Nine Dragons

From the mist--

yellow eye lolling

beneath

a scaly lid,

blunt horn

jutting from a skull,

armored, undulant

tail so tapered

it might never end,

the body

only a guess

in veiling

formlessness--

belch steam and ashes,

multiplying night on the cragless

mountain, confounding the hunt.

There are no dragons, no mists.

Like shattered wind,

its deafening shriek

embarrasses

the null hope mystics

mumble on their featureless mountaintops.

Bag of water,

bag of blood,

hung upon

a single hook.

The jeweled brow frowns.

The spectator of the game of being

the spectator

lusts for insight, trembling

in the white pall

like one tongue

of flame. All,

immense, eternal--

the first is one of nine dragons:

Leering groggily

out of their late afternoon nap,

muscles tightening

along the spine,

they breathe in whispers,

trembling slits widening—

widening into eyes:

into into

into into

into me.

Where’s your face?

Where’s my heart?

The bed sheets mount up like thunderheads.

I find our love

between our legs

when she pushes.

Curtains billow on the summer’s breezes.

I’m sorry you

must go

away from me.

This time maybe

I won’t feel

so guilty.

Glass bowls glow on the bedside table

among flowers

and a pear

and a knife.

Their faces turn to green rock,

hair to rusty wire,

fingernails to nails.

Then they sleep until it’s time

to wind the clock . . . .

Where there’s love there’s some new thing--

a child with one eye practicing

piano without

a metronome,

painlessly adding

note to note

for his mother’s love.

When his fingers ripple down

the ridged back of the keyboard,

women reach

with bent back arms,

and chatter prayers

only old gods

appreciate.

The notes fall

like thin trees

hit with an ax.

The boy’s face distends to a thin mask.

His mother listens

from the ropes

and curtains

in the wings.

Each note dies

before the next,

while breasts engorge with milk;

nipples toughened and ready,

their bodies’ purpose transformed,

each woman clutches the near man, who,

uncomprehending,

is nonetheless glad for such embraces.

The boy stands,

reaches in to pluck the strings—

his mother lurches out on his blind side,

unaware of what’s been written—

his plain music,

simple to hear,

like love so much harder to feel . . . .

Shadow dog,

burning giraffe,

Daedulus

and Icarus

watch each other

fall into the blue;

corn-on-the-cob

for the last supper;

the ptarmigan perched

on the torpedo;

interchangeable

corks and angels;

the little people

born in mushroom shade;

the butterfly/

hourglass rhyme;

the ocean and the desert of the mind.

At the base of the upturned pyramid,

at the point of gathered weight,

a little man with a face of scars

yammers, “I am

not the one! I

am not the one!”

We cannot tell

if he is the ruler of Hell.

At the end of roads, a hooded ghost

says, “You knew

I did not know.

It’s up to you.”

Nor square the geometries of the senses

with the smell

of a dead man.

Scales glistering and jingling

like gold coins,

fishes plunge

into mirror-black

floor tiles

to the hum hum of wind-strummed guitars

and the exhaust of cars.

Imagination

consists of this

or leads into

a blank abyss.

On more than faith the rose is taken red,

the painted flat an image;

something hesitate to name

or call it fear . . . .

August night—

one hundred and five degrees on the line—

spot-welds begat in spark spray—

station wagons and sedans

grow likes sons and daughters

visited

once a week.

A man, naked to the waist, sweat beading

off grimy skin,

arms arching back,

eyes white bulges

tilted toward

the I-beam-occluded ceiling,

bellows, bellows.

The line turns chorus of tin whistles

blowing off steam.

Beneath a grate in the concrete floor,

an earmuffed man

scoops metal

scraps and cinders

in a plastic pail with a plastic shovel.

Another

sleeps in the stairwell,

wags no forefinger

on either hand—

each night mops the cafeterias.

He’s found a pint of Southern Comfort

in his bucket

every night,

and a dead man hidden where only he

might find him,

every other year for twenty;

doesn’t know how

that could happen,

but he talks about it all the time.

The shirtless man was a P.h.d.,

but discovered

at twenty-six

that life is dust.

Into his mutter

has slowly stolen

a constant stutter.

They all leave be

a wiry man

whose nose and lips

were fused by

electricity.

His eyes hide behind his eternal smile;

no one has ever equaled his piecework;

he goes to church every Saturday night;

no one has heard a word from him in years.

Lunch at two

am on the roof—

the men ogle

the moon, kick pebbles, crack

the new tar bubbles

with their thumbs . . . .

A skeleton drawn in a horseless cart

plucks a fiddle and looses arrows;

enthroned beneath

sides of carrion,

he spreadeagles

the devils

picking through

mounds of human hair.

What is fetid in the fetid air?

First, the balloon mother brings home

brother pops

quite on purpose,

then all still life paintings seem the same.

There’s sense in the burying of fingernails.

Trees make wind blow and time sorrow.

Thus, the wings

wrap the ready

in stiff black leather and squeeze,

squeeze them dizzy.

What whispers

Nothing to fear?

The only angel

believed in

anymore. Out

of where there are not even mists,

the queen breeds soldiers and mites

from her bloated bag;

the white salesman at the doorstep

has no history,

sells thingumbobs

once and to only

one customer—

a proton winking

in and out

of existence

like nothing

thinking.

At midnight, the darkness stretches,

the moon blinks . . . .

Some ideas share the ages

with the mists.

Some die out.

Others, born

pregnant, delivered

of a reason

not to be,

will never die.

Hear it think:

E=mc shivers.

True courage refrains from creation.

