"He who dies shall live." Gregg G Brown Copyright © 1988An Annunciation
Drowned in the puling cradle emptiness has lit, In empty action of a tragedian's strut Hollow on a stage, a struggle in the sheets Tosses some watery image up, toiling to be born. What rose, with stolen bone or shafted ear, Lash-astonished, oceanic there? Was it some dragon-fantastic Imago of a phaseless man, phantom-real, Or a sea-struck Hamlet's ghostly father Rising out of night to the topmost walk When all the mind's aroused? Those dying eyes in a face blood-suffused Scan the gathered stares of men, new-ignited Out of an age's hesitations, dying to be born.Burning Byzantium
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 lobouring 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 over-long 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.II. The Salt Heart
Sang the burning lion from the fierce mountaintop: Death's insults emanate from ourselves; Terror riven images that complete Man and heaven, heart and feet. Scarlet briars in her hair--- Love from I know not where Descends the bitter air. Sang the burning lion from the fierce mountaintop: The empty prosecution of the skies Stares at a struck stage The tired heart derides,--- Man's best instincts gambled there--- And the watery heart about to burst All lose out to the worst. Sang the burning lion from the fierce mountaintop: Beaten man twists his neck to curse, White head in heaven Golden heart in a hearse--- A scolded boy or oblong body bends Dark by uncertain suavities of fire to request The sea's intercessions.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 Hawthorne 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.Blue Heron
Among the wrack and disorder of the day: dusty floors, Half carved resemblances and journey-work, A symbolical blue heron stands With wild protesting wing and look No living heron could have struck Deep in the grain; every crack, Every waver of the resinous wood Wakes a pulse in the unnatural neck. Barren out of a barren sky--- A heron falters to the waters here. That artist in his studio having aged Past all bitterness to stark astonishment At life's rapacious play Hammers out, from all other unlikelihood Or savage guess at parts, his fixed man Crouched in dark patterns of the wood; And because that image, once complete, Can finish up the man who bodied it Gangs of ghostly herons range against the glass, Stiff against one window to witness it.The Drowned Head
The gangling legs are absent; nothing whitens The deep blue surface curling there And never breaking. A stiffening face Turned mask-like and muscle-stricken frightens White birds that pern in whiter air. Riotous cries cannot give its tossing countenance a place; Blotched reds that crust the desert water Until all color cakes and lies motionless, falters. What but attitude of all man in a rage Can reverse a death's complacency and kick Up foam? Agony of living lonely as a bird Between sun and moon, moving like a spade, Empties the ragged features, the dull wickless eyes That looked on nothing common, commonly interred. A bird- Like woman lingers on the quay's interrupted sounds To witness drowning sailors, her head in beauty bound.The Overturned Head
Stands in this sand waste An abandoned stone, An overturned head a half house high; Waters that have flat its cut Vanish as a dream untold. But on this head is concentrate Intolerable memories Of youth grown old. I am that bright familiar Wanders through the street And banging merchants' windows in Must beg for my milk and meat; My old face by time betrayed To an indistinguishable mass, But when night and wine grow great enough I dance on the weedy grass. Down this long shore as a boy Body and soul were sure As any pale, unalterable rock That I now dance before. Hands urgent as a hangman's cord, All body warped to a board, Creep in the salt beneath a face Heavy, androgynous. Sliding up through valves of storm And mastered by a rage The variable sea has seen that form Descend from age to age. Wind-beaten I but seem, Flat on the wetted sand, A derelict, not worth The dock-dog's howl or tooth.Archangels Comb Their Muddy Hair with Sticks
Twelve white birds glimmer in a ring About my heart like fiery thorns of things Unable to be forgotten; And of all things else Oblivion alone most would bring Ease to the burnt heart's ash.The Weeping Womb
Out of woman's weeping womb Strode Hitler, Jesus and Michelangelo.History
Upright in nostalgia's vice, The newscast knocked me flat; I am Hammered from A stiff expectancy that the past, Under augers and a strong carpenter's hands, Could endure Into significance like a three-legged stool.Generation
