Studies in entropy, by Yael Dragwyla
Mercury: The Fair Country of the Sun
It is dawn.
* * *
Fire-fogs enshroud the coasts
Of lava seas;
Incandescent dew
Rolls like molten pearls
From the unfolding petals
Of flowers of flame
Blooming on prairies
Of rolling magma.
Cool freshets of brilliant lead
Leap down the mountains
Into deep, still lakes
Of copper and cadmium;
Craggy basalt trees
Sigh in gentle winds
Of glowing brimstone.
* * *
Great Helios,
Naked, save
For His whipping,
Nacreous cloak,
Trembles in ecstatic dance
On the edge of the sky,
Preparing to lay himself
On the quivering back of Hermes,
To impregnate His lover
With children of Dream and Will,
Thrusting His phallos of fire
Into the love-agued seat
Of Idea and Entropy.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Pele's Garden
Glass petals
Dropping into
A pool of liquid glass
Fill the night
With thickly ringing chimes.
Finely-drawn
Magnesium wires
Ring the pool.
They chime softly
In the slate-and-jet
Night wind.
The pool lies
In a bowl of quartzite
Luminescence,
An inverted,
Milky hemisphere
On whose exposed base
Ripples spread without haste
In slow, measured waves
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Evendark
Come to me at evendark,
Wrapped in flame and night;
Cover me in your cloak of fire
And set my soul alight
With blazing rage of culmination,
In revenge and hope and sorrow,
Then stand with me, by my side,
In the dawn of an alien tomorrow.
Life is cradled in a chalice
Of bone and blood and dream;
Death is Hades’ draining pull
At its fiery wine.
Come to me in Samhein dusk
With thy Staff incarnadine;
Then ride with me in midnight joy
Down Tartaros’ sorrowing stream
That dreams in ash and myrrh and musk
Through hells of Neptune and mars,
Across the blazing desert of Time
And out to an Ocean of Stars.
Drift with me on the Sea of Night
To the crêpe-hung halls of Persephone;
On a bed of skulls and a cushion of wraiths,
Two screams embracing in Fire and Death,
Silver crushed by iron and gold,
Lace draggled through wet clay,
Moonlight shattered by trumpets and bombs,
Perfume over a ghoul’s breath.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Heat-Death
Here there is night everlasting.
* * *
A Plutonian Sun
Strikes wizened rubies
From ice-encrusted rocks
With a brittle, time-crystallized chisel
Of old, dying light.
The ragged, threadbare skirts
Of the galaxy
Droop forlornly
Over abysses of night:
No seamstress now lives
To mend them,
Nor ever shall again:
Even Spider-Woman
Has spun Her last webs.
* * *
Earth, a small, despairing thought
Of the galaxy's agèd dreaming,
Falls through the darkening universe;
Her cool, bloated, scarlet Sun, wan and weak,
Pines softly in the gathering night.
* * *
No morning will ever come again;
No one will ever light another candle
Against the gathering darkness,
For there are no candles any more
Save the last, few, flickering Stars,
And when their last, guttering light fails
There will come the end of all things.
* * *
Draw up your blankets of ice,
O Earth,
And sink in slumber
Into the long, long ending
Of the universe.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Soul-Pirates
We dwell in nights
Of ten thousand suns,
Follow canyons of flame
Where the fire-river runs,
Trapping lithium hares
And hydrogen bears,
Stealing radium cubs
From pitchblende lairs.
We are the Gypsies
Roving endless years,
Trading in nightmares
And profitable fears
For golden dreams
And cinnamon lusts,
Taking meat from your pies
And paying you crusts.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A Voice at the Edge of Dream
And a voice spoke to me from the heart of a mushroom cloud
I will make of you
A white shadow on a black wall -
Come, look deep into
The furnace of my soul,
And lose all care.
I will make of you
Cracked green glass in a wilderness
And a gray wail expanding in the night.
You deny that I exist,
Yet I am your very bones -
And you wonder why
You dream of skulls
And waken full of dread?
I will make of you
A white shadow on a black wall -
And a black illumination
Of exposed white guilt.
I am Trinity
And a child's white shadow
On a scorched black wall
And the cries you will not hear
In the night.
I will make of you
A blinded thing
Who can no longer will
Not to see:
I am Hiroshima
And your fleeing soul -
And all that lies ahead of you is me,
And all that lies behind you is me,
And all that lies within you is me,
And if you want it otherwise
You must acknowledge me.
I am the Phoenix -
And thou art me.
You must accept my many deaths -
Or perish utterly.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Ravishing of the Wizard’s Only Daughter by the High King of R’lyeh
On the Western shores of the Ocean Sea,
By the Door to the Halls of Persephone,
Past meadows rife with asphodel,
In a bower in a haunted, tenebrous dell
By the bloody rapids of Acheron,
The wailing darkness of Hades’ Deeps,
The vast, crepuscular Abyss of Dream,
Where Death His dark cathedral keeps --
There the High King bears me down on his bed,
Below the rotting rocks of his haunted hills,
And from the boiling cauldrons of my heart,
There he drinks his slavering fill . . .
