the single and only music

YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE ​

by ​Ivan Argüelles 

​
so folds the old year its broken diseased leaves 
its tripartite reconfigurations of an exiled sky 
its functionless attributes of lungs and bellows 
days like felled beasts hamstrings cut ears lopped 
days immersed in prussic acid and forged moon-dust 
atavistic months trapped in their own circularity 
unable to mouth their own unpronounceable names  
nor to rectify the phonetic damage done to their shapes 
seasons withered by oppositions of gas and distance 
like mountains collapsing into invisible lakes 
hemorrhaging light from their invariable wounds 
speaking like statues in a void no sleep can enter 
the enormous effigies of history shadowing copies 
of heroes and nameless saints down corridors 
and embankments where stricken cities grieve 
how much was lost in the fiction of calendar time 
the manipulations of politicians and bankers  
homophones of the great solar disk turned black ! 
like the serpent tail in mouth devouring its own being 
spirit without clouds animus of destroyed wharfs 
scripts of tattered glyph and cuneiform high and loud 
in atmospheres poisoned by future shareholders 
planets and asterisks commas and circumflex accents 
dizzying spirals hermetic consonants sung on one note 
vowels redder than the voice of no-beginnings 
impossibility of medical science to redefine the sound 
issuing from the late cycle’s numinous accident of birth 
and now !? and now the inarticulate diapason of darkness 
the lengthening afternoon without windows or hills 
the absolute innocence of door-posts and gate-swings 
paths that lead inward eradicated by technology 
everyone spying on everyone else using progress 
to justify the abyss into which uncountable beings fall 
never to be recovered and memory itself the bereaved 
ear and eye without meaning in the blank effusion 
when rock fragment and cliff reassert their primacy 
how many are the distances denied by this passing 
minutes and hours thumbs and echelons of ink 
dissolution of the orient—why move on into the plunge 
this is not next year but the single and only music 
to be recorded before electricity fails and doomed 
spacecraft earth turns to enigmatic azure powders 
you are my sunshine my only sunshine 
 
12-31-20! 

​Ivan Argüelles is an American innovative poet whose work moves from early Beat and surrealist-influenced forms to later epic-length poems. He received the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award in 1989 as well as the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 2010.  In 2013, Argüelles received the Before Columbus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. For Argüelles the turning point came with his discovery of the poetry of Philip Lamantia. Argüelles writes, “Lamantia’s mad, Beat-tinged American idiom surrealism had a very strong impact on me. Both intellectual and uninhibited, this was the dose for me.” While Argüelles’s early writings were rooted in neo-Beat bohemianism, surrealism, and Chicano culture, in the nineties he developed longer, epic-length forms rooted in Pound’s Cantos and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He eventually returned, after the first decade of the new millennium, to shorter, often elegiac works exemplary of Romantic Modernism. Ars Poetica is a sequence of exquisitely-honed short poems that range widely, though many mourn the death of the poet’s celebrated brother, José.

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