Selected Poems from the new writings of Dan Guenther.

Humpback Whales

Whalers called their songs
the dark liturgy of Lucifer,
the grunts and groans of his aggrieved, 
fallen angels, echoing
through the scalloped chambers of the ships.

Off Hawaii, long ago, I first heard them cry
from their cathedral in the deep. 

The songs bring their solitary kind together.

And together the sonic pods 
become acrobats, cavorting,
leaping free and clear-eyed, 
high into the air, 
shaking barnacles from mottled snouts.

At times the placid humpbacks will float quietly 
on the smooth surface of a night sea.

Do you suppose the whales are gazing at the stars, 
the galaxies spinning 
above them in cosmic emptiness?

November, 2007

Cicadas

After such a long sleep
the cicadas climb into the treetops
where dark oaks rise like religious towers.
 
The heat of the day softens their stiff tongues,
and they lift their wings to sing, 
turning loose the longings of 17 years.
 
We belong to their brief cycle,
to that whine for the chirping nymphs
emerging from the leaf-litter,
when all that runs and cries is bright and young.
 
So what form is this that broods to shed its skin,
then clicks in our memory, perennial as a first kiss,
to tangle together high on the trunks of trees,
buzzing until they perish and we are sleepless? 

The wind gathers their crisp remains,
sweeping all that falls to earth into ashen clusters, food
for the grumbling toads scavenging within the ferns.
 
June, 2007

The Frog Choir

Twilight dissolved into an April moon,
and we took her pony for a ride
to a pond bordering the deep woods. 
 
We were gangly and dumb, both tall for our age, 
playing with fire 
while chorus frogs trilled along the reedy banks.
 
When the wind in the trees picked up speed 
so did she, guiding my hand in dark hour
to the songs of a frog choir.
 
The pond dried slowly into mountain meadow
over time, and the ranks of the frog choir
have thinned to disease and ultra-violet rays.
 
High overhead, on silent wings, 
flocks of geese glide by, the old pond
but an ancestral memory in their cold celestial blur.
 
Out in the snowy timber 
the call of a Great Horned Owl 
fades in the moonlit here and now.

August, 2009

Advice to my granddaughter on the physics of hope

Don’t be threatened by the general relativity of everything.

Remember that the sky is infinite in all directions,
that the physics of hope evolves out of imagined worlds.

We know that the fabric of the cosmos is held together by tension,
that the stars and planets are suspended 
in a web of invisible atoms and electrons.

All that is dogma, a long-standing idea 
that will one day unite quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity,
releasing us from fear,
allowing technology to ennoble humanity.

I believe that particle acceleration is the foundation of love,
that the future is firmly anchored in new ideas, 
in the assumption that both large and small are acceptable.

To glimpse the Grand Design is possible.

For within the physics of hope one finds vision,
a pure notion often expressed in renewed energy,
a science never reduced to finite marks on paper.

The real solution to X is in the essence of dreams,
in having a quest, a passion through time.

All the music of nature may be manifested on particles and waves.

But remember that the Almighty’s equations are a matter of faith,
and one doesn’t waste time
in speculation on the death of the sun.

Oh yes, and memories are stellar dust sprinkled on a pillow.

January, 2007

Letter from a city on the plains

Many come here for the healing waters,
others to escape the void.
 
Some to connect with lost mysteries under the palms.
 
At its height this city boasted ten thousand under arms,
fountains of artesian water for the spice caravans,
always a city looming large in my historian’s eye.
 
Nights on the broad avenues belonged to street musicians
and poets, philosophers who argued various possibilities 
of being, the unchanging within the flow of sensibility.
 
But the king’s astronomers turned to prophesy
and a false science of the stars,
evoking decadent forms in their path to power,
beauty, decay, and rebirth, the transcendent ethic.

The end came out of the cold steppes to the north.
 
A vigorous horse culture, yet to be degraded,
swept down on hardy ponies to seize the wells.
 
Tall horsemen took control, marveling at the comfort
found in this city on the plains, 
and embracing that dark Gnosticism 
with its worship of black angels.

Dusty tombs chronicle the history of their slow decline,
where I consumed my life in a worthless study.

My life has contributed nothing to the greater good.

When you read this letter I will have walked away
into the treeless nothingness beyond the walls.
 
How appropriate for the shape-shifter I have become,
dying in the pursuit of a more complete knowledge,
and perhaps crossing into another world.

October, 2006

Meditations after the supernova

The sun goes supernova and all that remains is beauty.
 
The blue and watery eye of our globe 
blinks and disappears without an elegy or valediction.
 
Nothing escapes,
the masses evaporating
as one expression of heat and light.
 
All our oiled motion ends in a drifting thing of clouds.
 
Corruption whirls in a luminous well as the galaxy spins.

Infant stars 
clump out of the infinite,
yet invisible magnetic flood.
 
Gravity bends time 
and an ocean of gas arises to glow like a great lamp, 
grand and serene, bright as any moon.

September, 2006

Finding Refuge

In dense woods 
where the weasel’s red eye gleams,
blue jays pick clean the carcass of a deer.

Light rain slicks the trillium and bloodroot.

Last night, in their estuary of leaves,
tree frogs croaked.  A circle of pale toadstools
sprung up 
under the canopy of the oaks.

The blue jays protest our passage forward.

Tangles and leaf litter hide the refuge of the vole.

Just ahead, where the weasel speeds on,
aligned only with his dark design,
the clear-eyed and chattering jays 
protest the dark snout nosing in the leaves,
the chilly wind’s needle teeth.

October, 2006