Twist and Shout

Poetry is the art of consciousness.

Even in my most desperate days—writing about

        spears of grass like warrior's shields—

I knew that the poem is about the present moment—
already a cold abstraction as soon as thought.

        From this high woods

        to the street I walk,

        daisies in ditches.

        Waiting

        on the season

        in the tall grass,

        I crane up staring

        to see all that blue.

        Starting
        at first stone.

Stumbling through my life,
heading for the moment when existence slugged me in the face—

still preconscious today—
walking down a mountain slope at dusk,
night at the canyon bottom.
What did I not say in those days? I said,

        Water,
        the moon lives.

        Rock,
        the fingers test

        rock with moss

        by fingers smoothed over.
        life like honey
        spreading over the mountain.

—the fingers, I said.
Whose fingers were they?
Fingers and toes.
Dionysian mountain ecstasy.
And I even thought of Hans Castorp skiing in the alpine blizzard.
I was lascerated
by how bad my poetry was, and I knew it.

Happily, that episode closed
with a Yeatsian twilight wail,

and I wrote it with a ladle:

Three men up bourn,

three forewarned.

Last of all,

the final throes

v          Cease wail,

turn far

your gaze –

all green fields.

Before the fire

tell us your will.

Now rise in flame

holding sword.

Release all pains

from the deepest reach,

those depths,

burning flowers.

Face yellow, steel

the face of peace

Steel and the fire

in the most all death.

Nothing particularly edifying there.
But never neglecting my auto-erotic life—
that was time well-spent,
and I really did read a lot about ancient Greek religion,
and the writing was good practice.
And now there’s nothing about those times I regret.

The poetry 
works it on out.