DESCANT
La musique savante manque à notre désir.



1.

her sum each mute blue scape welcomes
isocracy weathers its id for the nonce
eroded omens of the upraised surface
adrift in the age's othering

2.

stat conk is no-win kin to prove
the to be too avers or errs
as what once rove to grammar's tap
root's dower divvied did endow

3.

eyes' ire augured in added hours
a tantrum's trope avulsed
the trumped shill gloms a reet demean
or semblance of nought in vacuo

4.

loci hitched to hectic metal
chords course nerve-borne the finite rush
to table time to ear to ink out earth
its pastness a last vast dig

5.

backlit dust of unencumbered stars
fractional annals of aeolian laminate
subsided currents tumuli moraine
and the unadulterated race of children

6.

censured a nubile graph outwits
the veil of wickered axes
a disputation of thralled staves
tessera's looted troth

7.

white clay fretted to blue changes
faith too flawed to hold love in it
at plinth of noon an agon's ambit
antiquity's ageless weather

8.

cold steel tokes the god of rust
mud bone and jade the unchained glacier
depth incumbent on actual years
some greet others count or hide in

9.

the word stem spirals clockwise from
its rubric a constancy of tombed roots
whence the entropic crystal of art
whose cleavage is its requiem

10.

minims limn the simplest intangibles
the pure word glosses the fulgent blade
posthumous memoirs the isms be damned
that sparkle in your eyes is gone

11.

breath equivocates where once it praised
ancestors grown remote as lore
grammarians leashed to lamp the score
by periplum tongue to boot

12.

rules of thumb reap moot stumps
wrath's ordnance mimes its flaws
so that the ruined sanctuary gains
the labor of a thousand gods

13.

the ogive offset occults odd lots
hindsight's slash and burn
at terminal velocity the twig of fate
whose lauds a wry child learns

14.

complicit night gone wild for wastage
venture foliage adorns the lily
mated and abated the physics of denial
in a weave of works and wonder

15.

bared to the windrow's chronic rune
whose tune exaction dared oppose
not word one in its singular violence
says granite conquers the compassed rose

16.

standing waves redact the light
less world than loci an ardor compounds
to each its shade or living shard
the incremental alms of disregard

17.

conjuration's bride derides
what ill wind ciphers as licensed heaven
elided illogic of narcissus paired
alien gaze and pulse

18.

anatomies crave their demon phases
all zones yoked to rote thighs
not that it lasts uncommon child
unasking and unaxed

19.

scattered sightings on the littoral
migratory qualms unlettered bacchanal
that nary a debriefed devil dare defile
this diaspora of sun-seared nerves

20.

canticles court the troposphere

subtending mass to mutant fear
whose graphic bits abrade the font
of rime's consoling matrix

21.

epic intervals filter quicks
in situ fill a flogged fool's air
breasting fire to clear what cause
unsanctioned hungers there

22.

vexed by affinity second sight
concedes the law divines the circle
deems the eristic hiss of logs
a discourse sans parole

23.

twilight's garden enjoined is ever
apt to resurrect the literal void
homing through the bluest hour
its ancient template to embrace

24.

the many cleave to the what of one
quiet for an ocean still for an air
this conjugal blossom these sceptered radii
whose meridian senses gloried in


© 1989 Ted Pearson