July 2023

 notes: minor edits to I, II, IV, V, VII, IX; added X (1/28/10) and XI (2/9/10) at the end.

Here is a wound that never will heal, I know,
Being wrought not of darkness and a death
But of a love turned ashes & the breath
Gone out of beauty; never again will grow
The grass on this scarred acre.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay

I

Poetry as she lay dying whispered, "all of this! a ruse for fools!" then bitter peace chased pain's courageous mask, leaking bloodstained tears: i shuffled near, to sigh with her fading soul.

despite his wars, History had never lost so much before, nor ever any better; beside his drooping frame i dripped my gloomy legs into her earthy grave. shallow sympathy: i, with so few years, could never comprehend such grief.

perambulating shores excogitating ponderous oblivion, i asked "where will she go?" and then, momentous as such pastel sky, the Sea! took up my dirge within his birds: in haunting, salty cries and beady eyes.

i woke to find such partial men who live their years without all Three. they never know! lost is the further life, within: as triune silhouettes are these dreams deep within the forest's shade, where trees are thoughts! but oft forgot these Three, whence all my ancient seedlings sprang.
 
II

well: since the death of Poetry, History has stayed inside his books and shelves, eking solace from the complex carpet shadows. i sat with him today and heard how we have built such boxes for ourselves; the deep wall-creeping shadows seemed to agree.

i took a walk to ask the Sea such things: he moves oh, ceaselessly and as we surged along he said it's true! the saddest thing he ever sees (and i think he must see everything) are shores--made not of sand and time, but marble stone glass porcelain and plastic metal, or convenience: we bottle him and everyone.

then, still-standing in their absence i thought of you, o departed Poetry. you would have had such answers and behind them and around them you would write such slim smiles in your sparkling cavernous eyes. yesterday the world, i'd say, it smelled such of bright fall and the deepest joyful death. ah, how the leaves depart this world! but i had wished you would not be the same.

III

"i would have wept with her," i told the Sea for she was dead! but he unsmiling showed me shores where men learn not to weep.

IV

i lingered by the fog-damped rocks pulling on sweet thick Spring. oh, content & numb; little seeing, little feeling, sleep-thinking but aware!--and yet i pause, blinking: aware of whom? not the Sea far off, laughing to shore with such momentum! he echoes thinly through the thickening wood. nor History in his dusty libraries and war-sodden battlefields (how they strain now to bloom!--most splendid of the Aches). no, not them.

but Poetry? not she that died! this, too--there was no Muse, no wordish stem blossoming in so much Spring--dead, was gentle Poetry. yet as i languid lay, dazed, intervened between deep forested cathedral sunlight and the moistened cool of living stone: ghost-apparent beauty swept her frigid vacant hair under my breath. no words had she! who was Death's finest charge--but i can no more mistake than Hellenistic warriors miss Athene; shape-shifting goddesses both, sweet Poetry in mute spirit-skin i knew.

V

i traveled to the Sea--and oh, how she dances, though not for i nor anyone: ripples upon ripples, capricious, consuming, delicate, aloof. i lost myself in stares.  in other dreams i'd seen the Sea with naked masculinity, but here: she: mother, sister, lover, confidant.

and i knew places: under her, protected by her, owned with quiet jealousy, where rest great living rocks on velvet floors man's feet have never touched--ah, but even i hope not to comprehend! stupefying monolith, palatial jewel, one solid Titan stone: built when Earth herself wrinkles forth green land. we snorkel past their tips like molecules, and they--stone clouds entrapped!--themselves mere pebbles, skipped across the wide, wide, terrifying Mother Sea. how could we understand?

but i've heard too of days when Father Sea was cruel Poseidon: heartless Sea-god, as unsilenced survivors, tale-tellers, whisper terrified, long ashore. i've seen violence done the Sea as well: fierce motors rend his harsh, terrific hide, forcing great ship-beasts forward; the churning wake a scar across his great, momentous peace.

shadow-man i stand as magistrate: distant ocean stones tell with silent honesty of Mother Sea's sweet tranquility; yet nearby birds betray their biased witness with the passion of their telling--all is not always warm and bright and well with great Sea-god! i weigh the matter carefully, but in the end abstain: who could judge, sweet Poetry, absent your distant joy?

i only know i've seen tall sister-sails glide upon the Sea's clear shimmer-skin; pass in grace and slip along her body, held by his wind and buoyancy. who could say, who could say? surely we hope not to understand.

