Duane Vorhees is an American poet in Thailand. He is the author of THE MANY LOVES OF DUANE VORHEES; HEAVEN; GIFT: GOD RUNS THROUGH ALL THESE ROOMS; MEMORIES ARE LINKED LIKE OASES; A CONSIDERABLE SHARE OF FELICITY: and THE WOMB AND THE BRAIN. He has taught various subjects in the US, Korea, and Japan and has dabbled in dishwashing, lifeguarding, acting, modeling, broadcasting, journalism, door-to-door sales, tool room management, and other activities.
NHERITANTS
It was Adam’s first sunset.
Clothed fully in nakedness
he watched blush balance blackness
and studied how the ruby
became coal-dull and sooty.
He was the man of duty;
thus Moses would brand Adam;
Paul would call him the pattern.
We are cuttings from his garden.
Eve’s limbs sprawled cloudward. She lay
there like an uprooted tree.
“Bury us, we are the seeds.”
We still pray for redemption,
never for reconstruction.
So, when all is said and done,
immortal Adam and Eve,
our pools carry your dead leaves
and we echo you always.
.........
UNKNOTTED
Far off we see those bright quasars
captured by their own black holes,
their old buds dying inside,
hopes fettered to fears,
guards shackled to their convicts.
We’re soft diamonds under iron skies.
Lovers of the youth earth’s noises,
but raised in cold and shady nations
where light is unknotted from the sun,
we end here in ancient silence.
...........
NEO-GNOSTICS
The Church of Christ Geographer
fixes its axes
between Bethlehem and Gethsemane,
charts its coordinates at Patmos and at Tarsus.
Heretics infidels schismatics iconoclasts
occupy our incredulous post-pagan planet.
There are those who claim
the universe is actually a Freemasons conspiracy,
and those who maintain
that’s absurd – obviously, it’s the Rosicrucians.
No, no, some insist
the Universe Machine does exist
but it’s a self-construct.
This is in contrast
to those who preach
the universe as a divine wet dream
or, more likely, a component
of a cosmic plan to accomplish
an unfathomable end.
“It’s inscrutable!” “It’s immutable!” “Oh, it’s beautiful!”
(and don’t we all admit
the future is finite,
while dreams and gods
are limitless?)
Cosmologists define chaos
as order not yet perceived.
An artist believes
in the mathematical function of the mind:
A poem is a formula.
And every past
is an artifact of imagination;
art, and not religion,
is our only interface
with eternity, with reality.
To those who posit the passing
phenomenologically,
as the present swallowing
some possible tomorrows
to appease the past,
and to those who
pile past upon past
with no diminishment of futures
(though I myself feel yesterdays
lengthen and futures growing short),
the upholders of omnipresence
counter that God is timeless --
God does not believe in Wednesdays --
and the demarcated God
does not admit of territory.
The Church of Christ Geographer
proselytizes its atlas
among us mapless navigators
lacking compass and astrolabe.
..........
AN ORDINARY LOVE STORY
If you are the vault, I
am the combination.
(a tux,
a mum,
a candled dinner)
If I am the match, you
are the conflagration.
(a kiss,
the cum,
those tangled
fingers)
If we are the watch, you
are the complication.
.........
EMPTY AND PEBBLED
--Cheops Beach in autumn
Naked we together again run
on our gold dust and pearls
beside the sleeping sea.
The waning sun beads our skin
while the wind smothers our lungs.
Every vagina is exposed,
a messy lagar where the wine is formed.
Any penis is Hermetical, closed,
an opaque clarinet.
Today the halves of the hinge
are rusty, stiff, and worn.
These times before,
nipple and prick would respond
to the air the sheen the motion
with alert anticipation.
These times before. But no more.
This is what this fall displays:
our lifetimes are pyramids
infinite at base
inexorable toward the point.
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