BEAUTIFUL DIANA

You could make yourself cry about anything, I guess,
The more that time and circumstance progress—
I mean myself, not you.
Still, why should I be sad tonight?
These thirty years later,
I’m sure you would be vividly alive
If only, Death be damned, you were alive
And not the dead who failed to navigate
That icy northern street, Diana, where you bled
And we didn’t know to cry. It’s so long ago.

You were my high-school girlfriend’s best friend since youth
And later her giddy college roommate—
Just two more headlong girls their first fast year away from home.
You looked straight through me when I advised you all
To close your bedroom blinds, even on the second floor,
When you undressed at night.
“No one below can see!” you laughed, squinting out at me through
Granny glasses that almost hid your wild unwary eyes.

No one took my advice back then and not much more
Of it in all the time and distance traveled since.
I dated you once, a silly date where nothing happened
Except in me: a tight-wound soaring and a sigh
That made no outward mark or sound—
We never even kissed.
Later, my girlfriend—your girlfriend!—made up with me and it
Was then a great relief all round, that unaccomplished kiss!

We were friends after that—not the best of friends, perhaps,
But now and then, far and near, still friends.
Once, when I took some psychedelic drug, I thought
You were a witch or at least that you looked the part!
I didn’t mean to let it show, but still I was unnerved.
“We all have some form of discomfort with reality,”
My girlfriend Jeanne consoled (and passed another funny cigarette),
"For whether we get High or Low, it peeks back in at us!”


Once when I hadn’t seen you for six months or so
And I arrived full-force in my new long-haired guise
Of hungry, proud, and poor,
You served a generous supper and shook with laughter till midnight,
Especially when you’d found I’d taken up
That silly sixties hippie habit
Of blurting out, “Far out!”
Multiple times in a single conversation.

Perhaps because I said it with my familiar tone of flippancy,
You chose to find my idiocy delightful to the Nth degree
And your fresh freckled face—those contradictory features,
A schoolgirl’s upturned nose, an old-maid teacher’s pursed-up mouth—
Became as vivid as your long red hair!
At last you had to take your glasses off to wipe your eyes
And I thought, just in that moment, I’d never seen before
A woman wearing or needing so little makeup.
It was such Beauty!

But that moment, like the others, soon was lost.
Such beauty passed, yet I survived
To be this wretched, bowed, and crooked self.
Time now makes all these views of you seem true at once—
Except your death.
Can there be no relief at all for those of us not yet released?
Jeanne said she waited for that spectral visit
You promised each other in seventh grade, but the messages
That came to her only came in dreams and to me not at all…
Why is there not some way to recall You instead of memory?
Christ, how I’d love to see you vivid once again!

I was sick of you when you died, hating you almost
For dating that Delaware con-man
Who spoke such manly gibberish.
Was that Engineering-Speak or Business Ghoul
Or just plain Northern Geek?
It’s funny that I don’t remember any more than that,
That his was not the language of Romance that you deserved.


Poor old Romance! It’s suffered so
These thirty years run by
With nothing left now I adore.
It’s disappeared into thin air
Like some bad joke,
Like all those coffin nails and joints we smoked,
Like my old youthful certainties,
Like these new tears for you will do…

You deserved better than this weakness you would have found in me,
But better too than that insensate educated fool you wed,
And certainly better than this hard-closed door
That you stepped through too soon,
That even I at last deplored…
That closure’s lasted now so long that I’ve been ashamed of my anger
Longer than I was angry, longer than I loved you—
God, longer now than you were alive!

Now that’s a knot in time
(Or is it in my stomach or in my head?)
I may never manage to untie.
But why should I be sad tonight?
All Time’s the same to you, dear ghost; it’s always kind—

But just as Jeanne and Adam’s now-grown children
Or my gray-peppered beard give proof I’m growing old,
So your remembered youth and beauty make me feel vain and false tonight,
Here where my moment’s joy and love and beauty have long been lost.


rcs.

