CONTINUUM

We take a slideshow of our past
trying to remember the good
picturing in our continuum
the films that last in our memory
those clips which cast us
to make us understood
by our encountering lines
which suddenly birth forth
raking in our own neighborhood
in those greensward seasonal scenes
when the birds took off
from the North woods of our country
now we look for signs in Vermont
when looking down the hills
for a spring of fountains
as earthly flower miracles appear
at the foot of the White Mountains
with good news at the divine hours
wanting to to hear,chant or sing
country lyrical melodies
from a quivering peal
of church bells
in musical keys shivering
from a bird search
on the plateau below
in the good news hearing
as garden saplings are renewing
with early spring flowers everywhere
yet we preside at our keyboards
at bordered doors
with the silence of writ
by our screened concentrations
keeping up in a poet's ceremony
at our stations with everlasting credit
near our computer Muse and mouse
as we sum up parts of our own origin
emerging from our sleep house
with print outs of punctuation
on our thumbs of reinventions
from our own realization
wishing to know how to suit
and address every golden vacuum
of human speech's simplification
hearing from every podium's
chapter and verse
within reach of our recreation
in a personal acting form
what in life mocks and mimics
listening in at our readings
from quorums or forums
at library reading rooms
discussing various literary critics,
as we view St.John's
approaching Apocalypse
through the Bible, Virgil or Dante
reacting to a fainting stratum of stars
in those poets who paint a prophesy
others opt for famous rhetoric
with an adopted political cause
on some confident lips
reacting their own adopted style
of diction's or musicians laws
like Keats, Yeats or Henry Lawes,
while others write fiction,
every audience has a chance to view
the floral spring rose stem
in a garden of verses for them
as people from every diaspora
of the universe rejoice
at words of public reaction
handed out at our performance
of Eliot, Beckett or Joyce's
coming attraction
who enjoy the acting out voices
hiding out from many tensions
at a balm of oral reading choices
away from all worldly distractions
to partly reside in revelations
from art's own satisfaction's grip
of poetry almost moving inside us,
hoping our postings will be cast
in Elysium's flora
and not exiled or planted
to any asylum with ghosts
of Sylvia Plath and John Clare
by their lone mirror and pictures
we try to unravel and compare
all cultures in the disparity
and irony of our adversary's tone
by our own motioning sagacity
without the pretext of being alone,
like marlins and dolphins
at sunlight by the sailed ocean,
for not all poets are like Cinna
trying like get Cassius
to spy on Caesar or to tell Brutus
about the Ides of March conspiracy
as a spell in life presides
under the Roman arch of history
he is in a reflection of Narcissus
over the body's mirrored bone
to embarrass us in his mendacity
with a mean and hungry look
it is in the stars that we atone
when we cannot make any sense
hidden here on rocks and limestone,
nor has Ulysses has ever failed us
from all the pretentious years
far from home
on his adventurous path to share
his tales of a future jagged journey
knotted inside with cabin fever
yet floating on rain, fog and air
nor will he be overcast
from our own past censorship
in any monologue of emotion
to be unmasked as any voyager
as he miraculously returns to
his bride wife and lover Penelope
when Homer often asks Ulysses
when writing his detailed book
about his Odyssey
as if he were a younger voyeur,
that even our modern poets
question his insight
as is Auden moved by it
as are other poets from Greece
on ports of exile,
with their years of contemplation
in long suffering and strife,
like Yannis Ritsos lost to his nation
living far from ships off the Aegean
not softened by his terror of exile
or by the succeeding fear
of impatience in spite of knots
as in a mighty continental flow
of being in the know,
like Jason capturing his fleece
from the Argonauts bow at Lemnos
despite mind racing Freudian slips
writing with trial and error
with sentences by sequences,
we too are still pacing
on aisles of unemployed exposure
where we give our actors
all the truth and consequences
in responding to our poetic plays
giving pleasure to our audience
left over our own contemporary stage
at a drama's reacting ruminations
or at shattering glass readings
in focus of our post silver age,
with all measured symbols
of a leisured conversation
which cannot escape the last chapter
weighing in our many years of trial
on verse's writ over a higher scale
because love or politics interferes
we still go on in silent living
where we might in loneliness fail
to be forgiving every betrayal
in rhyme or diction's composure
to locate our own holy grail
and to engage with disclosure
which we sought
in cogitation's lowly denial
from our unlimited energy
of creation that lives on
pondering over our exile
that we may still universally smile
as the Muse wandering in
to discover us by tracery
from our scenes of disclosure
on reinvented files of memory
expecting our own brooding
over metal fretwork filigree
we reinvent phrases on the page
sitting along the ocean isles
in meditation by hummingbirds
who like us are undoubtedly feeding
on hungry necessities
or in a repast of delicacies
by fallen trees to to stay alive,
we invent our fervent primal words
by leading others to finally survive
on these token yet matured end days
in a scenery's pretended disarray
on these extremities times
conceding to us in rhyme
with our spoken chorus of amen
to follow are small miracles
and simple priestly benedictions
from our nature's poetic creations
by swallowing the critical
call of continental nomenclatures
even temporal achievements,
until tomorrow we stand up
with bread and a cup of red wine
and rise up by hearing
the final business of bereavements
a prayer is said for the dead
covering over
another's delayed achievements.