Like Pushkin's Tatiana—Among the Many Some Already Know and Always Knew

 

In between the body
qua journal and qua wall,
some of them look
for another locum,

perhaps even
for a fresh new
classic form—

which always reads
like a prophecy in verse,
and makes us all

keep guessing,
yet never quite getting it right,
though it never fails

to land ideas
upon our shoulders.

And those women,
within this timeless form,
somehow always know

more about us
than any others ever can.

So when I think of it now,
those epiphanies seem to tell me

that existence comes folded
within a cosmic dragon's coils,

of which most glimpse
only a few glittering scales

or merely the tips—

while they somehow always know,
and somehow never forgot,

that all which truly is
has come upon a long,
long, long tail.

In a Bamboo Forest, All Admits Its Greening Light

 

Back and forth they sway,
Those bamboo slender stalks.

O how they sway and shiver
As they press against a breeze

Before they yield it back!

And how they tip and tilt,
As if the roots they sank
Deep into the ground

Were danseuses' upraised toes.

Thus back and forth they go,
Still upholding their erect pose.

O how subtly they lean,
And how gently they rock,
Full of grace and nestling worth!

Sometimes It Is a Glance Or a Word's Sudden Strike That Rubs Upon Us Something of the Lost Art of Soul's Interior Design

Beneath a darkly deepened sky,

Into silence's paradox
Comes Hypnos, leaving ajar

How from lyric lilt and lull

So many serene and deeper voices,
Hushed by daylight,

Are born and rise to plead
On behalf of stillness

Which souls still carry within.

While sudden women clothe
Their ears, wrists, and limbs

In added strings and streams,

Bearing weights of pageantic gold,
As though they thought Eros
Were of another sun.

Of the Bolt and Serpents of Those Arms

O those lilies of the night,
Bloom-piercing through the dark,

Why, that is satin's severed sheen
Upon such shoulders and such arms.

They bring to riot and to joust
Marble shaped in flowing white,

To sight and touch as living flame
That speaks in ancient tongues.

And that marvel's molten wax
Lands its sting and casts its charm

With its polished, bruising brush.

In those shoulders, those bared arms,
Love and night discover their lamp,

Like a rhyme that gives shape to sound.

Of a Piano in the Attic of One's Head

 

A piano in the attic —
what or whom
does it attend
if unplayed, untouched?

Yet do not many of us
carry just as much silence,
long accumulating,
and just as long unsung?

Yet there is always more —

not merely the instrument,
unused and left behind,
but also the music —

And the musician,
just as gone,
or perhaps more so,
if lost

to her own self-forgetting,
to amassed and accrued non-use,
whose coat upon a life
is what ringing is to death,

hyphened into sleep —
where only ghosts
come dropping by.

And what are melodies to souls
but varied depths and portions
of lives they themselves once lived,
and thus recovered memories?

Which, in music's classic art,
possess precision and discipline,
and which, among the Romantics,
yield to cantos of the heart.

And all this somehow
goes in Czech under the name
vážná hudba —
serious music, verbatim,

or music with a weight:

a music that attends
to the source
beauty placed within,

that living gold with a mirror
so that it may search its face.

In a word:

music with a weight,
ever serious and ever sincere,
the one and only weight
that always strives skyward.