Apollo (1/2 - sections 1 and 2)

 

                        Apollo

 

                       Song of the Sun

 

 

                             I.

 

The flush, from first, is its own genesising:

Inside the flameyard, comes at first its revelation

At our lie, eyes set on glass: no point of notice

Of where the shade struck blind some shy three hours from Terce.

We are white refractions glanced from mullioned windows,

Where at watch the world resides the mirrored way

In which The Sun's bird sweeps a minor mirror distant-

From the russet curves that skim the Milky Way.

In its meridian swim, the image, of an unrequested promise-

Thus here again sequestered and sequestering, and may

It stay as red magnesium as our love, or lust, a trellis

To the wordless rung upon its roundelay.

And as our love-lust's fuschia turrets, the night also slips vermillion,

On our tar and terracotta, in remembrance of that plea

That Prime pregnated burst at first, upon its lover's pillion-

That split the cyan waves that clutched us undersea:

Caught at the lazy zenith of its math, remembers

Without knowing us weakling stars who fork the Forger's tree-

Perchance no nest or rest of all its metalled embers...

That fluctuate the bud, that curves the mullioned sea.

 

And if Death should be preferred, in lieu of sleep, then

Held in golden hands is all the land we see:

Remembering the tenfold by the ‘not again' ,

Upon blank gates re-entered in this infancy-

Of wake to second slumber, oh, and come faint, forth,

Or brighter from mad garrets where grey claimants cry

To solitude the same as frames the Crossbow north-

When sud of speedwell centres in the safflower sky:

Fey-clad consumption of the suns, a diorama bárred in

Access to the strake gates of  a garnet See:

As the world's waif engraves itself by the same garden,

In the pepperminted rondure of its moiety.

 

And a nurturing consumption is the someday Sun's:

Some day that would inherit us, though then

In burning us, would It receive our margins-

Arrayed to greet its blaze, through liquid aconites?

We'd seek one stranger, perched upon our kingdoms,

For sure enough are other satellites-

In turn to take as lampborn saviours, but for these

Adjourning derelicts, gay ghosts I call our hours,

And tick-tocked motions stations of the grave,        

Appointed on the spellbound course of seasons-

I shine Thee eternal, Sun: and come the scours

To the grey regalias of post-Summer's pages,

You will still burn flower-bud turn upon the fiefdoms

That appoint no lords but who inherit You.

The pilot assets, promises, debentures,

Debuttante emissaries of market ventures,

And jobsworth adjutants and arbiters of guises,

Of a mart that wears us by our capital -

Transmogrifying hives of business guerdon,

And the smiling strivers of the office quadrant,

Shine too in You though absent of arriving

At a thought that claims them held within Your hall.

And, chasing glades of dust, between far fairways-

Left, insomnia's wanderers where the tight lamps climb...

Floods moonwhite on intemperamental stairways,

Both the moonwight's curve and silver strands You limn,

From out its shuttled vertex, O Appolon..

Soon mount, and then encapture in their clime

The office hearts You cast a crystal Cross on...

Setting far their cots from thoughts of harvest-time.

 

The streetlamp shuts its moth within its osier.

Burned way beyond its sail, meridian Rose,

A mounted mothship waits to hold way closer,

By sides that sheer it straight of fellow throws

The silent waves take: ah, my burnbright, chase her;

The ship at sundown sees one blueblind star,

Among the bluebound sweep below the Chaser;

Set sight from her but bé her magister.            

 

...And the bridge I claim by midnight does not fear the bringer

Of the equal grace a day benights in parallel:

That faced a while my outreach from the spare blue bell

Above that learns to burn below the bellflower.

On magnesium meadows moonsweeped by no fall of farer,

Serenade us as the reels go by and wheels and runs-

And a nurturing consumption is the stalwart Sun's:

And recumbent, Its lane's light is its own harbingér.

 

                                II.

 

Gigantically heaping, past the pumiced dawn,

White rider, swinging circles into light-

Do you cross the spar-lengths of meridians,

O albatross, conspirant of the thought

The sea dreams of its relic mastery?

Light-bowed reliquary of songs of this the leap…

Cognizant of our choral, O prowed Sun:

Sift-soarer of our pain and orchestry-

Orgasmic chorus, of our penitence-

 

Drowned absolution of our bitter prayers

When sweeping seaward-down against your steeps,

Swing desolation on our finitude,

We choristers of blanchening majesty-

Sprite Sun: adjourn past satelliting heaps

Of traffic isles and be but by and by

What every tempest tells, to those who sleep

Beyond the crux of Your last lullaby.

