Pageviews past week

Friday, October 4, 2013

THE STARRY RAMS




COLD RIVER PRESS will be doing a chapbook of my work.  It will be titled ETERNITY REMEMBERED. I am delighted they are doing this and am posting a poem from the chapbook here today.



THE STARRY RAMS

The starry rams that vex
The starry plow and trundle
Cross the heavens at the edges of the hex
Signs, tipping huge and noisy beacons
Toward the table of the morning,
Lower head and butt, no warning,
But continue toward the dawn.

Oh sparkle, clean and burning,
Clustered in the arms of the sun
That makes no claim to
Planets. Air like flying junk
That litter space as it races
To the limits of what is known.

The starry rams perplex us
And the starry rams suspect us
Of having forgotten them.
They left us perhaps, we left them
And see them only in the heavens

Or caught inside a wish
They could be less than poetry,
They could be less than verse
Or could become a simple myth
And the whole construction burst.



Wednesday, October 2, 2013

ALLOWING THE LANGUAGE

Mike Worrall

Toward Darkness - D.R. Wagner


ALLOWING THE LANGUAGE

We cannot ever bring back the dragons.
That was the agreement back when we
Came to the high camps.  Even if
We were without hope we had vowed
Not to say their names aloud.

Their gift for this was a new language.  it took so 
Little time to gain its usage.  We were amazed
To be speaking it in groups within a fortnight.
It had a quality of song about it.

I am going to allow the language
But it will speak as tigers, terrible
As the dawn might be or the nights
Great majesty, for the words have power

They power all and you may dance or you
May fall, swirling on a pause that
May be a comma or nothing at all.
The eyebrow of the beast may twitch
And we will run from the forest
To the shore and I may
Never know you or I may know
You all.  There is no sound upon
The page
As we see the tiger in its glade,

But its eye will see you,
Smell the warmth of meat of which
You are  made and find you almost
To Charon’s boat, now blue,
Now only a shade. 

The burrs of understanding
Every language in the world,
Their curious cadences we use
To ride.  The horses come from heaven
To do our bidding as we beg
to become the night that we might
See feel the language fill our sight.

I am going to allow the language to
Dwell here for its famous moment.
A purity we are amazed to have privy to
Even as we open our mouths.