From website gregglory.com
Written by Gregg Glory (Gregg G. Brown)
DIVINE REVOLT
GREGG GRLORY
AMERICA AS I MADE IT.
copyright © 1996 Gregg G. Brown
published by
BLAST PRESS
324B Matawan Avenue
Cliffwood, NJ 07721
732.297.5920
C O N T E N T S
NO PLATO'S REPUBLIC
I. The American Revolution
II. Fame, always a difficult
III. Man is only free....
IV. Jefferson and Washington
V. Perhaps our reality...
HISTORY
DIVINE REVOLT
THE REBELS
CAPITOL RIOT
LAPIS LAZULI
AN NADIR
AMORICA
NEVERLAND
THE DRUNKEN GARDENER
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
GLORY BOY
THOMAS PAINE
KING WASHINGTON
LEE'S RETURN
LINCOLN
LEWIS AND CLARK
MAD JACK
OPPENHEIMER'S ESCAPADE
MASTER AND SLAVE
THE MORALIST, or THE FALL
REBEL ANGELS
THEIF OF GLORY
DECLINE OF A STATESMAN
I. DECLINE OF A STATESMAN
II. VIETNAM IN WASHINGTON
III. HOUSE PAINTING
IV. NIGHT MEDITATIONS
V. NO MOON
VI. DIALOG
LIMELIGHT
A DYING VIOLET IN THE SIDELIGHT
WORDS ARE WORLDS
LIKE DROWNED DIVERS
BIRTHDAY POEM
PAUPERS IN THE BLOOD
IN THE DARK
STARS IN THE CELL
SHALL
WORLD'S WORST SONNET
I felt exceedingly disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the narrowness and nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon. So little are images capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected with words.
S T C
We are made of it, and if we get sufficient,
Among our chances there's a chance we can choose.
RICHARD HELL
NO PLATO'S REPUBLIC
I
It seems all whirling passions must,
As the whirlwind, come to dust.
The American Revolution comes to me, as all great changes in the state of humankind must, as in a violent dream. No human value survives the wreckage of such great events unaltered; all must think, or must come to think, by the new measure, and with a very different heaven looking over their shoulders as they pray, or cease in that abject oblation if it is a diminishment of character. That Revolution came as a unique circumstance, not in obscure fulfillment of some hidden Historical Destiny, no, but as an opportune moment seized upon by its players, and recognized as such by them. A moment when speech and circumstance might intersect, and the right words tell all.
When Jefferson stooped to the stagnant page, what rushed in his veins? That Liberty might not die, that great vision unblooded, and freedom be succeeded in their day by the old safety of Tyranny, the blind paternal hand holding even the populace's spirituality in its sceptred grip, they wrote out their epic with the measure of their lives. They did not kneel to crass necessity in their moment, but made what seemed all the fallen logic of that cold, royal world come up into their dream; so strangely and so strongly was their singing made. They made their poetry stick, and gambled all on Lautremont's truth that "poetry, if it is to be made at all, must be made by all."
America's very greatest poetry is in her public documents, "made by all." What other nation may say this? The time of their creation has passed. But where has that moment gone, when heroes talked to the godless hills and sought reply, as if in the echo of Natty Bumppo's shotgun? No Plato's Republic had they sought, finished in its abstract detail, the poets exiled and the vision ended, but instead a living document whose voices sway and register beside our own even now, not in some moron hymnal, some blind collective marching song, but, as it were, in a cricket-chorus, each timbre distinct and every individual head vibrating to the kicked notes on its own thin stem of grass. That era when citizen talked to citizen as if to find all necessary knowledge in the talk that passed between us, all wisdom in the common speech, has passed, or seems, at the very least, but dimly remembered. Has even the echo of that dream passed beyond our sleep?
All have known the moment's oppression, the hand weighing darkness on the eyes, the eyes unfitted for sight as if by some inner brightness, some interior recognition that has flashed the negative of our more conscious thoughts blank. What record do such moments leave if not in the vision of poetry; all that talk but a second guess at some more primal reality that escapes the tongue, however exquisite. Is there any sainthood in our veins, if we refuse to bleed the manifestation? That ghostly kiss takes all breath and leaves lungs and heart empty, as if for some as yet undiscovered function. If we do not possess our ghosts, wear their powdered wigs, and roil in their battle ditches, they shall never break out of their storybooks and, by a complementary compulsion, inhabit us. And what are poets, and what are the people, in their own minds, if not the possessed? A sack of magnetic rhymes and a cooler of bad conscience, too sick to tremble into utterance or ecstasy, deserving the useless silence they exemplify.
II
Fame, always a difficult, often tendentious, topic among poets, finds its grounding paradise as an extension of the simple wish to communicate. Fame occurs when unknown hearts respond to an upwelling heart. And the wish for Fame is but the acknowledgement, among persons capable of creation, of the validity and continuance of meaningful memes, a sort of unit of cultural transmission, of unruined evocation, like a stone rune but with its compelling story intact, past death and into the genetic body of Destiny. This is imagination's inheritance, and deserves the applause it commands. The multi-generational "judgement of one's peers" but charts how far the inroads of the one creating consciousness have gone since the creator's departure, how his talk has infected his inheritors. A good poem changes that nation's grandchildren, altering their rhythms and changing their chant of selfhood for no other reason than that they themselves find it best and most beautiful in the soundscape that surrounds them.
When I consider the haste and distraction in which modern lives hurry to their empty ends, it comes to seem that a distinct disinterestedness in all that is found in such a life must become the pre-condition for the poet's discernment of whatever might in his song be sung as necessity. In such a speeding life, any memes capable of procuring Fame for the particular imagined Object a living individual has created or contributed to can take no part in the common waste, but must be lifted above, or drawn aslant, by that creator's limning eye. I think of that great Blake, all his vision but the imposition of a meaningful line against the angelic flux which surrounded him, and made of his mind a chorus of interpenetrating colors, blossoms without petals. Such a mind, chastised or inflamed to an excitation beyond the norm, directs the hand or the tongue that utters it into some more visible, inviolable form. Here we might see that the selfish gene, which prefers reproduction for its goal, and denigrates the alba to the extent that it is not the sung promise of some Don Juan to go back to bed, is at odds with the selfish meme which wishes only and always to sing, whatever the hour or the occasion, in almost a madness of selfhood; this is the rash heart and loud hour that made punk rock imperishable, another outbreak in the inevitable line of heresies the first dogma demanded. No such arbitrarily imposed restriction on the individual may last, no dogma enforce acquiescence from the greater entity that created it, which greater entity is always the individual. Poetry, the verbal essence of the individual, his or her meaning meme, is, as Shelley descried, a sword of lightning, which consumes any scabbard that would contain it.
Both meme and gene battle for the allegiance of the awakened individual. Once self-awareness has occured, its potential effects are limitless, as in Plotinus' dream. All human nature, he had known, is creative; the only choice in this dream, is whether to be active or passive in our creativity. Self-consciousness, by its very act of self-creation, is no longer necessarily tied to the inherited structures of its existence beyond what individual freewill commends. In the war between gene and meme, a combat rages for the resources of an individual's time and attention, always limited, and either cause is often abetted or averted by encumbering circumstance. In some ways the individual herself may be considered the net effect, the ultimate creation of memes, since only individuals with an independent view can ever come to create beauty beyond a day, and only individuals, self-created in the act of their own flooding baptismal, and never averring to any outward source for this selfhood, can truly incorporate the self-consciously constructed meme-things of others, which is to say respond with the sympathetic originality required of every great individual work of art or masterwork of talk.
