From website gregglory.com
Written by Gregg Glory (Gregg G. Brown)
The Death of Satan
Selected Poem
"The death of Satan was a tragedy for the Imagination."
— Wallace Stevens
Gregg Glory
Published by BLAST PRESS
http://www.gregglory.com
gregglory@aol.com
Contents
Contents
First Memory
Epigraph in a Burned Book
Flatterers Among the Roses
A Mocumentary of the Sun
Blank Generation, or, the Death of the Muse, NO, HARDLY
"BLACK ORCHIDS ON THE RED DOOR"
MON HYPOCRITE LECTUR:
"EVEN WHEN I'M DOWN, I HEAR SYMPHONIES"
HOW TO WRITE A VICTORY INSTEAD OF A TRAGEDY
DECONSTRUCTING THE DECONSTRUCTIONISTS
Outing
Slaves of Glory
For Tenor Semblance, Who's dead
Burning Byzantium
Die Wille
Three Songs
i. The Glass Mountain
iii. Third Song
After the Bacchanal
Ronald Reagan
Boris Yeltsin
Dr. Reverend in Ohio
Her Words
May Fire
Jonathan Miller, U.S.M.
Final Phrases
You Stood Up
Prose Poems
Those Images
The Rebels
Capitol Riot
Lincoln
Unimagined Things
Nativity
Apollo Belvedere
La bellezza chi io vidi si transmoda
non pur di la noi, ma certo io credo
che soloi il suo fattor tutta la goda.
The beauty that I saw transcended
all matter of measure ... past touch...
I believe certainly
that only he who made it enjoys it totally.
--Dante
First Memory
Leaning against a warm curb at the height of summer some years ago, a loose knot of theater people speaking with animated or distracted faces on my righthand side, and staring down at my gripped hands lolling between the fold of my knees and up at the dim stars in the humid air, the conversation turned towards the subject of first memory. Whether, once out of the womb, any memory depends on the ability to say that one recalls some image personally, that some 'I' must be present at the recollected moment, I do not know. If it must be so, then the first memory must be of alienation, a gasp at the recognition of some diminished 'I' against an overwhelming 'Other.' As the talk drifted past me and went on to some more current subject that has now lost its signification, there came before my eyes the image of a brilliant chameleon waving on the bitten tip of an infant's pink finger. It had attached itself by the teeth to the wormy finger which shook its mutable body in time to an unending wail against a sky half filled with palm fronds amidst the blue. Somewhere between the floating blue and lime green, the chameleon was wriggling in the middle of its liquid changes, the infant wailing at the lost beginning of his. I remember that flexible skin. The Jamaican atmosphere. The universal hue things seen in childhood retain. The chalky concrete of the porch's balustrade that had been poured in decorative shapes to admit a mixed light. To the left a swimming pool warmed its blue belly in the sun. The chameleon's bite had surprised me; I cried. I forget much of the intervening years; much of the last few weeks; much of yesterday; much of this morning. And I remain firm at this present instant only about the distant past --- faces and wreckages. A few human shoals scattered in the waters.
Epigraph in a Burned Book
Viewer, passive and bucolic,
Sober and naive man of simplicity,
Eject this book of Saturnality,
Unless you licked up your rhetoric
At Chez Satan, that sly boy doyen,
Eject! you won't comprehend an ounce and
You'll think me a flaming hysteric.
But if, without falling under charms,
Your eye can plunge in the gulf:
Tolle, lecte, and apprehend my love's alarms.
Soul, curious and suffering,
And lost searching for Paradise,
Caress me... or else: Sinon je te maudis! C.B.
Flatterers Among the Roses
Does the moon sail in its sumptuous heaven
Disfigured by pity,
Blindly tearful in an icy lair?
To walk in the moonlight to trod
The verdant ambers, and to think of nothing,
What sort of matter for a poem is that?
Is it a matter of having nothing
In the mind, icy sequester
Of nothing, of nothingness layered in its own absence?
Or is it a matter, rather
Of nothingness icily conceived, icily meant?
It is a matter of sinister consequence.
To walk in the violet moonlight
Discussing the moon from which it flares
Disfiguring the roses
Is a kind of nothing, a suave
Hollowness that we may hold near
Or suspend between us as we walk---
O savage celestial, misty moon,
Snarling in your lair, speak,
If speak you must, in dismal syllables
Some more blatant human meaning.
A Mocumentary of the Sun
One bakes and waits in the roisterous sun
Tapping out universal time with a particular foot,
A principle shoe, worn leathers unable to reflect
The merest shard of all that solar crisis
Burning in the sky and in the apperceiving chest
Like boxed jewels winking out of showiest velvets,
One waits for the desert to be done with itself
For the holy sequoias to drop their arms,
One more martyr, torn down by storms,
Reduced by the sun to one skull of dreams
Throwing one more shadow away from the hill
Like a river that flows out of the mind at last.
This earth of cakes and sweet excrescences
Lets us eat the loam, lick saccharin sands
From our lips, taste smeared blazons of cotton candy,
Raspberry and chocolate, the florid saps
We bite from the tree, laden with glistering fruits
We ourselves have made, and ripened in each eye.
Blank Generation, or, the Death of the Muse,
NO, HARDLY
Defeated by the paraphrase, or nearly,
He puzzled out a dwindled life-- in poetry
Who, perennial importunist, assessed
His era unfit for 'the best.'
Defeated by the paraphrase,
The inexact guesswork of sleepy heads,
Reciting lines of despair, never knowing another,
Never sensing, in their age's indifference, another
More enduring light.
No longer
The Ariel feeling
Or whipping spirit stronger
Than an evening's reeling.
Not a mirror to the muses' face,
Not Helen, limitless in grace;
Never divinity, never the light angelus,
Nor any, still ephemeral, 'sublimities.'
The age demanded an image
Rapped in cellophane or bandage,
A brain of eaten hates, or laughter
Soulless out of deadened waters.
And no one left to give a damn about 'the Graces,'
And the reviewers live on, indifferent---
Slaughtered Beauty shot in the face;
Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace;
Cold feet under etherial faces.
II
Untouched by the amorous,
Stripped
Goes Eros, incomprehensible
To "the masses.'
Hieratic verse,
Each head limned in light
Suffers the obverse,
Blotted rummagings of a blotted sight
Yet still he felt, with a savior's amour,
Neither drugged hedonist nor yet a bore,
Limitless possibilities
Like so many leaves
Clinging to the ancient portal's wetted door.
The percipient shall rule, discerning
'Neath modernity's fractious overlay
Here an emerald, there a ruby, thing:
Sustenance enough for poets in the ruby day.
