XENO

The Folk Artist

i.The trouble with Xeno,
He tasted the ashes of death.
His friends, they mocked him
When he raised the issue,
And he would play the game
That he was still a youngster
Acting old. And one time
In the winter solstice
He dreamt he plunged his oxcart
Off the cliff above the sea
And drifted with the wind
And sat down wheel-first,
Hoof-first on the waves
And sank and sank and waked
Into the moist tight drum of youth.


ii. He woke up coughing blood,
And drowned within the chambers
Of the Self. He raged for strophes
To stay that old typhoon
Upon the brain, but words betrayed
Their origins, and chaos reigned.
He cast out nets to catch
Their own creation. The Mirror,
Now the Lamp was broken.
It was the death of language.
The Sibyl and the Satyr fell
Across the threshold of his mind.
Where to build the Watchtower
When the Watchman's blind?
Xeno was impaled on his modernity.


iii. One bright day in July
The moviemakers came,
Caught him in slow motion
Wheeling through the dust
Across the hills, the seas beyond,
The intermittent sunrays
Darting from the clouds
Across the good side of his face,
The lesser half in shadow
By request. His payment:
Mortgage money and a filmstrip
Of his sequence in the "epic."
At night he held the frames
Against the firelight and let
The flames come rising from the sea
And melt the sky into apocalypse.
And still the tiny figure, Xeno,
With the oxcart stood alone.


iv. One cold day in October
He gathered up his faggots,
Made hell blaze in his oven
And too three pounds of clay
Out of the orchard.
Made a figure of his wife,
All glazed with green and gold,
And the torches of her breasts
And the mottled curves and veins
Aroused a guarded smile.
He put her on the shelf
Beside the pictures
Of his children. Now he saw
The hollow quest of art,
The prison house of memory,
The necropolis of forms.
We view the Cosmic Dancer
From the wings, the stuff
Of smile and grimace,
Of ligaments and sweat,
While angels and the noble dead,
We hope, are cradled in her arms.


v. He sought "old crazy Cumae"
And listened to her voices
From the Other Side. His uncles, aunts,
His long dead sister, Anna,
And his lapdog, Sappho,
The smorgasbord of voices
And of yaps had left him empty
And alone. He left the Oracle
Still wheezing and intoning
By her crystal ball and candle.
But late that evening
When the crescent moon came through
His skylight, came a hundreds rhythmic raps
Across his dresser, walls, and windows.
He slept and dreamt his father
Led him to a window
Where his mother lay in death.
The fiery spokes adorned her head
And breasts before her body
Burst in light. A ghostly presence
Gave the world a metalingual glow.
The Word was resurrected
And the Cosmos rang. Old Xeno
Welcomed Death and Death's dark song.


vi. And nighthawks slept in the humming wires.
The nightingales sang in Berkeley Square.
And ghostlier pelicans over the sea.
His spirit rose above the mundane
And romantic. And Xeno dreamt
Of dark wings beating and the lapping
Waves across a northern inlet. And then
He saw the haloed Virgin standing
By a gothic tower in Bucharest.
And finally he dreamt
About a freezing process in Helsinki.
How he steered a schooner through the straits
And floated gently on the waves. And the boat
Became his body and his body, boat.
As he wheeled above the waves, a bird,
Perhaps his Angel, hovered in the darkness,
And the night now lay within his ribs.
He stretched out oblong, with the frost
Across his lips and brow. His own dark wings
Lay chestward on the pale sarchophagus.
And nightingales over the sea.