From website gregglory.com
Written by Gregg Glory (Gregg G. Brown)
HYMNS
By Gregg Glory
BLAST PRESS
Copyright © 1994
Contents
Some notes for an Invocation Delivered
at the Convocation of a Dying College Review
You do complain upon our time, and that,
When love's ripest hour holds discourse with thy face
So far from rancor, my ill-abused heart,
How can strangers love, knowing not your face?
All my parts do my pursuit of love betray
My love's more constant than the watery moon
All my notes so-called crowd to tongue thy praise
How does our exalted time unfold
Let you face be my book wherein I'll read
Hymn to Itself
Water remembered has drowned the words we kept
Father Tosses Baby to the Ooze
Soliloquy
Song of the Self-Sufficient Beggar
Humbert Humbert's Defense Attorney Caps his Disquitation
Jamie Reid
On A Night
Misbelieve Me If You Dare, O Sonneteer
This Island Man
The Man is Statue to the Act Unfolding
Discussion Among the Solitudes
Dejection
Epigram on Self-Neglect
Redress
My Soul, Like a Wicked Father
Blood Loves
Swimmers
The Shirt
Spaces
"Triumphant Victims"
Dejection
Vindictive Advice
Solar Perplexus
The Hue of Evil
Sid Contemplates Nancy's Death in a Limousine
Meditation
Between Them
Coda: Advice
It had seemed a million others had loved best, or first
I, I am part of it. I am carrying on the
tradition. I am in the stream--
eleusis discernible in the gas-light.
of modernity.
What is there in all this wreck of ages?
A few dollars at the 'right' shop, a paid
curio for the mahogany shelf, near Flaubert's upright;
lost among "the tone of things."
Perhaps this is a more desireable form of monologue,
able to be shut off in an eye-blink,
or with a cold hand
turned away entirely.
And somebody swapped an eye-patch for a jade eye
by the double gates of Chou. The dog rabid, howling,
that we fed from our plates yesterday.
Civilization is not a cafe. But a few lights
gathered, gathered
an unsteady voice against the nothingness
I sit in veils of vague glory,
Engendering the brutish bloods
Of despair. A light of Dionysus
Scaled the broken walls of hope,
Erected in a great Grecian gyre,
A theatre for the gods to dream
And housed the soul's virgin fire.
Consumed by a youthful darkness,
I stagger to the unaging muse...
-- DBD
Some notes for an Invocation Delivered at the Convocation of a Dying College Review
Unlike that yattering Krishna of Indian legend and religion, I have but few tales to tell--- and none tonight. Instead I have patched together some sort of odd talk out of remembrances and wishes.
The unfair love that develops in a concentrated boy or girl for the words of the dead-- this is the central college experience. It makes us harsh and discontent with our contemporaries. For how can the home and dorm-bred cry lifted from behind a cheap desk compare with that Shelleyian lilt and agony passing time has patinaed with an ineluctable grace? An institution of publishing, such as our small review, works against this cynicism-- which every great creator has disposed of in his time-- and permits the clear registration of value to enter the ear with the intent impact of a whisper. The page of a review is as serviceable a blank for our Elroy as for any England's Shelley. And the context of the times, which bookends such productions, does not subtract from the effort of any individual but rather lends its substance to the impact of a voice raised from amidst its mass.
I forget what voice described literature to me as "an education of the emotions," but that phrase seems to me to touch upon some central complexity, the crux of some nexus in human perceptions too immaterial to remain, as with so much in our lives, unreal.
And it is such talk, and the notion of such talk that must, when our lives have lapsed, remain imperishable; for all our individual voice is but a semi-tone in the dialog. But remove that semi-tone... and the entire house of cards must collapse, the harmony dissipated, stale and flat. These are the voices one can catch--- in an interview, or in the lifting song of a poem handed over during some knowledgeable or serious talk. These are the voices that talk in praise of the process and the objective joy of creation--- nothing less. there are our voices, on occasion; and they may shape a life, or give implementation to an impulse, even out of the mere incidental energy thrown off by such a subject and such seriousness.
