Alcaics in the Key of B Minor

© 2003 Lucien Francesco Brancaccio
All rights reserved.

While cutting past a difficult stretch of brush
Inside a forest heavy with dew, beneath
      A waxing gibbous moon, I scraped on
            Briery tangles of thorns my right hand.

In quick reaction, licking the blood, I felt
Immediately, full on my tongue, a taste
      I never understood until then,
            Trekking alone in the gloom of vague leaves.

The salty taste of ocean with giant squid
(Born deep on sea floors), lethal with tentacles
      Attuned to darkly frigid currents?
            This was the gate to the realm of seed-sounds.

Below this depth, moreover, was music such
As locked Tchaikovsky?s manhood in lawless love;
      And, save for music, here the speechless
            Cosmos-begetting domain of Blind Will.

Pulse after pulse of pensively piercing strains
Exposed a secret thought that began to shape
      A thing of conjured beauty: first like
            Mist, then a shadow discerned in moonlight.

At last a youth, good-looking and twentyish,
Appeared, complexioned pallid, with eyes halfway
      In hue between a red and yellow
            Flame of intense, penetrating cave fire.

The smell of damp hay stored in a leaky barn
Pervaded all the air as he glided near;
      Or scent of swamp gas redolent of
            Slogging alone in a marsh of cattails.

Within my touch, blue sapphire of perfect lips,
With taint of frost, glowed fearsomely touchable.
      His warmthless countenance, in spite of
            Otherness, seemed as if always well-known.
     
Instinctively I longed to escape and yet
Intuitively knew I would not, could not
      Surrender this one chance to join his
            Beautiful form of the foul with live flesh.

I offered up my neck for the piercing kiss,
The sanguinary thrill of a sexless lust.
      He drank, in firm embrace, the life blood,
            Carefully, just to the verge of heart-stop.

Then cut his wrist and offered his own. Upon
His open wound I freely imbibed until
      Our intermingled selves transformed my
            Body to one with a need for fresh blood.

Since then, unbounded pathos has taught me how
To lurk in green parks bushed for nocturnal trysts,
      Where unawares some tangled couple
            Grant to the hunter an easy blood sport.

My pale companion helps me dispatch at joy?s
High point, with kind alacrity, two in one
      Embrace. We neutral males, deprived of
            Carnal fragility, gulp the warm blood,

Yet never undergo the experienced
Delight of all-too-human coition, love
      At sacred crossroads where the woman
            Sanctifies manhood as earth the sown seed.

This now exsanguinated and peaceful pair
Will bear no child save poetry, gold from lead:
      Alchemic transmutation always
            Working in nuclear cores of huge stars.

I?ve studied well! Blind Will Schopenhauer taught
Compels from death an endless rebirth: a star
      From gathering debris of cosmic
            Ashes, or ex nihilo a new world.

With crimsoned teeth and hunger relieved, we seek
Our cloistered lodgings, always to close the night
      As two of common blood, with Kindred
            Hastening home to our coven?s mossed halls.

A male-to-male (in life unpermitted) love
Exists (in view of all the undead), upon
      One couch, innoxious, sharing glances:                                  
            Comets of ice with the gleam of hot fire.

Our cloister's Common Room is abuzz tonight:
Just yesterday four cantos of poetry?
      Childe Harold?s Pilgrimage by Byron?
            Soothed our prosaic demand for blood; now,

A young vampiress, saved for the arts by death
(Who sang when Wagner opened Bayreuth), performs
      Again Isolde's ?mild und leise?
            Aria, bringing the room to blood tears.

And here alone, between the undead and you
Of life, the single bridge to an intercourse
      Of pensive highs, ecstatic crashes?
            Moods that demand the chromatic scale?s range:

A music, like the one of the spheres, of pure
Emotions, blemished neither by craven love
      Nor loveless wants: clean stars on wintry,
            Crystalline nights in the north of James Bay.

Tchaikovsky?s final work, ?Path?ique,? next night,
No less than sunken sun on a gibbous moon,
      Will be enough of afterglow to
            See the composure of time on known lips.

Blue sapphire, taint of frost, and recall of woods,
When love outdid familiar and boyish fear,
      Will be enough of manhood, full of
            Courage to love and be loved through stroked flesh.

Though otherwise unsexed, the undead respond
To love: the chaste androgynous love that drives
      The artist, making out of thoughts worlds
            Sensate with hazardous beauty once more.

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