“The Innuendo”

The innuendo woven not so much in the fantastic,
But in experience, a living witness within a precocious cloud,
A view to forward motion, counterfeit because in itself it is allowed
To be but never adequately traced: inertia has no station; static, elastic,
Yes, but to no greater purpose.  These, the chords of oneness in righteous bond
Cannot be but bastard confirmations of the spirit’s sparse but potent
Progress, motion, goal’s, the irritating “now” but well beyond the quotient
Of “then again…..” But there’s not it. There is no special wand
Nor spirit guiding, none the precious gift beyond simple accident in bands
Of language, maudlin to the ear which is to say we may embrace not knowledge, but the inordinate love of what the ear may be gifted to hear;
We may glory in what the tongue speaks, and its wonders to suspend the fear
Of dwelling on the absolute, mere ciphers written ingloriously on the sand.
And if, by chance, there is a point to these sentiments and if pernicious—these
Fine words—it is the soul and not the author who penned such thoughts with ease.  These, my words,  will not endure; they dwell
Within the canvas stretched taut by hand, commingled with my blood
That has no patience in its present station. The cud
Is there, perhaps, and what is felt
May be forgiven its fibres: thatched roofs and hives
Yield similitudes, some passions, a slight nod,
  Perhaps at best, a stay of execution but sans lightning rod,
A tool, a catalyst with which its throne and queen survives
Their moments of glory ere the day they find themselves alone.
Something ever lacking in the honey. Transitory needs reveal their secrets
In the rough draft, as natural tides recede in time in egress
From the scene; but what? What remains in the station of a drone?
No progress is forthcoming in the champions of an age
Where the presence of the tides means the turning of a page.

“The Adagio Begins”

The adagio begins; I am so very old this afternoon.
I drop prescriptions at the pharmacist,
And, while I linger, phatic melodies persist
Perniciously; cornered by exchanges with the clerk. Soon
The neighbourly welcome wears a little thin in me,
And while she might have had me read
The blurb she found in yesterday’s discarded need,
I found myself a little on the run and disinclined to be
The latest in this evening’s causeries, her chance encounter, leisure’s
Fodder in the daily bond, another rerun of the previous day’s events
That even when fresh and in the bloom of youth were set
Ajar in previous matinees. Politely I decline the pleasure
In the “breaking news” edition of the hottest feed of tips
On vitamins, deodorants, and balms to soothe the driest lips. —Once

“Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.”
Aldous Huxley
[1894-1963]

“Who Tolerates the Touch”

Who tolerates the touch of palm and fingers
Triggers of the tympanum’s lover’s voice,
The involuntary arch of eyebrows, that choice
Of recognition dresses doubt that lingers
Yes a while on what once was until it reconfigures
Long enough to serve the summons, reaction’s invoice,
Undesired but necessarily what is required; a void
Is not an option to the unbelieving mind. Ligatures
Every particle seeks are sealed with audience, weight,
And purpose in immortal cycles that begin and end
In memory, its regeneration suspends
Its own belief and use within its measured time.
For him who wills cannot resist nor hesitate.

“The Balm of Blame”

…painting by Kyle Ragsdale…

The balm of blame relies on shame
While fools amass in cloisters; clowns, their terrors
Grouped in choirs as with fires sired in hell. Errors
Come as natural as breathing, while their eternal flame
Afflicts the every man, and cannot be concealed.

How, then, does the crown not fit
As when in the thick of smoke and mirrors bells peeling
Not from above or from the side but fulgent, sealing
Heaven’s signs in record time, the eyes, the gait, the every gesture
Bold prophetic witness as the Eastern Prophets’ Word is echoed in the West,
Their lights snuffed out in increments that underline the tortured tests
Of wills and structures of the Occident in bulging bank accounts–sequestered,
Belching fallacies–metered by the hour that all but scream for want of closure?
Yet, the line is long and longer for ambient mists of deft exposure.

They will not hear the key left limp at latch–the entrance
Or the exit; they cannot see the rising
Or the setting of the complaisant star, its restive analysing
Of the land and sea at midnight, the telling glance
Of creatures who stalk their prey in the foyer of the edifice;
The temporary seating exceeds the number of the tombs is evidence
Enough that in all creation few defy the mirage; the fence
That must divide the space above a phantom’s presence
Of this planet from the gaping hungry star-filled void
Of all that passes for imagination.
Connoisseurs of matter taste
Nothing but the venom of the fang in hours of self-defeating waste:
That posits purpose in pursuit of the outrageous, they speak of decoys
And photographs in place of simple memory and obsolescent joy.