Beauty to beauty called, and beauty to beauty came; is not this the living trace of every story we adore? Helen unadorned swept all the Greeks to sea. Such moments are so conscious a construct, so planned a disaster, that they come to participate in what all sages call the Mind-stream of a life; and what artist could abandon his body before he had swum the currents of such a stream? That more may find in life what artist or visionary have ferreted out, and so that such wondrous labors will not die, "consciousness raising" of this particular sort becomes the supreme activity of the artist in life; Homer sings that the Argives might dash their poorer lives away for a wish without hesitation, and thereby die the richer. If some modern poet or creator should wish to insert their thought into the heart-rhythms of posterity, they must insist on a self-creating audience of vivified individuals:
Though grave-digger's toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.
The poet votes for the eternity of meaningful memes!
III
Man is only free to create beauty, and, through the rational senses, communicate that beauty to other consciousness’. And these others themselves must be self-creative as well, or they would not even really be there or be able to be touched by the spin of your manufactured Beauty's twirl. No poet ever sang to a stone, unless it was to hum himself a lullaby. And yet, one thinks of the million useless moving gestures, of Nietzsche embracing the tragic aesthetic for a final twirl on the dance floor where "God Is Dead" hangs in a banner over the refreshment table, and Stephen King's Carrie croons all old wounds open again. Even Nietzsche's lucid intelligence could only, as he thought, transform passive nihilism (the unconscious plodding of those baneful men and women of his age) into active nihilism. He brought his self-consciousness to an annihilated stage, and sang the sweeter for that self-consciousness. He became another in the great line of Oedipii, embracing his tragic suffering in gaiety, as Yeats says, that he might see the more clearly the reality of his own era. He had put out his eyes for the sake of imposing some meaning in a universe he viewed as meaningless before he could see another, or additional, mode to express and discover the freedom and victory of the individual on this globe. Thank God [ha, ha] that I, at least, at last, and by damn [ha, ha] have come up with one such mode.
Man is only free to create beauty. Circumstance, the bog of facts, is collusional in this definition of individual infinity, granting a uniqueness and unrepeatability to the most haphazard of creations. Man is only free to create beauty: to deny the infinite, self-creative reality of others is to deny yourself a beauty; in this way, one becomes a slave to 'egotism' instead of liberated by its reality-principle. DeSade's entire career had come and gone to make this point, demanding that all others become objects of pleasure for an encastled Master, all relationships and lives ruthlessly reduced to the one relationship of Power, servile dominance or servile submission the only values. This reductive self, this minor 'ego' is the only horror that the Tyrant and the Slave have in common. And how fucking free can that ever be? It seems the smallest system of joy imaginable to me, if I don't think about the churches. The free man will never willingly lessen his bite of Beauty, never exile the living consciousness of another, the paired wings rising higher for their symbiont competition.
"I want to free other men and women from my tyranny." In such a speech, to which an unwretched life may give good meaning, lies a godless Shenandoah, a paradise for the senses and the sensible, individuals ready to live without the demeaning exactions of the Tyrant. In such words, lived truly, the self may come to its habitable place. No Plato's Republic, endorsing exile, but all free, unruined, the Adams and Eves of their self-made bowers. Each Eden-blossom becomes a face turned toward its individual sun, unchained from both necessity and nature, choosing its source of life and meaning. Those who are reasonable, in this sense, 'go between' the extremes a misapprehension of time demands. Creative of the present, I share in neither the past nor the future, save by memory and hope.
IV
Jefferson and Washington, and all those famous men
That out of obscurity came, and were on enlightenment bent
As on some perfect woman's face, and had such holy measures
In their drums, out of what dark hole began?
Where had all that purposeless glory come?
O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself.
"The Revolution occurred first in the minds of the people." So Jefferson wrote, and Ezra Pound's 'revolting' cantos echo. But what happened? Why is that idea so lively and alive even now? What artist's virtue had those men come to seek, what sleek head emerging out of all that destruction? With the revolutionary overtake of the political process in the old colonies, all government functions became capable of being considered as one with, or as becoming one with, the rest of humankind's creative emanations, a work to jerk the heart out of us and into use. Things, objects of use, become memes, become meaningful, when picked up in the free will of a creative human mind, and can then get passed on to the next generation as art-consciousness does.
But only beauty, tenacious servant of itself alone, may hold the whirling mind still, like a balanced top, long enough for the sting of another's message-meme to penetrate our vocabulary. That is the portion of all that others say and do that we cannot live without, since to live without it is to be less ourselves, to participate less in the beauty that surrounds us in a rainstorm of gems, to die before our deaths. Unbound from dead convention, the people are free to design the values by which they live, to forge and fashion the mask that their society shall wear. In this effort, which must include all of themselves or be rendered void, individuals are called by rapturous beauty to express themselves in rational Liberty. Nothing less will do. It is the only choice that can occur without the wicked imposition of some tyrannical self-contradiction that will incur eventual failure. Theocracy, Socialism, the extravagance of the commune or the Khymer Rouge, all that take meaning up into themselves exclusively, or put off the revelation of meaning until the end of history, as in Hegel, or the doctrines of the Christian Church, or any that await a deterministic point where "initial conditions" embolden themselves to a ripeness where some certain visionary future must play itself out as in a card hand, all must succumb to their own closedness, cultural tombs with no snaky outlet airhole from which the spirit may peep its way to heaven.
Hopeful means to express one's current freedoms is all a rebellion may hope to achieve--- and that is everything! Any absurdist point of view, wherein man is rational in a meaningless, random universe will not suffice. All abstraction, all spoken thought, then becomes random, and all the objects in our lives begin to evade our touch, our loves turn to smoke in our embraces. To come to the assertion that the universe is meaningless and man rational, one would need to hold both things in a single unobstructed view with a clear, almost deterministic, totality. But it is circumscribed to man that he should view himself as his supposed God might do, useless for a human to wish to wither into a single one of his creations. And since no self/other, man/universe perspective of this variety can occur without some such Third Term (God, 13th Cone, or What-You-Will) intervening to give the perspective its reality, it collapses, and we must find a new ground for Camus' hopeful ethics. Since the absurd universe cannot exist, we need to see how radical genetic and historical contingency dovetail with infinite human self-definition, freedom's expression, art, divinity of self, and rational joy. In my terms, quite simply, the future doesn't exist, except as guiding hope in individuals, nor does the past, save as memory. Association, arbitrary perhaps but never banal, becomes a rich tool for beauty and consciousness-shaping thus; it holds as in a trust (a self-trust where one believes the self capable of meaning since self-created) many of the old arts and traditional means of expression and discovery, even to the point of verbal fatigue, keeping all alive through the centuries.
V
Perhaps our reality follows some such strict simpleness as science shows, its skeletons of all knowledge supple in their simplicity. Monarchy was one individual's strategy to perpetuate his genes, all consciousness of self flowing to its seed, this great and necessary end justifying the terrible tyranny of his means. Perhaps all such men are ignorant of our commonality in this goal, the united nature of the human race, or that the radical nature of his own self-consciousness spelled his doom; for once any individual reinforces an irrational guess at self-preservation with any conscious means at all,--- and every individual must have some consciousness of the decisions they make in life,--- then the end itself, in this case the preservation of a lineage, must ultimately come to an end. Tyranny always backfires in this manner, since using a self-conscious end to justify the less than self-conscious means of one's actions makes that self-conscious individual one with a meaningless, irrational universe, and not its joyous opposite. Every step we take must be in self-conscious Liberty, and reinforce the totality of our current sum, nothing less. We are always creating ourselves, and this is our end as self-conscious beings; to imagine that what we do in any given instant is less than everything, is to resign that self-consciousness to defeat and ignorance, it is to create in the passive mode, disengaged from our self-conscious source of selfhood; it is a lie. To endorse such meaninglessness with rational self-consciousness is to interrupt one's being, and to introduce an unresolvable perplexity into the center of one's existence. Since the rational self is real and perduring, this state of affairs must come to an end, obliterating its bearer.
