All Articles by Vincent O. Moleski

An Old Jew Hearing Der Ring After Many Years of Silence 

Woden, mad berserk and hopeless drunk,

Whose revenging dreams stalked that soma—

That mead of poetry, that dark and esoteric truth—

Gave a superstitious eye to prefigure even the ravens.

There’s blood in mead. Only sight can trade for sight.

 

Like the wax which screams at the weight of a needle,

Transcribing truth upon the air only

At a small cost.

 

A truth so painful it pilots my brain back

To the red roofs and the blue ink

Transcribed on bodies

Screaming at the weight of a needle

Like a great human record.

 

So when, with my one good eye,

I see the young blackshirts parading through the night,

Black on black, the ravens and I

See too the ghost of Wagner.

Daybreak After Nightfall

When noble dawn arrives

After a lecher of a night—

A night that feels

Like the millionth coat of paint

On a wall that never existed—

It seems the weight of one more day

(For what is a day but a shade,

A kind of color that bleeds into the last and the next)

Might, in metastasis,

Topple the facade,

Peel the veneer

Which hides nothing.

 

It is then the Indian summer blooms out of blue,

Imitating another sunrise:

The red runs down a face,

Followed by the orange and the yellow,

And all at once

Every color in one white.

 

And in this sunrise

Tomorrow never comes.

 

There is only the razor of now,

Right now.