77 Spirituality poems

Foil'd by our fellow-men, depress'd, outworn, We leave the brutal world to take its way, And, Patience! in another life , we say The world shall be thrust down, and we up-borne. And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn The world's poor, routed leavings? or will they, Who fail'd under the heat of this life's day, Support the fervours of the heavenly morn? No, no! the energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun; And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing—only he, His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

At the gym, they told me I would not die, I would only get sexier, and I believed them. I spent my nights wondering if this was going to turn into something long-term, if this was what is meant by casual, or if this was just my annual catastrophic disappointment because if it wasn’t, then I would have to brace myself. I took my medication and looked at pictures of people who were not in love with me. I deleted their names from my cache, said hello to my cat over the phone, took more medication. Days passed. I learned it’s hard to measure your own increasing sexiness. I enlisted bystanders. I passed mirrors and pretended they were not mirrors, but clean windows, and I was not myself, I was a clean stranger. Some days I was sure she wanted to come home with me, and I had to let her down easy, through the window, like a priest. Once I’d been unleashed from thoughts of my own death I was free to be loved in the way I always knew I’d deserved: reciprocally, in Fiji, our bodies lithe and bronzed like gods, but at the same time I felt like a vampire, and none of my friends could relate. They were jealous of my book deal, my time spent at the ashram while they were here, suffering another winter, their unsexiness a flourescent sign that blinks all night.

Like the stamen inside a flower The steeple stands in lovely blue And the day unfolds around its needle; The flock of swallows that circles the steeple Flies there each day through the same blue air That carries their cries from me to you; We know how high the sun is now As long as the roof of the steeple glows, The roof that’s covered with sheets of tin; Up there in the wind, where the wind is not Turning the vane of the weathercock, The weathercock silently crows in the wind.

Am I a character in the dreams of the god Hermes the messenger? Certainly many of my dreams have nothing to do with the common life around me. There are never any automobiles or airplanes in them. These dreams belong to an age in the distant past, to a time perhaps when nothing was written down, to the time of memory. I chose Hermes not out of vanity but because from what I’ve read about him he had a pretty good time, was not just a drunkard on Olympus. In his traipsings delivering divine messages he must have met some pretty girls who gave him pleasure. We know that he invented the lyre for the benefit of poets, and Lucian relates in his Dialogues of the Dead that he was the god of sleep and dreams. My dreams are not frightening, they are not nightmares. But their irrationality puzzles me. What is Hermes trying to tell me? Is he playing a game with me? Last Monday night I dreamt about a school for young children who had heads but no bodies. Last night it was a cow that was galloping in our meadow like a horse. Another night, and this one was a bit scary, I swam across the lake with my head under water, I didn’t have to breathe air. What is the message of these dreams? Into what kind of world is Hermes leading me? It’s not the world described daily in the New York Times. A world of shadows? A kind of levitation? How can I pray to Hermes to lay off these senseless fantasies, tell him that I want real dreams such as my shrink can explicate. I’ve looked up lustration in the dictionary. Its definition is not encouraging: “a prefatory ceremony, performed as a preliminary to entering a holy place.” That’s too impersonal. I want a man-to-man talk with Hermes, telling him to stop infesting my nights with his nonsense.

In the secular night you wander around alone in your house. It’s two-thirty. Everyone has deserted you, or this is your story; you remember it from being sixteen, when the others were out somewhere, having a good time, or so you suspected, and you had to baby-sit. You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream and filled up the glass with grapejuice and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller with his big-band sound, and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney, and cried for a while because you were not dancing, and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple. Now, forty years later, things have changed, and it’s baby lima beans. It’s necessary to reserve a secret vice. This is what comes from forgetting to eat at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully, drain, add cream and pepper, and amble up and down the stairs, scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl, talking to yourself out loud. You’d be surprised if you got an answer, but that part will come later. There is so much silence between the words, you say. You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse. You say, I have too much white clothing. You start to hum. Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isn’t now. Outside there are sirens. Someone’s been run over. The century grinds on.

are our spirits, these loquacious silver gods who glide at some safe distance above their rank and proletarian bodies. Foul though fascinating landscapes they are that they traverse, besmirched with armpits and fruity genitalia and belching gobs and those impulsive blurting sphincters in whose hot updrafts they might ascend and soar. O, but our spirits are so lustrous, so hairless, so advanced in their glass-bottomed flying machines which run on just about nothing! What quick and icy notions they have that slot into one another like the tightest clocks, and how they lick their lips as they gaze down in anticipatory glee, for though they would not themselves wish to rough it, they certainly will peep through their bedroom windows, each a jiggling voyeur of its own ardent body when that body has chanced upon another, and the pair of them have knuckled down to their immersive work.

