Calliope
I have been reading my friend, the poets,
those ancient mariners of rhyme,
each adrift with a sun and a moon
and some grand estimate of the truth.
The Greek, Demitrius,
who tied his sail with a brood of song
and on tin backs and prayer
sailed the world.
The mad and princely ones,
who in absentia rule the penuries of night
and come to love with a terrorist's ambition
its creeds.
Italian, Dina Campany, who died in Tuscany
in the hospital for the insane,
Celine and Valladares
who wrote their gaieties in blood.
The archangel Rilke,
and Neruda who wanted to lie still with stones.
Your son smiles then,
like one of them
his eyes the portals of a blasphemous wind
a swallow's black eyes
irredeemable
like Shelley's waning moon
or the immutability of gods.
Those who sing their rhapsodies and arrogantly grieve
incline towards the light,
its bestial will
and like a moth's dizzying grace, fall.
No less angels than men.
I read the philosophers and understand little
of the ways of the world
the bastard knowledge of Democrytus
or Leibnitz's proof of God.
All of time is a dying moment
starlight and the casuistries of faith,
the chaffed sentience of men and women
who each in a different season
sing their own poor songs.
It is perhaps best a poet not judge
but stand between,
lost to the oracles of darkness where
all great faith begins.
By deathwatch and pardon
and by maddening seas.
But you Yannis why must you suffer so
for you are only six
and have already been saved from the world,
unlearned in the pantheon of sin.
Damn them all, physicians,
the gods they serve like a chalice,
the cancer that dances like a drunken reveller
about your raven soul.
How I wish you could know as I
the joy behind the failure of words,
the riven settlements of the heart
and the obeisances of beauty.
New York pedestrians quarrelling with the immensities
their newspapers holding up the rain.
"Bazeball", as you say in French
now broken with a motley English pride,
your throat curdling the body's will.
Here in the greenest of mornings where still you rule.
I throw the ball
and with all the strength of Heracles
you swing, sweet child,
and its sails, oh how it sails
into a fiery sun.