Poems
To a Dying Poet
Poet's Elegy
The Old Romantic
Frog-Gigging
To One Whose Fairy Castles Have Fallen
Issa
Acquaintance
Plainsong of a Frustrated Post-College Bisexual
Wasps, Which Do Not Love Their Dead
The End of Days
To
a Dying Poet
The images
are hazy now
The lines have deepened in your brow
The audience awaits your bow
You hold the stage alone;
And wonder, in the silence, where
Experience has worn you bare
And opened you to winter's air
That chills you to the bone.
And
you remember brighter times
Of fanciful and gentle rhymes
Of mournful harps and singing chimes
Of sweet and skirling flutes;
When honey-tongued the whippoorwills
Sang ballads to the emerald hills
Where sat young lovers clad in frills
And capes and velvet boots.
When
quetzal-kings and troubadours
Paraded on the padded floors
The closing of a thousand doors
Rang softly in your mind;
When piping urgéd down your eyes
And nymphs sang to you lullabies
You hearkened to the forest's sighs
But somehow fell behind.
Poet's
Elegy
The play
is over - now you lie
Among these cold sarcophagi
For so you lived, and so you die
Unseen, unloved, unknown;
While all around you unclean things
That stood by at the fall of kings
Now gather round in watchful rings
To claim you as their own.
The
tattered flags of lost jihads
The viscera of butchered gods
The stinging whips and brutal rods
That robbed you of the womb;
The bitter conquests that you played
When you were young and unafraid
Are now returned, and now are made
The trappings of your tomb.
The
audience has left the hall.
You missed your final curtain call.
Behind the scenery, the wall
Is splitting at the seams.
The epilogue that was to be
The footnote to your elegy
Is left unsaid, and you are free
To ponder what it means.
The
Old Romantic
We came
here
To find the open land, to see the sky,
To live out in the wood and breathe its air,
To take our food from the earth;
We came to forget that once we locked our doors,
And were unfailingly polite, and studied books,
And lived our lives in numbers and accounts,
And hurried quickly home. We came
here
To show that Man and Nature were the same,
To walk on wet grass in the morning, and under stars at night,
And take no more than what we could return.
We came to grow our beards,
And haunt the deep green woods like savages,
Wild and heathenish and free.
And so
they followed us
With paving-stones and iron bars and bricks,
And axes for the tall green trees, and fire,
And said the sun was too bright;
They came with money that was quickly lost,
Promising that more would come, and so it did,
Casting long shadows where it piled against the sky.
They gave us the account-books back, afraid we'd lost them,
And bade us turn in early for the night.
And so we did, with heavy hearts,
Wondering if the stars had ever been at all;
And, sadly putting our tools in the corner,
We locked our doors with heavy, useless hands.
Frog-Gigging
I remember
that far-off chilly Autumn morning
When Aaron and I rose at dawn
And took up our long spears
To tread carefully over long reaches of soft, wet land
Through muddy fields and great dark trees
To the quiet frog-pond.
There in the still forest air
We spent a long hushed morning
Treading the muddy banks under the silent oaks and maples,
Watching with patient intensity the motionless mysterious water.
We were
savages there for an hour,
Ancient warriors with our long sharp spears,
Walking slowly in a timeless dance,
The barbed spear-heads poised over the still water
While our eyes watched unblinkingly for the first sign
To move without thinking, and swiftly impale.
There was no time there, no civilized world,
And youth would last for the eternity of the morning.
The morning sun came slowly to the woods;
We held our spears in chilly hands, and saw our breaths,
And did not care that there would be no frogs.
To
One Whose Fairy Castles Have Fallen
I could
have said, "I told you so."
When she told you it was over
And all your protestations
Your insistence, naïve, that this was it, forever,
No doubt rang back in your ears, hollow, flat, and foolish,
And Fate almost mocked you to your face.
Poor man -
you were so happy for a while,
Swept away by this, your first love -
It was good to see you that way, so full of life
(And besides, you were easier to take),
And I tried to tell you, but you wouldn't listen.
I wanted so badly for you to be right.
And now
the bitter old cynic is back,
Full of self-conscious misanthropy
And railing at the ignorant world. Well,
take heart.
Life is
long and there is nothing that is not worthwhile.
Even some of us with broken hearts
Can sit back up, and dust ourselves off,
Calmly pack away the old letters,
Brush away a stubborn tear or two,
And manage to be romantics after all.
Issa
The axle
of the waiting world that day
Stood mercilessly firm, ungodly tall.
Against the soulless planks
Great corded muscles strained (made massive by
The work they did with wood, and which the thankless boards
Now tore at length apart); down swarthy flesh
Ran unchecked rivulets of wine-red blood; the great black mane
Now hung in salty strands made thick with gore.
The vicious, round and spiteful shattered wounds,
Wherein rude iron rasped the ruined bone,
These held him fast across the patient beams
That, standing still, would rend him at the limbs.
The sun, unkind as in all desert climes,
Descended from his seat;
When next he rose
The ghost would since have fled the broken frame, the battle gone
To the rude and dreaded gallows where it hung;
And on the sensuous lips
The vestige of a grimace, or a smile,
Split open when they parted at the last
To sap the last life's strength to groan aloud
And utter to the heavens, "It is done."
A lie, if
but his only; and perhaps he did not know
The world would not stand by, would not allow
His words to be the last, and leave at that.
An instrument of cruel and bitter death,
A genius in its simpleness of form
To stand, and only stand, and in its frame
A brutal and a long dismemberment -
That this thing would become, this bloody thing,
The silhouette of all that is sublime -
Had he but known, he might have raised his head
And took the thorn-wreath for a cap and bells;
And lifting up his voice with all his strength,
Into the yawning void laughed loud and long.
