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SEPTEMBER 1998 (con't)
16.
Who answered the call?
Who is the gracious dancer?
The mirrored walls are empty—
Hushed,
Trusting now
In a languid sweeping turn
In a lush dip
Deep in swoon
He leans back
I look up—
Death is my partner,
Death the seductive dancer
Faceless
Now
That the music stopped—
Unheld
Unholding
In the intimate courting
I behold
A tart pomegranate promise—
17.
In overload with being
The spirit somnambulant
Twists—twists again
And then
A shudder
A faint scream
And the membrane
Splits—
Wings in seasonal stupor
Remember how
To unfold—
A taste—
Raw metallic pungent iodine—
Pushes up the spine
Stops at mid-point zero
And the iodine terror
Erupts volcanic into bliss—wings
Inhale the world—tips
Span the distance between
Doom and Salvation—
And it's over.
There is no other news to bring back
From the either/or pivotal divide—
It is there.
18.
A bird alights
On my shoulder—
"Quick,
A choice has to be made
A knife to be sharpened
A sacrifice to be offered!"
But how to cut self in half
Along that zero divide
When contraries interlock like
The halves of a seed?
"Kill the darling et ceteras!"
Somebody please
Halt this raised arm
Knife in hand—
Like Simon
Perched atop a pillar driven
Into the flaming ground,
I offer my argument to the stars.
Like Simon
Bone naked
Hermetic in his pensive fury
I hold my breath—
"Trust water
Trust the long arm!"
In the pinched commerce of
Communication
Samuel Beckett shouts
From atop his private pillar
"Fail again, fail better!"
So I will Mr. Beckett
So I will until
Something will
Thrust itself into credulity—
Tell me,
Is the stone
On which the myth is carved
Still quarried?
19.
The taste of peasant bread
On my tongue
A distant confluence.
The scent of apples
In the narrows of being
Of birthing—
"Salt in the wound is
Bread in hand is
Wine in the cup."
The taste of wine
A quicksilver wave
Massive luminous
Wipes the slate clean
Stabs the ocean mirror-still.
Up in the stratosphere
A tall river shimmers
Cascading
Down over smooth river stones
Lazy when passing the reeds
Lazy deep on the plains
Where a hush skims the delta
Spills a sigh into the shimmer
The haze
A horizon—
A green drop of dew
On a green blade leans
Into water.
The blade dips
The drop slips and
Ripples a smile
On water.
Resting
In the cool morning grass
I ride a cloud.
The cloud stops
I move on
My destination
In the breath of wind.
20.
No spectacular happiness
Has come to claim me.*5
The moon still finds me
In the arms of Mother Earth
The weeping willow still sweeps
The shadows off the cottage roof.
Re-invented at a moment's notice,
A new self
Points across the bay
Where humanity voluntarily
Strangles itself.
— Don't look back, it says
You made it across, it says.
In the long-armed healing silences
Words dip into fresh meanings
And the lean particulars
Splinter understanding beyond
Saving.
—Dance we shall, Death
Dance we shall.
Until then
Your tease and
The ease in my heart
Will keep my limbs nimble.
Earth
My mother my grave.
As long as seasons bend reason out of line
This frenzied mortal shall ride
The white-winged steed and
Graze the low and high moon meadows.
Shadow and light will carve
My face when I reach the place
Where Basho's islands gather
Where the sky rests
In water.
Let the drums roll!
*
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