If after grandeur, disappearance, If, after all this splenetic ascent, The crippled aftermath of a fall, Less and less intense, among such 5 Bright, abstract things, then what? What low-watted misapprehension, What fatal fault or suborning error Still all awhirl in the mystery, The furious cauldron of un-become, 10 Spicy broth of untasted potentials, First recommended to the infant sense The haphazard and mistake of birth? What wry ointment in what creative eye Thumbed from the numb terror 15 Of inexistence, this existence? This houseless maundering among Syncopated rubble, this shy twist Of a fast-disappearing, evanescent fate? Erratic twirl of wounded imaginings, 20 Soporifics poured in a killing cut,--- Inflicted birth, the eccentric squeeze From nothingness to somethingness, A human caw among perished isles, Nearly silent against the sea's 25 Greek, inanimate suavities? What was in the cherished river, At first, to flood us from the womb, What in the dry blue mountain To pile us up to the height, 30 The convulsive height, of birth? Why was there something of us, Some tenuous insisting among pecked grain, In all this pervading nothing? Why begin, with a glittering cry, 35 To speak of the shine of Things Among all this annihilated rot? Why begin, and breathe, and breathe Until lungs revolt and breath secedes Gasp by gasp, to finality? 40 Why this compelling fragrance, This last stink of a terminal sweetness, This blanketing panache come home To impelling nostrils, Why this, why this, among all 45 The universes of nothingness God had heretofore imagined, Singular monarch in his cloudy sublime, Unpopulated paradise filled with rocks? And if we are all of mere spirit tweaked, 50 Smacked rat-a-tat from the celestial, Like clean water from a clean tin can, If so thin a strain of the etherial, Then what is in our exiled spirits Fleshed to the daily endeavor we construe 55 To make us weep? What acrylic inch Of our invisible divinity uninvisibly Will manifest to measure our wash of sorrows? What interior tide pushes us to tears, Continual tears in a plangent land, 60 And not one sorrow forgotten But a new sorrow returns, like spring, Ever-freshening the sadnesses We pursue? Why this continual cry If in our essences we are deaf? 65 Does the grandest theme weep For the splattered litter of notes That bodies it from the tearing page? Did a charming lietmotif ever Spare a tear for the plucking hand, 70 The arranging brain, the fostering voice? I have slept, and now arise, Vacuously awake in a vividness of dawns, Apruptly up with an enhancing vigor, And, among the snickering trinkets 75 Of bedtimes past, with a vocal flourish, Dimly echoed to the listening esplanade, sing A more manful, arising phrase. I, A shattering light against the pharisees, Those blocking and those blacking hacks, 80 The unresting interrupters, sprung Enjambments of clear locutions, Sponges at the garrolous baptismal font, Eager drinkers of accidental holy waters, Theives of waterfalls and decoy reliques, 85 False trophies of the miraculous Our spurrious loves disguise As saving revelations: I arise. Out of these body-heavy hours, crowded With the torturous splendors of a dream, 90 Out of these distorting caves and caverns, Out of this loud and proud now My tiredness had supoenaed To that clogging court unconsciousness, Out of sinister blackness like an arrow 95 Plumed with snicking lights, Out of simple silence like a siren Roaring unresisting reds, Out of my bones, my very bones, Mutible and hollow, 100 Like a tenderly fluted note, I arise. Now in my found bower, I survey its contemplative shades, Its confectionary greys 105 And half-fabricated half-darks Where I had pretended meditation. Shipwrecked in my spousal house And torn down from splendid heaven, A castaway spasmed from the completed Ideal 110 Kicked into the gestured frescoes of the real, The half-completed wall done half gold, half A caribbean pearl of spic splashes, So white as to blind the eye, So warm as to melt the memory, diminish 115 Sheeted winter to piebald April. Here I yawn awake in arousing play, Dandling argent dasies, spooning A million raw julips on one tongue, Improving my tenor to a rafterless sky 120 A swept blue of renewing heights, An up without a top, capless As my sheering serenity, My full bloom of honey flooding From each minutest flowerlet: 125 Intention devoutly touching intent at last. All alone in glory I live Who am a speaking spirit to the things I rack and ratchet blindly about, A ghost of irresistible force 130 To the hesitating, quick quill, A god of wind blowing pansies In their inscrutible purples, A thing of merit, and a demon of note Proffuring awful caresses 135 In trade for the one syllable 'love.' From my fleur-de-lis bedding I stretch, intensely lazy, Moving a few less-than-useful Pussywillow sprays away, that mark 140 My makeshift ark with their velvets. From here I peer far past the small Eloquence of the 'merely' personal Steering to the vertigineous exact, The brightening verities of the sky, 145 Sting of stars, the cosmic whip And nagging lacerations of the real, All the subsuming finite, intricate, The thousand wavings of detail that finishes The uncertain infinte, the expressive sense 150 Of still-to-do and yet-to-do And not yet done, the pang Of manyness, and pule of puny Maybe, become the plum of one, The glistering artifact in the bowl 155 Of the out-there Eternal. And when I wake, and my bleak eyes see In all this catastrophe of light One dark soul only, definite as night, A mute, ruminating being 160 Treading the solitary rhododhendrons, as if Veritable miracle floresced Somehow darkly among the pinched Blots beyond his pinching fingers, A corpse marauding the roses, 165 His cadaverous reaching after fragrance Shaping the desired dark by his questioning, A pornography of death Flopped on the living divan, There, in the branching rhododhendronish 170 Dark, I in my bed mutter wonder: Is this the result of hugeness Inaptly confined, a gigantic dwindling Into the narrow coffin of the senses Of all the airy wideness of a soul--- 175 Stuffed in five cramping fingers, And those fingers resolutely shoved Into a single, shrunken glove? I do