| tell me again about the last sunrise for Alison Romney "Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn, Bash� and his friends go out to view the moon; In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter, The secret courtesy that courses like ichor Through the old form of the rude, full-scale joke, Impossible to tell in writing." -Robert Pinsky the poets � the world loves to know a poet � did speak of tragedies that have, and would yet, befall leaders of the darkened souls that in darkness await, and in every heart strike fear of the promise of daylight casting shadows o�er the diatribes and delections spoken between conspirators on a bridge in the dead of night, arms crossed to break the cold, an imperceptible drop in temperature threatening to overcome the worn bodies of the strangers gathered to discuss the fate of the poets � those madmen, those clans of unholy martyrs, those ill-motivated pillagers of wrath of reason, those pilgrims on their world-weary pilgrimage � and yet it gains momentum still � those who profit from the depravity of a people and a mindset and a set of circumstances beyond their control � they are the true angels, the angels whose hearts of ice and eyes of fire will be the last to falter. falter, but not of weakness, of necessity�faltering only proves the belaboured point they seek to crusade beneath the shadow of (because every great philosopher knows you can�t end a sentence with a preposition) there�s no panacea for what the legions of priests and whores and book-burners have wrought upon a doe-eyed people unable, or perhaps unwilling, to meet the darkness halfway, unable (or perhaps unwilling) to face the fears not of what awaits but what they themselves have become. I don�t need to be forgiven for being a traitor to the fallacies that strike the painful blows, that give a soul up for dead, that bestow upon the poets these tortured halos alight with circumstance, that shield the depraved souls from the coming night. prophetic as that may sound, I assure you it is not my intent to preach pragmatism in spiritual matters, nor use metaphors out of my league to belabour a point � I leave that to the bent and broken bluesmen. Bluesmen�armed with shaking heads and tapping feet, they speak of things I have not seen, not in this world and not in any other, but which I do not doubt they have seen � it is tangible praise I dare not tamper with � I purport to speak only for the belaboured points they strive to drive home. Driving home, home � a tangible and largely arbitrary location, could be a destination, or a metaphorical conclusion, where lamb-hearted demons speak with tongues ablaze, say this trouble isn�t worth the foundations it�s built upon and there�s little left to remember � where an empty night in an empty palace finds you listening to a radio station blaring peals of bejeweled sonnets to the empty streets, in the Capital, in the dead of night, where only the streetlamps gather on the bridges over the River Moribund to conspire, in the mist and fog, never to allow the sun to shine over these dark streets, damp with charcoal sweat in the heat of the dizzying fray that greets the strangers, the passersby the saviours, the Sultans, the enigmatic smiles that haunt the core of the soulless statues an elusive radiance, a sometime-lover of the pragmatic rightmindedness that greets the first light, breaking over the Tower on its way towards the southside tenements where children wake in mothers� arms to a heartless rendition of a national Anthem, or an anthemic song of heartless nationalism, that through the Eightfold path can attain the same deliverance from desire as you or I, only we are well aware of the difference between Desire as a measure of Pyrrhic victory and Desire as an inclination of the rightminded, though you�d never know it. I mean, of course, not to make light of our own inadequacies � you know I do that so well � but in the bleeding war-wounds of the darkness, before first light, we wake to a stillness not seen since Lameches� ages, where only the frenzied whispers of the streetlamps, huddled together on the walkways between the Towers, and in the alleys behind the butchershop, and the ministry, and the whorehouses that swell with pride when mentioned, even if only in such hostile company as this, where the metronome records the pulse of our conversation, records the inevitable ebb and flow of the tides that lap at the feet of the rivers that gently ease closer to midnight, company they find in the naked bones of the moon, falling in waves on a Belizean caye in the spring-softened air. the Universe is the eponymous brunt of an enigmatic Joke � which I only capitalize in order to compound the enigma � which inhales greatly, and at length in a slow and loud rush of air, exhales, a satisfying breath taken of the spring-softened Belizean air � nothing like it in the world, as the poets can, and have, told you � the poets, the peons, the streetlamps gathered together, arms crossed to break the cold, like conspirators over the river (I�m of afraid of the river that runs so deep) and in hushed, excited whispers tell of ages in which such a night might be given a name, for their children to remember, but in name only; perhaps Tr�umenacht, or Verschw�rung, or the Night Of Evil Dreams � you were once a member of this time, you were there, and you will always remember the moment you realized there was no going back, akin to the morning you heard Kennedy had been shot, or that Dunkirk had been taken, no less a victory and no less a tragedy. The alleys and the ministries and the banks and the whorehouses lie cloaked in secrecy; something everybody knows, but nobody will say, for fear of reprisal from some as-yet unknown overseer. omnipotence comes on the heels of Rimbaud, and Morehouse, if you�ll care to revisit that night through the eyes of the immortal streetlamps, conspiring against the coming light, walking in dark longcoats of midnight, lying to hide their enigmatic smiles, praying only to the saviours, the Sultans, the prismatic cascade of light rebounding off the charcoal-sweat soaked gutters lining the back alleys, standing in rigid formation, in impeccable salute, to the fog and the mist that ambles murkily across the cobblestones, pausing imperceptibly briefly to greet each one in turn, in unsmiling terms a meeting of minds in the cold of the night, where lamb-minded demons hold these vagueries high in esteem, their soulless, statuesque rhymes to remain forever lost to the darkness from whence they came. |