ATHENA
by Daniel J. Weeks
While my deaf breath steams
the onyx air,
in dreams of misery,
like misery itself
or crazy labor,
you pour out
of the cerebral folds,
breaking through to me,
the youth you were,
quiet now or laughing
under the deep green of summer maples.
And I too rise
like a dead someone
the clattering projector
deLeoned, both paint
and painter
of the dream, I mean.
We are hidden together
near the brook, oblivious
of the charcoal remnants
left in the sturdy park
barbecues. Your lips
are warm and there
is something in your eyes
I recognize. But even now
I wonder, if there is
wondering in dreams:
Is it the stuck
second hand, the halted
moon or the obsidian
cinders of the sun
that allows me to speak
to you and be spoken to,
to touch the heated skin
of your arm or sweep
the wheat of your hair
from your face? A sharp cry
from the diamond behind
a line of trees breaks our kiss,
the cry of a kid, who even now
has grown and married
or embraced his mean unmeaningness.
In cool dawn,
blue light glows beyond the curtain.
My son’s cry cuts from the crib,
and I wake upon your catafalque.
THE BLUE MORNING GLORY: MY REBEL EMBLEM
1.
It isn’t because I love
life, any more than the
bee loves the peonies
or their color or thinks about
the beauty of the August air,
but because I don’t know
any other thing to know,
to be, to do.
Yet, I shall not go as the bee goes,
by rote visiting each
bursting aureole,
and not yet in despair
as does one with bruised
appetite and ruined mind-
but in hope-and singing,
as full of the world as the world
is pregnant with me, with an eye full of
morning glories or with their memory
at the least.
At the least-
how else might one outface
a waning August afternoon,
when all the shadows lie longer on the lawn,
with all the dogwoods cast
in amber light,
and all the headstones that once
seemed white, now aglow in a gold
that washes out the names and dates as they
were never there?
2.
Somewhere this hour someone is dying
and somewhere this day someone is being born-
a cycle of force.
Though there shall be grief enough between
the dawn and dawn,
grief enough, and remorse,
and deep-stinging bitterness to stop the heart
or lodge like lead
behind the eye,
and all who breathe or ever breathed
shall lie down dead-I promise you-
we shall not be forlorn. This
is a race to beauty,
and I
am an engine quick
with fire. I have no time
for hearts sprung from the strangling vine
unless that vine be strung upon a lyre
and teach the heart to sing
a song aflame-
a fine blue burning.
3.
Star of the morning,
my rebel emblem,
stand bluely toward the light.
Like the burst face of dawn,
defy all summer long
the canker’s blight,
kiss the gusting air,
seek a new radiance,
dance with the dancing sun,
do all that might be done,
and then
close tight
against the warm oblivion of the night.
MY OWN ELEGY
1.
In this choked heart of weeds and elegies
I remain half-mad,
with a mania set always to
boil forth anew
like a cyclical disease or perennial purple flower,
like the drunk’s ebullient nose.
Yet with each hour I shall be more malleable
than metal,
fleet, like mercury perhaps, conforming
with sleek abandon
to shapes and vessels
formed from the imminence
of my own collapse.
2.
Shelley, floating free on the green Arno,
his pencil lamenting Adonis, Adonais and Bion dead,
little minding that with such pointed lead,
singing worlds, singing galaxies
clusters, clouds of stars converging, or
winking out in black,
well before Don Juan had unfurled a single shroud,
or caught a breeze to tack into the warm Lerici,
he had shot himself straight through both heart and head.
3.
I have walked out far, far into the blue
gloom of a winter day-
like frost itself-outside the circling
neighborhoods and past
the slumbering leafless woods, and found air
cold enough for new snow to lay
fresh and powdered amongst the stubble and decay
of autumn’s fields and thickets. Out
to the old abandoned barracks, I made my way,
to analyze with sullen eyes the scene
where soldiers once
lay sleeping quietly on their bunks.
It was my desire to sit all day
by the glow of your unencumbered fire-
to rise with the ascendant vapors-
a Grecian soul-
through chimney and flue-
like a great gray gull beating his wings-
then up into the steely
sky’s high liberty.
I hoped to find a human warmth within
the circling dream of snow.
I had seen no soul nor sign
until the old barracks’ shingled side,
its own paint gray and peeling,
turned in view, revealing new
footprints magnified in the blue silence
of that snow. I stood
disquieted to know a man like me
could be abroad
in such quiet cold-
a further witness to the white
gowning of the trees and chill
draperies along the hills and fields.
I heard the crow’s cry drowning
in that white blanketing.
Fear told me to turn back
upon my tracks
to flee all desire
all hope of the kissing flame and fire-
this fiction truer than a truth-
so fragile are the dreams of youth.
4.
I recall Rachel willing to be kissed
all the deep forenoon, and Eleanor,
under the orange mouth
of a late October moon,
desiring more, yet fear took hold
of me, and every moment
ripe to seize was missed, could
anything be more
fearful than the memory of this-
a soul too sick to be
alive to love or beauty?
5.
I had left this man behind,
an accursed shade in a depth of wood-
the leaves greening over him-he fades,
a half-remembered dream,
though he remains always younger than I,
yet still a slave to an ache in heart and head,
and like Adonis, Adonais and Bion, dead.
6.
I recall: The Virginia heat. The honeysuckle,
impertinent, impertinently grew,
yellow and white
and sweet as death, up unto
the fractured concrete porch. I longed only
to know what the black snake knows,
curled like a slumbering garden hose
within illumined leaves-
I still think of Shelley secure
in his sun-filled boat, dreaming
of Jane caressing a song of love
from the cat gut of her fat guitar.
The snake too floats in heated air
among the glowing green.
Between the porch, veined
with its own collapse,
and the ancient Air Stream’s
silver skin, he’d shed his own
like some cast-off kin,
and left the hollow past alone.
7.
I too hoped then to be new-
revivified in flesh and bone, dead
to love’s fool passion and to compassion, too-
grown cold as the sinful snow
to all the old sour images of
Rachel turning alone into her room, and Eleanor
in her youthful gloom
sitting athwart the unmade bed
with slightly parted thighs.
I had hoped to screw
dispassionate eyes into the sockets
that must never cease to see anew,
to sever from myself and memory,
to be in every essence wise
to all that animates the black snake’s eyes.