The Weight of Being Eden
Ran into Ben Henry Howard,
In the black of the hotel cellar a few hours back.
He had only a short time to spare and spoke
Full of confidence and consequence,
With his dromedary bottom lip,
And that speck of know-it-all worn by cosmic gurus.
The moths swarmed the solitary condemned glow
Like constellations in motion; peering, swirling,
Eyeballs gazing back from the mirrored walls
Smeared with interstellar dust
Painted in pigments of love and lust.
He suggested I kill my imagination
And count my chickens before they hatch
And begin to scratch at their shells and beg for food.
To do this would unhook the clasp of mystery's cloak
And send it floating rumpled to the floor beneath the hat rack,
Until it climbs again to weave golden thread as it did before.
You can feel the Spice Islands' tradewinds
Warm your face before they pale upon the backs of whales
Across the shorn spring lambs skin
Of the bleating North Atlantic toward a battered bowing inn on the shore.
The torches light the drooping tropic night
That sags beneath the weight of its own perfume
And the weight of being Eden in each extreme.
It is always day where it snows.
Always white with perpetual light and fleshful of pumping blood,
Adieu, Adieu.
The last kiss before boarding a train
Lies frozen beneath the slow drifts
That creep motionless across artifice of day.
Look, there, another plump thigh
In purple garters warbling the songbird's goodbye to night,
Adieu, Adieu.
And I simply wait and hope the telephone rings
For a conversation about the evening's mundane trials
With the inevitable farewell, awkward and sterile
As it always is across the lines, across the miles. Â
And I simply wait and ventilate the balmy breath
That blows unseen between the wiry veins of all things.
See that wall there. It never whispers
Or cracks its toes or masks its intent
To become the universe in miniature.
Best as anyone knows it bears its load
And waits like a curious turtle in repose.
A thousand sermons dangle
Condemned sprung jacks in their boxes
They bounce and cackle from the tree's unsteady arms.
Each one naked knowledge,
A singular original sin to pluck and bite
And with delight begin another lapsarian lineage,
Rise, line of Cain, Rise, line of Eve
We are all fallen here,
Get up and breathe.
An empty urn black with tarnish
Greets the tongueless thirsty traveler
Beneath the neon's flinty flickers
And the maypole's sundered wreath.
We are the spring sprung children
Spinning, spin, spin
Spin with your nectar-ripe ribbons
So that we all may be born again and again.
My head is full of numbers
Manipulated and constantly recogitated in an endless algebra
To push aside the regret and all that is lost with it.
This time I hear the drums
Pound and drum beneath the Banyan tree
And between the fixed wooden wings
Of the samurai city's soaring gates.
All Hail a little sprig of jasmine, dazzling,
And placed in her hair, just behind the curve of the ear,
Or a wedge of lemon in the blue iris of her stare,
Come, Rise, Hail, Spin, Adieu- and again.
A deposed simple primeval emperor
Marches across the cold vast silver
Folds of the budding rose
As it sways in the infinite fileds
On an ordinary day,
And now it's best I be on my way.
Totentanz
look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them,
and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed.
2 Maccabees 7: 28.
Lotus sutra,
gong-slow breath
gradual, imperceptibly paused
between the birth and death
fashion and reason,
rota fortuna and geometry lessons.
pondspawned empyrean blosom
Latinate and elegant
Timepiece,
oh keeper of deep blown rhythms
Unnoticed and infinite.
Chronos sets his clock
to your tidal-pulse
moonlit and latticed.
To your big bang in miniature,
this lightspeed in slow-motion strobe,
Yama boils water for his morning egg
In autumn, always autumn,
Empty feuilletons, scribed in an ageless age,
shipwrecked and shorestrewn,
Gasping to the rhythm of retreat, always retreat,
perhaps only once scarcely imagined,
but retreat nonetheless.
Wet with emptinessand with broad-shouldered despair,
One brother upon the next,
like the sun and other stars
Dying defiantly in distant filaments;
They do little but rustle and hope for memory
With a jig
Self-enclosed, self-circling.
Chasing,
Impounding the physical,
Matter and matter of fact not,
Tortures and metatortures,
Cosmic pendulums, bad spelling
And all the things from which
Genius is shaped.
Quelquefois, peut-être,
but neither necessarily
The reigns of Pegasus nor the bricks that buttress
unsleeping towers on Alexandria’s shore.
“Danse, Death, Danse,”
if the music suits thee.
In a tempo
of ivory and velvet,
dance your sunfractured one after another waltz,
we make believe,
and deny three times,
When similarities so inconveniently surface
And the pharmacy is closed-
And betray,
oh how expertly we betray!
Walk, amble and jalan-
As all the while
We pretend to do otherwise:
That folly
which constitutes the better part of existence.
Oh, I saw your reign,
I saw your false temple- and
Asunder and into ribbonshards and rivulets
Of what was once one source
Unfractured by time, wind, gravity and the whimsy of the lotus
Blinking unaware as a
newborn locust
- I did tear it
and divine its both bleak and brilliant fortune
in charybdian diotomes
and cosmologies of celestial coordinates
and rutted orbitals.
In long, sleepcast
shadows of barbarian scaled walls,
By the banks where women wash, hunched and crouched,
Like Arachne spinning to mock Minerva,
all our speech and deeds: blasphemy blessed blasphemy,
fated and damned,
watch there
Astride vast horizons of shifting sand
good and evil walk together,
One warmed by sun,
the other soothed by shade,
Entwined and twinward, sepulchers
Side by side, sharing the selfsame soil.
Indistinguishable,
diametric, poured forth into the same vessel from one vein.
In both battle and embrace-
