Song of Late Afternoon

I.

What bare feet meet in the tangled beard of bermuda grass,
In the squirrels standing farcically solemn, targeting metatarsi
By the strategic strewing of acorns, in the stabbing jabs of twigs,
Is an imperative to live forever. A fey invocation in the wind howls,
“Let us curl our phalanges for the digitus landings of soft dewey skin
On the shaley shoulders of the river!”

I clamber, rambling, the knees of my jeans in shambles
Up the tradesman’s path, past the lookout point, and
Down the thieves gully to the arching beech whose
Insouciant stance allowed a barefoot adept to ascend.
Twenty-one and foot-naked, perched in his old arms
I hear the desultory susurrus of the tree-beetles
And sip six-dollar whiskey from my hip-flask
Like a Mexican cowboy about to cross the Rio Grande, pardner.

And then slip steadily like a drop of sweat
Down the forehead of a mountain to the browridge,
Where a courageous tree shoots out acutely, above the river.
This nook with a grandiose look over land, river, and life.
Lately discovered by a xenophile craving exile.
I am an imp! (momentarily) A hairy, heathen sprite of the mountain
Dancing now in and out of a cloud of Latakia smoke
And reading old English versions of Persian poetry to
The mice and the sparrows and the baby snakes.

“What does the sun say, if not that it shall cover its nakedness with blinding spite?
What does the moon say, if not that it shall clothe itself in both darkness and in light?”

II.

I should have been an angel, but for the mud cakes tressing my hair.
For there on the hill between striving and rest, I climbed a heavenly stair
And panoplied in light ranked the pantheon sons of great might,
Promethian purposes pale standing bare and exposed in their sight,
So I returned.

There is ever a loneliness along the trail that skirts the tree line.
The trees are inebriated for the air there is thick as red wine.
I break into the river, ginger – for the stones hurt the bones in my feet
There is a laughter in the splash of the brook that is young and honest and sweet,
But it is leaving me.

The sunlight sparkles off slime on the half-sunken trunk of an oak
I stand bare in the waste-deep river that flows around me like a dark cloak.
I look around as the water drowns an ever greater part of the land,
When they let the dam out, I think I will not be able to stand.
Will I float on forever? –

As cresting stream becomes estuary,
          ever eastward in the aestival wind?
Will I reach the sea? — find myself barefoot
          in the brackish mountains of waves, moaning?

I will float with mordant mutterings upon my salt-split sanguine lips.

III.

In the opening and closing of eyes comes an all-ness
Like a realization that even the cloudless sky is full of something
The becoming-ness which confesses,
“What may be unfinished is not thus incomplete! O palimpsest,
Bear your pallor away from the shrouding aesthetic of pain!”

And I, stumbling softly, on the oft water-tumbled
Cobblestones of the crumbling riverbed, hands plunging under,
Halting my lunging form, sending missiles of water into my eyes
That blur the burn of the solar star into something suddenly so un-maleficent
That I behold her, rapt, as a beautiful woman on a far stage, her warmth, a
Weeping soprano strain, sailing through the sleeping darkness.

What ambles ashore wears the same bare-legged hide of a man,
Has swallowed a mystery which will burn like the ancient Temple fire. You can
See it in his face, lambent and waxing but yet weak.
It is the light of the hope that he will find the white garments he seeks,
To clothe him.