Poetry’s Eons Needed to Make Out A Cosmic Premonitory Hinge or Point

 

Just as it took years,

years of consistent training

to master the art of Shui Xiu (水袖)

or Water Sleeves that had them flowing

so that on the air they would paint

singing grace and joy or sadness,

it’s far more unknown, oddly, this:

 

without lifetimes of arduous trying

poets won’t win either their white silk sleeves

to move speech and voice

where other form may not reach—

for isn’t this how poems come and gift

shoulders, elbow, fingers, wrist

to each other’s soul:

rippling water, drifting clouds—

 

or how love of mortals

is divinely sculpted

when one strikes her

with a cosmic,

premonitory hint?

Of Gilding Filigree Adoration (That Doesn’t Flee)

Like the Heavens mesh
when cast on the face of the deep
that, numberless, teems with life,
the yin is coupling with the yang,

like a shroud with eyes wide
open, that so tightly latch on
all they see and lean to grasp,
la gloire de l’âme chez les femmes

conceives l’éclat du dessin:
“What is better — to see or
to seek being seen
and, in that masque and mesh —

rolled and fixed,
to clear — to net — those
prying eyes — like sequins
on peacock widespread plumes?”

Yet does it matter how many
of these have been gleaned?
Or whether any — of those
who come by —

is of gilding-filigreed damask,
a calligraphic thread for life,
after life even for another life,
ask the eyes entwined,

those ones that care & think —

Doors Unbarred to Mountains (On Thymos, Psyche, and Eros And the Figures Which They Cut)

Μῦθος is a memory — othered
and uttered in word and sound
like a dewdrop gleaned
from a vanished night

that left us of what was
emblems, only misted signs
from which a poem or a chant
then reaped and mixed

washed-out pearls and shells
garnered side by side,
not unlike what μῦθος meant
to Aristotle and his poetics:

“arrangement of the incidents” in tragedy
that needs to include something
that is stray, ill, deceptive, false —
the cause that brings about the doom.

And, in this, μῦθος mirrors the spirit,
its own consanguine twin — θυμός,
conscience-free Odysseus’
daemon-goad and inner voice,

the seat and throne of anger (orgē)
of the unjust, apt for a tyrant or a king.
Just as in the tale of “the best and most
beautiful city in speech (or argument),”

πόλις τῷ λόγῳ, θυμός is inserted,
similar to the “noble lie” — like a wedge,
a bar, a separating cut — between
logos and eros — as if to join

the two or to cross from one
to the other, one has to pass
through the thymos’ gaping jaws —
not unlike, in Symposium,

with thymotic Alcibiades trying to
insert himself between Socrates
and Agathon (“The Good”): Θυμός,
a “rising vapor,” sacrificial smoke

and offering for the favors of the powers
of the dark — and that’s also why,
in the Republic, in the “Apocalypse”
of Plato’s opus, Socrates unveils at last

the deepest feud behind all the other feuds,
“the ancient rivalry” between tragedy,
the poetics of thymotic infernal smokes
and its Eros-Thanatos, and philosophy

that, in this war over the soul of our self,
reads θυμός and its θυμοί, tales
and “poetry” — making of deadly
tragedies out of fates for men.

For, as the Bhagavad-Gita says,
“there was no death and nothing
to set off things apart till all
was obscure at first — dim

and dark in the dark — and all
but an endless, formless ocean —
the heart of nothingness which took
on being — born of severe heat.”

Donner et recevoir, un rapport marin (Une étude sur la magie sympathique)

On and on the waves are coming
to play what they played before—
the whiteness of the clouds above
is now manes of rolling foams.

And there, in the self-same color
flowing from the waist below—
someone’s standing on the shore,
anew avowed, an act of kinship

by a marriage of the air and the sea.
Sans fin et pourtant, enfin—affinity
has been found—dans le blanc

des gémissements et de la glisse
qui est sensible, plus ou moins,
là... tellement ornéé de nuages.

Fresh from Innocence Long Time Ago

As they let mirrors
dress them up,
surely quite a few of them
cannot help but wonder:

“Truly is this how gods
made me, and for whom?
And if so and if the god is he,
how else or with what else
do I need to help him?”

Epiphany of a Woman by a Well

A classic scene: a woman by a well.
But how many ages do we need to pass
along with many passings-away
before someone steps in and stops
to ask: “Which of the two is deeper?”

But to know the answer, there’s much
one must remember: underneath
the stillness of the well
there is—there still has to be—
yet a deeper bristling spring.

A spring that cracks even the hardest
and the highest of the mountains
to prove that its clarity takes
after light and speech,
and many steps past

any mortal counting
it takes to attain one day
at that one step
when at last what the soul
wants you to hear, she puts on your lips:

“Are we deep enough
for one another—or at least
as deep as a well that goes
as down as where
water bearing a life’s gift

is as pure as gold may ever be,
and clarity and knowing
emerge as the arché
present and, therefore,
truly present for us within?

