Anacreon’s Place

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.

I shall pour clean water over you and you will be cleansed; I shall cleanse you of all your defilement and all your idols. I shall give you a new heart, and put a new spirit in you; I shall remove the heart of stone from your bodies and give you a heart of flesh instead. I shall put my spirit in you, and make you keep my laws and sincerely respect my observances.

Ez 36:25-27

Needing to be reprogrammed from
the inside out; needing to be
scoured like a pipe from decades
of incrustation.

A town near where I live a few years ago
contemplated reworking its sewage and water
circulation system. It was a turn of the
century arrangement of glass pipes with innumerable
blockages and twisting ramifications, and
not a few areas that had simply been crushed
by the movement of the earths solid volumetrics,
pushing and pulling in its rumbling undergirth.

I have a vision of the network of glass pipes extruding tetrislike
into an open limestone cavern deep beneath the town, gossamer
chandelier glacier in frozen avalanches of hidden brittle
openness, alone. But, somehow, this glass is much stronger
than one might think and when the living nectar pours again
through it, all filth and clottage aside, it groans to life,
and moans peace, in a still small voice.

This voice is as of a glasharmonika. And we dance to it.
Its notes tumble over us like leaves, and when we join
the notes they take us on journeys we never
imagined and will never forget.

But have no idea how to talk about it.
So we act.

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.

regale the gift
stern uplift
prim exceptions
to napoleonic deflections
the artillery lord of toulon
will play with a red baton

only if when why whither
scatterskitter
the bier sags heavy with
unclaimed deeds

as they remarked
the lack of tact
the catcalls that greeted
them

they thumbed their noses at
anger, and said

let’s be stronger
than danger,

and learn to swim
in love.

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.

Water runs in rivulets
along the tiles of the
cathedral floor, outlining
a labyrinth of the consciousness
only.

I am solely occupied with
pinching out a candle flame
and do not see the gargoyle
diving toward me for the kill.

Or he does not see me.

Or I am the gargoyle.

2.
Awakening on a hammock with
the travel chest spilled out
onto the lawn and maps and books
and chits and things about to be
rained on.

But the mountains breath stops
the rain.

3.
I awaken again and realize
I am the mountain.

A long drive through rivers of
self with a light at the end that is
higher and brighter than I ever
realized, the Jerusalem that
has always been the goal but
gets more beautiful and
intricate, exquisite, multilayered,
and ramified, as I get older.

I realized that there is no avoiding
these shadows, that I must push through
them again to reach that destination,
a flickering radiance on a stained, dog-eared
map that scores chunks of soul into hypertrophied
benificent angels, frees humans into more agent than
they were born as.

The poem strikes, a release of timed fire,
monastery call is the being,
many lives in the waiting
caterpillars of love and space
spin silken pain to golden
thronestuff, to share with
multitudes, and rejoice.