Totem For Autumn Nights - Blunted Inscriptions Of Impermanence Poem by Warren Falcon

[NOTE: Asterisks ** denote footnotes to be found at the end of the poem]

for/to Walter Christian Schell,
died October 7,2008,
and now for Holly Blacky,
died July 13,2016—both beyond the veil


'Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element...
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the hush'**
—Allen Tate



Totem for auto nights
in flagrante,


Tempests
not understood,


barely withstood,
massive pagan
quakes there


where sap does
rise born again


long of old half-dreams
boned aromas,


pines adolescent amonias
sticky there

where tarred groin-boy
aches, patient,


limb to limb,
squints
holding


weight and breath


without complaint


or brakes



Whereas once of spinning stars docked,
the spillway Galaxy spins out,


or tries,


its star-child every night for a week,
from-front-seat-from-back, breaches


Nova - a star's sudden bright increase
swells, slowly inward turns, burns back


to original hover over some months
then settles half-past-and-beyond


Carolina


before Interstate 85 was ever



of blue and grey, states blue or red,
this morning's metrics convey the
once-were-living too very late to
Poesy, to stained cemetery angels'
questioning sentinels leaning whitely
into space rendered mere gestures
in the dusk.


They conjure abstract eternity from
years ahead of our deaths as if we
had already passed on.


Just what is it the meek shall inherit, after all?


Such is mythos - the inheritance,
and the transcendence, of dirt —


First hurts hurt us into conscious selves,
thereafter the losses, the embossing scars
we call character—glyphic scratches on
cave walls such are brain pans. Only bones
remain which in their stiff muteness provoke
the volumes we call Myth, Religion, History,
Art—blunted inscriptions of impermanence,


precise and precipitous prescriptions for
living, we think, free while leaving that
'stained white radiance'** eventually stumbling,
foolishly surprised each time, into all our
grave or urn or scatter greeted everly by


'the conquering worm'**—


so goes the Funeral March's drum


Tum tum ta-tum

___________

**from 'Ode to the Confederate Dead' by Allen Tate

**—from 'Adonais' by Percy B. Shelley
'Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
stains the white radiance of eternity,
until Death tramples it to fragments.'

**riff on Edgar Allen Poe's poem title, The Conqueror Worm