- thinking of previous post, remembered this from the last poem in Way Stations, "My Byzantium" (1996):

7

Not the flower, but the whistling stem,
the stump still sprouting
desire from pain, pain from desire –
a homeless voice, roadside day-
lily in rearview mirrors,
unstemmed longing, infinite,
to the barren node of the
horizon.
Not for itself,
but in response, a choral thorn-
crown for harvest of black-
eyed Susans tempered
by drought – the keening
proud repentance
of Appalachian eyes.

From the fissure, a breath
of warm air – the frozen flower (touched
by a human hum) blooms.

In cliffside cave or hermitage,
a prehistorian, unfrozen now, draws
out Nativity from spring charcoal:
under the modal drone of mountain
banjo, streambed clay (glance
of a goldfinch) rose infant lips
are moving (do, re, mi. . .)

another inadequate sestina for Jonathan (from Way Stations):


SESTINA OF THE BOOK

         And once upon a time. . . she read to you,
 and all at once, time was a different time.
 A something you could feel – invisible,
 the way a breeze (when you were feverish)
 passed through the window and across your book
 and touched your forehead like an animal.

  
         The books taught you the name of every animal.
 As you forgot them, they remembered you –
 whispering come back, I am your favorite book
 just when they began to pass their time
 deriding you – the neighborhood gang (feverish
 with pride – tired of being invisible).

  
         They revealed the real world was invisible
 and beast was Adam's name for animal
 and there were herds of them, roaming feverish
 through history, lowing, howling for you
 – or for that shepherdess of fabulous time
 circling like a vision through your book. . .

  
         oh shepherdess of the smoothest book!
 You see her even now (she's invisible,
 but you see her) pirhouetting perfectly in time
 with the concert of the world – vegetable, animal,
 stones, stars, ocean, all dancing for you
 beneath her shadow, a sweet and feverish

  
         dance!  And it was wisdom to be feverish!
 As you drew closer, she was like a book
 unfolding a microscopic world for you –
 a globe of penetrating texture. . . visible
 inversions. . . tendrils of an animal
 unknown. . . the shell of involuted time!

  
         . . . so it wound, oblique, around your time,
 and whispered sea-foam until, feverish,
 you felt immersed inside that animal,
 a velvet valve, enfolded in a book.
 And you grew more and more invisible,
 and changed, and suffered no more – you

  
         who (once upon a time) had read a book
 while feverish boys (now all invisible,
 celestial animals) called out – hey you. . .

      
                                                           3.3.97

Old HG poem.

                  The wind exhaled, this world
  sprawled – a spring disaster, flocks of embraces
  in the garage, under the oil refineries
  hospitable sirens, waltzing on broken silver.

   
                  And night deepened around the temple,
  a yellow-black wafer, crust for the swans;
  and the wind circled the olives, a morning watch
  all night by the Kedron, all day by Euphrates.

   
                  And we'll meet again by the wintry river
  where we swaddled the sun in a double wreath,
  cedar and lilac, tangled in a knot of beaten
  gold – sea-roses, breathing in Jerusalem.

As for obscuritie poetickal, here's a somewhat oblique, Marvellian meditation on the social role of poetry (from Way Stations):

WATER MIRROR

 
  Hammersmith Farm, childhood home of the late Jacqueline 
   Kennedy Onassis, site of the reception for her wedding to 
   John F. Kennedy and his summer White House, is for sale.
        –Providence Journal-Bulletin (July 4, 1995)

            
                         1   
  
 They're selling off the old homestead,
 the mansion's on the auction block;
 the lawns where Jackie used to walk
 burrowed by realtors instead.
 Ten million bucks, it can be yours:
 the gardens, chandeliers, heirlooms,
 John-John and Caroline's bedrooms...
 Camelot flickers in the mirrors.

             
                         2
  
 From harbor frontage you can see
 four seasons glimmer in the surf,
 watch changeless flotsam crash, drift.
 Washington seems far away.
 There, a bigger sale is on:
 the common good, at discount rate,
 from state to corporate bureaucrat
 (by way of Senator Middleman).

            
                         3
  
 So why mold grief in pewtered rhyme
 for simple change, a mansion's fall?
 Irish rumrunners, after all –
 death by water.  A waste of time.
 A Yeats might mourn old manners gone,
 the shipwrecked dream of Camelot,
 and scorn the Newport plutocrat
 gnawing mahogany's snuffed grain...

            
                          4
  
 She's in the grave, the early girl,
 swan-woman (pillbox hat, pink coat) –
 sun-glassed, mysterious, remote,
 demure, still point of social whirl,
 who tacked astern with hasty Greek
 to homeward islands, east of West;
 she's gone, the akme of the best,
 a dolphin – gilded, guileless, sleek.

            
                         5
  
 But like a man who finds his wife
 locked in the arms of a stronger chest,
 I'm stung with song's unease, unrest –
 a uselessness, usurped by strife.
 Trajectories of melting ice;
 chaos of shards; an arctic herd
 shrinks (absurd equation) toward
 Time's backlit Death Row device

            
                          6
  
 and no one knows who killed the King
 or the two princes by his side –
 the talent that is death to hide
 cannot un-Gordian anything.
 Times are evil.  Redeem the day –
 that day he sat at Hammersmith
 and merged the Peace Corps with the myth:
 a green American sunray.

