C
Dear Cold Night in July
Dear cold night in July,
I've not seen the like for years:
when rain arrives to play
for hours wearing our tears
from rooftops into eaves,
each tear a strain to rain
too silver on green leaves,
your memories our bane
poured into your green sleeves,
no rhyme or reason why.
Before such rains drift on
can we declare their cure
before dawn's clouds are gone
or will blue eyes allure
be sun's on our lean willows
or ours on our down pillows?
© by Richard Vallance, 2003 & 2005
July 12th., 2003
Ghosts
For John Keats, and his incisive sonnet,
"Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition"
Surely the mind of man is closely bound
In some black spell; seeing that each one tears
Himself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs,...
Were you as haunted by the soul as life
had haunted me? Still are you? What's the excuse?
You say I see, "... My childhood days were rife
with throttled love and long-on-tooth abuse
so endured!" Thus our hardened victim's keen
to traumatize the mind, and well before
she must ghosts let out she'll have heard unseen,
locked down beneath her cellar's banged-shut door!
Why so? Don't ask me. You I never knew,
although be sure I stumbled on those keys
that unlocked my own, where long cobwebs grew
and spiders crawled with unapparent ease.
Why cellars yield to keys, the secret's out:
invite ghosts up. And learn what you're about.
© by Richard Vallance 2004
January 22 2004 (2:30 a.m.)
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6
Oh My Tigress, Lithe and Free
after William Blake, "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright!"
for my little night wanderer,
Argentée ("Silvery"), age 18 months
1
Oh my Tigress, lithe and free,
in what moonlight by your tree,
What light wells beyond our days
in your eyes where starlight strays?
2
Through what playgrounds must we run,
In the absence of our sun?
What immortalizes you,
in your dusk's Cimmerian blue?
3
By what spryness, by what flight
could your sinews so alight
on every spruce your forepaws clasp,
where your cat's blood's coursed to grasp?
4
Blurry! Flurry! Where's there strain
in your calculating brain?
What dread tree trunk, what rough bark
dare restrain you from a lark?
5
As all the stars smile down on you,
pray tell how they well up through
that silver ocean in your eyes,
scaling down our seas to size?
6
Oh my Tigress, lithe and free,
in what starlight by your tree,
What light wells beyond our days
in your eyes where moonlight strays?
© by Richard Vallance 2004
September 4 2004
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Persephone, What Prayer
for Rainer Maria Rilke
Persephone, what prayer do I hear you pray,
as the god of the netherworld sweeps you away?
Orpheus, if as of winter you
once lost Persephone, pray, I ask you once,
why this low lament?
Tracing themselves in foam as long as blue,
the waves rush hush against the shore
where I also hear alone
your lyre's strains as though
you might have saved Persephone
from Hades' shadowed halls,
and you too
might have redeemed her long sad soul
from November's realms.
If, on this dusky shoal
hard by the roaring Aegean
you may have glimpsed there wash,
though only once, one trillium in autumn,
if you will have watched it still
afloat, though shriveling fast,
if now the frosted surf will not
as yet have gone and claimed it on the Aegean's bier,
will not have madly quashed
her corset's bloom too fair,
fallen from Persephone's bosom,
will it have really blossomed out of season?
Orpheus, I see no reason.
Come then, lyricist, and clasp your young bride's veil,
where with April's bowers you both laugh to your avail.
© by Richard Vallance 1972 & 2005
(composed at the age of 27)
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10
Wuthering Heights
Off Wuthering Heights rains race west again,
Their mists memorials to whose pelted past? --
The manse oak ashen, or its tenants slain,
Over whose graves alone cold moons were cast?
Was this Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights?
Were Catherine and Heathcliffe truants here,
Their passions as fierce as their wild delights,
Their jealousies inflamed by kinsmen's fear?
What was their sin in lieu, or lore? How will
These howling winds rekindle passion's fire,
Or shall their shambled ruins stab a chill
Through you as you flee their phantasmic ire?
You shan't skulk by! Those ghosts you loudly hear? --
Their passions singe your blood, your wildest fear!
© by Richard Vallance 2005
April 25 & 28, May 6 2005 & June 8 2005
