Known by the Darkling Thrush: Poems Conceived from the Demented Vision

COPYRIGHT © 2009 BY T.J. KING

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Rev. date: 06/20/2022

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CONTENTS

Preface

The Difficult Birth of Poetry

The Sublimity of Light

Love Was Here Before Us

To a Captivating Young Actress, Just Turned Seventeen

What Means the Dying of the Light

Erotic Dream

Probing the Roots

The Flaw Pathetic That Blinds My Heart

The Captive Flame

As Opposed to Bats

Early Morning High Fidelity

What Image, Rembrandt

The Great Wallenda

Of You, Much Ado

To Philippe Petit, Defiant of Gravity

Celebrities

Morning Traffic in Nice

The Fond Peoplewatcher Catches Sight of Someone Familiar

For Antonini Andonis

For Susan Bibb, My Student

Negative Capability

The Church Sublet to Pagans

The Jolly Corner, by Henry James

The Reef

The Prince of Pessimism

Tumor Beyond Rumor

On Kay Boyle’s Year Before Last

Christmas Reflections

Saying Uncle

Out of What Cradle

Jane Austen

Shelley

The Odd and the Awed

Listeners

Singing to Beat Sixty

Horizontal Cathedral: Sunday Morning

Finally, the Distinguished Thing!

The Diminutive Architect

What the Hell Was a Filly

Legerdemain du temps

Suspended Animation

Addressed to the Distaff on the Occasion of a Momentous Anniversary

Oliver Stone’s JFK: Special Edition

Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen

Verses Suggested by Some of Jorge Luis Borges

On Listening to Mozart

Beneath That Blue

Vigilance at 16th & J

A Modest Meditation on the Universe

Peter Abelard by Helen Waddell

Antony

The Canyon

Against the Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame

The Passing Through of a Lightweight

Epilogue

Postmortem

The Rainbow Benediction

Notes

APPENDIX

Journal: Entry One

Journal: Entry Two

Journal. Entry Three

Journal Entry Four

Journal Entry Five

Journal Entry Six

Journal Entry Seven

Journal Entry Eight

Journal Entry Nine

The Fever: A Polygraph Test in the Form of a Film

Intimacy

Californication

Adultery Unadulterated

Dealing With People

Key West:

Kitchen Dialogue

Mel the Cat, His Crisis

Friendship in the Fulfillment Equation

Waikiki Wacky-Wacks

Patrick O’Brian: A Master Revealed. Part One

Patrick O’Brian: a Master Revealed, Part Two

A Meditation Upon Yosemite

The Master Speed

Champagne Toast to Liesl

In the Valley of Elah: The Significance of Impure Art

The Meaning of Life

Class Lives

Crossing the Rubicon: Michael Ruppert Charts the Unthinkable

A World of Hurt

The Calla Lily

The Folly of Grieving

The Debts of the Soul

to the companion of my pilgrimage

whom had I been in on the creating

I would have fine-tuned to be just as she is

Preface

If you should be, and the odds are slim, one of that miniscule and entirely inexplicable segment of humanity who bothers to poke their noses into contemporary tomes of poetry, you may have noticed that few of them are encumbered by prefaces. Why this is I don’t pretend to know, but ripe speculations come to mind. I can’t resist the suggestion that many of their authors prefer the relative freedom of expression afforded by their versifying: for it is no longer required of a poem that it communicate to its reader. Prose, on the other hand, still bears its conservative strictures. It is still expected of prose, hampered by that annoying straitjacket we know as tradition, that it pay certain dues to clarity and logic.

Then again, to seek a kinder answer, it may just be that, unlike the present poet of porcine head, they have learned that readers of poetry abhor prefaces, and seldom ever bother to read them. Or is it possible that, outside the sly soliloquies of their medium, they simply don’t have something to say?

Be this as it may, this poet, whether for your illumination or your blue-in-the-face exasperation, most inexorably does have something to say. Let me confess it straight off: in the poet you seem to be inclined to sample here, there is a critic trying to get out.

You can tell I’m bent on saying some mean and un-mealy mouthed things about versifiers variegated. But before I get concrete—before I commence throwing spitballs out of cement allowed to harden—let me raise the abstractified question of what function a preface to one’s verse rightly serves. Certainly it is not as a commercial for what is to follow that a sane man parades a prattle of prolegomena. Poor scribbler—it is no use.

It is no use, no use a ‘tall—

by its shining or by its foul stench the stuff must stand, or fall.

