To put one’s affairs in order,
to ponder and articulate,
to ejaculate and swim,
to lug, muddling,
the heavy bodies
our minds are
through emulsifying
tedium and industry,
to be all ears,
to have eyes
in the back of our heads,
to wear our hearts on our sleeves,
to be operatic and porous,
submissive to susceptibility,
mounted by curiosity,
to invite wonder,
to wander ‘round
castles of our own
making, modest, yet baroque,
to capitalize upon the acoustic plenty
we find therein, to ambush our muses,
to push them up against the wall,
as, sultry, domineering and
obedient to octave shifts and
crescendo we commit
to memory and come
to know song by heart,
to consent to being governed by vision,
by seeing what sticks
to the wall when we
catapult it, to fling
our souls into the ring
like a line into surf,
like the flesh of a tomato
going up against
ancient granite,
is to sing ourselves to dream.
And when we sling our souls
forth, their ripe mettle combusts.
Chains sound, the drawbridge
is lifted and towering carillons
resound as accompaniment
to our crossing over into the life of
hurtling death we live
which finds its way into
the concerto. It’s our occupational hazard
to guess. But in any case
the scherzo’s on us.
There’s no getting around it.
You’re always Keats or Yeats,
young in middle-age, immature
in dotage, dashing, in your way,
on your own, in your own way,
your own worst enemy,
your own insurance policy.
Sure, you were fluid once,
but in the end, you are fluent.
If you are lucky, you are
venerable but lust
still, not dead
on the beach,
a good looking corpse,
your work in crates,
your joy disseminated,
attaching where you never would
have expected, the incantations
of your divine tribe taking root
underground, in bloom,
a sharp-looking legend,
whose work is perfectly laid
down upon cross-
thatched cross-
hairs — all fruition, friction,
and operatic luster
(“Da mi colori!“ .)
who were once wily and outsmarting,
with a fine command of perspective,
an all-knowing god in tight pants,
peeling off, flexing jacked-up imagination,
guns out. If you are still here,
still listening, maybe you’re venturing
to guess that maybe lumbering
the distance, unencumbered
by all the times you didn’t get it
right, or get it down
is possible. Growing old,
once an anathema,
is looking pretty
good about now.
The rope-a-dope
tuckers one out,
naturally, but you’re still
fighting Irish
when the bell goes off,
you go off into
action, pummeled as you are
into an ample tenderness.
You’re a great white dope
in love with the holy
Word. In the
mix, you are
in the
clear as a bell’s
echo, delicious
in your way,
no longer in your own way,
armed with ornery
fervor and a few
worthy combinations capable
of ripping away whatever
ropes you’re up against.
You make a loop of their twine
to fashion not a noose
but a curved means of reining in
stars to gather as you gallop
toward the celestial vault
that you might
do with them
what you will —
You’re a god,
peeling
away, like a bell,
pealing, off,
you’re a little
off, in your chariot, leaving
not enough blood
to kill you behind
where it mottles
the canvas, its contours indicate
the shape of crescent
moon burnt in orange,
the color of oxidation,
the ruddy color
of your Irish up,
a revisionist moon
up and ripe
for raving at,
a red moon
to remind you
that maybe waning is waxing,
automatic or waxing lyrical —
maybe it is just
as well beauty
is sacrificed
like a firstborn child
on the altar of faith
by willing participants,
the dumb chumps
who go along
with a cruel joke
a stuttering god articulates
as lust yields but is wasted
on the young,
and suckers like us
with all our expertise
in beauty who stand
by, gaping and open,
sometimes saying precious little
more than “Wow!”
with our Irish up
gaining greatest altitude
just
as the glow begins
to vanish from our flesh,
and the elasticity, which
resiliency can replace,
moves out of our
reach — but maybe
waxing is waning,
maybe beauty is nothing
more than a series of tests and
lavishments a hot and
cold running muse delivers
in a whorl without end —
a world with no end
in sight, a ravishing world
overgrown and lush,
through which,
advancing, we prance,
as, besotted with a certain fidelity
to these savory cuts of music
and the study of pulchritude
on the run, as, besotted
with fixations on surprise,
shadow, wit, mindfulness and song,
as hounded and trumped
by a fascination with what’s difficult,
we keep travelling, stuck
on trains of thought so glorious
who but a poet could possibly
know how to catch one?
We accelerate and thrum,
figuring, who but a poet
can be trusted
to conduct crucial
interviews with the engineer?
Who can be trusted
to conduct the strange adaggio,
say, of equinocturnal snow
such as this one I behold,
which in turn takes hold
of me this instant
as it transpires outside
my window
as inside the chambers
of this poet’s heart
which is one busy
pump tonight.
The flakes fail
to sail straight
but rather they slalom
curvaceous in a downward
waltz at the behest of
gravity, their lacey
voluptuousness aglow
as they tumble and land
with an unheard thrash
upon early shoots of hell-
bent crocuses, which may be
seen and construed
as the frozen upshot of
God’s shooting from the lip,
the aftershock only poets
even if nodding off
in chairs before fires
making love in their dreams
can hear, for their fires are still
going below, their pilot
lights are still blue:
their angel vehicles are still
aloft as ever, eternal dirigibles
amid a marbled firmament, afloat
in a variegated field
of nacreous noctilucence,
amid the ramous circuitry
that reminds me a bit
of those black limbs
encased in ice
my neighborhood pear
tree brandishes; they
overlay an under
drawing which burns
with astonishing ordinary
beauty in my icy fenestral vista:
a modest scene adequately
lovely to incite lachrymal
wetness, depicted, as if in oil,
which right angles and
perimeters my window frame,
delineate, limit and set
apart. Glassed-over
rounding off of new buds
frozen in clear swells
form barely visible molds
of ready green that reached
early from shoots but stopped short,
stunned in the frigid clench
of a casement that is doomed
to cave in under
the weight of light
and the warmth
its live limbs dispatch
in the interest of releasing
dormant verdure from its trans-
lucent, transparent confinement
giving way to an arching rhapsody
of swollen tips, lips, fists
against the death winter
doesn’t always have to be.
A bright backlash follows
having waited so long
for the “go ahead” —
The waxing heat
comes as it may,
comes as it can,
armed with explosive
wetness and romping
pulse with which we,
O, supple bards,
have some sense of
what to do. It is for this
reason we may decide
we might be wise
to stick around a while
if only to see
what develops,
knowing all
too well
the inspiration
that is ours
doesn’t come
cheap,
but it comes.
"capularis" -- Latin for having one foot in the grave.