Botticelli - detail Venus

Botticelli - detail Venus, a photo by petrus.agricola on Flickr.

Birth of Venus

The Next Day

The Next Day

For Herbert George Wells, Time Lord 


Everything that you think is here, is out there.  You live
surrounded by The Past., waiting for The Future,
for the events stored as holograms on the edges
of the universe to flow from your lives
on a continuous beam of light,

waiting endlessly for Forever, for Godot,
for the Right Man, for Superman, for the signs  
that will keep the Terrible Silence at bay, for the
Right Moment, for Jesus to return, for the bus,
for the elastic wormhole that will  tear down the walls
and take you from Now to Then,

you wait, knowing you are,  and are not part of it.
It is in no rush, although you think it is.  It passes
or it does not pass, slowly, or quickly.  You wear it
on your wrist or in your pocket, and in the lines
and wrinkles on your face.  It beats in your heart
like a drumline.

They tell you everything happens at once.
You know that Tomorrow is relative
to where you are Now and to how fast
you are moving.  You step across a threshold
and marvel at the way it all holds together.

So.  What will you make of it, if after the rain
the curtain is never drawn, and like a Time Lord,
you find you have endless expectations?

Happy Birthday Mikolaj Kopernik

Happy Birthday Mikolaj Kopernik
19 February 1473


"To know that we know what we know,
and to know that we do not know what we do not know,
that is true knowledge."  ~ Nicolaus Copernicus  


Since your birth the earth has orbited the sun
five hundred thirty-seven times.  I am sorry
Mikolaj Kopernik, that I still cannot understand
the heliocentric calculations of the cosmos.
Arcseconds.  Stellar parallax motion.

But the real story here begins with dreams,
your dreams and mine.  In mine,
the Arcade burns again.  And again.  Night after night,
it sends up sparks smaller than pinpricks,
the smoke of penny postcards flying like pages
of an animated flip book.  An optical illusion
into the movement of celestial bodies.
Charred walls cave in upon the pinball machines.
The photo booth.  The autographed pictures
of fabulous Sally Rand and Clark Gable.  Nudes
and Midgets.  Bagatelles and Peep Shows.

I am five.  It is night and the Milky Way is hung
like an illustrated map.  Every blooming star is a marker.
An affirmation.  In this dream I stand and watch it burn,
holding my breath.  The child in me returns.  And returns.
Forever dreaming of these visible and invisible delights
and mysteries blazing upward in the sky.  A holocaust
with no survivors.  The earth, racing around the sun,
the fires of earth so like the fires of space.  A tapestry.
A brocade of soot and cinders.

If I could bring you back, I would. I would bring back
Sally Rand and Clark Gable.  Cain and Mable.
I would resurrect the Nudes and Midgets,
untie their ashes from Orion and Saggitarius.
Bring them back on blu-ray, believing in themselves

I was five.  They thought a child would not remember,
Mikolaj Kopernik.  Now that I am seventy-five
my dreams are filled.  Still.  With starscapes
outside of this world.  I remember.  I remember everything.
And it is not like anything I have ever seen before.           

The Gull

The Gull 


Light and lacking focus
but committed to air

the gull
is blown south,
steered by a north wind away
from whatever is fixed.

Who can understand
the truth of it
but someone arbitrarily reborn
in a stranger's nest?

Who can understand
the exhilaration of feathers
above all the graffiti 
of civilation,

like a soul glimpsed,
leaving the body done?

For the Holy Spirit Loves the Rat

For the Holy Spirit Loves the Rat


Praise be to the rat at her birth
in the dim rain of the sewer, her lungs filled
at the first roll of the dice, with the Good Wind
of God, the Holy Spirit.

Jubilate, from Him will she learn
to run for her life from the cat's long teeth
and the owl's claws.  Jubilate, she will await
the Good News of her own small teeth.

And her own small eye beholds
what she cannot say, and her small ear
makes music of noise.  In the everlasting
geometric light of winter, or

in the slow, flawless light of summer,
the Holy Word of the God who loves her
leads her on the path of crumbs
into the pastures of garbage,

where she becomes Vermin,
who, if she cannot live, in His absence
can always die.  Beseiged,  she will venture
onto the decks of capsized ships, will flee

with no notion of the dark water downstairs,
nor of the wire cages upstairs, where she lends
her precious flesh to the microbes and vaccines
of Science.

At Judgement she will be blameless,
for her sweet trust in the Promise
that if any of us do,
she will live forever.

To a fisherman in a small boat:

To a fisherman in a small boat:

Old French fisherman's prayer:  O God, Thy sea is so great,
                                                     and my boat is so small.  


