Ten Quintains III

A beast is most like man when hibernating—
relieved of its ordeal, it takes its drop
of consciousness and spreads it over months,
until a canvas wider than a lake
inspires the sole reflection—‘Now I wake.’

*

My night in jail cooked up a measly dawn,
as though the gods of rote reversed a tape
of shameful flames receding into coals—
only to greet my getting out with rain...
a drumroll skipping over my non-escape.

*

Days mislaid down brooding’s alleys... Time
to play detective, then—to match ennui
with noir. What do they mean, the ghosts who draw
you into their despair, their dark street-fighting?
Observe. Reflect. That’s why it’s called mood lighting.

*

I’d lost my sunglasses on last night’s bender,
but even clouded over, the day was foul;
I felt that I was being mocked, not blessed.
To see the children, though—I had remembered...
Beside the narrow path, a fallen nest.

*

We lie awake, the day is yet to come,
though soon the birds will mutter, pick at crumbs
of grainy light. While at the future end
of Europe, morning unveils an old libretto:
Eruption in full-throated song; red ode.

*

The lyric equivalent of an atom bomb
would leave the reader breathlessly in awe—
possessed by an epiphany unbidden.
And it would be inscribed in gilt along
an altar for the sacrificing of children.

*

Am I to understand, synthetic voice,
that all the blood displaced in countless births—
those human sacrifices in reverse,
with death pacing the hallway of the sanctum—
has christened...what? A bloodless simulacrum?

*

What poetry is missing is the nerve
to assert—the confidence of centuries
of speech—not talk in rooms abstracted from
the square... Pale discursives, save your breath:
we go from shibboleth to shibboleth.

*

However bad it gets—however much
we let the watcher see to our desires—
our kind can hope to quit this false Osiris
as long as thoughts are held inviolable;
and held at arm’s length his illumined bibles.

*

Devoted to devices that we thumb
like rosaries, the way we thumb the coins
of dreams into a wishing well and gaze
upon its surface, smooth as beads of black...
The difference is some surfaces gaze back.

*

(The Quintains)