Sam Silva - "That Skull & Spell"

Blue music over a sea of yawning calm

though the rain outside in April sounds a gentle

reminder of the cold.

Cold wish of some gray demon

to clutch me down

and end my song

whose breath is tired and smoky short,

whose season growing happy has grown old.

A terrible thief!...to steal such pleasant days

as finally find their peace

in a rhythmic chanting of what soft storm

matched by violins!

And all thunder and all grief

brought less danger in the loss.

A terrible thief! Lonely as the anguished sins

taken to a cross...

Weeping in a lonely paradigm!

A stony soot out there to salt your breath

and cling to you, that lover,

with her avid kiss like grime,

with her bloodless crowds

all hungry with TV.

Where half a century tugged you in its slime

...made you chirp just like a pigeon,

fly in circles round the park.

Once! The New York subways cost a dime!

Now they offer up their freedom in the dark

where city lights are their own eternity

sending the mortal minions

to their death...!

3

I tiptoe over nightmares that I've had!

and skim the shoddy surface of the day.

I walk along the rooftops of the mad

...loose shingled, leaky, and absurd!

...wet in loveless decoration

by the city's millionth wicked bird

who likewise crows the hour

...each alter to its desecration!

...each crazy dream that lovers had

blown off like a wild flower

toward bloody fields of earth and worthless clay.

I tiptoe over grave stones in the night!

for those who died

and for those who never will.

Ah! Moonlight! more inspiring than a pill!

I wish that you could bury fear that way....

...and in the summer of his life

whose cool and easy winds

were so disposed

to that crowning purpose

that all luck and love foretell,

He worked at a computer.

He did it very well

...A man alone

who but for his loneliness

...the buttons suited him

...that carved artistic kind

that amplified a neon shirt

that shone

sweetly for the women

who waltzed

into his spell.

So that he married in his thirties

...an alter at the height!

that lifted up his public grin

and privately bestowed

the bridal gown

that fell

to champagne and a slipper

in such a shiny night

much like Christmas when it snowed.

Much like Winter and its snow

he tired of being tepid

in that extended wedded afterglow

and went into the cold air

for that kind of cigarette

that shivers in its ashen light

...and sooner or later

there were things

one of them knew

that the other did not know

or pretended not to know...

She was very good with buttons

and fire to ash and ice

that things would work and warm

...and icy ashen fire

became the essence

of those things, appearing

relatively nice.

Like the buttons on his shirt

...being relatively nice

what flared

was quite another charm

than that failed and fat desire

to learn to tuck his towel

underneath his arm.

...so like the buttons on her dress

undone and pleading guilty

to the horror

of that cruel and fleshy mess

...the flesh of which went pale!

Angelic pale!

They were very good with buttons

...one for quiet!

...one pressed

on the telephone

to signal its depressed alarm.

One to send a sprite to Heaven,

hands folded up

against the chest

in a ghost of what was human

in its form

...the other not so likely blessed,

rather learning

how not to be so human

in that more literal jail

when March begins to blow

its hollow tragic kisses

in a storm.

Rodin's "furied flesh" was crucified!

Time and time again

that tragic passion which we bronze

engulfs the lonely hour that Jesus died,

pleads with opium and knives

that fate's true hour would be fulfilled.

So that dreamers of the sweet and easy bliss

live alone in that brief moment that survives

only as a tear, where blood was spilled

...by those who trade betrayal

with a kiss.

6

That sore and dusty agitation

of limbs that come to ache

in a mumbling grumbling solace

of their disrepair,

and of an allergic mind

that trails a body's plague

in wounds and ulcers kept in kind

and fed with Spring's sweet air

...but by lungs that wheeze

such stock despair

as is the anguish

of a life come close to finished

in the flower and the purpose

of its own disease

...Ah! April!

In a tired life whose pathos

does not match

your tragic beauty

nor catch

that crime and essence

of your fire

...for those disposed

to take a task,

to labor at a task

...though all the gods,

their wine

and spirits finally come commingling

in their presence...!

Ah! April! Never ask

the meaning of desire...!



x

Children! Need we have knowledge of our death?

we, who have slipped into the muddy

and thorough going silence,

...or say...had rough hairs aroused along the neck

and likewise with a bullet or the cudgel from behind

and long we live this way

dazed and broken by our violence,

slow and awkward in our breath

breathed by a ghost

that cheats the air in kind....?

Even birth!,

where wombs rip in their pain!

Even the clarity

in the eyes

of youth that fathoms breathless skies

...is something lost

when painful Springs provide!

Cold! Lost and oblique

in the week

that kisses winter

crib and cross and splinter

...as a relic of despair's first and final cost

when sky seems frozen, pagan

...worse than pagan...in that aspect of its rain...

Or need we, again, have knowledge

in the least

of how the self

secures its ripened image?

Yes! The little beast!, in a brassy little replica

polished on a shelf?,

or on the other hand in a billion other selves

that spill their salt, their blood,

in what leaks into the land

and into rivers

that go wet the artist

who goes mad upon his muddy clay...?

Little children!

that a Universe confounds

in echoing chambers whose insanity

like a shattered glass resounds

...and only for the sin that they have listened

to a vague and ruined God

pronounce his pain!

x

8
Given choices

it is a cigarette I might decline

...where choices are few

and matter little

though the haze

this time of day is pretty

where the Sun slips through to shine...

My lungs wheeze the daylong now

in a murmuring of spittle

like voices

arguing an issue in my head.

Voices calling after the crow

"He has no interest at all

in the thing, you know.

He might as well be dead!"

Those lumbering steps

of a full grown cow

...a pulse that races

in a corpse of lead!

Just as each time

a cigarette consumes

each final lie.

One way or another

the bloody flower of April blooms,

be it cross or bunker,

iron or dust,

Wagner or a lullaby

or even just

that tired dream and joke

blowing smoke,

like fire

in rings around the footstool

by the bed.



9

Snoozing at the sorry gates of Hell,

that Hell might burn the bog

of your more complacent lies.

Or later, freezing in all fear

like Winter's dog

in ice made for an animal

that "Devil sin deserves"

...so say you, your lukewarm alibis.

For truth is what I look upon today

...that glaring void

more nude than sex...that skull and spell

by which you bury everything

much like a case of nerves

...and I see weeping pleading spirit

within each victim's eyes

...and you pursue your pious habits

made of clay.





10

Through a murky mind

I still remember

that I used to see those toothy geezers

with their smiles,

the users and the pleasers

in a worn home

where a woman keeps her tears.

I saw them and I felt to wretch

...that slimy men

their tepid hands

incised to circumstantial use

...In old and lonely trailer lands

their poetry of sweetly sickly smelling refuse

would give each the cause to go and fetch

love from the deep heart of such freezers

stocked with beers.

And now I dance on salty feet

and feel my own decrepit lack

...shuffle here and shuffle there

as swollen with the things I eat

and wishing I could drown in drink

that lullaby of my despair

...for though I love you as the days

are rainy dim, and as the nights are black,

like so many golden losers

having blown away the youthful foam

I should have drunk the thing that pays

and settled to that tragedy,

where love in its small dignity

stretches, yawns, lies on its back

gives a thousand kisses

to a dream that is impossible

blissfully...drifting off into the haze...