Five Poems by Royal Rhodes

 

Remember, body...
(after Cavafy)

Body, broken by being body,
once athletic elegance
of limbs extended into space
in perfected Euclidean ratio,
now aching with age and the weight
of the hall mirror's revealing gaze,
remember eyes wide in desire.
Now you fool yourself to think
the one you want could want you.
Your skin, that knows the worst you are,
still embodies your likeness anyways.
Body, aggregate of senses,
learn from the signals you give yourself:
the click in your joints like a caged cricket,
the shadow rasp in your labored breath,
the beauty you see as if through gauze.
Body, transcendent carbon dust,
return to the waiting water and earth,
ground down with the love you carried.

THE MAN WHO LOST HIS SHADOW

He noticed, not knowing
the day or the exact hour,
when his shadow vanished,
as if the sun stood still
directly over his head.
Did a shadow thief
slice it away from his limbs
and hide it in a locked drawer,
rolled up like fine netting?
Or did he pour it inside
his own mouth, like a Negroni,
a drink he swallowed like black silk
to forget all the impressions he made?
Had it spooked him at night,
suddenly elongated by gaseous
jets from the antique lamp-posts,
a blackwing cast over earthlight?
Or did he come to regard it
like a book jacket blurb,
of "untold secrets...unspeakable sins,"
that stalked even the slightest move?
A thousand kisses deep,
it witnessed him outside himself,
more than he could predictably know.
His body, its perfect form,
was like a pocket, cut exactly,
to hold this two-dimensional twin,
wrapping itself like an interior shroud
and claiming the one heart they shared.
And then other shadows began disappearing.

"The Man Who Lost His Shadow", was previously published in networds

edition 46 recently.

SUNDOWN

Locals and strangers mix
on the concrete platform
surrounding the white chapel
of St. George, the wonder-worker --
hagios thaumatos -- athanatos.
Its banner tower of bells
is topped with acanthus.
Here the gods never die,
but come again to visit.
We rest here to follow
the slow decline of the sun
until it bursts bright orange
behind a distant island
into the night sea.
And then the ships
filled with sightseers
turn back to the port,
leaving a trail of bubbles
where they parted the waves.
Each of us deeply senses
to have confirmed the world
in this brief respite of time.

THE CALL

"Are you happy?" the high voice
echoes in branches overhead.
It speaks and repeats, "Are you happy?"
It could be the owl perched in vines
or a Wood Thrush in flowering Dogwood.
What startled me and made me stop
in this calm ravine was not the voice,
but the question out of Nature's mouth,
caring about all that is gone.
Like other casual strollers the first
form of wild flowers I noticed
was trillium, both white and pink,
wakerobin and birthroot,
the latin and common names we give.
They never spoke in return to name us,
silent down to the papery cover
of their roots in this slope of damp earth,
careless of my attempts to see.
And a dueling pair of catfish,
indifferent to the racket their thrashing
made in the shallow bed of water,
as sediment on the river floor
clouded in plumes like dark smoke,
let my presence go unnoticed
and were blind to the shadow of nesting eagles.
Only the sole Great Blue Heron,
standing tense in the dead wood
along the banks, might care to speak.
In an instant it takes to the still air,
as it says, "I know what happiness is."

THE PARDON

"...for that's as good/As if thou hadst seal'd
  my pardon with thy blood."   -- John Donne

Those words, "I never loved you,"  freed my soul, your body's
captive, held for ransom, and made the deepest wounds no longer bleed.

Through that incantation, mumbled spell, my soul, an empty cell,
became a dove, airborne, homing someplace, once you freed

it from the sharpest thing that made it bleed, and stopped the flooding
blood that worked its wings, and let the soul forget why it was freed.

The colder atmosphere it feels will freeze that body that it carries,
drained of love. No longer feeling loss -- it cannot bleed.

 From this I loose myself: what now is freed, from beauty, love, and time,
your words have let me leave all hope, and what that hope might breed.

I never felt so light, so luminous, but now when everything had seemed so lost
I feel the burning urge to let things go, everything, and quicker, to 

be freed.

Royal Rhodes is a retired educator who taught global religions for almost 40 years. His poems have appeared, online and in print, in: The Lyric, Ekstasis, Last Stanza, Dreich, Snakeskin, Seventh Quarry, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, and The Montreal Review, among others. His art and poetry collaborations have been published by The Catbird [on the Yadkin] Press in North Carolina.