My youthful muse raged in first beauty:
Sweet milk on a dirty morning in late May---
Ruddy, green spears pierce Chocolate fields in a crisscross grid.
The glutted stream, snaking, coiling through the pasture,
Multicolored calves nuzzling one another
While their mother gnaws and tears with broad mouth
At the yellow green grass.
Such newness is all that remains of sacred traces Invisible to man’s eye.
Sea froth and sea drunk,
The tilting flight of a gull---
Autumn leaves,
First loves---
No stable thing won my heart.
Then came inspiration for the letter,
Human enterprise and woe,
Yearning for justice And God’s steady Law.
Now I turn to your stranded occupation of pride and futility.
Your confession of beauty mingled corruption comforts me!
To broken things I turn and structure fragments to my liking
Walk with me and see great glimmers of things that might have been.
I call forth broken idols and solitary sing your praise.
While a busy world fits ready for battle.
Gathering new and shiny things for merchandise
Plastering slick streets with autos shimmering in petroleum parade.
You retire to your original home,
Neither resurrected, Nor damned for torture.
Insensate,
Long enduring---
Exempt from place---
Defrocked of style without yearning.
Litter and trash cannot endure as you have endured---
Neither garbage, nor junk…
They are soft currency in time’s market
Whose value will neither sculpt into exhibit form,
Nor resurrect.
Whose paradise is uniform landfill,
Monotony of rubbish,
Flitting ephemera flashing and fading on beaches,
In parks, and along highways with the mangled, roadkill corpse.
You are idols of a calm religion
Whose history waits to be written
Whose first hymn I intone.
You are a signal and marker Of time’s indifferent escape;
Abiding strong outside of use!
Mother Time brings forward the world.
Every bright, shiny thing parades as wondrous and ruddy as newborn flesh!
To meet the sparkle of parental eyes
Greeting these babes with pride
And when time has squarely brought these things to pass,
Swiftly turns with season to abandon these children outdoors
No matter how well designed.
To even newer things!
Ever and anon to newer things!
A toast to new things!!
Left in the wake of ever-renewing nature and her blooming seasons
An aging poet sings a sad song.
The works and the hands of man are caught up in the vortex of elemental dissolution.
He constructs wild dreams and plans for civilization,
Conjures eternal life In a plastic cup.
Like Mother Time He abandons his projects To linger/
In a second nature/
In a fading twilight.
To come to a standstill,
To resign,
And surrender
To dust’s slow certainty.
To have outlasted your creator
Neither moving, nor decaying,
While nature cycles endlessly
You survive the frivolous onslaughts of decades
Your stillbirth is permanent
Though the hands of your maker have withered.
Sweet milk on a dirty morning in late May---
Ruddy, green spears pierce Chocolate fields in a crisscross grid.
The glutted stream, snaking, coiling through the pasture,
Multicolored calves nuzzling one another
While their mother gnaws and tears with broad mouth
At the yellow green grass.
Such newness is all that remains of sacred traces Invisible to man’s eye.
Sea froth and sea drunk,
The tilting flight of a gull---
Autumn leaves,
First loves---
No stable thing won my heart.
Then came inspiration for the letter,
Human enterprise and woe,
Yearning for justice And God’s steady Law.
Now I turn to your stranded occupation of pride and futility.
Your confession of beauty mingled corruption comforts me!
To broken things I turn and structure fragments to my liking
Walk with me and see great glimmers of things that might have been.
I call forth broken idols and solitary sing your praise.
While a busy world fits ready for battle.
Gathering new and shiny things for merchandise
Plastering slick streets with autos shimmering in petroleum parade.
You retire to your original home,
Neither resurrected, Nor damned for torture.
Insensate,
Long enduring---
Exempt from place---
Defrocked of style without yearning.
Litter and trash cannot endure as you have endured---
Neither garbage, nor junk…
They are soft currency in time’s market
Whose value will neither sculpt into exhibit form,
Nor resurrect.
Whose paradise is uniform landfill,
Monotony of rubbish,
Flitting ephemera flashing and fading on beaches,
In parks, and along highways with the mangled, roadkill corpse.
You are idols of a calm religion
Whose history waits to be written
Whose first hymn I intone.
You are a signal and marker Of time’s indifferent escape;
Abiding strong outside of use!
Mother Time brings forward the world.
Every bright, shiny thing parades as wondrous and ruddy as newborn flesh!
To meet the sparkle of parental eyes
Greeting these babes with pride
And when time has squarely brought these things to pass,
Swiftly turns with season to abandon these children outdoors
No matter how well designed.
To even newer things!
Ever and anon to newer things!
A toast to new things!!
Left in the wake of ever-renewing nature and her blooming seasons
An aging poet sings a sad song.
The works and the hands of man are caught up in the vortex of elemental dissolution.
He constructs wild dreams and plans for civilization,
Conjures eternal life In a plastic cup.
Like Mother Time He abandons his projects To linger/
In a second nature/
In a fading twilight.
To come to a standstill,
To resign,
And surrender
To dust’s slow certainty.
To have outlasted your creator
Neither moving, nor decaying,
While nature cycles endlessly
You survive the frivolous onslaughts of decades
Your stillbirth is permanent
Though the hands of your maker have withered.
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