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Soren Kierkegaard's
Flower
What is your worldview?
What is the paradigm
of such an unassuming self
that sits
there, so content in time,
when all you see is blue? Do Poets Have Encores
He left the stage,
empty but for applause,
when she asked
if poets have encores,
and I wonder
if,
like a medical
condition, they're tacked
upon an otherwise
healthy body,
or surgically removed
like a kidney stone, wart,
or a deviated septum.
Do they have encores,
as if they'll ever dwell
beyond the doors of encore.
It's what they do,
how they persist,
produce again, again
to live, and then
again,
each fellowship
of words is fleeting,
a nightclub filled
with random meetings,
letters drowned
out,
the space between
their bodies unified
by the throbbing sound
of encore,
encore,
encore. But when there is no more,
there is a dead poet,
though a man-like this stage-
may remain, empty.
Demeter’s Call
It is January still,
but you would not know
it,
except for trees which stand
now nude and sunbathing
in an extraordinary
interruption.
Persephone escaped today,
heard Demeter’s call
and through the earth rose up,
reached out onto the
surface.
She touched it,
just before her husband
pulled her back to Hades.
Sitting in her fingerprint,
the smell of spring
unnatural but welcome.
Like the bogs before me,
stripped and dull, yet having
thrown
a remnant to their edge along
the sallow turf, this is
a day incarnadine, not dun,
a
post-it note for spring.
Waking
From a Dream
When I leave the island, without fail,
I feel as if I'm waking from a dream,
stuck
upon a vessel somewhere sailing
in the moon and morning.
I see the dream, a distant sunset haze
exhausting
form and breadth and color,
captured in between an Eden lost
and Purgatory gained,
bound to lost ideals
of peace, nostalgia,
longing and fulfillment, faith in God,
who conjures light from utter darkness
smoldering
in the void.
When I leave the island, without fail,
I feel as if I'm waking from a dream.
The Grey Lady
Do I sail away
from her,
or does she sail away from me?
Subsumed in fog, she floats
upon a still, sleet ocean,
vanishing
within a swath
of mist and magic,
the ghost of a dream,
not terrible or lost
but melancholy.
She's like a lover's body
lost to endless fathoms,
beautiful and still,
becoming less distinct
and
sinking down,
down into the depths
beneath the surface gray.
A final strip of sand
that glows like amber
through the mist
is like a final strand
of golden hair that waves
within the current,
lashes out until
it disappears.
She sails away from me,
lover to a desperate heart
with all my joys
and expectations
anchored there,
like when a lover
turns to walk away
on a day of rain and grief,
robbing me of dreams.
I stare into the fog,
imagining that she's still there,
another beach or even just a light,
wanting desperately
to catch
a final glimpse of where I was.
But sea meets sky uninterrupted,
their frontier edges blurred,
and once again I drift
upon unending waves.
Sieur de Monts
Cool beneath
Acadian granite mounds,
I'm prodded gently by the breeze
in the wildflower gardens
of the Sieur de Monts.
The air is delicate, infused jouisance,
secreted with the flowers' scent,
disparate to the naked thrashing
of the ocean swells
on cliffs and gangling rocks that leave
the awed and trembling observer
sailing towards
horizon,
more aware, more afraid
of my life-blood's meanness
thrashing naked through my veins.
So instead I ramble to the servile lull
of wood and stream.
The flowers offer up their honeysuckle smell
with
woad and madder
blueberries-replete with juice,
for nose and eyes,
a dry and greedy mouth.
And for my
ears the birds,
whose songs cascade
on branches, intertwine
with the rustling of leaves.
I'm
a god of the Hesperides,
a modern day Edenic first-man
blanketed by solitude, the center,
having found significance,
or the appearance thereof, again. On
Six Foot Wings
I am surrounded by celestial beauty,
overwhelmed by mountainous expanse,
the vulture's dance
on six foot wings upon the snowy wind.
I have met Elijah's ravens
souring up to cavernous nests
of sticks and tamarack,
as if they come to feed me
on
the mountain's barren peak,
black angels of God,
messengers from a holy realm
to
keep their eye on one
alone.
Poor Icarus
I
Stave off
the waves, I yell, but it’s no use.
He has fallen to the Lorelei,
whose sweet enticements followed him
into the sky, fly higher still,
until the sun deflowered both his wings,
picked them one by one.
Then an abstract
rush of wax, feather, flesh and human fowl
tumbled. By the Acherontic Sea,
helpless to
assist I am a shadow
of the boy, a passing billow of a man
who stood upon the fold. Poor Icarus.
