The First and The Last (so far)

Not so much the first poem I ever wrote, but the first I ever considered keeping….

Web

At the edge of my garden

Is a fluorescent matrix

And I lie angling the sun to see it,

this pattern of geometric progression,

a regression ever back onto itself.

Inside. Outside. A living mobius strip

reflecting a form of the universe.

Complete. Timeless. Tangled in its own purpose;

Which was this: to be broken,

just now, by the fly’s struggle.

-- 1983

I took up the pen (pencil, actually…) again in 2001 (after 9-11) and for the next two years produced 1 or 2 poems a month (Marshall University’s Joan Adkins would be proud, if, perhaps a bit critical, of the result…), culminating in the one below. Curiously enough, most of the 21^st century poems are largely biographical or autobiographical in nature. This last one drifts from that pattern a bit, I believe…. I hope….

Silua si

Silua si, the fairy host, gambols alongside

Drawing potency, sniffling silent

Along this dark edged pathway, strewn with

Pale shadowed night bloom -- wavering lustily

Amid a negligible breeze, wafting spectacular

Nose perks - as unto a pleasant reminiscence

‘What if,’ I wonder-think, ‘the Gaelic predisposition

For emotional substrate proved to be true!’

Fantazy! Projected upon ancient innocence

‘It seems, sir!, that you propose…’

Propositional parenthetical pretentious Proportionate

‘… Propose an unnatural supremacy of --

Non -- I say, NON! - intellectual superiority’

So I leaned -- just a bit, adjusting for a draft --

And tapped him briskly - knuckle to nose

Noisy wheezing muffed gasping non-sobs

Bleeding a bit, staining (upon drying)

A bit of snotrag to a chocolatey, red-brown

A heightening of color --

Redolent of something

Fragrance upon the breeze, brisk downwind

A feeling! --

Not the wrist -- karmically sprained by its violent exertions

Upon the now stanched nose uptilted and bracketed

With two chunks of cloth-wrapped rectangular ices

Silua si -- a troupe of children, so they seemed

Shigging noiseless through the twilight

Yes, a misty haziness shadowed

These, my cousins in time

‘Where from does Ossian come?’

I hear them singing -- voices raucous yet beautiful

One, stepping nearer,

Points my way, smiling --

A wagged finger

‘No, sirrah - not yet for thee’

Then there happens -- a drifting unmoving

Till only One remains -

Red-haired -- swelling in size

Blue veined -- emerging from the dimness

Long tapered fingers -- a smell of jasmine

Vaguely feminine -- floating emergent

Then when one last pretension remains

What passes before me as within me

All mine recognized, claimed, cherished

-- 26 September to 7 November 2003