Weep for they whose righteousness consists of lawlessness and celluloid.
The sardonic moon signs mayhem and havoc to the eyes
At rising, a potent rift between what is and what only seems
To be; and we, its tools allow for fancy as it deems
Fitting to be in the mystical early patterns of the evening skies.
How meet and seemly even for the dedicated mind
To allow such flights of visual savagery to arrest
All logic, moving as it does to attest
What truly isn’t there at all. How like denial, refined
Anticipation in the night of our modernity
To grant such majesty, so great an urgency
As the behemoth moon of our imagination cedes
Nothing to the truth but flaunts its strange lucidity
In increments that must eventually crown itself the liar.
Fully risen, there it is what begun must in turn expire
shedding neither light nor fire.

“Solace in the Courtesies”

…just a note to say that about a year ago, I posted the following sonnet induced by having seen the Moon and Jupiter in their full glory together; they’re both back, and contrary to public opinion, so am I; for the mind, “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to:; for the heart, time is conquered, thank God… —Once, 23 July 2011

Solace in the courtesies of the constellations, Jupiter
Surely there at sunrise, the brightest star,
Visible while the jealous moon, scarred,
The closest audience; apt, significant. The irony. Her
Dwarf, yet here in circumstance; the bond a quiet perpetuity.
The mighty planet rests for moments in the night,
And we regard the larger aegis the greater light
And think so little of her smaller celebrant; so great an inequity
In vision we’re wont to dote upon from such a station as this.
It is just so with all luminaries of perspicuous wisdom and guidance in the night
That they are worshipped in coal black skies, but preludes to the dawning light
Because it pleases the eye see none but them and rest awhile in ignorant bliss.
Yet with the rising of the sun, all former brilliance must surely fade,
Withdrawn by force to honour greater virtues than the night has made.

I wonder why it is that knowing consciously the identity of what that star is that shone this morning just before the sunrise and has been shining every morning so significantly in the southeastern skies makes so much difference. Tonight it was joined beautifully by proximity to the moon.

A few weeks ago, I learned from a friend that that bright, unusually vivid star was in fact the planet Jupiter. Not that the news was astounding, but in some quiet way it was comforting because as I looked out from my balcony in the early morning hours always just before sunrise, when the skies were clear I had seen that star and wondered just what it was. Somehow I wanted some confirmation as to just what that thing was. I wrote to my friend who was kind enough to confirm its identity for me that it is true that it’s Jupiter and it is very visible in the skies during the whole of June into July. Now, then, this silent delight in knowing consciously that I have seen with my own eyes this “other world” that shares our solar system in some subtle way pleases my soul. These are the signsof God, my friend, as if the moon and sun, the inevitable revival of the earth at spring, and countless spectacles of greater and lesser significance were not. Did I need another confirmation of the majesty of this Creation? These days, for me at least, even breathing is a sign of God and becomes more obviously so with every passing day at my age. —Once, July 2010

“I Could Have Called”

I could have called last night, you
Know; you’d have answered, of course, and we,
Removed, should conquer these deserted walls; the you and me
Expressing wonder and ecstasy de facto that two
Fine tunes in a single space find nothing in our words;
No lyrics, no grandiloquent prophesies, no binding ties,
No coy deception, fitting deposition, or bold-faced lies
To truss up seams, loose and dwindling ends; just birds
Of prey whose festive table breeds in fables, birdseed, curds
In whey–nothing offered, nothing taken–
Gilded fare in a God-forsaken
Intercourse that breathes perhaps in syllables, but nowhere near a word,
Stentorian sensations that somehow subdue a nightly desperation,
Declarations masked in stilted mantras ripe with endless repetition.

