A Volcano Island
[Originally Published As Everlasting Archangels]
By Gregg Glory
Copyright © 1991
Published by
BLAST PRESS
Every passion that the heart can hold
and the head bow down to, my heart holds,
and my head bowth down.
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
I too shall die, my velvet hymns lost in Immensity,
My valerian ringing alive in deaf immensity
Preamble
The world created in an eye of fire
Forever joyous, forever renewed!
Touch but in yourself one divine desire
And live: forever joyous, forever renewed!
Flowers tumble into wreaths, and urns
Though clotted with rank weeds and tears
The steady heart may overturn
Spilling Love from dust, rescinding years!
Prophecies are sweetest in their day,
Manifesting first the heart that speaks them;
Above dull Empire's crumbling sway
Whisper wanted loves their sweet conclusions.
Here we touch who had brief parting,
Ariel lives kissing bliss immortal,
Straying into light falling from us
As pulsant breaths from loved lips
May fall blessed and blessing best.
The world created in an eye of fire
Forever joyous, forever renewed!
Touch but in yourself one divine desire
And live: forever joyous, forever renewed!
Guttural Doggerel at Night
Why can't each diminished, moroser, I in Me
turn an instant hero of human liberty?
Where is the halt in hydrangeas that lash,
or in the coldness of the foyer at midsummer?
The hero unfolds, like a completed page,
out of the red book of poems the poet has made;
scintillate lines of moonlight, or sultry writings of the sun
all are one, are one.
The aurora of midnight, exuding ichorous blacks,
the poem of noon dripping saffron wax,
all, all are one, are one,
with the hero of tinsel who eyes up the sun.
Address of Phosphor for the Moon
Behind which, a manual of technis,
derided and real, stood another, more real,
more derided, a moroser and a bluer moon
that knew nothing of the longing in which he dwelled.
I too shall die, my velvet hymns lost in the lmmensity
my valerian ringing in deaf immensity
And Love, Ever-Freshened
And Love, ever-renewed, and ever-fresh
like a self-fulfilling fountain never spent
it lofts forever its inverted bower
of consumeless crystal in a rainbow air
as if to hold eternity were a simple wish
accomplished for the length the wish is lent
to our encompassing minds' sustaining power
leveraging hope with hope and fair with fair.
So like this surging fountain are you fair
in unchanging changefulness exchanging
Your sweet qualities as wild water and subtler air
intermix with light, while in my attention hanging.
Of all the beautiful things in my suspending grasp,
None may stay, but you, who changes while I clasp.
An Exultation
If we cry the most exalted sentiments
In an age of exultation, who shall mock?
Those whose hearts are small, and spirits vanishing,
Make black assaults with blackened tongues
Upon the crystal rock. No others have ever lent the least,
Well-wishing weight to such a thing, begun
In cloudy opposite to what our clearer thought has sung.
And if our orphic band of titans may yet release
The heavens unbelled from ruined man, then Peace!
All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,
Each man sighing out his sensual ghost like a bell!
Renegade Pearl
The renegade pearl of her conscience unconsumed
Writhes repentless in the purl of shifting fires;
I taste her infant breath-- like asphodels
Enduring rain, scenting perduring nothing risible rose!
Her hesitant spirit wakes the finitudes we crave,
Suspect eyes reinventing the evening's spent char,
Giving night the one, acetylene touch
While she trembles alone in her vintage heaven of wait.
The light in her chaste fingers undoing rue
From all this blessing conspire lifts the sacral hue;
Spilling love unbelievable from her telltale eye,
They caress the everliving in eternal charge.
All sleeping nature in morpheant calm
From your darling breath takes contagion
And teaches the sacred ache looming in your smile,--
Infinite fragment of all divine principle,--
To rhododendrons balled against unsifted snow
And, abrupt pupil, injects January's fricatives
With August's unadulterated ululations.
You demand the encrypting eye espouse
Arrant whims of celluloid fire--
Prised from the uncomprehending tilt
Of all these elemental longings I pursue,
Arced within our finer breast. Or did.
How in the torn winds resuscitate
This abandoned grace?
Her spirit lifts a spiral fire
Whose vivid wish may once consent to touch
Enduing mists with acerose light.
Still is it her-- in this trenchant whirl gone blue,
Alive in this misprision that you chase,
Spinning virulent coils grasping
After this abiding prayer?
