Lilies’ whiteness persists
to the summer’s end —
so now its spiny rays
may attest to the birth of autumn,
already gilding those cedars
rising in the marsh, almost always
overlaid and masked in silence —
so long and ever yet that lightly
lit and slanted by the lilies’ scarcest scent
from the luminous and genteel floral face
and its necked flask holding inside still
In their fall, first leaves of autumn,
threading the air with silent chords,
swell with each such drop
a flaming carpet growing thus —
game, then, soon enough, to rustle
and fly off in the wind
from below the feet
as the space around
begins to burst with coruscation,
folios of lightning forks
and the lightest of the roars.
In such crackling intervals,
on such agape sills, we both
meet and find what we never lost.
The horse gets it —
that is, he gets those few
human idioms and terms
in his ears ever recurrent —
not unlike the generations
in this day and age
when most of what you hear
has been simplified and scripted
so that thinking anywhere yonder
keeps on running out of space or time,
and runaways are really discouraged
in the economy of penny-pinching
harnesses and straps, and I wonder:
will all those many Lenores ever wise?
London’s dandy—Onegin’s shaper-dresser,
professor, overseeing handler.
—Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, 1.V
The advent—Epiphany of the Dark.
—Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, 6.XXI
Empires always PR-ed themselves
as golden times of PEACE
even when or if—war
was their bread and wine.
“They make a desert and call it peace”
(ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant)
in casting his eye on the spoils and shards,
Tacitus already remarked famously and dryly,
speaking via the persona of Calgacus,
a Scottish chieftain addressing the troops:
empire achieves dominance
through destruction, theft, and slaughter,
and then calls such crime and doom
liberty and peace—even reign of law—
when supposed souls invert and mock
Heraclitus’ old adage—
that, if “water” is to be death of the soul,
then a dry soul is the best—
Empire demands—the egos,
having shed the soul
like a bride’s cathedral train,
turn—as if under a malefic gaze
of Medusa multi-serpentīna—
and become withered, desiccated,
and cruelly so—like Onegin,
inside out—dryly ossified
as lifeless stone (6.XLV, 7.XXII),
and such stones—cast and assigned—
in lieu of souls—“growing cold and hard
and stiff as stock—in deadening fashion,
and in that morass, all afloat” (6.XLVI).
It’s the “peace” where “the poet’s
dead, and no one recalls him” (7.XIV),
and what passes for poetry—
and not less—if composed,
secreted by the Jungian—
“language died” (8.XIX),
“friendless and estranged” (8.XXXII);
for it becomes “the agony
of hollow sequence” (8.XI),
which is to say, “losing
the language of the gods” (8.V).
Thus we live, as Pushkin foretold—
“and the presage—secret message” (5.V)
in that “strange freedom and peace” (8.XXXII),
in “stately orchestration
of oligarchic converse…
with imported rout” (8.VI-VII)
where the order’s pivot, spinning pin
is “a monster of the gens Satanic,
a Demon of the [modern] dream,
[someone like Pushkin’s] Onegin” (8.XII)
and where people’s miens
are masks and these are covered
with ciphers—imprecations,
prints of the dark and shadows
and hellish fiends and powers—
the underworld (3.XXII)
which Jung with Freud prescribed—
as the prose of now-ordinary devils,
installed instead of sublime
poetry and songs (3.XIII);
and “this mental fog enwraps up,
each moral being put to doze
so that evil traps us—and the fog—
that’s the triumph of British Demon-Muse” (3.XII),
“a trance coopted” (3.X) under which
“all men are zeroes, and the units
are ourselves alone—all else
only instruments and tools” (2.XIV).
And such egoism, “panacea,”
is a cast, a figure deadlier and colder
and more soul-destroying
than the Ghost of Death (1.XXXVII-III)
which is prima facie odd—
that such “souls”—
souls without character and crux (7.XXII)
are as bad to intellect as they are to heart…
But—no wonder—since this order
is made of perfidy and treason
where all betray all and where
“what we ourselves betray
deceive us in turn” (8.XI);
and since there is no wisdom
and no rhyme, no reason
since “the soul had perished
long time ago” (7.II),
there’s no stop to this either—
this world of unrestrained betrayal
of what is good, beautiful, and holy
is the Lethe’s nether world of souls,
made “hermetic” as in “closed and dumb” (7.XI).
It is a world and order whose “law
is to share—in promiscuous fashion” (8.III).
As Onegin, the accessory-legislator,
speaking via Pushkin’s voice, decreed:
“On such indifference, such forgetting
we all must build—foes, friends, and loves
the voice of soul stilled” (7.XI).
And so it seems that this late Empire
reduced all and every divination
to Hexagram 12 of I Ching,
all down to Stagnation,
to the Dark Side of Peace,
to the times made like Paradise
both of Earth and Heaven—
except here they are hurled apart
to make an ensuing void.
The great had left, and the trite
invades what was left behind,
and the below and the above
can no longer meet,
and the inferior collects
rewards denied to the good.
It is a time of void
that calls sickness good
and health is a threat
for which it finds no use;
“attention turns to the quick fix,
the instant celebrity, the fad,
the one-nighter, the current buzz.
No room for depth—only strange
legends, bas-reliefs, dead poets,”
drowned in amusia, tone-deaf noise.
Trekking through Anatolia’s goat-rugged tracks
one finds many a ruin of ancient towns
strewn across the rocks amid tufts of grass,
long already stripped of any gushing fount
and roofs, or bared, unburied marble statuettes—
while, in the heat, strumming cicada gangs
hoot and toot their horns and restless legs
in cacophonic orchestras that drone just right.
And here and there and with a bit of luck,
you could find a pillar or a lonely door
with no walls sidewise for wings left,
but I still see a flap of red or deep violet
at those shoulders pinned as she pats
on the temple taut-out tambourine…
Under the tympanum sunk-reliefs
people pass but no longer understand
what those gestures mean or represent
as if someone took out of their crania
those eardrums needed as much now
as then to hear what gods have to say.
Why, there the figures rise only so slightly
from the backdrop that would be
otherwise all flat like lines and lives
not ruffled by a frothy beat or tone.
And yet how the flocks of passers
oddly resemble what they disregard:
an image sporting a minimal depth,
holding on to safety that stays low
not to risk a skyward climb,
bending their heads into the height;
and thus a view just somewhat up
is lost to those fast and weary eyes—
not unlike a chance to catch a soul
when she’s lurking nearby—
but then it goes, and she sinks
below and behind the plane
of that ever-moving now—
and just like that
some timeless god might have
surfaced and even held out
an index finger to be gripped,
and thus pointing at an arch,
a window, door, and entry
into what has paused inside.
Just like the marble columns
that served as glossy strings,
fastened and attuned
between earthlings and the sky;
but what a freedom we got now—
flashing: “No strings attached!”
The dragon, the unseen,
comes from the lily’s
pristine, polished cup.
And the cup?
It swims atop
aquatic black
curtained in the dark,
with the bottom
giving in to muck,
as one can see
in Maya iconography
from Herbert Spinden’s book (1917).
And the lilies’ pad—
not unlike a wicker fan,
even a wrap of cracking egg—
that loops and knots
the passage, rushing
through that which is not,
and which only
what never ends
can unlock—
that one should call
with the name of life,
winding in and out
through the coils
of knowing
that rises and ebbs
for the mortals like a tide.
