Songs and Visions
Alan Gullette
"Among vast ruins roaming,
One strains to catch an echo from the past..."
Frontispiece: Young Priestess, Adolphe-William Bouguereau, 1902
Contents
Awakening
The Portal
Oblivion
Painting: Dreamscape I
A Game
Poem to Polymnia
Selene
Carven Faces
The Witness's Account
For Fear
Yahm Keschmän
Cataclysm
Dusk
The Sorcerer's Lament
Lunar Liturgy
Vision
Between the gilded dawn, the waking hour
The fleeting legions of dream decline
And fade away, as I within my bower
Yet on a bed of clover grass recline;
And in quicksilver moments vanishing,
The want to rise and fly with them recurs
While spectres dancing far beyond my being
Invoke the ancient fear -- my heart demurs.
This conquered, I upstart, invigorous,
And seek audaciously in mystic things
The path beyond surmises perilous --
The path betook in frightful wonderings.
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I stand before the portal of all dreams
And look upon the realms of timeless lands
I see the desert wastes with colored sands
Of shattered comets from the solar streams.
The reigning beauty and the majesty
Of amethystine mountains to the east
Holds one respectful of the fallen past --
Whose legions have since sailed beyond the sea.
I sit upon a desert knoll and think
With eyes down-cast into a golden cup
Whose marvelous liquour stirs and bubbles up;
I tightly shut my eyes and dare to drink ...
I knew from what he said that I would be
In soporific languor in strange lands
Beyond the raging oceans of all Dreams,
Which waft the shores of unreality.
And so I drank the Elixir and dropped
Into a deeper sleep than any Lethe,
Into profound, blissful Oblivion --
I fell eternally and never stopped ...
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Painting: Dreamscape I
A plain of marble stretches ever on
To floor a time-swept valley desolate,
As limply hung as gossamer between
Two lunar mounts whose crags reach raggedly
Against a cold and palely turquoise sky.
The mottled bier is of a thousand hues
All mixed and swirling in a dream-array
All mild-disturbing in their stableness
While speaking of the touch of death's sweet kiss.
A Fissure in the marble is beheld
To mar alone the planar perfectness
Of glassy stone laid square by mammoth square
Throughout this vale of fantasy and dream.
A beam of rotting maplewood is thrust
From out the fault within the valley floor,
And this is crossed by yet another beam --
Are these illusion of anamnesis*?
The hint of death, the hint of life again
The clouded thought of reincarnate wheels
Set firm within the great, complex machine
Of Time and Life -- of God, Infinity --:
These thoughts and notions are but fancies, yet
Present us with vague fears of ignorance.
Upon the fallen cross, now meaningless,
There crawls a single ant, another aft',
Until a line of them run up the wood
To see the truth that legend has foretold.
* anamnesis - memory of past lives
Winner, First Place in Poetry, Belmont College Literary Contest, 1973
(For Nashville, Tennessee high schools)
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Eight children dance on a knoll
Under a southern-isle palm
Under a tropic sun sinking
Into the clear sanguine twilight.
Eight children moving enchanted
Moving with motions predestined
With an unwillful possession
Act out the scenes of a play.
Powers of old are within them
Speaking in voices bemuffled
Speaking in tongues unremembered
But by the Mind quintessential.
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Poem to Polymnia
I know the Muse, Polymnia
And, too, her sister, Euterpe
I know their garden, where it lies;
I pluck these rare fruits from their tree.
I know their mother, Memory.
I know of all things that have been
And know of all things that will be.
I have such eyes as they have seen
The worlds beyond eternity.
I pluck the pome and snap the stem,
And sap as ichor oozes forth
To bear more fruit, to heal the seam.
I drop the seeds upon the earth,
And vines spring up where I cast them.
Berries are yeilded from the vines;
And when one cuts and when one reams
These fruits into Morpheic wines,
And if one sips, one sleeps and dreams
Of other lands in other times...
Notes:
Polymnia - Greek Muse of sacred song (also Polyhymnia)
Euterpe - Muse of music and lyric poetry.
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- The goddess of the years:
She promenades while birds a-wing
Flock o'er unto a southern spring;
No autumn midge or elvin being
- Has seen her golden tears.
- The vines of autumn creep
Upon the stones about the well;
The moss-grown walls in auburn swell;
As founts the season's coming tell --
- In bronze oak-bowers sleep.
- The cooler winds, they come
As trees shed off their fiery wrap
To bow before the thunderclap
That rolls across grey plains that nap
- Beneath the winter's dome.
- The sunset's rays are dim,
And wan reminders of the night
That lies ahead do cause us fright;
But led on by Selene's light
- We feareth not the storm.
- Down through the wells of space
In pitch, byssmal darkness fall
The gleaming, glowing stars and all
The planets and their moons will fall
- To light her lovely face.
- "O goddess of the moon!
Step out upon the glassy sea
In all supremest majesty --
We bow before thee humbly,
- Child of Hyperion!"
- Our goddess, she is come
Unto us in our worshipping
To bless us and to bid us sing
Her wonders -- the the light she brings
- Forever shall we roam!
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Carven faces in the mountains,
Gargoyle watchers o'er mankind;
These are relics of Their passing,
Measured traces left behind.
Dimly through the aether staring,
Masked by mist and mystery;
Faces -- silent stone, but knowing --
Motionless eternally.
Chilled, the mist is stirred and flurried,
Animated oddly by
Some great power, dormant, hidden --
Deep within stone faces lies.
Now the mountains fully tremble,
Coldly shiver, stolid quake;
And the carven mountain faces
Smile malignly and awake.
