Two more

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Two more poems of mine that originally appeared here earlier this year---The Hanged Man and The Knight of Swords---now also appear in this month's issue of Yareah.

The Hanged Man, the Tarot card that also appears in The Waste Land, draws on some images from the Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound; most notably his noting the birds on telephone wires as similar to musical notes on a staff, but also from the figure of Pound himself, strapped and tortured in an iron cage after the fall of fascism in Italy.

I am working on a cycle of poems this year based on some cards in the Tarot deck.

The Queen of Swords

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I saw you working once
at Théâtre Odéon.
You are from a time
When honesty had two edges.

You distinguished sin from crime.
Pride, envy, lust, greed,
Wrath, sloth, and my gluttony
For pain—all were nothing to you.

In your emerald taffeta dress,
You won the Furies over—I was redeemed—
Then you tiptoed across the island sand,
Masked for a ballroom dance.
~

lepidoptera

JM, A swarm of white moths, 5.6.09

Both orchids blooming for the third time in nineteen months. Note the promising shoot for fall blooming on the one on the right.

Stationery

JM, Old World, 4.24.09

Rather than trivialize the longer efforts, I will be sending out my more artful, more labored, more favored correspondence on stationery going forward.

The Hanged Man

~
Searched and seized, The Hanged Man hums,
first made mad by the whole wide world.
His Tau a good bar for a traitor—

—The Hanged Man, dangling upside down
sees birds on nearby telephone wires
as whole notes on a treble staff; he notes

melodic birds prefer mad perches,
underpasses, wires to trees.
His coins drop to the ground. He hums

the melodies birds perch and chirp
on buzzing wires, then falls to earth
by gravity’s fiat, free and redeemed.

So do hang on, remember, love: Upside down
you too are redeemed; your torture
the world you knew before your hanging.
~

The Knight of Swords

I want to know. I will
Rock the planet. I will
Prove my love. I will
Get the girl in the end.

Because I don’t know.
I don’t rock.
I can’t prove a thing.
The girl won’t talk to me.

I have a sword
And one at home.
I am always with my
Love, she is always with me.

I’ve never stabbed a soul.
I barely have a home.
I don’t know who my love is,
I don’t know where I am.

I fought for peace.
I built the castle.
I read the sacred words.
I stopped to smell the roses.

I was petty.
I lost the key.
I ignored the sign.
I cried to know myself.

In like a lion

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My poem The Queen of Cups, which originally appeared here, appears this month in the Spanish zine Yareah, and is also online at their site.

For March of this year, I drew the Knight of Swords.
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The City

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You said: "I'll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.

How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally."
You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world.

---Cavafy, The City

____

Note: The City was a poem much beloved of of Lawrence Durrell, born February 27, 1912 in Jullundur, India
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not enough silence

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Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

--from Ash Wednesday, T.S. Eliot

The Queen of Cups

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Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards.
~~--Eliot, The Waste Land


The wisest woman in Europe, feeling cornered,
told me this morning, "The Question
is choosing between waiting
for paint to dry
or leaving footprints and making a mess."

What makes her so wise?
She follows her heart.
She is moved by pain.
She is not discoverer, but
discovered.
She knows

Every pack, even every card
is equally wicked.
Every footnote
an expression of fear.
Every song
is really a prayer.
Every brush of skin
makes for more stories.

____

NOTE: Often I write a poem on my birthday. One from five years ago is here.

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