Adam's Bath

ADAM’S BATH

winds are lit within the sun

and wind through the sheen of things

which sheen discloses light alone

and the winding salt of sight’s corridors

spiral deep to the still lake

That I may climb and find relief

      where sight lives, and speaks things

the raw trees of speech

articulate branches

of the Law,

    That I may climb and find relief

no more hand to get between 

Christ was compared and united with the stone

two naked suns

    two winds disappearing

  I want to hear my voice

the anthropos

    not reincarnated but whose measure is my own

to dissolve my body in its senses,

  two winds dissolve in resolution

αποκαταστασιν πολuκρονιον

Christ was compared and united with the stone

long lasting restitution of things

find the measure anew

where the body’s temple remembers

rotund Falconetti,

herds of antelope a friend’s hand

our true form

the line remembered

the speaks my own

vindictive Yahweh

into the God of Love of the New

The Christ-lapis projected into matter

matter with its magical fascination

threnody for the lost god

that is the god’s calling

from the disappearance of distinction.

***

Ishtar’s lament for Tammuz

      ‘for the far removed there is wailing’

she is dissolved with him in the bath

                    she is the bath itself

the fiery sea the king cannot endure,

            she is the fiery image

of myself dissolved in her

united with the stone

the lapis full of voices,

dust from the four corners of the earth

when the earth refused to provide for Adam

black white and red earth from the angel of death

Adam, because of his perfection

must have had a knowledge of all natural things

in Arabian tradition Shîth (Seth) learnt medicine from him

as he lay, still inanimate, in the ground

(as we watched, Adam, asleep in the miracle play)

Seth (Shining Star, Sirius) learnt medicine,

Seth, Ishtar, Isis, The Star, 

ex nocturno seminis fluxu

from the sleeping Star Adam

Seth learnt medicine, ate the lettuce covered in semen, 

ate Ishtar who killed Tammuz; 

Isis who gathered up Osiris:

The Star Seth and The Star Adam

the fiery image of myself dissolved in her

Sirius, The sun behind the sun

the sense of rhythm is the distribution of: recuperated in this

bath of alergens the wind tunnel

  leaves at my doorstep

ex nocturno seminis fluxu

dust of the earth wailing

          Adam taught me asthma

body’s wail for the far removed

Argentum Astrum, the far removed

disappearance of distinction. But, How far is far, if you can think it?

I think of her when I’m about to die.

hieroglyphs continued

3.

Patterns issue from the mirror I try to be

goat footed box I track through the letters

through the animal dimension it is a wheel

you can hear still pouring through this alter

I mean this string I hold, the wellspring

Pans cascade through my privatized topology

to rebuke me for making the world

when it’s self I should be listening for

not training vines to grow up the light’s legs

while a flowering sky offers itself as an axehandle

to the snake that ties handles in bundles

that leave me messages at my mother’s shores.

4.

See what gathers and deduce the number

to find which two places I am at once

all my pans bow to Pan the random

their voices polish his resonant ewer

spindles turned true through abstract yarn

work awake whatever’s inside this bottle

fishy seeds to come imagine my soul

weight in the world calling my goose to bear

as if somebody were in search of a lamp

iron in your pocket to bring the children back

cast their broken hooks in the maternal oven

and untie your dolphin from the red ribbon at last.

5.

The images are tethered by a silent observance

bones ring in resonant boxes

each of them facing what they call north

the roar of Typhonian waters

through the orb of a plucked string

their grammar binds in my little ears

the wide sounds in which the tall ghost walks

a goose pulling an anchor by a red ribbon

grabs my hand with his neck permissive light

green wood tied to corroded ore

above and below both dangerously entwined

a dead dolphin for my trusty weathervane. 

6.

Consonants thresholds bones

keening towards their mysterious owner

chicory fleabane roadside asters

I open my small mouth onto all waters

learning their thread, fate, measures

that tie me to the ocean’s brother

fish bearing palm fronds peregrini

goose dredging your lost anchor up

by the light of the lord’s stolen lamp

things are tied to the will to find them

holy tools the snake brings to mind

in whose shadows reach blood’s tethers.

7.

A skull whose hair can work the fields

into a seen fire

of petals that thrill my imagination

its reflection in this wise water

stored away within each wave

until at last the water is silent is you

no reflection but direct report

no distance between my anchor and the goose

whose soft thin neck strangles me

iron leaves bending my young green stem

my flowers tell you I’m not from here

how the light from your sea came to die in my hands.

8.

The first is always the hardest

folk wisdom theology bird born from eye

multiplication will teach me everyone else

a pitcher with each time a different drink

that say truly I am not to be trusted

under the decorative twine of parochial grammar

suppressed formulations undermine our power

this logos I wave this fake anchor

only big enough to tell a bird’s lies

before the olive sprig handle crumbles

and lets the gates of the celestial palace down

to regain animal and thingly speech.

9.

This tape is a recording of the sutures of a skull

mesh of wood and geometry we are

knowing too much in our curves

wounds healed with memories like water

never letting go this ball of thread

that ties me closed as it comes

we accrue a fate begin the bible again

while words tremble to begin in us, their fate

and for some reason still take us in

to work crappy ore from the flowering branch

Kircher knew still shows the organization of the plant

a holy Kabbalah in my evil stories.

10.

From here deduce the rest

what language wants to say

the hour’s hexagram

archetypes rush in to be organized

their jumbled spears in the water

that dutifully files them away

I too am just a calcination of soul

this salt I call my own

anima mundi will one day reclaim

soluble like language on its way to begin

unconcerned with our complexity

but the consubstantiation of flesh and what it wants.

11.

Order I conjure from the so called random

order, Thoth, my own disharmony procreates

to espouse my cause within the world

we create in this house eloquent fiefdom

of effect radiant seeming

seals refract through emptiness

white Manjusri pre-teen under white sheet

imagination releases through the seen

creator of seen and unseen I dare imagine

Nicean flowers eating their iron branch

eat of the secrets whispered by the road

where you meet your own body traveling home.

12.

What happens when you walk up to a cup of water

rain collected in skull what did you see today

the water mistakes me for one of its hundred brothers

and I fill up my pitcher each weft

day is collected 

and I preserve the secret medicine

Galen knew context is the study of the soul

where to whisper in our home to change

the world we ail, unsay us against

the balance of forces that drive me to speech

unsay my seeing from the weft

year by year wearing out the shore of things.



***
Now that I'm done I think goal was to give each image a range of possible meanings across the 12 sonnets, and in the 12 lines of each sonnet propose a reading of the series, so various proposals for meanings would resonate all at once, not serially but with a sidewindering reach throughout the whole: that in the midst of meanings the image might hover, gesturing, iridescent. 

A translation of hieroglyphs from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

A translation of hieroglyphs from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili:

1.

Bound ox offering of the king

the vulture and the eye syllable

held within the lodge of mouth

as the priest washes his hands

in the thread that runs between them

and ties the vessel shut

a grammar to trap the god and make king strong

an anchor tied to a goose

your hands strangle but discover a lamp

a window fastened to the flowering olive-branch

to see the birds in there fly up and down

the intracellular weft of all that’s seen.

2.

Lumbering aleph these chords binds

that issue from the box beneath the fire

that here form basins, pools, names

through which the priests carefully pour

learning their thread, fate, measure

geometry that traps us like demons

to explain again this familiar shape

my goose tied to the anchor

in order to light the rest of me

the little tree behind these copper leaves

that steals your tools

to work a death beyond our treasure.