Hughlings Himwich

February and the Rites of Spring

 

It was in the bawdy, riotous
play of the Lupercalia
where young men,
dressed down to nothing
but grease and skin,
would strike with goat-hide thongs
the bare backs of women
who wished to conceive
in the coming year

That Mark Anthony,
the leader of the Luperci,
thrice offered Caesar a kingly crown
that Anthony in his eulogy
tells us Caesar thrice refused,
thus denying the claim of his assassins
that Caesar was ambitious.

The tale may be true.

Beyond Shakespeare,
there are accounts by others
who saw all this live.

‘February’ comes from februa,
Latin for the goat-hide straps
the greased down ‘wolves’, the Luperci,
used to drive young women mad
and into spring.

 

Big Cat Dreams

In the throat of a bird
that yearned to sing
was the knife used
to cut out her tongue.

Then a lion roared
and she coughed it up.
The big cat dreams
he can hear her song.

When she sings,
she calls to him.
Big cat dreams
all night long.

 

 

Dream of Spring

Though she's lost her way
a river runs through her veins

She calls to me to dream again
I go to her like the wind

Her touch as soft as the rain
we breathe as one

And wait together
for spring to come

The Little Lovely Truth

 

The little lovely truth is

that it is a little truth

and lovely and lovely

because it is little. 

 

Leonora: Photography and Artwork 191, 192

 

 

 

© Leonora; all rights reserved

Auguries of innocence
(Ochna thomasiana)

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower :
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."                        

- William Blake, English poet (1757-1827)

 

 

 

© Leonora; all rights reserved

Catch the Moon

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Leonora's Photography on Flickr

 

 

A Kind of Heaven

He had looked everwhere
in trees and clouds and up his nose
and searched inside his lonesome heart
for that old sock that like a friend
he had lost, but then looked down
and saw he had no feet
and thought if this is death it ain’t so bad
repeating now without end and with relief

  You don’t need socks
  If you don’t have feet . . . .

It seemed to him a kind of Heaven

 

Ber Himwich: Photography and Artwork, 423, 424

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Letting Go

Be brave! No more sneaking around, no more affectation!
What great soul said that? Yours, of course! One soul
seeks another, that's how it knows where to go,
You and I the same, like birds
who, by grace of wind, fly high above.
If you keep hiding, you may find
you're not there at all: no breath no smile,
(Goodbye beautiful eyes that once caught the sky.
Yes, your eyes are beautiful. It's never a lie.),
no joy or grief, just an echo that tries to rhyme.
Listen! That ringing in your ear?
It's the tolling of your soul:
It's time, it's time, it's damn well time already!
Enough of all this hide and seek, a soul
knows itself as two in one. 
The less we fear and sooner than now
the more we can dance and dance 
like those whom God makes fools. 
Let the kite go and be where it goes.
That's poetry! It's like falling in love...

Hey there, beautiful, where ya goin'?
—I'm going with you.

 

The Poet

He sits looking into the light
And like Adam calls out the names
Of what he alone can see:
Quom and Kas and Tok.

So begins a world of strange beings
That burrow into the earth
And find the sky. Listen.
You can hear them at night

Weaving constellations
Out of pure sound:
Orion Boötes Pegasus.
The moon rings like a bell

Calling us to dream.

 

Still In the Game

Sometimes I wear my three-cornered hat
and folks look through me to a time
when such hats were what men wore.
Sometimes I wear a baseball cap
and see myself at the plate,
my swing a little off.
the pitch too fast, my hands too slow.
Strike three, the ump calls me out
and doesn’t hide a dismissive laugh.
He says, Old man, get outa here.
Get yourself a rocking chair.
He laughs again at his little joke
and repeats the rhyme:
     Old man, get outa here.
     Get yourself a rocking chair.
Yet he wears a mask.
I say at least I swing a bat.
His face turns red
and with a jerk of his thumb,
tells me my day is done.
Now it’s my turn to laugh.
I say, here, take my bat, feel its weight. 
He turns away,
his face now a darker red.

 

Johnny B. Good

Like Jonah,
he's on the run
and turns away
from the sea.