By my lights, the justification of a prologue is the establishing for the reader what constitutes the writer’s ideal. What poetry does, at its best. And this will be not with the expectation that what follows will exemplify that best, but rather that it will provide a precise measure for the reader, which is only fair, however cruel, of how far short of his ideal this poet finally comes.

Let us then sit down together, reader, and ponder this hard question. Let us indulge in a backward look, and console ourselves in contemplation of the immortal fields fertilized by the muses. For in our particular language, and particularly in British poetry, the best, as even your garden variety illiterate knows, has been very good, indeed.

To identify the common denominator is, truly, no easy task. Such diversity, such disparity! Balance the homey warmth of a line of Chaucer against the stalactites and stalagmites in a line of Milton. Juxtapose the perfect poetic diction in Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard with the superbly tuned vernacular of Frost’s After Apple Picking. Contrast the hyperbolic ingenuity of John Donne with the elegiac thoughtfulness of Wordsworth.

My own answer, after long pondering of the puzzle, is that what characterizes all fine poetry is a felicity of sound and sense. Now I wish to spell out what it seems to me this responsibility entails.

The Petrarchan Movement in 16th Century England, inspired by an Italian of the 14th Century, Francesco Petrarca, was a revolution of poetic sound. Before the transplant to English soil accredited to Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the nation already enjoyed an indigenous poetry both substantial and virile. It was verse, however, not categorically different from prose, and aimed like prose at simple, unostentatious asseveration, moving often argumentatively and didactically towards its vigorously expressed perorations. But with the Renaissance’s drift northward, the subliming of the southerly sonnet wrought the subsuming of thought to language. The discovery the versifying gentlemanly amateurs writing in that time awakened to was what a magic box language actually is. So discovering, they tuned their instruments to perform exquisite tasks, mastering all the secrets of metrical impact, select rhyme, consonance, assonance, nuanced audial effects—and eclipsing all else, metaphor. Metaphor not only conquered poetry. Its conquest was everlasting. What this meant was that poetry would henceforth cease to be prosaically straightforward, since the digression into the expanded figure likened to its tenor would become at least as important as the (implied and now indirect) reasoned discourse. If the home truths of life had not yielded entirely to the beauties of enraptured similitude, their priority had forever lost ground.

This discovery of all that had lain in the magic box of language was intoxicating. If one studies the sonnet sequences exponentially proliferating in the reign of Elizabeth I, he enjoys an exhibition of poets literally drunk as lords. Virtuosity became the name of the game. What a poem had to say was quite literally of little matter. How it said was everything. It is posterity’s good fortune that poetry would come eventually to shake off its hangover, and restore the balance between a poem’s substance and its expression. We see that recovery already commencing, for instance, in the finer sonnets of Shakespeare. But if you want to contemplate just how wild the binge was, read his entire collection. If you have the hardihood to do so, you’ll discover what the scholars and bard-worshippers don’t like to admit: that the mighty William’s sonnets are for the most part devoid of any redeeming significance, mere virtuoso performances ranging between mediocrity and indigence.

A portion of the body of poetry in our language, even the best poetry, never sobered up. It is what we refer to as romantic poetry. Two wines, poured together, were found to be eternally addictive: the wine of language mixed with the wine of what we might call the outermost boundaries of experience.

As with Shelley.

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert—

That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest

Like a cloud of fire;

The blue deep thou wingest,

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

So (ahhh, yes, you sigh) begins the famous To a Skylark. We know not why we respond to rhyme and to metrical uniformity; it is a given in our nature, just as our enchantment with narrative, the Scheherazade-like unfolding of a story, is another given, mysterious and unfathomable. We can only acknowledge that there is a pleasure in these well turned lines, these crisp, slightly surprising rhymes, and, closing out each stanza, the culminating alexandrines, lines lengthening to six strong accents. Yet the richest yield of this poem is still to come: each metaphorical extravagance turned out in the compacted dazzlement of a five-line stanza, the most intoxicating series of similes in all poetry.

Writing as early as the century just previous to Christ, Horace, in his Art of Poetry, established criteria for poetry that have never been improved on. The thing which Horace said that had a profound influence in the subsequent two thousand years was this: The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life. We understand his word inform to be intended not in the sense of how to build a birdhouse, but as reinforced by that final phrase applicability to life—how we shall wisely live. He states elsewhere in the essay, in fact, In all good writing the source and fountain is wisdom. Thus what we want from poetry, according to Horace, is either pleasure or wise counsel, and at best the two in combination.

