"A dream"

"The real conflict is not between Christianity and 'nature', but between Christian principles and other principles in the control of 'nature'." (C. S. Lewis)

Probably, and as night is night
  I was certain
to have dreamed (& torn out the
   antlers of)
a first view of its beastly grin—

  and crazy also
to have burst into a rage of cold embers
  with trying,
riled at first & then slowing to a trot:

 

  and crazier still
to have seen up close the dark sin
  such as it was
—for it moved from the very spot
  & spun like Naomi!—

Not the easiest thing I’d ever seen:

  stag without horns,
and tail coiled nicely down its throat--
   the sting!

 

And I followed like a coot, & ran
  down that maze,
racked with dark eyes & willow-lean—
  sin's dark lean

God percepta



"The concept of 'God' is the way in which we understand this incredible fact--that what cannot be, yet is" (Alfred North Whitehead)

__________________
     (For Father Loza)

 

In one way You feel like a tough goody (gopher-)wood
  of an Ark; the molluscs, of course
eerily jeered but the geese are the first to make shore,
  smacking the weeds.

 

Not any old receding lake will do nor a fawning mastless
  boat but geese who recoil

 from nothing and crack their jaws open—

 

                                        When You
  retreat catfish deaden dreams,certainly
or leave, belly up, drifting to shore, foam-churned,
  or long pike,
fins outstretching to You their warming source, who nose
  deep in the sensual mud
and grow old.

 

               A hardy rudder through sun-gleams You are,
  for skiffs fueling the tides
& mussels maddening a ship's tired sides will kick
  the lake bock green or grey,
and lay down shingles and timbers for another dirty
                                                                              day:
—   Maison sur la plage!

 

The rains and blossoms, too, that tenant You but dissolve
  hearts into a cruel mist; & shove
crabgrasses aside, mashing rhizomes into fine bee-glue.

  You dissolve in tears, too
as the groves loop in mire and loons turn silent as marshy
  inlets with thistly sides.

 In quite another way, You  still hang draping like Vimy moon,

  mother-weeping with obsidian
frown & star-dishevelled hair--
 

                                  You are, that is, a kind of
  drooping mother-eye
who peeps over teen sons:

 early scented, and carved in salt, You who march the clouds

  red with 'em  (don't You?)

sent always as a prowless Ark that runs aground even here,
  hulls stuffed with lads anemone-eyed,
feet to feet, scallop- brained & sadly disbudded as You who left
  & left the dead standing,

 

always cross-armed over the ones without boots, the dried, emptily
  drummed sons wallowing in salt.

Volta

 

Or even as (in another Eastertide), aeons from now, You'll
  hang in sculpted cathedrals,
canopy of crocuses and thuribles, of hosannahs slung
  craftily from leafy greens;

or sit like forsythia garlands on a sun's doddering brow

 

The sateen- or shagreen- folds of wrists & ankles,sides dripping
  red berry instead of court gold!

Herons jab at your sides-remarkable!-most likely and we'll all
  leave You behind,
and crane over the damnable world serving as gateway to hell:
  where You'll dare follow

 

discalced boys ferried in gopher boats to Iroquois ridges,
  and catfish dream the dead
and post-glacial hills will rise algae-like & flake and shelve off
  steeply into recoiling Times.

Outside my window



the one sits belied by his size alone
  (same dusky sky to be in)                     
while the other turns

  Eyes swivel from tree to tree--
then the inexhaustible spurt to earth,
  her cruel unusable joy!

A Face to a Name (4): "Karina"

Poetic musings inspired (long ago) by a remarkable one:

 ______________________

To etch the soft pout is enough--believe me!-- to see a temperamental cross appear

                                                        ...

 To cross over (as I once did) was to coo like a very warm heart that just once, dear haijin, lay once

in me, too

                                                       ...

A marine, poet or SEAL-- or poet crossed in love, poet above all--  will always sing into her ear

                                                      ...

 Two smart brows that crossed like verses & used to bludgeon me

                                                      ...

She's a cross between an angel (of the red holly and spider) and faithful sketchbook

                                                     ...

Who's ever had to bear a cross, like hers, of cremated dogs or deep smudgy stars?

                                                    ...

A view of smashed windrows and windbreaks after Katrina: whose cross was ever like hers?

 

A Face to a Name (3): "dodgy Danny Dennett"





Ah, when will these cheese-eaters ever learn!
___________________


Unimaginative as dust, he does chafe hard and
                                                           stalk like a toff
  and turns sweet and pearly, too-


To evolve, quoth he, is to attain nothing except
                                                           bare bums, sugar-

                            Ha!


And it gets that way--with clam leading to you-- just
                                                          because it does,
  as far as we know, as far as we know


Every dodgy Dan's at least 12 tod (with darkish hands and
                                                           ties to a corpse)
  Theirs is a stain of the beard & tribal weird

                            Chi sa?


  A seduction of a poor hirsute guru's girl is always
                                                            the goal,
  always


  Who's got the gut of every cognitive wingman or scaly
                                                            rubicund Pan?

                            Danny, Danny Dennett does!

A Face to a Name (2): "C.S. Lewis"



Sorry! but in order to tout love from every side
  I won't come to it stilly

Heart's red and porous so I said to myself,
  pushing into place

that I thought of nothing more than to be
 like him 'Don't leave!'

See, Jack loved his Helen, and he grieved
  and made himself tall

So I tried my best, too, unobserved, to
  look tallish, like him

If C.S. Lewis can, then up the stairs I'd
  bound along, in my vest,

in order to reach the dark of her portholed
  door, the soft expulsion

To a fallen runner




Jeffrey Boucher

The runner aims at a contradiction. It's hard to imagine, in other words, the rewards of daily devotion to strenuous exercise as anything but a sort of life for an ideal that makes the years of ceaseless striving its only means. It's done though the price is so exhaustedly (and painfully) taxing. And growing old into it doesn't make it easier either. But, of course, the run is itself its own enticing end. The elites, of whatever sport, know (as all devotees to something bigger than themselves do) that to excel is to die to self. I won't apologize for the religious connotations for the parallels are here necessary. I'll call the elation of daily exertion--as Jeffrey Boucher must have certainly known it--a transcendental to which every self-sacrificing activity is always directed as towards its end and reward.

So what do we make of this death of the runner? Is not death some horrible affront, after all, to the spirit of the run that's to be passed off here as one of life's aimless ironies? Perhaps the most horrible type imaginable? Is it even conceivable the runner can take his own life, tired of the repetitiveness? What do we make of this running unto death (if indeed the end was a final type of self-annulment that is perhaps every run's true telos)?

I'm prompted really by sadness --as everything that exactly resembles my own life and then tragically ends must--and proper sense of horror, too. at the spectacle of a self-discipline reduced to water and so much sand. I'm reminded that awards don't necessarily await even the disinterested devotees of  morning air, sunshine and the circular miracle of life itself. It may be, after all, just a matter of treacherous piers and horizons. The runner most certainly aims at a contradiction.