Night Storm
The storm's unushered, prophetic dark,
And livid wind welled violet between
Scarlet uncertain oaks, blueveined in flashes,---
Upended elements pried from the purpose
Dull day proposes, these elements
Rhapsodize to obey your compelling grace
As I, who move unshielded among them,
Am spun to molten love by the owned harmonious noise
Sending white tendrils into stone gated ears
Until melodious waves crest and besieging enter
To touch a magenta core, unsealed:
So touched, so tortured.
A Mortality Enclosed
Desperate exigencies of sifted light
Straight radiant depart a wilted soul
Not wrapped by the felony touch of dust
But uplifted in scourged golds infolding her
As blood scarves defend a weeping head from death.
So much is hefted out of this sepulchral singing
My blindfish heart rives in satiate dwells
To swig until christened or drunk enough
To swell my thin monody to her coral repose,
Flecking lucent spectrums of heaven's lacewing weeping.
Shirred angel, unsplint this shinplaster self
Outfaced by your blue radiant weeps, and
Take this shunt offering that limes the raving grave!
Charivari mourners cluster the lorn wake;
I melt to a shrive, retouched. Too often retouched.
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
Locked 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
This arcite find, in a world too plain for hating,
This disturbless gem among coruscate wrecks of majesty
That replenishes what autumn lessened with waiting
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!
Nothing of that beauty in which you dwell, disdaining
The choking sneers of drugged humanity, as light
Disdains mud, through purer air illuminating
What is best and nearest Heaven as the mind finds right
Interfusing loveliness with the manic grace of birth
Forever arriving, to resurrected senses' uplifted might
Blow the salt foam links of enduring hope and worth,
Drowning continents of dread, enchaining the earth!
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. I 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 tight 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!
Azrael
She seemed an unbodied fragrance, flung
To salt our bound mortality with the chancing and free, wrung
Phosphorescent out of mundaner air, mulier
Inconsistencies, faking the autumnal tint. Wry jeweler!
Moon-mother and mater, creator and queen,
Shed the coronaed gown you wear, the glowworm togs
And gems of deeper aspect that dazzle, as it seems,
In the gelid junctures of your aspic bones.
And then as we approached, in humble aspect drawn,
To those chill towers hacked from the ice of dawn,
She slowed to come among us, as we were, simple
In her simple habit frothed of bone-- limp, unpearled.
Unbosomed we whined for the very concupiscent tit
And eyeless ached for the river of pity that we had had--
O death and mistress, o Azrael locust-winged and lacking
The twitching mead even our clumsy sisters blend
In the groin's obscure fortress, we arrow to you still!
Hymn
I
No power moves through the absent womb of world
Save the unchilding freedoms we exhume,
Rareeshow raptures or agonies of grace---
Initialed nights glorying boyhood's chrysalid had shed,
Choosing or willing the infinities that we use.
Anything is possible on the prayered moment if
We can ourselves conform to our intensest wish.
II
Sudden glory, like a chastizing star, comes down
In visitation of a beauty so profound
It charms from the chorus mass of men and hearts
Slim glimmers of awakened individual; like a spark
Sighing half-alive, and into weedy rushes blown
That shift disconsolate in brutish dreams beneath the swell
Of vaulting summer skies, hugely serene,
That wait in their million fires, half-alone,
For the solitary touch to shatter them, and fall.
III
When nature's blossoming bower hovers over--
Impelling love of kind and kind for kindred
Into the roving mind lost dew-dazzled in the grass
Where leaf soft leans on leaf while faded hours pass
Thoughtless in the light weaving blades tie rainbows of,
All confusions of the thousand rivers of thought we wove
Return to the solitary glory of their mountain cone above.
IV
Does the mutable rose regret the sorrow
That seeded its mystery forth,
When some previous forethought 'tomorrow'
Spoken by argent dreams into the midnight ear did late
Blind its parents to their unhappy state?
What momentary interplay of unquitting faith
Can ever give to us the tenth we pledge to it?
Unbeholden, proud, irreducible and true: ourselves.
Out of ecstasy engendered can never come hate.
V
But death is no soft pursuer, and crimson without relent
Stalks the lambent arteries of the brain
Shifting an unlifted sword of terrifying flame,
Crowned with the antlered ratoon barbs of blood.
To survive past his infliction would vitiate our hour
Or fold what we are into what will be, or should.
We are winning princes of ever-nascent hue
Until dread and expectation dethrone our power.
VI
The individual and his hissing spit of flame
Remain an inviolable fire, never shamed
By that which rises outlandish from the crux
Of this safe diminishment and purgatorial flux
Of knowing and unknowing we purblind endure,
Then clamor to regain, aping ignorance's blessing word,
Crying out upon the rock: I do not know, not what,
not why!