We are about the have come before us a man who was witness to such talks, and a prompter of such commotions. He will talk of a writer's club and of its once living presence on this campus, its effect on conversation and action, its feeding and care of a lively review, and of a present wish for its reconstitution. Let us not wait for a break in the courses of our efforts to ourselves begin to take some such meaningful action.
The consecration of such action must come, in its communal form, not with a deliberate grandee's flourish, but with a slow and conniving accumulation of all our best and most cherished and most characteristic efforts. We must come, to steal a metaphor from the national preoccupation, as depositors to such an account, and not flashy spenders of a generation's worth. Advice, connivance, a little money on occasion, a helpful ear: these are our great resources.
Disputatiousness, anger, violent action,-- all may help turn the great wheel. But in this case we must all bring but balm and guidance to our successors. Any tradition is only as alive as those who press for its ressussitation. gather your hands to this chest with me, and we may find a burning pulse there yet....
Do not let us have the rush of our current lives and livelihoods whirl our convictions away.
Dip your hands once again into that stream of life which in this place flows as black as ink, and freshen your minds with the cool water offered by this opportunity, and let some writer's club or other effort sharpen its dull quill once again by the aid of your stinging wits. And I give here as invocation to our duties and in homage to the past trials of our young lives these words: it is the passion of the old man that renews the eternal youth.
You do complain upon our time, and that,
You do complain upon our time, and that,
Yourself being eldest in our love,
Our time shall be shorted by the length of yours.
Go not; but let my argument run
Its minute marvel, and if, by its ending,
You have not found yourself, for some second,
Some unconsidered second, somewhat, yes,
Somewhat amazed, as when a woodland doe
Before a gentle mirror does appear, and once
And once in all her shaded life confronts herself
And stands admiring before that sight. If not
Somehow touched, and of yourself amended,
Or have that harsh judgement gentled to a laugh,]
Then go; go and my pinching purgatory
I'll serve silent as a smiling saint.
When love's ripest hour holds discourse with thy face
When love's ripest hour holds discourse with thy face
And in a sudden lapse of taut argument
Unties your age's fears in little space
Flushing dark beauty from pale intent
And you, all mirrorless, jet returning
To life's receiving sea, where chance is lent
And uncertain weather tossed between burning
And freezing-- and no surity sent
That summer carry summer's well-beseeming
Or winter lift his shaggy face in frost
But each season contingent in its teeming
Must brave each hour at unreckoned cost
Then will I, more constant than such thin shows,
Stand and love, still love, which is all love knows.
So far from rancor, my ill-abused heart,
So far from rancor, my ill-abused heart,
Stay and thrive, and on love's thin sighs grow fat---
For though her looks all come crossed with darts
and her breath distilled show this name or that,
Not yours, still love, since love on nothing feeds,
But hangs a perfect orchid in tropic air---
Bloomed on surmise, and, perfect, nothing needs
But is itself a superfluity of air
Made visible, that in visitation fine
Descends, as dreams that shake us when we wake
In that far country still to eyes divine
Until, in a wink, as winking exiles wake.
Content yourself, crossed heart, with what you have;
Lay alive awhile gladdened that you gave.
How can strangers love, knowing not your face?
How can strangers love, knowing not your face?
Or any alchemist claim his lead gold
Absent your touch? Has reality place
Beyond sound of where your rumor's told?
Any sound love's quality that lacks your name?
Yet love has many full thousand silent sounds
And quiet lapsing looks of equal fame
Darting far past your name's parading grounds.
And alchemy's little stones play lover's parts---
Held apart, or wooing in crucible---
And interchange their substance by that art.
Yet strangers love--- a thought impossible!
Yet strangers love, and cannot from their strangeness wend;
Nor can I, lost in you, find ecstasy's end.
All my parts do my pursuit of love betray
All my parts do my pursuit of love betray
And stand panting like poor lawyers in the docks
Demanding courtly redress for what shall not stay
Were all the world made intricate as locks
And I myself given the only key.
Still your eagle love takes its noble flight
And to my raw hawking will no majesty
Shed on those below; and yet, in such sight
I cannot feel myself all abandoned,
A forgotten prey limping to its nest,
Of too small account to win love's bare tooth,
Less than nothing, and worst than remnant least---
For to be cursed by such fierce eye is blessed;
Eternity a moment when such looks have passed.