III
Villains are feted in peeling shoes, and garlanded
Is Ginsolds, the great damaged head
Thrust into the atmosphere,
Impercipient, the small eyes dead in their spheres.
Seeing in earth neither paradise, nor fit habitation,
The Ginsolds of his father's scabrous generation, -
Monumental dinosaurs of the heart--
Researched dung and drugs for their start;
At first, a religious pre-occupation
Made them stare at Sunflowers and feces,
Purporting maculate Bhudda in the rose
Of an anus in dilation.
Tarry pools
Accept their coral bones,
Steeped in excesses
Of the incorrect and religious.
"BLACK ORCHIDS ON THE RED DOOR"
Black orchids on the red door;
Fitfully the raconteur
Consigns the ownership of elegance
For a few hundred dollars, for a 'superior' glance.
Black orchids on the red door
0Mark the poet's stipulated habitat.
Depression afflicts; he begins to yawn....
Stretching away from the world with a bored 'eclat'
Exhausted by his meditations on the black
Orchids on the red door, of a few, niggard, dark,
Striations intermit with rose;
Guilty only, in his ichorous lair,
Of a certain
Kempt Baudelarian repose.
MON HYPOCRITE LECTUR:
Ginsolds of the foetid spawn
Patched with no forgotten pulchritudes--
Vulgar paucity faintly echoed
In the weak light of decline.
Mr H. (insert your name here), possessed of an anesthetized soul
Blathers his useless abstraction,
A tongue-tying of half-felt immolations
---Unendurable! if not so falsely done.
Enslaved imbecility defiling life....
The age demands an image,
The image that we give it!
We demand the eternal image,
Absolute, inscribed, violet, blessed....
DBD
"EVEN WHEN I'M DOWN, I HEAR SYMPHONIES"
Apollo and Bacchus hanged in the neon marketplace;
Cold feet under etherial faces.
Bore-ed by the lack of temerity,
Slack desire suborning the bandannaed faces
Of hippies contented by Peace, and not Energy;
Marijuana leaves placidly
Shading the crib and high-chair.
100 punks, or fewer, or one,
Concoct out of impossible desire impossible reality:
Burning ambitions in Waldorf, or SoHo's zone,
Shed from the aether
These symphonies.
With a tongue of justice,
With an eye of fire,
With an ear made fabulous
By beloved mind's one wept flame: desire.
Rotten's masquerades,
Sid's pinioned victory,
The burboned voice of Hell establishing 'blankness' as priority
In a world floating valueless; incisive,
the eye of ice.
Aching faces brave the astonishing light,
Asserting TRUTH in ecstatic sanction;
Our redemption was individual,
London our capitol.
Our 'decade' compressed to "'77!"
We acknowledged, as aftereffect, a fey, uneven
'inheritance' of 'reticence.'
Youth as a remembered depravity
Gives no living soul satisfaction; relentless
Sojourning away from their parents' questioning
Consigned to them the 'aridity' of bliss.
* * * *
When dust hath hushed the roses,
Unmediating silence
This crimson-ochre splinter of song
Encloses
On time's blank slate
Lick this, and relate:
'Here twists,
With upraised fist
An Anarchist!'
HOW TO WRITE A VICTORY INSTEAD OF A TRAGEDY
Exile first the inconsequent
The casual hand,
Speech procured at secondhand,
Opinions possessed for an 'effect.'
Recast ANAKE as the actor's whim:
Vital eyes
Outweep all that tragic circumstance,
Lear and Cordelia locked in paradise.
Catastrophe hacked at Hector
In his skirt, but the Eumenides
Themselves were mild when Antigone died,
Singing at a string-end in the tomb's lee.
Become Promethean, to this purpose:
Amid lesser qualities, personalities and such,
Swimming in unexamined idolatries, personalities and such,
Inscribe what I equate: Man = universe.
DECONSTRUCTING THE DECONSTRUCTIONISTS
Philosophers of stone
Ungainly shift
By love's bright drift
Undone.
Of unbodied air
Came spirits' enhancing;
Never a Dunciad
But angels' hearts made glad.
Impeccable sirs
They discerned
Exegesis
Spit in sand.
Outing
No Transcendental Impulse but then
Invaded, sense by sense, and sense by sense again!
Confused, harassed, stammering, half-mad,
I arrived at a mountain stream's small source alone
Whose each mere moment of dropping flowing
By dropping more intensely flows. Heart's-blood
Stuttered along the tongue of solvent air
Following out the stream's wanderings apace
As if my liquid's hush through every cataract
And canyon-enhancing rivulet did move;
What weariness then penetrated every limb
Which had flung itself the whole blue morning through
Like a ceaseless wheel! I lay a lonesome hour
Upon a tabs of stone spined just so long
As myself from dead heel to skull-top
Imagining its travel! By my veins
The moss-indentured rock with iron force
Is cracked, a hammering flow enveloping the mass
With pale empurplings and smooth-prompting bulbs
of glass
That maturer nature had given a more rugged touch.
So I lay sun-warmed upon that human stone,
Neither foot nor head beyond its grating cradle,
Until all that made me I un-made
Then wove again together in eye and ear;
As if sunlight spoke and sound gave voice in light
All these before me in hazeless dazzle floated free
And I consigned them to their Liberty!
My rushing emerging blood swept past
Cochlea and ear-drum in bird-like thrum:
Stream on stream ascended purer air in song
Til all was bathed by part, the unaccustomed whole
Of oceans leaping from my spring! each martlet that sang
Told some note of me; myself had stained
Sky's unstarred majesty with pinks, and in a wink
Sent each sense sharpened as it spread
From azure zones of whispered fire
To the old pond's own cool shadow of repose
Til every busy sound was somewhat tinged with red
And every shifting leaf, dew-shadowed as they were,
Burned outlined by that bright delight
Their own laughing motion shucked from them in sound.
Then a purple rain, it seemed, descended
In answering haloes shaken from the sun
And broke in its descent to mist hallowing all.
No part of the under-sky receded
From that pursuant touch, - but rather
Rose to its own undoing in erotic rapture
As drones to their honey-loving maiden-queen
Lift translucent wings in flight;
Leaf and leaf in murmuring applause
Stretched on each twig-end toward that sky!
The stone that held my casing seemed more up-raised
And the low appearance of the swimming sun
Took on a duskier and a closer tone
As if it wished to immerse itself again!
Strange mist was everywhere, endowing each
Glowing glen that lay as little as a lens.
Strange mist had wrapped the very bowsprit of the rock!
My own skin was mist-engrafted!
Within, my own departing heart,---
So whirled with-in and -out with the luminous,--
-As pulsant globe and center now resolved.