Those acquainted with the great poetry of the 19th Century’s Romantic Movement know that its astounding plethora yielded more pleasure than wise counsel. But given such sublime drunkenness, who would be so ungenerous as to hold out for wisdom? The inebriation here, in contrast to the Petrarchan sonneteers, was by no means limited to the apotheosis of love. But the preoccupation with the amorous, earthly and transcendent, was never to pass away. Its culmination was to come with the verse of the insuperable W.B. Yeats, arguably the greatest poet in the language, and particularly with what he wrote in the first half of his long and fruitful career. During the second half, when he had partially recovered from the longest jag in the history of poetry, Yeats’ verse was not necessarily better (depending on your critic), but it displayed a restored balance between the appeals of substance and execution.

And here we arrive at a point it is important to underscore. Surveying the best poetry in the language, we see that for a poem to be good, it need not be impregnated with trenchant, original insight, while simultaneously displaying a Yeatsian power of expression. But it must manifest certain estimable portions of these gifts: delectable skill of language, and/or thought, if not original, at least freshened by treatment.

But now the task grows most onerous. Thinking thoroughly modern, thinking contemporary, we need to think about what has been happening in the twentieth century’s second half, as time trips digitally over the threshold of 21. Lest this tract tax the patience of even those few stalwarts determined to read this, I had better confine my remarks to my own countrymen.

I must first put aside the name of Robert Frost. Whether Whitman or Frost was our finest poet will always be debated. Whatever the outcome of the contest, I submit that no American writing in the twentieth century can touch him. In all our prayers of thanksgiving, let us never forget him.

I wonder if a study has ever been carried out to explore the question of which among the greatest poets have exerted the most unfortunate influence on poetry in their wake. For all his indubitable power, T.S. Eliot’s influence on the poetry of the 20th Century was a resoundingly deleterious one. Those great ringing fulminations he penned, such as The Wasteland and The Hollow Men, made doom-and-gloom fashionable. And, alas, while his own productions were distinguished by peerless eloquence of voice and image, those of the myriad midgets spawned in his wake were not. The Zeitgeist Great Tom had defined gave the sorry tribe of poets permission to turn out endless verses of tedious whining—self-pitying laments and inarticulate grumblings as uninspired as redundant.

Likewise, that poetry has ceased to delight must no doubt be laid to a large degree at the door of Whitman. While Leaves of Grass is a cornucopia of unending pleasure, the revolution it launched has been more baleful than fruitful. This is not to say that the manumission of conventional usage was in itself an evil, for if man or woman wishes to express the shape of thought and emotion freed of traditional conceits, surely no one would propose to place them under arrest. What has been our enormous misfortune, however, is that free verse has supplanted traditional poetry. The powers that be have by and large refused to print it, succumbing to the mass hysteria that it is passé, the fashion of a less sophisticated era. And to be sophisticated, it seems, is to accustom ourselves to a proliferation of poems, read or unread, mind-numbingly dull and unedifying. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria taught us that the pivotal principle was similarity within dissimilarity: pleasure derived from the superimposition of regularity, in the form of rhyme and metre, upon the idioms used in everyday parlance. Within the span of centuries in which metrical verse prevailed, this yoking of the natural with the artificial explored and refined a near-infinite pleasure trove—thought-and-feeling rendered magical and enthralling under the hand of artifice. One wonders how long it will take the illuminati to realize that free verse represents more loss than liberation. It is not my claim that free verse alone accounts for the failure of poetry in our time. But I would go so far as to submit that the interdiction of those traditional resources contained in the coffers of poetry has substantially contributed to its debilitation.

Admittedly, even a nation of dreary doom-dealers will occasionally have their mood swings and inspirations, so that, certainly enough, poems have emerged we would be sorry not to have garnered. Allow me to advance a small sampling, if only to get the bitter taste out of my mouth. The power of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl can scarcely be denied: inspired Whitmanesque philippics that thunder through pages with the excitement of a steam locomotive. I might cite, if somewhat randomly, the delightful postage-stamp portraits by Anne Sexton, For My Lover, Returning to His Wife, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Or, for sweetness on the tongue, try the small delicate idyl of John Ashbery’s Some Trees, along with, for accomplished tour de force, his sestina The Painter. Nor could we bear to part with the mordantly clever romp of the self-immolating Sylvia Plath, Daddy. Then there was that inexplicable moment in this miasmic, feculent age when words came together in a single poem, to become again all that it is possible for poetry to be: William Everson’s Homerizing of San Francisco at the end of that decade it led a re-shaping of history, The City Does Not Die. And so it goes. You too, reader, can uncover little pockets of pleasure, if sufficiently determined to persist in your salvage operation within the 20th Century’s junkyard.

