Poetry
Poetry at least in modern times seems to have become the most inaccessible and emotionally remote of the arts. Compare the general tenor of a poetry reading to the wild bacchanalia of a rock concert. I'm one of those strange people who like them both. I've always been interested in poetry; by a fairly early age I had read most of the famous poems in English. Later, when I learned German, and a little French and Spanish, I read Goethe, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Lorca in their native languages-a great experience, as poetry is inherently untranslatable. And, from time to time I do one of my own. Below is a small sample of poems I have written in the last quarter of a century or so.
The fog came into the old graveyard
Stuck in a used car lot, a barque of stone
I have heard soundless silence, death-devised
The full moon on the yellow grass
You are sad in the yellow light
The aviaries of night close down the eyes
She was a gray believer; now her lips
Are fraught with atomic fire; eye sockets attest
The luminous waning of light bursts; bones are melted
Souvenirs of the staccato coming of atomic dawn.
Her shoulders art of the nuclear reprise; muscles toned
With gamma violence; her tongue hard
In a neutron hail. Brain burned with a late awareness
And sensuous acceptance of atomic flowers.
Hear, where her legs thrash in the slow staccato of atomic going
And her mind released in the starred hail of the morning sky
It was a blackened wing that fell that day
It was the earth excelling in selected suns
That recalled us to blood from the sky
And the oracular acceptance of that dawn.
The fog came into the old graveyard
The fog came into the old graveyard
Orion lay in the southeast
There were nebulae in Tomales
A woman standing by a dark gate
Open graves and flowers; star traverses
And beginning suns; there were latent openings
Where a girl lay by a chrysanthemum.
The beams slant in yellow light; her eyes
Follow vaulting suns; breasts grow to arms
In darkness. Her face open and surprise
Walks by the old graves; bones sag in wet earth.
The mind birthing in a yellow room;
Beds becomes eaten beams; the music
Must cease before Cynthia assumes the third position.
Yellow flowers part the mind in latent thirds.
Outside: water, wind, and wet grass.
Her face asks: Is this the real scream?
The bed is yellow as the music was
Her throat pulses with Protozoic suns.
The waves rush on Dillon beach;
Ghosts come from Tomales graves:
"Julia: God rest her soul, my good wife of thirty years."
Dead fish turn their glazed eyes to the shifting fog.
Yellow lights in a white room:
Her body lithe on a red blanket
From the south, a flash; her eyes asking
The mind is a cucumber, thinly sliced.
The gate is hard to open; it pours rain.
In the garden, in the darkness, there is fog;
Under the steps the neighborhood cat coughs;
A polite cough, imploring wet roses under white stars.
Her body a torus of imploding suns;
Her eyes green stalks with yellow gates;
She asks: Where is the surface of No Time
And would you fill the dipper with water and stars?
Stuck in a used-car lot: a barque of stone
Stuck in a used-car lot: a barque of stone
In neon tights astride a Mustang
What philosophic beau geste is buried in old tires
And smelly tidal flats where crows pick over
The vomited bodies of sea gulls. Alarm clocks
Go off and millions rise,
Wearily to eat their morning fecal matter
In the acacias mockingbirds
Haunt the sound of diesel trucks
Under the airport corridor, by ceaseless boxes
Filled with mothering tubes and Mr. Clean
A sound of infinity, of man rumbling
Toward a far-off alarm clock,
Punched in Algiers, oracular lunches in Times Square,
Monoxide for desert. Hear the space ship
Hunting between stars for the mind's track
The eye of Iapetus enshrined in formaldehyde
A dark truck hurtling the cosmos. Time wells
Backward on Aldebaran, up the faint wisp
Between quasar and galaxy; unheralded as heron wings
In Orion. Who (gray entwiner of the infinite, mathematician of drugs)
Interposed exeunter of black dwarfs and the mind's failure
At space's edge where the dust thins
And no mourning for the soul lost in a quantum jump
He didn't come out boys; no matter, wings.
Your eyes dark; above, the rock
Transcending water.
Stone above stone; the sun's foil
Scintillae in your eyes; the dark
Below an exit of the wind;
Your mind a starwheel of imploding dones; what day
Rises in dark rock; a hawk's wing falls
Before the iris; light pools like ibises of eyes.
