The Sorrow And The Pretty, A Proem Upon 'the Fallen Chrysanthemums' - Confessions Of Nightingale, One Who Did Not Leap Poem by Warren Falcon

escape to chrysanthemum

clouds

now too too crowded

for six falling, the sad young
men who leap from bridges:

Tyler Clementi, Raymond Chase,
Asher Brown, Billy Lucas, Seth Walsh,
Justin Aaberg


Chrysanthemums in hand
clutched for support:
the pale boys silently leap

They spoke no word
The host, the guest,
And the white chrysanthemum. - Ryota, haiku master

...descend and of the curveship lend a myth to God. - from To Brooklyn Bridge

What does a man come to with his virility gone? - Walt Whitman

He sought for his beautiful body
and encountered his opened blood
Do not ask me to see it! - Federico Garcia Lorca


*

Even the pigeons on my stoop are silent now.

One mourning dove coos tenderly for these who have taken their own lives publicly on our behalf, for untold scores gone before them with broken hearts enraged, no more to engage the unpersuaded world which, one of them, one of the public ones, in spite of murmuring wharves, in spite of amorous dark alleys bitter in the pitch in the hateful American Twentieth Century, Hart Crane, wrote before his leap from the ship beside the phallic curve where Cuba meets the lisping sea, took his tongue away which sang to us of chill dawns breaking upon bridges whose spans still freely splinter light returning hungover from night wharves' grottoes and denim grasps, World Wars' industrial embraces crushing every man, and now another one abandons his fingers and fiddling, o scattering light, takes flight from ledges to edge close to an embrace no longer forbidden—

And so it was I entered the broken world to trace the visionary company of love... - Hart Crane

I am at the Way of Peace Bistro, not your favorite place I remember—unkind to queens and Miss Things —but the server whose cousins are the famous Wolf Boys in Jalisco, Mexico, hirsute himself, gives me free double espressos for very large tips, of course, and it is not as populated here on Saturdays with the braying brunch crowds, their hammers for pinkies poised...besides, the server just yesterday came out to me in my confessional booth here at the perpetually wobbly table in the far corner at the cracked window rocking with Hart's un-confessed bones wrapped in soothing silt which he now dreams to be his silken pall. Life is indeed strange above the veiled bottom. I do receive confessions here p.r.n. ('as needed, ' in medical jargon) and at my other, now, confessional spots, the usual cafes I weekly haunt for chasing down dreams, waves, receding horizons...why, I wonder, is each window where I sit cracked?

I am the itinerant priest who sits at meager feasts. Suffering congregants (servers, busboys, cooks, regulars forlorn over their starfish and soup) , when their fellows are removed to basement or kitchen or groceries, come to me, ask about a dream, confess to some anguish or other, ask what should be done or undone. I consult espresso foam, open the nearest book willy nilly to see what advice or wisdom might be gained from that Eternal Logos sustaining us all here straining after some meaningful thing to keep us going when Hart and those too recent others obey some impulse to place at last the final period, reifiying the punctuate though unrepentant ending of this too too long run-on sentence of hate. One hopes this period holds fast, that Logos/meaning is somehow, plates of starfish with fork and knife beside, true or truing, at least.

One serves where needed. And when. So come unto me you sad young men...All the news is bad again so kiss your dreams goodbye.

Here at my confessional I can only plead mercy upon the gay boys of late who have jumped from bridges, hung themselves, cut, sliced, diced their sad and abused compulsive hands, exploded hearts, leaping dears, eyes ablaze in thrall of antlers, trembling flanks strong to fly decrying the violent hunt which always ends with a death, bequeathing these chopped bits to me and those others like me who remain at table, plates before, to stare at what is there to be later scattered, sown, those pieces in and for Love-without-name or, if named, is still a stain upon confused local deities, their wide-eyed supplicants, but there is no stain upon the promiscuous sea. The compliant sky is not confused, neither is all that is between confused, allowing birth and blessing, passing of all kinds in all manner of motive and motion. But in the human world, distressing, there will be more boys, more men growing up as from the very beginning where earliest enmity mythically grew strong before shoes, before hearts were capable of breaking before turgid theological floods spilled blood of brother by brother turning witness stones toward silence, echoing lamenting Federico:

Do not ask me to see it! I don't want to see it. I will not see it!

