Ars Poetica

A poet peels from the mind and heart
the first layer of skin,
yet does not succumb to the astonishing
ecstasies vouchsafed to him.

He can seem weak as a sick cat
and twitches at every breeze and whim,
then tough as an old vulture, rapt,
hovering, alone, above the field of the dead.

He's known failure, hatred, love,
success, defeat, power, wild
grief, overwhelming bliss,
and despair, death hungering,

and holds to none while holding all,
to find the words that, saying each,
purge them all; that carry the sun
in the heart across the torn mind,

the spirit’s ice in the soul's flames.
Clear when clarity is called for,
he flashes mind in a cry of light,
tooling like a scalpel in pain’s mesh,

and obscure when obscurity is required:
mist and cloud and fog are true,
as tears are true although they blind:
the laws of light no night obeys:

some things the day can only shame.
A poet is never too pure –
his fingers smell of rut and mud,
not just ink and old, fine books;

also of jasmine, roses, honeysuckle.
He's failed at the slow, dark work of love
and paid for his heart’s stupidities;
and also knows triumph’s pride,

the steely happiness of conquest.
He’s learned that words, like him, are not
innocent, and forgiven them –
he also knows what evils are not

forgivable, and will not forgive them.
He hasn’t forgotten the unpaid debt
that poetry owes humanity,
or turned his back altogether on

the feckless species he calls his own,
though every hour they disappoint him.
He combines heart, nerve, brain,
psyche, body, spirit, mind,

in the loom of words beneath his hand:
never failing his goal of a truth
he never may be able to attain,
as he aims his words at his reader’s heart

though he misses again – and again –
and again.

The Terrible Truth

One day the scientists discovered a truth so terrifying
they closed their laboratories,
returned their grant money,
resigned all their positions,
and retreated en masse to the desert
after taking a vow of silence.

The internet erupted with chatter: “What is it?
What is this thing that made all the scientists on earth lose their minds?”
Thousands of guesses blackened the screens of cyberspace,
but not one guessed what.

“Any lie at all would be preferable,”
one of the last scientists was heard muttering,
“Any lie at all . . . If only we didn’t know . . . !”

A young man overheard him,
and sneered.
“Cowards,” he thought
as he planned to break into the boarded-up laboratories,
discover this “terrifying truth,”
and steal, like a punk Prometheus,
the fire from the abandoned altars of the gods.

And he did. And the next day they watched him walking the streets,
his eyes blind with the despair of what they had seen.

The internet erupted with chatter: “What is it? What is it?”

No one guessed, and the young man
would only say, “Any lie at all . . . any lie at all . . .”

A thousand years passed. The laboratories had been rebuilt as temples
and people lived in little tribes among the ruins of a civilization rumored to have been
built by giants,
lived on berries and nuts and what they could kill in the hunt, and died young,
and they worshiped a god made of feathers and grass, with the head of a porpoise, the
legs of a tiger, the wings of a falcon, and the torso of a man;
his name was whispered in the darkness of his temples by worshippers who had
proven their faithfulness by eating the hearts out of the breasts of living children.
“O En-i-ly-atal, save us!” they prayed in the darkness. “Save us, O En-i-ly-atal!”

The Mask of Adam

The day they left the garden
the garden left them.
The birds gathered in the groves.
The sky opened like a fan.

The ground is hardpan.
The rocks are knives.
A canyon opens its arms.
Wilderness, will you take us?

Wrinkled already and sere
are the leaves hiding our nakedness.
A cold wind blows. There is no
shelter but our embrace.

Our only way is forward.
Behind us stands the flame
of the guardian angel, terrible
on the distant horizon.

Somewhere the child’s face
has slipped into the pool,
vanishing behind the ice
of the man’s mask.

Freedom the Tyrant

“So you want to be free, do you?
I’ve heard that before!