VI

in dismal grey i wandered back, along the aimless cobblestones, breathing shallow thoughts. days stretched into weeks, months: my slow soul slept. i took up drinking, which made me hunger; took up smoking, which made me thirst. the drab brick walls closed in around, and City growled low and menacing, chasing me toward gloomy hills.

i met History in a cemetery, pause-walking in unkempt grass; he stooped to right a heavy-fallen headstone. we pondered on along, stride for step, and i asked him how long, dear friend, how long--have we lost forever Poetry? he told me gently Death is jealous of his own, and always has.

we came to a river, dark and rushing, and found the Sea quite weak within; he told us of a partial man who'd leapt to Death upon his bulk. i listened quietly and walked apart, leaving two silent forms behind: shattered triune, sharing grief to keep mere memories alive.

if only had the Sea's poor partial man been whole!--but ah, cruel Death is jealous of his own.

and i thought of you, o departed poetry: how you would have wept and come to joy, in your cavernous gentle eyes.

VII

History had fallen far behind, standing with the Sea; i was alone. and then:

brilliance! a sudden spear-splash of bright, deep orange! Olympian color-cascade throbbing life and energy: i stood below, i stood aside, i cringed against the splendid weight upon my awe-struck retinas.  such, such familiar thrill, deep-moving and alive!--too like my own lost Poetry. i turned away, marked by this.  but ah! greater luminence beyond, beside, below!: pure blue, indominitable strength; velvet purple, transcendent royalty. great beauty, beauty, in raw nudity of light and form--i could neither stand, nor fall; neither look nor turn away. 

at that i knew what words could not. this--beauty of sight, Unnamed, unknown to me. and from its surging elegance strode a mortal shade, one like me, grey, unwhole. we paused, eye-locked in examination; question; mutual intrusion. it came to me that here, these overwhelming visions quite surrounding, were to this shadow form what poetry had been to me: and more, and greater, throughout and far within. she spoke, and her voice carried sweet light within: "traveller, sorrow surrounds you; visit here; draw comfort from Beauty visible."

sitting, we marvelled silent together for days or years; all the while, Beauty visible swept great color-flames around us and within. eventually i slept, and woke alone.

VIII

the day before she died Poetry set her meager house in order; i was there and said to her, "you need not do this terrible thing! you may yet live tomorrow, as today!--" and she with eye-flash silenced me. we emptied waste bins, locked the cabinets and set dust-cloths over furniture. quickly, quickly: sweeping floor-boards, folding shirts and collars, pressing sheets into deep drawers, tugging basemented knobs to stop the running water. i'd never seen her move before so somber, silent, sentient, so wrought with nervous energy. and at the end she stood quite still, centered in the largest room, looking carefully around. this was Time unlike all other--despaired of Mercy, jealous Death pacing without. "i cannot wait," she said, yet dared not rush ahead.

after her death i self-discovered this as Poetry's parting gift to us: she had left behind for us no need to sear our hearts with going through these earthy things.

IX

at early evening, i stood apart to gather my thoughts in. near me stretched three long, thin trees; and in them stretched a long, tall wind.

oh, put me next to windows! put me next to everything clear and busy and full of tall, thin time. for time is everything! see those who climb the long stairs quickly, they pause for breath: that is time. this, too, is time: an hour, a month, a year of pauses, one year of looking to the door with hope. time is Age, who sits above me speaking slow and full of words. he speaks of you, and he knew you, Poetry! he speaks with love of you. but time is everything, he said: you must understand how absolutely time is everything. i dare say History has said the same.