And on this thought my mind no longer moved,
By spells of rapt intransigence inly held,
Til all that had its faultless action once impelled
Conjoined to conjure pause; sweet was the wind
That kissed my aching lungs with such sweet breathe
All piny, with some sunny hawthorn scenting mixed,
---Even still that air is fresh within me,
Even still do I desire the clearness I had then!---
For one hour's welter of such unwon wealth!---
For then I had found out--- in clearness still
Do I see it!--- motive of moon and sun and sincerer stars,
Our perpetual guest, the unsullied source of glory
That limned my out-flowing veins in rivers'light!
Out, out of the very center where my spirit slept
Flood called out to flood and flood responded
Out-pouring Life! there, there are the harmonies!
There the endless systems counted back to One!
There the measureless Space contented
To a water-drop! There echoings on echoings
By their velvet source are hushed!
Anguish and insistence vanquished by a touch!
Nightmares and chimeras chastized by a love
The soul's own shaping power makes animate!
Slaves of Glory
The very astonishing hour has come.
The very astonishing hour indeed!
Green Heinekins, jade brain and rose-coral vodkas
---Exhausted! In one final, fantastic evening.
Hosannahs invade the empty windows,
spurs of blacks, mysterious
As the tender invitation of the body.
Bright, alcoholic after-haloes sift
Timid ash upon stale, upraised lips.
Sobriety has entered us
As mourners enter a white church.
Enough of this pathetic quietness!
This simpering, dog-like wish for 'temperament'
The madness of faces full of 'sound judgement.'
I forgive all disasters, all accomplishments,
Every disguise that announces 'I am finished!'
Choking its inhabitant as a mirror chokes beauty.
Songs of sporadic intensity, wicked verses,
The poem of flayed skin, blind eyesight
Mutes imagining laughter, I forgive you!
Pathetic quiet!
Bring tympans, wild sibilants,
Drunken elephants of sound, mists,
the harsh clangour of brass.
New eyes, new hearts, new senses!
Bring a speech of bloods, the invention of Angels!
Why was one ever afraid of waking?
Eh! a little daydream I had in the haypile.
But now the new era has arrived --this moment!
Let us revenge the sky for an hour!
Let us run out muds of new births upon us,
And seize in hands of ice the very flowing waters--
-Dreams of incorporeal perfection!
Dawn leaves splinter in my eye
Enacting the death of Satan.
Vertiginousness in the closet!
Very astonishing!
For Tenor Semblance, Who's dead
'What things real are there but imponderable thoughts?'
--- Ahab
There was Tenor in his party grave, sharing
All of the same old sick jokes with himself.
1
He says, "What is there besides imagining?
These four occasional walls will not bring
Spring or sorrow to any unsuffering thing.
It is the will that wanes, in summer dark
After clogged stars have scraped the sky and left
A newer dark for some cold singer's questioning.
Rusted apples gathered, honey melons dusky gold,
Cherries rosing in the tinted sun, what was invented
If not these things? Shall my hand remain
Unfloured by its own effort? A pointed oar
Plunges and plunges in a white war and remains
An oar. The mind is not so meager; it becomes,
Once its rent raiment roars, in polychromes
Above chalk waters that it held and gave,
That of which it sang and did not hear, because
Too busy singing in undivided, tensile mystery."
2
If, on the wings of sparrows, men's feet shall flesh
Who shall fly, in contrapuntal destiny,
In waltz time, alone, beneath
The unceasing testament of the waves?
Tenor Semblance in his water-wings, bulbing
At his back held his breath and dived, at 4,
Into the tossing terror of a tame sea.
Once caught among the coral's shadowing, he saw
The flash and error of dying fish in that dim maze.
Their antlered looks and opalescent eyes
Placed a holy horror in his slalom breast
Racing, among more mobile lights, out of death's
Abrupt shade. He knew of earth by this
buried paradise.
He told his parents of the sharking waves and sea.
Alone,
His executed gestures in scarred sunset seemed
The switch-back hesitancy of leaves.
3
It was his mother's going, her poignant death,
Like still water, that made him hear
Curlicues of God's named trumpet world.
A French horn paddles in his ear;
Finches mocked the minister at her wake, his frown
Emitted solo labyrinths, corona icicles of round.
Tenor Semblance. leaving, knew his feet
Were tambourines, clashing in the grass.
And when he whispered, it was with sorrow
That he could not ring himself a barrow.
In her twinking time upon this mortal orb,
In laundered air, tender sequences
Of love and love, flashed from her bright center
Like perpetual suns that sang and knew their tune.
It was because of her he sought
A personal, vocal dew.
4
Semblance swelled in his soft decor,
Like an awkward Alice, he used his vital eye
To distill a separate scenery in the dwindled grass.
Little thunder smoked the mountaintops.
Gnats as vultures bulked silence on their prey.
But a swung censor, sacred scenting, never lends
Its incense to these more airy, tendencies.
Neither garland of flowers, in a stiff ring,
Nor any distincter bloom was worn.
Victim in winter, he tried to say
The measureless landscape he became:
Desolate branches, details of packed snow,
Paired tracks of deer, or south-seeking geese
Dispassionate as the sky. There comes
A crowd of moths, an abrupt lamp flapping
In discontinuous circles as he speaks.
5
But should we sacrifice infinite finesse for that
Snowblind and last, fatal profundity?
Sonless Semblance once, with gagging glands,
Turned abrogated Pa; the wincing world
Trickled from his groin. He clawed out an eye
And dived, lost in a reef, resulting in a sky
Made blue, by harshest imagination, by
Exclusionary rules. Was it a mincing butcher's
Cleaver thumb, his abusement of a One,
Chopping up the single digit we pretend?
False finesse? The sky was blue; he claimed
To be the author, and his grave
Was dug in blue clay; bluets brushed the edge.
His mineral bones are scavenged by worms that die.
Thus we see, beyond cut division or misty ending,
Death is daughter to imagination's venting.
6
A man Is Image and Is sound,
Imagining sounds; a blare of being
Scribbled like a cloud, pinched nothingness
Palely resembling himself, in a mirror;
Unalterable shadow, that falls
As seasons fall, in whitest trumpeting.
Thus was Tenor in his dirty grave,
In severest evening, uttering
A few, essential words, In his halter,
Dawdling day undid the staunching fist
Of night and materbirds like mandolins
Twanged his very song. They were his toys, who,
Hautboy accountant made of his breast
Final register. A second heaven, set
Beside the first, is best when we forget
Ourselves in what our wish of death becomes.
Burning Byzantium
I
In night-devouring pride
God and ghost deride,
And not knowing what is best
Peering past his death
Man's untiring vanity
Consumes his bitter rest.
