I. The Artist

Do you remember do you remember

The smell of static days of summer of

Blue skies blue homes hazy roads of

White trees white ties lazy oaths

And painted

Do you remember anticipation

It opens behind you it opens behind you

Like a warehouse door

It opens behind you you are backing out

Goodbye

Brand new

Goodbye

Liquid crystal

Goodbye

Goodbye to this

This dismal pantheon

These ancients and classics

They don’t shine like you

Not a drip of white

Nor a drop of blue

No

Do you remember turning back

You don’t turn back you’ll lose your face

You don’t turn back you can’t turn back

With crystal blood you can’t turn back

With liquid blood you only surge

You surge face-forward

Into the universe

And I the unstoppable

Your superior your overlord

I will bring you all you touch and see

Touch heavens divine

Yes you

White and blue

How I flash past

Same and same again

Same and same again

How I am new

I am not you

I am sure to be a wonder

Sure to make your barren eyes

See with wonder yet again

I have come to save your soul

You innocent one you

Of colors tranquil

Colors modern

Colors same and same again

What good are they now

Blind creature of the night

Who ventures out to

Long chanting tables

Long empty tables

To drown in a bay of

Pale black

To rise and shine and despair

You look for hope and guidance

But see nothing

You look for hope and guidance

With wide eyes

But you see nothing until

You see me

How I stream by

Gallant and noble

Upon my Babieca of shining white and blue

How I live for this moment

How I live for you

Goodbye

God be with you

Reincarnate

Is what I am

Revitalized reinstated reborn

And manifest to all you

Who bear witness

I am new

I am Postmodern

No more of that Baroque

No more of that Deco

Which has been out of touch for so long

Out of touch with you

My most gracious companion

My thoughts do not take shape

As you would like them to

But thoughts are trivial matters

In this beautiful world

I am too new

Too young for this game of chess

My mind is in other lands cracked and broken

And waiting to be reborn

Like you

II. A Train Ride

I thought I saw the Queen of Spain

’Neath a white-washed dome which bore her name

And splayed over her

Like Olympus’ under-side, where across black Phlegethon

Strutted ladies with devilish scarves and crying suitcases,

Where Arabic figures flipped through space

Calling to globed clusters dancing ‘round their feet,

Where a ring fell and cracked on the marble shores.

Had we only left that morn? “A sorry crew,

A right detestable crew,” she said, “I’m blue, I’m blue”.

Rising over one hill you’d remarked, “Were it not

For these fragrant airs I’d feel so lonely,” but that is not

Why the sparrows flew low today, and that is not

Why the beady, lacquer-tinged petals from Phnom Penh didn’t arrive, and that is not

Why our laurels were found strung in uneven lines across the table, and that is not

Why she is blue, blue, blue.

She sat, that twisted Iberian hint in her eye,

And a police-man asked if I’d seen her,

And I said, “No, sir, I’ve not.”

“Should she chance

Across your countenance,

Take heed, sonny.”

“Why, you are

A ragged sort of a man,

A twisted fraud,

A brute, I say, depart at once!”

Bearing her weight were best wishes

Which came in such profusion

That she thrashed to hold her head above them,

But her strained and mutinous aspect

Caused naught to blarney her

So she deigned to slip below and drowned.

I cried to the Gatekeeper, “Sad man,

Deliver me away. Sad man,

Deliver me away.

Let fly up in smoke from desolate coals

The sacrilegious disloyalty I’ve shown you.

Let nothing come between us again.

Amen.”

Now the thirsty crown on the hangman’s chair

Lolled its tongue about the room,

Sweeping out the feet of a stately virgin –

Like the clock-hand it was.

I, out for a smoke,

Looked in and saw you consoling her,

But oh, how you berated her afterwards, and

Yes! it was a soggy, rainy day, and

No! love, there’s no love to be had tonight.

My, how my ingenious thoughts dance in their cage!

The ring is key, I think. You see,

It’s broken into four pieces,

Two big and two small,

Which won’t fit back together,

But which might be melted down

To make a flaxen shawl

Which you’d wear as you stroll

Through fields of burning heather.

We will bury it someday

In the church at Kilkelly,

But now that we’re headed north again with the trade winds

We won’t be seeing you for quite some time.

It was a doleful, dreary view when the olive girl left

So instead I watched the marble and granite fraternizing in the deadened land

As above, Helios gazed down at Tartaros

Whence envious, truculent rumblings rose

To drape their dull vines across our laps, and a plated metal barking sounded through the atrium.

Perfumes and pansies and pitted cherries flooded the vapors

Like so many flies drowned in liqueur,

While our fair city peeked in at the window, but the police-man,

A bronzed statuette of Lazarus in his plump hands,

Shut her out, crying, “Reinvent thyself!”

A hissing below, and the voyage commenced.

At the state-line we drifted under

A steel bridge, and there a man hung

With a constant, careless resolve

Which sparked lasting admirations unsung

Amidst our number, who truly were

Too soft, too romantic, too bruised, too young

To rise above the heathen lands

Yet might climb the ladder, rung by rung,

To see his worldly face, and learn his name,

And learn to speak in his forgotten tongue,

And breathing once more the turbid air

Let slip the reins and to death be flung.