VII
Beauty dissipates like the morning star, moving on
To an unknown noon we never can remake;
O artisan of ecstasies, defy
With inmost grace my tembril heart's white-speaking argosy
That foretells disasters in a triumph never crowned,
Or weak in the dividing chine of sable fields
Thinks eyes that see her dying will never see her healed.
VIII
Beauty brushes up the brigand love in me,
Feels severe heavens burn
Banished in a blink of pain;
O summer dove, gone too often, so lightly afraid
Of my intruding face, thrust too high again...!
What should sustain this troubled ecstasy I feel
Vanished breathless into those misty rocks
Swept with ominous shadows malformed by thought,
Chambering a dark feeling I cannot bear to see?
IX
All life is a snaky finger pulling out a braid!
Still I feel the opposite
Crowd into my aching thought
Until every true light in darkness takes some part,
And a looming mood is descending to obscure
The innocent auguries of ever-sought, that risp
The haloed meadow in a world gone sour, eclipsing
Each dew-weighted blossom with some soft blot.
Penitent Skies
Penitent skies fall to her uplifted face
Spurning vermilion reels of obsequy
Still night had enchanted with simpering shades
Born to fawn at whatever her coral soul imposed.
Naked girl of insistences
Dismiss this churn of universe
With a backpaddle of that turnless hand
Spun starlight spins to expire upon!
Dawn's jade twirl cannot climb to kiss
The disastrous greens of her envisioned eyes;
Wrapped with a bandage of incendiary tongue,
I cannot unbraid this claiming fire within me
That spikes these whipping words.
The Invoking
Spirits out of remoter time awake, conclude
This unsteady enterprise I undertake, bestirred
To seek by doing your old victory's certitude.
All action waits unread in the breviary
Conscience scribes on the germinating page of brain,
Turned and unturned by each half hour on the clock---
Unwound once too often, and then named death.
What is in the poet's drink to make him sigh,
Or naked beauty purling at his tender feet
To flood his delta spirit to his muddy sense?
All true doing does its mirrored loop uncoil
Aiming in splendor to uncurl forever
Until red ministries of wishes that chafe
Angelic ears come spattering back at earth
In drum-torrents of sweet-willed rain
Or shatter damned, and eat the uttering voice
That challenged their cold potentiality
With one warm breath, or lucid exhalation
Unbraiding in the air. Vital arbiter!
That in the limpid human summons diamonds up.
I, a loblolly boy adrift alone address you
Shadowed sages pulled from the umbraed pall
Of so many deaths, hurrying to carry fire
In untried hands that take their anxious brand
As easy as snow. Cannot the unearned vow
I voice at night go unerring also?
All raving arrows of a vinegared heart!
Cannot this sovereign whisper lipped by a sleeping head
Suffice the perilous chalice of gathered hands
An over-hasty life has swept together?
Still there is a greater unabating chance
In any decrepit model of your flagging past
Than the thousand inanities dreaming out
Today's false-misted, haze-struck 'tomorrow';
I hear the taxing outcry of your valorous start
And spread my stretching soul to its farthest part--
Which was a heavy mercury in crucible valleys rolled--
And change every flowing form to a unit of that grace
That shrieks ecstatic stasis vacant heavens laced.
The Damned
A spell of adoring April fell on him
Mazed with the dark freshness of the evening light
While the filling oak made its ghostly silhouette alone
Swooning with midnight above a starry ground
Of crocus buds, until, enlivened by the haunting moon,
His every trembling vein flushed bright the skin
And he lay in tumbling sleep, reddened by the night.
Tumultuous dreams that in his waking soul
Were long kept burdened by the disdain of day
Leapt like tigers at the approach of night
And sped to his dazed consciousness again,
Seeking their rapturous release.
Wild images and untamed thoughts first kept
The night with him, unveiling strangeness
In their fantastic change from mundaner memory,
Flashing matches into torrents of reigning fire
Or enduing the noon passage of a bird into the sun
To flame the bewildered horizon with phoenixes;
Interfusing chance with diviner substances
He found a realer fate in accidents
That happened to him. Then a kneeling girl
Appeared, with no rose penumbra or mystic light,
Touching his sleeping ear. He seemed to wake
And stretched half-lifted to her moving lips,
For even as he was stirred and stricken
By the dawning beauty her aspect imposed,
She lent his hearing wreckless unerring visions
She had, in some angel's hibernation, composed:
"Respire as spirits of former time--
Tempering justice in tranquillity, inventing
Themes for espousing night to improvise on
In angel's meditation of unabating soul; ignite!
