To Dorothy

I

We Met in Oz

It was as if you held everything in your words
No man could be expected to pursue
The unholy enterprise of integrating and renaming
What has been known only scantily and in moments
Beyond the still fragments
Littering this life.
Whether your industrious world
Backs up right to your heart country
Or you laze in the dreams of impulse:
Dorothy it is you we court.
We met in Oz or was it earlier:
Paradise is not discovered.
It resides in birth and before
Where pools form after the emptying rain.
Our eyes open in it
As if in memory.

II

Straw Man

A boyish eager grin and eyes
Cleansed of sin.
I can’t imagine you lacked the faith
Necessary to believe.
It was part of your unhindered nature
Except you lacked a brain
Which disqualified you from life,
That is, what passes for it.
Where it might get you is anybody’s guess.
You already hold pride of place
For Dorothy on the golden path.
You come apart so easily
In the heat of battle or a fiery threat.
Such glibness, utterly disarming
Would launch easily into a marching song
Or a matinee satire of what’s right and wrong.

III

Tin Man

You are second on the road.
Not so kind to the touch of man or dog.
I suppose brandishing a weapon
Meant more to you than your admirers.
We finally oiled you into speech
To learn your heart was just not in it.
It would be harder as flesh and blood,
To survive as organic matter
Except the light of the world
Can’t shine within without a heart.
The beating of all we are in time,
Bearing with all that does not rhyme.
It is just an opportunity to realize
The fences of a garden hold a gate.
It works that way on the earth
However circular our dogged fate.

IV

The Lion

Rage all inward to him,
The outside a mere reflection.
What can measure unhappiness?
It is not bound except by sin.
You cannot imagine a body of remorse
--more hideous than what consumes it—
Burn down the narrow gates of fear,
Let the larger world embrace you:
Not love of man or woman,
Not the sanctified peace of heaven,
Rather the meeting of self with hope unbound
So fears burn with time to past.
Performance mattered so
With the pestilence of critical reflection
In prison yards and the empty theatres
The brazen heart is gradually invested.

V

The Wizard

You who held the keys to it all,
What buffoonery for the many.
Slide your fingers along the levers,
The mechanical world is so very clever.
Men of high degree and moral turpitude,
Lovers in their various positions,
Trace the path of the mortal compass.
All of that is mere reflection.
You know as well as I
It’s not a matter of hand or eye.
What courses in the heart and loins
May by chance be randomly conjoined.
Such mathematical puzzles with awkward pieces
Confuse the mind and waste the spirit.
Not all is known, not all regret.
The Mighty Oz has spoken.

***************************************************

This poem revisits the Wizard of Oz in a serious manner. Like the twister that brought Dorothy to Oz, it rips into each character, lifts them out of their familiar setting and examines their inner nature. The insights seem to rush forward in an accelerated manner in the style of Joseph Brodsky.