Not Just The Sky


Twenty years ago last month, I walked into a library in Columbia, S.C. for a little session in free association. I walked out of there realizing that my poetry had truly been born on that day. I was in an unusually receptive state in January, '86 --- floating in a nebulous transitional medium bearing only a superficial resemblance to the noxious fog of a mid-life crisis. It had recently occurred to me, like a punch in the gut, that I'd been in the same job for 7 years. Up until that time, I'd never bothered to hold a job for over a year, so I found the 7-year mark rather troubling.

Somewhat disoriented, shambling into a university library that must've looked ultra-modern in 1957, I picked 2 or 3 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica with the project of perusing them at random. Beginning with 'Freon to Hokkaido' or some similarly surrealistic title from the set, the reassuringly hefty book fell open at 'Helios'. It seemed propitious, immediately encountering a sun god, and as I read the short entry, I was struck by the part of the god's journey that was unknown to me through the more familiar travels of Apollo --- not the blazing passage with straining sky-horses pulling the chariot across the daytime sky, but the fragile subterranean night-passage to get back to the point where dawn begins once more.

By the time I left the library, I had the poem fully written down and carried the realization that for some inexplicable reason, I was now a poet and not a dabbler. As a bonus, there was an implicit promise in the air that I would be allowed a dispensation to ply my craft without fear of writer's block or an evaporating pool of inspiration as long as I respected the time and place and the process by which these mystical arias revealed themselves. And that's pretty much the way things have worked out.

So you could say, like a UFO enthusiast, that this message came out of the sky somewhere near the confluence of Green and Sumter Streets on January 16th, '86 and you might not be wrong.......


Not Just The Sky

Helios sailed.
But not just the sky by brighest rays,
Also the night waters with spires enfolded
Through northern cataracts in a coracle.
Aching from the arc of lighting,
Aching 'til the swirl of sleep
Meshed with the river, sea-surrounded.

All shadow's angles
Described by our transits underneath.
The hopeless abiding need for ruling chariots,
Bashed longing for freedom among flanks,
Liniment bestowed after the scheduled glow
And before out notice finally doesn't escape
The sun in a teacup.

______------__--- Lp