Wisdom of the Crows (After Bushi)

 

Autumn ushers in its end,
beneath a crow's black crown,
on a bough stripped bare—

Who else can survey
so keenly from within the woods
all that has died or lives?

These ever-alert guards
know always
who moves in, who out.

Dust of Light: A New Collection of Poems Coming

 

Women Don’t Just Walk

 

Women don’t just walk;
their walking is entwining,
and better still
where sea and sun
are teachers of form,

a form rhythm-trimmed,
tuned to cras amet
qui numquam amavit,
quique amavit cras amet—

let the one love tomorrow
who has never loved,
and let the one who has loved
love tomorrow—not less.

To remain silent
would be to sin
against this Muse,

and Apollo himself
would leave me
without a word
in his train.

Vladimir Suchan's new poetry book Devotion any Time now available on Amazon

Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GPDK5PH5

 

I Know I Must Have Lived Before For No One Today Could Have Instructed Me Like This Any More

Oh, to summon is not to summarize,
she said, sensing the unsaid with a smile.
And do you know that with the Renaissance
we gave men a new sense for fingers’ touch—

by letting it mean “to play a musical instrument”
as well as “to take something thievishly”?
And why, you ask? Latin fingere—
to touch was to devise—and to touch,

we knew too well, was to shift and alter.
Even though hardly but the very few,
and perhaps not even the poets,
could suspect that fingere

is kin to faint—to swoon,
to lose possession of oneself—
that which fails to be musical
and does not know the play.

And what is more—the etymos
or eteos—the true and original root
in all this is dheigh-—to form,
though first to knead,

to lift and ferment bread into shape;
and from one single etymon
came a well-arrayed host:
fingere, as I have glossed,

feindre—to hesitate—and feint,
to make a pretended blow,
but also figure, lady, paradise,
and to feign—to conceal.

So all these are thus
dæges or diges—
makers and poets
of what may be made to rise,

just like their kindred,
τοῖχος—not only a wall,
but the snug side of the ship.

Aphrodite Morphē

 

She belongs to a form—
and what that form is
barely understood—

only a sculptor-genius
of Egypt, India, or Greece,
might place a finger on it—

or one with the ear
of Mozart or Bach
hear the form divine

as it breathes and moves—
wave and whisper
folded into awe.

Morphē—structured form,
inscribed etiquette
of how to cut a living line—

that, from serene
and sincere between,
steps forth

and brings to presence
what alone endures
through each stunning now.