TIME OUT

 

 

 

                                I

 

Imprisoned in the rats cage of success

for failure to do good and love the truth,

we learn humanity disused breeds out.

Scientists who lie to gratify

the common greedy wishes creep from plastic

dens to batten on the blood of mothers;

friends fall to illnesses long since controlled

albeit not for anyone or not

for anyone not in highest power;

nurses lose their civil leave to keep

the loving finger on the beating back.

So many died, so many lost their minds,

so many never grew, that others might

write in mournful numbers requisite

within the grant proposed and save themselves

in simple, rising from each clever challenge

to craft a test to justify the answers

as yet a lower form of life until

a tide of human misery rolls people

blooming in food for Titans, self-made mutants.

The state as Great Facilitator tithes

to float its noisome, poisoned cloud aloft;

after a hundred years, the light in Quincy

that sickened little Henry’s temperate soul

casts a shadow, darkens the Capitol.

Court above, court below, we measure

our future worth by whose rude lust for sway

cancels our dreams of light, whose might says No

to us when most unseasonably right.

 

 

                                II

 

Turn from the hazy glare of untouchable

corruption’s endless summer; drive farther up

and farther in, past the sedgy keogs.

But I have heard that the top of the world drops

in dust to dull plains of iron crossed

by stolid streams draining to the Arctic.

Stop in the middle North of the frozen mean,

find the enchanted way and step aside

into a pastel scape of headlands pillowing,

spun sugar clouds of candy rock, billowing

over unstill water burning cold,

the temperature of conscious utterance.

Without rhymes or reasons, girdled by

this richly fringed and jeweled intertidal,

neither land nor sea, stand and see

before you, the domed island at the center

of the vision, garlanded with mist,

if drowned mountain crowned with silver circlet

or planet cinctured in blue space.  Where smoke

and roses ride the air, behind you, hear

the galled pines sing, fretted with bitter globes.

Now trim the skill disused to praise again

creation’s bones exposed here, the will of god

the soundless watery surround, ringed round

with currents of her inference we chart

at times in part or not in time, who are

simply less successful than the lichens.

Our laches forgiven, unclean hands washed,

the bell on running swell tolls our limitations.