Claim the perilous grace of divinest liberty!
Thy soul, in blood profound, imbues splendor
In afferent traceries of nurturent veins,
Enthralling thrown infinities here forever,
Where one scarlet touch inscribes eternities
Against a face chastely serene, now lit
With unrepentant love in spun regard
Evadeless ecstasies endow and bless."
She bent, pursuing some darker aching part
Of her enchanting story, and further still pursued
The unwinding of her vision in his streaming eyes
Until, her inwept paradise unburdened,
They kissed, exchanging subtle breaths.
He bent upwards against her, as when joy
Overtakes some dread state in exultation
Transmuting the possessed. And then, as swift
As lightning leaves the vacant sky to shake
Unlighted with sorrowing thunder, she fled
And left no footprint on the swelling seam
Of his vacant brain, astonished as the skies.
Nothing in the darkness answered the compelling cries
Torn from his mouth; his eyes in wretchedness shone.
He pored across the landscape, holding fast
To any fainting detail imagination might
Misconstrue as hers. He closed his eyes, and there!
Her voice pursued him into the unlidded dark,
Calm as the sovereign thoughts she chanted of.
Many hours he passed in awed silence thus,
Or perhaps half speaking as he heard,
Listening to the everliving lays of heaven
Kindle once again with a contented smile.
"The poet's lips, straining the unbelieving air,
Disclose a gasp, and, murmuring astonishment,
Speak what his own unlived dreams have given him."
In Holy Illume
Visionary excess uprose in the stolen tides
Crystalline, perduring, vetted in the instant
Golden hymns pouring requisite challenge bled
Telling spoken thunders of obliterate night, discasing
Napalm essences confined respiring within.
Amontillado longing has layered in dote snow
This solitude's long cacodemon alone,
So long alone! coffined is the resplendent dare
Resolving dawn had etched heroic in infant light,
Holy illume robing hope's winking oval.
Singletree astra vent the penetrate sigh
In crescent exhilarations unbounding might
And overarch in reck disaster's devoutest crash,
Asymptote stars purloining their spirit's ash
To deadlight infinities lapsing black
Witholding the shocked taste of vestral tongues
Amending heaven in rapturous recurr.
Act again the vibrant chroma of a soul
Rendered restless vexillum in forever frission
Touching eternity as you touch a tear!
Availing tenderness, who propels the afferent aubaude
Sympathetic skies flicker dark to listen on
And dawn-starred morning's stir lessened to quiescence is
Chime of me what your lustrous substance says,
A reborn sounding out what nature offers hollow---
The bell-heart victory whipping blazing wings!
Consuming the specter revelation suspiring still
Hidden in sacred songs' reforming breath
Hand-made to dissipate at the spirit's reveille---
The spiring call trafficking miracle from will,
O oblate rose enfolding the casual fires
That I tender, scansorial scapegrace
Deigning imagination's dream of love to earth,
Floating bridal above the violet sacgreal flood
I, mimic bittern eclipsing space, become
A noble spirit beheld in the overflowing air
Time's soilent chanson never can erase.
Vibrato folly windlassed to a heart
Too old for aching, newborn in blisses!
Better raving death's whitened pestilence inhale
Fretted with the russet dew of morn, than be
Of all this molting richness reft.
Vitiate existence sheds its rude root
Commanding mink appellations of divinity
To squander undying on the breath of earth,
Scintillate acres condensed in the
Brightened loop of a man's brave saying---
Causeless caduceus fires risible ever
In the roadhouse roar of torrid exhalations.
Chase perron the persiflage ecstacy
From the bone fortitude billowing birth
Into the absent garden, willowy terrae,
Thronged among corolla weeps of lilies
And foxgloves cascadent as the waterfall
Where restful banks of slant rhododendrons shade
Hydra eyes of opium, corposant disperse,
Inherit coronas auroraed from the misted moon,
In cirrous lacramata uncurl each timid lid
Chastizing disaster in the espousing skin
While rosetted haloes about the argent body break
Roulade glories gospelling the spine until
Like sultry angels hastening paradise casts down
We burst cinquefoil in the cispidane kingdom
Rivering of ourselves the immaculate substance,
Grace-abiding in the tinct rove of memory.
Devouring gilt whitens in the rimed eye,
A devotional hauteur that cannot avoid
Sharpened joys siliquose breaths elude,
Immersing salt ninevahs-- rapt heavens
Blowing from our mouths! Sidereal child
Withy-spirited in the wristing beam
Withstand alive the thunderpeal's throatlatch
Remaining recherche in the light you weave.
