Along how many lengths was it measured –
On the bittersweet of a tapestry
In which the impetus plowed its furrow
And the regard wove its regal garden -
A ploughshare whose morning topography
Would have us believe the world was made round.
To have moved upon its watery face.
To have seen at least that the least was good.
A final count, respecting gift of tongue,
Left names unnumbered, quickly forgotten –
Brisk, so briskly uttered along the fray,
Flaring like candles, Roman, in gardens.
***
I am a fool in the absence of gods.
Tawdry verses from a sickened Pierrot
Leap drunken into a storybook moon,
Accosted by its fanciful guardsmen -
The Grand Turk with a rubied scimitar,
Or a pale washerwoman with linens.
Camouflaged parrots or penguins, perhaps.
From these long abandoned childhood playgrounds,
In this swill of profaned remembrances
And Mother’s bedtime technicolor psalms,
I long for the yarns of a younger moon –
An Orpheus, having misplaced my lyre.
***
You were the poem of Wednesday evenings.
Your words caressed my banks in rivulets
That flowed to our common estuaries
Out beyond my cadential dams and locks.
Your sigh scattered weeping haiku, windswept
Elegies into the calm of your pause.
Your gentle wink strummed sonnets in a night
Already transfigured with muted strings.
Heavy and moist with a beckoning sleep,
Your eyelids repeated their soft goodnight,
Filled with the hope of flight and departure,
Like open shutters flapping in the wind.
***
My heart was a commerce of reckonings,
A consensus of beating harmonics,
An agora of loveshop escalades
Busied with well-tailored, tallying Toms
And numbering Nancys in pursuit of
Measures ever so swiftly following,
One upon the other, without constraint
Of rest or cadence or homeward purpose,
Shuffling amid-key for the unrehearsed
Tonic. When they found that sparkling fountain
They broke their stutters, agasp in the count –
Loveletters strewn across the marketplace.
***
When the corn grew high in everyone’s tongue
And sunshine gleamed in the flaxen spittle,
Removing all skew ‘twixt pose and shadow,
And all was all beneath the June-day sun,
I held your finger and called you “Nana”
As we marked the gleeful chat of the jay
And skirted puddles of the yesterdrear.
Cradled in your harbor-side’s naptime lull,
My head in your lap, a dreaming Pooh-bear –
Honeycomb briars, marshmellow thatches…
And if there were a place which had such things,
You would be there, counting four-leaf clovers.
***
Alone here. Were the Muse to sing in me…
My will – like a boxspring in a closet.
It trembles in the still of my regard,
Waiting for a winged angel’s visit,
Staying with its sullen rise and fall the
Leering darkness. My dreamless sleep is filled
With pacts and conflagrations. Wings singed, you
Glide through its walled-up devastation, as
Thoughts like ashes fall upon my pillow.
You! Resolved against a glowing backdrop,
Bearing my sad likeness with your teeth clenched
Upon these wooden slats and rusted springs.
***
Athletic cabalists heave their moonbeams
And joust amid the aqueous numbers,
Hooping a populous, opulent globe.
And I am merely the whimsical scribe
With a-tic-a-tac-ulating fingers,
Jotting down notes for cummerbunded Seuss
and running errands for bush-tail Potter.
And who will present the sporting adjective,
Like Baptist’s severed head on a platter?
And what star-glutted Brando will master,
What constellated Olivier emote
Such scrupulously scribbled scrivenings?
***
According to a paradox of Zeno
The hare will never catch the grinning tortoise.
To square the sum: a pair of dice at Reno
Often fails to win the gambler’s purpose.
The same is justly said of the martial word,
Which prematurely stakes its written claim:
The fundamental’s partials are left unheard
As Truth escapes its pre-established name.
Yes, I could wrap it neatly in a bonnet
And cash it in for payments in arrears –
But this is not a moralizing sonnet,
For a couplet at the end doth not appear.
***
Unless, of course, it overflows into
The subsequent unassuming stanza.
Whereupon the reader (though feeling no
Less cheated of the magnanimous rhyme)
May be left in good faith to decide for
Him or herself which facts were essential
And which were written merely as filler
To close the conspicuous gap between
The tireless pen and the eluding paper,
Stuck in a perpetual steeplechase,
In a timeless, unclocked catch-as-catch-can,
Scornful of bruised palms and the aching heel.
***
This is my customized testimony -
Another little book of days and numbers.
Glib musings for an equally glib age.
For I am just a chimerical goop,
Etched in a celestial cartoonery
And underwritten by a moon of legends,
Realizing that all will soon be well,
That the numberless progeny will return
With a cue from evening’s dauntless hero -
That the Purple Cow will bless us tonight,
And we will still be licking our forks and knives
As the cosmic jongleurs mount the rising stage.