A blue ceramic bowl patterned with fishes

lies in sand out of the tide’s reach, is

unbroken,

never breaks.

Sand may come and go,

burying

and unburying,

grain by grain blasting

the glazes away,

working the walls thin as paper;

the bowl is gone,

but not before the sand.

What is its final taking off?

Some say this thought.

Or is it the one

who first thought of Hell,

then told his son?

When the last thing

we are inclined

to be is nothing,

shouldn’t some words remain unspoken?

Each man and woman

stands still in the street,

looking at her or his own feet.

No muscles. No names.

Beyond horizons,

the sequestered

miracle

flashes into being,

splashing matrices,

and for a moment there’s no need to die . . . .

“So what? We are all gods, all angels!”

he bellows,

“A dove nesting on my nose sustains

my attention.

Consider the instruction of the times:

‘Ignore everything.

Keep the counsel

of the argument

of the council,

and press all eyes closed to the agony

of individuals.

You are the pariah lion in the dusty bush

devouring

hyenas.

Eat your bread.

Say yes and no.

Love nothing.

Love the nothing.

Add, but don’t

multiply. Eat,

but don’t grow.

You can be what you already are, with

modification.’

Consciousness doth make us children.

Poor Grizzly

and Hellken, Deaddog

and Curlybeard—

incarcerated

by an idea

most overrated—

loathing the taste of human souls.

Only the rain

blocks the wind

from the window pane.

Pietas remind us of the criminals

buried by thieves.

‘Inevitability of understanding,’ says

the doctor of

interrogation,

the priest tapping the cheek

in Confirmation—

the poetry

of the last sound

of the last line,

the soporific of repetition,

the lonely kneeling walk down the long aisle,

the unicorn

mortal sin—

the teeth of the beast who

stops hearts with the judgment of his eyes.

The other eight are as apes and plague us,

hoist us screaming into the leafy trees,

where they bless us fondly, fondle, or let go.

Consider:

if I say

everything,

I say dragon.

Say dragon,

I’ve nothing

to go on.

Here’s how one might see it: I wake.

My brow contracts

upon a wadded thought;

vigorously fanning wings on the dawn wind,

and with one thrust of immense haunches,

I’m airborne.

The clouds below

erase me

as I go. No!

No, no, no!

Fancy being the early rumor of belief,

let me be St. George

tilting his lance

into the dust,

and not see myself the pitiable beast

beneath his horse’s scissoring hooves,

resurrected

in the arrogance

of martyrdom.

Not even I can say the earth is

as old as it is

because I’m here

to say it is so.

Wings folded in prayer, I genuflect,

receive the dragon

on my tongue,

draw it between my teeth,

float it beneath my roof,

feel it—dry,

savorless—

until (my one good

eye closed tight as a healing wound)

it dissolves

and I swallow . . . .”

I am the visitation of mists—

the thousand cracked bowls holding

the measureless moisture of the earth,

the cat rubbing its back upon its back,

a weary conspirator to the extinction

of the universe (not without its qualms),

neither shunning the sun nor sure

it destroys me—

I am the cathedral sanctuary of dragons.

The bodhisattva

flaps up on his crane

and pierces me.

I hide Christ’s agony on Gethsemane.

Be empty yourself

and hide everything!

On Sunday I am proud to dissipate.

I am the conical cloud meandering

the brightest sky in June,

mimicking

a parasol,

the lethal yellow gas descending

from the cauldron of a crater lake,

the perpetually losing player of tag,

the permanent undone by street breezes.

All clouds create

themselves, winds

assisting.

I am the very meat of the mushroom,

a binary

war machine,

the thought balloons of all murderers.

I shroud the first instant of history

like the mind of Cain.

I am the very meat of the mushroom.

I am the position and the velocity.

I am mist, all mists, and all equally.

I am the dragon hidden in the mist.

I am the envelope of the letter

never sent,

the ink in the pen that never writes

what is read.

I am so

much ego.

I, the smoke that pushes the train down tracks,

the hen who lays the eggs of sun and moon,

the sugar film on the delighted tongue,

the spume on the naked thighs of ex-virgins,

the laughter of children on a winter’s day,

the prayer in the execution chamber . . . .

Vision is

a pint of mist

frozen and rolled

into a snowball:

in Sesshu’s Winter,

each stroke is the stem of an exclamation

point, each dot

the period at the end of a question mark.

Nine strokes of the pen make the man

spryly mount steep steps to his home.

Name everything:

tree, rock, cloud,

mountain, step, water, boat, man, house

and that’s all.

But the painting!

you complain.

But Sesshu!

A thick, vertical line cuts the top half

of the landscape.

To the left,

an outline of unfoliate,

craggy pinnacles;

to the right,

the mountainside teams

with unnamable forms of vegetation.

Old mountain.

New mountain.

Humble Sesshu.

Catch any one

of a thousand snowballs. Hold it up—

watch it split,

feel the inner,

wriggling newborn emerging . . . .

For the new locus is never completely hidden

inside the old one;

otherwise, relation

could not exist between them

(not that Reason could rout it out).

It is neither

undiscovered,

nor guarded by dragons in distant

mountains, where Imagination

could brave wind and lightning

to bring it home.

The place of birth is too obvious

and near to notice—

a dim kennel a stone’s throw

from our hut

outside the castle walls—reserved

for those who peek

from the parapets,

for the eyes of faith to find;

the unattended

hatchery

may have already grown too cold . . . .

Note: Several lines near the end of “Nine Dragons” are borrowed from Auden’s “Age of Anxiety.” View the entire "Nine Dragons" scroll at: http://www.craigcoss.com/DragonScroll.html