Finally there’s that inexplicable phoenix, that poet laureate perhaps more generously talented than the age deserves, Richard Wilbur. Wilbur, like Frost earlier in the century, stands alone and apart. To say that Love Calls Us to the Things of This World ranks among the dozen finest lyric poems in the language is not enough to get his number; the more salient fact is that dozens of his poems are nearly up to the same mark, the bar raised too high for his coevals to compete. To luxuriate in the compendium of his verses, brilliantly conceived, infinitely inventive, elegant and quietly erudite, incrementally suspenseful and surprising and finally satisfying, is to realize all that is most plangently missing in the output of his fellow poets.

All too much of the poetry of this century just ended has been the mumbling and grumbling of a mud-groveling Caliban too mindless to see that the petty little productions he turns out are like dried cow dung offered forth in beribboned packages as gifts. These poets simply do not deal in excitement—neither the excitement of thought freshly spaded by conceptual agility, nor the excitement of language in its fertile symphonic resources.

Charles Wright at least brought it out of the masturbatory closet with his The New Poem:

It will not resemble the sea.

It will not have dirt on its thick hands.

It will not be part of the weather.

It will not reveal its name.

It will not have dreams you can count on.

It will not be photogenic.

It will not attend our sorrow.

It will not console our children.

It will not be able to help us.

Enter the ludicrous: the pedestalizing of mediocrity. As the century kept truckin’, establishment of poetic reputations had less and less to do with merit and more and more to do with social agenda and shrewd promotion. The surpassing lows, perverse deifications of the bathetic still allowed to stand to this day, are too numerous to catalogue, but a few must be mentioned to anchor my case. There was, early century, Langston Hughes, his childish gibberish a black propaganda of unrelieved graffiti. There was, mid-century, the emerging voice of Adrienne Rich, who rolled up her admitted intelligence into one great ball of dull feminist grumbling. And there was, also mid-century but lingering unfortunately into greater prominence late-century, the incoherent rant of sheer mindlessness unleashed by that publicist allowed to pass as poet, Gary Snyder.

Two Fawns That Didn’t See

the Light This Spring

A friend in a tipi in the

Northern Rockies went out

hunting white tail with a

.22 and creeped up on a few

day-bedded, sleeping, shot

what he thought was a buck.

It was a doe, and she was

carrying a fawn.

He cured the meat without

salt; sliced it following the

grain.

A friend in the Northern Sierra

hit a doe with her car. It

walked out calmly in the lights,

And when we butchered her

there was a fawn—about so long—

so tiny—but all formed and right.

It had spots. And the little

hooves were soft and white.

What possible justification has this passel of words to be mounted for a reader’s contemplation? Since the delight-seeking reader is denied all traditional gratifications of the genre, and in reality we have nothing more than prose which fails to make it over to the right-hand side of the page, why call this poetry? But even as a prose-meditation it is worthless. Certainly simple juxtaposition, the un-commented-upon placing of two scenarios alongside each other for implied ironic impact can be effective. (Thomas Hardy was especially good at this sort of thing.) But there is simply no mind at work here. These are jottings for a journal—which should have been left in the journal, and not foisted upon the public as, in some mysterious way, the oracular operation of art.

There you have my snapshot of a century: an age of poetry gone dark, save for tiny pinpoints of light. If this preface can afford nothing like a proper survey, but must confine itself to random and cursory samplings, believe me, you are the better for being spared the dreariness of the unabridged tour.

I view the enterprise here engaged, therefore, as defined by a dual mission, one of craft on the one hand, one of spiritual tone on the other. As to the craft of my trade, the poems in these pages will seek to exploit both the spontaneity and freshness of form emancipated from metre, as well as—more characteristically for me—the recovered delectations of traditional versification. As for spiritual tone . . .

Recall what poet it was who set the century’s moribund tone at its very dawning: Thomas Hardy.

