What God has put asunder, I have joined together.
He chuckles at this somewhat self-consciously,
His clientele comprised primarily of gentlemen of a certain age,
Most of whom have stepped off to the altar
Twice or thrice, some even more,
Whose wives will be, at least pro tem,
The mistresses of the Moorish bastardizations
Being commissioned by their husbands,
Vaguely Iberian grotesqueries
Christened Sin Cuidado and Villa Tranquilla
Festooned with cornucopias of cornices and cupolas,
Featuring vaulted cathedral ceilings and open-prairie floor plans,
Impossible to cool in the ninety-degree dawn of August
Or heat during the all too frequent cold snaps,
(Such being noted to him by a visitor
From a staid Boston architectural firm,
To which he replied, Save that for the classrooms, pal.
I give the people what they want, dad,
And these folks are first, last, and forever
All about the façade.)

It is not, however, his effort to turn Florida’s East Coast
Into a giant movie set for the stories of Don Juan or El Cid
Which inspires him to utter his inversion of the marital vow.
He has moved beyond being a mere designer;
He is a man of substance, a builder in the larger, cosmic sense,
And so he is here, in this sticky, sweltering venue
Which disappointed Spaniards named after a rat’s oral cavity,
To make a new Venice, complete with electric gondolas,
Cloisters which would put any in the Old World to shame,
Gesturing, bellowing, and cajoling,
A Prospero of sawhorses and steam shovels,
As displaced Seminoles and colored laborers
Sweat and swear and stumble
As they dredge swamps and hack down stumpy mangroves
In the service of his vision, the aggrandizement of his bottom line,
Arm-twisting the caprices of drought and hurricane
To serve the pricier whims
Of a gaggle of DuPonts and Wanamakers.
It’s not that I don’t believe in a higher power, he will demur,
I’m simply not averse to some slight enhancement of His plans.

There is a certain shock, not from the silence itself
But of its revelations, the laying bare
Of the utter superfluence of language
In all which unfolds before us, the testament mute
But imbued with all the power of an orchestra
In full-throated fortissimo
Delivered through the panorama of the vast steppes,
The bounty of their Junes,
The desolation of their Januarys
The visage of the doomed Strelnikov,
The darting glances of the chameleonesque Komarovsky,
His eyes scuttling to and fro like dark cockroaches,
And most of all by the unquiet, not-of-this world gaze
Of Yuri Andreyevich, a stare which tells tales
Of how fleeting this world's happiness will be,
How final and inescapable its sadness,
And as he stumbles and falls in his mad, final pursuit
Of a grail which is unheeding, unseeing,
Always just a step out of reach,
The dialogue is not a necessity,
For we have a trove of our own words and experience
To attest to the veracity of the scene in question.

I take in the
Taste of prisms
With a tender tongue

Blue,  violet, verdant green
Magenta marvelous
Yellow, mellow light
The flavors of the sun
Shining through crystal
Covering my lips
Cherry red

The Taste Of Prisms
Emerges
Energizes
Enervated inspiration
And the ecru canvas
Comes alive with color!

CREATE!!

In the rain forest we heard the first birds
stood amid the cooling spectral fog
walked upon the spongy ground
the layered earth of moss and mud
along the path and further on
came streaming rays of sun
that silver lit the wild paphiopedilums
smiling toward the sky
a shine of silken stars.

Chance
is being in the right place
at the right time,
coinciding with the orbit
of another searching
the aspirations that you to seek.
A connection needs attention,
a compliment, a smile,
an enquiry of mutual interest
that engages instantly.
The abdication of convenient norms,
a shift in behaviour,
adopting a new travel direction.
It requires no discrimination,
but an open welcoming mind,
conjoining parallel convergence,
Meeting.


© Pagan Paul (2018)