10/30/96
Dante had an ever quest for his Beatrice
we all have this quest for the perfect giving and forgiving virginal love
It is the perfect love we always felt ourselves deserving of, before we are born
and then we hit the two sided heads of hell
A mountain lion roams, pure, in his hunger
mad dogs come barking, pus and saliva slavering...
our own fears engage, and become real
Every one of several considered doorways that are entered
each private gate to our beloved ...
flower petals become irons
each innocence becomes rash , and even that is a kind word.
I try to rethink myself in Dante's time.
It was a time of intrigue, of poisoners and lovers to stir the pot
Quartered at the papal expense, thinly through a corridor
even the papal Borgias, with sisters
The wild and violent art that followed
Caravaggio cut down by a sword
Mimics the violence of new ideas on old traditions Each year brings an ever increasing share of life I cling to so dearly
Sleep both claims me and robs me of life
If I could but do a Perseus, like Cellini,
The casting complete in one
But even he, rests on a false foot.
And yet in sleep, the sun rose in it's appropriate place and the stars shone...,
All the behemoths of my dreams were conquered by the cobwebs of growth
Illusion begat a lion in my place and the straw man proceeds
One day we begin, and enter into this journey.
With all our fears, our uncertainties, and gifted with our truths
We enter naked and squealing and covered with blood
Ejected from our private paradise where all is warm and celestial music begins
I remember music and dancing and costumes and gaiety and sex
Five button gloves in black that needed to be undone
Life was querulous
Each object of our hearts came under consideration and only in the end, did love win.
In the end it was love over commerce
It was heart and essence, over gold
A terrible time
A terrible season
midway upon a journey of my life
Separate echoes of my immortal being begin the long ascent
A She- Wolf, a Lioness, and the cub
Each one hungry for it's deserved milk
And how is the terror of my heart quieted
The sun in it's movements sets night's migrations to sleep
Cantos II
A child running
A warm tongue
My she cub licking and caressing
The very wildness of that rough and savage place taught this wild one civilization.
I enter, midway upon the journey of my life.
There have been so many dead
The landscape is littered
God, family, children
They are yet another journey
Each one entering into and receiving growth from the past
It is said a poppy spits out its seeds
They bring either Lethe or home made bread
What other staff does man erect, except to continuum
Sperm and ova always erect their temple in the body of woman
growing each god by simple bricks
for we are all gods, in our innocence
If I could but be a child again,
To begin in full bloom before winter taints a bulb
Before forced growth
Wild animals outside our shelter growl
They smell the blood , yet the feast is outside their den
To a god who is silent I address my most composed thoughts
What is the sorrow that some take from their birth
as a curse or ringlet about their necks
What are these four square walls, that contain my possessions
How can I walk the patterns of the night
Always the same
It has been the same for centuries
Always a quest for that perfect forgiving and accepting virginal love
The love that is like a mother, the Madonna and those blind and mad with love
lightning hits a house on the prairie
To divide, to partake, a hand holding
God holding the hand of man
holding the hand of his family and community
Evidence, according to fighting
The women of Pope Julius' time wore wild dresses of silk
Like women of any time, they were women
As we all are
The body is a temple to both extreme joy and hell
CANTOS III
I am looking at my mother through a wall of glass
All the body fluids have been drained and lie awaiting observation
At least there is not the slow chuck a chug of the life support
Life has been gone for many hours
A man waves papers at me and asks if this is the body...do you know this woman
do you know what is left of what once was a woman
do you know what is left of your personal madonna
birthplace and origin of your life
It is so impersonal
Death is so much worse.
THROUGH ME LIES THE SOULS THAT ARE LOST
JUSTICE IMPELLED MY MIGHTY ARCHITECT
We are in a world obsessed with blood
Spit and bodily fluids consume our waking thought
Divine right of the people both obsesses and represses us all
As we defend ourselves against skepticism
repercussions in art become plain
Our bodily fluids and our blood have become agents of death
A natural lust for life
Cause for destruction
Are we such timorous and ignoble souls that we can deny action and moral responsibility to ourselves
One can only remember the actions of both Japan and France
Where foreign blood is considered
Death is better
A highly moral culture, united in their vision of architecture, neglected man
It is said architecture is proof of power.
