Gnarling, fomenting, and terrifying was she; Screaming the wrath of Poseidon's doom was the sea. Drowning was Panic's cacophony in the blasts Down from above and below which shattered the masts. Crying, just crying and fear. All courage destroyed; Thought, in its vacuum, disintegrates in the void Realization has carved out. Only despair, Only despair and anxiety of the snared. Iron and liquid, the sky is hard yet it melts; Torrents from Heaven in syncopation with Hell. Clutching in darkness below the deck while the bolts Flash in the chaos without, all struggle to hold. Crashers rebound on the hull and toss us around, Piercing a hole in our side like running aground. Light spills in almost as fast as water, and sight, Fouler than blindness, itself impresses on night. People unfathomably bereft in the lands All of us left, that will never see of those sands Where we return; it is never now for the forts Cannot espy us, and nonexistent the port. Always awaiting, the ones surviving us poor Souls of the wreck; we were gone the same as before, Then it was final. The sea in silence responds; All that she offers are marching waves from beyond.
Month: February 2022
Where in the islands northwest of devotion
Where in the islands northwest of devotion Utters that voice that is sweetly deceitful, Dark but serene in its haunting erosion Deep in the mind? All my pieces the ocean Washes away, who can find them? They people Thoughts and ideas in the eddies and breakers Wide of the safety of lanes, in the wake surge. Green was the isle, and the hair of the maidens Freely exulted in breezes from seaward. There in contentment for just one occasion Spent I a morning; the sands then were weighed in Human retention; one-nature. The leeward Wind would remind me. The salt; the enchantment. Lost is that land; who could seek its revanchment? Green was supplanted, and greener but darker Rose the approaching domain of the tidal Ocean, outside of all time with no marker. Deep in the being unconscious, no ark or Lifeboat surmounting a solemn requital. Death is a sailor unmatched. And a singer Silent encircles in vapor and lingers. Somewhere an echo of wanting ascended Out from the foam of a distant embankment Born of the fog—the horizon that ended Roiling beyond all my senses, all flanked in Luster's mystique which all reason has sank in. Hissing and spraying, it beckoned me forward, Out to the vista where sunlight is cornered. Sing me the song that my wits will recoil from, Menace of men who, unwilling, must listen. Rapture cognition; my muscles, embroil them; Cast off exhaustion, the waters! They glisten! Only that song will be fit for my mission. Madness or passion is fueling my rowing, Swimming if oars will refuse where I'm going. Millions of chopping collisions a-cresting, Hacking away at the tendons of reason. None but a manic bereavement, and testing Any exception to fancy as treason. Always unknowing my heart which believes in What? Will it soon be discovered, why waits these Visions of countries on waves that my fate sees?
The rain falls on the pond of Avion
The rain falls on the pond of Avion; The turtles' armor shimmers black like glass; And softly does the egret trace beyond The surface, then at once without a splash It pierces down to plumb the algal cache, To fish for flies, to skewer and to poke Around the sparkling mirror on its pass Where it evaporates in midnight's cloak. And ever little ripples there respond In quietest alarm to breaching mass, Alert to anything that enters on Its small domain. Beside its ebb the grass Is pointing from its soily hilts en masse Amidst the rain, the verdant warmth awoke A misty cloud that shields the low morass Which then evaporates in midnight's cloak. The tree's patina'd leaves the wind absconds With for a moment, then the next it casts Them down upon the fissures of the pond; And on the bank they anchor next the class Of ducks with plumage darkly flashing brass Beneath the scattered moonlight where the croaks Of frogs disperse in every droplet's flash And then evaporate in midnight's cloak. A waking dream that plays out past the ash My cherry grows while on my nighttime smoke; Our gloaming glows together til the last When I evaporate in midnight's cloak.
Hyacinthus and Apollo XV
The god of music heard my fervent prayers, More beautiful than any man he looked; I dared not want him yet like needing air, I still besought him while my body shook. Let all take note that who attempts is glad, For when I asked of him he asked the same. And then he said, ah here's my handsome lad, He held my cheek and sweetly asked my name. I begged him to unlock the secret song. He bade me stand and took me in his arms, And instantly to him did I belong For more than songs and divination charms. Is this the thought upon the godly brow That though eternal thinks of only now?
Hyacinthus and Apollo XIV
Your gleaming limbs beneath the streaming light Entice all beauty lovers with their shape, Yet I alone most wondrous of delights Have known—their tender fingers on my nape; Your precious abdomen and milk-white thighs That wrap around my circuitous embrace; Your feet that bring you when you hear my sighs; Your lips on mine, my arms around your waist; The melting timbre of your singing voice; The intimacy of your whispering; With these alone a lover would rejoice. But more, much more than one could sweetly sing, More cherished than the blind could ever see Is this my lot, that you have chosen me.
Hyacinthus and Apollo XIII; Zephyrus III
He loved and lost and left for foreign lands Away from olive branch and temperate bay, Where what was known were climate's cold demands And frost instead of dew proclaimed the day. Around the Earth his refuge lay; the air That gusts upon his tear-stained cheeks ripostes In slicing curls. In perilous despair He flies alone towards the snowcaps' gloss. When Autumn clasped around the one who spurned Him, Zephyr crossed beyond meridians, Equator, spheres and hemispheres; he turned To gentle Spring the sleeping hinterlands. But soon the wind returns again and sips The bitterness of absence on his lips.
Hyacinthus and Apollo XII
A dry and dusty desert now is he With no oases for his parched dismay; His still effulgence matched in irony By flowering winds making him this way. What thrives in Spring and fashions growth must go The way of everything in transience. What breathes and dances in its vigor slows To feed each beast and bower standing hence. But science never soothes a tragedy; Philosophy he has, which doesn't heal; Divine life now unravels emptily; A god without a godhead: what he feels. For though a life is short, a god be whole, Beside both life and death are lovers' souls.
Hyacinthus and Apollo XI
Ye gods that see the mortals' suffering Your own delivered to that fate laments. His deathless blood an offering His cries He'd make, his golden hair he's rent. Incised. The cosmic dreaming gods He sleeps now in Take shape in enervates The Stygian. In Physics' nightmare; Phoebus casts the rod Upon the ground and dashes it in hate. Yet healing arts he holds not culpable, These too he made as surely as the quoit. As well the Sun in seasons pulls His hand: The whipping winds adroit. Dread operand. He drinks the bitter blame himself, The petals blue-on-white as delft.
Hyacinthus and Apollo X
In Winter when the night is wan and cold, And evening shadows early on the brim Of the horizon's nose, the dream is sold; Enubilated purple drawn so slim. The lips of midnight purse and draw a belt Of transpositions all across the sky. Beneath immortal constellations pelt The waves of worldliness where no souls lie. You turgid cosmos, where is what I've lost? In novel spawning maws or in the old Forgotten corners where the mourners cross In Winter when the night is wan and cold? If every speck eternity contains Remains, then when will he come home again?
Hyacinthus and Apollo IX
So, so unlike the petals were his hair; His tresses gamboled as no iris did, Those lesser beauties of the name they share, No treasure like his face their veils have hid. His locks the deepest midnight color shone, And sunbeams would dislodge a golden crown No orchid wears, it was for him alone; And when they're kissed they make a different sound. The nodding sway of violets in a breeze Is not the way it bobbed when we would play. A larkspur, when I kiss it, doesn't cleave And cling upon my cheeks on humid days. But larkspurs now are all I have to keep; A larkspur and the anodyne of sleep.
A place for my poems 