It's the jakes
for him. Someone

asks who he is.
Johnny B. Good,
he thinks out loud,

but now the Whirlwind
catches up with him
and carries him again
out to sea. He lies

fathoms deep,
an empty coffin,
a lonely bed.

 

We All Got Some

All you brothers and sisters
busted up, pickin' up jesus,
got nothin' but      
Mister Please
tell them angels
bill and betty
love is free
We all got some
but brothers and sisters
Y'all been holding out on me

 

du Pre

The song falls below the sound
and begins again beyond our hearing,
erupting now as light bird wind and sky,
your fingers driving the bow across the strings
your hand arm a hammer beating
against the silence that holds us all
and you rise one last time
alive as never before
calling us to hear the music,
to breathe again, to dance and die
as every day the night and night the day,
and you, grateful for the applause,
stand before us as ourselves.

 

Road Poems

Watch out for me
on the road.
I write poems
In my head.
I turn left
when the light
Is red.

 

Playing It Rough

 

Mother said
I'd better read
but I played dumb
and played it rough.

Now all I do
I do with words.
She would be pleased,
though now I bleed
in other ways.

She must've known.

 

Illumination

It’s too late to sleep,
too soon to worry
about what must be done.
A candle makes
the darkness darker.

It is a ghost
who writes these words.
We talk as if we were one.
When morning comes,
I disappear.

 

Deep Water

The mountains float
in the morning fog
like shadows
on the ocean floor.

They'd lure me in
to drown in sorrows
if you weren't here
to hear these words

that like stones
would hold me down.
The mountains rise
as light breaks through.

 

 

The Stream of Words

These words are mine
but when others read them
back to me, I dream
of wading in a stream:
a song of sorrow
and flash of fin.
And so I know
what I'll become
when these words
and I are one.

 

The Sky as Close as You and I

I fell in love with her
Before I ever saw her eyes.
She was always there,
Shyly hiding in the sky.

There are the charms of morning
And the lovely evening light,
But now she draws me close
And sleeps with me at night.

 

 

Teaching

I lost a student,
A student lost me
Though we had walked
as one as far as
the eye can see,
but then we stopped
to see the ocean change
from blue to green
and she was gone
to walk the distance
left to her alone,
leaving me standing there,
the sun the moon,
the ocean curling like her hair.

 

Fateful Etymology

O Them Eyes

Sassin' me will ya
With them witherin' looks
See here she says
And shows me them eyes
Lordy I let outa cry
Seein' fall'n angels
Runnin’ round wild
Lordy I seen her laft
And pickin' flow'rs
Like wishup on stars
Look here she says
She seen the sky
Takin' me with her
Lordy Lordy
I could've died

 

This poem won't be silent

Speak it not with your lower voice
Or in a whispered prayer
Tell me and tell yourself
What we need to hear
WAKE THE DEAD
Make every word
Ring Heaven's Bell:

YOU'RE NOT ALONE
I'LL BE YOUR FRIEND
AND STAY RIGHT HERE
THERE'S NOWHERE ELSE
I NEED TO GO
THERE'S NOTHING ELSE
I NEED TO DO

 

The Story of a Life at Sea

 

You will come to the end
of your high story,
your body broken,
your spirit weak and alone,
the goal still distant,
yet on your lips a song
of no regret as you
set out a final time
on a ship unrigged,
your self the wind
and sky and sea.

When Lightning Strikes

 

Poetry gives us just enough of what is real
to make us howl and gambol in the night,
but too far from where the music rises,
the rolling thunder of eternity. 

 

 

If we were wholly open to earth and sky

and with an open heart heard the voice of a hungry child
and held in our hands the true weight of things,
of which the fall of night and the thunder speak,
we would die ten thousand times
yet live and live again
in every call of bird or cry of pain,
each a thread that binds each to each
and would, if we would,
make whole a broken world. 

 

Sacred Ground

Sacred Ground

Only a living ghost knows
what it is to go on living
after one you loved has died
and be but light and air,
the trees casting shadows
where once you danced,
the rocks and ground
now the skin and bones
of what once was your life.

 

The Rhyme of the Sea

 

Soon I will stand
upon that shore
where all must come
and be no more.

Here is the rhyme
of an ancient song
that knows no time
or love or home.

Here with the waves
We're many and one.
We rise and fall
with the evening sun.