In the day, past numinous water, the hills curved;
Time riding your arced silence, the dragon's tears.
A hunger for flight, for the sun's rush and the flawed wing
Poised in the hill's flow; downward to dark rock
In the dragon's eye.
Far off, the sun goes; hillward, hawks;
There are pools in stone.
Where the water and rock wait, silence. Your tears
Flow inward to the dragon's eye.
In what adytum your crouched terror; where, in the prescient dusk
Your dark eyes crying at the wind's edge;
Night, stars. There, no flight and no great soar
Where hawk's wings were. You waited,
Your mind a beat of the hill; your body curved
In the vortex of the dragon's eye.
The full moon on the yellow grass
The full moon on the yellow grass
A cat in the window; frogs; frost.
The fog covers the stars; Orion is in the East.
Near dawn the moon comes through upon her hair.
I have heard soundless silence, death-devised
I have heard soundless silence, death-devised:
The mind spun outward, love's illume:
Your face, chameleon-like, attack the sun:
You are a mimicry of the rock's song:
A motionless music lost in falling stars
And whether I hear the bird of time lose wing
Above bounding water, and death-enclosed, then fall
Upward, sunward till your magic moves
Arcuate laughter and all running worlds
To fall past silence into your smiling eyes:
Or whether, centaur-like, your mind excels
In duality unhinged, earth and stars:
Into the crossed silences of deaths and suns:
Whether our love's by life or death begun
We must be less than two, but more than one.
You are sad in the yellow light
You are sad in the yellow light
Your hurt shows in the quiet room
On the slanting roof the rain is falling
It is cold in the trees by the window.
You move in the shadowed light: gray leaves.
You ask whether it rains: moths, moving.
This month the winter comes;
The ground is wet, and the grass: a quiet sorrow.
The light rises on your face
Your mouth asks for something
Your body clings to the golden shade
The room is empty beyond the mirror.
The aviaries of night close down the eyes
The aviaries of night close down the eyes
Articulate epicures of the invisible
A strange dish ensconced of infinity
Magical hawks diving into the mind
Their egregious claws hammer home
Desolation, ennui, decayed designs while over
The poised hill they go pointilliste
Tail-first into eternity. The mind renders
Inviolate the gray walls of silence; trees are outlined
Upon stars; a sharp shiver comes from uphill
And the night walks still heralded
All acts cease when the stars fall.
We wait here where the world ends;
Westward the track of the dolphins tears
The upthrust waves; concinnity and the uninterrupted flow
Of the mind circling nothing; terror is down there, where the bottom goes.
Opalescent overtures of silence;
Hawks of the torn sunset of Los Angeles
Return in an asphalt presentiment
Of supermarkets eating freeways.
On the beach by the millions
Rubber condoms and blind kids
Pussed people devouring dead birds
Their passion arrayed on the sands
We are birds of the night; no askers
Of infinite, no seekers of stars; we run
On a far road, quickened by the hunt;
And do not feel the asphalt flashing past.
It is a sun in a center, explosions wheeled
At the mind's edge; the nerves raced before starting;
We see worlds flash endlessly, a married quarrel
Of chaos and order, welded by chemicals and a full moon.
The mind dances in a gray room: a red star imploding;
The eye sees endlessness in a webbed corner;
A piece of infinite explored and catalogued;
The dirty sheets lie artfully in the morning sun.
The scimitars of dusk
The scattered curvature of broken and mute fire
Worlds, rising in rings; far off, suns, illumed
There were stars
And triangular musings on dead shores; wings
Aviaries of silence; attitudes; Augusts and trips
Insolence of eternity; eucalyptic wings.
And Ann, floating above the lawn, ecstatic to music
A flash of gold, light feet and wings.
Where
In the corridors of dark time shall worlds illume
Her silence
©1998, 1999 Samuel L. Greene
[These web pages of Samuel L. Greene, Jr. (1931-2007), Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Sonoma State University, have been reconstructed by his colleague, JST. There were originally links to course pages and to larger images, but these have been lost.]