sw00160p-poem21s1

Postures 2007:  #21 from Side One

"Symphony"


  1

Sometimes I whistle morning to the sun,
great withering light
that has no vision of its own;
but there is more than sun,
more than rivers running wildly through my eyes,
as in my shivery skittering
sliding over frozen puddles,
I think
of summer
for the numbness in my hands,
and of the processes of things.


  2

A certain friend of mine is
lonely
for a wife,
and miracles,
and a simple life.
And I am
lonely too.

Yet,
what is it, purely,
to be a sun in winter,
a freezing thing
scurrying from
artificial warmth to artificial warmth,
a certain friend of mine?


  3

How we tumble through our days,
take them all
for drumlin stone!

Is there not a liveliness,
a green,
a cycle, for our
bodies and spirits?

A wind
at zero
will chase behind my glasses,
freeze a tear on them,
drift a snow
until the only death's
in whatever or whoever
would brush it off;
will whistle,
not at the sun,
not at
anything.

But is my whistling,
our whistling, such:
a sorrowed oboeing
or perfect pizzicato
on a liquid string,
the trembling of
which not a
man who slithers in this dark
has any ears to know?


  4

Egg - snake - hawk
plankton - fish - squid
man - man - dust
endless and continuous
circle upon circle upon circle
violets wink
in secret woods and die,
elms topple
unto the glory of mushrooms;
students hide in wool,
discussing literature, philosophy, and all
the knickknack rednesses
over coffee.


  5

What is lonely?
A certain friend of mine
is.

If only
his desires were a tangible
spring.

If only we,
rashy cymbals,
could scintillate to melody.

If only. . . .

But ripeness
needs a reaching out for stars,
a digging eye.

(The mightiest of our crescendos
 rumble not
 nor harden to a mountain
 but tinkle
 in the slightest fires, and shiver
 in the spindly pines;

 yet ringing
 where they will, our whistles
 slice the cycles of this world
 and we are rare and happy boasts.)

But people, problems, periwinkles
wholly change upon each chord
that measures
through an inner air
our sense of basses to sopranos

and in our calm or wild symphonic lives
every movement tenses, heightens,
varies to a paradigm;

so morning whistled to the sun
or evening whistled to the stars,
the silences of memories
are what define:

                 And then it comes to me,
                 soft yet bold,
                 and I attend
                 its rooted skies.             
                 And then it rolls through me,
                 power-souled,
                 and soon my form
                 begins to rise,
                 and I become
                 its heaven's eyes,
                 and where they roam
                 none can divine,
                 none can divine,
                 none can divine.

-------
Brian A. J. Salchert