            
                         7
  
 Another Greek, Simonides
 (or so writes Roman Cicero)
 wove stories intricate and slow;
 his tyrant patron was displeased.
 "Lay off those Twins, you dunce"
 he cried – "Castor, Pollux –
 you're labored, prolix –
 recite my noble deeds, for once!"

            
                         8
  
 And tossing the poet only half –
 "Let those Gemini pay the rest!" –
 the prince expelled the fabulist.
 Then, in a glancing lightning shaft,
 two spooky boys were seen on high.
 Destruction rained down on his head.
 The bard survived, to name the dead –
 baptizing each guest with a sigh.

            
                         9
  
 Another house is up for sale.
 Driftwood clutters down the shore.
 No one listens anymore
 to songs of Camelot or Grail.
 But over the mortgaged property,
 over White House, pillar, dome,
 I see two ghostly brothers roam.
 Let slow strands weave their filigree.


      
                             7.8.95

One take on obscurity in poetry. Another forthcoming.

                  To give back to the rain
  what was announced on the rooftops
  in whispers, at the end of May –
  the rain, a drowsy origin
  cradled in the huge bronze
  and silver of twisted beech.

   
                  Your sounding, not like laughter
  on dry streets, nor an obituary
  reminiscence, give and take
  of battering wind – but slight
  drumming on rough graves, midway
  from the obscure haze of a lamp.

[Another little poem from long ago.]


They are nobody's children,
and they walk with your airplanes,
they touch your shadows.

Nobody heeds them,
they were born on the west side
of the train, in a heavy rain.

They are your time.
Their eyes close on your flag.
They will take no names.

They are nobody's children.
God is the worm in their hearts,
they were born of the Virgin.

Blogging away this afternoon, before the 3-day weekend. Here's another "triptych", published in Way Stations. (I should call this blog Way Stations. I'm recapitulating the stations of my way, since I started writing poetry about 37 years ago.)


HART CRANE

1

Above checkered flickering of late
coffeehouse generations, light pricks
tap out a dim, midnight tattoo.

Is it the underbelly of a whale,
unfurling a turbid Mardi Gras? Slow
motion horns dilate for one liquid eye.

Answered by silence. Orisons
babble, fitful reeds rehearse,
recount your rendezvous

with a perfidious bark, while calipers
compress the extant manuscripts
(flagrant gulf no hands could span).

It was a weatherbeaten, Southern face
below the embroidered wash and spume
whispered the one word -

"follow." Upward, through vertiginous
mirror gardens - dangling fluted
routes of a sunken - forsaken Babylon.

2

Spinning, restless, coaxial, cued
to firewater, pried from pueblo
gaol, a primeval kachina leaping
into the blaze - out of time.

Hidden underfoot, to be quarried
from the subway, the broken stone
wheel of a ruptured earth mother
revolves with disjointed orbit.

Weft of vertigo, carbonized. Exploded.
Pronounced from wincing salt, faltering,
slagged. . . flower names. Fertile
reproof. Slanting, bedecked at last.

Volcano, livid, fluent, enlists
the police. Magnified chevrons.
Pulques Finos. Skulls look up,
fed your tangled battering ram.


3

Ironclad northern city in your nightmare,
and the sound of the sea, too familiar,
eager to lock you in a wavy ooze,
forlorn foghorn. . . such was Death's only ruse.

Who waits by the pier to feel your taunts
will always wait now. You waited once
for shoulders tensely spare, the tide's advance;
reposeful strength was gateway - into trance.

The bridge you strung beneath your bones
still rises, harbored, iridescent, out
of your twenties and the century's, still
delicately rides the storm. And Ariel
holds his song. . . and now Atlantis groans! -
surfacing with your ascending steep descant.

Another short poem from long ago (found in Way Stations):




A slow wind blows through the night,
carrying summer in puffs of sighs.
Far off there in the valley hollows
a yellow lamp swings to and fro.

Tree-bark, tree-limbs creaking,
the muffled sounds in the warm air,
and overhead thin clouds hurrying
under a wheeling shroud of stars.

Day will impress our crafty cities
with silver and bronze, the filigree
of spiderwebs, moldering iron,
the legible engraving of farewells.

Night, and heavy-hearted woodlands,
and the rustling of uncut grasses
in the children's books, a lamp
throwing a wide circle in the wind.

Early (mid-80s) quatrains:


Bees dance above closed lips;
in the clear shadow of the oak
wherever they turn their heads
they follow the bright pattern.

Quietly, by the granite cistern
under a crowded canopy of reds,
in the cool wind a broken spoke
sways whichever way it slips.

& here are a couple more little poems from long ago (Way Stations):


[infin che'l veltro verra]


Aboard a swift Greyhound
adrift in America,
one of the grateful dead
plays a slow harmonica.

Sons honor your fathers
and heed their command -
it's a surplus contempt
that lays waste to the land.

