Transformatioii
errol miller
“Transformation is in the head.”
G.R. Swenson
I have a twin, beautifully
oxchestrated like the arches at St. Louis, I
am not content with thinking right at times.
Saturday will find me rocking&rolling in
a great Northern city of broad shoulders: my elastic
mind springs back to cosmetic freshness in another
time, another place, another hand-hewn era
where dark stars fell on Alabama and hippie groups
recommended free love and beer. This exotic new season
is different from any other, avant-garde in nature,
happening so fast, Cisco, so fast, as surreal
as any midnight hour from Cinderella’s story, as
upside-down as any geriatric nation
rowiji(j into Doomsday.
Of course we are living geometric art,
weaving the junk of our environment into Dada-stories
of last night when Paris was in our dreams.
Such inspiration, from make-believe and tattered brains
of remnants of Confederate brigades charging across Dixie
to challenge the future: it is grey, Beloved,
surpassing any eternal flame into blazing boneyards
where ancient flesh and literature fuse into
a catalytic union with impressionist painters
creating melancholy moods on paper,
the Devil buying them all, it is
the invisible world that troubles us, academic poets
from New York City schools wringing the back alleys
of their soul for experimental material, soon
there’ll be a symposium on Southern life, how and
why the dusty hired hands of Planet Earth
have shifted in their orbit: they labor
in the fertile lowland east of Little Rock, they till
the red clay soil of Oxford, they farm the stony hills
the supreme sacrifice when the crop’s in
and later, in Star City, they wait
in solemn columns until their time has come.
A little painful, this odyssey, an extension
of the Master Plan where it rains for forty days
and forty nights, cleansing the tenants
until they are well again.
So “things” change. I don’t know why.
Our bodies , rather abstract, meandering into absurd
mounds of dust in limited space, displacement in
the shadows of a pretty lighthouse strewing
dynamic candlelight over all the world.
An awesome distant charting, an order of evolution
beginning in New England and disappearing down Frost’s
road not taken: stylistic subdivisions
house the seashore poets: Emily, Anne,
and Sylvia, they’ve surrendered all
to evolve in their own white light, they
come and go in the precise imagery
of man’s bumble-bee demise, they develop
more parallel stories for the eye to see, they
pump their own hearts to no avail. I
say this is a very small building we’re working in,
designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, perhaps, or another
custom designer in the mid-20’s. The past lives
with us through our houses and our music, enduring
pop art from Little Chicago and the Sunset Club,
magnificant shaggy orators shaking sawdust
fmom their cuffs: you tell me your dream, I’ll tell
you mine, so goes the rowdy crowd to execution
carrying paintings of soup cans and Mickey Mouse
and anonymous big breasts, they never read
the Hudson Review or published in Poetry Magazine.
They only drank their thin red wine and called
a Yellow Cab to whisk them away to Yonkers,
for another Happening until the art of life
degenerates into an empty chute of time.
And, like social endeavour, the contemporary deluge
continues, the kinetic energy of time and place,
the complicated mode of survival,
and fragments stashed away for a Golden Age
of Probability where desire and anticipation
blend into perfect imagination.