Cast
no wayward nets
     where sea-gulled winds sing
     darkling in the glassed-off sky,
     where muffled oar-blades pull and wane
          across ice-netted waters

Out
of familiar sun
     the shadows grow
     in silence from damp-caved dooms
     that cannot feel the dripping cold
          nor hear the sodden safety

of the bells.

In Mary's Web

In Mary's Web


The spout of every tide
garrisoned
from green weathers
speaks of shafts of ships
cloistered
with lost sailors
where the sea rings
in the spinning stars
in Mary's Web

And voices unbidden
of ghosts under capes
suck water
and bubble
and echo again

O receiver
of sailor's bones
run down lost shores
and weather in the shell
until this myth
of silver seabirds
tilt's the Oracle's
spent hammer

After the Close Woven Touch

After the Close Woven Touch

After the close woven touch,
thorn and velvet tongue-tapping
spindrift night,
after the firm dove-tailing of nerves,
gunner, crack-shot, shell and ball
bridging the half-way halves,
 the seeded flesh finds
the inhaling womb.

Bienvenue,
galleries of man-shaped boys
kicking a bellyful of heels.
roll, grasp, leap toward the burst light,
tear through thickets of bent bone
and drowned dark, crush
and wane in the cruel, sweet and endless
forever, and empty
in the capsized bed.

Bienvenue
the salt and watery boys,
riding the shipwrecked waves
home. 

Candle Behind the Eyes

Candle Behind the Eyes


The candle behind the eyes
lights, hanging fire bright as tears
that spin of waters where the salt gushes wide
down in their sunny tracks,
down in their seas.

The starved candle burns the bolts,
the fire at the lock consumes
the anchored, frozen, stone-set stare.
Alone and naked in strange waters,
summon out of the sea a lantern, a bell,

and a high, wild harbor.

Atonement

Atonement


This morning
the defenseless eye of a calf
catches my eye
through the bars of
the slaughtering pen:
Help me.  

At noon
the bruised doe floats dreamlike
across the Honda's hood        
like a constellation floats
across the sky at midnight.  Her eye
looking grievously
into mine  is the eye of
the Archer looking into the
dark heart of the galaxy, seeing
the End of Time.  Help me. 

In our bed
my old cat purrs softly
in the bend of my body,
the sound coming
from some plaintive internal tunnel.
Her eyes are cancers.
They have shaved her to the skin.
Her sad pink body gives off
a kind of light.
She shudders with the explosions
of her own sound, claws working,
heart beating.  The wave of it
climbs and then plunges her
into cat dreams.  She sleeps.

In the dark of night, we sleep
my cat and I, our heads together,
filled with winged things:

          angels and archangels,
          white cabbage moths,
          and slow, incautious sparrows.  

This is another story.

Although the moon
shows no trace of them,
they still exist somewhere in
the memory
of the universe.

Blueprint of a Swimmer

Blueprint of a Swimmer


Divers and keepers of lights and swimmers in solitary waters
                     are lonely folks, I think,
        familiar with crabs, anemones, and annelids.

               They do not fear the inky Kraken,
                nor lumpish dead-men's-fingers,
                nor the stings of the ballooning man-of-war,
                remembering, perhaps how they
                snuggled in liquid shelters
                of underwater cradles far from shore:

                up from curved secluded beaches,
                loosening minute grains of sand,
                        alive and water-borne,
                           carried on a swell
                  that never touched Gibraltar
                    or the shores of Labrador,
        penetrating whiplike the single spilling shell 
                         of a solitary swimmer
                            charting currents,
                              mapping flows 
                    fringing gulfs of smaller seas
         (of brain and blood, of mouth and tongue)
                  that never touched Nantucket   
                      nor the Gulf of Mexico.

Divers and keepers of lights and swimmers in solitary waters
                        are curious folks, I think,
       familiar with urchins, drifting jellyfish, and foam.

                 They measure origins beyond the quay:
                 the primal swimmer's tumbling rush
                 as on the crest of some great wave,
                 like otter, and like lion, out to sea.

                    

 
                         

The Prize

The Prize

"But life, life
the living think,
is the prize." 

        --Maryan Paxton

Groucho knew the secret word.  It came
dangling from the rafters on the tail
of a rubber chicken.  And God knows
the Word, made gooseflesh, when He said:
Let there be light, that astounding spark
continually challenged by darkness.
It is hidden in the whisper of saltwaves
licking the edges of seashores the world over,
inhabited by protozoa, all fringe and propellers
spinning, and in the whimper of the dog

that stays by his master's grave.
It is audible in every note of Mozart, and on
the heavymetal strings of Iron Maiden.
Every bailed-out Wall Street billionaire
carries it home folded in the pages
of his Late Edition.  It is known to every bum
waiting in the soup lines in Detroit and LA,
by the slowest and the least alert, and by the quickest
and the most vigilant, by the seed triumphant
in the loam of every species, and it is indeed

the prize.

