The Dragon Orchard

                                                               I

Peach-poised, weightless, on a hard chair. Pleached, shaded, concealing glowing fruit. Pencil skirt. Uniform blouse. Notepad mortar-boarded on her pointy knee, sucking a pencil lead. Sharp: ready to take down every word. My amanuensis. Ready. Begin:

                                                 The Dragon Orchard

Blue flash of rock in the deep, the dragon-writhing, mist-shrouded bowels of the earth, granite-sinewed contortions of stone, petrified fearscape wreathed with fire.

O twisty dragons! (The nine sons of the Dragon King, and at least one from the Shahnameh. Ten dragons I counted.)

Far beneath the Manhattan schist, the Inwood marble, the Fordham gneiss. Somewhere under Washington Heights.

Like a snarling nest of cockroach mothers fat with tear-drop eggcases hanging off the ends of their long elegant abdomens, behind the wire shelves in a fetid storage locker on 151th Street, under canisters of mayonnaise, towers of deli pickles and styrofoam trays.

Intellectual dragons, coils of knotted flesh, their watered-silk integuments the color of blued steel, shooting livid fire and casting off flakes of light, ripples of noiseless energy.

Sheets of blue flame sloughing from their carved gemstone backs, their eel-smooth bodies like dandruff into the void, like autumn leaves from an orchard of dragons under my bed.

                                                 "The nine sons of the Dragon King...."

                                          "....and at least one from the Shahnameh."

                                                 (Click on pictures to view full size.)

                                                                II

Wandering in the dragon orchard I met a girl. The visual essence of her flowering, fourteen year-old never-exfoliated, derm-abraded, spa-pampered skin seeped into my eyes and drenched my optic nerves, flooding my olfactory circuits and spilling over into my loins. Now, close to the flesh of things, I smell colors, or more precisely feel them, cupped in my hand like a breast or—in the case of many colors—like a middle manager’s abused, misshapen, leather-encased fifty year-old sweaty malodorous feet. Colors engendered in marketing surveys, developed by research teams and debated across conference tables, then manufactured in laboratories and chemical plants where the living, speaking surface of things (not colors—there are no colors in nature) is transformed into crematorium smoke to goose up our sunsets. Mortuary showroom colors. Hunter green. Harvest gold. The new black at nature’s funeral. The toxic skin color of waiting room furniture. The jaundiced, garish hue of twelve-packs of drumsticks in the supermarket poultry aisle, mummified in plastic.

The feet of my darling are watchful, timid and dusty, like small animals.

The Poet’s Angiogram

The poet’s angiogram would reveal me with its fluoroscopic dyes as a branching bloodcloud dilated in space around a pumping organ. Ready to fall into the sky at any moment through a tear in the pavement of reality. Though a tear in the skin of the model on the magazine cover. (The “tear” at the corner of her eye is based on inadmissible wordplay, a thoughtless homonym.) A roving purple mist of anxiety and longing.

(Language should wallpaper our world, not harbor bedbugs of infinity under its curling edges.)

Expelled from my mother's womb into the shark tank of reality, I am already "blood in the water."

O air whose waters I purple
Luminous clear ink dream dark with gravity’s
Invisible shark.

As when, on a first date, you plump yourself down on a corner of your apartment balcony to smoke a cigarette, showing off the expensive view to your new playmate, and the railing gives way sending you plummeting seventeen stories to your death on the street below, hitting a construction scaffolding on the way down. (Oops, I fell out of my life. I tripped on the sky.) Successive freeze-thaw cycles over the course of seasons have turned the concrete to oatmeal around the rusting anchor bolts. What are the innocent zigzags in winter’s temperature graph but the teeth of the invisible shark? Gravity is not a “physical constant” but a creeping hesitation, a conspiracy of opportunities, a web or tissue of increments, of dark—albeit slow—designs as candid and transparent as air, hidden in broad daylight—or as the “clear ink” (have you ever seen the ocean at night?) gravity conceals itself with while creating its masterpiece, dipping its pen in the inexhaustible well of luminous, inexplicable last moments.

Three Sonnets

                           I

My idle prospects are an open wold
Where, in the sun, the dews of morning burn
Naked and pale, in fields of ripe lucerne,
Fragrant lucerne, azure and smoking gold
(Incense more pleasing if the truth be told              
To the gods’ nostrils than the soot’s return
As acid rain—tribute the heavens spurn
As sickly—to this miserable pinfold).
Industrious youth! The high gods laugh to scorn
Your picked fruits pilfered in the hopeful morn.
You are the abundance.  Your soft flesh, O youth,
Divesting to the noontide’s amorous tooth
Its shroud of mortal snow will stain the sky
With gold and turquoise filaments, burn and die.

9/13/2011


                               II


(Faust, Zweiter Teil, Fünfter Akt, v. 11581-11586)

Though my intended task is still undone,
My stone-pale blood reduced and untoward
My backward youth could wish its maiden sword
Were fleshed with deeds and sated with the sun.
To wrest by force of art from the million-
Marvelled fortress of language the bright hoard
Of silver words, by dragon-avarice stored
Against all strength, is hardship scarce begun.
But all that I in animal fury durst
In one proud heartbeat meeting strength with strength
Is animal fury scorned and wasted breath
Until time like a ruptured artery burst
And saturate the sky throughout its length
With poetry, hypoxia and death.

5/4/2012


                           III

The wind is fair, and tides of sunlit foam
Engage, immesh, retreat and flash again
In liquid foray, like embattled men.
This pulse of spray, this dance of tides, this dome
Of sweet and sea bright air, I call my home;
An exiled slave, till fortune, fate or pen
Secure release, and once more rapt, I ken
My salt and crystal sea, my spirit’s Rome.
The rape of Aphrodite: a child’s flesh
Polluted by excited sea foam. Dragon
Semen milked from the all-inseminating
Seahorses yoked to Oceanus’ wagon
Coating her calves and ankles with the fresh
Spittle roused by the wrath of the God’s mating.

3/16/2012