My Tale Of Vales And Valences, Mountain And Manhattan

On the edge over the bee-loud Blue Ridge valley all apples and manure shining, flashing of green-tailed flies, before further exile, I escaped nightly to work, late ward sits as an attendant at the local psychiatric hospital, wee hours reading poets of the world who like Liu Tsung-yuan - 'just give me fine wine and friends who will often help me pour' - turned woes into ancient hymns and overtones. After one fateful graveyard shift all night reading Basho Matsuo's Narrow Road to the Deep North, in dawn's hut I begot to stumble-bed visions of pagodas and temples, fog-draped mountain passes, high peaks - names like Dismal Crouch and Turn Around Fool - spare anthems such are haiku, chrysanthemums in my head 8 a.m - 'chysanthemum' means 'golden flower, ' 'gold' = chrysos, and 'anthemum' = 'flower' which, by the way, holds an anthem within - with such a mind full I dreamed a Great Mountain voice shouting, 'Go away! ' and that was enough for me. Where I'm not wanted I don't stay so I made plans to flee. I followed my exiled self into further exile, Deep North, a symbolic defiant suicide-by-New-York-City.

All this the above said may make me sound like I was a bad-ass but that's not true. Irreverent, yes. And bluster. Bluster counts here as disguise for I was pretty. Not handsome. Prettiness counts for much in youth, in older age it is (sadly) sacrificed for Beauty.. A necessary assault in order to grow wise. Wisdom comes from loss and blood, always of the Moon.. Even gorgeous buds must go. Nature says it so. And we can and should protest their going but in older age one loses energy to fight so gives in to what is 'just so.' In sorrow sore, in broken mendicant hearts, having touched tenderly and tasted the binding buds, wisdom is born.

But pretty boys make for an awful confusion amongst men, a real trouble, and, yes, violence verily. Men like pretty in their women but find it most disturbing in boys and young men. Then Golden Flowers are crushed, 'righteously' so. Chapter and Verse. Sanctified wrath against sublime wraiths-most-lovely wars and destoys. It is by polite and holy society 'of the male born' considered a duty harsh, justified, manly and rushed, that the feminine is preserved and men are saved from tempting male beauty.

In most forbearing mountains thus I hid my blushing pretty at war with myself (having internalized the Christian cultural fulminant Funda-fomentalism) . But one must not in mountain world surpass even their beauty, or their pretty. They win such wars by time which wears down flesh and minds. Respectful of this then, and gladly, while in their secure embrace, I cultivated both god and verse hunkering down in remote cabin shade. There I braved the pretty and the beautiful by day - the bluet, the rhododendron, the trillium, the mountain laurel - to boldly reveal them ahead of the inexorable shadows that mountains make because that one and only golden Sun, ours, flowers only-danced in shortened pretty skies bluet-blue, because those who know mountains true know that valleys are king and sunlight is brief tip to top, and in the between-brief span brightness stops both Sun and seer mid-afternoons.

And obedient, some of us, the pretty ones (then) , to the sheltering darkness get. Much may be done between 10 a.m and 4 but then shuts the revelation door, the valley/the veil resumes its reign. There both pretty and beauty pander to stained human palettes painfully returning as did I to fire or bulb light for all Beauty burns away to shadow (only in memory Beauty stays) . One develops night vision to see it. Thus did I work the night surrounded by others tears, lost their pretty selves the youths of wards and afterwards, and also those in tenements the old, the homeless Good Will-ed, for such now my verse is bestowal most holy gentle upon their sleeping faces, chrysanthemums each a pretty a beauty, black buds made mad with themselves the blunted social world could not contain.


*


No matter whose hood and gauntlet we come through slaughter.
The nightingale's song and the raptor's scream are complicit.
How to eulogize the lost? How speak for those whose lips are dust? how balance the books of love and death? Endless song would be required; a text to span the spinning earth and all the human creatures, weeping and striving.

I read your confession, Nightingale.
My window too is cracked, but I heard you singing.
I pray those souls you love and loved have also their hearing. - Brian Purdy