“A Pyrrhic Victory”

“A Pyrrhic Victory”

A Pyrrhic victory at best, hours after yet another year’s
Bitter cold before the coming estates of sweat, insurmountability’s
Surmised but never publicly revealed. Accountability’s
Moot when age transmutes abundant copper into gold, drowns tears
With astringents of patent patience, maintenance, and losses dear
But ever too late for death to gloat no matter the audience. Flexibility
Of course is needed, reticence too calm for promiscuity
And not a whole lot larger than regret and nothing left to fear.
What then, comes next; what must? What highway markers point the way
To some fresh spring or more than nocturnal notches at the oasis?
Longevity rests its case while youth is lost in grasping straws
And twigs of self-control with nothing guaranteed to thaw
In time for dinner. Long since the urge to worship heady homeostasis
Yields mere noise, the debris of mindless predators at work or play
Whose highest aspiration is passion’s demand and supply of endless prey.

…paintings by Jeanette Bessette…

“Patience”

Patience in the jumpstart comes from seeing people–yearning’s
Genesis–the Sirens’ call, the weave of fugues of air
From all points, the afterglow of friction in the wings. What is fair,
Then, and where’s the owl in such a scheme? Where the eagle? Learning,
Patterns, snags,  tangles, knots, the steady twists of fortune
In the sleeve will flatten with the years, and while doubts
Will ever be removed, certitude remains the balm to all persistent bouts
With mundane depositions culled from oceans
Of occasion, the wider seas of diversion: exteriors hesitate, interiors pass.
Take care, my friend, leave movement within the gale
Of equity and justice to all occasions, the breath remains beneath life’s holy veil.
Alternatives in solitary places can never scale the heights of healing of the mass
In this weary workshop; not in books will you behold the open gates
Of paradise and all the world effaced; but patience, friend: Peace waits.

“Oh, the Moment, Yes”

Oh the moment, yes. Movement
Owns them both–stillness
In evening’s fire’s thought and witness
To a change. Cycles are but rudiments
Along the way as if cosmic paths were condiments
To reasons for it all, seasoning enough
To accent all eternal syllables and possibly a word; the stuff
Of endlessness in verbal arguments
That pause to take a breath and form an action–mind the road!
Delicate digressions vie with natural hesitation
To embrace the midnight hour as circumspection
In the minor chord and prelude to the code,
Anomalies in the nexus like pearls of depth and deepest night
That birth a blinding light as moths, those sycophants of dawn are drawn in flight
To mark a resurrection in the properties of death and blend
With all things living. Disappearance–
All that is in splendour’s reappearance,
Redesigned to bind all broken hearts–is sent
To comfort both the faithful and the lost.
Seek confirmation, then, within the mind or soul,
but look to it in the end! as the beginning never folds
Nor those who look for solace in the costs
Of faith and knowledge; but losing teaches search
And then is gone. Certitude rises in the East,
With eyes held skyward. Fortitude abounds in inward feasts
Of broad intention, tone and pitch and blessed with inspiration reach

For patience in the present, memories of the past,
And perspicuous signs held in escrow from first to last.

“Diversions Mount”

Diversions mount, but decisions are determined
And timing in celestial spheres and signs
Are not paused for dilatory motives nor do the blind
So easily blot out the sun. Some there are who enter
Darkness seeking the mercurial stations of the tongue, the move
From where they are to where they divine they must
Be without so much as limb or wing but straight through the dust
To strike pavilions over what is not and never could be a truth. Note all who’ve
Owned a cause to glorify the effects of blows to obfuscate, to conceive a sure
Obstruction of all evidence, nothing more. “In My Father’s House
Are many mansions,” written plainly in orchestrated independent clauses;
The caveat in escrow, the final contract awaits the ink *and “If it were
Not so,” He would have writ the mystery of galaxies and stars
as when polemic balances mark the seasons’ endless cosmic scars.
Simplify the matter, choose the either, consult the ether, pick one,
Be, and it will be! An avizandum is no match for public exhibition
And the journey never really satisfies the abyss of timely erudition
Further than a fortnight nor the rule of planets beyond a single sun.
And if the moon’s the object in the search,
Winter’s clouds will override the story
If they speak at all in apostrophes of midnight glory
While the appetite for fear what must follow the zenith. Dirty shirts
And all the king’s fine laundry’s better left
Unwashed if the pawn neglects the very lint of ragged pockets. Socks
Are so easily separated, so inevitably lost forever. High tech stocks
And clever use of futures are stuff of much the same in strategies in what’s left
Of patience or detachment, or verisimilitude when the trend in toys is moot
or confidence in leisure time exacerbate so strange a shrinking;
Ships and stocks are never stronger than the thought of either sinking.

* John 14-1-9

“In the Meantime”

And, in the meantime, what?
If the requirement is the sun
And in the hour, none;
If patience swells but in the rutting cuts
No clearance, no escape from paths
To howling destinations; if the moon
Must hide behind the earth, the cry of loons
Is heard no more for lack
Of seasons in the ether;
If the house depends on creosote,
And vessels pine for tides; the coat,
The autumn’s lack of warmth and wintry blasts recuse nor
Will they join demand to orderly confusion, what then?
The egg exacerbates the vigil not within the cock but in the hen.