And if so, can we be to another
like that woman and her well,
ever as before and ever after,
even past this timeline’s
narrow rim—

almost as timeless as a temple,
a garden’s image set in stone,
both nearby and outside
some forgotten tomb
like those hermae may crown?

For if we meet, isn’t each
and every such one moment
a temple, garden, well,
never meant only for
a rush of walk-through,

but just for this—to step in
and stop so that love
and our soul grow deeper;
and no, no arrogance may enter
and savor such delights?

Or isn’t it written: we ought
to learn love as does a musician
or a thoughtful poet, since only thus
one can enter the sublime and its interval
the ages and more have conferred—fated?”

In Those Hands Divine Thunder Cracks

Worshipers in Japan bow and clap to gods,
and, in the clap of meeting hands,
entrance into the divine
is turned to sound,

and the sound, the air’s crack,
reaches from one’s heart
to the below and into the above
where the deathless hardly ever tapped

forks and curves to our fates,
their chartered path,
whereupon a thoughtful note

may come and melodically pulse
to pass — into the sheet of light
for fans of arms to sieve delight.

Metamorphosis, Defying Death, In One Brief and Quirky Act

Here dragonflies abound,
and yet so short
is their adult life,
and brief is their flight.

But as they rise to hunt
from where, darkened,
water remains still,
they add a point and ring

to what gave birth
to the nymph’s nom de plume
and to metaphors that link

what only poets dare to see and call
when the mortal and the divine wed
beneath such wings with a circling pen.

The Two Met, in Fact, Must Have Met Ages Ago; Like a Mountain and a Tiger Introduced to Each Other—to Form a Timeless Bond

On the word of I Ching Hexagram X,
it seems many women sit
on a man’s “tiger’s tail”
and so do men, contrariwise,
on a tiger’s tail a woman
lies down behind—

where one, the joyous,
makes an open place,
a chance, for the other
to create, even as what poets do,
something of a happy mishap,

and if something bites, it should be
Love for whom arrows fill his pack,
and thus what is weak worries the strong,
and, in this game, the strong needs to give in.
For this is the way — to please the wild.

And perhaps it is just as right
that, on the tiger, the tail, if treaded well,
ought to be the most tractable part,
though people are fond to forget:
good manners better serve a love

as they fortify thinking of the heart,
thus stillness of the lake in clarity
holding on unmoved follows
Heaven and, in Heaven,
allows itself to be dressed as joy.

So They Shuttle in and out of Aphrodite’s Ocean Frill

Almost noon and the fading moon
still afloat in the celestial froth
in the western azimuth —
but now feigning that she is

not more but another trifling cloud
among other ephemeral gasps —
at least for those whose gaze
either quickly passes by

or barely lifts off the ground:
since what else is there to be seen,
up in the sky — when, there by the sea,

all’s daubed and shaded in whites and blues,
and some tense birds, picking, pecking chasers
into Aphrodite’s foam, are then rushed in turn?

Sudden Syllaeum’s Epiphany

Instead of taking the path
of the main approach
that came into my view
only at the very end,

like a goat I climbed
a steep slope of the hill
of the ancient ruins
of Syllaeum or Sillyon

with its many dried-up wells
or cisterns on the top
and an occasional spring
still gushing from old cracks.

And thus I circled round the town
searching for its theater
to see it swanning
with its rowing seats,

and only after much of wandering
I saw it last and found its fate:
the whole theater had crushed
down from the hill in 1969—

forty-four years before, being there pulled,
I came to see that site at last;
only some Odeon rows remained—
few feathers that had failed to fall.

On the Measured Laconicism of Beauty’s Ornaments

“Three things that old music had: lyrics we could understand, a story to be told and heart.”
—Anonymous comment to the song “The Windmills of Your Mind” (1969)

Ancient theaters of Dionysus
were as democratic as the people
in those times could make them be —
if possible, as large as to hold
all the male citizens in town.

But their Odea, theaters for music,
were strikingly smaller and fewer —
not unlike adornments — addons
that work at their best
if they strike the golden mean —

neither too much nor too little
but just enough, just right
to free the inside current
ripened in fruits of the notes —
but only for the chosen few.

And so — next to the many
and their entertainment’s roar
made of masks and tails and hooves,
they had these oases to which
pure beauty came, to be
and be plucked,

and just as it is equally strange
that to learn playing music well
takes all one’s time but much less to act,
and yet, as in love as opposed to
what goes — rather wrongly — in her name,

it is so rare to be treated to those finest sounds.