Roll on, O Great Sea of Man

Roll on, O Great Sea of Man, roll on
To where the only light we see
Is the song that lives through us
When we dream and ride the waves.
There is no need for the sun to rise
for us to be who we are. Roll on!

 

The Sound that Wind Makes

(for Maya)

I want words to breathe like I do, weep when I do, and bruise easily.

I want words to dream and remember those dreams that first set me on this path.

I want words to grow old with me and become like the lines in my face and tell me
      old stories that keep my stumbling spirit from falling and new ones that tell of
      love forever young and freely given.
I want words of no regret even for the sorry waste of all I have left undone, unsaid.

I want words to hold up a mirror and see there all who at some time have gone hand
      in hand with me through this life.

O what a wondrously crowded reflection that would be, all of them in the morning
     of their lives, young and old alike.  

O that words would fall like these tears and mark the page in silver and gold, the true
colors of night, that these words would live on in their hearts and find some rest there,
though I myself be nothing but the sound the restless wind makes on a cold night,
the wind that sweeps down the mountainside and past all the houses in which loved ones
have died and gathers up all those lost souls and scatters what is but dust and ash
through the deep space of time. 

We But Wake to Dream Again

The stars for mercy
would lift us up
and bury us darkly
in deepest night

but the dark is
not dark enough
we wake up
and see the sun

we rise to fall
to dream again

 

The Hard and Loving Heart of Things: Dūrum Cãrumque Cor Rērum

 

Dūrum Cārumque Cor Rērum

Hīc sunt manūs sanguine ātrō flentēs,
tamquam argentum in membrīs nostrīs fluat;
hīc est dūrum cor rērum et animus avāritiā torquētur;
hīc ventus in antrō vastō vānōque ululat;
hīc quoque ūna manus cāra aliam quaerit;
longē sōl lūnam bāsiat et astra gaudent.

The Hard and Loving Heart of Things

Here are hands weeping with dark blood, just so silver flows in our limbs;
Here is the hard heart of things and the soul twisted by greed;
Here the wind howls in a vast and empty cave;
Here too one dear hand seeks another;
from afar the sun kisses the moon
and the stars rejoice.

 

Sententia Poetica 1

 

"THE WEAVER-GOD, HE WEAVES;

and by that weaving is he deafened,
that he hears no mortal voice;
and by that humming, we, too,
who look on the loom are deafened;
and only when we escape it
shall we hear the thousand voices
that speak through it."*

*This rendering of an immortal sentence
from Herman Melville's Moby Dick
("A Bower in the Arsacides")
reveals the poetic cadences
of Melville's prose, itself
a kind of weaving
through which we may hear
the Author's voice.

 

Longtime Passing

How did Nietzsche die?
We killed him.

We heard and spoke
his words so playfully
we almost thought
we were undergoing,
overcoming, and broke
free with a yay and a nay
and a heigh noddy no

but we weren't
and we didn't
and we won't
and he died.

 

 

Ghost Stories

I walk with you 
as I knew you once.
though out of step
with whom you
have become. 
I tell your children
stories about ghosts
who are thirsty 
for another chance
at life. The children
scream, pretending
to be afraid, then laugh.
They do not see
you turn away
and face the dark.

Aliens Arrive!

O Brave New World!
Did you know Caliban sang soprano?
Full Fathom Five isn’t deep enough!

Are you not like Ariel, sometimes
a malignant thing, sometimes
charming, singing a lullaby,
perched on a bat's wing,
sometimes sadly,
no more than what you are
unless you lose a pound.

Monsters dream
just like you and I.

 

On the Road to Nowhere

Were I to tell Penelope
I must leave again
To where an oar is not an oar
And make peace with Poseidon
So may I come home to stay 
And wait for death to come
In sleek old age
Gently from the sea,
Would she tell me, 
Don’t come back,
This never was your home?

 

Carmina Nocturna I-XV

 

I.

The darkness tells
no tales, outruns
the sun, and hides
its light in song.
We sing all night,
its light for us
to share alone.

II.

The Gathering

The window frames
the darkness. I
open and listen:
.
In the moonlight shadows
gather, beckoning
me to follow.
                      This time
the moon smiles on me
and holds me in its light.

