Septuagenarian Memoirs No. 7
“Music is the doctor of my soul,”
eminent healing of a day’s dregs
by reversion to a primal heartbeat,
immediate submersion in sounds
streaming through the blood
like a sacred river of strange currents,
from a steadfast beating of drums
to Mozart, Elvis, Doobie Brothers
& Bob Dylan’s always rolling stone;
music is edged with eternity’s marriage
to the full measure of the moment,
releasing the monkey-mind from itself
& raising the soul to obvious ecstasy.
Without music, angels weep at dawn
& hearts suffer attacks of melancholy
from irredeemable distraction noises,
but music is my radical muse
from a mysterious silence
where all music is born
in particular infinities.
Distractions (2)
Distractions measure out our lives
with unredeemable plastic spoons
that break, splitting open tongues
with blood drooling from openly
catatonic mouths until the next
distraction is up and ready to serve.
All very surreal, very sophisticated.
Homo Distractatus is our name,
distracting from distractions our game.
When did life itself become a distraction?
Why are we addicted to everything
but silence & solitude, preferring
to vulture the carrion of our cravings?
What happened to vision quests
and fasting from deprivations of soul?
Where are the crones and sages
guiding us through rogue waves
and the spiritual sloth of the frivolous?
How has wisdom lost itself in deviations
from the ancient ecstasies of life?
When we weary of ever-circling
the brazen-bright laser lights,
will we just lay down & die?
Why the malingering fear
of living naked without
the numbing shielding?
Where are the poets
& earthy saints to take
our breaths away with
their spirited geographies
impervious to deadenings?
Imagination
Imagine there is imagination,
forming what does not exist,
seeing what exists as strange,
a surreal dive into possibilities
where old mysteries
and new potentials
converge in crucibles
compounding elixirs
into fathomable insights
surprising all the more
for their bizarre beauty.
Imagination as knowing
with the soul’s blood,
remembering what never was,
receiving whatever could be,
soaring in divine winds
into the heart of wisdom,
finding peculiar revelations
creatively disguised
as ordinary absurdities.
Alan Altany is a partially retired, septuagenarian college professor of religious studies and theology. He has been a factory worker, swineherd on a farm, hotel clerk, lawn maintenance worker, high school teacher, small magazine of poetry editor, director of religious education for churches, truck driver, novelist, among other things. In 2022 he published a book of poetry entitled *A Beautiful Absurdity* (https://www. alanaltany.com/).
