The Sword

Inside

new poems

Gregg Glory      

Published by BLAST PRESS

http://www.gregglory.com

gregglory@aol.com

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Alphabetical List of Poem Recordings [MP3s]

Disorderly love falls on our lives

Like a dream in which we die

And cannot awake or dream otherwise

And only this dream is before our eyes

Ritual and rote and stigmatized

Inescapable and inordinately stylized

A sleepwalker’s temptless step’s imposed

And we see only the dream and are blind

This is an epic: shrunk, crabbed, and small,

Full of false-effects, self-pity, the merely personal,

A Don Juan who lambastes not the passing scene

But all that has-been Juan may be, or is, or has been.

Where more loving looks would gloss a blemish

The critic's eye inscribes a scar to cherish,

For every jot that takes away from fame, frame, or form

Bolts the sniping critic thus much more above the norm.

I spy inside to sight with telescopic sighs

The whys of my feelings' reasons:

Interloper on a landscape without seasons

-- Why are such thoughts always such internal messes?

Insistent blots and bleeding

Awful as a Rorsach reading?

Or are summer ladies in their swaying dresses

The carnal cause of my distresses?

(Your guess is as good as I guess my guess is.)

Love's each word confirms what I suspect:

Disaster's the master, and we but the guests.

She sheds no sigh for any man's part,

Whether the nether gender or simply his heart.

On Time's high hill my glass house lies sheer,

White licked-together ice panes as thin as tears--

I'll throw nothing as improbable as rocks

But must content my anger by flinging dirty socks.

When confronted by the bare barbarity

Of a too-intimate, too-personal personal history

The titillating crowd contracts a gassy gasp

Into the actor's ruination of a yawn.

Put away the hugs, unclench the hearty clasp,

Poke about for the folded rulebook on Badminton

Or dewy martinis not cleared away at dawn,

Any of last season's or last night's amenable diversions,

No worse for the weather on the party lawn.

"But I have a tale to tell you!" he told the mirror

As a minor chord played in the castle dreary,

And like a lawyer at a settlement

Between heavenly disputants temporarily hellbent

He unpacked his tale like a holy relic.

He tried, when talking, talking about his happenstance

To concentrate Pure Mind from nominal Space.

Somehow somewhere something means something

As we fill with ephemeral words our eternal dumbness.

And ever the bleak bitterness of Love is present,

Awkward to forget, awkwarder to remember,

A golden goose whose taste has turned to pheasant:

Sour to eat, but the killing's pleasant.

Leaning with a highpower scope on my pickup's fender,

I forget at once who was the first offender.

A kiss is just a kiss, for all our wishing

And love is just another way for brains to say "gone fishing."

And yet what hopes are harbored in a sigh

To which all the pall of History can't manage to give the lie?

And somehow behind Love's final curtain

The essential something-nothing of ourselves is lurking.

To say that these things are only so,

That, in the course of life, such heinousness is usual

Is to dodge the lodging dart that conscience pricks

And with our green tequilas reel

About the empty garden like a crypt.

It doesn't make much difference

If you're in the Congo, Buenos Aries, or France

Time can add no savor but regret

To what the hand has done, or the heart inflicts.

Yet I may say, like the newscaster at six "Once

Upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away

I loved." Such a rare occurrence

Can't be measured by existential stirrings and segues:

It's the internal turnings of that monster Fate

That makes our mousing loves or hatreds great.

Is my mauve eagle of presidential pinion,

Or am I but a seraph's wingman?

Public puffs and public scrapes

Suck divinest wines back to earthy grapes.

A purposeless scrub plain laid before the sight,

Inarticulate, has nothing to offer;

Neutral evolution's meaning is neuter

Until interpretive man stands near.

Cool swaths and charts of haughty stars

Whirling infinite on a pin

To rampaging wolf and twittering lark

Revolve innocent of sin.

But one constellation-loaded look or angst-angelic glance

Cast up by blameful man

Can trace God's wrath in each twinkling coordinate

As plainly as a plan.

Until the intuitive outcast on the monotone plain

Divided the iterative day

Into the arrowy horror of arbitrative time,

Inventing vatic history,

God's mercy and His blood could not from the dust

Gather us to his breast;

Bhudda in his monk-smock howled the rice from his throat,

A proctor without a test.

Lacking sin's spectacle or anticipatory hope's

Human ability to fail

Life spins in a bituminous bubble of unbecome,

A whereless, whenless exile.

Narrow animal and expansive man both hunt world and sky;

Anxious and inscrutable they rave.

The one with tooth, paw and blind beak will kill,

The other with inner glaive.

