I summon to me again the sentient ghosts
who've lain in dormant purgatorial sleep:
in Spiritus Mundi (stolen from Yeats again),
storehouse of fey flotsam and jetsam. I knock
at the colossal whorl of a giant's ear
who sleeps as long as a river, shout helloes
in cavernous hollows, in the din of echoes.
O come, they said, some twenty years ago,
and whispered in a gossamer singing: come,
a little kiss of silk on the tender ear.
Seductive shapes danced sinuously, dressed
in diaphanous gold, windswept; Ovidian
lanternslides upon the inner eye -
and now I bid them all return to me,
my loves, my flickering fireflies that gemmed
hours of boyhood's darkness: dark of nights
or dark of days lived in desire or dread.
I summon back. I rummage among shadows,
as one who channels in a circle of stones.
O come, I said. In silent wells of thought,
a drop: the birth of ever-widening rings.
who've lain in dormant purgatorial sleep:
in Spiritus Mundi (stolen from Yeats again),
storehouse of fey flotsam and jetsam. I knock
at the colossal whorl of a giant's ear
who sleeps as long as a river, shout helloes
in cavernous hollows, in the din of echoes.
O come, they said, some twenty years ago,
and whispered in a gossamer singing: come,
a little kiss of silk on the tender ear.
Seductive shapes danced sinuously, dressed
in diaphanous gold, windswept; Ovidian
lanternslides upon the inner eye -
and now I bid them all return to me,
my loves, my flickering fireflies that gemmed
hours of boyhood's darkness: dark of nights
or dark of days lived in desire or dread.
I summon back. I rummage among shadows,
as one who channels in a circle of stones.
O come, I said. In silent wells of thought,
a drop: the birth of ever-widening rings.