But the wind whips on the dryer lanes where no-one speaks:

Alantic harbinger and virgin sailbird, sway,

And albatross, “Are you through shrieking speech?”

Fallen forth at last upon the utmost way

The rocks lose all rejoinders to their rocking bell...

The wraiths of spray will dessicate, upon Your drum.      .

Dynámo silence hammered of a blacker belfry

That greets perception with no pandemonium

Dead eyes of diamond seize; O sing and turn tongue-blindly,

While vultures cross my radiance, screaming “Yell.”

The yellow bursts afresh in orgiastic swell,

But does not strive to feign my rapture's radiance:

Olympian seabird swinging into knell,

That profligates the coast's wan prescience, scry,

Ejaculating tumours of this tell

Of tides that tick the hours and matte the sky

The Atlantic vagrants wave upon their crest

We do not seek or see, we have no rest;

Is this the passion of our liberty?

So slick the windows that the coast-lights fly,

Amidst their mirrors past all hasp and hest...

Of spoken junctures languished into jest,

Of feignless joy or paintless tragedy.

 

Where spill Your wights, my Maharajah,

Or lightly sites your fresher faun,

That skates beyond the frosted water,

Belonged, long past the broads of bone?

What summer's bronze sends its sung spiral,

Or seed or shaft rehafts its hides

In bonze's court, or hay-block barrel,

Or lightening that the rainbird rides?

Oh, lilt, celestial Pomegranate,

Or tilt to tryst the pardoned's path,

When guilt is just more white planet

Hardened at the cenotaph.

Fleet-fill you far, grand Diorama,

Let loose the girdles Your full sides,

Eternal fracturing of the dharma,

Of Her who turns and churns the tides...

 

And parlous myth abroad, the lightning rider,

Of cloudling wraths made in man's cell

To lend him ruth, O shadow strider,

If left lapsed where light roses dwell.

Though knowing nought where will your wheelers,

Pandora blossom, ordinance of sun and sill

May wonder well where will at wheel is,

If voice-lopped where You wheel Your will.

Abroad upon a sill-less window,

The search of what apart, ago,

Was left, is left for limbs to winnow

Of light-lipped branchlets; even so

The svelte suffusion of Your sorrel

Immagistrates the last long blue-

Where what was sending such sung spiral?

We are the days that disinherit You:

 

But You are what the crashing stars umpiral

Leave on arts and leaves on oracles:

To sway fresh sands on lines imperial

Time bleeds on frozen boats, and coracles-

To pave another recourse from the chasing air.

And what faint weight has placed You, Ariel,

As toppermost of chosen circles there,

Other than the vacant stand at top of stair-

Or blue below those bounds, Your beating auricles?-

Limned in linnet's raptures that regleam, arterial,

Beyond grey gates we build again less magisterial,

Or sweet retreats we seize again from strands anterial-

In rooms of play where once You came and waited there...

 

And in nests of ires that spire in calms, come, Magister of fire:

To my gallows-hearth once blanched in passions: strands, and palanquins

From East of where the russet comes: come higher, cladding higher-

On millioned lanes and trellised circle, lamps, and harlequins-

Abroad from urban congeries, grand mariner, and wire

That the refugee from shipwreck slips with; slippingly, there spins

Again from out the crosstree of Your galvinating gyre,

The mirror-quest, the spires of answerings

The sea breathes, over pebbled dash and shire,

Entrenching floats of fliers over almond, over grey;

Our orbit shifts so gently we can't correspond to Day

That day by day stood sentry still, or silenced, or to sing.

Fix Your broad and clockless orbit on the clockwork world, and bring

Across the glass and lilac tapestries, the way you wing there, weigh

Our claiming entry: over flutter-fleets of things that ring

Across the grass and lilac lands, wherein You wing Your alway:

Across the grand and violet tapestries that flux and fling...

 

And I found my silence trancing in the crash and blaring

(Reel, ever wheeling Priestess, will us waywards, pray,

Curving turn in circlets): and I steel and, staring,

All the while you slake your manes in us and while our weigh-

Catch swift, before the summer comes, fern dykes at open

On all floors, celestial Shrike, that with all noonsuns swing;

Learn to love us as we loved You once, and tired of turning

Lay our heads at rest in entry to Your Mother's den...

 

Warm windless night: that knew no masters once, or sired their mastery

Of the force that keeps all boats afloat in hold and prone:

Cast up beyond Your whirling float to gyve in archery,

Towards the nightlight masks, the corralled ones who harp and hone-

Grand anvillers of hence of here, the lords of lost and onwards,

At the gantries that espied our paths a second Rome-

At point of all each heaven holds, and harboured homewards:

At the point of all each heaven-held and havened home.