Pegasus Dream

A wild Pegasus grazes

next to Star B Stables in Virginia,

ready to spread his lacy wings

and rise above the weepy clouds.

But the preverbal horse

relies on the words of a fickle poet

to make him fly.

If only there were just a Pegasus problem,

an idle poet could solve it.

If only there was just one lie,

a word could make it right —

to awake the dreamer,

to raise the dead.

The brilliance of words brings confusion —

they were mighty, now they are useless.

A peek at a stranger’s grocery list

tells me more than a hundred poems.

Pegasus glimpses the leafy forest,

the steep road to a grassy field,

lusts after the weepy clouds.

But the pathetic horse cannot wing his way

without the words of the fickle poet.

On the wooden porch stands

an abandoned broken rocker.

Pegasus and poet left

to wring out a few more lines

from memories of the leafy forest,

the steep road to a grassy field,

the weepy clouds.

The sunken, colorless eyes of Pegasus —

the defeat sprang from euphoria.

© Helen Kanevsky, 2017

Four Muses and Pegasus on Parnassus
Painting by Caesar van Everdingen, c. 1650
The Hague, The Netherlands
from Wikimedia Commons

TUNIS—BARDO MUSEUM—2015

To become powerful in this world

You must learn to destroy joy,

Destroy the Muse, destroy souls.

You must spray videos of your pride

In the decorum of torture, the ritual of righteous murder.

Your failure to be human

Becomes Absolute Law—unappealable.

You establish the tyranny of arid illusion,

Lovelessness, the faultless Priesthood of Death.

Each person is a Museum

Where memory is a masterpiece,

Where our secret Muse is guarded,

Past and present one vivific delight.

Yet our yearning is art.

Each Museum is therefore a person

Where Joy is studied by lovestruck scholars,

Where art is heart, breathtakingly displayed.

High sadness is here, part of our soul.

So the museum is an immortal Garden

That soars on our bliss into the future.

Here, the shapes of our hope are valid.

We see, and our mind caresses our sorrow and goodness.

Museums are therefore a garden

That must be sprayed with death

By righteously insane gardeners.

Hectic soul-flowers must be poisoned,

The muses disintegrated in ecstasies of hate.

For the failure to be human

To become absolute law, Awe must be identical to murder.

Innocence is declared guilty.

Art, identity, soul can’t exist—museums can’t exist.

The flying garden must be forgotten.

The people in the Museum are guilty

Because they are people.

But the Universe is a museum, a garden

They can’t destroy,

Where the startling stars are displayed

Like flowers, like souls,

Like the art of blessed yearning.

This Garden is guarded, this House of the Muse,

Somewhere almost forever.

The Shape of our names

Somehow, there will be safely luminous.

Yearning will also be solace, home.

© Stephen Margulies, 2015

Garden in Nogueira da Silva Museum, in Braga, Portugal
Photo by Jose Olgon
from Wikimedia Commons

How to Draw an Elephant: A Chestertonian Inspiration

Your muse has sung in siren tongue 

A beguiling incantation.

Your inspired mind no shackle can bind, 

No qualm deter its vocation.

Artistry pent, pause you resent;

All scruple you christen defeat. 

Your aim, I see: originality

Suffers no orthodox conceit.

Promptly then, your opus begin, 

Unleash that rapacious vision. 

With each stroke defy, make each shape deny 

The tyranny of convention.

Prepare your page, your pen engage,

Your subject (let me now confirm)

Is that splendid beast, that atheistic feast, 

The tusked and truckèd pachyderm.

Stylus grip, press its inky tip

To field of pale obscurity.  

Why stand dismayed? Dare you invade

Its utopian purity?

No pretense is artistic sense

That reveres an unsullied space.

But reluctance to its neutrality hew

Conflates passivity with grace.

Yield not to fear, sketch first an ear

With a broad, elephantine curve.

Now neatly impose a prehensile nose

By a dexterous manual swerve.

How you protest! Do I suggest

So insipid a rendering?

Can I advise such a trite exercise

In artistic surrendering?

Drolly antique—hardly unique—

Is the hackneyed, serpentine snout.

I sense your distress, how can you express

Yourself by so public a route? 

Art must be bold (or so I’m told),

So cowering custom displace.

Why not a square, or else nothing but air

To hang from his singular face?  

Next his leg—your pardon I beg, 

You find its girth too confining?

Then cinch it a bit, or freely submit 

To less inspired designing.

Onward we tack to his broad back;

His bulk let us immortalise.

Never! Cry you, every feeling eschews

The banality of an elephant’s size.

Your pen strays near his unshaped rear

Tracing a concise, playful trail.

How dogmatic, how undemocratic— 

But how sublimely like a tail.

Why do you cringe? Does it impinge

On your avant-garde proclivity

That a form so concrete should now complete

Your surge of creativity?

Bar then, rules of outmoded schools

From your audacious abstraction.

But if I may be plain, while they restrain,

They merit no blithe rejection. 

Though indeed, your subject you’ve freed

From the rigid form that bound him,

In that cage he was free simply to be

An elephant, as you found him.

Corporally shrunk, loosed of his truck.

Can you him an elephant name?

The freedom you prize in willingness lies 

To be restricted by a frame.

Pure license no insight attends, 

But like that fool’s tale does it ring

With the full fury of blind anarchy:

A scene that signifies nothing.

Heed then, friend, lest your daring rend

Image from imagination.

Rejoice that each line from all else defines; 

For true art is limitation.

© Elise Matich, 2012

Grey Elephant; drawing by Luigi Bairo, from Wikimedia Commons