Toshiba Island Eclogue

by Duncan McNaughton, my new favorite poet.

I should be writing a poem in his voice, but instead I'm just writing his poem so you can enjoy it, too.


Virgil's wine-dark belladonna cousin's
amaryllis trumpets have collapsed atop
their stiff translucent shaft, and with them the
phallic secret of Neruda's punctu-
ation: this year's May a memory: turns
out stars falling on Alabama are the
true race.

I can't stop, daydreaming, wandering
schoolboy through weird figures of age-old
quotidian mystery -- day's phenomenal
light show, night show's incandescent myth: same
dreams in ten thousand poets: sic transerunt,
no other way than: Possibly...
Possibly not...

It's June now, the white monkey needs to speak
about love. In love, everyone, it
never changes from the first to the last,
always in love with every love.

Look - all I've ever heard about heaven
from religion or metaphysics:
bullshit. My heart knows its heaven: it knows
the one heaven I shall be given, for grace,
will have been the companionship of my
friends, on earth: real blood, imaginal blood,
straight ahead, existential, immediate,
momently able, sensual, profane,
to move.

Not only that. Violets have blossomed where,
in that shaded corner, tarragon
used to grow. Who knows what else can be, even,
especially, from within The Alone,
that only honest conception of "God."

Why should either one of us care if it's
all muktub as long as we are friends to
one another and to the invisible
inks that caress the pages our loves read?
What to do? They say: Walk to the near bank
of the River Time. Stop at its edge. Turn
around. Toss the ashes over your head.
Then, without looking back, walk away.
Away. Into the meadow of living you's.

____________________
to Dadi Mariotti