Clown Noon

I will be dead soon,
perhaps by noon,
another harlequin
to dance black
this afternoon.

Note my angles,
like bird wings
embroidered
mischievously,
a rack on ruin.

Recall my spread
wide of wings,
when I led
you to the center
of things.

You were so de-
mented by vis-
ions, you needed
guidance I couldn’t
provide by noon.

It’s no matter
now, when the clown
who came to town
this tattered
so soon shatters.

I always had
extra room
in the afternoon.

 

August 28 2019

Gray sky lies low on my new flat land.
Dark birds jostle others in the scratch
arbor out the window I view the scarp from.
It rises to surround the horizon of the world.
Some toil, a little pain, pangs of anguish
as new weather washes my tongue.

My friend’s memory is better than mine.
He remembers the time now long gone.
He remembers the perforation, paper,
chads that littered the floor, the lasered
pages I printed past years of the tales I wrote.
He remembers stories not true we told

each other, back when we were younger,
when we intended to be much more
than we ended up being: clear knights
who went into battle with avarice,
lust, engaged with blood, sorrow,
lived to renounce yesterday, tomorrow.

Suddenly I’m not,
And never here, lost
As if I’d never been,
Not even shredded rags
At the bottom of thunder,
Not a blue light
Circumnavigating
The planet, not even a rock.
I wish I could wonder
What I had been here then,
Before you never knew me,
And after you hadn’t known,
After you hadn’t memorized me,
The tip top of your hat
With nothing forever under.

I will follow single file all my dogs
Through their deaths to Valhalla
Or to final immolation into ashes,
Not to be scattered haphazardly
But placed amid the dead roses,
Along the line of blue spruce
Christmas trees we planted for
Their lives when they lived and
Wandered along the thin trunks and
sparse foliage, needing seasons.
I will go into the darkness or light,
Whichever they found after breathing,
Be with them forever in cold or warmth,
All sinless, eager, stripped of lovelessness.

 

Whose fine filament wavers in the wind
Outside my window? Some spider’s life.
The black arachnid (nearly all except for
The blue and red peacocks, the rainbows,
The irradiated ones, dull browns) spins
Its tale in the corner of the door, its spring
Avoided since it breaks twice a day or night,
Leads to overwork, disharmonious patterns,
Song changing from enticement to avoidance.

I was wounded back then, two of my legs removed
To allow me to walk unimpeded forward, backward,
If not around. I remember the syllables of the joints
Of the web, the intersections where a fly might catch,
And the tremble as I walked along my web home,
The glistening of my lattice on mornings after rain,
When the little wind stirred it, and ants fell from sky.

Now I am a contorted black clot wedged in pebbles,
And no one can spy me out as the grand designer,
My desiccated flesh no food for any insect, flower,
Awaiting only the acidity’s breakdown of carapace
To dissolve onto the basin of the garden underneath.

The wind wearies the tree in the yard.
It’s stood there now for fifty years.
I remember laughing at it when you
Climbed catlike up its branches, yowling
At the nicks of thorns on your skin, your
Insistence that to no mere wood would you yield.

We separated for forty years, the yard
Grew wilder as ownership passed beyond
Crisscrossing squirrels to wide canyons
Of time, erosions of roots, a coyote
Dogging the old dogyard, beyowling
Now the rain and cold, the sun unyellowing,

And you are no longer here, but yonder
In the withered nests, bespattered yolks.
The tree wearies of the wind’s yawing.

Hey, liquid, lacquered one,

There is nothing left to be.
There is no other eye to catch
And hold. The light flickers out.

There is nothing left to seem.
The dark in your eye
Is blackness in God’s eye,
Obliterating light.

I’d say knowing what
Is not what. That what is obscured
By the eye, even now blind.

Which which was this?

Which what? That what.

Cube the angles of your face,
If I could see the separating,
There would be no what.

Cynthia says something
Yellow now in the middle.

There is nothing left to see.

There are no wheat or corn
Tassels you can fly with now.

O blind, languorous one,
We near now, here know,
Only the purest white time.

 

From “Stradivarius”, George Eliot (1908):

” ‘Twere purgatory here to make them ill;

And for my fame – when any master holds

‘Twixt chin and hand a violin of mine,

He will be glad that Stradivari lived,

The masters only know whose work is good:

They will choose mine, and while God gives them skill

I give them instruments to play upon,

God choosing me to help Him.”

 

Stradivarius hadn’t meant to be aware of us

Listeners hidden in the violin’s future. Instead

He knew the sound he wanted to come out,

Soul of the human voice, the deepest tone

Able to fly up to the ecstatic cry of angels

And fall far lower to the dull moan of devils,

Encompassing in passing we in purgatory,

Caught just lower than the Earth, who listen

To the furniture being moved above us, chairs

Pushed back in anger, fists thudding into bodies,

Shrieks of feet on floors, tremblings and stampings

Of the tumultuous world we’ve left for another.

 

Some say the wood density mattered most,

Maple from northern Croatia, found along

Borax bogs, then stored overlong in humid Venice,

Decomposing like us, waiting for a second forming;

Or the length and width of the various pieces fit

Together meticulously and overlaid with fruit gum

Mixed with quartz from the mountains, finish

To keep the worms long away from our wounds;

Or it could be workmanship prodded by the devil.

 

So now we strive to be Stradivarius, in the wail

Issuing from our luthier tongue, its sense,

Often brittle, because not naturally seasoned,

But strident, frenetic, as we cry up the groans

We feel rise from the damned ones below

Stumbling through the dark, their murmuring,

To those shuffling their feet above us, not hearing.