Spring's History

AZALEA, CAT

Feb. 2003

Perfect azalea bloom
widening its fist of pink
in the still-naked night:
what riot of color
and odor surrounds you,
like an atmosphere
sotting the sex of bees
as they drink so greedily
from your sweet paps.

Cat in the window
with ears and nose
honed on every shift
in the wet breeze of
this day: in your tempered
attention, how much
this very moment plays
in your shape in the window,
God’s eye marveling
at God’s left hand
opening to reveal
a small bright coin.




AZALEAS

Peter Meinke

In the morning, in December
they lean like flares over our brick pathway,
vessels of fragrant energy,
their bright explosions enclosed by the frailest membrane:
they tremble with their holy repressions.
We watch; we tremble, too. We learn.

They thrive on acid, these azaleas; they burn
in darkness, loving the shadows of old oaks
whose broken leaves flutter down to feed
their flowering fantasies.

For surely azaleas are not real, they grow
in some deep wilderness of soul, some known
ideal of vulnerability made palpable,
whose thin petals float dying to the ground
even as we walk by, without touching.
Our very presence seems to kill.

We know more than we can say: we live
in waves of feelings and awareness
where images unfold and grow
along the leafwork of our nerves and veins;
and when one morning late in March
we walk out on our porch and see
the white azaleas open to the air
we recognize them from our dreams
as every cell projects our affirmation.

O Pride of Mobile, Maiden Blush,
Prince of Orange, President Clay:
the names are humorous examples
of human hubris—O Glory of Sunninghilll
And yet they’re touching, too: my salmon
colored Duc de Rohan’s fragile aristocracy
doomed like his forebears to lose his head;
your Elegans, that early bloomer,
whose petals lie like butterflies on our walk
or pastel Kleenex thickly strewn
in some orgy of melancholy weeping ...

Dwarves and Giants, Pinkshell, Flame—
O my dear, so many azaleas are dying!
We must have a party! Here! This afternoon!




START YOUR ENGINES

Feb. 19, 2006

It is still and quiet this
early Sunday morning
that sound itself lies sleeping,
drifting on a dream’s blue
sea beneath a snoring moon
with not an isle in sight,
not a flicker of white
eros to carouse the
darkened waters.
The stillness is so
complete that there’s
nothing here to row,
no surf to disclose
its end in paled rousings:
Nothing sings.
Is such quietus the consequent
to what so soared yesterday
bellicose in the halcyons
of early spring? You should
have been there in our
brushes as we painted
the back door steps,
astride the thick green
and whitish smooths of
smooshy gloop sliding
up and down bare wood
while the afternoon
sang la la la and the
sun offered its treble
cleff for breezes to
aria our soaring sighs.
You should have
heard those Harleys
vrooming up and down
Ninth Avenue, hoggy
hurlyburlies of farting
late-middle-aged libido
which crashed
and ebbed between
us and our neighbors
across the street who
were painting too, their
efforts almost cartoonish
as they labored high in
the eaves with oil-based primer
that too-stripped wood
sucked with demon infant glee.
You should have seen my wife
bent over as she painted
white our own naked wood;
should have seen all
those tiny leaves released by
the swaying waking oaks,
ellipses of confetti, spraying
hosannas of earthbound sperm.
The jubilant wild noise of it
all is ineluctably inside the
zipped-tight nada of this hour,
like a glacially receding shore
downed of every exhaled bliss
the season fists in its belled
lungs. Soon the birds will waken
and tumult the choiring air;
soon I’ll feed the cats and
sit inside the circlet of their
tiny chewing mouths, wet and
wild in appetite; soon I will
head upstairs to wake with
my wife, perchance to undulate
those billows which have such
surfaces and depths I’ll never
fully know the full jist of them,
much less say all those
pulled-back sheets could reveal.
Across the state the drivers
knock back coffee and
amphetamines, soon to head
to the garages of Daytona
where their garish wheeled
engines are most still and
pent and nascent, bright
red hard yellow high blue,
festooned with corporate
deities and nailed with the
prime numbers of the tribe.
And the orange grove just left
of town begins to lift its green
kilt as a million buds
prepare to toot their horns,
soon to blast a sweet infernal
scent across the land far
louder than the dawn’s chorale
of birds or the rocking
motion of our bed or the sound
of two dozen stock cars
revving up a hundred
thousand horses or the basso
sound inside the fold
and crash of the beachside
surf which lies drowned
in a silence not even
the song has timbrel fingers
to caress as glides off
the page--at least, not yet,
not yet: Though grant another
hour for this year’s day
to wake and resume
that daylong surfside hollar.




