Why Did the Pagan Statues Never Look Obscene and Why Did the Baroque Succeed in This at Last? (A Little Meditation on Opening Lines of Howl)

 

What eyes do cities wear
when all the horns proclaim
that beauty is mere guff,

an overrated surplus?

And what, meanwhile,
do all the scholars of war do
on such a pleasant May weekend

with their Argus Panoptes eyes,

after spending breath and brain
fanning those gyrating mills

that grind whole harvests
of human seed

into mortar
for posthumous pedestals?

In the backs of rooms I used to listen
as, juggling one contrary against another,

they reduced truth
to a clever gag,

relying on the lethargy
and impoverishment of eyes

already hollowed out—

eyes denied the apples
distributed by the same exclusive growers
with the same certified grip.

For truly it is said:

where bliss abides,
fruit reveals mutual nakedness—

even that of the Emperor himself,

a nakedness starved
of its madness

and its furious, unending
Sisyphean fixation,

which turns even pharaohs and kings
into busy dung beetles,

dragging the world and its sun
downward into the nigredo pit.

How else could they burn away
the ancient heavenly bond

in exchange for a supernatural darkness
that “bears all to El”—

as does the Don-El Motel

in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Falls?

Thus the ghost drifts
across its old aqueous flats,

forever anxious, forever jealous
of someone else
baring it all

in verse or jazz.

What Does It Mean When Memory Speaks and Sings in Poems?

That little café, daring to claim
that behind its door awaited
another kind of space and mind,

used to have short, off-white curtains,

as though they were mockups
for chance ivory gates of dreams,

either woven or drawn
by Penelopes at night.

But each of those now-vanished blinds
seemed like a piece of blouse

hung silent before a bath,

where the light poured in subdued
through that yielding passage.

And beneath such mellow shade,
now and again I would jot a verse—

perhaps even a poem
caught while merely passing by—

made of distant meadow scents,
honeyed by dew and sun,

and longing to refresh
the feet no less than the mind.

And so it is no less strange
that simply by remembering
how it once was—

a Muse, a butterfly,
brushes my face again.

Not Every Mirror Taps the Chosen into the Timeless Otherworldly Ritual

Not every mirror inspires
one to raise her arms above
in a convinced, meticulous rush,

as though the arms were wings
opening all the rest to sight.

And not every woman can be
stirred that far—

before such a strange space,

where she rests face to face
so differently with her own self,

and in such a candid, effortless act,
refined to an apogee of art,

she now could almost perform asleep—

were it not for those eyes,
exchanged with her own shade.

Being One of the Veronese Della Scala, However Uncertain and Much Distant, I Too Went Down Where the Sea Is Trying to Give Birth to a New Atlantis

 

Los Angeles—oh yes, that living emblem,
America writ large beside the sea,

just as New York City is—
that dented great apple
of knowing and not knowing
much of good and much of evil—

or like Las Vegas,
the den of thieves
and bacchanalias of rushing nights,

where all who enter somehow remain
within that desert Garden of Eden,
its money minted from fever and dreams.

So what then of Los Angeles
and its Orpheums?

Do pagan Hades and Christian Hells
likewise keep their homeless
upon the streets—

within the selfsame pageant, revel, and reveal
of basic human need
and this Divine Comedy?

Surely there, everyone—
everything that, despite itself,
still manages to remain human
to even the slimmest degree—

must be one of those lost, yet brimful angels,

hovering and circling
like the terminal, falling stars
of The Republic,

thirsting after oblivion
while standing on the brink
of bringing back Atlantis—

in defiance of the sidetracked celestial gods,

that Emporium leaving
the Gates of Horn wide open,

so that what is above
and what lies below
may mix and flux
until who is who dissolves—

an Empire of Water,
souls deliquesced and loosed,
each surrendered
to its indiscriminately chosen poison.

Oh yes—where else
would the powers that be
place a hive

for so many angels with broken wings,

whose stumps are growing
blades rinsed in Styx?

Ode to the Supreme Act Of Those Seen and Seeing Blues

Before lotuses open
the fists of their buds
into whiteness toward the sky,

there, down the valley, water
dallies and keeps its calm,

while forget-me-nots already
show off their minute stars,
embossed in the light blues
they share with my own eyes.

And there are so many—
never just one or few—

as if forever yearning
for dream and life in them
to remain as one,

to cover all they could—

or perhaps emblazon and extol
someone’s body
from all its meeting ends—

and do so both
in poetry and in love,

and in that spotless, perfect act,

even amid such swarms of shades,
the very word forget
would lose its meaning.

Yes, It’s True Not All Lovers and Mates Are Musical and Lyrical

 

Strange how gentleness is a leaning-in,
and how the action—its verb and move—
articulates three key vowels out of five:

A, E, I—

before the shock of touch
gets a chance to shape and round the mouth
into the likeness of deep-toned O or U.

And so intimacy’s summoning call
casts its wooing vows

like a brush in its initial stroke—

as if the space in between
needed to be swiped aside, undone,

so that joy and bliss of the soul may live—

with the help of lambda,
which stands—per Socrates—
for a motion gliding softly
more than any other sound.

Algebra with a Heron on the Cuyahoga River

The heron’s blended blue and gray
bespeaks a ruminant silence
as it covers and dyes
the dusk between day and night.

With its glow subdued,
that coat—a little cloud
furled in gray and blue—
alludes just as well

to the silken swells,
the tufts and wisps
of mists that moor
in dells their raveled sails.

And I cannot help but wonder
how adamant the heron is
in staking out its vertical,

and thus aligning it all—

like a painter’s clean and easy,
perfect, and thus otherworldly line,

with an ethereal, waiflike axis
running through both death and life,

since only in that way it knows
it may attain and consummate
the faultless—the arrant,
pure clarity and calm

in which alone the mind
touches the impeccable,

that lets one hear and see
what moves—even in the dark—

and where, down within,
it stirs and heaves,

even if but vaguely,
stillness and its script.

And in that faint
and paltry rift,

then the heron acts—
and brings

the netted charge and catch,
lifting it from its element
on a precise bill—

so that two

are once more one.