Sometimes I long to be the woodpile, cut-apart trees soon to be smoke, or even the smoke itself, sinewy ghost of ash and air, going wherever I want to, at least for a while. Neither inside nor out, neither lost nor home, no longer a shape or a name, I’d pass through all the broken windows of the world. It’s not a wish for consciousness to end. It’s not the appetite an army has for its own emptying heart, but a hunger to stand now and then alone on the death-grounds, where the dogs of the self are feeding.

The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us; visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower; Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening, Like clouds in starlight widely spread, Like memory of music fled, Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river, Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom, why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope? No voice from some sublimer world hath ever To sage or poet these responses given: Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven, Remain the records of their vain endeavour: Frail spells whose utter'd charm might not avail to sever, From all we hear and all we see, Doubt, chance and mutability. Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven, Or music by the night-wind sent Through strings of some still instrument, Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream. Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart And come, for some uncertain moments lent. Man were immortal and omnipotent, Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart. Thou messenger of sympathies, That wax and wane in lovers' eyes; Thou, that to human thought art nourishment, Like darkness to a dying flame! Depart not as thy shadow came, Depart not—lest the grave should be, Like life and fear, a dark reality. While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. I call'd on poisonous names with which our youth is fed; I was not heard; I saw them not; When musing deeply on the lot Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing All vital things that wake to bring News of birds and blossoming, Sudden, thy shadow fell on me; I shriek'd, and clasp'd my hands in ecstasy! I vow'd that I would dedicate my powers To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow? With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now I call the phantoms of a thousand hours Each from his voiceless grave: they have in vision'd bowers Of studious zeal or love's delight Outwatch'd with me the envious night: They know that never joy illum'd my brow Unlink'd with hope that thou wouldst free This world from its dark slavery, That thou, O awful LOVELINESS, Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express. The day becomes more solemn and serene When noon is past; there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which through the summer is not heard or seen, As if it could not be, as if it had not been! Thus let thy power, which like the truth Of nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm, to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind To fear himself, and love all human kind.

Is everything a field of energy caused by human projection? From the crib bars hang the teething tools. Above the finger-drummed desk, a bit lip. The cyclone fence of buts surrounds the soccer field of what if. Sometimes it seems like a world where no one knows what he or she is doing, eight lanes both directions. How about a polymer that contracts in response to electrical charge? A swimming pool on the 18th floor? King Lear done by sock puppets? Anyone who has traveled here knows the discrepancies between idea and fact. The idea is the worm in the tequila and the next day is the fact. In between may be the sacred—real blood from the wooden virgin’s eyes, and the hoax— landing sites in cornfields. Maybe ideas are best sprung from actions like the children of Zeus. One gives us elastic and the omelette, another nightmares and SUVs. There’s considerable wobble in the system, and the fan belt screams, waking the baby. Swaying in the darkened nursery, kissing the baby-smelling head: good idea! But also sadness looking at the sea. The stranded whale, guided out of the cove by tugboats, turns and swims back in. The violinist will not let go her violin which is 200 years old and still on the train thus she is dragged down the track. By what manner is the soul joined to the body? Answer: an arm connecting a violin to a violinist. According to Freud, there are no accidents. Astrologists and Presbyterians agree for different reasons. You fall down the stairs with a birthday cake. You try to fit a blunderbuss into a laptop. Human consciousness: is it the projector or the screen? They come in orange jumpsuits and spray the grass so everything dies but the grass. It is too late to ask Kafka what he thinks. Sometimes they give you a box of ash, a handshake, and the rest is your problem. In one version, the beggar turns out to be a king and grants the poor couple a castle and a moat and two silver horses said to be sired by the wind. That was before dentistry, which might have been a better gift. You did not want to get sick in the 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th or 18th centuries. So too the 19th and 20th were to be avoided but the doctor coming to bleed you is the master of the short story. After the kiss from whom he will never know, the lieutenant, going home, touches a bush in which birds are singing.

I believe there is a song that is stranger than wind, that sips the scald from the telling, toss, toss. In the room I move in, a wrecked boy listened to each sky’s erasing, for it was shrill winter, for it was blast and blur. For it was farther from the native birds and the gray heath heather and the uncaressable thighs of the one who shook in violet. Those who fly farthest must always burn the nest. But the mind in its implacable spec- trum dims to brown. Must you die on your back like a cheap engine, rust and wrack? In the crevicing days, there are no words for prizing, be- tween the lidless moon and the silver hands of the fountain. But if it is space you must fail in, teach it din.