My love's more constant than the watery moon
My love's more constant than the watery moon
Whose wandering gaze chases each passing star
Bright a while, but after dim and dun
As too strong sun makes shallow pools turn tar
By a too-constant too-true attention.
My love instead shall prosper as it ages
Not turn sour or grievy under a rotless sun
That changes witless crows to worthy sages
Crying 'Death!' and 'Soon to die!' and always right.
My love instead will outgrow such mazes
And like the rooted oak scorn all flight---
Show winter and summer indifferent faces;
If any million years shall disprove this,
Kiss me again, and find me transfigured with that kiss.
All my notes so-called crowd to tongue thy praise
All my notes so-called crowd to tongue thy praise
Who are the template of surpassing note for all my lays.
Much pleasure has the singer who sings of thee
Whose sweet subject trills when urgentest songs must lag
And by his poverty thus proves the worth of thee---
Opposite the lark, who praises dank night with prodigality
And makes his listeners shut eyes to see dreams,
All your choir but begs to your picture see.
How much more then should I sing of thee?
Let song-birds out-lung cannons, you'd more deserve;
And more deserve than this unbreathing ink
Can give, which but takes the breath of each downturned eye
And makes it raise your praises in spite of time,
Which shall all thy praise and praisers too confound betime.
How does our exalted time unfold
How does our exalted time unfold
From hours of pure unbeaten gold
To silver minutes charged and unrehearsed
To bronzen seconds licked out of our days and ways?
How from the mountain on the plate,
Each magenta ridge and azure indent searched,
Must our centuries slimmed to acres now contract?
Or acres to a bare, unhallowed plot be shrived?
Still it is in us to race the sun's exhaustless rays
And make each moment pay in double time; alive
In these dark eternities chalked black between each IS
I wait for the platinum infinities of your kiss.
Let you face be my book wherein I'll read
Let you face be my book wherein I'll read
How all the weaves of fate come to bleaching rags;
With pen no more will I unleash these inky bleeds
Or stain any whiteness with what my cross heart has done.
How in love's upright beginning can we read its fallen end?
Cancelled are all other griefs--- there are none!
To wrap this majestic disaster in a dulling flag
And bear the freighted body to where the water bends.
Inhearse with disdaining sighs these love-looks
I cannot live and otherwise disperse,
For bottled ecstasy will make a sot of the earth
And mountains toss like daffodils on the vintage therein locked
And bluehearts dance in charters of such bloods;
And rhythmless dirt shall be by your swaying swayed.
Hymn to Itself
Beauty of itself is the final shrine
And takes no template from earth's creeping things
But is beyond blatentest gawds divine
Descending not among our tangled strings
Nor standing off past moons' unequal light
Feigning variation by what our eyes,
Subject to death's mutiny, for delight
Must clasp, and our reliquary judgments say permanent or wise--
No, no; beauty is of sager colors
Than our tests, which trick ourselves and others best.
What form owns the rainbow in white heaven
Forever bright, and the sun tattooed gold
Radiant on eternal skin unshaven?
There altar boys attend a pageant mass
To comfort those who never shall grow old;
And lame Time dawdles by a frozen font
Thinning unkillable fleas from heaven's cloudy sheep;
And disconsolate Death sits staring at the grass
Never to bring another consciousness to sleep
As in the dimming world was his constant wont.
What form, and out of what majestic sea
Steps the vanished bridegroom to his wedded feast
Heavy with ripe apples and solemn pairs
Moving, two by two, through the forest crease
Into the dauntless levity of the sun?
For there in high paradise, unviewed, far,
Helpless rains may never fall, never mar,
The simple perfection of that expected guest
For whom cold doves wait in the gloomy sun,
The banished crow is silent, and we rest.
Water remembered has drowned the words we kept
Water remembered has drowned the words we kept
For words like winds orangely agitate against the hush
And citron solace lashes each leaf's velvet
To unpupiating pulp. Eyes locked in pupal locutions
Split the moany remainders of the day to syllables.
Never in the best sinning you and I commanded would
All the fallen chittered leaves again rehearse this rose.
