Saturday, August 12, 2017

URIEL

URIEL (Angel of Poetry)

Uri’el
The Light of God
angel of the South.
Write his name on
the south side
of your desk.

Now you’re
facing North.
The letters
will change.

PHANUEL
The Face of God.

A presence,
mercifully behind
our irreverent eyes.
This is the back, then
the turning away
our faces wear
in a veil of light
like Moses wore
when he returned
from the mountain.
Somehow this was allowed,
to show the others
this turning away,
a mirror pointed
at Him unseen.

They say M’s veil 
“horned light.”

A call uncovering 
the naked air.

The pen is a type
of candle, like a stolen book
to copy quickly.

A pen is all copy.
Mirror. Twice.

They say Adam 
wrote a book
to help him forget,


a light that discovers the light.

Sunday, August 6, 2017

Trestle Board

Trestle Board

Blue car tapeworm. 

Bowelwork: stars in blue ink.

Now, state your intention. 

The haruspices show influences, affirm Saturn’s entanglement, with these certain veins and vessels here, affirm confusion.

Saturn blue. Law ink. Saturday Sabbath. I sacrifice, make sacred this day. This is the mystery of the creative word. The creative word– that the word is not creative, but revises: all poetry is revision– the words we speak enter the written law. The Sabbath is our listening…

Saturn trembles at our subversion: my body is the cradle for what comes to mind. A magnetic patience shortens my personal distance from the unending day of action.

The tyrannical planets tremble.

Each thing discovers the primacy of the word.

Grasp the star in your liver.

Obol.

The image is passage.

Don’t explain too much.

The three sisters draw their swords, and the snake is cut into 
three pieces.

The snake howls beyond our body and whets the forest’s edge
that slices through.

Through two. Through three. 

Throbbing, follow.

The pen’s career through the forest of white wood
at the size and speed of mind tells my line, lives.
The forest’s inhabitants, follow.

The forest shuffles forward through the trees.

The sisters cut themselves from the serpent that surrounds the forest. 
The serpent’s cutting edge they consider their bodies, slicing forward:
snake trees in morning’s splendor.

Words on a white page. Us strangers in a play.

Lines, colors, to show the way. Dromenon. Mandala. Dissolve this image. 

These were the three named Hiram.

That will be our names.

The Master Builder of Solon’s orchard. 

Here our ritual returns to its Egyptian sources. The painting above my desk, done by a local, of  Imagination’s blue pond.

Take off your lid and dip in your pen.


Let’s find out who we’re talking to.