Please be kind- I'm not claiming to be T.S. Eliot
For a moment stunned
in angst awareness,
a recited poem, imagination.
Hearing lioins roar outside the rivers,
the fourfold stream of Eden's blood,
innocence in happy awe
but viewing our world, thus-
to sadden without melancholiness,
an orange-red sun dripping sunset, pleasure amid life.
Drunk on
and sobering in its frantic scope:
regretting the net (cut down in youth),
the highwire of anguish
and cares and loves;
this golden tenderness my sweet
secluded valley shadowed
by mountain afternoon
and azure vault embracing
beautiful uncertainty.
And my memorabilia,
my debt to Browning and Shelley,
are not the words or actions,
but rather an expression of growth
in this shaking hand; inured within,
throughout a wondering moment.
All I remember.
So the snow crinkles
from the December bough
and laughing, "well,
I forget the rest."
Harboring Hertzsprung, and Russel too,
my diagram lingers casual amid
your rebarbative scorn, though cellular
in concept and myopic in scope.
Perhaps my verse is simply a tractile image
unraveled in its apolitical climate of primacy,
dusk before dawn in the Julian page,
a parhelic echo of my solitary dance
round the unvoiced narrative,
the Sequoia urging on the ghost-like spiral
of the drunken flag claiming she
was increately made, resisting
the deadpan humor of Keaton's emotionless mask,
in the silence of the colorguard's pallor.
Though my thought denies the role
to the haggard sommelier with Stradivarian skills,
-he yet too young to retire
unwilling to endure
a personal abracadabra:
charm into speech
into dada, that is, demonizing a demitasse daiquiri-
still the eagle-eyed discernment of the worm,
perspective of istle's pita,
quickens as Roethke's mottled bent.
Perhaps a recalescent spark
yet waits beneath the ages
waiting to scatter the shadow
of new-world vice and old-world charm,
a nightblind oasis into satin calm,
for the nonce, disappearing into
red and green and yellow rose,
and azure's forgotten blue.
