Yes, this is indeed what I am doing for Lent. I'm going to add to it every day between now and Easter. This is what I have so far.
Lencten Tide
By Nathan Turowsky
I.
Reluctant eyes watched
Through the skies’ frames and the snowmelt
on the Holyoke Range
come
Parnassus.
Turbulence of reality unveils its greyness
Under putative silence of spanning stone.
Eye of God to eye of man
Off the waves two worlds connect.
Something’s secret behind the nerves
There—Deep, deeply.
The ground is yet white
It is an underskirt layer
That is green.
Red banded wings
set out over still water
Not the deep river and not
the cold Quabbin
Under a quivering cast of stratus
As they would in the golden world.
In Kendrick Park
The nudity of the trees stands suddenly
Over earth’s similar nudity
In front of the pitched roofed Capes.
From remaining ecstasy of snow
Brush buds carmine-purple
Standing along the highway
tin soldiers.
Light come down
as love is
wont
So that on
the high-flung
mont
With the joy
of dancing
colts
We may catch
its florid
bolts.
II.
Once my heart made a sound
Like a little starling nested
in the wall, not reaching
down into the hollow…
Not here not there here everywhere
Kindness, space of the eye.
Its been so long, all of you
Speak.
Green the time, green the air
filtering into grey cisterns
filling crystal skins, tracing
A solid line.
In the emptiness of the hull—
Running, my heart—
‘Simplicity’
Could never be
Without the curve
Of the beech-tree.
Blue sky behind
the mystic curtain slashed
in agony.
III.
Wantastiquet imposes its looming loveliness
over the midst of riverine town and country
A singleness, like clarity, but murky and potbellied
how could we grant that it go unmystified?
Even walking to the southward, ashen-faced—!
IV.
On Thursday the life of the world slows to an intolerable trickle
To solve the problem of Greed,
Two worlds kiss in agony, the Cross with the Hammer and Sickle
Surely Prince Mammon hath an agéd, ravaged, insubstantial brain
Why should we not see the value
In pity, in taking it and praying for its health once again?
Has the ‘authorship’ of the tragedy, or has is interest thereas ceased?
This had been called,
On a day, by the last time farcical, the caper of an absurd beast.
V.
The pearl lustre of the sky
angers the City.
This City lies downriver from the
power dam and West
of that Reservoir which holds
drink for the bigger Eastern Cities.
The smaller to the north of the West
its street a dragon’s back
its train tracks crisscrossing
And are then without form.
Pearls, pearls and nard
Ambergris and leopard-
skin and charred
bones from the barbeque
on the first ‘Spring’ eventide
Ah—see, this problem
The streets are very dirty
What of farther skies?
Sky vanishes in
Imperceptible portion
Of an unseen Time
or Temporariness.
The north-Western city has its
active will in
an idea of rights
Seized as futurity of hereditaments—
And that bigger south-Western
City in its polka and pierogi
With the Knights in
[non-FARC] livery
Acted declining Golden.
VI.
From the far-flung sands drenched
in horror rings faint the madman’s gun
Here, Lent wears on slowly
and quickly all together, as days come
swiftly, groaningly.
Only early and yet
the ashenness of the season
takes hold. A nasty feeling
that in the personal life only can be properly expunged
The life of the world does not follow the
Liturgy of the just.
So to you I will speak
To her I will laugh
To them I will complain
To that I will rejoice
Here in this season
In this land
obscene in its luck.
Metacomet blazes—
VII.
The Prince burned across
the countryside
in that earlier climax
Tranquil, tranquil in
the virgin forests.
The others walked in the darker wood
Or in hateful
brightness
melting
the orbit of the eye.
Even though the pain is not too onerous
Even though it could be said we’re used to it by now
Even though the rocks of Golgotha are afar off
Even though the sands of Tripolitania are afar off
Why is it that in this season of soberly remembering
the tears won’t stop streaming?
Even though the pain is dulled
Even though I’m getting used to it
The fact remains that I can’t do anything.
Let ‘I’ be the indicator of
‘not less than all things and all men’
—let that thing pointed to not
or let it no longer
do those things
say those things
that would misrepresent its burning heart.
Roiling, roiling
Greyly, greyly
The deep rivers surge unceasingly
but
the red buds blow thoughtlessly.
In its tentative way overcast
its way of letting the rainbow break
VIII.
As on the street the traffic-light
Makes its correction clear
So off the street the fear of night
Explains a sudden tear.
The wrongness that in standing by
Impelled the careless sin
Clarifies the occluded lie
That gobbles up from within.
The pedantry of regiments
Prevails; that much is plain
And has watered human sentiments
With the blood of Cain.
The redness into yellow blares
The black to orange burns
As undisturbed by worldly cares
Corrupted Heaven turns.
O Lord let not this season
turn our love of the creation and the created
to hatred and resentment for their imperfections
but let us see—
let us see—
there is a light fog on Stratton Mountain
the colour of calcified ambiguous purity.
IX.
I was doing seven Rosaries
a day—:
—that’s how I roll.
