Our Separate Darkness

THE PUBLISHED WORKS OF SY KAHN: Our Separate Darkness

C 0 N T E N T S:

A Song for David, My Son

Merry-Go-Round

Boy with Frogs

Rocket

My Son Writes In Stone

The Wishing Leaf

Children In The Trees

Be On The Lookout For Robber Jones!

Crucifixion

Aftermath In Saarbruken

Woman, Standing At Midnight

Like A Sorcerer, A Lover

Invasion

The Distance Between Who And Who

Dangerous Verticle

Poems For Two Women

Greek Almond

Our Separate Darkness

The Heart Breaks As the Mountain

Antaeus

In My Advancing Age

Philadelphia Sculptress

Antiotomic Poem

Black Signal At Rocca Sinibalda

Night Song

Still

Death As A Waterbird

Pattern

OUR SEPARATE DARKNESS
and other poems
by Sy Kahn
with an introduction by
Caresse Crosby
A Castle Continental Edition
Rocca Sinibalda
Italy, 1963 (1st ed.), 1968 (2nd)

From the 1963 Introduction:
"Sy Kahn has written a book of poems as personal and I believe as humanly involute as any collection of poetic expression published in these tormented days. . . . here we have the whole gamut of the poet's feeling.
This is a first edition of first poems, many already published in the little magazines of the era. The content of the volume is impressive because of the continuing strength and richness of the cosmogenetic image. One can feel sure that there is much yet to come of flesh and stone and of sun and moon that with conviction will be skillfully expressed by the poet."
-Caresse Crosby

OUR SEPARATE DARKNESS
by Sy Kahn

Out of our separate darkness
We move to our appointed time,
Awakened from our sleepwalk lives
By the passion that marked
Our meeting and our birth.

There was always the moon -
Silver running down the mountainsides
Like marvellous volcanoes,
And the quicksilver sea
With its phosphorescent stars.

Black were the trees in the aluminum night,
Black the leaves and the skeletal ships,
But the air was white, the boulders bright
Giant's jewels, the moon a white torch.

It was a bare room and often cold.
Wooden shutters, slat upon slat
Came down like a wall.
Or they were bars -
The blazing moon striped our flesh;
Moonwhipped we were, mysterious, soft
Flagellation. Then was the moon our jailor.

A long time
Before the moon was merely moon again,
It burned so long. It whipped us more apart
Then when we took light blows together.
Wearily, under the flagellating moon,
We fled, and seas, countries, continents
Rose between us
And we returned to our separate darkness.

MERRY-GO-ROUND

At the center of the whirling world,
At the still point,
David stands tranced
By the prancing, skewered horses
And the circling, golden cars.
Spotted, striped
They gallop in the air,
Flying mare and stallions,
Charging and churning
In the burning summer light.
One hand upon the center pole,
He, not yet four, seems
A tiny Atlas, an axis
For the clanging tumblerumble world
All shadowed in his
Unblinking, brownblond stare.
And my prayer as I watch him,
He, unruffled, except by the wind
In his hair, is this:
That when he has ten times his age
He will be as stable and as sage
At the center of the spinning globe,
Tranced still, aglow,
Moved but unmoving,
Watching the golden horses go.