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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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