Stephen Richard Eng: Sonnets

8/4/2019 Stephen Richard Eng: Sonnets

1/39

The Yellow Danger(after M. P. Shiel)

Poor Yen-How only asked for one small touch,The English girl refused to give:

A tiny kiss, not really very much;

Thus scorned, he swore the English wouldnt live.

For Yen-How had for years lived in the West,Absorbing Occident lore and skill;

Now he would lead the Orient and wrest

The heart of England out, in one slow kill.

All this because of unrequited love?

For surethe Continent caught fire and charred,As Mars, the War-King smiled from up above,And England fought Chinese in her backyard:

Till finally the hero of the age

John Hardywon against the mighty Yellow Rage.

01-31-79

*


2/39

Wilde(1854-1900)

Dear Oscar was a darling for a day,

In fashion with the fawning, fickle press,

Who later laughed his dignity away,

And saw his soul unbutton and undress.

The once delightful dilettante was stilled,

His unborn epigrams aborted in his mind,His future poetry and plays each killed,

His fancy faltering mute, deaf and blind.For Oscars art was not enough to check

His masochistic challenge of propriety,

So into Reading Gaol they locked the wreckOf Oscar Wilde, whose wit once fluttered free:

In tears and blood he scribbled and he scrawled

The butterfly that once had flown, now crawled.

01-79

*


3/39

Arthur Rackham(1867-1939)

Arthur Rackham lived to draw:Observe the dreamy things he saw

In his fey, fantastic brainElves and fairies, sprites and trolls,

Giant birds, huge rabbit holes,

Yet the man himself seemed sane

Modest, mousey, very plain.

Grey and green and burnished brown,

Embroidering an elf-queens gown,

Or the foggy English skies

Looming somber up above

Moody colors children loveAnd their parents prize as well:

Rackhams visionary spell..08-08-78


4/39

\\\\\

Arthur Symons(1865-1945)

Ethereal as Soho candlelightBehind a fog-enfeathered window-paneLurk Arthur Symons decadent designs:

Poems, paling like a yellow haze to white,

As all their pastel tones dissolve in rain,

The storms of Time that curtain and confine

The poets soul, and blot each precious line.

And yet you glimpse his ghost in Drury Lane,

Languid like a vagrant vagabond,

A misty phantom fated to remain

Forever flickering, in and out of sight.For Arthur Symons lived behind (beyond)

This muted, modern age, amid the fondYellow Nineties aesthetic yesternight.

03-30-80

*


5/39

The Isle of Torturers(after Clark Ashton Smith)

The Silver Death was ravaging the realm

Of Yoros, slaying with a Silver agony,Except for young King Fulbra at the helmOf his blackened royal barge, adrift at sea.

And later he was cast on island sands,

Imprisoned by fierce natives who enjoyed

Unspeakable sick pleasures with their hands:

King Fulbras flesh was tortured withand toyed.

They tempted him with hope, and then withdrew

All promise of escape once proffered him,

Redoubling all his suffering anew,

Until all faith inside him died down dim.But when they seized King Fulbras magic ring,

Then Silver Death smote torturers and King.03-17-79

*

Haunted Heritage


6/39

(for Mike Ashley)

Primeval campfire bards intone their tale

Of fairyland, where human beings dare not strayA nether-realm of water-sprite and fey,

Evoked by incantations and the banshees wail,From out of ancient balladry, Mans myths prevail,

As legends from a far-gone pagan day

Evolve, and make their immemorial way

Down centuries. Old ghosts, old magic, cannot fail.

They live as fiction on the printed page,

To thrill a reader on a winters night

In some Victorian book, shelved by the bed.

Such phantoms mock our glib, computer age,

Where even Science cannot point the light

To drive the cosmic specters from our head.1973

*


7/39

Hadrians Wall, Revisited

Grim stones still undulate across green land,Mute monuments to legends passing on

Imperial Roman eagles, rusted, goneBefore barbarians, slaying with a hairy hand.

