CONCEPTION

Could this be the morning of our conception?
The swaddling clothes of impending birth?
The gods plan a crafty deception,
And draw us unknowingly in. On earth
We mortals do not see the devious
Deities at work, the loving pair so
Unsuspectingly spinning gold out of hay,
Sight unseen, mysteriously complete.
And this! Our parents turn their backs
On angels, friends, and fiends alike
To consummate wishes inside of a kiss;
For deep inside each other’s eyes
They watch not us but heaven rise.

JUDGMENT DAY

I will play the devil’s witness,
If not his advocate; be firm,
And formal in my way, careful
Not to be too careful; witness
What on earth is fact and being,
Crucible alone, in tandem
With another. I will witness
You now, as I was witnessed then;
I will hold the pale transparent
Crystal to my eye and wonder:
So too did you. The devil sends
Me as he called me, messenger
And message, each to the other one.
In fact he nears, so witness come!
God approaches and I must swear you in
With a forked tongue, my exhibit, his whim.

RIDING WEST ON ASH WEDNESDAY

I’ve given all my thoughts away,
To bury under sheets on Ash Wednesday,
To buoy the bundled up beggars who meet
To pray--they hurry down the darkened streets
Well muffled to the wind. I’ve come to think
My thoughts are like the hurt and harried thing
They hustle from, not to. So here now, bring
Us a horse we both may ride, our wishes
May become our brides, our broken dishes
Full to the brim, our endless trust the missing link
That’s tied to dream-bound whims that swell and breed
A hell of vapid words that wages war
With deed, in doubt spells out the sacred name
Of creed, in virtue names its donor vice.

God it was who rolled the dice,
Who rolled the dice and left the game,
Who ate the apple down to the core,
Who ate the core down to the seed,
Who looked at me and winked.
The circle in cantos self-damning is vicious,
Like fish that eat smaller and smaller fishes,
All put at last in a song to sing;
Or caught like a bird in a book, or the wing
In a butterfly net which you think
Is your eye, until your eyes meet
The eyes of the ones you pass on the street
Surging like horses around in their pens, day
Passing night: all thoughts pass one way.

USTIYONEV PRAYS
    (for a solution to his geometry problem)

And why would he pray before his reckoning?
Does he know the sloughing off of temper
In sight of the sacred endows him
With respect of the inward kind, a hymn
Of hope and retrospect? Oh semper fi,
The sigh of youth to freedom's beckoning!
Before the simplest task he bows his head
And raises high his eyes to unseen gods,
Then tries with all his might to do his best.
The beating of his heart within his chest,
Each beat a pea within a swollen pod,
Bursts in its final throes before it's fled,
And falls like rain upon the drought-dry plain:
So grows the sacred yield up from his brain.

MY RUN

I donned them all and then began my run
(Plethargic most, swift-heeled Achilles least,
A plethora of lethargy in one)
Then threw them all off as my speed increased:
My orange hat, my old and ragged coat,
And last of all, with one great heave, my sweater.
The trees flew by; I knew them all by rote:
Birch maple, pine oak. Like words in a letter
Or letters in a book, they took on light
And color in the brushwork of my mind.
At last the swift Achilles came in sight:
I saw ahead the crowds of clappers lined
Along the track where once the stands had stood.
They cheered me on, though all had turned to woods.

GOLDILOCKS

Now you are the three bears, or rather Goldilocks
Trying out the beds, first one and then another
Where your children left them, leaving--and you? You who
Took a quarter century's years to bear them all
And eighteen more to send them off? How many beds
Is that? How many chairs all broken and repaired,
Or left in pieces where they broke? How many spoons
Sent flying to the floor boards, fallen through the cracks?
How many bowls of porridge? Nine bowls of porridge
Left to wash; nine beds too soft, nine chairs too large,
Too cold the bowls of porridge, or else too hot. How many
Did you have to try, before you found the one just right?
You tried as many as it took and more.

And will the bears come traipsing home again
Fresh from their picnic in the woods? And enter
In without a knock--of course this is their right--
To find their home in shambles? Cupboard door
Left open wide and empty, muddy steps
All leading up the stairs--and see the beds
Are slept in too, not one of them is made.
And there are you in bed beside the window-pane,
Asleep at last, too full of porridge and sweet dreams.
Will you awake and jump right out the window?
You who entered in this strange new world of poetry.
Without a knock? This house of porridge, beds, and bears?
I think you'll stay: it's what you came here for.

AGAMEMNON'S GOLD*

Though treasures glimpsed are still not ours to hold,
She has in hand her muse's new rendition:
Homer's hammering Agamemnon's gold.

Across November's Sapphire skies are tolled
The terminal, the extant, sole edition:
Though treasure's glimpsed, it is not ours to hold;

We see the beech's pewter base unfold
With nature's heady new intuition,
Homer's hammering Agamemnon's gold.

