Supple stream
lower than pond drainage can
flow onto the terrace
The acres withered, the barns
serried and empty. Harvest is past
and we are not saved.
A spring erupts
from within the
brecciated folds
of hill, cleansing of
leaves and roots,
pushing boulders aside.
Water from within the earth
yields benevolence unto the
seeds that yearn, and shudder
open, to drink light from the sky.
Finally, beyond the clasp
of turning fire-roasted pork
over open coals, smell of a
living being’s unwilling
self-donation disclosing
to him the reality that
non-aggression is a package left lonely
in the cellar by most, he scents one night
in the garden before the pond a hint of perfume
from the grove next to the cemetery
that nudges his awareness to the next
plateau. The silhouette of three figures in the scatter-flash
of a passing car’s headlights serves notice that, when the
car is gone and a lightning-strobe accompanies the wind-gust
off Carter’s Mountain to show only one figure remaining,
that all surfaces are one, or none, and so
is he. He does not light
a cigarette.
The rabbi wonders
tossing in his bed
if it is possible that
the depredations, the horrors
that have savaged his people
in the last century are because
a flaw in the Name written
on a scroll somewhere in the operating
system, the very Name of the Most
High, has crept in and split
the fabric of being. Some Demiurge
or Archangel, some malevolent entity
or foolish intoxication-seeking youth stole
into being’s fulcrum and raised the
bridge. God’s name was smudged.
The world came unglued. All because
of a scorch-mark on the Name
in a scroll amid the reeling
shutters and blinking lights,
the galaxy-sized microprocessors
within the Tree of Knowledge.
And this corrupt, collapsing world
is on that scroll reverently but purposely
set aside into the storeroom in a synagogue
of Hyper-Being, pending proper burial.
Like some ideas, and institutions.
Down-wind, dinner dropped from the stars; I think Coltrane
was playing but we mistook the mantraic chant at the resolution of
A Love Supreme for something Mozart might have dreamed.
And Salieri was without nightmares in this scheme - the plastic
m48 Patton poised by a child’s hand at the top of the stairs to
shell Lego buildings below has nothing in it of real battle,
only a twice-removed shudder through the gamma ray-stroked ethersphere.
But the nourishment that plowed into our planet at 2 kilometers
per second and buried itself in the turf and mulch the other side
of Afton mountain is yet undiscovered, just harmonizes silently on,
while the semi’s roar to and fro on a highway that is beginning to
look like a figment of its own imagination, what with the strip malls
and diners collectivating on either side of the well-worn runnels
the myriads commute whithersoever together on. I wonder if this
is just a blip, or will it endure?
Coltrane keeps playing. The meteor continues to thrum
melodies onto the stalactictes and stalgmites under
the mountains semis drive over every day. The Creator wonders
why He ever built this place, but the denizens are fascinating
if strange. He loves them. When he looks into their eyes, He sees
something like himself looking back, and something else.
The else is why.
To scry precision beauty
from a mess of paint and
shrieking guitars is my aim.
Stretching canvas
across the wind, the woods
are tight and fierce but
friendly to ones who
pass within.
Thorns yield gentle fruit
to the bard who knows the
words.
Loving the leaving as well
as the giving and conception,
the necrotic filters crumble
to dust as roots pull nutrients
from deeper than the rocks know
to understand.
The machine has no place here.
The mountain waters rumble
in quiet delight
The firesure walker runs
to the portal strapped
to a lattice of missed
opportunity which
gets stuck in the doorway so
he has to shrug it off
to get in.
Nightly striking
the door is of
none effect, because
the homers are
long asleep and
will not be roused
by dayslake or
touslescourge,
so he will have
to send an email.
And somewhere, within
the folds of enclosed
self, one makes more
of what one truly is;
love that enfolds, refines,
divines.
Moses went up with Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel.They saw the God of Israel beneath whose feet there was, it seemed, a sapphire pavement pure as the heavens themselves. He laid no hand on these notables of the sons of Israel: they gazed on God. They ate and they drank.
Ex 24:11
Around the halls came
a thunder and branches
broke down upon them;
from the belly of the
hill a roar of fire,
gold melting invisible
in the air, we smelted
bricks from gobs of it
by the road.
Who rocked this
wilderness to pave
a planting for discrete
uniformed individuals?
The music scars us for life.
The scars are beautiful, and
transform starlight to bushels
of spun silver.
We twist the silver around the
branches of the tree, which is our
collective body, back arched to
purifying, pervasive womb-sky,
to scry perpetual roiling
waxwork inkness, receiving a code
intricately colluding with outsiders
to get back out from within,
and take the palace of mirrors with them.
You have stood there for generations,
palms outstretched, awaiting a blessing.
I have watched you for generations
from across this murky river, as our cloaks become tattered
from wind, rain, and too much sun.
Let us stand together in the shade of the quiet oak.
May all the children of Abraham find sustenance at this confluence
of battered roads. And learn to sustain others too, rather than
to disdain, and deny, in the ochre twilight
as the chariot revolves over the city, watching without ceasing
you and me and them.
We are one without weapons before the shrike-radiance
of the living Most High, to learn to breathe without denial, to refuse the poison fumes of the altercators. To run at one with the outgushing
of the waters that form and marry the marred plains into burgeoning
fields of wisdom to people the living towns with warmth, and
glad light, unobstructed but weaving ever more intricate patterns
of beauty, of love, of grace, of the sublime, on a darkling plain
that none called home.
Gentleman time stands and winds
the branded clock, a breathtaking
display of virtuosity and erudition
that goes unchecked by the forces of reaction
when the fusion clarinet pops on the river
bank and jazz fills the evenlight auroralike.
Hammers with percussive intent feign industrial
solemnity but are in fact pulses of Malian
benevolence, gathering angels of mild and
placid countenance who favor the meek with
Hersheys kisses and refuse to sue for peace.
Their pounding triggers rockslides on the
mountains surrounding the vale, and clouds
of chalk dust obscure the stars. The absence
of starlight reminds us we are in this thing
together, and someone needs to start
paddling fast. The thunder is getting
louder.
Grains of sand
on a distant shore;
nautilus shell washes up;
no meaning is found
between incandescent arcs
of evolutionary light -
positivistic dualisms fire
science into the jet deep;
ochre passions return pulsing
with magma, flaring fountains
of clotblindshrieking jelly
way too hot for life.
The science is a wisdom
of hindered business; RCIA
is called off, due to lack of
interest, but the sacraments
continue, as predestined,
translators’ treacheries
unrefined.