Hocus Pocus
Now the hocus pocus
Of the day,
The dream-like magic
Of the dawning sea,
Winks its baby eye
Across the rolling ivory,
The bore of island sky,
Through imaginary hells
To bring the devils
Of the surf
To my early morning cell,
Which until you woke me
Was drenched in sunless shells,
Bleached out in beds
Of shifting sand,
A roiling beach-day haze
Just waiting for the waxen land
To rise, for a chance to flow
And bloom in the sunup’s
Burning swirl,
In the windows stippled
With the surge and flume
Of the summer world,
Of hills and shades that streak
Across the rippled sheets
To drip the traces
Of the fading rain
In the mazes
Of my waking brain,
Neurons waving like anemones
In the sleep of spinal space,
The ramping terror
Of the growing seiche
That braids the night
Before the sweep
And thrust of light,
And spring’s clear face
Breaks me from the flash
And billow of the atmosphere,
The slip and fall,
The ghostly thrash
Of nightmare squalls,
Before the dawn,
Oblivion reversed
From what the night
Has obviously rehearsed
And drawn, before
The cymbals of rejuvenated spore
In a burst of crocus
Lift their newfound inflorescence
Into focus.
April 1st–5th, 2026, Kaiholu
Explanation
My poems didn’t come in to focus, were pale copies of who I wanted to be, had no real voice, until I fell in love with Cathy. There was something magical somewhere, some place that I couldn’t get to, until Cathy happened. A miracle, like a lightning flash, brought me to us. Cathy says I’m her miracle. As she is mine. Cathy came up with the phrase, the hocus pocus of focus.
Poems, at least my poems, are written by time. They mature over the days, until they slip into as coherent a shape as I can manage.
Cathy says, Your connection to something that shapes the world isn’t exactly religious, it’s more personal, more humanist, and connects you to the universe in a way that doesn’t have the God figure as the interpreter. You have a more direct relationship with nature. It’s the poetry of a Catholic who one time stayed home for smoked salmon with me rather than going to Mass.
That was the moment when I stopped going to Mass, when I began to function apart from belief. But I’ve never lost the sense that the universe has a structure, a shape, that there must be some force that creates billions of mathematical coincidences, such endless structures. As Dylan Thomas wrote, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age.”
Thomas, like any good Celt, brings death in with the next line: “that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer.” Perhaps the mirror image of death complicates the vigor of life, but I don’t think that death, as appealingly Irish as it always is, is necessary to augment the life force, which is miracle enough for any poem. The Catholic religion would rather claim that, as St. Francis of Assisi wrote, that “it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” Dante wrote, “In the midst of life we are in death,” but religion would say that, similarly, life is a mirror force that also encompasses death.
I say in my poem “Arrangement” that death is just a rearrangement of matter, as Hamlet hints:
Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Could stop a hole to keep the wind away.
The greatest emperor can be rearranged into a cork by dematerialization; but at the same time, the spirit survives, to reemerge at Easter in sometimes more rejuvenated forms, as I mention in “Your Father’s Flowers.”
Although Alexander Pope’s is the famous translation, Arthur Golding’s Metamorphoses is similarly brilliant; he may have let his nephew the Earl of Oxford do the bulk of the work (adding more than adequate fuel to the case of Oxford’s being Shakespeare). Dryden, Addison, and Congreve as well brought substantial Restoration wit to Ovid.