O sun in the trees, sun in the trees,

What have you seen before you’ve seen me?

Do you bounce off this steel rail?

We are in the lucid phase, I believe.

Yes, that’s it.

Paris, son of Priam, take note:

We are coming for you.

O, but you –

Do you smile when called

The Lacrimosa?

Do you cry out,

“Ne absorbeat eas tartarus”?

Two terrors haunt our human condition:

The first, the fount from which passions spring,

The second, I shall tell you in time.

In a mirror-world we saw ourselves,

We made ourselves

As we were,

As we wished to be.

Gliding through the grasses

We were woe,

We were fervor,

We were those

Staring darkly into our forbidden futures,

Taunted by our haughty ghosts,

Weeping at their graves.

Near a signal we paused near an hour,

Yet we made nothing of the time.

The infernal whirring began anew,

Yet we never smiled the same again.

Two miles to the north,

The beggar of Sharon

Laid bare his neck on the grim guillotine

As ten thousand laughing limbs looked on.

Cried he, missit me Dominus!

As he cackled till the last.

The blood flew up in the salty air,

Twisting, inverting in helical stupor,

Discharging its noxious blue-green dainties

To do as they would with the world.

That fall, I believe it was the fall of the fall,

Mephistopheles struck seventeen tolls on the waiting chime and

Unholy November, stalking like a bright spring rain,

Loped across the Lozoya and

Peeked through Cybele’s garden,

Thinking to crush the two lovers

Discounting his presence.

Hush, child, she weeps not for you.

What sounds are these to hit my dull mind?

You know that you, the most lovely maiden in the land,

Struck thrice by lightning,

Batting your ne’er-rested eyes,

Crying, crying, crying, crying,

Are what we face five times a day.

’Twas only winter’s wail which six times did sweep us

Under the cemented barricade

Where coffee and sangria commiserated

In a mottled mess on the floor,

Yet who would have guessed

He would really come

And smite the Earth with a curse?

Hush, child, she weeps not for you.

Quiet, fool, she might overhear.

Her seat is folding under her, see?

Cannot you, in all your hellish power,

Save her?

That night

A lone trumpeter, James Price,

Blew minor scales

Up and down the line

Till his poetic, untimely death

Did us part.

Hush, child, she weeps not for you.

O, good police-man, where are you now?

Can you not cuff these maligning airy distractions?

See, she turns her head!

Surely she’ll sell in Seville,

Make note of that,

She’ll sell in lands cracked and broken,

She’ll be reborn.

O, but only look into my eyes –

O, but only remember that

There are impossible things!

I accept and I protest.

Still the wind twists me

Into hideous forms, and

I find reason only

In these two straight rails,

My firmaments ‘midst the waters,

My legionnaires,

My heroic third and fourth.

Alas, I am bid never continue.

So in Arlington Under, I leave you.

Recount the rest in my place.

Her Phrygian robes are flowing out the car

On all sides. Might she be swept under and

Shatter in miraculous, indifferent displays for us all.

Flow softly now, Sweet Holocaust,

Her face draws near.

You, who once plucked a flower from a triptych on a wall:

Dance a jerking step off a bridge in your flaxen shawl.

Hush, child, she weeps not for you.

What knows any man of glory?

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side

“Far less than these coasts,” he said,

Then cast his line.

Wear the print of his remembrance out

Say, now! They all do! Every one!

Swifter than a weaver’s shuttle

O remember that my life is wind

Yes, it was just that morn.

Flow with boundless power, my lovely, she wants nothing.

III. The Great Conanicut Wedding

She makes for a jagged Ganges,

Flings spots of her holy sweat upon us

As we consecrate the affair.

Here in this hallowed land

Splendor frolics on the crescent beach

While credit waits patiently behind the dam.

Turn over, tide.

Spring peeks through January’s bare briars

To bless the quivering occasion, where

She is the beaten rocks and

She is the fleeting wings and

She is the half-tide kingdom.

Twenty feet down a ravine

Sallow men lay perished –

How they were treasured!

Yet she loves them most,

Loves us most,

Loves us all most.

No lesser shades dare cloud that aspect.

She is all that is less, she is the mooring

To which cling our doomed vessels in the sun’s narrow eye,

A thoughtless precision lifting few to perch

Upon heaven’s floor, a soggy maw swallowing many

In fond remembrance of their deeds.

Thus she suffuses our eyes and our mind,

Till we cry, “Take us! O, take us now,

We are yours – forever!”

So there is to be a marriage today,

In a chapel she has built for us, base and unruly,

Which she bids her winged deacons exalt,

Which she cherishes with tears in her eyes.

The inhuman face – such a wonder

That we deserve it!

Such a wonder that she turns not away

From a slip or a sigh – such a wonder,

Such a beauty, such a love,

Such a foolish, blind love,

Blind to the giver,

Blind to the heights and the follies,

Blind to remembrances

And journeys

And sorrows.

Yet who will resist:

When she weeps not for us

Nor any ideal?

And who will resist:

When nothing is the better

And nothing the worse?

Truly, who will resist

The fount from which passions spring?

Aye, not a soul.

A rambling breeze, bound for Madrid,

Mutters the rites on its way past

As we kiss her careless brow.

☉