If you stare at a stream-floor
If you stare at a stream-floor— struggling with a language
you’ve known always, nurtured in the nurs’ry
through hazy shapes and shuffling shadows--
you’ll see the stream with strained accents
recite an ode sacred in its subject:
A leaf from a lime-tree, laving on the surface
‘twixt light and foam, lays its shade down.
A shadow, heart-shaped, shifts among kindred:
the shades of stones, standing immobile.
A burbling shade, bass obbligato
to the stream’s surface, striates the stone-bed
(like shadows from cirrus on summer pastures).
Where light invades— vagrant vision-bringer--
the mobile mosses, mimicking the tempo
given by the shades, gain a spectator
to their soft sarabande. Sediment joins them,
like children at dances, ducking through the growth,
for a moment seen, then sent onward
to a silt bedroom somewhere unknown.
A bluegill fry, frightened by your breathing,
vanishes entire, vain to seek him.
Your eyes then raise, reading broadly.
A stone, stranded, sticks its nose out,
violates the surface, invades your space,
with a green moss-patch that’s matted and moist.
The green lime leaf lands on this island.
So green and green grapple for your attention.
But so does the water, white and whirling,
that garlands the island, garrisons the greens.
It draws you down. The dun stream-floor
Finishes the ode with a final line:
The stones, stable, stuck in a mud bath,
motionless and cold, move in make-believe,
by lifts and dips—dimples on the stream-face.
The current’s surface, concave and convex,
refracts the light, livening the limestone
below the island laurelled all in foam.
Though you hate to say it, you see meter.
The rhyme resounds, designed wisely.
But who knows the poet? Heathen holy men,
with a macabre carmen, called up the Stream-Sprite,
summoning the daemon. Dared you do likewise,
she’d wake from the stream-bed, stretching and straining,
light and droplets dripping from her hair
with breasts exposed, perilously pale.
If she didn’t drown you, damned for your daftness,
you’d raise your question, querying the maiden.
She’d seem surprised, puzzled and pond’rous,
as though you’d wondered, worrisome and witless,
over things patent, apparent and plain.
“You know the poet. He's not hiding.”
With shirking shoulders, shimmering and moist,
she’d turn to water, unwilling to wake
from her ancient silt-bed-- a sage, silent,
who exposed your lie, leaving you alone.
Clouds Are Like Clothing
Clouds are like clothing. The clear welkin--
its blanch and blue blended gently,
a brimful of bigness imbibed at once,
an unbounded beauty— can bend the soul
like a nude recumbent. It needs clothing
for safety’s sake. The silken sky,
lacking a landmark, is like the sea
descried from the crows-nest: the craven soul
will long to leap— to lose self-hood,
enclosed in the ether. Clouds clarify
like temple veils or tunic smocks
or tinted glasses, tempering beauties
that would savage if seen. Cirrus inscriptions,
like a soft Sanskrit, superscribe the sky.
They’re mostly air. Microscopic ice-flakes--
thirty to the litre— align for miles.
A cold camisole, they cover the sky
with a fine filigree. But farther below,
Cumulus courses— cauliflower-form,
the juicy giants, whose jangling bolts
clarion the gods. Clear-bordered clouds,
the cold carves them: condensation
conjures the sky into Ricotta cheese
or cotton-ball mountains that cover the air
with a blotchy blouse. A blinding veil,
constraining Stratus strangles light-fall.
Madd’ning monochromy, and minor scales,
and single malt, and the scent of soil,
and strong beauties are straight from Stratus.
It sprawls, spacious, and spills its draught
in thinnest doses on thirsty thatch.
A beautiful burka, it buries the sky
so that we, longing, may wait patient,
with a view heav’nward, for the veil to rend.
The Kiss’s Sound
Sunsets are noiseless. Sol the Sight-Bringer,
contented daily, his touch tempered,
kisses the cloud-line, clings to the horizon,
then glides homeward, happy in his heart.