A silent fibbing moonlight washes

Distorted shadows of the dissenting sun

Over each snow-molested branch and bush

Arranged outside with a congregation’s grace

For the terminal minutes of our love-embrace

Happening behind an unrolled windowsash.

You had wanted to hurt me, and did.

Truth was my only tribulation.

Your hands hung, inert and underfed,

Along the sofa’s arms, overstuffed and wan,

Resisting the reconciliation of my touch

— And you pulled away, besides, your face,

Quick and moonlike, from my near face

Hurrying forward in a rudimentary rush

That had so often sought the complexity of bed.

Truth was my only tribulation.

It was then, snowbound and alone, you had said

Words that made all things one

And useless, in the gelid December hush

Whose winds diminished to a sparse trace

In the outer emptiness I could not face,

Too full of the moon’s pale refracted crush.

I don’t know how all this roomy dark occurred.

Truth is my only tribulation.

Winter's never here at the fountain

Whose waters' liveliness seems a warm

And open candor. Things are but things and do as they must:

As in the fountain's pallorous spangling forever

Heaviness and light contest.

Beyond the torus of its halo

The summery waters' motions endeavor,

With the tear-bright dignity of an eye in agony,

To show how lightly may a substance go

An afflatus of divinity.

All things to their opposite use

Tortured, as when this lithesome watercourse

Was narrowed from easy murmur into gladdened sound,

Reveal some laden tale of their earthly course

Returning to their source.

As when like tears to ground we streak

And the opened waters that accompany burial

Flow in broken speech, so the startled water, at its arc

Interpenetrate of scattered light, torridly tumbles

All rainbows to one stone bowl.

Something had sung up

From the dark watered words summoned to console

Bodied brightness; as when we ourselves, by a terrible pity pul-

Led vocal from the womb, tighten and squall

To give creation's own

Cry to the beautiful.

Tired of the afternoon, too tired to rest,

a crooked dropping spider made herself my guest,

dispossessed of the wood over which she'd labored

wispily uniting the crooked scrap lengths of pine

by busy inner habit for a length of time.

Unwitting where she was, she knew no reason

to rest here out of season. No reason....

Though with no reason myself among the rest,

I dare endure my time as long as any guest;

ignorant of Sisyphus, she had no sense of labor,

tying and untying her crooked knots of pine.

Reason's only reason in the absurdity of time.

With sly and candid step, each time each time,

a spider will weight a grassblade for her reasons

until the toppling tip on earth must have its rest

where busy man himself is a busy guest

by dint of crooked reason and crooked labor.

Too tired to rest, wherever here is, I pine

for bed. Each crooked plank was chopped from pine;

I lie and contemplate the length of time

Granddad who'd taught me hewed his reasons,

laboring and loving busily that I might rest

somewhere on Earth an honored guest.

And here again the dropping spider took up her labors,

surprising me upon the crooked wood I labor.

I watched her threaded progress along the pine

desktop chopped from scraps of time

when Granddad himself had thought his reasons

for cutting and hewing had been laid to rest.

Busily I contemplate my busy guest.

Absurd, I think, how the length of time we're guests

Shrinks, and crook my wood portrait while she labors,

going awkwardly on against the lengths of pine

as if it were no labor to labor all her time.

If reasons she kept, she kept them her own reasons

as we carved the scraps of day to silent rest.

Tired in my crooked dreams of tired day's length of tired time,

I hear my angry Mentors demand and reason;

I labor, labor, labor on my portrait without rest.

Beyond the serious torches of several cypress trees,

The dusty chirrup chirrup of militant cicadas,

The noble solitude of a solid lonely oak

Clattering his leaves at the sun over a bleached field

That balanced his high growth by spreading out,

Desert-like and hot at noon, and all afternoon

Until the evening made them equal sharers

Of one shade, a blackness welled up from the root.

Beyond all this, beyond the blushing bluish grasses

And inner darkness of some evergreens out right,

I thought to see what seemed from the county road

A sweet hilarious patch of beech, tittering

Among more sober rowans, and walked on

Farther than I had thought at first to do.

A forest darkness hustled, a coat atop my coat.

And so I came upon a late-flowering bush

Hidden deeper in among more doubtful darks,

Taller and elder, more august and up high.

It was way out of season, much too too late,

Yet full of hopeful blossom regardless

Of the season’s clock; it kept its time its own--

Before the long sharpness of the frost that tapered

In shadows till midday, it held its whites aloft.

The flowering bush was a thing itself, alone,

Clotted with milky flowers as large as fists

As if to claim a space among the harder barks,

As a child will feel more brave at midnight,

Startled from a nightmare, to smile in the dark,

Or as a father walks twice round and round

A house, for proof he really has a home.