Starting sex up out of books, pale apparitions act again the hairy rounds under always weary skies Straining sweating eyes for a typed text Always the same. Always the same Ghost upon their heaving back like nets igniting Spines of blue fire, turbulent on the doused skin, Falling with hope of the dead on locked hearts to find Coffins of beating victims too glad to die.Disturb the Eagles' Nest
Blasted rocks and an old warped tree Lift above a still spot of the sea As though some vague hand had painted them; A little back from the verge, A step or two back from the verge, And compelled by a strong salt wind, A clanging ear and troubled eye A battered head without a tooth, Rags and crutch and old broken bones--- All that wreck which I call myself, Having climbed an unaccustomed stair In a changing state of mind Or with a bewildered mind, And revealed to the weather On the promontory, Stood shaken by a vision. A burning woman and a man In Quattrocento gesture struck Above the bed where all began; Half-risen above the multitudinous sea Above the tangled branches of the yew, Their abstract bodies are not mixed With commoner dirt, nor sullied by a cut Thought of sin or guilt begot. Is that sweetest skin, ghostly there, Half human still or all celestial? World-engendering Pythagoras Stalked Heaven and never took a bride. ---O all that golden multitude Had clarity to unpuzzle it. I, A skittish old man upon a rock, With a mouthful of rue With a slippery crutch on a rock And reeling backwards in a fright Am blinded by the unbearable light.An Old Man's Hawk
An old man raving picks up sticks, vitally erased Under mazy roughness of his thumb, except where A counter-coalescence of the grain Turbulently surrounds a knot of blood. Out of fisted clouds, white And distant as his stiff bride Coiling in her grave, a falcon Eyes the wormy meadow and descends. No arm, no mind controls The powerful muscle, falling to a branch Heavy apples mellow to a bow Aimed at an aimless sky. Red memories of the man disperse In meditation like an arrow's throw; The turning falcon's shaft Falls in its desire.The Old Man and the Demon
OLD MAN Vanquished is the sorrow That rages in my breast; I am too old to care. What passes for the serious Is a younger man's affair. Loves have burned and leapt between Yet staring doubt announces: Have hands as old as these About a woman's lightness crept? DEMON Rough centuries have trod Your thin spirit out. What can woman's body hold For one who's worn and thin? OLD MAN I am an old man, a withered Stick, lacking all right monument. DEMON Lacking all right monument, Gather close what worth you can, Draw your spirit in. For when you lay you down to die What can she but by you lie? OLD MAN Until all, all penalty of God Or eternal mystery forgot, Dissolve paradoxical Into death's bone knot.The Solitary Body on the Pallet
In the high tomb, the windows blackened A solitary body stretches on its pallet. The hush of broken candles, glistening Attend the vault of remotest night, listening To the exquisite montage of the moon decieved By that which ancienter vocables had revealed. Strumpets came bearing like tom-cats in The bronzen flesh of him, of him; Primping ladies laid the ledgendary body out, Quip on quip, in storied profusion. Prepare the touncing oils, maids, to scent Vestigal joys that pip the corpse. Some backwards catastrophy of the stars Looked in, like a forgetful mother, At the voice laid out in state, hugely blue, Hacked out as it was from one immenser slab While sleepy birds unconscious of their pains pursue The day's spontaneous symphony, beneath A watery dawn that washes out a sink Full of the moon's bleary oils.The Discarded Tower
Blows that wind of every sound Upon a battlement Where a ripping Andy Jackson stirred Every rebel heart to its head. Raging after beauty in a fire; Horses tremble; men-at-arms are quiet; Heavy cannon are crunching through the wood. Noble minds all by ancient battle set ablaze. Upon that black battlement where Great Caesar stoked, Half in admiration, Rome's mother-forges against the barbarian herd, Not Egyptian Cleopatra's whispers Nor Antony's sweet words, Could still his already conquering hand. Noble minds all by ancient battle set ablaze. Staggered stars over the geared stone whirr. Electric fires in the mind's eye blurr Till all the creeping hill's a blaze; Pacing ceases; the last Bird dies into dark; All night sounds transmogrified To a monotone. Noble minds all by ancient battle set ablaze.Eisenhower's Son
