CONTINUAL
... when Th'Morning, wet & green,
once the Will's thin crystal
now: Silence's brooks tinkling
with th'snap of soundness
as ripe as rotten, more rush
than blush: Time's soaking syntax
down glaciers of the Actual
grasps the soaring hair of Rain,
the damp brilliance of the dry Sun
made frost at its unsuspected turbulence:
each tear a stair of Time's welling
& wept out of memory's rotted remains:
Ruin hardly running --Truth at its timeliest trill
out of Death's implicit
thrust from every sapling just sprung:
The Past's shining ashes,
The Future's frenzied swords
spices instead of Justice,
Worry's awkward walks & other groping
quivers rendered red numb
disgorging gales in the blood
sparkling! in th'harp-like melting muscles of snow
at the daisy's edge, or weed's shimmering rhythms
tracing the unsteady, breathing waves
of an amazing name
across What's wild weathers,
deep into Wrath's great Grave:
Love's smiling extortions,
lost amongst Regret's grappling laughters,
those unnerving backdrops of Man's firmament
sweeping away Eternity's astonished troops
where Harvests of The All convene ...
... There All Origins begin :
taking its time towards splendor
Dawn leaves sprinkling their dew...
Creation's unending pains
saturate forests and plains
and all wonted spanking Shapes
that their ordinary forms renew
while Youth looks, as yet dispassionately, to Th'Sky
(leaving it to The Future tears
of some more sanguine Dawn to resolve Th'Why
that, armored, murmurs at its ear,
trails in its gaze)...
This is The Stream
like some formless sadness
diluting The Boundlessly sublime
into well-balanced Madness
at eventide
--Yet, still morningtide, it
launders th'beaches, th'Woods and the plains,
washing forever the living (refrain,
vivid echoes and rhythms)
replenishing/replenished by
secretly slain Shades & Shadows of days far & wide
where once--ominous mansions
now countless white horses
through dusky cathedrals tread
disturbing ghosts-of-waves (long dead)
whose tails now make the Musics of th'deepest
Slime intertwined in death-struggle with Time
in a crushing refusal to climb ( up
th'plaintive) stairs of desperate human hopes
eternal-high cascade
of Midnights Ever-after braid
into The Singular, sunny brocade of Life's
interdependencies ...
Continuity refurbishes its form
(even its old embodiments of stone
gain all-new disguises
in th'reactions) ... Cataracts are tempered
by Th'Solar Fires above (below
robustious-bodied Stream blindly keeps rushing on!
as if it were a closed-eyed dream seeing no end
Dawn, or Tomorrow) ... and
those things that may: contend & struggle
until, by & by, Continuity
wears down Th'Forms of action, even, until
some newer, some more settled Eternity supplants The Old
... muttering oblivion, white horses tread ...
sounds of almost winning eyes
unseeing, unmoved, yet entwining
eyes through th'cathedrals
of Reality, where a choir of silent judges
sits, softly!... waves along the eternally unmoved
shore: all white horses
retiring to the distance which, O never goes
away, say only that white horses
in the distance, neigh, because ever does
th'current Stream
find newbloom Ways upon this Present
where momentarily stands ... Youth!
to cheer the Gloom and Numbness
(only) of its own stagnant Doom
or blindness... where no roses
bloom, too soon, too soon only white horses
rushing out onwards across its dreams just to be gone:
Left is the puddle prophesying Man
soaking The Night in its dead waters Th'Twilights
while no Emperor Firefly his Splendor turns
his kindness like a strike
at The Dark, silent cathedrals
with their broken urns of wasted centuries
assembled motionless as if to judge
what Dreams pass to,
what Hopes refuse to budge...
Darkness (at its mute podium of stars
clasping th'brief spilling of Light
by mere fingernails, though
countless & countless) ...
Darkness endures Th'Space (for Night)
walking on Twilights all star-masked
around th'shadows of The Light
to find replies for what life asked
or will ask because/despite...
How full, how far must life blaze to
before at last The Light shines through
... nor Distance can out-distance Time
as to The Stillness of Th'Unknown
it overflows (with th'Golden Rime
of glacial Grace's monotone)
How full, how far must life blaze to
before at last The Light shines through
Yet, to the murmurs of toy stones
& Foes (of fun) we raise our Hell
until all that remains is Moans
heard softly above The mortal Swell, still
Still, still, still, You Stream
unceasingly continue to grow on & on
(beyond what Mankinds will approve,
beyond convergence of Man's brook
with the wan weed Expanse! which will not move
out of his Speed's impudent look)
Stream knowing no other way
to resolve Infinite Day
... such-same unyielding Currents go
to their unrecognized demise
in the perplexity of Flow
that cannot give over because it has no Goal
rising to Evening, falling to Sunrise
while stumbling to many a Whole
& yet surmounting with a roar!
