Was I already inhabited by the lyric
demon that exalts and transfigures
everything…
Gabriele D’Annunzio “Notturno”
1.
Cleansed, the piety of the sweet
strains, the pleasures, lullings
& relishes of it, no ecumenical kinases,
genteel but pabulum that would pervade
the sacrilegious, speckled maxims
dolorous & moldy, all the celestial
sirens streaming along the orb’s
concentric whorls a reconcilable comfort
2.
& it is this that instigates: Demon?
Satan, Moloch, Belial, Mammon
even Beelzebub all in winged
ethereal ascend or perhaps the Angels
in their strict sentries and stations thick
watching, disentangling the entrapments
dispersing & irradiating all the palpable
yet obscure abstinences & misty restraints.
——————–
These poems from a sequence entitled “The Kingston Abstracts”