The Gryphon at the Mansion on Thursday night

How could our world change, become a  hostile place?.
Here at the mansion on the hill, a crowd of us
seeking fun, taking time out for happiness,
parking cars, rushing in, spreading blankets on the grass
bringing picnic dinners and forgetting for a night
the other garbage stuck in our worried minds.
It’s not  the end of it, our world,
It wouldn’t make sense, now in this middle time,
but we might destroy it by  implacable selfishness
the ‘I want’, before thinking
but not, not before the band plays.

The Gryphon on the pedestal
has glassy eyes and rapacious beak
but it doesn’t speak
or perhaps we didn’t hear it,
we make so much noise
dancing to a metallic amplified beat
Giddings’ big band underneath the stars
where we bathe ourselves in warm night air.

.        Listening to poets, a dancing in the stars,
.        Zukosky’s flow of words tumbling through 800 pages,
.        Jorie Graham’s rushing music, meanings compressed
.        and expanded, lines like accordions.

No oracle from above commands us,
though we think we’d like it to,
nor words in the songs we’ve heard before
automatic as drum beats, even as our hearts
repeat, repeat, repeat.
Words from above would not come
b‘cus there’s no one out there, or here.
We won’t listen if it just comes from us
no matter how wise.
So perhaps it will end
this time, this species
so beautiful, so pleasured
dancing here under the moon.,

Kent Bowker               4/4/2011

2 thoughts on “The Gryphon at the Mansion on Thursday night”

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