This poem is for four poets, among many others, but have
profoundly influenced my worldview, selfview, and voice:
for four poets - Robert Duncan,
Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and
Grandfather Walt Whitman
Where is that Spirit which living blamelessly
Yet dared to kiss the smitten mouth of his own century?
- Oscar Wilde, from 'Humanitad'
Love, when you biting tear the ear of my hearing
bear me then upon a steel altar by hammers tongued.
Estranged men hard slam their bodies upon
what Shine's there, flares each punch metal
to metal reinventing the last century or the
one before - this man and this other now into
Man/Woman-forged-new-culture, allow simple
hand in hand, no demand/punish upon any 'Other',
no price in-breath or out but allow public all
possibilities of once hidden worlds.
Knotted muscle, nerved cord, by heart and heat
implore/defy no sky nor pliant dirt deny but cloy,
hand in hand require only dissolution of the Old
Masters tyranny by Numbers insistent upon reduction,
odd waters trail calcinations/calculations-bodies
born of even water into mists, continuously reft
from Given, riven from Dream, such freed from
virtual into literal placenta and spleen, striven
history reshaped redeems a value once consigned to
Hell-realms confining dark thoughts to matter.
But only one
just finger,
dark, traces
delicate
a lace
conforms
forehead tip
to nose
then wet
lips
rose-swollen
with happy
use cries
and
barriers
break,
surge in
to new
terrain.
Does not it all bear
the familiar arc say,
of just-dawn color,
mauve-play at the liminal
curve where sky beseeches
bounded space to give
its shapeless-nest a
Cause, a nape conformed/
convex from Orbis what
has been scored by breath
pressed upon it?
Who then falsely may decree
any matted clot, spark-charged,
blood engorged, may not body-charge
ahead and into 'other' merge so
must be flung expurged behind
neglected Moon or plunged through
the bruised ring of abjected Space?
Hear me now
Thrice trace
an outline
Give form to
now dust me (I am)
awakening surprise
Here me how
there
and there
and yet
there again,
after hammers,
caressed
aureoles
and hosannas
outward turn
***