Someone Else's Appointment

Wellness is a fountain
In an office park
By the freeway,
The ripples
From its pipes
The only schematic
Of the whole
That's available
Or needed
In this moment.

East Bloc Flashback

The dark night of the collective soul
Is one last jar of spaghetti sauce
On the white and empty shelves
And two people too afraid to reach for it.

Return of What Could Not Be Thrown Away

Fear constricts, because we need to get smaller
To fit into these shoes, that walk across this stage,

To make it easy to forget everything
But the overwhelming feeling something's wrong.

What would we do if our visions were true?
Would we fly off like birds for different worms?

The minutes are so tense, the aperture so thin,
A squirrel skull pulled from an attic box

Becomes something wholly new, that has come
For our confusion, to explain the world.

Van Gogh

There is comfort
In letting
The dragon dig to China,
In listening for
The disembodied voice
Of the armadillo lady,
Phyllis.

It's so much more sensible
Than what is happening now
On the ground,
The emotionally-precise,
Hideously-false
Stories
That kick up so many allergens
On this clear, blue day.

The goat is pacing.
The lies are piling up
And falling harmlessly
To the cliffside.

Her expression
Has never changed.
It's more peaceful
In this state they call death,
The people of the dream
Bereft of thorazine.

The poppy bloom
Might as well be the sun,
As the passion flower vine
Might as well be the wind.

There's a picture book of Vincent
From an old estate sale,
Filled with ghosts and dust
But now
Every picture's been torn out,
Carefully, so as not to rip
That delicate face.

Incident in Corona del Mar-tial Law

The isolation mansions quiver in fear
Salt air
The sea offers no answers
From every window

They are coming still
To the far side of these hills
Enmeshed with cactus
To suggest fear

Such a thing can't possibly exist
Here in this rarefied air
With cottontails safe in the green
And wildflowers free in their thinking

There are only bees and streams
Grackles and crickets
And the low drone of hikers
Pontificating on what they've earned

No threat to the distant Spanish castles
That glisten in the sun
It would seem
But there it is

The threat the illusion poses
Can't be ghosted
By the brushes
Of the palms

For there is madness
Wherever boards can't be bolted
Being too close to someone else
Might expose you to their truth

Back down the hill
The bees are terrifying
Even to those who wear
The latest stylish masks

Haiku

Many are awakening
From the dream of time
The Eisenhower dime

Distant like the Wind

A pelican rolls in against the gale
As terns race against the tide
And we who turn our backs to the sun
Vie, for what we never seem to know,
A place of rest, to feel we are safe,
That is, admired by all
We have so carefully hidden away from.

Note to Saboteur

There is a me
Beyond the you,
As impossible as it is
To conceive.
The important work
I have to do
Is not for you,
Per se, or for anyone.
It just needs
To be done,
By me, exclusively.

I wish I could give you
A happier reply.
"It's nothing personal"
Sounds too much like
"We salute you,
Those about to die."

What the Wren Said

The hills are green between the blue peaks and
Yellow valley, the lavender's full of bees,
Hummingbirds scream for creosote nectar.

It's a good year for the ocotillo,
Improving the brood with magnificent buds
Waved like coquelocot handkerchiefs at the sky

That moves its white forms across the canyon
As the wind tries to turn over every stone
But can't dislodge one living crusty jewel.

I will find the desert willow in the dry stream bed,
Or go higher, to the crackle of the final palms
With their hanging black berries.

The Words at Bow Willow

The black cactus effigies seem now like a game,
Red blooms on sticks, chuparosa flags,
The creosote trees forever waving present a new bouquet,
A funerary collection. The hills look like wombs
Or burial mounds, take your pick.

Fragrance abounds in the warm spring breeze,
Not exactly hope, more like remembrance.
The branches have dropped and are scattered in a pattern
That seems deliberate, atop the whisper grass
Speckled with pincushion, meadowfoam, lesser paintbrush.

The bees of knowledge race around the fairy duster
In a constant hum, of the same mind as the wind's benediction,
And the slow glide of cloud shadow across the hillsides
Is no different either than the breeze,
One breath, bestowed for new thinkings.

The rock faces turn away from expressing this,
Though birds emerge from their wiry smoketree mouths
And the bees sound, going to their purple,
And the green life calls from their every closure
And the bitter bush looks down in kindness from their bluffs.