and i've heard preachers--atheists and tragedicians mostly now, who never saw you breathe: yet they are absolved, truly guiltless! they've only gambled so many sides to lose, you see. it's Age who taught me to know them so, dear Poetry; who taught me theology, taught me love! who pulled back long velvet curtains to reveal the broken innocence of helpless ignorance--and there behind, Age showed me love for us! such love for us, oh love for us! how we are loved!--and he says that too is time: everything is time, love: love too is time. and ignorance is time. childhood is time. you & i, and he, great color, Beauty visible and all gray Asides: we too are time. long, thin trees and wind within: ah, but time, time, time.

gathered, gathered! harvested in, here are my thoughts, broken, full of ignorance, empty as yet of time. oh thoughts are never finished; for thoughts, too, made all of time; such long, long, terrifying time.

X

midnight, velvet dark: i stand upon an empty theater's empty stage, looking back--oh, deep within these brick intestines lies great life, withheld. musk-energy seeps liquid from these walls, the scent of elegant pretense; and before me, light-spot upon the splintering stage, lies the mask!

oh tragedy, grandeur, insanity! romance, thrill! every arena-seat a throbbing tendril, every curb-light unwinking eye, every balcony detail true gold in our twilight of belief. there is a bow, bent forward to the chill of thunderous applause, silent shrill within my ribs. great Performance attends his shrine--

and yet there is no swelling greatness here. i descend the empty stage to stride the empty aisle's slow ascent. and the mask remains astage:

XI

"i cannot live this way," i heard deep History say by the shore-side rocks: "we cannot abide without her." i looked out far upon the Sea's terrific hide and saw that he agreed.

"i would have wept with her," i confessed, for She was dead! but teh Sea unsmiling showed me shores where men learn not to weep; and silent History gravely told of times that taught the same.

"what will you do?" i asked--i tried--but no words came. before the thought had passed i knew no answer ever came to mourners such as we.

"lost, too, once was Beauty Visible," i heard in memory-voice. compassionate shade spoke quietly in my ear: "do not despair," telling of such holy momentum i have yet to witness.

"whence this motion?" i pleaded of my gentle friend; "and where shall we arive?" and she: "ask those who yet remain--"--and all my memory slipped to deaf-mute blindness.

yet back upon the shore--

"you shall now hear less of us," History admitted, holding hands together before his terrible chest. i knew at once: holy momentum, sweet desperation, refusing to despair. "you enter now a time like any other, yet--much less; far less," and he turned away.

and i found myself upon the distant plain, far from the Sea, aware of History's shallow absence. all surround were dying trees, thin shadows: unwhole shades; i knew myself to be alone. Apathy and Cynicism swept dreaded free and near. i hid myself and longed to weep--but i had learned.

XII

My face is a wall. My face is a piece of lead. My fingers fit this table in perfect crescent contradictions; I am History, spoken. The Sea has passed. The Sea has dried himself to salt and so much foreign land, all terrific motion laying still. We speak of Poetry, who is lost to us. Lost to me. For I am a stone. I am a crevice in your long-forgotten skyline.

XIII

Wisdom met me on the stairs: "History too has died," she spoke from a handshake face, and in the void that next possessed me quoted, "Vanity, vanity," until in numb indifference i departed. i cannot now recall whether she wore a white gown or stood nude--it seems to matter very little--for History and the Sea followed down to Death her sister Poetry.

XIV

listen; oh, listen, all of you, for now i must depart:

you are small children, each one of you, composed of triune silhouettes, laid deep within a forest gloom--oh, you are ghosts! you are shades! each one of us trip'ly composed of greater Images: yet even these do not eternally remain. i have mourned lost Poetry while i held the hand of History and felt the Sea within--but i have seen another, wrapped in Music and Philosophy, who knew the Mountains deep enclosed; and another! for my father dealt in Music, too, but his mind followed Math--and the Wind propelled him ever on. there are so many others; and always, always--we stand between three trees, and in the bark we carve their names with languages none other understands; yet for each of us they are the same: Nature, Curiosity, Love. deny your maker and all love as you shall, small children, yet you shall ever find your heart within this forested cathedral shade--

i must depart, i must depart. i go to find them, children; to Death i follow these, my images, companions--Life, himself.

