* For permie, see XXX
My first permie, an epithalamium of sorts, was composed in April, 1977 on the occasion of my first wedding:
Those who who …
love change fear
fear love change
change fear love
love fear change
change love fear
fear change love
love change fear
I thought of it as a concrete poem and had composed it while I was working on the first academic paper I published, From the Pictograph to the Metapoem: Realms of Concrete Poetic Reference in Brazilian Concrete Poetry.
For the ceremony, it was set to music by Philip Larson. Unfortunately the recording and the original manuscript have been lost.
I wrote a second more conventional epithalamium, Buds Longing to Be Leaves
The apples blossomed first. The old apricot’s
fruit we missed visiting inquisitive relatives.
The exuberant migratory bird
who passed through last week has left us
and this evening in the garden recalls
the surreptitious spring we shared
in a backwater province more home than here.
So fertile then, we eked through months
of bliss with fear. Nothing came of it but
my now looking from this knoll to the light
matted by the screen of our kitchen door.
So this is what we engendered seasons ago,
our bodies buds longing to be leaves.
Yet as the changes rung upon the first tryptich (love change fear –> love change fear) show love is a complicated matter. It was a short term-marriage, as much my own fault as that of my partner. Soon I began a series of divorce poems, including:
Rainbows burgeoned over the old apricot
I was watering, showers of tiny red leaves
leaves feigning rejuvenation. I fell
into some weird trance. Friends shed
inveterate habits, hobbled along
with canes, comfortable in their flab.
All went fine until their glib repartee
struck home. I lost my bearings.
You were hurt. I took fix after fix
on shooting stars. There was no choice.
I unleashed the hose, let it writhe
across the soggy lawn. Hoisting
my sacroiliac up the tree. Chary of tart
fruit, I gazed with watering eyes
to the isthmus of ocean, aching for an out.
Down the well I threw a stone. No splash returned.
Just the right slice of night was served up instead.
Twice now the moon’s beckoned through the fog.
I’m no fool: moonbeams can’t be harnassed up to woe.
Riders end up ridden, haulers hauled, just like
the bars we put up to keep out thieves, not
ourselves in. I married someone. I made her
unhappy. She learned to make me unhappy.
Earthlings we are, so clouds we keep making
last in the sky as long as the light,
thoughts tracing the same thoughts at flight
in the afterglow of an undertaking.
Say some man leaves his wife. Say she leaves.
Said man sees the sun set through winter smaze
though no orb sinks into distant waves,
it is the spin of the earth he perceives.
Despite quakes and slopes plants grow straight
on this planet. We walk about, change spheres,
gravity keeping up and down athwart
and mooring the sun as the solstice nears.
Are there decent grounds to celebrate
when bodies slip their bonds and fly apart?