You would never know their meaning with your mind
But you flow like a river through what they tell you,
Of love and its eccentricities of design, the beauties
Of geometries, and all the learning they have come to hold
Camouflaged as a saving grace from us.

In their sharpened points and ancient lines
Are the used-up spears from countless futile wars
They have the mien of having fallen, but staying even so,
As if the experience must be preserved in rough block
For those who cannot be allowed to know.

The teddy bear cholla shine instantly when the sun
Reluctantly appears, while we have barely the patience
To follow the desert verbena that live for today
As they spread across the sand, and give away as well
Their form, instead of what they could become, in our gaping.

We can see how every limb on the creosote shakes and prays,
Which turns the whole thing to a dancing figure
Expressing the wind as a form of art, as we do when
Whatever flame compels us, the red ocotillo on the top of the hill
Or the carpet of popcorn flowers below.

Into Montezuma Valley

The rock blocks out the sky
Except for some brown-grey clouds
Hiding the desert blue:
Mountainous craters
Dropped from on high
Like precarious truth
Molten and refusing to yield,
Lichen stained with melting words,
Colors of a distant palate.

The flowers are too purple in their prose.

Bristling on the hillside
In a yellow that used to be the sun
The sage make their way
Vibrant where there should be no life,
Much less that which is seen.

The land folds in,
Water jostles ancient stones,
And grasses everywhere
Go along for the ride of the breeze,
The prime directive of green
Fills each crack.

The valley is shadowed by spring,
As patterns of picked-apart clouds
Having drifted too far from the central rain
Molt on the naked plain
That waits for the flash flood of life
With infinite patience.

There could be flowers from this height,
Such magic in the quiet
For the mind.

Further down, the small white boxes
And pocks of mesquite,
The roads like streams
And the endlessness of turquoise
Haze in the distance,
The hills ahead strafed with yellow,
Like it came from them
As a poem.

In the town
The shrubs are like bone
And pebbles of bloom
Where butterflies waver wildly
In a mad dash to be invisible,
To veil their rainbows
With sacred trajectories
Passing stiff grass
Still clouds
Lost in the sun's insight

While mica light
Charges the sand with galaxies,
The cholla holds source in spikes
Splashed with it
Along the vast horizon of brush,
Red ocotillo in the distance
Like a promised land.

The branches tune their blooms
To the seemingly silent air—
A bee blows by to note there's something there,
The harmony unseen
But felt in the lungs and on the skin;
How insubstantial is
The merely physical.

Prison Planet on Quarantine

Like RVs by the sea
Our separation brings us closer,
Though we'll never agree
Who we are, what this means

We are free, to speak for each other
Without any fear we will be wrong;
In times like these when we're alone
There is unity.

For we no longer have to share
Our imaginations,
They no longer need a defense
To be real,

They are no different than the wind or the moon now,
Something tangible, impossible to know,
Yet a thing to be believed
When every idol falls to shame ...

What is the nature of our waking,
When some find themselves in different times,
Different planets, leading the same old different lives,
Where it's safe at last to be with others?

The Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin

Happy spring! Today is the 250th birthday of Friedrich Hölderlin. Here is a pdf of his wonderful poems, with the original German on the left side and my English translations on the right. Enjoy!

Forgotten Riff

My graveyard of guitars
     Came easy and they go
There is an ocean
     Beyond the shells

Variations from the Nine

Emotions are so tangible
                   They become angels
Worked into the one
        By the faith of children

But before they return
        They turn crystalline
In forms we term
                    Memory
                 
                    Held against
The long sinking hole
        That would otherwise
                    Receive them

The only thing we possess
        What once
                    Existed

Jeanne Leaves the Bottle

The earth has been sick for as long as I can remember,
Its cries silenced by the hush of a human voice
As fires burn the unseen forests beyond the eyes.

This morning, however, the earth is well,
The streams gleam as of old,
The hills hold the weight again of blue.

It's the voices who told us all was fine
Who have that tell-tale rasp now
Of something no longer viable.

It's as if the earth needed them to be ill
Before she could recover,
As the truth needs to be said before one can escape.

The Traumas of Remembrance

The tines and tongs of
                  Ferocious compassion
                                     Are washed
        In blessings of light
                                     Implied
Infusions of what is not
        Flow over the difficult moments
                  Of default polarity
                           Of what we see
                                     The ideal
                           That is real
                  And the practical
                                     Unsatisfactory
Vie as the circle throws off the flame
                            Of their friction
                                     With utter calm
           In some harmless spiral of bliss

So the divine words
                            Shimmer in the waters
           Of the cast iron pot
                                     As it's stirred
Endlessly dissolving
                            Relentless
                                     Revelation
           Fritters crackling like the rain

The Saxophone For Sandalphon

I.

