Morning at the Cenotaph
Come, Morphine, give me joy
until dark morning dawns!
Leave the morose conclave
of deathly cenotaph
whose dry marble sucks me
of my tears and humors
into its dessicate
rete granitic veins -
old-age home with staircase
carved with eery faces!
I'll go out in the world
to find a mortal mate;
and sacrament our love
with my body's hidden resin;
I'll use my plectrum hand
to braid her hirsute lyre,
and when we cry in pain,
our tears will form a sea.
---------
notes
I have to get a week ahead, for I shall be busy next week. I intend to perform the fast on the indicated day.
cenotaph - a memorial which is empty of any body or bodies.
rete - a network, and
dessicate rete granitic is a dried up network of granite-like stone within the veins of marble.
staircase - is sort of like a vein of a rete growing within the old-age home, joining parts togther.
plectrum - in Greek it's a small piece of metal to play upon the lyre, but in Latin it reminds me of "plectere" meaning "to braid, to twist" such as hair.
So I combined them...and the instrument called a "hirsute lyre" is anyone's guess.
The essence of this to me is a new life to be lived. If you have read stuff here or in the other blog, you are aware that 2008 spelled the end of one old life for me, and I can never seen the world that way again.
The old world was a world of greatness, of power, of compulsion, of arrogance and persuasion, of myths and tales of heroes...all of which was discovered to have ended a long time since - yet still we take our uncouth illiterate ravings to be Wordsworth and Whitman, and our politics to be Burke, Pitt, Jefferson, and Washington.
The old world is the world where greedy children never grew up...and it is the old-age home where we extend unnaturally empty lives.
Old long since...
inspired by Pushkin
February 20, 2010 copyright.
No comments:
Post a Comment