When Pussywillows Last in the Catyard Bloomed (rtf) (2 page)

BRAXA

In a land of wind and red,
where the icy evening of Time
freezes milk in the breasts of Life,
as two moons overhead—
cat and dog in alleyways of dream—
scratch and scramble agelessl
у
my flight
. . .

This fin
al flower turns a burning head.

BRAHMAN TRIMURTI

I

Brahma! Creator!
Thy suppliants abound:
A diplomat,
A paranoid,
A Democrat,
A Man of Freud.
Before Thou,
Initiator,
All would bow—
Tomorrow’s door—
Create!
Renew!
Resolve!
Change things as they are.
Deflate,
Review,
Revolve!
Status quo and par.

II

Vishnu! Preserver!
Reactionaries’ forte.
Maintain!
Uphold!
Retain!
Infold!
Support the present!
Bar the change!
And hold the pleasant
Present range.
Mediocre middle!
Constant average!
To Thee we hie!
Here Thy minions bow.
Neither much nor little.
Grant our suffrage.
Hear Thou our cry:
Hold the Here and Now!

III

Shiva! Destroyer!
Eternal rebel’s liege!
Grant to wear!
Grant to bend!
Grant to tear!
Grant to rend!
Ere Thy Throne,
In legions ’round,
Madmen prone
Abound the ground.
Of lightning
And storms
Of rage
May Thy mouth partake!
With frightening
Horrorforms
A stage
For Hell and Chaos, make
!

THOUGHTS OF THE JUPITERIAN
FRANTIFIER FISH

During the “Night” Freeze
At Which Time,
Unfortunately,
Consciousness
is
Maintained by
the Fish, Who
are, Also Un-
fortunately, Quite
Intelligent and Highly
Sensitive Creatures—Alas!

i

Steep above,
the clouds have stopped,
and we are suspended
in the loss of warmth:
our frozen pond.

ii

The night is a rock
to spread wet galaxies upon .
.
.

iii

Fie! oh day!
a long night off,
and that we cannot sleep.

We hang about
till night is done—
Black day—
in eyes’ weightless prison,
seeing—

in lake’s dark lens,
exposed—

falling up pits of the sky.

iv

To tear that sky down the middle
will be more than the mind can bear

Brittle, it will break.

v

Our frantic remains
will continue the species,
in ignorance and light.

vi

Swimming, as we did,
they’ll never give a damn,
till just about this time
tomorrow night.

vii

. . . When ice before shards
is too right.

viii

And the light!

ix

The light...

x

Such
is
the
kingdom
of
ice
of
ice
such
is
the

L
OVER’S VALEDICTION:
FORBIDDING DAY’S SACRAMENT

Phlox of the liberal phoenix,
breasting towers to day,
extensive
spirit ahead—
repetitious Ananias,
forever forswearing azimuths at noon—
sinking song
in centuries of idiom overflows thy habit,
as flocked thoroughfares spend sloped shadow.

Where gnash thy left,
despairing doors,
as cosmos-meeting crusts
cover a baked vacancy,
I say,
out this emptied one,
“Absence is not eaten”.

FUTURE, BE NOT IMPATIENT

Someday, perhaps, but not this day
Sometime; but then, not now.
Man is a monument-making mammal.
Never ask me how.

SOMEWHERE A PIECE OF COLOED LIGHT

It is such a relative thing
that I am loathe to explain
this brightness as being of the sort
once attributed to the breath of a goddess
dozing just over the horizon. However,
it is also a shame to talk
of ionization and light refraction
(even if they do sort of rhyme)
when something is pleasant to look at.
These terms smack of the magical,
of the incomprehensible—
while it does seem much more likely
that somewhere a billboard-scale Princess
sleeps within a circle of flame,
dreaming kleig light coronas,
breathing plumes of neon mist. This,
somewhere beneath an almost but not-quite
familiar sky; and that she is waiting
to be awakened by the kiss
of a handsome and tireless Prince
about twenty feet tall
in his handsome and Hollywood armor.
Nice thought.

SOUTHERN CROSS
(ELEGY, HART CRANE)

My Nameless Woman of the South,
and the Spring that I accomplished you . . .

All ways one phosphor furrow, Orizaba—
All skeleton streaks one streetlamped street
. . .
But always one Spring, so South,
and all shored ways one deep drawn day,
coralling under oranged climes’ chloral bays,
spent and spelled at skulled heavens,
slappings of your tidal sands.
And always my ears will throb as stoppered bottles asea
as the one bunched pearl soul of prior suns dips by askance
when the rude rood raises your wake through night
then bends it down to a dawn
between the sob of the sea,
under the sail of the sun,
and sighed-out hissing sounds of spectered stars.

