USA

Azleigh8@aol.com

Two Gods

Two men flew over Hiroshima,
hailed on return by General Spaatz.
Back home, one entered a monastery.
The other embarked on a life of crime
(leaving the money behind on the counter).
His sentence was reduced by the criminal courts
when experts explained his need for punishment.
God of pity, god of wrath.

Wagner’s Dreams

Above the low roofs of the town of Bayreuth,
above its thickened air and its slender river,
above the dark forests of Bavaria,
Wagner is flying. His sideburns flutter.
He’s asleep, he’s dreaming, Tristan’s chord
moves painfully across the German earth.
Wagner is asleep, his strength has ebbed,
he no longer climbs trees in the orchards
of friends or slides down their banisters;
he’s asleep, his ego subdued for good.
Let him sleep, let him inhabit his dreams,
where he forgets all his frustrations,
his years of poverty, illegitimate birth,
his embittered revolutionary pride.
Let him inhabit his dreams, the only place
where he defers to another human being,
where he points out to Schopenhauer ‘a flock’
of nightingales which the master has already
seen; his dreams, the only place where
he defers to compassion, to the noumenal,
to the unity of wrongdoer and wronged.
His dreams, where he is finally reconciled
with the phantom ‘otherness’ of Jews,
where he talks quietly with Mendelssohn,
calling him Du; where his abashed apology
to Meyerbeer, ‘a certain Jewish composer’,
is applauded by an enthusiastic audience.
Let Wagner sleep, let him live in dreams,
don’t let him out, let him dream his music,
where he finds love beyond sex, belonging
beyond blood, longing tempered by form.
In music, where the sound of redemption
is something fresh, a drink of clear water,
the voice of a young girl, a flute. Let him
seek refuge in music, where the sweating
bourgeoisie can’t flatter him, where even
Ludwig’s search patrol can’t track him down.
Let him dream, turn his portrait to the wall.
Keep the earth firmly packed on his lips.
Let him float on the wings of music, across
a dark landscape where he meets Beethoven
but also Mahler, Schoenberg, Shostakovich,
and reads in their scores the symphonies
he never wrote (continuous melody) which
show him he may have been wrong, that
death is not a triumph nor birth a defeat,
that art cannot replace the world, that we’re
released from the will by love, a free gift,
or grace, the same, that the final chord,
resolving our pain, is not written by us.

To speak
Love (you speak from the grave)
- J. Bobrowski

Here, so far from home, to resume
the gathering together of the world,
from the flame of a cardinal’s wing,
the ecstatic chant of the cicadas,
which, having no history, only
a permanent revolution of seasons,
are perfectly indifferent to disaster.

The trees throw off cascades of rain
like an unwanted intimacy of Zeus,
there is no commerce with the sky.
The prophet of the city staggers
to a corner store, crying in tongues
that the end of the world is at hand,
followed only by a retinue of dogs.

Blind man, prophet of dogs,
who will interpret for the angel
who enters and abandons you at will?
Will you lie down in the dust,
on the asphalt road, while the cars
whip you with shreds of your shirt,
yet feel no bitterness, but love?

Between God and our desire steps
the loud constituency of the dead.
My grandfather’s military coat
floats, bodiless, over continents,
to be laid in the suitcase of a poem;
a tangle of long grey hair, pulled
from a hairbrush, still goes hungry.

Dog man, beware of the future tense,
of the dreams born of lack and pride;
discover with your blind man’s cane
the edge of the sidewalk, and cross
on the arm of a memory of crossing;
hope is digging its way towards us
from the darkened tunnel of the past.

There

There, where you turn right at a bridge
and follow the path’s descent to water,
there, where pines are bitten by frost
in a valley unprotected by mountains,
the oak holds winter in its black arms,
unmoving, yielding nothing to the sky
and grey angels are raking the needles;
there where the rustle of a river sounds
under the ice, the flash of a kingfisher
is the only measurement of time, there
the breath rushes forward like an animal
staying always just ahead of the hunter;

to return there, alone, with a poor spirit
in an empty sack, a heart that ran like Io
down continents, stung by sharp desire,
to lie down on the cold bank and listen
to the fish breathe and see the weak sun
moving west like an old woman groping
along a stone wall, to read the memory
of human birth in earth’s tangle of roots
and believe that love, a tributary of this
slow-moving stream, is leading you back
to the lap of a teeming sea, where a bird’s
wing unfolds the horizon and vanishes –
to turn, to follow, to listen, to believe.

© All Copyright, Alissa Leigh.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.