Squat painted savages rose in a band

Against the sentries on the fortressed wall

Toppled standards, banners, each to fall

Forever. Caesars empire could not withstand.

There looms another siege-wracked wall today:

Poets standing guardwith bureaucrats below

Whose sharpened pencils for their sanguine spears.

The ladders risedefenders join the frayAs boiling oil is spilled in scalding flow

But walls are breached. Poets pierced. No one hears.11-25-82

*

Immortal Bouquet


8/39

The withered arm of Time has plucked the blooms

That crowned the brow of Love and rent the ring

Of roses round Loves head. Decay consumes

The petals. Powdered grey flecks everything.Thus shorn of blossoms, Loves skull draws

Its scalp in wrinkles that retractAnd tighten. The first of all Times laws

Would seem the last as well: the fatal fact

That life means death. Yet death becomes rebirth:

Loves phantom sheds its flesh and rides the sky.

Below, its skeleton sinks deep in earth,

The gnarled old arm of Time grasps high

But cannot seize the cloud as it encloses

In silken mistgold-ruby roses.

08-06-85

*

Progress (2)


9/39

Modernity has ravaged golden thrones,

The Kings are toppled, ornate crowns displaced,

That roll and ring upon the palace stones:Decapitated, those heads the crowns once graced;

And severed, all the links of language with the past.Dumb, unlettered beasts, we grunt and snort

Among the vine-choked, fluted pillars. No words last.

Antiquitys philosophies abort

Inside the wordless womb of Now. We swine

Have overthrown the ruined emperies,

Boar-tusk crude, we rove--barbaric and bovine.

The parchments all are shredded. Smashed, each frieze

Of carved Hellenic majesty. We root

Amongst the marble rubble where weeds shoot.

1989*


10/39

The Tritest Song

RenewalEaster,,,April loverebirth

Are easy, archetypal terms for when

Fresh shoots begin to green the thawing EarthAnd fill with sweet clichs this poets pen.

At least I know what Spring is notThe cruelest months not April, no,

In spite of Mister T. S. Elliot

Whose Spring and soul were both of snow.But he was young. Age brings surcease,

And Spring, forsythia and daffodils,

As flowered sonnets sprout, increase,

And decorate the rain-swelled rills.

Thus, in the landscape of my autumn brain

The hues of yellow and of green remain.

03-23-83


11/39

Eternal Balladry

I hear the songs of working people playedBy three-piece bands, sung part off-key

In taverns, with electric amplifiers turned up high,

Or up the mountains where the tunes have stayed

Changeless, for two hundred years of song.

This Anglo-Celtic minstrelsy can never die

So long as mandolins and fiddles cry

Their plaintive songs of true, true love turned wrong

Of Godand ghostsand deaths and birth,

And square-dance reels where clapping couples throng.

Upon the oceanson the plainsthere, the songs are madeFor people close to water, dust and earth,

Where love and grief give music all its worth,And where the troubadours ply their timeless trade.

1982

*


12/39

Lamia(for Michael Fantina)

The lady bade me linger for awhile

Beside the cypress in the burying-yard.

She fetched me to a graveside with her smile

And set me on a marker cold and hard.

She smiled. It all comes down to this, you know,

That kings and merchants, each the same,

Will sleep as brothers is a marble row

Till mosses blanket over each proud name.

I shiveredmid-November air breathed chillAnd I looked down at my watch. The hour was late.

I said, However much Id like to listen still,My appointment scheduled in the village cannot wait.

She smiledand begged my pocket-knife from me,

Then carved my name upon the cypress tree.04-18-80 (rev. 12-10-90)

*


13/39

Buddhist Monk

Unsullied by the world, with conscience free,

He sits in contemplation, hour on hour,Of one small point on his anatomy

From which he gathers strength and mystic power.

Not for him the heros wide acclaim,

The soldiers glory, nor the merchants prize;

Deaf is he to trumpetings of fame,

Blind to the promise in a womans eyes.

