From Poems by Joan Murray (1917-1942)

Ahab the Supermonomaniac

An improvisation



Ahab, the supermonomaniac...

The finite creation leaguing it

Through the torturous underseas of un-God...

Sought all life damned.

Pain chanted imaginings.



Ahab, the strain of the inexplicable,

The man-fathomed bitterness.

We who turn slowly,

Forcing our consciousness to conceive of passivity

In land, in night, in stone...

We, who are rocked to the bottom by our own inability

To dent, to stammer, or to guide, to restrain

The slow annihilation of the coast,

The shift, the imperceptible movement of inanimate

Dissolving all along the line...







Things That Are Sinuous



Things that are sinuous are the rivers of the land--

Women stalking, with the ripple of cats

Along the leg, and movements of the body

In deep eddies, in silk transparencies.



Rivers of the tumbled slopes,

The flatlands to the west,

Tidal rivers, licking and drawing back,

The whole weight of protuberance toward the sea,

Making a salt ridge in the bright flush of the flats.



They are women with bare and subtle feet,

Of brooks, of rills, of mountain lakes,

Of turbulent cascades, of torrential moments,

Of long coiled tenuous drift, with one still cloud

Sucking from rim to rim of that insoluable thing...

Down to the river and the beat of the river.







Lullaby



Sleep, little architect. It is your mother's wish

That you should lave your eyes and hang them up in dreams.

Into the lowest sea swims the great sperm fish.

If I should rock you, the whole world would rock within my arms.



Your father is a greater architect than even you.

His structure falls between high Venus and far Mars.

He rubs the magic of the old and then peers through

The blueprint where lies the night, the plan the stars.



You will place mountains too, when you are grown.

The grass will not be so insignificant, the stone so dead.

You will spiral up the mansions we have sown.

Drop your lids, little architect. Admit the bats of wisdom into your head.







[That's my favorite. Isn't she a lovely freak?]