apotheosis

Another response to Hillman's Hero Challenge! I had another idea... I love how, in Creative Writing Class season, I always write. I always write throughout the whole year, but usually only do it when the mood or a specific inspiration strikes insistently. But in Creative Writing Season, I think about writing all the time, and I even sit down without much of an idea and then start a poem just like that.

Whenever I write a poem, I think it's weird that I write so many poems. I'm supposed to be trying to be a novelist. But poems are easier to write for me, in ways, because to me they have to follow far fewer rules than stories do. But here's a poem. :D





There – the fine-drawn veil-cloak. A figure steps between
the curtains’ quick conjoining. The billow now
does hide the forming legend; and from the silky brume can now derive
the myth, an image: perhaps a gold Apollo; in night Endymion.

But here – a yellow poppy plays the part of Justice Favored
pinned to the piper-chaplain’s costume, almond-brown.
In-tune to the light and airy presence of a first-month festival,
the newborn tales trace I, a humble servant, Almandine.

Play upon my riven spinet, hold the ambry’s chamber-keys;
Look once through this hollow window, see the pane so lined
with hopes and honors even I can scarce detect at night;
then step away.

The glass here shows the task, an idling of the hours:
to rend a leaf of parchment from the long and worn
famed Lay of august deeds, and whittle through the course,
throw my wordy secret into the covered folds.

I cobble soft the chance, the curvature’s sole meaning
of Someone’s tall trim figure halving the dusty road;
He marveled wisty at the blade still trapped in tourmaline,
and moved aside to let the trammeling oxen pass.

I play my raveling cinders when the flame subsides.
But Justice Favored, clutched by the hand of a spring girl,
causes her small rosy lids to flutter softly, when
the piper dances by in robes of almond-tinted cambric.

To-morrow, his fluting jumps and flourishes
will happen upon a reverent night, and ‘round
the dashing dally of the flames, the tastes of heroes’ legends,
the lovely hearts will sit, clothed whole in hatching safety –
they will bravely tell the finest dance Not Yet.

While Great Men humbly vary their professions four-square
away from each sole neighbor, to cover all the hungry stage,
Know, that in the records of the siege on Tasks Undone,
there endures no inking record of the still-concealed secret,
a small pale poppy-flower, a speck in the sun of a high wooly wind,
caught wondering in the hold of a blue-eyed child.

Wait, stay.

I tell the stories by the hearth, but know not any reason.
The storyteller’s strength and safety are both relative:
I cradle lucent lilting river-water, and in Fortunate air
make known the larking Secret, and the slight and pearly guise
through which the Searching flows and hides.