Who is Kurtz?

Who is Kurtz?
by Gideon Burton
after a passage from Conrad's Heart of Darkness

I say a name that's hemoglobin red,
a talisman, a paradox, a charm.
I might as well attempt to raise the dead.
Can you perceive the man? Hence my alarm.
No wealth of words can say what can't be spoken,
absurdity, surprise, revolting tremors;
the circled squares, a dreamer's logic broken.
How can I speak what I can scarce remember?
Impossible to summon or preserve
the essence of a decade or a day;
whatever is the truth is bent in curves
that language will confess as it betrays.
     Our mind in isolation hosts our dreams;
     we live just as we dream, alone, it seems.

Photo: flickr - Baronvonhorne

From Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

He [Kurtz] was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream -- making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams. . . . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence -- that which makes its truth, its meaning -- its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream -- alone. . . ."

Sonneting

Sonneting
by Gideon Burton

To find a form sustaining me enough
to hold, to hold unweathered over time,
an instrument both sonorous and tough,
with sturdy words shaped smooth by ending rhymes.
Not every patterned art nor instrument
makes time both tow and flow in even turn,
So many words are brutish implements,
stutter-pulsed or bruising with their runes.
And there are books and symphonies whose length
is little argument, while most haiku
are pearls so tightly wound their strength
invisibles itself within their youth.
     I've found a form who forms me line by line;
     she's brief, yet most my thoughts she can refine.

Photo: flickr - jcarwil

He Bears No More

He Bears No More
by Gideon Burton
a remix of Parley P. Pratt's "Jesus, Once of Humble Birth

Once humbly born, a lowly lamb and meek;
once groaning in his bloody tears and loss;
once left alone, rejected, bowed and weak;
once weighted down while lifted on the cross --
In glory now returns to waiting earth,
His chariot a blaze of fiery cloud;
in glory comes to give us second birth,
the Savior meek and mild with thunder loud.
Exalted to a throne, Almighty King,
debased no more, ascendent and supreme.
With hosts of angels shouting as they sing,
He breaks the night with morning's brightest beams.
     I shouldered all, all suffering I bore;
     my sacrifice complete, I bear no more.

Photo: flickr - brainedge

Winter

Winter
by Gideon Burton

The argument of Winter settling in,
the light receding earlier, the wind
as weak as grasses browning in the thin
decay of foliage. How do we begin
retreating? Layering layers on our skin,
and waiting for the earth to slowly spin
its tilting path back where the warmth has been
direct, unsubtle, never wearing thin
but garish: saturated saffron rays
that boil or scorch or scald with burning heat;
high noons to span more hours than a day,
and lava pavement melting down our feet.
     Outside, the night descends at half past four.
     Inside, a second blanket, then one more.

Photo: flickr - lensfodder

Cosmic Skeptic

Cosmic Skeptic
by Gideon Burton

With little lenses pointed to the sky
we calibrate the universe and know
its origin and destiny. With dry
equations tallying the cosmic glow
of supernovae, all that dust and time
and space beyond all measuring of space,
and we unable anywhere to climb
except from rock to pebble. Yet we face
the past and future, scooping every gram
and ray and eon, everything toward
a set of numbers countable by man,
in confidence though all has been ignored
except our sets of observations, graced
with certainties. Our faith has been misplaced.

Photo: flickr - rickz

Pimento

back off she's mine

Pimento
by Gideon Burton

Your love is the pimento, red and sharp
that slumbers in the olives’ salty cave.
One sample of that taste I nibbling crave,
and I become an angel with a harp.
Your love is a bazooka, armed and ready
a missile primed and smoking for its flight.
If only I could give your fuse its light,
we’d have a rocket reason to go steady.
Your love, an orchard ripe and overgrown,
and I the migrant minimum in wage.
Oh apple tree, please toss this dog a bone
at least an apple tender in its age.
     Your love is metaphor a mountain thick
     It’s getting past the words that is the trick.

Red Wheelbarrow

Red Wheelbarrow
by Gideon Burton
after William Carlos Williams

So much depends upon the window pane
above the double sink that frames the yard
where she is watching as the evening wanes,
The light is growing heavy, thick, and hard.
The wheelbarrow is sitting on its side,
its rust invisible against the mist,
the tire caked with mud.  She stays inside
and sometimes wipes her forehead with her wrist.
The chickens do not seem to feel the rain
or hear it tap the metal barrow's edge.
She tries to see how little day remains
by peering from her kitchen's little ledge.
     So much depends upon the glazing wet
     arrangement inked in silty silhouette.

Photo: flickr - sgrace

The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carols Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Why Walden

Why Walden
by Gideon Burton
an imitation of a famous passage by Henry David Thoreau

To be deliberately alive; that's why
I went, confronting the essential facts.
I did not wish to find out when I died
that I had wasted time on lesser acts.
To suck out all the marrow from each day,
to sacrifice the petty and mundane;
to chase from vivid prisms middling grays;
to range the heights and depths, the joys and pain--
I had to melt away the dross and foam
and drive the price of living to the true
accounting never found except alone,
prepared for silence and a world to view.
     By walking through the wilderness and sky,
     sublimely quiet, rarely asking why.

Photo: flickr - hz536n

from Thoreau's Walden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Thanks List

Thanks List
by Gideon Burton

For chewing gum, whose minty fibers scrub
my after dinner plaque. For asphalt, smooth
and new, replacing random rocky nubs,
allowing swervy-rapid skateboard love.
For polyester in my cotton shirt
unwrinkling mornings with its magic thread.
Formaldehyde, that keeps cadavers pert,
and students weeping as they probe the dead.
For tutus, tap shoes, cheese that comes in cans;
for popsicles and broccoli and paint.
For sneezing dogs, samosas made with lamb,
for teachers not too proud to say they ain't.
     For pageant teens who speak in gnomic riddles,
     For muscles I have found to make ears wiggle.

Photo: flickr - clrcmck

Help Thou Mine Unbelief

Help Thou Mine Unbelief
by Gideon Burton
after Mark 9:24 ("Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.")

If once upon more lonely shores I stood
in reticence before the puzzling wreck
of elements and time, of breath and blood,
uncertain what to fear or to expect --
No longer, Lord, though darker raging seas
push up their acid tides, press down their might
and trembling earthquakes drop me to my knees;
or salty winds and sands shred dimming light.
For I have seen the clean serenity,
and I have heard the calming spacious spread
of deeper peace ring through eternity
and animate what in me I thought dead.
     Unfinished, my belief, and sapling weak;
     upheld by Him whom I am sure to seek.

Photo: flickr - MattWhale