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The Poetry of R. Dean LuddenR. Dean Ludden is mostly retired and has worked as a teacher, radio announcer, and pipe organ technician. He is a graduate of Hamline University, with graduate study at Columbia in New York. He is married and lives in Dixon, Illinois. Check out his web page is www.coiinc.com/people/organum
We missed it, Dad—
that last embrace that bonds the blood of men who always faced into the wind of love and never understood its source.
So arrived the days in early fall.
We settled for a handshake, then, and after all the years that we pretended we were close, the words, like leaves, were also blown away: weightless, dry, and crumbling.
There they stood, two helpless men
without so much as one distracting tear, who lied about the year to come, and of those dear and fresh remembrances beyond the day of parting.
You knew the last stop
would be Arlington, albeit not on Chaplain's Hill where sleeping comrades filled the ground you loved. You did not know a slope beneath that crowning tree awaited you.
So there it was, we heard once more
the sound of Taps, the slap against the sky of twenty-one explosions, and a young man's tribute to an officer who wore two crosses and a silver leaf— who marched with his old comrades years before.
Now as this aging son
who would embrace with spirit arms, I wish you rest, old soldier, there to find the peace you never knew in war... the peace we shared one final afternoon, on Chaplain's Hill.
Second Sight
Vision is
the province of a journey where the hearth is left behind. To listen with the mind, to let the storm clouds roll across a new, uncharted heaven. Observe them in their infant gathering of wisdom as a wind takes mists and feeds them to a blackening dawn until it roars its "yes" upon the unsuspecting prairie. All the while, the eye deceives and tells at best of one small frame, already history.
Rivers, lakes, and quiet fires
may only simmer in the refuge of nostalgia for a time, may resurrect faint melodies that floated from the distant hills or just caressed the truth's retiring shadow, for I lost it there, saw it quickly borne away by morning's restless flight, saw the years inflict their crust upon its maiden gown.
One learns to pray
with due respect to caution. New and improved sunsets are far too dear, too overwhelming; too much truth gets in the way. Oh yes, much more awaits just past the outposts as all proper revelations do, were I to have the time, the will to disenthrall this body from its splendid toys... but they are so lovely, still.
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"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding." ~Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
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Reasonable insanity
Upon the scale of graces
is there nothing to be said for aberration of the mind? Where one may choose the path of irresponsibility and see the tigers play— to bid them save their roaring for the blood scent of the hunt?
I want to go
where unicorns beguile and where wild halloos still echo 'cross the barren fields, when the wind remembers. I want to shake out all the dusty pretense in those plans I made so many years ago.
There is music
beating out the triumph of the spring. Faint upon the ear, it grows and feeds each effervescent soul until the senses join the march, until the Mardi Gras crescendo rules the night.
So let it be. The tomb is cold enough,
and laughter will not penetrate its walls. Diaphanous, the curtain closing madness from our grasp. Those silhouettes entrance us. Spells abound. Propriety is not a word we know. And of tomorrow's tired reality? The muse be praised, It is turned back Into the black forever raging sea!
Here let me rest a little while.
Where the soil is lush and yielding, where the trees reach out in one magnificent embrace of mother earth, silent teachers of an archetypal love that history could not disclose. Here let me co-create, to meet consanguine shadows rising from maternal clay—here in the heartland, where my dust congealed, where the breath is shared again, again...
Moss invades the headstones.
My fingers trace the names, while souls conjoin and know that flint spark birthed within the cave burned hotter still in pilgrims' breasts, still spreads its heat across a continent, flashing in the eyes of youth, smoldering upon the page's edge and poised to leap and dance upon the open hearth, or to destroy.
Enter, solitude,
and in that place where roots descend, reach forth as tendrils intertwining with the past, there grows a new tellurian peace to trace the sun, earthbound and free, still calling from the ground to sons unborn, "Remember me."
It would have been a hopeless search
when every day's persistence saw an overused humanity, dried out, still taking from a host that had no more to give.
From every continent and
into every tired street they reached in avarice, and never understood how pure the winter is for cleansing, how steadfast in its raw embrace is this ally of death.
