Postscripts

Siegfried Transformed

Oh woe to Wotan
fully clad
emerging now from darkness . . .

There is within you

a tragic poet —
one who has crafted time
and the ductile blades
of irony
guilelessly
without intent
to find what he loves best
at distance beyond relent.
(We mourn for thee
Beloved Brunhilde
and for Siegmund
lost to Fricka.)

Only art unwitting
could have forged real life
into “Notung”
such needful thing
such sword of the Volsund
(the drama’s didactics
of sublimation —
merely temporal —
falling victim
to Poetics of cosmic
strength and revolution.)

Only the purest of souls
could have hurled
such purlblind vision
such renegade vision
across the heavens
like comet or spear or
thunderbolt from Donner.
(For excepting the Love of Woman
none of this had you sought and
gladly might you have lived
without art or even wisdom —
both eyes closed
both eyes intact.)

Your scimitared comet
(avenging cloud of Valkyries)
is poised above my heart
and I know what each
has sacrificed to its arc:
solemnly
gently
we pass our understanding
between us
like a sole remaining
organ of sight —
our shared redeeming sphere
of wolf-song and twilight.

. . . Oh woe to Wotan
fully clad
for what hast thou given an eye?

2/91

Imageless

Today a poem without imagery
to pose the dilemma,
mirror the heartless
condition I project.

“But wait,” you may object, “already
your words are drawing,
sketching the mirror,
its size and its shape.”

Nay; I tell you
’tis a ghost;
the glass is bare,
returning only the room and
the moving shadows
of trees, cast on
the wall through the window.

It is an image without color:
a ghost in the mirror,
no reflection to share.
You cannot know
the life of those trees
as you picture the chevall,
its oval lozenge
leaning against the wall.

Nobody knows
all that my looking
glass has seen.
By my own illusion
of free will I become
another’s beloved.

Prisms of word, broken,
refract my love beaming
upon its sorrow
and you will always
be a tremendous
loss for me.

5/91

Good-Bye and Thank You

Festooned with words
as I have always been
I spent them without thrift,
sent them out like cartoon balloons,
believing their mother
lode of ether
would never end.

Now at the last
when I would be
freighted with heavy ore,
with words long as
Greek sesquipedes,
with words Delphyne,
oracular,
to bless and be
remembered by,
I have only
these silly tears,
an effusion
excessive as my words —
but from the heart —
to mark our parting.

9/91

November

Late November days
frozen by cold
and flight of light
before they are ready to die
draw me back in time
and memory
under their cobalt blue cover.

November quilts of rime
can only warm
through memory’s kindling,
warm by what they draw on.
Afar, that shelter seemed enough
a cozy cache of mementos.
Arriving, I shiver under thinner blankets
and feel grateful
to be held in the moment.

Winter, ’91-’92

The Night Mare

The horseman of my night
rides a dark beauty,
holding his severed head
like a helmet in his hand.

Oh headless knight
your life spumes forth from its wound
in plumes of winelike plasma,
the sparagamos*
of my mayhem.

With naked fingers my
sightless poet searches
for truffles in the earth,
awaiting the prismal
headdress of dawn.

2/92

*Sparagamos is the portion of the Dionysian ritual which involves the scattering of the body after it has been dismembered. (See Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia, p. 95.) Paglia views the poet as the bridge between the Dionysian and the Apollonian.

For Siobahn

A mouth nearly too small
to hold its fleeting laughter
or the love-murmuring vowels
of her own name whose
sound is always as a whisper:
Siobhan — Siobhan of the
sloe-eyed glances and fluttering smile.

For what now seems brief moments
the butterfly of your love
surrounded my child
with its fragile shield.
Would that he could
have stayed forever
in such silken envelope of first love.

Forever I would hide him
from the wound of life,
the rupture forcing growth,
the realization come late
that none may love him more than you.

Forever I would hold him fast through you,
still bound by innocence,
constant and pure as a child.
But with his flight
he leaves sanctuary
for himself, his own integrity,
no longer mine in your name.

Oh Butterfly,
how we grasp at you
’til your colors have smudged our hands.
He takes your wings with him
and leaves the heart rent
like an open, sticky cocoon.

Sleep long and well
and keep in your
memory my blessing,
for one day, again,
you will be reawakened.

I may not be there to
share your moments of joy,
the wild or full-blown soar,
but I will always have
in my memory
the sound of your laughter,
the sound of a butterfly.

’92

*Cellar Door

These have been rigid, trussed days
spent triaging the battlefield
of my calendar, densely packed
with crosshatched bodies of broken appointments and canceled meetings.
Postponed deadlines hover on
the edge of their remaining quick,
like candlelight flickering, waning
in the wax pool that swallows its own wick.

Script in a thicket of tense, crowded
strokes, is rendered cryptic by their
stuffing and bundling into lines
whose neatly marching flags of
hours mock me as they coyly
designate a task, a purpose,
a structured fort of order.

The homeless poet in my brain
has been asleep for two years now.
For nearly a decade he roamed
through attic labyrinths, like Wotan,
father of the gods, recording
his history on his spear.

His guises were many, so each thrall
that seized me was held in surprise. Always,
and with delight, I welcomed his spear,
while in multi-fonted calligraphy
we conspired to fill each curve of space
with the words we carved on his wood.

Then the schedule book replaced that wand
and there was no history to record.
Drunk with self-pity the homeless
poet has sulked himself to sleep.
Two years he has slumbered with
deep resentment, a stubborn thumb
stopping the bottle of a mouth,
once too filled with words to hold them all, to
contain their spill of wonder, so that
not even the sound of his sleep has
disturbed me or let me know he’s alive.

But today I felt him stirring
in my cellar, amidst a siege of snow
that has chastened the world with its weight
’til also the wind has bowed low,
swelling such icy virginity.
And I begin to light of him, as from
within, his strength makes fly the
snow burdened wings of my cellar door
and whole pages of my calendar scatter.

2/11/94

*J.R.R. Tolkian once said that the the Celtic words “cellar door” were far lovlier than the French-rooted word, “beautiful.”

Approximately 50 poems have been excluded from the collection for various aesthetic reasons. Without the luxury of an editor to axe the ones that ought to go, I have undoubtedly erred on the side of inclusion.  Still, I feel nostalgic for them, all those unborn children.  No, I have lost or discarded their copies.  No photos or films remain.