I Deliver a Sermon to Myself

I Deliver a Sermon to Myself


Beloved:  Sit here.  Have a cuppa.  Throw off your shoes
and be comfortable.  Be still, and I will tell you
secrets.  In God's house are many mansions,
and many closets wherein our souls are hung
like greatcoats, female and male, spotted, striped,  

or feathered.  In them, our many pockets store miracles, 
spill answers stitched with strings of light.
In this pocket, find the advice your mother gave you.
You cannot look upon it without hearing
her voice.  This is where lost things are found:

your father's eyeglasses, your brother's hair,
and all dropped stitches are gathered.
In this pocket, find a handful of earth.
In this, miracles, where cancers are turned
into roses, and lesions become pearls.

These are the things that connect us, one miracle
threaded through the keyhole at a time.
In God's kitchens are endless cupboards
filled with loaves and fishes for your delight, and
His table is spread with manna enough

to feed all things, both men and beasts.  Come 
and dine!  Come trade your curses for blessings!
Did you not know that there are rams
in every thicket?  Did you think
you are not loved?


10-10-12

The Departed and the Unborn

The Departed and the Unborn


Beautiful, in their cloaks of light,
their hair a gauzy filament of
spider webs, they pull me out
of this room by my hand to that place
where the holy becomes art, and knowing God
is eternal life.

They cover my shut eyes with coins.
They make a necklace of my teeth,
and like the Bathers at Asnieres, made only
of dots of pure grace,  like points
in a Seurat, they oblige the eye and mind
of the beholder into a lexicon of wholeness.

They are wise as serpents,  harmless as doves
Do they have ears? Yes, but they are stopped
with clouds.  Their lips move.  They say
nothing to me.  Their eyes are sewn shut.
Oh, you departed, you unborn, tell me
your names again, for I have forgotten.



JED  9-29-12

Tinnitis

The moon, of course, is always
 there -- day moon, but it's still there; behind the clouds but
it's still there.
                            --Richard Siken

She is going deaf,
 one part of growing old,
heavy as a sigh.
It's always there, a dim figure
like the moon, absent at noon
but nevertheless, always there.
At night it lays itself down with her,
runs into the pillowed darkness
under her ear, a ringing of bells
that fills an absence of sound.
It is something from her aging brain, filling
the enormous void, woven like a bright thread
through her sleep, like ripples from
a thrown rock in a pool of water.
Some part of it is music, sometimes
a string quartet playing a high c-sharp,
other times the reedy whine of a clarinet.
Quieted by day, it sinks like the stone ghost
of the moon, meandering at the edges
of light, but still there,
always there.

God Can Weep

God Can Weep


Because we have opened our mouths
and they are not filled, and we have, from
Grandpa's Dentist, a gorgeous smile, and did not
have to pay twenty thousand dollars for it, and because
we can't afford not to hear, yet our ears
are dull of hearing 

we have foresworn ourselves, and by our oaths
have brought death

and because Syrian warplanes leveled
a poor neighborhood, burying scores of people,
among them women and children, under piles
of rubble, a hell was prepared for them,
and the killings took place under a late spring sun,
and the people who tried to remove the bodies
were shot,

all flesh is in his hands, and he will do
as seemeth him good. 

And in Mexico, students pondered
their next step, to build
a human fence.

The mountains did not flee before them,
and the rivers turned not from their course,

and the economic recovery is the weakest
since WWII, the consumers are feeble and exhausted,
and their pay checks are shrinking, and they are broke
and nearly homeless, and

Enoch went forth among the people
and cried with a loud voice, and all men
were offended because of him, and said:
there is a strange thing in the land, a wild man
hath come among us

and anti-nuclear critics are crying that executives
on the board that regulates radioactive waste is akin
to having the fox guard the henhouse,

(a wild man hath come among us)!  And the Lord
has cursed the land with much heat, and the barrenness 
shall go forth forever.

Of course, there is Global Warming, the melting
of icebergs, the rise of oceans, the withering of corn,
and the price tag for wildfires has hit $50M.
Does it matter?  Does it matter?  Does it matter?
Does any of this matter?  Do you have any
of the following symptoms?  No Woman
Should Have To Suffer The Way You Do.
Why haven't we been told, generation upon generation?

It came to pass that the God of heaven
looked upon the residue of the people, and
he wept; and shed forth tears as the rain
upon the mountains.  Were it possible
to number the particles of the earth, yea,
millions of earths like this, it would not be
a beginning to the number of thy creations
from eternity to eternity.  How is it
thou canst weep?

