ut1 – Page 27 – Underground Turtles

The Egret

May 31, 2019 ut1 Comments 0 Comment

A white egret
Is juxtaposed against the moon.

If not for its dark silhouette,
You would have missed it,
The white on white,
Bone on bone—
The way the scene was lit.

T.S. took a back seat
And so did Whitman.
The miracle of meter
No longer mattered or so it seemed;
It all flowed together

So seamlessly,
O, in such symmetry
And endlessly,
Or so it seemed.

This whole universe stood still,
Stands still,
As in a tableau. Yet
The egret
Flew;

The egret;
Black silhouette;
Death;
Unseen, save by the light of the moon.

And Wyeth,
N.C., came, and comes to mind.
And so did Sassoon.
And I thought of Monet. And Rilke:
Poets, painters, “poet-painters,”
All of the same ilk,

All, breathing from the same turgid tube;
Not pretentious, not dull from storm,
But solemn—
Somewhere where Plath and Keats
Met,
Meet,

Somewhere where the sea and the path forget.
This is no longer dry land.
Flies the egret.

Succinctness 2

May 15, 2019 ut1 Comments 0 Comment

Keen the sharp edge,
even redundancy,
life, as with poetry,
is best facilitated by brevity,
point a – point b.
But there are the exceptions

leading me to the question,
that detour, that out of way venture,
that rendezvous long way home.
And then when you ask the question
it’s already been answered–
to the bone.

Is for better or for worse.
The train has arrived,
You have left the station.
Occupation-wise
There is monetary gain,
Momentary fame—
If you’re lucky—posthumously.
It keeps you awake at night.
You clamber for
And hoard
Scraps of paper. At night you rise
Among melting dreams.
There is a railroad track, a chicken coup.
An evening sunset, a morning monsoon.
A water buffalo is cleaved in half.
Rat-a-tat-tat.
A former stick, a yellow-lipped Krait,
Glides through manioc.

You ask yourself: is this real?
Thunder answers,
A bell answers,
Poetry answers—all one long peal
like a train whistle through a long tunnel
And there is no appeal and no recourse
But to press on in the dark,
Press on or forever hold your peace.