For I not for an hour did love,
Or for a day desire,
But with my soul had from above,
This endless holy fire.
–Henry Vaughan
1.
A bed or a boat
carries us home to the sun
that pleasant Glagolitic summer
where the scripture flaunts its handles.
but I could never read these letters:
flowers on the sun-beaten hill.
Do they know they’re in Jerusalem?
2.
As Billie said at dinner
only a fraction of conversation is spoken:
we never cease to communicate.
But the poet can stop,
lead on by ceaseless touch, light
of the communicator. Sun that tests,
speaks our silence out loud.
3.
I heard myself say, as I plunged
my broken hands
into the fire
just as your planet was coming
to wake us up.
In Magyar the object
is given an ultimate ’t’
resounding somewhere in the dark
my secret name.
Yet behind the I is an empty throne
hetoimasia, so more of me come
and we fill it with out emptiness
that calls the name we don’t know.
4.
Século was it
or second, some freedom
my mouth was telling you
stuffed with orchids
you tried to grow as a child.
Words the shadow
that hurries to the underworld
to tell its secrets.
5.
Beneath the face of the Sephiroth the ouroboros bites its tail; its movement engenders consciousness with a second-pass beneath Geburah: in that place of the mirror: the place of Judgement.
Chaos pulls away from Judgement; Tiphareth, art: the circle bends away from itself unfettered and is the possibility, is the power of revision upon being: the Catholic death-rite of confession, that undoes the grounds of judgement, and walks forth anew.
Forget your name.
6.
Only the voices remain then
as you sweep the floors.
No more instruments;
the music free to play.
7.
I.
We’re too wise we thought to worship poor Oedipus
gnawing away at the muddy earth
with nothing left to distract him.
II.
There’s always snow on the ground
to help me guess who I am.
Cold colnannon at dusk
the voice never fails to listen
to the voices within, this faraway
place with memories of Ireland
but there’s no enemy to answer
only cannonballs lifted to smash cabbages
in cottages where I have lived
now home again in the waiting sea
brought closer than they have every been.
III.
Dusk. Blue. Where the poor king works
to somehow find our tender use
broken body boarding night’s sleek vessel
life locked in death, heaven in a shell H.V.
the sonorous patterns of his ear ray
forth in listening: the king must die
to hollow this cave for what she will say.
8.
The sentence wears emblems
sheep that feed on these rocky hills
buried effigies of our faces.
Every coffin does come with a telephone.
Such flowers skip around the valley
to whom people are flowers
reporting on our silence.
How is there so little of me
and so much there enjoying itself,
he said and she knew they’d left the gate open
of whatever we wanted geometry to mean
the sacred animal shitting on the clean sheets.
9.
The earth is thinking
quietly language equates all
through the snowbound
dog’s-bane and bullrushes
we were destined to learn.
Siegfried learning
the language of birds.
Or Siegfried who learns death
as Steiner claims Judas
was the closest initiate
who could work beyond
his master’s death;
grave maneuvers
love executes
against these fallen bodies
leaves, in which it lifts its wings.
Of course Siegfried dies
from a wound on his back
where a leaf had prevented
the dragon-blood from washing him.
The same particulars
entrance and exit.
It is a Christian story,
not for the dragon so much.
Augustine remembers her
in his stolen pear,
we guess backwards from
this stuff. To misremember
is the guidance of the dead.
Things give off their actual light
that are not themselves the truth
but I can hear it listening.