. . . While I drink from that same dark fountain’s source,
Where worlds collide, and Suns give birth,
And Eternity runs its endless course --
And the hands of a God heal the savaged Earth.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Holocaust
Carnivorous butterflies
With wings of Teflon and aluminum
And guts of rotten lard
Sit quietly upon
A fleshless, polished skull,
Letting their meal digest,
Preening the blood from their probosces
With delicate gestures of steel-spiked feet,
Chattering among themselves
In the soft, breathless whispers
Of the mad.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Charles Addams: Zen to Zen
Black roses growing in snow
Mark the path down which love has fled
From a world in which plastic flowers
Line concrete-covered meadows
And the banks of inflammable rivers;
Ski-tracks between the roses
Tell the lover even more certainly
Where to go
To find runaway love:
They curve around the wends and bends
Of the path the roses mark,
Bracketing here a tree, there a post,
Sometimes, for yards, vanishing altogether
In the soft snow,
But always reappearing.
I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep --
The promises were made under duress.
Fuck the highway.
I'll follow the roses.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Sun
Down a palisade
Of lightning-battered,
Incandescent gases
Pour firefalls
Of roiling flame
Ten thousand miles high:
Eddying across
The endless, seething plains
Of intertwined fire-fungi,
A river of sublimate glass
Rolls down to a screaming sea.
There are sounds so loud
They shriek in whispers,
Light so bright
It seems a dimness;
And here, the heat
Seems cool, with only
The barest hint
Of its Disean power
To nerves laid bare
Of dissolving skin
And bone
And mind
And being.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Dream-God
The sleeper wakes
And, having woken,
Rises.
. . . Anansi weaves
And, having woven,
Dances.
. . . In a dream
(Or am I conscious?)
He hears a tumult,
Smells smoke, and,
Waking
(Sleeping?),
Rises.
. . . In a fury
To beget children,
He senses whirring
Wings and legs
And, stalking
(Dreaming?),
Dances.
. . . The sleeper wakes.
. . . Anansi spins.
. . . And waking, rises.
. . . And stalking, dances.
. . . Without his chamber
Tumult grows.
. . . The web trembles,
Anansi senses prey.
. . . The sleeper stirs,
And, having stirred,
Rises.
. . . He stalks and acts
And dances.
. . . And, having woken,
Rises.
. . . And, having woven,
Dances.
. . . The tumult grows,
And smells of smoke
Follow.
. . . The buzzing rises,
Stronger, faster,
In the hollows of the web.
. . . And wakes to what?
. . . And feeds on what? . . .
It is dawn.
* * *
Fire-fogs enshroud the coasts
Of lava seas;
Incandescent dew
Rolls like molten pearls
From the unfolding petals
Of flowers of flame
Blooming on prairies
Of rolling magma.
Cool freshets of brilliant lead
Leap down the mountains
Into deep, still lakes
Of copper and cadmium;
Craggy basalt trees
Sigh in gentle winds
Of glowing brimstone.
* * *
Great Helios,
Naked, save
For His whipping,
Nacreous cloak,
Trembles in ecstatic dance
On the edge of the sky,
Preparing to lay himself
On the quivering back of Hermes,
To impregnate His lover
With children of Dream and Will,
Thrusting His phallos of fire
Into the love-agued seat
Of Idea and Entropy.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Pele's Garden
Glass petals
Dropping into
A pool of liquid glass
Fill the night
With thickly ringing chimes.
Finely-drawn
Magnesium wires
Ring the pool.
They chime softly
In the slate-and-jet
Night wind.
The pool lies
In a bowl of quartzite
Luminescence,
An inverted,
Milky hemisphere
On whose exposed base
Ripples spread without haste
In slow, measured waves
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Evendark
Come to me at evendark,
Wrapped in flame and night;
Cover me in your cloak of fire
And set my soul alight
With blazing rage of culmination,
In revenge and hope and sorrow,
Then stand with me, by my side,
In the dawn of an alien tomorrow.
Life is cradled in a chalice
Of bone and blood and dream;
Death is Hades’ draining pull
At its fiery wine.
Come to me in Samhein dusk
With thy Staff incarnadine;
Then ride with me in midnight joy
Down Tartaros’ sorrowing stream
That dreams in ash and myrrh and musk
Through hells of Neptune and mars,
Across the blazing desert of Time
And out to an Ocean of Stars.
Drift with me on the Sea of Night
To the crêpe-hung halls of Persephone;
On a bed of skulls and a cushion of wraiths,
Two screams embracing in Fire and Death,
Silver crushed by iron and gold,
Lace draggled through wet clay,
Moonlight shattered by trumpets and bombs,
Perfume over a ghoul’s breath.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Heat-Death
Here there is night everlasting.
* * *
A Plutonian Sun
Strikes wizened rubies
From ice-encrusted rocks
With a brittle, time-crystallized chisel
Of old, dying light.
The ragged, threadbare skirts
Of the galaxy
Droop forlornly
Over abysses of night:
No seamstress now lives
To mend them,
Nor ever shall again:
Even Spider-Woman
Has spun Her last webs.