His kisses are soundless— a sign and seal
to those who notice. He’s no mortal.
We have a weakness, wearisome and vain,
made clear in our kisses. The contact can’t--
the long lingering of lips applied--
provide a sound. Soft surfaces
collide lightly, aligning tight.
The four-fold lips laid up lengthwise
with a strained striving struggle to unite.
The pressing fails them, faint and feeble.
They’re still separate. Suddenly they turn,
with a slight suction (so unnoticed)
to draw downward— devilish designs--
to breath a body, to bury the lips
and soon a soul inside the lungs.
But still this suction, startling as it seems,
Is applied in silence— pluribus unum?
The powerful explosion, painful and piercing,
makes a shattering sound. The seal is severed.
A smack that wakes us woefully warns us
It’s a vain venture that invites failure
To make single, to amalgamate,
To erase the “and”— wrong and reckless.
But with the last sun’s fall,
That scrolls the welkin round,
We saints, in union all,
Will kiss and make no sound.
The Four Parts of the Day,
ad Ionathan Iacobum, in occasionem desponsationis
Dawn, dapple-cheeked, delicate featured,
bold-eyed bustle-bringer, unbinds her hair,
lets loose her locks, long and ginger-colored,
to clothe the clouds. Her clarion voice--
Chanticlier’s chanson, shimmer of finches,
or the hack of the squirrel in the high hawthorn--
raises creation, ripe and rested.
With the limbs of youth, lean and lanky,
she reaches round and wraps the world
in a soft embrace. Scents of saffron
and honeysuckled hedgerows hanging on her earlobes,
are pleasing perfume. The pearly speckles,
the night’s nectar, nickel-plated dewdrops
are gathered in hand by the girl of gold
who weaves in the welkin a watery crown
for her dear sister. Dazzling Daytime,
buxom, brazen-bodied, the bronze matron
of the wide and warm, walks out smiling
to the plaudits of starlings—plural playfellows.
Her platinum hair, plaited up with plooms
of soaring cirrus, settles on the world
like a heavy counterpane. Columnar cornstalks,
rye and rye-grass, rain-shy meadow-brome,
Timothy, tail-headed, tolerant barley,
and abundant wheat bask in her body-heat.
Consort to vocation, she calls to yoke
the twin-born team. Tawny farmers
dance with Daytime a dozen bourrées.
Handsome horologe, she heralds the change--
the colorful coming of her cool sister--
with the cry of cows, cream-filled and cramping,
desperate for twilight. Dusk, dark-headed,
with blood in her cheeks, a charming child
whose virgin brow reveals her veins
of pink and purple (painting the horizon)
arrives shyly— reticent rest-bringer.
Deer, her maidservants, modest as their mistress,
with ritualed reverence, raise and lower
Their lean faces. The lateral light
makes fustian fabric of a field’s surface--
a textured tunic for her tender form.
A copse of cedars casts its contours
in lengthy shades— the lowered lashes
of her hazel eyes. Home-going husbands,
day-weary fathers, devotees of dusk,
trace her fingers— the trampled trails
from field to fire-side. Her finest hour
is the illumined last. As she leaves the earth,
her sharp shoulder-blades show through the veil:
Mars and Venus mark the moment
of Dusk’s egress. In the east, the Night,
eager if ancient, in an inky dress
with opal beading, opens her wimple.
Her artful hair, argentine and onyx,
token of her age, ably curtains
the empyrean eye. And Io’s horn
is an aperture opened in her ample collar,
an alabaster key-hole that asks us glimpse
at the eastern edge of her egg-white breast.
Toadstools, in homage, offer in equiform
an oval temple, opened overnight,
in Ionic order. Like obverse stars,
Her impish torch bearers— iridescent fire-flies--
With green impulse intimate the grass-blades,
illustrate the tree-leaves. The ill-lit hour
of her westward exit is embryonic--
all but silent, all but sightless.
