A Departure From Will

Will, this is truly excellent!!!! Thank you for sharing.. .

Marilyn

Well, thanks Marilyn, quite a departure from my usual poetry which as of late has been -- frenetic -- dislocated from the centre. I am trying some new things this week!
-will

Keep trying, you're not only trying, you're succeeding quite well. I like your other writings too, but there is something about this one that really touched me.

I love this one! This reminds me of a couple of your others that are my favorites. It's the softer side of Will. Most excellent, dear.

There is no dislocation in this force of a poem. It radiates a process of Truth seeking rarely translated to words. A heart mending through a poem, as it weaves Love through veins that taste your every neuron, awakening to highly sensitized purpose of fulfilling a new day. The challenge of creating and radiating a hierarchy of intent that magnifies everything in finest clarity, teases and provokes with delicious introspection here. Truly a lightning bolt of delicate perfection rebirthing through a poem. You inspire me so, Will. Thank you!

Will, this is beautiful....and powerful as well. I LOVE it!

Thank you all - it is very similar to my previous c:\memories\* poems - which i do once in a while, maybe just so you all don't think I am thoroughly, mostly, completely daft.

whew. I appreciate the heaviness of this work, your bittersweet contrastings and discoveries. Bravo

Superb verse here, Will, jettisoned out of the craving heart and the seeking mind, groveling for a closeness beyond.... "I assign myself to your sacred fire," is an amazing act of passion and resignation... the departure here, I would have to suppose, is not so much a "going away," as a "coming to" and departing from self to unite with another, is a departure of ultimate value and beauty. I like this poem very much.

One of the truest, tenderest poems you've ever written. There is so much self-awareness in this work of art (for it is indeed a literary work, and the choice of the Dubliners quote is superb, for it reminds us of a man left behind, who all the Stephen Daedeluses must leave behind if ever they are to progress toward their infinitely opening vision) and so much trust in the voice you sense comes from both depth and a future (epistemically accessed? Does it matter, when beauty pours into the reader's gasping throat?)
This is such a brilliant, characteristic line of the entire ode: "Your laughter, these contingencies, fret and conspire/To murder the black sun" The latter phrase brings to mind Harry Crosby, the Boston Brahmin scion from the Back Bay turned Romantic prodigy poet and editor of the Lost Generation's legendary Black Sun Press in Paris (his Red Skeletons collection brilliantly inspired by Baudelaire and Poe), dead of a derringer bullet through the head at age 31. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Crosby
But this poem really builds spectacularly through its intuitive, open-hearted structure, which builds through a series of 1st person action statements with the refrain, I lay me down tonight, to a powerfully eloquent climax:
"I chew my fingers all morning" (worry)
"I assign myself to your sacred fire (response to a call)
"I kiss you in my thoughts" (expression of supreme selfless love)
"I do implore these confines"
I awake at dawn and know the pain"
This is a deeply felt poem of loyalty and love and devotion to a cause greater than Self, a poem of vocation and surrender to the highest self that one is capable of. The love evoked in the poem summons the speaker to his greatest acts of empathy, creativity and personal genius. It stirs the prophet in him. This is the love of Shams and Rumi, of minds "flowing through these days" in search of the melding of feelings and consciousness in a transformation that defeats time, that is to say, entropy.
It is poems like these that make me fully realize how limitless the effortlessly spun products of your prodigious literary talent seems to most readers; to me, you are the only one who can put limits on where you stretch your mind, Will, where you declaim,
aqui hay monstruous del mar, no puedo ir mas lejos.

Your least favorite navigator and serendipitous discoverer, Chris Columbus (aka Cristobal Colon), knew not to let that thought mark his sargasso end, and I think you do, too.

For those interested - and I rarely do this, from the title, Departure - I warn you up front where I am going - moving away from nihilistic self-absorbsion - towards empathetic release and surrender to a higher love, from within, pointing outward, everything about the taking in from those around, and turning into something that in turn nourishes them and myself - the opposite of oroboros.

Came back to read this poem again. I really loved this one, Will. One of your best.