9th draft: 11/18/07
©2000 Ronald C. Southern

---

The Rueful Heart

You can grope all night for the one true rose
or swoon alone for free without embrace—
what moves the heart to heartbreak
will always make the petals close.

You can flee, you can hide between the beats of heartbeat,
you can turn bright eyes aside from love's dark fate—
but what can move the rueful heart
When you neither love nor hate?

Who can you trust, which way turn, when
dreams like dizzy rockets cross and crash,
flinging you down to earth so stark
amid a churn of char and spark?

(What turned lightning's stroke
to pale blue smoke at dusk
may yet turn love to dust
that blows away and leaves an empty husk.)

Here now you see how rivers
running fast and slow divert and dry.
Hear now these lovers running down cry "Time!"
when shadows veined with red run wild and stain the eye.
What For, they cry, this flash
and spark and manly flutter?
For What this smooth and supple
marbled flesh of womankind?

The old, the young: embrace, disclose;
desire the flesh, the flame, the rose;
Your dreams, your flesh: aspire, perspire—
but every year it takes more pain to reach the fire.

What then? What's wrong? If time
that held your heart enthralled so long
holds no hope but this at last,
this vexing gall at all that's past,

if waste that chewed itself to numbness
lives but to taste this morbid tongue again,
if haste that chased it's tail to madness
now flings and flays and flails itself again,

then hearts that rue such motion
Here now must still these throes.
Now lovers running down cry, "Time!"
Which only makes the petals close.


rcs.

4th draft: 12/06/03
©1986 Ronald C. Southern

Mary's Child

There must have been
Some days when she forgot,
When the child was only a child—
Not that epiphanal flash sprung forth
Like an arrow from the bow of God,
But only a plodding child
With an affinity for dirt.

She must have stood
Some days in the doorway
Concerned with his mortal hurts,
Watching with a mother's eye
As his naked feet went pounding,
Sounding with a child's quick beat,
Through hard and narrow earthbound streets.

There must have been
Those days when she forgot,
But soon she would remember
And know it every day
That each passing day he became
More and more like an arrow
Returning to the heart of God.

rcs.

4th draft: 08/12/01
©1980 Ronald C. Southern

I Might Like

"I might like all of my lovers to come back for a visit,
I've always thought that would be a lot of fun.
Still, I might be mistaken--I sure wouldn't
Want them all to get together for a chat."

rcs.
2nd draft: 04/08/07
©2005 Ronald C. Southern

Ardebil 1828

"They've got a fine library in Ardebil, I am told,"
Grinned the portly Russian prince, taking another pinch of snuff.
He was sitting slouched and florid
In his silver-handled carriage outside the city walls.

"There's swarthy throats to cut in there,"
He said gruffly, studying his well-groomed fingernails,
"And bright gold coins to liberate from greasy hands
And swarms of pear-shaped Persian virgins you can spear!"

"They've got everything it takes to satisfy our needs!"
Smirked his officers, nodding their agreement.
"There's plenty for the kind of man who risks his life
For blood and bloody gold and bleeding frizzy-headed foreign sluts
Plus bounty for the kind old men who let us die for what they want.
We're glad to rape and loot, but they can shove those foreign books!"

"If all goes well, which so far it has not, my murdered child,"
Wept a poet of Iran at his daughter's muddy unmarked grave,
"Maybe those learned books they stole will make them wise at last
Or else they'll hesitate, perhaps be reaching up for one when
The next band of armored monkeys fling down feces from the trees!
Then all those sorry Russian throats and nuts will be uncouthly cut!"

"That's what we have to look forward to,"
Sighed the crimson-faced historian
As he closed the green morocco book.
"Someone always yearns to kill you just to prove
That he can be more civilized than you!"

"When the final monkey gets here, Father,"
Gaily mocked the surly scholar's open-hearted daughter,
"And if he doesn't wipe out the whole wide universe at once,
Will we then have peace at last?
And will we send back all these books?"

rcs.

