The Wax Melted & Other Poems
The wax melted
and though I burned and burned
I did not die.
What is he who survives destruction —
a spectre flickering thru life
ephemeral, indefinite,
a moth that flew into a flame
but which, after burning, remained.
I walk the earth like some ghost
carrying its remnants …
When those who bury themselves above ground
continue living
as if still alive
they are but a simulacrum of life.
To breathe, eat, sleep, and congregate
as if no pulse beats within —
the collapse of time
t e n s i o n lost
thread cut
a n d unraveling thru space-time
like a shattered meteor
throughout a ’verse
unsure to which galaxy it belongs
a misplaced species
its last evolutionary step
NOT TAKEN
bone to bone
even breath is dis/cordant
a frequency lost
in an ocean
Odd Nerdrum, Limbo. Nerdrum.
Median
Is it only a median,
some interstice of no determinacy,
or an as of yet unforeseen meridian,
darkly pregnant with a rich horizon
whose burgeoning is but obscure?
What of this scattered debris,
this life become disparate flotsam,
the force of decades
splintered through infinity
like houses obliterated by tornadoes —
existence swiftly pulverized …
memory, history, roots
each divested of their ground
as if gravity
suddenly ceased
to function —
coral is loosened from ocean depths
planets plummet out and beyond
then ricochet through the cosmos
the sun plunges into the sea
its light and heat extinguished
now no longer sun
just cold stone
the sea and its flora & fauna
spit thru space
like detritus ejected
from black holes
each fish a fossil void of record
day no longer
night gone
stars unharnessed & pale
all brightness absent
all passions spent
a final darkness
a final light
riverbeds crack & twist
the earth beneath
like metal tourniquets
splintering bone
Francisco Goya, The Dog, c. 1820-1823. Wikimedia.
bread, olive, and oil
bereft of their binding stuff
microbe, cell, and atom
no longer here to fathom
no muscle, sinew, or bone
no vein or breath
no organ pulses
thus no rhythm, vibration, or sound:
a silence greater than the silence of space —
even the Pythagorean spheres resound no more
Pascal knew no such terror
nor Hölderlin in his tower
nor Nietzsche on his terrace
nor Borges in his darkness
What of Radnóti and Celan,
what of Crane and Luca’s watery descent,
what of Mayakovski & Esenin,
what of the khurbn,
or Lorca as the bullet pierced his skull,
what of Pasolini in Ostia?
Marsyan martyrs
flayed like goats for sacrifice.
What Baudelaire said about roast poets was but a prophecy
of every Marsyan atrocity
for the myth is true
& every tyrant dons the mask of Apollo
to silence the dreaded musick of tomorrow —
discord, triumph, and strife
sound in the shrieking wind;
each shifting plate
vertebrae breaking beneath our broken feet
earthquake, storm, and drum
sound no thunder
howl, earth, howl —
this world is done
Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake), 1955. Tate.
Vapor
If I leap into Etna
there will be no body to bury,
no last word to betray,
only evaporated DNA.
No one will suffer
being unable to honor
an implacable will,
the force of life
pressing beyond death,
a living holograph
effectuating an ethic
too strenuous to sustain
over the slack-willed string
of quotidian regimen.
Detuned, most go on,
devoid of exacting creed.
Who can sound the composition
that every great will demands; who ascend to the gift of death,
or endure its vivid test?
When life is complete,
the living weep,
but the dead only do so
when their will suffers defeat.
At this dark kairos,
hemispheres align;
tested by their force,
the living struggle
to redress the calumny
of every arcing arrow
whose flight was broken,
its sharp-pitched intensity
too fearsome for the placid vectors of a cautious polis
that knows not danger’s bonheur.
Where does the driving arrow land?
Broken open, what tomorrow
lies await, an undiscovered star
whose burning light radiates.
The tempest of the cosmos is within us.
Winter 2018
Salvator Rosa, The Death of Empedocles, c. 1665 – 1670, Oil on canvas. Wikimedia.
