1990
The Seasons
cycles flash--
repeating the round,
There is reality where
memory of life and the moment
are one, looking forward.
a turning point,
through seasons
Is there a height
possible? maybe a geographic move
to the outside,
this subconscious-- a crutch?
framing the present with
the past and future
Spring through Winter
clouds, leaves, waves-- shells
gather, swirling in clouds, circling
through leaves, passage...
the journey
the wind of time
in reeds, gyres of...
repeating a mantra
coming towards one,
bang-- the day
a colored classic, up front
close, living now!
the still life tumbles
shells, sunflowers, circling rope
the vase breaking, change and
decline from
the immediate moment
Autumn, the fall-- the comedian leaving
winter’s dreams and wandering
Crispin self,
Sunflowers on his breast,
incarnations of an inner frost
are hidden. The mask
summons a shield,
imagination-- suggesting
red diamonds set in yellow sun.
Stop!
vertical gasp, creates a height--
possibility
of a returning idea
as the earth each day, returning
from night into light.
now arise
tripping
through the day, seeking Sun--
diamond’s sun and the
spiraling shells-- tumbling
the waves continue
unfolding this day,
a sunflower in the blue sky.
the windy weather
filling differences.
Shell twirling cosmos
receding
dreaming
the future’s Ideal form
always beyond
this surface of Reality held
in elasticity between
the Dream and the Ideal,
a Fate-- Freedom-- and Power
revolving.
propped in dream
between the what one
(thought) that happened
and the Ideal that might--
A troubadour in the sun, afoot
riding the crest of day!
two figures walking through reeds,
the wind picks up, leaves,
shells, dream designs, circling
a vase looming, beyond.
16.
A Joker, spirit Sun
trickster joking, eyedazzling--
Harlequin of cubism!
striving, but broken--
the end of painting
the end of nature
a still life, set
to bridge a gap
we feel,
The modern, a gimmick
always past in our hearts,
that fiction, created to disguise
our failure. Living in this
rubble of concrete boxes, housing
we’ve named it, this separation
from nature or God, a lousy story
retold in outworn shape.
Climbing, again.
A painting-- of still life
in our climate
(of sad ecological disaster)
no need for ironic subterfuge.
“like a blindness cleansed”
I lift my hat to that fish-shaped island, Paumanok.
This friend of birds,
sees snakes with rings,
hears wood-peckers laugh,
jays, squawking their raucous
thought in pines, as
crickets scatter before bells
jingling on cautious feet.
blank upon the sand
his staff aflame,
the black oldsmobile horn’s blare.
Exchanging presence for distance
Achilles merging with Crispin,
then, as Walt,
“...this book is a man.”
all the birds have died.
A sparrow fights a starling,
a cowbird
raids another’s nest.
no rescuing spaceships
out there, seen, still
the tragedy, of the planet.
afoot with vision
Chaplinesque, a picaresque saint
a friend of birds, as St. Francis
in Giotto, holding Sunflowers
for Vincent and Lilacs for Walt,
the Brooklyn Bridge in the distance,
over which a figure, returning
awakening from sleep, Pierrot!
A jar overturned by the spring
wind, sprinkling seeds, to the air
a black rope interwinds and weaves
a string of shells
dragged behind, sunflowers
darkening...
a book of poetry, upended
at the tide line,
wading off into the pink
translucence, at the end
of that summer’s day.
