poetry, voices
October 10, 2008 at 6:38 pm Leave a comment
the hippy
I.
The hippy’s woman
spends an hour, in the morning,
combing
her tired and frizzy hair, vainly attempting
to hide the scars
that clown her face,
distort her smile.
Gentle she seems, meek
(but the careful avoidances
mask a thing
the hippy knows too well):
her words wander,
refracting sometimes strangely: hebephrenia, perhaps:
or,
may be,
she carries scars too
in her brain.
…having outlined and
emphasized, I say,
she goes out to assume the burden
of another day.
II.
The hippy rises early,
most mornings. Brandied
coffee, joint fuming brain,
he starts the fire…
and what will he do
today. This home,
this house; a symbol.
He made the money
selling pot. (say
that softly, now.)
He built it himself:
hoisted each beam, shifted
each plank; this ‘place’
is no place, it is part
of his self, writ large
and quite wordlessly.
He has missed the city at times,
to be sure. He has few visitors,
here on his scrubby hill.
But he knows this hill
as once he knew lovers;
each curve recalling a secret,
a private experience; he hasn’t
had so many paths
since childhood.
The land knows no lies,
no portents, no meanings: the deer
do not cry of justice,
struggling against that
long vaguely sensed, and suddenly familiar spectre.
He has known, at times
a mysterious calmness: “all things,” he says later,
vaguely,
“made equal and thus all
things one, no division
any longer visible
“whether of self or other, whether
of gain or loss, where
there is no word nor separation.”
The knowledge, you see,
is quite quiet; nearly, in fact, silent. I say, he
daily
becomes more silent.
III.
They greet me as a friend
each time they meet me.
(But each hearing
can breed echoes, with some.
Perhaps somewhere
i lost my sense of time:
i think
i have never been touched.)
Am i my own friend?
At times this same insight
is self-directed, pauses each
word and swallows each act.
I have never been, in a sense
other than a stranger
to anyone, at all. The price
of poetry is silence: but of its lack, noise. I have
learned silence,
by now, fairly well.
But how do you speak
a lack of words?–we say
little, really, the hippy
and i. Shadows…
this next time, I’ll sharpen
his knife.
(silence
has many forms)
IV.
Fugitive images and
vain vague images: once,
I can remember, I hoped
to be free.
I lived on the hippy’s
land, for a while.
It was bad for my art
and not good for me;
we drank those months
away. Yet still these visions
of some esoteric brotherhood
will not resolve
to vain dreams
and self-deceptions.
–i have described myself
quite often
as a voyager toward
truth. but, to be honest,
i’m not at all certain
how to stand it, should i find it.
————————————————————-
Glenn
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