Torch-lit liberty laughs in the willing flaunt
Of glistered death, sundering pulpit---
Elixive veins inventing the baptismal wells
Sunning solitude pulses glowpoint to look upon
As if tissued insistences of a gossamer world
Sinistral failed, twisting the penchant veil
That clouds our doings to pinched nothingness.
Pursue the fled ice steps of what
Has never left, inveterate stitch staith,
Lipping the vireo's cordial incantations,
Never stale, deep in intricate night's exult,
Upwelling the radiant lashes once again,
Stammel descantings rosined choicest coral
Never breaching the sacred tympan must, and be
What shadows of summer skies in hymned immensity
Half guess the golden purpose of the inspiring sun;
Become what the staring eagle cannot see
Although he stare revolving fires to the whitecomb sea
Or sphinxlike out-wait time's inseamed mystery.
A suicide is committed.
Bad business, says the merchant.
Unrequited love, say the ladies.
Sickness, says the sick man.
Crushed hopes, says the shipwrecked.
---August Strindberg
Wandering Glory
"Itinerant glory that on the lancing heart
Made play, as water in the wine of light
Radiates itself by the light it allows to pass;
Doesn't every glory have laughing for a start?"
"Stars alive in the heaven of night
Are but the laughter eyes see first and last."
"And so the crown that crests your autumn heart
Amplifies blood-water's laughing for its light
And radiates but what heart holds first and last."
FIRST VOICE
Man's choosing fate, unwinding ever,
Moves through destinies unbidden
As greeting Spring to touching Summer blows,
Enhancing the heat of Life's passing fever.
Once touched and forever unbarren,
The virgin spirit in solitary procession goes;
Like a bee alighting on some trembling lip,
Life comes aching to quicken with a kiss
As, year to year, and summer though summer slips,
Till rouging winter wakes to kill us with its hiss.
SECOND VOICE
What, though they fall to Hell, have not
Their dying eyes seen sweet Heaven weeping?
And although their day must lapse from less to less
As leaves give way to leaves gone brown,
They resigned not the green while it was
Raging in their veins, nor the tears that sparked
Those vertiginious and fresh cheeks of youth.
And although each night must blow winter's hollow horn,
Did not the spring dew burn when it was morn?
The Crimson Bower
Somehow this minute's perrenial gift
Twirled lost between delivery and drift.
Somehow life's crimson bower
Witheld the summer's dauntless power
To sing and strain unsullied
Note to note in holy love allied.
"O jeweled ruling impulse of this life,
Sacred presence in scorning emerald repose
Serrating heavens in rosaries of light,
Out of one controlling heart explode
Carillions of blissing affection, pure moves
Of this tonsured heart's obeying resolves
A tameless faithing conscience imposes,
Out of my moment's soulless rock exhaling roses!"
Nirvana
We had rowed half-way over,
Half out of breath, half-way to death;
His hand upon the oar grew stronger,
Every effort adding what should be less.
And in the heralding storm I saw a clearing:
Never had what was far panted nearer;
Invisible clouds in angel's light brought tears in;
Resolved, my heart awoke: I could not fear her.
"All things to all things impart some measure;
Death's leaden touch sinks breath."
"Coriolis longings of my love have abdicated leisure!
I rise forever exhaling light and pleasure!"
What Price Freedom?
And you shall pay, shall pay,
with "the rock, the vulture, and the chain."
Oh my fragile immortality!
gifted at the price of eternal pain.
Life's secret, and death's mystery,
both despise my freedom's synergy;
A haughty god despising fathers
conceived in a moment's squalor.
A Volcano Island
Storms have had passage, and the summer impinged,
The rain has come and gone dry again.
And the suffering flood, and now, the tide
Is sunken that was whelming yesterday,
A hard rain broken on winter stalks, forcing an effect.
And all with all, stand conjoined, and healing,
That stood in deep need of repair before.
The rail station turns emptily, and larks alive
Diving undo the blackberry bush, the hidden yew.
Sparse this vegetation that held us
Warm in the slack light of forgotten afternoons,
Cool a little, and vacantly hot in sunlight.
Summer's tongue has healed the blisters
A sun of sand had held against us.
October's moment, at the waste ends of our fashions,
Made stark the pleasures of our silks and satins.
Mrs Ormolu, cheeking her fur in the tea-shop,
Struggles splendour from her subterranean moods.
Barbed by the Telex in an appointed room
We moved, at evening, to the forecaster's gloom
Exchanging gins at the slender end of an ormolu table
Heavy with the commerce of breathless opinions.