THE DE-SYNONYMIZATION OF WINTER

FLIGHT

Hilted of flame,
our frail phylactic blade
slits black
beneath Polestar’s
pinprick comment,
foredging burrs
of mitigated hell,
spilling light without illumination.

Strands of song,
to share its stinging flight,
are shucked and pared
to fit an idiot theme.
Here, through outlocked chaos,
climbed of migrant logic,
the forms of black notation
blackly dice a flame.

WHAT IS LEFT WHEN THE SOUL IS SOLD

The sting of the startled porpoise,
welting mulatto the bay’s gray belly,
brackish entrails of ocean,
wrapping the mammary reef,
nor all minnow-dried decidua,
festooned of salt excrescence,
shall barter from heaven back
that heaved corpse
—
indemnifying eagles
in peristaltic angle—
by felling fleet the flagstaff wing
on folds of stomach slough.

OUR WINTERED WAY THROUGH EVENING,
AND BURNING BUSHES ALONG IT

(Where only the evergreens whiten . . .)

Winterflaked ashes heighten
in towers of blizzard.
Silhouettes unseal an outline.
Darkness, like an absence of faces,
pours from the opened home;
it seeps through shattered pine
and flows the fractured maple.

Perhaps it is the essence senescent,
dreamculled of the sleepers,
that soaks upon this road
in weather-born excess.
Or perhaps the great Anti-Life
learns to paint with a vengeance,
to run an icicle down the gargoyle’s eye.

For properly speaking, though
no one can confront himself
in toto
,
I see your falling sky, gone gods,
as in a smoke filled dream
of ancient statues burning,
soundlessly, down to the ground.

(... and never the everwhite’s green.)

T
HE MAN WITHOUT A SHADOW

What master were he of brush or of graver, who
drew the shades and the lineaments, which
there would make every subtle wit stare?
—
Purgatoria
, Canto XII.

“Machine-like, I saw Achilles
Challenge the gods with the inevitable conflict
Of mortal desires that even the son of a god
Did not lay at the feet of those that formed him.
And I saw him lie
Like Balder spread,
With that mortal tree drawing of his fluids
And shivering against the violent sky,
Upgrown from his pierced member
Upon the darkening ground.
And their open faces sounded
While she, the distant Polyxena, sister of Cassandra,
Spoke nothing, but was believed
Of pity and known of fear.

Unbelieving, I saw Osiris
Enter the House of the Dead
On that Great Day when all the days and years
Were numbered and, yet, saw that his name
Was given back to him,
And, too, the lacerate parts
We re-formed and rose again
And strode again.
And great Isis, before those merciless members
Was undone, and unbelieving
Felt the movement of his nightclaimed torse
Those very hands
Had seen to the rending
While she played the great adultress
To a brother god.

Godlike, I saw the great Odysseus,
Wielder of the blinding brand,
Retriever of the goddess-image,
And bender of that bow,
Fall unknowing to the unknown slaughter
Of an unknown son
Of his own limbs that lay with the darkness
Of she that made men what they were
In all but flesh.
Beloved of her, the dark one,
And also beloved of her
That may never know love,
He took to race of arms
With his own, by darkness,
And fell before his dark own
That even she of the aegis could not hold.

I saw the gods walk by
In vain procession long
To the distant doom of the home
Of the eater of gods
That throbbed with the constant thunder
Of clashing teeth, tongue and jaws
That consumed their Burgundy and cakes
While bearing perpetually
Their unwanted sons.
And the gods came by in their trappings
Of yellow, purple and awful red,
And, asking that it might pass from them,
Shuffled their feet near the end
And thought of a thousand undone trivia
That lay behind, and looked furtively aside
For open doors in the labyrinth
That might lead the way away.
But when these could not be found,
Strove to bear themselves like noble men.
And the unwanted sons inherited
The lands of their fathers
When the fathers were no more
Than outlandish names and strange figures
Cast in stone, mud, wood and straw,
While the filmier integument of the earth
Yet held their horrors
Constantly stirring in green chambers.
And the universe is a blue room
Where an ever-singing woman sits
At the heart of a lotus
And plays upon a stringed instrument,
Where all these have passed and passed again,
And never turns her crimson-cowled head,
Save to the subtle nuances
Of her own melody which she
Creates for an unknown lord.
“