City Sky: Threatening Arrival

Calm, abeyance
before the storm,
clouds forming,
building, holding
distances, and minutes
delay the graying
visible on the horizon:
darkening, visible
moisture heavy clouds lower -
a reservoir of tension's energy;
winds released, non-confined
fore-tell, promise,
a fore-warning of the fury,
tempest thunder and lightening,
the oncoming, onslaught advancing
storm still perched on the horizon;
advancing rain-sheets trace
black gathering sky streacks
which sweep inward,
mists obscure sight, ever darkening:
the approaching storm
shadows grayed buildings,
determined mists obscuring the distance...

The city, darker,
darkening, the air move dense:
one watches the approach,
the blue-black spectacle;
awesome nature, natural event,
proceeds, wind driven clouds
gathering, re-enforce and advance;
grace with joy and dread
and beauty's frenzy - pause;
one recognizes the strength
and the impending fear;
one is only partly pleased
for the on-rushing force,
a proof beyond
the capabilities of man...

Shadows and memories:
Pan plays his pipes,
the music echoes through faint time
and out, almost gone, disappeared
into the immensity of memory
and the darker necessity
of our darker, deeper expanding universe;
Pan plays nearly forgotten tunes,
melodies  and odes, the lament
the ambiguity of the dance,
the intimacy of desire…
fawns and idiosyncratic fun,
 

mirrors and shadows,
the reflected light - laughter
of the half risen moon;
faint treasures and memories
and beyond, drift
into the dark immensity,
into the silence of the expanding spheres,
every outward through the unseen,
the deep dark matter
 
Silenus and Pan
 and the playful Maenads,
pipes of music played,
homage of nature and nature known:
Silenus, precursor to Socrates
and the search for the meanings
of time and desire;
play the pipes, Pan,
laughter before the sun turns down,
slipped into the receding and deepening dark
of the universe, of our perpetual night...
without moon or Pleiades or signs
there is only the fainter rhythm,
echo of music and shadows
passed down, to be lost, extinguished
into scientific perpetual time.
 
Still, the search for laughter,
the sound, the music, the myth
of the mathematical rhythm;
the reach for the existed purpose
the desire of the dance
now - yet - still so barely heard,
so faintly audible -
the meanings of the music;
play the tunes of Silenus, of Pan,
heedless of any significance
of the "I" or the "me"
or the Satyrs' shepherds dance
or the barely distinguished last remnants -
touches of sound:
play, defiant chords
while the ode, with Silenus and Pan
and the Satyrs, drifts,
continues a last lament into the heedless,
the scientific, silent, deep Black Matter
Universe...