Tomaso's Tunes   

 

We came to the edge of the inner sea

To see where he once lived and loved

Where he medicated the afflicted

Where he scratched out his exquisite tunes

Revered by the inhabitants of this baroque metropolis

For the elegance of his largos adagiettos and the rest

As they navigated liquid streets

 

His was a glorious time but not for all

His tunes reflective of a joyous age

The veil of ignorance for the most part shred

Fears flown but not for all

Dukes bishops merchant-princes and their ilk

Hummed his melodies while their ladies wept

And offered themselves behind closed doors

 

Money-lenders consulted him when they were sick

Their spouses swooned as he bled their mates

And parcelled out his powders

And for a price - rid some ladies of their grubby yokes

Absolved for this sinister behavior by his priest

He now composed his melodies in peace

His murderous achievements unrevealed

 

The flower of his fame withered as he aged

After his death the parchments curled and faded

Until a fortunate find was made by a young girl

Rummaging through her granny's dower-chest

She played some of Tomaso's tunes upon her spinet

Heard by her lover who alleged the music to be his

A small measure of corrupt prestige

 

As with all - Tomaso's tunes have dimmed with time

The ornamental neighborhoods of his fluid city

Stained by countless chemical floods

Mutated into crumbling stone-works

Its dredged lagoon ravaged by winter seas

Its once-vibrant water-courses transformed

Into smelly malodorous streams

 

Still - God's scratching perseveres

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Swept Air   

 

So they slog up this narrow valley above the dams

After the remnants of typhoon have passed

And stall at a cave-drilled hill terraced for rice

As the sky rains mortar down

 

So they send up a combat team

Mostly guys from Kentucky Tennessee and West Virginia

To flush the caves where the slants are hiding

The ultimate coon-hunt

And they stall too

 

So they blast them with an amplified Neisi-wire

And tell them to come out - that no one will hurt them

But no one comes out

 

So they call in some Hellcats from Lingeyan with jelly bombs

And the Cats set the whole hill on fire from the top

A beautiful cascading waterfall of fire

Flowing down over the terraces

 

So they watch the fire roll across the cave-mouths

And kill the air inside where the slants are hiding

And the next day they go up through the stink of phosphorous

Into the caves and see them

Almost a hundred of them - not a mark on them

Collapsed

All twisted and collapsed

The slants with their Manila whores and kids

All caved in and collapsed

Air swept completely from their guts

All collapsed

 

So what else is new?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Mite   

 

Deep in the limb the stealthy mite

Twists in the dark solidity of this majestic night

And with discreet rapidity rips heart and mind

From all aspiring men

 

In this ethereal night

The secret mite stalled in the bright day's starkness

Reaches outward now and soars

Higher still in this desired darkness

Than it ever will again

 

Who can it reach in this acute and bitter loneliness?

How does this disenchantment lie within it?

Does it go as deep as its immutable heaven?

 

Soundless - The mite burrows as it dreams

Of aureate skies and tremulous seas

Of whirling fogbirds and withered maple trees

Of the bitten lip as the child moves restless in its womb

Of earth tossed upon paneled wood

As the sorrowful living close the tomb

 

Stark sudden visions stalk this incredible night of the mite

Light floats flicks flickers

Hideous hydrogens hibernate in their heat

Entombed atoms toil then quit

Enlightened electrons explode divide

Stars soar - Galaxies glide

The universe veers in this violent void

This dust of starworlds

Crystallized cosmoses teeming dreaming

Questioning the ever-questioning mite

Do they affect its acrid soul

Thirsting for rewarding dews and sensual nights?

