Dust and Dragons
2023
The Ancient Chinese poets were well aware of the tensions existing between human-created dust of this world and unpredictable, often apocalyptic changes that sweep away everything our pride and egos have created. These 75 poems (ending with one heroic crown of sonnets in tribute to those Ancient Chinese poets) scope out the 21st Century interplay between that dust and those dragons. Our pride, prejudices, and our love of fame, wealth and power may keep us kicking up a lot of lung-clogging and mind-boggling dust, but nature has a way of bringing chaos and confusion to our self-destructive realities. The dragons of change are indifferent to our wars and schemes, and these poems present examples of both dust and dragons worthy of our attention.
Sample Poems from Dust and Dragons
Dust and Dragons
Life is made of limits,
but understanding is limitless.
— Lao Tzu
Throughout space/time, it falls, coming down
softly, relentlessly, simultaneously everywhere
humans do their dirt: business, government,
school, church, or town, everywhere, everywhere
falling, coating, covering human help or hurt,
falling invisibly through the air, through the mind,
falling, hovering, gliding, coming to rest inert
on surfaces of reality where humans labor blind.
See it resting on passion. See it lying about
on love. On hope. On promises and prospects
formed in the heyday of youth before doubt
became the norm for all tomorrows, dust
in its infinite, immemorial numbers a silent rout
of the five ineffectual senses, intellectual rust.
But there be dragons. Throughout space/time
they rise, writhing up out of all the world’s waters
into atmospheric, geographic, apocalyptic change
where abiding dust flashes off splashed surfaces,
dust previously hiding all things pure and strange,
dust grievously smashed and cleansed away,
dragons, dragons making us awake and aware
painfully, frighteningly, of our being only clay.
See a dragon scale shimmer wet, sparkle bright,
the thrash of a tail sweeping away complacency,
the slack of a lower jaw drooling opportunity
for those alert to how igniting chaos gives light
by which to climb above desolation, desecration,
to find other famished flesh to know and love.
It’s Not Dementia
One can see what will trouble this sleep of mine,
whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone, the woodchuck could say whether
it’s like his long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
or just some human sleep.
— Robert Frost
For the life of me, I can’t get used to seeing old friends
gone for years visiting me at odd moments, their being
dead no barrier at all to their attentive listening to me,
then disappearing as if they were never here beside me,
their smiles as warm as ever, their bodies as healthy
as they were long ago when we were young humanity.
The walk may be asphalt to you, but to me, I walk on
a soft woodsy duff as I reach out, not for that steel pole,
but for a black birch that grew old beside my school,
that grows there still in my timeless, faultless mind,
and even now its bold, lenticellated bark feels cool
to my hand though you see metal from where you stand.
My birdfeeders, where are they? Where did I put seed?
Here in my room, I search for small things that stray
and are lost to you, but not to me, and I need their feel
between my fingers: rings, coins, photographs, and such
that trigger scenes that seem to be current still and I’m
in them as I was back then: young, robust with a will.
Strings of long-ago conversations yet come to mind.
I try to carry them on even though I know I’m alone
and who knows who’s listening? Things I wished
I’d said I say now hoping those who aren’t here
still can hear, those who mattered once can know
I haven’t forgotten them though time has shattered.
The past is a better place than here, and I dust off
memories to be back bright again in my world of yore
where I was whole and strong and still am in my
mind’s eye where there are no stone strangers,
no corridors that lead nowhere I want to go, and I
live inside a blown reverie of what was until I die.
Beatitude 2
Blessed Are Those Who Mourn,
for They Shall Be Comforted
Love plies like life plies, languidly, a day at a time.
Lust-struck youth goes beachcombing through
bright morning, becoming “old folks” slowly,
long in a gloaming that lies between realization
and remembrance, cooling pubescent pleasure’s
warm saliva into cold, senescent drool.
Senility’s not-so-subtle weltering puts us here
in our pool’s shallow end where we stub toes,
stumble and thrash, looking back wistfully
to the long-ago deep end where we still see
blissful youngsters’ pleasurable splash.
But love knows no such horseplay’s rigor mortis.
Unbenumbed by age, love will never go away,
Abiding as sharply at eighty as at eighteen,
an aching beyond where even mourning dies.
Still here? Love, fumbling with this and that
among the brain’s last bric-a-brac, still causes
a caught breath even as the body fills our agenda
with task-canceling, calendar-clearing death.
Late, isn’t it? Love, shouldn’t you be going?
Love, shouldn’t you be gone? How strange love,
old and broken, shadow of what once was,
though deranged like life, steadfastly lingers on.
