The Willows Adorned By The Return Of Their Old Hair-Dos

The willows adorned by the return of their old hair dos.
I’ve been mud-mashing my way down to the banks
of the Tay River lately through the primordial ooze,
now that the weather’s turned round, just to feel
with an overly sophisticated sense of childish anticipation,
Venus bright in the apple-green gloaming of the swallow-swept air,
as if I were playing with fire again, the flaring
of the wild irises of the spirit burning hot and blue
as hydrogen in the heart of a needle-shaped flame
that can see right through me into what goes on
behind the curtains of my theatrical third eye
when I come like an amorous arsonist,
bearing bouquets of dried flowers
I’ve pressed between the pages of a matchbook
as a token of an old love affair I’m annually immolated by.

Not as a martyr who takes things lying down
but as a heretic who does his time standing up at the stake,
though I’ve always been a little suspicious about the heroism
implicit in that. Even in the fires of hell
I’ve tried to avoid posturing. But there again, you see,
I’m assuming a virtue I may not have, I’m blooming in fire,
I’m shooting clowns out of cannons without safety nets
as the heavens come down around me like the circus tents
of the empty envelopes of day old loveletters
who’ve lost the scent of what made them so flammable
in the first place. Just because I’m waiting for wild irises
to break ground along the banks of the Tay
doesn’t mean I’m not a spiritual disgrace
that’s as hard to fathom as a shipwreck
in my oceanic consciousness as it is
to see myself raising the skull and crossbones
like a condor among the angel fleets of heaven
at anchor in home port just to give them a good run for their money
like the wind in an orchard in bloom
impatient to get beyond the first fragrance of things
and taste the fruits by which everyone of us shall be known.

Either that. Or I’ve got more of a river nature than I thought
and that could explain why I’m always talking to myself
like water in passing that no one’s listening to
in these solitudinous out of the way places along the river
I seek out like natural shrines in the woods,
trespassing against obstacles in the way of my pilgrimage
securing its footing on the bones of those underfoot
laid out like crosswalks and the rungs of ladders
stepped on like thresholds that stayed well within bounds
as you would expect any mystical stairwell addicted
to its spiritual vertigo like a Sufi at a crossroads
dancing with a dust devil of blue hydrogen stars
into ecstatic annihilations of satoric fireflies
who clarify the afterbirth of their clouds of unknowing
by sitting still as constellations on contemplative waters, to.

Besides, everyone’s got their own way of dealing with metaphors
to render the chaos of experience communicable
through some intimate form they can spend their whole lives
trying too hard to relate to as if it knew who they were
and were simply waiting for the right time
to let them in on the secret that it knows
nothing more or less about what it is or you are
than you suggested to it in the first place
when you began to take yourself too mysteriously.

I see a red and black baseball cap floating down the river
and right away I think of a decapitated tiger lily.
A fire someone put out too early to catch on and spread
like a spiritual conflagration of heretics
through the alphabetic birch groves of the Druids.
Does that mean whatever rises from the ashes
is thereafter struck dumb, deaf, mute and illiterate?
The counter-intuitive grammars of free association
are thenceforth to be demonized and burnt as witchcraft?

If I await the coming of the wild irises with poetic devotion
and the offshoot of my daydreaming to pass the time
is to see the eddies in the water like the tendrils
of wild grapevines trying to get a grasp on things,
couldn’t that mean that life playfully suffers
the same highly suggestive visual imagination I do?
And did its ears come late to the party as mine did too
and crash it as usual like an egg a crow drops
on the skull of a river rock anointed by the sun,
beaten away by the irate broomsticks of the sparrows,
because there is more instinct in swimming upstream
salmonwise against the flow of your own thought
on a return journey more dangerous than the first
than there is in painting watercolours
from the back of a hearse when it’s raining?

But don’t try to answer that question with your eyes open
unless you’re used to seeing things in your own light
and waiting for something as I am wild irises to bloom
like the sagacious fires of female dragon muses
on the dark, unmothered side of the moon
I’m seasonally inspired to sacrifice myself to
on the altar of a river rock that sticks in my imagination
like a vow of the voice in my throat
I made to the river as much as myself
never to let its beauty lack a messenger
that couldn’t speak in the tongues of the wild irises
without tasting my own ashes in the blue fires
of what they wanted me to convey
with a passion for extinction to the clouds and the stars.