The Elegy Season

The Elegy Season

Everything talks in requiems.

The mountains cry out in forested waves,

leaves speak from vanished syllables,

the sun shatters the world through magnetic

spots, a prophet sits on Caesar’s statue

speaking of shadows

shuttered houses laugh

What life is it that dreams the life we are?

A voice before the world was made?

We remain awake while sleeping,

listening to the dirges,

to the voices formed by voice

constant utterance before

first footsteps faded in morning dew

those alien voices formed long before

we were made.

These were notions of the spirit

making secrets sensual & sound,

voice speaking in our ear of that

which was & will be again.

Forming & reforming & forming again,

that is our blessing.

Unbounded

Georgia hot seeds on a hallelujah evening

with pennies & quarters for holified collection

plate carrying all the past days in silvered reflection

& two years beyond puberty’s genesis, chrysalis yet

uncracked, molded by creationism & Augustine &

Bible-hard precipitous waters & Calvin’s predestined

voice, her hair a golden halo spilling like a waterfall

turned to downriver rapid & voices of Alabama radio

preachers carried on magic waves over the state line

& a tree, a fine rib, the trebled deep word

from the abyss, departure to Tennessee

where now among kudzu, lowing cows,

mountains towering like ripe breasts,

cars in the streets, like-minded friends,

salvation’s minted smell, the woman

need came upon her like the intersection of an

old old moon & the disked sun, the planets

singing out in the dark wheeling, musical

spheres & migrating geese overhead & hot

ground searing her toes like baptismal rain.

40 years in the desert with only horizon mirages,

confused necessity playing about skirted hemline,

awkward as flesh, as goblet, as an unfull chalice

settled among stones in a field & an ancient

Roman hill.

Among the resisted forces carried with her since

birth, canopy of rainbow’s promise & the vernal

equinox, year’s darkest night, feast days & yelled

out epiphany some thing stirred deeper with an

ache beyond autumn & cultural manifestos,

beyond Darwin & the quantum world, unto the

very nature of spinning spirit that raked her like

fire spit from the stars

where she met one who she had already known

without knowing like Plato knew, the aromatic

sacredness of Byzantine mosaics, uncreated

laws of physics outside her realm.

Here he said in the truck’s metal mind

You want to taste the fire within the

corn, yellow flames tiny suns, Shakespeare’s

ghost come with darkened tongue & waved

his hands where the deep forest trembled &

spread out leafy truth & there was a deep

cave with animal blood paintings: savage

artist, writhing limbs pouring out from

disembodied fingers a panel of lions,

horses bucking on green plains, the mastodon,

stuff of meat & pitted bone.

They have killed history he said from the deep

South to waving plains, Colosseum’s bloody

roar, reason’s march from the dark age tomb,

stuff of Bacon’s materialism & tree & ice rings

& shadowed clouds & the bright penny Europe

like a glowing pot shard rejoined in metaphysical

awe by a waving particle hungry for a double

slit.

They have killed history, all of them. Made of it a

fledgling bird too frightened to fly. But you, yellow

hair, it is there in the cave, in singing meat, the old

old hunger, race’s salvation, that & your eyes like

some penetrating jungle thing in starless bush

where you can sing stars down from the heavens &

know antiquity rattling your bones & cry out O

Lord, this is my history where I become unbounded

from where I began.

Information 

Where does it come from?

Must come in infinite forms like ever changing

blackbird fractals flock-weaving in & out

over a stubbled cornfield where time recent a

farmer fallowing his fields planted Kentucky

half runners &information deep within the white

seed beamed out to burst, grow, and twine

around bamboo teepees.

Or the girl at bath brushing her sun hair, silky fall

wheatfield holding spring’s promise.

The earth bursting with information from the tide’s

rise & fall, the angry volcano god belching fear,

wheel of seasons, locked in gravity’s embrace,

clouds airy ballet, watery shape shifters done

away by a puff of air.

What is information? Politician’s desire for dirt,

electrons racing across a circuit board flashing

Yes/No Yes/No No/Yes No/Yes like an inexperienced

virgin in the backseat after a big game, stock market

fallacy, the frozen holographic bits on a black hole’s

event horizon, Pythagorean theorem translated into

lover’s sighs, the mystery of the Sphinx & cuneiform

beer recipes.

A universe composed of information like computational

sequences sounding in Beethoven’s mind despite

deaf ears, information with no explanation beamed

out at us from billions of light years so that

maybe what it most desires is a captivated audience

drenched in awe as it whirls in prodigious splendor.

Languages

The old man of the woods said,

we grow from the languages of youth

& find rich tongues in all the land.

I lived in those languages, yearned

for the vanished places

I left that I want to return to & know

the wild ways of the wind blowing

through the hollers as stolen generators,

& we human thermostats heated

by the buzz of locusts & katydids

despite the harshness saw

the day become buttery moment

while the night

has seen a thousand bony moons.

Tomorrow trails forward as a multitude

of films projected

out by perished drive-ins, maps for our

inner terrain where cedar posts rot in

their holes marking weed-choked fields,

church at the end reduced to ruined

foundations & moldy abandoned books

whose sticky pages conceal the planets

wheeling in orbit & Mendel’s genetics

growing from the edges.

Mind’s limousine trucks us through those

languages for there in the fallow field

the apple tree become ghost where once

fall possum grapes bloomed fat & blue

after first frost & crows lighted there,

made black hieroglyphics that taught of

the brooding ways of man through

feathered vocabulary & flew away as

winged lexicons.

As child vernaculars were simple:

quivering female-thing, male toy

soldiers, days of rain & cloud & mood

& endless nights rolling toward Christmas.

Stripped now of youth’s husk we have

ripened away from the parlance of hubris

& know those spaces above us sing out

an endless dialect, never ending language

of infinite darkness.

Ecclesiastes Waters

These Sunday streams coursing through my body

Ecclesiastes waters returning to the source.

Behind, emergent self from the dark of Plato's forms.

Ahead Sheol’s dark eternity.

For a while the mountains are a stay.

Winter's clouds a gray nucleus of vapors,

a type of atmospheric comfort.

The running ice green mountain river,

fog returned to Earth.

The way that we returned for a time to April's green

& feel the sticky sap of stirring vegetative roots

awakening us from the slumber of ages.

Rock is needed, strong cliffs that form a buttress

from all the indifferent stars circling overhead

as we pass with them in space through eternity’s dream.

We cry out O Lord do not forsake us. Oh Lord!

I am of those frightened by bright sun,

clean well-lighted places, the songs of Job.

I yearn for snow crusted firs,

Norwegian fjords, snow for half a year,

arctic cold and Northern Lights that write

God's many tongues in hieroglyphic script

shimmering like a multi-colored desert mirage

thirsting for water.

There in that velvet enclosed coal womb

watching the primal story burning across the sky

I know why I returned to the mountains &

dip my fingers in cool green waters.