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-gray,

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be

The Century’s corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

This is of course one of the great poems in the language, and points beyond the poem to the poet: to borrow the words of Horatio, Now cracks a noble heart. No author ever so perfectly personified his age as did Hardy. He was the last of an era in which God had been comfortably enthroned in his heaven, and all had been right with the world. As this last Victorian turned, so turned the world. Betrayed by a God whose eye he had thought was on the sparrow, he mourned disconsolately, and left us his mad and immortal thrush. Had Hardy lived in an age featuring the Holocaust—try to imagine his response.

The problem of evil, as the annals of both religion and philosophy testify, is a riddle too deep for the profoundest genius. Anyone who would seek to offer glib explanations for the darkling sides of life we immediately recognize to be a fool. What the disenchanted Hardy saw is what the Western world has still failed to absorb a whole century later: that the fairy tale of Christianity, with its simplistic and sentimental version of divinity and original sin, simply won’t do.

To say as much does not automatically eliminate the hypothesis of a caring God and a moral order in the universe. It might surprise some skeptics to learn that, even within the distraught century just past, professional philosophy has afforded pockets of resiliency and hope less naive than the ontological mirages of established religion. Needless to say, however, this preface is not the place to unfold the comforts of philosophy. It is time for the task—and the task for the lyricist is not to reason, but to express.

For any of us not graced with his genius, it would be idle to aspire to rival the power of Thomas Hardy. What one might reasonably hope for his own poetry, however, is that it would beg to differ with genius: that it might insist that, after all, there might still be found cause for carolings of ecstatic sound written on terrestrial things, and persuade by successful expression of the light borne by the darkness.

At the very least, it is an inspiring and ambitious mission for a smaller talent: to work towards restoration of the balance poetry sustained before the 20th Century between brightness and darkness. As Hardy put it, the bird represented some blessed Hope, whereof he knew/ And I was unaware.

Thus it becomes my undertaking to give the thrush the last word.

T.J.K.

The Difficult Birth of Poetry

Against what awesome odds great poems are born!

But so, all who aspire: behind, before,

the deathless heroes, all the fabled great

that history’s dimlit monument adorn

along with names the lamewit crowd adore

leave one who strives with what he might create,

trying to pay back riches life bequeathed,

dismayed by grave self-doubt, his weapons sheathed.

Hero (an antique word; see Webster’s gloss)

who’ll yet prevail will raise his star by force

of inward voices couns’ling Do not strain

against those gone before, but be your cause

a stroke in thanks to God, lest awe unhorse

the beautiful maneuvers of your brain.

And so he goes forth, dauntless, like a fool

whose very folly tutors him to rule.

And so the poem. What shield against the power

of lines that shake the firmament forever?

"The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

glowed on the marble . . ." In the desperate hour,

how shall the faltering wretch resume endeavor,

forced to compare, or scribble more than groan?

For there are poems that dwarf the Jungfrau’s fastness

and implicate the spheres through space’s vastness.

Perhaps the verse I spawn shall scarce prevail

or glow on marble; lead where great Will led.

(Who’ll Cleo catch without his silken net?)

Yet in the cunning craft I shall not quail

nor bend the knee before the mighty dead,

but seek my ends by introspection’s sweat.

Beauty attained is victory never Pyrrhic;

the undefeated heart is the loveliest lyric.

The Sublimity of Light

So easily undone

by a fault, a lost connection,

is it true we have something to do with the stars?

Perhaps. Yet what of when the whole skein seems

ineluctable grounds for disaffection

unthinkably obscene wars

screwing us even if won

fey our dreams

justice moot

its quest at best no more than a duck-billed dalliance,

as a gust of black soot

tears the eyes of a man keeping his precarious balance?

Why, then, in light outlasting all weather

beyond the dark where freebooters flaunt their booty

fleecing the poor wherever and however

the sun confirms what lives beyond wanhope in beauty.

Despite the acid rain that pelts the heart

love’s overture that fails

the lies that dart

and the winds unstinted of old betrayals

all the little murders of the I and Thou

of now and of now

truth become a quagmire

affections of comrades mocked in the mouth of satire—

the hell when the helplessly hopelessly beloved ignores us—

earth itself, touched by the god, restores us.

Then we

enmeshed in a muck of wares

amid the maze of a thousand thoroughfares

rise up from our bitterest cup

and, wonder bright,

witness the sublimity of light.

Morning rays pass

winnowing through the grass

and dancing towards night

the long day plies its chiaroscuro.

