Roger Zelazny: To Spin Is Miracle Cat

Graham crackers on the patio
and peace in the afternoon.
It was a two-piano Sunday
under the darkness trees.
Lady high on the mountaintop
let down your auburn hair …
Cathedral bells in the city,
coffee in crystal cups …
The greenness of lawn
beneath unfurling cloud …
The notes have reached the dancer
at the center of the earth …
The train bearing dead relatives
will come …
Rainbows dance
on tread and riser,
the coffee steams in the cup.
High in the noon of June
a lopsided moon
drips venom
to the vectored eye.
The woods decay,
the rivers halt.
The world falls to the dancer,
Sunday apple,
earthdance cadenced, Mountain Lady,
blindeyed watcher,
falls, silent, Lady,
in ellipse and default—
I heard the bells expel.
Down then like diamond dominos
the stairway shuffled, fell.
Lady, Lady, let down your hair …
The train is coming, an eye
behind every bullet hole,
from out the vanishing point,
on tracks of gleaming bones.
The scapulae of buffalo
lie in the right of way.
… in ropes of auburn mercy.
Sacrifices pianos
and shattered cups
upon the fading lawn …
The ghost wind sings
thundersong.
One strand down the
firmament, Lady,
to world awake away …
And crumbled Graham crackers
feed the black birds …
The train fills
up the sky, mechanic
throb and eyes
like coded bullets …
I cannot see
the mountaintop. The
shadow grows before
the engine. The world
belongs
to the dancer, the dance
belongs
to the dream.
Dead eyes and iron thrust.

God or gods, there is a music.
Once I thought it a stringed thing,
but now I know it’s pipes.
Listen as it stills the cricket note
in the soul’s dark night.
Love is only part:

Hate in our time
and partial mind
may bring the soul of man to God.
But then again, Cratylus,
who knows? Which Sistine roof
was Michael Angelo’s proof?

Under Santa Ana’s lights
Philip Dick has known dark nights

barrel of gun
note of pipe
Easter picnic eve
despair koan

and scratched these lines
where neon glows:

Where sound the notes
in every order,
traffic pass—
worlds without end—
by.

Pipe now the last
insomniac shepherd
beyond the dawn,
where bars of light
hold up delinquent day.

Traffic turn left
where fat horses
gambol.

The world’s a world away.

a line of dust behind me
dust beneath my wheels
having lived at all
is miracle cat
and peace is war by other means
said a wise old man
the clarity of the blue curve
overhead the bowstring of day
veed taut the tinny notes
of this my radio the sad call
from the pages of a book
are all if truth be known
I can hold within my head
deer on the mountain
blackbird in the air
the world is circle
and movement I its center rider
and each is something else
by other means dust
beneath the wheels line
behind the car our
paws need licking when we
pause to sort the way
that cat is the quantity
the maximum quantum
leap of dust to blaze
of day starting with eye
sometimes catching language
often losing words to circle
and movement to utter leaves
like trees to spin
is miracle cat