 

Its effort ceases

Yet the corrupted soul of the secret mite

Is ever sparked anew by the tensions and trials

Which are its common sheperdings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                    Rose Withering  

 

                          In the delicate dream   

                          Of a blowing rose

                         The fragrance of lost youth

                         Lingers until the last desire­­­­­­­­­

 

                         And its spent breath

                         Is past remembrance

 

                         An echoed shadow

  

                         A blossom

                         That breaks the heart

                         With its longing­­

 

 

 

 

 

 

           Elegy  

 

              These island woods have given up the ghost

              The only growth a mindless alder-shoot

              As sickness from the south and west

              Floats in on warmer rain and snow enroute

              To northern lakes

 

              The last great conifers are choked

              By resurrected remnants of ancestral crush

              Slurried into enormous furnaces and then up-smoked

              Far from mid-western streets forloned by soot and slush

              To fall as poisoned flakes

 

              The matchless brilliance of long-past dawns

              Once fresh with jewel-drops of uncorrupted fog

              Is but a heart-rent memory now shorn

              Of all its loveliness - a septic bog

              A pestilence thought dead awakes

 

              These mournful woods they creak and moan

              Their cankerous malignancy now obvious for all to see

              But no one comes and they are left alone

              Exhausted in their ennui

              Elegiac of man's mistakes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New

 

 

 

Here then in this transient garden it is met 

This end of the sentimental - This end of the obvious

As leaves are torn from momentary branches

And ground to immaterial dust

 

 

So bent upon the soul

Pierced forgotten

This intagible is drawn from within

Given reason - Given purpose

And whatever it becomes - It will be absolute

Desiring only with dreams as build-blocks

To discern the intagible without

 

Pitiful mouse in this mouldering maze

Why do you screech for exit?

Is it not left for you  - The New

To smash the broken conceptions

And give meaning to movement?

 

Can it be these corrupted masses

Like dead grasses shall rekindle their seed?

Will you feel their vigor? - Spaceless unknown?

Will you be tempted by their enfeebled attempts

Those whimpers of stalwart articulates

Those shouts of the weak the meek?

Yes you - The New

Together with a Very Few

Will you be flung upon the withered concept

To destroy it with your wounds as weapons?

 

An inward wind has begun to sweep the silenced masses

As dead grasses - Suddenly alert

It rolls over the hopelessness

Thundering messages

Flee!

Desert it all!

It will change

It will come when the blinded claw the walls to dust

When all will change

Rush back to the savage lash

To the natural cradle where it was conceived

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ashes  

 

 

 

Even now he tells himself    

 

The soft days will come again

And soft air will flow once more across the island land

It will flow from beyond the barrier isles

Gliding in on dim whispers from the great ocean shelf

Where giant swarms of sea creatures are harvested and iced

 

This joyful breeze will float in - lathering the incremental

Caressing spiny ledges with its salty aromatic

Cooling city-spattered visitors and permanents alike

 

His heart will happily slow down

His blood will flow merrily through his essential vitals

It will be once more his time of substance

 

There will be nothing to do - to take care of - nothing

Except to fill this water-laden entity that is he and also us

With far-away cleansing nurtures of scented african deserts

Flowing across countless oceanic leagues

 

He will be again with loved ones

To breathe with tides

To take and eat from the bountiful sea

To simply and happily exist

 

But that was then

 

 

 Now his universe has been switched off

 

 

 Only a faint melody splashing on moonlit rock is heard

 In that private place behind his brain

 

And Sleep is the Dust of Sleep

 

Forever

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Markers   

 

Last night became

So many thousands of nights ago

 

Two kids - Two buddies came to see

 

Would they really see

Would they really understand

Before the souls of these boys deep in the earth

Stirred and awakened?

 

Most of them were our buddies

But three were young Filippino Muslims

Eleven guys all told - interred quickly

Warranted by the fierce heat of equatorial forest

 

Yet

How could their souls stir and awaken?

