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The Young Glory
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Stanley Gemmell
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Jun 17, 2008 14:06 PDT
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The Young Glory
This is the First Canto of a projected three canto composition
investigating the transmutation from youthful to mature love. The
action in the piece is very symbolic, the language an offshoot of French
Symbolist to Modernist concerns. Each canto of 100 lines reveals an act
in the overall plot. This first involves setting the scene, "foy" is a
farewell feast or celebration, "faena" are the final matador passes
before slaughtering the bull. "Egress" or emergence has particular
astrological implications involving emergence from eclipse or
occultation. "Shrieve" is the pardoning of sin. "Encomiasts" are
praise-singers. Thank you, and ENJOY!!!
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The Young Glory - Canto The First
Orb, my heart's mercy to my heart
Quick another chalice to compare
See the shapes escape each other
Who have I unsealed and who has
Made me into a circle
From any point of this infinite reference
I may begin or I may choose to end
Thus my self as memory of my self
Precious the path among such resistance!
Time, oh, time where to tell your tortured hollows
Where once I rested my fragrant head
To touch my precious love's temple
Like a flower I feasted on the light
But like the flower I shall die
Withered with my own contusion.
I was battered by egress, your eclipsed moon emerging
And while you torn, clustered and cratered
Preternaturally beautiful, awakened
By this deathless, white rose
Which quivers in my skull,
Reach out your shining white arm
Carelessly sweet, woven of lashes,
Seeming to weaken at the ritual stars
Holding my thorned stamen between your fingers
How can I not fall from my senses
Dark purpose nude beneath fixed heaven
Burned of all color, buried in the after-sweetness
Of you, gently poured, tears kept in crystal vial.
A single word exhaled by your name
Stays the transfixed elements
Water and word, wind and wine
Fire and foy, earth and ease
With these you have tempted my fable's destruction
Until I can no longer contain my fadeless shadows
Faena circling the golden, bleeding bull
Breast bleeding black blood, drunk and stumbling.
Distended heart of hope, production of absent things
Abnormally beautiful, wish-dripping, eyes folded
Into the future as if violent tempests and raging skies
Could thwart the gift of amber, the morning-gift
For your first arrival, carefully veined in ivory.
Proud labyrinth, I walked among the venomed lances
Of your admiring looks, I shut out the glances
Of foraging, lesser beasts and gazed upon the hives
Instead, rooting for honey, blending colors
Allowing your even breath to rise and fall
Into my neck, softening at this second sight,
Following prisms streaming out from the sun.
Mouthfull after mouthfull of kisses
Sweat tangled hair, muscles strain against
Themselves, drowning in light, probing fresh wounds
How love has illuminated this answerless craving.
Body reaching for marbled body dark with need.
Green and sharpened, think of you, only time can tell.
Reasons tear at my breastplate, the bull's agony
Silvered by the forest light, kill consecrated to trust
Meat for the burning villages, meat for the flooded
River houses, meat for the mountain king
Myself at the oracle, wind streamed
Line of platinum drool from beneath the beast's muzzle
The droning hive in his throat
Surrounded by royal slaves
Take your token about my corded arm
Twist dreams into plans
Fears into hopes, wildly beating heart
Magnified by your sacred, indifferent eyes
Wildly beaten drums at your crisp march
All around rumors as to my end
Deathless, rioting thrusts into your soft, woman's body
Grasping haunches, musks mixed with moon.
Tonight answers for itself always as a circle.
The chalice fills with your name.
Darkness drunk wings bear me to fulfillment.
Stop and ponder this breed.
Strangely brimmed dream
Pour forth your assent
At last for time renews.
The eclipse has passed, the bull lies dead
And the thousand-stinged swarm has
Buzzed up and away like an erratic cloud.
Was it waterfall or dream this test to my rise
Among slaughtered Hawthorns and Oaks
Let the willows grieve for nothing is real
And soon the dawn shall shrieve our sins
As too our wounds congeal to scars.
Harbored in my ecstasy are wide awake memories
Do not sleep among the bitter thieves of fortune
Prest petals between the pages of closed books
Endlessly exchanging their own precious absent
Intervals with no heaving doing only as they are told!
Armies awaken at the wave and crest of my smile
The shielded eyes of the encomiasts sing forth
Upon the riddle of my masthead
And I shall never lay to sleep the pungently flavored
Seavines announcing my return
Forever forewarned are the betrayers to my muse
Whose forgiveness is as limitless as my wrath harsh
For the sake of those unjustly charred embers
Of wreckage, the golden hopeful, whose voice
Is still amber.
_________________
STANLEY GEMMELL
END FIRST CANTO
JUNE 17, 2008
Temple2 http://www.angelfire.com/il/surlsone
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