A Dionysiac Poetic Sensibility Poem by Richard Blanch

With apologies to S.T. Coleridge and Kubla Khan



Is there a crying in the forests of this soul? Divinity
Is failing? Or a dream has stretched the twining elasticity
Of thought beyond endurance? Or perhaps a fine stability
Was never meant to be - except in ruin. Brute sublimity
Requires the bright, the still, the lithic quelling of variety.

But this swaying veil of lock and eye, it shuts out equanimity,
Demands and reaches for a writhing dusk’s impossibility,
Tearing at reality to make a unanimity,
To bring together, fling apart the fabric of the unity
Of breast and thigh, the close-sheathing of minds, finding satiety
Only for fleeting moments. This wrenching, kind avidity
Gluts itself on trifles, greatness, in a mad affinity
For everything and nothing, swings and sings the night’s ability
To form, unform, to stir, to swim in, welter in plasticity-
Such is the dancing in the forests of this soul’s divinity.