Leo Yankevich
THE SCARECROW
Drunk on clouds and yesterday's rain,
his hollow eyes would hate the stars
and his hat shelter him from pain
to the whirr of distant passing cars,
but the cosmos inside his head
is only a vacuum of air:
he cannot feel my angst or dread,
though oft I think he knows despair.
Fastened to the stick of a broom,
his cramped straw feet would touch the ground
and his racked arms embrace the gloom
of anguished nights wound round and round,
but he won't tame a feral crowd,
nor build temples of a new faith,
nor in tears cry to God out loud,
nor enter heaven like a wraith.
Underneath an unminding moon,
amid corn that spreads on and on,
he never lives and dies too soon
as endlessly, I wait for dawn.
HAD I NOT GROWN SUDDENLY SHORT OF BREATH
Had I not grown suddenly short of breath,
I'd have sung hosannas. But the poor beast
that I found lay martyred beyond its death.
The holy sun was rising in the East,
and I was watering bright illusions
as sweet and as old as Plato and Christ.
Birds in arbours were making allusions
to Eden, and I was bound for a tryst
with a seamstress, with Angel Jones of Mold.
But the writhing and the buzzing woke me
and the foul stink in the mystical gold,
for, breathless, I stopped and wept to behold,
as some dead poet's angry stick poked me,
a fawn in a laughing hyena's hold.
ESCHATOLOGY
When the mind melts in the cave of the skull,
forsaken, alas, like everything else,
will some victorious Socrates crawl—
out of the depths, like a most secret self—
beholding all things as they really are?
Then, apostolic, but shunning the smell,
will he crawl back down inside—to polestar
and enlighten the blind monkeys in hell?
Fettered to our forefathers' desires
and at odds with the light, no doubt those apes
won't listen, for madness never tires
storming through our eyes and roping our napes.
And our magnanimous clear-sighted Greek,
that spark in the dung, our most secret self,
will he weather the worms of the first week,
forsaken, alas, like everything else?
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