Dar Bonda
Poems by Dar Bonda
The Captives
L’amor mi prende e la beltà mi lega.
Michelangelo, Sonnet 41
i
The clouds at Enryaku-ji
Drift across a rose-washed sky.
All eyes are on the Master now,
Who sits alone, and sighs --
“For fifty years I’ve purged my soul
Of Katsu-ai that binds
Us firmly to an endless wheel,
Since men so bound are blind.
Fifty years of prayer and toil,
But no one is more bound than I,
Because I am so haunted by
The beauty of the rose-washed sky.”
ii
Where spiral golden galaxies,
The Maker from His zenith sees
The septic filth of man’s dominion,
And furiously declares that in one
Instant, Time and Space must go
Down a swift vortex to Nihilo.
The seraphim cry out, amazed!
He rises to unleash; His gaze
Falls on curtains of starlight
Shimmering in the felt-black night,
And then beyond, to where wind blows
The clouds through heavens streaked with rose.
A pause … the Maker hesitates …
As on a razor’s edge, He waits,
So rapt is He, so haunted by
The beauty of the rose-washed sky.
n.b. The first stanza is based on an anecdote from the 14th century Essays in Idleness by Kenkō Yoshida. Enryaku-ji is a Buddhist monastery and Katsu-ai is the worldly desire that hinders enlightenment.
The Burrowers
an actuary dreams of the Caribbean
Is it shocking that we long for a bending palm,
a delirium of sunshine, a sweet silence,
an expansiveness of heart, and the body's calm?
Look at how our days are spent: each one intense
to burrow into a narrow cosmos, to be
underneath. We are not creatures born to hives
of honey, nor have we the ant's redundancy:
we are the burrowers, and our little lives
are molded to the contours of a cul-de-sac,
chosen, one among many, for its speeding spark
and dazzle of light within the burrow's black.
We've lost human speech for a jargon of the dark.
But since the work is expedient, we need not feel
hunger; since the burrows are many, we need not feel
shame; since the games are intricate, we need not feel
ennui; since multitudes are there, we need not feel
solitude. Yet at times within that sparkling grave,
in our rushing and desperate prudence, we might
dream (our bodies bent by the strictures of the cave
and its walls, our eyes squinting in the filtered light)
dream of the health-giving sun and the sun-bright sea,
of nearby heavy blossoms humming with the drone
of honeybees, and long with all our blood to be
there: idle, starved, guilt-ridden, and alone.
Three Epigrams about Epigrams
i
Things grow stronger by being distilled:
Ten million heartbeats reduce in time
To one million stirrings, four thousand wishes,
Two hundred passions, ten words, one rhyme.
ii
During an oppressive storm,
A sudden thread of fire connects
Writhing cloud and passive earth
And after sudden contact, speech.
iii
To catch the wheeling constellations
Your canvas need not span the moon;
In small things great things may be captured
As on the convex of a spoon.
Bioluminescence
The canopy on southern summer nights
Looms: a silhouette on indigo
That sparkles with unnumbered flashing lights
As fireflies hover in the stillness there.
The world itself can seem a looming darkness
Until a flash: as when a poet finds
The image and the phrase that names his joy
And fixes it inside a crystal sphere
And thereby brings the unseen world in view.
A seeker with a flash of insight solves
A dozen tangled riddles in one stroke;
A doer, hemmed in with inertial mire,
Within a flash, detects a path through chaos;
Two lovers struggle past their foolishness,
Their deeply held, conflicting vanities,
And in a torrent of desire, strip bare
To seek their flash of joy, and then again.
I wonder: when angelic eyes look out
And view our world across vast distances:
What do they see? The microscopic swarm
Of particles in ceaseless agitation?
Cascades of UV, infrared, X-ray?
No, seraphic retinas are tuned
To frequencies of joy, and when they glance
At our dark globe revolving in dark space
And peopled by eight billion souls, they see
The pinpoint flashing lights upon its face
That sparkle endlessly -- an eerie sight
Like the canopy on a summer night.
The Hour of Speed
The thunder you are hearing is the horsemen,
The unbalanced horsemen on their endless run,
Not solid or completed men, but phantoms
Whose hunger is a vacuum that draws them on.
Their stallions' measured gait is sweetness itself
To all who carry a completed soul;
But those whose strength of heart dissolves beneath
Intensity of love let the rein's control
Slacken, and gallop an exhausting course,
No longer masters but mastered. Though the race
Must end in utter wreck, a headlong pitch
To darkness, when it matches such a pace,
Each knows his end and yet is ravished by speed.
And if some hand were found that could allay
The unbound frenzy of a bolting horse,
The rider would yet dream his life away
Longing for longing, dreaming of the hour
Of speed: the blur of hillsides, houses, streets,
Always the bright wind rushing through his hair,
Always the drumming of the hooves like heartbeats.
