In this age of blossom, age of Bloom, reflecting,
Always astonished how it is between
The acts under Western eyes:
The good soldier to the lighthouse; or
The good apprentice waiting for godot (in paranthesis); or
The burning oracle… But O nothing, nothing like
The sun, loving the wheel of fire, the sense
Of an ending, is this fool-- a son saved!
For it’s my homecoming, Amerika,
Like the sleepwalker (a man without qualities)
In the last days of mankind, in the storm of roses.
O illuminations! parables! fragments! aphorisms!
O the trial! the unbearable lightness of being
Guide to the underworld-- the cancer ward, the gulag
Archipelago, the foundation pit, shadow lands…
And during this visit a part of speech, hunger,
Tremor, guilt, exile …until
The prophesied return later? …much later, the nightingale
Perched on nothing’s branch,
At war with the newts…
…A slow homecoming, yes, to
What I love in the past continuous, in traveling
In my fathers’ court—(Barabas? his daughter?),
In the fountain and tomb—a dress of fire
At the stone of losses, a perfect peace
Like the future in the present (see under: love),
Or like the lost steps, labyrinths, the music
Of human flesh, dreamtigers, men
Of maize, Paradiso! (the obscene bird of night)
Or Like a change
Of skin… O on and on! Traveling
In the family, now at a bend in the river,
Now a dance in the forest. …Yet… No longer
At ease… For the harder they come
--Arrows of god!— so come the
Casualties, things falling apart…
Didn’t you know? …My foe
My ‘brilliant career,’ an imaginary life
Now the professor’s house, the necessary
Angel surfacing under the volcano
With midnight’s children (in heat and dust…),
My fables of identity a fringe of leaves,
Tender buttons (spring and all!).
An American tragedy? It can’t happen
Here, here in the palm at the end
Of the mind, here at the house of
Mirth—three lives (Lazarus laughed!).
The garden of Eden? (Call it sleep).
In other words, world enough and
Time, time for the ponder heart working a vein of iron…
Barren ground? a rhetoric of motives? or
A cool million in cold blood? The price
Of the ticket-- Seasons
Of earth while bending the bow…
O seize the day invisible man!
Make straw for the fire (pale fire),
For wise blood, ancient evenings, for the second skin where
I’m calling from-- advertisements for myself
As the fixer, writing by the left hand of
Darkness, by my life as a man, as
The moviegoer, child of god, a running dog
In love and sleep-- with dog soldiers
The central motion, the counterlife of
My mumbo jumbo, of the little disturbances of man.
Time remaining? On wings of song the form
Of a motion, the dead father (speed-the-plow),
And the stars (were) shining, living together from
The first, findings, as the one day dimensions of
History. Still, the continuous life, streamers
In the world of ten thousand things. Westward!
-- No nature?—River writing
The rest of the way (earthly measures), a call
In the midst of the crowd. The old and new
Dark harbor.
Botsford, Alan. A Book of Shadows. Katydid Books, 2003.
Botsford, Alan. A Book of Shadows. Katydid Books, 2003.
