1st & 2nd December, 2005
Rod in Concert
Holland, December 2005!
San Sebastian Strings
albums now available on CD! Order
now!
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Photo by Edward McKuen 9/24/2005
A Thought for Today
Today is World AIDS Day and today and
every day AIDS is everybody’s problem.
TO BEGIN WITH
It has been awhile since I reprinted something from the book that takes
its name from this website so in the coming week I’ll be featuring
poetry from my 2001 book A Safe Place to Land.
FROM the¨BOOKS
TWO POEMS from A SAFE PLACE to LAND
Remembering the Maker of Minotaurs /
for Michael Ayrton
His bull-men were earthbound,
in the best sense of the term,
aspiring to be nothing more
than to be separated.
Be a Taurus raging in the lea,
a man confused but coping
with
confusion.
One or the other.
Please, God,
not both at once.
His Ariadne stayed and spun
beside eternal spinning wheel,
forever trapped inside the dreams,
nightmares she hated,
never at the end of his pen
to meet King Bacchus.
Each maze he made
was made so perfectly,
so well executed, as to be
the work of master architect.
Michael Ayrton, the king
of modern hyphenates–
painter-sculptor-novelist,
draftsman-stage designer,
illustrator of books-writer
of short stories,
art historian-broadcaster,
essayist-critic-filmmaker,
poet-portraitist-engraver,
raconteur-et cetera, and so on,
add item, never infinitum.
England’s Brain Trust chose him
because of none of the above.
He told good jokes
with novel punch lines.
Polished stories
that even twice-told never bored.
Good cook, glutton, egotist
who thought himself superior.
And why not? He was.
And the only Englishman
who dared hate cricket openly.
No wonder Michael died
a near unknown
on the sixteenth day of November,
nineteen hundred seventy-five
at five-thirty
(the hyphens are my own).
England too does not allow
the ragtag cloak of fame,
the lofty title Everyman.
The term true genius
ought not be set down
upon the head of man,
already consorting with the gods.
We do not create elitists–
enough are born that way already.
And so the only thing
befitting a biographer
of Berlioz
is death in near obscurity.
Bury him not inside the Abbey
but off someplace
where cult is thin.
Let one soprano by his graveside
intone Les nuits d’été, a cappella.
La Mort de Cleopatre
still roars through Bradfields,
but the Minotaur
has crept away upon all fours.
He hides, no longer daring
to stand up,
knowing that all chance
of being separated died
with the re-creator.
What is man
that I am not a man,
caught in this chrysalis?
The terror in the eyes
of bull-men off in Crete
or here upon these walls
is hateful, heavenly
Michael-made,
as if it were the dark side
of its nearly always
jovial creator.
The bull let out at pasture,
raging but forever locked
in death throes trying to escape.
The man inside the bull
cutting up his entrails,
growing larger every hour,
hoping to be passed
like tapeworm
through bull bile to freedom.
Do not let bondage
be my last encounter,
final feeding place.
I was never bound until
you bound me.
I have made my way
from high hedge maze to pasture.
Here in openness, let me breathe,
or let my heart burst
on a Sunday
the way my Maker’s did.
Heart too full of everything
to settle on the one thing.
-from the book A Safe Place to Land, 2001
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