Upstay the course, the wood is vast,
beasts there chitter, in dark amass;
fabrefaction—blade from bone,
amarulence to the thorny throne.
Ramiferous lanes, newly cleaved,
swift through, gather fallen leaves.
And in the clearing, xylem stacked,
by sanguine tongues, the ochre wracked.
Tawny char there howls ablation;
the raze but kindling, for creation.
He was a creator of talent rare, whose works earned great reknown,
and jealousy in equal measure, from those much lower down.
He labored beneath a city vast, ruled by lust and grift and gun,
where much work was accomplished, to ensure little else was done.
Shortly, a savage band assembled, around the maker’s domain,
with precious little consistency, official concern was feigned.
“His wonders he shares not yet enough, and so unto the flame,
his worldly arts and life, to avenge the affliction of our shame.”
Loosed from the throng were feral cries, as the fire ate all away,
“The villain was at long last dead, the people have won the day!”
Yet months after that fateful encounter, without the maker’s sway,
confidence in the system’s operation began a sure decay.
Despondent, a former acolyte of the creator, sat a lonesome bar,
and drank in mournful silence, and dreamed of faring far.
There in the corner he spied, suddenly, a odd man, robed and pale,
who seemed somewise familiar, and so he gave him hail.
The stranger raised his head, and to the drinker’s great surprise,
found none other than the maker—xanthous luster in his eyes.
“Tell me, man, what are you, that could escape that fiery suit?”
The maker turned to the souse and answered: “I am absolute.”
Under cyclonic skies,
where no owls sling;
upon brawny boughs,
where no doves sing;
over roiling wastes,
where no eagle flies,
there, the scene,
where the serpent shall rise.
Sat the abyss,
the blue marble shines,
stony step of
a steep stair to climb.
Red god and lover,
first to be tread,
that decrepit Jove’s laurels,
may, thorough, be shred.
Reaved the caduceus,
sandals unwinged,
progeny freed
from Ops’ consort’s rings.
Thereafter, the father,
by sickle undone,
reposing before,
the horse master’s run.
Wrest be the horn,
from old Ploutos’ gloom,
that death may die,
in Aevum’s bloom.
Dead men speak from living maws,
as cordyceps, rampant, affixing jaws.
Gnashing flesh of self and kin,
rending veins for phantom sin.
Their funhouse mirror reflects no face,
no eyes to chart the charnel waste.
Yet, from the blind, keen cheers abound,
libations for the hungry ground.
As the last lichling tumbles in,
a eulogy from vast Cybele’s skin:
Wormrotted husks neither excel nor flee;
the apex of equitable unity.
Auric wings, undulant
Fierce, the torch alights;
Unhindered by the zephyr
That roils on the heights
Empyrean forge, prolific
Unveiled in umbral flight
Bares iron talons, adamant
To encircle endless night.
Sculpted stone to rend the meal
It the mind to bake the wheel
Culinary engines whirl and pur
No captive to the hungry fur
Thence to mine the tynes of night
To cast the seeds up to the heights
His scalding words accost the court
In chitin—pitch’d—with dark cavorts
Cocottes scattered—cloisters cracked
Quenchless gyre’s consumption wracked
His tower high, over the dead
Blossoming fog—past colors fled.
The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one:
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
—Francis William Bourdillon (1852–1921)
From Virtue’s blissful paths away
The double-tongued are sure to stray;
Good is a forth-right journey still,
And mazy paths but lead to ill.
—by Charles Brockden Brown (1798). Wieland, T. & J. Swords, H. Caritat, New York.
HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
by W.B. Yeats
Written by Anne Bradstreet¹—the ‘Empress Consort of Massachusetts’²—July 10th, 1666 after the burning of her house. Copied from The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry (Columbia University Press, 1995).
¹Anne Dudley Bradstreet (1612-72) was a prominent North American poet and scholar. She wrote extensively and was widely read in both America and England. Her writing is exemplary of Puritan plain style and was influenced by the Huguenot courtier-poet, Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas. A memorial marker stands in her honor at Old North Parish Burial Ground, North Andover, Massachusetts.
²Rosemary M. Langlin. (1970) Anne Bradstreet: Poet in search of a Form. American Literature vol 42, no 1, Duke University Press.
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