XV

in milky dark i slowly separate the sounds outside my window-screen. one sound of air belongs without; another belongs within. they fill my body full with little things: the rush of sheets, a misdrawn breath, pockets of unwarmed air. in time i learn the languages of night and carry all to sleep.

in sleep i die, to slumber-wake alone in the grand concourse catacombs of Death, smelling the moisture of stone; stalactite drips scatter thin and light their eternal hesitance: a fairy sound, high-pitched echo weaved close between the folds of deep, blind silence. i linger here, healed by the musky stillness of ancient air. ah, Death: you take the finest for your own.

lightless i see through sound the soaring chasm stretching far above me. within its vastness i am miniature, terrified by the crushing weight of size. what is the Earth, but huge? and what is Dark, but infinite? there is no safety from the unimagined horror of enormity.

XVI

Late she comes to me: all is in void and shadow. She is a precious thing, she is a prick of light along a thick and fallow body, she is a face against a window. I am hideous in her presence; I cannot look away.

Muse, Muse: she approaches, withdraws, extends a hand of endless grace, thin fingers laced between the glisten-dust of her light. "Traveler," she whispers, and turns: oh, the shattering Beyond of her voice!  I am crushed, I am made, I am destroyed and thrown to death and drawn, drawn, ever in!

And for these eternal moments I am free, I am weightless, I am innocent in my grave un-being. Those that surround remain frozen in the length of an endless second; Muse slips within, immaterial, to my horror and ecstasy. "Traveler, you journey not far." Not far, no!, echo her words down the long valley of my spirit.

Muse, Muse! Ever-shifting, now apparent, now terrible, unreliable, unthinking, loyal adulterer, she is a thunderclap, an avalanche, a fog in forgotten hills. Her treacherous eyes pull love and terror from the hollow of my chest.

Then: I am upon a lawn close-kept, beside a perfect dirt path which runs around a dark pedestal. Cypresses line this narrow hallway, thick brooding clouds solid above. I stand to find the pedestal holds a thin bowl of gleaming black water, and in its perfect ripples--

"You journey not far." Muse, Muse! Eternity splits; time, sweet time spills through and rushes in, my mocking Muse laughing afar; I am again within the grip of all surrounding; the weight bears down upon me and I wake again to the dark echoes of this dim cavern, Death.

XVII

into the chasm of time that is my life's commute i drip my words, in obscure piece-driven slow pursuit of meaning eked from these blank, mounding minutes. for years i've missed my deep soul-patrons, they having left me high ashore (or i left them: i'm never sure), but seldom do i miss them more than here.

once or twice i've dreamt the brush of Poetry, shrouded in a gentle face jostled about by the train's foul mob and sway--and i admit she might have been: though always, in the end, i find she's lost amid the crowd.

then again: i've seen her, too, in the dust-shone light of a train coming in underground where we wait for it, we wait for it, checking our watches in a bump-up fight for place against the space-drop down to the tracks below. she's there, in the open volume where the ceiling accommodates the platform above us we rode in--despite the screech and rush, i find her peace in that glowing air. the light belongs to her, as she to all.

--then through the hole. the train plunges out and towards us, a narrow miss, and promises us home. we're carried forth, to the mundane life, Poetry in that moment of light left behind: and yet--

at dinner i subdue the imaginations of my day to favor thoughts of the less ideal. i take my meals alone, now, at a mirrored table whose reflections of my face betray the cheap resentment of my frozen loneliness. i never sat alone like this before to eat.

what differences divide, like desolated platform stops, the tracks that string together this exile and entombment? some few, i think: but not decay (which binds the soul before the body starts to go), not idleness, not the dull morbidity of an empty face. we are quite closely dead, we many who are alone.

and yet, we're thus in temperament more than truth. this solitude is a counter-preference, sociality deferred to times that we control. our species does abound, after all: it is my hesitance to meet my neighbors, to greet a woman on the train, that so exiles. this, and theirs to do the same. we live in angles of self-and-else resistance: and so, crowded all alone.

and so at length to sleep, although each passing night i ask the dark what more composes History than time's untiring, vectoral thrust. we pile on these many evenings, then find a year is gone; then a decade, then a life; what's more to History, then? yet echoed against the walls i hear the answer spoken in my own voice, and Poetry close beside.

