Called By The Dryad
To Be Her Husband
A breeze murmurs
through icy twigs with a sigh
where she summons my heart
beneath her ageless canopy.
Inside her sensual eyes
I am forced to climb
her wide-spread limbs,
to nest forever in her arms.
She dresses me
in raven’s clothes to caw
and call out warnings
to strangers along the road.
Her trunk with many branches
is the family’s ancient tree
used in that sacrifice
with night’s flame and smoke.
And like my father
I shall be crucified on her oak,
such a noble way
to lose one’s breath.
By a mound of damp leaves
piled up by winter’s wind
we shall rest forever
in gray ashes on the ground.
- RH Peat
Two Proto-Modernist Epiphanies
While nodding on a bench
in the coal dust steam clouds
of Paddington Station,
Nietzsche watched Darwin's
evolution disembark
the 8:05 from Oxford.
Although soot from the
Industrial Revolution
had smutched the
o'erarching skylights,
it seemed to him that,
from ape to Übermensch,
each one in his turn
stood taller than the last.
Where lies the anvil of
inspiration? Did the shadows
of Cézanne's overbearing father
push him to make sense of new
encounters by painting them
as stacks of sculpted facets?
And while attending his
posthumous retrospective
at the Salon d'Automne
did Picasso and Braque turn
to one another and say "Hmmm"?
Did they say "Aha!"?