8/13/2014

"The cicada's dry monotony breaks over me.
The days are bright and free.
Then why did I cry today for an hour?

I stood under oak, while autumnal fog
eddied around my feet, waiting for the bus
with a dread that took my breath away.
I stood at the side of the road.
This summer- it was the only life I had."
Jane Kenyon

A Sourland night with some tylenol at my
side and a black shirt that smells like Pierre Cardin
doesn't sound half bad,
and if it does, let me know. Do you remember telling birds at 5 in the morning to shut the hell up?
That was june and time goes on. And now you flinch as if hit when you see the first gold leaf, huh?

The end of an era we could not say goodbye to came and it went. We sat sullied in our sunken brows like children who'd misbehaved and silently regretted. Our mouths
tasted of sunflower fields and henna birchs. You realize summer is over when you feel it was minutes, not hours that you killed off slowly.

Don't worry. Nothing Gold Can Stay, this time you can't stop the gold from staying, but the feeling of a hell hot afternoon layed out overwhelming like a blanket is gone.

63

If pain for peace prepares
Lo, what “Augustan” years
Our feet await!

If springs from winter rise,
Can the Anemones
Be reckoned up?

If night stands fast—then noon
To gird us for the sun,
What gaze!

When from a thousand skies
On our developed eyes
Noons blaze!

I’ll trace the lines of a love poem
With the tip of my generous tongue
I’ll bend you over a sonnet
pounding your heart with verse
Until you come
Closer to the slippery edge
Of the highest haiku peak

Pulsing cranes shoot from
Sky following deep swallows
Cascading heat wing

The beat of the sextet
Engorges the plump plum with tantalizing taste
As the surging wind tickles swirling grass meadows
A pirates plunder
unbridled womanly chaste
Riding my large prose with feminine pleasure
Until both writhing bodies are drenched in chicken broth rain
I will slather you in brilliant color
As you vacantly stare ecstatic
Groaning through the augustan age

Whiles I peruse the archives of the past,
Occurs a mental transformation fast—
As thru accounts I search, and journals read,
A bold mid-cent'ry impulse seizes me.
The words I write, in structured meters fit;
Infinitives begin to slowly split.
I have at last attain'd a style so grand,
It captures an Augustan poet's hand.
O what great writers we might have today,
If Dictionary Johnson had his way.

You well know
You left once before
Returning with a
Tapping knock
Upon heart's door

Plaintively pleading
Can I enter once more
To press into your soul
Promising a true
Forevermore

Of only us as one
And none other
A one to forever remember
One of the blissful sublime
Not a love to wither and die

Shunning wise counsel
Reluctantly I granted
An entry through
Love's window to my soul
Yet all again a lie

In my agony of sorrow
Of a love lost forever
Having found my Athena
I sip deeply from my glass
Nepenthe warm and sweet

From behind heart's door
Whilst barely breathing
Teeth clenching
Rage seething
Quietly whispering
Nevermore, Nevermore


©  2017 Jim Davis

Could not resist a steal from Poe! For anyone concerned, this comes from an old personal thing.  

From Wikipedia on Edgar Allen Poe's poem, "The Raven":
... "Christopher F. S. Maligec suggests the poem is a type of elegiacparaclausithyron, an ancient Greek and Roman poetic form consisting of the lament of an excluded, locked-out lover at the sealed door of his beloved.[14]"

Paraclausithyron (Ancient Greek: παρακλαυσίθυρον) is a motif in Greekand especially Augustan love elegy, as well as in troubadour poetry.
The details of the Greek etymology are uncertain, but it is generally accepted to mean "lament beside a door", from παρακλαίω, "lament beside", and θύρα, "door".[1] A paraklausithyron typically places a lover outside his mistress's door, desiring entry. In Greek poetry, the situation is connected to the komos, the revels of young people outdoors following intoxication at a symposium. Callimachus uses the situation to reflect on self-control, passion, and free will when the obstacle of the door is removed.[2]

From greekgodsandgoddesses website
Athena
* Athena was the Goddess of War, the female counterpart of ARES.
* She was the daughter of Zeus; no mother bore her. She sprang from Zeus’s head, full-grown and clothed in armor.
.......
* In later poetry, Athena embodied wisdom and rational thought.


From Dictionary website
Nepenthe
* a drug or drink, or the plant yielding it, mentioned by ancient writers as having the power to bring forgetfulness of sorrow or trouble.
* anything inducing a pleasurable sensation of forgetfulness, esp. of sorrow or trouble.

They said, "We come from ******, where the love
"is more exquisite than men can dream of,
"much less provide.  The hard Augustan rules
"are masculine, and made for breeding fools.
"Your patriarchal moral cannot sever
"our intimacy---that will last forever!
"We have the right to choose our destiny,
"without permission of society.
"You call the past His-story; but a page
"has been turned.  We come out with a new age.
"New drama will appear upon the stage
"of life's existence---with new cast and scene,
"its poetry composed in Mytilene."
So spoke they both . . . intensely . . . from the heart.
Not too long, after that, they broke apart:
the one given to raging jealousy;
the other?---children, domesticity.

Arc of the Solstice

High summer’s solstice is the year’s proud crown:
The sun has reached his apogee, and now
Will linger through July’s life-ripening days
Then drift into a worn Augustan gold

September is a sort of seasonal coup
Who in the equinoctial treaty signs
For a slow dissolution of the sun
And all his ancient power to rule and reign

In his old age the sun is seldom seen –
Diana, then, is crowned as winter’s queen