IN MEMORIAM TONY VAUGHAN
Oh, for the intangible perfume of bitter-sweet truth
that hovered about the bees of your brain.
You actually enjoyed thinking,
a peripatetic on the by-ways of ideation
and the eternal return... Despite the post-modern tilt
of your capacity to frame ideas, at heart
you were an old fashioned type, and much a gentleman,
More than once I saw you gallantly waltz
with a charming lamppost or affectionate stop-sign.
And if general conversation left you feeling
suspended, you had a way of talking to yourself
that did not invite contradiction.
And your passion for justice
could burn like metals that stars exhale.
You remained hyperborean more than hyperbolic.
Your ethics tempered you to the cool.
Your inferiors found you fightening at times,
how you'd spook their illusions of separateness,
and fears of realizing that we're all semi-permeable
and you like a pool of liquid lysergic.
You were the only person I'd ever met
that could go so far and still remaim among us.
That was part of the magic that kept you complex,
and shadow-inclusive. There was something feline
in your soul, the way you could droop on the limbs
of an afternoon, the sunlight your sufficient currency.
You saw through so much, unafraid of the skeletal.
Your artwork was touched by something sublime.
The animals therein with their musical instruments
had more humanity than some poets we know.
Like me, you were ipso dipso at times, and as far as
other proclivities went, that line about "the unexamined life"
could have been written for you..cover image: The Way of the Lion
In Memoriam Tony Vaughan (cont.)
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