And there by still sarcophagi of amiable sons gone cold
And rambled off across the abyss rim
Astroll upon the meadows of parched space,
The weeping monarchs set down toys
That only yestermorn were in the hands of child.
These fragments of lost play,
Strewn all about like breadcrumbs for some mighty bird
To come and pluck and eat,
Were thus left there
In hopes that God or gods, a singular or plural Presence
Might, paused curious, see,
And step in across the mortal sill
To spend a while each night in splendid joyful wakes
By sleeping son;
To nudge his stuffs, to wake his soul perhaps;
So boy and God might squat awhile
On tombstone floor and rattle numbered bones
Or tremble ghostly xylophones and shiver harps
Or trace in dust a hopscotch pentagram
And dive in it
To swim on river tides of moon
Let down through windows of the vault.
Could God refuse such sport?
No, no. Our God, Forever’s Child,
Will always play and show rambunctious wills
Among the molecules and atom storms
As well as knockabout of toys within a silent dungeon keep.
Let the world sleep.
Let father sit outside the door
And only now and then peek in at toys
Placed there about the box where his son hides;
And if he hears twin laughters,
One seedling-sparrow small,
The other vast as weathers off the sea,
Let him not look at all
But weep, and turn his tears to joys
That there, hid down, asprawl in floury gusts of midnight tomb,
There be a frolic of brothers/fathers/sons…
Oh listen! Let the sound fill up your heart!
That tumult of the large
And oh so pitifully weak small happy boys.
ODE TO ELECTRIC BEN
Ben Franklin was that rarity:
A man whose jolly-grim polarities did tempt our God
To hurl his bolts which, fastened to Ben’s ears,
Lit up his cerebrum for years
And thus illuminated reams of history.
His dreams, electric dreams,
Were knocked together out of Boy Mechanic schemes;
He wet his finger, held it to God’s Mystery and Storm.
God, in turnabout, gesticulated, touched
To know Ben’s warm or cooling weather.
So somehow these unconvivial two
Fell in together and were friends.
Their means quite different
But most similar-same their ends:
To Light the Universe,
Or light a world,
Large thing or small.
God blinked and Lo! the Nebulae!
Ben blinked; electric founts poured from his hands;
Within a century his sparks had lit the lands
And filled the towns with noon at night.
Such was God’s vision.
Such was Ben’s sight.
And after long years, some eighty-odd or more
Of intemperate days, good afternoons, storms, calms,
Bad fights, then making peace,
Vast multiples of weather,
God yawned, Ben gummed his eyes,
But still arguing… went off to bed together
SOME LIVE LIKE LAZARUS
Some live like Lazarus
In a tomb of life and come forth curious late
To twilight hospital and mortuary room.
From one womb to another
Is but a falling step;
Yet Innocence unbandaged
Blinks at Truth in terror
And would blind itself again!
But better the lame drags forth at last
From morning sickness waxed to twilight sleeps
Thine own self litter forth in autumn’s self-consume
Than linger in one room.
Let summer wander idiot in these eyes
Which stricken wide one wild sweet moment upon day
Fix, transfix, and die,
Than, warned by widows, stifled in a cage
All stillborn stay.
From first cry to last breath
If all one knows is death upon a frost-rimed path
To yet more ice,
Let one warm breath suffice
For July dawns of hail
And August snows when stormbound senses fail.
Best Lazarus born of witch-hag, shocked, miscarrying
Than, senses shorn, gone ill with thought
Of marrying ear to music,
Eye to luscious color,
Nose to time and tide’s caprice,
Hand to squalor.
Tongue to late sour wine must answer sweet.
Mere roadway dust-track now name street.
Best Lazarus born a dwarf dismembered
Than cat-sick hairball choked in half-out,
Hid moth-hair, chaff-seed, cold steam of un-lust
Unthrust, by hungry Death himself quite ill-remembered,
Never birthed at all.
Better cold skies seen bitter to the North
Than blind unseeing sac-bile gone to ghost.
If Rio is lost, love the Antarctic Coast.
O ancient Lazarus!!
Come ye forth.
THESE UNSPARKED FLINTS,
THESE UNCUT GRAVESTONE BRIDES
The ladies in the libraries
Do not go home at night;
Stand watch, be sure, just wait
Outside the mellow place at nine
Crouched down in bush and elderberry vine,
Look in through windows tall
Where virgin brides go quiet as the dust
By shelves where titles ranked, gold-bright as foxes’ eyes,
Glint sparks of lust.
Among the million dead and million more to perish
These unsparked flints, these uncut gravestone brides
Do nourish silence, and their tread
Is stuff of moss and downfell rust.
They do not touch the floor, incircling the dark,
To one-by-one pull strings to snatch the light,
Extinguish and move on to next and snatch again,
Keys at their waists ajingle in a gentle rain,
Like skaters in a summer dream,
Their spectacles agleam beneath the greenglass shades.
The smell of hyacinth pervades where they have been
And goes before as harbinger of youngness kept
Clasp-corseted in Iron Maiden flesh.
Where air was warm and bounteous on the sill,
In passing, such as these give vapors and the chill
To airs that touch and move aside.
They hide themselves a moment in the stacks
To shove long needles murderous in their hair
And find themselves in mirrors, unaware;
Both seer and seen the Queen of Iceland’s crop,
A blind stare, a strange drift of unshaped snow.
