Insidious Pathways

Quaker Bridge road winds toward Mercer Street
Oblivious of the connections it makes.
Memory trails off like fragments of a conversation
Overheard but unlistened to.

Smooth black tar knifes through misty fields.
A trap set for small animals by men who no longer hunt,
A dark artery designed to contract space and multiply time.

Who will inherit the time that is saved?
Will we save enough time to remember
All the little things we have crushed under our wheels?

We have paved the world with insidious pathways
Whose numbers outstrip possible destination.
Symbolless we hurry down the Labyrinthine highways
Of imagined deeds.
At the end of the road we find Ariadne,
A black spider attending a derelict gas station.


AUGUST 1976

The Lady of The Lake

OH! PRINCETON, MY PRINCETON

And... have I ever left Princeton? ....
It's green sycamore canopies,
The intimate midnight warmth of it's asphalt streets
Caressing the soles of my bare feet deep in July.....
The unmarked paths over fences, through back yards
To waiting swimming pools... and eager mermaids...

The giant oaks and maples and hemlocks,
The sheltering chestnuts and elms guarding our relentless play...
A labyrinth of palaces
Spread out around a seat of learning,
Perched on a hill above a lake...

Oh Princeton, my Princeton... You are not a Prince....
You are the lady of the Lake who calls to me...


A. T. WOOD
1999

For My Father

Dear Pop, This is a happy birthday letter for a man for all reasons:
His thought speeding like Apollo's shaft
Cuts through the tropics of the mind
Leaving the Garden of Eden guacamole for those who come after.

A young God who leaves his foes stunned on the canvass
Floor of a ring on the deck of a giant battle wagon.
There they dream of Kansas and endless avenues of corn.
Heedless beneath these contestants
Leviathan lunges toward Japan.

Friend of black widows and silk spiders
You walk through forests and over mountains.
Never far from Hemlock boughs,
You sip the scream of things to come
And fall down dead for hours.

You nurse the wounds of Judas
And mind the petals of broken flowers.
You dance and sing and find yourself
At home among the monsters.
You mix memory and desire
In a living cup.
You guide the fronds of each day's end
And bend them back
Toward the true crucible,
The human form.

Master alchemist, tyrant, teaser, Master Preshy, Percy and Peach,
Mama's boy, Knight errant in a foreign land.
Close your eyes now
And open them again and see once and for all
That all your days have been spent in praise
Juggling the oxymoron of mortality.


JUNE 1989

Mama

There is a look of nightmares about her face.

Or is it the fact of many days?

She dresses for the days.

Each foot in a special shoe.

A great blue stone for the third finger,

A silver asp for the fourth.

In the labyrinth of her heart

She crushed the supple power and single loin of serpent love.

She is a priestess, Virgin, Queen.

She is a little girl on a hill

Overlooking a river in Tennessee.

She is the orphan of her parents muse .

And yes! the child of their love.

The white wine she pours in the casual visitor's glass

Gives meaning to the errant pilgrim's fast.

And sets his feet on the road to canterbury

Or is it Marrakech?

When but a maiden she found her man in the mountains.

Their vows said, deep in the marriage bed

She found he bled

From wounds his armor gave.

Risking the wrath of the ancestral gods,

She tore it from his body...

He rose from the bed, a young healing wizard

Naming the name of his mother's curse.

She has sent her four children out:

Two into fall, one into winter and one into spring.

Summer she holds sacred for her young healing wizard.

And now in retrospect we see

Nightmares are but minions in her quest

For the serpent's head.

Perfection

The soul's descent into the dark labyrinth
of the unconscious
Into death, night, disintegration and hell....
into forgetfulness,
Fear, anomie... that lightning like hatred whose coiled
Energy stands ready to rend and tear,
to destroy any hand
That would violate the perfect darkness of utter despair.

Utter despair like other perfections is subject to decay.

Maha Devi

O great Goddess,

With one hand you bind me to the world.

With one piercing look

You burn away all desire.

I long to hide from this relentless tension

In some polar extreme

Or some holy ground

beyond contradiction.

Teach me to love the demons

And their karma,

To see in their fury

Your gentle hands,

compassionate dharma.