Filtered regrets distilled against the lingering rain
Wipe down the diamond sky, crashing cabriolets containing
All the shivering incense of a pursuing mist
Tracking the anchored package of intenser life
Deep to its frissioned shelter, flaunting a sea
Of snickering distractions to angle on a time
Purpure because unlamentable, part of the brinking etern.
We were not shaped to finish, but extend
Beyond intolerant time's staggered kisses
Drunkenly laid on senses as full of hits as misses;
How can we kite to ecstasy who cannot drown in minutes?
Filial lips will find us, ministering the dark,
Cold angels to our natures, spurning the unloved dust,
And in blazing passes touch us still unwarmed.
Is this excellence extempore a receding grace
Made supremely visible by withdrawal alone?
You are a man, bred for loving oceans to imbrue!
Let not the bastard element dull the divine in you;
So intermixed is our living sense with rarest wine
That heady jumbles of love and menace can come
Confusing innocence with the sweetest and the worst.
Father Tosses Baby to the Ooze
"And so I have cast you, forgotten babe,
Scarcely cased, into the rough turbulence
Of this watery world. Let jellyfish,
Decked like angels, your radiant chorus be
And cast starfish indicate a heaven
In the unceasing motion of the deep;
For props to make flush this tempest of death
Nature is no short-supplier; let fins
Serve for wings, the water itself for air
(O, if it were! how would you have drowned
Save by too much breath and not lung enough
To lap it up!) and let St. Peter lean
With the emerald guard of a pipefish
And all lit from above, and there's the set.
But there can be no journeying for you
Who put all paradise in his clear eyes
And then drowned his looks. What paradise's left
Then for us, miserable above,
In the dry panting air abandoned now
That yet your warm embraces remember
But this: that we, poor broken-legged devils,
Who cannot climb to that hard place
May yet dive to heaven! Sweet gulf open
And from my bare unprepared bosom
Sunder the willing soul!"
Soliloquy
Deep in ruin the world long has lain---
Science has no answers yet
For what we must do with our hearts' debt;
Physics peeping into the birth of World
Sees but its own image featly curled.
And what can we do with that blank weight
Within us, but paint again our human faces?
Song of the Self-Sufficient Beggar
"The rich have built all the churches
And the poor must pray,"
Said the beggar stopping at the crossroads way.
"How thin and wiry the rich must be
To pass the portals of eternity!"
Stumping in the dust with a backwards lurch.
I am still astonished, like an aged see,
And like a monk in his cloisters brood upon
Love's sensual mystery.
I have been at my serious play
An hour and a day.
The wind must break its teeth upon
All I say!
Humbert Humbert's Defense Attorney Caps his Disquitation
"Do not incarcerate him so.
What dishonor names criminal in him
Is but the action of our timid thoughts
Lustily embodied. Does the dragonfly,
Mating in August on the lily's stalk,
Playing at crosses to increase his kind
Stay his lust
On the low approval of froggish stares?
Why then this limping pedophile ring round
With steel pickets of our disapproval
Vowing to violent gods a swift dispatch
Of this man's life? I call you gentlemen
To bear true witness to yourselves,
That any life that slumbers through the knot
Of its own nature, leaving unexpressed
The dark puzzle that anchors each existence
Will languish solveless in a marshy grave.
Look how the illuminating mirror of his fall
Starkly shows ourselves; Your faces hang
Above the gilded intersection
Of his folded wings; your dwindling eye
Accepts the cast of his thousand-faceted look
To view yourselves with scorn. How sad it is
That the careless insect, and this one man,
Gross apparitions, two-headed prodigies
As like and unlike each other as ourselves
Wild as lizards to leap beyond their bounds,
They thrust themselves up from the perilous slime
To mate their natures and make us dote.
Their rapid fuses burn more furiously
To the wick than our sick tapers
Whispering in the hollow congress of a room."
Jamie Reid
"We cluck a bizarre patois; rooster-heralds
rou-cou-cooing the bastard seeding of a sour age.
Every time I stuck the X on sex in their ribald name,
or put a blinding pastie over Queen Elizabeth's green eyes,
I knew I was the PR Goering for Malcolm's fanatic machine."