It's inaccessible, an inch away,

Orpheus and his Lyra from on high

Buzzing with advice, just like every

Departed spirit. To hear the cold sky

Takes an awful lot of silence, to cope

When knowledge is too painful, and the day,

A machine, pulls inevitable ropes,

What you want still a semiquaver away.

But the mystery, even when it comes,

Is an orphan, invisible and dumb,

Like any new leaf fallen from the sky,

It needs, to even sing, receptive ears,

In those who'd live without cathartic tears,

Yet it receives ... a few keys, to get by.

II.

Each unexpected gasp, familiar roar
As it comes, comprehensible as wind,
Is received whole, pure, as known from before.
The suffering's sent to the other end,

The flame automatically breaks the air,
A disembodied voice speaks to who you are,
A ghost reminds you are alive and bare
From somewhere else, as remote as the stars,

Until you're surrounded by what's not you,
Chasing what's not real as if it's what's true
As the music froths to its aching top

And the material world disappears
To a higher ideal, more solid and clear.
There's just longing and the void when it stops.

III.

How can you know where it went, when you won't
Know where it came from? The note is alone,
Threaded to others by forces you don't
Want to understand, in your close to home,

Where materials demand to be shaped
And transformed, in a blind urge to modify,
From discomfort, at how what is can't escape,
So the sun-lit world's for the hand, to deny.

You work like a monk to capture its word.
It never says what purposes are served,
Even as we puppets bob on our sticks.

It is not for the monk to ask for more:
What God is, what He wants, what this is for;
No use asking a dancer, "what is music?"

IV.

It's still there, even when it's not there,
Ghost spring in the stride, working whistle tone,
Makes the hammer on the actual flare
Something more than what is circling the stone,

A vapor layer of longing, concrete
As the glistening water sprayed on lawns.
You can hear, wafting past the homes like meat
The notes of someone conjuring the dawn.

She is shut off from this world, in darkness
Waiting for sounds to tumble out of strangeness,
A thousand private vagaries turned loud

To offend the neighborhood, for it is wrong,
But only because what's right is known
As soon as it breaks like the sun through cloud.

V.

Like the sun out of clouds, warts and all,
The belligerence of the composer
Coming in on a wave of golden love,
Nature denatured, like a bleached sand dollar

To harmonious form, to the elements
Of violence and color, love in abstract,
Viscous, chaotic, a new dissonance
To call consonance, dug sand flung further back--

He's digging until the image appears,
Putting his life aside, his wife in tears,
For what comes, seemingly of its own accord,

What he only understands a little bit
But hopes we can get something out of it,
What exists for us as a self-portrait.

VI.

For how could you know what it is, when you are
Mired in ecstasy, your own private stone,
At turns of phrase tuned to immaculate bars
That become something different, what you somehow own.

You scan the tabloids for who the song's about
In lieu of looking within, for the blame
At what takes you back to your hardest bout
With sanity, drowned in waste, regret and shame

And wishing to disappear, to never feel
A thing again, that's how it turns its wheel
And you hold to its rope through deepest fog

As if it knows you, and will save you somehow,
Though it only falls, to nothing at all, down
Like any other invisible God.

VII.

The stone figures in the sand are alive
According to the Indigenous; we
Think of them as Art, created from desire
For the higher, however incompletely

Understood. The tides seem something expressed,
A subtler music, so distant you'll re-
Harmonize the clouds, whose colors can't be guessed,
Just glows caught on their being's minor keys

With the full weight of your longing imposed.
And your emptiness is filled with echoes
Retrieved in quarantined notes, flat impressions ...

We call it, what fades the coastline to gray,
The imagined, what the stone figures would say.
It's the only way to understand them.

VIII.

Fish through my hair, and other anomalies
From the 99% of life unseen ...
We call them dreams, these partial memories
Of old realities, where any scene

Can be played again, any phantasy
Concocted to a thing, but what is this?
The entertainment's electricity
From last night still entrains your synapses ...

That's the dream you want, a meal pre-made to dine,
For the subliminal is too sublime.
What fancy of yours burns through this construction?

