R. L. Cook
AUTUMN'S THRESHOLD
O do not come again; or, if you come,
Be cold and hard, or mocking: do not bring
Those fires again, but rather freeze me numb:
O do not come, an incandescent thing,
Possessing, unpossessed, to sear and burn
My careful harvest: do not shine on me—
Do anything but that if you return
But do not drown me in a burning sea.
For I had watched the drooping Summer pass,
Had paused on Autumn’s threshold, looking back
Across the stubbled fields, and saw your face,
Haloed in Spring, hovering above time's wrack,
Shatter the icy visions in my glass
And point deep down through time a long-lost track.
THE DREAMERS
The canyons of the city call
And swallow in their dust
The silver kings, the golden queens:
All are consumed by lust.
But, habited in dreams, we walk
Cloistered in corridors
Of make-believe and phantasy;
We do not hear the wars
That rage without, the wars within
Are channelled to a sea
Where stardust glosses over strife
With drowsy alchemy.
We live upon the upper air,
Nursed on the massive breast
Of hills that stare, serene and blind,
Down on the world’s unrest;
And we shall hope to see upon
The half-familiar air
Of paradise those same quiet hills
Delineated there.
NOCTURNE
Sunset scars the grimy sky
And the town is silence-bound,
Waiting for the healing moon
To silver over every wound
That the glaring day has made:
Veils of darkness gather round,
Muffle every sight and sound.
Veins of branches trail across
The bloodshot sky; the pillared trees.
Waiting for the kiss of light,
Loom, a row of arteries,
Groping down into the earth,
Where the heart of silence lies:
Where the sound of silence dies.
SYMBOL OF PERFECTION
There is a symbol of perfection in the sun
And earth, his shrunken effigy, our home
Spins round him like a drunken bee about
The flower of truth: his honey in our veins
Becomes the wax of evil and encrusts
Earth's surface, covering the crying skulls
That sing, time-wise, from the dark throat of death.
They gleam through tombs, outlast our crumbling walls
Of flesh; they join, not fight, the centuries
And in the flow of time their wise old dust
Has danced and sung before our sunshot eyes.
NIGHT ON HORTON PLAINS
In the photostatic hush before the sunset,—
When shapes freeze, twilight-clear, against the sky
And the clouds, virgin by day, are stained with bloodred
And the jet-cold river ripples sulkily,—
Only the mist seems moving: writhing, wreathing
Across the plateau, round the trunks of trees,
Its voiceless thunder rolls toward me, breathing
Oblivions white signature, and peace.
The outraged clouds have mellowed to pale gold
And grass around me glimmers with dew-sweat,
But still the mist comes, whispering, while cold
Fingers of night smear evening’s silhouette.
Darkness is everywhere; silence is loud:
Is death a time like this, the mist a shroud?
Top of
Page
|
