Whether spawned by hell or sprung from the stars,
to live in mankind is far more than to live in a name.
How poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
full of masks and dances and swelling chants,
great sphinxes stretched out in the depths of emptiness.
You'll never find things like that on your way
rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
where the air is wet and the light is cool,
and the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully.
I know the voices dying with a dying fall;
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves.
Strange myths of souls that found themselves among
strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep.
But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands.
To molder among the bones of the dead
will keep your heart from beating, from wishing...
Though stricken to the heart with winter's cold
I know the art of evoking happy moments.
But you who brought this glory here. I felt
perhaps you consider yourself an oracle
—from obstinate dependence on nicotine,
Bending your passages from right to left and from left to right.
The fullness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.
And all that mighty heart is lying still
Turned incandescent by a changing wind.
I watched the past move, a line of clouds moving
to break your courage, bring you to bay.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
That swelled and burst, and rippled beauty out
against uncertainty which holds us down.
Then, your love looked as simple and entire;
deep as first love, and wild with all regret
in looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
under the brown fog of a winter dawn.
That is the bewitching souvenir which flutters,
looking for the light and the key.
I want to describe your beauty:
In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends.
the distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight
from the charming tips of those pointed breasts
reflecting in a watery mirror.
Keith E. Sparks Jr. Copyright © 2004
Recently Published In Quintessence by Soul Poet Society
Available on Amazon.
Line sources and highly recommended reading.
1 Charles Baudelaire --- Hymn To Beauty
2 Vachel Lindsay --- The Eagle That is Forgotten
3 Billy Collins --- Marginalia
4 Imamu Amiri Baraka --- Ka'Ba
5 Charles Baudelaire -- Cats
6 C. P. Cavafy --- Ithaka
7 Billy Collins --- Fishing on the Susquehanna in July
8 Arthur Sze --- The Shapes of Leaves
9 T. S. Eliot ---The Love Song Of J Alfred Profrock
10 T. S. Eliot ---The Love Song Of J Alfred Profrock
11 T. S. Eliot ---The Love Song Of J Alfred Profrock
12 Ezra Pound --- Masks
13 Ezra Pound --- Portrait D'une Femme
14 Theodore Roethke --- Elegy for Jane
15 Charles Baudelaire --- To The Reader
16 Walt Whitman --- To You
17 Charles Baudelaire—A Carcass
18 Charles Baudelaire --- Posthumous Remorse
19 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow --- An April Day
20 Charles Baudelaire --- The Balcony
21 From Cyrano --- Sonnet 30
22 Sylvia Plath --- The Colossus
23 Arelene Ang ---More Than A Deficientcy
24 Ezra Pound --- Before Sleep
25 William Wordsworth --- Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
26 William Wordsworth --- Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
27 Charles Baudelaire -- Overcast
28 Louise Glück --- Landscape
29 Charles Baudelaire -- Sed Non Satiata
30 T. S. Eliot ---The Love Song Of J Alfred Profrock
31 From Cyrano --- Sonnet 30
32 Vicki Hudspith - Were We Drowning
33 Richard Wilbur --- June Light
34 Alfred, Lord Tennyson --- Tears, Idle Tears
35 Alfred, Lord Tennyson --- Tears, Idle Tears
36 T.S Eliot --- The Wasteland
37 Charles Baudelaire –The perfumed flask
38 Charles Baudelaire --- Beyond Redemption
39 Charles Baudelaire --- The Beautiful Ship
40 T.S. Eliot --- Portrait of a Lady
41 T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets 3: The Dry Salvages
42 Charles Baudelaire -- Lethe
43 T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding
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