a seer's whiskey sour,
nature without surface.
A drawing to surpass
reality, it grows,
it seems, to embarrass
red and white roses.
We know the artist’s known
a multiplying power —
the rose blooming unblown —
The sonnet sequence, "My Human Disguise," of 600 ekphrastic poems, was begun February 2011 and completed January 15, 2022. It can be found beginning with the January 20, 2022 post and working backwards. Going forward are 20 poems called "Terzata," beginning on January 27, 2022. Thirty more Terzata can be found among the links on the right. A new series of dramatic monologues follows on the blog roll, followed by a series of formal poems, each based on a single word.
The religious impulse, it seems to me, is more about seeking than finding. There’s no greater composer devoted to this search than Gustav Mahler. The most memorable concert I ever attended was when my mother was dying of cancer and Alzheimer’s.
There is only one tree in the park.
Not this day only, but every day,
I find that tree when the day grows dark,
Never before dark, when the gray
Leaves are like a whispered amen
To a prayer I wasn’t there to say.
Therefore, I’m cautious and slow when
I start to climb (I believe the tree
Is not unknown to other men);
I test each limb before I leave the
One beneath, without assurance
Any but the lowest will receive me.
Then my doubt subsides where I chance
Upon a tangled branch, ripped free
The time I almost lost my balance.
Now I can move quickly up the tree,
Into its clotted heart, where the dark
Yields, to my callused fingers only,
The life of the one tree in the park.
An Air Force brat, I was so used to soldiers marching by our house, I hardly noticed.
————————————————————————————-
A creature of prentice alchemy,
slack-jawed butcher, zombie,
wrote the last Deuteronomy
in egg on the first door to Hell.
In breastplate and iron cap (bell
in a tree-tin and distant knell),
Meg schemed the death God would flee
from hated lizards' bite and miss
the jaws of soldier-swigging fish,
but not her blood-sword avarice.
The sick crone ran, her dream to marry
hot in pots and pans she'd carry.
"He is a spy,
a bloodlust fly
circling the sty
above the sky,"
she said as the egg ashes fell
on all red, fecund infidels.
Her barrel insect monster's hiss
excited her waistless bogey-
man's ass to speak; it said, "I
eat and fart and then I die!"
The hysterical diablerie
on the witch inflicted flies.
God's dancing pipers' fantasy,
with spiders from a harp to kill
those who eat apples but can't piss
a lake in payment of the toll,
blow them long and bloody kisses.
His winking, trapdoor-blinkered eyes,
opened wide as windows, see
Mad Meg charge; she desperately
desires to confound her enemy.
A beam of light cutting the skin of space
travels at the speed of time to the beginning,
the end of things, seeing everything between,
without being seen.
Or a single photon released into a sphere
lined with silver, instantaneously covering
all of space, repeating that cold cycle endlessly,
as if someone might see.
It is a discrete miracle, like a man’s soul,
a point on a continuum proliferating one day
to saturate the universe with something better
than gas, heat, matter.
It is moonlight, the boxes sketched on the floor
at two thirty three in the morning, a lighter
shade of light. Watch it turn the earth.
It is promiscuous,
infecting its neighbors, or looking to.
It stretches across the sky like an eyelid
and proliferates color like a drug dream.
It splits the prism
into living spectra, dulls the magnifying glass,
blanches the dead leaf, burns the cloud white;
it is nothing at all—
until it strikes something.
With a bow to Aram Saroyan, who wrote the title in 1965.