Then, at the door they go, give last looks round the shop
Where Time is vended in the books,
Where skin prolapses from the dinosaur,
Then wheel again to knife the air, go out and down the street
To places no one knows.
They do not go.
Their coats all buttoned tight,
Their spectacles fresh-washed, they spin to call:
“Is anybody there?”
In hopes that some deep terrifying voice of man
Might some night soon reply, “Ah, yes.”
Their ringless fingers tremble on their dress.
They hold their breath, their souls, they wait.
Then reach up for the last light-string and yank.
The night drops down.
But in the instant of eclipse
They snap-close-clench themselves like
Ancient paper flowers of Japan.
A wind from basements dank and attics desert-dry
Breathes up, breathes down the air,
These scentless flowers shower everywhere!
And where before the brittle women stood,
Some vagrant tattered crepes now tap the floor.
As for the rest, the lustful books on shelves gape wide
And into these the funeral-flower souls now rattle,
Tickle, rustle, hide, and, hiding, rest;
Each to its age, each to its own and proper nest.
This maid to Greece and Rape of the Sabines,
That one to Child’s Crusade
Where knights shuck off their stuffs
To bed the sixteenth summer maid;
The third and last cold statue turned to farewell summer’s dust
Flies up the Transylvania height
And welcomes lust by showing it her neck
And trading randy bite for bite.
All, all turned to bookmarks!
Slipped in dreadful books
Where loving makes a din
Ten times as loud as loving in the world beyond the shelves.
Tucked in warm dark the bookmark maidens
Feel themselves crushed and beauteously mangled,
Scream and gibber all the night,
Only swooning down to dreaming sleep at dawn,
Smiles creped about their mouths.
Squashed flat ‘twixt Robin and his nimble nibbling men,
And Arthur who, if thanked,
Will pull Excalibur from them at breakfast-time,
And so be King, his weapon free of stone
That held it fast, all hungry for a fight.
Such screams! Such gladsome mourns of happiness!
List, listen! by the library.
But, soft… the books, gummed shut, do muffle it.
The maids all night each night are maids no more.
Come back at noon.
And see the ancient cronies three, aswoon,
All somewhat tipsy-drunk and tenterhooked with memory
Propped up at desks as if the sun were still the moon.
Give nod,
Give book,
Go off, but never ask, for you will never know
Where, where o where at night
These long lost cold-chipped marble ladies go.
Ask silence,
Linger on awhile
But all you’ll have for answer
Is a sad remembrance smile
They’ll quickly cover with a Kleenex, wipe away.
So, old again and lonely and unsquashed
And ringless, pale, and breathing only ice,
They face the heatless noon,
The sunless hours of day,
Reckon your question,
Recommend files,
And give virginal advice.
AND THIS DID DANTE DO
The truth is this:
That long ago in times
Before the birth of Light,
Old Dante Alighieri prowled this way
On continent unknown to mad Columbus;
Made landfall here by sneaking, sly Machine,
Invention of his candle-flickered soul
Which, wafted upon storms,
Brought him in harmful mission down.
So, landed upon wilderness of dust
Where buffaloes stamped forth
A panic of immense heartbeat,
Dante scanned round and stamped his foot,
And hoofed the trembling flints l
And named a Ring of Hell.
With parchment clenched in tremorous fist,
He inked out battlements of grime
And arcs of grinding coggeries which, struck,
Snowed down a dreadful cereal of rust
Long years before such iron soots were dreamt
Or made, or flown,
Long long before such avenues of steel in sky were sought.
So, in a guise like Piranesi lost amidst-among
His terrible proud Prisons,
The Poet sketched a vaster, higher, darker Pent-up Place
A living demon-clouded sulphur-spread of Deep.
From tenement to tenement of clapboard dinge
He rinsed a sky with coal-sack burning,
Hung clouds with charcoal flags
Of nightgowns flapping like strange bats
Shocked down from melancholy steam-purged locomotive caves.
Then through it all put scream of metal flesh,
Great dinosaur machines charged forth by night,
All stomaching of insucked souls Pent up in windowed cells.
Delivered into concrete river-shallow streets,
Men fled themselves from spindrift shade
Of blown black chimney sifts and blinds of smoking ghosts.
And on the brows of all pale citizens therein
Stamped looks of purest terror,
Club-foot panic and despair,
A rank, a raveling dismay that spread in floods
To drain off in a lake long since gone sour
With discharged outpouring of slime.
So drawn, so put to parchment, so laid down
In raw detail, this Ring of Hell (No mind what Number!)
Was Dante’s greatest Inventory counting-up
Of Souls in dread Purgation.
He stood a moment longer in the dust.
He let the frightened drumpound heart of buffalo tread
Please to excite his blood.
Then, desecration-proud, happy at the great Black Toy
He’d printed, builded, wound, and set to run
In fouled self-circlings,
Old Dante hoisted up his heels,
Left low the continental lake shore cloven, stamped,
And hied him home to Florence and his bed,
And laid him down still dreaming with a smile,
And in his sleep spoke centuries before its birth
The Name of this Abyss, the Pit, the Ring of Hell
He had machinery-made:
CHICAGO!
Then slept,
And forgot his child.
YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN
They say you cannot, no, in any way
Go home again.
Yet home I came,
And picked an hour when the train
Slid in upon the golden track of twilight to
