Gnosis

And he wept when, rending his chest
at the thought of his base design,
he found not filth, but a thing blest
as gold, a gold itself divine,
nor a possession or a thing,
but golden light that travels on,
transitory, yet undying,
an endless light—eternal dawn.

A Tyger’s Contempt

Walking at noon, cane counting the meter
alongside a messy woods, the deadfall
hung like severed limbs that sway and teeter
as Spring blooms from within Winter’s dead hall.

The cat is a shadow between the trees,
sleekly stalking along a fallen limb,
the sun is high, the day golden, the breeze
steady and smooth, with a feline rhythm.

She must see mice creeping through last year’s leaves
as she hunkers down in a stance to pounce
like a gargoyle on cathedral eaves—
blood better than milk, to her, ounce for ounce.

Lithe, lethal, striped by shadows from the trees
as she leaps so high with her claws spread wide,
then clutching her prey, the mouse caught with ease,
an easy swagger in her Tyger stride.

And I hobble onward, after the kill,
seeing in my mind’s eye the acrobat
that sprung so lissome, though before so still,
mouse now in the praying paws of the cat.

The cat leaves me the head of the dead mouse
at my doorstep, her green eyes fixed on me
as I limp up the steps, into my house.
Is this a Tyger’s contempt? It may be…

Sleepless

I’m apart from, and a part of, the rain,
and the echo that becomes the refrain,
the noir neon light, the rainy late night,
a darksome skull, its deep dreams gleaming bright
until the morning when that windowpane
should gloss over and the contrast should wane
in the new day’s dawn, shadows taking flight
from that electric district of the brain.

War Soliloquy

“There be no mercy here. There be no pardon.
No haloes have we in the clemency of saints arrayed, but with mane of the lion haloed, and given to crimson appetite such as begets bestial slaughter. Beg off.  Beg off with thy entreaties to gentler nature, for we’ve none, but with fang and claw keenly paired giveth unto surfeit that rage innate in all whom so wronged seeketh recompense. This is reckoning inexorable in its numeration. Doff thy fleece. Doff thy fleece, for poorly it becometh thou. Prepare thyself as well may prepare the sexton. A roar, though deafening as thunder, is but the death of an ear soon reconciled with a truer silence. And that silence shall follow fast. Take what comfort thou may in that surcease. Mouth the words of braver men. Mouth the prayers of thy Lord, should he proffer ear to hear. No Daniel walks here, unafraid, nor would such as he escape wrath such as ours. The den resounds, thou bleating fool. We come. By fang and claw we shall slake the thirsty dust with thy meager make. Believe no shade of doubt in this, for it conceal thee not. By day or night, villain, we see thee clear and, as hound to mark, seeketh unrelentingly. Whether thou art steadfast in grim resoluteness toward thy end, or whether thou flee far from sudden battlefield, we shall pursue. As hound afoot or crow alight, we pursue thy bountiful blood. Doubt it not. The clarion of war ringeth as the sky in revolt. Lo, it soundeth in every thirsting throat.”


(Recently I have been reading Shakespeare’s more confrontational moments in his plays, such as Macbeth and Macduff’s fight scene, and I wanted to attempt something in the Shakespearean vein. With minimal success.)

To Ezra Pound

Were you to have seen the ovens
your hard tongue would have burned to ash,
you devil, lecturing covens
as the fulgurous blitzkriegs flash.
Across your adopted homeland
you exulted while others warred,
having no honor, a Roman
who would not fall upon his sword,
even after his unjust wrath
had been thwarted by apt measure
like Commodus slain in his bath,
a tyrant cleaved to his pleasure.
What good songs you sang are lost,
deafened by your erudite cries
of hatred, bigotry—mind lost
in rooms padded with your own lies.
The lunatics sang behind you,
electroshock troopers plugged in,
the asylum leader in view,
his thunderclap voice a loud din
that quickened Europe’s stagnant blood
and swept you across the ocean,
your own heart racing forth, aflood
with a Modernist’s crass notion
about “betterment”, “perfection”,
Aryan teleologies,
the irony of your lection
being bad Aristophanes.
Eliot, Yeats, Woolf, and others
embosomed you with their regard,
sympathetic to such brothers
who despised those whom were ill-Starred
and though I might forgive them such
as was wont in that insane age,
you, villain, were not half so much
repentant on your prideful stage.
Some claim you recanted your songs
so thunderous with cannon force,
but even if true, how can wrongs,
once done, not continue their course?
They are as birds within a cage
set free, their talons stretched apart
to clutch the world with a sharp rage;
thunderbolts thrown into the heart.
You cannot outrace the echoes
that fly away from bygone words,
no more than may a weed beck those
seeds carried far by passing birds,
or passing storms, or fell ages,
the seeds sprouting roots and shoots far
and blooming fast, necrophages
of blood and soil spilled from a Star.

Mere Words

Fling a handful of words
against the chill rain,
fling the choicest words
into the dark, ash-throated fireplace
and see if they kindle a flame
to keep off the wintry cold.
Cast a lifetime of mellifluous words
into the river
and haul up a fish,
a minnow,
a meager leaf.
Overspread your whole language
as the arches in a roof to keep dry
one’s head
or, lesser, a blanket
on your bed
as you shiver in the nighttime storm.
My words fail
to do what my father’s wordless hands have done.
I have never built a home of words,
but my father has built a
life for me,
a life more easily lived,
a life distracted by
words,
head-down in study,
transfixed by scribbled ink
on flimsy paper,
my
smooth fingers on smooth pens,
never looking up with proper gratitude
for the wood his calloused fingers worked
to shoulder aside the brunt
of elemental onslaught—
to keep my head down,
to attempt to reach higher realms
beyond wood and fingers and ink,
and still I fail.

Bridlepath

Thunderous the too-distant hooves
along the softened bridlepath,
countless the many horseshoe grooves
in the twilight, the aftermath,
and half-awake I but wander
that sylvan lane wherethrough may pass
dreams aplenty over yonder—
a pilgrimage, a dusk-flown Mass.

A Man In His Castle

My father declined to cut down the trees
where he built his beloved sylvan home,
thinking them a fortress against the breeze,
or the columns of ancient Greece or Rome,
but as the March windstorm shrieks like banshees
I watch, and worry, in the early gloam
and think of the courtier, Damocles,
while trees fall like swords from their vaulted dome.