Palindrome, and: Last Days, and: Scar, and: Counting Herons, and: Flying Low

Palindrome

My subject's Ramon Llull - troubadour-turned scholar
and reluctant saint - buried in a church down the road:
jinxed by the perverse yearning of youth, Llull presented himself
at the door of a beautiful young widow, sang his song
and she flung open her robe to expose a breast eaten away by tumor.

Llull spent his last days contemplating the Romance of Numbers-
a proof of Alla transcending laws of the mutable flesh.
Under a sky so clear it cast its indigo across an entire mountainside,
Llull scribbled his exquisite equations.
His story's moral isn't clear.

If one wrote about Llull, would the dying day give way to
unspeakable loveliness? Make my own lines long and Italianate,
filled with cicadas and olive groves - give them a cuckolded husband,
and throw in an obscene phrase or two - and there's a poem I'll never write.
Behold Lull's face carved on a mountain or writ large in clouds-

spasms of light pulsing down the valley, shapes called the self
a moment ago, but now merely clouds. Three green hummingbirds
enter the garden, and there are roses and more roses:
the evening light leaps down the valley, conjunction and adverb catch flame
in the afterglow, then sputter out.

Last Days

1.

The end of August outside Naples,
the roads are clotted with broken-down chariots,

the sea's the color of overcooked mutton.
79 AD a banner year for volcanoes-

great sunsets, Orphic sunrises, ash in the mouths
of Christians and non-Christians:

In the garden nothing stirs: a dragonfly dips and genuflects,
and behind the vines and arbors,

miles away from the gardens of Pliny Segundus
who has long since abandoned his house to his servants,

Vesuvius fumes and fusses,
a finch goads his beak into the ashen fountain.

2.

After the wind dies down, the signs are last signs:
a few dollops of pine-sap rain, the master's stables in ruins.

These first days of our unimperial decade, bitter the rain
bitter the road on which every manner of conveyance moves away from Herculaeneum.

In these last days nothing suits one better than silence:

better to mutter under one's breath
in deep conviction than to blunder on,

phrase after empty phrase, although Pliny tells us,

          It is the sublime orator who thunders,
who, in short, bears all before him in a confused whirl.

What whirl, what world?

3.

No prayer I know can make the late-forgotten
shake off their tomb-wrappings and breathe again.

The letters of Pliny Segundus moulder on an oak table
and more books, a slough of words, receive our benediction.

Despite paragraph upon paragraph of lucid description, the words,
the words don't "leap off the page,"

Pliny's villa is inert as melted glass,
his sweet Etruscan wine sits, untasted, in earthenware casks:

Pliny Segundus, the sycophant, son of Pliny the Elder-
our first taxonomist-

who just now, on the flanks of Vesuvius,
loses his footing and falls,

his mouth filling with hot ash.

4.

But the son knows little or nothing of the father
whose specimens fill rooms and rooms of the doomed villa:

equally, the words of senators and solicitors
mean nothing to him now.

His dreams are hungry birds in the orchard of an old fool
who's tried too hard to be wise.

A bull wakes and drowses under a single plane tree:
scattered across the realms of August

                        the late-blooming asters.

Scar

Dubuque, 1965 - and the war's just a gleam
in LBJ's errant eye. Remember that scar
below his rib cage where his gallbladder'd
been cut out?
Maybe our troubles led
from an incision in the president's gut
to an Iowa golf course, and, thence, to a bloated river's muck;
but after a day on flood clean-up I don't think of war
or what'll happen to those kids I work with, soon...