Jack D. Harvey

Riddle Me A Riddle

 Who is Athena's owl to

 solve the unsolvable problem?

 To crack the

 unspeakable code

 with his beak?

 Who is the intelligent?

 Who is the secular ivy

 climbing the walls of monasteries,

 creeping green up the columns

 of pagan temples?

 Where the spirit of

 Phidias, of Augustine ends,

 there the permanence, the

 seemly beauty, immovable,

 of stone.

 In the great American west,

 inside the bunkhouse

 the dancing fiddler plays

 Mozart's music backwards

 to its original

 pure and simple shell;

 easy as pie for his

 expert supple hands

 and fingers.

 His audience loves the mystery

 of his skill

 more than the music;

 that is all right.

 John the Baptist,

 pure and simple,

 lost his head;

 mother and daughter wanted it

 sitting on a plate

 and they got it

 and while it sat,

 we saw,

 as in a dream,

 the walls, the bulwarks

 of his magnitude fall away,

 saw his power evade us and

 surround us, like the air.

 John, waiting on the one to come,

 the Savior, the solver

 of the only certain problem,

 Himself a solution seeming

 clear as the stars above

 and as remote, though

 He walked among us.

 Did He save and solve

 or only create faraway

 white escarpments, holy

 places of refuge

 we can never reach?

 We see

 His violet brow

 coming across the water

 of the Sea of Galilee,

 we see His agony

 on the cross,

 we know from the bible

 some few details

 of His life;

 in the simple and elegant

 flow of parables and miracles

 we discern His truth, but

 do we know from Him

 any more than we know

 from the dancing fiddler?

 Our ardently desired solution

 to the mystery,

 our trials, our travails,

 no more, no less than

 too much time on our hands,

 too much useless rind

 in our heads, so

 we can't find our way

 to the simple world

 where there is no owl

 and no problem.

 Only the sweet music

 of the fiddler filling

 our brief days until

 he, too, plunges

 in the shadowy ocean

 and that is enough.

Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener,  Mind In Motion, The Comstock Review, The Antioch Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The University of Texas Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal and a number of other on-line and in print poetry magazines over the years, many of which are probably kaput by now, given the high mortality rate of poetry magazines.