II
Poor Icarus. His eyes are discs
of bloat. Peculiarities
a little more amphibious,
but not nearly enough. He roils
in his memories of breath
and wishes he had more to take
as oxygen
and life begin
to fade, like ink upon the palimpsest,
and all his thoughts are gone but one:
It would
be nice to write this down.
Tonight I Could Weep
Tonight I could weep, as God wept
at the creation of the world,
and fill the seas, preparing shelter
for Leviathan and all who frolic
in his tears, who cannot understand
the sacrifice of a divine solitude.
I could weep, as God wept upon the world,
and kill it with my tears, born from the loss
of innocence,
wet and warm as blood
seeping from my bones, pressed by the deluge
of another day, alone, without
the consolations
of an olive branch.
I could weep, as God wept by the tomb
of Lazarus, abandoned by his friend
to death,
accosted on the way
by grieving sisters, by an utter void
of truth, by the anguishes of life,
before the
sudden raising of the dead.
I could weep all those tears
for all those many reasons,
along with the
constrained
amalgamation
of sorrow and confusion.
I could add my tears
to the engulfing mists
caressing with the wind,
a sympathetic power,
powerless to comfort
because it does not know,
cannot
understand
what it's like to be a man.
It travels on in waves
across the field, obscures
the new-spring
green, and makes
the scenery a pale wash,
dull in the expectations
of my soul.
And if he wept
as god or man,
then how much more should I,
unable to conform
this paradox theology
with meaning or
discern
an end from a beginning?
If he could weep, then I will also weep
and add my tears to ocean
waves,
to dust, to mist, to graves: creating,
destroying, utterly alone,
understood by no one
but
the weeping god.
A
Writer's Life
A writer's life is lonely,
like the letter a
at the beginning of this
sentence,
useful, bending the mind towards
a coherent set of thoughts,
the linguistic piston catapult,
but
it's utterly alone,
just an a,
meaningless
without its poetry.
Pointers Jump left. Turn right. Now, run
along the russet shore
where wood meets gilded
fields. Their masters run behind
blowing into wind the whistle
calls. They follow
spotting birds
escaping
into aromatic
sunset smells
of earth tone tamarack.
They run, ears flopping,
excitement palpable,
galloping like horses.
They stop. They point.
Good dog.
They wag their tales
and run through endless
sunburst possibilities. They are confined
by rules, calls, commands,
but I envy them.
They are
free
bound in chains
among their masters. I long to run
and catch birds, to be free.
Don't Tell Me That I'm Young
I'm young.
As if I cannot feel the airborne sting
of a million locust thoughts.
They pester me,
a young choice grain
that stands in solitude.
I'm young.
As if the weight of tired years at twenty
six
is feather-lite, not weighty as the night.
I'm young.
As if a man, bloated and distorted,
drowned in his own tears
at twenty six feet deep is less drowned
than one at forty.
That's why I wait
for you, my love,
at twenty six years young.
If you are God, then come.
If Eve, then I will wait until I wake.
Are you young, too?
Then come and pick these grains
with gleaning hands
before the coming
of the years.
Don't tell me that I'm young.
An Admiration
If you turn your face,
I'll admire your feet,
feet of knitted sinew
and delicate flesh.
They are your foundation,
and your hallowed form
rests on
them.
Sacrosanct siren,
I know your face.
Your radiant petal eyes
open to me now,
drizzling honey
over cardinal lips,
my strong tower.
But I admire your feet.
I love your feet
because they walked
unfruitful earth,
through contumacious winds,
on restless oceans,
until they found me.
Nantucket
I
Nantucket-island of my heart, within
its rhythmic soundings lost to the pulsing
of the sea's perimeter, throwing
up
its sand upon the waves, as a white flag
in the calm anticipation of peace.
Placed within
a body of dark terrors
and beasts of unfathomable power,
where storms dance over a lachrymose floor
in intemperate
worship, uncaring,
unanswerable to anyone but God.
II
People school like fish
upon its shores
in search of food
strewn across the cobblestone,
of shelter, of friendship.
Every year they swim
on surface sands,
inelegant
yet lithe, a sign of safe
discomfort, a turbid light.
Like clouds they come
to carry off the sun,
dissipating
on the ferry
home.
III
The Lady Grey
vanishes from sight,
with a glimmer,
a wink and a nod,
in the exhale
of a dying sun.
