445 Religion poems

In the energy crisis my city has turned to burning angel skins. I read by their light, a book of elegies. A fruit fly lands on Amichai, I slap him flat Against the page. Now it is an elegy for him, as well, And his tomb. And I am a terrible, toothless god, Stringing blades of grass between the tongues of sheep. Ash of angel fire drifts over my head, falls in my coffee. O Holy, Holy, Holy indigestion. I bribe the coming day with open windows And freshly washed underwear Hung out on the clothesline, Slipping hastily over the hips of winds. The winds know, all you have to do is Open your mouth, the flies will come.

Mangled, uncared for, suffering thro’ the night With heavenly patience the poor boy had lain; Under the dreary shadows, left and right, Groaned on the wounded, stiffened out the slain. What faith sustained his lone, Brave heart to make no moan, To send no cry from that blood-sprinkled sod, Is a close mystery with him and God. But when the light came, and the morning dew Glittered around him, like a golden lake, And every dripping flower with deepened hue Looked through its tears for very pity’s sake, He moved his aching head Upon his rugged bed, And smiled as a blue violet, virgin-meek, Laid her pure kiss upon his withered cheek. At once there circled in his waking heart A thousand memories of distant home; Of how those same blue violets would start Along his native fields, and some would roam Down his dear humming brooks, To hide in secret nooks, And, shyly met, in nodding circles swing, Like gossips murmuring at belated Spring. And then he thought of the beloved hands That with his own had plucked the modest flower. The blue-eyed maiden, crowned with golden bands, Who ruled as sovereign of that sunny hour. She at whose soft command He joined the mustering band, She for whose sake he lay so firm and still, Despite his pangs, not questioned then her will. So, lost in thought, scarce conscious of the deed, Culling the violets, here and there he crept Slowly—ah! slowly,—for his wound would bleed; And the sweet flowers themselves half smiled, half wept, To be thus gathered in By hands so pale and thin, By fingers trembling as they neatly laid Stem upon stem, and bound them in a braid. The strangest posy ever fashioned yet Was clasped against the bosom of the lad, As we, the seekers for the wounded, set His form upon our shoulders bowed and sad; Though he but seemed to think How violets nod and wink; And as we cheered him, for the path was wild, He only looked upon his flowers and smiled.

After Stevens By now the snow is easing the live nerves of the wire fence and the firs, softening the distances it falls through, laying down a rightness, as in the spackled whites, the woodgrains of a room’s hush before music, before a lush legato in whose unctions the excruciations ease, as in the first thick arrhythmics from the hardwoods of the late quartets, whose dense snow of emotion, downdrifting, formal, whose violins and cellos, desiring the exhilarations of changes, turn loose an infusion of wintry music, all sideslip and immense descent, repetitions, evolutions salving down into the still air, the wound, the listening.

Deep in the soul there throbs the secret pain Of one homesick for dear familiar things, When Spring winds rock the waves of sunlit rain And on the grass there falls the shadow of wings. How should one bend one’s dreams to the dark clay Where carven beauty mixed with madness dwells? And men who fear to die fear not to slay, And Life has built herself ten thousand hells. No wave that breaks in music on the shore Can purify the tiger’s bloodstained den, The worms that crawl about the dark world’s core Cry out aloud against the deeds of men. Alas, the peace of these still hours and deep Is but a dream that wanders from afar, And the great Dreamer, turning in His sleep, Smothers in darkness all our little star. Yet in the gentle spirit of the wise Light flashes out through many a simple thing, The tired ploughman, with impassive eyes, Knows in his heart that he was once a king. He sees in dreams the crown long lost and dear, That glittered on a fallen spirit’s brow, A shattered gleam from some far shining sphere Has dazed the eyes of him who drives the plough. The long brown furrows of the broken soil Lead in straight lines unto the sunset's gates; On high green hills, beyond the reach of toil, The vision of the twilight broods and waits. The silence folded in about the heart Whispers strange longings to the broken soul, That lingers in a lonely place apart, Stretching vain hands to clasp the secret whole.

Make me, O Lord, thy Spining Wheele compleate. Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee. Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee. My Conversation make to be thy Reele And reele the yarn thereon spun of thy Wheele. Make me thy Loome then, knit therein this Twine: And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, winde quills: Then weave the Web thyselfe. The yarn is fine. Thine Ordinances make my Fulling Mills. Then dy the same in Heavenly Colours Choice, All pinkt with Varnisht Flowers of Paradise. Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will, Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory My Words, and Actions, that their shine may fill My wayes with glory and thee glorify. Then mine apparell shall display before yee That I am Cloathd in Holy robes for glory.

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth and go on out over the sea marshes and the brant in bays and over the hills of tall hickory and over the crater lakes and canyons and on up through the spheres of diminishing air past the blackset noctilucent clouds where one wants to stop and look way past all the light diffusions and bombardments up farther than the loss of sight into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest coelenterates and praying for a nerve cell with all the soul of my chemical reactions and going right on down where the eye sees only traces You are everywhere partial and entire You are on the inside of everything and on the outside I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down and if I find you I must go out deep into your far resolutions and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

Less the shadow than you a stag, sudden, through it. Less the stag breaking cover than the antlers, with which crowned. Less the antlers as trees leafless, to either side of the stag’s head, than— between them—the vision that must mean, surely, rescue. Less the rescue. More, always, the ache toward it. When I think of death, the gleam of the world darkening, dark, gathering me now in, it is lately as one more of many other nights figured with the inevitably black car, again the stranger’s strange room entered not for prayer but for striking prayer’s attitude, the body kneeling, bending, until it finds the muscled patterns that predictably, given strain and release, flesh assumes. When I think of desire, it is in the same way that I do God: as parable, any steep and blue water, things that are always there, they only wait to be sounded. And I a stone that, a little bit, perhaps should ask pardon. My fears—when I have fears— are of how long I shall be, falling, and in my at last resting how indistinguishable, inasmuch as they are countless, sire, all the unglittering other dropped stones.

