Leonard Schwartz - USA

Banned In Iran     

I intuit the brilliance of the moon

in this room without windows or sense of time.

After all, the most archaic unit is the moon

and language is lit with its reflected fire.

It isn't the moon I'm after,

its barracudas at low tide circling the mirror.

It isn't the moon I'm after,

It’s a single mother falling asleep next to her child

It isn't the moon I'm after,

it's a woman upbraiding the dawn's indifference

It isn't the moon I'm after,

it’s a mindful wraith, a rattling mystical June.

Room service, please send up six units of moon.

In solitude waking and dreaming are more easily one

As is impossible with others, unless you happen

to be in love or on the phone with the moon.

It isn't the moon I'm after:

what will not transform is the will to transform.

It isn't the moon I'm after:

rolling a carriage through hutongs in the rain.

It isn't the moon I'm after:

wild dogs, gypsies, desperate men

Camping out in the ruins of Byzantium's walls.

Inside the mosque I think about moons.

Low slung chandeliers and bowed believers

populate the interior of the moon room eclipsed.

Scatter moon dust over the menhir

if you can find moon dust and menhirs.

It isn't the moon I'm after,

its a peal of thunder and a rain of pearls

It isn't the moon I'm after,

its a great imam whose eyes ban idiocy

It isn't the moon I'm after,

its the ghost of a wolf haunting the Luberon

It isn't the moon I'm after,

its those wild dogs tearing up a crescent flag

It isn't the moon I'm after,

its the moon I'm after

Its the wound in the moon, the woo

in the moon, that womb in the moon

The screw in the moon, the spitting cobra

in the closet, the V imprint on the spitting cobra

It's the moon I'm after,

It's the moon I'm after, etc.

  As You Run Up The Stairs 

“I seized it and opened it, and in silence I read the first passage on which my eyes fell." —St. Augustine, The Confessions.                               

Story of a garden:                                          

in the middle of the story,

an account of the will.

Mysterious process: twisting

and turning in bronze-silver chains.                                                                                                                                ideality leaps in the hands.

Golden reproaches, opening a book,

where the random eye falls.

The shaping of thought a difficult work,

never completed, or never begun.

Searching in thought for what you were thinking:

whirling to look when nothing is there.

Flesh, color, speech:

these exist by the rivalry

amongst little phrases.

The struggle to conceive,               

sounds that palpitate and style the possible:

distant horizons that complicate a ghetto

in a grove, in the shadow of a city

that goes on writing.

Enclosing circles:

 it pained and they gave me something to

quell the pain.

Searching in books for what's to be said:

whirling in thought as you run up the stairs.

The space of the mind in constant retreat from space,

the voices we hear,

no longer coming from things.

A glance at the floor:

no rational argument can ever succeed

in calming such doubts. Yet no one                                                                     

can wield these words, without adding

phantasms to the real. The language supports the facsimile,

ideality leaps in the hands.

Searching in thought for a way to get out:

it pained and they gave me something

to quell the pain.

Enclosing circles: twisting

and turning in bronze-silver chains.

Whirling to leave when no way is there.

Ecstatic Persistence

Continuous revelation of,

no subject but light.

Too, tied to the stake

     of foundational doubt.

Steam off rocks of this perception.

And snow monkeys. On their thrones.

Of stone. In the steam. Illuminated.

Action taken equals miracle.

Burning stake.

Or a world away:

a lament in tones so sweet the tones

permeate

This composition,

this drinking

establishment -

  no, never the establishment -

 (we seek to inhabit

what cannot be inhabited)

Yet the eye emerges whole.

Outside in that world

The voice dances as through trees

and who moves is like the bird

Deigning to primogeniture

knowing dark bloods and eye-buds

A snow monkey giving birth in snow

a splash of red, perception fired

Where they eat the golden apples

and never get old and so forth

Figures on a stage

that lead miniature lives, zoo creatures

in the action of language

Wildness withheld, hope to uncover

The being outside the bars

at labor in the steam off those waters.

   Would ask the music for help.

Would listen till I was out of my head

only they'd rightly say

          escapist.

So when the song

      is sealed,

let variously dispersed elves

Congregate

Let the ale in a glass, amber in color,

be drunk

And be replaced with ale, equally amber

Equally amber

Until the snow monkey

until the snow monkey

until the snow monkey.