SPRING TIDE

2004


Spring in Florida has washed
over us so clear and fragrant
these past few days as to
immerse us in a drowse
and a dream of heavenly
song, the breeze sweet with
orange and jasmine blossom,
the sky so heartbreakingly
blue, the pale green trees
whispering of lower
urgencies as the huge oak
boughs lift and cast us all,
like wave-spume, back
here. Wild. Yet is this sudden
thrall of God, the sea, or
of some paler propinquity,
the spirit of this not
so much lifting wings as
sprouting fins to fan an
emerelding blue? Spring
washes over us in a wave
and we emerge at dusk
spluttering and anointed,
our heart no longer ashore,
but far and deep and wild
in a vaster bliss which no
one walks or wake from.
It happened to me long
ago, when I was 14 and
stretching long exactly
when the groves awoke to
pour their white brandies
into the ladling breeze.
One day I woke smelling
that low sweetness in
the window and then
felt some inner beach
of flesh awake, washed
pure and clean
of any music beyond
that grove-wild sphere.
The angel-whitened
floss of my wings turned
right then a feral blue,
my hand reaching under
the sheets to translate
that boozy scent across
the sheets. Singing or
flinging back all I heard in
that waking, racing spring
day. That was 30 years
ago, and though my hand
now holds a more articulate
device (surely though a
more minor fin), the jots
are still as hot and hard,
the end just as imprecise,
my thrall no less for having
said it just so. Oh I can
smell that green whisky
rising from the dark just
now, curved and immortal
as the one so long ago
who washed her breasts
all over me and then
ebbed back into the grove
back and down of soul
to wait and sing and pray
and make a home of
the hole she tore in me.

***




The candidate sits down between two turo {trees of which the large branches have been cut off but whose crowns are preserved}, and drums. The old shaman calls one by one the spirits down the southern turo, and with ring sends them to the candidate. {A red silk “road” stretches from one turo to the other, and a wooden ring moves freely between them.} Each time the teacher takes back the ring he sends off a spirit. If this were not done, the spirits would enter the candidate and would not leave him. ...

During the entering of the spirits, the elders examine the candidate who .. must tell the whole history or “biography” of the spirit, with all details, such as who it had been before, where it lived (in which “rivers” it had been), what it had done, with which shamans it had been and where the shamans had died. ... in order to convince the audience that the spirit is really in the candidate. ... After every night of performance the shaman climbs up to the upper beam and remains there for some time. A costume is hung upon the beams of the turo. ... The ceremony continues for three, five, seven or nine days. If the candidate succeeds, sacrifice is offered to the the clan spirits.

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

PROOF

I hang in this singing tree
for three five seven nights
occulting a wild god’s name
in a river whose mouth
I source, orating every
day afresh the salt
of bluest seas.
I sing the history of
moonlight which makes
mad and savage every
bliss, its dark hook
like an undertow
hauling hearts all the way
to shores where they
are feasted on by
love’s shaggiest of bears,
red in sooth’s bright saw.
If this tale is educated,
it’s only in what I’ll never
know; and if it requires
proof, its craft is
not not so much of
balanced fricatives
as of dreadful addlements,
all-too-feral sums.
My singing cloak is
sewn of eagle feathers
plucked from the shit
of great white sharks,
& speckled with the
scales of cobo salmon
found in the claws
of a mountain lion:
Its voice has harrowed
every league of bad descending
nights to shore at
something darker,
a basso distillate of
deeper marges, a
higher-proof horizon
not graced by mescal
worms but whales
only the plunging seas
can whiskey. I sing
here the entire history
of beachside storms which
shores the soul with
berms set by the great
year’s high and lower
tides, summer and winter
not so much
balanced as sufficient wild
contrarians. My proof
is a history
of rises and falls
half hurled from a
fomenting mind,
half demented by
pent balls. This costume
is not the one you
earn by wooing
as the one end
up with having
burned through
all the others,
charring all
conceit and dull
device until you
get at last to something
so pure as to wash its
own dark shore
far left and down from
sight in the clean and
hard finality of heaven’s
earthward-heavy bite.
I do not name the gods
as relinquish mine
to Their victual jaws,
free at last to haunt
the precincts of
a Lascaux carved and lit
and writ full down
by augments of such
pure bone-deep thrall
my words at last are all
the moon remembers
of that merry dark mead-hall
at the bottom of the sea.