'Sconset
Melancholic cottages in droves
scramble for the sea in layer
tumbling over layer,
splash on stilts
upon the breakers.
They flatter the sea, a mimicry
of shingle over weathered shingle,
gray as the Nantucket
dawn,
riddled with cracks and dents and grooves:
products of wind and time
like a battered wave's surface.
Time passes. Observations fly.
No more distinct, the masses
fall united with the deep,
each cottage
a wave,
each street a current,
each rotary a whirlpool,
around which white-capped houses swirl,
each
block a gale,
the village a tempest.
I walk between the crests
with friends, with villagers,
with
other traveling guests,
who float upon the sea:
the sea at 'Sconset.
A
Riparian Drama
Hermaphroditus and the nymph
exchange
their glances,
passing by like lovers
impassioned by the fervid sun.
She drags her blue and milky hand
across his talus skin,
stroking, turning his face
though still but not unmoved, entranced
by the pounding
of her steps,
the ripples of her dress
that fruitlessly obscure
her body's taut, quivering contours.
He draws her in until they kiss
upon a bed of sand
and pulse and roll and move
upon and in each other,
one.
Loved and Lost
I
Whoever said,
'Tis better to have loved and lost,
than
never to have loved at all'?
Liar. You have never loved.
Or loved and never lost,
rested in her
cantrip arms,
lighthouse to the lost lover's ship.
They beckoned you like rays of light,
puncturing your soul
like knives
through the emptiness of night.
But you rested on their edges,
steel-cold to the vagabond's touch,
soothing to love's fire cracking
in the embers of your heart,
and then you wrote those lies.
But I
have lost.
I don't believe your poetry,
your fanciful imagination.
I have lost.
II
Love is, for me, a threadless needle,
a coat with none to wear it
though the world is frigid,
a sea, its waves tumultuous,
symphonic, swirling up, around
like a conductor's wand
yet heard by none,
received by nothing:
there is no sand, no splash, no ears.
A tree falls in a forest,
a man falls for
a woman,
but if there are none to hear it
has he ever loved at all?
Yes. Oh yes, and how he loved.
But better if he hadn't.
An Act of Marriage
Sear it forever in my mind,
and let it radiate from there,
a sun to warm
my ice soul-nights.
Persevering to remember
this guignol act, played out for me,
two
wood-beams merged,
forever joined
in the Golgotha of my mind,
the fell, on which you died instead: two beams, never
to be divorced.
Let me hear throughout
the ages
that ceremony's wedding bells.
Let them free me
with their ringing.
Ode to My Pipe
Last night
I had a conversation with my pipe.
I felt tired: tired, bored, and empty,
as if I never existed.
I
lit it slowly, took a drag, and watched the smoke
curling in the air like soup, remembering
the many things forgotten,
and I told them to it while I smoked.
I told of all my longings,
recounted the desires
planted
in your kisses,
lamented your forgetfulness
and all the tears I suffered
from the love that left me
desolate, forgotten,
told of how it's possible
that no one really loves me,
I mean really loves me,
I mean just me, loves me,
because I've been alone,
refusing to pay tribute
to the baseness of the world,
that maybe I'm finished,
maybe I'm defeated
by my own tragic life,
that I've suffered and cried,
that
I've struggled to the end
and laughed, that it's what I've won
for being understanding,
only to live desperate
in an empty world.
Last night I had a conversation with my pipe,
and, having turned tobacco into ash,
I notice how, in this sad poem,
only he has cared for me, as an only friend,
and in the end, was incinerated,
emptied by my melancholy sighs. Windows
Outside
the windows fly
of another world, another life
window to window passing
like strangers, light like wintry
airs,
inconsequential, unrestrained.
And trees, buildings, people,
the harbour tweaked with moon
and pale lamps, fraternal twins
that dance upon the waves and time,
pass like film along the glass,
along
the cool rigid touch
of a translucent gaze
into a transient companion
of a world, until it disappears.
All of it: all this dies,
is buried at my back
under the soil of my periphery
never to be raised.
And if I turn
it is altogether something different:
changed and running away.
I think of
death,
of passing lives and trees
and windows.
Links to F. G. Capitanio's poetry online:
Spanish Amah, published in the May 2008 issue of Apollo's Lyre
Divine Voyeur, 2006 honorable mention and published on the website of the Utmost Christian Writers Foundation.
The Bridge Literary Journal, 2006 publication in PDF downloadable format. "Of Wakeby Pond" by F.G. Capitanio, Page 61
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