not know what answer I would make Seeing this blacking thing of shadows, 180 Mate to the doggish nail that has dug At its own fascinated creation, An insincere earth sincerely debauched By a passion more real than its consequents, A living verb among dead lilies, 185 A certain sound of parable, evoked From the incredible waste, Arbitary horizon and guessed-at bound Scribbled against the infinities, A scholar's seperation of the dark 190 Into dark and dark, a delineation, too, Of fantastic lights, where only light And higher light, and a lowness Of light only and always are. What are these parings and portionings, 195 These niggling splits And uneasy chafings, these soaps And chromy shavings of eternity, The selfsame immensity that we are, too big And brave a thing for ladies' mittens, 200 The parasol of sight and leaf of ear, Shade of smell and shadow of touch, Forever less than the elephant they gloze, What are they all to us today, In this dizzying second above the chasm, 205 This pirouette upon a gyroscope, This rustle of meaningless papers, chime Of windy whim, cast of fate, What do they mean, and how, How, how, how, mon frere, 210 Do those puffs of meaning manifest? How do we come to degraded meaning Out of sincerer wish? How descend From the very portico and pitch of heaven To the quixotic swamp of decided good? 215 What winces in the hero's nerve That makes the paradisical damsel, saved, Less than his own, and grandest, Saving gesture? What gets her, though beautious, Reduced to an incident, a paltry 220 Happenstance recorded in a tapestry, Less herself, both in and of herself less, Than the skillful weave that retrieves her, Summons her narrative beauty to the orb, The goldenest orb, of sight, saved again 225 From the final damnation of the unsaid thread? Is it that she is a noun merely And not a verb, a paraphrase of greatness And not the great thing herself, Her motive being and selfsame source 230 Never troubling the trumpets' Victorious ogling of her story, Louder and louder, at her paraded reception? And yet all about me now I see Splendid unsayings of these themes, 235 The gilded weave picked bald, The hero maligned and maid discomfitted, Returned to glory in a rustic nave Of beaten seashells and scratchy quartz, A bare displaying of simplicities 240 Fit for neither homily nor hymn. These mutainous eviscerations Of life's sparse leavings, The brindled curd and the voluble leaf Begging after silence with one last word, 245 And sighing for revelations as once Their own profuse confusions they pursued, Going to the interior nothing And producing, like an avid paramour, The true, universal gem, a sum 250 Of themselves and of their mystery Only the questioner questioning Could, from blank possibility, create: The Macy's diamond rummaged, ex nihilo, From a cape. What good has ever come 255 From living in the smallest world Or raging for the tiniest chime In all the unreeling Appalachiens Of our august symphonies? Splendor, nothing but splendor 260 Tattoos the groaning soul, pricking Aptest testaments in the flinching skin. This is our inception and our destiny, Despite these shrinking meanderings, These mangled sayings of the small 265 And mousy praises of the infintesimal, This obscuring appetite for tiny Registered among our surrounding large. Am I nothing, nothing more Than the mere instance of a theory, 270 A fabled example or hypoteneuse inked-in? No, my soul! But the decision for good And the good are not the same thing. Saying a word and meaning a word Are seperate instances of things 275 Mere contrivance can never finally tie; Starry shatterings clump against my hand. To imagine an end is not-- Fortuitous proving of eternity!-- To come to the end. We have said 280 Everything at one time or another. I say again that saying is not To mean. If it is not to mean, Then what is it to have said at all? The expressing wish, the tink 285 Of tink-a-tink-tunk, the song Of the garroted voice, the sole Ululation of various mutes, The single thing of diversity, The only theme purloined 290 From the myriad mashing of myriad notes, Is this: I live! Any heart, any love, Any word whose empty impulse I move And by passion alone redeem From the meaninglessness that ensconces, 295 The disordered view packed up In ordered sight, all wild night held In the spilling instance of my vision, Discovery and instance unified As the blowsy seed, once watered, spurts 300 To the mastering citadel of the tree, And its great discordance veiled By a will that gives as it commands: "Hear my soul, and speak my plea: I create the paradise I pursue, 305 Enlivening each green-new bud With untroubled blood. Tender, I sense the soft furl of each Leaf asleep in its seed. Seedlings, unfurl! Is it strange 310 To live once loved, and never die? Live but once alive, and eternity is thine! I am most myself when you are me! Enter this heart palpitant And take the living light 315 Heaving there: It is given! And every blushing rose of heaven Has my blood on its cheek, Thorns its redness to a glory By my own, as you shall dip and grow,--- 320 With a lover's insistence, Swelled world, now allow My bending face this kiss, Though it may be with bloodied lip; I crave such missed wishes, which, 325 Forever untold, unwhispered, Become prayers recinded As if God had hindred All love gave. O! In this presence of peace 330 Forgive me for loving In pure reminiscence Each future unrewarded kiss You will decide not to kiss. All flush giving's removed, 335 Washed to dust by mere 'having,' So cold is your loving. Never absent in wishes Is this tenderest of touches: Grave world, I am giving 340 More resolute loving-- unstriven-- Than you in your sorrows May ravenly raze from me, However you harrow My soul's own simplicity! 345 I toss my angel haloes to blackened souls, Burnt wrecks and hulks of matchsticks, Haphazard of my lightness, For I cannot choose but float in light While in this dizziness I live: 350 Beauty has a power All goodness to endow Once lifted from its bower. Beauty is a thing as once its dreamed. Ever, eternal,--- once lived, undying."
From the collection "Torturous Splendours of the Dream"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.