445 Religion poems

In Shia Islam, the Twelfth Imam is said to have disappeared in the ninth century. It’s believed his return at the end of the world will deliver order from the chaos. no one ever brings up the wages of virtue        the cost of avoiding that which you were built to do some men actually love their enemies remind me to tell you about them when you arrive and when will that be again? I’ve already spiced the duck and hidden the sherry even grain has genes that say drink this or bend there so much like our own I am rubbing yogurt through my hair getting ready for your return I read old mail from my bababazorg the Farsi like tea leaves or exotic blades years ago he melted into the tautness of earth like a pad of butter on turtle meat the birch curled its tongue I was full of credible fears today I’m full of olives and smoke sucking a fat red cigar and ashing on the good lace I’m comfy as a snake sleeping in a silk shoe though my glasses are foggy or maybe I just got perfume in my eye either way I’ll recognize you by your heartbeat you’ll recognize me by the green bird in my shirt pocket if you hurry I’ll let you hold her her flightlessness will mean nothing in fact my whole house has been cleansed entirely of symbols a strange call came from the west and I understood it in this new language I burnt away my candles and woke the sleeping spider resting his fangs against my hand there will be nothing here to distract you from your work just some old pears browning in the kitchen and a glass vase of pink roses humming their little songs

To tonsured monks and dreadlocked Rastas, To idol worshippers and idol smashers, To fasting Jains and feasting Shaivites, To Vedic pundits and Faber poets, The weaver Kabir sends one message: The noose of death hangs over all. Only Rama’s name can save you. Say it now .

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes, The booze and the neon and Saturday night, The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons? Why should the Devil get all the good tunes? Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite? Why should the Devil get all the good tunes, The booze and the neon and Saturday night?

I Hung up on body parts in the particulate daylight, you step out of a Beckett play to find yourself in a memory resisting itself, as meat hits the fan so to speak against the white blanket of the grainy void. You never know where it’s going, the body, the boy swathed in bullets with those black eyes pissing a letter-opener in the desert mud near a disabled Mercedes. When things enter the room you think bazooka and check your hat. A puddle of warm ice-cream in anticipation. Here’s where Coney Island drops like a discarded napkin and you can’t go home again. Mucous brimming the banks, a cake of dust in the shape of a rocking chair ticking away. But soon it will snow as exquisite dogs languish from inside a sandwich tied to a parachute. No time for ballads, the table is set. II Light solidifies in cells, the keeper of lost keys. They don’t belong to anyone, the keys. Playing the game backwards reveals nothing a blind child could not guess by the hairs on his arm. The lips on old men are lockboxes in the terminal of no-knowing without gratitude for the despair of angels. You have to suffer, you have to fill up in order to implode, to be recognized for the necessities of commerce. They unhinge, finally, the doors you walk through into phantom stairwells in telephonic hum smelling of wet coal and doll’s hair. Precipitous adjectives gush from a cracked faucet in the chancellery restroom. Someone is stifling laughter from underneath a card table where an electric utility had fallen from his sleeve. They say that trussed birds derive no pleasure from the music of mangled wagons and that gas seeps like a well-kept secret imperiling dust mites in the spleens of hooded maidens locked away from the light. Everything is descending, even the scholarship of the ancient adverbs. Mouths twist into almonds and you wonder how the noise can drown itself out with nothing but nouns and dinner plates and gallows, with history a hiccup waiting to happen. III The music is an absence of colliding masses. You can cut your feet on the proverbial and be too close to hear it, the other music, the suffocation of things that can’t fly. A beautiful cacophony flutters in the brightness of dead calm as true objects lost in the politeness of daylight fill the grail of a new primitive. You choke on little candles and all through the night your legs cramp in the sweat of the moonlight. For no good reason a tenderness of geese is billowing in the curtains, as holes in the face open and close and paper scorches sky with futile encryption. Those armchairs foundering in the scum of the surf. Deafness craving disaster green in the spine, knowing the cocktail party’s over. Now it’s all red and your lips are trembling in believability, but it’s only a flickering image in the dark quadrant of your eye bending the light as they mow the daisies under the stars, for no good reason.