Because of the intense "initial conditions" sensitivity of all natural events, and their "chaotic" aftermath, revealing the radical contingency of evolution's knitted loops and history's wide nets, we must come to pay an utter attention to the present moment, the 'now' of our current circumstances and renewed initial conditions with all of our humanity. A Zarathustrian self-trust and collapsing into his own humanity to become the Super-Man of intensest feeling is required for every second of existence. This is the man whom the arrow of ethical Beauty transfixes, as St Teresa in her ecstasy, gored on a pike her own imagination had soaked bright with significance; her self-conscious self the spoken hub and nexus, neural and otherwise, of the collapsed abstract second of the poem imposed. We must demand by will and imagination the self-conscious freedom of every exterior bit of matter, as the rood that spoke of Christ draped upon its angles, so that Darwinian competition can be entered into with one's whole mind and without contradiction. This is how a single consciousness can make the world alive with itself, rational and universal harmony and love thus prevailing under that one consciousness' moniker, and that single sweeping consciousness not God's. This is where evolution itself must push us, once we had been granted the power of abstract imagination, a radically free self-postulating instrument in which to focus the circumstances around us. If our imaginations are capable of it, perhaps in some such simplification an inerrant science may eventually make, these circumstances can come to include the entire Universe, and we ourselves become the Third Term, without any need for the invisible world of our tribal days. The result of such an attitude and self-emanation enduing one's environment thus unrelentingly is always that moment of self where self and world inter-pierce, and which all ages have named Beauty.
What we think of ourselves is what we make of ourselves, the thought itself body enough for the reality it inherits. The genetic substructure of our existence fades as we come into the pride of our speech, knowing and illuminated Lucifers all of us, by our defiant cry establishing a limit and end to any inherited order, and demanding new worlds for our purgatories. Lee, living his idea of duty and right, made all see those ideals as an embodied reality. Lincoln, renewing the pledge, asserted the Declaration as a universalist document, not, as some would have it and all know to be false, that "all are created equal" in terms of talents or any native abilities or circumstances-- such would be a weak lie-- but that all are equal in their self-created moral context: the words we choose to create ourselves with, and never stop creating; equal in our imaginative moral worth, with each individual's beauty, or idea of beauty, becoming part of the present scope and power of all; an increasing truth, not a dead end.
Can I imagine the universe? I can definitely imagine as much universe as any other human, and would thus pass the Turing Test for universe construction, if there is one. We are all the inheritors of this freedom, and may arrive at our built universes without any sticking contradictions to snare our dreams. Let every thing that can so come to imagine, every robot or butterfly, think itself free and alive; let all enter the lists of self-conscious evolution with mind and tongue against the raucous denigrations of Time. We should speak our DNA in a chant; then what poets shall we be! All meme and meaning from center to fingertips. A self-echoed thing supreme!
Rebellion simple as a flash
In the waters of the night,
Unconfused by darkness,
Giving up its light.
GREGG GLORY
HISTORY
I hate my time.
SAINT-EXUPRY
Upright in nostalgia's vice,
The newscast knocked me flat; I am
Hammered from
A stiff expectancy that the past,
Under augers and a strong carpenter's hands,
Could endure
Into significance like a three-legged stool.
DIVINE REVOLT
I
A strange, endangered rebellion
Made our continent an island,
Traced its oar about our shores
And in a glittered swish
Of rebel arm and leaping fish
Seperated us from England.
Thomas Paine construed a truth
That shouted from a Concord roof;
All divinity in an old church tower
Watched the lower river's damp
In the crossbeams of its lamp:
Oneth, twoeth, and all that followed.
II
But what did all that insurrection mean
That in a modern eye can't raise a gleam?
Men and horses and battle-confusion
Race about us, and what conclusion?
Tumultuous scenes, shouted lives
Gave all then but what to us may give?
Is that arc of miracle spent
That had all History for its jet?
III
Every art must find its measure, or dissipate,
Spent its seed, and scorned its treasure,
A wild opiate incense gone into day;
So that those dead men may live again
And this telling be reckoned permanent
All must be compounded by song and pen
Into the eternity of Art.
That out of experience's desert
One flowered thought or act might live,
Resign your part in all that hurts---
All that is not glory or divinity
Is inhuman, a graceless less;
Greatness is impartial to happiness.
IV
Patriot, poet or painter then
Learn to finish where we began:
Those men who murdered Hessians were
Twice worth the weight of a collapsing star.
When Liberty rocked its cradle
What continents shook then?
What future years regained a scope
Romans had murdered in Greek hope?
What if we live and die a day,
Rebellious mayflies in a sty,
What then? Our difference is less
Than sense differs from sense.
V
Prometheus, Napoleon, Satan, Don Juan, Cain,
All that naysaying gang of yes
That charm a closed experience
To open rebellion again;
Huysmans, Immoralist, Rimbaud,
Urizen and Los together locked
In charring chains, all changed
When once the universal chord was struck.
Because those imagined men refused
Death like that taught out of school
Their great memories are fused
Into attenuated attitude.
No more the infernal, incomparable flourish
Or gesture twice the grandness of a wish,
A hand so well-turned it might faint a maid
Or bring home Helen's panties in a raid.
VI
Because I had rushed to life
My life had rushed to me;
Human nature lives and dies
Upon a temporary stream.
I have stood and I have heard
In some broken after-lecture talk
Or more commodius, blossoming talk
Under sweet night-shaded trees,
Defeat defended by a fool,
That death was an imposition
And not a sundering Heaven
Self-defining man invented,
He was so wrapped in errancy.
Oh I have listened too long to talk!---
To some dying worm upon a hook,
To whom no human greatness tended.
I have said, and I say again,
Unaccountable glory moved them then:
Sharpshooter, scout, and Indian.
A mist that fails or fulls
Comes upon my solemn breath,
So momentary an emanation
It empties the meaning of death.
He neither knew nor could guess
How grave, graced Lincoln was
Lost amid his happiness.
Is all that monumental resolution
Torn from quills and stories leaves
But the fitful trace of some
More furious memory?
All the past's but what I know
And all the turning future's Hope;
I stand beneath the increasing tree alone
And look back upon them all:
Dead deeds alone still can carve
Or plead with the hangman's rope,
Which proves tight their loves,
Upon one living soul long enough
Until a single thought is thought
Within a starving heart.
Yet who of all that rebel pride
Who rode the green-breasted countryside
Solitary upon the dawn
And had gestured freedom
Beneath a midnight-laden tree
Upon the Boston commons
Will puff from an old, frayed sleeve
Their near immaterial hand
In benediction of the land
To touch our own risen faces?
THE REBELS
...simple words are the only salvation
from this death.
CAMUS
I
All things move in the direction that we sing:
Rebel-loving mothers battle-hymn long rest
To babies cooing at their breast;
Mother Goose elects the parliament.
