Ouroboros, For Breanne

 A short poem for Breanne on her birthday. Written December 13, 1988.

                                                                  OURBOROS
You gather her into your arms
And instantly she drops away into the deep.  
Tiny body, warm
 Against your hips: conforms
As one flesh, again complete.
The mind falls like a stone into sleep.

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The Full Moon

I woke up this morning thinking about the first lines of an old poem, one of my favorites.  The Harvest Moon shines tonight.  I wonder what we shall each reap?




The Full Moon
                           for BB


Bright white china face
Hanging over every tree
Crystalline and full of grace . . .


No wait.


So, I have a question.           Full stop.


Why does this stillborn corpse
Of unspeakable violence past,
This lost and ungrown twin,
Still circle us night after night?
Why does he try to steal the oceans
With every revolution?
Even in the daytime, he won't go away,
Skulks on the horizon, barely visible.

Pockmarked by insult and asteroid's crash,
The worst hidden from view, but still.
A dusty rock  . . . .a chunk of us, broken
Away but remaining in our path
Threatening to trip us in our grander
Flights around the Sun.


Purposeless and yet,
We would not be the same without him.







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My Affair with Ayn Rand

I know some of my friends will be shocked, but I have been flirting with Ayn Rand lately.  It started with a training I attended in which the presenter expressed his admiration for Objectivist economics and, of course, Adam Curry has been raving about Rand for years on No Agenda. . While I was in Texas, I picked up Atlas Shrugged and read about a hundred pages.  I stopped to listen to an unabridged reading of Ayn Rand and the World She Created and this weekend, I watched the movie, The Passion of Ayn Rand with Helen Mirren in the title role.  So now I am poised to listen to the unabridged reading of Atlas Shrugged which looks like it will take me months of commutes to work, based on the number of hours.

I am sure that I had heard of Ayn Rand when I was in school, but naturally I was travelling in other circles at the time.  I have friends (and relatives, I learned last weekend) who felt moved by her books and philosophy, as many do now, I think.  With the resurgence of Right-wing, Nativist, Free Market Capitalists in the form of the Tea Party, the notion of going to the roots is intriguing.  I wonder, however, if her philosophy will have the same effect on me now as it might have had when I was twenty?  O how the notion of the misunderstood genius, persecuted for his virtues, rings so true when you are young!  Whether on the left or the right, being misunderstood seems to be the norm for young people.  What about a person in middle age, jaded by a lifetime of real world experiences? Will I be moved in the same way?   I'll let you know.

Part of John Galt's speech, from Atlas Shrugged

In the name of the best within you.
do not sacrifice this world
                                            to those who are its worst.

In the name of values
                                           that keep you alive,
do not let your vision of man
be distorted by the ugly,
                                         the cowardly,
                                                     the mindless
in those who have never achieved
his title.

Do not lose your knowledge
that man's proper estate
                                          is an upright posture,
an intransigent mind and
                                                        a step that travels
unlimited roads.

Do not let your fire go out,
                                                           spark by irreplacable spark,
in hopeless swamps of the approximate,
  the not-quite,
                            the not-yet,
                                                  the not-at all.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish,
in lonely frustration for the life you
deserved,
but have never been able to reach.

Check your road
                and the nature
of your battle.

The world you desired can be won,
it exists,
it is real,
it is possible,

it's yours.

The Poet is a Seashore Dweller

Tidal Pool, Innishmore

Rachel Carson once wrote: "To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of year, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be."
Today's poem was the last one in the Charles Street Manuscript and was meant to express all I felt about what it meant to write and be a writer.  It owed a dept to Rich, of course and perhaps a bit to Eliot, but mostly I wanted to take something I knew well - the experience of ocean's edge - and imbue it with what I thought was a deeper, more symbolic meaning.  Every image here is symbolic, and the experience of the poet as standing on the edge was meant to be as well.  To write poetry is to stand on the shore between the symbolic, the magical, the sacred on the one hand and the mundane, the earthly , the profane on the other.  It is the poet's job to point out that sacred quality in everything they observe.  In that way, poetry differs from prose.  Good prose makes us think " Yes, I know that.  I understand that, I have experienced that."  Good poetry makes us feel " I have felt that way, I remember that experience, I have lived that."  I submitted this poem to the only writing course I have ever taken, an introduction to poetry with Constance Hunting.  Her comment was "Big stuff indeed".  Well, a good effort, I guess. My apprentice work, if not my masterpiece.

Neither sea nor solid land,
the place wherein the poet dwells.
To one side rolls and swells the grey
green back of the ocean depths, of icy murk.
Hidden there beneath the waves
the predatory sharks of guilt,
the sounding whales of wisdom deep,
the moving schools of caprice and quirk.
Mysteries glowing far below -
glowing, even deeper places showing;
lost to all but the the strongest swimmer
who dares to dive below, desires
to plumb the depths of his soul.


The other side is light and land
of reason and of everyday demands.
The beaches, in their season, filled
with youngsters, dogs and radios.  Tanning
faces turned to the sun; coconut and sand.
Young men run to fetch light cans
from their treasure chests of ice.
Yet even here the sea intrudes,
not obvious, the waves allude
to deeper places further off.
But the sea remains confined
in basins, algae lined, rocky places
where sun-warmed water small life breeds,
snails, crabs, bright glinting seaweeds.


Neither sea nor solid land,
the place wherein the poet dwells,
Neither the ocean of Being, holy space
and time; deepest feelings from whence
all living symbols come;
Nor beaches, dunes and land
of everyday and ordinary.  Not the 
sun-warmed rocks and sand, the solid 
experience of living here.


The poet is a seashore dweller
between the ocean and the land
seeking the experience
of the fuller life between;
so that both worlds 
he may command.