heard
Her beauty ricocheted and drowned, absurd
In maze of old genetics yet there kept,
Some wakening of love that now is slept?
An echo of her voice in some mere phrase,
A flicker of her glance in old beast’s gaze?
They come to find the lamb in lion’s paws,
But something in my laugh now gives them cause
To order more and more and deeply drink,
Though Lovely’s not my name, I clearly think.
Ah, well, to stand for her is not a shame,
And if the echo pleases them, what blame?
Years back I saw an old love’s sire one day,
And round about his smile I saw the fey
Sad, far, lost echoing of one mad year
Which ravened me to frenzies and wild fear.
So if a father’s teeth can cage a cat,
Why here behind my eyes, beneath my hat,
A girl before her time waits to commence—
Young men, I have no heart to cry: Go hence!
So stay awhile and hear her voice in me;
But, please, no tears, no funeral salt at tea!
Thrown out of Eden
Now we headlong humans
Sinners sinned against
Return.
Tossed from the central sun
We with our own concentric fires
Blaze and burn.
Once at the hub of wakening
And vast starwheel,
For centuries long-lost, and made to feel
Unwanted, orphaned, mindless,
Driven forth to grassless gardens,
Dead and desert sea,
We were shut out by comet grooms like Kepler
Galileo Galilei
Whose short-sight probing light-years
Upped and said:
The Hub’s not here!
So shot man through the head
And worse, each starblind prophet killed a part,
Snugged shut our souls,
Chopped short our reach,
Entombed our living heart.
But now we bastard sons of time
Pronounce ourselves anew
And strike fire-hammer blows
To change tomorrow’s clime, its meteor snows.
Our rocket selfhood grows
To give dull facts a shake, break data down
To climb the Empire State and thundercry the town;
But more! reach up and strike
And claim from Heaven
The Garden we were shunted from,
For now, space-driven
We fit, fix, force and fuse,
Re-hub the systems vast
Respoke starwheel
And at the spiraled core
Plant foot, full fire-shod
And thus saints feel
Or yeast like flesh of God.
We march back to Olympus,
Our plain-bread flesh burns gold!
We clothe ourselves in flame
And trade new myths for old.
The Greek gods christen us
With ghosts of comet swords;
God smiles and names us thus:
“Arise! Run! Fly, my Lords!”
Ghost at the Window, Hive on the Hearth
It was a smother of Time, a crumbling of white;
The night gave way in hysterias trembling to cold,
Grown old and falling apart, let its white heart go
And slow and slow in a withering slide from the dark
The snow fell down and down with no lantern nor spark
Nor star nor moon to show its fracture and fall
Appalling in all its shivering shaken chill dusts
In soft clamors and tremors of panic it touched my sill
Like an old woman begging the storm to keep warm with mere crusts
And make do on my cat-couching hearth
Where a teakettle cinnamon puss kneels and folds
And beholds a soft inner contentment, a bumblebee simmer kept there
Like a hive on the hearth in a honeycomb color of cat
While nibbling the windows and gnawing raw rainspout toes
And flaking the rainbarrel frost there the smothering goes;
A funeral quell passes by in a pageant of lost
And cataracts windowpane eyes with a filming of frost
And sugars the dogs as they yellow-write sums
