TIME
It rose up like a black ship from the sea,
that top hinge of a giant serpent-mouth,
and broke the dipping sunlight on its teeth.
The poets lobbed out ordnance from the quay:
tick-tocking iambs beat an ancient pulse
as tongue and breath were yoked in ritual;
spruce measures pattered on its hide like knells,
or, lighting in that maw, were swallowed whole.
The bottomless gullet sucked up dribbled edges
of dazzling tropes and metaphors, duets
of perfect rimes flew in a desperate volley;
but when the sunset’s dazzling pinks and oranges
gave way, and far white stars winked like shallots,
then silence blossomed in the monster’s belly.
RUSE
The poets agreed in their subterrenean nave
to write more poems in praise of monsters, though
that would not waylay Time whose tongues of snow
inexorably licked each architrave,
blew gales of slow frost on each martyred figure
frozen in glass, snuffed out their sputtering tapers,
curled up and browned the edges of their papers,
contained one acolyte in ten with rigor
mortis. And so they sank leviathans
into the mundane deeps, set basilisks
on bridges, sang out Gaudete as griffins
stormed ramparts with their wings like m‘s, or chevrons.
Mastodons rode men upon their tusks
and Jacks with bright knives divvied up the women.
SOLO
Their one goal was to keep the people guessing,
and so they delved an apsis underground,
beneath the sound of heel and radial passing,
hidden away from even their maker’s hand
that scooped out blindly with a lifer’s spoon
the earth in rinds as hard as baker’s chocolate:
a buried enclave or ulterior Camelot
where in reverberating baritone
they summoned every lusus naturae
that answered their demonic invocations:
chimera, hydra, gargoyle, cockatrice;
and yet those apples of the devil’s eye
would still, despite a thousand permutations,
confess their sire, a chafing onanist.
ASTER
He scratched his head and thought of naval ships
at war upon some master’s oily water:
the canvas flying in flames, the shredded banners,
cannons firing billowy mushroom shapes.
He realized he’d given up his secrets:
he couldn’t see it straight, the ding an sich,
but twice removed he rifled through the pockets
of those to whom his beggaring lines were schtick,
the junk and jetsam of a live half-lived,
the stale bilgewater of a secondhander.
And so he rallied all those bogeymen
with which his suicidal brain was gravid
and watched his tiny reputation founder:
one title less for his memorial stone.
ABADDON
Despite it all he winds down fractured stairs
turning wide-eyed in cloudy dream spirals
that might be akin to those legendary gyres
he heard tell of. The yattering tongues of bells
still flood the echoing dark with o‘s like obols,
where mouths that never kiss still omm in ovals.
But he knew that before the poem started,
that it was never the brighter thresh of sleighbells
or happier clicks and clacks of jacks or marbles
that drew him inexorably to his inverted
Pleasure Dome, his topsy-turvy Eldorado,
mock-gothic and profane basilica,
darkling Atlantis, gloomy Shangri-la:
another dupe to his dear Amontillado.
CHTHONIC
There he scanned the breadth of his brain’s horizon
like one plunged headlong in the ultimate pit:
some vengeful Lucifer or madcap Urizen
droning his self-obsessed magnificat -
while in a derelict garden statuary
stood tiptoe in the rain and minor angels
wrestled in windfall when an ordinary
sunset flared the stark walls of Tintagel
stuck on its evergreen and desolate hill
hard by an unbroken sea no man could ride,
its waters churned white by the serpent’s tail -
and heard the dead men cross the Bridge of Sighs
heading for holes in the ground that were the size
of graves, where they were buried until they died.
SIGHTINGS
On Presidents’ and Independence day
the colors in the evening sky flashed
in the Hudson River whose slow waters washed
against his feet. Better recall July
than bleak and gaunt-boughed, icy February
when wind swept off the sleepy river and smashed
the glass of his gollum-eyes to a fire-splashed
blur. In summer time he watched ships ferry
up and down the river, past Bannerman’s Island.
He only saw it from the shore: a brushwork
rook-shape in the air was all he gleaned
of a castle, once fortress and stockpiled armory.
The Indians said the place was haunted. Naturally
The locals saw strange lights there in the dark.
HAUNTED
He never saw those lights, though often he gazed
out toward that island from the mountain road
above West Point or from the riverside
where it was said a failed cadet composed
his Ulalume. Now maybe there’s your ghost,
he thought, that gloomy subterranean bard
remembered for his bells and his black bird?
And yet he knows there really is no ghost,
knows that the dead are happy in their tombs;
that though the eye is easily tricked the mind
is the softer touch; that even if men were blind
the dark would resonate with spirit voices
crying out angrily from forsaken places
or whispering to themselves in empty rooms.
