When Pussywillows Last in the Catyard Bloomed (rtf)

by Roger Zelazny

  in eyes’ weightless prison,

  seeing—

  in lake’s dark lens,

  exposed—

  falling up pits of the sky.

  iv

  To tear that sky down the middle

  will be more than the mind can bear

  Brittle, it will break.

  v

  Our frantic remains

  will continue the species,

  in ignorance and light.

  vi

  Swimming, as we did,

  they’ll never give a damn,

  till just about this time

  tomorrow night.

  vii

  . . . When ice before shards

  is too right.

  viii

  And the light!

  ix

  The light...

  x

  Such

  is

  the

  kingdom

  of

  ice

  of

  ice

  such

  is

  the

  LOVER’S VALEDICTION:

  FORBIDDING DAY’S SACRAMENT

  Phlox of the liberal phoenix,

  breasting towers to day,

  extensive

  spirit ahead—

  repetitious Ananias,

  forever forswearing azimuths at noon—

  sinking song

  in centuries of idiom overflows thy habit,

  as flocked thoroughfares spend sloped shadow.

  Where gnash thy left,

  despairing doors,

  as cosmos-meeting crusts

  cover a baked vacancy,

  I say,

  out this emptied one,

  “Absence is not eaten”.

  FUTURE, BE NOT IMPATIENT

  Someday, perhaps, but not this day

  Sometime; but then, not now.

  Man is a monument-making mammal.

  Never ask me how.

  SOMEWHERE A PIECE OF COLOED LIGHT

  It is such a relative thing

  that I am loathe to explain

  this brightness as being of the sort

  once attributed to the breath of a goddess

  dozing just over the horizon. However,

  it is also a shame to talk

  of ionization and light refraction

  (even if they do sort of rhyme)

  when something is pleasant to look at.

  These terms smack of the magical,

  of the incomprehensible—

  while it does seem much more likely

  that somewhere a billboard-scale Princess

  sleeps within a circle of flame,

  dreaming kleig light coronas,

  breathing plumes of neon mist. This,

  somewhere beneath an almost but not-quite

  familiar sky; and that she is waiting

  to be awakened by the kiss

  of a handsome and tireless Prince

  about twenty feet tall

  in his handsome and Hollywood armor.

  Nice thought.

  SOUTHERN CROSS

  (ELEGY, HART CRANE)

  My Nameless Woman of the South,

  and the Spring that I accomplished you . . .

  All ways one phosphor furrow, Orizaba—

  All skeleton streaks one streetlamped street . . .

  But always one Spring, so South,

  and all shored ways one deep drawn day,

  coralling under oranged climes’ chloral bays,

  spent and spelled at skulled heavens,

  slappings of your tidal sands.

  And always my ears will throb as stoppered bottles asea

  as the one bunched pearl soul of prior suns dips by askance

  when the rude rood raises your wake through night

  then bends it down to a dawn

  between the sob of the sea,

  under the sail of the sun,

  and sighed-out hissing sounds of spectered stars.

  THE DE-SYNONYMIZATION OF WINTER

  I. Pure.

  II. Decadent

  III. Iceage

  Who bells out green mornings

  told the summer season to stop

  and slept a spell of silence in the earth;

  yawning, strode again and overtoned

  his bell to more green.

  (For this rang the Second Baptist,

  Frazer, and Halloween,

  with Christmas-conquering irony?)

  Autumn Apollo

  golden and brown

  crackle the bowlength

  you bend.

  Would were you

  so flexible, my lord:

  They borrowed your unerring

  arrows and brought your sister

  to the child-board

  among tamed animals.

  A revealed pudding of mud

  mars the making

  of morning snow biscuits

  in the maiden eye

  and the afternoon runs in the streets

  after one inspired advocate

  but is walked on to a broken crust

  the color a charcoal-powdered anything

  (yet strangely, the goat

  thigh-bone burning smell

  records in smoke script itself

  on skies the peculiar shade

  a bleeding handful spilt).

  FLIGHT

  Hilted of flame,

  our frail phylactic blade

  slits black

  beneath Polestar’s

  pinprick comment,

  foredging burrs

  of mitigated hell,

  spilling light without illumination.

  Strands of song,

  to share its stinging flight,

  are shucked and pared

  to fit an idiot theme.

  Here, through outlocked chaos,

  climbed of migrant logic,

  the forms of black notation

  blackly dice a flame.