Turning in my mind That famous, heroic face That ciphered out Right government from wrong And brought boys flying Out of bed to death, And because he is dead And cannot annul my choice, I make my name and death. Before a great Greek head, Half ruined and knocked From a blank rock At bleary midnight slumped, When night-owls in their hunt Toil from branch to branch, Some wrong-eyed philosopher puzzled out That all mind's sunk In the rut of the world, And can't drag out its ragged theme Because frenzy-driven, riven mad By terror-ridden hours that rend Shifting tapestries of soul. All man's but broken pride, Wars reduced to bandages. Because all image He can be all suffering Or exultant hatred personified To a deity. What once Wan man, and now's a shade Stands here--- lonely as the hawthorne Tree traced in winter's Resiny dews. Dead shade Hammer again this form, if you can To make of bone and tendon Pure image. Famous men and solitary souls Have cursed with equaL breath Generations of stupidity; Monuments flooded in a hole. I fed by the boards as a boy--- But when I consider that, Old and wrong and out of breath, I hammer out my death: Repetitions of mere breath Satisfy my thought.The Mareotic Lake
A bald summer and an empty lake return Imagination to a childish race Past strange muds broken-up by the sun Some famous dead indian's grave breathing face Hung its stone arrowhead over as I dug Down the sharpening years as the edges mix, Rattle blankly in a rich pocket, and repeat The one sound early delight had fixed In whatever's left of the mind's ground. Unremembered faces are crowding to the top Of a mist-covered muddy lake; sharp cries Rise and stop. On hands and knees I grope for bones, Clacking the blanks, back and forth, back and forth, Casually as dominoes, or bullet them Back to mud--- to see how the flesh gasped Or must have, ebulliently spilled to stone.... I watch my life appear as the waters drain, As if some restless hand had opened a vein. I set all compass by this wrecked shore, Dry blood shelved dryly against a wood; Deposited among all that lush scenery once, And outfitted for a war, we put on an alien mood. Ten years' unholy sweat for change, and after What man, bandaged or unbandaged, what man But brought a jungle to his house? There breaks Beneath the out-worn branches of the lake Some invisible water-bird's penetrating cry.The Manor-House
Slow and late, with bloodied Paw and stumbled hoof Slouching huntsmen drag themselves Through the opening gate Retiring hands had bolted. Unshaken belief is proof That the abjured rounds of pursuit, and late Loss of a scattered trail traced to mud But confirm the circuit Of hound and blood. Unliving bodies lie heaved to the brink; Heavy-bellied gulls stare about. Low and rough, a drunkard mouths a tune Down the old dirt road, Half out of mind--- A tune the king's players once Repeated at the palace. "each moment dies and Nothing may its breath renew. Yet minute piles on minute A solace none wise would dare refuse." Whispered low the drunken man Near where slept the hound. Failed fathers that have failed to deepen The ancient track of an old race No bunched mountain's back Could have rightly steepened Rant at rigor mortis; Deep tears eat their faces. Lead bells tell the hour of the house. Children blow their candles out. Ashes cover the coals. Unliving bodies lie heaved to the brink; Heavy-bellied gulls stare about. "Out of all slaughter, the one Globe sundered by a gash Far past the antique wit Of Solomon to sew, That black day may come And may yet come When no high death can save A rare daughter or extraordinary son From rash disaster When we've to destruction come." Whispered low the drunken man Near where slept the hind.A Barren Moon
Moving among the moon-drained hills Remembering the dead, Lover to ghostly lover cried: 'Whenever I see a sweet man's body Great pain within me dies. 'Enough of such rough comforting Drives out much suffering, Clapped in a ruinous grave,' Cried that distracted woman Under a rude, red moon. 'All night having grown unnatural We drop to the distended ground And there beneath a man-shaped tree Sick with sweet labor of sighs I cradle nothing between my thighs.'The Poverty of Motherhood
Raised from the proveless dust Like a shrouded bird into the sight And set tumbling with the rest, I daily give wet suck to one That is a barbing brat Tangled in my skirts; I'll not bother to raise him right Lost in the indifferent dust Under sky as bruised as that Tumultuous spot that got him; But I daily give him suck Because he's the nearer dirt.The Hysterical Girl
