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Lyric Poetry by C.M. Decarnin

JD 21                             12-1-91
 

Goodbye, angel of my mind
I cannot take you past this gate.
Love, no illusion was more sweet
of all Illusion's kind.

If no one knew your radiance
what use would be eternity?
What use would all creation be
with its audience?
 
 
 

JD 6c   Samedí                         9-14-90
 

The gorgeous sadist dressed in night
slinking spangled with all light

The world's is a whip that burns like fire
The world's is the whip of our desire

To crave pleasure, to flee pain
and never see the spreading stain

Where under pleasure's dripping cud
forms the pool of our life-blood

-- See how we play and oh what fools --
play by the universe's rules
 
 
 
 

JD 6b                      9-14-90

Desire is paint
the universes use
carousel horses'
insane faces'
whites and reds and blues
 
 
 

Capsule Hist. of Eng. Lit.:  A Ditty

I sing of a male perverse and cruel
And how his looks were free
And I was a fool for that liberal boy
That never was fool for me.

This is the line and this is the book
And this is the A through Z,
That I was a fool for a liberal boy
That never was fool for me.
 
 
 
 

After "Lady, Weeping at the Crossroads":
      Women to W. H. Auden
 

Now with a leash of greyhounds
And hawk upon his glove
Who comes to the crossroads
Singing love?

With velvet cap and feather
And red jewel in his breast
Oh why send the deathsman
So rich dressed?

Don't we follow your sheep-boy
Down to his cold still pools,
Follow bare feet and a garland,
Death's own fools?
 
 
 

The Angel in Autumn
 

Evening in
late November
and a star
white, white,
unbearable
messenger

standing,
sleeves spread,
on point,
in the fade,
joy
is a planet

saluting
the infinite; incantator:
acute pure
note
ignited:

the quake of the intervene
of air
tremoring
immobile bright
spike

that arcs by utter
sacrifice

of light.
 
 
 

Englyn proest dalgron
 

When the gold rubs off you, boy,
then the wind runs in the row
showing the wheat grass, and law
in physics, lovely as you

in your lawlessness.  Then crow
flattens wing over furrow,
in a pine wood a pine bough
blows, intently, gentle, through

shadows of others also
devoutly moving, the few
repetitive figures new
in each air, as each wind's flow.
 
 
 

Maitresse
 

The night of the orgy
Milady, in red velour,
and blue sashes, booted tightly up the calf,
creamy tea-rose swooming toward death in her
decolletage
colors her face to distract from her waistline
and snaps
the cockring on her left wrist.
The evening, she fears, will be too brightly lit.
To corset
or -- politics and vanity be damned --
to breathe?  She's cast her lot
with air and darkness;
and beauty that maketh its own shadow
moving in the room,
she'll take, as far as it can be had,
in her eyes, palms, mouth, but oh,
age leaves so little shade.
 
 
 

Arc
 

What music worthy to go forth
to my cruel love? -- breath
and stops so little worth,
though the loveliest sounds of earth,
by your angel call toward death.

Clear peal of the horizon star
mute by the siren meteor
that down vacuum black as char
ruining writes his buring scar
where never was any light before --

What dirges for these gods that die
and rise again in fire?
What voice beside a demon's cry
to ululate the old wild lie
and wail a requiem for desire?

There is no death.  This matter spun
from dream, that dreams in turn,
that weaves itself and comes undone
in making many loves of one,
slips from the dreamer and dreams on.

Beauty rebukes Death as a liar.
Bright flourish in the sky,
my covenant is a bow of fire:
awake upon life's shining pyre
and know yourself too fair to die.
 
