Ken Greves

LANDSCAPES OF THE HEART

© 1994 by Ken Greves

XXVI CANTOS: LANDSCAPES  OF  THE  HEART

I

Autumn arpeggios

Cascade from fingertips of splendid willows weeping

As if the wind stirred the glistening green

Into an animated suspension of Niagara.

II

Black Chords; winter blues:

Love for sale. Unfaces come, go.

False prophets of spring.

III

Cultured death in the empire heart

Shrouds the eternal hearth

In a vale of lustful ejaculations - Jug! Jug! (sic).

Sirens of sex rape the blood's magic.

Genitalia focus minds upon a singular mastery,

Robbing beauty its mystery,

Wrathwhipped torrents of frozen manna

Inundate manunkind.

Shadows of clouds unleash the tar world of night.

The skyclimbing phoenix freezes in ascent,

Extinguishing the groin's fire.

Spring summers and falls into winter's snows

Silencing nature's choir.

Ill-wingéd Icaruses rime under the glacial sun

And reel earthward, disfigured.

Cannibalizing Cains chomp their brothers' vitals

Swelling with the waters of liquidbirth.

Fluid guts ooze out once able lips.

"O sacred Earth...."

Memento Vita, lovers. Promontory perched, promiselove's ark

Delivers the hearthope:

Winterborn child of mantime spring

Descending like the rose, in flames of birth and breakaway,

Upon the ice cream phoenix.

Sprung from winter by the pull of the Sun.

THE INTENT OF LOSS: A HYMN OF LAMENT AND REBIRTH

Your deadly words, hung in midair,

Before clattering like silver coins

Upon the altar of my heart.

In the cool blue of twilight

The veil of stillness descended

Shrouding day from night;

Outcasting me into the darkness of suspended seconds.

A mute moon screeched over a bruised world

With the keening heart of a widowed bride.

No more the morning light

Refracting into rainbows or

Radiating into glories.

No more the living concert

Resolving into harmonies or

Resounding into majesties.

I see dimly now

Through a glass darkly

The hidden dreams and desires of a misbegotten exile.

I hear faintly now

Through a wall enigmatically

The distant cries and whispers of a misplaced heart.

Gone, now,

It seems, forever,

The long slow green comings of summer.

Here, now,

It seems, forever,

The disjointed gray goings of winter.

Autumn, lay outstretched,

Like a broken skeleton of a beached whale,

Displaying traces of magnificence.

As I lay unliving,

Diminished and depleted,

Tethered to the cross of memory and desire,

Passionless,

I surrendered all to All.

In the extraordinary eternity of a second,

The full fury of Spring

Resurrects your deadly words into a shower of roses

Wine-red rare.

From the East

A balm of breeze,

Mixing forgiving freshness with renewing fragrance,

Gathers up the petals in a gentle frenzy;

Strewing them along the path of plenty,

As I behold Thou,

Altar-wise by owl-light*

In the perpetual spell of Presence.

*A phrase from a poem by Dylan Thomas that resonates deeply with me.

-July 4, 2003

West Cornwall, CT