A Histrionic

What is produced will shine,
Because it is the energy of soul,
Of process, Psyche across
Shores,
As Poe said,
Bearing history's lantern over the sway,
Baring the light, the unbearable light
Of the day.

Song of Songs

The apparition of youthful love
In the eyes of lovers
Who are not that love
Is the ritual of time,
Setting the motions of the heart
In order, arranging intentions
Into words concordant
With their thought
Beyond, the notion rising
Through cadences of grammar
As the single solitude
Of solemn chant.

Amateur

I must speak. The exigencies of the page
Demand it. I am bored, you are bored.
You are outraged: who thinks fit
To disperse empty words, the naked sounds
Of thought, to the winds, to the press of the air?
But the strings of speech, I implore you
Who do not so much listen as overhear,
Must be stretched out vibrant and supple, tuned
To the world, to the sounds they involve:
This is the screech of the young violin.

"The Fallen"

Justice is the death of everyone
Leaning over the towers to watch
The falling of the evening, a spark
The color of blood, but golden,
Only a momentary silence before
The darker colors of the night
Unfold, swallowing the city, digesting
The bodies of those who lived harm.

Corollary

Then the poetry of experience cannot be known:
Experience being always specific
To the knower, as the words would be the intervals
Of sensa, the chords of a private vision
Striking thought. --Unless their structure intimates
The music of perception, or unless as symbols they glow
With the mystery of another mind.

A Reply

There are, then, two truths, the truths of revelation
And the truths of discovery? Then the first
Will not be the voice of God, the second voice of man,
Unless when he speaks it is the word spoken,
The word heard. --What I mean is the frequency
That agitates the air and what it means, science
Sub specie aeterni and the transitory illustrations
Of its faith. But the word uttered is illumination,
Brushing, itself a being, the realm of beings.
The necessity of science is capacity, brimming
Fuller and more astute, more resolute -- closer
To always and ever towards its source.

Poetry is supposed to be the immediate...

Poetry is supposed to be the immediate, because though science
Ferrets out the truth hiding deep in the nature of things
To which philosophy then gives chase like a faithful hound
Or reports it is nowhere to be found (and often she
Is barking up the wrong tree) poetry is the revelation
Of feelings and perceptions, dragging up the surface
With mere words and exposing it, exposing them to the play
Of a view without a view to see anything more.

No Explanations

Live your fears. The poem
Will not be immediate, delineating
An event or an object
Materially (the spiritual being
Just another kind of matter)
With the materiality of words.

Will it be a metaphor,
Pointing to something beyond it
Like a symbol or a sign
Or a confusion
Of a meaning with its truth?

But it is immediate
At least in this way,
The way all things
Are: it has transpired
(It is).

The ideal poem
Is something organic --
It multiplies
Like a cell, it devises
Mutations, it touches
Many things that it is
Not yet, but was
And will become.

Organism and Process

I am inspired to reach beyond myself
For what I am not, but might become
-- But the friction of inspiration
Should be tempered with charity, which seeps
Like a cool oil over the works, lubricating
And making them smooth: then
The machine purrs, then the parts
Work among themselves, and the blades
That dig up the ground
Can constantly slice their kith,
Joining and dividing
The things they have made,
The things from which they were made.

"I too want to touch..."

I too want to touch what spreads below fingers, feel
The patterns, know their directions and the paths
From which shudders, slight as a breath,
Detach. But in whose body? Somehow
It must be very far to travel with hands
The feeling past every horizon,
Even the farthest distance that winks
Under the finger and, if you lift your head, hides
In the color of the eyes.

"Betraufelt an baum und zaun..." (S. George)

Did the cleaved oak bleed
A balsam for the tree, a balm
To hedge? Illuminate
Fallen colors the truance
Of the sun, blending
Gelbed red, sprinkles of brown,
Scarlet and a scene of green.

Who alone nears the alone
Pierced from the solitude of crowds?
A boy dressed in palest maud…
For this meek wind tussles, for this
A mortality of roses
Suspire even in incubations
Of the pointed light.

By the round of the glazing hedge,
The whistle of withering leaves,
And lightning the canopied songs
We take ourselves in hand
Like fairied sisters rapt
Through zagged get-along.

"Der saal des gelben gleisses und der sonne..." (S. George)

The chamber of glistening gelb
Is house of the sun who lords
The caving dome beneath the stars
In quick of bolts, lava's cistern,
Onyx mixed with amber's kern.

The sides smoothed into mirrors
--Snatch of all villages' every state--
Tiles stretched of unstained gold,
Hackle on the ground the lion-hide.

Only never will suffice to pierce
The blinding eye whose gaze glares universal
Crowns and thrice a thousand gravitating
Urns must spend their spirit on the scent
Of ambergris and citron's spice.

Strand (S. George, C. Valhope, E. Morwitz)

Part us from the kingdom by the sea which
When in want and wild too with swelling glooms
Only the tameless gulls in winging sway sustain,
And always spectra of the ungroomed heavens watch
-- For we have lingered in the deep of day too long.

To ponds the green of bog and sporing trace
Where with tendrils thick and lush weave
Grass and leaf and every eve
Devotes a shrine while, sailing from the creek,
An obscure swan brings tidings of the bride.

For from the northern fallows we are borne
By lust, your glistered lips, on beds
Of budding kelp, where bodies
Melt in springs of blooming snow,
And all the bushes murmur they agree,
And make themselves aloe and bay and tea.

"The cindering amphora..." (cf. Mallarme)

The cindering amphora cannot hold the sphinx
Who will arise, who will re-arise and realize
The ruby dangling before the Buddha's eyes, the star
Of things as they are, rapt in a mute concentration,
Propelled by the fact, the inundating action
Of waves mixing with embers, tides rising
Into the sun, spurging steams, the bay,
Whose condensation is the day. But can this be
Rebirth? A peacock is woven of jewels
Whose substance is the ground on which he walks.

Aimer

It is a message to you, it must be
A message for you, because messages
Always waiting on the wings of time, travelling
The glint of another, the revelation of the other, must
Find in the air, must find through the air,
The double voice that is their speaking
And their heard -- it is to this
They must be true.

Dedication

Consciousness would be what it is
Full of just the sounds and visions
That are real -- their feeling
And the cold. The texture of objects
Would be something to hold
Or smoothe on the tongue or fill
With the lungs. Memories,
Being elsewhere in concentration,
And an evitable ambition,
Looking appropriately towards the future
And the past, are no less
To be comprehended than the other
For whom recitations are destined,
The brother who turns on the order of things.

"A la nue accablante tu..."

To greedily drown, and in what
Seminal floods? -- The
Sepulchral, act
Of their darkness,
Her shadow
Among the shadows.

The shadow is a member, is
Erect. The shadow will sing
Its nude, painting
A voiceless overture. The shadow

Is one among many shadows.

Always it comes back to this multiplicity of thought,
This vain ploying,
These shadows that multiply shadows.

The shadow is a cloud,
The shadow of a cloud:

Who is the man who walks among shadows?

He is a mast who leans on masts. He sails
The ocean of the dark, his walk
Echoes his plod. Like dogs

The shadows slobber at his feet. Water,
These are the doings of the sun: to sing
The undercurrent's overtones,
Covering the world in its own still shadow.

A Face

What is a person? Are the slashes congruent,
The lines of his face?
You would have to place him over himself
To see if he had changed.

The person is behind the mirror. Observe
The eyes observe; watch
The harmony of studied lines,
Recite the name.

Call his name.

Does he hear you? It is because he is hidden
Behind the mirror,
Under the things that appear,
Where it is silent:

Where everything is silent.