Sane-eyed men put on powdered wigs and sit
Arguing weary evenings through to things
Declared clarity and truth.
Hanged men say 'o' to the words.
Stockinged midnight stamps the boards,
Arguments combat for place, their own hard-won
Among the sordid knots of man's oblivion;
To themselves they whispered out
A speech past inheritance, yet thought-possessed:
Democracy, sighed some. In one shout:
The Republic! cried the rest.
Hanged men say 'o' to the words.
Syllable by syllable they dreamed
That their own bitten mouths might close round
Imaged words their dreams confessed;
That they themselves were what they seemed:
Dear dreams that would not go hoarse
In the smear of the marketplace
Or horse-sown pamphlets thrown to wind.
Hanged men say 'o' to the words.
II
Romantic governance, the soul upon a sheet
Of quill-ticked parchment thin as skin
And worn about the dirty neck
Of some brave, hanged rebel
For his sole ornament; words kept in
Sweet consciousness had swept
Through the damned head death breaks.
All things move in the direction that we sing.
His arms outstretched upon the pallet,
As upon the gibbet, his mother keening there,
Whether toward some young savior in his mind
Or from the black-flamed insanity of terror
None but the dreamer may see or know,
His arms outstretched as if toward some
Overwhelming imaginary goal.
All things move in the direction that we sing.
Each bobcat wish comes puzzling, and hunts us
Until we out of each vague thought or meme
Have trumped the meat, and sit
Like the bewildered soldier musket-shot
Through his cold back in the peaceful, misty field
In solemn, bloody ownership
Of our own still-beating hearts.
All things move in the direction that we sing.
CAPITOL RIOT
Blood runs from the torches,
Streams in anxious uplifted eyes
That stared bleared dreams to daylight,
And blindness drowns the wise.
I
Past the pitching Senate
That votes and then forgets,
Past the marring crowd that yet
Scorns what Love may give or get
But will not relent:
Numb hands unstitch the star-strung flag,
Marrying violence and fate.
Violence burns out the masterwork
Right heart or touch had thrown
Out of the clay of the dark
Out of pinched mind's increasing black
With careless, vigorous fingers
To all the ragged sheen of the stars.
Blood runs from the torches;
Mad hands demand mad eyes.
II
From some patched and patterned floor
From a pile of scratched and fallen blocks
That lion Liberty, born to our call,
Who roared all joyous creation once
Roars an ancient, forgotten agony
Roars dully upon all fours,
A gin-drunk Adam who rants his tune
Outside the garden wall.
Outshouting Lincoln's blind white head
Mute at my neck
That from my blood-wet shoulders stares,
Cold eyes that must wait to wake
Whose searing sight once dreamed all things:
Equality, Temperance, Justice,
Fit substance for one soul to sing.
Blood runs from the torches;
Mad hands demand mad eyes.
III
And now that strumpet Ignorance,
Her mouth upon my wound,
Struts an age's monuments
To shivers in the clay;
Her feet are hillbilly thick,
Her flashed sex a brillo down,
A battered pennant upon a stick
That waves with the wave of the drowned;
And I swear her cobweb gown's a shift
Torn from where a broken window lay
Silent in the plundered town.
Tired of seeing glittering things in the waste
I lay my head with the rest.
Blood runs from the torches;
Mad hands demand mad eyes.
LAPIS LAZULI
Over his own heart man strides
Walks all day, and may not pass by.
Basho and his narrow road
Blake's terrified and enlightened eye
Milton's morning laved in rays
Or Lawrence's apple-hearted dark
All move or bear their load
And with no strain go by
Each a fountain in noon-day,
Each a dead monument at dark.
AN NADIR
"God is dead," and "I am God," man cried
And pushed the thorn into his own side.
Who knew but that rebelling God caressed
Rebel mankind to his breast?
AMORICA
Freedom's womb was red,
Religion a torn book;
America snaked skyward in wrath and flame,
Dead to England, but alive in fame.
Its sinuous joy in Liberty shook
And, lover of wild rebellion, took
Incestuous History to bed.
NEVERLAND
I whispered a word into the hawthorn's bud
That it might bloom and think;
My amaranth fancy then awoke a flood
That ran crystal-shot to Mississippi's sink.
Ah! How bright causes put the darkness out
That in dark eyes must hesitate and waver
And from the eternity of Life flow out
Into the eternity of never.
THE DRUNKEN GARDENER
Lively sings the drilling bee
From nuzzled bud to bud,
Hearts that open to that thin, black tongue
Blossom past the shroud.
And the gardener is drunk again
Among the dazzled aisles;
He sinks in dreams of immortal joy,
And the bee walks on his lip.
Hatred bears with passion
As culling comes to fruit;
All that blossoms on the wild, high air
Shall wither to the root.
Hatred stirs to action,
Music stabs still hearts to dance,
Full Love would move our passion there
But for our partial circumstance.
And the gardener is drunk again
Among the dazzled aisles.
Now come to that high tenancy
That from heaven to heaven slips,
As a contralto hummingbird
Warbles as she dips.
How should we avoid that wandering,
That whistling word Immortality
If we but hold our lives entire
In a laughing eye?
And the gardener is drunk again
Among the dazzled aisles.
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
Hell is the eye in ruins.
Heaven is the tongue caressed.
Darwin's sorrowful ape
Stood erect, the imperial shape
Deigning imagination to a flat landscape;
Even in the fluct-state of his quantum brain
Fiery roses suffer loss or gain
By tinct of joy or pain.
I'll hold a butterfly
Hours maybe in the gleam of one eye;
After hours fluttering I can no more decide
Which of us first flew into the other's gleaming eye
So sharp out of chaos can my I
Concentrate when worlds collide.
So beautiful's my sung shape,
Upright man or more sorrowing ape,
Pursuing hot consciousness in a cold landscape
All my song or self becomes all I've made or make
Revivifying roses or lakes
When tongue gives and eye takes.
GLORY BOY
1
Gregg Glory's crossing freedoms
And all his fizzing flesh
Bifurcates unlaw's chaos
Into anarchic order again.
2
Frank divinity's a fable
No reason could compel,
Once out of its Klein bottle,
Back into the reality of Hell.
3
Innocence and virtue unbrother,
One kills or corrupts the other;
Cold knowing chokes the knower,
No actions survive the bower.
4
A happy soul is one
That lives by what it does
Not in sycophantic Is,---
No innocence is bliss.
5
Wisdom was an animal
Shook stark terror from its eyes,
Lived between the moon and Plato's pull
Unambitious of its size.
6
A solitary desire
The singleness of want
Finds all reality a fire
I shall not shunt.
THOMAS PAINE
In protestation of his time
He found the human mind divine,
Found the talk that made it up,
Spoke aloud, and would not jump.
"Clear words beget clear heads."
Clarity in life, clarity in death
Is the best man has to hope or dread.
In protestation of his time
Man completes the balance of his rhyme.
To rip at the savage face
To tear out the tyrant's heart
Was his only mellow wish, when once
He tottered at his infant start.
"Poetry's the soul in the hole
Of all our deluded union."
Never again to read in dread
What any briary tongue
Or lashed heart had said.
A pauper's son, a poor man's daughter
Live their fused lives upon the waters,
Bless the vision that lifts them in a trance
Beyond their haunted circumstance.
A steady voice, a glance like Fate's,
"All the million reductive deaths
Of a single soul in resistance
Find their measure, and their truth in Time
In the balance of a rhyme
Not otherwise."