Nothing was there to see, A girl half-starved ranting at the sea Where the soulless moonlight pins Heart terrified in agony of sin. Repeated syllables teach her mouth to pray In abstract hatred of the everyday Indigence of things, dull pain of a table Sat at too long or in too deep thought. And now she casts her moonblind eye Upon cracked hills the sea derides With desperate complexities of sound, Lashing furious meanings at the departed ground. It was not her singing sent Drowning blanche mermaids to the tent Of the solid man who mastered them in thought But found their floundering forms were soiled; Nor commanded, in sapphitic fury of a dream Drained among grey stones in lurid streams, The empty apparition of the departed moon Fail and vanish, and hide its scorn. No one living saw her there, Rapturous between null sea and thoughtless air As she, thin-waisted, blind, hypnotized Blank waves of the sea, stark desires of the skies.Among the Stables
Pitching in a hay-cart How many discarded sighs Must beat upon my breath Before you unclench a thigh? A singing boy will solace us; I paid him twelve and eight. Exhausted by post-mortem Duties to the state I watch a great bay's racing mind Rehearse its fury at the gate. And a careless boy is singing, Singing past the garden gate. We shall hear him straining there, That collar shattered, the thick heart rent. [spent.] Swallows ordered in at dark Will keep the mares content. A singing boy will solace us; I paid him twelve and eight. Stars fill the drinking trough While frantic moon invents a cloud--- Enigmatic, passing out of sight, And the night cries out loud. And a careless boy is singing, Singing past the garden gate.What Joy Departs?
What joy departs the heaving night When we stretch out upon the stone In momentary bliss; Laid like sticks and together bound Indifferent to hurt, What love remains?The Thorn Tree
O I had all of them That had all of me, A drop of sweat that stung my eye Under the old thorn tree; Yet some dark trembling in the blood Recalls what troubles me. Bloated moon escaped the limbs, Night-bird to night-bird called; Unknown arms at midnight lift Body and limb appalled Into the light-terrifying Heavens. Whatever it was it was not God. Many men have come again Beneath the twisted thorn; Now they but seem as light as breath, And love's not worth a stone, For there's a greater glory Shrieking in my bones.New Age
All watch blindly because all are blind, Mixing in a bitter ditch, while hands and eyes Bolt new brains on a body tamed Out of all unnatural instinct at last Until all stand, skin to skin, with all who stand Ecstatic round one plate, honey-filled, Like some dark-bodied community of bees. Like some dark-bodied community of bees All turn to that one vast image hung Forever sweet in an abstract sky: Riotous selflove perfected to a stone Until no man is shaken with a hate, Or cold eventuality of death--- Adam and Eve out of one stone struck. Adam and Eve out of one stone struck; Interrupted churn of heads, or worse, Confused there, welded in the air, as if once Fury of the sexual onslaught begun, No deliberate loveliness Could its purpose or pleasure deride: All watch blindly because all are blind.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 lamp-lit 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.That Place
Is it like a light That dissolves an empty street, That place where dancer meets with dancer Whirling like a top And does not ask for music So long as dancing never stop? Or is it more like some Time that revolves when the skies Are overthrown, and dark comes Ravening the tomb Or heavier delirium That body lays on eyes?Realist at Atlantic Highlands
Empty eyes emptier of thought Returned to turn upon the upturned stone That still fell although it stood. And the river empty a little after, alone. The hollow space of the wave determines The shape of space a wave may take, Filling itself, suspending itself until it break In predestined syllables upon the fragrant rock.The Wind That Lashes Everything at Once
The wind that lashes everything at once Came lashing at the lutanist on evening's hump Disturbing chords, flinging river pebbles at his back Hunched to deeper strains emerging near his hands In a wind which is a wind and not a motion Of elemental ardors making speeches. The lutanist deposited hid lute, like so much trash, In dusky golds, till gild and gild congealed, Shrank, subtracted from each other as they became A part of the haloed wish for a universal whole Where lute and lutanist and avenging dusk are plucked To one hue, convincing, not permanent, but arranged for, vented, In the wind which is a wind and not a motion Lashing everything at once.End
Aug 272015