Old Gerontius
left his drafty cave
one brisk October day
to gather gnats and mites
and other delights
for his favorite
woodland souffle.
While munching on
a frosty lichen
he spied gold petals
of light break off
the sun,
that swung madly
like a pendulum-
giving him a fright.
They fell all around him
in arcs and reams
and perianths.
So, he broke
into a merry dance,
in the grass
four fathoms deep.
I
Appeasements on the rim of the caldera…
measured footsteps deliberated
on plasma consecrated clotted ground.
The priests’ eyes of remoteness,
like clear stones look past the temporal field
piercing malfeasance with dismissive gestures
while incantations gutter outward
amid the amassing immolations.
The obsidian blade assures
no lasting atonement,
cycles accumulate new trespasses,
generate new hunger in the gods,
perpetuating unending crucifixions
of the id.
The smoke of the sacrifice purpling
at the edge of the known
deflects bleakly into
the sonic dark atmosphere.
II
All deeds have fallen to dust,-
dead spores suspended
in emoted volitions.
Of all that was written,
nothing will remain,
the tongues of sedition
stamped down amid
the praises of the overseers,
leave only the silence stones.
The creatures of Prometheus disperse,
are covered in iridium, are laid down
in the black Jurassic mat.
Those newly born into twilight
succumb silently on the charnel ground.
III
Lives, small-minded,
lived in corners of deceit,
conceived and regulated
in the rat run,- polarized,
strung out, bent under laws
that bind us to earth,
rush on adrenalated
in the wreck of days.
Where-to these enduring
expectant lives, whose fears
articulate lies of preservation,
who fester day-long
in inescapable self-deception
and loss of faith, ultimately wresting
promise into lost days?
What-for?
IV
Of artifice nothing will remain:
the Iron Pillar of Chandra,
the temple dance, the fire altar,
pattern of the jola drum…
these lie buried in labyrinths of untraceable
and irretrievable time.
Gone the full ardour of life
expressed in subtle craft
and overt contrivance;
invention spun into a myriad arts lost:
masters of fire, shapers of metal,
those who augured from charred bits of bone,
they who grappled eagles in their middens,
she that weaves the pattern
of earth and sky into fabric, removed.
From their dust their art shall not be revived.
Lured across crimson seas, led over yellow sands
intoxicated by visions, those drawn in
dreaming the many temptations
proffered in the siren’s call,
neither do they return;
the earthen tracks of their caravans
close like the wake of a wave
in a sea of oblivion.
V
Cursed objects unearthed
drive the fever of the mind,
roving over subterranean rhythms,
delving in dark streams rushing below,
ignorant of stars,-
ignorant of the flowering stone.
VI
Underlying everything, buried in every cell:
DEATH APPARATUS…
Power, arrogance, authority over men
legitimized by the doctrinal ravings
of lunatics: deceits leading to
pollutions of the mind,
corruption of wills,
contaminations of the body,
oaths of allegiance coerced,
professions of faith coerced
on the frontiers of hysteria;
suspicion and distrust precipitating
the slow slide into madness.
Summoners of Primordial Shadow,
lurk in the Doorway of Syndromes,
robed in the Dark Pathology
of Endocrine Disruptors.
Carrying the star of the false prophet, they
incur the Fate of Desecrators upon us all.
They haunt the Shadow of God,
which is DEATH.
They dwell in the ECSTACY
of the all-consuming fire,
which has become my abode,
where I stumble headlong
onto descending paths
to fall in among the dead,
the weight of the soul held
against the weight of a feather;
there falling in among
things past and things lost,
to lay like a stone
with angelic music streaming in my head.
(Aniridia Redux)
We would never know love so deep and wide,
‘less the spear-point had pierced His side.
What burden of mind could man have borne
As heavy as His crown of thorns?
And unless the nail had stayed the hand
Against unyielding wood,
No claim would hold up in this world
As having done any earthly good.
So , think on these things,
How the bruised heel and battered foot
Held fast by iron spike
Crushed the serpent’s head
And delivered us into everlasting light.
There is no life without sacrifice…
Grief has taught me,
what joy could never
reveal,
the severity,
serenity,
and sovereignty,
of Love.
And where it is joy
we desperately seek,
and deem thereon
aside from Love
no higher value
can be obtained,
always the same end
to Love befalls on
this earthly plane,
and rooted in it
the greatest of sorrows
are contained.
When everything is said of ‘what is there’
and the seminal meanings teased out of
juxtapositions: the more a thing is perceived,
less of it is seen, the more it is contemplated,
less of it is felt,
the more it is understood, the less it exists.
The hammer in the mind breaks down reality,
the hammer in the hand breaks down matter,
the hammer in the soul breaks down that which
stands in opposition,
and drives the nails into the hand of God.
Shrouding racked bones
in a mantle of black years
he, shed of vanity,
raising no cry against fate,
finding no rose renewed,-
just old man
bent over the chaos
of his fitful shadow,
struggles to counter
the weight of gravity,
heavily leaning,
his cane tapping
unsteadily against
the pitted glaze of stones.
From eyebrows furled
into storm clouds
and a keen eye brazed
on black heaven,
a few jagged thoughts
still ravel to earth
inventing his last
green dragon world
from illuminations
gathered lifelong,
held in evidence against
a legacy buried in ash,
discarded notions left at the foot
of weathered battlements.
Slowly descending
westward to the gate,
having found no redemption
among men,
he, pitching forward
perilously on blocks
of detached, blown out steps,
slips into low shadows
near the outer wall,
merges into darkness.
Angels standing in the sun
raise no cry against fate;
he is soon gone, countenance freed
to breathe in Elysium.
