An Albatross on a Wind Gusting is Always in Sight by Philip Butera

Philip M. Butera grew up in Buffalo, NY, earned a BS degree from Gannon College in Erie, PA, served in the US Navy then received an MA in Psychology from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He has four books of poetry, “Mirror Images and Shards of Glass”, “Dark Images at Sea”, “I Never Finished Loving You”, and “Falls from Grace, Favor and High Places. His crime novel, ” Caught Between”, has been published, and his second novel, “Art and Mystery: The Missing Poe Manuscript” will be available in the Spring of 2022.

Introduction

Long past and far away, I came for me. I had this fever with unimaginable imaginings of me of every me. I am but the reflection from a million mirrors shattering, blessed and cursed. Incompatible with nuance and confused by misunderstanding, I cannot find my way, yet I have realized what is, is not, and with gentle sadness, I fear I must search for myself.

What is sculptured from marble, painted on canvas, or notes on paper are misty bewilderment? As cacophonies swirl about me and falling Angels gather in the distance, I grasp contradiction, unhinged within an enigma.

One

Eclipsed by inconsistency, where do I flee? Prometheus, his biceps bulging, calls to me, “She will see you now.” Then, he adds, “I wish you luck,†with a mournful grin.†I never move. Nevertheless, I am traveling, fumbling through existence. Everything reappears before it appears. I slip away from a claustrophobic fury and find myself on a peaceful shore, warm with satisfying waves. I shout to the sun to stay above me, bathe me in nourishment, but my voice is corralled before execution.

The sun becomes the moon, the shoreline a flowering valley between high peaks. The wind brings on a chill, and nothing has meaning, just insistence. Daffodils, buttercups, and marigolds cushion my fall from grace. Wrapped into circles, circling, I plod through awareness. I always wanted to be where I was going, beyond thought, beyond thinking, beyond what is where substance and madness dissolve.

Two

 False images allure as metaphors slither, but they are swept away by a cavalier vibrancy from a cascading sky. Visions spy me, uncovering all pretense. I am getting nearer to where there is only stillness. The voice I hear is familiar. Above me, on a cloud made of Italian silk textures, my father enjoys what he has forgotten he desired. He cannot see me; I am unknown to him. I am an impression of myself, a clue about to be revealed. 

The crack of thunder sounds, yet the bright blue sky remains silent. Nothing has a voice. What can be understood is unknowable because the astuteness needed is delicate, varied, and dimensional aliveness continues to evolve from a dream, my dream.

Charon, the ferryman across the river Styx, asks me to board. With his large muscular arms on his oar, he looks past what is to what must be and says, “Justice is a human creation.” His emotions are alive on the hound of Hades. He tosses me a two-headed black and yellow lizard and quips, “I use her to navigate the unfolding of hypocrisy.”

Three

Thetis, the future mother of Achilles, tells me as she has defended Zeus, she will guide me into the domain I most covet to be. She is all women, known and desired by me. Her breasts are heavy, and I begin to drink. When I have consumed my fill, she wipes my mouth, swallows the lizard, and spreads her long legs—clarity bursts from where all mythology will follow. She looks beyond my gaze. As foreseen, I have added confusion to what invisibility conceals.

Thetis’ vaginal lips bring me inside her. The warm moistness blesses me. There is no absence within her womb, and benevolent sleep lasts until before time and after existence. My journey has begun. For once, I am pleased. I am a wave moving toward the mischievously strange yet familiar.

Four

DaVinci is lying back, his hands behind his head. He envisions Camus writing “The Stranger.” He gazes at me, then sits up, asking, “Are you the one who knows why?” I am mystified at the sprinkling of actual thought permeating our presence. 

Alive without any encumbrance, I ask, “Am I here?” His laughter is so loud, long, and innocent that small birds gather within and make nests. They chirp without worry, and their song develops into a theme Mozart would capture. Finally, after several stars become languid moments of belief, he responds, “No, Plato’s forms are yet to have boundaries.” Torches appear, and my poetic thoughts determine my direction. Toward more of what the mind desires, but you may not be prepared to experience.

Naked Venus rides high on a swing. She glides past above me. I try to reach for her, but I never seem to gain momentum. This is a time when a haunting violin concerto is the signature of a remarkable Goddess. As the music lilts, she melts into the skyline, an illusory dreaminess tinged with flowering abstraction. I get just a nebulous impression, but that impression alters as the soundest truths become cavities of being and tears for creativity. 

Not all who have sinned are artists, but most artists are sinners—delicate fingers fight the sublime and point to me. There is a lingering presence and a promise of things to come. I am a mystery inside a secret, inside another mystery, and I have never been more intrigued with not caring who I was, am, or will be.