 
 

Damascene                      4/4-7/06

all the past
gold-traced in the steel
   all praises
   all despair,
long, in the final cruelty,
sickled
   down to dust
smoke, mists
from autumns
and breaths
green delicate trail
of springs
on hills and tumuli, once
footsteps over stones
and cermonials
bore the thoughts on, mind into mind
all long millennia
vines patterning
trunks old as
   buried walls
lichen chasing stone
   set when iron
   was born

deeds
in blood and bone
worked immovable
the writing
on the blade
all unperceived
hard understood
so secret is
the script
all scriven
but few scrie
from the lorn heath
and glittering-hilled city
scrawls our light
who once in the same
illiterate fur
reconnoitred night
as all other animals,
till the foundress of
a genus
caught and raised
the cub of fire
and learn'ed,
marked its days in char,
chalked hallows to the moon
and in the language of the endless wind,
the ceaseless wave,
called time to heel
o ancestress
blest be thy sword
where dwells the word
blessed be the jewels
written full of craft
that ages read,
still garlanding thy dust;
otherwise only the heavy stones in line;
grass in the wind;
so-ordinary quietude marking having been
utters, with earth and sky
the nothingness, profound within what is.
 
 
 

Daimon                     10-5-76

Strange, a slave that goes
and comes as my love does
and warms his whispers in my hiar...

a suckling at the witch's-teat's
a less peculiar servant
than the familiar murmurring to me,

his mouth laid near
the blue of the throat's vein
to breathe his secret pulses to the blood --

he lifts his kiss at last.
As our lips touch
the whole of his sweet breath spills on my tongue.
 
 
 

Weather

No taste, no taste --
I come from where storms show up in heavy sables, ropes of diamonds,
bright stiletto heels
-- none of this grey-flannel savoir faire.
I woke up in a respectable suburb
where one was practicing flicking
the roofs off houses with a new blacksnake.
Winter gets together its ermine and ice, the nights slink by
   in sleazy auroras.
Fall is an arsonist.  Spring likes to slap you around a little.
What kind of background is that for a sensible poet?
 
 
 

Canto Hondo
 

Lyrics of dogs in the dawn cold
-- as deus was devil in the old
original code -- address the mystery
of what we speak, and why, and other history.

Why may we not howl, alle'-lujah',
since god rides up from our raw
organ meat:  wet red, white dried crumbs lie,
spilled sacraments upon the thigh --

O perfect voice out of the animal
loitering in black and silver wail tell
day's coming, rising of the moon, perfection, death,
hooved presences; the passages of breath.
 
 
 

Spell
 

Bring me a sea-wet stone, something broken
                  of your own
-- I want to make you a charm for death.
A charm I make you of my breath
                  and sea-drone,
casting to mateless moan, things not spoken.

Time is the bone-white ache, all thing cloven
                  it will break
-- I will leave you amulets for pain.
Round amber and round jade have lain
                  in sea-rake,
light in the stone awake, liquor-woven.
 
 
 

Aphrodite

born of the sea,
of the surge,
of approach,
of exhaustion, of sliding away,

born of the air's capture
in plunge, in collapse,
in destruction, of form out of ocean,
the foam-daughter --

the swirl, on the full
liquid force, of such lace,
the slide for the dark of the trough,
and pitch from the crest --

with worship off Kythera,
in wind for Cyprus to witness
the rise from the mechlin crush
of such breath's tissue as this.
 
 
 

(untitled)                  9-28?-91

The rose unfolding
in the evening sky
turns all its petals down
to black and die.

Light lies down on
illusion and expires.
The night lives full
of mystery and stars.
 
 
 

Homeland
 

North, the trees rust and burn,
drop their swags of fire to the ditches.
Wires all
baroquely scored with birds at dusk
swing silent in the wind again at dawn.
The roots of the corn-stubble freeze upon the clod,
grey lingers on horizons,
hawks convoke.
So late to learn it:
autumn is my homeland.
I am far from home.
 
 
 

Where I Get Those Crazy Ideas
 

The upstairs neighbors, fans of Dr. Scholls,
                                      trip on their clogs,
they own some object, large and wood, they drop,
neither can they keep a grip on their rollingpin a-pie-making;
they entertain centaurs often,
integrate a token unicorn or two,
the odd rhinoceros.  Drunken rhinoceroses condescend to demonstrate the charge.
A bit Marin, they read The Joy of Indoor Wildebeest Breeding and believed it.
They jump rope.  They pump iron.

I take up retaliatory typing late at night.