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.

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.