[Newspoetry] ProVerb recite; ConNoun anathema

[Donald L Emerick]

                            PROVERB

Les morts vont vite, the dead go fast, the next day absent!
Et les vivants sont dingues, the living are haywire.
Except for a few who grieve, life rapidly readjusts itself
The milliner trims the hat not thinking of the departed
The horse sweats and throws his stubborn rider to the earth
Uncaring if he has killed him or not
The thrown man rises.  But now he knows that he is not going,
Not going fast, though he was closing to having been gone.
The day after Caesar's death, there was a new, bustling Rome
The moment after the racehorse's death, a new one is sought for the stable
The second after a moth's death there are one or two hundred other moths
The month after Einstein's death the earth is inundated with new theories
Biographies are written to cover up the speed with which we go:
No more presence in the bedroom or waiting in the hall
Greeting to say hello with mixed emotions.  The dead go quickly
Not knowing why they go or where they go.  To die is human,
To come back divine.  Roosevelt gives way to Truman
Suddenly in the empty White House a brave new voice resounds
And the wheelchaired captain has crossed the great divide.
Faster than memories, faster than old mythologies, faster than the speediest train.
Alexander of Macedon, on Time!
Prudhomme on time, Gorbachev on time, the beloved and the lover on time!
Les morts vont vite.  We living stand at the gate
And life goes on.
                            --    Kenneth Koch (1925-2002)
(Poem printed in memoriam, in New York Review of Books, 15 August 2002.)

(PS  --
                    CONNOUN --- DING UND SICHT

I share this with you because I find a beauty to admire reposing in it --
but, as I would not possess, nor let myself become one possessed,
I must exorcise any beyond that lies in me and lurks out in beauty
as mind-clouding grown from mists shrouding worldviewn landscape,
for clouds may boil up and tower into intense raging water-storms
where zig-zag bolts from black-and-blue strike, discharge chance,
strikes a kinder bush, makes a burning bush speak foreign tongues
of gods he never knew, growing up in overgrown blackboard jungles,
where bulls rush backyards and bullets run backward in their flight
for wind bellies itself up to bards of metered words for drowning
in frothy tides of ideas, lashed by odd winds blowing those words,
on cresting waves, punctuating hither and yon, in syllabitic storm,
woods darken, walls dampen; surface flows and footpaths flood;
still no storm runs its course until rivers stream for higher channels,
inundate initiations submersively scrub and erode inclined intuitions,
and still the waters roiling rise, ripping out ever higher canyon walls,

make a maze, which lab rats would find interesting and entertaining,
to follow twisting churning paths, to splash up against box canyons,
seeking cheese betrayed by its aroma, wafted scents of rind-landers,
and, were any maze ever solved, then build we better rat-trap mazes,
than any random gods of chance storms oddly might have been doing,
for the same beauty might have been a cloud that shrinks or shrivels,
boils not up but away, vanishes into thinning air, magically swallowed
in vast and gaping maws of heaven, father to no crack storm-trooping,
parading rains down on parodies of living well, in water-parking lots

and then is day made most glorious whether simply sunny-side up
or tossed and turned, mixed up and scattered over and strewn round,
in soul-stirring storms of stir-frying rain, sizzling on scorching brains.
--- Thanks for listening, DLE (1948-2xxx (or, maybe, even, x...x))



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