Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Metaphor

I saw white moths ascend in moonlight
beneath black trees, saw white moths
rise, white wings turn as if to charm
 the night, then fall into double
helix with no beginning and no end

spin twin spirals as if to tell
the crystalline structure of snow
the hallmark of the embryo
the way a shadow bends in wind
what worlds inhabit the space
within the copula to be, what
means exist to make amends

but when I awoke, cold and yet alone
to turn my face toward day-to-day
I saw I'd only dreamed how mind
might reveal the source
of truth informed by art. Once again
I was vouchsafed to the real
the banal and the undisclosed

A Florilegium of Broken Promises

Christmas, Easter, Passover, Fourth of July,
come every weekend these disquieting days.
And O God, the tarnished ornaments, desiccated
palms, wasted ashes, spoiled eggs, spilled wine,
furled flags! Crucifixion augurs nothing
if no one's forgiven. So come home, come home,
Doctor Feelgood; shrive us of syphilis, vertigo,
clap, crudities, catarrhs, winds, and swelled heads.
Never mind the daily bread and green pastures.
I'll be nice; I'll live a better life, Jesus,
if you'll just let me the Christ's sake alone.
And when the time comes, God, let me walk out
of this place and find me a poor spot in a field
like the ones where Grandpa used to take his craps.
Let me lie down like a Plains Indian and wait
for old seeds to sprout and new flesh to quicken.

De Mortuis: Elinor Gray

Why'd you go off and die last March,
Elinor Gray, when I'd planned to kiss you
in May, just as I did in 1952. You
with your loving oh-there-you-are eyes
smiling around the years. You at lunch
in the Lafayette Hotel, wearing a Grecian
helmet of a black hat, half turned
in Hello-Thack-that-I-so-seldom-see.

You're dead, Elinor Gray, yet there you are,
eating a salad in a knife-blade suit,
flower-burst blouse, your moth-wing lips
still far from lost to me. You never married,
Elinor Gray, yet never were a spinster.

Why cry, Thack, over Elinor Gray? Don't you
see? You mourn the music of her name
and that she cost you nothing in risk
of love, for all her smiles were free.

Spanish Ballroom--Glen Echo Park--1970

To the Big--Band--Sound, round and round,
raising remembrance of the Trianon, Aragon,
Avalon, swing the satin swallows,
their chandelling dance as patterned as The Lancers.

These are the last live romancers, their swirls
as reptilian as those of nubile girls when the True
Orange Serpent reared among the flowery whirls of an
Eden black as the arsonist's brush could paint it.
Daydreamed fox trots, fandangos, tangos skirl
just beyond the "Women's" and the "Men's" at the
turning of the stair where ladies smoked Fatimas
and shoved barettes hard into their hair.

Gangrened garlands drape the plywood arches
where Les Brown and the Count might still
make a thing of dancing if there were not a
chill from just below the heart that chokes
the breath within the throat. All the laughter
and the chat is offstage and open to the night
where swallows might be bats for all they know of light.

A Resurrection Behind Rodman's Discount Drug

In the Hour between Kojak and Saint at Channel Five last Xmas Eve, a new Jesus, confusing death with birth, spreadeagled himself on his own True Cross five hundred feet up the starless sky.

Responding to witnesses and 911, a shock-trauma copter loomed and cops zoomed in by the roller-full to talk Messiah down. (He had to 
          piss 
and it was cold, cold!) Trembling, rung by icy rung, white skin drawn and quartered, he stood at last immaculate in the phosphor light of full experience, chin stuck out in the sempiternal mode of martyrs. Sad . . . had on his Great Speckled Jeans. Got to hold onto the old Image, Mensch. Let there come a time when something has to give, who wants to look seedy when he buys the farm? It's demeaning enough to be laughed at when you're courting grief that passeth understanding.

Christ was a carpenter for four years before He arose--let's then suppose a new start: no more booze, no pills, no loveboat, no smack.
Drama's not what it was in the days of Pontius Pilate and Golgotha. To 
          star 
now, you have to die on camera, Mac, and that isn't the half of it. Still, this time at least, no one yelled "Jump!" So Western Civilization advances--in halting climbdowns, a modest role model to other worlds.

The Biddle Becalmed

Westing beyond the Tonga Deep
In one of those wars to end wars
 Last week, or was it the week before?
We wiped a bearing on the shaft and hove to
To make our own repairs.

We hung glistening, a new dark
Star low in the blue empyrean.

Silent, we watched the Southern Cross
and Centaurus wheel by
To fall below the Friendly Isles
Like embers snuffed in the fogs of hell.

Windless, seared by moondraw,
Our burners banked, breathless we waited
Day by endless day; not for the wind,
For wind would not serve us,
Nor for help, lest the enemy hear,
But for St. Elmo's fire and the
Strangling hair of the Sargasso Sea
And for Leviathan and Moby Dick
And Noah and the upside down sky
And the end of the modern world
And for a sprig of green.