Power to control cities to exert shape and structure
Man's ultimate power over other men through their combined environment
denial of all moral obligations where the state is concerned.
and yet the angels swarm, some between heaven and hell
Cowards of men who have never lived, and thus foolishly pass our mortal plain
With no courage, with no life,
One does not join the forthright sea of man
"It is so willed, where there is power to do"
so the boatman of us all quiets himself
in the place of such upheaval"
life and death do not mingle well
We see each other in passing
Our breaths smell
Cantos IV
Skin becomes pale and green
The veins, purplish and distorted
Our last emotions frozen as a mask
Who is this character that we once were
All love enters and dismays this hapless room
Even the fire of all good men does not light this bush again
Though we talk of spirit and intellect
When the breath of life goes
It is as a bird in Winter
The Chinese say that the Earth was born from the slowly falling elements of the Sky at its humid zenith.
It was comfortable and abundant
Earth was always at the center
In the Spring, the Earth renews
I ride seasons of my mind to new ardour
Always, the vanity of living flesh
All hail vanity
for vanity has no place among the dead
Each one dies with her furs on
Even diamonds are not a girl's best friend.
Cantos V
Oh that lily's tongue that beckons
How sweet the champagne and caviar
What trophies the small hairs of men
love is no master of death.
In the purest of love
Another will find evil
We weep for ourselves
Finding the salt tears warming
Re- entering the womb.
Oh, for a time when music sang
Soft silks caressed
chimes of first light song
Awakening the birds
In the morning as I walked
Sweet drops of moisture fell, and in their languid embrace
Adorned the stars in their night-time chambers
What am I to make of this woman
Born of man, with man
Of my very flesh
How can I enter the eyes and see with the fresh soul
How can I have the compassion
forgiving love
At the gates of Hell Cerberus writhes
A two headed dog knashes at prehistoric bone
Shadows pass before my face as memories of some exalted summer
As ghosts of a dark winter
Of cities encircled by clouds where it is always rain and cold.
Excited quarks pass in binary dances of angels on pins
Oh for the innocence and joy of a childhood I only imagine.
Cantos VI
It is said, certain women suffer from an excess of spleen.
This can lead to a nervous condition if the heart and it's goals are not met.
It is like a filly
Neighing
Penned in by the bars of her corral
Religious symbols brand
Around the neck
Around the door
We are cut off from the humanity of man by our prejudices.
A sweet odor pervades the air
Perhaps it is of incense
Perhaps it is the smell of burning flesh
The odor of man and horse, mingled.
At the eighth well
Man came back to his original vision of himself
His need for perfect love, even though man recognizes
That he, himself, is flawed
These pure flames rising
Creating children, event, and food
An ever present well and renewing
As close the joy is
So too, is the pain
Love is a sharp sword in a child's hands
Cantos VII
A lone wolf howls at my belly
The hunger is unsated
Even the moon does not caress her cubs
Rage and vengeance come with heavy locks
They eat the wind
And the sun when it is warm.
My parents both lie beneath six feet of earth
They were comfortable in their love
And in the beauty of their love they dwell together
My father had many names.
It was a superstitious tradition to rename your child after a serious accident or health crisis
Why do my brothers strike me so
Cantos VIII
There were no lawyers in Dante's time
No ministers of justice
Justice in that day was the Inquisition, with it's file of submission, or a lord's whim
In that day and age the Lord was Master
It was always the first born son
The second born son would enter the service of the Church
He might rise to be a Cleric and inherit many lands
Many of them had bastard children
Not much is known of the daughters.
There were few powerful women in that day and age
It is well known why Shakespeare's women affected the dress of men.
