246 Spiritual poems

Late fall in the villages of Pompey, Preble, Oran, Delphi Falls, churched river and woods. In Homer and Ovid, the localities and principalities of central New York, the hollows and corners of the burnt-over districts visited by angels in the 1800's who led us to greatness: awakenings, gold, portents and lies, heaven, women's suffrage, and bundling with the other in the love beds while we waited for the lamb, the dove, the velvet of the ten-point buck grunting through the underbrush to rut. We learned in divine time a year's a day. We learned obedience and had charismatic children. And now the boy's an angelic eighteen days or six thousand years, as he leaves to serve. He did what we told him: blocked for punts—no one likes to block for punts— and when his friends crashed the truck in a ditch, he waited for the cops and took the rap, nice kid, because he did the act of deliverance one does in central New York and made the vows, pledged, testified, and swore and participated in the sport greater than the coming of the dead, and escorted the exaggerated girl to the prom where he was befuddled with organza and tulle and he did not forget the corsage, an orchid in a box he stared into: the white outer whorl and the inner whorl and pouted purple lip. He butterflied the pollen with the lashes of his eyes. The flower was his terror. He was not meant to be the indwelling beauty of things and surely he was not meant to be the wind in Iraq with three others in his division and become the abstract shape of a god formed from a blood clot. I've seen the pictures, the vague shapes that ripple in the heat until I was terrified. It looked like he still moved. Remember fall in Delphi? All ardent and catastrophic and counter, elbows flailing, he ran in the flat places scraped from the gold hills and valleys.

1 Nothing passes,Lord,but what you allow. Mornings the milky sap on my knuckles burns. Last night the piglets fought then suckled in the barn. Still no word. Our one cow grazes but won’t come in. The pamphlets say: Patience is required. I say, let’s try again but John blames the state, the neighbors, the way we wrote our bios, filling out the forms. Across the road our neighbor starts his truck while God, feather by feather, downs a wren — swollen, its black eyes shiny, small dark tongue. In the drainpipe, something slithers wet and stuck. A race runner? A ground skink shedding skin? Lizards, John tells me,can’t bear live young. 2 John tells me:lizards can’t bear live young. Another of   God’s mysteries: hard rain muddying the corn. The kind woman at the agency said,it takes longer for certain types of couples

Courage, my Soul, now learn to wield The weight of thine immortal shield. Close on thy head thy helmet bright. Balance thy sword against the fight. See where an army, strong as fair, With silken banners spreads the air. Now, if thou be’st that thing divine, In this day’s combat let it shine: And show that Nature wants an art To conquer one resolvèd heart. PLEASURE Welcome the creation’s guest, Lord of earth, and heaven’s heir. Lay aside that warlike crest, And of Nature’s banquet share: Where the souls of fruits and flowers Stand prepared to heighten yours. SOUL I sup above, and cannot stay To bait so long upon the way. PLEASURE On these downy pillows lie, Whose soft plumes will thither fly: On these roses strewed so plain Lest one leaf thy side should strain. SOUL My gentler rest is on a thought, Conscious of doing what I ought. PLEASURE If thou be’st with perfumes pleased, Such as oft the gods appeased, Thou in fragrant clouds shalt show Like another god below. SOUL A soul that knows not to presume Is heaven’s and its own perfume. PLEASURE Everything does seem to vie Which should first attract thine eye: But since none deserves that grace, In this crystal view thy face. SOUL When the Creator’s skill is prized, The rest is all but earth disguised. PLEASURE Hark how music then prepares For thy stay these charming airs; Which the posting winds recall, And suspend the river’s fall. SOUL Had I but any time to lose, On this I would it all dispose. Cease, tempter. None can chain a mind Whom this sweet chordage cannot bind. CHORUS Earth cannot show so brave a sight As when a single soul does fence The batteries of alluring sense, And heaven views it with delight. Then persevere: for still new charges sound: And if thou overcom’st, thou shalt be crowned. PLEASURE All this fair, and soft, and sweet, Which scatteringly doth shine, Shall within one beauty meet, And she be only thine. SOUL If things of sight such heavens be, What heavens are those we cannot see? PLEASURE Wheresoe’er thy foot shall go The minted gold shall lie, Till thou purchase all below, And want new worlds to buy. SOUL Were’t not a price, who’d value gold? And that’s worth naught that can be sold. PLEASURE Wilt thou all the glory have That war or peace commend? Half the world shall be thy slave The other half thy friend. SOUL What friends, if to my self untrue! What slaves, unless I captive you! PLEASURE Thou shalt know each hidden cause; And see the future time: Try what depth the centre draws; And then to heaven climb. SOUL None thither mounts by the degree Of knowledge, but humility. CHORUS Triumph, triumph, victorious Soul; The world has not one pleasure more: The rest does lie beyond the Pole, And is thine everlasting store.