Current draft: 03/20/07
©2000 Ronald C. Southern

Albatross

“You do not suffer close enough,” is what the distant voices said,
“and all your talk of this and more is becoming less and less.
Self-centered though we are at heart, survivors of war and peace,
small shrewdness is required to know the next victim of the feast.

“If you were here or we were there,
your suffering would impact us more, of course,
but that is neither here nor there.
You live at distances both real and surreal--willfully
disconnected, disastrously alone, tragically but safely apart.

“You must, we fear, suffer more or less as we do
or as others who are near and nearer to our hearts.
Justice demands that recognition, yes, but little more,
and less and less of that as these frayed threads
of time and separation gather toward an end.
That some break and others bend seems to surprise you even yet.

“So is that sad? Oh, yes, what else?
We sit in carefully bordered rooms each evening,
pining for what is lost in you and in ourselves,
pitying our surrender to surfeit or starvation,
nestled in exclusive harbors, where some ships leave and some arrive,
in sporadic dread of who goes next. No one wins, but some survive.

“We know you do not suffer gladly
the fools we are and must be to succeed,
but that's the levy, old mariner, of failures of your own,
divergent from ours, not worse perhaps, but dour freight,
resembling more an anchor than anything that floats.

“And you, at your safe distance,
press clamorously a slow cold measure of protest
against the hammer's heated claims upon your heart,
that pulsation of anger, compulsion, and frustration,
a churning churlish stain which makes uncertain
whether you or those you buffet will be next.



“You are one of us still, we know, but what we know
to love in you seems always masked behind that manic stance.
Your decades-long dance of desperation, old mariner,
by now elicits small panic in these ageing wedding guests.

“And is that sad? Well, yes, close enough, but still
you must desist this remorseless clanging in our ears.
We feel as much, if not the same, as you,
marking boundaries as you do, pursuant to our pain.”

rcs.
4th draft: 08/09/01
©1995 Ronald C. Southern

---

Texas Crude (Fischer's Tune)

He went away on a ship a long time ago,
Slipping away quietly out of the noisy harbor,
Sailing with regrets-to-come and no-fanfare
Out of the inland port.

The city behind him disappeared in haze
As the ship moved slowly through the channel to the sea,
And the last things that he saw, perhaps were the tall black
Towers and the storage tanks choked with Texas crude.

We said goodbye,
We said farewell,
And being young we could not know
The changeful nature of all we felt and said.

He sailed back home to Germany
And for a while we wrote, exchanging views
Of Zappa, Beatles, books, and style.
But soon we ceased; we were young, and cold, and true,
And never knew the changeful nature of such views.

"Well, damn him," I thought,
"If he can't write back!"
And at the other end?
Who knows,
Perhaps he thought the same?

He went away on a ship,
Sailing home to a life of his own,
And nature took her own course
And kept us well apart.

I left home shortly after,
In search of a life of my own;
Ten years' time took me everywhere
That I could think to go,
Then brought me here—back home again—
Where, like some better poet said, I finally had to go.

So here I am in port again near the channel to the sea,
And I sometimes see a ship sail past the towers
And the tanks, and I wonder what it's like to see
The last, the very last, of all this Texas crude.

rcs.

5th draft: 02/14/07
©1980 Ronald C. Southern

For David, Who Died By Drowning

(Dead 30 Years Now)

Who goes down for the first time
Goes down with you in mind;
Each is responsible for each,
The links between us
Destroy, create, and teach.

Who goes down in water
Comes back,
Comes back on mourning's tide;
What ties the dream to earth
Is life and death and joy and birth.

Who goes down for the third time
Comes back as spark, as flame.
Now he who comes to mind
Needs no more a name; his name
(Be given or taken), his name is vain.

We come to term as flesh,
We come to term and wait;
Not one, not some, but all: all die.
And we who have not fallen
Can but remember, weep, remember...

rcs.