When the pronouncements were spoken days before

By the Padre and the consenting Imam

And the circle of the living

Dispersed

 

Rapidly roughed-out markers were made by the villagers

Graved with crosses stars and crescents

Some decorated with dog-tags

Some draped with the Lightning Bolt of the 25th 

 

They gleam in the blackness

Their white-washed coldness

In this warm alive place at the hamlet’s edge

Deep in Mindanao's bush

Is undisturbed

 

It rains every day at five o’clock

And when we’re gone the markers will be stripped

The jungle will quickly embrace and shroud them all

Mattress-cover body-bags dissolved

Nature’s internment begun

No one will ever find them… and back home…

 

A few will cry

A few will grieve

A few will mourn

 

A very few will understand

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beautiful Dreamer*  

 

He is beyond the narrow valley - he has clawed his way into the dreamery

But this deliberate and medicated journey is now flawed

By the smoky drabness of this last fall day

Before the silencing of snow overtakes and muffles his languor

 

Wild things seem to fly at him from this bitter-leaden patch of sky

Try as he might to sweep them away - still they come 

Hounding him into a sort of middle consciousness

Not fully aware - not yet swollen with the rudeness of sleep

 

He sees island spruce bending slightly waiting for inevitable ice

Even though the scrubs of alders he struggles through

Are burnished bright with death of leaf

Their lovely tangled leaves on fire - their sugars spent

 

He stumbles and is jabbed by lost branches of stiff birch

He is in pain - he is bloodied by their vicious sharpness - he is hurt

He must get help - but who on this massacred island is there for him?

He is ravished by fear - no one will find him - there is no one to help

 

He has lost his way - where is the middle path? - the one he must take

To return to "life among the living" - so much of this tangled mass of moss

Falling from above is stuffing up his mouth - he cannot breathe

The wild things are crawling into him and biting his insides - he hurts

 

He is on a gravel beach - he picks up a stone with a starfish frozen into it

A billion years ago - and there are bloated bodies floating now

Carved up by cruiser fire in the Pacific straits - eyes eaten by crabs

A totem washed out of an African grave glides on a wavelet toward him

 

A huge cranberry wave roars up beyond the sea-moss laden ledges

Seas fairy-colored by buoys - brilliant hues of yellow-greens and reds and oranges

Detonate below him and carry him flying above the blood of bodies

Seeping from smashed ships lining the bottom of seething Leyte Gulf

 

He is in the forest again - its blackness blinds him - he cannot breathe

On this rocky outcrop the ghosts of Sarah Bradford and her eight children

Smother him with hugs and tender kisses - has he come to save them

From the axes of rampaging savages? - they cling to him like sucker-fish

 

The wilderness suddenly explodes - a great copper-beech crushes down on him

Mud seeps into all his openings - he struggles to free himself from the mush

Cormorants light on the copper's branches and peck at him - why are they here?

So far from the implacable sea - a harbor seal slithers toward him barking softly

 

It smiles a toothy smile and sucks the smothering mud from out of him

What is this animal doing in the middle of this violent tree-fall?

Eyes open dully - comforted by blindingly brilliant sun filling his room

Breath slows - he has survived yet again- to return to "life among the living"**              

 

 

      (In the early 1600's Abenaki Indians harassed by white settlers. killed a white woman and her eight children

                      who had fled to an island in Muscongus Bay, Maine)                  *Repost                        **Marsden Hartley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            Elegy 

 

              These island woods have given up the ghost

              The only growth a mindless alder-shoot

              As sickness from the south and west

              Floats in on warmer rain and snow enroute

              To northern lakes

 

              The last great conifers are choked

              By resurrected remnants of ancestral crush

              Slurried into enormous furnaces and then up-smoked

              Far from mid-western streets forloned by soot and slush

              To fall as poisoned flakes

 

              The matchless brilliance of long-past dawns

              Once fresh with jewel-drops of uncorrupted fog

              Is but a heart-rent memory now shorn

              Of all its loveliness - a septic bog

              A pestilence thought dead awakes

 

              These mournful woods they creak and moan

              Their cankerous malignancy now obvious for all to see

              But no one comes and they are left alone

              Exhausted in their ennui

              Elegiac of man's mistakes