Dead, dying, flying, clacking, tumbling – Shining eyes, girl lying in the grass, in the moment, and now the bones. Each second is a hint of death. A year is a nudge. And then you are someone you weren’t, and the eyes were clear and now they are fogged up. Soon they will not be there at all.
Blenheim Palace
3/9/14 Verses in the Blenheim Palace grounds
- ii. – in the Secret Garden
- iii. – lying in the meadow in the sun
- iv. – walking up a hill in the twilight, sniffing in the glorious smell of sheep-poop on a pilgrimage to the base of a monument
ii.
I am a wanderer who sticks to the wildflowers,
straying down paths strewn with golden halycon.
You may conquer mountains strong and rooted before time
risking life and limb for danger’s high and thrilling flight –
As for me,
I will lie in the dimming dusk in a hammock full of roses,
singing with the bumblebees
a homely melody.
iii.
Saunter through green, reflective seas,
redolent of waking earth.
Beauty – now gone, elusively flitting –
is held in this moment, ephemeral worth.
iv.
The sun throws its rays to be fractured and broken
on trees with their shadows of negative might,
a scream of beauty,
dancing and singing its agonized act through the universe.
{9/2/17}
Pitter patter! Who goes there?
The flowers were fair, and they were not ashamed of their beauty.
Belles lifted their skirts high off of the ground,
Bluebells chimed merrily,
one, two, three.
A linen sweep of petticoat catches-
The bluebells nod, a dew drop falls
and breaks in a sad streak on the starches.
Pollen drifts along the breeze
Fertilizing Judas trees.
Deep in the plumbs of the mirror pool,
Worms and rotting branches rule.
Skirts berustle chiming laughs,
Blue eyes. Blue eyes. World’s collapse.
.
.
I wrote this poem because I am a beauty worshipper, won over by that cosmic pattern that repeats and encompasses and sucks at one’s soul. Of course, beauty is a good thing, but grasping one good thing too hard leads to a perversion of the good. The Judas tree compares overvaluing beauty to overvaluing money – to love the lovely over the ultimate Lovely is similar to avarice, the root of all evil and one motivation behind Judas’ betrayal. The last line alludes to Eve’s mindset as she reached for the forbidden fruit: it was pleasing to the eye to the point that it entranced and seduced her, and perhaps one of the reasons Adam also partook of the fruit was because he was entranced by Eve’s beauty. But, even as the reflecting pool reflects the beautiful blue sky and the flowers and the women, it is full of rotting fish and decomposing plants. A mere surface beauty is nothing compared to the kind of beauty that has integrity through and through. That kind of beauty cannot be perceived directly through sensual experience.
This world holds many innocent things, and those innocent things trigger hidden traps for certain people. The beauty found in music, art, nature, and language is a stumbling block to me because my heart distorts it so that it appears to be whole in and of itself, when really it is only one cog in a vast mechanism.
As Fyodor Dostoyevksy points out in Brothers Karamazov, “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”