4th draft: 05/07/05
©1977 Ronald C. Southern

---

Like Antigone

---

Like Antigone, I have been buried here alive,
perhaps for the same kind of dismal daunting reasons
(those bounden days-of-evil blinding reasons),
except of course I found I had
no brother to bury or to kill
or to glorify or be killed by,

but wrestled with myself alone as if I were perchance
my own Polynices or Eteocles1
in some sordid fratricidal jest
or jeering ingrown deadly-soft incest.
Such dreamt excess is not quite death, I know,
except that the extremes imposed require
so much of me that nothing else gets done.

I've done my absurd best so far, that's certain,
in leering violation of my itching awkward self,
veering wildly like some wayward waylaid ship
encircling while at anchor who-the-hell-knows-what,
but surely nothing more in sum than clumsy circles,
a scratch at night performed by four bored fingers and a thumb.

I have been buried long and deep,
gone numb as if asleep inside this winding fate,
like Daddy's Girl interred in earth and pride and hate,
and have not seen the light of day this clear and fine
in waking dreams or years of nights—see how it plays and shines!
How dare I feel it might unbind these rigid lines of destiny, and yet
How dare I not? I can but look and see it Gone, and yet I dream
I could find my way above and seize wild-hearted chance again!

rcs.

10th draft: 11/18/07
©2000 Ronald C. Southern

[Notes: Polynices and Eteocles, sons of Oedipus, killed each other in battle. Eteocles had broken their agreement about governing Thebes alternately. Their sister Antigone defied her uncle Creon and performed the funeral rites for Polynices. Creon then buried her alive in the family tomb, where she hung herself.]

---

A Woman Leaned Over My Corpse

---

A woman leaned over my corpse
While it was blinking back the tears
And she pointed her knife at that disease
And strutted her stuff without making a move
And blood went everywhere.

She sang an artful lied and sorted out with ease
Every shortcoming and every sordid part of me
While time and the light of day ran wild through my muted veins
And the girl in me was piqued and those seductive hips began to move
And everything began to leak...


rcs.

4th draft: 11/19/03
©2003 Ronald C. Southern

---

Nurse Corday

---

At the costume ball
A well-constructed Frenchman dressed for his bath
Was feeling fey and very down at heart.
When he saw a lady come in with a confident air and a nice round pair,
He felt himself stirring the water and sank toward the drain with a sigh.

When he asked for her name and she replied
That she answered to "Nurse Corday",
He knew that she'd come to alleviate his pain
And said he might do a double back flip in the nude
Or kiss her, using plenty of tongue.

"You'd better not do either!" Charlotte said,
"'Cause I'll cut off whatever you got!"
He'd been pressing himself crudely against her
As any wet Frenchman might do when a lady's almost in his bath, but now
He backpedaled fast and covered himself and thought about the guillotine.

He assured her that he liked her very much,
And that he didn't want to be rude,
But he'd always thought she was gay.
Then she stabbed him through the armpit with a fork
And held him there like a brisket while she used a knife on his heart.

rcs.

4th draft: 03/18/04
©Ronald C. Southern

---

In The Dark

---

Now you've traveled along alone so far,
no heartfelt human voice to hear except your own
or else some dim recall caught briefly on the march
where some spoke soft and some with starch,
forestalling for a time this dogged trouble with your heart.

The cops, the doctors, must have known or sensed
some awful bloody offness in the memories you've made
of voices that cry behind you in past tense
or whisper faintly from inside—
how must they have despised all that your speech must hide!

You speak to no one in the end,
hearing women's voices weakly in your head
that used to spark the hardness even of your self-brazed heart.
You've traveled alone a long time now and far,
no semblance of a voice beside you in the dark,
unless you count the chaos, and the chaos seldom counts.

Count the stars instead, so far away, apart,
and what a long way now would it not go
toward being home at last
if only someone in the dark had said—but what? Said what?
Time is so far along and all except your art is at heart's end
at last, where all that human voices ever said is soon forgot.

rcs.

8th draft: 09/27/04
©2001 Ronald C. Southern

---

Dear Emily Dickinson

---

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

---

Was Emily an ugly girl or did she have bad skin?
Was she flat instead of curved? Was she far too slim?
Were there too many splendid belles come out
Those cold New England antebellum years
And she remained—because a little plain?
It makes me sick that tough-sweet spirit had to grope among
Such stiff-necked pious dullards for fifty-six notched years.

