A wineless man on your seat of native rock.
-Oedipus at Colonus
October 2017
When anger flames in torrid waves,
Component fires and torrid ash,
The wine that rivers ocean’s crush
Beneath the land beneath our flesh
Embroils its blood in soil that drives
Imbibing tongues in speechless droves
To writhe and rave like Tantalus
At all that frank and fruitless fall survives.
The flow of sweetest liquor from out
The arteries of Bacchus to veins
Of Hades’ quenchless burning vines—
Now hush our wish in panic winds
That lust for soot and loss. By sweat
And brow each duct and gland is sweet
As ash to taste—and snapping seines
Are sorrow’s final scenes erupting from the fruit.
When fury cruises the rooted ferrules
Of California hills, each crest,
A purple burn now bruised by fist
And kick of flame, jets a tempest
That slows the dribble of stolen jewels;
And diamondbacks now rue their rule
Of descending ocean-greens which fuel
A rattled jujube forest
With gimcrack roots like crucibles crossed—
The dials of day shatter the sun
And splice the starry dais of night
Into Persephone’s inferno, hot
And swift to wilt with volcanic hate.
With flaring dragons’ wings one
Wincing and glancing ember can spin
The worms of circumstance to cut
Antigone’s acres from vintage possession.
Thus, a subterranean succubus
And its phantom spirits drain away
While Ariadne’s leafy array
Collapses: a funereal display
Of scorched heddles and phoenixes—
Tarantula winds now spin and truss
The trellised moments, fruit as fey
As tragedy’s sightless path to Colonus.
When sparks at root engender quick
And truncated lightning, a satanic drop
Of flammable fruit, its molten sap
Melts these pacific sands. The map
And glass that chart the fickle rock
Of feckless Sisyphus now trick
To cull the strangling spill and slip
Of sloughing dust, a chaos sifting at our back.
When raging nature’s racing wind
Draws a crop of glimmering flint
And slashes this flashing monument
To the palisades of time, spent
With flowing ebb, the tide is spanned
And cursed with spawning cinder’s brand,
The heaven-falling harvest bent
To hold us fast and take our final stand.
Still, netting proof’s reproof
The eye that hangs by lash and lid
Is witness to the arid mood
Now sere with smoking wands of wood;
Our hands now poised to grope in love
Another mothering flame—from roof
To groin—now wineless, blind and sad
As Oedipus—house-erect yet fathering a grave.
I think that was a good one.