Golden Poem
(See! Everything is alive!
Pythagoras)
Man, free thinker! do you believe yours the sole reason
in this world where life is splintered in all things?
The strength which you have, which you so freely use,
but for all your advice the universe is deaf.
Respect the intense spirit of the beast:
each flower is a soul open to nature;
a mystery of love ingrains the metal;
‘Everything is alive!’ and all things pulse upon your being.
Be fearful of the blind wall, it watches, it spies:
to matter itself a verb attaches …
do not indenture service to blasphemous usage!
Often, in the indistinct, there lives a hidden God;
and as a living eye is lidded,
a pure spirit throbs beneath the coverlet of stones.
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Chimeras
El Desdichado
I am the man of shadows – the widower – the inconsolable,
in the abolished tower the Prince of Aquitaine:
my sole star is death and my star-laden lute
wears the black sun of melancholy.
You who have consoled me in the mausoleum of night
bring to me Pausilippo beside the Italian sea,
the flower most pleasing to my desolate heart,
from the trellis where the roses climb.
Am I Love or Phoebus? …. Lusignan or Biron?
My forehead still roughed from the queen’s kiss;
I have dreamt in the grotto where the siren swims …
And twice I have crossed unconquered over Acheron:
strumming time and time on Orpheus’ lyre
the sighs of the saint and the cries of the fey.
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Myrtle
My thoughts? Of you, divine enchantress;
of fires rendering Pausilippo brilliant
as your brow, the incandescent Orient,
and of black grapes mingled in a golden tress.
Drunk with the fumes of your chalice
and the furtive clarity of your smiling eye,
when, at Iacchus’ feet, through prayer refined
I was made a son of Greece by my Muse.
That volcano’s eruption is no mystery …
an agile kick you delivered, yesterday,
and suddenly a horizon of ash hurtled.
Since the Gods shattered into clay,
until the end of time, beneath Virgil’s laurel tree,
pale Hortensia entwines green Myrtle!
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Anteros
You ask why I have such rage in my heart
and upon a swan’s neck so indomitable a head;
it is because I am the issue of Antee’s race,
I hoard the darts against the conquering God.
Yes, I am of those who inspire the Jealous One,
he who has branded my brow with his seductive lips.
Beneath Abel’s pallor, intermittent and bloodied
I have the implacable color of Cain!
Jehovah! The last one vanquished by your genius,
who cried from the pit of hell ‘O tyranny!”
This was my grandfather Baal or my father Dagon ….
It was they who plunged me thrice in the waters of Cocyte,
and now, with only Amalecyte my mother to shed tears,
at your feet I plant the teeth of the ancient dragon.
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Delfica
Do you know it, Daphne, that ancient romance?
At the foot of the sycamore, under white laurels,
beneath olive branches, myrtle or trembling rushes,
that song of love ….. continuously re-arising.
Do you recall the Temple, its immense peristyle,
and the bitter lemons softly indented by your teeth?
And the grotto, fatal to imprudent guests,
where the ancient spell sleeps, lightly and unbroken.
They will return, the gods for whom you so constantly weep.
Time will refashion the order of the old days;
the earth convulsive with a living breath … prophetic …
Even so, the Sibyl with the Latin face
is still asleep beneath the Arch of Constantine:
where nothing disturbs the severity of the portico.
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Artemis
The thirteenth arrives … or is it the first, returning?
And always the only one, and always the only moment:
are you, o queen, the first or the last?
And you, o king, are you the one, the only, or merely the latest lover?
Loving who you love from cradle to grave;
who I love only loves me as tenderly:
it is death – or Death …. the enchantment! the torment!
and the rose which she holds is the primrose.
Sacred neopolitan, hands filled with fire,
rose with the violet heart, St. Gudule’s flower:
have you found your cross in the wasteland of skies?
White roses, fall! You are an insult to our Gods:
fall, as white shadows from a burning sky:
the saint of the abyss ever sacred in my eyes!
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Christ On The Mount Of Olives
(God is dead! Heaven is empty …
weep, children, you no longer
have a father
Jean Paul)
I
When the Lord, lifting to heaven his thin arms,
beneath the holy tree as poets do,
had been long lost in his silent griefs
and judged himself betrayed by ingrate friends,
he turned towards those who waited below
dreaming themselves kings, scholars, prophets …
but numb, lost in the brute sleep of beasts,
and he cried: ‘No, God does not exist!’
They slept on: ‘Friends, do you know the gospel?
I have touched my brow to the eternal arc;
I’m bloody, broken, in suffering for all eternity!
Brothers, I tricked you: the abyss! the abyss! the abyss ….
There is no god at the altar where I am made victim …
There is no god! God is no more!’ But they slept on.
II
He began again: ‘Everything is dead! I have traveled the worlds;
losing my course among their milky ways,
for a lifetime those fertile seams
spill out golden sand in silver waves:
on all sides the empty sun is sphered with storms,
hurricanes of chaos from convulsive oceans ….
A dead wind rocks the nomad planets,
but no spirit moves in those immensities.
Searching for the eye of God, I saw nothing but a vast
orbit, black and bottomless; where the inhabiting night
radiates upon the world in continual darkness;
a strange rainbow domed that Stygian pit,
threshold of the ancient chaos whose shadow is Nothingness,
spiraling and swallowing up space and time!’
III
‘Unmoving Destiny, mute sentinel,
cold Necessity! …. Accident directs you
among the dead worlds in perpetual snow,
frozen by degrees, their universe growing dim,
do you know what it is you do, o primal force,
chilling your suns, extinguishing one after the other …
Can you be certain of the passing of immortal breath
between an awakening world and a world in death?
O my father! Is it you I sense in myself?
Have you the power to live, to conquer death?
Or will you perish under the final blows
of the cursed Angel of the Night ….
I feel myself to be alone, to weep and suffer all alone,
and if I die, alas! so will all things die’.
IV
No one heard the eternal victim groan,
surrendering to the world in vain his opened heart;
but in his faltering and reeling strength,
he called to the One, unsleeping Jerusalem:
‘Judas!’ he cried ‘you know the price set on me,
make haste to sell me, and end this journey:
I’m suffering, my friend! stretched out upon the ground ….
Come! you who at least has the strength to sin!’
But Judas had gone away, disturbed and pensive,
finding himself ill-paid, and full of remorse so alive
that he read his blackness written, on every wall ….
At last, Pilate, aging in the cares of Caesar,
feeling pity, and being struck by chance
cried to his satellites: ‘Go, find the madman’.
V
For this he really was: madman, sublime and insane …
That forgotten Icarus ascending the skies,
Phaeton, crushed beneath the heels of the gods,
handsome Atthis bruised, by Cybele revived.
The augur reads the entrails of the victim,
the earth intoxicated with the precious blood …
the stunned universe careens on its axle,
and for an instant Olympus totters on the abyss.
‘Answer!’ cried Caesar to Jupiter Ammon,
‘who is this new god who will affront the earth?
And if not a god, is he at least a demon?….’
But the oracle, invoked, forever holds its silence;
there is one alone can explain the mystery:
the one who inspires the children of grief.