II
Flame emanating, spout upon spout,
Flame on his head that shouts
Fiery Dionysus climbed
Olympian plenitude and dined
On rarer bones than men's eyes
Before or after spied;
Then, finished with that golden feast,
Burned statues down, head and feet,
In serpent-seas of fire that we
Might build again from perfected memory.
III
What if destruction of vast colonnades appalled?
Wrecked form to formless called:
Holy fire makes wide mind a wall,
Paints thereon, and names that image All.
Water and desire and stark upright flame begin
Where world grew ocean from some ecstatic limb.
Starved eunuchs hunching bald-eyed at the law
Know Adam to the marrow, jumping to the fall.
An engendered emptiness can beget
Strong delight for those whose minds are full;
Stark contemplation hollows out delight
Save when sword or scalpel pull.
IV
Answer to sorrow or suffering comes
Displaying ornate mask or abrupt gun;
Michelangelo labouring in the sculpted dark
Blazed imagination forth upon uncertain tides--
Pale constellations of his thought
Brought death and life out of one troubled heart,
Or might have brought --O How long can man
Out of narrow sorrow extract a song?
Right action finishes out the thought
A lonely exalted mind began;
Long-loved monuments fixed in the sight
Assemble us out of desire to dissolve
Into that unutterable One again.
Die Wille
I banish all
Who fret and stall
To finish out my work:
Pitched to that extreme of thought
Or dark, and shambling room to room
As from spirit to spirit
And always preparing for that
Never-arriving guest
I have labored overlong
Or too-thick with theme and means
Have overwrought my song.
Out of night like a distorted dream
Or storm more mysterious
A penitent ghost that cannot crest
The bound of rotted day appears;
Poets, learn to live as clay
All rich substance to underpin
Whatever a great man might make
Tinkering with his fate
In momentary play,
Or more solemnly erect,
Out of an undistracted hate.
All our lot have spurned and sung
Brevity of man, necessity of guns,
Unable as any mirror
To sing ourselves aright
Caught in enlarging night
We turned from face to face
As if every face would save us;
We who had arrogance enough
Of thought to have thought
That careless hands had made us.
So that a few good words might not perish
Or empty imagining sink unmanned
In unalterable loss
Collect like solemn children round
The myriad confusion of the foam
And write it out again:
Live, and live again, as old men say
Anxious for eternities
That make their own wisdom seem
But momentary toys that gleam
And are beaten back to mud.
I am not that holy sage
Remembers the misery of knowing all
Or turning to a wall completes
What body and its pleasure
Were forbidden to decide---
Under burdened moon
That sinks in July to rise on fire
Out of the glittering wheat
Knows man and his defeats,
All the sudden infirmities
Blind violence took for sureties
And looks on them and laughs.
From the womb man falls
Or from the widowed breast
Dispatched to a sultry grave
That gives no rest.
Three Songs
i. The Glass Mountain
Night and fire surround a broken tree
Made blacker by the fire;
A head, an arm, barely distinguishable there
Cant towards a broken sky--
Black eyes unwired in the ancient face,
His old heart's thudding done,
Hangs that great man who's mind's a sea;
Red torches gutter tongues,
Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop.
Nor proscenium nor orchestra
Nor gilded balcony set
About the vaunting terror of the scene---
Idiot crawls to idiot
And idiot begets.
And none's alive who'll now recall
Utter nobleness of limb or sin,
Beauty beyond a fall.
Sang the burning lion on the burning mountaintop.
I picked a blank mask
And put on a changing soul,
Exampled by those blessed men
Who suffered all in all.
But I reject the holy past;
That banner cannot lift again.
Forgotten men can't raise a song
Or change my ranting soul.
Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop.
iii. Third Song
God built man in a black fit.
I tell you suffering a pall;
Lone men could not fashion it
Could not create themselves at all.
Heaven itself is what I gate-keep;
Descended from that sphinx
Crossed centuries between her paws,
Another hand has finished me.
Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop.
Emboldened by riches
A steeple mind had heaped,
Father son and holy ghost
In his flaming mind are linked.
Stale generations that bred him
Recanted at the leap;
Rule square and trine
But toys to make the typist think.
Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop.
A man displaces a woman
With the image of her face
Until some loud stone betokens it
Mixing ecstasy and grace.
A great Adams and Hawthorn knew it
Knew it and turned sour;
But it is the best that man can do
Unwound by the backward hour.
Sang the burning lion on the fierce mountaintop.
After the Bacchanal
Smoky midnight torches slowly enwound
A wine-heavy head; my old eyes
In ominous moonlight upon a photograph confound
Some ancient satyr's head drowsing in its beard;
Fabulous syllables out of the bitter heart rise;
Embittered fables of the Emperor instruct
Oceanic ache of sex and blood
What's most noble in the bone.
Out of those lamplit or flame-lit mouths
Flickering vaguely there, flash thousands,
Upside down or upright in the air,
Battered abstract complexities of flesh;
Dark turmoil of flesh begetting flesh.
But all mind needs image to be complete:
Rage-minded Timon thrashing riches at a stone,
Or that huckster Richard abandoned to a throne.
Self-invented, or tossing thought of age,
Cast-out circles of the flames reveal
A single man upon a stage, all Lear
In his proud lineaments thunderstruck:
Confusion of a mind unable to set a scene
Among a multitude of scenes,
Dramatic images that repeat
Tumult of living body stylized to a theme.
Ronald Reagan
Familiar as a rerun, he dazzled in the glass
-the resurrection of euphoria, fathered on our wants.
Still high on Nixon's drowsy hemlock and love of self,
we passed the absurdity from hand to hand, and drank.
Balloons fell and blistered in the elected dark
on the metronoming sign of every state
the Union still possessed, and we were glad;
he even made our incandescent sadness dim....
He dazzled; the Columbia, our one experiment,
flowered and faded out, a burst of scents.
And still we held ourselves hypnotized like fish
to the television's bowl, trying fin on fin
to shatter it and disappear within.
Boris Yeltsin
"I sway drunk and liberated from the tin green tank-top
spouting my bright brand of Nevesky's Napoleonic 'Liberte!'
Yesterday, I ran away from poverty to fame,
a circle clipped... by lies, by bliss...
Brezhnev signing in my subway bill after a solid round
of boilermakers toasting his longevity! Such dull, glum rounds.
Am I the hero of my nation-state? Giving parliament a kiss
and a whistle for their censure of my too solemn unsolemness.
Soldiers fawn and come to humble silence
when I spill the beans about the independence we've won
from ourselves. Who needs psychoanalysis now? They smile
and cheer in black ironic, loving, loved street-jeers;
good ethnic-russian boys to the riven core!
I weep with bilged courage into hot salt hands
when I declare The Coup a Coup Decapitat... those guys
couldn't hang a cat! The bear dances mincing on its paws.