On A Night
All thought stirred to sinning, all sin to have said
Any uttered word against your blessedness;
O high priestess dropped into this vale,
Your hands have already borne the sacrifice
How many times! Chafe not the new-won altar
That I offer, with cold disused touches
And absent looks shucked from over your lover's shoulder.
Fetch the lamb that upon your neck now mews
And let him bleed for this: for love new-loved to you!
Misbelieve Me If You Dare, O Sonneteer
Misbelieve me if you dare, o sonneteer, your ghost's ash
Litters imagination's minions with sooty rhyme,
Ash obscuring ash in the final chaos;
Heat along these wires will raise a miscreed,
The cry a cri de coeur rising at deep need
From rickets inlaid in soul's-bone, all thought shed
In the crimson heydey whose sparks bonfires are,
Now in an amber hour among embers sere.
Youth was a glory miscreant Time has bled
Of all colors other than death's bone-pale;
O time has spurred the truant soldier back to bed---
The tender colt leans age-heavy against the rail.
This Island Man
This island man
In his lighthouse watches
And lets his disturbed ear hear
Strangers roaring over
The silentest crest
Of a sea at peace with itself.
Strangers in lifeboats gaily pursuing
What I cannot pursue myself.
Never in all my handholding days
As the trees shadowed my friends
Did I know myself the island I wore
Skirted with thin flesh
Deep and dense as sand;
And the stars silent as ministers
Have watched my days unclasp.
O stranger rowing over
Clasp you an arrow or glass?
Now the stars like spectators
Crowd to this lulling shore
And alone in my clothes
I let days and birds pass
Quiet as a radar's sweep.
Shall I go to the boats
Unloading my griefs or keep
Eye and ear in my lighthouse locked?
O stranger rowing over
Clasp you an arrow or glass?
The Man is Statue to the Act Unfolding
The man is statue to the act unfolding,
Alone must watch ne worlds unfurl.
The sea beats against its shingle
With a maniac's claw, confounding gems and wreckage.
All at once the falcon that knew me
Dashed his beak to my being with a piping cry,
Undid an eon of grief and sandwiches
And tickled me with arrow vowels to the sky.
Aloft and lunatic, shoes and fingertips,
I let all love move from me
As the surgeon's knife sighs,
And spelled my way to heaven'sgate with a broken tongue.
Discussion Among the Solitudes
Why always this effort and effect?
Why this continual ebbing,
After desire's brightened onrush,
This retreating patter and perpetual mumble
Of the ocean skidding back to the stones?
Somehow, our minds stand
Near our bodies, near the ocean.
Why just one dew-diamond in a field of blues?
Why this misery of gestures
Lapsing solicitously
From each bright, particular wave?
This failure of metal sprays and squirts
Firing between jacks and queens, japes and jonquils,
The unplayed banjo and the imagined hand
Strumming a dusty fistful of strings
So anxious, at evening,
To be touched, to be merely touched
Which way and every way in the clanging wind.
Dejection
What out of nothingness so soft
May be formed to stand and give hard looks
Throughout the created eons that sift their days
From the swift division of like and like?
Out of mounded flour let these floured
Mounds be made. What attitude
Out of wind instructed to furnish a soul?
Should we loaf like the tittering nihilist,
Owning absence all?
Or like the cataloguing merchant recreate
Each sparrow's feather with a numbered stroke?
Life is but what we may name of it,
Tonguing our souls mute with winnowing lists.
An upward flame leaps and dazzles as it goes,
Burning the spider's ribbon to its hole:
Scorched and scotched, o my soul, my soul,
The masquerade's a bust.
Epigram on Self-Neglect
Dead loss, and the blank hours after
Motivate your mockless laughter,
Kicking around an empty house
satisfied with all the empty rooms.
There's no glory in your gloom,
nor lightning out of cobalt nothingness.
Redress
Brain, why did you storm,
Imagination, why feign
Crowds of suitors, diamonded,
Distilled from thinnest air?
Lonely comes the lioness
Stalking under arid trees,
Golden paw and golden cress
Disturbless as royal empress' tress.
My Soul, Like a Wicked Father
My soul, like a wicked father,
Has been robbed, left, quiet and near dead
At the blank side of the road,
A tripped-up bundle of old clothes, old lives,
Old faces, an offshoot
Of what is left alive;
Of all things that move,
Unmoving, a thing.
