In the Act of Ardent Evermore

 

“You know,” she said, “perfume is not

outside language and neither is it

without either the body or the soul,

and neither do I wish to be

ordinarily ever understood.

 

Not even before and not even after

this thing you may misname

or apart from the action — this one —

living present:

 

plus ou moins dénuée,

plus ou moins chaste

mais encore profonde

et même parfaite.

 

And if the scent is fine,

it certainly sings

for it too is like a smile:

 

it likewise waves —

now it’s shut

and now once

more open.

 

And what is

fragrance in the end?

But a release of the voice

and a woman recovered —

 

from beneath clichéd old conventions.

 

For breath too

is a form

of my remembrance.”

 

A Sweet and Earthly? Wine

 

On the glass glazed

and grazed by lips,

an echo of sweet,

earthly wine.

 

O is this how the night

has grown on her

as a loosened gown,

an image-echo

 

that lay inside

or idles in between

what comes before

 

and a quiet aftermath

of the happy sleep

sired by her lullaby?

Some Must Have Been Adept Musicians and Painters Who Could Have Competed Against Heraclitus’ Knowledge and Art of Measure and Proportion

 

—How many times (and lifetimes) are we

removed from the true Universal Medium?

 

Embellished with riddles’

adornments of the ever,

deemed flowery and rare,

pure and rich, femmes enter

give-and-take ringlets

of well-polished speech,

 

measure by measure

kindled and kindling

what they hint and offer                                                            

and thus quietly gripped

in reedy tongues

of ever-living flames,

 

themselves so delivered

then as creatrixes of melts

side by side with solids

with grades of lightning-flash

by which earth is liquefied

and what went down

 

begins rising back

till it cools again

into lucent drips

or pearls hardened

in the clasping shells.

“Is this how the cosmic

 

binds and interacts

with the matter

on this earthly plane?”

perhaps only the naïve

or some with a keener sense

could be made to ask.

 

But the key is “measured,”

and to measure is to ally,

align, array well—as if

in accordance with a God

who taught: “No excess,”

since going past would

 

corrupt even those immortals;

and thus women who know

open and weave the ways

of thinnest of the highways

for presence that is always

into beads of such here and now.

Why Would Anyone Want to Barter Beauty and Soul for Anything Else?

If all’s radical flux
and cyclical exchange,
what can what ever is
swap with anything else?

Maybe in part this is
what it is: what doesn’t
stand by timeless laws
becomes its non-being.

But where would this leave
mankind the way we know it?
Note how much it labors
to raze the soul and tear

its own heart and being
in a frenzied race
to win much for much
of great nonbeing,

as if death itself were
our chiefest master.
But when it comes to beauty,
does she ask of us in turn?

A bow — a proof, a pledge
that, coming face to face,
we stop holding on to
what is false and base.