The Poetry of R. Dean Ludden

R. Dean Ludden is mostly retired and has worked as a teacher, radio announcer, and pipe organ technician.   He is a graduate of Hamline University, with graduate study at Columbia in New York.   He is married and lives in Dixon,  Illinois.  Check out his web page is www.coiinc.com/people/organum

 

In Pacem 

Second Sight

Reasonable Insanity

Roots

Looking for the beautiful

Untitled

A new Creation

Life's Winter

Fire from Heaven

At the last

Scylla and Charybdis


 In Pacem                                     
 
We missed it,  Dad—
that last embrace that bonds
the blood of men
who always faced into the wind of love
and never understood its source.
 
So arrived the days in early fall.
We settled for a handshake, then,
and after all the years that we pretended
we were close,
the words, like leaves,  were also blown away:
weightless,  dry, and crumbling.
 
There they stood, two helpless men
without so much as one distracting tear,
who lied about the year to come,
and of those dear and fresh remembrances
beyond the day of parting.
 
You knew the last stop
would be Arlington,
albeit not on Chaplain's Hill
where sleeping comrades filled  the ground
you loved.  You did not know
a slope beneath that crowning tree
awaited you.
 
So there it was, we heard once more
the sound of Taps, the slap
against the sky of twenty-one
explosions, and a young man's tribute
to an officer who wore
two crosses  and a silver leaf—
who marched with his old comrades
years before.
 
Now as this aging son
who would embrace with spirit arms,
I wish you rest, old soldier,
there to find the peace
you never knew in war...
the peace we shared one final afternoon,
on Chaplain's Hill.
 
 
 

 

Second Sight

 
Vision is
the province of a journey
where the hearth is left behind.
To listen with the mind,
to let the storm clouds roll
across a new, uncharted  heaven.
Observe them in their infant
gathering of wisdom
as a wind takes mists
and feeds them
to a blackening dawn
until it roars its "yes"
upon the unsuspecting prairie.
All  the while, the eye deceives
and tells at best
of one small frame,
already history.
 
Rivers, lakes, and quiet fires
may only simmer
in the refuge of nostalgia
for a time,  may resurrect
faint melodies that floated
from the distant hills
or just caressed
the truth's retiring shadow,
for I lost it there,
saw it quickly borne away
by morning's restless flight,
saw the years inflict their crust
upon its maiden gown.
 
One learns to pray
with due respect to caution.
New and improved sunsets
are far too dear,  too overwhelming;
too much truth gets in the way.
Oh yes,  much more awaits
just past the outposts
as all proper revelations do,
were I to have the time, the will
to disenthrall this body
from its splendid toys...
but they are so lovely,  still.
 
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"Logic:  The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and
incapacities of the human misunderstanding."   ~Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
**************************************************************************************************
 

           Reasonable insanity

 
Upon the scale of graces
is there nothing to be said
for aberration of the mind?
Where one may choose
the path of irresponsibility
and see  the tigers play—
to bid  them save their roaring
for the blood scent of the hunt?
 
I want to go
where unicorns beguile
and where wild halloos still echo
'cross the barren fields,
when the wind remembers.
I want to shake out
all the dusty pretense
in  those plans I made
so many years ago.
 
There is music
beating out the triumph of the spring.
Faint upon the ear, it grows
and feeds each  effervescent soul
until the senses join the march,
until the Mardi Gras crescendo
rules the night. 
 
So let it be.  The tomb is cold enough,
and laughter will not penetrate its walls.
Diaphanous, the curtain closing madness
from our grasp.  Those silhouettes
entrance us.  Spells abound.  Propriety
is not a word we know.
And of tomorrow's tired reality?
The muse be praised,  It is turned back
Into the black forever raging sea!
 

                      Roots

 
Here let me rest a little while.
Where the soil is lush and yielding,
where the trees reach out
in one magnificent embrace of
mother earth, silent teachers
of an archetypal love that history
could not disclose.
Here let me co-create,
to meet consanguine shadows rising
from maternal clay—here in the heartland,
where my dust congealed,  where the
breath is shared again, again...
 
Moss invades the headstones.
My fingers trace the names,
while souls conjoin and know
that flint spark birthed within the cave
burned hotter still in pilgrims' breasts,
still spreads its heat across a continent,
flashing in the eyes of youth,
smoldering upon the page's edge
and poised to leap and dance
upon the open hearth,
or to destroy.
 
Enter,  solitude,
and in that place where roots descend,
reach forth as tendrils intertwining
with the past,  there grows
a new tellurian peace
to trace the sun,  earthbound
and free,  still calling
from the ground to sons unborn,
"Remember me."

          Looking for the beautiful

 
It would have been a hopeless search
when every day's persistence saw
an overused  humanity,  dried out,
still taking from a host
that had no more to give.
 
From every continent and
into every tired street
they reached in avarice,
and never understood
how pure the winter is
for  cleansing,  how steadfast
in its raw embrace
is  this ally of death.
 
No,  the dreams kept fighting back
with their quixotic paradise
and irony became a scheme
for upper class deceit.
Take apart the puzzle
of a hollow quest
and find inside a world
too far gone on ugliness,
too much entrenched
in all the spoil of victory.
 