III.

Moon Time

her gift her fire dying in my arms
her body rising until nothing
but the bloom of sighing
herself to sleep and flying

IV.

The more profound
the night, the less
there is of who
we are, then 
are born again
in the morning light
and try again
to do things right.

V.

To sleep, perchance to dream

The mountain hangs on the moon
And gathers clouds about her
And vanishes. The moon
moves on, taking us
deeper into the night
we love.

VI.

Tonight there is no moon --
All you hear is the rain,
the leaves in the wind,
The arrow's breath
Before you kiss
And die
Like day and night,
Night and day.

VII.

We met when raw desire
first flowed like fire
through the dark fullness
of simple night. We met
in the play of wind and wave
upon an unsung shore,
where rack and shell
called out the time to come,
the time that's now
and will always be
and be no more. 
Before there was love
Or hate, our names were
Inscribed in every sigh
in the golden harvest
of our first night.
You came to be
as I lay dying, barely
breathing, ready
to be born again
and praise the light.
What do I do to sing like you?
Be born again and sing the blues?
It’s not the same. There’s another song
In the song you sang, buried with you
In the cold hard ground. The Earth
To the moon now sings for you.



VIII.

Quiet falls like leaves
Like night, the wheels
That turn the stars stop
There is no you, only
The sound of birds
Nesting in these words
So quiet they must be true



IX.

When we turn
with the moon
to the dark side
and see through
closed eyes,
we see the night
as it is, turning
on an axis of light
inside the scattered
dust of us.


X.

It's lonely out here among the stars,
To be stretched out across the sky at night,
Yet for a poet who makes the darkness
Other than what it seems, it is home.
We love the darkness for its light.

XI.

Traveling at Night

He tripped and fell
and there came wolves
and owls, a rattle
of bones as the moon
looked on, an old man
with a tale to tell.

XII.

All things that burn -
the stars, the diamonds
in your eyes, the bird
perched now inside
my mind and sings -
return to the darkness 
from which they come. 
Without that darkness.
there'd be no fire
or anything at all.
Praise the burning.
Some call it tragic,
I call it love.  

XIII.

Awake at Night

I thought I had slept
All day and night
And the sun had died
And I’d no longer ache.

How wrong I was!

I was like a toy
With which no one
Plays, though
Always there to tease
Or play help me please.

Through all the day
And every sleepless
Night, you're not here..

I wrote this poem
some time ago.

Despite what it says,
what once was written
on a random page
enchants me now,

though nothing's changed.
I still lie awake all night,
but there's a difference.

XIV..

If you were here
all aflame in the evening light,

If you were here, running
through my fingers
like tall summer grass,

If you were close upon me,
curling like a wave
on a moonstruck shore,
(so much like my beating heart)
we could make all things right.

And though I know
your eyes divide the night
to hide away the tears,

If you were here,
If I could, If I may,
I would share with you
a broken heart.

XV.

The Loneliest Loneliness. Who knows himself and does not know the loneliest loneliness? Who has loved, been loved, betrayed love, risked love, sold their body for love and does not know the loneliest loneliness? It is always there. It slept while you slept and woke when you woke. It is what you will be after you have died. It is what you were before you were born. Dost thou not remember? Dost thou not know thyself? You shall know that loneliness when the mirror you hold to trace the lines of your age becomes only memories. The Other will come and ask what you are staring at? And you will answer, truthfully. Nothing. Nothing at all. What will you do then? Let us sing a song of the night, of the darkest night, that is so passionate and true that the darkness itself becomes beautiful:

Out of the night comes love;
Out of the night comes the darkness of your eyes;
Out of the night comes the body of the world;
Out of the night come the larger and the smaller light;
Out of the night comes the leaf to the branch;
Out of the night comes the weyard wind.

 

 

 

Listen

There’s a whisper
In wind, the unwinding
Of a soul searching
For a home. Listen.
It’s your song too,
A chorus sung
Only by one.
It’s but a whisper.
It calls your name.
Listen. It comes again.

