Ars Poetica

At first a silhouette on the horizon, then

turning solid, like Schiller coming up the path to meet

the adorable sisters, and they, pretending not to watch,

tear them apart), the same force that drives

the salmon upriver, against the current, the odds,

turns backward, with the same feverish glow as autumn

gives to the summer’s leaves, a deceptive glamour,

warming the past with an amber light, like brandy

held up to the fire, or the sun sinking at dusk

of Lithuanian folktale, lies the amber castle

of the female sun, burning in the dark water,

a globe the color of harvest, aglow

there in the depths of the past, though

living force, is broken into bits, and the mythic

castle with it — strung now as beads, and hung,

a charm, around the neck of a daughter,

and in a swirl of violet cape and the pounding of hoofs,

the dark god broke out of the earth

driven by the same spring force, consequential

and mortal,

fields of what recurs and recurs (though never the same,

and never to be reconciled) — what is that?

with passengers who paid to be raised

in a basket, to be up there looking down on

the ground where they live, a place shrunken now

beneath their gaze, while their bloated shadow floats

like a jellyfish in a green sea, barely a smudge on the pastures below,

the trace of their passage less than a breath of smoke

from a coal-fired engine — a blast of tarnished air

from the actual past, heavy metal delivered from memory.

hand will always be reaching out for the flowers, or

the sisters inflamed with Schiller, as he with the tricolor

dream of a world he could never inhabit ...

the eyeless Tiresias who knew how terrible was

wisdom when it knew itself useless,

the names on the shining black wall of the Vietnam

Memorial, the text of exactly what war has accomplished — 

not the little figures of the wise ancients that Yeats saw

carved into the deep blue stone — but there, standing high

above Arlington, against the blank lapis of the sky:

a horse with the torso and head of a man, yes,

it is Chiron, the last of the hybrids, the wise and terribly wounded

centaur for whom immortality was a curse,

to Prometheus, who stole the god’s fire and gave it away,

as art gives the power to give it away,

for that fire is the gift that cannot be held,

for it will burn to an ash those (born

and born again, war without end) who would hold it.