Ups and Downs

Beyond all passion is a quiet place;
The right place for you and me.
We belong there, it’s our home.
It’s a small wood-frame house
Overhung with white oaks
And wild hickories,
Reserved for the birds
And their enticing songs.
How we love to languish there,
Beyond all tears and ashes of regret.
We lie within the twofold doors
And watch the rolling lands stretch away.
Hyphenated with fences
Punctuated with cattle
Tree-megalithed:
Home for dissolute souls.
There they can crystallize
And harmonize. Become whole.

At night-
The Dance begins.
Toe-tapping antics
And frothy frolics
Beneath the stars.
Segments of creation
Come together for us
As we make joyful
Memorials to eternity.
We wait for nothing.
The wind riffles our souls,
Cooling them only slightly.

‘I’m weary of heat-bound days and nights
and Sultry Decadence,’ she sighs.
‘Come Autumn and blow a new wind on this
overheated soul,’ he replies.

Outside
these double doors of joy and pain
The world,
the cosmos resides-
Do you seek to hide from
And do you fear?
Fear dulls the glittering soul,
Renders dreams sterile,
Lays waste to Hope;
Initiates Despair.

Turtles sigh, but for whom?
They live alone in their houses,
Peeking out tentatively, moving slowly,
Withdrawing from dangerous hints.
Their withdrawal can’t always protect them,
Cars and catastrophes can still end them.

I don’t care to be earthbound,
Waiting for catastrophe to shatter
My house of protective thought.
I prefer instead,
to soar
And be a bird.
Knowing that I might well
be blasted
From the sky;
My plummeting plumage
would streak
Towards the dust
And I would end there.
But I would know where I had been.

The quaking is temporary.
Ballast of my soul-
It soars
It plummets
Loop-de-loops
and summits

Then plunges into abysses;
O, the silence of my wishes.
As mute as fish
Struggling against
vicious currents.

Outside of reality
And away from impotent nostalgias,
I find hints of oncoming joy.
It’s a tickle to my mind,
This ecstacy I await,
This phoenix-flight.
No mourning can belay me.
I cannot mourn anymore.
I trust eternity and that is all.

Metaphysicality and the
Structure of the universe
Entice me into admissions
Of confusion, disillusion.
(Where’s my transfusion?)
I want rejoicing.

Syncopated sighs
Slice through alibis.
Yes, I’m the mother
Of my bastard rhymes.
So many fathers have my children
That I can’t begin to name them all.
There’s no discounting my whorishness.
My voluptuous and eclectic appetite
Sends me to dark streets
And back alleys
Seeking wayward, dissolute souls.
Past all temporal dreams
And nameless anticipations
Is the joy of my dissolution.
Joy, because from those ashes
Rises the flame-devoured bird;
That plummeting bird,
Blasted from Reality
And Resurrected.

I am One
And Whole
And Hopeful.
Creativity is my regeneration.
Even my marrow rejoices.
And my broad joyful cry
Pierces the most obstinate ears.
No morning song is sweeter
Than this intoxication;
This delirium that has no earthly excuse.
The lushness of my thought now surpasses
All chagrin of past disillusion.
(Transfusion complete)

My will has willed this:
My poem is Infinite
And my name is Infinity.



© 1977 Melissa Songer