Did she fail to learn the dance? Did she make the boys feel dim?
Did she love—just once—too much, then not again—
Or did she always love exactly what she loved—
But in her dreams and books?
Why couldn't she be happy? Why couldn't she be wed?
Why does her photo draw me in as if I think that
Somewhere she's alive and I should hurry up and write
And tell her—I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I wasn't there for you!

Dear Emily, my dear—maybe I'm just sleepy this Monday 2 A.M.
Maybe I've gone crazy that I would weep for you.
You've been dead—though you live here still—
More than a hundred years
And I've only been about half-here for this tired fifty-two.
I'm near the age now when you died and I must say I've felt
That treadmill in my brain, that maelstrom in my dreams,
And wonder which did you—
Did you fail to cling or did you just let go?

rcs.

8th draft: 02/21/03
©2000 Ronald C. Southern

Another photo purported to be Emily.

---

The Old Woman's Estate

---

One shady afternoon not long after she'd passed,
The caretaker tidied up the careless things
That laid about the dusty house.
He felt bereft and curiously breathless, embalmed almost,
In the dry deathless residue that curious spinster sculptress left.

Nothing she'd left behind was his, or could be,
Except his vagrant thoughts,
As he recalled beneath her favorite white oak tree
How like a leaf she'd shake beneath the covers on stormy nights.

Behind the house, he stepped into
The artist's still over-crowded studio—
Inactive now, but still the source of all the dust—and thought,
"Love has a thousand foolish faces in the aftermath of life.
Her life is gone now, yet only life is left.

Of her, there is only her young/old gaze staring out
(From years of photographs, I mean)
Above that sweet and poisoned mouth
That would so seldom laugh—
The stern and somber specter of my soft and secret wife."

current draft: 02/02/07
©2003 Ronald C. Southern

---

Conversation Piece

---

(Saturday Perversions)

There she was again, his new friend whom he barely ever saw,
disheveled but enchanting in shoulder-length gray-golden hair.
She wore that Saturday a crushed-velour green blouse atop a
wrinkled brown-suede mini-skirt she'd owned a bit too long.

On her right shoulder reposed a wide-winged dragonfly-brooch
with Griffin's claws and lovely human female face and breasts—
“A cheap and vulgar replica of an Art Nouveau Lalique!”
she'd laughed lightly earlier that day. He'd shrugged and smiled.
He knew his English Lit; he did not know Lalique.


They'd both been taking far too long to drink a cup of coffee each
in that dim-lit roach-infested faculty lounge downstairs.
Was it the coffee-colored stains and bugs
or the buzz and flicker of fluorescent lights
or his own loud knocking knees and nerves
that finally drove them back to work?

Half-hidden but upright behind her old oak desk that night,
she sat at ease, her bare and bouncy fanning feet
dancing to some happy unheard jazzy beat,
so trim, so leggy, so proud of it, and seeming very pleased!
Was she waiting just for him like that? No, she always sat that way.

She was dawdling in her office in the History Department,
looking pleased as any well-fed gray catbird might look
who'd found a round and rapt canary all aflutter
right there amid her usual shifting clutter—

all her red-inked scattered papers and splayed laid-open books
and bite-marked apple cores. He glanced aside
and took a breath because he felt her mocking eyes
had landed right on him. He sucked his stomach in.

He made a show of spotting something odd or out of place,
then stopped outside her door and, standing on one leg, leaned in.
“You need to clean that cobwebbed cow skull out
with a high-pressure hose!” he grinned, pointing to her
newly-acquired but musty relic of the old wild desert west.
He'd recognized it instantly as the perfect conversation piece.

“Why, do you have one I can use?” she laughed.
“This college campus is full of them,” he told her,
meaning it pragmatically—but hearing how
uproariously she laughed, he saw the joke.


“I need a high-pressure hose, huh?” she smirked.
“I used to have one myself,” he said,
“but I've gotten a little too old for it now.”
(Now why, he winced, did he say that?)

