sw00830v-39.poem37

Venturings



 Stages


One day when I was tricycling free through air
And summer came the "whom" of drums, the "where"
Of brass.  Wonder wheeling response to both,
I prayed they would march till distance was bare;
Prayed they would march till melodious growth--
Mysterious as the varying shade
I peddled through--could no longer be loath
To share its faraway goads, goads who played
Near railroad yards in suits of blood and blade.

And again today I remember fields
Whose star-white blooms brought o strawberry yields
We sunk ourselves into with laughing joy;
We plucked, we pressed, we smeared.  How wild the wields
Of berries crushed!  How cool and pink each boy!
Neat screams: chaste girls who ran through weeds; who fell
On clumps of razor grass: new queens of Troy
For us to save, new tears to wipe on hell.
How soon we lost our hearts beneath that spell!

So, as eleven solar orbits turned
Me toward a special pine, those hopes I spurned
On music's board began, somehow, on art's 
To climb; and I, rejoicing, deeply yearned
The miracle of canvas life.  My heart's
Impatience gathered oils.  My fingers strained
For the mixing knife; grasped released the darts
That tell. . . .  And so I brushed and stained
My tree: all that was lost; all that was gained.

But time allowed another turn, and I
Allowed my paints to crack till knowing why
The notes would not; nor would the brushes' strokes,
Long last.  For days this self, a foreign sigh,
Appeared to be, as if a webbing's spokes
Destroyed by some invader hard about
And the webber forced to hide, spinning jokes
For its survival, jokes which could not shout:
Each word must be a pebble ringing out.


                                                         (1964-197?)



-
Brian A. J. Salchert