At this instant, Venus is my idea, along with the perfection of others. They are a permanent and absolute existence both in my thoughts and as a floating traveler created from forbidden words and paintbrushes simply for us to worship. 

Aware of the strangeness of expectation, Venus and I exchange genders to experience how the other tastes. The sky is a salvo of purple and orange, ballet dancers as geese and swans mask the subject but not the content. Suddenly I am enigmatic, yet she confirms that men are but shadows suspicious of their pantomime.

Five

In me, not that me, but this me defined by a perfectionistic ideology for being, fills my curious persona. “It is time,” laments DaVinci as Venus swings up into the heavens.

Prometheus puts the dice in my mind and into my hand. All love affairs come to mind. All triumphs come to mind, and reason comes to mind. Expressionless faces stare, mythological figures, fictional characters, and Gods in their finery, relentless in their depth, circle quotations yet to be written. There is nothing, not even sorrow, yet I am conspicuous.

Sjöfn, the Nordic goddess of love, nude and seductive, demands I kneel. Wrapping her legs tightly around my neck, she places her sword on my lips. No sounds are heard, though sad music plays, a dirge full of expectancy. 

Irrational within a paradox, a dispute about myself spill from a rhapsody into an inquisitional quandary. The crowd does not appear in an arena that does not exist, yet the roar remains, “Roll the dice,” and the eyes of Prometheus become flames.

Dice bounce. The dice tumble, tumble and turn. Dots are lines, and dots are blurs, dots are deciders. One die twirls, the other winds around, and the shouts are frenzied. Hera leads the procession, and Aphrodite follows. Sjofn, blonde, fair, icy perfect, just snickers, a tinkling, devilish giggle, as nightfall overtakes darkness.

I confess I am nameless. The dice roll, they roll. Thick corollaries of words cloud my view. That is when I realize I will forever be wandering within a storm, this tempest and the next, and the next until pushed boundaries become the lyrical language of pure passion. Passion is the poisoned tip of all things dangerous but momentous that murderers and artists covet.  

Six

Athena, understanding complexity is a jaded pleasure. Never a burden immediately removes the numbers from the dice. A herd of magnificent multicolored mares gallops past and blend into abstraction – a painting, a symphony, and a poem. Everything past is a memory of the future. 

Seven

Charon’s ferry slowly leaves the cold waters for the negative after-image of eternity. We pass Madona on the half shell going in the other direction. I wave to me, but I am at her breasts. I shout my name, but names are, but juggler’s props and mine are lost in a conjurors treasure chest to be used in another tragedy. The Madona becomes Enos, who Aphrodite cursed with a craving for carnal relations only with mortals. Her breasts and sexual prowess are exquisite. Enos becomes the woman I have always loved and longed for, and she notices me on the periphery of a dream neither of us is having. I want her, and I will continue to want her as she is now, at this time, visceral and actual between light and darkness. I need her womb to breathe, fill my lungs, and understand why I have lived. But both vessels move away from each other, away from where reality is a leach and truth make-believe. Faint, nostalgic, tinged tears drop from my eyes. No one is free of weakness. An albatross on a wind gusting is always in sight. 

Charon grimly looks at me on that other ferry where I am nourishing myself. He takes a rat from his pocket, a white rat with pink eyes used in experiments, and holds it by its tail over the water. Soon my arm appears from beneath and snatches the animal. Charon grins. He knows I cannot comprehend what is beyond boundaries. On a shaft of white light from a prism, Dante asks, “Is this Canto III? I have an appointment.”

Time is a mirror of a caged mind, so moments become elastic, and all color is taken out of the false horizon. The ferry stops at a place of fluid wit where images congeal with words, and everything that lives is without meaning. I am neither above nor below, but where claws fill the gaps between thinking and knowing. I am in the endless land of failure where one’s contempt for oneself is worse than hell’s bottomless rings. Where laughter directed at one’s ineptness harangues ceaselessly. Here gnarled ideas are noxious refections that scream desperately for validation. Though as with all rituals, fear is the key. 

The agony of one’s own company is gloomier than the penetrating tangles and sharp brambles slowly bleeding out one’s singular meaninglessness. The ever-failing essence, the ambitious harrowing of insistence, that worth has value. Failure has no redemption, and the imperfections will never cease to burn like a brazen rod’s hot brand. Past the last thought, there is a ribbon, a visual ribbon made up of nothing. Nothing in its most vile form, hope.

Eight

The lizard crawls from the soft womb of Thetis, it has another head, red, cerise, crimson, cinnamon cherry. This head devours the other heads, and the lizard, now furious about its demise, digs its talons into my thoughts. Uncertain about my self-awareness, but knowing imagination is reason courting fantasy, I sink deeper into myself and eventually disappear.