Ariadne

I. SONNET

How could he have been brought so low just when

Grand granite battlements had seized the skies?

Frail fabric! Dream of stone—whilst quarrymen

Dressed paper parapets. Thus matter lies,

And space is but a gaping gate for love

(O doors that shut and blades that rush down on

The fallen prince!). He’d sacrificed: above

The worlds, would not the goddess shield her son?

The worm has turned, for armies one had thought

Were naught but vultures’ feast upon the field

Erupt to batten on limp flanks; he’s caught

In ambuscade—defeated, he must yield:

He stood one step from safety, just a space…

Then in pale vision loomed her peerless face.

II. PROLOGUE

The labyrinthine shadows interlace and gambol manically,

As slate-gray specklets flit and fleer

In tardy transit through the purlieus of asthmatic torches.

Drifting motes accumulate in window-niches,

Dim the blaze of old gold stragglers,

Droop and drape themselves like velvet violet brocade

Congealing in blue shadowlands—

Commingling absences and drear abysses—

Until, like a roaring sot at tether’s tail

They bloat the throne-room’s mantling dust.

Finality: defeat, disgrace, and doom

Are such tenacious squatters

When fool fate is lounging languidly,

A lazy, fustian country-squire by day,

A demon-dullard whoring zanily

Adown the gleaming bowels of the night...

And yet I kindle coals and fire sweet incense,

Drape your shrine with scarlet garlands,

Serpentine lianas of bright asphodels

Still moistened by the lustrous dews of dawn—

Death’s blossoms culled afresh from rocky Cretan fields.

I’m loyal to my Love; the shaft of Eros—

Deadly, deadly is his aim—inspires, enraptures me

As I scrab up the shards and garner precious slivers,

Remnants hoarded from your ruined realm,

The fragmentary riches scorned now

Even by the barefoot burglar

And the pawn-shop shark.

O that I could restore that wounded world!

My Ariadne’s altars seem to summon me—

Mayhap an olden glory summoned me from dreamland:

I know not.

These small stars—

That gleam and tinkle

As they swirl between around and through

My lapidary’s hands—

These brilliant suns in nuce,

Are her rarest gems, the honored treasures

That adorned her royal robes long since,

When Minos sojourned far upon empurpled seas,

And Ariadne ruled, a Regent truly regal in an Age of Gold;

O how I worshiped her!

How I revered my Lady over all else living,

Until passion brooded darkling,

Blossoming and ramifying,

Overwhelming my deep-buried heart,

Then self-condemned

To silent sorrow in the dark.

But now, my Lady, I beseech your brief indulgence,

For I now must silence that enfeebling silence,

So that word and melody and mind itself—

The very substance of my being,

Maze and magic intertwined

In works of shimmering precision, granting great delight—

May not perish without hearing

In the court of courtly love.

III. THE HIGH PRIEST PREPARES

Pathic slumber of the soul

Still pulsing with desire

And drenched with dreams,

Which stream through marble flagstones,

Shimmering, cascading mightily

Unto the night-side of the world.

Solemn is the office and the bearing

Of the high priest, 

Who conducts affairs expertly,

Metes out swift and condign justice,

As skillfully as, in the twilight,

He’ll arrange pre-destinated patterns,

Of the cultic artifact and runic relic,

On the bronze-appointed altar stone.

Impressive is this ordered manifold,

As if a crystalline propriety of place and purpose

Had arrayed the worlds in stiff, fatidic postures.

He has tautened fragile structural supports,

Retinted stained glass fragments

(Celebrations of her storied flux),

Repristinated aureated filigree,

And garnished icon, polished idol—

For Our Lady, chased by her white wake of stars,

Soon honors night’s cathedral with her presence.

She will enter from the twilight,

Through the transept’s gloomy portals,

And her pomps must be prepared.

IV. THE WINE OF EROS

O sacred silent shrine, the moon's preserve.

Beatitudinous dark wine of Eros

Infiltrates mind's fortress to relieve

The drowsy watch. O demoiselle, again

My fortress shook to its foundations,

For your suave, slim footfall,

Drifting gently through a dappled daydream,

Sapped the granite’s vigor,

Ere the walls rushed down with such fell speed,

One might suspect that even stone

Obeys your invitation to the universal ruin.

