Silenus

The sadness is a crystal glass
Of red, or bitter crabs'
Crunch, a nimble punch of poison
Darting to sweeten the limbs
And numb our oblong sense
By chiseling the distance
Into rivulets of thyme, whose flood
Quenches the skin, fiery sap leading
Back to the hour's beginning
And my birth.

Leave me by the spring. Long shade
Is cooling the mountains, musk
Is gathering under the moss, and primrose leaves
Are curling into the cradles of dusk. Let the sun
Blink like a swollen eye, throb vainly, shedding
His violent tears by the sea. From the cliff I observe
Ferruginous vicinities of honey by hedges
Smoldering a faint buzz. Leave me to ponder the rain,
A sweet sickle tickling at my tongue and teeth sharply:
Leave me to lean by the wain under night's compulsion,
Lap my rest.

The Tragedies, The Dreams

You! Again, and with a tripping skill that far defies
These voiceless cries, mixed in with all the sweets
Of moonlight and perfumes,
Soaked round a ragged stench,
Come: will freedom ever be as free
As your craft? Hurricanes make for most placid lakes,
The swill of the prow is the dip in an ocean
Of stars. Elements, voices, fire! It must be Empyrean fire!
The heavens never staggered such bolts, but we,
Poets of the earth, have staged our stumbling groans.
Here's homage to you, then, where all things foreign
Find renown, and a most natural bit of fun
Is the general humour in things, a lactic play
Of words, but more convincingly arranged in bones.

More Old Shit

The dilettante philosopher,
Bewildered in logical jungles
Would do well to pursue
This fragment of wisdom,
Delivered from the hand
Of Scaurus Lecti Tityrus,
Roman, minor poet,
Of whom we learn
From Cicero,
In an equally brief
Piece of a longer letter, lost:

And you ought to peruse --
For its brevity and clarity,
Concision of expression,
The eloquence and wit
With which it sets forth,
In twelve books,
The general principles
Of Stoic logical discourse --
The work of a certain
Poet, lately published,
And more lately perished
Which I am equally tardy
(Though by the gods I had promised)
Myself in sending forth: Tityrus'
From the Ends, a perfect place to start.

That letter, evidently, in response
To Memmius, his dissertations
On physics and God. As for the poet,
We know little, and from extant
Remains have gathered less.
His turn of phrase is metaphorical,
His mode of thought is allegorical,
The hexameter at times deplorable,
But he abounds in common sense
And so memory gives him license.
We excerpt here a quaint bit of praise
For the study of logical nits:

Poorly hewn, the chop and turn of the axe
Hacking every which way, desperately, when
By careful craft, what was required
Was a pole to the eyes like the shaft
Of a blushing ship. Ply-wood drifts
About the streams of discourse,
And water reflects our heavenly dreams,
But what a rank pit of nonsense!
Would you fish without a hook,
Or hunt aside from dripping nets?
Let me teach you, lest the torrent of our speech
Rip apart your sails and blind you
As surely as Alcaeus' winds, vilely loosed
Along Libyan sands, and bearing dunes aloft,
The principles of syllogism,
Adzes for stippling a dark place,
And setting out doubtful giants of thought.

What the World Came to Be

... look at our tiny house,
son, the white dot of your mother waving.

I will be your father
Someday, and the strings
Will hang loose from our clothing.
Our life will grow as threadbare with long
Journeys as the scraggly wisps of my white beard,
And your gray hair's dispersing strains
Will run into rivulets, like the departed streams
Of our song. Father, I remember mists

Like mountain crags, and eyes
As knowing as the sky, peaks
Of jutting crystal, sharp as ice,
That came to represent the world.
When I left your house, hands
Were still distant: your breath was the tide
That carried me into the still distance
And the world's tough hide. Only now

I see how weak we were, like saplings
Pushing themselves into the thin air
Of the mountain, tender and green
Among the few, harsh, spiny twigs
And an irascible wind.