FERDINAND, OR A MODERN TEMPEST
{Directed by R.B., Ventriloquist}
Why so hard and shrill, Miranda,
Must it be islands or nothing?
Nothing, it will come
(I can outbleak you)!
But paradisal dreams? When? Where?
In here, in here, Miranda,
Beneath that silvered hair
And pale, ribbed forehead
And all that damned-up flood
Of social fury.
The moon
("Ole egg trod," you say en Bosch
Humanized)
The huntress moon
Yet bathes down there
Within the branches
Of my brain.
How you do scowl at my conceits!
Too airy? Freudian? Pussyfoot? Keats?
Scowl on, scowl on, Miranda.
Come, put down the daily news
Of wars and deaths and suffering.
Watch, o lyric love,
As you were used to do,
The moon fill up
The chasm of our street
And set our balcony afloat.
You sneer, demure, Miranda?
Here I stand,
Case study in a wounded love,
Mister Masoch himself,
And the hounds
(Those you call my penned-up
"Sodom" and "Gomoorrah")
Still tear me in my sleep.
Such price my ariel flights
And quaint abstractedness
That you should let that Caliban
Of a fellow do you in.
Your soul and mine are
(Forgive the pun)
As gilt-edged as a posh
Regency boudoir.
My social sense is atrophied
Compared to yours.
I rarely whine or weep
For deaths by flood, plague, quake,
Or wind and other acts of God.
And I fear the various kinds
Of war man visits on his fellows,
On other creatures, and the earth,
I feel these too are, or might as well be,
Acts of God.
You, my queen,
Condemn the very beast you hope
Will build your Crystal Palace!
I sometimes see Vesalius
Weeping in the streets of Padua.
He decries the large mechanic head
Its flashing particles and laser beams
Breaking from the skull. The sacred body's
Form all shrunk and dry.
From Michel-ange's Hell the Doomed
Look out upon the wonder
That was woman.
Toulouse, much like the Cosmos,
Stands ironic and bemused.
What are we now, Miranda,
What are we cultured souls?
Animals weighed down,
Repressed by pyramids of thought
And action.
You would have all races,
Nations, men and women,
Especially women
(Just joking, dear)
Free! Free! Free!
But cultures, Miranda
Rise on fictions
(Plato to the Southwest Taos)
Necessary premises,
In short, the gentle
And the not so gentle tyrannies.
Cast out of Eden,
From your pseudo-Marxist mount,
What you survey
With your eyes of Michael
Is, dear comrade, my Miranda,
But the foreplay
Of another cycle.
Handbook philosophy? Economics,
Anthro, all the -ologies, made easy? So?
Still true, Miranda.
Look homeward, Angel.
Come to the window, Love!
You peer out upon the city,
See war and threats of war,
Disease and hate and grief.
Let us leave, Miranda, a while
This twilight world
Of bootstrap aspiration
And partly self-wought pain.
To hell with the Cold War, Hot War,
Duties, rights, and social, sexual
Guilts, etcetera, etcetera!
Come through the window.
Out balcony's alive with fern
And rhodadendron.
You see that patch
Of smokeless, moonlit wall
Across the way.
Look, Miranda, how it
Draws the fountain statuary back
Into its blankness.
What delicate relief!
Young Actaeon is loosed
Of the gnawing dogs
And Diana sways and pulses
In selfless energy.
Music? Your smile says you
Want music, that wordlessness
That's prelude to our loving.
Let us go in, Miranda, now.
Put on the phonograph
Our record of the sea
And hear, immersed within the sounds
Of gulls
(Think me no gull!)
Above the waves abreak
On mental isles.
Our free and prosperous act of love
Will bring down sprites
And raise up beasts!
Come, Miranda, come!
We'll pierce through all disguise
(Our egos, fears, and even irony).
Unmasked, save for the darkness,
We will,
As you might say,
Netherize.
Max Edward Cordonnier
Sometime in the late 60's