Here panthers pace rememorated kalpas

Bright with bliss, in perdurable Symbols;

Unmolested by the Logos, in eternal flux

Your Eros bears to term embodied shades.

V. CONSUMMATED IMAGES

Perfected Images blaze remote from all

The drab liaisons suiting l’homme machine;

When grasping claws in heated haste

Tear treasures birthed in fire in earth's vast vaults,

To plunk the clinking relics, scarcely seen,

Upon the Bourse, the richer poetry

Which gleams in low-relief upon

The monarch's visage, stylized, shorn of shadow,

Rescued from its temporary dust

For archaeology's deep dazzlement,

Bears but a diplomatic valuation,

Its actuality of line annulled

In unelaborated newsprint, blurted sketch-work,

Anchor's crooning, orator's first draft.

VI.TO SUFFER ALL AND BE RIGHT GLAD OF IT

O nightblack gulfs, dread oceanic voids,

My Ariadne’s eyes,

Wherein I’d drown in blest content.

O gracile limbs, pale dancers down the gloom,

My Ariadne’s legs,

Beneath which I’d prostrate myself.

O glossy ebony, Medusa’s coils,

My Ariadne’s locks—

Make me as stone, free me of strife,

If needs must, Lady, take my life…

VII. “THE PATHOS OF DISTANCE”

Let proles and pawns

Applaud the babbling converse fouling up the air

Where bores in bars arraign the bitter tang

Satiety ensures; let phantoms track

Stunned disappointment in phantasmal murk.

Shed dross is benison

On wanderer's hejira.

After sleep

Intoxicates with trays of colored slides,

I summon up those slender fingers

Stirring languorously,

Pressing out the fragile whorls and serifs

On the trembling palm.

How Eros longs to linger in such dens of danger,

Given over to the storms of yearning,

Where the Blood-glow swiftly slips the leashes

From the elemental forces,

Liberating cosmic radiations

Focused sharply on the secret enclave, blest with bliss:

O Eros Cosmogonos...

Roaring throngs resume spasmodic antics

As a hustler croaks stale compliments

Anent my Ariadne’s sable sorcery:

With lightning speed the dreaded shield

Assumes a molten-red, Medusan menace,

Till a gentler iridescence signals

Supervening peace.

And the Lady, hearing, smiled; and, smiling,

Vetted such familiar tricks,

Concluding that man’s crooked dice

Are merely improprieties;

She smiles, she drifts away…

VIII. ECSTATIC EROS

From fugitive impressions,

And from strange alluring phantoms

Spawned in calenture's hot glow,

Authentic splendors are not wrought.

For vision is a privilege, a rapture in the round

As bone adopts its flawless flesh, and flesh displays

Its plenitudinous endowments

In daemonic dance,

A mad Maenadic dancing

To the music and the ecstasy

Unleashed by Ariadne’s destined savior,

Great God Dionysus.

Poetry demands a trained,

Sharp panoramic eye,

Encompassing my Ariadne’s

Olive-toned soft sheen

And lean long limbs,

Expression of a goddess,

Movement of a tigress.

Poetry replenishes itself with each expense,

Acquaints, and reacquaints itself in stunned delight

With dazzle of her dancer's legs fresh from the sun

And on the snow-glossed lacquer

And the curvate arches, bridges 

To the melting lands of gold, afar.

Where dreams dwell, darkling.

Eros thrives upon the far,

Draws its own life’s-blood

From the distance sundering the lovers,

Populates the poet’s visionary landscape

With a coruscating chaos

Of astounding images.

That landscape: the primeval Cretan paradise.

That lover: Ariadne as she moves and breathes.

IX. THE TEMPLE OF THE GODDESS

Refurbished ardor whelms dread’s shadow

As we enter hallowed precincts 

For the cultic rite. Bacchantic votaries

Sing solemn summons to divinities of eld,

Those deities who ruled the middle seas

When Syrian Astarte favored the Minoan bards,

Those saints of heathendom, with revelations,

Frightful, mind-dissolving,

Flaming souls of poets to a molten ecstasy.

