these decades,
trying to resolve a wearying dispute on
the proper station of the Fool
and thus regain my balance, reforge my
damaged sword, my tongue, my
uncouth tool,
playing at Parsifal in an age decidedly
un-Arthurian
Posted, senses sentinel, on my porch in
this quiet south Ohio suburb,
startled by a helmeted barbarian shattering
the evening's silence through the full-bore
high whine gears of an unmuffled motorcycle,
my hearing tuned for the warning, waking,
wet diaper cry of my sleeping son,
I strain to hear beneath the mechanical
distractions and the nervous circus of
the crickets that fragile tone that is
the surface tension of an ageless Silence,
Signal beacon to our secret navigation
through
this infinity of atoms toward the blank
interrogation that guards the entrance
to our ancestral home.
At times I argue with the Keeper of the Gate,
attempt to lead him by debate to visions
of the things that I would do.
Outside of that I live my quiet life,
eat home cooked meals accompanied by a
modest wine, entertain at intervals,
watch the dream take shape, plan
journeys which I may or may not make
dependant as they are on circumstances
which have been left for someone else to
dream.
Or else I scheme,
recalling earlier seductions in which I
cannot place my part, those brittle
brilliant lights like comets which we
substitute for memory and urge to art,
knowing that they hold a key that they
will not surrender.
Those actions which the Eye encompasses
are few,
interplay of forces encapsulated in a
limited number of containers.
I know some half a dozen people whose
delight consists in this:
to cast reflections in a thousand borrowed
forms,
sport in bodies only marginally their own,
loan their language to a passing stranger for
a joke.
There are others too, more serious
(these are my retainers)
remnants of patrician Rome intent on building
mythic cities on which to found a history
or vagabond Castilians engaged in futile
exploration:
the fevered souls, the rapine ghosts,
defenders on a vanished barricade.
Temptation
"Often in the early morning
of this or that fine day,
I cry," she said.
"There's no reason really.
The tears come on as sudden
as a memory, as inexplicable
as wind. I'm just a silly girl."
I sat surrounded by the clutter
of her sewing things (unmoved,
it seemed, since last I visited
so long ago) and lingered
over coffee growing cold.
She talked of friends and school
and men and I (no saint) moved
defensively in my chair,
eluding jealousies to which
I had no right, remaining balanced,
ever balanced...
"You have another life just twenty
blocks away," I whispered to myself.
Then added, slightly louder
(being now and then the
Fool): "True.
But that is twenty blocks away."
Untitled
On such short notice
(having just hung up the phone)
I cannot write nor rhyme.
Still, in orders of importance,
a birth's a birth
(more so when it's yours).
Despite the weight of passing time,
your fear of wrinkles and
your mounting count of husbands lost,
all the days you've worked the earth
deserve some commendation,
at least a salutation
from a friend whose love,
imperfect though it is,
is love no less.
One wish then;
that you may
live as lovely as
you are and wrest from heartless
years the heartfelt joy that brought
you crying to the world and keeps
you --- crying yet --- still there.
you are and wrest from heartless
years the heartfelt joy that brought
you crying to the world and keeps
you --- crying yet --- still there.
Sleeping Woman
Sleep form flesh
soft
round shoulder suspiration
sea breath
the last ahhh...
thalassa. . .
all mothers when you sleep
childbearing dream dreaming on
continuance of a dream continuous
from Eve.
Quilt covered hair brown
pillow sunk abstract in
seawaves womb enclosed breathing tidal murmurs to
absent Adam's ears.
Female, from male, rib drawn
respiration of the secret scheme.
So dream...
Prodigal
(Item: 7 September 1970 --- A
sea lion, quite dead, washed up on the sand
at Drake's Beach, Point Reyes, California)
Salt blown sea licked walking on the beach
I passed it and,
seeing that it was dead, felt
my bones shudder
and demur.
(The currents
revolve;
blank suns wheel
the circuit of the universe;
time eddies in
round pools, whispering: about!
about! about!
about! The tides lament:
revolve, resolve,
revolve, resolve...)
Dead. Quite dead.
And of its dying
what to say?
Nothing...
Unremarkable...
It comes as no
revelation,
no sublime
surprise...
The tamed myth
lies: Nature is neither kind nor just.
She plots with
time and kills by whim.
(These years of
tracing lonely city streets and lonely
seaswept beaches
have left us sadly wise.)
Death's drama
cracks:
bereft of power and
of terror it seems suddenly so common,
the trivial
surcease of life's ancestral anguish.
So not its dying,
no...
not its dying.