The gilded, false shuffle of our flighty republic's shifted
once again. At my slipping, bootblacked foot
some Mother Russia holds her infant up to the AKs ricochet.
What will Yevteshenko think up to rhyme with this?
A cab-man in his busted cab crammed with madcaps
putters by and sings: 'Puling Pavlov, Pugo and Yazov
-- manhood's appalled...
70 bleak years of the Commies' trawling haul ...!"
red blood loss open from throat to groin---
this soft lusterless blushing ends in a simple frill."
Dr. Reverend in Ohio
"Pacing the thin streets made long by thought
I jingled metaphysics in my purse, caught
the lecture circuit and cleaned-up with bunk.
My brother in the arts, Dr. Blank, got skunked
by every whorehouse publisher to come
down the twisting pike. 'Some
of my best friends...' he would say, and stop.
He was forgetting syllables by this time, on top
of everything else. First in my class
at Harvard (seminary) I used to pass
my historic heirloom polo shirts around like greeting cards
and proselytized humility. A liberal education's hard
to come by these days. We would sit and stare.
If only to live one did not eat the air!
Safe on my white soap-box, I did drool
and gibber liquid like a priest. The fool
who made me call him mentor did me in.
-He thought my thesis too encyclopedian
and useless to the race. Why I'd hold the hand
of any povero insensato in the land.
The blue air cracks against the chimney-smoke
of this Midwestern coaltown. These days I have to choke
the hissing words back down my throat
to save my shovelling job, the boss' swelling goat.
Now lost and dazed beneath the white camellia,
I meditate at lunchtime on the sacrosanct and familiar."
Her Words
"One dark night, unjust soul's repose
sunk in a midnight past my midday's cure,
I rattled blind down corridors, stuffed
my loud bright watch beneath a pillow
to keep the silence out (the between ticks tick).
I danced with mirrors, slept in blinks,
threaded whiskey like a lifeline to my glass.
I spun our wedding ring to a gold globe
and waited the balance out; how it rang against
the stone!
I cannot think; the one world whirls....
The world's pink ears are crammed with speech;
I, I, I, I, becomes a hollow sound, you
infect my eye, enlarge to a troll....
My bruised head floats in a goldfish bowl."
May Fire
In Red Bank, painted red, the heat
Kills infants, sprawling at their mother's feet,
Packing into Woolworth's for Easter flowers
And rattling water pistols now on sale.
At Reckless Place a barbecue begins,
Matches flash and blacken on wet coal, near
A gallon tin of gas, waiting to explode.
The children hang like lilies from their necks;
Open-mouthed, alive, they squab the mall
In summer cut-offs, roiling at the sight
That float in marijuana spikes of color
Of Barbie's head of smiles ghosting the Navesink
In dream apparel, while a plastic Christ
Bobs wished-for and haunted on black swells.
In Red Bank, where a squall of heats
Unhouses God from a fitful sleep
Like dozing Godzilla from the China Sea,
And ferries hellish stenches noseward in fuming oils
As far as Prowns, the parade
Which vaulted Christ among us, an Olympic star
Bright and burning on chrysanthemums,
Was over weeks ago. White as milk
The holy faces melt in boredom as they pass
In lowing Volvos, while, near the fire, red men
Stutter useless baptism from a firehose....
Everything in cinders is coming down!
O Jesus, Jesus, standing in the rainbow
Of the hose, shout deliverance again
And scald these unbelievers with your breath.
Drenched in dreaming sweat I saw
Souls wake in blood, behind
The Broad Street Exchange, butcher-red, and rise
In dead march ordinance against the sides
Shuffling to the stocks, and the bell
Of RBC came clanging straight from Hell
While trumpeting sirens foretold the fire
That has risen, swimming every street
Until the sun and mud-baked river
Is fire. Resurrection will visit us after death
Has burned our smoking bones of sin, and we wake
Purged from the grave, waist-deep in the flaming
Shallows of our lives, and stand, and wait
For Heaven's hissing flesh to drop on us like cloth.
Jonathan Miller, U.S.M.
"It is night. Date-palms are rocking on the leash
Of Time, the hurricane, that straddles our defeat
With two-legged winds, and stalks the dusty town
With a sheriffs clinkered heels until we're mown
Down by our ambitions to police the world.
Tonight the Mid-East's bunkered sandlots lash
Dynamos of fire into the throttled air to crash
On cindered houses abandoned years before.
The generals' camouflaged tent is staked
In the vampired heart of our affairs of state;
Our bloodless motive moves in for the spider-kill,
Touching each fly-fat thread centered on our ill.
All things are playthings, and the roar
Of the black ocean here consumes our speech at night
Lifting its frail levities in a matchstick's
Minute light, God knows I was not born to kill---
Who grew up in Indiana's tidy wheatfields tilled
By machines as patient as mothers, giant-wheeled,
That came sighing with sweet scythes when autumn cooled,
Keatslike, and the silo's sundial shadow
Met itself in the empty auguries of the meadow.
Unhoused thousands are beating to our copter's mill;
Prayers raise them cresting to their crescent moon
And Allah's sweet-water paradise filled with girls.
These are God's sufferers and wear his brand
Of salvation creased In shin and hand;
Doling out bags of rice and reconstituted milk
From the throbbing helicopter's side, half tilt-
Ing into the begging sea of faces, I wish
For a lunatic's rare absolution of my guilt, his bliss.
Stigmata almost washed away by weeping still
Eat into the innocent wrists. Now, at Easter,
They hold their small hands up, robbed
Of all that held them, tongue-tied, to earth,
And rise like moons, balloon-willed, lovely, free
At last, to their creatured deaths; until we die
Nothing stops the cresive wanting of our breath."
Final Phrases
If, after grandeur, disappearance,
If, after all this splenetic ascent,
The crippled aftermath of a fall,
Less and less intense, among such
Bright, abstract things, then what?
What low-watted misapprehension,
What fertile fault or suborning error
Still all awhirl in the mystery,
The furious cauldron of un-become,
Spicy broth of untasted potentials,
First recommended to the infant sense
The haphazard and mistake of birth?
What wry ointment in what creative eye
Thumbed from the numb terror
Of inexistence, this existence?
This houseless maundering among
Syncopated rubble, this shy twist
Of a fast-disappearing, evanescent fate?
What was in the cherished river,
At first, to flood us from the womb?
What strobe rose was in the bones
That first inflicted birth,
The eccentric squeeze
From nothingness to somethingness
To pile us up to the height,
The convulsive height of birth?
Why begin, with a glittering cry,
A human caw among perished isles,
To speak of the shine of Things
Nearly silent against the sea's
Greek, inanimate suavities?