But lo, eastward, even as we speak,
An azureous aspect abrogates her hour.
Her ebony train, evident at last,
elegantly hemmed, with an edge of lace,
itching the horizon, is in an instant gone.
On Discovering that Venus Can Make Shadows
In the pitchy pre-dawn (pupils like portals,
colour-blind and clamb’ring) I cling tightly
to hazy half-lights. Huddled electrons
rouse from slumber my retinal rods.
Grasses in greyscale, growing clearer,
reward an eye that's willing to wait.
The eastern face of a fescue blade
collects some light. Its linear shade
dims the darkness with a deeper hue.
A thumb-sized limestone—likewise illumined--
variates the void with a veil of shadow.
The blocked light-fall blotches the blackness.
A dappled darkness of differing shades
implies a light source. But Luna’s lamp,
in first quarter, fizzled in the horizon
around midnight. Maybe morning
has stirred early. I stare eastward,
and the featureless sky-line, an enforced blindness,
says dawn is distant. But a diamond light,
a stream of lumens, like a star, but steady--
Cytherean sunshine—saturates the landscape.
Availed of Venus, the vast night-scape
teams with texture. Tuffets and low-spots
form a grain of greys in the grass-thick lawn.
The shadows are sharp: a shining point
makes no penumbra. Normal sun-shadows
have a faint aureole— a fuzzy frontier
where fulsome light-waves make foam and spray.
But these are hard-edged like hands on clocks.
Sea-born Venus sets a sun-dial
of sticks and stones. Her sterile father--
potent Chronos—empowers her light
as she tells, by shadows, the tenor of time.
But an Hour arrives, wrapping her in robes
of reds and pinks and her pale pen-light,
is dressed and dimmed in a drape of day.
Lapis Lazuli
The boast of Badakhshán— the beige mountains,
like jaundiced arches in Tajik terrace-farms,
like sepia sentries, sentinels with veins
on sinewy forearms— circumscribe the source:
the singular stronghold, in Sar-i-Sang,
of Afghan lazurite— Lapis Lazuli,
aureoled azure, absolute blue.
Neolithic nomads, negligent of safety,
moved by lucre, made for Pamir,
headed for Imeon, heedless of the heights.
Sumerian masons, master stone-cutters,
Ishtar’s image-makers, imitating nature,
bartered for the blue, begged for the bead-stuff--
life-like lazurite— to lay the eyes
of the prayerful priest, a prized sculpture
in the house of Astarte. Still and staring,
the alabaster abbot, Ashtoreth’s attendant
in the town of Mari, motionless as his mistress,
invoked the idol, irises sky-like,
heralded his Lady, hailed her with the hue
of the blue bead-burden borne upon her breast.
For Ishtar’s jewels and his jocund eyes
were made of Lapis: in the mythic tablets
Utnapishtim, parent of Gilgamesh,
witnessed Ishtar, white with anger,
take the Lazurite— tectonic token,
mineral reminder— from her milky throat
and swear boldly, “beads of Badakhshán,
witness my sadness, my sons sunken,
bedraggled daughters, and drowned children;
so neither you, near my nakedness,
nor the flood of creation, will flee my mind.”[1]
The blue that bound her is a blessed symbol,
a diluvian testate, lithic league-marker,
Sumerian rainbow. Milled to microns,
Smashed to pulver, pounded into powder,
the precious gem-stone was a prized pigment.
Servants of the silk-road, Saracen traders,
settled on a price. Pious painters,
mindful of their subject, sought the substance
in the Age of Grace. The ground pigment
mixed with egg-yoke— an amazing sight,
the blue in a binding, blinding in its beauty--
painted on pine-board, pulled along the creases,
feathered along the folds, faintly on the high points
of a maiden’s drape (a maid and mother)
reminded millions—myriad faithful--
of the tender Theotokos and the Tiny Babe.
And the City of Zion, set upon the heights--
above Badakhshán as beech is briar--
has a sounder sign; it’s sealed with blue
from the veins of Christ, crimson when spilt.