KING WASHINGTON
...revolution was not undertaken to raise one great reputation, to make a sublime page in history.
The cry of gratitude has made more men mad, and established more despotism in the world, than all other causes put together.
JOHN ADAMS
Rebellion came to revolution
And revolution came to an end.
Fusillades of voices rose as one,
Roses and crowns upon our sodden ground;
A poet's tightened throat had Washington
Who gave his couplets blood;
No crowned Cato but a sharp American
Moved from where he stood.
Human minds illuminate what no God understands.
In that one man's overarching arm
Flung above the alarming dawn
In simpleness of a salmon's leap
Over black Atlantic's treasured heap,
One man's insistant measure
Holds a moment in reckless leisure
The pursuing sword of Justice
Bursting toward its flower:
Reality is not the reality of Power.
Human minds illuminate what no God understands.
Hidden torches sheer the river
And a boat moves soft and slow;
Quick voices arise there like silver
In impartial light's improving glow.
Thomas Paine and Washington
Alight with experimental joy
Pursue foul ghosts from house to house
Smiling like wild boys.
Human minds illuminate what no God understands.
LEE'S RETURN
When sullied world is gone, or rent
Hidden meanings like hidden ghosts arise.
That Lee might live the thought fidelity,
To defeat or victory indifferent,
A world's measure of gain and loss
Lies in his swords' ceremonial cross.
O nothing but a passion burns
Mourned countries to their soot.
Spotless Appomattox first and last,
Lee's ruinous duty, and after
Kent's canon that shook the stocks,
Who served a sane, distracted Lear
Because he knew a royal soul was one
Human before humanity had come.
Long, long lay the shadows on the grass;
Uniformed men flit and pass.
How many of the undiscerning multitude
When Lee passed there had thought
The great grey face all gravity,
Stone blossom of a moral root.
What first might drive a man
To live an abstract thought?
O nothing but a passion burns
Mourned countries to their soot.
Courthouse shadows judge the field
Where Lee both tried and failed;
A lonely, exalted thought that still
Drives restless as a nail.
O How had Athens come and gone
Without one such man?
Long, long lay the shadows on the grass;
Uniformed men flit and pass.
LINCOLN
A long frock coat, a stovepipe hat
Straight as a core of coal,
A long black ribbon at the top,
The ax-drawn face hanging there
As if Old Testament prophets
Had burned to a single stare.
Ghost to ghost, those shoving men
Push heaven to the ground.
Gettysburg incurred a debt
Blood's spontaneous blot put out;
That no wrong word, no marring phrase
Or disjointed look would come
He held a vigil of long silence---
All the simpleness of a sum.
Ghost to ghost, those shoving men
Push heaven to the ground.
Because the Union had grown sick,
That fine, long hand atrophied
That had put the British from the field
And shovelled back the Styx,
A single, revolutionary mind
Clacked truth from the burial bricks.
Ghost to ghost, those shoving men
Push heaven to the ground.
"All men are created equal,"
A troubled voice had said it;
Calm lightnings play the mortal storm
Where dead limbs had bled it.
Flies lift and alight among the faces
Torn by universal wishes.
Ghost to ghost, those shoving men
Push heaven to the ground.
LEWIS AND CLARK
That Lewis might discover
No matter where he wandered
Virgin universes of conception
Many-minded Jefferson commanded
Gallatin, Dearborn, Madison,
Freneau, and Peale, and Paine,
To gather round the table
To make his mind serene.
Lewis and Clark went nowhere
But river forever in
That place where shadow meets with shadow,
The human mind's wide basin.
Each leaf must suffer naming
To be ressurrected on the tongue;
Adam had that told truth espied
And coined no God that whispered lies.
That imagination might be exact
And range the further therefore
Jefferson clapped Lewis' back
And sent him over the edge of the world.
That the manuscript would not suffer loss
Nor the nation diminishment
Teen-aged Sacagawea swam across
The toiling Missouri to put
All that high, wild country
Into our countrymen's hearts for good.
Quietly list soft reeds against
High cheeks a drunken Lewis kissed.
Lewis and Clark went nowhere
But river forever in
That place where shadow meets with shadow,
The human mind's wide basin.
Who knows how that man who hated
All the common parade of men
And could not drive to Washington
To be feted or hated there,
And had paddled far, absent ways
Into wilderness's invisible haze
Was by beauty's arrow riven,
That hatred-driven, star-wandering man?
Who knows but that when he shot
In clear distillation of his thought
His muddied heart upon a ruined cot
And into uncharted silence slipped,
Sick of all that sickened lot, he yet
Inhaled a clipped Pacific air
And set his mind upon blank skies
High upon Camp Fortunate?
Lewis and Clark went nowhere
But river forever in
That place where shadow meets with shadow,
The human mind's wide basin.
MAD JACK
"Faith is unnecessary
To a world-begetting savior,"
Spat that Mad Jack whose breath begat,
Braver and braver, each live epithet.
"And heaven is no mystery
To him who's brobdignagnian breath
Is maker both of Life and Death."
"Breath that moves from body to body,
As intemperate Spirit one minute inhabits
And then, of a sudden, disincorporate,
Pursues each winding of tongue and tooth
To undiscovered temperatures of truth,"
Sang that Mad Jack in the crossroad's black,
The moon a strange hook at his back.
"All mind whirled in a glance
Compounded both of Fate and Chance."
"Breath that ceases with body's cease,
Sweet heats that lapse to a gasp
When the elegant anarchy of the subtle body becomes
The stiff contrivance of a corpse
Create a Death, I say, create,---"
Laughed that Mad Jack who spat a chant
Claiming human imagination might
Out of solar day devise a night,
Rend life to puffed nothingness
And return all surety to a guess.
OPPENHEIMER'S ESCAPADE
"I am made Death," and in a breath
Atom-spastic, creation-hurled
Man's hubris-science claimed
Oblivion in imagination's name;
Death itself lay down surrendered
To the Atom man had sundered.
All men die, but a few remain
Packed up with their thought;
They with Ceasar/Jesus both lie and rise,
The unsure world's so tossed,
A single man may live a single truth
And never die in thought.
MASTER AND SLAVE
I trod to prison on burning feet
Accompanied both before and back
By squadroned angels in heaven's black
Receding to the abject divine;
They ferry souls upon their backs;
I was trussed against the horizon's line
But had no captors I that could see
But my squad of angels to accompany me.
I am John Brown and will not come down;
Cold murder of the one or the all.
Spartacus defied when hard men called
And deified more angels than God.
My guilt has come and gone many times
As I recalled or forgot my crimes,
Made meditation of zero my study
Or swallowed riven demon's infinity
Into the awed-white cavern of my face.
My hands were bound in threads of blood;
I struggled against harsh cordage once
And was blinded by a golden hood.
Yet all about me I feel the wings
Of my locust angels on everything.
I am John Wilkes Booth and jumped to truth;
Cold murder of the one or the all.
Strapped brine-soaked in an electric chair,
Heaven lays stripped of its defense,
Condemned skin and naked innocence.
My delicate eye and fragrant hair
Burn all evolution's inheritance
Back to the vagaries of chance.
My future's ash yet designs a limit
In the electrified eye that gives it,
In my eye shot out by a blind round
From a squadron's unmarked gun.
I am St Just and did as I must;
Cold murder of the one or the all.
The Executioner flips his lash
In mockery of innocence:
My guilt absolves his sin.