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The Witness's Account
- A Fragment
"... God help me, but the very sky above
fell down upon us as we fearful watched
And then amidst the shattered fragments rose
A star-lit horror clad in dust and death
Unto the broken shell which was the sky!
"And heaven help me if I did not cry
Aloud to Mother Mary us to save!
For winds from out the starry spaces blew
And swept in hell-bent gales our earth away!
"...But settled aft' an aeon noticeless
A frightful stillness swept o'er all the land --
For noguth of ruin was there to be seen
And noght of dust ras rustled in the air
But for the ground-fog lighted by the dawn
To veil myster'ously th' enchanted sight:
"For there below us on the morning plain
Was set a quaintly village, gambrel-roofed
And dully reminiscent of long past
In crumbled Tudor cottage years...
"'Twas then the Sun was up above the rim,
And from the small, round portal of each house
There crept a wizened man onto his step
To hold up high a candle or a lamp
To light the dawning for his sightless eyes..."
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For fear of darkness falling,
For fear of Memnons calling,
For fear of black fiends crawling,
At night I cannot rest.
For fear of winged beasts flying --
On star-winds they come flying,
At sunset they come flying --
I dare not go to bed.
For fear of things not made for sight --
In hordes they rush at midnight
From caves of green malachite
In mounts of ineffable height --
I must not fall asleep.
For fear I will be tossed
In sleep into the past
Of alien lives -- and lost --
Pray God I will not dream!
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Yahm Keschmän
Yahm Keschmän, the sorcerer, sits,
Enrobed in a black, hanging cloak,
With eyes flaring -- coals from the pits --
And long hair the color of smoke.
Yahm Keschmän, the ancient sage, reads
Dark characters carved on a stone
Which wind as a path does that leads
To hill-hollows secret and lone.
Yahm Keschmän, the mighty king, seeks
A twilit place seen in a dream:
A city bedwarfed by great peaks
Reaching up to the sky -- so it seems.
Yahm Keschmän, the voyager, finds
His twilight necropolis, true --
But also a cruel truth that binds:
He finds there his destiny, too.
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Between clouds spiralling in opal skies
There come envisionments of other spheres
That drift and whirl in blackened cosmic vaults
And blink malignly with their passing years.
The blackness separates, the night is opened,
The aeons shriek in chaos and are heard
As down the stellar well-depths they are tossed
In this -- the cataclysm all have feared.
The galaxies all flounder in the whirl
Of hyper-empyrean aether-storms;
The cloud of nothingness absorbs all things;
And Doom -- Nihility -- resounding comes.
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The radiant orb of life
Did set on the horizon of man's experience,
As does the sun at evening.
Then it sank beyond what is known or understood,
Leaving the world of man to the dark.
And the wise men, weeping, ask:
"Whither hast thou gone?"
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The Sorcerer's Lament
- A Fragment
Away, thick mist, and leave my brain be clear!
'Tis cluttered, true, with strange things, odd and old,
Whose dust itself will cause despair the seer
(But which is not against the atmosphere!)
- Will thou not do that which thou hast been told?
Be off, I say, and leave no smelly mold
Or mildew causing ill and sterileness --
O, God, what have I done to come to this?
- This stifling of my pow'rs -- was concentration
Over-done or not? and meditation
Have I forgotten? Never once again
Shall I take such a course of studying,
Lest the well-ruined track derail the train
As then, while mind was busy travelling...
- A silence, now -- a time for needed rest
From studies taken too serious and swift,
Of battered brain long tired by lessons stressed,
And drooping eyelids I would force to lift.
- Sweet sleep! Aft' prisoned long, forgot,
The Fancy now is left to freely roam
'Cross lands and seas such as it vainly sought
Before released from conscousness, its home --
But all too oft' its dungeon and its tomb.
- Sweet sleep! Bring waves of friendly-flowing sea --
Blocked ere from sight by dams built on the lea,
Whose roaring tides were harkened ne'ertheless
By mind fatigued, distraught by weariness --
I say, Sweet sleep! Bring waves of friendly sea
To wash away the images of walls
Aligned with books up-piled on table-tops:
Let thoughts of benches turn to forest trees
And make to shadeful bowers what were halls;
And look! The faithful clock ticks not, but stops
While grimaced face is shattered by my hand,
Transforming glass to seashore's timeless sand . . .
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"Marvelous Maiden of midnight!
O Sister of Hecate, the black witch!
Enveiléd in grey, dismal cloudlets
Inhaling Your dim-glowing power
Expending in great bolts of lightning,
WIth trumptets from far-off Olympus
Rejoicing, announcing, inciting
This tribute to Your divers marvels."
The cloudlets pass swiflty as dancers
Encircling the elegant goddess,
Appraising, enhancing her beauty
Enshrouding in grey adulation
So none but the high-flying falcon
And Pegasus -- wingéd -- may glimpse her.
The people of night throng beneath her,
They chant and proclaim old inscriptions
Evoking by dark runes recited
Her wonders, her secrets, her splendor,
As sing in deep voices the prophets:
"All hail Her, renoun Her, and praise Her
The Goddess of black night eternal
Who lights up the heavens and peereth
Through darkness to lead the night-people,
And comfort us 'til the last daybreak."
[top]
Through facet-windows searching,
The mind enjoys to toss itself in play;
I see life-cycles spinning,
To dark horizons roll away, away.
I see great blossoms blooming,
Long-buried memories that sprout at last;
Among vast ruins roaming,
One strains to catch an echo from the past.
In quick-remembered moments,
Things lost forever seek to live, but die;
To silent spots retreating,
I see these forms and figures fly and fly;
One rushes out to meet them:
These rapid-fleeting glimpses of the day;
The poet sings them lightly,
These words and thoughts he passed along the way.
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