A Memory
You brought a sudden silence to the room
As you glided down the bridal stair.
The whole dark world, its agony of wars,
Melted in the halo of your hair,
The sweetness of your glance. And meanwhile I,
Confused and humbled by the majesty
Of love, struggled through the bridegroom's part
With the ecstasy of a brimming heart.
Surfeit
(after reading Awakenings, by Oliver Sachs)
Imagine how the earliest tint of dawn
Enraptures the poor patient in his bed,
His eyes a long while bandaged from the sun,
Or how, at last, a sip from the pond's brim
Shudders through the deepest soul of one
Half dead from wandering an expanse of sand.
Imagine too a slave for decades kept
In shackles, and his first unfettered step,
Or else the faint, faint notes of distant song
To one immersed in silence for as long.
Oh think then how this radiance of sun,
This banquet and these endless rounds of wine,
This symphony, this wild release and run,
Have made me reel a delirious incline
When blindness, drought, and shackles all were mine.
My Lover, Compared to a Tree
The skin of my love is smooth, while bark
is fibrous, furrowed, dry, and dark.
The lace of lichen never grows
over her shoulders, hips, or toes.
No wood-borers or mites infest
her arms, or deign to build a nest.
No sapsuckers or woodpeckers shin
up and down her slender limb.
No mosses fur her northern side;
No pigeons in her hair reside.
You might even conclude that she
bears scant resemblance to a tree.
And yet, when the tree’s lover, Wind,
wraps her in a caress, and when
her branches all stir gracefully
and leaves all tremble with delight,
then sunbeams touch each leaf with light
until she seems to glow from within,
and seems to wear, as Wind mounts higher,
a corona of incipient fire!
So too my love, for sometimes she
is lit by arboreal ecstasy.
Scuba
A giant stride, a splash, and down you go,
Plunging through the skin of the sea to where
There moves a viscous world more cold, more slow
Than known to those who dwell in any air.
You flutter-kick, with buoyancy made right
So that you glide, weightless as in dreams,
Through curious gardens lit by shafts of light
That shift as shifting waves refract the beams.
Sea fans and sea whips sway in synchrony;
Fish dart and flash against a backlit blue;
Cliffs and canyons on each side fall away
Encrusted over with corals of every hue.
Feather duster worms that mimic flowers
Zip back into their stems at any touch;
See-through moon jellies drift through listless hours;
Pufferfish balloon as you approach.
The beasts here either have no arms or many,
As brittle star and octopus attest,
And Nature’s mad profusion is uncanny:
The world is far, far stranger than you guessed.
When the sun sets, and all the blues go gray,
And eels slip back through gloom – into the flood
There glide the nightmare forms that savage prey,
Leaving only moonlit blooms of blood.
Do sailors, balancing on pitching decks,
And tossed by all the waves that surge and roll
High above this scene, ever suspect
What strange dramas swirl beneath their soles?
As dreamers and geographers should know:
Two-thirds of the world abides below.
The Peril of Heaven
One will suffer; one will drop
lifeless to the ground;
one will root the garden up.
Only one is found
worthy of that holy place
of four that voyage to Pardes.
In umbral dark, the Mikdash fell
amid a roar of rumbling stone.
So four great scholars left their scroll
and, restive that mere blood and bone
could anchor an aspiring soul
so far from heaven’s light,
invoked the Name, night after night.
The One who heard their prayers allowed
them each to see while living still,
before their bodies, wound in shroud,
were stowed beneath a lonely hill,
the beauty all hearts crave,
but few will find outside the grave.
Perfect beauty can ignite
a boundless love, and when the first
fixed his gaze upon that sight,
suddenly his weak heart burst
as when a surge explodes
through floodwalls fissured by their load.
The next, unbalanced by the light,
would speak to humankind no more,
but fled familiar touch and sight
to sing mad songs on a desolate shore,
wandering, a slave
to the wild, careening, unfounded wave.
The third survived the vision, then
held neither God nor man in awe;
He spread destruction through the land
by spurning custom and the law
as merely human art,
forgetting his merely human heart.
But when at last upon the plain
of Pardes great Akiva stood,
no weakness, fever of the brain,
or pride disturbed his placid mood.
He wore the Crown of Light, but then
returned to the world again,
carrying a redemptive spark
to flare a torch in the umbral dark.
One will suffer; one will drop
lifeless to the ground;
one will root the garden up;
only one is found
worthy of that holy place
of four that voyage to Pardes.
n.b. Based on the talmudic legend of four rabbis who were allowed to visit Pardes, or paradise (literally, orchard), of which Rabbi Akiva was the most famous. The Mikdash was the Jewish temple destroyed by the Romans. The Name is the ineffable name of God. Umbral dark is the darkness of a total eclipse.