The creator you don't know leaves a name.
It is a talisman to further realms,
For it lives beyond any creation.

IX.

A name that is but a word, but a sound

Provides the difference needed between

Receiver and received, the free and bound,

For all will know what the artist has gleaned

Too easily. It is as if the form

That is all it is instantly melts away

To some universal feeling of warm

That precedes whatever tints that were played

Negotiating with the subject, its sense,

Which is only ever the audience,

Which is always only the void, a lack.

It starts off with that, and to that returns

In an infinite loop of what's never learned,

The eyes that catch fire to revert, to black.

X.

But there, at work, is an actual poet
Found on the pencil smears under the eaves,
For the plans are not the dwelling, as yet,
However much they accumulate leaves.

She gathers the strays from a world built of words
To find they have voices, stories to unpack
To whoever will listen, and the birds
That come out of her pathos only lack

A mind to perceive them, the gift for her
To carry. It can't be shared; so in softer,
More desperate keys, she turns them into beasts

To be slayed by the Gods of the brook's egress,
Falsified, but true music nonetheless,
Fruit of a voice that sings, but cannot speak.

XI.

Yet there is nary a note of regret
For the words of her enemies on her lips,
For hoarding the sensuous for private
Purposes, for all the betrayals slipped,

For she's kept the perfect hostage, the not
Yet created, what the collective songs
Promised before falling unfulfilled and caught
Revealing nothing but how much we long

For expression, but have nothing to show,
Unarticulate, inexplicable,
And the glow of the afternoon overture

Takes over our senses, assumes our heartbeat
Til the kalimba thrum thumbs lift, and we
Recall nothing, least of all who we were.

XII.

And now I have picked up the rattle gourd
That has so much to say, all of it me.
What is there to make of this landed sword?
What can I say when all there is to see

Can be shared? That is, it can't be called art.
It's not of the original, the private
That speaks to what we refuse to make part
Of the humanity that would devour it

As its just dessert for shared suffering
As if there is no other offering
But the tribute of the already known,

The almighty owned, not things without sense
Adrift from time and space and our omniscience,
The only things that are worth expression.

XIII.

Though the poem is no more of spirit
Than anything else, and we reject it no
More than other small things, still we fear it,
Quivering like, beneath a jet, a crow,

Yet the incommunicable comes through stones
And eyes that cause the pains of compassion
And the trajectories of each quip blown
Like a talisman to eyes that are ashen.

The symbols are our own, they have become
The measure of our striving, far from home,
As if we would be solved like an equation

With only the gibberish of the tribe
To hold up to the skies, to inscribe
Permanence among the unseen nations.

XIV.

Still I chase after the invisible
Moth, though I can't pretend it torments me
Or even that it's any more real
Than an urge inside me to be,

Though nothing I create bears a resemblance,
It's like a carnival barker smaller
Than a fly, this insistent voice, "Your chance,"
It says, for adoration and dollars,

To be heard, obeyed, to rise to the top
Of every murky barrel. It would stop
You dead off any scent that you could track—

It's meant for the children of the dark, a prize
To think the world will change if they are recognized.
It's kindness, then, to take the promises back.

XV.

Drummers in the afternoon, like houses
Speak that strange ambition too, wresting cool
From wherever it hides and rouses
For whatever reason it chooses to

The rat-a-tat of unmoored ambition,
But still there's something, something that it knows
But cannot reach, from another musician,
Presented like the sky, wrapped in a glow,

As natural and divine as one's breathing,
Forever elusive, ever leaving,
The drum roll at the end of the tunnel,

It's enough, this light, for sacrificial
Rites, the small i self for the superficial
Delights of objects dancing to the null.

XVI.

No one's between the speaker and listener,
Or is there? We appeal to the middle
No matter where we are, like a tracker
Returns to due north. It's far too brittle

Otherwise, for us. We won't hear of it
Until the visible pundits approve
And won't speak freely without a "love it!"
From our ham-handed fixer nearby, to prove

On terms acceptable to the naked
Expression of collective power, faked
Like a game of chance, cards on the table

With numbers victorious. A different voice,
Plangent and heavenly, still in its choice
Will wait, until we've finished such fables.

XVII.

The blue girl who dispenses pain to you
Why is it hard to believe she's the muse
Humming from Lyra, from Hades rescued?
You gather with shaking hands what you'll use

To the paper. And it's comfortable,
This world beyond the mind, where memories flow
Disguised as the future, voluble
Utterance that shocks as it soothes. We go

To it, never knowing if it's really there,
Despite clean lines and architecture, bare,
Impossible to capture, thus valueless.

