The Tropic of Anamnesis

Robert de Beaugrande

(the scheme of assonances is based on North American English)

canto first

I watch in wanly glazed amazement

How I reweave despondent blonde insomnia

To spin equivocal erratic epic

Made of many-edged legends

And many-ended memories

I would-unfurl my swirling shoreless odyssey

Sketched like memory's meridian

Traversing textured nets of vibrant lifeline

I recollect the echoes of those vanished stanzas

Writ in sun-script on a river's restive eddies

Reciting azure axioms from seething seas

Or hoary forest's whispered mists

Or crystal city's crumbling walls and walks...

PERHAPS I shall dispel the startled particles

That hover fuzzily on contours of some bleeding dream

And drift their wisps within my finest wines

To sully them with galling sullen colors

Perhaps I might decipher cryptic scriptures

Formed by fields and forests or by labyrinthine :towns

Skimmed from dimming windows of departing aircraft

Perhaps I may beneath opaque tenacious surfaces

Discover some redeeming meaning or some missing message

Recasting sunken siffering as joy-filled buoyances

AND YET it's oddly possible that furtive searches

Under sundry surfaces uncover further surfaces

That mirror weirder wavy images than any:

And show demoted hopes or caustic losses

Or transitory cancelled chances ...

I may exhume a wealth of stealthy cellars

Whose acrid casks distilled from smarting harvest

Etch the seams of years with searing scars

The landscape-writing of abundant countries

May freeze to muddied puzzles or unbroken codes

Subverting subtlest study ever after.

——————

canto second

THIS unintoned recital of unchanging rainsong

Reactivates the rivulets of deep depreciated seasons

Long lost in currents seeping under oceans ...

No doubt on such a greying rainstained day

Uncertain birth immersed me in the world

That new-made children hail with wordless wails

Emergent couriers of later plaint

MY childworld was soon inbued with unrealities

Enchanted fantasies and tattered tales of ages

Purportedly recorded in the rolls of early earth

I peopled countrysides of agile magic

With fancied gentries governed by untroubled love

With pageants of impervious and ivory victories

Attained by sacred races over evil's creatures

I scanned the blazing hands of brazen knights

Who overtoppled ghastly gnashing towers

And entered portaled welcomes pouring trumpets

The thanks of kings recalled from baleful spells

I did not realize the realer role of heroes

Nor guess their destiny that wends with winds:

To explode at crossroads into undirectioned steps

To follow formless callings toward receding realms

To proclaim to absent masses in a vacant stadium

Replacements for misshapen rank reality

To earn with joyless toils only further journey

Until a dimly noted death in cobbled gutter

Bedded on the listless leaves of last nomadic legend in a leveled age.

held instead in vain unswerving certitude

That magic forces can reverse injustices

Redeem believing peoples to inspired triumph —

Until I urged confirming from my elders

To verify the truth of youthwrought vision

And in their saddened silence heard demurrals...

A lasting shadow sank aslant that childhood –

To blight my widest striding through the lands

And sometimes walks in front.

——————

canto third

MY mind resigned revolved to other study

Intent on tomes intoning withered history

The dawning chronicles of long-spent centuries

Once swayed by waning crowns of dying tyrants

I read unbedded tablets of Egyptian historic

Exhumed from fruitless tombs of stony dynasty

I looked to lists of gore-born laurels

The world-diseasing seizure known as Roman rule:

Concealed intrigues to own a lonely throne

That drove beneath its crooked yoke the ancient age

Yet faltered under straining slaves and guilded guilt

In monastic manuscripts of medieval masters

I heeded deeds-of sinless princes and untainted saints

Who strongly strove or meekly preached against an iron time

And spent their deaths for sure celestial respite —

Their searing miracles emblazoned on cathedrals

Built of lofty frozen light and marble shadow

Though arching turgid swirls of harsher marshes

Still stand to sketch on skyscapes their uplifting riddles

I SOUGHT intrinsic principles that fashion happenings

Decide the gliding glories of empire and republic

Assigning greyest nadir or supremest zenith

I sought some mark or measurement purveying greatness

To sort ascendant regents from the sinking

But this instead I read to be the tragic axiom

Which stitches into history a scarlet pattern:

That forceful war insanely maimed the many;

That higher castes imprinted bloody footfalls on the low…

WE in temperate anesthetizing times

Decorate belatedly the hasteful graves

Of rarely chartered martyrs who disproved this brutal rule

For we, not fearing fabled fey invaders,

Are terror-tied by silent sightless systems

Classifying abstract evils on statistic scales

Dismembering pretended enemies upon haphazard maps

Deprived of drastic battlefields or torture cages

We purchase holy glory with convenient credos

And save our doleful souls in numbered vaults.

— the plains of northern Germany, December 1973

——————

canto fourth

DESPITE depressing messages of early journals

Their long since silent languages still offered hope

For human refutation of recorded dire crimes —

The harshly marching rows of Roman legions

Subsided midst the latitudes of Latin language

Whose sentences were hewn in tempeled thought,

Whose poems ware poured in rows of changeless bronze:

It spoke and sang of hectic festival and morbid orgy

Bathed in waves of classic attic wine….

— Laguna Beach, September 1974