My Beauty
My Beauty speaks to me in ancient tongues,
And cares not for the pleasure of my hours;
Hers is the ageless song of cloud-capped towers
In Ilium, and she lives in the strains
Of mournful pipes on long lost misty hills,
The fresh turned earth that makes a silent mound,
And fiery wheel to which the soul is bound;
Hers is the pleasure that is borne from pains
Insensitive to human plight; she wanes
And waxes like the raven moon, demands
I write her tale and then cuts off my hands,
Binds up the wounds, and after all complains
I am unfit to honor her in verse.
The one I love is both my boon and curse;
She is the newborn’s plaintive cry at dusk,
The banshee wail, the grinning mask of death;
She lives at the extremity of breath,
The alpha and omega, and between
The fateful quest begun and journey’s end,
In life that lotus-like blooms in the mire
And then in triumph, fated to expire,
Falls down to earth and in its wisdom bends,
She wryly grins at me, and then she sends
A plague of visions, drawn up from a well;
Like revenants arisen from a spell
With unfamiliar coins they cannot spend,
They stand upon the porches of my ear
And challenge me to just one time appear,
A poet fit to know how round they are,
How full of life they are that they might burst,
Despite their constant feeding die of thirst
Before the practiced art of one deft hand
Can write them into life eternally.
And so I must. My Beauty is all things,
The rose and thorn, the attar and the stings,
The stately mansion built on shifting sands,
The Northern Lights that shimmer and expand
Like rosy fingers clawing at the skyAnd then,
before dawn’s limpid light draws nigh,
Withdraw unheralded to unknown lands.
My Beauty is protector of them all,
And it is unannounced when she will call.
I’ve seen her footprint on the mountaintops
As surely as Peruzzi Chapel’s walls;
I’ve seen her face and heard her siren calls
In madrigals of ordinary things ―
The headlong, senseless rush of eager youth
That wakes one morn, a filigree of lines
Upon the brow, the eye without its shine;
The little blades of grass where dry leaves cling
As if there were a grace in tarrying;
The joyous hymns of softly milling choirs
Of gnats that teem on summer eves; the fire
All embers where a faint sweet warmth still clings ―
I do not know why she has chosen me,
Why it’s become my fated destiny
To see with eyes like those of other men
That yet are not the same as them at all
And have the same two ears, but hear the call
Of undivided nature beckon me.
Where other eyes in twain divide the field
Of sense and sound, the realm of passing sights,
My thought is strangely foreign and delights
In draughts of bittersweet poetically
Poured into one grand cup. Reality
Observes no rule, no boundary; it slides
Through narrow passageways, and graceful glides
Into the room and fills it. Poetry ―
My mistress and my Beauty, saving grace,
My eyes, my heart ― there is no other place.
She lives in windows like a candle lit
To lead a weary traveler back home
To places that he lives but has not seen,
But there is little solace in the gloam
Or salve to soothe the wounding of one’s wit,
And yet I welcome her, and crown her queen.
Author Unknown
