Pan, Daredevil, Step Into Starlight & Other Poems
By Michael R. Burch
Featured in New Lyre Summer 2022
Pan
... Among the shadows of the groaning elms,
amid the darkening oaks, we fled ourselves ...
... Once there were paths that led to coracles
that clung to piers like loosening barnacles ...
... where we cannot return, because we lost
the pebbles and the playthings, and the moss ...
... hangs weeping gently downward, maidens’ hair
who never were enchanted, and the stairs ...
... that led up to the Fortress in the trees
will not support our weight, but on our knees ...
... we still might fit inside those splendid hours
of damsels in distress, of rustic towers ...
... of voices of the wolves’ tormented howls
that died, and live in dreams’ soft, windy vowels ...
Fascination with Light
Death glides in on calico wings,
a breath of a moth
seeking a companionable light,
where it hovers, unsure,
sullen, shy or demure,
in the margins of night,
a soft blur.
With a frantic dry rattle
of alien wings,
it rises and thrums one long breathless staccato
then flutters and drifts on in dark aimless flight.
And yet it returns
to the flame, its delight,
as long as it burns.
Completing the Pattern
Walk with me now, among the transfixed dead
who kept life’s compact
and who thus endure
harsh sentence here—among pink-petaled beds
and manicured green lawns.
The sky’s azure,
pale blue once like their eyes, will gleam blood-red
at last when sunset staggers to the door
of each white mausoleum, to inquire—
What use, O things of erstwhile loveliness?
Daredevil
There are days that I believe
(and nights that I deny)
love is not mutilation.
Daredevil, dry your eyes.
There are tightropes leaps bereave—
taut wires strumming high
brief songs, infatuations.
Daredevil, dry your eyes.
There were cannon shots’ soirees,
hearts barricaded, wise . . .
and then . . . annihilation.
Daredevil, dry your eyes.
There were nights our hearts conceived
untruths reborn as sighs.
To dream was our consolation.
Daredevil, dry your eyes.
There were acrobatic leaves
that tumbled down to lie
at our feet, bright trepidations.
Daredevil, dry your eyes.
There were hearts carved into trees—
tall stakes where you and I
left childhood’s salt libations . . .
Daredevil, dry your eyes.
Where once you scraped your knees;
love later bruised your thighs.
Death numbs all, our sedation.
Daredevil, dry your eyes.
To Flower
When Pentheus [“grief’] went into the mountains in the garb of the baccae, his mother [Agave] and the other maenads, possessed by Dionysus, tore him apart (Euripides, Bacchae; Apollodorus 3.5.2; Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.511-733; Hyginus, Fabulae 184). The agave dies as soon as it blooms; the moonflower, or night-blooming cereus, is a desert plant of similar fate.
We are not long for this earth, I know—
you and I, all our petals incurled,
till a night of pale brilliance, moonflower aglow.
Is there love anywhere in this strange world?
The agave knows best when it’s time to die
and rages to life with such rapturous leaves
her name means Illustrious. Each hour more high,
she claws toward heaven, for, if she believes
in love at all, she has left it behind
to flower, to flower. When darkness falls
she wilts down to meet it, where something crawls:
beheaded, bewildered. And since love is blind,
she never adored it, nor watches it go.
Can we be as she is, moonflower aglow?
Charon MMI
I, too, have stood—
paralyzed at the helm
watching onrushing, inevitable disaster.
I too have felt sweat (or ecstatic tears) plaster
damp hair to my eyes, as a slug’s dense film
becomes mucous-insulate.
Always, thereafter
living in darkness, bright things overwhelm.
Step Into Starlight
By Michael R. Burch
Step into starlight,
lovely and wild,
lonely and longing,
a woman, a child . . .
Throw back drawn curtains,
enter the night,
dream of his kiss
as a comet ignites . . .
Then fall to your knees
in a wind-fumbled cloud
and shudder to hear
oak hocks groaning aloud.
Flee down the dark path
to where the snaking vine bends
and withers and writhes
as winter descends . . .
And learn that each season
ends one vanished day,
that each pregnant moon holds
no spent tides in its sway . . .
For, as suns seek horizons—
boys fall, men decline.
As the grape sags with its burden,
remember—the wine!
Michael R. Burch is the editor of The HyperTexts, on-line at www.thehypertexts.com, where he has published hundreds of poets over the past three decades. His poetry has been translated into fourteen languages, taught in high schools and colleges around the globe, incorporated into three plays and two operas, and set to music by seventeen composers. A five-time Pushcart nominee, his poems, translations and essays have appeared in hundreds of literary journals, including The Lyric, New Lyre, Romantics Quarterly, The Chained Muse, LIGHT, Measure, Southwest Review, The Chariton Review, The Chimaera, Brief Poems, Poem Today, Asses of Parnassus, Writer’s Digest—The Year’s Best Writing and The Best of the Eclectic Muse.