dragonsong

dragonsong

have you ever

played with the dragons?–

one changed me, for a while

and we spun arabesques¹

in the wind, lighting

the sky in our fiery course.

ah–have you ever

played with the dragons? i

did; it ruined

my life. i’ve spent it dreaming,

trying vaguely to recreate

those half-remembered flights.

dedicated to Ursula K. Leguin the The Earthsea trilogy; she did read it.

rebirth

rebirth

…in the years of my decline
(i can recall this
quite clearly, you know)
i knew visions well.

i would not speak
to strangers: i was
an unruly tyrant
with my kin.

but i still was
foremost counsellor (though
given to sudden rages, and no one quite dared
challenge that).

mostly, of course, it was
the unseemly pains of age, acid gut and aching joints,
and other discomforts…

o, but i had my power!
i was dressed in pomp, all attended–for i was,
despite those rages, still wise.

ah, though: reborn, freed
of both pains and pomp, i wonder; who will requite me
for all the smiles i lost?

The Blind Woman

The Blind Woman

The blind woman is dancing
out on the dimlit floor, shaking
her head
and tossing her golden hair
(i have felt her
heavy, well-kempt
scented hair), her gestures somehow formless,
unknowing.

She doesn’t even know
i watch her.
(I sip my beer, and sigh.)
What does she think of, who
does she see, lost
in her private world?

Later, walking away, muttering silently to my self, i wonder:
who watches my
private dances?

Let the Buyer Beware

Let the Buyer Beware

Let the buyer beware.
It was in winter
that he met you, and
shyly touched you:
frost-whitened trees, and grass,
disconsolate…
he gave you a stone,
a small flawed agate.
(“I look for them on the beach,”
he said.  “It gives me
something to do.”)
It was in spring, perhaps,
that he loved you, though
he never claimed it.
You took him
or he took you…
the definition troubled you,
at times.

It was in sered summer
that he left, still
saying nothing of love.
Weeds in the socks,
in the hose…and if
you could (somehow)
clean the heart, too?
Let the buyer beware.

________________________________

To some extent ‘he’ is a portrait of me at a certain age; the selfishness portrayed is the vision lent by hindsight, whether wise or no.  Note that who the buyer might have been and what might have been bought are markedly absent.

On True Love And Its Essential Value

On True Love and Its Essential Value

having turned
and turned again
to that (now faded)
portrait of you, a bust…

You are so much
a part of me
there is no place
i can say, you began…

And i knew this, that there
was no forgetting.
I knew that then.
I did not hold.  I let go.

having turned
and turned again
to your portrait…at length, for a while, i manage to
look away.

---

Actually quite true–except for having a bust.  I have no pictures of her at all, unless memory counts.  It happened–that year did–about 38 years ago.  I try not to think of her, and when I do, it is as if (to others) I were having an ‘absence seizure’ or petit mal.  Some paths you may only walk once, and expect afterwards unending echoes, so to speak.

And how could I do aught else?  I’d even said I loved her.  I’m trying to learn that phrase again with my brother.  Before that, my adopted mother, who would cherish the phrase for a moment and then think of something cruel to do; I even had witnesses.  Oh, and I had to say it, or I wasn’t being dutiful.  Before that…more to forget.  Nice to have actually forgotten some things.  Oh well.  Things happen; we all occasionally live “in interesting times.”

The Hierophant

 

 

 

The Hierophant

 

We’ve waited for hours

in this dusky, dusty place.

Anger and fear

are mixed in our breasts

as we wait on,

kneeling, heads bowed.  (Perhaps

the blindness

is hardest to bear.  I think

I’ve memorized

this cracked patch

of floor.)

 

Or perhaps

these hours

have been my life

as I wait

for meaning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The personal pronoun, unusually, is capitalized, but it seems fitting.  I generally don’t use it simply because English is the one and the only for many things, but I think most irritatingly for this; it capitalizes the personal pronoun.

Family and 1 poem, ‘departures’

Sorry, I’ve actually been busy with my family in fairly pleasant ways to extremely pleasant.  Spouses can have rough spots that require sanding.  That might be self-administered, spousal ‘maintenance’ read spouse abuse or shadows of various sorts.  Veterans of all wars I think bear those shadows.  And being close to death just does that, as does dying.  At least it has been a while since I was dying voiceless in the night, knowing that I was fighting to regain control of my body.  That’s not a good feeling.

I intend to spend more time on the blog for more than one reason.  One is that I’ll simply get “voices‟ published.  The ‘easy’ way.

departures

having hesitated by a field,
overgrown and rocky
we found our path suddenly obscured and sat to ponder

us, and our selves, and
eventually decided
our paths lay different ways…
and then (humanly if not naturally)

each blamed the other
and set our separate courses,
i pursuing that perhaps illusive beast enlightenment,
or wisdom…

and you went (you had to go)
to peace, to some security.

…i pause often by that field.
–not with regret, nor even
with real deliberation, without care for was and why
and how:

i pause often by that field,
and watch the shadows change.
(Such tangled webs we weave!)

 

I’ll be detailing how to get a copy of voices in various fashions, the most expensive of which would make me actually drop everything and get it converted yet again.  It’s a big collection of poems which mutated into a picture type .pdf somehow with the bloody upgrades.  I finally found a word processor which allows me to break it down or…if pressed…to actually bulk-edit the whole ms.  Which I simply won’t change the writing on again, but the conversion does introduce things like extraneous spaces.  Those I will work on, with a stick–so to speak.

On VOICES

Voices is my first poetry manuscript (that I saved).  My first was stolen (not returned; the pejorative was lent by my adopted mother); I was the ripe age of 8, since I’d just been adopted.  From fluent reading to my first attempts at poetry in one year; my real mother (my adopted mother’s sister) hadn’t ensured I could read, although she was…an elementary school teacher.  I took to poetry because of things that English couldn’t express.

 

WordPress won’t take a whole manuscript.

 

I promised to publish Voices here.

 

Here we go, one poem at a time, cut and paste, beginning with the next entry.  Few of my (current) friends read poetry if any.  I take that back.  I know two do.  I have suspicions about a couple more….they know I have my eye on them…there’s a them-shaped dent in my eyeball…

 

I have destroyed most of what I’ve written.  Around ten million words in prose, and at least five manuscripts of poetry plus innumerable poetry “works toward” which are often destroyed immediately upon completion.

poem, voices

distortions

these reflections, i think, distort.
i keep striving for clear vision
for perceiving now
and instead dealing
with that long gone.

you speak, i hear
in now and yet
i act toward the past.

how odd.  as
finally, you turn
and walk away, realizing
i haven’t heard you:  not a word of it.
and as i wonder
at your leaving, and then

interpret it
in terms of the past.

—————————————

Glenn

poem, voices

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silences (2)

i have written

so very many words! the writing

the thing, assuredly: a crystalline moment of vision

and somewhat-freedom…

my life consists of broken threads, the undone and

unsaid; my only expression, really, these lines:

unmetered and sprung, unrhyming, unpolished cadences

and rhetoric,

and endless seekings

of undefined, indeed perhaps

unnamed unknown

things…i have known most closely

and best despair, and futile

endings. these scenes

occlude, refract.

…i have written so very

many words: millions. i have perhaps five percent of

that.

i sing, i say,

quite strongly, quite silently. but

when i’ve need of words…

i cannot speak.

————————————————–

Glenn