SOUL O who shall, from this dungeon, raise A soul enslav’d so many ways? With bolts of bones, that fetter’d stands In feet, and manacled in hands; Here blinded with an eye, and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear; A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains Of nerves, and arteries, and veins; Tortur’d, besides each other part, In a vain head, and double heart. BODY O who shall me deliver whole From bonds of this tyrannic soul? Which, stretch’d upright, impales me so That mine own precipice I go; And warms and moves this needless frame, (A fever could but do the same) And, wanting where its spite to try, Has made me live to let me die. A body that could never rest, Since this ill spirit it possest. SOUL What magic could me thus confine Within another’s grief to pine? Where whatsoever it complain, I feel, that cannot feel, the pain; And all my care itself employs; That to preserve which me destroys; Constrain’d not only to endure Diseases, but, what’s worse, the cure; And ready oft the port to gain, Am shipwreck’d into health again. BODY But physic yet could never reach The maladies thou me dost teach; Whom first the cramp of hope does tear, And then the palsy shakes of fear; The pestilence of love does heat, Or hatred’s hidden ulcer eat; Joy’s cheerful madness does perplex, Or sorrow’s other madness vex; Which knowledge forces me to know, And memory will not forego. What but a soul could have the wit To build me up for sin so fit? So architects do square and hew Green trees that in the forest grew.

I My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent, Upon the broken, crumbling battlement, Upon the breathless starlit air, Upon the star that marks the hidden pole; Fix every wandering thought upon That quarter where all thought is done: Who can distinguish darkness from the soul? My Self. The consecrated blade upon my knees Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was, Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass Unspotted by the centuries; That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn From some court-lady's dress and round The wooden scabbard bound and wound, Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn. My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war? Think of ancestral night that can, If but imagination scorn the earth And intellect its wandering To this and that and t'other thing, Deliver from the crime of death and birth. My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it Five hundred years ago, about it lie Flowers from I know not what embroidery— Heart's purple—and all these I set For emblems of the day against the tower Emblematical of the night, And claim as by a soldier's right A charter to commit the crime once more. My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows And falls into the basin of the mind That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind, For intellect no longer knows Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known— That is to say, ascends to Heaven; Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue's a stone. II My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more? Endure that toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain Brought face to face with his own clumsiness; The finished man among his enemies?— How in the name of Heaven can he escape That defiling and disfigured shape The mirror of malicious eyes Casts upon his eyes until at last He thinks that shape must be his shape? And what's the good of an escape If honour find him in the wintry blast? I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, A blind man battering blind men; Or into that most fecund ditch of all, The folly that man does Or must suffer, if he woos A proud woman not kindred of his soul. I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.

There is a heaviness between us, Nameless, raised from the void, that counts out the sprung hours. What ash has it come to purify? What disappearance, like water, does it lift up to the clouds? God of my fathers, but not of mine, You are a part, it is said, an afterthought, a scattered one. There is a disappearance between us as heavy as dirt. What figure of earth and clay would it have me become? Sunday again, January thaw back big time. The knock-kneed, overweight boys and girls Sit on the sun-warmed concrete sidewalk outside the pharmacy Smoking their dun-filtered cigarettes. Nothing is bothering them—and their nicotine dreams— This afternoon. Everything's weightless, As insubstantial as smoke. Nothing is disappearing in their world. Arrival is all. There is a picture of Yves Klein leaping out of a window Above a cobblestone Paris street. A man on a bicycle peddles away toward the distance. One of them's you, the other is me. Cut out of the doctored photograph, however, the mesh net Right under the swan-diving body. Cut out of another print, the black-capped, ever-distancing cyclist, as well as the mesh net. Hmm . . . And there you have it, two-fingered sleight-of-hand man. One loses one's center in the air, trying to stay afloat, Doesn't one? Snowfalling metaphors. Unbidden tears, the off-size of small apples. Unshed. And unshedable. Such heaviness. The world has come and lies between us. Such distance. Ungraspable. Ash and its disappearance— Unbearable absence of being, Tonto, then taken back.

