“That We Fall Is Natural”

That we fall is natural; that we rise, elephantine.
The elemental flow of oceans cannot be
A thing so scripted in the stones nor greater than it seems,
But ever-striving, ever-writhing, natural peaks declining,
Irreconcilable in their conniving, twice and more desired falling
In or toward Themselves, the Mothers of all Waters, yes. Rivers
Die and are reborn at once–revivals in their streams and noted divers
Books, catalogued as tributaries and watersheds–calling
And recalling from a moonstruck swollen pinnacle
even to the least and last most holy drop.
Confucius* said it long ago that greatest glories
Come not so much in never falling, but in histories
Of revision, sublimes in tectonic prodigies at the mountaintop.
Little wonder save to mortals what the matter is;
energy is the bright selective gleam
Of noble souls who
like the stream, the river, the brook,
must at last rejoin the sea.

*Confucius B.C. 551-479

“The Peace, That Is

“The Peace, That Is”

The peace that is, some sense of fortune, love
Of life, that is, the promises that dwell in hearts
Whose beacon is the present.  Darts
And shafts, phantoms’ arrows, doves
Of superstition and the flights of eagles not yet dreamed
Become the weights of weariness, embellished chains of thoughts,
Of past and distant memories; all these are. The nought’s
Outweigh the should’s, the clarion chorus of what seems
Will drown the melody of what is as patently, the past
Is nothing more than magnification of future’s cold deception.
Certainly, who’s to know but that at conception
What was sure to be could never really last
And what endures is petrified in quicksands of false alarms
Because we dwell so near the morning’s light and yet so far.

“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-- ]

“Concessions”

Concessions, yes; hairy clouds and rains can comfort hearts
Within the sheltered warmth

and welcome of my own bed.
I imagine angels on the pillow

where I lay my head,
And when I pray I am at Temple,

nightly sanctuary of the arts
Within my head as when I read or hear

within tales and fables
Running rampant through that vapid place

where hues and sounds abound
But are not seen or heard; choirs in the void,

not a hint of laughter round
The workman’s bench, the manicured down

of gardens or at the table.
Yes! One day’s maintains bear no obvious hint of perseverance,
No consolation for the years,

no respite from the constant consequence
Of experience in real fears. Vision simply comes to me,

enabled,
Ready made. Who I am to speak?

With whom am I that am alone? I ignore
The whole vicarious mirage as I lay here but for a superficial middling time,

And here with me is what never is

and nothing more.

“Something Close”

Something close to life’s desserts
contains a draught of loss in all that glory;
after longing, we reign for precious seconds
before the here evaporates like chocolate mousse,
delightful, possibly salacious; addictive, yes, but gone
Nonetheless. Perhaps it’s age that solidifies liquidities in this;
perhaps coagulation with having endured just so much conjugation, so many
strident verbs seduced from the indicative to the vagaries of subjunctive
certain obscurity. Still certitude persists and grows with time.
The only antidote to the common predicate is to lose the subject
and assume it’s there just as surely as for every never
sits an always, with its sibling, ever, within the text
we’re sure to draw necessity, the sign
of righteous passage illuminating this world faithfully to the Next.

“They Arrive”

They arrive, the legions, thorns, as seconds torn
From any calendar and common to us all;
We welcome what must come–we have no choice–the plaintive call
Of late night amber moments need not be recalled; we warn
Ourselves and just perhaps we navigate the rapids bruised and numbed within
The cusps while all celestial orbits’
dispassionate marks reclaimed and rearranged
And burnt across all foreheads the latest number,
a simple paradigm–today exchanged
For yesterday–within a fading image of outrageous dreams,
some few last wishes in thin
Disguise. Nonetheless, what’s as clear as what is not’s the fact.
The purview, vision’s purposes recalled, and all collective memories attract.
The purgatives to what comes must be and what must come. Tact
And all discretion set aside, to barter solace and eternity for a bowl of soup lacks
Substance: in exchange for knowledge, wisdom;
Esau’s hungers burn within the leaves
Of Scripture as all prophesies are turned to satisfaction in the marriage,
the final crowning of action with belief.

“Anxiety”

Anxiety brings to mind a smile, a certainty
That what is good is merely stalled
On sidetracks to avoid collision, the call
To order from the ethereal unseen; eternity
Does not disappear with so little provocation
As a disagreement, a suspicion of a difference
Of opinion, or what appears to be interference
Even to the very gates of defeat. The invocation,
“Thus far and no father!” is but a station’s stop
And not a terminal carved in destiny.
Nor is it understood to be a bending of the knee
To anything short of order in the chaos and the melée. The shop
Is closed when systems fail and nothing lasts forever:
Where there is place and time, re-creation pulls the levers.

“Be Careful Here”

Be careful here, my friend, truth can burn
But cannot bring you down; a given is a given:
A man is fooled within himself; he will be driven
In and of his own delight, impelled at every turn
Toward the Qiblah of his creation as the sun
Will rise from his East, recline and resign
Toward his West. As the rains decline
From highest peaks seduced to run
To the ocean, so, too, creation brooks no barrier,
No alteration in its prodigies. Light ordained
Is not the lamp, nor within a wick retained,
But consecrated within the oil; its properties tarry.
Be assured. Energies within the lamp will reign;
Where comes a spark, no light can be restrained.

“The Minute Stands”

The minute stands, my soul does not suppress
Its hours in conference rooms, nor press neighbours close
Upon my door, nor do trusts for futures, expectations, hopes
Of lasting curb the armies of my arrogance; I am at rest.
Because I love my soul, no lasting fears breed
Wantonly because I house beside an ever-running stream
Of waters several purified within a plethora of dreams,
In potent, proper cadences and rhymes descending through the reeds
And rocks from all my memory’s distant melting mountains. Glaciers
Of pietys’ states release potencies passing to the very porch of my door
And gone, and on to others. Yes, the raging rains are there for
Correction, yes, but clouds, never trespassers; diamonds, ever placing
Galaxies in my hands. My outbuildings are full, the harvests good;
And through it all, gain and loss, my soul rejoices as it should.

“And While We Live”

And while we live we see but one of us
May pass through single spaces, one
Will ride the northern run
Toward the right and trust
The left will soon produce
A southbound pilgrim free
And safely bound and while his
Soul’s in transit, quietly he reduces
His necessities, and so it goes with fellow travellers
Along the route and so it is within this place. Passengers
Once removed within the present do not truck with languor,
Neither do they traffic with a mutual struggle; revellers
At feast and lovers in their thrall beneath the moon
Will seek the waterline alone, and while none arrives too soon,
All are always just a little late.  Sisyphus, consigned to fruitless spoils
Willingly approaches his sacred chores; his noble views,
Along the edge of things, the crust, consensus, news
Of what the gods have built and a litany of foils
Is all that is of him that was or ever will be.
His ambition moot, he has no equal in his toil;
He glories as he stands, his sweat, the oil
Of yearning for perfections never rightly seen
And never consummated in the breach.
He oversees his crown of thorns and spies the puny forms
Beneath the clouds far beneath his station, He mourns
For lack of company and for the less blessed so well beyond his reach,
Preventing touch to fingertips or comfort from his lips a farewell kiss.
Touching nothingness but briefly, he turns his back on all he’s missed.