What has left my soul like this, abandoned
And near death, this deathless thing
That has returned like a swan in its bearing
To stare at my face? What can be left
For a face to recognize, a face left,
Like the soul, wicked and robbed,
By the side of the road, in earth's detrius,
Washed of its prim innocence by these giving sins,
Breathing, when noticed
In the brief abrupt ambulance light
Into a pool of cold water, into its own face,
a disturbed mirror?
Blood Loves
What is finished in the alert swish
that pushes my heart's blood
between that wing bone and stingray spine?
I look down at the drowned gown
from the astounded height of my pulse
working its military, single-file
nose row of slugs
in an unending, still unending,
circle that hoops my aorta, its muscular thumb
swishing the slug bloods through and through
like rosary beads
like tears congealed to beads,
like the poor beaded things you squint
at me with. What had happened
to the pearly girl
I still glimpse through shuffled prints
of a happy family of strangers?
Her thumbed skull like an onion bulb
peeled down to its cut stench
and ooze of rudimentary dews.
What had happened, as she stood
in the sea-wash of her dress,
the sin of her uterus
stabbing her like a stubbed
cigarette in her belly's eye?
What had pushed through her blue hood
of nerves, this sacred red dragon
that came babbling its pink woman's secrets
in a hideously slurred sampling of Chinese idiot words
only to be dabbed back
to its victorian cave, its prattle axed
by the thin white tongue of a hand,
my hand, this hand, the hand
hidden in the photos by a snow
of friendly gestures. The blood comes out, anyway,
and leaves a stain like a heart
between the cool banks of my thighs. Is it
a valentine for dwarves? I feel
no sliver of affection for its broad loves,
escaping me like a note in a broken bottle
washed up by the clean hand of the sea
to what prince? I do not love. I am a fish,
cool, delicate, slit
to its blood livers. The droll loll
comes pushing its messages,
rush after rush, into my thighs, my hair.
I do not love. The blood loves.
But now it is settled, the dragon,
shoes off on the plush victorian carpeting,
an unlit cigarette in one relaxed claw,
slithered into a turban of coils
on the overstuffed couch, hearing the drum of my heart
thudding miles above, from indian territory
from the New World, a tribe crouched in the forest
swatting bees by the thin pulse of the brook,
building their birch canoes
for the summons of the flood,
alert to the flinch of sign language,
listening for the smoke signal.
Swimmers
Love floats through us
on cinnamon skimmers
a waterbug with a tug
boat for a heart, pulling
the world out of a pocket
a very small pocket
I had rubbed with love
shut when you dressed.
Naked as fishes
we swam in the bed,
undressed in the dark
with only our wishes on.
You moved to me, me
moved.
I could never get used
to how your stitches stayed closed
when everything else
was up for grabs.
Open, playable---
a soccerball with a pouch.
Our fingers touched like candles,
our mouths met like fiery brine.
On each, scarred
side of the line, oceans
wiggled out of their skirts.
We commingled our jiggles.
Love, the waterskier,
skated professionally between
the furious greens, unable to punish
or furnish a victor.
And, flame by flame,
our fingers sent up the fires
of desires brambled in our mermaid hair
like a torch.
The Shirt
The fetus in me
grows, glows knowingly,
nuzzles its nodes, the two
burnt-out bulbs that gave it a start.
Now, nurtured like a shirt
in the wash, alphabets appear in its stew.
The mix is as warm
as tepid soup.
The letters spin like dials, like stars
in the stubbed-out substance
as consoling as bad milk.
But look at the baby, its bald eye,
the thin, angelic webs
reaching like fingers to grow it shut;
my eyelids flutter like a shocked heart.
The baby basks in its Mediterranean,
sulking hub of suds,
it is new, new, new!
It wears its body like a shirt,
unafraid of nails,
of lies, of hates,
of regrets downed with the sugarless coffee.
The shirt doesn't flinch
from the hammer that batters
firetongs that pinch the skin,
love harrumphing with its daggers in,
plain as the mail on the table,
plain as the no-nose on the lump of its face,
the club of its skull
milky as an escaped gasp.