And yet, to be dead
so...
having played the
stoic scene, the final tragic act;
having succumbed
to time's imperial command;
(perhaps with some
small sound or gesture
hinting at a frail, receeding grace)
having relinquished
the joy, the agony, the pain and play,
the breaking waves
and company of dolphins,
the shimmering harvests of the dark sea floor;
(perhaps with a
final gentle sigh)
having, at last,
finally and simply died... to be yet so...
A lump of bleeding
refuse cast on the rude sand to lie
without mourners
in an alien land sweating sick sap:
dead covenant of
promises betrayed (or kept?),
an open broken
jawbone lacking teeth and
one unblinking arid
eye pleading mutely to the
bottles and the
scraps of paper, the stubs of cigarettes...
garbage to
garbage, trash to trash...
spawned, loved,
sustained, drained,
shattered and
spurned by this eternal Ocean,
(Brahma! Vishnu!
Shiva! Brahma! Vishnu! Shiva!)
spewed useless on
the sand, sport for sea birds and marauding
flies...
So small a mercy to request
(and even this
denied our sea blanched bones)
that, being
finally dead, we might at last find rest,
at last we might come home...
(The tides lament:
revolve, resolve,
revolve, resolve...)
Critical Opinion
A famous
modernist, reputedly superior,
eschews the brush
in favor of her derriere.
Her writhings are
hung in the finest museums,
depictions of
mankind's intemperate dreams.
"It's made
the art world so much cheerier,"
admirers say of her posterior.
But...
when asked to
opine in a professional way
how the lady ranks
with the best of the day,
Hinson, our astute curator,
proceeded roundly to berate her:
"She spoils a
luscious, firm technique
by placing clashing
colors cheek to cheek."
Two Flamencos for Garcia Lorca
Love
is a wound:
cornada muy grave
on Death's other horn ---
the thing you must not think of,
stroking the white
blow home.
Aiiiee!
The spiked moon,
how fatal!
Aiiiee!
The guitar!
sobs, abandoned in
the
blue spotlight;
sobs, low in its
quicksilver
throat:
a woman (dark as
olives and
fatal as a dove)
wailing at the
moon.
Suburban Interlude
We are aware that
we are captives of the
moment, entangled
in a whispered trick of
time which we are
always just about to understand
but never do,
trying to sort
beginning, middle, end
with imaginary
words that will not fix an image and
cannot ascend to
certain meaning which beyond a
moment we could
not be certain we intend.
A feeble tool
with which to
comprehend a ghostly passage
in an unpropitious
season.
***
I confess these
ambiguities to calm a fragile
excitation, an
ancient pulse revived beneath the
sounds of
conversation proper and reserved:
the offer of a
beer, a glass of wine,
perhaps some
pretzels or some cheese,
the ritual refreshments,
the obvious amenities.
The blood disturbs
its sediment less savagely
among these well
kept lawns,
cools sadly in the
lazy arc of twilight sprinklers
slaking barbered
grass, denies its hot intent
among the office
haunted dawns,
the tricycles, the
shining young at play, the
monthly web of
budgets, taxes, grocery bills...
disturbs its
sediment less savagely but
disturbs it still.
And in this
patterned round where bodies
cannot move and
dare not touch (for that
would break the sleeper's
abstract trance)
nor passions grow
incautious and change position
in the dance (we
fear the weighty consequence)
the blood
electrifies and makes the eye
audaciously ionic,
restrains itself to flirt
with air, confines
its lusts to courtesies
between two chairs,
and in that space defies
the Laws that
forged the ordered ages,
hinting sadly at an endless jest.
Late
Night Phone Call
I interrupt my masquerade to stage
this midnight conversation
this moonspun wordfun salutation
(intimation of my larger exultation)
by which we wish that we could be
that being which we are and
not be forced to plot our course
among the small considerations of
these wholly faded stars,
discursive life of living memories,
wife and I remembering
(accused
among accursed) the kinks and catches
of a twisting journey turning on a
compass point the world has long forgot.
Elliptic eruditions this eclectic
verbal polyglot,
spirit symbols syllables of
spoken flesh syntactically defined,
electric speech inclined to kinds
of sentence sentience this instrument
transmits only intermittently,
subjecting to its dull inflection
hypnotic fires of a limber tongue.
Well, despite a bad
connection,
at least we have begun.
Conference
Room
No air conditioning.
The sound of hounded heat in
dead rooms, that dull hum,
ineffective coils, condensers,
machines oppressed, oppressing,
fluorescent strangulation:
a dearth of air, heat made
tangible, expressed in grams,
in pounds per square inch:
that pressure on the chest,
this violated heart.
A meeting of the bored.
The word made heavy, given
gross weight, cumbrous shape,
trapped in three-dimensions,
formed in space,
tabled,
like a glass, a water pitcher:
the sentence sentenced.
Then the soul's protective tic,
an unthought turning of the head:
this tree outside the window.
Green.
Green.