For him no cleaving to ephemeral things

No ties to trap his feet in tangled ways

That snare the steps of diplomats and kings

No fear of blame, and no desire for praise.Supremely blessed, the holy Lama sits,

Heedless of bombs that blast the world to bits.1974

*


14/39

Retribution

The table was running with ale,

The wizard was starting his tale.

The barley-drunk swordsmen slouched near,

And tore at some dry hunks of bread,

And scowled as the sorcerer said:

Come close and listen and fear

But they only glared at their beer.

Their leader unslung his long blade,

Said Youre the one should be afraid,And severed a head that went thud!

The story remained never told,The warriors pushed north in the cold,

Next Spring, theyre found frozen in mud,

Their hair matted, smeared with black blood.07-11-78

*


15/39

The Armageddon Hour

As children playing with a dangerous toy

Who think it sport to make the toy perform,No matter what it will soon destroy

And maim the innocent in fiery stormSo men of might, in momentary rageUnder cover of enforced democracy

Let loose upon an unsuspecting age

The curse reserved to scourge humanity.

Not quite content with their appalling deed

They vie with Woden, ape the mighty Thor,

And toy with thunder that will surely breed

A raging whirlwind whipping flames of war.

When men make playthings of so great a power

The times portend the Armageddon hour.1978

*


16/39

The Witch ofPrague(after F. Marion Crawford)

The wan and weary Wanderer arrivedIn Prague, in search of someone lost from him

Dear Beatrice, whose love for him once thrived,But now diffused in daydreams, misty-dim--

The days were damp with darkened dew.

Instead he met that siren-mesmerist

Unornaseductive, subtle witch who drew

The Wanderer to her within a tangled tryst.

She pulled him backward through the centuries

Exhibiting a horror in the graveyard gloom,

But still he spurned her wanton witcheries,

Aware that yielding only promised doom

At last his Beatrice returned, once moreAnd lost Unorna vanishedout Deaths door.

03-23-80*

Am I My Brothers Keeper?


17/39

Of course not. I must walk aloof, alone,

And clutch my dear possessions close to me:

Pomp and power; prizes Ive sought, and won!And since I have no brother of my own

I have no one to keep or help, you see,Each man for himselfthats how its done!

And help I ask from anyone is none.

At least thats how Ive tried to make it be,

Until suburban chilliness stills my heart

And I grow sick of living inwardly,

Discovering my neighbors arent made of stone,

(Chain-link fences cant prison us apart)

As cautiously our nervous voices start

Exchanging greetings in that iced Unknown.

02-20-80*


18/39

Christmas Symbols

November casts its leaves and days away.The calendars last, best, page remainsDecember. And our losses and our gains

Are summed across a sky of frigid grey

(Forgiving sins from some far August day),

Our slate scrubbed clear. The month now wanes;

And yet behind Decembers sleeted panes

There crackles warmth: an ancient mystery play.

Its symbols are the holly and the scented pine.

Humility, not vanity, at end-of-year,

And peace to our trespassers and our friends.The English mistletoethe gift of yours and mine

And carols that poor sinners, like ourselves, most hearThen, manger-ward, a band of seers wends.

1982

*


19/39

Marys Song

Above the sunken lake of Galilee,Lay isolated disdained Nazareth,

Where misted in obscurityWas Mary born. Her kin Elizabeth

Gave John the Baptist birth. But Mary wrought

The Motherhood of ages: Jesus, Son

Of Man, Whose prophesied arrival brought

Astrologers and shepherds one by one

To marvel. Mary, in a squalid cave

In Bethlehem nursed Infant Child with care.

The Savior Whose death forgave

Our primal sin too weightisome to bear.

To celebrate that first far Christmastime,Let carillons of joy inside us chime.

1984*


20/39

Manger Monument

Had Yahweh picked a palace for the birth

Of Christ, its splendored Solomonic worthWould stagger calculation: sheeted gold

Might overspread its cedar walls, and boldPhoenician carved designs would praise the Child.

