Dead-Lock
The Poet waits in human dwellings, searches the finality of wisdom for some special purpose, draws forth his language from the streets, from the throats of poverty sears with his eyes the ironic twist of inhuman sleep, dreams of a way out of the birth cycle, clutches with his teeth the angered shards of a burning cyclone, touches with his hand the precious beauty that has no name, but arrives in his poem as the plaintive anguish of somebody isolated beyond the walls of memory, is quick, reasons out his tragic situation, smells the thickening winter in his words, buries his trusty sword in a blind star that is the reclusive outburst of his prurient thirst, mixes the drowning Sun with the rising earth, is devoted to the simple search for an open language that can pin-point the starving ethos of a cultural underdog, what is the human match that is not martyred by shape? I saw the last bus returning from the ranch, I left my broken walking stick on the winding mountain, I searched the open fire for some sore whisper that tossed out of those burnt offerings, I cried all night, sensing there was a hidden truth in your humble beginning, yes, poetry is caused by the birth-song of a planetary silence, we turn away only to move closer to the center, robed in blackness the sad stone faces of giants gather inside the crumbling clouds, there is the gander from which the goose is born, to travel from inside the inertia of a sacred longing, to fill the social calling inside a prism of circumstance, the long and star-struck diversity of the birth model, the precious cinders of the acidy-overtones of the make-believe séance that resounds in the crawling future, to reach out in the dead-lock of pages impounded together, while the hands traverse mountains with pens of blood, a see-movement through the otherwise dead streets, laughter from inside the testimonial mausoleum of Time, fit to the destruction of inner doubt, we return with the whispers of a century's madness, poem for the difficult professors of logic, and there inside the difficult ending strikes the cycle eastward, birth of the Mother-state that dreams against the ilk of wonder, caged in by distance, shaped by the brotherhood of man, and brought as the only solution to the symbolic underworld of jade chess-pieces all moving in a state of chaos, there the ordered songs are presented to an audience of strangers walking upwards the dead-lock of the mountains silent in their freedom to be understood.
Reprinted by kind permission of the Regents of the University of California,
Bancroft Library, Berkeley. Gift of Diane Walker Murray