The shirt simply hangs,
waiting to be put on, like a night-club crowd,
waiting to be touched
like scissors, waiting for the worst
to enter it, like a man, to make a sail
sailing somewhere, to some purpose perhaps
to fill it with winds like hands
burdened with an excess of gifts,
waiting for some breath to stretch it
like a manfully handled canvas
to take it into the hands of its mouth
and make it wake up
and shudder like a lung.
The shirt must do something inside of myself!
The shirt is there, alive in its hamper,
its buttonholes waiting for hooks
to pull the buttons through like flowers
and hold itself shut.
The shirt is there, cautious
(you'd better believe it)
suspended in its char
of suds, hanging like a kite
in the black sky of my uterus.
My sky of warm liquids and tepid laughter,
hanging, hanging,
by its little miracle string,
ready to whoosh down and pull me through myself
like a turtle entirely reversed.
But for now the shirt,
limp on its elephant of skeleton
still reels and flutters
like a clasped flag from its knot of hand.
Spaces
Baby, baby, mannikin in the crib,
there is something pulling us together
closer than a stitch.
Your sweet echo sweats
a troubled double of semi-sweet me;
my chocolate loves, mutable as kittens,
melt and glove
the powerful applause of your hands.
How primly they're mittened,
black as a glum
executioner's greased thumb. The invisible stitch
cinctures us nearer.
Vast spaces dissipate.
Nearer, your small sound
leaps bandages,
muffled in good wishes,
exits you loud as a cloud. Jade baby,
green at the gills and undoubtably drowned,
my red ears are still ringing. Your eyes
pause astonished,
pure as pins in their clogged knob of dough.
Mild child, your tiny attentions
suspend me
like a marionette not quite yet half-across
this bridge you have built between us.
"Triumphant Victims"
Can we know a love not inwoven with defeat?
The glow of childhood noon does still eclipse
The tags and rags of days adulthood endures.
How much more so then the binding love
That ties our vandal looks to one post of joy
And, moving us, demands we move unmoved?
Prometheus or God had had the knack
Of enduring satiety so-- not I! Loved
And punished with a velvet mask of sighs
Inching inwards when they are expelled to die!
The happy dagger hilting hidden in the breast
Ordains the killed and killer with their rest.
Dejection
Solemn usurpation of one consciousness
Leaves us what it leant us:
Anarchy's chaos and spilt grain
Lost fertility left wandering
Dark airs and night's uplifted breath
Unreal because left unplanted;
Thoughts lost without a brain to bear them,
Dry conceptions that lean in the wind
Whispering nothing to an earless earth.
Vindictive Advice
And use what you have
Lover, tragedian, jade,
Puffed ceremonies and excited speech
Excited ceremonies that obliterate the dark:
Anything in your arsenal of suns
Stretching your marbled arm
From your swept-back chariot
In moon-benediction,
Altering nothing with your obscure tongue.
Solar Perplexus
Say that the sun, bitter pill,
Is full of dividing edges,
Sharp essences that will not meld
Or coalesce, even like worn lovers,
In the dark. The black chalks
Have riven us in their abiding way
And left a charcoal powder on the rose
For that choice globe and hale eye to scoff at
Ringed with fiery hooks
And chastising sparks, I stare at it
And ask myself, pawing the powder
From my nose, eyeing its razor skirt,
Of the heft of ONE phalange that it flaunts.
The Hue of Evil
Did the damsels, in their charged parade,
Moon and fawn for the damsel-master still?
Their heightened curls fulfilled, in them,
The topiary's palate, the green abundant smell.
Who would, wicked enough, tell them what they were?
They had a haggard pomp and drab panache,
Swishing as they wished down rain-anointed streets
Curtseying to streetlamps' occipital pull.
They cheered each other up. With old gossip
And tales teased from the shadows, or here
And there some bladed crevice canyonized
Between yawns, as they marched, to hold their minds.
Time had put the blazing jades away, and,
Over-conscientious craftsman, connoisseur of trash,
Hoisted from among the once-admiring jades,
A few, thin, flecked, neglected greys.
Sid Contemplates Nancy's Death in a Limousine
"Leave off life awhile. It's overrated.
