Diminuendos Battered chimes ring but there is no song Held high upon the end of a collapsing roof Dangling above a small mound of ash Of no earthly natural end Above the poet that computes no verse Ash that once burnt words In the cold fire of every profound sentence Died as a comet burns out In a system that lost its worlds Unseen, unfelt, eyes iced All spirits having fled The fountain and the fool of the soul Erupting elsewhere. Mountains lean over the broken roof and crippled chimes And like flustered frozen giants Chart the path of a snowflake They watch the pass of a lone, pale figure As pure as the first quiet snow upon the first cold world Untouched by the howling gales Of want and reason and god- She is imprisoned dust that paces within its cell Has blood and breath and dreams Dust will not honor nor forsake Old ivory hands brush back courageous curls (Long ago exhausted black locks had begged gray To assume the dressing of the head) Her face worn but not battered Chiseled unevenly instead, the careless art of time She that is mostly silent speaks softly Sitting next to ash below quiet sun blistered chimes Wrinkled legs crossed, her fallen cheeks Red from the quickened pulse Of long slumbering words: Poet, you are extinguished As fire fights fire, life burns life Words are no longer your unhealing wounds Dead as I cannot die For how can love die? Poet I will now tell barren mountains And dark burnt blue sky All that I knew of you. Upon this a breeze came and the chimes above Stained tin cylinders that only rattled Suddenly made music Untroubled, chaotic, but pure notes retrieved From the void of many dreams As if sleeping children Woke and suddenly banged on a Steinway. She tells the ways and wants of the poet And shakes a tiny, timid fist At mountains that will not listen And then rails at the poet How he had forsaken the future of virtue To embrace the fornication of a moment How even now amidst proclamations Of her harsh, cruel sermon The same breeze stirs a cinder that stings her left eye And this, she cries rubbing her eye (but her noise is soft and slight No louder than a frustrated bee Scratching furiously at the center of a plastic flower) And this, she violently sings, is the pain of the poet- The irritant of clear vision. Robotic is the sun as it sets Made by the factories of assembly line gods Who, at break time, drink coffee, smoke, and Thunder back to the line To make more suns to warm more worlds. She sits and stares at that machine And knows that Once her poet was Disinfectant of the sun Dreamer of a world choked with despair The mountaineer forever kept from every cliff The comic collapsing upon the stage Quietly weeping. Once her poet was Merely red ink loose in the washer Staining white sheets, The last wild iris to bloom In the center of a burning forest Seen only by crackling, exploding cicadas Once her poet was The night upon worlds that will not turn The painfully bright morning In the sleepy, drooping eyes of an owl.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 01:40:42 +0000
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