“This Earthly Vision”

“This Earthly Vision”

This earthly vision has no sequel–traces of blessed tealeaves,
I suppose–perhaps a some day catalyst for random thoughts in minutes
In the aftertaste, little more. My sometime friend, the spider spins his
Web and hopes but can depend on nothing more; his weave
Is carelessly placed in a vacant room where nothing flies,
And nothing’s gained–I do believe that no one knows
What spiders gain in being there. Flaming blue, the floes
On Northern Seas achieve as much for all the seals in mating season while It lies
To fate and sorry accident arranged or possibly ordained that in their time
The innocence of hapless polar bears sows ancient annual paths with dangers,
Weeds of freedom there among the jagged swords, the Arctic winter’s rage or
Where smelt and herring are the food of something even greater hidden, divine
And very much alive; all are victims. All are caught,
seduced by lethal circumstance within the tundra’s crystals’ crisis spread
Of rich absurdities and matchless ironies of living freely here among the dead.

“He Will Not Compromise”

He will not compromise the stock, his private petri dish.
A line of foxes frolicking through the sheep must prick
The curiosity of any pilgrim pausing at the brook; the brick,
And mortar, tools of what a man constructs, the wish
That something happen here. Daubs of oil in the dish
Will draw the brush to do what must be done. The stick
Will find his cousins own the table; wicks
Are there, (if left unused) while golden fish,
Apparently at rest, take turns about the bowl
If only to sustain the journey to the point of death.
And so the heady phrase and weighty line:
While others may or may not find the rhyme
We neither weigh the consequence of natural signs nor pay the toll,
The fee for what it means to know the glory of the seed, the soil of every soul.

“But Was It Really Wise?”

But was it wise to see the end in the beginning?
Once, some years back, I had a dream
That with some fellow travelers in several cars it seemed
W’d hit a traffic jam cum parking lot, the condescending
Leavings of some dire event up there at the sea in the ninth inning
While we were yet in the bottom of the fourth; the team
Had halted, caught bumper to bumper in the scheme
To escape or somehow reach the sea, in spite of spinning
Wheels and going nowhere, gears remained in “Park.” I spied a service road;
Seduced by prospects of short circuiting my journey’s
Trial, I pulled right over the grassy divide and hit the raked
Lane leaving the sheep in the dust. In short time, my naked
Chosen lane brought me to the shores of the ocean as foretold
By discovery of the secret solution but, lo! impatience replaced by
Circumspection proved a Pyrrhic victory, and was it really wise?

…within the dream, I had reached that sea, but as I looked back at the snake that was the long and winding trail of traffic, I realised that I had achieved the goal, I had arrived at the destination,…alone….

…I once had a student to whom I said, “It’s the early bird that gets the worm!” in a discussion we were having in class about the evils procrastination, to which he promptly replied, “Yes, but there’s no point in getting there before the worm!” Above the howls of disapproval from the rest of the class, I gave him an extension on his due date for the essay in question over the weekend for his blatant originality…

“She Appeases”

She appeases, others simply please
Themselves with platitudes, refined. Reeds
Produce a tone, but, lacking song, exceed
Themselves with piping. She treasures seeds
Produced but placed in barren soil
That comes to nothing. Patience finds
Reflective fields that take the sun, define
A reticence in clouds and makes them boil
To shed redeeming rain from discards
Of the winds, and melodrama in the shadows. She cares
For these her tender ones. Her signs she shares,
Her fruits, her flowers in the fragrances of winter’s snows: far
From smothering her gifts, she lifts them up and leaves them free
As imperfections, promises, and indecision, the rites of insecurity.

“Step Aside!”

“Step aside!”they all say astride their steeds
While buffaloing headlong to oblivion at the table;
Brooks and streams strewn with corpses of the able
And the weak unable to feed the fable’s appetite yet–needs
Be damned–they cannot nor will they ever get their fill. Seeds
Burst before planting and riverbanks wish they could; cables
Spanning harvests struck by lightning, channels deadlocked, disabled,
Tailings from once mighty veins of emerald and gold drain to open seas;
Columbian stains, their poisons seeped, seas weep that have produced
The Adventists’ tidings of all the world’s disasters; waters only dream
Now as would a pond or puddle, redirected, desiccated and paralysed
If not entirely a thing of dreams. Still, moving on, they are never satisfied
And no one’s laughing as both glaciers and oceans stagnate misaligned,
Now home to nothing more than pink flamingoes, shrimp, and stray hyenas
just cruising for an evening’s meal in all that sodium and steam.
So few, then, those whose substance lasts beyond the flight
Between the gathering suns and planets rising, falling, inexorable gifts
Of expansion and contraction ever in arrears, unsung universal shifts
Of natural sequence in the unobstructed view of all that matter’s blight
Rehearsed and then again reversed by relentless change of growth
By God! of all that is and isn’t catalogued a may as well be total loss.
Nights are only final rites of sentinels at best, embossed
In silver shadows and golden inner fires loathed
To show their faces in the darkest wake of dearth
In greed for their own purposes. To the living, rest;
The dead, repetitious rioting in creation from the west
To the east and back again. Abundant waste is here and what on earth
Avoids the accidental? Providence translates
for most to costs and altercation
Lasting little longer than a clot; wisdoms,
but perspicuous public masturbation.