Nancy, you blue eyes toward death, as if toward
Another shore whose beating sands were war-drums
Marching you out of life and sense-- and love;
For I had loved you. Together we'd poured
Each hourglass with centuries-- to the crest!
And now, insensible and languid
And any milky tear, I watch awash
These blank solemnities and joyless vigours
Strut their little glittering while before me,
Prating: I am life! I am alive! Alive,--
Has not a salamander's tail, disjointed
from the sleek head, and fidgeting in the hard palm
Like threads of fire, as much claim upon
The grounds of self-animation as these
Who clamor ecstacies? The quiet nun
Or quaker staring walls down in her church
Commands vibrant meditations in a breath
Unbreathed; voiceless, and without even
So much as an eyelid's unconscious stir
That might annoy a flea, the devotee
Whirls the cosmos round her like a cloak
Invisible, and the kneeling stars in choir
Warm her hush contemplation, those white maids
Stirred to comfort an unmoving central calm.
And so, to cut short the dogs' whining yip
And defoliate the grievy wreath of death
Before its planted, blackly ribboned,
Above my Nancy's unuttering grave
And avoid the choked yodeling condolences
(Almost worse than the shrived chastisement
Of my sense!) and dolorous crowds of mourners
Stamping passports out of my private grief
For a photo-op of mourning stardom,
I'll pack myself into a holy cloister,
Eschew the tasteless ornaments of this world,
Revile in silence the thousand hands
Excited to touch, or anxious to please,
Holding nothing but their wanting of me,
Discard the thin sensuality of flesh
Poor in variety, lost in having,
And in saving spent, whereby we each
Mock ourselves in choosing one above another,
Exiled from all this aping mockery
And saved in being lost, found in being saved,
I'll quit this exchange of jibes, this commerce,
This weary commerce of weak weary souls,
Primping worn attitudes in new attire
And withdraw as the widowed spider
To her pall, mourning-gorged, defeat inflicted,
Damaged in spirit and in sense maligned,
Grim in prayer to the godless absolutes,
Nature's cheating majesty that cannot cease with us
And that way pay love. Drive on, drive on."
Meditation
The thinking mind in constant delectation seeks
Some bright shadow of the power that ignites
All delicious agonies of waiting to the sun's one pitch,
Flames that consume their sources as they rise,
Burning in men as a match in ethyl pitched
Bursts in alarming might, and to unclimbed skies ascends
In iris-blue flames consuming a fragrance mild.
Between Them
He: "And is it in the moment, collapsed,
Revivified when dead, unkillable and lived,
That this transport of 'nowhere else to be'
Inspires forgotten freedom of the freest mein?"
Said She: "Nothing is lost if not forgotten;
And in this temple of the chancing and free
Nothing is forgotten, nor can be."
"Beauty raped by time is nailed to the door."
"Again, by the hammer of the mind, batted is
The slivered instant into the all-consuming void
Giving that void meaning and beauty thus!"
The wellspring of the living-dying boy prepared
The ocean of void for its infinite waters of song:
He: "What survives in the sweet minute unrehearsed?"
"Everything of everything that is best.
God and all his angels' overwhelming behest
Cannot demand what is minute by minute leased."
"Life, I have beheld the lakes in which you breathe,
And drowned in silver glories of your tongue's breath."
Coda: Advice
Lean into the earlobe of the aspiring boy
And tell him of the investigation
Only his whitest, lingering spirit
Can undertake and eradicate this world of void.
Name the name that's scripted in his brain
And let the unleashed Victory behold herself as she must be!
It had seemed a million others had loved best, or first
It had seemed a million others had loved best, or first,
And that my breath but added injury to glory's hurt
As when the painter's dipping brush defames
The madonna's infant halo it encodes
And touches her not; dame Psyche, unrepentant
And purple in her cave, ringed with voices as with fire,
Filled with quick remembrance of departed faces
My mind agape and agonized by her features
Which taught the subtle wind its troubled smile.
And now those winds enwrap me where I go
And peace is the memory of any other pain
Than this one ache that drains my heart away;
And in the troubled air sighing soft and slow
Stream myriad voices half-angelic like the rain,
These voices gathered, these faces at the door,
I cannot flash beyond them, although I would.