For it is only what we lack, an answer,
Exquisite thing that brings out the dancer.
We call it chaos, what's to the flesh a guess.

XVIII.

Whatever art is there, it disappears
In the mysteries of living, lessons
On the wind, the razor-thin timbre clears
And loses coherence, its finesse in

Limbo, aureoles akimbo, missing
The meaning it had but a moment ago,
Though, unlike life, it's remembered, trembling
Still seems to flow through the bloodstream. You follow

Like it was there, but it's not any more,
There is only a desire for closure,
The dumb notes circling the remembering brain

As the ghost limb melody fills up the hills,
Its trills billow through the late windowsills,
Take the town, in mid-pirouette down a drain.

XIX.

Love we call the feeling we get from the sound
Of the song, or the look on the paint, or
The way the characters talk as they found
Out the story. As if that's what it's for,

Our regard, when we cannot even look
At ourselves, even when looking, unaware
Who the gods are, these artists or ourselves, hooked
On the outside catch, the proffered picture,

Not as a gifted glimpse of what we are,
Not as being aware of our own power,
IE. loving ourselves, but as a rod

Where we are as sheep, chaff to wheat, lead to gold,
So far beyond us we release our hold,
To dispute among ourselves who's the true God.

XX.

The truth is love and it is beauty though
It disperses us like rats, even when
The truth-teller dresses it in the most
Refractive threads. The arctic winds come in

To manage us, as calmness becomes coldness,
To shake off, in the eyes of beholders,
When the coping mechanisms regress,
The second-hand treachery like soldiers,

Which is only the sincere desire
To connect, find friends among liars
Waving goodbye, escape them finally.

It's the season of mental illness, when
Truth can no longer be held back again.
The ways of man and God are a mystery.

XXI.

Like wind-up guitars the sound of Africa,
In no way does it prepare for the lofts
Of inner Bronx, result of the diaspora,
What they've been turned into, no longer soft,

But a flame of rage and Milar pure land,
Heaven's voice through inconceivable pain.
Or maybe it's the pain we understand
And heaven is the thing too far away.

And maybe it's this absence heaven craves,
The mourning for what's lost, the urge to save
What seemed to be real until it disappeared,

As if it was something, anything at all.
The retch of our senses, the unacceptable,
Must be gifts the distant heavens hold dear.

XXII.

For us they are gifts to question. There must
Once have been a piece of art that was bad,
But could we ever know it, being just
To our survival needs, what makes us sad?

A book of poems! Unreadable although
I drink it in like this undrinkable
Cup of coffee, to be surprised, by no,
With, like heaven, the "not I," unable

To merge awareness, as if that's the goal,
The instinct to follow is dig the hole
And find nothing as far as you can go,

But what glamorous ores along the way!
The masks you abandoned in a fit of play,
Such secrets of who you are interred below.

XXIII.

Bless this darkness, for you would not exist
Without it. But you chase with flashlight
What seems so separate, poised to resist,
The eternal shadow forever in flight.

That's how a solo becomes a duet,
The incomplete finds itself faced with a kiss
Exactly equal to the force against it,
Thus to create new, beautiful conflicts,

And we who sit listening remember
The harmonious, what was complete before
The double, the stranger, came from charged air,

And we enter the darkest of frontiers
With nothing but joy, affection and tears,
As if we know now just how to get there.

XXIV.

Here a stretch of coast, achingly beautiful,
Immaculately desolate, thoroughly
Boring gives way to a strophe of usable
Soprano sax solo, in a song we

Have all heard before. He was in New Orleans
When they recorded it, and he came right in
—And now, 45 years later, the sea greens
Are gone, there's no sky, no sun, only him

And his pretensions to Sidney Bechet
And the whole fabled lore of the Beatlés.
Maybe some jelly beans were left on the tray

As he looked at the changes, pay was arranged,
The ambient baffles were moved into range
And he fingered the runs he might play.

XXV.

This poet from the 19th century
Is afraid of me. He's doomed to be
My precursor forever, or so it seems
He says, as his present turns to history

And he debates the sun and shadows with me.
I say they are only symbols, but he
Believes them lies, and it would be too easy
To leap where I do, to conclude, says he,

With hindsight's view, where he would always lose,
And those who would posthume would always choose
The latest iteration of the curve,

For time has not yet ended: There are still
Judgments. The poet and I are one will
For you, reader, the one we can observe.