Why this compelling fragrance,
This last stink of a terminal sweetness,
This blanketing panache come home
To impelling nostrils,
Why this, why this, among all
The universes of nothingness
God had heretofore imagined,
Singular monarch in his cloudy sublime,
Unpopulated paradise filled with rocks?
And if we are all of mere spirit tweaked,
Smacked rat-a-tat from the celestial,
Like clean water from a clean tin can,
If so thin a strain of the ethereal,
Then what is in our exiled spirits
Fleshed to the deity endeavor we construe
To make us weep? What acrylic inch
Of our invisible divinity uninvisibly
Will manifest to measure our wash of sorrows?
What interior tide pushes us to tears,
Continual tears in a plangent land,
And not one sorrow forgotten
But a new sorrow returns, like spring,
Ever-freshening the sadnesses
We pursue? Why this continual cry
If in our essences we are deaf?
Does the grandest theme weep
For the splattered litter of notes
That bodies it from the tearing page?
Did a charming leitmotif ever
Spare a tear for the plunging hand,
The arranging brain, the fostering voice?
All alone in glory I live
Who am a speaking spirit to the things
I rack and ratchet blindly about,
A ghost of irresistible force
A god of wind blowing pansies
A thing of merit, and a demon of note
Proffering awful caresses
In trade for the one syllable 'love.'
I have slept and now arise,
Vacuously awake in a vividness of dawns.
Shipwrecked in my spousal house
And torn down from splendid heaven,
A castaway spasmed from the completed Ideal
And kicked into gestured frescoes of the real,
The half-completed wall half gold, half
A caribbean pearl of epic splashes,
So white as to blind the eye,
So warm as to melt the memory, diminish
Sheeted winter to piebald April.
Here I yawn awake in arousing play,
Dandling argent daises, spooning
A million raw juleps on one tongue,
Improving my tenor to a rafterless sky
A swept blue of renewing heights,
An up without a top, capless
As my sheering serenity,
My full bloom of honey flooding
From each minutest flowerlet:
Intention devoutly touching intent at last.
From here I peer far past the small
Eloquence of the 'merely' personal
Steering to the vertiginous exact,
The brightening verities of the sky,
Sting of stars, the cosmic whip
And nagging lacerations of the real,
All the subsuming finite, intricate,
The thousand wavings of detail that finishes
The uncertain infinite, the expressive sense
Of still-to-do and yet-to-do
And not yet done, the pang
Of manyness, and pule of puny
Maybe, become the plum of one,
The glistering artifact in the bowl
Of the out-there Eternal.
And when I wake, and my bleak eyes see
In all this catastrophe of light
One dark soul only, definite as night
A mute, ruminating being
Treading the solitary rhododendrons, as if
Veritable miracle fluoresced
Somehow darkly among the pinched
Blots beyond his pinching fingers,
A corpse marauding the roses,
His cadaverous reaching after fragrance
Shaping the desired dark by his questioning,
A pornography of death
Flopped on the living divan,
There, in the branching rhododendronish
Dark, I in my bed mutter wonder:
Is this the result of hugeness
Inaptly confined, a gigantic dwindling
Into the narrow coffin of the senses
Of all the airy wideness of a soul--
Stuffed in five cramping fingers,
And those fingers resolutely shoved
Into a single, shrunken glove?
I do not know what answer I would make
Seeing this blacking thing of shadows,
Mate to the doggish nail that has dug
At its own fascinated creation,
An insincere earth sincerely debauched
By a passion more real than its consequents,
A living verb among dead lilies,
A certain sound of parable, evoked
From the incredible waste,
Arbitrary horizon and guessed-at bound
Scribbled against the infinities,
A scholar's separation of the dark
Into dark and dark, a delineation, too,
Of fantastic lights, where only light
And higher light, and a lowness
Of light only and always are.
What are these parings and portionings,
These niggling splits
And uneasy chafings, these soaps
And chromy shavings of eternity,
The selfsame immensity that we are, too big
And brave a thing for ladies' mittens,
The parasol of sight and leaf of ear,
Shade of smell and shadow of touch,
Forever less than the elephant they gloze,
What are they all to us today,
In this dizzying second above the chasm,
This pirouette upon a gyroscope,
This rustle of meaningless papers, chime
Of windy whim, cast of fate,
What do they mean, and how,
How, how, how, mon frere,
Do those puffs of meaning manifest?
How do we come to degraded meaning
Out of sincerer wish? How descend
From the very portico and pitch of heaven
To the quixotic swamp of decided good?
What winces in the hero's nerve
That makes the paradisiacal damsel, saved,
Less than his own, and grandest,
Saving gesture? What gets her, though beauteous,
Reduced to an incident, a paltry
Happenstance recorded in a tapestry,
Less herself, both in and of herself less,
Than the skillful weave that retrieves her,
Summons her narrative beauty to the orb,
The goldenest orb, of sight, saved again
From the final damnation of the unsaid thread?
Is it that she is a noun merely
And not a verb, a paraphrase of greatness
And not the great thing herself,
Her motive being and selfsame source
Never troubling the trumpets'
Victorious ogling of her story,
Louder and louder, at her paraded reception?
And yet all about me now I see
Splendid unsayings of these themes,
The glided weave picked bald,
The hero maligned and maid discomfited,
Returned to glory in a rustic nave
Of beaten seashells and scratchy quartz,
A bare displaying of simplicities
Fit for neither homily nor hymn.
These mutinous eviscerations
Of life's sparse leavings,
The brindled curd and the voluble leaf
Begging after silence with one last word,
And sighing for revelations as once
Their own profuse confusions they pursued,
Going to the interior nothing
And producing, like an avid paramour,
The true, universal gem, a sum
Of themselves and of their mystery
Only the questioner questioning
Could, from blank possibility, create:
The Macy's diamond rummaged, ex nihilo,
From a cape. What good has ever come
From living in the smallest world
Or raging for the tiniest chime
In all the unreeling Appalachians
Of our august symphonies?
Splendor, nothing but splendor
Tattoos the groaning soul, pricking
Aptest testaments in the flinching skin.
This is our inception and our destiny,
Despite these shrinking meanderings,
These mangled sayings of the smell
And mousy praises of the infinitesimal,
This obscuring appetite for tiny
Registered among our surrounding large.
Am I nothing, nothing more
Than the mere instance of a theory,
A fabled example or hypotenuse inked-in?
No, my soul! But the decision for good
And the good are not the same thing.
Saying a word and meaning a word
Are separate instances of things
Mere contrivance can never finally tie;
Starry shatterings clump against my hand.
To imagine an end is not---
Fortuitous proving of eternity!---
To come to the end. We have said
Everything at one time or another.
I say again that saying is not
To mean. If it is not to mean,
Then what is it to have said at all?