Pater noster in caeli
Driving down the highway
in a used subcompact
behind a tractor trailer filled with
farming equipment
The rivers they say
—O, swell substantially in
un-substance
but now beneath the rivers
Coming up, roiling up
Boiling up
The sick feeling the bad feeling the
unworthy feeling that
maketh human love to fade away
The ashen emptiness of ostentatious
repentance envelops everything.
Like the death-breathing worm of
the sands of Mongolia it comes
dragging its tail in sackcloth seas.
X.
Raritan roars beyond
the course allotted by the millions
of years; in the centre the traffic
turns and is missing in painless
pain without sacrifice.
Surely there is some ungratefulness at play
when it comes by.
It was definitely fated
inevitably the idea that
He would have to bring
up the same street corner
to the angels’ play.
XI.
Nothing will come of most of these feelings
Yet this world is so important to me so not
Knowing what to do I watch the blown clothes
Blue and white clothes over the sand blown
And live my limited string of my own chaotic
And own entropic being as it runs out in a riot
Of tonelessness.
I am in a hurry for such desires
To become things of a scarce-remembered past so
Unlatching the hinge undoing the seal on my
Heart seal on my head I make the second flight
Anybody makes I come to the deciding point
Whereupon stepping sickly out upon the last
Allotment of emptiness I decide to actually fly.
Just to be here in this world with you and just
To share this space could be said perhaps to
Be enough given the horrors that steal upon
The concerns of the red and the black robes
The creeping concerns of the men in the robes
The burning concerns of the women in the robes
Beyond everyday life.
Lost in the sea caught in a
Bell-jar is the voice of what had been committed
To a plain that was not held fully to have been
Formed or made to exist absent the intervening
Figure of the penitent who moving forward as the
Apostles did can take a final flight that will not
Lead into a susurration of greater striving again.
XII.
This Saturday the fleshy
nature of the ambiguous and faltering girl
injects itself by unlikely force
into debates over
Providence.
Providence lies by Narragansett.
Delaware is the mobile
focus in the day when youth comes
to The Old Place where it lived
and (was?) loved.
In the colonel’s house by the bluffs.
The jewel-torn cup
Whose
Lap
Is that sitting
Below the stair
Laughing at
The fig-fruit
Query
Questioning?
XIII.
The delicate muscles of
an insubstantial face
are broken,
broken on the pendant
Come close to me
O my brothers.
XIV.
Senatorially she unveils
her soft strength and smiles
in the midst of the city’s edge.
Borden’s-town stands by Delaware
at the black junction
of the crossed candles, hissing
Historical fictions
through its power lines, singing
Historical truths in the bricks of its
sidewalks.
They said to let him come,
through this muddy place
over the skunk-cabbages.
He stands with her by
the wreck of the old
keel-boat in the creek-canal.
Woman put her hand
on her son’s arm and holds, son thanking
Woman with soft suppuration of the core grace of
speaking.
Flatly and with an earthen tone [He said]
The crow of Consequence scraws aloud
Scrimshaws from a sparm-whale’s jaw
Along the sore from town to town
The sea is roaring in the spring tides
The wind is whipping up the river
Beneath the bluffs and the highway-bridge.
The conditions for peace fulfilled,
silence comes in a beating flurry of fate
along the streets filled with morning mist.
O, that great Jersey patriot who
in silence would not torment
himself, him without
Name is lying here
minus any basis of supposition
Name is that which is only engraved on his
monument.
XV.
Curtains open but
Venetian blinds folded down
The sunlight glances
Through but greyishly
And in no wise garishly
To this spacious room.
Welcome back, springtime.
You come in ashes as you
Are accustomed to.
The snow trickling off
Carves microcosms of vale
Hillock and parkland
In the cool cool mud
Stirring the deep deep brownness
Under the same sky
As they cried up to
Tied or nailed to wooden dreams
Or nightmares upon
Golgotha in
the days of the Ram.
Farewell, winter’s rages
Not yet, summer’s blazes
With ash-smeared embraces
Spring is come to the hills.
Farewell, pure cold whiteness
Not yet, golden brightness
Dour but with strange lightness
Spring is come to the hills.
XVI.
Albany lies in collusion with
Trenton, and
Ann Arbor whispers sweetly to
Annapolis, which
Smyrna [DE not TK] hears and reports with
Putney, who
With her soft voice plies good old
Tucson, and
Tucson lies horrible and dreaming and streaming
with
blood
Still, in these months, not
redeemed, though redeemable
through the grace of a ‘God of’
the desert heat—!
‘Unlike the Roman
I see the river Delaware
foaming with much
slag and dreck
and waste,’ he said, his
thin-lipped old mouth working
over the purpure words.
Tripoli could, profitably, simply
LIE to New York, as Fukushima
could without too much trouble
IGNORE Tokyo, but then that would
be something like evil, something like
SIN in this
world of being
together.
O be joyful things to come
O be sorrowful for things
passed on.
O come all O come all
O show me your truth your true
tears.
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