No, the dreams kept fighting back
with their quixotic paradise and irony became a scheme for upper class deceit. Take apart the puzzle of a hollow quest and find inside a world too far gone on ugliness, too much entrenched in all the spoil of victory.
A single word speeds past perfection
in the dance, and that is awe, most uncontrived; from there no beauty cowers but is revealed at once to naive souls alone. Alas! Greed's wizened prisoner at length, may dance no more. UntitledLent, full of God,
There comes a newer paradise
along the path of truth a world in parallel to rest upon the day and it is wondrous in its silent tumult for all time is suddenly unlocked; quiet shimmers throw their echo back across the galaxies that once we knew, and everything is changed.
This is the realm of trust,
full-blown, caressing, soft upon the air of revelation where the spirits bow. The work is of believing and the peace is of a true humanity that only visionaries see illumined by the son of God.
This is the time also
when graying intellects return their chalk to dusty trays and speak in wonderment of crumbling halls where the elite compose the fate of man. Speak of art and tears and voices in the night, of yesterdays that hung like smoke above the field of death. And they too sigh, complicit in that grim memorial we celebrate in song.
This new millennium
so obsessed in infancy with punishment, revenge and walls of fire, is it stillborn? Petulant, intractable within its cradle of a thousand winters, yet defiant to a single spring? Are its stripes unhealed, its stars still dipped in blood? Or might it by some miracle see life still glowing far within, reach out to hands across the sea and give it all away? "Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the
noble art of
All up and down the
corridors of timelessness, before and since the dreams and schemes that fester in a twilight consciousness, imagining will sire reality, for all is transmundane where wish and need and gift converge and there is certainty.
Less and more are made of vanity,
and good or evil, yet unknown. The patient silence breathes in throes of birth, for there amid the swirl of dust and galaxies the process still unfolds. the word alone expressed and in a magic that brings magic to its knees the particles assemble, coalesce, and it is so.
Above all else
There is this cooling of the blood within my veins. Flat horror is my next-of-kin. Fingers scratch in ice of a December made of sterile moons that mock their suns with hollow light too weak to care. Silence is my prison, death a faithless friend who will not keep his time, but ever backs away... Look out upon a highway cold and still. It is as if I stand alone upon a frozen island, just to watch the roaring wind and know of emptiness. Within, without, a living tomb where even color races to the edge and drops away. If at last the choice becomes a dying fall or an immortal spring, I choose November's coverlet of snow and long for rest.
Call it not rest.
It is the peace of lassitude that draws its cover over those defiant ones, never wise enough to know serenity, never tuned to timelessness until that CRACK across the sky asserts the warp assaulting every scheme of Lilliput, every glory that mortality may throw upon the stage and in that instant terror mind is prostrate, cold, emasculate, Eons condense; dreams walk unseen along the shore while spirits frolic in a transient ecstasy. On high the solons gather. Only then life may resume to plod its weary course along a more incisive edge of day, no turning back, for all is new.
Light makes its retreat
upon a thousand western hills and it is time for endings, overlapping, self on self, leaping on the past, like hurdlers in a race of the insane, the denouement broadcasting fear like seeds that flourish, feed, then gnaw upon the viscera. Then is dread self-orchestrated, colors fade, and hope is turned away. Even sadness quite stillborn, time suspended and the open door to God forever closed.
And yet to acquiesce?
Impossible. For at the end, one question... "Might there be, somewhere past that far-off plain, unknown, unsought, that which begins again?" And then a gentle, "No. Although, there might have been."
The winds increase,
Messina off the bow! Beware! For centuries of myth and stark reality enshrine this meagre strait where Jason sailed, and St. Bravado keeps his benefice.
It is the foil of Everyman,
this profane, drenching lair. Monsters indeed! To leap upon his peace...a peace that flies in fear before the morning watch, when from his lover's arms he rouses, torpid, ardent of a dream exploded, mocking in retreat.
In vain, reminders
of past choices, justice, recompense. In vain, the watchers tremble, death is cheap, and heroes quail. In vain I live would I not choose to die.
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