Justice stalks among tall gallows
Concrete-secreted deep underground,
Looks for his charmed dead men there
And for balm of absolution peers
Into every blue, angelic face;
In charity or error he seeks my own
His salvation's fashioned hollow.
I am Vanzetti and am dead already;
Cold murder of the one or the all.
Irrational murder has made him
One with the common tide
Raising his spade with the bladed wave
That falls to his own side;
Splintered hands obliterate creation's heart
Rend worlds to a red thoughtlessness;
By every thought he kills he's less.
I am dead but still can chant
All a passing artist's passions out,
Interior echo of the outward shout.
Spartacus defied when hard men called
And crucified more angels than God.
Are my grim limbs, hanging inverted here,
Above the midnight churchyard’s grave
Above all that ghostly-priestly rant and rave
All exalted sacrifice has won
All ecstatic triumph has known?
All scatters backwards madness-chased
Into a rolling blizzard-ball;
Insect angels surround my ground
And their wailing wings buzz-sing:
Whore or chaste, the world's laid waste
Come kill the one or the All.
THE MORALIST
Camus the moody moralist
Buzzed surreptitious honey from
His single hive and hornet's nest;
Pulling new worlds from a book
Or referencing dull ideas
With a visionary Look.
How could human Ingenuity
Which hammered out the clock
Waver self-deceived
By dumb tick and tock?
Time and times lie multiplied
About the center I decide.
Every science focuses
Itself into my hand,
A moment in a mirror
Or clear/obscure magnifying glass
Shows wide world's very locus is
Within what I demand.
Where weird energies weave
Into stark perceive
And Blake's Glad Day
Dances in a ray,
Manifest neutrinos
Become what we know;
Calm consciousness intrudes
As deep as dream concludes.
The body and its hazards
Implant supreme desires;
Closed cells open to the skies.
At every zig and zag the spirit veers,
Recovers, and then discards
The momentary mire.
REBEL ANGELS
Uncompromising virtue, all Heaven
Ascending without a stop
Turns homicidal frenzy when
God neglects to die and drop.
No sober angel outpeers his view
Nor calls found clouds and stars divinities;
He knows that every boundless vision shows
The innard of his eye.
Every menaced tear or murdering heart
Punches down the consequence
Eye or fist first pour to start.
When violence rules the lash
Meanings stolen from death
Vanish in the unannointed air.
Proud rebel angels sit or hunch,
Fold insect wings like scales, and stare.
Old words must mesh the net;
They pull where knots have met
In human codices of wish.
A bending fisherman upon a boat
Sweeps the seas from stern to front
Sweeps new seas entire,
Seiving with rough grace swart fish
From the rudimentary mire.
There comes upon my troubled heart
A thing, I know not what,
Out of all I had thought
Or thought in thinking to've thought
An image like a bird in a cloud
So high-ascended was my lovely song
That alone those solemnities among
I cried aloud.
THEIF OF GLORY
Jefferson and Washington, and all those famous men
That out of obscurity came, and were on enlightenment bent
As on some perfect woman's face, and had such holy measures
In their drums, out of what dark hole began?
Where had all that purposeless glory come?
O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself.
Past turbulent lands and frenzied watercourse
Man finds but broken solitude, finds his own soul hidden there,
Gasps at his luck, summons all his wayward heart to swear
To keep it sacred; and then, lonely with his own audacity,
Perjures himself in the first company he meets.
O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself.
Caravaggio's painted flank that struck God in a horse
Shimmering, floating there, radiant sky made flesh
Above the tumbled saint who crawled in dust away
And in that abject departure made his prayer.
What besides his human hand had put it there?
O, man's a thief of glory, and steals it from himself.
DECLINE OF A STATESMAN
I. DECLINE OF A STATESMAN
The suns themselves have multiplied and spent
Their smear of gold against my body,
Melting the marrow out. Circle on circle,
The round day divides my being like a planet
---Into two halves--- a shadow forecast falling
Beneath my heel, as I walk.
Bending ancient in a garden, twisting stalk
Of buried carrot or sere tomato
Wasted by the day, I watch
Ruined plaster hands majestically drop
In sudden rain or broken rage of age
And know they are my own: intimate, incarnate.
Time spent dreaming, swinging on the garden gate,
Pulling tender acorns from the antique tree, too proud
To labor water into fruit, is past. I meditate
Scuttle of fat rabbits that shift in frosted hate
Like a pair of nations, once great, now bickering
Over vegetables slouching in a ditch.
I am victim to the fading vision of a face
Unlike my own, whose articulate bare beauty burns
And deepens at a glance. My wide mouth
Is crippled and full of sticks,
Red daubs against a glass, when I perceive
The swiveled shining of her countenance, a fist of wicks.
And still I see her able eye or able hand
Pale in the singed mist lechery has left---
Residue of torches, motionless, transfixed.
Her, whose youth was whispered skyward
As I sowed discord among more murderous men,
And friendless men, who loved more
Formless anarchy and mere gold.
I bolt back the ruined latch like a rifle to see
How time has clicked its picket into place.
I stand inside the unimagined shadow of a tree
While shadow forms of a shadow world surround
The half-turned plot. And I have lived the wire-model
Of a life, an old skeleton dissolving in the sun.
I dream of a self not worn down by days,
As who would not rebuild what grew awry,
And love aright what Love could not define?
Now crashed beneath the awful awning of an oak,
Politic of history, adverse to time, alone--- I start
To rend the bone from heart.
II. VIETNAM IN WASHINGTON, 1985
The impenetrable monument
Does not verge or angle
In a time made green by grass,
Nor does it lightly lack
An upright pointing finger
To implicate a God. It is not
A comfortable spring; there is no
Useless cherry blossoming.
There were those that said
A people's greater than her nation;
Or that war was a mask
We had put occasionally on
To learn our own true natures.
And who is left that's numbered
Among those that dream
Of future events, future events that still
Charge out of the bewildered mind's
Shattered cognizance. Things were so
Confused it seemed that some
Might burn until their hearts were new
And remain unrecognized. And so they walk
Like amicable young children taught
To know what is the past.
Though there were those who spoke
Of the uninstructed dead,
Others said its only
Stray names caught in a niche
Like dirt beneath the nail.
Such talk does not make the moderate
Slant carelessly to dreaming
Or a troubled sleep or sleepless---
Mere mimic to the migrant change
Of patternless galaxies.
By measured statements that proceed
From a level look
There came a jeering last
The gaping multitudes, or a few,
To examine what had been done
About what had been said.
THey came murmuring names
Or weeping, weeping,
Or murmuring names.
And to the uttermost of this
Still uncertain heart
I find I cannot confess
The imponderable waste of days.
III. HOUSE PAINTING
Twenty heaving workers
X-ed out in overalls, mirroring crossed clouds,
Plunge twenty painting brushes
Legato as a rageless sea
In artless decadence.
At least I have conceived,
In thankless tranquility of age,
Or unknown secret storm of age,
Not permanence, but a new start
For these revolutionary straight boards
A powdered Tommy Jefferson had stomped.
Yet even a great prophet's
Black pre-emptory baton cannot
Alter the red exclamatory heart
Of circulating Mars, or start
The sleeping rivers from their beds
Of cozy rounded stone, while uncondoned
Wild artery or maniac crowd had bled
Into the unresting arch of history.
That is no job for prophets, who at best predict
When moon like a white comet
And slowly turning earth will hit.
What I have known is this:
All men are adversaries and fight
Solely against what they cannot see;
For nothing less than Plato's Right
Or Aristotle's inner Ought
Is worth the endless battering.
