October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Chords in the blood–listen to their answer at the door to all human beings. The entrance to our nerves breaks with our andiron-black rainstorms. Each bone finds a cauldron to dance in. Each light, each mistress near my face, Polaris in the syllable, voltage in the remembering, giver of passionate breath. I cannot see a Job in the sun. Vanilla moods pass by in a parade–it was a wild self-education. You with solid-colored hair, you, Joseph, deserve the oxidizing thread of goodnights which are four-fifths flame, having several souls storming deep inside of you.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Detonations of warm violet this autumn. Back and forth we’ll drink farewells! Love on another evening returns as a strength on this one. The heart is seared by each thought in the music, music for a painter at tea who finds more than tea glittering in the china cup. There is a cruelty we know and feel right down to the bone. We are alone with it usually, kicked by its eternal blossoms and formulations until we think we have found life. Such is my constitution, what I am made of, what my face and heart share with the wind.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
POSTMODERN CITY, BLUE EXPRESSION ELEVATED TO
original rules and orders of life–Aspen, I’ll cling to the old, forgotten words. To the stars with our inspiration, to Aspen, ad astra! We’ll taste mint leaves in lime rickeys at Roaring Fork Valley and end all weariness in a lift viewing the world. Pine Creek Cookhouse. Bandit Trail. Red Onion Alley. Aspen Mountain. Winter and skiers bedazzle each other on endless fast powder. Poised psyche on Aspen Mountain. Ski-jumpers, slalom contenders above the quiet of old hotels. Nature is relentlessly present. Our mood speaks its narrative. The mind is not narrowed
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Rilke of ten thousand shadows, slant-rhyming death-gold, come where Dylan Thomas drank, at Stag and Deer Inn under the ruby-eyed tiger-head. Recite correspondence of Zeus and Hera detailing eight hundred years. Again Zeus’s thunderhead will detonate. Other gods will laugh at humanity’s lost cubist musicians, our actresses with four mansions on three continents. But don’t damn our string quartets, balalaikas, dense fugues and astronauts watching earth’s ultramarine strand drop away. Zeus himself admires earth as a green steel raindrop. O lift a last bracing whiskey at Stag and Deer Inn and eternize this moment, Rainer Rilke.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Storm traces. Someone is writing this all down, getting a state of mind in order. Necessity is in the design of music and in thundering words whispered by the steam of heating pipes where reflections sparkle and dry. You would return to the sky from your cold chair, leaving behind an old heart with its white horses and reckless wild roses in broken shadow. In a hundred years the wind chips away at the memory of those burnt while flying so that these words as beautiful trees offering no shelter descend to nothing and do not shine in the shadow.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Songs are burning at this moment, spilling out upon the page in sun-patterns, or like an earth full of roots. Lingering in our glasses is winter and its six-sided chemical, moon-white. Teardrops fall upon your page of mathematics describing the dark red medicine of the future, but far over the orchard there is a new growth of stars. Night is certain of your pulse, and photos of glory in America are like pink smoke touching our cellophane hands. Somewhere deep inside of us, colors crash down upon the Oliver Goldsmith Telescope in the grove. Angels respond furiously.