POLYPHEMUS

  

Throughout this fabled country of the free,

And dominating every living room,

There squats a Cyclops sentry guard to whom

All dwellers in each cavern must concede

A backward posture, so that his eyebeam

May cast upon the darkened wall shadows,

Which take the shapes of things they cannot know--

And this is how they realize their dreams.

 

But woe unto the man who sues for grace

In meditation, or who longs to hold

Communion with a living human face!

He winces, when upon the cave’s damp mold

They worship an electrical device,

And in that trance envision Paradise.

 

THE TWILIGHT LANGUAGE

 

Before the sun sets, the landscape grows dense

And darkens into ambiguity.

 

All objects take on a significance

At once familiar and hard to see.

 

What we dismissed as nothing new or strange—

Trees, stone, moss, fences, sky, stars, grass, river—

Speak to our hearts in the twilight language.

 

The boundaries of our bodies quiver,

And we dissolve like raindrops in the sea.

 

A lightning flash illuminates the gloom

Of all our furtive, momentary dreams.

 

The mudras of the pine boughs pierce the moon’s

Mandala and the mantra of the wind

Chants wordless tones that still the storm within.

 

JANUARY SEEMINGS

  

Today my brains

are like clouds

in a windswept sky.

 

Without concentration

they bounce about my skull

like a roomful of ping-pong balls.

 

Perhaps it was the blizzard,

and all those feet of snow

that walked round my house for hours--

 

stood on the roof, waiting,

till that old arctic wind

blew them off into a break-dancing

 

frenzy in mid-air: Fancy footwork,

disintegrating in wild

self-abandonment to the windswept sky--

 

scattered like brain-clouds

through January’s gray Mind

of trackless amplitudes.