The Gates

I.

There were wrought-iron gates by the riverside –

salvaged bits of a grandeur left untouched,

save for the bloody, hardened frost of untold years of creeping rust –

holding fast to shifting dirt, fascinating urban folk

and adding fuel to village lore, the mystic cause of children lost:

"Bodies pried from off the shores! victims of its demon claws

which wayward men invoked." This is the stuff of fairy tales,

which aging men stuff into tomes like photos into old shoeboxes.

So when young eyes were shied away in houses,

and hunchbacked trees bent about these gates –

in the days of dying that define the autumn;

the opaque days of winters lost to the beating down

of uncouth weather –

shuttered sunlight rolling down past leaves

blasted flakes of those gates' splintering red metal

to soothe over churning riverbed sediment,

crumbling into metallic stones smoothed over

from the glancing graces of thousands upon thousands of watery hands;

and cracking crayfish on the bellies of otters did these old relics sink

into blue Egyptian silt with the bones of their old possessors –

stirred in and bellowing with the riverside tides

of the earth's foreign sentiments,

where tumble and glide the endless confessors

of the silent and placid seas.

(and so it went,

that in every minute which from it followed came a minute more, one...

two...

...and three hundred years would slowly pass

as the great ambitions of great-souled men

with all the wears of work and wine

would acquiesce to their too many days

let by them fly as purely wasted;

with altogether too many dreams,

expectations and aspirations

let slowly simmer to smoldering regret.)

II.

Blind old fingers of blind road builders groped in banks

of iron lakes and rivers- clutching moldy copper pails for stones to lay

for cobbled city paths and chunks of ore for molded hand-rails,

joking quietly to themselves of local legends they once heard tell

of magic portals, gates to hell, that once there stood as tokens of the

"Abstruse magicks of sorcerers past,

whose dabblings with demons fell to Peter's ticking time;"

while mild droning from the city's gentle breezes,

sweeping out beyond wheat fields as far as forest trees

(and filling these old builders' minds with something not quite silence),

carried all in one a thousand and some voices,

stories told from the very mouths of men of trade, and faith, and crime.

The pebbled roads and mortar made (in rivers set in stone

that stretched their splitting fingers past old liquor stores and houses

and curling steel painted black that guided rippled fingertips

to there and back on worn staircases circling down to sea)

the feet for all these busy lives- pears in sacks for midwife baskets,

crates piled by the docking spaces full of ships with tea and glue

all waiting for the moon;

while seagulls dump their noises in the box full of the sky,

golden heat retreats from radiant roofs:

The colors shift like wooden candles snuffing out their lives.

(And as stoics come and slowly go

and gnostic chanters give their glow

to children left on doorsteps, comets marching on and on

with dusty scraps caught in the flow light paths for fortune seekers;

Quiet eyes sigh across washed and dusty

stone floor tiles, redefining ancient truths

to fit new prejudices [to which they now

are circumspect],

and yell cross marbled and ivied courtyards:

"I can not wait but to indicate this to you!–"

Offering finger-pointed eurekas to the heavens

of troubled intellects.)

III.

A rebirth of man-made monoliths bearing down on their creators

framed a new paradise of recycled cardboard and corrugated steel,

And peeping voices pouring sound into cacophonic overtones

that buzz and hum into the earth and through the walls and windows of

historic old brick palaces (left standing as a quaint antique and left

to rot in nostalgic molds and mosses) gave birth to aural organisms

that crept between the city blocks and crawled to nest in urban brains-

brains that jumped in sad amusement at the creature's sudden absence

in the peace of placid countrysides.)

The quiet slap of leather soles on grimy sidewalk cracks,

and nervous hands on windowsills with anxious eyes bewildering,

(who, for all their intermittent gulps,

Will not consider what they've got at stake:

In the words of the old philosopher,

"One swallow does not a summer make")

are measured by the pulsing beat of cars and taxis sifting through

the narrow lanes of thoroughfares,

and asphalt-layered streets.

And in the time intuited

between eyes that cross with eyes,

and puzzled bits of shape and shade

and sound and scent and softness

that somewhere speak of reason when

all made and packed in words,

understanding names itself

the instant of becoming –

where senses cease to struggle with

the notion of the oceans,

and of stars and sticks and birds.

IV.

There were wrought-iron grates by the roadside,

where old and grimy rainwater drops into sewer pipes,

persecuted by bits of trash and the gripes of window-wipers

from rubber tires and metal shells that roll like beetles

down worn-down Indian trails, spiked with orange traffic cones,

covered over, over and over with tar and flecks of stone;

someday left behind to grow dangling vines like prehistoric temples,

forgotten like two young lovers aging, who crumble into bones;

Written into tiny bits of lightning caught within the grips

of fiber-optic flax (long and stringy tendons laying

the skeleton of a birthing world without the limits

of night or day, drawing close together lips

to foster conversations) are the offhand thoughts of modern heroes

conjured up from crying Ids to connect with fellow

dreamers: worlds on top of worlds escape the pagan fears

that once drew lines around the Earth (those age-old myths

of non-believers and enthroned and vague redeemers);

searching for the 'übermensch' in dark and sinister lexicons of silicon.

(The bright rooms of blind potential

which strike out the outlines of trespassed doors;

and the hungry hands of the average man,

with all his glands and hairs and pores

that can seek no form of progress but

the conquering of foreign shores:

these things are one with my desires,

lying fetal on the floor;

There's tea on the table waiting yet,

the feeling's fickle, to be wanting more.)

V.

With the passage of time there was only iron, left behind,

scattered fragmented Ozymandias memories –

left barren like wrought-iron gates that point to a time

long lost, standing still: grey-scaled skeletons dead to a stillborn, littered sky,

once decked with the flesh and defiant spirit of 'mankind's everlasting quest';

they lay like ancient angels under all their ash and grime in rest –

and maybe all for the best.

Wondrous legends grew up around

the gods of old with metal birds, palaces that touched the sky,

and magic boxes of light and sound;

while green shoots sprouted up past lonely long-dead finger bones

by a river, with wrought-iron gates at its side,

the salvaged bits of a grandeur left untouched –

save for the bloody, hardened frost of untold years of creeping rust–

holding fast to shifting dirt, fascinating urban folk,

and adding fuel to village lore, the mystic cause of children lost:

"Bodies pried from off the shores! victims of its demon claws

which wayward men invoked." This is the stuff of fairy tales,

which aging men stuff into tomes like photos into old shoeboxes.