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A Few Dilapidated Arias
With a Chorus of Bullfrogs
By H.C.,
1.
And thus the morning has descended. Slowly like
a tremulous lady down the great stairs of the east.
What I notice is language pressing in my mind,
surprising me, as in those times when I made poems
like sweet tarts cooling on the windowsill of a
studio in the woods. Day blooms, a somber flower
in our valley, nowhere and now there. Am I
merely misinterpreting some psychic blip?
Or has time changed? Casually the light extends.
2.
So let the sentences unfold again, like a measuring rule
jerked into angled shapes that nevertheless trace
the line onward toward resolution. Let them be
a little sonorous, but only a little. And let them,
for my lady's sake--she who evokes this lingering passion
from hoar-faced hebetude--rise up in melopoeia,
plaintively, lovingly, or wonderingly, from time to time.
3.
"Liberation" was the shibboleth and slogan
of my time. We even had a magazine by that
name, and now dear Dave Dellinger is dead.
So many have gone with him! And now who is free?
Only our depraved president, who is free to
send thousands and thousands to their slaughter, like calves
tumbling and jumping in the chute at the Chicago
stockyards, where the blood-scent overspreads the city.
And now we've bombed a wedding party in the desert
outside Baghdad! Can you believe it? Bright shreds of
the wedding tent flying away, bloody pieces of people
flying and flopping on the sand. Pieces of the lovely bride,
pieces of the groom, pieces of the attending elders,
pieces of children, musicians, drivers, and the religious
attendants. A blood-bath, truly. The desert wind rises.
The palm trees bow their heads, the desert birds fly
screaming, It is the absolute opposite of an oasis.
4.
"Our crumbling civilization"-- a phrase I have used often
during recent years, in letters to friends, even in
words for public print. And what does it mean? Can
a civilization crumble? At once appears the image
of an old slice of bread, stale and hard, green with mold,
shaped roughly like the northeastern United States, years
old or more, so hard and foul that even my pal Maxie,
the shepherd/husky cross who eats everything, won't
touch it. And it is crumbling, turning literally into
crumbs, as the millions of infinitesimal internal connecting
fibers sever and loosen. The dust trickles and seeps away.
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