When Pussywillows Last in the Catyard Bloomed (rtf) Read Free

pudding of mud
    mars the making
    of morning snow biscuits
    in the maiden eye
    and the afternoon runs in the streets
    after one inspired advocate
    but is walked on to a broken crust
    the color a charcoal-powdered anything
     
    (yet strangely, the goat
    thigh-bone burning smell
    records in smoke script itself
    on skies the peculiar shade
    a bleeding handful spilt).
     

 
    FLIGHT
    Hilted of flame,
our frail phylactic blade
slits black
beneath Polestar’s
pinprick comment,
foredging burrs
of mitigated hell,
spilling light without illumination.
    Strands of song,
to share its stinging flight,
are shucked and pared
to fit an idiot theme.
Here, through outlocked chaos,
climbed of migrant logic,
the forms of black notation
blackly dice a flame.

 
    WHAT IS LEFT WHEN THE SOUL IS SOLD
    The sting of the startled porpoise,
welting mulatto the bay’s gray belly,
brackish entrails of ocean,
wrapping the mammary reef,
nor all minnow-dried decidua,
festooned of salt excrescence,
shall barter from heaven back
that heaved corpse —
indemnifying eagles
in peristaltic angle—
by felling fleet the flagstaff wing
on folds of stomach slough.

 
    OUR WINTERED WAY THROUGH EVENING,
AND BURNING BUSHES ALONG IT
     
    (Where only the evergreens whiten . . .)
    Winterflaked ashes heighten
in towers of blizzard.
Silhouettes unseal an outline.
Darkness, like an absence of faces,
pours from the opened home;
it seeps through shattered pine
and flows the fractured maple.
    Perhaps it is the essence senescent,
dreamculled of the sleepers,
that soaks upon this road
in weather-born excess.
Or perhaps the great Anti-Life
learns to paint with a vengeance,
to run an icicle down the gargoyle’s eye.
    For properly speaking, though
no one can confront himself in toto ,
I see your falling sky, gone gods,
as in a smoke filled dream
of ancient statues burning,
soundlessly, down to the ground.
    (... and never the everwhite’s green.)

 
     
    T HE MAN WITHOUT A SHADOW
    What master were he of brush or of graver, who
drew the shades and the lineaments, which
there would make every subtle wit stare?
— Purgatoria , Canto XII.
    “Machine-like, I saw Achilles
Challenge the gods with the inevitable conflict
Of mortal desires that even the son of a god
Did not lay at the feet of those that formed him.
And I saw him lie
Like Balder spread,
With that mortal tree drawing of his fluids
And shivering against the violent sky,
Upgrown from his pierced member
Upon the darkening ground.
And their open faces sounded
While she, the distant Polyxena, sister of Cassandra,
Spoke nothing, but was believed
Of pity and known of fear.
    Unbelieving, I saw Osiris
Enter the House of the Dead
On that Great Day when all the days and years
Were numbered and, yet, saw that his name
Was given back to him,
And, too, the lacerate parts
We re-formed and rose again
And strode again.
And great Isis, before those merciless members
Was undone, and unbelieving
Felt the movement of his nightclaimed torse
Those very hands
Had seen to the rending
While she played the great adultress
To a brother god.
    Godlike, I saw the great Odysseus,
Wielder of the blinding brand,
Retriever of the goddess-image,
And bender of that bow,
Fall unknowing to the unknown slaughter
Of an unknown son
Of his own limbs that lay with the darkness
Of she that made men what they were
In all but flesh.
Beloved of her, the dark one,
And also beloved of her
That may never know love,
He took to race of arms
With his own, by darkness,
And fell before his dark own
That even she of the aegis could not hold.
    I saw the gods walk by
In vain procession long
To the distant doom of the home
Of the eater of gods
That throbbed with the constant thunder
Of clashing teeth, tongue and jaws
That consumed their Burgundy and cakes
While bearing perpetually
Their unwanted sons.
And the gods came by in their trappings
Of yellow, purple and awful red,
And,