Text: Everyone’s Given Their Own Set of Eyes
EVERYONE’S GIVEN THEIR OWN SET OF EYES Everyone’s given their own set of eyes to see…
A lyre sat in the sun
and played itself
Harps all over the world began to
strum
leaned up against corners in Latino Tavernas
covered up on buses heading for
major city performances
long forgotten on a shelf of some
ex-Orpheus startling him from his nap
strings from top to bottom and from
the middle outward in both directions
began to vibrate tonally making an
unsettling music both rare and strange
Jungle harps scattered bats
Music Shop harps made snare drums
sizzle
One harp left in a desert attracted a
long-eared fox
A clown’s harp made him laugh after
fifteen years of taking his sad face
for his own
One small harp covered with dust
made mice dance
All their musics from Cambodia to
Connecticut began expanding until they
overlapped creating a vertical veil of
sound in which we all find ourselves
mesmerizedly enmeshed
And I haven’t even begun to enumerate those
famous harps we’re either
all supposed to play if we do enter
Paradise or will eventually tire of just
walking around in flowing togas
strumming forever
which may be why so
few are attracted to make the
effort to go there
when in fact it’s nothing at all like that
Those harps have strings each one of which is
miles wide
played on shimmering instruments of
galactic proportions
each strum of which vibrates worlds into
existence their wise populations enter singing
to penetrate unheard-of
adventures of immediate and unfathomable
wonder
as another strum
opens new worlds into valleys and
rolling landscapes extending father than either
eye or ear can see or hear
that multiply amazements in
latitudes of light years and
interstellar radiances
but paralleled down below by
hell-harps plucked by saw-like
fingers as disembodied as hell’s hot denizens themselves
forced to hear cacophonous notes held for
millennial durations making
tectonic plates shift and seas disgorge both
shipwrecks and whales pleading for mercy
Oh harmonious and disharmonious harps
in uneasy concord
in whose reverberations we see our
original faces liberated and
sent across earth as sweet messengers
or trapped as imprisoned poignancies
who never quite
either in earth or heaven
learned how to sing
6/2/2011 (from This Light Slants Upward)
Categories: Poems