Hymn From The Rear

Your charms would keep
me here on this dark blue
shore in the last ranks of
the cultural rear, the vanguard
of a fond, reflective old-
boned glance, of no matter
nor any consequence
to the times: Good for You,
I don’t belong to that ever-
faster harder brighter
dumber deluge with its
crashing falls and white-
crazed foam: I disappeared
long ago from the view
of the fonts of wild youth,
or at best became its
askant bemused uncle,
the lute I play the
road not slakened, plucking
mad and loud
infernal boughs:
As my form rounds and
bends and wrinkles,
I’m thus lurching toward
oblivion’s tribe, a
brightness ebbed to
embers of rue
and thence to pale cold
lucence, the memory
of a dream of fire
which no dearth or
darkness can requite
or suspire: Though my
days shoulder a cross
which befits my age
and love, there is a
yet a lightness in
the music You demand
of me which is less flight
than pure dive in the sea,
the freedom to fin the
depths drowned gods
and whalers fan in
the absolute heart of
God, that nadir where
all things rend remit
and thus surrender
that which at long
last begins: I linger
at that shore long
after all I wished for
all washed away,
the starry romancing
and incessant nights,
sea-dawns cerulean
pink, even, adieu
upon adieu, the sea:
Stripped of
such augments, the
training wheels fell
off and I’m now riding
in Your full blue,
astride a meaty heart
of verbal mouth and
fin, pure penis
sans the old addles
of hooch or plain
wrong beds: I’m more
naked now than
when I was born,
world and word
conjuncted in the
tongue which darts
across the page: You
bid me linger here
so long I’ve emptied
all of the songs,
all insides of the
wave’s collapsing mash
of blue blue blue blue
seem: I have devolved to
this far simpler man inside
walls of strange verse,
a sweetness so deranged
with salt that the sound
harps pure blue gall,
the quintessence, if you
will, of what those
emptied bottled distilled
in the long years after
I was emptied even
of them, at last even
of absence itself: How
wonderful and strange
and quietly enrapt
this hour in which I
try to write waves down
as close in sense
and thought as the man
who rides the fish
which strides them,
not by providence
but in pure
victorious thrall,
forever on these
staining waves which
ink my daily spiral
raves not even You
full understands:
That, I suspect,
is why I keep coming
back each day to
write the measures down:
As I reach back, You
reach forward into the
future gambols of the
tribe, perplex and falling
as they seem: They will
make a later sense,
to be sure: Your strange
gambols have been stamped
like a question mark
for all these ages: My job’s
to make ends blue
and salt my pages with
eternal breadths of You.