XXVI.

There is too much light, there is too much art

But darkness never enough, the divide

Turns to void too easily, the central heart

Gets bedecked with mind, its beloved guide

As if the war was already fought and

Decided. The blueprints of the blue sky

Just prophesy geometries that end,

The chords resolve too soon, and nullify

The infinite, which relies on discord's

Endless spread. That quiver on the record

Betrays the ghost you cannot see, your own

On each other side, in a cruel mirror

Where you paint your face without one being there—

The empty glare, the inexhaustible alone.

XXVII.

So I imagine an angel, to
Look at myself once again, and to know
What would otherwise be hidden, the blue
Of heaven as the blue of my sorrow

In a duet of bliss and pain, heaven
With earth, the broken lifted, the elate
Transformed through being broken, a communion
That breaks the bread of each one's strict estate

Of focused knowing. The moan of memory
Hums like bees. And joy is all the tones breathe.
The echo calls to still the trembling feel.

The gap fills: Sandalphon laughs at the gag
Of what's released from the heavy, empty bag ...
A simple squeal, my fingers on the prayer wheel.

XXVIII.

The play, like a baby, comes from the dark
Like all the crackling things that are not real
In a tossed night of sleep. The light will mark
Itself in each crevasse for its reveal.

It finds itself in absence, as you cure
Yourself in catharsis, the terrifying
Deception where even the deceiver
Believes the alchemy. It's clarifying

To chase the shadows dancing in the lamp,
And know that that's your vehicle to stamp
As well these subtle contours of your soul;

Darkness, the only canvas you will know,
The only pen, the only stroke of note:
Such fire in that irascible lump of coal.

XXIX.

It's something that didn't exist before,
What is born of nothing but desire to know,
Not knowledge itself, that crystal absorber,
But what makes itself, a God of sorts, whole

In the spiral curl of the recursive
Experience re-inferred, like fresh breath
What was old, once, now pure, and to be lived
In the rhythm that is love. It's the path

Of visible, not rooted, light, that drops
Its aromatic leaves, a gleaming crop
For the new yield from the darkness. The seeds

Must foster a further reality
For spirits to bear responsibility—
It's called freedom, what the universe needs.

XXX.

And so what if the records are stolen?
The mediocre borrow, the great ones
Keep! Ubiquity needs isolation
To pull new unities at will, undone

From the ties of all-to-all, and reapplied
To a singular path before the whole,
The eccentric way of the countryside
Sending all its saviors to the circle

To play strange notes on familiar instruments;
The airs of humus fill the cities with scents,
And they're faced with a choice, to join or split—

They don't like it but can't turn their ears away.
It is merely the call to their own way.
Will they listen, or toss dead blooms against it?

XXXI.

What stirs within, from the heart of the cosmos

Is distance, for it would otherwise be too close;

How a few petals strike the center of our souls

Disguised as angelic blessings, mere grace.

They would only be words to ourselves, but for

The spiritual bureaucracy layers

In between, that make the flowers seem more

Immortal, of some familiar prayers.

The most vivid pictures you have never known,

Or so, from the mirror, you are shown—

You think the moon and not your madness is real,

So much passes in that day to night frenzy

There's just shadow before your reagency;

It's the only way you know how to feel.

XXXII.

In the immortality of the void
You have to let go of everything you know
To become another, to say to the destroyed:
I am, and to all that overwhelms: I flow.

As you reach out to what so far away
Surrounds you, transparence and magnificence,
You pull in all it is with what you say,
Your artist's rendition just as immense,

The otherwise unimaginable
Drops like secrets whispered at the table
In a procession of glittering playthings

That turn back into you so readily
They must dissolve again, the forms you see,
Which feel, now that they are real, like nothing.

XXXIII.

The rattling of the rain is far too much
Truth for us to bear. There's nothing to see
So we can't say we perceive the truth as such,
Just its rattle from far away, where we

Once agreed to leave, to reclaim the lost
Idea, what permeates all we think
Here, where nothing exists per se, just a host
Of godlike structures built by man. We blink

And they're gone, and it's like we're really grieving,
The strings of Orpheus sound out our leaving
As bracelets of stars listen from our home

To what we have learned, in our orphaned blue,
What we can't remember, felt to be true
And sung, alone in our echoing dome.