... winding & winding, through & through
around its tangled complications ...
until, lastly, even The Ultimate is through
with its futile emotions
and Wind-swept Songs of Once & Today
the yawned Tomorrow,
Progress widely
laced with its so careless Passions
only too reckless fashions, O heavens
Heavens, it seems, surely our soul is always
lawned with cool, discontinued actions!
for the inhuman Stream, which knows no other form
of falling but existence, and goes Onwards!
much more profoundly than Comprehension,
smoothing th'surface tension beyond
on its way not to the end but to the mean
as if completely unaware it is Itself
that corrugates into being waves which then overwhelm
with their Herculean minuteness
butterflies' too vulnerable wings
gliding so closely
to The Peril of its Urge
... And, notice how the endless fields
cannot contain Progress' streams
though every last derelict drop yields
to the dry influence of dreams:
They never stop to battle out
th'loftly cliff upon the way
& yet they motion-on sans Doubt
and are past it the following day...
while pointless Man stands all alone upon the quicksands
of his own empty, momentary, arbitrary breath
& to th'Voids ad-libs upon, "How long
has Something lived before its point of death?"
... Indeed, how short a point
does meaningful Death make!
Maybe the drop your finger scoops out of Today
was There when th'unkempt God of Chaos avowed to
Everything: The Laws inviolable
which Nature now commands (like some
mightier King John forced to bend knee
to some more prodigious aristocracy
than ever fashioned its own course)...
--Might it be argued that great age
allows Stream time-enough for Peace?
while our short lives but for the rage
of struggling over each crease
... maybe that is the reason why
something more constant than a river
sees itself writhe up & die
while fitful Flux goes on forever! ...
Onwards do flow,
O Stream!
At every other turn another overture
tickling th'mantle of This human Mind!
with--meaningless, O tons of earth-matters
like Itself (Time), so silently, with never a
herald from so common, so mortal a thing as
Birth (perhaps pouring "of teardrops
which must not long endure"
Stream's infinite-
ly peaceful, fertile banks)
where stands, incomprehensibly, Youth
th'war-like archer that forever seeks Peace's
(to him) invisible masked seams
in lines superficial!
... Yet must we always find, always anew
each time Th'World does us the New Start's turn
that nothing momentary wounds The Soul
putting forth for its eternal Goal:
that self-seeking going of All...
Its trumpet's mantic music's made
for quite another far too distant dawning,
some much better Day than this one shrouding
our momentarily too-pleasing shade
(passing) of yesterday
--Thusly is it designed
that all the self-defeating men of this World
may build their innumerable vain bridges
to span its penchants exposed
to get away from Choice, to get over Chance
yet no man will set there-on A Path so
straight and abiding as
half to reach its tranquil acumen
& deep/subtle profundity
T e r m i n a l P o i n t . . . .
Strumming the belly of the World-Mind
(your) waves are the very musics of reality
discovering the poetry of its sensuality
chanting with opulent cathedral throats: th'undying
figures like white horses of a moving melody
unmoved Man makes Stagnation,
deaf Mankind hears as Silence!
O Sea! with swords-woven waves like blue torches
engulfing the Future with fun!
your illimitable empires of Dreams
returning & renewing, cleaves Th'Skies:
Day, from its unimaginable Sunrise
in God's Breast,
harmoniously
do you blaspheme, O Sea, seething
red roses from the spuming heads of horses
our souls' intangible joys turned to
screams cold & endless as a living field of flowers
frozen yet renewing Th'Winter's current
sleep dissolving white horses to waking streams,
streams of white horses like notions of the blood-
drained Spring, O Sea, your empires of illimited contrasts
in sheer Continuity: display Life's all-evolving art
fraught with unceasing years of gathering the World's
unfolding common human
tears finite & warm
making it The Noon of our tranquility, O Sea
but a Thought passing from Void into Th'Vast
surfeit of infinite/eternal Changeability
aghast! sweeping & sweeping, sweeping out with
the evasion of mythic white horses' tails
(like melodies of nightingales always in flight): the
mystic, the meditating, the frothy refreshment that's
Confrontation, washing away & laundering our
stanched-most Moment,
O Sea celestial
reflecting (back to the earth) The Endless Eyes of
Heaven: Time's countless roses raising vast storms
of white, white horses to annul by their run that calm
anxiety of Space over (all) our heads, and then
hymnal distillery of Golden Blue
Magnitude! sitting upon
The Judgment:
Ponderous
Infinite Patience,
the unmoved Sea collects
The drowning Soul into her almost-gesture of motion
immovable
Imagination! and then
Onwards! the still ever-seeking, ever blind streaming
of men continues where they will not see,
while She, even without Vision shall outlast
all far-flung courses Mankind casts.