[1] From the Epic of Gilgamesh XI.165
The New Moon
The infant moon, mewing at the morning,
awakes unseen. She suckles sunbeams.
The Greater Light, unlikely nurse
to the night’s sov’reign, soothes the satellite.
He walks her ‘round, all wrapped in rays
for swaddling bands, borne in a bundling
of heavy daylight that hides her face
from the lower worlds. Walking westward,
the Lesser and the Greater leave a longitude,
hide a hemisphere, in unhindered shade.
The stars, overburdened, burn but badly,
like sulphur matches in a sunless cell.
They labour like subjects, lost for a leader,
in an interregnum. The regent child--
dimpled darling— dims a surface
to our night and day. But our near neighbour,
Love’s Luminary, looks to the infant
and sees sunlight. The satellite shines--
like babies elsewhere— with rebounding beams
from a doting nurse, dousing Venus
with light expressed by the Prince of Day.
Tellus, over time, turns the infant
and sees her change. A charming child,
she’s long and gaunt and lights but little.
As she grows, she lingers and her light widens.
Her maiden body, bowing in its borders,
is feminine and fulsome at fifteen days
(her days like years in a young girl’s life).
In majesty, the monarch, making eye-contact--
veritably shameless, though her shape is shown--
invites our gaze. So we view, ling’ring:
Her form, weighty, affects our flight.
Her gravity grips us, gradually slowing
tellurian motion to match her own.
Tellus, tenderly (her tempo slowed)
will catch at her cousin for countless years.
Maybe by microseconds, but our morn arives
later and later, and Luna’s phase
faster, though unfelt, conforms slowly
to Tellus’s orbit. Tidal forces
will pull on the pair till a pas de deu--
or a corps a corps— consummates the union
of the night’s sov’reign and her near kinsman
in the last epoch of the lower worlds.
And if that Dreadful Day
cuts short this dance for two,
what more might heaven say
when it and earth are new?
If you stare at a stream-floor— struggling with a language
you’ve known always, nurtured in the nurs’ry
through hazy shapes and shuffling shadows--
you’ll see the stream with strained accents
recite an ode sacred in its subject:
A leaf from a lime-tree, laving on the surface
‘twixt light and foam, lays its shade down.
A shadow, heart-shaped, shifts among kindred:
the shades of stones, standing immobile.
A burbling shade, bass obbligato
to the stream’s surface, striates the stone-bed
(like shadows from cirrus on summer pastures).
Where light invades— vagrant vision-bringer--
the mobile mosses, mimicking the tempo
given by the shades, gain a spectator
to their soft sarabande. Sediment joins them,
like children at dances, ducking through the growth,
for a moment seen, then sent onward
to a silt bedroom somewhere unknown.
A bluegill fry, frightened by your breathing,
vanishes entire, vain to seek him.
Your eyes then raise, reading broadly.
A stone, stranded, sticks its nose out,
violates the surface, invades your space,
with a green moss-patch that’s matted and moist.
The green lime leaf lands on this island.
So green and green grapple for your attention.
But so does the water, white and whirling,
that garlands the island, garrisons the greens.
It draws you down. The dun stream-floor
Finishes the ode with a final line:
The stones, stable, stuck in a mud bath,
motionless and cold, move in make-believe,
by lifts and dips—dimples on the stream-face.
The current’s surface, concave and convex,
refracts the light, livening the limestone
below the island laurelled all in foam.
Though you hate to say it, you see meter.
The rhyme resounds, designed wisely.
But who knows the poet? Heathen holy men,
with a macabre carmen, called up the Stream-Sprite,
summoning the daemon. Dared you do likewise,
she’d wake from the stream-bed, stretching and straining,
light and droplets dripping from her hair
with breasts exposed, perilously pale.
If she didn’t drown you, damned for your daftness,
you’d raise your question, querying the maiden.
