Poems on the Soul

I. Ars Poetica

Away with rhyme -- rhyme, the method of the madness
Away with iambics, the clods
Away with paratactic, adjectival glee -- give
Us a poem of nouns, straight up -- of nouns aligned with verbs;
No adverbs, no description,
An only not often qualified phrase, so the poem
Becomes lucid, clairvoyant, naked of artifice, gilding,
To tread on the trembling grapes; this is the brambling entrance
(What poor players are we)
To a poetry of pure philosophy.

II.

Soul, not
Extraordinary toucan in an iron cage,
Rage of life, indisoluble from atoms, you who, scattered
Through time, somehow breathe forth unity of thought
Like letters that spell out a word
Too low for my lips, fundament to heartbeat,
Subtler than vision, toneless melody

In tribulation, diatribe when you
Or I touch the glass ceiling of constelled
Patterns, trying, tracing
Some purpose in a void pierced twice
By the flow of the rising globes, and when they set
Into sleep, reforming
Dreams and the monsters that suck by the tides,
Some perched on the cliffs,
Insatiable of singing, vapors, mists,
So like we:

Begin the jump in infinity, skip the ruckus
Of the players, twice, skud the backdrops,
Lift the curtains and reveal
Frail and fragrant ripple of the stars.

III.

There is no journey, soul, no body
For the beautiful ascension, studded with
Diamonds, sapphires born in the heart
Of flaming rocks, gold-cast, edified with eddying
Silver that spirals into vortexes, vectors,
Fractals of the blackened infinite.

You are my pulse, soul,
Tides of my vision,
The waxings and wanings of my mind.
It will swallow you up.

If we did scoop pitchers into the infinite, my soul
It would neither be relinquished nor replaced;
No fish of silver fins awaits that hook:
It is the place of our return, from whence we came.

IV.

A few words on love, my soul:
You yearn to dip yourself in this lake,
Rendered three corners of sky, and a quarter
Mottled earth, from which it is true lilies bloom
In their first spring delicacy, but also the chicory
With its bitter fibers, and the caltrop, hateful to cattle.

There is plenty of crushed beauty,
The pleasure of a long coffee
And after. I'll even admit that it serves as a kind of return:
Cool waters spread across the body and wash away
The sweat, the dirt; the feverous heat of living
Subsides from the neck, leaks from the brain as when
A colander, sifting hearty meal,
Drains the brine from the carrots,
The softening celery from soup, so limp and hearty
Mush remains; nevertheless,

It is not the flight of birds that encircles that island
Of gloom and retreat: with its swoop of silvery wings
You'll crash into the earth, limbs buried in dirt,
Diaphanous, growing to seed:

There is a lake in the heart of the twilight,
The aspens shield it from the winter,
Clear and placid, crusted with snow, bristling
From the winds' assaults, long, and heavy with age;
And their branches clatter in the stillness, sirens whisper.