quiet end of the year

LOVE’S CAVERN

At the quiet end of the year,

among the barn smells

a chilly infant wails –

a refugee.  Shepherds draw near.

He is king.  His mother is

queen.  His father is

a mule-driver (was,

anyway) – Vietnamese,

I think?  They live in Egypt now.

They’ve never seen Ghiberti’s

Gates of Paradise –

that brazen lava overflow

to metamorphoses of fiery dream

and rock – sedimentary,

igneous, flickery...

roiling sun to spring, upstream;

they’ve never been to Providence

or heard the Rose Ensemble

whose violas tremble

with harmonious transience...

they live the poverty of innocence.

Light flickers in a manger.

Someone senses danger –

cows murmur, chickens grow tense...

enormous shadows of the monster-men

leer over flesh & blood.

It is the shadow of the rude

star burning in the last heaven

                  *

– the red star, bringing rectitude

out of the mild mien

of that child-man –

incarnate stony magnitude

heavy past sullen measurements

of every swollen tinpot

despot in his chariot.

Matrix of cosmic elements –

the figure of a man emerges,

burning in brazen tongs

and glossolalia of tongues

from every tribe.  Sea surges

multitudinous, incarnadine...

Ocean called universe

forging one verse

with arches (catenary, almondine).

So combers crested in a tower –

moonbright Witch’s Hat

tenting her desolate

oak-limbs (snowy owl’s bower).

Quetzalcoatl, brazen serpent,

lift each refugee of time

into your feathered rhyme

of flame.  Your flicker-tongue, sent

dancing into each soul’s paradigm –

the sparkling river, bent

back to its fundament;

Love’s cavern, salting every lime.

12.23.17