Outside the antlike workers hum
In antlike ignorance;
They spill blank music on their hands---
Sheer potentiality that pricks
The out-worn conscience of an out-worn man.
A chameleon only copies for its art
And in ceaseless adaptation plays its part.
I wish it were so simple to reclaim
Each broken acre by such sweet laboring.
But the sky is not one large star
Conceived in colors bright enough to make
My listless painted heart increase
To white eternity.
IV. NIGHT MEDITATIONS
There decays, forgotten among more meaningless things,
And casual things, a delicate, once well-fitting decor,
The deliberate clear image
Of a meditated life among
More mediated images that sting
Because they are ineffectual, half-changed
From what they were. A rare, stiff-legged porcelain
Charger charges riderless
Over a snow globe that holds
The firelit sad face of a girl, and breaks.
A sheaf of hooves display against a wall like a shadow
Their shattered sounds for some more ghostly auditor.
Perhaps the ghost of some primal past mother comes
Ageless in argosy, whose coiled hands unwind a rope
Hidden on a dock.
Chanting in close-eyed ecstasy,
His great grey eyes half-lidded, drugged by time,
Her lizard tongue uncorked, lazy against cracked lips, and glistening,
Her words are silken scarves
That cling, and her red-gold feet are stamping
In tribal dance that imitates
The cat-footed grace of dying.
She speaks, whose hollow whispering might seem
Vastly mistaken to the image-making, image-bearing mind.
Because I am old I think I know of death
And the last ending. Unless all breathing breaks unasked
From a tossed sea-shell by the Nile
In empty echoing, or encapsulated image,
There must be a source for life
And death and the eternal
In-between meanderings.
Watching casts of stars or lonely women glittering
As they drown, cloistered to the dark waters like scarves
Thrown down from desert Egypt
In African simplicity, I hear
Desolate yeowl of attic-cat, self-fallen, scatter inheritance.
At last a lion's breath commands a lion's body.
V. NO MOON
The abrupt dark.
And the populated evening coos
With voices. Should I take
My life from images that break
Or close in self-fallen ecstasy?
I am no ghost, full of a ghost's
Wry imaginings. All those
Who lost the faith of chosen words
Are dead or dying as I speak.
Night but names its night with calls,
Dividing darkness with a coal
Less absolute than questioning.
But what if from some unasked
Terror-ridden memory I should hear
The cry out of silence
That concentrates---
All present being into a past image
Unable to be abandoned?
Or what if blackness has a soul
That registers the marks
Of a midnight hand's midnight stenciling?
Or expands the accidental mark
By nightmare addition into an
Infinity of absences?
A single sail can diagram the wind.
equally the breathless soul will spend
Its untracked solitary hours
In a gradual darkening---
The inevitable, slow
Winding down of evolution,
One last twist of intimacy.
Yet something unexpected haunts,
Some axle of impertinence controls
These quiet hesitations. We had thought
Dumb cruelty into an artistic bliss,
Something abstract and mathematical to erase
The slurred insistent figures
Responsibility delivers. Words
That once symbolized the dead
Gladly fading, an automatic raven
Shrieks and shakes
Dew from the late autumnal trees
Heavily swayed. No mirror-
Making stream or self-deceiving,
Self-defining moon rides out to shell
A dry old mind in light, that must create
New darkness out of nothing to resist
The silk insistence of her ways.
VI. DIALOG
An unchanging mind's a stone
Defined by what it damages;
Spray of speech, then silence
Gives night a damask tone.
Angry with the sea I claimed
An everlasting fire:
While fragrant eyelid closed a night
On bodily desire.
When she stepped seaward, stone to stone,
In violet degrees
Did a paper eyelid burn?
Or changeless oceans slide?
LIMELIGHT
Limelight limbers sleep
In a trapped, syrup eye.
Bluedevil spots pin
A valiant heart, violet,
Wristing in serrations.
Charred heart, hoar today
The light decays...
Sent champagnes
Stale in the umber spirit's quiet;
Sulfur seraphs, half chrome
Inch the amberling lights;
The pulley of the tongue hoists,
Licks spic the new acids
Revealing reviled reveilles of self.
Championed eye, aster ear,
I stand by the dark post
Lonely in the halo-lampblacks.
A DYING VIOLET IN THE SIDELIGHT
Incandescent will--- to forgive youth its brevity!---
To alight the summer's maze, and inscape the outward bower
(Crowded with the loud lopped roundnesses of bees)
And verve to rediscover all blood's white hilarity
(Super-attenuated supernatural power)---
In the passing of this passioned blossom, violet
Ranging every decaying shade to black-brushed death,
The dark backward collapse of veins, and after
To in-breathe in owning nostrils, high and hard, to let
This scented tomb upon my palm invigorate my breath!
As a wilding god among the coal-folded valleys
I came, overturning tenderly the violet's motioned growth
By the ransacking lightnings of my mind's designs
Returning tarred Time from its monotonous pitch
From birth to prime, renewing this velvetest skin:
To untouched youth pulled back, seeds in my mouth unspoken,
Like shouted prayers kept in a cracking heart
Germinating nothing unless I sighed, and I was happy.
WORDS ARE WORLDS
A thousand worlds to the unkept minute hasten,
Reveilleing wars in the dumb trumpet of a second taken,
Not noted in passing, and yet has passed,
An immortality of Fancy stirred and drunken---
A paradise in apprehension that cannot last.
(Oh that the ticking world were not by Time's arrow driven,
And pulses and seconds could dilate against the shriven!)
Just so my many angel-flights have come and fluttered,
Dropping golden feathers against pearl-wrought steps
That spiralled out inner domes to top uncreated matter
And peep-out hot-made mysteries where colder stars had shone;
I, in my heart's laboratory, keep the chemical key alone.
Blood notes writ with the devil's eyelash wash and drip;
But only I, alone as bone, snap the raw and bleeding whip.
LIKE DROWNED DIVERS
Whatever sparring light marrs and death amends
Pluck from the warring
Hollows of my hand;
Whatever of cooing good life plunders to extend
And we wrestle like drunken divers to breakage
Pull from the sounding mellows of my mouth
Until death that takes all gives my stone tongue back.
Whatever of love creeps from the lying wind
Blows my coal,
Lashed eyes to tears;
Whatever care cracks from the cormorant docks
Or discovering sorrow divots from the feathering shore
And makes life spasm in the teeth of time
Sights down the red waters of my blood.
Comfort and mother in my manhood hums
And I break
In the tide's sprawls awake;
My black veins wreathed in the sea's last knock
I strut my shivers to their grave-finding breath
Until, moon-man and bone-man, I rub my salt face off
And lie down dying with my brother coral in the dark.
BIRTHDAY POEM
Nothing under the soul's weary weather
All heavenslight after the plumed owls' hoo
And starry cries stoppered above the trees' stir
In the rumored dusk dust the dark leaf told,
Spendthrift and windfall in night's clear silence,
Pours roaring down from the light-crafted clouds
To drown my nickering wicked ways and proud.
Hooded and hooved altogether now
And all my mazy footsteps arrow-trod
Beyond yawning dawn, unknown, alone
I awake and break the milky veils---
I tear all my swagged bag of guilts and courages
To scrawl this crippled, page-black shread
And cock-eye again with memorial warmth
My burning youth under day's bald ray.