O cerveaux enfantins! sullen in afterthought
Before the faultless midnight had so devoutly trapped us;
And still we moved, as like as unlike,
Day's churn whirling the black with white,
Gold and unholden, jetted with ebonies and ruby blacks,
As like as unlike in longing day's extended pursuit,
Spotless, the time that revolved around us....
Have you seen the various papers with
signatures attatched?
Various hands had signed them in red and black.
Swift to the nosedive of a bike I had held them,
Stocks and certificates unleashed by the warring bell.
Brothers like cruxifixes charged blood out of my eyes,
Brother against brother with nothing to tell.
I have made my purchase, Thank You, and will take
my fall.
Sudden staring provoked an impaitient ending.
Where's the washed glory of the infant day,
Diadems of wishes, stolen sparks under matted clay?
Dark leaves spurt their aching blades against us,
Warm blushes cluster. Dark, dark, and the eyes gone golden
Which held us with their simplicity in the morning.
Grasses fountain at the salty marge
Bringing green to the barrenness, where once
Nothing sighed, not even the dirt, to hide our bones.
Endless grasses, endless grasses. Endless, endless.
Water was expected,
Both before and after;
No flood had undone perfection,
Nourished in the water's laughter.
Pastor and miracle-boy, tell me again
What we must do about what has been done.
He came to me in direst confidence
And went away elated.
What, what had you told him?
He remained the source of his own confusion, same
As Tiresias, who I'd treated in the Alps, the same
As Joe Campbell, whose methods he employed.
Sow the seeds of terror or ecstasy without regard.
Light intertwined had saved me, light
Blotted. How many hands do you have, how many?
I am exhausted. I am no pastor, but a man
Desperate to aid others. Do not call again.
It is breaking up. Its breaking up.
Et puis, et puis encore?
Look in the hymnal provided, if you must, for comfort.
Lullam, lullay.
Green dust has borne the body away.
And now the golden corpse lies laced with silver blood
Under teeming Tiamat. O cold momement of touch
Elapsed in the mist and foliage.
Unclasp
Manipulated Nature. Body shall follow
Where the mind must wend. Abhorrent, obedient,
Parting the waters an alert spirit dives,
Divining. The fervent river's circle had pushed us
Out onto the fields of praise. Us Albiginsians
Stigmataed in the ditch, slaughtered,
In the garden plot of sunlight. Swept light---
And the passage in snow assured
That had been doubtful. Unpack your heart first
The sherpa instructed, and no loss can find you,
Knowing divinity a human inclination.
The moment of simple touch had come
Where I had hesitated in the garden,
Dawdling my purples. When I look up it is night.
Always. Always the same. Same night. Same star,
Prim Argentine! We had put ship to ground
In the dream. And the waters closed over us.
No renewal in passion. That is the lie.
Green everlasting. By prayer like rainfall I shall make
This mountain of bones my own, clasping.
Lullam lullay
Clasping
2. The World Apprehends
The world apprehends some deep, familiar change
Autumn to autumn, and spring ever cresting Spring...
But is it what I apprehend in longing still
To push to its effect in some stranger breast
Beating wild soliloquies of blood upon the night!
O world never answering the claims I throw,
O world that in seclusion separate and cold
Meditates nothing, on nothing renews and grows
To what bleak granduer spiraling the void!
Am I forced by some injury or defect in sight
To reflect the broody moods black waters
Uprising, as if within me, bear to the flood?
Black as the answerless mirror at midnight spied,
Cold as that pulseless hand invisible
Pressed to the midnight face, depression afflicts
And will not quit: Cannot some spring face
Flood ever-fresh the weary sense again?
Why must every flamelike intent of love and joy
Feel the barrier of single consciousness
Imposed? Alighting love expanding without fault
Through all the bent glass this waiting world
Wavers composed of, send light to unify,
Warmth to make solid as an afternoon forgotten
What hate or sorrow in dark solitude have kept
Untouching!
Is not the interpenetrant
Sense itself all of loving touches composed?
What wavering brush of its canvas deprived
Ever painted beauty right?
A song among the rocks
Falls effectless as a dying wind, heralding
Nothing to a mass insensate as itself.
Walk, o light! O walk!
Light that can elcipse
The sky and Time
Whose back is ever curving,
Beaten down!
Stand a stark
Individual alive
Past the eclipsing curve
Severing Death descends
In one blow!
The torpid moon above his back
With every star it kills
but grows more black;
Hideous horn
Dwindling.
