Portraits of Friends - 4

for Edgar
...
Betwixt us, the milk of dragons
& our soft speech that ossified in notebooks,
enamel-plumed by bird-torn bookmarks.
I remember in your Shelley
the ugly torpid feather you left on Mutability,
still there, unchanged from youth's white-egg,
page 562. In the makeshift
room you made of the bed in back
of your darkblue pickup cab, you cracked
eggs and dunked 'em down your throat.
Protein & Shelley, for weeks.
We convened at McDonald's &
made the best of a 1st encounter.
Chicken nugs & our woman-born
love of women. 'Twas always beautee
that brought us twain. A stench of meat
can't cheapen inborn inflorescence.

Surreptitious, you glimpsed me a precious few
bone-sculpted verses, the 1st but not
the last time 'round, tuskwhite convolutions.
A poacher with even your own goods.
If you'd been stark-fleshed then, beloved &
crowned by appeals, with magnetic poles
charging up your limbs, the eyes that looked out
like famished sunstones, were still weary, incantatory.
Nat Shermans in pocket, the plaid habit of a pensioner,
& the invisible ebony-carved cane of the filadelfian,
Weston Loomis, in your clenched patriot's hand.

A dragon hither, its bitter milk a draught
from the ruined World, brought us composure
when we drank but sometimes too, demonios.
So go the war & peaceability of mesoamericans,
that in our blood was the peace of war, and the study
of arms & Man: the songs that were yours were mine.
The breath that you spoke, I spoke too, the storied
conradian english of converts. Masculine and knuckled.
(The ephebe would not have queried the congenital
amorous kiln from which his rhythm returned a vase.)
Hailed by thieves the vagabond purloins mass geographies
from Proserpina's thigh; drinks from hebraic pearly chalices.
So often we drank from these mutual cups, unpossessing
of what we owned, or what we grateful offered.

If the dragon sundered us, divided our wares &
dispersed the careful-ranged hoard we shared,
regardless, the river Thames ran softly 'long, &
still flows on; atop the cliffs of Crete the bullroarers
pursue their feats, and snug in Quauhtitlan
hides the unknown quantity of the Quetzal ribbon.
These and other realms open to us at all times,
who would not choose to perish "in hot rain,
loved widely by women"? We'd have our hearts
& divagations cleave like ire & pulque, course
the circuits of the world's lengthened technics
like mud, flesh, & earthly attire. Times past
are not times gone. Who so loved the Brave
New Earth, & its union, "when earth and we
were without the toil of burning in the dark,"
the enlightened hour, its Monticello, and Mister
Adams, and the excellencies that renounced
the future shock of glib contemporaneity,
was no demagogue at heart but worse:
a Poet. A legislator who learned how to mint
Pounds from gold & not the phantom credit
contra naturam, therewith 'no man hath
a house of good stone,' nor the rubrick for feed.

But you trudged through the fundamental dross
of an implosive nation, trusting of its trust, &
retooling the cabinets of speech for substantial
redress. Those fields we farmed you revisit,
digging into the cavities and undergrowth
of graveyards that men are wiser for studying dogs'
tread, unafraid to snoop the remains of better blues,
black goat blood-fed souls who speak; & even further:
the seeds of the mācēhualli, the tecolote's eye,
which gazes on what the wind lists to usher...
'And then went down, you, to the ship...'

Envoi

So lurked he who had effaced himself,
whose work loomed where his corpus
once lounged, heaved up from seasmoke:
the Nao in its wake leaves no trace,
New-World-bound, Atlantean-tongued.