How Can Anything Ever Truly Be If It Lacked the Soul and Her Depth and Gravity?

 

Harness of heavy silence, and yet—

that silence found its word

and the word—a true and pure voice.

How come, how could it be?

 

Please do tell how is that silence

and above all when at its deepest

can speak and even sing so well

or rather—the best of all?

 

Could it be perchance because

that, in such a hard-gained way,

only with a soul that grew deep

 

and thus earned its gravity,

what is true may be born and come through?

What is a soul if she is not that deep?

And Yet the Ancients Thought that the Fruit Of Those Floral Nymphs When Made into Wine Was Bound to Bring on Death-like Forgetting

 

“Once the flowers are pollinated, the growing fruit

is pulled back and down under water for maturation.”

 

And what would the capitals of our temple columns be,
those emblems of the sacred tree,
without the forms of water lilies?

 

Those bemusing fragrant water lilies

by the bridge that still remains closed

clearly like the morning sunlight most,

rushing up to open early with the dawn,

 

on having garnered so much yearning

from the depths of night-time dark.

O those diamond-like Nymphaea,

Nymphaea odorata, so sharp and bright

 

and knowing how to coat and perfume

the gentlest of the light they had learned

to love with their scent and yielding white

 

before they turn into candles folded tight

for the night, even ahead of evening dusk,

and thus they float on water smooth and still.

At the Approach of the Other the Soul Withdraws (Phaedo), So I Wonder Now: Which Mask or Face or Verse Can Be More and Which Less Congenial to Her?

 

 

Just between night and dawn

the sky is silver-blue

as if the moon had not disappeared

but poured out all she hoarded

 

deep inside her pallid face —

and the wetland mists

edge it with

a lacing breath

 

as the distant lights and dreams

are sinking back

at the approach of the sun,

 

So too the last shade
of another face,
unknown once more,
slips away
like the thinning night.

How to Let in the Letting-in of the Evening Gold?

 

About half an hour before the sunset

something happens

to the shadows and to the air

and its light —

 

as Maxfield Parrish, among others,

knew so well —

a sudden sharper clarity and contrast

enters the world amid in turn aroused leaves,

 

and all that’s infused with life

becomes radiant with a single stroke:

what kind of god is so indulgent and profligate

that he wastes so much bounty and yet so briefly

 

upon so many mortal, unheeding minds.

But what we know of divine fortitude

and how much patience it takes for souls adrift

to ripen into a drop of elixir to likewise shine?