Poems

The Hero

I stand before your image,
Flesh confronting stone.
Book in hand I ask who is this man?
The deeds are worded here,
The figure fixed in space,
Acts retold, remembered face.
But where are you?
Your breath, your seed,
Your skin, your bone,
Less or more by legend grown?
Cold marble tindered by a need?
The light is here within my mind.
Alexander—
You the dead, dispersed, the free,
Have found another life in me.
While I, tho living, have burst this sad cocoon
Following your path to unity and splendid ruin.

* * * * * * * * * *

Withdrawal

In the dark archaic subterfuges of our dream
Sibylle’s shaft of truth breaks the invented night
And love inchoate leaps from the blank images of desire.
You whom I love I fear and take sudden flight…
not from passion and its moon-illusioned fire,
but from the sun-truthed dawn of love…
                        …I flee back into dream.

 * * * * * * * * * *

The Search

Down into the depths beneath the depths
where desire hides a despot face
and dances behind its complex veils…
                       O I do not know why this is truth
                        and why I seek in this arcanum place
away from round stone firm fluid sea
green wind moved tree
root splayed sun shadowed earth…
                        why I turn downward
inverting death
                        into a paradigm of birth…

  * * * * * * * * * *

Collusion

We shape great masks from star-blurred night
to ritualize the death of day.
We follow hopes down corridors of dreams
and break each truth that blinds our way.
We change eternity into a pulse of time
and transform change into infinity.
We terminate each link and lien
to claim our brief mortality.
                        O form that yields so fragile to our grasp-
                        O love that breaks so sudden in our clasp!

* * * * * * * * * * 

David

In Florence the hero David
rises in marble above all men.
There is no sign now
Of that small boy who dared
But only that pride, that force, that gloried brow,
That destiny,
The godhead bared.

There is another David,
Small, divided between child and man
Who dreams his fate
And holds his world concealed
While on the rim of this arena he waits,
That moment
The seed of deity revealed.

 * * * * * * * * * * 

For Joe

So many things formed, then broken.
     Yesterdays forgotten.
     Worlds unmade in voids of pain and violence.
     Where do we now belong
     who span the present as separations in silence?
So many words said, unspoken.

So many paths trodden, abandoned
     Landscapes dissolving.
     Dawns ending in the fall of horizons.
     Where are we now wandering
     who moved as one through separate origins?
So many truths learned, untaught.

So many ties woven, unwound.
     Realities made false.
     Shadows turned into a foreign sun.
     Where do we now dream
     who held the midnight in the shelter of our dreaming One?
So many myths secured, unbound.