Pierce what darkness,
Abiding ever, cannot abide;
Take the temptless spirit's
Tentative lamp
Ever entering
And enter the undarkened side.
Enter it. There
Shadowless jewels are lingering....
And I am caught questioning
And I cannot hide.
The light was a light
Of cadmium floresced
Or distraught plumage
Harassed into a white crest.
Light tremblant in ecstatic sanction,
Day's praises, and night's intermittent death,
Combine in the true tenor of thy gentle eye
Sighing all sight past far earth's transparency
And faded emblems harping after life
Which instead present to thy penetrating eye
Wondrous loving wells of the visionary real
Upheld in tenderous airs of your own breath
Owing nothing to world's corroding realm
But bringing ecstasy ever out of faultless heart's
And warmly obeying mind's one work of wish----
Desire undying for each charmed instant's
Momentary touch, a hand upon my eyes so clear!
3. Epithalium
Before the nuptials, cymbals, symphonies, hush
Crash of love, hymn-praises, sermons, laughs,
Filthy snickerings in the red, rowdy pews,
Song-sighs choiring a crush of one from these
Million-loving tongues, faith saying fleshes
Supposing combed words in a racking wind's stir
That tears away all, and in thronged All suspends
This auroraed bride's brindled veil swaying simple
As kisses, warm as dew, and undone as air,
Morning-lifted in outrageous altar light
To never flutter crippled from heaven's harsh shut
Blues, buoyed amber, eternal, where bride
and groom,
Skyey twins all tall among May's constellations,
Titter back at the spatter-smack of stars
Flaming wishes against God's dark, kids again
In the coaxing hour of sun and honey, kids again
In the awake time, when time, once won hoverdom
Of love, I, an unready singer sing,
My smile all smiles slimly seamed in dawn's silver
Who takes as bud-beginning this thistle wish:
That no doom of flood will drown down
Their happy miraculous town of rough, bright starts
Where every memory's a story, absent clamped
endings,
And evergreen sprays nail the cross doors wide
Open to Spring's blessed day, its fever of ferns,
Prodigious boy and girl of the honoured hours
Before the widow's long black walk of hurt,
Or spark-eyed child's mewling through the roof,
Your joined joyed hands, spry fives, numb tumblers,
Work all love's agued locks aghast to lift
Each crowbarred heart's cement hatch at last.
Here to the tying place, the trying place, the tryst-
Twisting lamp circle center, where startled guests
Gored with gifts arrive scurrying to hear
Each undead, annointed syllable, come!
Ear the merry sojornings of two souls twirled
In wedded love, eat the feasts buried in their eyes
Who dance forever the loose measure of their lives
By shafted Cupid pinwheeled to their pulse,
Gifted girl and lucky lad, who curse not
Their execution's unsteady stay on earth,
Who prick scrimshaw ivories of their imagined world
Or conga roaring Amazons to their flowing feet,
Going together their blood-bearing travels
down the tongue,
Prayering every impossible grace like a thirst
Or swearing all paradise in a parched swallow,
So becoming is it when time-twining lovers
Forswear all long agony's terrored second
To, one witching minute in the weather, become.
Come syllable and bell! Come harmony and drum!
All squeaking rivers come rushing to cry
Down to a ministering sea, its flak of salt
That washes away all sours, and delivers Love.
Somber before the deacon sober, fresh in his ash suit,
(With all the names of friends mooing from creaking pews,
Clenching soggy knees to see, spooned the froth
Of agitated life at their Sunday service, once,
And buffooning faces at its bitterlessness)
The sugar man and sugared woman approach their lord,
Who is Love, and none other, whose breath is caught
In kisses they give each other, whose combining
Tongue utters whatever their bodies have said,
Not blindly divine from the crimped mind down
But holyeyed up from the awkward fact of things,
And wetly skyward fountains heaps of blessings.
Never could my hobbled praises jump to where
Their slowest heel pinned a hunching wing,
For they are heaven's couple, and leap lights----
Marooning Einstein's murmured knowing, crowned
Spendthrifts of forever's free eons, and of this
One day's redding rose, thorned before, but now,
In upright nakedness is: a blossom wholly blossom.
And here the stanzaed lovers stand and wave
Forever young against the grain of any decay,
Sprung above by solacing lungs and gold loins,
Primed in the unenvying noontime to use
Their smallest wasted hours in largest ways,
Fondle doubts like aches out of their living skins,
And glow all loving-full all afternoon.
