[ars poetica]
angry that, Bernice’s lock
doth no one show, who think
that to “get it off your chest”
is all, meaning of, sitting
for hours for the noonday
class the wine growing tepid
the oblong shadow, of doubt,
of fear and the Man, over how
many days the epic struggles
first in hashed latin then
in obbligato cinquecento prose
finally as an after struck to
the unsounded chord, the rampant
shield aloft sun’s glint the
Eye doth dart, hovering behind
clauses of rejection, pink stray
pages can go nowhere, isn’t that
what? essentially at war with
syntax, with the elemental
emotion, ghosts, who rhyme
with darkness pleasure’s ancient
ore, is it the peacocks in tumult
for rage and scorn alike?
is it for Mnemosyne the muse
of pearl-green hue?
is it for the variegated bloom
that adorns the suffix fair?
for whom is this catastrophe
of orange-red dust and powders?
is it heaven-sent we come to flail
among thunderstone and cliff?
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who come to study not life
but its mundane chores and charnel
house the whores delectable a
prize in midden-heaps for those
that counting is the only game
for those who cannot above prose
rise, is it not hell their one
and only fane the boulevards
of littered prosody, come then
away to groves and shrines
where mystery, to dreams that
through cloud scrapes break!
here, admit “I do not understand”
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is it to purple luster bruise
the Ear in sweet remorse doth tend?
how then does the assassin sing?
whence these Harpies to whom Meat
doth cling? Ah No more
quod I in shrouded verse aspire
the elysian fields to espy
the dire moly and asphodel to eat
isn’t that what warned us once
to remove from sight th’Infernal
and in meadows bleak to ply
the unsown shadows of dead the
angels who in Hell conspire
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who will no more come summer’s
plush to enjoy nor lake and mere
beside what slight waves in breeze
ruffled move in some small sleep
who dreaming in choirs vast
of languages radiant and beyond
gyres that tumbling round the
shafts of darker planet’s score
warriors cleft from the Lamp
face down in miasmic gore, did
this one remember ever May’s
bright? in hospitals gather
by bedside verse and to archaic
statues implore what Grief!
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is it to love the flower the many-
sided in winds swaying how sweet
remembrances in azure crystallize
and die
“remember Me” doth Narcissus
slake his breath in depthless Pool
doth Hyacinth then lament
upon his shepherd’s rock
the day-long grass of tears
and rent his cloak in briars
running like one Mad
into the fierce Unknown
is it to love then, Heart?
how words woven take on their own
subsiding never,
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
now recline and die Thy little death
it is to Love, was once by might
taken suspended High above
while in the foaming spent of eons
the years unnumbered went
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“doth ever Rose so swoon and pale?”
—Ivan Arguelles