From Where The Rivers Come

The platform
Of the Norte Station welcomed him to Madrid
Where all the trains finish their run
And cabs wait ready at the whistle.

Placing his baggage on a floor
That time had worn with inconsideration,
The little colonel embraced the solitary air,
Looking west to the brilliance of a sunset
Against the dark and inky corridor of change,

Finding isolation against northern frugality,
Sipping slowly to tongue the sweet ridges of fermented time.
The New York apprentice opened his passport,
Pausing like a southern hawk
Into the eccentricity of its image.

And in that sphere of beauty,
He understood “The mountain,
The trying sense of man’s vision,”
The necessary consummation with “fear . . .”
Inhaling its sour breath
To reach “the summit of that ambition . . .”

Looking around to see who hadn’t noticed him yet,
Truman Capote walked over to the empty seat.
“Let us leave it to history,” Mailer said,
Exhaling his handshake to Fear instead,
Where neither refused the meeting;
An empty exchange of Time for dread morbidity,
In the corner of Hemingway’s last round.

An anxious clerk taking up dreams in a rifle,
Papa, trained well an itchy finger,
Losing aim in the foggy breath of
An inner landscape, looking west into the Sun,
Casting an eye east toward the nightmare of his odyssey,
Killing what he had begun.

A fowl breast at his feet,
Weathered feathers beset in the flight of an eagle’s feast.

A lifetime fighting the bull’s fight, stab or be devoured,
Thirsting for the very things that destroyed him.
Playing the long run in a losing battle
When losing is never an option,
A worn out herdsman
Mistaking dreams for realities.

Come sweet death in the hour of my art,
Where in its mystery, the performance of
Dying is exalted in the turbulence of its passion.

Painting blood on a carved-out silhouette,
Molded at the potter’s wheel
In the clay of hedonism,
Molded into the piercing realism of his reflection,
He looked into a cold blue abyss of Narcissian water
              where
One saw God, and the other saw nothing in the drift.

Nothing but fear —
Tearing through lions like a bullet.

“Mercy Father, hold back your trigger!”

Wait in the day’s embrace,
Touch your hand, see the dim
Sorrow of death in the afternoon of your eyes
Without casting shadows,
So that I too, might survive the aura of glamour and power.

Lurking against the night air,
The changing guard
Molted his armor in the hands of Jacob,
Leaving others to do the rest in the troubled ecstasy of beautiful things;
A courage of despair left in the shadow of shape,
The other left for the shadows of woods,
Bending himself toward the religion of moons and men.

Fishing for the nerve
And learning to keep the catch,
Mailer fingered with the line of perfect tension,
Knowing how Marlin play in
The laughter of criminal waves,
Ready with the knife and the net,

Tethered to an absent father
In the solitary silence at his ear;
Holding back to taste the stillness of his sour breath,
Rutting through life and death like rams
Entangled in a Chicago handshake
That never leaves
             A
        dangling man
   above the rivers running.