DIMINUENDOS
Battered chimes ring but there is
no song
Held high upon the end of a
collapsing roof
Dangling above a small mound of
ash
Of no earthly natural end
Above the poet that computes no
verse
Ash that once burnt words
In the cold fire of every
profound sentence
Died as a comet burns out
In a system that lost its worlds
Unseen, unfelt, eyes iced
All spirits having fled
The fountain and the fool of the
soul
Erupting elsewhere.
Mountains lean over the broken
roof and crippled
chimes
And like flustered frozen giants
Chart the path of a snowflake
They watch the pass of a lone,
pale figure
As pure as the first quiet snow
upon the first cold
world
Untouched by the howling gales
Of want and reason and god-
She is imprisoned dust that paces
within its cell
Has blood and breath and dreams
Dust will not honor nor forsake
Old ivory hands brush back
courageous curls
(Long ago exhausted black locks
had begged gray
To assume the dressing of the
head)
Her face worn but not battered
Chiseled unevenly instead, the
careless cuts of time
She that is mostly silent speaks
softly
Sitting next to ash below quiet
sun blistered chimes
Wrinkled legs crossed, her fallen
cheeks
Red from the quickened pulse
Of long slumbering words:
“Poet, you are extinguished
As fire fights fire, life burns
life
Words are no longer your unhealed
wounds
Dead as I cannot die
For how can love die?
Poet I will now tell barren
mountains
And dark burnt blue sky
All that I knew of you.”
Upon this a breeze came and the
chimes above
Stained tin cylinders that only
rattled
Suddenly made music
Untroubled, chaotic, but pure
notes retrieved
From the void of many dreams
As if sleeping children
Woke and suddenly banged on a
Steinway.
She tells the ways and wants of
the poet
And shakes a tiny, timid fist
At mountains that will not listen
And then rails at the poet
How he had forsaken the future of
virtue
To embrace the fornication of a
moment
How even now amidst the
proclamations
Of her harsh, cruel sermon
The same breeze stirs a cinder
that stings her left eye
“And this,” she cries rubbing her
eye
(but her noise is soft and slight
No louder than a frustrated bee
Scratching furiously at the
center of a plastic flower)
“And this,” she violently sings,
“is the pain of the poet
the irritant of clear vision.”
Robotic is the sun as it sets
Made by the factories of assembly
line gods
Who, at break time, drink coffee,
smoke, and
Thunder back to the line
To make more suns to warm more
worlds.
She sits and stares at that
machine
And knows that
Once her poet was
Disinfectant of the sun
Dreamer of a world choked with
despair
The mountaineer forever kept from
every cliff
The comic collapsing upon the
stage
Quietly weeping.
Once her poet was
Merely red ink loose in the
washer
Staining white sheets,
The last wild iris to bloom
In the center of a burning forest
Seen only by crackling, exploding
cicadas
Once her poet was
The night upon worlds that will
not turn
The painfully bright morning
In the sleepy, drooping eyes of
an owl.
COUNTING CARS
In me races the blood
Of a tremendous one
Rising, making the bed
Washing breakfast dishes
Checking the mail
After early dinners
Counting cars
Remembering none
Looking at television
While unmaking the bed
In me is the blood
Of this one.
OUTSIDE PLAYING
Wrought from wombs past
There is eternity that does not
last.
Into the neighborhood store
Radiating, I go and then stopping
Like a comet under glass.
That, pointing at delicious
confections
That is what I want.
Outside playing
I find there is no substance
Sweeter than the salt
In the soundless slip of a bead
of sweat
On a blade of grass.
Richard Wilson
Moss
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