Fathers honor your sons
and regard the heart's law -
for it's ease and corruption
that open Hell's maw.

And I'll sing the dark waters
and keep the long watch
til that Greyhound swings home
across old Devil's Notch.


*


It is moonlight in the darkness,
and the heart finding after midnight;
it is a boat unmoored on the water,
and the current circling by itself.

It is tomorrow; it is a light word
floating through an open door,
and the wind moving in the quiet,
whispering over the land of the dead.

Have been reading Steven Runciman's classic history of the Crusades. Great dilemma facing civilization: peace, justice, security can't be achieved by military force. The irony of nuclear states trying to control proliferation. The necessary step is global disarmament. A few days ago, heard a brief interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu; he spoke about "just war" theory. Said that perhaps it's time to recognize that modern weaponry - even "conventional" weapons - are so indiscriminately destructive that the concept of "just war" of any kind is rendered obsolete.

Another little old poem from Way Stations:

Epitaph


He set his hand to many
treacherous decrees,
and made many enemies
among nobles of good family.

Quarrels being the cement
of state, after the blood-
scrawl of a name is understood:
honorable Gloucester, noble Kent.

Yet who will rise to condemn
this prince of liberty's decay?
With a mortal wound he lay
by the seashore, crying "Jerusalem!"

One more little old SHORT poem today, for every stalwart blogger. . .


in RI

No one will blame me
on the whispering shore
for lingering so long
near your small rose island.

Bees' slow honey
is the measure of summer;
morning and sundown,
by that rose double-arch.

And my tongue's dark island
leaves a late russet shadow -
dry relic of the voyage,
our lips' broken compass.

Yet another early poem (early that is from my 2nd life in poetry, circa mid-80s):

Time now for the trees to shroud the earth
with their dark branches, time
when the wind dies down,
and over the still mirror
a faded voice is whispering.

Time again to climb into the old
music-box in the forest,
and wind the iron spring–

it is letter by letter,
line by line.

One more old poem for today, from Way Stations:

The wind exhaled, this world
sprawled - a spring disaster, flocks of embraces
in the garage, under the oil refineries
hospitable sirens, waltzing on broken silver.

And night deepened around the temple,
a yellow-black wafer, crust for the swans;
and the wind circled the olives, a morning watch
all night by the Kedron, all day by Euphrates.

And we'll meet again by the wintry river
where we swaddled the sun in a double wreath,
cedar and lilac, tangled in a knot of beaten
gold - sea-roses, breathing in Jerusalem.

Another early poem, from Way Stations:


To give back to the rain
what was announced on the rooftops
in whispers, at the end of May -
the rain, a drowsy origin
cradled in the huge bronze
and silver of twisted beech.

Your sounding, not like laughter
on dry streets, nor an obituary
reminiscence, give and take
of battering wind - but slight
drumming on rough graves, midway
from the obscure haze of a lamp.

Another old poem, from "Way Stations".


Now and England


The wind for France
blusters and laughs.
Green hills, gathered
and chaste, gleam
over the humped sediment.

And bowmen will carry the day.
Silence an awkward garment
among the clear circles,
at the lighted feast
of modesty and honor.

Only, in the mild air,
to say goodby. Or there,
in grandmother's book,
Rapunzel, glancing down
from her strange tower.

Or stars over the sea.
Or tongues of fire.
A hearth-blaze. Fold
my hands, light the
four corners of the bed.

Here's another lil' old poem from long ago (untitled):


The poet is monotonous, his head
resting on her empty sleeve,
his voice out of the mineshaft
muttering rumors of precious gems.

And stars shine in the black sky,
peacefully, released at last
from that deep unspoken gloom
by his aimless, undying lament.

as a kind of illustration, yet another old poem of mine (from "Way Stations").


Ocean State


Here the waters gather along the shore.
They meet the land breathing in foam,
and roll the sleepy pebbles and shells
back into long sand waves as before.

Our moon, casting her antique spells.
A motionless iris in the whale's eye
of the sea, her unspeakable name
sinks to the bottom of lonely wells.

Her low whispers frame the deserted dome.
Her light covers the circus floor.
And she lifts, with one nocturnal sigh,
the heaving swells in a silver comb.

Another old poem from "Way Stations" (untitled):


In a rough-hewn four-poster
the moody Puritan sleeps.
Down the steep dark stair,
slowly, a poor wife creeps.

Under a heavy kitchen box
there's a crust of dry bread;
strong hands undo the locks;
she goes out by the shed.

The old redhead dreams on,
kindly dawn slowly rises -
he sees a fatherly sun,
gleaming strawberry ices,

and a justified Rome -
while his wife, thinly wan,
espousing dear freedom,
succors an orphan swan.

an old poem (published in Way Stations : Poems 1985-1997)


Breeze



A city before sunrise
hovers in the cool air,
under the modest arch
of early blue sky-

a dry honeycomb,
a gray wasp's nest,
hung on the limb
of some buried river.

Soon these streets
will swarm with faces,
laws and lawlessness
and careless artifice;

but dawn is simple,
native to earth, sky;
a sea-salt breeze
at the bedroom window.