 

The only true word I know

I don’t know how you know you have to make a change. You just do it and think about the whys and wherefores later. And in any case, I would only be making it up to sound like I wasn’t crazy or something, as though I actually had reasons for doing what I did. Maybe it was the rain. Who in his right mind would throw a few things in a backpack, leave his car and bank account behind, and just set off walking in the rain?  That's what I did. At nightfall I found a place along the side of the road to sleep, but I couldn’t stop shaking.  It didn't stop raining until early the next morning when the sun came up as though for the first time. 

I had started out in Rhode Island but hitched rides that left me the next night in Georgia and the next day I was in the panhandle of Florida, walking down some back country road that would take me wherever I was going. I really had no idea, but I was going and I was going to stay gone. I know that this all sounds crazy, but it didn’t feel that way then. It felt right and for the first time in a long time my head was clear. 

When I had started out I had only a couple packs of cigarettes and about twenty dollars which paid for coffee and more cigarettes for awhile. The kindness of strangers supplied the rest. Folks who picked me up were curious about what I was doing and where I was going. What interested them most was that I didn’t know. They saw my sorry shoes, shook their heads, and gave me money for a meal at the end of the ride. One man said he had never picked up anyone before but now he thought he would the next time he saw some young person thumbing a ride. It had somehow been interesting. I told him that was a bad idea. 

I went wherever a ride would take me and that’s how I found myself in a small West Virginia town, where an old preacher picked me up and took me home for a meal. He showed me with pride the wooden casket he had made with his own hands and how he was all set for eternity. He called it his boat. It was really no more than a crate, though its dimensions where about right for a coffin. I don't know about eternity. What I was really curious about were the huge old books that were lying on the casket as if to keep the lid on. He said the truth was in those books and I could see for myself if I wanted. The first one I opened had the picture of a  young woman, tied to a stake, her breasts exposed, looking up at the heavens ablaze with lightning.  I swear her whole body looked like it was electrically charged as though she were having an orgasm or something. Beneath the picture were the words, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” I turned over the page and saw the words "I ad crucem!" scrawled over the English text. I knew what those words meant alright: "Go to the cross!"  On another page was the picture of some wild man who was having a crimson X branded into his chest. After that I was in a hurry to go, but the old guy kept me there talking about how half the town was dying of cancer because everyone was marrying their own kin and goin’ to hell. I got the crazy idea that he was about to ask me to nail him and his books up in that crate and set him adrift. I told him I had to go. He wanted to know why I was in such a hurry. I  told him someone was waiting for me in Winchester, which was just across the state line. He said he would drive me there, but I just walked toward the door and thanked him. I closed the door behind me and didn’t look back.  

My next couple of rides landed me in New Orleans. I was beginning to realize that though everything was new to me, I was not quite a stranger to the folks I met. In New Orleans, I fell in with others about my age who looked just as lost as I did. They had liberated an abandoned house, worked at odd jobs and did drugs at night. When I didn’t partake, they became suspicious and shortly came to the conclusion that I was a narc. I had never heard that word before but its meaning soon became clear to me. They said my story about going wherever the road would take me just didn’t add up. That wasn’t the last time I was suspected of being a narc, but later it somehow didn’t matter. They could just think whatever they wanted. The first time, however, it was a shock. I had been glad to have a place to crash for a few days, but they told me I had better leave.

I ended up spending a month or so in New Orleans, making some money by working out of a day load outfit that sent out sober men like me on jobs that paid ten dollars a day. If you didn’t quit the job – loading, unloading, throwing bricks out of boxcars and digging holes – you got paid at the end of each day. In the late afternoon after I was paid, I felt like some goddam saint. Cripples, men with no legs, drunks and drifters like me were lined up along the sidewalk with their hands out. One fella, mounted on a board with rollers, had no arms or legs, just a cup. I had a simple rule. I would give away half of what I made and keep the rest. It was more than enough for my needs. They would call me father, though I was younger than they were. Maybe I looked older because like them I had grown so thin. A fellow worker had his own room where he let me sleep on the floor and he knew all the churches and other places where a person could find a free meal, though sometimes you had to pay by praying after you ate. I didn’t like that and said so. I ended up basically stealing the food before the praying started. The problem with that was that they were on the lookout for you the next time. At night, I wandered the French Quarter looking in the jazz joints and at the girls who looked right through me as if I weren't there at all. I can't say I blame them.   