Weird runes wrought out in chthonic caves

Dream strongly in their vaults

Before emerging into day as sacral implements

Employed expertly by Ephesian priestesses,

In Samite robed, whose paroxysms

Body forth the pain and stress of prophecy.

Each adytum and cloister spring to life

With blaze of torch and fume of censer.

Every chorister’s in voice,

Each dancer’s movements

Do conspire to map

Transcendent symmetries

On twilit lawns.

Each golden sylph gleams with a novel grace.

X. THE VOICE, SO SWEETLY SAD

The voice of voices sighs strange secrets,

Weds bright bliss with pain,

With whispers ties her knots,

As in the pallid silence we adore.

And the mysterium you still protect,

Beneath the three-fold seal,

From rabble’s bark or heresy

Of exoteric provenance?

Your name. That word of might 

Will ever be my telesmatic charm,

Abiding always inenarrable—

An unmolested fiefdom;

An impenetrable preserve;

Mine own allotment staked out

At the golden heart of earth;

A secret sanctuary,

And a refuge for embattled knights;

And here will I maintain your word, inviolate,

Unstained by throat of loathsome mob,

Till prophecy of metamorphosis

Hath coaxed the flame-wheeled cycles on

Towards your restoration,

Till the clangor of cathedral bells

Tolls tardily the message of return.

XI. OMINOUS ORACLES

Already there are omens pregnant with annunciation.

Premonitions and prophetic proclamations

Speedng down the winds as promises of balm

For flayed and ravaged loyalists,

Your star-illumined acolytes who loft sweet canticles

In earthly tongues to Thee, O Bella Donna, Goddess,

Empress still in all refracted rainbow-riot of your images.

XII. GODDESS UNVANQUISHABLE

Ephesus remains unvanquishable,

Each salvaged stone irradiates my inmost soul,

Which seals its gates of adamant

Against all edicts and anathemas

Spewed forth by jumped-up

Plaster deities of hate,

Those wrathful sky-gods, Molochs

Who have supped to bursting on our hearts.

Will they not themselves sing pretty carols

When their foul and aged carcasses

Endure the pain that is intense and lasting

In a dank and noisome chamber

In the entrails of the earth.

XIII. ELUSIVE SIGNS

You have been always as a seal, a sigil,

Rune indelible upon my soul.

Amid mad mazes running, hunted,

Melting, merging with the phantoms of mirage

Your recollected substance somehow still adheres

Unto these sorry remnants,

Still reconstitutes, in some dank, dusky corner,

Of a desecrated cosmos,

All of You, my Ariadne, consecrate to Eros.

O sharp, tip-tilted planes of ivory

Inviolate from nascent dawn

Till late the moonbeams

Lave the Goddess in their silver.

O the bright beatitude!

How such visitation, bittersweet enchantment,

Rouses up for festival your votary

Who else would loll and groan here still

Amid this quick-congealing gore, 

This sinister, dark harvest of the ever-singing lash.

With parched and wounded palate

Still I crave the savor of Your nurturing attentions. 

From Your breasts in golden shimmer,

Numinous, uncanny,

I would sip just such a sleepy draught

As numbs attention in the dungeon’s drowsy watchman,

So that psyche’s liberated wings

May bear me down to even darker realms.

O you have graced all worlds unto their limits

With Your satiating gleam of smile,

Your plenitude of our release, as of our durance;

You’ve seduced each critic’s judgment,

Shaken, shattered, powdered terminal redoubts,

Until one summoned footfall’s delicate caress

On merely-recollected flagstones, barely glimpsed,

Brings ruin to the thickest wall,

Sets strange submission in the hardest warlord’s heart,

And populates with shards of empires

All Your winds of aftermath and agony.

ENVOI:

Let Ariadne’s fane be swept and garnished!

Now the pagan pomp of her parades and progresses

Have donned their final polish; let us march forth,

For already these her paired attendant panthers

Pace and pant like intertwining conflagrations.

Let us gather our community

Within the goddess’s rememorated kalpas,

Where her bright-enameled,

Perdurable Symbols will abide.

So render homage, pilgrim, lightning-locked in ozone-blue.

FIN