Magna Mater

The earth coughs, whispers, dims the house lights, mutely
Allows herself to be discoursed upon
By supercilious aerial commentary.
Ethereal footprints. A gray rose. A sulphur
Yellow. Poetic arrogance of cheap
Chromatic oratory, passively
Lapped up by gulls in all the orchestra seats.
Dramatic denouement. The stage darkens.
Actors depart. The audience stretch their legs
Well-edified. A crass sunset. Seraphic
Repertory played to sell-out crowds.

You know the kind. Always after a day
Obscenely bright. Gay pretty flowers exposing
Their vulvas. At cockshut the ladies fold
Their parasols under the pale silk light.
Cornmeal silk, nacreous and translucent.
Silkscreen posters made for summer stock
With “Teahouse of the August Moon” designs
After a day of punts and parasols
In upstate watering places, summer circuits,
That sort of thing. Pale half-light, summer smoke.

And every evening the earth fetches up
For scientific scrutiny in the sky
By connoisseurs of modern medical lore
Some multi-colored, marbled lung mucosa.
Shouldn’t we be alarmed and consternated?

What does it bode, when our earth, the chaste bride
And consecrated mistress of the heavens,
Thrusting her shameless organs inside out

Like Miley Cyrus on a sailors’ tour,

Parades them with all lack of modesty
Nightly in this absurd burlesque revue
And bawdy show the many call a “sunset”?

Lewd interlude, sandwiched between two peepshows,
Lakeview and fireworks. Stand and salute
The garish flag, all candy and spangles
And ruby blood and glittering worlds, and then
Cheer as the band plays “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
“Courtiers of beauteous freedom” Shakespeare called us,
Our country built on Roman principles
A ship of state for Tudor privateers,
Our pirate flag a burping treasure chest,
Python disgorging undigested bits
Of his bright-colored prey, our mother earth,
Her rifled bowels, her bloody bits of magma,
Strontium, magnesium, aluminum
And suchlike host of boiling poisonous metals
Ignited in the fires of industry
And splayed as Chinese fireworks ’cross the sky,
Metallic ores and mineral pigments quite
Enough to paint a hundred Albert Bierstadts,
All ancient and inviolate sanctity
Of metal or of marble or of men
Extracted, desecrated and displayed
Because a plain old sunset’s not enough
To showcase our imperious dignity,
But we must have parade of looted plunder
Chains from the necks of naked prisoners,
Exploding rockets, gold chrysanthemums
That detonate and fall into the sea.

On days of broken sunshine earth herself
Reeling upon her axis in the throes
Of meteorological dyspepsia
Regales onlookers with a febrile floorshow.
As the clouds part, uncurtaining the night,
Oneiric images imbue the air.
Vast hulls maneuver in the fish-tank gloaming
Like neon tetras and striped zebra fish,
Mouths gaping in the watery halflight.
Argosies, airships, angel-launched flotillas,
Submarine dogfights in the lurid light—
A spark of encephalic lightning in
The boreal jelly of a frigid cloud
Crackling with splintered ice and shards of frost
And flickers of cerebral cruelty
Makes hell’s hot legions melt and dissipates
The swelling turgor of the heat-charged air,
Its frayed caparison of faded azure
Washed in the camphor light of cool blue night.
An eructation—earth replants her cheek
Upon her spinning pillow of stardust
And plummets down the well of spiral sleep.

A silver-skeined or mackerel-clouded sky
Begins to glow with its own inner light
Then flushes heavenly shades of pastel orange—
Evening has brought her sketchbook and her chalks
To the veranda by the lakeside where
She sips, discreetly, from a iced sorbet.
Above a bleak suburban shopping mall’s
Deserted asphalt hatched with painted stripes
The sodium vapor lamps begin to pale
Under the fire of an eerier green—
A “war-of-the-worlds” luster, as in Wells.
Fire and ice: bucolic Armageddon
Already showing on a sky near you.

The sun. It sets. What alien gaze has raised
The welts and bruises on her fair pale skin,
Her gaseous envelope of melting aether
Mottled with industrial moles, the faint
Impression of a bra strap, turquoise veins
And clotted cream and mother’s milk and spider
Veins as intricate as those that mar
The emptiness of interstellar space
With remnants of galactic nebulae?
What spectral presence makes her glow and blush
Coral, and salmon pink, and cinnabar
In carnal and unnatural combinations,
Funereal tints and tinctures culled from dreams?
What voiceless might forbid the sun his sledgehammer
And nudged him, gently, off the edge of night
Where now she trembles in a placeless stare?

The “sky.” The “heavens.” “Space.” Time out of mind
Everyone noised authoritatively
(As if they knew the terrors that spoke)
These simple vocables. But what, I pray,
Is space, and where for pity’s sake does it
Reside, and why in heaven’s name should I
Believe that everything I am, and own
Is “in”—locked in some crystal prism—“space”?
But something leaves its footprints in the sky
And discomposes with its measureless
Reserve and ushering silence earth, the Magna
Mater and the sum of all things “real.”

                         5/15/2012