Member Poem

I

See the sun is failing quickly,
retreating down the mountain face;
dusk becomes a blossom in the crags
that blooms unseen in silent space.

What a sullen thing is this:
a remembrance that comes
in this darkening of sepulchral air,
so often ill-conceived as fair?

Where’s the loveliness in fruit
when they rot away at last?
Is there beauty in a man
with no bearing of his mind or humours,
laying on the mortuary slab of time?

So often winter’s praised
for the beauty of its blight:
a long and cold infection
and branch’s baring night.

Then again:
what’s beautiful of childbirth?
What’s humorous of this creation
that relies its own destruction?

II

The morning is the third day’s Christ
that never rode the burning clouds;
for since the solstice cast the maypole’s shade
Apollo stalls his steeds past five.

And in this time of sunless quiet,
no earth did move or stir.
And, folded five times, thirteen, then twenty-one,
the golden rose refused its buds the cure.

For each uncertain certainty
of the ill construction where hope resides
and left to vanish naught:
there is time.

For each fig’s wax is ageless
until it fills itself or falls;
and each mind’s book is nameless
and pageless and but that rotting cross
would point to its endurance!

Oh decay in heaven’s melanplane,
for how long is your direction false?

III

One gear makes the world go round –
bound to cogs and wasps and winds.
Yet star-herds die by entropy’s maw
and life persists…

Nebulae in cosmic dance
consummate the cosmos –
and some flower on a precipice
wilts…

Thousands of worlds tumble and rest –
and then the hourglass tilts…

IV

I subvert the fifth,
and this one –
for that boundary between
my skin and air is nil.

I will and have always been,
for I, and all things,
am not apart.

There is order because I am regnant,
and no light can falter me.
I am born of dying star-clouds
that decay forevermore.
Already I know the silence.

For I am a cog.
I am a flower blooming in a crag.
I am some memory of sunset.

I have no deixis, and yet…

Oh –

Life will never see the end of me,
nor will death know my beginning!

V