Dog Star

Dog Star The clarity with which youthful vision perceives the world Is increasingly fogged by the successive days of life. Simple magnanimity is replaced by complex reservation. Knowledge is replaced by uncertainty. Hope is replaced by the leaden awareness of the cold laws of chance, and of time’s passage, By the degeneration of familiar forms, By the merciless reaping of the best in human spirit: Gazing upon the heavens and the deep stillness of those constant lights, Searching course of purpose lack; unsettled certainty, brain benumbing. Castor and Pollux, lucid pilot stars, begin to calm the fever of my blood, Settling upon me a vision of a mystic green and silver thread that links existence round. And yet, sadness when sylphs withdraw, and Ariel weeping for Belinda flies, And Umbriel, a dusky melancholy sprite, as ever sullies the fair face of night... Down to central earth, the realm of rocky truth. Repairing to search the gloomy, yet whitely glowing, cave Where, sharp-witted and dull-eyed, a god, Ankle deep in sterile and lifeless mud, Moved in a rhythm perfect to reason. Yet delicately astray to hope; Separate from all the golden harmonies Ordained by the measure of bowel and heart; Machined cortex, sailing through gaunchious deeps, unimaginable heights, Built step upon step; Cheops’ pyramid a fly speck by comparison. Still unknown, unnoticed, the green and silver thread...... Unbend the substantial back, honest god! Upward cant the neck! Toil not; drink green and silver wine as the Dog star rules! (The cricket sounds sweetly from the leaves and the jonquil blows softly.) Cant the neck! Observe…. Phantasm swimming in space, Covered all over with visible power and beauty. Green and silver interlaced, the whole its parts beminifies. Endemion, Diana, and Pan ooze from mesh of mass and law as limpid condensements on cold granite: Man’s lonely vigil, a warmth that lifts magic… creates, Imbedding blue-green strands. Reason fails; life begins!