A single word speeds past perfection
in the dance, and that is awe,
most uncontrived;
from there no beauty cowers
but is revealed at once
to naive souls alone.
Alas!  Greed's wizened prisoner
at length,  may dance no more.

Untitled

Lent, full of God,
too soon begins to slip away;
each draught left unconsumed
drinks of itself
and will not tarry long
though freely tendered.
Every soul
that rides the surge of days
gains excellence
at looking back with sighs
upon that empty cup,
and forth upon
the reservoir of time
(so set to drench eternity
with love) and so deferred
a little while again, again
and then to cloy
the Easter Feast
amid the hope
of yet another year.

 

         Post Modern Mystique

 
There comes a newer paradise
along the path of truth
a world in parallel
to rest upon the day
and it is wondrous in its silent tumult
for all time is suddenly unlocked;
quiet shimmers throw their echo
back across the galaxies
that once we knew,
and everything is changed.
 
This is the realm of trust,
full-blown, caressing,
soft upon the air of revelation
where the spirits bow.
The work is of believing
and the peace
is of a true humanity
that only visionaries see
illumined by the son of God.
 
This is the time also
when graying intellects
return their chalk to dusty trays
and speak in wonderment
of crumbling halls
where the elite
compose the fate of man.
Speak of art and tears
and voices in the night,
of yesterdays that hung like smoke
above the field of death.
And they too sigh,  complicit
in that grim memorial
we celebrate in song.
 
This new millennium
so obsessed in infancy
with punishment, revenge
and walls of fire,
is it stillborn?
Petulant, intractable
within its cradle
of a thousand winters,
yet defiant to a single spring?
Are its stripes unhealed,
its stars still dipped in blood?
Or might it by some miracle
see life still glowing far within,
reach out to hands across the sea
and give it all away?
 

"Besides the noble art of getting things done,  there is the noble art of
leaving things undone.  The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of
nonessentials."                     ~Lin Yu Tang



A new Creation

 
All up and down the
corridors of timelessness,
before and since
the dreams and schemes
that fester in a twilight consciousness,
imagining will sire reality,
for all  is transmundane where
wish and need and gift converge
and there is certainty.
 
Less and more are made of vanity,
and good or evil, yet unknown.
The patient silence breathes
in throes of birth, for there
amid the swirl of dust and galaxies
the process still unfolds.
the word alone expressed
and in a magic
that brings magic to its knees
the particles assemble,
coalesce,
and it is so.

Life's Winter

 
Above all else
There is this cooling of the blood
within my veins.
Flat horror is my next-of-kin.
Fingers scratch in ice
of a December made
of sterile moons that mock their suns
with hollow light too weak to care. 
Silence is my prison, 
death a faithless friend who will not
keep his time,  but ever backs away...
Look out upon a highway cold and still.
It is as if I stand alone
upon a frozen island, 
just to watch the roaring wind
and know of emptiness.
Within,   without,  a living tomb
where even color races to the edge
and drops away.
If at last the choice becomes
a dying fall or an immortal spring,
I choose November's  coverlet of snow
and long for rest.
 

Fire from Heaven

 
Call it not rest.
It is the peace of lassitude
that draws its cover over
those defiant ones,
never wise enough
to know serenity,   never
tuned to timelessness
until that CRACK across the sky
asserts the warp assaulting
every scheme of Lilliput,
every glory that mortality may throw
upon the stage
and in that instant terror
mind is  prostrate,
cold,  emasculate,
Eons condense;  dreams walk
unseen along the shore while
spirits frolic in a transient ecstasy.
On high the solons gather.  Only then
life may resume to plod its weary course
along a more incisive edge of day,
no turning back,
for all is new.
 

At the last

 
Light makes its retreat
upon a thousand western hills
and it is time for endings,
overlapping,  self on self,
leaping on the past, like hurdlers
in a race of the insane,
the denouement broadcasting fear
like seeds that flourish,  feed,
then gnaw upon the viscera.
Then  is dread self-orchestrated,
colors fade,  and hope is turned away.
Even sadness quite stillborn,
time suspended and
the open door to God
forever closed.
 
And yet to acquiesce?
Impossible.
For at the end, one question...
"Might there be,
somewhere past that far-off plain,
unknown,  unsought,
that which begins again?"
And then a gentle,  "No.  Although,
there might have been."

 

Scylla and Charybdis

 
The winds increase,
Messina off the bow!  Beware!
For centuries of myth and stark reality
enshrine this meagre strait
where Jason sailed,
and St. Bravado
keeps his benefice.
 
It is the foil of Everyman,
this profane, drenching lair.
Monsters indeed!  To leap
upon his peace...a peace
that flies in fear before the morning watch,
when from his lover's arms
he rouses, torpid,
ardent of a dream exploded,
mocking in retreat.
 
In vain,  reminders
of past choices,  justice,
recompense.
In vain, the watchers tremble,
death is cheap,
and heroes quail.
In vain I live
would I not choose to die.

 

 
 

 

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"He that embarks in the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse
of the wind than the strokes of the oar;  and many founder in their passage, while they
lie waiting for the gale."            ~Samuel Johnson