The Revelers

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Revelers

A tilt of the head
and there's a universe
never seen before in time and space,
and passing strange—it's boiling hot,
contemptuous in its familiarity,
for though the slate is new,
it mocks the mind and speaks
of high adventure, Mondrian upon the wall,
the queen of age enlightening...
that fresh page a ship at anchor,
tugging at the post to sail
before the morning's past.

Do you feel it?
Can you breathe the air
Arcturus saw when you were born,
and passes on afresh— stirred anew
this time around with one
forgotten eyelash?
And, do the changes
thunder in your heart?

We are the revelers,
the chasers of the dawn,
who from our beds may joyfully
engage Leviathan, or rage
upon black flowers of the night
that dare to cast their shadow
on the day.
~

The Lighthouse

The Lighthouse

Its singularity is insular
until it stirs itself
and throws its restless particles away,
out to the blackened, hungry sea,
the heaving grace of irony
whose understanding is but to receive
and never to return.

Now in the steady beam of sacrifice
there is disclosed the synthesis of fire,
that essential spirit stuff
which place is only to destroy
yet on its saving mission
borne along on minute quanta,
substance of the universe.

I cherish that cold vision
of a lonely cynosure upon the coast
that draws me from the world
and speaks of vigil to the night...
speaks of faith where none is asked...
speaks where time enfolds
an unknown plain
in its embrace of light.

The lighthouse, that last ghost
of mother shore and set apart
like some evasive anchorite
enchained in vows of silence,
demonstrates its wisdom
in th' immaculate restraint
of modesty that we who write,
audacious in petensiousness,
will never understand.
~

For All That

For all that*

A man assembles in his mind
that which he knows,
then listens to the colors
of oncoming thoughts,
tempered in the fire
of passion and of love.

It is the knowing that he fears,
the messages that trail across the years,
creating "I" within his mind
and tremulous that he might cast aside
a piece of soul that nestled in him,
his alone, or worse the germ of everyman.

He pauses by the stream
to dip his fingers,
wonder at the incompleteness he has wrought,
and suddenly impatient
with the rippling image looking back,
he clings to the identity that is
his permanent sarcophagus,
a sacrosanct mortality
no one may ever share.
~
*(with gratitude to the spirit of Robert Burns )

Ezekiel Reborn

Ezekiel Reborn

There are hazards there.
To board imagination of another soul,
to probe behind the rocks along the way
and find too much, converting chill into reality—
there is the romance!

There too is desert, the wandering for years,
knowing that the self alone will dessicate
until there is another sacrifice,
another mingling of the blood there at the wrist,
forsworn to die as breath is dry upon the skin.

It is as much a ship's departure
blessed of the wind upon the back,
blessed to see the stars above the prow
and still detect the beating of a second heart
as passionate as mine to cease
its feckless thundering.

There is the time to seize the glory
of the second wind from out the east,
the second rising of the power of God
that lurked behind the cloud of innocence
to interpose its frailty
upon device, its patient magic
on the dryness of despair, the bones
of a forgotten day, connected still again
by two...and by that still outrageous gambit
forged of love.
~

C'est Moi

C'est moi

In my childhood
they
impressed on me
not to galumph,
lest I be typed
in stereo
as my eternal twin,

but now somehow
it pleases me
to see you are
constrained to know
that I will go
galumphing on
into the nevermore.
~

I shall not come home again

I Shall Not Come Home Again
(reflections on a college reunion)

Too much of loveliness enfolds the ground
I walked in youth, again in age,
and I shall soon lie down beneath it
as my spirit wafts above its art
in clear salute to mind's eternal joy.

Too much, I stand upon the edge of a regret
I do not wish to re-explore,
though I did not succomb.
Old flowers would sigh with me,
and speak of gravamen
that memory could not restore to light,
of crusted wounds I had ignored for years,
then strange in their emergence
would leave their ghostly shouting in my ears.

Yet I had smiled politely as I watched
the curious melange of student mirth
among the pretense of a mellowed age
which walked beside them
for that shred of while last weekend...
and that inside a host of smiles
that flashed around in vain denial
of a fiercer truth.

The time was beautiful
inside that frail transparent shell
of grace that comes with blessed rarity,
and I departed with a heart and mind
in dialogue upon dualities
that never should appear, but drum
upon the tympanum of my perspective
on a world I caused to change
two generations past, and now impart
a flavor in diminuendo, a seasoning
refreshed, more newly wise
and in finality, more spacious in its love.
~

Chimera

Chimera

I saw a titan trembling in the wood,
a little deity who once devoured
the power I gave him, stormed at me
for my naivete, and left me on
my knees to pray, not for today,
but some chimeric garden spot away.

It is the fall of leaves and titans
as I pass the wood again,
divested of its mystery
to make its pathways plain—
that I may look within
upon another twilight of the gods,
a new apocalypse to write
and yet another new Jerusalem
to settle in.

It is a transient Eden
we would give away,
to celebrate the monstrous in ourselves,
to recreate within a forest plain
the holiness of fear—

and an Olympic irony
that we as gods would tremble too
beholding all our gnomic children
scampering to seek a paradise
or an oblivion.
~

Statue

Statue

A whisper of his life within the stone
emerges from the cold of retrospect,
that he behind the figure's vacant stare
could know that other hands saw history
within the reach his fingers stretched, could throw
his burning soul across millenia
and we are there attuned, somehow, to catch
a shred of wisdom, borne upon a gray
and crumbling art.

And do not look apart just yet, for there
is mystery within the telegraph
of ages left to us that may not foil
romance, but prey upon the dying age
that we, ourselves encapsulate in time
to shun mortality.

It is a voice we may not like so much,
unable to attain vitality
that seizes the imagination as
a Praxiteles did, a voice for us
that we may not let go, though photos fall
aside, for this was life incarnate in
the stuff of earth, a transient man come down
to breathe upon us as before.

How still he is! How firm his stubborn grasp
of all we are—how lost are we outside
this quarried slab to meet a personage
that we already knew within ourselves
and fear to know again, lest life and death
in harmony may speak aloud before
we run away.
~

Touche

Touche

At the end,
there is the silent field alone
to offer up its peace , and then
his eyes upon the rising smoke
Pyrrhus smiles,
not for his hollow victory
but for the twisted, blessed men
who do not have to see.
~

And then, and then

And then, and then

Quite apart
from anything to touch,
more is an increment
that lies behind the consciousness,
to swell the mind with new imagining,
inexhaustible—thriving in its sacrifice
just as a fountain
throws its treasure to the sky.

Still as a vision never seen before
and nevermore returning,
haste to burn it into mind and then
away, away across the clover fields
to seek the wooded edge aglow
with inspiration's light.

It is just such fantasy as that
to feed a passion where reality
emerges from a thought created,
just as God ex nihilo sought out the earth,
the dew upon the ground,
the misty heaven, the distant haze
of peace.

In dulci jubilo,
the endless questions
form the ziggurat
of humankind's delight—
the endless answering
a sacred palindrome
of an eternal life.
~