08-11-2015, 08:44 AM
Breath of the Knowing Earth
Breath of the knowing earth, bouquet of clay and copper air,
heavy sighs of upturned soil, heavy sighs that carry
like words on quiet breath the drifting scents of evening blooms—
seasonal tongues of pear, of pond, of snow, of rotted corn—
buried beneath these vocabularies, the earth’s unbroken syntax
in song of clay and copper air, knowing beneath all knowing.
Clay is the voice and stone the breath that sing the seasons’ song,
though when the mortal voice is cracked, the stone continues on.
Green-garlanded March, crowned in oak sprays and woodland fir—
ungainly titan, dew-soaked beard gleaming with winter hoar—
staggers up from the north on unsound sap-tanned hand and foot,
leaving mats of crocus and snowdrop where he plants his massive grip,
or shaking off billows of storms from his russet wild mane;
behind him April, little garlanded girl with lilac and pansy,
gay grinning girl leaping through puddles of March’s massive steps;
Her antipode, grave huntress in hides beneath a sanguine moon,
a black-eyed god, breast bare, sexless as the soil;
his a crooked and threadbare gleaner over cropped white stubble,
fingers of trembling twigs combing chaff from his hair in a wreath of rye.
Winsome wisps, fancies of earth—terrible gods of man—
in whose seasonless heart mountains sail a roiling nickel sea,
—thin vapors of earth above rocky leagues of Cambrian dreams—
wisps that flicker in life and seep into crystalline memory.
Petrified there are potencies, unnamed and personless,
in depth, as agate and quartz, the “shall” and “had” in twain engrained;
though one from the press of tectonic thoughts may rise,
and be as a word from mind produced and poured upon the air,
the other as sediment may sink unvoiced, autochthon unborn,
so to repose in memory of the gestating mind beneath memory.
His chisels and pens and harpsichords mold the same undying clay
that in the boundless bosom of earth is sculptor and balladeer;
mind in man is an effigy of the memory whence he is hewn,
and breath in man a coppery sigh of recollected stone.
Breath of the knowing earth, bouquet of clay and copper air,
heavy sighs of upturned soil, heavy sighs that carry
like words on quiet breath the drifting scents of evening blooms—
seasonal tongues of pear, of pond, of snow, of rotted corn—
buried beneath these vocabularies, the earth’s unbroken syntax
in song of clay and copper air, knowing beneath all knowing.
Clay is the voice and stone the breath that sing the seasons’ song,
though when the mortal voice is cracked, the stone continues on.
Green-garlanded March, crowned in oak sprays and woodland fir—
ungainly titan, dew-soaked beard gleaming with winter hoar—
staggers up from the north on unsound sap-tanned hand and foot,
leaving mats of crocus and snowdrop where he plants his massive grip,
or shaking off billows of storms from his russet wild mane;
behind him April, little garlanded girl with lilac and pansy,
gay grinning girl leaping through puddles of March’s massive steps;
Her antipode, grave huntress in hides beneath a sanguine moon,
a black-eyed god, breast bare, sexless as the soil;
his a crooked and threadbare gleaner over cropped white stubble,
fingers of trembling twigs combing chaff from his hair in a wreath of rye.
Winsome wisps, fancies of earth—terrible gods of man—
in whose seasonless heart mountains sail a roiling nickel sea,
—thin vapors of earth above rocky leagues of Cambrian dreams—
wisps that flicker in life and seep into crystalline memory.
Petrified there are potencies, unnamed and personless,
in depth, as agate and quartz, the “shall” and “had” in twain engrained;
though one from the press of tectonic thoughts may rise,
and be as a word from mind produced and poured upon the air,
the other as sediment may sink unvoiced, autochthon unborn,
so to repose in memory of the gestating mind beneath memory.
His chisels and pens and harpsichords mold the same undying clay
that in the boundless bosom of earth is sculptor and balladeer;
mind in man is an effigy of the memory whence he is hewn,
and breath in man a coppery sigh of recollected stone.