Free as a bird, free as air,
master of your fate and captain of your soul,
uncabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d,
unconquered and unconquerable,
your own master, your own lord, your own little god –
unmarred, unmarried, unshackled,
at liberty abroad, without a debt,
duty or obligation, unmastered and unslaved.

I grant it to you: there’s no word sweeter
than freedom and its cousins, free, freed, freely,
and even sweeter, stronger, deeper,
wilder is the rush to bliss
of being freed from bonds
that held you like a prison, like a fist around your throat:
the half-crazed thrill of liberty triggered by release.

But then what, friend?
After a time, you rush about in a-twitter,
intoxicated, flitting like a drunken bird on speed,
half mad, until you hit your head against a stone gate
liberty can’t open, from which you can’t escape:
the little clink called need, the penitentiary called your belly,
the deadhouse of the night and the tempest and the rain
that make a roof a requisite – bed, water, food, air,
clothes, shoes, a friendly stroke, a patient willing ear,
and all the reminders of the prison of your need:

your delicate skin, easily chilled, your demanding gut,
your perilous ignorance, clamoring flesh, vulnerability
to time and weather, injury, illness, death’s ball and chain
that holds your ankle in its teeth – now you learn the truth
that liberty is a mockery, your freedom is a door
out of a cage into a prison that contains the world.

And let’s say that you escape into endlessness:
freedom will snatch out of your hands any certain truth
for every truth stands halt to freedom, your liberty offends,
and so it must be trampled, hated, despised, condemned, slain –

truth and good are the cardinal enemies of any free man.
You’ll always need a house, and your house will be your jail;
will always need protection from your own despotic needs;
will not be free of life that makes you love your liberty
and crowns the horizon with a wall high
and thick and deep and black as the darkness behind the night’s sky.

If you live longer than Tithonous,
ancient, immortal lover of the springlike goddess Dawn,
freedom will make your life an endless age of living hell,
for you will know no truth, no good, no briefest certainty,
but eternal meaningless flux, the world in chaos, like you – free.”

Aim, Fire, Miss

But what is success
if not the bull’s-eye, hit
at the maximum range,
whether seen or not
by the indifferent crowd
or the riotous judges?

The vacuum, celebrity,
makes its greatest
boy’s noise
as it, jeering, escapes,

turning into scorn
everything it admired,
just to prove (in case we hadn’t
gotten it) that it,
and only it,
makes and dandles and ruins
every reputation.

But how you wanted
to be admired,
to hear frank praise,
be faced-off with awe
and eyes humbled, dazed.

Your vanity will feel
the scathing it asked for,
the laughing eyes,
the taste of the lash,
sooner than the oil
of admiration’s seed,
the puff of genius
for any of your deeds.

Few are chosen
to stand in the dance
that makes life half godlike,
half myth and half holy,
a life’s sacrifice to honor
the impossible in time.

Few fit the shadow
of the antique dream
out of life’s dust,
time’s cut and sweep,
the dream and its shabby realization,
the inevitable defeat of the impossible hope,
the cunning joke called human life,

and our refusal to laugh at the mocking
between the shake of a head and a fist,
the sleep and assent as we nod
between our dreams and our lice –
to slip on the cloak of the sacred
and mask the face of a god,

the human and divine overlapping,
bodying forth the holy
as they ghost into paradise;
eternity breathing sweet nothings
into time's faithful ear.

Doggerel About the Genuine

A genuine poem,
as you indite it,
seems to sum up
your loose life behind it,
and promise a changed life
now and to come,
youth, love, beauty, power -
chaos now; kingdom come.

It’s delightful to write it,
reread it, revise it,
rewrite it, then type it
into Microsoft Word,
a tough cosmic loveliness
pulsing and rising
through grammar to beauty
beyond the absurd, hazy
intent of the poet
hell-drunk and heaven-sent,
syntatic transcendence,
God’s love in a phrase.

It quivers from the mouth
to the screen to the page,
a genuine poem;
it promises for ever
damn-, salv-, transformation
as it wilts on the page:

it is the poem that dies
as it blooms, age on age.