In a lightning bolt of memory, I see our statue of Buddha (a wedding gift from Uncle Gene) which always sat on top of the speaker cabinet. When a visitor asked, “So, does Buddha like jazz?” you said, “I hope so. He’s been getting it up the ass for a long time.”
"As certain also of your own poets have said"— (Acts 17.28) Cleon the poet (from the sprinkled isles, Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps "Greece")— To Protus in his Tyranny: much health!
Come, Holy Spirit, bending or not bending the grasses, appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame, at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada. I am only a man: I need visible signs. I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction. Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church
If Heaven has into being deigned to call Thy light, O Liberty! to shine on all; Bright intellectual Sun! why does thy ray To earth distribute only partial day? Since no resisting cause from spirit flows Thy universal presence to oppose; No obstacles by Nature’s hand impressed, Thy subtle and ethereal beams arrest;
Even as the sun with purple-colour’d face
Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek’d Adonis tried him to the chase;
Hunting he lov’d, but love he laugh’d to scorn;
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-fac’d suitor ‘gins to woo him.
Slip-pilings on the Brooklyn littoral —the poles still tarry, flimsy; the ferry terminus with its walledup doors wan doorshapes on eroded sills. Downstream, the strutwork of the Williamsburg cable tower threw its cool shadow half a mile inland
Cold eyelids that hide like a jewel Hard eyes that grow soft for an hour; The heavy white limbs, and the cruel Red mouth like a venomous flower; When these are gone by with their glories, What shall rest of thee then, what remain, O mystic and sombre Dolores, Our Lady of Pain?
Seven sorrows the priests give their Virgin; But thy sins, which are seventy times seven, Seven ages would fail thee to purge in, And then they would haunt thee in heaven: Fierce midnights and famishing morrows, And the loves that complete and control
Would you believe, when you this monsieur see, That his whole body should speak French, not he? That so much scarf of France, and hat, and feather, And shoe, and tie, and garter should come hether, And land on one whose face durst never be Toward the sea farther than Half-Way Tree? That he, untraveled, should be French so much As Frenchmen in his company should seem Dutch? Or had his father, when he did him get, The French disease, with which he labors yet? Or hung some monsieur’s picture on the wall, By which his dam conceived him, clothes and all? Or is it some French statue? No: ’T doth move, And stoop, and cringe. O then, it needs must prove The new French tailor’s motion, monthly made,
The light foot hears you and the brightness begins god-step at the margins of thought, quick adulterous tread at the heart. Who is it that goes there? Where I see your quick face notes of an old music pace the air, torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre.
In Goya’s canvas Cupid and Psyche have a hurt voluptuous grace bruised by redemption. The copper light falling upon the brown boy’s slight body is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing
The fake Parthenon in Nashville, Stonehenge reduced by a quarter near Maryhill on the Columbia, the little Statue of Liberty taken from the lawn of the high school and not recovered for months, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in the tile maker’s shape of a ship to sail home in, the house in the shape of a ship near Milwaukee where once before the river below rose up to swallow the bank, World’s Fairs where one can enter the cell of a human body
You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time—— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
(excerpt) On Hellespont, guilty of true love's blood, In view and opposite two cities stood, Sea-borderers, disjoin'd by Neptune's might; The one Abydos, the other Sestos hight.
Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis, Et fugiunt freno non remorante dies. Ovid, Fastorum, Lib. vi. "O Cæsar, we who are about to die Salute you!" was the gladiators' cry In the arena, standing face to face With death and with the Roman populace.
The wanton troopers riding by Have shot my fawn, and it will die. Ungentle men! they cannot thrive To kill thee. Thou ne’er didst alive Them any harm, alas, nor could Thy death yet do them any good. I’m sure I never wish’d them ill, Nor do I for all this, nor will; But if my simple pray’rs may yet Prevail with Heaven to forget Thy murder, I will join my tears Rather than fail. But oh, my fears! It cannot die so. Heaven’s King Keeps register of everything, And nothing may we use in vain.
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