The expressing wish, the tink
Of tink-a-tink-tunk, the song
Of the garroted voice, the sole
Ululation of various mutes,
The single thing of diversity,
The only theme purloined
From the myriad mashing of myriad notes,
Is this: I live! Any heart, any love,
Any word whose empty impulse I move
And by passion alone redeem
From the meaninglessness that ensconces,
The disordered view packed up
In ordered sight, all wild night held
In the spilling instance of my vision,
Discovery and instance unified
As the blowzy seed, once watered, spurts
To the mastering citadel of the tree,
And its great discordance veiled
By a will that gives as it commands:
"Hear my soul, and speak my plea:
I create the paradise I pursue,
Enlivening each green-new bud
With untroubled blood. Tender,
I sense the soft furl of each
Leaf asleep in its seed.
Seedlings, unfurl! Is it strange
To live once loved, and never die?
Live but once alive, and eternity is thine!
I am most myself when you are me!
Enter this heart palpitant
And take the living light
Heaving there: It is given!
And every blushing rose of heaven
Has my blood on its cheek,
Thorns its redness to a glory
By my own, as you shall dip and grow,---
-With a lover's insistence,
Swelled world, now allow
My bending face this kiss,
Though it may be with bloodied lip;
I crave such missed wishes, which,
Forever untold, unwhispered,
Become prayers rescinded
As if God had hindered
All love gave. O!
In this presence of peace
Forgive me for loving
In pure reminiscence
Each future unrewarded kiss
You will decide not to kiss.
All flush giving's removed,
Washed to dust by mere 'having,'
So cold is your loving.
Never absent in wishes
Is this tenderest of touches:
Grave world, I am giving
More resolute loving-- unstriven--
Than you in your sorrows
May ravenly raze from me,
However you harrow
My soul's own simplicity!
I toss my angel haloes to blackened souls,
Burnt wrecks and hulks of matchsticks,
Haphazard of my lightness,
For I cannot choose but float in light
While in this dizziness I live:
Beauty has a power
All goodness to endow
Once lifted from its bower.
Beauty is a thing as once its dreamed.
Ever, eternal, once lived, undying."
You Stood Up
You stood up, and the world rose with you!
Astounding globe, charter of misty distances, held love!
From you, all things emitted their eternal energy.
From you, the sensual regale of lifted light, diamonds!
From you, spears of daybreak arose, laughing lioness!
Night abandoned melancholy, ropes of dew lifted with you.
Dark-headed iris of a thousand days,
When love comes before us we abandon everything.
Old harbingers, old hates, past truths, deficiencies and victories;
Miscarried words scrawled on a discarded cast.
The hour of getting here and getting here has arrived.
The clock has mounted up to your eyes with minutehand prayers.
Glissades and everglades tick also in your eyes.
Now the door of spring rushes open.
Winter's broom sweeps out its ashes and its tears.
Now it is the hour without shadow come again,
And the sun collects us. Us together in our nearness!
Guitars boom in the garden; struck thunder, sound-blossoms.
In your chest, high and light orchestras promenade
Through galleries of just showing up. Like tulips.
Down your unleashed arms, rivers arrive at honey seas.
The mock turtle goes on in his heavy rounds, baying boisterously.
My heart has eaten up the days of us together,
Salty and strong in its thumb-made dish of red clay.
This arriving with us and within us does not stop.
It goes on and on, on and on forever.
Stations of departure, those old crosses, stand
Worn and gilded. They are empty, abandoned as lice.
Together we come dancing and solemn, two porpoises.
Our sides are streaked with blue universes of wet light.
In you, the first hello and the last hello. Hello!
In you, strange seagulls x back and forth.
In us, the swallows' songs entangle and beat.
The last thrill of their virtuous vibrato domes our sky.
In us, those who never expected to meet themselves do so.
Found dogs surprise each other, exchanging rushing tails.
In you, dawn cannot come to autumn. Shadows are always deep.
Hallucinations adopt your stance, but only you convince.
Let me stand upon your porch, a little old and rattled.
Let me travel like a shipwreck back to your anchorage.
Let me wash in your tender banks like a seal, and roll there.
Let me sink in you, hold in you, like greenness in grass.
Oh my sunlight, oh my day'sbreath!
Let me transfigure you, like chlorophyll, into my own body.
Let me suck sweet sips of air from the cups of your ears.
Let me drop my heart in your mouth with this tongue.
These words I use rumor your abiding.
And yet you do not abide.
You rush through all dawns, all skies, all risings
With eagle feathers afloat in your hair,
An indian princess bartering for her bridehood.
A new Danube charging her bankheads.
You groom the night away, particle by particle,
Until day stuns us.
Prose Poems
. . . .
The face haunts me. Melts, vagrant ghost that it is, enters my veins and wells up to impossible laughter. Shrieking radiance of newness-- shrill and virile! Well, well, I feel that I have not yet forgotten how-to-love.
Blue innocence of adoring airs-- unnecessary extravagance! in the face of your face. Come, stand beside me. There is so much I demand to imagine as still possible tonight. How void of solace is the empty moon! One bladed touch of your fingernail, and the world lies ripped around me in bleeding shards.
Art, poetry, complexity: Let us destroy these sterile mechanics of happiness---
How uselessly this world is gold troubadour to my impulse!
Yet, the face haunts me.
* * * * *
When I truly dream on Paradise for me, how few faces accompany the vision! None of them recognizable! Here, an unendurable tenderness--- leechlike affections, very like modem art. Empty souls gyrating with a sound of suffusing suction! Wanton in their emptiness, their excessive lack. What sold-out paucity. Inhibitonists sacrificing the spinning wish to live! Mourning doves hop from my head to eat out the eyes of these remorseless sycophants. Trapped by a desire--- they know nothing of how to desire reality for themselves... Ah, my petite soul! How conjugal thy green dance. Come, swirl your cherry scarves around me! We shall play at spitting on these faces!
. . . .
Shattered lilies on the abstract faces
Poor bastard! I shall wear your skin--- as a victory and a celebration! You have stripped it off as a drunkard strips off moderation. How jealous of God's spotlight ached St John! There is a willing divinity-- as real as any pig sacrifice in Tahiti.
. . . .
Angels possessing cowardice! You too!-- I have felt it--wings delicate and oily as a fly's, shivering with the anticipation of some heavenly visit--the recorded face of a little girl at the instant of death; the very moment when she threw herself on the tracks to save the family dog. These are the fetishes of good spirits.
I myself am hurtling down the same track, my eyes magnetized by my eventual death--a death totally without salvation: For I have seen the glorious angels and stood among the hive as they communed with their Creator. My hanging heart hungry with righteous appetite has been caressed by the Supreme Hand, altering its tick--but still I refuse to believe in them; I won't stick by that dirty crew! Not I! Not that lot!