Along the tree trunks of evening, the line of subdued fire

so tenderly has burnished the bark

that lovers, humbled, mark

their paltriness never from man or woman to know

the supreme caress of this glow.

Musing in such wise, gaining the key thereby

we come to feel the pulse of the heart of the cosmos

pumping behind its one unflinching eye.

Love Was Here Before Us

Love was here before us.

Life was the lovely afterthought

that reified what longing sought

allowing death the crowning stimulus.

Mortal imperfection

predates our birth; we’re not to blame

that time turns down love’s blazing flame

long before death’s final disconnection.

Guilt let not engulf you.

If lovers fail, did they pretend?

Not you, but fault’s in the fabric, friend.

Kiss, and make your final fond adieu.

Grief let not distract you.

Whether the crack in the deep-flawed heart

or death—some force must tear you apart.

Lay in your roses with no thought of rue.

What shall stretch beyond love

that desperately this one endears

whom death kills, and through our tears

makes beauty without flaw the grief whereof?

Long look in love’s face.

For love has wed this blessed earth

whose gaze without we’re nothing worth

but looked on by the god take on his grace.

To a Captivating Young

Actress, Just Turned

Seventeen¹

What the poor world clamors for, you’ve got,

but more—a helpless openness to beauty

that stands to hold you humbled and apart.

Hence insufferable, at least as yet, you’re not;

thus far your sweat preserves you.

That you shall become on any stage

the circumference of your gifts, as you desire

in this fickle, tasteless age

is as improbable as a great peace washing over the world.

Mächt nicht. Or rather, if it matters,

the odds sit in your corner in spite of you.

How could one, once lifted shoulder-high,

from Golden Gate to London all the rage,

her name the maple syrup in all throats,

her wrist an actual ache of autographs,

her face as familiar as detergents,

her heart as divided by loves

as loaves broken to feed amorous thousands

daily devour the dawn

get soused on Bach

or make an art of loving friend-to-friend

as well as one man?

These I wish you

beyond failure as you fear it:

may the sway of your unspoiled spirit

within a circle of loved ones, worthy, devoted, thrive

and in that circle its dazzle go dimless.

May the sappy rush of you ripen to such richness

that heartsease in all about you swell.

May the quick of you splash and leap quashless

and, effervescing to an arching meniscus,

overbrim upon all warm and well.

However span your years, may they seem many,

with wild love packed in

enfolded with care, laid on with plenty.

Then when brightness falls finally from the air,

may death, your piteous would-be paladin,

gather you up with infinitely gentle care.

May you, as you once wished, be made a star

and the light of you stellify over your small world

long and far.

What Means the Dying of

the Light

On chiaroscuro evenings

with the equipoise of stillness

in the hush of nature’s gardens

after sunset casts its flambeaux

underneath the dome dissolving

into duskiness of chaos

in the course of things appointed

Earth is undismayed by darkness.

Only earthlings fierce-aspiring

bent upon intense attainings

feel the gathering dark’s encroachment

sound the knell upon their strivings.

Safe from these neurotic closures

those who seek no vain distinction

but by instinct find their nurture

in the interlacings human—

such as these by humankindness

made to run and not by booty

may by grace such intertwining

with their kind all openhearted

come to know till all their being

be transformed by human beauty.

Then of death shall not the gloaming

whisper, but deliver peace.

Erotic Dream

Sublimely limned like maiden by da Vinci

in all particulars exquisite, she turns

and, seeing you, is smitten to the core.

The very sight of you, the dreamer dreaming

(you have this on authority sans doute)

has copp’d the engine of her life.

Finding your eyes, she cannot look away,

Oh! She is lost, quite lost!

Her helpless heart exposed, she melts before you.

Have mercy! pleads the ardor of her gaze

and as for you

no daylight tycoon’s spoils come even close.

Night with its vision passes. You survive

weak from the loss of something dear as blood

the sense of being adored by one your heart

cooks up from sheer perfection.

The bliss recalled now transforms into anguish

since life, taking your measure like a tailor,

identifies your limits.

Wised-up to how the plot plays out on the planet

you call desire like a dog to heel

proposing to what happens to come handy

and marry the real.

An adolescent’s fantasy, we say.

We say it though the dream persists

in later life, never to go away.

Man-child, remember this room in chambered sleep?

Your daylight hours show nothing to compare.

Each enterprise you launched, all lucre gained

A bellows of wind

Fanning this haunting, unfulfilled desire.