“That's too bad, I guess. But how does one do that?
How does it feel, I mean? Oh, God, I can't believe I asked you that!”
“It's all right,” he shrugged. “All right for you to ask, I mean.
IT hasn't felt quite right for about two years, I guess.”

“Does it hurt?” she asked. Her question sounded serious,
but her face still looked amused.
“Not exactly.”
“What, exactly?”

“Well, it just feels less!” he squirmed. “It takes
a great deal of real and imaginary stimulation,
not to get its attention precisely, but just to feel
some sensation that is precise instead of general!”

“What can you do about it?”
“Suffer. Or go to doctors and let them make me suffer.
“I've been waiting for a woman again, really,
to see if she would also make me suffer.”

“That long?”
He stared at the sightless cow skull and nodded.
“Women always make you suffer,” she kidded gently.
“Yeah, I know. You're doing it now.”
“I don't mean to.”
“Women never do.”

“And men?”
“Men always mean to make women suffer,”
he volunteered. “As far as I've been able to tell.”

“Is that true?” He was surprised to hear her ask.
“They're getting back at their mothers, perhaps.
And, of course, I guess you know men think that it's more
difficult for them to make women suffer than—”

“Really?” she interrupted. He'd never heard her sound so cold.
Her face, he thought, had clouded up as if she now had doubts
concerning not only his moral legitimacy,
but his entire liberal-arts education!
“But only in that purest sense!” he hastily added.

“What sense is that?” she stared. “You've got me losing track.”
He was losing more than that. He wiped his palm across his brow
and wondered why with every passing year every square inch
of his skin except for his high forehead got drier and drier.

“After they're married a while,” he persevered, “men hardly
seem to suffer about women at all; they tune them out, I think.
I meant it in the sense of love-in-bloom, of lovers
who are still new to love and to one another's ways.
I think I mean that men, just barely, but do,
know how stupid they are at this kind of game.
You know, while everyone's still doing all
that nervous parrying and lame ballet?

“Like we do?” she laughed, the light returning to her face.
“Are you trying to make me suffer more?” he beamed back.
“Not at all!” she grinned. That was when he licked his lips.
“I think you'd best be careful, though,” she said,
“about too much fencing and ballet!”

“Like too much horseplay, you think?” he grinned.
“All in good spirits until one day
the balance isn't right
and the play becomes a fight?”

Quietly her leather-covered chair rolled back and swiveled left—
was she showing off her underwire-uplifted breasts
or giving him the softer view of her slightly crooked nose
or was she staring into space or at that damn dead steer again?
Just then, her short brown skirt rode up her legs
and showed their come-here length and shape!

Thus, when her eyes found his again, she fixed and pinned him.
“In this sense,” she said, “the party game that we've begun
now becomes—a what? A love affair? A sex appeal?
A system of rewards and punishments that's fair? Who cares?!”


He looked at her with some distress as if he'd hoped she would.
“I like to think I care,” he sighed.
“You can have a spanking now,” she teased,
“or you can wait and fidget until you're tense enough to ask!”

“I thought—” he'd just begun when, vaguely like a spider, on long
slim legs she rose, went round, and then on silent feet moved in.
“Why don't I close the door?” she rasped.
“There. Now you can turn and face it.
Just close your eyes; don't think about your feelings or that lost
high-pressure hose and we'll just let that unwashed cow skull watch!”

“Let me think about it first!” he stalled.
“Oh, please, don't think!” she cried impatiently
and kicked his heels apart.

“I so often don't know what to do at first,”
he panted with his eyes completely closed,
“but I think you'll find that, given time,
I'm good at making things up!”

“I've noticed that!” she grinned and nibbled at his ear,
“but now you're here, don't talk so much!”
She shrewdly brushed the front of her skirt
against the back of his pants.

She reached around in front of him
while he stood still and stiff
and thought about how the door
was probably still unlocked.

rcs.

12th draft: 08/27/04
©2001 Ronald C. Southern

---