City of Legends

the dream shifts.  the dreamer persists.
and all our free will illusions
bind us to what we find resists
our fatal, natal natures, sons
and daughters of the slaughter done
in the name of life, mockery
and memory, songs to a sun
too distant and luminous.  we
speak dark matter, undetected.
we dream variations, measured
in our allegiances respected
by the hypocrisy we cured
by curving the hyperbole
and finding what we bind is free.

William F. DeVault.  all rights reserved.

I am not unaware that my latest work, a seven poem cycle using the sacraments of the Catholic Church as metaphors for romantic and even erotic imagery and actions, has created a stir.  I expected it to.

But the truth is, I am an heretic.  Always have been, always will be.  But for clarity, let’s set the record straight about these seven works.

• Nowhere do I use obscene or profane language.
• The romantic and erotic imagery is established as being in the framework of a lifelong, committed and yes, wedded union between two individuals, specifically myself and the Sunday Girl.  It is not a call to excess, adultery or self-flagellation.  Okay, maybe a little self-flagellation.
• It is beautiful, soulful and one of the most proud accomplishments of my life to have penned these.  I include what is almost certainly the only surviving haiku of my career as a writer, a sonnet and a return to my own triskadekian canto form. 

The seven poems are:

• Baptism:  The cleansing and public conversion rite, making the transition, marking the preparation to receive the spirit.
• Confession:  Admitting past mistakes and errors in judgment, making clean and clear the way.
• Communion and Absolution:  The taking of the flesh and the blood into you.  In this case I literally used this (and some Catholic friends are NOT happy with me right now) as an allegory for oral sex, where flesh and body fluids are exchanged and taken into one another to blur the barriers between one body and the other.
• Confirmation:  Affirm what was said in the throes of passion, the morning after.
• Matrimony:  The haiku.  A proposal made and answered within a specific time of year.
• Last Rites:  A sonnet of the passing of one who is beloved, in the arms of their lover.  This damn thing just about killed me to write, for by this point in the write I was inside the sphere of this love.  To one day be so parted from her will be unbearable.
• Ordination:  A triskadekian canto of how love is meant to be witnessed and proclaimed, that to love is like taking on the vestments and becoming an evangelist for the person you love.

Controversial, of course.  Beautiful, undeniable.  All my love to the light that passed through me to the page, my beloved Sunday Girl.

I didn’t.  :)  Spent the morning with my folks, the middle of the day with my sons and the evening with…the Sunday Girl, remotely, but nonetheless.  She wrote a poem for me, beautiful and purposeful, and video’d herself reading it and it was a religious experience as far as I am concerned.  I’d share it with you but things are said that are private to us.

The name of the poem was "Only skin" and it was about faith and hope and passion.  I loved it, and her reading of it.  Can you get a video tattoo’d on you?  Damn.  But I did write a response, a sonnet.  "White Sunday 42".

You shivered at the cold and thought the room
would be empty on your return, iron
headboard still cold and hard and your bridegroom
gone, a sea of insecurities, dawn
and midnight, stolen in a promised kiss
that would never come.  But I kept faith, held
on when silence roared for I would not miss
this consecration for life or withheld
my love for doubt.  You will always find me,
patient if not perfect.  Not only skin
but lambent determination to see
this through with you, to everyday begin
the best I know how, in your heart and arms,
and surrendered to your brave love and charms.

William F. DeVault.  all rights reserved.

This was my best birthday, ever.

A little something for my hardcore fans, who complain I have been neglecting them of late.

sonnet of a vision

I have cast my blistered spirit out to
wander among the trees where the shadows
shield me and once healed me of the bled blue
that stained the chained solemn golem as rose
the moon I’d seen with eyes too wide and died
just a little to find my hands fell back
reaching to the pale blue seas without tide
where I’d thought I’d dreamt seeing you look back.
Where I’d thought I’d dreamt seeing you waiting
for me to speak in a voice made weaker
by the thin air in the heavens, singing
your song, a hymn so grim and the speaker
told us only of love, as it should be
anytime or where your name comes free.

William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.
for Candy, who knows the path and the goal.

The Twelfth Panther Cycle is “the wedding cycle” and was to be a vision of an engagement and wedding as we foresaw it (still in the early stages of The Panther Cycles, the doubt and despair that often visited later works was nowhere to be found).

This piece is a sonnet, a form I do not often use (but, considering the formidable size of my canon and catalogue, I think at last count I had somthing on the order of 150 to 200 that have passed my culling edits).

sonnet: the journey

I have stood at the edge of eternity and watched the gravel
beneath my toes fall away into the endless void. down
into the abyss. for so long did I wander free and travel,
deemed mad by all who saw the decade’s dance turn brown
the greenery of my youth. alone and arrogant, I traced
the line of a shining path of cunning calculations culled
from my perceptions of life and love and god. and faced
with mortality, I laughed a hearty roar. and when called
by fate to answer for my sins, I took my cross with grace
and peace, knowing that truth was a better companion
than anyone I’d ever known. until now. I turn my face
from the lonely wind and hold out my hand to ask you join
this lonely quest. alone no more, for I have found worth
in one who shares so much and I would share my time on Earth.

William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.

This is a continuation of audio posts of works from the July 18th release of THE COMPLEAT PANTHER CYCLES. For more information on this massive volume of poetry, visit my website at www.cityoflegends.com