The flowers asked for bees that would not come

To so shaded an interior, whose buzzed instincts

Could not guess to lead them there, too far

From the sugary buttercups and tigerlilies of the field;

The bees were busy with their honeys and their hives,

Too industrious to bother with this thing alone.

I wondered what had made the seed drop here

All those years ago when this bush first pipped.

Had some panicked thrush raced bewildered through the thick,

Or been carried dead by some hawk, and dropped?

How had the seed, which loved the sun, found

Filtered light to endure, in the coolness all about?

Had some tree burned out and a dormant seed

Been sprung, hot from its casing, into germination?

I’d known an odd old fellow who had not

Half begun to sing until he was half past eighty,

And his voice as awful as an old phonograph;

But still he sung, and mostly pleased himself of late,

And showed the lyric shavings of sharpened wit

To any too-curious; those words were his fists.

Above us all in the little clearing, the dull touch

Of a near cloud’s inner-lighted immanence

Broadened into mystery over man and bush.

Something happened then, I did not know

How much until years afterward had stretched

My roots into some new dark flowing underneath.

But then, I did not know what I would become,

And, never having intended to be there once at all,

And having forgotten all about the patch of beech

That had first sent me off into the dark,

I shook my head at the flowering bush and took off.

It's wondrous easy some days to guess

What at last we are and what's happiness.

Yet these inscrutable questions duly observe

Both the face of the question and the hidden obverse.

What do we know but that knit intuition

Pearls the stitches of mere superstition

When sacred instinct's emergent pattern comes

Divulging phantoms of what we might become?

There's no simple time in which to simply be;

Time's a dark palimpsest of what we can see:

Squaring the past with our parochial acre of here,

Or inferring a fictional future from fanciful history.

Flip, stitch, or analysis: we guess as we must,

Surprise ourselves, and end as dust.

A psyche's inscape's treacherous,

As alive with dangers as with bliss;

The purple outcrop of a mental rock

Cripples the supple Muse and mocks.

Caught between imagination and the dream

The mind's barriers dissolve at the seams;

The motivating carnivals of lurid emotions

Cycles us like actors thru smoky memories and scenes.

Here we're running, running on the borderline

Half-unaware of the tailored baggage we've brought,

Half-amnesiac about the burdens dropped,

Drunk on our own lucubrant blood like wine.

Blindfolded eyes foretell dark prophecies

When we cannot see that we cannot see.

Come with me, love, beside the oaken bole

We'll watch the finch dance in the waterhole.

Old blind men get their comeuppance

Whenever a loving two become

What's commonly called a one;

Only unlovers sit on the fence.

Come with me, love, behind the hill

Where the geese hold court on the croquet field.

Look at the terrible virginity of the snow!

Whatever is the matter?

We'll get the geese to scatter;

Only the unmoved won't go where's to go.

Come with me, love, uncomb your cares,

Mother and father are no longer here.

Take this white ribbon, take it and tie

The wildness of your black hair,

The wrongness of your despair:

Only take my white crossed hands till I die.

Come with me, love, into the sun,

We'll dare what they daren't when we are one.

Let the old man's finch and the old man's goose

Run to ruin and devolve to havoc;

We'll burn the prison and break the locks

And like the moon in water let happiness loose.

Square sunlight on a square green field

Shows in a polluted puddle a perfect sky reflected:

The ordered boskage of the public park blesses

All those whose disordered hearts it caresses.

Love, with her careless powers

Marks or marrs our unable hours

Until desertion's our proof of having been touched;

Although the matter is little, the feeling is much.

Crossing that out, I then passed

A dead house with nothing to recommend it,

Solitary and unstately on the grizzled grass

And thought again about my sonnet:

Love's a whitened house with thin ivy trim,

Red roofing tiles almost caved in;

Its got attic eyeots to let out the stale air

Ninety long years had inheld with stale cares.

Soon I topped a big crooked hill that tapered,

And unsteadily almost drunk with the magnificent view

Settled down sweating to my dark square of paper,

Carefully writing while the sky was askew:

Love, which soaks up all connotations,

A paranoid obsessive of boozy inflection

Will cringe at each hiss, puff at ovations,

And in light looks divine heavy temptations.

A garter snake having easefully transgressed

My naked left ankle, I stood as I Xed out the rest.

One quarter's still blank; I'll try one more time.

Perhaps my tongue-tied Amour is a mime?

Love, the anaconda banded to the brow

Compresses all meditations into raw howls,

Cancels all occupations, the well and the dour,

And contracts imaginative maybe into definite now.