(3/2011)

Away, away, mercenary machine, out from under your Pittsburgh sky; your paper engine drives you forth--and yet you hang behind. You left your heart on a rusted hill, in renaissance graffiti on crumbling alley walls: green cartoon words from a bitter youth, and yet they still survive. "I would have wept with her," you told the Sea, and he unfeeling showed you shores--but no. No! Rather, we grim things, our souls of stone & metal: away, march away--we mercenary machines!

(5/2011)

i believe in trains--trains and moving things that bind us in a stench, a crush, a tossed together cacophony of human limbs and heads. it beats our sterilized obnoxion, our childhood terror of the deep-brow stranger...

i believe in filth, i take it on as the most monumental of all human creations. after all, it is: why disown what we made (except, says the sour-faced agnostic: perhaps we were made in that image). perhaps you were; not i. wherever you find humans you find filth: i, honoring humans, drink deep the cup of our disease. no wallowing, for gluttons perish first--but drink the unwashed cup, eat the uncooked meal, smell the evidence of our staggering survival.

not out of pride: only History has taught we ever drank and ate and smelled the same. i'll not be fancied more than purer bloods in such a cheapened age.

(10/2012)

"On her deathbed"--
and I withdraw
to History's arrogant spire
indecently indifferent
reading these, my life's events
as in a dull book.
Judge not: withhold
your intent to condescend.
We all do this when seeing clearly
what and where we are;
I spread such pains
and subsequent joys throughout
these many memories loved and feared.

Well, that's all imaginary.
When Joe's mother nearly died
Brandon repeated his assessment--
that sounds "exhausting,"
to chorused low-note murmurs
from a surround of dramatic sympathetics.
"I had a friend in high school once
in great shape, got pneumonia
went to the hospital for a month,"
"Oh God, the fungal type will
Kill you,"--suppressed emotions
seeming reproduced from last week's
more exuberant review of sports,
they sound like they are trying to
sound somber, take this seriously.
I decline to comment, shy of my
black philosophy on life's ongoing death,
regarded as one more normal thing we do, like
sex, or birth, or eating, or the toilet.
Nothing Joe wants to hear
right now, nor should.

In the fall I often think of death:
my own, my lover's, my mother's,
my children's (although they are,
as yet unborn, so safe from death)--
to practice grief, which likely will be faked.
I cannot separate the normal
from itself! I expect us all to die
as a condition of our current life
and thus decline to be surprised at its result.

We are leaves upon the tree;
in the autumn
we colorfully descend.
Others shuffle past,
remark demurely on pastels
and forget. Seasons,
and trees, carry on.

(7/2015)

The silence of expectance, a paltry tale slowly scrolled across unread banners, chides the parched and uninspired soul: no artist ever was, who lived unforced as their own images portrayed.

Resting as I do at the foot of massive walls and heavy furniture, I hopelessly recall the genius of my youth. In laying prostrate upon my bedroom floor, I held a baseball in my hands and suddenly understood Size--the horrifying, helpless enormity of Earth and our own insignificant molecularity. I shuddered then in terror and now regret I have not since.

And yet I do become aware as well of the parallel design of Time--the slow quickness with which our many years unpromised pass. A child is born who wears his father's smile, and a joy-filled face looks out upon a newborn world as it has not for thirty years; a tree is felled five decades hence and warms the brick-lined fireplace all bitter winter long.

And I remember, too, a time before I knew Poetry, a time of baseballs and the gravity of high-branched trees. I recall, too, she for whom I met dear Poetry, and she for whom I tried to chain her down.

All History, this, I suppose: my darkened, aging eyes weakly piercing fog that's long accrued. And: the smell of Sea, his salted wind in California eucalyptus trees, felt in the cool damp sand of my earliest childhood, a playground by the beach with a young mother I then barely knew--and to History I tender the whispered hope that someday the inheritor of my childhood grin will also carry some similar, morning-cooled memory and scent in his different soul.

