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FOR JOHN SEELEY, AT 94
At the turning
of night, when you remember,
remember our dreams, the dreams
we shared of the future
to come, if only the heart,
beating, half-hidden, could make its way
into the light, into the morning
we thought sure to arrive:
the fields cleansed of blood, the dead
deeply buried, the dance of life
beginning again, forever...
Let there be this: a certainty
of rightness, even though
by the measures of reason
we failed, erred greatly, arced
like the falling of a star
through troubled, terrible air:
a flash, then a brightness, then gone.
Oh, we were right, John, to see
what we saw, to imagine
a world to be lived in,
as were the Albigenses, defeated,
and the Dukhobors in the snow
and the Quakers speaking in silence
and the Catalans for a moment
free and happy in the streets,
unconstrained by the police,
believing the world to be theirs.
Fragments of history, remnants of Eden,
faint views of a kingdom dimly seen
open the heart to its vision:
ah, here they are, the lovers hand in hand
walking the boulevards under the trees
lost in the sweetness of bliss,
perhaps whispering your name
as if somehow they know
the secrets of your heart, or how
even now you bend toward them, smiling,
ninety-four, yet as young as they are
watching the sky, crying out
as it falls: look, a star!
The Forms
By Peter Marin
Let each image
weep, as the Forms do, lost
to thought. For love
is also a way, as
the heart is, or birds
as they sip from the body
all that is gone from the world.
Yes, love is a way
folded in the flesh,
in the gazes of lovers,
in the great lake of tears
cupped by the mountains
in landscapes empty of men.
There is this, also:
the organs afloat on the air
like leaves in a breeze.
What has been shattered
cannot be recalled. The Forms,
where they wait, distanced and faint,
are broken, bereaved. This too
is a grace, the ground
of our Being. Where
words cease, where images
fade, there we can live:
as if Venus will not rise,
as if the world was still unformed,
as if wisdom is only a field --
green, filled with flowers --
where lovers can lie down.
If humming-birds sip, as they do,
from our bodies, can we not,
in the end, become flowers?
Let us make of the flesh a garden
where, though broken, the Forms
shine in the light of the Good.
Let spirit brighten the world like a sun.
And, yes, we can be saved by love --
the wise learn this, one by one.
FOR BILL
Impenetrable days,
impervious to desire, the consequences
of desire made visible now
in the dying of trees, the darkness
descending, the small birds
lifeless on the ground...
What has led us here, on the paths
halving the heart, through
the wilderness of attrition?
Perhaps error, perhaps fate,
perhaps the powers of resistance
arrayed against the will, against self.
Perhaps merely the direction of time
carried as it is on the waves
parlaying the skies into emptiness.
Lord, let the meditations of my heart...
But these break down into images,
and the false faces of lost women
float like spores on the air
at the end of a glorious summer.
—Peter Marin
The Dream
The riotous
host of images
celebrating in the mind
make it an isle of pleasure.
By the river, the chattering monkeys
gibber and mime their masters.
Even the trees, stripped naked to the waist,
burn with the fever of need.
Children count the faces
hidden among the leaves—
there's a saint, there's the devil!
Hand in hand, demons and gods
dance the dance of becoming.
Oh, heroes! Oh, lovely sages!
Down their long threads of fire
the maenads are descending
like maidens down bright poles of May.
—Peter Marin
For Lawrence in a Time of Woe
Ah, Lawrence,
who wanted a god of sex,
who wanted a bleeding of flowers,
who wanted the fullness of the turning earth
as the rod of beginnings,
as a call to rebirth—
how restless your spirit must be
brooding over waters, interrupted
in its journey, held at bay
by the fevers of evil.
We have come to death here,
we have passed into shadow,
on the long curve of the seasons
the stars have retreated from the skies
and Pan is no longer singing.
Let the dead reign at last.
Let the signature of death,
written by swifts in the dusk,
loop itself into new constellations.
Let death walk nimbly among us
touching lovers on the shoulder,
rousing this one from the couch, that one
from her labor, choosing companions
for the dead king of suns.
Let the trees bend, leafless and broken.
Let the wolves howl in the wood.
Let the demons loose again
to howl above new corpses,
singing their hymns to the war.
Let the widows come, lamenting,
and the widowers naked and keening
and the motherless, pregnant with grief.
Let the winds die and the waves lie down
and the farmers in their fields
plant the Nothingness of woe
as they sing to themselves: we are men.
Here, helpless, we remain,
harvesting our crop of bones,
propping up the dead
in the boats we launch weeping
hoping they find the lost shore.
—Peter Marin
The Wanderer’s Song
Desire
allows him
a way out of the caged
spaces of his heart.
There he resides, remembering Rilke’s
panther behind its bars.
The openness of God,
the landscapes of thought,
the great plains lit by the Good—
these are not his countries.
Where the body is as grass,
where the belly is a field—
there he walks in delight.
Down this path or that,
through one wood or another,
he wanders in search of the summer.
At the sound of a sigh,
at the hint of a breeze,
he lifts up his head, astonished.
Here I am, he thinks to himself,
overcome by a sudden wonder.
—Peter Marin
The Open
In the open, where we meet,
oh, there, for a moment,
the world shimmers with light
as it did thirty years ago
when coming over the rise
you walked the green field
to where I was waiting—
the morning park, Mexico City,
when we were still young.
It is this coming, this approach,
this crossing from distance
to the nearness of touch
I have learned to see, watching,
in the gardens of existence.
In this moment, then, always:
the coming-towards, the withdrawal,
the flowing in and then out
in the brightness of time
of all that comes forth…
Yes, here you are: standing!
And beyond? The falling away
of earth and its measures—
back to beginnings, forward to mystery
where the last whisps of thought
part themselves for the Forms
standing in all that has gone.
Is there such a place? You wore
a gray flannel skirt, a gray
sweater, and your bare legs
under my fingers were like
the visit of a god, the vow
of what is to come, though not yet.
Not yet…Blonde hair. Your smile,
even now, though you no longer
come towards me, floats faint
on the thin and shimmery air.
—Peter Marin
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