I forgot to tell you that before I left to nowhere in particular, I had been a desk clerk at an otherwise respectable hotel called the Pilgrim Inn that catered to a certain class of working girl. They were all somebody’s daughter and they sent the money they made back to their families. Some paid guys who protected them and would beat them up to keep them in line. I would take payment for rooms from the johns and take them up in the elevator first and then the girls. It became routine. I liked the girls, but they all thought I was queer because I hadn’t done anything with them even when they offered for free. They would laugh and ask me if I knew which hole to put it in. I didn't mind. Everything had been going along fine until one night I was arrested along with the girls in a police raid and spent the night in jail. The next day they just sent me home. The hotel's lawyers had worked something out. The girls had to pay a fine. After that, I felt like I almost belonged and everyone treated me as if I were one of them. Then one night a little later I got beat up really bad by a guy who demanded to know where a certain girl was and when I wouldn’t tell him, he came around the desk and let me have it. It all happened so fast I didn’t even have time to be afraid or even feel any pain. I was kind of numb or stunned I guess. After that, the girls treated me like a brother, which I guess I was.

After I had saved a little money in New Orleans, I set out again. I had heard from others about riding the rails. It was fast and straight but they also told tales of railroad bulls that discouraged me. I thought hitching was safer. My first ride, a long sleepy cruise through the night, took me to Texas, a little west of Austin. It had been a sweet ride; the stars out the open window seemed to pump their light right into my veins. My very next ride, however, changed everything, but I have written about that before. I don't really want to go into it again except to say I came out whole after a man tried to force me to have sex with him and maybe for the first time in my life I had been brave. That was then. What I really want to talk about is Richard whom I had met a year before all this craziness began, never saw again, and miss every day of my life. Before we parted he gave me a small carving, made from an odd piece of wood found on an east Texas beach. He had used only the sharp edge of a stone. It was like something out of the prehistory of man and had three faces on each side, one emerging out of another.  It is the face of every man I meet. For forty-six years I have kept this carving with me. It really is Richard's story that needs telling, not mine, though maybe his is in some way mine as well. You see, he taught me the only true word I know and he taught me by example and it cost him dearly.  He was the most honest person I have ever known and the bravest.   

https://www.hhimwich.com/hughlings_himwich/2016/03/song-for-richard.html

https://www.hhimwich.com/hughlings_himwich/2010/04/this-i-believe.html

Photograph by Her Himwich 

A Cat, a Smile, the Wind, and the Living Dead

Don’t be surprised if the cat
is the one playing with you.

Don’t be surprised if she says
she can’t stand the sound of your voice
and yet is always smiling at you.

Don’t be surprised if the touch
of the wind makes you blush.

Don't be surprised if you're alone
you talk to the living dead. 

 

Experience

I am not innocent of anything.
I said what needed to.be said
and did what needed doing
and loved others as best I could.

Still, I cannot help but laugh
at what a fool I've been.
What's done is done.
I'm as guilty as the setting sun. 

 

a dead-wall reverie

Ibidom. Is no thinking thing here but the peepinghouse round it goes is there nothing there from sea to rounda coda no knowing no browbeating to hoedown the adamses and damses looking roundaway the wailing goes awagginawaning about the off wall but there shebares all to what is not there the museymusik makes you trot and drop so rainruns and her lastofall. There!

*ibi: L. there, in that place

Song of Fire

I seek to rival
the morning light
and see with eyes
that burn with fire.

The night is long.
When morning comes,
the songs of birds
make fun of me. 

But then I sing
for the sun to burn
in all we see
with holy fire.

The birds now join
Their song to mine.
and praise the light
that longs to sing.

That's how I learned
that song is fire.
Won/t you too then
sing with me?