All of the objects (the snakes, the sonnets)

Distributed like rhymes in this Lover's Park

Endure the warm unlacing of the afternoon yet

And stay in stricter order until after dark

When darkness grants us all all the dark wishes

No acquaintance of daylight would ever wish us.

"The neon fire Prometheus stole

Shown here before us as natural

In a painted campfire fuelled by laurels

Says stealing is Art's only real school;

Mimesis flames from Nature's manual

An ignis fatuus that kills and fools."

Museum explanations and the afternoon

Presume the usual, the accustomed track,

Drag us down to pre-history and myth

And then obligingly back.

"Before us both chameleon and sloth

In the surrealist jungles of deceit

Follow genome's and artist's plotted path,

Blend inhabitant and habitat;

So what could ever differ then, in pith,

Between boar's snort and man's snit?"

Among the crowded halls and windows

Our tourguide of the Louvre

Explicates Christs, perennial widows, the dice,

Hung between anonymous thieves.

"Since birth we're honed

To art and to theft;

To deceive to survive alone

Is Nature's tricky gift;

To get what's been gathered

By others is thrift."

Pastiche of paradises once pursued, chimeras

Simmer and shimmy, love's dancer desires.

In an era of boredom they glare from the shelves.

Our wanting all wanting by wanting consumes.

Desire's substance is fire, and desire continues,

A pastiche of paradises once pursued, chimeras.

Miss Mississippi poses and pouts blue allure as

We lust, Romeo baboons who drool for new Julias.

In an era of boredom shes glare from the shelves.

Kisses in a cave-dark hole we willfully dive in,

Drowning and hoping for anxious love's prizes:

Pastiche of paradises once pursued, chimeras.

Don't walk to their whistle or wink at their mirrors:

What's seen there's not seen, merely seen as.

In an era of boredom they glare from the shelves.

Fadeless as marshlights, they hate the actual stars.

It's fine that they shine, but not where they lead us,

These pastiches of paradises once pursued, these chimeras.

In an era of boredom they glare from the shelves.

The silent woman in the church

On nerves and vitriol does her work.

Doilies of the crucifixion

From warm young hands spread benediction.

Beyond the garden, where interred

Repose parental elders of the herd,

A picket fence keeps neat within

A few old sinners gone to Hell again.

The silent woman in the church

Tho' fourteen summers have blown away

Hiked up her heavy velvet skirts

Fourteen summers ago today.

And love was in her dawning eyes

And a wild slow dance in her step....

She turned a measure from where the graveyard lay

Like a promise not yet kept.

You've aged me one million this minute, my dear.

For you were my time before time had begun,

Your approval my watchword, my moon and my sun.

My cartelidged bones, once supple, now snap when I shiver;

The boys on the block wear thick Santa beards,

The pup that I kissed whelps broken-hipped in my hands;

I see them grow agued, and myself grow unbrave,

Full of hard wisdom and friends in the grave.

The hourglass pours eons in my ancient eyes,

I, who first saw you and leapt like a panther!

Like fated black clockhands, together we dashed

(At midnight my rest is murdered quietly).

I, who was once as timeless as laughter

And lived in quartz crystal; that crystal is smashed.

Perhaps my middle-aged spread, love,

Is made of despair instead of

Potato chips and beer.

The refrigerator's cool porcelain leer

Sighs and hums in weighty solace

Nightlong, and leaves a light on in the palace

Stocked with richest foods, assembled desires

Anxious yet to stoke caloric fires

That youth kept warm

By muscle burn.

   Happily at home amid a blizzardy haphazard of papers
        dawn steeps the window with visionary promise
          for the entire apartment complex.


   I am barren as you are barren, in a world replete with objects
        indifferent to our crux; I am broken and unwise
          as you yourself are broken, and both unclear
            and nobody objects.


   Its always a trifle embarrassing to be caught in the act, to be alive
        isn't it?  Coping with jaundice and child-proof tops, waking
          out of the same problematical nightmare at five
            as if sleep were the body's occasion for jeering


   at the brain, which imposes its ordinary articulate order
        fetishistically every day on the bombardment of senses
          selling us fictions while telling it all, reporting odors
            and heartthrobs with equal indifference.


   God bless the gods, apathetic executives of the irrational
        who are powerless without our laughable bodies
          to cast even a third-rate thrill-
            er, and make of our unable lives
               their inarticulate movies.


   Discursive stanzas look like they're hurrying
        to the nowhere-somewhere of a formal fountain's
          repetitive static whiteness.
            What is left to say, is there anything?


   Let love be the last letter of the penultimate law
        righting us rigidly as a strapping father full of laughter
          when like every incertain curious infant thither
            we totter and yaw.