She’d seem surprised, puzzled and pond’rous,
as though you’d wondered, worrisome and witless,
over things patent, apparent and plain.
“You know the poet. He's not hiding.”
With shirking shoulders, shimmering and moist,
she’d turn to water, unwilling to wake
from her ancient silt-bed-- a sage, silent,
who exposed your lie, leaving you alone.
Clouds Are Like Clothing
Clouds are like clothing. The clear welkin--
its blanch and blue blended gently,
a brimful of bigness imbibed at once,
an unbounded beauty— can bend the soul
like a nude recumbent. It needs clothing
for safety’s sake. The silken sky,
lacking a landmark, is like the sea
descried from the crows-nest: the craven soul
will long to leap— to lose self-hood,
enclosed in the ether. Clouds clarify
like temple veils or tunic smocks
or tinted glasses, tempering beauties
that would savage if seen. Cirrus inscriptions,
like a soft Sanskrit, superscribe the sky.
They’re mostly air. Microscopic ice-flakes--
thirty to the litre— align for miles.
A cold camisole, they cover the sky
with a fine filigree. But farther below,
Cumulus courses— cauliflower-form,
the juicy giants, whose jangling bolts
clarion the gods. Clear-bordered clouds,
the cold carves them: condensation
conjures the sky into Ricotta cheese
or cotton-ball mountains that cover the air
with a blotchy blouse. A blinding veil,
constraining Stratus strangles light-fall.
Madd’ning monochromy, and minor scales,
and single malt, and the scent of soil,
and strong beauties are straight from Stratus.
It sprawls, spacious, and spills its draught
in thinnest doses on thirsty thatch.
A beautiful burka, it buries the sky
so that we, longing, may wait patient,
with a view heav’nward, for the veil to rend.
The Kiss’s Sound
Sunsets are noiseless. Sol the Sight-Bringer,
contented daily, his touch tempered,
kisses the cloud-line, clings to the horizon,
then glides homeward, happy in his heart.
His kisses are soundless— a sign and seal
to those who notice. He’s no mortal.
We have a weakness, wearisome and vain,
made clear in our kisses. The contact can’t--
the long lingering of lips applied--
provide a sound. Soft surfaces
collide lightly, aligning tight.
The four-fold lips laid up lengthwise
with a strained striving struggle to unite.
The pressing fails them, faint and feeble.
They’re still separate. Suddenly they turn,
with a slight suction (so unnoticed)
to draw downward— devilish designs--
to breath a body, to bury the lips
and soon a soul inside the lungs.
But still this suction, startling as it seems,
Is applied in silence— pluribus unum?
The powerful explosion, painful and piercing,
makes a shattering sound. The seal is severed.
A smack that wakes us woefully warns us
It’s a vain venture that invites failure
To make single, to amalgamate,
To erase the “and”— wrong and reckless.
But with the last sun’s fall,
That scrolls the welkin round,
We saints, in union all,
Will kiss and make no sound.
The Four Parts of the Day,
ad Ionathan Iacobum, in occasionem desponsationis
Dawn, dapple-cheeked, delicate featured,
bold-eyed bustle-bringer, unbinds her hair,
lets loose her locks, long and ginger-colored,
to clothe the clouds. Her clarion voice--
Chanticlier’s chanson, shimmer of finches,
or the hack of the squirrel in the high hawthorn--
raises creation, ripe and rested.
With the limbs of youth, lean and lanky,
she reaches round and wraps the world
in a soft embrace. Scents of saffron
and honeysuckled hedgerows hanging on her earlobes,
are pleasing perfume. The pearly speckles,
the night’s nectar, nickel-plated dewdrops
are gathered in hand by the girl of gold
who weaves in the welkin a watery crown
for her dear sister. Dazzling Daytime,
buxom, brazen-bodied, the bronze matron
of the wide and warm, walks out smiling
to the plaudits of starlings—plural playfellows.
