The Bell Ringer

I stuck my face through
the hole and knew
without hearing
that I was the victor.

Ovals of applause, mouths
wide with acclaim,
blessed my one good eye,
tempered the bronze

in my ears, its soft thrum
bright and quickened.
Lifted above the rabble,
I floated through

the city until one that loved me
took me down,
made the quietness hard again,
so hard and black it hurt.

How I would ring
the bells for him,
that he might know
this pure and finished silence.

Moses

He saw the finger write in stone,
the tower of fire and whirlwind,
all doubts erased. The crack
and echo of that colossal loss
would bellow in his ear's ache
until he was wrapped behind stone,
left for the promised disinterment.

How would you feel, in the vast
violent face of things once merely
ruminations, in the brutal brunt
of dreams made loudly, brightly real?
You would wear the whitened mop,
would stumble and bear the signs
dizzy from epiphany, consumed,
weathered with such shock and solace.

Behold, he croaked, this adman
back from a sudden unmasking
laden with proscriptions, conferee
entrusted with his ten bold proofs.
Down the mountain he came, affluent
at all pores, bloated with knowledge,
not an ounce of faith left in him.

An Admonishment

May odes, epistles to the hills and fields,
Wordsworthian trifles lauding daffodils,
acquire innocuous irrelevance.
Have done with Keatsian honeyed indolence,
all naive praise of lethargy that limps
in panting languor under Helicon.
Give out, faint reverence of roses, rapt
applause for passive habitants of gardens.
Beauty is everywhere in evidence
and may by any eye be wondered at,
an easy loveliness, substantial grace
that leans amenably and comes to hand;
and yet in blindness Homer sang, whose eyes
were far too keen to tarry on a rose
or any bagatelle in wilderness.
Illustrious legend, cast your towering shade
from the Idaean mount and dignify
myopic poets who in dalliance dote
on dew-drops, deafened by the pipes of peace.

Last Supper

How could they, in His presence, eat a thing
or swill their wine? One thought how, if at all,
he would escape the weight of guilt. The King
of kings spoke gently, quietly cast His eyes
from plate to glass, and He regarded the wall
on which a devastating shadow rose

and took a shape that only He could know.
The revelers went on eating, ignorant
of Death upon the door, and even's glow
that shone red with the holy blood of God;
nor could they hear the angels' keen lament
for men who in that Name would drown in blood.

A Call to Shadows

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.

Suburban Sketch

I.

By night, the dogs' kingdom: warning yawps
Stretched across darkness, unapproachable.
Occasionally the clamor of a truck
Passed by, or from the highway wheels
Screamed on tarmac. A place of furnished yards,
Swing-sets, locked sheds, pristine lawns.
Moths bounced by devious blue lanterns,
Struck and thumped like dropped acorns,
Fluttered and died, about every hundred feet
That crackling, seductive glimmer.

All doors were bolted, blinds drawn.
Deltas of shadow thrown by tousled trees
Curled in rain gutters, probed weathervanes
Mounted near the taut guy-wires
Of unwavering antennae. Tiled roofs
Bore the weather on their scalloped
Slopes, secured the sleepers under them.
A child, I sat in the boughs of an old maple
And saw them, in strict order, like soldiers
Ready to uproot themselves and march.


II.

There was something about the silence
Of closed garages, like faces in sleep,
Something in the way fences explained
What they were keeping in and keeping out
Better by starlight. In packs we wandered,
Hiding cigarette ends, those telling lights,
Behind our palms, observed by owls
Perched in trees like judges, eyes like ingots,
Or down the back roads, under telephone
Poles erratically orbited by bats.

Half-hearted delinquency set us
Standards of conduct, left the world
Safe and at a distance. Our eyes
Meddled at dimly lit curtains, pried
Furtively for a breech, a glimpse of some
Coveted girl in dishabile that never
Was seen, nor even sought in earnest;
But dogs were king, pacing their beats,
Keeping the peace. We pensively returned
To private rooms, Ataris, quilted beds.

Corinna and the Swains

I


She wanders floral pastures, through shadows
that mottle shivering meadows, damp
her sandaled foot and radiant ankles, calves
like ripened peaches, eyes cast downward,
rarely sunward. O Corinna, cry the swains
that pine in perpetual pang of love,
that steep their palms in lust, that of
desire are never purged, that pluck
languorously the strings of lutes
or breathe but faintly into flutes
and make sad music of hard luck.

She moves in ways that scream to the eye
and punish the groin, her swollen skirt
sways with flesh's opulence, slides
in maddening shifts and moves
in clefts, on supple cloves.
Eyes fat with unappeased desire
swell after her, crying, Corinna, Corinna.


II.


