mwotw

May & Can

I know it is the Sun
that shines upon the moon,
and not the gaze of men.
It is too soon
in our Divine Experiment
to think our will (We train our eyes
on every corner of the night.)
the same as lucid sight.

I am capricious to the bone,
the maker of a thing or two
I’d call “of Perfect Kind”,
but own that all the best I’ve made
(the baubles of my pride)
were never those I sought by force,
but those I chanced to find.

16 January, 2003 (For Paul V.)

paul valery | poetry | les saisons

Animus

Watch the way the wind will ravel
Random oddments on the ground,
How it jostles leaf and paper
Stirring stillness into sound,
Never merely one direction.

There appears to be a hand
with a preference for the circle
and a penchant to demand.
“Such behavior from good subjects!”
“Why should we quit our beds and strive?”
“For your daily viewing pleasure,
Many dead things seem alive.”

poetry | animus

The Reef

I see the solemn Myripristis wake!
The tide has drawn her sleepers into bed,
but draped a veil of flesh for evening’s sake
upon the spires of coral dead.

At night one hears them murmur where they dwell…
(The raging storms and, once, the careless oar
have caused the living polyp’s haloed bell
to bleed its fevered juice and ever more
resign its palps from filtering the Sea)
a billion billion skeletons of lime,
enlacing septae, doomed in destiny,
to make a solid substance out of Time,
and… for the benefit of surface life,
preserve our buried histories of strife.

poetry | war