LIVE FREE OR DIE

 

The Old Man of the Mountain--

Is he what Daniel Webster

Chose to call a Real man?

He stares across the notch,

Past the peregrine cliffs,

And into the blind vistas

Of his own granite eyes.

 

It is we who attribute

To the crag his Persona,

Derived from the images

We cast upon our storm-blasted

Aggregates of Clinging.

 

Trembling with this vision,

Like mountaineers we sway

From the stakes and the cables

We drive into the Rushmores

We have not yet conquered,

Yet scale in our presumption.

 

When Jefferson looked up

At the Old Man of the Mountain,

The Old Man looked down

and laughed a mocking laugh

that echoes from the White Mountains’

jagged slopes, even to this day.

 

APRIL IS HER NAME

  

Across the patio

wheel eddies of white blossoms

from the Bradford Pears.

 

Hunched in the vinca

by the wind-shaken flagpole,

the female duck nests.

 

The petals’ fragrance

reeks like some decaying mole

a dog finds lovely.

 

The noon hour drifts

before the door in fragments

fallen from the sun.

 

            NATURAL HISTORY

  

The Horseshoe Crab has really been misnamed,

According to the experts, who should know;

But common sense forbids us to be shown

That ticks and mites must somehow share it’s fame.

We find these crabs in copulative chains

On inland beaches at the full moon’s rise,

In late spring at the thrust of evening’s tide;

To us it seems that lust has made them slaves.

Sometimes one lies upon its carapace,

And waves its spiny tail and crawly legs;

You flip it over, so that it can drag

Its skeleton where tracks cannot be traced.

Three hundred million years without a change!

The Trilobite once spawned within its range. 

 

                        THE ANGER OF GOD

 

     “Hellish fire or love comes from the same source

     as heavenly fire or love—from heaven’s sun, or the

     Lord. However, it is made hellish by the people who

     receive it.” Heaven And Hell, section 569.

 

Why does the Body Electric

Cease to flow with the urge—

Bursting into cinders

With an uncontrollable surge?

 

Look at the Good Grey Poet,

Paralyzed in a wheelchair--

Paraded around the country

Like an idol they prepared.

 

What glamour deludes them

That Freedom has no consequence?

Still searching for that Promised Land,

They stare out in a trance—

 

Consumed with lust and greed,

Strip-mining purple mountains

And smothering the prairies

With flesh of butchered bison.

 

Whose Name do they call upon,

Kneeling to their false desires?

Damnation cleaves the sky

With pyrotechnic fire.

 

Their separate selves they sing,

Yet utter the word Democracy—

In virtual wastelands condemned

To wander and grope blindly.

 

Have the flames of Heavenly Love

Turned hellish in their breasts,

Casting them into the furnace

Of their own self-righteousness?