But who today would know? Instead, a wild

And rude unlikely cavern cradled Him;

Above--a star millennia cant dim,

More brilliant than lamps of oil aflame,

Illumining the cave where Jesus came.

Thus Bethlehem endures, a citadel

Within our hearts, where mankinds chief event

Occurred. Though Nineveh and Tyre each fell,

The manger outlasts every monument.12-85

*


21/39

Nashville Christmas1779

Scots-Irish borderers, devout, austereWith Anglo-Saxonsmade their rugged route

West from Watauga, in the chilliest yearMarked in history. Five hundred miles out

Across Kentucky , down to Tanase

They trekked with horses, cattle, sheep.

James Robertson led forth this odyssey

That halted opposite where bluffs of steep

And craggy cedar-guarded limestone, rose

Above the Cumberlanda river iced and white,

That Christmas Day when ever rivers froze.

And when the cliff-side landmark loomed in sight

The cavalcade traversed the waters frigid span.Then, in their lean-tos. praised the Son of Man.

12-19-87*


22/39

The Defrauding of the Worms

The ashes of the years diffuse in dust,Their motes exuding mauvish glow

That alters grey to black. But Ive no trust

In Time, that cut-purse thief, who robs us so.

For, graveward borne, my gathered decades shorn

From off my limbs, my soul but cuts adrift

And cheats the maggotry of Death. Forlorn

And cheated, Satan rues my flight! Christs gift

Of sweet perpetuation foils those worms of Earth

Who rend my flesh when nothing live, lives there.My human husk decaysto wait rebirth.

Ethereal, my souls exultant, whereAbide infinities of angelswhite

And efflorescentbeaming lucent light.

1989 (rev. 92)*


23/39

Sonnet

Your sky is shadowed with a tomb-dark cloudThat dims our futures falling, faint far star,

And all your pain wraps us in cold thick shroud,

Till who you were is choked by who you are.

The flame of love that flickered golden-red

Is grey-black ashes in your frozen soul,

As you wish you could sleep, forever, dead

And dreamless, like the love Time saw and stole.

But yet, however bleak the fireless sky,A shaft of God-light bursts and burns up high,

And glows on you amid the grimmest grey.

And if you find the death for which you pray,

Youll damp and darken everybodys day:So any friends, not just I, will weep their grief away.

06-20-76

by Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)

First English translation


24/39

The Windmill

I saw before me

In the mists of the moonlight, a silhouette tall

On the hill like a monster, gaunt arms clutching wide:

A huge windmill whose blades only rise up to fall,

Carving arcs in the shadows upon the hills side.

Thus I saw in the haze, like a dream up ahead,An immensity looming, that shook me with dread,

With a forehead that scraped on the star-sprinkled skies,An old mill that continued to thrust up and rise,

With its sails a-spinning, circling galaxies of

All those stars ringed in haloes of light far above,Stealing gold-dust from robes of the comets so far

That old Time himself seemed a prisoner of Space,

Yet the windmill on earth still revolved in its place,

Going down, then back up, circling each distant star.

08-12-76 (rev. 12-10-90)


First English translationfrom Des Vers (1880)

*


25/39

Dedication of Love(For Mary Rose)

Your mother is someone I live for and love,

So come, little child, and sit down next to me,

And tell me, did pale golden stars up above

Paint your hair the halo of yellow I see?

Your curls are fringing your forehead with light

The colors of planets that melt with the greenOf your eyes, reminding me, through gaze serene

You will speak of my love, to your mother tonight.Caress her with kisses of innocent fire,

Your hair and your lips gently carrying my desire,

And when she sees your love has gained something newShell tremble and wonder and murmur a few

Soft words in an answer to loves gentle kiss,

And stroking your curls, shell whisper to you: (remove)

Whose love are you bringing to me? Is it his?

08-25-78


First English translationfrom Des Vers (1880)


26/39

Ocean City

Immortal day, that far July ago,

We dug our toes inside a Maryland beach,

And didnt let our first faint feelings show:

Invisibly, they floated out of reach.