patricia beer O Lord thou draggest me out From the deep harbor άρτταγησόμεθα: we shall be caught up. Plymouth as it was, the Hoe laid out above Goemagot chary with scattered primrose, a stand of tulips that court the sun as glacially as girls beneath rayon doll hats and parasols inclining to passersby on the promenade. Beyond the breakwater,Warspite between Grenville and Hood. Narrow-eyed gulls with heartrending mews like paramours. Then Padua, balanced upon its own rubble. Raw colors returning with the first days of spring unkempt and ravenous to the faculty, students linking arms with practiced ease in giro through a stream of bicycles trilling in sweet voices. Kisses desired in full view returned, the elegant cafes audible from the river where the sky wanders through its city. Austen and Gaskell. Coffee, a stroll. Austen again. Brontë. I met her. The gray, lavish eyes. A ruthless stare softened by an accent. She was gracious, even to my callow posturing — called one windy effort that ended O Lord thou draggest me out a most faithful homage to Eliot, grave with kindly mockery. I drank my bitter tea. But consider this: her calves in sheer silk still a girl’s, her polished tan half-heels set against them: magnificent. That Italian air, the strict bob ordering her face. And driving back with Pinkie at his schoolmasterly pace, I picked my nails and watched myself in the dark wing when “The King in Thule” suddenly swelled with falling cadence through the speakers, its pure aurality heralding the shattering white late snow of April, the road a vein of black ore exhausting itself slowly to the north, the fields at Rogationtide émpty, innocent of all things, even life. i                   ii                                                     iii fay pomerance Beneath the shadow of hís wings, the scales stand baited against us. Maddox, charming predator, robustly mustachioed, vivid behind thick lenses condemning that discredited iconography— towers collapsing through quicksand, pavanes of anguish, the bodies of the lost ransacked by hobgoblins — reclines, his hatred virtue, its vital purity and strength, all his outrage told against those humiliating genuflections. Since there is no model for her features, conceive of her blanched as the Cabbage White, each brushstroke the drama of a tiny kenosis, the bright clatter of ferrules over- heard as conversation at a distant table, queasy and isolating — Babel. Tower of teacups at ominous angles in the studio, rings indelibly stamped in the watercolor paper’s grain. Stretched in membranes of fat: passover, Lamb. Burning leaven. Head ringing with psilocybin and gin, I kneel in the foreground of my own life quarter-sized, self-consciously humbled, like the donor in Altdorfer’s Crucifixion peering through the shadow of the cross to the city emptied of day laborers that rides at ease in the sun, bay deliciously windswept, the curdled blue of high summer fading out beyond the spruce where she stands in her living robes — and still I cannot comprehend how incidental we are to our own redemption, though the sacrifice remains intimate in violence, the half-accepting flinch of the face as if breasting the parapet or tensed into the impact of a tube train, the rapt mother in the privacy of her distress. Here is the gate of horn, the hacked bough of ash that even dying shivers forth gaily its barrowloads of leaves. jack clemo Let there be a chamber wherein no other light comes Not that I forget, but that, increasingly, the objects of my memory become ripe for disparagement: irrational or petit bourgeois, complicit in imperial power, conjurors of air slapped down by wolfish lecturers with gestures of ennui, pared nails and implacable smiles, vicious with piety. Little traitor, I defend them with a wounded stare and no more — perhaps, I find my place among them, being so cold and all. Bone-white pits of china clay gouged through that vision, the extravagant gaze of grace balanced upon us, its soteriology divorced from nature — something terrifying in declaration, his unforgiving line like being hunted. From the steeply-banked clay tips new dumps of refuse clatter to extend the protectorate of sand, sparse prickles of mica like fields in snow — above all, the dogma never thaws. And nothing. The day we climbed slowly out of Antequera through the cloud base stippled in dew, the lightly slung blue bells of nazarenes blazed between karst and darkness, wild rose and orchid, the unaccountable blood of the peony aching toward a sound that was both forsakenness and longing — wolves baying somewhere deep in the park — and I turned to you and wanted to know what next? Lost, we turned and turned and turned about among the stacks. Wings drilling the invisible host from cover to cover alerted us, the cramped and sullen thorns in anguish loomed. Until, picking our way down a gully deepening into spate, the fog whitened, glared alarmingly, then lifted in one sweep from the sheer drop-off of the cliff — we saw as if through glass the road receding among gray rocks | the citadel.