(10/2016)

Beauty is a Truth
and has always been,
like Nature, a Thing Revealed.
Cartographers, you know, do not create
rivers, forests, clear mountain passes;
so, too, is the poet: a student, a passerby.
And, of course, what's now revealed
will be someday long lost:
the hidden treasure
(now gilded with a gift shop)
will lose itself once more for our dirt-
caked adventuring descendants to find.
I'd have it no other way!
What's the merit otherwise? Why else
do humans pursue Physics or Medicine?
Unless these endeavors briefly hoist back
the massive curtain hiding Truths
we young brief beings want to know, however
short it may be we live to see
these Truth-exposed times.
Poetry is only mortal! Thank God!
And yet somehow sometimes
she still reveals That Which Is--
somehow sometimes she is a puncture
in the fabric of Unknowing.

(9/2017)

Late at night she comes to me,

Apathy with her silvern voice--

"Why do these sons of men persist,"

she sighs, "in all their pointless ways?

From dust they come, to dust return--

they, and all their works, their fears

and loves, never to remain.  Why then

the dogged struggle, the frightful will

to persevere?  Struggle and be still!"

I cannot answer, but in defiance I remain

silent, as a whisper stirs within me--

"Heed her, my child, but only for

the beauty of the charge: why

do frail men persist and strive, except

for courage, hope--for the reflection

they may cast of their creator?  Why,

indeed--but for the beauty held

only by fleeting things?" And as it fades,

History and the Sea appear at some remove,

with awe and desperate hope within:

is this then Poetry, this unsilent voice,

who gently insists on hope in the very

bosom of despair! At long last, is this

then how she returns? She does not answer

yet I know her presence by the deep dawn 

of calm hope and resilient joy, flooding

through my cavernous Within. "Good

morning," I tender, "how I have missed you!"
And with these words I know at last.

(6/2021)

"The death of Poetry," I wrote--

but then she died again.

The imagined death, I guess

was destined to repeat itsef

but how do ideas die twice?
Or save ideas, but sacrifice

habits, motions, motivated acts;

children thereof, and leave the idea

neutered, toothless, bereft, adrift.

What then, of the second death?
Or does it prove itself only

a false idea that never was:

she never died, nor even changed,

set me no differently upon the Erath 

than I had been before.  So what?

Only silence, to self-admit I made it up;

I cast the shadow on myself.

More even than the death of her,

now I lose the loss of her: I lose

a cherished grief, that last memorial

burned to ash with inner fire

leaving only nameless pain.

How could Poetry die? No,

I'd only mourned the hope

for future heartbreaks and their muse

upon whose adrenaline shores

such wild adventures thrived.

And now, darkly possessed

by knowledge of my self-deception

what's left to do? To nobly mourn?

No nobility remains.  So then, I turn

an expressionless face to a silent God

and try to feel remorse.

Among the curls of smoke, the

charred embers of the last memorial,

no answer alights upon me;

but the next dawn slips into view,

then the next, and the next.

I leave all this to gather

dust in a garden shed,

in a forgotten weeded corner

of an orchard now abandoned

I only imagined in my mind.

And I find that I now live upon the shore

where men learned not to weep.

(6/2022)

"No!" She laughed at me, eyes wild and fierce.  "Poetry never dies.  Only poets do!" Then through a dark reflection I saw it all anew: she had never died except to me.

(7/2022)

Poetry found me when I had not asked for her

wan and listless, dreaming of dreaming

and with a savage shake she woke me--

the ruse had always been myself.

Her salvation was destruction: collapse:

among the rubble she met me, all in white:

see how I am the oxygen, the light,

the fires and the world that I consume!--she breathes

and thrusts the pen back into my trembling hand.

(4/2009)

Then I came back, from nowhere I think, in the first breath of air after too long under water. Love poured through from nowhere and I stood in sun-stunned wonder. Nowhere had I been, now everywhere was. The cynic's breath upon my neck was faint--but what's more: no longer escaping from my own lips.