When I dare at last to imagine hunger, see farmer wandering his parched fields knowing nothing to do, finally, but sleep the day out in the barn's long shadow, dreaming of the family dog he drove deep into a neighboring county and abandoned by the side of the road. Weeks later a boy finds it in a ditch— timid and gimp, a halo of gnats festering between its swollen testicles and wormy flanks—and he coaxes it into some pines, tethers it with a tentstake and a chain as the late summer light spirals and drapes over the branches, a mirage the dog slavers and snaps at. Consider the boy's amusement as he imagines the animal jerking the light down and the ruckus of bells that clang and catapult from the treetop belfries, the canopy rent like a piñata, spilling licorice and circus peanuts, coins and fluttering dollar bills. The real possibilities are beyond him. The dog as a parable of pain or loss. Hunger as some small iridescent thing at work inside the animal, hovering around its heart the way a lone dragonfly skirts the dry pond crater, dismantling the day—light unstitched from dust, dust unbuckled from air. By now, the dog's given up, and the boy watches its tongue loll in the pine needles, the heave and fall of its stomach, its eyes following birdflight in and out of the shade. Restless for something he cannot name, he imagines the music he might make if he thumped the dog's belly like a drum. Imagines its eyes are the color of iron. Imagines the unimaginable and does it, the tire tool and the belly unwilling instruments, and the dog's caterwaul is not like music at all and when night comes the cricketsong dulcifies nothing, the dog's body is just a body, is not paltry, is not glorified. What hunger is this that haunts the boy, that haunts the man sleeping in the shade? Watch as the dragonfly dips into his open mouth and keeps going, a blur between bone and sinew, a wet thread collapsing soft caverns of flesh, gone to where his body is a field honed by sleeves of sunlight, to where the boy ceases to be and the man wakes. He knows what flits through him now keeps the time with its thrumming, carrying him away from himself into himself, to where the dog roves in the shadows— ravenous, luminous—its tail bobbing in the heat, a winnowing sliver of light.

for Robert Duncan It is hard going to the door cut so small in the wall where the vision which echoes loneliness brings a scent of wild flowers in a wood. What I understood, I understand. My mind is sometime torment, sometimes good and filled with livelihood, and feels the ground. But I see the door, and knew the wall, and wanted the wood, and would get there if I could with my feet and hands and mind. Lady, do not banish me for digressions. My nature is a quagmire of unresolved confessions. Lady, I follow. I walked away from myself, I left the room, I found the garden, I knew the woman in it, together we lay down. Dead night remembers. In December we change, not multiplied but dispersed, sneaked out of childhood, the ritual of dismemberment. Mighty magic is a mother, in her there is another issue of fixture, repeated form, the race renewal, the charge of the command. The garden echoes across the room. It is fixed in the wall like a mirror that faces a window behind you and reflects the shadows. May I go now? Am I allowed to bow myself down in the ridiculous posture of renewal, of the insistence of which I am the virtue? Nothing for You is untoward. Inside You would also be tall, more tall, more beautiful. Come toward me from the wall, I want to be with You. So I screamed to You, who hears as the wind, and changes multiply, invariably, changes in the mind. Running to the door, I ran down as a clock runs down. Walked backwards, stumbled, sat down hard on the floor near the wall. Where were You. How absurd, how vicious. There is nothing to do but get up. My knees were iron, I rusted in worship, of You. For that one sings, one writes the spring poem, one goes on walking. The Lady has always moved to the next town and you stumble on after Her. The door in the wall leads to the garden where in the sunlight sit the Graces in long Victorian dresses, of which my grandmother had spoken. History sings in their faces. They are young, they are obtainable, and you follow after them also in the service of God and Truth. But the Lady is indefinable, she will be the door in the wall to the garden in sunlight. I will go on talking forever. I will never get there. Oh Lady, remember me who in Your service grows older not wiser, no more than before. How can I die alone. Where will I be then who am now alone, what groans so pathetically in this room where I am alone? I will go to the garden. I will be a romantic. I will sell myself in hell, in heaven also I will be. In my mind I see the door, I see the sunlight before me across the floor beckon to me, as the Lady’s skirt moves small beyond it.

προσέλθετε For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered far to find. And near is where you’ll very likely see how far the near obtains. In the dark katholikon

"Dullness of words where God speaks. A dark which feels good. Drawn curtains. On the dark page lines continue the crease and the dream, the space between." -Reb Rissel 1 "Hope: the following page. Do not close the book." "I have turned all the pages of the book without finding hope." "Perhaps hope is the book." 2 "In my dialogues there are no answers. But sometimes a question is the flash of an answer. "My route riddled with crystals." -Reb Librad And Yukel said: "If an answer were possible death would not travel alongside life, life would not have a shadow. The universe would be light. "Contradiction is the scream of a soul drawn and quartered by the moment. Did not Reb Sedra write: 'Here is grain for your field: a grain of life, a grain of death. The grain of life will nourish your death, the grain of death feed your life.'" ("Death will get the better of me. God can only help me in the void."