And when all the lead-legged world can stamp for this
Magic miracle minuet its dancing due,
Subliming hates by carefree steps to some
Near perfect finger dance of tippling care,
Then forever's monotony will kneel to bliss
And every sky-cast instant will fly us round to this:
Sugar lovers tilting on their cake to kiss.
4. The Dead Redeemed
HE
Is it my one love again, restored
From storm and all the difficult stress
Midnight remembrance in darkness clasps upon us!
O see her, my slim-hipped silver lily
Returned to this life. Brief life! Watch
Her cold chaste lips warm from snow to rose---
Blush from this blood-color to incandescence!
In holy illumne, her breath, all softness, slips
From a heart of purer air thru molten lips.
Of all harsher striving now divest
The cloudy anvil in your breast; let melt
The winter diadem cold ambition keeps.
Dear bare-headed child, lost in weeping spring,
Dance back to us! O the aweful glory
Of her eye has some dawning motion in it!
O eyes do not break, seeing miracles.
O heart dare not out-pace your temper,
Made mad by this passion. I'll take
The sweet delerious heat of her
Now to life restored. She was Eve icicled over:
To this still manner unnaturally brought,
By innocent want divided from the sunny vale
Whose oven Love warmed temperate paradise
Within her, and made her exile heaven
Untouched by the prohibiting sword of fire
The hot herald angel holds against us,
Halting readmittance atop that palmy hill
Of green summer man first inhabits.
O how her eye now swivels to my sunken gaze!
By my sin, none have ever known
Such melting tenderness as I,
Barely in my solid senses speaking,
Who witness this. She steps! And to thy embrace
Never again, dear, dear, will I falter.
O all the earth may wrap itself in death
And the unpeopled globe go snowballing
Through infinite uncharitable space
Seeking out the shapeless source of darkness
In an abyss of time, I shall not care
Who holds my world in inches of my heart.
SHE
Uncrowned and wetted by these servent's tears,
I take my life now and forever from
The love you give.
HE
O then take, take it all!
Of that joy I never shall lie desolate again.
SHE
I dart like a humble robin round your face,
Taking here and there from you, my earth,
Her everything. And who, nesting in the springtime
Of your fond smiles, surrenders her sweet eggs
To a pouch of twigs woven of your beard.
There she sings in hope that future time uncracked
Will reveal itself as but present-time
Extended, your warm arms enchaning all
With father-wings as eternal-gentle then
To all our laughing company as now to me.
For you see, no single life is hatched before you
But a pair of ressurrections descended,
Mother and child both.
HE
It is too much;
How strange the incidents of life do out-crow
The strongest visionaries, and make them drop
Their fantastic eyes from the castled air above
To the panoply beneath. I don't know what to do!
SHE
Love, then, that love which loves whatever loves.
He that, when purple passion's overthrown,
Changes to day's clarity, a simple amplitude
Of light grown clearer, and purified,
As eyes when thinking on their own dear love
Spark the purer for their thinking delight.
HE
Have I conjured thee out of the tender air?
All eternity of sight takes shape
And solidity from your shape and shade.
Make some mortal gesture so I know my dreams
Do not cheat me.
SHE
I shall quit earth, quit life,
Quit everything that lacks a higher pleasure
Your unbounded blessedness is the answered prayer of,
(For what's noble in this life that its plucking off
Sharpens not the sweeter?) and with my own,
My sacredest whispers worshipfully incline
To heaven's graces in your dwelling presence,
Giving evidence in divinest breaths
Of this poverty of words.
HE
No, wait, and wait,
Until I am myself a something etherial
And may climb to dreams that suffer nothing
But exalted visitations of your face,
Sleeping in paradise, and waking in heaven still.
The Yellow Rose
My friend had walked her ways of life:
My friend came to me sighing:
"O take what I've brought out of this life,
A little yellow rose."
My friend at night grew troubled with life,
And troubled my heart with sighing:
"O take what I've brought out of this life,
A little yellow rose."
She came at midnight, and at midnight stayed,
Our eyes never done with sighing.
In her dropping hand she held and gave
A little yellow rose.
Oh take what I've brought out of this life,
A little yellow rose.
The People
Poets of the visionary trade, why sing a day
To touch those hearts the people threw away?
Why rummage in the common ditch
Where workmen cast their broken lot,
Deploring the trouble, and cursing the task,
Day and day, to turn with a soured boot
Their offended hearts where luck abandoned them?
Poets, throw your sodden hearts away!
Wearily came my heart to the world's heart
Sighing alive from a time my tired soul forgot.
Oh, Poets, throw your sodden hearts away.
End