The genius of Paul McCartney

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I dream of darkness visible, a nest
Of tangling marshes in a valley’s gut.
Bound-blind, I hear the echoes from the west,
Crescendoing until the advent juts
Like mountains rising up to heaven’s crest,
Sharpening blades of light that singe and cut
Through knots. Then Aeophon strides above the peak
With Helios behind him in a streak,

Breaking from dawn into reality,
Or something like it. No, it’s still disguised.
There’s something there, still swirling in the sea.
I slowly start to see beyond the skies...

I wake, and just as soon, the vision flees.
A warmth remains. I turn to see the eyes,
My Kindle lying black upon my chest,
One mind awake, another still at rest.

I’m back in late September in the first
Moments of dawn, a new life spreading through
The life I see—my neighbor’s conifers
Are golden-green—and through the life I knew.
I start to understand those dreams that burst
Through us, blazing the trails across a dew-
Damp mind. I trace the silver light until it ebbs
Into the empty fibers of a spider’s web.

That web has been there all throughout the summer.
Most nights I’d find it built before I came,
The muted architect there at the center,
Who makes and masters its own private game
To catch what comes and sate an ancient hunger;
And is this different? Is it all the same?
What weaves such crystalline geometry
Only to kill what kills it, rebuilding nightly?

I’ve seen it catch a moth before (what “steered
The white moth thither in the night?”), but not
Then hold it “like a kite.” It rather sheared
Its own design to wrap it like a clot,
So quick and so precise, no seeming fear
These tremors are from something that, though caught,
Will destroy not just the web, but the spider too;
“The process kills the fear, or fear kills you.”

The ready web, the waiting weaver, that
Enduring patience for whatever comes,
Events that hover near its habitat,
And those that land to bang the battle drum
That resonates across the thin-skinned mats,
Plucking the strings until it wails and thrums,
That shakes and struggles, rips and shreds the cage
To its foundations… then the empty page.

So there are days of dearth, a staid perfection
That means no struggle, and no nourishment.
The challenge is to see all those infections
That kill us slowly by our own consent,
To want the death that breeds the resurrection,
To kindle that which sparks the soul’s invention.
“A lovely sentiment” I think I heard
The rumbling stomach of the spider slur.

And then an unexpected thing: a flood
Of cottonwood seeds drifts across the yard,
Like someone broke a snow globe, silent thud,
Then this unnerving whiteness that bombards
The lyrically liminal spring buds,
The broken cage lying in scattered shards
Somewhere below these ever wandering feet,
Still treading water, not quite on the beat.

Maybe as well a need for dissonance,
Residual interruptions unresolved.
Yes, yes, I’m well aware that ignorance,
Those damned pervasive blank-spots that convolve
Us, shouldn’t make us wallow in romance,
To think that magic’s real, that gods involve
Themselves with our too petty lives. Design
Only governs in a thing so small: a mind,

And only writ by an automaton.
Yet, insofar as those blank-spots exist,
They’re part what is daily undergone
And need, as much as others that persist,
Woven into the web, if just so dawn
Can find it empty still, a kind of mist
That makes the twilight barely visible,
Like something not quite inexplicable.


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