Her platinum hair, plaited up with plooms
of soaring cirrus, settles on the world
like a heavy counterpane. Columnar cornstalks,
rye and rye-grass, rain-shy meadow-brome,
Timothy, tail-headed, tolerant barley,
and abundant wheat bask in her body-heat.
Consort to vocation, she calls to yoke
the twin-born team. Tawny farmers
dance with Daytime a dozen bourrées.
Handsome horologe, she heralds the change--
the colorful coming of her cool sister--
with the cry of cows, cream-filled and cramping,
desperate for twilight. Dusk, dark-headed,
with blood in her cheeks, a charming child
whose virgin brow reveals her veins
of pink and purple (painting the horizon)
arrives shyly— reticent rest-bringer.
Deer, her maidservants, modest as their mistress,
with ritualed reverence, raise and lower
Their lean faces. The lateral light
makes fustian fabric of a field’s surface--
a textured tunic for her tender form.
A copse of cedars casts its contours
in lengthy shades— the lowered lashes
of her hazel eyes. Home-going husbands,
day-weary fathers, devotees of dusk,
trace her fingers— the trampled trails
from field to fire-side. Her finest hour
is the illumined last. As she leaves the earth,
her sharp shoulder-blades show through the veil:
Mars and Venus mark the moment
of Dusk’s egress. In the east, the Night,
eager if ancient, in an inky dress
with opal beading, opens her wimple.
Her artful hair, argentine and onyx,
token of her age, ably curtains
the empyrean eye. And Io’s horn
is an aperture opened in her ample collar,
an alabaster key-hole that asks us glimpse
at the eastern edge of her egg-white breast.
Toadstools, in homage, offer in equiform
an oval temple, opened overnight,
in Ionic order. Like obverse stars,
Her impish torch bearers— iridescent fire-flies--
With green impulse intimate the grass-blades,
illustrate the tree-leaves. The ill-lit hour
of her westward exit is embryonic--
all but silent, all but sightless.
But lo, eastward, even as we speak,
An azureous aspect abrogates her hour.
Her ebony train, evident at last,
elegantly hemmed, with an edge of lace,
itching the horizon, is in an instant gone.
On Discovering that Venus Can Make Shadows
In the pitchy pre-dawn (pupils like portals,
colour-blind and clamb’ring) I cling tightly
to hazy half-lights. Huddled electrons
rouse from slumber my retinal rods.
Grasses in greyscale, growing clearer,
reward an eye that's willing to wait.
The eastern face of a fescue blade
collects some light. Its linear shade
dims the darkness with a deeper hue.
A thumb-sized limestone—likewise illumined--
variates the void with a veil of shadow.
The blocked light-fall blotches the blackness.
A dappled darkness of differing shades
implies a light source. But Luna’s lamp,
in first quarter, fizzled in the horizon
around midnight. Maybe morning
has stirred early. I stare eastward,
and the featureless sky-line, an enforced blindness,
says dawn is distant. But a diamond light,
a stream of lumens, like a star, but steady--
Cytherean sunshine—saturates the landscape.
Availed of Venus, the vast night-scape
teams with texture. Tuffets and low-spots
form a grain of greys in the grass-thick lawn.
The shadows are sharp: a shining point
makes no penumbra. Normal sun-shadows
have a faint aureole— a fuzzy frontier
where fulsome light-waves make foam and spray.
But these are hard-edged like hands on clocks.
Sea-born Venus sets a sun-dial
of sticks and stones. Her sterile father--
potent Chronos—empowers her light
as she tells, by shadows, the tenor of time.
But an Hour arrives, wrapping her in robes
of reds and pinks and her pale pen-light,
is dressed and dimmed in a drape of day.
Lapis Lazuli
The boast of Badakhshán— the beige mountains,
like jaundiced arches in Tajik terrace-farms,
like sepia sentries, sentinels with veins
on sinewy forearms— circumscribe the source:
the singular stronghold, in Sar-i-Sang,
of Afghan lazurite— Lapis Lazuli,
aureoled azure, absolute blue.