When I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn. —Fyodor Dostoevsky I traveled to the page where scripture meets fiction. The paper slept but the night in me woke up. Black letters were now alive and collectible in a material crawl. I could not decipher their intentions anymore. To what end did their shapes come forth? To seduce or speak truth? While birds swept over the water like pot-bellied angels beautiful bells rang to assist the hoist. Up they went to slake their thirst, drinking from the mist for the sound of bells seemed to free as well as hold them. Then down to scavenge the surf and eat the innocent. “I love God and the ferry too,” wrote Kerouac. Only that which exists can be spoken of. *     *     * I wonder, will our imagination remain a temple burning with candles against all odds? Behind a nipple and a bone? The simplest of glands laid in a circle around skin and liquid that stirs up imagery winged and prismed, as if blood were a wine inducing visions *     *     * Some people cry when the characters die. Then they kill themselves offstage, away from the pages that they are turning in the night. Some people sacrifice themselves on a whim and regret it later on paper. Now I see you in the window. Are you in the book I was looking for? The one who traveled back to the happy days when she could jump on a moving bus and swing in the open air clutching a worn novel in her purse . . . ? A curtain, a knife, adoring eyes? *     *     * I watched the children running and turned to Alyosha for a blessing. He was sunk in the morass of rural life I like to sit with him in the grass. Then we see the same thing at the same time, and are one mind. We two masses, one a book, one a hand. When Alyosha spoke to the boys at the end I anticipated their next question and his answer For they formed a single gesture of kindness. “Will we?” “We will.” *     *     * It seemed evil to read about people we would never meet. We tested their fortitude as if in sleep. They generally failed the challenge being strangers in a strange brain. They were baffled by the tools handed to them and by the traffic’s direction. Frankly in a dream or story, the goal is absolutely hidden from the one to whom it matters. *     *     * Eons of lily-building emerged in that one flower. Eons, eons. Pins and wool, thread and needle, all material made of itself and circumstance. It was a terrible century: consisting of blasted oil refineries and stuck ducks, fish with their lips sealed by plastic and tar in the hair of cooks. Filth had penetrated the vents. Institutions moan. Balls of used cotton from the hospital dumpster, redden. Yawning on obsolescence the computer wonders who punched in such poor grammar. First-padded virgins graduate to this suffering drama all by her-selves. Who once were cells. *     *     * History is more than just another surmising grandmother at a window or a reminiscence twisted in the scrim of translation. Some long-ago light is pulsating in a trout’s heart on a laboratory dish. That light has entered all the holes, no matter how small, because it is the light that wants to live. *     *     * Still waiting for you my sunshine of justice and mercy. If west is east of Moscow, depending where you’re going then will you ever find me coming from a northerly direction? Are you even looking at the earth? Remember the map is flat but everything else is not. Is the newest child the oldest body in creation? Does he carry more information than his mother? Does her mother, his grandmother, do I seem redundant by having arrived with less, though first? Is that why I read at night with my lips compressed? *     *     * The fact is, I never knew if anyone felt me the way Nijinsky knew how to feel. Or Nastasya. Nothing could shock that woman who had done so much wrong. As if trained in a theater, multiple personalities streamed from her tongue. This made her an exemplar for our time. She knew how others felt and became each one, forgetting who she was before. I remember her as a child. Her skirt got tangled up in a thorn bush when she watched the sky. Shaking herself free, she had to see the spiders, ants and dirt around her skirt, It was like peering into her own body and she screamed in horror. Later, consolation would be extended by a man dark and handsome: It came with his semen (when she wanted hibernation). She didn’t commit suicide this time, but ran down Nevsky Prospekt as it began to rain, and paused to lift her umbrella. For this moment we were in our soul a child rushing home to granny five floors up. *     *     * I dropped the book, wept and went to the movies. It is here where I can forgive someone for his crime. Poisoning babies for profit. Harry Lime. I can actually forgive it when he is crawling in shit. Otherwise we will stand on the ferris wheel together forever stuck in the fog and iron. I just a witness to his ironic story He will be a mix between Paul Celan and Oscar Levant when we are at our happiest and no forgiveness is asked. Neurotic, pale, and drawn to the canals, we will lean over the embankment like sister and brother who are tempted to be actors. It is here that his shoes and cat will converge in the dark. Like fish in a secular city flipping through sewers for a flash of Christ.

Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star In his steep course? So long he seems to pause On thy bald awful head, O sovran BLANC, The Arve and Arveiron at thy base Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful Form! Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines, How silently! Around thee and above Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black, An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it, As with a wedge! But when I look again, It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine, Thy habitation from eternity! O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshipped the Invisible alone. Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody, So sweet, we know not we are listening to it, Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my Thought, Yea, with my Life and Life's own secret joy: Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused, Into the mighty vision passing—there As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven! Awake, my soul! not only passive praise Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks and secret ecstasy! Awake, Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my Hymn. Thou first and chief, sole sovereign of the Vale! O struggling with the darkness all the night, And visited all night by troops of stars, Or when they climb the sky or when they sink: Companion of the morning-star at dawn, Thyself Earth's rosy star, and of the dawn Co-herald: wake, O wake, and utter praise! Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in Earth? Who filled thy countenance with rosy light? Who made thee parent of perpetual streams? And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad! Who called you forth from night and utter death, From dark and icy caverns called you forth, Down those precipitous, black, jagg

Prepare the feast of perfect faith, the delight of the Holy King. Prepare the feast of the King. This is the feast of the Lesser Presence; the Ancient Eminence and Field of Apples assemble with Him for the feast.