Ulysses, hearing the sirens, understood

and had the sailors strap him to the mast.

The greedy heart outcraves the holdings of life.

Fool—stay with your wife!

Probing the Roots

He sits where his bones ache against hard tree roots.

The rough lines of this scape in finished brush strokes

he’d known when the air was shot with butterfly colors

so wild he could forget his stone-cold marriage.

To the mat of grass atop this cliff, in a lush spring,

he’d brought a rapt and richly woven woman

whose love was as fierce as her helpless heart was gentle.

Her ruttish laughter leaned on his words like does

bunched with bucks within a narrow canyon.

Once by this point where the cliff succumbs to the creek,

wading, wading in the lambency of noon light

their blood whipped to lewd dreams by the May heat

they drew, uncaring, from their hampering garments

and there, where now he sees a floor of pebbles

he ventured out and took her like a satyr

both of them standing, bright against the meadow,

the water slapping high above their calves.

Reckoning come, the choice he made surprised him.

When all the love and woman he had dreamt of

were struck against a wife and helpless children

he stuck by those he’d nestled. Now he haunts

these open fields, battered by oncoming winter

searching to know the meaning of his choice.

The earth is close and canny yielding her answers.

At best she crooks a finger like those sisters

who japed and jeered Macbeth in a wilder heath.

He sees, like mummy fingers crook’d from the pale cliff,

the roots push free, threatening the living tree.

The rub is clear: for roots, once breathing air,

to claim again the elemental clay.

The Flaw Pathetic That

Blinds My Heart

My pummeled study window frames the rain,

its steady drum-tattoo my mind entrancing.

By drops from heaven dancing,

lo! I am rendered sane.

The window opened, wafts the scent I love so well . . .

While drenching days leave humankind annoyed,

the sky’s encoded signs

forth from the void

have ever wrapped me, enthralled,

all study stalled

and plunged my thoughts into some Proustian passion

some rapture I cannot tell

in which Earth the mother entwines

with my being in some unearthly fashion.

Were one to be stuck in the American Southwest

where theatrical mountains

reach for the sky from a barren dryness

and out of nowhere, like a crossing of loves,

came such a storm

a regular Valkyrie of fountains

rain driving through thunder like pounding hooves

this would transform

as though a beautiful woman, some mysterious ethereal highness

cold as the dead unblest,

severe, aloof, heartless-seeming as a statue dumb,

suddenly by a racking of sobs, lost love, were overcome.

Is it the flaw pathetic that blinds my heart?

Or could this planet

itself be spinning, sensate, on its course

lone and apart

and all its organs, earthen, wooden, granite,

pervious to wounds,

open to pain twisted with gravity’s force?

Then earth is just that storm-beleaguered woman

straining to keep her dignity as best she can

cosmically ultra-human

along with humans facing her mortal end

her beauty unmatched (though fouled, still what more

beauteous than?)

her racking sighs heard in the soughing wind

and her tears the rain.

The Captive Flame

The shape and fire

of this wood on fire

set in the blackened cave, hearth-high, before us

gyrates in flames

our fireplace frames.

Prometheus we thank. May warmth restore us!

Yet warmth is less

my gain, I guess,

than image wild of light and color dancing.

Battening on such

I feel in touch

with all the dead who found this show entrancing.

Beth, drop your book

a moment. Look

scarce feet away where, threatening in upheaval,

this snarling beast

who’d on us feast

rages as it has raged since age primeval.

Devious-designed,

it steals my mind!

striking its mystic thrall beyond all reason.

For what use, thought

when torch’d onslaught,

reaming my soul, leaves nothing real to seize on?

Its bright renown

I would set down.

In words I’d cage its fantasies diverse.

Beauty its heart!

But how impart

by canvas, photograph, or feeble verse?

Vain is my rhyme.

Outside of time,

outside the power of art to paint or tell

now do we know

its potent glow

and joy to lose ourselves beneath its spell.

As Opposed to Bats

The way a hawk hangs on banks of air

the fierce gaze unhooded into the sunk sphere

whose firelight, gone alchemic, gilds the rude grace

of the swept head inexorable between the raggedly torn

spanning of tireless wings

(now just

see the way it takes with stretch of slack ease

all elements into its vast embrace)

—pondering final things,

is this not how one of woman born

likewise best

hangs anywhere?

Who, like a squeaking, webbed and radar’d rat,

flock-minded in flight

cave-careening under the cover of night

would all by