(audio) PC 13: the Panther on the Beach

Here's a very popular work from the Thirteenth Panther Cycle: Panther on the Beach, from my new book THE COMPLEAT PANTHER CYCLES. Yes, it is a villanelle. I love the challnge of the form and have considered putting together, someday, a collection of the hundreds of this form I have composed. But for now, just enjoy this one as part of the tapestry of this extraordinary book.

the Panther on the Beach

A poet's dream and invocation of dark divinity
spun of the ethereal webs of chance and sweet mortality.
A future memory calling of the panther on the beach.
Forbidden and forever. The rose, she grows just out of reach,
representing a resonant sweetness, nectar of a peach,
a poet's dream and invocation of dark divinity.
So innocently the Judas goat, la belle dame sans merci.
My blood, it burns in cascade turns, now in bondage to be free:
a future memory calling of the panther on the beach.
Hardwired, soul to sinew, as if the vengeful prophets preach
a fallen grace of lost face, disremembering what we teach.
A poet's dream and invocation of dark divinity.
I gaze, in rapt amazement, committing all to memory,
raging in a cage called propriety. A false dignity.
A future memory calling of the panther on the beach.
A visit to the edge of the enamored infinity.
Woven in words incarnate and the elegance of my speech.
A poet's dream and invocation of dark divinity.
A future memory calling of the panther on the beach.


William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.

No, in sales it isn't and won't be "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince"...but the odds are when HBP is a marketing study, the literary writers of this generation will have just begun their toe-hold on the culture that endures.