Neolithic nomads, negligent of safety,
moved by lucre, made for Pamir,
headed for Imeon, heedless of the heights.
Sumerian masons, master stone-cutters,
Ishtar’s image-makers, imitating nature,
bartered for the blue, begged for the bead-stuff--
life-like lazurite— to lay the eyes
of the prayerful priest, a prized sculpture
in the house of Astarte. Still and staring,
the alabaster abbot, Ashtoreth’s attendant
in the town of Mari, motionless as his mistress,
invoked the idol, irises sky-like,
heralded his Lady, hailed her with the hue
of the blue bead-burden borne upon her breast.
For Ishtar’s jewels and his jocund eyes
were made of Lapis: in the mythic tablets
Utnapishtim, parent of Gilgamesh,
witnessed Ishtar, white with anger,
take the Lazurite— tectonic token,
mineral reminder— from her milky throat
and swear boldly, “beads of Badakhshán,
witness my sadness, my sons sunken,
bedraggled daughters, and drowned children;
so neither you, near my nakedness,
nor the flood of creation, will flee my mind.”[1]
The blue that bound her is a blessed symbol,
a diluvian testate, lithic league-marker,
Sumerian rainbow. Milled to microns,
Smashed to pulver, pounded into powder,
the precious gem-stone was a prized pigment.
Servants of the silk-road, Saracen traders,
settled on a price. Pious painters,
mindful of their subject, sought the substance
in the Age of Grace. The ground pigment
mixed with egg-yoke— an amazing sight,
the blue in a binding, blinding in its beauty--
painted on pine-board, pulled along the creases,
feathered along the folds, faintly on the high points
of a maiden’s drape (a maid and mother)
reminded millions—myriad faithful--
of the tender Theotokos and the Tiny Babe.
And the City of Zion, set upon the heights--
above Badakhshán as beech is briar--
has a sounder sign; it’s sealed with blue
from the veins of Christ, crimson when spilt.
[1] From the Epic of Gilgamesh XI.165
The New Moon
The infant moon, mewing at the morning,
awakes unseen. She suckles sunbeams.
The Greater Light, unlikely nurse
to the night’s sov’reign, soothes the satellite.
He walks her ‘round, all wrapped in rays
for swaddling bands, borne in a bundling
of heavy daylight that hides her face
from the lower worlds. Walking westward,
the Lesser and the Greater leave a longitude,
hide a hemisphere, in unhindered shade.
The stars, overburdened, burn but badly,
like sulphur matches in a sunless cell.
They labour like subjects, lost for a leader,
in an interregnum. The regent child--
dimpled darling— dims a surface
to our night and day. But our near neighbour,
Love’s Luminary, looks to the infant
and sees sunlight. The satellite shines--
like babies elsewhere— with rebounding beams
from a doting nurse, dousing Venus
with light expressed by the Prince of Day.
Tellus, over time, turns the infant
and sees her change. A charming child,
she’s long and gaunt and lights but little.
As she grows, she lingers and her light widens.
Her maiden body, bowing in its borders,
is feminine and fulsome at fifteen days
(her days like years in a young girl’s life).
In majesty, the monarch, making eye-contact--
veritably shameless, though her shape is shown--
invites our gaze. So we view, ling’ring:
Her form, weighty, affects our flight.
Her gravity grips us, gradually slowing
tellurian motion to match her own.
Tellus, tenderly (her tempo slowed)
will catch at her cousin for countless years.
Maybe by microseconds, but our morn arives
later and later, and Luna’s phase
faster, though unfelt, conforms slowly
to Tellus’s orbit. Tidal forces
will pull on the pair till a pas de deu--
or a corps a corps— consummates the union
of the night’s sov’reign and her near kinsman
in the last epoch of the lower worlds.
And if that Dreadful Day
cuts short this dance for two,
what more might heaven say
when it and earth are new?
