For the P Man

"Here we must make separation
And go out through a thousand miles of dead grass...
Our horses neigh to each other
as we are departing." - EP, from Cathay

O Ezra, the days are so hot,
The gardens so small and roped off.
What have you done to be part of this
And not, as I am, there to see it?

The rivers you swam in were clear and cool.
We've given them names, but no one nearly drowned, like you.

O Ezra, the peasants revolted
A long time ago, and we never did
Learn how to sing like jays
And think like mages.

We chased, instead, the bankers' foundations in your name,
Asked the false question if you were insane.
The world has become what you feared:
History is dimmed, as before, the soul
Distorted, the sacrilege pronounced as holy,
And there's no one left to know it.

O Ezra, you glow an impressario
But you guided them to greatness with your eye.
No one you believed in would be read without you.
Those you believed in were the ones who saved the world.

Now the struts of hallowed diction
Are a blunt of whistled strife,
Interlocking smutteries, from hollow horns of brass,
A hymn of scorn and languid talking
Of the holy, vocable koan.

O Ezra, a poet's not defined
By whether he reads the stuff,
But by his alignment with the sky,
Which gives no jewels or answers,
Only dim and transient images
That none but Gods can carve.
Frail and heavy humans
Can make of them something real,
Barely heard in the whisperings of trees.

The river that you swam in, clean and cool,
Naked quarries cut from quartz, now cesspools.

Still Ezra, there's something left, authentic,
Though discordant with its places
And awkward in its times,
There's a flow we cannot stop,
A voice that shapes a music,
We must adjust our tempers down to hear it
As parents kneel before a rebel child.