  WHAT IS LEFT WHEN THE SOUL IS SOLD

  The sting of the startled porpoise,

  welting mulatto the bay’s gray belly,

  brackish entrails of ocean,

  wrapping the mammary reef,

  nor all minnow-dried decidua,

  festooned of salt excrescence,

  shall barter from heaven back

  that heaved corpse—

  indemnifying eagles

  in peristaltic angle—

  by felling fleet the flagstaff wing

  on folds of stomach slough.

  OUR WINTERED WAY THROUGH EVENING,

  AND BURNING BUSHES ALONG IT

  (Where only the evergreens whiten . . .)

  Winterflaked ashes heighten

  in towers of blizzard.

  Silhouettes unseal an outline.

  Darkness, like an absence of faces,

  pours from the opened home;

  it seeps through shattered pine

  and flows the fractured maple.

  Perhaps it is the essence senescent,

  dreamculled of the sleepers,

  that soaks upon this road

  in weather-born excess.

  Or perhaps the great Anti-Life

  learns to paint with a vengeance,

  to run an icicle down the gargoyle’s eye.

  For properly speaking, though

  no one can confront himself in toto,

  I see your falling sky, gone gods,

  as in a smoke filled dream

  of ancient statues burning,

  soundlessly, down to the ground.

  (... and never the everwhite’s green.)

  THE MAN WITHOUT A SHADOW

  What master were he of brush or of graver, who

  drew the shades and the lineaments, which

  there would make every subtle wit stare?

  —Purgatoria, Canto XII.

  “Machine-like, I saw Achilles

  Challenge the gods with the inevitable conflict<
br />
  Of mortal desires that even the son of a god

  Did not lay at the feet of those that formed him.

  And I saw him lie

  Like Balder spread,

  With that mortal tree drawing of his fluids

  And shivering against the violent sky,

  Upgrown from his pierced member

  Upon the darkening ground.

  And their open faces sounded

  While she, the distant Polyxena, sister of Cassandra,

  Spoke nothing, but was believed

  Of pity and known of fear.

  Unbelieving, I saw Osiris

  Enter the House of the Dead

  On that Great Day when all the days and years

  Were numbered and, yet, saw that his name

  Was given back to him,

  And, too, the lacerate parts

  We re-formed and rose again

  And strode again.

  And great Isis, before those merciless members

  Was undone, and unbelieving

  Felt the movement of his nightclaimed torse

  Those very hands

  Had seen to the rending

  While she played the great adultress

  To a brother god.

  Godlike, I saw the great Odysseus,

  Wielder of the blinding brand,

  Retriever of the goddess-image,

  And bender of that bow,

  Fall unknowing to the unknown slaughter

  Of an unknown son

  Of his own limbs that lay with the darkness

  Of she that made men what they were

  In all but flesh.

  Beloved of her, the dark one,

  And also beloved of her

  That may never know love,

  He took to race of arms

  With his own, by darkness,

  And fell before his dark own

  That even she of the aegis could not hold.

  I saw the gods walk by

  In vain procession long

  To the distant doom of the home

  Of the eater of gods

  That throbbed with the constant thunder

  Of clashing teeth, tongue and jaws

  That consumed their Burgundy and cakes

  While bearing perpetually

  Their unwanted sons.

  And the gods came by in their trappings

  Of yellow, purple and awful red,

  And, asking that it might pass from them,

  Shuffled their feet near the end

  And thought of a thousand undone trivia

  That lay behind, and looked furtively aside

  For open doors in the labyrinth

  That might lead the way away.

  But when these could not be found,

  Strove to bear themselves like noble men.

  And the unwanted sons inherited

  The lands of their fathers

  When the fathers were no more

  Than outlandish names and strange figures

  Cast in stone, mud, wood and straw,

  While the filmier integument of the earth

  Yet held their horrors

  Constantly stirring in green chambers.

  And the universe is a blue room

  Where an ever-singing woman sits

  At the heart of a lotus

  And plays upon a stringed instrument,

  Where all these have passed and passed again,

  And never turns her crimson-cowled head,

  Save to the subtle nuances

  Of her own melody which she

  Creates for an unknown lord. “

  IN THE DOGGED HOUSE

  The heart is a graveyard of crigas,

  hid far from the hunter’s eye,

  where love wears death like enamel

  and dogs crawl in to die . . .

  WRIGGLE UNDER GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE

  One who saw the striped underbelly

  and light dotted fins swim,

  like a creature's from depths of the sea,

  above the moon,

  may have glimpsed the face that is beauty

  in its late orbiting moment

  of most skinless dexterity.