Still, heaven is open to me. Its razor azures. Just the thought of falling in love stops my heart.
. . . .
The watered loves of salvation. Again! Again these symphonies disrupting restless dusts. How long and how lovingly I longed to be a corpse! Let the roses close over my eyes-- how shyly! Simply the moon's light leaks into the tomb, my arms crosswise, awaiting the heart's cool command to cease. My nostrils shudder at the other corpses; morose disfigurements gnarling the stone. Even in death I am a snob! To have given as I gave: this face to this time! Horribly, I held her hand. I mewed, 'I love you.' And at this, at this her veiling virginity lapsed! No heroic soul melted between us. Monstrous Beauty! Chaste hands held and licked like cold-cream. How tender were the lies we steeped each other in! Disingenuous lust, dispirited genitalia. She, too, was dead. Her eyes died when I licked the tears from her face--and laughed!
We are so immemorially close! In the velvet afterlight of burning decay, how solemnly her lips beheld mine. Bridegroom to spent darkness. Avidly, vividly, licking. Night, night my own most especial despair! Unwrap the spirit this cellophane traps! Extend my nauseousness to the masses! Sick, and in infinite hope infinitely despairing, I extend my tongue to your bootsole... I weep if I can touch one discarded object of your hatred!
Those Images
Stand again at the old well-lip
As one half-sleeping might
And drop a stone among those images
That lay hid in the night.
When still a boy at the water's edge
Cold with terror at the dark,
The light was like a fish's hide
That floated back to me.
And drop a stone among those images
That lay hid in the night.
What has escaped the breath
In hated words or curses, now rescind
And let an older beneficence begin;
Call that harshness in.
When driven to that edge of speech,
The tongue half out of the head
Recall what purpose pleased you best
When time had not yet begun.
And drop a stone among those images
That lay hid in the night.
At gasping dawn a boy again
Swears all breaking light's a game
And climbs before the mounting sky
To catch a dreaming fish
While the water's high.
So sound out the plummet-depth,
With some stray rock or cocked ear do it
Or hearth-stone out of pocket;
But drop a stone among those images
That lay hid in the night.
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-licked 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.
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.
Unimagined Things
The world must change if we but imagine it.
Copernicus squinting traded in his lamps
For furious mysteries; Galileo tossed Aristotle out
For a swinging stone, back to the turbulent sea of thought
Because his ghost had no bones. What new paradigm
Will rinse us shining from the misbegotten foam?
Unimagined things grow real, grow real.
Nietzsche know pale Apollo well, that he
Must step lightly from red Dionysus' side;
Michelangelo's high man and God, that mirrored touch,
Poured the raging heavens into our daily cup.
What matter that before unimagined things grow real
They must first condense in thought? Man's a drunkard
With his dreams and will piss them to the sod.
Unimagined things grow real, grow real.
Aging wrong and aging right cannot
Endure our scorn or enhance our thought
(Morality's an old, old play, with curtains that must fall)
But new worlds imagined, that body in the breech.
Einstein knew that his equation unravelled no new sky
--- That were indifferent--- but was a chant to change his mind.
Unimagined things grow real, grow real.
Nativity
Was there carnage in that shot
World-levelling God begot?
Stubborn Christ born in an abandoned lot.
Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust
Cracked heaven the dividing splinter teared,
All that riotous confusion heard
Before the roaring droplet seared.
Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
Did that staring infant's head
Dimly unwrapped above the stiff bed
Know what it engendered?
Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust
Pack-animals' musty blood
Flubbed responsive where they stood,
Deep in the passionless mystery.
Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
And was that woman bleeding there
As in a tapestry, for the crawling god prepared?
All generation in a wound condoned.
Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
Did that penitential infant shriek
Climbing heaven's empty cheek
Draw ecstatic thunder down?
Old cross crows are drubbing in the dust.
Apollo Belvedere
1
Is this hand stopped that commanded heavens: weep!
Does this angel's foot unstirred know love
For its enclosing stony bower, whose imagined flight it keeps
Looked in laurel and bay wrapped upwards to thighs that moved---
In gracing imitation lending what life keeps?
Past still stars in a rose bolt of thought they wove
Restless imaginings....
Has this youth resigned the reigning fury of its powers
That thoughtless as the cheating dream of sleep
Reveals in repose the still undissipated glory of its hour?
Does this temporal air unquiet lives possess
And ache to burn through, trace its faded pageant yet?
2
Give back, O lambent statue,--- what we gave and give:
Compeerless love that inhabits the spirit willing, exhaling
Noble chansons imputed by baser breath, and live!
Interfusing loveliness with the manic grace of birth....
3
Become in waking what in slumbered stony limbs
Lies composed and stolen: vigilant, universal, true!
Let again the visionary eye white steeps climb
Arching and overarching brightnesses to unknown blues
That signal a universe at rest--- O it sleeps
To be quickened by whatever comes to quicken you!
My eyes in darkened contemplation close, or half-close,
Against the mellow dying sun's half-extinguished ray.
Those arms before me and that undimming eye turn liquid in the hush---
All I see's a vision, the eye that shifts in hallucinated misery
From its embalming grove, the countenance disentangled from its lush
Confinement; the lips that speak in light the imagined joy
May speak again, and now, as on humankind's first day.
see
A death reversed, the spirit kindled that was ash,
burning free!
4
O high and savage, wild spirit impel my voice
Through this dross of world and rank habitation,
Completing the impulse that visits without choice
The divining mind of man, a crystal exhalation
Pursuing all through the gross swamp of loss, and worse,
Until the ages inhibited palace in a word is built, a consummation.
Let not the invading dignity of God in awe
Or foisting ministries of superstition linger
To drop a pall on the inceptive brightness we would show:
The individual in his tensile case is cause and stir of this
-Of all the bellowing activity of world and whirl below,
A principle aloft on the rapt pinions of his flight
the disdaining gaze forgetting each abyss.
Never was the world into sonorous darkness cast, but yet
A heralding dew did canvas its midnight branches in a net.
5
O pilot dawn that from chanting darkness vaults
Your clear fight line of song and light
Find a treble brightness in these words I choose and vaunt!
Oceans cold and amber-black thin to skies of light
And every denser, troubled atmosphere's dispersed,
Changed into tolled notes of this brave saying's might!
Banished is the night where frigid terror sweats its blasts
Into the mind's receiving dark, dispelled
The bitten hand, the frighted eye, the breath that draws its last:
All in one groan to courageous laughter fall.
O light, o song, o life compelling swift and fast
This torrent of my soul, in joy consume it all!
Transform by my seed of light this globing black
To cones of prophecy and victory that give life back!