To Alice, Dying

The fingernails grow slower in the summer,
but ridges prophesy a serious illness and the pace
at which there remains to Alice but a narrowing space
wherein to mime the happy little mummer.

No laughter and no anger can give surcease
from those funny stories of the lame at Lourdes.
Yet Alice drags her leg along as if assured
that healthy lips and wrists might yet appease

the reddening flush of overheated blood
that feeds the ever-more-demanding flesh
that eats itself and will at last enmesh
the patient drowning in the philanthropic flood

of meaning well. The hollow, sweating world,
the walls of shrieks and silence close ahead
predict the living cannot swallow Alice dead.
The therapist will rejoice to see her curled

in peace and slumber by talk and rubbing alcohol.
Pepsin, lime, oil, and hydrochloric acid,
heat and cold dilute her reek to merely rancid;
all uses tidy Alice up to don the pall.

But what about the words we left unsaid
in the hours together before the Consecration Ball?
The resolve we could have nurtured with the small
quiet confidences one grants the not-yet-dead?
 
The silent bargain was that Alice curse and dance
and take a pill to make our lot less hard to bear;
we faced the Thing with all the courage we could spare:
There comes a time when all must yield to chance.

Easter--Five Days to the Cross

Bitter, clean, unsexed,
     Psychoanalyzed and kind,
The grande dame parks her
     Chrysalis beside the curb;
Teeters down the walk,
     Melds brown into the stone
Of noontime prayer;
     Kneels within the Place of Skulls,
Folds the bread beneath her tongue
     And nods and smiles
     And bows and dies.

Winter Solstice

Suddenly, walking, I make a full stop.
I peer over my left shoulder at the wretched
sun, gloss-and-lemon in its own stare.
Four days it's halted there, its warmth
not worth diddeley-squat. Suppose it now
to descend, never again to rise?
Two of my friends have gone blind; when
will come spring and the new leaves
For them?

Saturn, meantime, boozes it up, eats his kids
alive, orders gifts exchanged, wars outlawed,
masters to sup with slaves, while Janus looks
both ways. What would you do, Friend, if time
were to turn on its heel? Jesus, deliver me;
Mohammed, take it easy; Buddha, be a buddy.
Look around the room, Old Man, memorize the way
to the toilet and where food may be stored
For days.

Visitors

In mists of dreams they come,
their raiment wet, their flesh transformed,
Or, they telephone:
"How's everyone? How are you?
(Can hardly hear--connection bad)
Just thought I'd say 'hello' and 'see you soon.'
Weather fair, crops poor.
Some call once more
for war.
By the way, someone died; can't think who."
Why are they so composed?
so cool?
Don't they know they're dead?
Yet how comforting that they come,
or call.
They chide, as of old:
"Remember when you . . .?"
"Yes, I do. So please don't . . ."
If only . . .
But still . . . and all . . . .

They are myths: Adam, Eve, the Garden,
the Fall,
Heaven, Satan, Hell, all apocryphal.
They are metaphors: God is, they say;
Life is.
Life is as if God is.

They whisper, "Do not despair,"
and steal away.

The Sculptor

I said I would use love and make it and shape it.
Because I was old, love would not hold me
to any mark. I would do with it as I pleased
and as it pleased those to whom I would pass
its forms, that they might caress, keep, or discard
it as they should choose. Let them, said I,
abide the old man, life-long in love with love.

Alas, I learned that age does not exculpate
the inattentive artist--that love lies iridescent
as oil on water, having no design but forms of
things unknown; lurks lawless in dark corners
of the soul, or sifts through leaves in the
occulted aisles of the forest; is sudden,
and ludic, and shapes those who would shape it.

A Modest History of Creation

In the beginning, the sun
is killed by jaguars,
then by wind, by fiery rain, then
by water. But soon the bloody
heart ripped out no longer
can forestall a final end.

How shall we spend
that last perfect day on earth
 just before tomorrow's sun
stops, implodes, and dies,
leaving only its pale siblings
in the lee of our undernourished
galaxy? In the serpent,
in the grass, in you, my dear,
live the corpses of the stars;
in crocodile, house, lizard;
in rabbit, monkey, reed;
in dust.

On that last day, watching
Tonatiuh eat Pluto, Saturn,
Mars, Venus, Jupiter,
and yellow daisies, shall we go
inside? or stop on the terrace?
while we wait for some new Black
Hole to suck our helix down toward
webs of form where
we aren't made of such insubstantial stuff.
Where, at last, we may become
one with neutrino, quark, and googol,
warm in the bowel of nothing.

Fold me, then, in your Red
Giant-White Dwarf arms,
That I may never die.

Joseph Thackery served for some years as a lawyer with the National Labor Relations Board; he is now retired. Thackery began writing poetry when he moved to Washington, D.C. in 1960. His collection of poetry, The Dark Above Mad River was published by Washington Writers Publishing House in 1992.
"The Biddle Becalmed" first appeared in Attention Please; "Spanish Ballroom" in As Is; "A Florilegium of Broken Promises" in Circumference: The Poetry Anthology (1991); "Winter Solstice" in Lip Service.