In golden hills with hungry gulls, where stillness kills and weather lulls, and mission bells ring culture dull; on sunset’s coast a teacher’s son, our host my ghost your medium—Promethean, bohemian, chameleon (qué bien & some)—with happy heart, nor art, the eyes fixed singly on the mark, and swimming laps from dark to dark—suspended, sea-logged, racing barque—yet nagging deep was discontentment: all achievement that was lent him came at cost of such neglection: words forgotten, song unpracticed, “heart of mine so like a cactus.”
Til one morning in the mountains—clearings where a libr'y founded, He-Man Miller, generous fountain—were all his doubt and debt surmounted, romancing to find his Merlin, and thus announced his route would swerve then.
A violin, a pedal loop, a puff of pipe-weed, o'raggad group; his Lady came from Guadalupe, and waved her arms amnesiac fog so he forgot about the odds—forgot the math, the path, the bath, of standing up to west wind’s wrath; the cries of gulls too much to take; from ghouls of death, sought lemniscate. The motto that he drank like nectar, brandished though he were defector: “I am muscle, I am arrow, I am bone and I am vector.”
So if it pleases, you may hear—my song so human and so flawed—of Heman the Americanite, his journey prolonged, in a nutative rhythm with writing that nods, with bouquets of distinctions that add up to God. (A cooing, an evenness, assonance, warble. A raga of throat-sounds that cast away foibles—that open up portals, make singers immortal.)
But what use is a bower that has not its bird? Flowers sans pollen are wasteful, absurd. The power of beauty, our interest, for hours; the sweetness of nectar, abhorrence of sour, is nutriment promised for which we devour. So the function of flourish is moral inferred, the lessons embedded in words we have heard. The rhyme is the dangler attached to the angler, and if it betrays, then it earns reader rancor. But reader is gambler and writer is card; a critical ear is a ward against bards. So caveat emptor and hurry along.