I am thy grass, O Lord! I grow up sweet and tall But for a day; beneath Thy sword To lie at evenfall. Yet have I not enough In that brief day of mine? The wind, the bees, the wholesome stuff The sun pours out like wine. Behold, this is my crown; Love will not let me be; Love holds me here; Love cuts me down; And it is well with me. Lord, Love, keep it but so; Thy purpose is full plain; I die that after I may grow As tall, as sweet again.

Humps of shell emerge from dark water. Believers toss hunks of bread, hoping the fat reptilian heads will loom forth from the murk and eat. Meaning:you have been heard.

Upon a lonely mountain, there lived two hermits who worshipped God and loved one another. Now these two hermits had one earthen bowl, and this was their only possession. One day an evil spirit entered into the heart of the older hermit and he came to the younger and said, “It is long that we have lived together.  The time has come for us to part.  Let us divide our possessions.” Then the younger hermit was saddened and he said, “It grieves me, Brother, that thou shouldst leave me.  But if thou must needs go, so be it,” and he brought the earthen bowl and gave it to him saying, “We cannot divide it, Brother, let it be thine.” Then the older hermit said, “Charity I will not accept.  I will take nothing but mine own.  It must be divided.” And the younger one said, “If the bowl be broken, of what use would it be to thee or to me?  If it be thy pleasure let us rather cast a lot.” But the older hermit said again, “I will have but justice and mine own, and I will not trust justice and mine own to vain chance.  The bowl must be divided.” Then the younger hermit could reason no further and he said, “If it be indeed thy will, and if even so thou wouldst have it let us now break the bowl.” But the face of the older hermit grew exceedingly dark, and he cried, “O thou cursed coward, thou wouldst not fight.”

Two went to pray? O rather say One went to brag, th’ other to pray: One stands up close and treads on high, Where th’ other dares not send his eye. One nearer to God’s altar trod, The other to the altar’s God.

THE FLESH "Sweet, thou art pale." "More pale to see, Christ hung upon the cruel tree And bore His Father's wrath for me." "Sweet, thou art sad." "Beneath a rod More heavy, Christ for my sake trod The winepress of the wrath of God." "Sweet, thou art weary." "Not so Christ: Whose mighty love of me suffic'd For Strength, Salvation, Eucharist." "Sweet, thou art footsore." "If I bleed, His feet have bled; yea in my need His Heart once bled for mine indeed." THE WORLD "Sweet, thou art young." "So He was young Who for my sake in silence hung Upon the Cross with Passion wrung." "Look, thou art fair." "He was more fair Than men, Who deign'd for me to wear A visage marr'd beyond compare." "And thou hast riches." "Daily bread: All else is His: Who, living, dead, For me lack'd where to lay His Head." "And life is sweet." "It was not so To Him, Whose Cup did overflow With mine unutterable woe." THE DEVIL "Thou drinkest deep." "When Christ would sup He drain'd the dregs from out my cup: So how should I be lifted up?" "Thou shalt win Glory." "In the skies, Lord Jesus, cover up mine eyes Lest they should look on vanities." "Thou shalt have Knowledge." "Helpless dust! In Thee, O Lord, I put my trust: Answer Thou for me, Wise and Just." "And Might."— "Get thee behind me. Lord, Who hast redeem'd and not abhorr'd My soul, oh keep it by Thy Word."