whispering the news

NESTED BRANCHES

When the Eternal comes, says the Rabbi,

& what does he mean?

May be the Ghost behind the scene;

the tear with grain of Ocean in your eye.

The truth is whole, the truth is one –

& what does this mean?

That Love’s criterion

is rectitude, in every human situation.

Gumilev, that Petersburg poet,

called it chaste vision –

welded like dew at dawn

to blades of grass, the spark of holy Paraclete.

The infant acorn was King of the Wood.

The leaves bent, whispering the news

through Ariadne’s arbor… (hers

the thread – her nested branches overhead).

The Rabbi is a child of God!

cried Mary Magdalen.

He dies on this occasion

since he bears the prophet’s spiral rod

twirling from heaven as from nothingness.

His smile defies your gravitation;

he will come again

after three days of stony sleepiness

like Jonah sprang from salty Milky Way;

the rule of theft & violence,

of Minotaur’s demonic fraudulence

is coming to an end.  Truth shines like day.

4.2.20

to restore a soul

SECRET WORLD

To restore a soul, to mend a broken heart

out of the wells of memory

for relief of misery

for your grace we pray.  A crane bone flute

keening her lonely call might still redeem

the wind that carries it

on the storm-clouds.  Fiat

lux – though the darkness loom.

This primitive wooden Vierge Ouvrante

unveils her secret world

with a copper hinge.  Old

masters of le Verbe significant

carved, flickered into form

a buoyant microcosm

within her oaken beam –

a human shelter from the storm.

Cicadas buzz amid burnt branches

of a poem framing history.

It is a mystery.

Isis on her throne, Ariadne’s hunches,

spider-Minotaur in his plangent web...

the sacrifice of innocence

behind a screen (some dense

thicket of Pig’s Eye Social Club).

The wind is clear & clean tonight.

Whole homesteads rise

toward ordinary Paradise,

warm lips forging a female Paraclete.

1.16.19

ANNUNCIATION


 
 
The painter, patient, painstaking, slows time:
quick nervous feathered strokes congeal
the gorgeous pageant of the real
to stillness, light (transparent pantomime).

 
The model, posing in a quaint alcove,
waits too (for pregnant image to emerge):
vague drafty sketches, baseless camouflage
become sharp stream of fire from beak of dove.

LETTER TO EMILY D.


 
 
You would have liked it here.  The sun flares colors
clear as the sea-floor.  The Navajo
make tracks circled in clay so sharp, so
clean – bladework of feathers, aloes, arrows...

 
And then, the Grand Canyon resembles you –
the Colorado scribbling a planet down
through dry spectral layers to the wet
blood-red and prehistoric marrow.

 
For Scripture precedes history – your insight
precedes Scripture – April’s alpha and omega
purl playfully from your soul-saga.
Who finds you meets a palm-tree full of light.

      
                                              Phoenix, AZ
                                              4.12.04