Not to be men, Not to deny being women
They had not been given their birthright as human beings
I never saw my mother naked at the beach.
I never saw a commonality of women
You know, in your bathing suit or when you take a shower, women all feel their breasts are too big/too small...our bellies stick out...and we have these odors
We were always the slave empire on which men draw
Yet in some way we were the masters.
That was my perspective from my child's eyes.
Love will die someday in the body
But in the mind it persists throughout eternity
What we conceive is immortal and enters that eternal eye
An eye that returns open, even in the slumber of death
What oarsman should guide us through STYX
I hope he will have a clean brow
A lot of our waking hours is thought thinking of misery
It's close companion is death
Many of our religions are more concerned with our life after death, than
Our life among our fellow companions and loved ones.
Dante puzzles me in his love of death
If I understood death more, I would not fear it.
Death continues to approach me
to claim me as lover
each action seeking function that engages my mind
I want to understand my mother's death.
She died alone
She died in an accident
She died with no one around her who loved her
Each moment living one feels the breath of dying
Tearing hands and breasts with nails
Our importance encumbers
encircling a city of both brilliance and darkness
passing through circle after circle by a round about gate
what descends
returns
even from portals of doom
to W ant
to Wish
to Exterminate
to Create
To send forth a breathing of approbation from the North
encircling a sea of dragons
What oarsman could guide us through the sea of our emotions.
We lay our dead under six feet of earth
Hoping they will not haunt the living
Allied to the horse, Man overcomes distance and appropriates land
Man wedded to the horse created commerce.
Man wedded to the horse was a potent agent of death.
Even in a state of equilibrium
Man experiences reversal
Cool winter winds calm wild thoughts
A mountain lion roams, pure, in his hunger
Each one of several doorways enter and shut
I both sleep and dream
My mother died on a lonely morning when the winter began
Wrapped in the cloak of death she achieved an immortal peace
A peace that was never entered into in life
Life only rethinks itself in death
For one day
It is all our slumber place
How can we kiss the dead goodbye and go on living
How can we kiss the death in ourselves
The death that is both ourselves and others
Each object of our hearts comes under consideration
Only in the end does love win
I am of the spring...wind...acid...
Looking at the limp body of my mother I wanted to embrace her and lend her my strength
Obstruction
Soft hands of the religious charmed my mother to a peaceful sleep
Animals survive
Man always attempts to live
Why
A rational man always asks why
Often, there is no answer
That does still not negate the question, WHY?
Proudly the fury of our emotions turns us to stone
seeking the warm and cool embrace
For Dante the descent into Hell had to do with untimely death
One that he loved died in the plagues that afflicted his century...
This woman, he would have married
Ann was my mother
I have not yet worked out the love and hate
Our terrible dance with each other
Even in death her legacy afflicts me
Dante had great love for his deceased
I find only conflicted emotions
At least with my father I could lay him in the grave
Ann, Hannah, the devoted one
What wounds have you healed of this wild cub
What milk alliances have we begat
Life only rethinks itself in death
attempting to bring clarity
An old woman with young hands
Does it really matter
Does history change
We have this overwhelming sense of our importance on this planet
The Phenomenon of Man
As if we were so much more than animals.
yet we are each married to our past
Go on past the nausea of the present
Go on to your true goal
For we are all filled with the foreboding of death
Silks and perfume meld with gay laughter and with flesh
Each one of several doorways that we enter
To find a cub
To find a lioness and her pride
We have each begun this journey
With god's bloom we bawled our way in
Life is always that second in front of you
Love, a portal a demon takes, and returns
Chastened
This mountain lion roams,
Pure, in her hunger
I both sleep and dream
My spirit is naked and cries
Sometimes the moon is dark and
Night crawls in anguish
Yet, if I can do nothing about the dead
My only gift is to live more ferociously in their honor
And so I roar
I roar to the mountains
I roar to the wind and to the sea
Eve
