Scattering of Salts Poems

VOLCANIC HOLIDAY for Peter Hooten 1 Our helicopter shaking like a fist Hovers above the churning Cauldron of red lead in what a passion! None but the junior cherubim ask why. We bank and bolt. Shores draped in gloom Upglint to future shocks of wheat. Your lips, unheard, move through the din of blades. 2 A Mormon merman, God's least lobbyist, Prowls the hotel. All morning Sun tries to reason with the mad old ocean We deep down feel the pull of. And in high Valleys remote from salt and spume Waterfalls jubilantly fleet Spirit that thunder into glancing braids. 3 Thunder or bamboos drumming in the mist? Tumbril or tribal warning? Pacific Warfare reads the explanation For a display we'd normally pass by: Molars of men who snarled at doom Studding a lava bowl. What meat Mollifies the howl of famished shades? 4 Crested like palms, like waves, they too subsist On one idea--returning. Generation after generation The spirit grapples, tattered butterfly, A flower in sexual costume, Hardon or sheath dew-fired. Our feet At noon seek paths the evening rain degrades. 5 Adolescence, glowering unkissed: The obstacle course yearning Grew strong in. Check to cliff face, sheer devotion. . . . To be loved back, then, would have been to die. Then, not now. Show me the tomb Whose motto and stone lyre complete With this life-giving fever. As it fades 6 From the Zen chapel comes that song by Liszt. Is love a dream? A burning, Then a tempering? Beyond slopes gone ashen, Rifts that breathe gas, rivers that vitrify, Look! a bough falters into bloom. Twin rainbows come and go, discreet, As when together we haunt virgin glades. 7 Moments or years hence, having reminisced, May somebody discerning Arrive at tranquil words for . . . mere emotion? Meanwhile let green-to-midnight shifts of sky Fill sliding mirrors in our room --No more eruptions, they entreat-- With Earth's repose and Heaven's masquerades. From the Trade Paperback edition.Merrill, James is the author of 'Scattering of Salts Poems' with ISBN 9780679441588 and ISBN 0679441581.