I spent my whole of love on a half
Ragtag child's green and runaway, grave-going
Hand I held, who withers and lives
In the roaring tread of the wild weather
Blown from the breakneck of my winters' steps---
And the dead trumpet air of the child's clover days
Is a thorned, horned blossom in a grassy waste
Where all the forgotten weathers come together
And flood my flashing eyes to be mourned.
PAUPERS IN THE BLOOD
Paupers in the blood purse of the heart
Lay their elaborate
Shillings on the table; cardsharks pitched
In the night-dealt tavern
Spade their aces on the circus-lit flat.
Time has sold my windy winnings to a torch
And I listen as I burn;
Desperation's lip mimes dumb prayers to the hands;
Tucked and crossed
Against age's gale I kneel in the fiery kirk.
Oh I'd lay any dollar in this sailor's booth
To get back half my wage
(Pained from all the paying days of my death that toss
Annihilation's light),
Or one heavenhued hour of my Gamorraed youth.
Now gambled out to the last most
Moan of my soul
And stretched to my shroud on the checkered cloth,
I fury my winnings
To the Bermuda wind, and all my cruel wishes scatter.
Daybreak's word clatters drainward with my bloods
Down to cluttered noon;
And there my heart's argosy, almost golden in the hand-
Hold of my ribs
Repeats and repeats and the seas rise and break.
IN THE DARK
I held my child's hand down to the grave
And traced his comet's roaring going with my breath,
Sorrowing sorrow until the sea's moon gave
Its thousand salt prayers up in sprays
Scattering the brine-shrived gulls on the shingle
To spread stars aloft, and each a different way,
As the waves fell down from their mingle
And found a thousand moons in their crossways splash
And told my broken, washed heart hush.
O I was a dying moon in the ocean's rove
And with her million wants my wants still move,
To her breaking crescent I still squeak my eye
That dissolves in her fabulous crooks;
Locked frost-cursed in my own godawful life
I freezed grieving past midnight's strife,
Until night on a moonstruck gravestone broke
And harrowing dawn gave my soul a saint's look
And shined on all my wonderful lies like love.
Out of the four-ways Jordan of my heart
Out of the splendid cincture of my pricking ribs
Out of the mercury furnaces in my brain
Out of my own dear hollow bailiwick rolling
I walked stalking my bones' marrow-trail
Scouted brawling galaxies from my blind bloods
Rode my star-fashioning veins to their black skies--
And, stepping the pulsing pathways of the stars,
I took my place among the meteors in the dark.
STARS IN THE CELL
Deep in the wandering ways of the blood
Drill my veins to their dust mouths;
Stars in the cell say "Love" and burn
The kin-kept eons out of hand;
Talk of the body may bless the tongue's lie
And all the interminable blisses;
Funneled by birth to a burning chalice
I drink my red liquors though I am dust;
Crabbing life outwits death but once
Then scrabbles back to its sea-sucked hole.
Thirty stretched years touch me to the poles.
A Mardi Gras grin spins at my lips
And the moon grins crazily down.
Much I wonder at the bleeding need for love
The mission of kisses, assignation's hours,
When we meet and pair off to die;
Both tongue and groin I wear like a star
And walk star-struck to the place of ashes.
Much I wonder at the wrinkled sun,
Amoeba or man, no blind difference given,
His acid shine drives all wases to once;
Much I wonder, at my death-ripe age,
Of the worded brine spit from the wasted lip,
The low tongue's lie that sums us up:
The fairy tale told down the bone.
Much I wonder at crossed hands' touched cup
Bowing the long faces together to kiss;
When the heart-drum kicks in another's stomach
Much I wonder at the restless licks;
And still I move both tongue and groin,
Rear star and eye out of one cracked joint.
Prayering hands and downturned head,
Circle-earth globed in a robing womb,
Flood and world of farenheit waters,
Dive their deep ends in a watershed birth
Flumed down the shallows of her thighs.
A mardi gras grin spins at my lips
And the moon grins crazily down.
And then I wonder at my crawling luck
That spreadeagled hopped the flaming bush
Fingering luminous maggots in the meat;
Spurred on by the spine's insistent dusts
Into the whaled oceans of another
The burning bell tower went clanging mad
Under a star-mad sky in my scarring eye
And all the parishioners jumped ship to die;
And, a drowning wick in its wax ruins,
I told myself twice the lie of life
Among the rafted congregations of my blood
That swam their red ways to death.
SHALL
Shall my love's saying soul
Flange the running sands?
Shall her timed hand repeal
Laws of the flying weather,
Clicking rains that drown my ears?
My love's soul shall tongue
Sugars rung from the hourglass;
What clouds compose she shall mock:
Her flung hand shall winnow
Wet ghosts of the clock.
Should my turning love say
Her soul's weathers in my ear
I should unwind the cloudy leaks,
Rain sand hours out of hand;
And one heart should flood all lands.
WORLD'S WORST SONNET
Riotous in my righteous-eyed rhyme
I kiss weird Bacchus at History's interstices:
There's the destroying mind, a chalky lime
That spades love's stink and antiseptically
Kills the corpse we once moved into,
All limpid-perfect in our after-loving rush.
Though it too shall dissolve to goo
And cease to hear the tattoo of the thrush,
My inner ear trembles at his tap-- and oh
All-at-once I'm kissed and captive,
Locked in my cells by DNA's il capo,
Hoping nature's don will let my sap live.
Agh-- I am the boss of my own Valentine
And cut forked hearts to fit my said rhyme's tines.
Dan Weeks
Gregg Glory
Stuttering Elijah had turned out the gods
That on his native heart [heath] had trod.
As when a sapping Johnny Adams
Had put out his eternal eye,
All was done for the minute's sake
And not the moment's eternal why.
Rebellion simple as a flash
In the waters of the night,
Unconfused by darkness,
Giving up its light.
Jail frees the enslaved man
Because it tells him why he died
Blood invaded the organs of generation
And held up rebellion's icy arms
It seems all whirling passions must,
As the whirlwind, come to dust.
Shaw, 100 and depressed,
Or the deSade who kept
Human imagination for his pet
The words I choose can but make up
The history all forgot
Inhale death with murderous breath
Nor speak of the dead nor the damned
THE BELLS OF ST MARY'S
Sweetly beat the bells of St Mary's
Over all the pasturage;
Ignorant souls and weary
Come gather at the meeting-edge.
When ever was body and its wreck
Home enough for what the spirit seeks?
The great clock has run down
And fair and foul are mixed;
Come where the bower's sweetly blown,
Come wind the clock-hands round again.
Come wind the bell of the old clock tower.
Sweet are the bells that beat St Mary
To bright sky and mournful cow;
Sweet are the hands that row the ferry,
The backs that pull the plow.
Work of the back can bring liberation
From too-great ache and half-starved
Candlelit concentration.
The great clock has run down
And fair and foul are mixed;
Come wind the clock-hands round again;
Come wind the bell of the old clock tower.
Sweet is knowledge for the weak
Who cannot tell what they are,
My heart is fathered in such soot
Mind and misery sunk in tar,
Unable to reckon either 'good' or 'truth.'
At stark midnight soul work begins.
Come sweet ladies of St Mary's
For the hands are running back,
Come wind the clock-hands round again
That beat the swollen face and rend skin.
Come wind the bell of the old clock tower.
WHAT LOVE
What love can know its underpinning,
Cause and causeless are so whirled?
What horse that canters at the gate
Stamp assured of the final winning?
Often what is best starts late---
The midnight pilgrim has her prayers heard
Before the dawning bird's.
I need to write an Ode to Liberty!
[end quote]