* * *
Earth, a small, despairing thought
Of the galaxy's agèd dreaming,
Falls through the darkening universe;
Her cool, bloated, scarlet Sun, wan and weak,
Pines softly in the gathering night.
* * *
No morning will ever come again;
No one will ever light another candle
Against the gathering darkness,
For there are no candles any more
Save the last, few, flickering Stars,
And when their last, guttering light fails
There will come the end of all things.
* * *
Draw up your blankets of ice,
O Earth,
And sink in slumber
Into the long, long ending
Of the universe.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Soul-Pirates
We dwell in nights
Of ten thousand suns,
Follow canyons of flame
Where the fire-river runs,
Trapping lithium hares
And hydrogen bears,
Stealing radium cubs
From pitchblende lairs.
We are the Gypsies
Roving endless years,
Trading in nightmares
And profitable fears
For golden dreams
And cinnamon lusts,
Taking meat from your pies
And paying you crusts.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A Voice at the Edge of Dream
And a voice spoke to me from the heart of a mushroom cloud
I will make of you
A white shadow on a black wall -
Come, look deep into
The furnace of my soul,
And lose all care.
I will make of you
Cracked green glass in a wilderness
And a gray wail expanding in the night.
You deny that I exist,
Yet I am your very bones -
And you wonder why
You dream of skulls
And waken full of dread?
I will make of you
A white shadow on a black wall -
And a black illumination
Of exposed white guilt.
I am Trinity
And a child's white shadow
On a scorched black wall
And the cries you will not hear
In the night.
I will make of you
A blinded thing
Who can no longer will
Not to see:
I am Hiroshima
And your fleeing soul -
And all that lies ahead of you is me,
And all that lies behind you is me,
And all that lies within you is me,
And if you want it otherwise
You must acknowledge me.
I am the Phoenix -
And thou art me.
You must accept my many deaths -
Or perish utterly.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Ravishing of the Wizard’s Only Daughter by the High King of R’lyeh
On the Western shores of the Ocean Sea,
By the Door to the Halls of Persephone,
Past meadows rife with asphodel,
In a bower in a haunted, tenebrous dell
By the bloody rapids of Acheron,
The wailing darkness of Hades’ Deeps,
The vast, crepuscular Abyss of Dream,
Where Death His dark cathedral keeps --
There the High King bears me down on his bed,
Below the rotting rocks of his haunted hills,
And from the boiling cauldrons of my heart,
There he drinks his slavering fill . . .
. . . While I drink from that same dark fountain’s source,
Where worlds collide, and Suns give birth,
And Eternity runs its endless course --
And the hands of a God heal the savaged Earth.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Holocaust
Carnivorous butterflies
With wings of Teflon and aluminum
And guts of rotten lard
Sit quietly upon
A fleshless, polished skull,
Letting their meal digest,
Preening the blood from their probosces
With delicate gestures of steel-spiked feet,
Chattering among themselves
In the soft, breathless whispers
Of the mad.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Charles Addams: Zen to Zen
Black roses growing in snow
Mark the path down which love has fled
From a world in which plastic flowers
Line concrete-covered meadows
And the banks of inflammable rivers;
Ski-tracks between the roses
Tell the lover even more certainly
Where to go
To find runaway love:
They curve around the wends and bends
Of the path the roses mark,
Bracketing here a tree, there a post,
Sometimes, for yards, vanishing altogether
In the soft snow,
But always reappearing.
I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep --
The promises were made under duress.
Fuck the highway.
I'll follow the roses.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Sun
Down a palisade
Of lightning-battered,
Incandescent gases
Pour firefalls
Of roiling flame
Ten thousand miles high:
Eddying across
The endless, seething plains
Of intertwined fire-fungi,
A river of sublimate glass
Rolls down to a screaming sea.
There are sounds so loud
They shriek in whispers,
Light so bright
It seems a dimness;
And here, the heat
Seems cool, with only
The barest hint
Of its Disean power
To nerves laid bare
Of dissolving skin
And bone
And mind
And being.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Dream-God
The sleeper wakes
And, having woken,
Rises.
. . . Anansi weaves
And, having woven,
Dances.
. . . In a dream
(Or am I conscious?)
He hears a tumult,
Smells smoke, and,
Waking
(Sleeping?),
Rises.
. . . In a fury
To beget children,
He senses whirring
Wings and legs
And, stalking
(Dreaming?),
Dances.
. . . The sleeper wakes.
. . . Anansi spins.
. . . And waking, rises.
. . . And stalking, dances.
. . . Without his chamber
Tumult grows.
. . . The web trembles,
Anansi senses prey.
. . . The sleeper stirs,
And, having stirred,
Rises.
. . . He stalks and acts
And dances.
. . . And, having woken,
Rises.
. . . And, having woven,
Dances.
. . . The tumult grows,
And smells of smoke
Follow.
. . . The buzzing rises,
Stronger, faster,
In the hollows of the web.
. . . And wakes to what?
. . . And feeds on what? . . .