  And yet, with all of that said (so much) and (conceivably)
       registered in heart and in head by habit
         each day is only a day at play....


  A lesson in how dowdy light becomes slowly a whole room
       and the grateful green leather chair emerged
         awaits patiently by the window its daily burden
            like a remembered word


  its definition.  Its in this way that we have died already
       died and come to this life, two civil persons
         talking together sanely, quietly, long-windedly
            as an aqueduct hums.


  The world is full of sane sunlight and responsible landscapes
       not too impossible for believable humans to accomplish
         their unremarkable heights or average depths
            and whose prayers resemble steps.


  But first a brief sleep, first order of business, then work (not too late)
       may commence: every man must darkly his own
         unconscious Olympus propitiate


  as when a mountain, unexpectedly on the horizon alone
       rediscovers without notice or noise
         its monumental poise.

The idle angling
		of a watersnake--
loquacious and lungless
		through yellowing waters
faded, sulfuric
		of a hurried traveler's Chesapeake
-- through tums of evolutionary
		time still saunters.


Politicians, as limericks tell,
		are of a swift and similar species;
unchanging agile evil vile
		a Nepalese prince with an Eton smile
considers the cost of suicide
		the price of becoming a democracy.


Palestinian flags
		on fallen Faisel Husseini
drape the dark Dome of the Rock
		while he's more leisurly laid beneath it.
Mourners wail until their faces congeal
		to unfeatured unsculpted stone,
blunted as snakes' in a pit.


Chinese warships in a watery ring
		lazily braid to enclose
the pale clarity and newsworthy brattle
		of independently little Taiwan.
Would cobras or roses be roses or cobras
		if they could be persuaded to choose?
Another day, another hour goes
		cold-soldered to the chain.


State Street bagpipes and banners
		play old Joe Moakley to rest;
dead as he'd lived, paraded,
		by cries and high casuistry followed,
down to the crypt and the Beantown dirt
		he lies interred with the rest,
another day snaked to the flow.


"All change as they die,"
		is the evolutionist's cry,
"and all ways wander unlost
		toward the one wild Great Way.
Each creature encircled
		beneath the infinite 'Ifs' of the sky
is trapped in the hydra of days."

Heavy, unforgivable dreams, despair,

Hard breathing, the omnipresent air,

Whistle beneath my brain a tribal tune

Uncaught by inner ear since Stonehenge rune.

Waking in a shuddered fever

Unconscious of pattern or the weather,

Ripped apart by an ambulance scream,

Torn to storm-cloud crepe in dreams,

The question presents itself undressed:

What's happening? Where's Death?

What's my cause, my case, my crux?

Horror stirred to eloquence

Returns the steady stare,

Blatant or beady, that I did not dare.

By failure of vision we unite

Where all the candles refuse to light

At the black bottom of a bowl or ditch

Where every nerveless hand fumbles for the switch.

To balance a friendship's difficult.

To give's difficult, to take's difficult,

Difficult to offer the enduring cure

To caustic inward hurt and to outward time

Where nothing's ever certain and less is sure.

One must always be willing to offer a sacrifice--

A clattering frag of the poor apportioned self let go,

Give the altar fire a fist of flour and rice

Thrown into the forward void of hope. An ego

Can be a convenient casualty at three, and suffice.

A memory of wiped eyes deployed at four

Can settle noon's uneasy moment, and by jettisoning restore

A lighter ballast to trim ship and sail on.

A calm cool hand on a vomiting neck is displaced

By the necessary zero, placeholding what's gone.

Jaded jokes traded over a toke and a drink,

The topical hour tossed off in a walk

That helps a mellow pair of humans to think--

All can be branded and bundled and bade fair farewell:

Your cost of continuing's their going to Hell.

Lose it and be happy at the loss,

Pay it and be damned the cost.

Friendships no less than civil societies

Send out their draft notices to the soon-to-be-lost;

Death's the price to maintain us at our ease.

An accurate accounting is friendship's worst curse

For, accurately speaking, however equit-

Able in feeling, all friendships divide at

The punctual inequality of a hearse.

So joy as you may and addition be damned.

Don't look to friends for your conclusions

While you nod and hum at their confusions

(As maybe they will nod and hum at yours)

And in this charmed essential interchange

Do not dream to esteem yourself the worse

Because of angry antsy things either said or did

(What dark horrors brightly shown, what honors hid).

After the humiliation in the kitchen

A friend will still do as friendship always bids:

Exert persistent force for modest growth

This quick collection saved my life.

May 20^th -- June 10^th 2001