HAGIOGRAPHY

December 2003

Old lives float along
in the high masts of
that frigate moon,
spiritous and cold,
a blue-washed psalter
whispering lost
hagiography through
the eerie moony night.
Long, long ago the
poet covered his face
with her palms and
sailed three nights
below, his song tumbling
like a severed head down
her dark blue well, his
thumb dipped in
her sidhe-mound and
tasted rich with
the honey of prophecy.
The moon sails
on in that ancient
enterprise, seeing all
in death and sleep
what we only dream,
eyes wide where we
can or dare not see.
Oran’s high up in
that mast with
Amergin and Merlin,
Billy Shakespeare
Blake & Whitman too,
vatic votives all
singing high in their
deepest burials,
their deadliest falls
into her silver arms.
Old songs are still
streaming from that
ever-westward moon,
thin and distant
as the mewling stars,
in registers the dead
intently listen to
under all the waves of
this world -- Chaunts
and chanteys, lays
and lives, a high sky
stream gleaming on
the cheeks of that
magic moon, the one
I found beneath
my pillow as I slept,
and which now at
5 a.m. dully fills
the yard with blue
milk, the moon which
somehow is the song
inside my own.
A silver marrow
of wild sea bone
whispers soft and
high and thin
inside this pen:

O let me tell you
of my dance with her
in the merrow-milk
of a high December moon ...


ANGLAIS MORT A FLORENCE

Wallace Stevens

A little less returned for him each spring.
Music began to fail him. Brahms, although
HIs dark familiar, often walked apart.

His spirit grew uncertain of delight,
Certain of its uncertainty, in which
That dark companion left him unconsoled

For a self returning mostly memory.
Only last year he said that the naked moon
Was not the moon he used to see, to feel

(In the pale coherences of moon and mood
When he was young), naked and alien,
More leanly shining from a lankier sky.

Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.
He used his reason, exercised his will,
Turning in time to Brahms as alternate

In speech. He was that music and himself.
They were particles of order, a single majesty;
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

He stood at last by God’s help and the police;
But he remembered the time when he stood alone,
When to be and to delight to be seemed to be one,
Before the colors deepened and grew small.


MOON IN THE MAN

2004

Why shouldn’t the moon
ache and throb pale
turbines of desire through us,
torn as we from our source
and destined as we
to wax and wane
high and low? The moon
confirms Pascal’s adage
that there’s a God-shaped hole
in every human heart. It
sails ever homeless in
that milky desire for harbor,
yet folds its wings just where
we shore and at
last touch the sleeping
other - God, Beloved,
the next poem. This tells me
that the moon is love’s
most shadowy sprite,
& is that
echo’s duration in
every wave’s curl
toward collapse.
Mark no angels in the
moon’s westward sail:
it’s motion is my own,
voyager from love
toward love’s
apple island inside
and beyond the next
glowing kiss. And lamp
these emulsions high
with that phosphor which
as all that it reaches for,
welling pure milk from
the pap and lap of God,
sustaining our dreams
and teasing out every
tender blossom of infinte
night. Wild is the moon’s
aura, light by which I
here write, blue-black as
the ocean womb that gave
birth to it, rimmed with
paling dawn, too hot to
the touch glowing around
you as you turn away
from me in sleep
in the high majescule
of one fading sigh.