  FAUST BEFORE TWELVE

  Every bone is trumpet;

  night’s counterpane muffles breaking brass:

  the rest is silence and not rest;

  chaos improvised orchestrations

  of minute

  dash downbeat

  the closings of fiery valve.

  THE DOCTRINE OF THE PERFECT LIE

  The doctrine of the perfect lie

  is a thing I most delight in,

  smoother than life,

  planed to fit the times,

  sandpapered to join with expectation,

  polished to suit the discriminating.

  But it is not that way, you say?

  Of course. The delight lies

  in the lie’s

  telling: times, hopes, tastes

  to fit, with a little disjoint

  here and there,

  for appearance's fair sake.

  Ask any Cretan you meet on the street:

  The carpentry is all.

  I USED TO THINK IN LINES

  THAT WERE IRREGULAR TO THE RIGHT

  I used to think in lines that were irregular to the right,

  but the straight-ruled dexter margin’s claimed its own.

  Too many pages where lines advance like infantry,

  too much continuity,

  too many harried characters in far too big a rush

  to descend the humps, the hills,

  to stub their toes on weighted words . . .

  Potential energy lurks at the rough line's end.

  A kick here, a bump there,

  reality topples,

  things slide,

  The talus of improbability grows.

  Prose is clean and smooth and slick,

  advancing fully to the right,

  building walls like rows of brick,

  caging wild metaphors,

  sealing their cells dead tight.

  What is left

  when fancy's eye is trapped

  and dragged along to such a place?

  The bottom of the page is cruel.

  LP ME THEE

  Claims of music

  shackle souls

  or free them.

  I’ve never been clear

  on the matter.

  Shall we dance,

  here on the hardwood floor?

  Or shall we soar,

  wraithlike,

  to some Platonic hall

  in the sky,

  where a ball

  of mirrors

  reflects geodesic

  whatever it is that we are

  to the eye

  in the air,

  to the measures of time,

  hiccup of heart,

  note in the brain,

  the consummate colors

  we bare?

  We circulate,

  the arm descends,

  the diamond finger writes.

  THE BURNIN

  No animal should be as bright as Blake’s Tiger

  and I never want to see one.

  Forests at night are disturbing enough,

  but while mean kids sometimes douse a cat with petrol

  and set it alight

  for small, cruel laughs at its meteor runs,

  its howls,

  who has eye, hand or stomach

  (let’s just call it “guts”)

  enough to try it with Thee?

  More than simple cruelty would have to be involved.

  An existential temper, most likely.

  As in, “No other is responsible for this act.

  Free, spontaneous and unpremeditated,

  I have decided to set fire

  to this sleeping Tiger I have just now noticed

  and burn it away to a grin.”

  Or perhaps the matte
r lies

  in the hands and the eves,

  not mortal, but im-.

  —A grotesque concept is involved:

  There is this being

  with immortal hands and eyes.

  Shoot it, stab it, gas it—

  It dies.

  But the eyes accuse,

  the fingers twitch,

  as if they’d like to twine your heartstrings

  and have all the time in the world to do it,

  you son of a bitch.

  Considering it every which way,

  it is the sort of thing a primate

  would contemplate.

  I can’t see Thee

  doing it to me, Tiger.

  A cosmic SPCA seems the answer.

  It is too late to do much but admonish

  after the act has occurred.

  Primates with immortal parts bear watching, anyhow.

  And I can do without fearful, striped incendiaries

  rushing by me in the night,

  God knows. Write your Representative.

  Preserve symmetry. Save the Tiger.

  I, THE CROOKED ROSE’S DREAM,

  DUMB-SUNG ANATOMIE

  That I am the pain in the matter is the case,

  though that I am the case in the pain is the matter;

  and that I am the matter in the case is the pain

  and the cross—a shade of passed-in substance

  screaming for a name under the driven agonies of hours,

  as the slashed apart circle of the sun by telephone lines,

  not unlike that final grating of hearts, cut from

  where wires begin beyond the bounds of seeing,

  ends

  shelving bright brooks on flows of black snaking parallel.

  So still beneath me lies the world in faint and jettison sleep,

  as oftener than nights are whirled the rabbits of my feet

  through dreaming jungle. While I revolve

  under that star-pimpled sky bust, the quick-gouged intaglio moon

  seems somehow a thumbprint bruising its breast

  concave under tree topped curves jag-collaring throat;

  and aches in later membrane of unclothed day make

  hot streams from its bleeding navel an unimprovised,

  non-sacrificial way of being, while not saying,

  some perpetually unmeant missa in dominica resurrectionis,