Acquaintance
I met a
man in Massachusetts once -
A scholar and professor, greatly loved,
A foreign man, gray-bearded, in whose eyes
Shone intellect and joy and love of life.
I met him only briefly, spoke few words;
I smiled and was warm, but soon moved on.
My mind had plans and business elsewhere then.
Not one
bare year from then, nor far from there,
And underneath a still library's roof
A student, young, but no less mad for that,
Walked in and, giving license to his rage,
Fired a gun into that sanctuary's calm.
This man, this teacher, kind and gentle soul,
Was there, and caught a bullet, and went down.
I knew him
briefly, hardly any time,
A few spare moments and a gentle smile,
A word or two in his uncertain lilt,
A handshake's time to savor, know his warmth.
When introduced to him I did not know
He was almost a specter even then.
I never knew him well enough to grieve
Or do him any justice if I tried
To grace him with the briefest epitaph;
My friend who shed brave tears could tell you more,
But I can only shake my head and frown
And offer what condolences I can.
The truth that I must grapple with is this:
However long or brief my book of years,
A man I met once now can never be
More than a footnote in that chronicle;
Had I but known, I might have turned around
And looked at him a moment or two more,
If but to see the shadow that at length
Crept up to him and opened up its wings,
So that I might know better when they come
Those soft foot-falls that still are strange to me.
Plainsong
of a Frustrated Post-College Bisexual
i like
women in loose jeans
and thick tartan flannel
and heavy boots
with hair cropped close
or falling in waves
and i like
men
who are long-haired and lean
and gentle
in vests and poet's shirts
with dark eyes and clever smiles
gallantly fey
or quiet and strong
and i like
women with brown shining eyes
or blue-green like the sea
slender like pixies
or solid and tough
or round like artists' models
with hair dark as new earth
or autumn-oak red
or fair like harvest wheat
like honey
i like men
with soft voices
who are tall and graceful
like elf-kings
or muscled like warriors
compact and spare
or short and soft like me
with features like aristocrats
or aescetic-smooth
or bearded thick and proud
noble faces
round clown faces
androgyne faces
satyr faces
and i like
the feel of wide curved hips
soft breasts
round bottoms
the salty kiss of labia
warm and wet and waiting
the potent mysteries of open thighs
and i like the stiff proud cock
strong backs
loins made for thrusting
and i like hands all over me
and willing mouths to kiss
and gentle tongues
and the wild heat of coming
and i like
lovers
who are a little mad
who have puckish grins
quick with a jest, not catty
who are strong in themselves
and are patient and kind
and full of passionate wonder
and mostly
i like love
which i miss so badly
and mostly i just wish
i knew
when someone had some extra
that they'd like to give away
Wasps,
Which Do Not Love Their Dead
Wasps,
which do not love their dead
Come round; and heedless of the corpses of their kind
Which I have left on windowsills, as warnings
Make so bold as to share my space. What
use they have
For the places that I make my home, I cannot tell;
These airborne alien things, lean and vicious,
Somehow find comfort in like things as me,
In common corners, common spaces, common light,
In the sudden heat of spring.
But the world's big, and the woods are wide,
And their interest in my quarters baffles me.
We do not
get along, my roommates and I;
They startle me with lurking in doorways,
Their aimless busyness intrudes, and their relentless wheeling,
And they make me cower like a child.
Their ways are not my ways;
They and I are at odds in philosophy,
And I confess I kill them when I can.
It's all one to them, it seems,
And still they come round, not in vengeance or remorse,
Just mindlessly at work.
Wasps are heedless of their dead.
Their interest in my spaces baffles me.
The
End of Days
I.
We stand here at the end of days
We stand here, our little company
In the purple twilight
In the mist
We stand here, tired and teary-eyed
To sing our parting songs
We have
come to this shore
Across strange lands
Through long and sometimes dark or merry nights
Taking the moonlit roads
And the strange and secret paths
And we are weary, who have come this way
To only start our journey on this night
This chilly night
This sad and quiet night at the end of days.
II.
We heard long since the call, the call to go
To all who knew to hear
The call to shut the doors and lock the rooms
And weep if we could, embrace and say farewell
And set off in the morning, through the mist
Down the long road to melancholy
We knew well enough
To settle the affairs and part
To lay down arms and make our peace
With the turmoil and the ravagers
The brutal and the doomed
The ones who dream in crimson and in black
We knew to turn away from them and go
And leave behind the trappings
The promise of a red and naked reckoning
The gruesome and the uncouth instruments
There would be no more use for them at all
III.
We have come to this shore, we who have come
And shivered in the forest
Wept through our laughter
We have come because we knew
We who have learned to think in mirrors
We knew the meaning of the pipes and bells
The mad and frantic laughter
That howled into the yawning night
We have been acquainted with grotesqueries
And walked with them in starlight, in the mist
We knew we need not be afraid
We had visited the tombs and labyrinths
The catacombs
The places where the doomed and useless go
We knew the shadows
And the formless things
Had breakfasted among the monoliths
We knew the language of the nebulous and damned
The forgotten
The mad
We had already known the roads to take
The twilight ways
The unknown and untraveled secret paths
Across the wastes
Across the wilderness
Although we had not followed them before
IV.
We have fit a ship to sail
From this, the end of days
Across the mist
Through a shroud of tears
And we will sail
From the melancholy evening
As the last of all things
Stand to speak the epilogue
We will not hear the apology
We will not wave good-bye
As we set out
We will not turn our heads
To watch it fall