In their son's room, they found a sandwich bag
full of oxycodone and acetaminophen pills.  The problem
is now more deadly than car crashes. You can read
all about it in the papers:  Our beloved, our dearly beloved
brother, uncle, friend, passed away at his home, died
as a result of being stubborn and "stirring the pot"
for six decades, died, and the garden's been watered,
the lawns are mowed, and dad's gone fishing.  His ashes
will be placed in Wise River, Montana, at the flumes.
I have passed life's greatest test and I'm home again,
after a long and valiant struggle....

Enoch knew, and wept, and stretched forth
his arms, and his heart swelled wide
as eternity; and all eternity shook.

There will be a viewing.

Teach your children.  Amen.


--Deseret News, August 15, 2012
   Moses  6-7

 

Be Water

Be Water

I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs,
Yet, like a tree, endure the shift of things.
--Theodore Roethke

Look,
among things invisible
yet seen, water
is but one thing invisible,
but real,
taking the shape
of everything it touches:
cups and pools, barrels, throats,
fishbowls, seabeds....

Look,
you cannot imagine it,
even in sleep, when dreaming
gives a shape and color,
a weight to ghosts
that have not color nor shape
nor any measurable mass
but a mind gone wild.

Look,
can you imagine:  what becomes
the field and the tree, yet is neither
field nor tree?  What fills the pot
that boils the rice,
yet is neither pot nor grain
is a shape-shifter
that might as easily
itself, take on
the body of the cup,
the blood of the dreamer.

Look,
even science, in all its halls
and universities, measuring velocity,
weighing mass, discerning temperature
(all things as invisible themselves
but real as curiosity or love, as courage,
wind, or breath)
cannot tell how a thing invisible,
of no describable boundaries, remains
itself, unseen as a spirit
in a mirror, assuming the face
of everything.

Sola Gratia,

for I wrote it with disappearing ink,
and afterwards
I could not read what I had written.
And it was as if a great cloud
had drifted over the place
where you laid me,
and the skin from my body
flew like flags
from your fingertips,

for this is what I remember
as if it happened yesterday.
This is what I remember:
that gravity is a sad thing, a thing
that is always holding other things down,

is a cloud that drifts
both inside and outside our brains
like thoughts,  that might be
real, until you think to observe them,
and they disappear at once,
and at once the Word
that is God begins to appear
and disappear like something else
that might be real.
Sola gratia.

Sola gratia.
We bathe ourselves in Holy Water
and it becomes our flesh, we drink of it
and it becomes our blood.

2
Once we were sparks
blown apart
by a tornado, a solar cyclone
of smoke and ashes,
the stardust of our own creation,
and every wave of every particle
that we are remains in this world
forever, and those electromagnetically
charged particles, every vibration
 will go on forever

 (but which may, in fact,
be as near to us as
our own skin).
We crave forgiveness as if it were a drug, we
need to be fixed,
like old bicycles or broken lawnmowers,
mi perdoni, mi perdoni, mi perdoni,

all of us falling like dominoes, 
men, trees, and animals, all
swallowed down the Black Throat
at the center of every galaxy

to become, ultimately, angels,
each in our own light
stored in tiny coded Planckian bits
of precisely coded information
waiting on the boundaries of grace
to be reconstructed
as stars, planets, and people.

I think I remember now
that what I wrote was a prayer,
or something like a prayer:
mi benedicta, 

for we are risen, and rising,
and whole again, risen from the abyssal
plains and muddy sea beds
like Phoenix, the salt of the earth
clinging to our wet backs
and shining.

Finding Grace at Waikiki

Male and female,
a rib, a little dust.
I almost can not tell
the sound of your sleeping breath
from the sound the surf makes,
wave upon wave, outside our door.

A rib, a little dust, a lone gull on the beach,
and I know again, as i have known before,
that this bird and every bird
will someday lay his feathers down
in some secret place,  as will
the beachcomber who every morning
greets the sun with thanks, lay down
his rubber sandals, leaving
his ephemeral footprints on the shore,
as will the Ohio banker sipping coffee
by the pool, and the little Japanese girls,
who with joyful cries, chase the gull to flight:

every single one of us now breathing
in and out this fine salt air
of early morning
someday will lay ourselves down
in our own secret place.

7-2012

Night Traveler

Night Traveler


Something happens that
unravels me from myself, unties me,
sets me free.  I do not, in fact,
sleep.  I fly.

REM is absent, my brain alert.
My dream body lifts, and falls
with each breath.

Inhale.  Exhale.  

Beneath me in darkening pastures
flatulent cows chew and belch and fart.
Highways flow with automobile lights rushing
like red and white cells through arteries.
I fly over the rooftops of cities, I leave
this world I love behind.  I fly
until there is nothing but air.

Inhale.  Exhale. 

When the sun has set, stars appear
on my left and on my right, above me,
below me, and I pass a boundary.
On the other side, I am the only thing moving,
and the sun is just another star.