And then like anyone who feels unease,

We talked and talkedbut all that really did

Was beat and batter us like ocean breeze,And bloody all the nerve-ends we had hid.

That evening at home we ventured far too nearFor safetyboth too reckless of how much

We frightened one another, fighting fear

That festered under every bruising touch:The ache erupted in her furnished room,

And we both felt that first foretaste of gloom.

03-04-75

*


27/39

Capitol Hill

She sat in downtown restaurants alone,And read her book until they shut the doors;

Defiant, seventeen, and on her own,She made her coffee last an hour or more.

So when I couldnt find her home I ran

Ridiculously about the neighborhood,A comic maniac whod been a man

Behaving like a wounded coyote would:

I circled, almost howling with brute pain

Around dark Washington, through every place

She ought to be but wasntalmost insane

Ashamed of panicking for a mere face.

The restaurants were empty of her everywhere:Could she have drowned in summers humid air?

05-11-75*


28/39

The Clown

My condescending friends but smiled in sympathy and shame,

That I had not selected someone slightly prettier;They didnt know I hoped Id trade my name

For something somewhere back inside of her.

Around her I was awkward, quiet, cold,Sweet agonies like a grey and grave less ghost,

Or else too loud, impressing her with manly noise,

That was but adolescent, clumsy bold

Bravado that at best but bores, annoys,

And at its worst tells people youre unsure

Of love and life, and of yourself the most.

And so I struggled silly through the pureI harried friends to make them see her charm

They changed the subject with their half-amused alarm.06-13-75

*


29/39

Death Cloud

She said she hoped for peace for all mankind,Made possible by mans deep-down good will,

And sorrowed when I told her she was blindTo mans inborn desire to maim and kill.

One universe united under one large law:

Her dream, and dream of countless men beforeWho looked at life and made believe they saw

Beyond mans greed and lust for gore.

Besides, world law meant world police and fear,

I told her gently, and she hated me

For hinting her utopia would not appear.

For checks and balances on law brings liberty--

But still at least we both agreed to dreadThe poison mushroom looming overhead.

08-06-75 (rev. 05-07-78)

*


30/39

Phil

She had a fellow Quaker waiting back

Behind at school for her Fall return:My inner rage went red, then inky black,

As coal-hard hate began its bitter burn.She called him softa coward! So I thought,

A pacifist, a scholar, and a boy,

And in brute bloody fantasies I foughtAnd fractured him like some cheap toy.

She seldom spoke of him, but when she did

It always caught me with no good defense,

And so the jealousy was hardly hid,

A stinking cancer she could smell and taste and sense:

It ate like acid at our August days,

The dread distrust that when it entersstays.09-05-75

*


31/39

Blue Ridge

As August melted from its sticky heat,September watched us traveling to where

Virginia, South Carolina, both do meet:

The apple-mountains rich with grape and pear.Her family and sister welcomed me,

Far too polite to ever seem quite real,

I drowned in country hospitality

And careful conversation at each meal.

But underneath I felt a tense unease:

Her elder sister seemed to look through all

The harmony like some lone bird that seesAn animal below about to fail and fall,

Our mutual hatred and respect were likeThe hunted for the hunter as it stalks to strike.

10-04-75

*


32/39

Regicide

We harvested so many grapes each day,

Our hands and lips were purpled, stainedThe shade of royalty: kings gone away

To die with queens, till rust remained

Of each tarnished throne and crumpled gown.

Inside her bed at night she floated far from me,

And like a knight that tugs a queens great gown,

I knew my enemy was brute Eternity,

That crushes kingdoms made of stone or dreams.She often mentioned autumnback at school,

Her words like shears, slicing well-stitched seamsUpon the royal tapestry, a cruel

And fitting ending to the fading myth,

Once woven lovingly, now scissored with!

04-24-76*


33/39

Mount Airy Station

The ever-yawning distance gaped betweenThe two of us, those last September days,

And nothing I could say could really mean

As much as all the silence in her empty gaze.

