Monday, February 18, 2019

savannah


                      i.
      how comes the muse

friday night and he is struck;
this poet, who ponders an image
that has arrived to rest in his
mind pulsing with mortality and blood.

thinking: how comes the
muse to the latched-upon artist?
that he is vigorously transfixed
by the aesthetic eye of a her?

in this breezy moment in time,
what comes touching-down
from the cosmos
is a spiritual palm,

and an otherwise depth-less thought
goes in one leaping direction
to become held deeply fast to
that desirable corner.

he must, in fact, let
loose upon his page,
does he not? or it becomes
just another obedient lie.

the poet has the luxury of being
so adorned from a fair enough distance,
and therefore urged to supplant idle
imagination with a new figure of Eros.

and that is how it goes: two
diametric skies are collided in escaping
randomness, through which the giver
and the receiver embrace rebellion.

                   ii.
          love, not Eve

is this not the question, then:
in what effective form can
the poet word-sculpt
the truest essence of the muse?

that he must reduce
it to a form at all, to capture
and release that which he feels,
is his first and ultimate failing.

surely the eyes are not that
color, nor the chin as fleeting
in the bones, nor the arms as
subdued and tone-full?

and what of the careful
consideration of another artist,
upon his examination and execution
to the page of the same she?

certainly, with the art held together
side by side, the tepid reader
will decide that she is
not at all the same subject.

so it is wanting that the
measure of a poet's success
be done by falling in love
with the poet himself;

that we are to know
the muse in her tender,
enthusiastic self only through
the complicated will of the writer.

but in what fashion can
we travel such distance,
and with necessary acuity
and informed reflection,

that we can get to a point
in which we do, firstly, know
the man and therefore,
secondly, know the truth of her?

it's all running up great
slopes of uncompromising, naked
dunes for a vista entombed, nevertheless,
by the clouds of longing.

i'm apt to believe, then,
that the artist looks not to
engage us in a game of
mirrored reflection,

but rather in a prayer
for the ascendance of
the muse to a level
of cosmic blessing,

so that what we come
away with is the
reigning answer to the
question of love, not Eve.

                iii.
     what can be done

what can be done of
you? might i approach
your selfness in a manner
beneficial to my whim?

some will certainly
behold you in accordance
with their own buried
schemes and predestinations;

they will take into consideration
what they know of you at the
outset, and lay over, upon
this tribute, a new transparency,

(if they know you at all)
and if not, my words will be
their first entry of you into
a book of old faiths.

so i separate whatever gray
there is and wash from my
scriptures those tendencies of fact
that mar so many relationships.

i know a bit about you,
so that is unhelpful and
no small impediment toward
art if i want to show the truth.

the fearful and the feeble
will prescribe whatever
required secrecy to their tongues
and thus split the joy of it.

the unknowing will travel
a different path and, upon
its end, be stirred by the
spirit of charity and restraint.

neither of which is anything
a polite poet need care
about, so i've put you all
to the back in a grave

so that now i can embrace,
free of the tethers and in a
colder stance and standing alone,
my prayer upon your image.

                    iv.
             savannah

the face is the draw,
moon-shadowed as it
is, one hemisphere obscured
by original secrets.

she is looking at the silent
and retreating dreams
of some such passion she
had in youth.

that she achieved her
station thus far by
the dint of a mystic
turn years before.

like the rest of us, her
songs and her parchments
of affection, written in the moon's
ink, have been folded

and have been put away
into a volume of hymns,
then remanded to an
impossibly high shelf.

she has her visible eye
affixed to some twilight
and keeps her hair behind
the ear, listening.

all women do this:
they hurt and they
dance in dark harbors
of want and desire.

they don't know who to be
when alone or in a party of refutable friends,
so they keep an eye and an ear
ever affixed to a life of sounds.

for a sign, perhaps?
for some portent sound
from the past that will
signal the new beginning?

her shoulder is faced toward
us - her patrons - but not
coldly. it is as bare
as the most memorable proverbs.

the neck, likewise unwed,
is where the strength is,
holding within which the voice
of a woman self-estranged.

her thoughts are not as morbid
as they might seem; she has
no palpable regrets but rather
lingering confusions,

thoughts full of beautiful invitations
to grand adventures,
both big and small, some
of which she's attended.

thoughts filled with full-breasted
rains of summer and
all the attendant whispers
of tall trees.

her thoughts are as
complicated as stones
on a beach in the manner in which
they make a reachable pattern.

if only she could connect
them at once to get -
in just a fleeting second -
a glimpse of her Call.

she knows it's there!
and puzzles over them
endlessly while on her
surfaces of days attends to life.

the lips remain unspoken
for, remaining purely at
rest and unparted, to suggest
nothing more than serenity.

they've been loosed before,
releasing all manner of
hosts - from songs in the
night to sighs in the storm.

they've pressed upon the brow of the
child and the hands of the lover alike, each
a blesséd gift from someone who feels
symmetry between the cells of life.

what leisure, then, resides in
her best moments? what wild
specters dance upon her
crown when she is alone?

what does she release to
a blue world, and what does
she retain for the right
receiver of love?

the entirety of her, from
what is seen, is the
beginning of swaying
answers to a watery faith.

there is a desperate certainty
in that visible eye, how
it reveals an absolute
skepticism toward something.

just beyond us, behind this poet,
she sees the accumulation
of a thousand reasons,
a hundred-thousand reasons.

and the darkened eye,
the engulfed eye,
is the one we want to
see, to know what

grand dream is left
in waiting and what grand
dream remains dormant, and
what grand dream is unborn.

she is, in this light,
capable of choosing,
it would seem, an old
place to visit -

in this dissecting light
she is present and
half-past and looks to
no one for answers.

but the eye tells us
she's close to it;
she's approaching that
point, and surely she knows.

0 comments:

Post a Comment