September 10th, 1976 at 5:34 pm
(Darkness, Featured Poems, Poetry)
Hotly I feel the evening’s demon creeping
at the rear of each resounding step as I walk
up the dark pavement; so silent in its keeping,
like an iron grasp to terrorize my talk.
The shadows that hide in the dark,
in the invisible closure, and shake in the wind
whorling the leaves like a sea between roots—
they’re fire-flames sucking me in.
Sucking me in to the dark, the underworld dark,
of dark inner fingers, hands clutching me, clutching
my sides, grasping out, squeezing the breath at my sides,
drowning me down, down, deep in the waters of nothing.
Comments
September 10th, 1976 at 5:33 pm
(Darkness, Poetry)
Tonight, falling rain,
I pricked my hand on the hedge. A bare
branch pricked me,
a knotted skeleton, dark-reaching
haunt-night excursion
out of the earth-darkness.
– I fling it
off me in despair! Death, death
follows me everywhere.
Underground currents rushing on
like black swirls cycloning my feet,
the dark, dark rain beating down, slipping on
us like underworld dawn.
And earth balled up
a tiny bug into its shell,
while death sinks on and the damp
rain of the underswell
swells on us
swirling about our feet down the drains
of the earth. The drains, down
drains of cowering life, on down
through the daytime swills of our life,
holding out like a sparkler not yet died.
Drain underground.
Underswill.
Black undersparkle of the gutter.
Down
the rubble down, washing
down, draining out
into the deep deep pipes of the earth, into
the hollow
roots
of pre-life and dark.
Like the siege of lightning in the storm.
Comments
September 10th, 1976 at 5:29 pm
(Darkness, Poetry)
High up in my carrel, in the stone tree
that sits woodless and rootless on the dust of the earth,
if you could but see me there stonefaced as I read,
stone-round eyes cast on the page like rocks on a turf.
Maybe then you would know
what strange animal this is — this student. The damp grotto mind
shackled up like an invalid, quarantined alone
within the castle of consciousness, the dim
mutation of time:
spaceless, spiritless, boneless, oh so closed
in his library of petrified stone.
Comments
September 10th, 1976 at 5:26 pm
(Darkness, Featured Poems, Poetry)
I know now, know now, the final swish
that moves my life so slowly—oh so slowly—
on its way. Is a swish, a swish of the secret
silver contract made with the moon
by a people I wasn’t even born yet.
But the contract is mine
as much in turn it was theirs.
And I will do my duty—even if it means
following mapless a sky I do not know,
whose stars are strange to me.
But follow I will as I have to
in the trip of life that is hardly a trip,
neither going anywhere or a getting
to any particular place on time—
even if there were maps at every station.
So I trace after the swish
the sweep of the moon; its endless charting
cycleless, lineless, only a turning
from something to something.
Comments