I packed my summer clothes and hopes,

And dressed for autumn, that last afternoon,

When breezes shook the farm and apple-slopes,

And rain beat down a bitter, time-bleak tune,Upon the wooden eaves, and winding road,

As we drove down together to the train.The loss of our idyllic summer showed

Upon my face, like slashing, whip-struck pain

Her sister on the platform seemed aware

And glad of what was swiftly dying there.05-06-76

*


34/39

Poet-Birth: 1961

At school I found the spaces in between

Her letters lengthened as the days grew brief,

And letters that I wrote were still as green

As spring before the fall inflames each leaf,

That tumbles to the pavement, brown and dead.

I read her final one that Saturday,As rage and fierce revenge throbbed in my head,

I knew how futile to believe that she, not he, would pay.But still I sampled other faces and sweet hair

And throbbing sighs, that couldnt really last:

In someone elses eyes her ghost danced there,

Reminding me of grief ahead, not past,As winter worsened and I learned to write

My first bad poems, full of self-hurt spite.

05-21-76 (rev. 06-16-90)

*


35/39

ErasingAll Trace ofElaine

Its true, I have forgotten you, Elaine,

Utterly, as leaves when leaving summer trees

Die unremembering, as they coast along the breeze

Toward autumn ground. No souvenirs remain.

Blurred images efface and fade. I cannot see your plainWhite dress, bedecked with flowered fineries:

Poppiesyellow, orange, with Death-dark centers. PleaseBelieve my loves dissolved, drowned in Falls grey rain.

Through dimming years Ill rarely, any more

View you in my imaginings. Your summer-tinted hair

Of golden tawn recedes. My lust cannot recallYour criminally-carnal figure, or

Your rose-flushed mouth. Romance lies in Deaths lair.

In winters pall, I have forgotten all.

08-80

*


36/39

ALMOSTS

Telepathy

I sat up writing one long verse-filled night,

I wrote self-pitied, literary lies,

That shrank and shriveled in the scornful light

Of dawn, across the mocking saffron skies.That very morning she walked in on me,

As if Id willed her through Times speed and space.She said shed just come by to stop and see

If I still lived at the same one-room place,

As if we were old friends and nothing more.

I felt my cracked illusions knit and mend,

I hoped my once-wet wounds were drained and dried.

05-11-78


37/39

Troubadour-Tribute

I love the songs of working people playedIn cabins and at dances, and along

Highways where the vagabonds wander by,

Unchanged since days of early English song.

The English, Celtic minstrelsy can never die

As long as mandolins and fiddles cryThe ancient ballads of true love turned wrong

Of Godand ghostsand deaths and birth,Wherever people and their folklore throng.

Out on the sea (or prairies) where the songs are made

Of people close to water, dust and earth:

Elements that give music its true worth

As folk song singers ply their timeless trade.

03-30-80*


38/39

Lured by the Looking Glass

Im running backwards down the hall of years,

Beseeching Time to halt. Time turns deaf ears.

I race down corridors in quest of you,In vain, in vain. Echoes mock anew,

Reverberating in the tunnel of my dreams

Loves playback of my heart-recorded screams.

On cold, metallic walls I press a kiss,

Then realize their surfaces are glass

Reflections, nothing more. And as I pass,Their fun-house images distort and bend.

While down loves labyrinth I blindly wend.1983


39/39

Elaine, Ethereal

(for Marge B. Simon)

I glimpsed you strolling as you always used to do,Graceful as a playful breeze

On the knoll alive with lilies, yesterday.You wore that tailored shirt of sailor-blue,

Tattered jeans above your knees

And your dust-gold hair in sunny disarray.Erotic wraith, I know youve been untrue!

Deaths the lover whom you please.

He seduced you, pretty phantompallid, fey,

In denim-blue and sunlit gold. And I feel grey

As your marker, where I kneel and pray.

09-10-82

*

Documents

Stephen Richard Eng: Sonnets