Poems for Dylan Thomas

DOWNDRAFT 
 
for Dylan Thomas
 
We feel rather than understand what he meant
as he reveals a shattered firmament
which before him never existed.
 
Here, there are no images gnarled and twisted
out of too many words,
but only flocks of white birds
 
wheeling and flying.
 
Here, as the sun spins, reeling and dying,
the voice of a last gull
or perhaps some spirit no longer whole,
 
echoes its lonely madrigal
and we feel its strange pull
on the astonished soul.
 
O My Prodigal!
 
The vents of the sky, ripped asunder,
echo this wild, primal thunder—
now dying into undulations of vanishing wings . . .
 
and this voice which in haggard bleak rapture still somehow downward sings.
 
ELEMENTAL 
 
for and after Dylan Thomas
 
The poet delves earth’s detritus—hard toil—
for raw-edged nouns, barbed verbs, vowels’ lush bouquet;
each syllable his pen excretes—dense soil,
dark images impacted, rooted clay.
 
The poet sees the sea but feels its meaning—
the teeming brine, the mirrored oval flame
that leashes and excites its turgid surface ...
then squanders years imagining love’s the same.
 
Belatedly, he turns to what lies broken—
the scarred and furrowed plot he fiercely sifts,
among death’s sicksweet dungs and composts seeking
one element that scorches and uplifts.