“The Greeks Have Flown”

The Greeks have flown; they’ve left their god
A morsel, a token of devoted consummation,
And a fitting tribute to Poseidon on the shores of conflagration
As Casandra’s painful cries go largely unheeded beyond a nod
From time to time within the royal brood; their sovereign’s rod
And sceptre sanctified by land and sea, firm determination
To abide by what is thought a victory for the nation
Complete with joyous riots in the streets, the sod
Still wet festooned with crimson oils and a decade laid to waste;
While Trojan mothers weep, their sons receive the final rites
And Priam’s troubles treble as the night in blindness falls.
Wreathes of fine remembrance punctuate belated joys, the caul
Of sorrow thin and thinner in the ritual; they’ll circumambulate
The horse that dwells within the walls and sleep in peace tonight.

“They Await”

They await some helpful word and know the news
Their fear falls short of what it is they want to hear;
Days’ delays, too much backlog must disappear
Before the silence and its echo can renew
The striking of the bell within this people. Still
It falls within the natural healing that smatterings
Of longing, waiting, hoping in and of itself brings
Spasms of a healing psalm to the many, and for the few no chill
Will touch the man who holds the triumph of the will to heart,
A movement, distant, upward, outward toward
The next plateau, a freshly minted meme within a percolating promise, forward
Always–never moving yet never still–magnificently arched and carved.
As with a steaming rainbow, himself the crown to every several cloud
While he succumbs to resignation and relief that only ignorance allows.
They study stars to bring a second truth to hand enforced
By what the doctors know, to second guess
The odds, the capture of a second a consolation prize at best;
To cheat, perhaps, or worse, to change the windless course,
The doldrums of ordination well before conception. Even more,
Delight to undermine what primal motives strength
Of certitude command, a reprimand the breadth and length
Of all creation guided as it were to win, to score
Beyond that something, this someone, those some things greater
Than the product of a wizard or the clever second hand
shuffles across the face of clocks and cosmic signs. A man,
A faculty of man, an energy–perhaps an enterprising satyr–
Quickening the insight and knowing just how much the gathering clouds
Have missed the point will gorge himself on fate,
and blaspheme right out loud.

“There Is But One God”

“There Is But One God”

There is but one God, one sea, one me,
One in exigencies, and so it is that we may be forgiven,
Forgotten for what some imagine, they who live in
Fear of all things independent, not bound by seas
Of visions circumcised by death, itself; cities, and a panoply
Horror honed with golden trumpets on the silver screen, driven.
Spent., the albatross, the unicorn, innocents that live in
Flights of fear or fancy, real or paginated manuscripts of fantasy.
Those of science, these of fiction hoard by dint of circumstantial
Weakness in the face of simile and metaphor; laurels and the oak leaves
Crown the brow of meretricious habit born of years excused
Yet forsworn by tedious repetition and nothing left to use.
Given, then, both time and choices, now–eternal wherewithal–
They magnify pathetic phatic lives
displayed as prayer rags grown limpid on the breeze.

“A Simple Chemistry”

“A Simple Chemistry”

A simple chemistry, the day, the night,
And what of course is never meant to be;
But still the hope is there, the simile
That never quite transforms a noun nor quite
Contents itself in action, so never mind a verb.
But, then what a change of heart is there.
Reaction taut, willingness, a kind of gas, an air
Of great and greater expectations that serves
No more than casual attention yet is so deadly. No, of course,
It cannot come to this. But, yes, eventually it does.
And with the cat’s release, it must.
The thing is there to see, to feel, to taste. The horse
Before the cart, perhaps, but nonetheless, a paradigm of waste,
And with each fine turning of the wheel the love of wanton haste.
A maudlin isolation seeds contempt and leads the mind
To rites and righteous thinking that was not there before. He’ll defer
To what he thinks is plainly there on the plate; they infer
From this that he’s content, but caution! Not all nouns decline
The same, nor are their heirs in action conjugated
In the subjunctive: something other brings the two together
And there’s no part of speech that weathers
Scrutiny in the spirit. Sounds and syllables modulated,
Dress themselves in exceptions ruthless syntax will abhor.
There is no saving grace in this, no workable alternative
To perfect tenses forcing all to deal with God and His eternity:
Dallaire declared that he believed because he’d seen the Whore *;
And, after sleep and shadows, I believe the Orb will rise
Because I’ve seen the sun ignored in midnight lapis leasure skies.

*Lieutenant-General Roméo Antonius Dallaire [June 25, 1946-- ]