On florid hills we lean on elbows, breathe
despairingly, one leg up, one slack.
That ceaseless baaing becomes nearly unheard,
taken so much for granted, like the sound
of one's own breathing. Birds
flit among branches of trees whose names
we would be happy to forget; the good dogs
keep the straggling fluffs in line. We scan
the skies for gods: their meteoric descent
from azure, heels afire, pinions pressed
flat against bodies of supernal sinew,
unnaturally shapen. We, in awe
and unadulterated envy, mourn
our common and unchanging flesh,
our merely expedient organs of generation.

O Corinna, we observe you, we poor Clouts,
we pale insipid-faced personae, we
slack-jawed bucolic bachelors, goat-scented
experts of the Petrarchan sonnet. Step
to us once, stream-wet, charitably bend
in front of us with pendant breast, be wanton,
like Cynthia with her rapt Endymion,
and let our cloying, classic thirst be quenched
before the Olympian ravishers divert you
with startling metamorphoses, strange shapes
of potent and exotic beauty. Stay,
and turn Tradition on its ear, balk Custom:

There are too many poets in the world.

Islands

We stood and wavered on the deck and gazed
half-heartedly into the chopping ocean.
Our girl, she drove through wild water, split
hills of brine, as brazen as a harlot;

No thin black line appeared on the horizon;
no wisp of turf to salve the stinging eyes
of men too long uncontinented,
lurching drunk on salted planks, wave-tossed.

A saturated and demented rabble,
we cup our ears for Sirens. We are lost.

*

The queenly moon lurked in cloud,
patient as the sun descended;
bottles broke, and Bacchus slipped
to steal a puking swab.

Disquised in that pale raiment
he reveled from stem to stern.
The sails bellied,
the ship lurched onward.

Where are the gulls
that shrieked
like banshees to remind us
of lands we left behind us?

*

Some of us leapt into the bitch below us
and welcomed oblivion in her wet embrace;
some of us met the Devil in a knife-edge
below-decks, and expired upon a curse.

*

This prayer we humbly whisper
at the altar of the wheel,

in solemn incantation,
with a tremor of the eyelids,

beneath our ragged banners
before a rising storm,

fingers at the triggers
of our plundered arms:


Sweet Christ, King of sea-walkers,
Tamer of winds, O make the waters smooth,
Wine-maker, Alchemist of Heaven,
Cloud-splitter, Immanuel,
Be with us in the unbroken waves before us,
Be with us in the froth and foam of our wake;

O Conqueror of the ancient ones,
the ghosts of Rome and Athens,
Your heel will abate the will of the Titan,
the maker of storms;
Your heel on the neck of the giant
will temper the wrath
that haunts the dreams of the mermen.

*

Well may You judge us, should we walk again
upon a ground that stays fixed to our heels;
well may You judge, and save a little blessing,
Mighty Jehovah, who wrought the mercy of islands.

Eve in Solitude

Adam is exiled, Eve remains; a fancy



Ennui 

She lowers her hands, long accustomed to joining
in the still posture of humility:
now she forgoes the sacrament of prayer
and dreams her silent mornings out. The songs
of little birds who crowd the Garden,
who make a raucous shivering in the leaves,
give her a tender pleasure, but not peace,
nor solace for her hours of grief
that halt and hesitate, and never pass.


Eve To The Angels 

Ethereal guardians,
I have seen through you,
but have heard the ruffling of wings
on rare occasions when you stretch, settle,

and resume your infinite watch. 
The moon, shedding cool silver,
ascends the darkness,
round or sickle-silhouetted.

What flowers blossom from her breast?
What cold petals drop like diamonds
in what phantasmal gardens
to gild what prisoner's pain?


Ages Hence

In limitless aether angels clash, rend clouds
that fly at fiery heels of seraphim;
obsequious cherubs sing perpetual lauds
and kneel concordant at a radiant Hem;
mammoth gears of ancient engines grind;
spirits divided by opposing passions
conjure tempests: wild empyrean wind
of Thrones, Principalities, Dominations.
Our Lady of the Garden lies unshaken.
Errant tresses spread in beds of fern.
Ages of exile pass, yet she, forsaken,
nervously awaits her love's return.
The chill of grief infinitely lingers
in the patient folding of her fingers.


Epilogue

Awakened at cock-crow, our solitary exile
lies abed and silently rehearses
the posture of Death, which she can never assume:
her fingers folded at her midriff, still
as standing water, and yet warm and tender,
blushing with the bloom of life; her eyes
sealed with volition, not shut down like blinds,
nor penny-weighted. Waiting in the darkness,
Adam, in full flush of innocence,
and naked in the light of memory,
will wait for her forever; but he wakes
no more to mortal seasons, changing weathers,
or crowing cocks heralding sunrise. Dust
is what has come of flesh that dressed his bones,
that struck her fancy, plucked her maidenhead;
dust now committed to the earth, to cycles
of change that never turn in paradise,
where she remains, naive in purity,
in solitude forever sanctified,
in sickness of inviolable health,
where blossoms in profusion burst, and bring
the constant, cloyed calamity of spring.