The Gold Museum

Nothing has ever been, nor will be,
As precious as the arbitrary.
From minuscule votive offerings

In anoxic muds of crater lakes
To cloud-caressing cathedral gilt,
It's never what we need that matters

But what we need what we need to be,
Sufficiently immaterial
To mete out justice, not just metal,

Just incorruptible. The gold dust
Of myth is the existence of myth.
Any myth, however fact-alloyed,

Will serve. People, not gods, are choosy.
Find any lovely thing you can't use
And tell divinity to take it.

No cavern, volcano, or sea bed
Will refuse you. Only your people
Must sanction gifts by acclamation.

Stability

My persistence feels less than dynamic these days.
A sluggish river can last as near forever,
I suppose, as any canyon-cutting chuckler,
But it seems like a poorer use of scenery.

What is it about slack-bellied middle-aged men
That our melancholy and pride swell together?
(Guts, melancholy, pride, and little enough else,
Sings the tiny bank-side bird of innuendo.)

We find ourselves meandering between stories
Of how everything came to be, best stowed away
For now, and discoveries we thought we would make.
What are we? Molecular rivers of the same

Pattern, whatever pattern is, but different
Substance than we were yesterday or ever were.
And that's just it. All the substance of the pattern
Is changed, but the changing's substantially the same.

What in this transformation is worth complaint?
I was something that never was stable, changing
Stably into something that couldn't be the same
Except for continual change. Wait. Where was I?

Drypoint

Tint burins,
Twig ends etched
The snow's crust
In steel-tipped
Shadows thin
And pretty
As the lines
Of a poem
About sleep
I engraved
Once on clean
Bone I lost
When printing
In charcoal.

Slender

Whatever I said was gone
Is probably still alive,
Including you, me, and the old guy
Who showed up with the lost
Wildlife tonight to help us get by.

I say it, and I forget it,
And I say it all over again.
I'm no good at prediction,
And I tend to encourage
Myself to think it's the end.

Here we are. Fire in the grate,
Wood in the pile, and a moon,
Or a sliver of such, high
In a wintry black sky, as the stag
I wrote you would die

Curls up next to the double-panes
With a new-found doe, planning,
I'd guess now, to make out like us.
Find dumb lucky love, be happy
At last, and thrive, I bet, thrive.

Notes on a Wednesday Just Gone

Predawn, a Dream, Literally

I saw a single light
High on a cliff cut
Up on the side
Of a rounded, dark
Mountain, and I

Felt an ache like
A crush for a girl
To live in the little
House by that light
Even though it was by

The side of the road
The cut made room
For, where cars shot
By its windows. I longed,
I craved it, I can't see why.

Midday, through the Woods

I bump into a young man whom I know
To be mentally ill, and he asks me
How I'm doing. I say I'm well
And ask him the same. "Getting
Through," he shrugs. We smile.
It's all getting through, isn't it?
The snow melts, the clouds go over,
People do kind and awful things,
We lie in bed and count the breath
Getting through our nostrils,
First one way, then the other.
An honest answer, then, although
I know he meant it to suggest less
Than ordinary living, a tough time,
No better than the obvious fact
That for the moment he's still
Going. I of course interpret this
Wrongly. I detect encouraging
Sanity in his wryly delivered
Bit of grin. Were he to have kicked
Up his heels and grabbed my hand
In both of his and shouted
"I'm great," it would have been
Scarier. So it goes and goes
Through all of us, just as we go
Through all of it going and are
Our sense of the going. Getting. Go.

Evening, Home

All the langsam, long, lonesome afternoon,
The repetitive, plaintive choruses
Of Lang's Match Girl Passion
Weave themselves through and encircle
My chattering thoughts, as if the sad waif
Herself were begging me and entangling
My legs as I walked--help me,
Help me, have mercy,
Have mercy, stay
With me, stay with me.

In the evening, then, my own reprise
Beside the banked-up fireside:
Can it help you then to think
About it now? Can it help you
Then, to think about it now?
How not to think about what might
Occur then, being helpless now?
If only the going of this went through
Soothingly smoothly like this cup
Of purple "Passion" tea passed to me
While the snow grips itself
In fresh blankets of hoarfrost
And the deer gather around
Our small, borrowed home in the dark
Without a sound, without pleading,
Just breathing, help me, help me,
Have mercy, have mercy, stay
With me, stay


With



Me.

Corbies Reconsidered

-for Athena's bright-eyed namesake

Every flash-winged magpie knows,
(Vide Trivers) the smarter we are,
The cleverer, the more deceptive,
The more alert to deception
As danger and joy we must be.

The brightest of the ancient
Greeks, no, not Plato,
Not Pythagoras or Heraclitus,
Not Aristotle or Archimedes,
Odysseus was a complete fiction

Within a partial fiction,
Telling exaggerations
While disguised by his ally,
The clever, dissembling goddess
Assembled with shield, spear,

And owl. Even the owl
Was a brilliant appropriation
And feint. Having a raven,
A crow, or a magpie on her shoulder
Would have given the game away.

An owl! Every corvid knows
A scrub jay has the wisdom
To outwit anyone or anything
Fooled by the gaze of that owl.
Owls have no appreciation

For the shinier, finer, inedible things,
Like the outside of a good story,
The empty wealth of night skies,
The truth kept safely for later,

Or an owl as a wide-eyed disguise.

Imperatrix Inferni, Miserere Mei

Mother of god, she's out there
Tonight in gowns of frozen steam,
The struggle to rise that settles
In ranks of vague lights under
The mountains containing hell.
The city gets its cold reward
For fueling itself with the dead,
The stink of commingled exhaust,
The exhaustion poured into
The stony, fuming basin of cold.
Old texts, hymns from the plague
Generations of the little ice age
Knew how to celebrate her, knew
A queen of heavenly forgiveness
Does not always move through
Gowns of royal blue. Empress
Of hell as well, her rule is a skull
Of rock-solid mercy in the deep
Confusing winter, even now
As long ago. Let the rows of trucks
And weary midnight shifts adore her,
The arc lamps, dreams, and boilers
Confirm the chill. This eroding circle
Of crushed-up mountain plateau,
Patch of light, hub of humans,
Can burn but never connive a way
To escape her cobwebbed glow.