The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets - The Poet's Press

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Lost penguins arrive here from time to time,
stand hungry and hypnotized for days, as wind
howls over the ancient air shaft openings,
making the ice-locked plateau resonate.
This is the anthem of Antarctic woe —
thirteen deep notes in modal succession.
In dream I come here often, walk solitaire
upon the windswept basalt promenades,
admire four suns through ruby windows,
drink from dark obsidian goblets,
discuss with the white/black avian sentinels
the meaning of glyphs beyond translation.
The wind’s mad organ relentlessly pipes,
the depth of note conveying the shafts’ abyss,
the unthinkable depths of crystalline city,
carved into stone pre-Cambrian, the keeps
where multi-limbed minions mined out
the now-dead heat-taps to the core of the planet.
The tones that should be random, repeat this song.
Has anyone heard such music before?
Perhaps we hear it everywhere, from bird to whale,
as an unheard, underpinning harmony,
the oldest earth enigma’s passacaglia.
Bass line invisible beneath a string quartet
(whose range is but a gnat-buzz against the cosmos),
droning to Andes in Inca-harps electrified,
mantric harmonies soaring above
the haunting trill of Tibetan bowls,
the echo that answers the mournful Pan pipe
heard at the edge of a November wood,
the solitary faun’s lamenting love call.
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Only a handful can pluck this dream, this song,
as only a few can walk the rim of madness,
gazing the surfaces dead before racial memory,
touching without terror the things that came before,
loving beyond mother-brother-breeding love
the purely non-human,
the vast, rich impersonal cloud of atoms electrified.
The Song of Ur-R’lyeh may nest in nightmares,
may hatch its egg in fever’s heat,
may force a lover to break off loving,
turn a sane world to a screaming asylum.
Your third eye, third ear, third brain are growing —
no stopping the eye-stalk, the throbbing heart,
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