 

γνῶθι σεαυτόν;*

de quo consultus, an esset / tempora maturae visurus longa senectae, / fatidicus vates 'si se non noverit' inquit**... Everywhere there are mirrors if we but knew how to look... in the trees and in the wind that they catch but cannot hold, in the mountains and in the clouds that rest upon them before the wind comes, and in all the varieties of water: rivers, pools, oceans and, yes, in your tears that are more like rain than you will ever know, and most especially in every dream, fantasy, delusion, and lie... in every act of the imagination and in every sight, smell, and touch... your skin, this kiss... in such images we find ourselves... not something, but not nothing either... we see as if in a mirror the essential movement of mind through which there is anything at all, through which there is meaning... and, like the wind in the trees, that meaning is elusive... we are like Narcissus who at first did not recognize the image in the clear pool as his own; we too experience the world and its meaning as if they were there to be discovered and precisely not as something for which we are the author... all that there is is the reflection of our own minds at large... should we come to know ourselves as Narcissus did, we would know that we are responsible for everything, that without us there would be no joy and no death, no love and no suffering... according to the ancient story, Narcissus remains eternally enchanted by his own reflection in the River Styx... If we too come to know ourselves, would we not also remain frozen in time as if we had encountered some Medusa... to know ourselves guilty of every act of cruelty would surely turn us to stone... or would we like Narcissus in Melville’s account plunge into the pool and drown... Melville tells us that the image Narcissus beholds in the water is "the ungraspable phantom of life"*** and that that is "the key to it all"... CONSIDER YOURSELVES WARNED... as was Narcissus that he would live a long life if only he did not come to know himself... this way lies madness... just as there is madness in the very capitalization of that warning... shall we like Ishmael remain on the bank of that pool, frozen by cowardice and fade into a living death... or like Ahab seek to embrace the image of ourselves and drown...

BE WARNED!
This gentle morning’s light
heralds a coming storm

CAVĒ!
Hūius mītis māne lūx
tempestātem futūram praenūntiat.

*gnothi seauton; (γνῶθι σεαυτόν;)῾Know thyself?” – the semi-colon in classical Greek signals a question.
**"When asked whether he would see the long years of ripe old age, the prophetic seer said, 'If he does has not known himself.'" Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Bk. 3, 348-350. These lines refer to the prophecy given by the seer Tiresias regarding the fate of Narcissus.
***Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 1

 

The Grammar & Poetry of Time

These verbs* are active
in the present, past, and future:

Burst Thrust
Cast Cost
Cut Shut
Hit Quit
Spread
Let Set

You hurt me yesterday
and today and tomorrow's
hurt will feel the same..

Today and yesterday
You spread a lie
And let me down.

The hurt lasts a long, long time.

*There is a small set of verbs in English that have the same form in the present, past, and future, e.g.,

Yesterday I quit.
Today I quit again.
Tomorrow I will quit
and quit and quit
and quit again
until the sun
no longer shines.
and the  moon is
full and bright.

Here are a few more verbs that are spelled the same in the present and past tense: beat, bid, fit, put, read, slid, slit, spit, and compounds of cast, set, fit, and let, e.g., recast, miscast, broadcast, reset, offset, upset, retrofit, sublet.

I love these verbs because they remind me that the past is never really past. Of course, I am using my poetic license.

 

The Art of Falling

This morning I fell.
A bird was singing and the sun
was tipping over the mountain
and I fell in its shadow.
Such a thing, a friend said,
happens only to poets.
I said I was afraid
of the fall of night.
She stayed with me.
The moon rose and we
together fell through dark
and light. Poets say,
that is love.

For Tony:

For a poet falling is never simple.
It's something more than many and one.
We stumble and fall and fall for a lie.
The rain falls hard or not at all.
We fall in and out of time
and never know where Tuesday's gone.
But the maximum casum (the greatest falling)
is falling up while falling down.
It's a kind of flying.
That's how poets fall in love.
It takes but a look.
The ground lifts us up
and knocks us down.

 

March 12, 1946 to December 25, 2024

Like waves the lines in my hand
Seek a distant shore. Here a shadow
Of a scar where once a knife
Cut through flesh and bone.
The hand stiffens and remembers
Other pain. The skin does not lie.
It asks if I have had enough.
Not yet, I say. I hold the hand
Of one I love and touch the sky.

 

Where the Light Is

 

It's lonely out here among the stars,
To be stretched out across the sky at night,
Yet for a poet who makes the darkness
Other than what it seems, it is home.
We love the darkness for its light.

 

Winter

How is it that a single leaf on a branch holds on
How is it that I'm still here when all whom I love are gone

I hold on, this poem filled with silences I do not understand
These tears speak some mystery that falls upon the page