Beauty is Imperfection

From his Errata,

In a room of shelved books

Dressed in winter argyle

A scholar descends through

Winds of high blue December ice, vain ice

And clear lake leaves on a sweater

Head full of drink and argybargy

*

Pig iron sleds stand around the black stanchions of

Ice; clouds around hoof and nostril

Plunging churches

*

Underneath, blood, red around these points–Cymryn versus

Vainglorious Anglo, Roman versus Breton,

Jute versus Viking–runs faster than milk,

While bodies of slit-throated, sacrificed peasants

Persevere in peat marshes,

Silver as death, bogged down to study

The chalk fire of white

Where looming orange cottages

Gutted

By daisy-cutters of war

Are a necropolis empty of sentinels.

*

The sun is summoned,

The re-apotheosis of Apollo

Who last went grazing among the drink of stars

Like learned men drinking at the trough of irrational books

*

His mouth,

Such a small wound from which to reemerge

In his chariot

Pulling winter behind him

His season of greatness once more finding its career

Born from a wastrel’s body

Like all elemental myth

*

(First posted May 24, 2007)

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A high buzzard

touches the mind

In a yard

of bleached bones,

Bare, calloused feet

heel the knocks

of sand,

Under cloud

dark beet,

No

water to sustain

Not even tongue

of root. Nor rain

to lick the rocks

In the turtle-lidded

insides

Of shells, once eyes:

A beggar collects

pennies for the temple

Pennies are pain’s gold.

Then from under the cock’s crow,

And hook-winged Molloch,

A star strumpet’s snow angel sallies

Across the desert floor

With His word

Absolution,

To clean the mind

Of its preoccupations

Cleanse rude

light off the Eastern rain

Through the

heat

Cool winding rose

Surfaces

All in the mind

August is reconfigured,

To expire

in good time

(Originally posted March 28, 2007)

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