ERN MALLEY REVISITED


“It is necessary to understand
That a poet may not exist, that his writings
Are the incomplete circle and the straight drop
Of a question mark
And yet I know I shall be raised up
On the vertical banners of praise.”
“Sybiline” by Ern Malley



Once again Ern Malley not content to be
the proverb perched on the sole Arabian tree
descends with feline feet the staircase
of flesh to where in a shuddering embrace
of fluttering heart, he begins to prophesy.
And once again the dream of lotus eaters
calligraphed on the veils of dawn will refract
through prisms of dew to fall like Noah’s
rainbow on the mountain of the mind. And once again
I will cry, “This is real, I tell you, this which cleaves
the innocence of the hyperbolic is real.
Lazarus resurrected from the cave of my dreams
is real. Jonah spewed from the belly of a fish
swimming in the waters of my imagination is not a lie.”
Ern is not the faded cumulus receding
into the horizon. Nor is he the man
in the moon preaching the tenets of a third
testament. No, he is certainly not the sun
eclipsed by the moon of your making.
He is more! He is a tiger prowling in a cage
whose mind-drawn bars keep the zoo
out of his jungle. He is the breeze visiting
the reticulated skin of the Tree of good
and evil, tempting us with sibilant whispers
to climb to vertigo heights. He is the fiery
arrow that flies suicidal from the crossbow
of tradition into the red eye cauldron of noon
where his fire consumes towering infernos.
And I? I’m the servant, I’m the scribe
and I write what is dictated by the voiceless,
a poem motionless as the climbing moon,
a poem that is as dumb as an old coin
held between finger and thumb, knowing that
as I do Ern has split the infinitive,
and beyond is nothing and everything.