Poetry: 2012

(First posted in 2012 on Stephen’s previous website.)

Reading Anais

Forty-three years
of her erotica on
bookshop shelves

yet

only now
we rendezvous.

I read unutterably rapt,
pixilated

her paradoxically
penetrating portal
entitled

The Diary of Anais Nin
Volume 1 1931 – 1934.

I am roused. Arrested. Awakened.
In awe, I hold my breath.
I watch
this profoundly wise and
fecund woman
seeking congruity of
personality and essence.

Moving to free herself from
a caricature of self.

Though much fleeced
–  – censored –
–  what remains is substantive.
–  Raw. Honest. Enough. 

Oh, to write brilliantly!
Oh, to climb from the
labyrinth of
inanity, taboo, constraint.

To become free of cultural
fundamentalism…
the rigidities of others’
thought,
and my own.

Free of
 enculturation’s perils,
and
its cruelties of ignorance.

To breathe again.

To relax and swim
with the
sentient turbulence 
in Life’s Pantheon.

To creatively express.
To articulate.

To move freely with the
poetic exuberance
of energy, body, mind and spirit.

© 2012 Stephen Victor

In the mid-1980s I lived three months in the French Alps. This poem points toward the Grace of a late afternoon/early evening mountainous return trek to my village, in which I was blessed with heavily falling snow and lightning.

Provender

Stealthy winds whisper
through nearly behemoth
Vercors’
Alpine trees,

who,
– otherwise –
silently witness
my steep descent.

Darkness privileges itself.
Profusions of snow pixels
– plenteous –
cavort en mass.

Yet too,

slowly submit their fates
to gravity’s seducing insistence.

Lollygagging,

these crystalline architectural marvels
are refectory to a
lightning’s fare
of soul candy.

Thunder pounds the rigidities
of my domestication.

My rousing sentience
drinks deeply
on these Earthly
and atmospheric
libations.

© 2012 Stephen Victor