Entranced by love, we counterfeit the mould:
Enticing, transcending emulation;
Though only glimpsed, it is not ours to hold;

It harbors in it truths as yet untold,
For ancient scrolls belie our new intentions.
Homer's hammering Agamemnon's gold.

With beating heart she resurrects a text grown cold;
With burning ears she offers up the new translation:
Though treasures glimpsed are never ours to hold,
Homer still hammers Agamemnon's gold.

        *(Inspired by Julia Budenz’s ALEXANDRIANS,
            The Gardens of Flora Baum)

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THE CRITIC PLAY

An archeological report play preserved from the Age of Metaphysics, culminating in the 52nd-62nd Century AD. Based on the fragment (spoken by the female) which is this report’s climax as well as its chief piece of evidence, the rest comprising the denouement. The term “social democrat” is archaic and obscure. Such finely preserved shouts of past passion confirm our dreams for the future. It is our earliest example of the fractal sonnet form (ABCCBDEDFAEFGG) used in series. Archive: Shed Chamber Press, N. Parsonsfield, Maine, 8300 AD. (Diaries, 9993 AD.)

ENTER the critic to speak:

In fractal ruin lies the lay
Buried near my heart.
Now and then I take a line
And toast it with a sip of wine,
Exhuming still another part.
I’ve learned its total on the run
Within the cradle of my mind,
And joined its forces with a pun,
And placed my wisdom at its feet,
To make of it a critic play.
Its author is its heroine,
Who goes away to noble defeat.
So fitting a form’s the fractal sonnet
I must beg to stage my play upon it:

    (Critic stands aside)

ALARUMS --a female enters and speaks:

A social democrat I am not,
My politics of being, incorrect --
That all men are created equal
Seems to me truth endlessly sequeled.
But from the common state I’ll not defect;
I have life from the insubstantial air,

And, with the certainty of a mother,
Find the forgiveness of children most fair.
To construe the world in my own conceit,
A lucum conlucare I have sought,
Stood alone at night among the others,
Made my ballot box a cloaca sweet.
My vote’s been cast in my heart’s darkest part
But that’s what has kept it whole from the start.
 

(The female exits)

Critic as messenger speaks:

Which is to say, little credit’s due me:
I’ve been a messenger sent on his way
Not to heed the angels, nor to deny
They do make it seem joyous enterprise
How better I might spend these, my last days.
I’ve spent my mornings running, taking care
To keep pace with wonders passing brings,
As messengers do who make their way there --
There in the forest where the long road leads,
Where the bright rill runs on the dark green lea --
I’d fly there directly if I had wings;
But the message I carry is dead mens' deeds,
And the cry of the deep is dearly bought
With a song as soft as a young mother's thoughts:

The female speaks:

Let me pause in your shade to sing my song
And climb for a rest upon the great rock
Which blocks my way in the path’s vast middle,
Enshrined on top with a tree; for riddled
With runes in an unknown tongue, it must talk
As trees do, in time, to me. There the worms crawl
Where bright moss gleams on the dark wet stone,
And the flies take wing before my foot falls
From places beneath where fern fronds enfold
Darkness in shade, where shadows are strong.
I have come here now, I know, to atone
For the messages lost, or those left untold;
But stop! Here's a thought so soft and free:
Surely these messages here are for me!

The runes deciphered opened like coffers,
Dispelling balms all about--deep in the trunk,
Bark scarred and dark are words whose offers
Our present day must mock:
"A social democrat I am not" is sunk
In deeply, as though with a rout;
And there where the dark grain shows through the bright,
Once more, more savagely, there’s been hewn out
"A lucum conlucare is what I sought.”
Dark in the shade the shadows offer
"The judgment of children" is in light.
I’ve found them to be, these bark scars, well-wrought
And decided to sink them intact in my song,
Which I hum to myself as I walk along --

Critic:

And now, good friends, I will close with a thought,
The truth of which we have centrally sought
In seminar slow and colloquia broad,
In the bright sunlight and under the sod;
The very best plays are acts of the heart,
And the best among men take the best parts.

                        *    *    *

NARCISSUS

Over a pool of dry dust kneels Narcissus,
Searching in vain for his lost lover’s trust.
Echoes blow hard in time's bitter cold,
Bowling him over like pins with its gusts.

Searching for signs as a true lover must,
Wearing a shirt of regret and remorse,
Tucking his head down inside of his hands,
Gravity rolls him about in its rust.

Soundlessly rising he stumbles about,
Humbled by pain and awakened by shouts;
For floating on high in the darkening wold,
Comes news of the world, an end to the drought.

Fumbling wildly he signals his page:
Narcissus now learns that a letter's been sent,
Where answers unfold while questions are spent
Upon a device he's learned is a stage.

