Arts Publications
Topic: RSS FeedProverbs of Hell
Hudson Review, The, Summer 2003 by Blake, Lorna Knowles
-After William Blake
1. No bird soars too high, who soars on his own wings.
But in every generation, it seems, they try,
remembering not the fall, but the heady
lift of flight, the eagle soaring by.
Like wax-winged Icarus, all too ready
to borrow shiny wings and gain the sky,
they risk the fearful plummet to earth or sea,
and stunned like garden birds who cannot see
the plate glass air of windows, unsteady,
numb with yearning, they rise again to fly.
2. Drive your cart, and plow over the bones of the dead.
All afternoon she sat, chain-smoking under a copper beech tree until one by one, the night set out its stars.
At her feet, a cardboard box: letters, harmonica, a fifth of Scotch, reading glasses, medals won during the war.
He was gone, who'd known her less and less, and absence stung no more than salt rubbed in a wound's old scars.
She crumpled the empty pack, carried the box across damp grass and gravel, and stowed it in the dark trunk of her car.
3. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Leave then. Try anything. Perhaps you'll learn
that on a pyre of greed your heart will burn
with pure infant lust, you will squander your
inheritance, become a cliche and a bore.
But when you sicken of that feast and turn
back to the home which you, Prodigal, spurn
for tavern, brothel, games of chance and more-your
father waits to greet you at the door.
4. Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
Like any amorist
writing and rewriting
a blason, she could list
his physical charms, but
everything about him,
she'll tell you, intrigues her:
the complicated math
of moon and water stirs
her imagination,
the sweet flow of season
into season; planets
in concentric orbits
spinning through the skies
exhilarate her. She's
undone by night's dark eyes,
and languid under noon's
high glare, midnight's quiet
touch, and when dawn beckons,
she aches for dusk, an hour's
stroke, the sweep of second
hands, for calendars, years,
metronomes, the giddy
carillon, the solemn bell.
It all adds up, but he
is helpless, he can't stop
these proofs of industry,
these cataracts of gifts;
she notices each drop,
and loves that he can't quit.
Every day, on her wrist,
another dainty watch.
But if pressed, she'll admit
the new digital ones
displease her. She so loves
the heartbeat of a clock:
the tick, the pause, the lock.
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