He opens the missive and unties its cache,
And reads there a tale of succor’s dark arts—
Around him the symbols of lightning crash;
The lines of his letter are broken like hearts;

He hears the torrent carrying a tune
He thinks it's the memory of drowning returned.
To all but the hand on his hand he’s immune;
The play on the stage in the wood is adjourned.

Over the pool of bright mud stands Narcissus,
Counting the inlets numbered in rhyme,
Gathering strength from the echoes resounding,
Backwards he steps, one step at a time.

Taking the hand that is proffered in silence,
Following blindly, wherever it leads,
Down through the byway and past the great fence,
Narcissus and shade float over the mead.

ALLUSION

Unjustified it seems I did the deed,
Gently ripped the new sown seed; passionless
Gave birth to mind, let destiny proceed
As though it were a flower.

And like a flower there it died
Pressed out between the pages of a book,
A brighter shade, more vital hue
Than death the text alluded to.

VIRUSES
 (The plan)

New snow floats down and covers up the old:
The shadows are deep. I think of viruses’
Dominion over man: they raised him up
In their conceit, and watched him run amok;
They created in him their image divine
(That being then the sole paradigm).
Billenia ago it happened: they
Devised the plan: let apes evolve their high
Domed brows, let ‘sapiens take dominion then,
Let him survive. “As ‘phids to ants they’ll be
To us.” (There were, of course, not yet the aphids,
But they spoke presciently in metaphor,
The language of viruses long ago.)

In a fission they saw it, saw him rise
To Parnassus, test the bonds that bound him,
Discover his own fermentation, his roots;
Saw him finally discovering them
(The viral invasion, the ooze sublime).
They in the deepening pattern’s oldest crypt,
In apocalyptic schism endured,
Preoccupied: “As molds to gravity
They shall be to us, intent on living
Symbiotically, immortal, divine:”
(They saw him in their holy image shine).
In old snow brightened by new, viruses glow.
They wait in the shadows I watch, and they know.

NATURE AND THE HEART

The heart I drew in symmetry I drew
With mind's eye open, and with an open heart.
So in the grass I dragged my rake,
And cut the young shoots down,
Yearling trees that blocked my open-hearted,
Open-minded way, the great symmetrical heart
I'd cut, envisioned in my mind.
I'd place my flowers down beside it low, in flower beds
On either side along its heart-shaped length.
.
What earnest war this Nature wages now
Against this plan of mine to cut a perfect heart
Through sweeps of old asymmetry,
Through swaths of deeper, lovelier stalks
And vines than any I'd make grow.
She makes me feel the power of her mind
In how she grows her trees in clumps
Right where my perfect heart-shaped path would be.
She laughs at flowers grown beside my paths,
She stops the dreaded shears from closing,
Makes all young trees when sprouting fast feel good.
She makes me bleed from scratches as I go,
Cutting my way through her undergrowth.
She would have me know, my Nature would,
A perfect heart was never in her plan.
 

MAGIC M
(String Theory and Spartacus)

Again my clothesline, there, had snapped and fallen down
—like Newton’s apple—leaving strings and quarks and branes
All tangled up with wooden clothespins on the ground!
Disgrace to see the fabric of the Universe with stains
Of grass—and shame to see the lowly particle
Of weak force grow so strong! I wept—and then rebelled:
"I am particle!" I yelled. “I am particle!
And I and I and I am particle!” I yelled
Some more, until I reached the end—eleven times
Invoked the magic matrix, Theory M,
In all degrees of freedom Witten rhymes,
Until the windy gravitons were stemmed.
Then up in perfect symmetry it rose
And hung itself upon the tree—complete with clothes.

THE BLIZZARD
(3/13/93)

In the past the fear
The sky is falling has forewarned
The duplicity of foxes
Or the uselessness of kings:
So it is now, the sky is falling.

Foxes and we cower alike
Under the falling sky;
We are its shadows walking
On blizzard feet.
That which comes in like the lion

Falls down like fleece in the night.
This blizzard, this night of dense security
Is lit with comforts of our past:
Candles, hissing green wood --
How we labored like love to bring it in.

So we confound once again
The duplicity of lions in lambskins,
Messages sent to earth from the gods falling,
Before the lights go out, before the stars return,
Before the fire turns to ashes.
Kissing them good-bye
Under the wide and starless sky
Black but in the light, on ramparts wreaking,
Our blizzard falls on us and bends
Our eyes to ages past again.

And thanks for that belies our fears:
The beauty that is snow befalls
Us all, warms us in its catastrophic glow.
We its candles through the ages
Burn to know the blizzard’s faces.

The sky is falling, light as lace.
In the brace of wind it brings
Is the song the sages sing.
Someone runs to tell the king,
Someone else sits down to sing.

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