The moon’s silver crescent
transects the ram’s horn
above the valley floor,
deflects endlessly
sifting enigmas
that bury our thoughts
in the migration of stars
across the black
marbled night.
Pillars of stone lit
in a vast whirling
cylinder of blue
and white sky crystals
distend in firelight
and water dance,
contest the weight
of the horizon
against our awakening
presence of mind.
Surrounded by the
foundations of eternity
and stars laced together
by our mythologies,
we dream lucidly
in the newness of time
and enter the fluidity
of the desert kohol night.
Foundering in a sea of shimmering grass,
hidden deep in featureless terrain,
washed out in mist and distance
on the frost-wine streaked prairie,
they hold fast to their covenant,
communing under the vigilance
of migrating stars in the perimeter-less
autumnal remnant bronze bramble.
Heavy, wind-bent, resilient seed-heads
of Cone Flower, Blazing Star, Blue Gamma,
and Indian Blanket, all grinding down
on their slender stems, turn in the wind
waiting to release their burden
to God’s providence.
These are sacred objects of the day.
I. The Writing of the Hidden Room
The hieroglyphs of scorpions
trail in the sand, conjugating
with the long lazing sibilance
of the viper’s scrawl
across rippling dunes, these-
dooms of nature written
on declending tablets of silica
soon swept over in
an instant of wind
on the red high horizon.
The tongue in my mouth
is a withered leaf.
The sun slants by
drawn on a skein
of jackal grins
across the absinthe sky.
Risen from hidden words,
in sky’s chamber tooled,
turned and fluted
in the rose engine,
timeless stems of rock
stand watchman on
the outer walls of time.
Under the silver horn of moon
the lotus reveals
the jewel of the day’s endurance.
Below the springs of Djed Weron
amidst broken crates,
pitched vessels and gutted sacks,
a few faceted stones drift overlooked
into the cooling sands
agate, chalcedony, jasper,
delved from dark arteries
in the waterless wastes
mother of pearl and mussel shell.
Brought to this ruin,
having divined an errant star,
I have relinquished my body,
left lank upon the ground,
to the priesthood of vultures.
A damascene blade pivots loosely
in my ribs catching the dessicate sun.
So is this commerce ended
and my last curses uttered.
In the month of Shomu
I ascended the Nile in flood,
the flax and the barley were ruined;
the river swelled with the moon.
By decree, the storehouses
were opened and abundance
flowed out from the holy cities
to the shrill of pipe and rap of drum.
I poured the heavy fragrant
oil on the rounded offering stone,
which my grandfather
retrieved from the waters
of the Nile’s heart at El Derr.
On the eve I marked the ascension
of the Goddess onto the rim of Orient,
traversing steadfast above the brown
rushing soul of the River.
II. The Book of Gates.
The Ox and the Oak
turn up the soil,
clay hardens in the sun
and wax melts away.
Shadows fall to earth and grow
beyond root and leaf
onto the temple gate.
When I was ill with fever
as a child,
my father placed a basin
by the window,
allowing the sun’s
reflection to dance
onto the ceiling
above my pallet.
Time is a span between
dreams, dry dust,
and the incessant rustling
in the reed beds
of Green Egypt.
Under the luminous arc of sun
the lotus weaves its perfume
into the memory of the day.
In the red land,
amidst stones immaculate,
pounds the sundering blue
of sky on the mind
like a generating ocean.
Brine salt eyes sink back into
a nest of blue flies
heaped like berries
in the yellow wafer
thin flask of skull
dead estuaries in the melon
light of the Nubian desert.
The bolt is drawn back,
now seeing is not vision,
but persistence
rooted in hidden words
established in the fountain
of the Going Forth…
I went up from the nome of Thiis
upon the Oasis road;
shadows fell long and lost
into infinite solitudes.
Persistence forces a
quell of dreams
to flow like crystal
loosened from its frame.
III. Standing beneath the beam
The spider has set its net
across the door of my house.
Sweet scented labdanum
burns there no more
curling violet dark with smoke
in my hall.
The fig and date have dropped
their fruit on the courtyard tiles
ungathered to purse
in the sun’s viscid meridian.
No more does fire light scatter
its tangled musings
on the silver ceiling beams
no more does the shudder of the lute
pierce these red pillared halls.
How changed
this house is now;
while ambition ran through
flesh and bone,
and no weariness hindered the day
to establish a lasting name,
now anguish runs through
stem and stone for the
barrenness of this failed house.
I came up from the nome of Thiis
upon the Oasis Road,
emptiness beyond me,
and the howl of souls mounting
in the wells of the dispossessed.
Silence ravels ragged
at the edges of the soul,
lacing there with shadows
in the blessed spaces beyond
the edge of the cultivation.
IV. The Pathways of Re
The eyes of Sothis
dance wetly between the reeds.
Amber and flowing,
tensioned against
the force of the current,
her glistening flanks
flood in rushing ichor,
proffer hints of smooth sepia.
Sun exuded luxuriant oil
anoints her matchless form,
the Ibis spread it’s wings
like a tan cloth around her.
At the banks of the great flowing Pulse,
deep in the salt laced thicket,
I caught the scent of her
cinnamon skin lingering
in the cool marrow of shadow.
In heavy leaning colonnades,
in the closeness of dark presences
I braced the drink of oblivion,
This, the inheritance of men
in the midst of Greater Beings.
Where the mortal fades away,
Cleansed is Re in the Field of Rushes.
Disconsolate, restless is the sea.
Gathering hidden strength,
dark-brooding Proteus,
abiding not the immovable,
assails his bounds,
pulls down the walls of creation
into his primal dark realm
grain by intractable grain.
Breakers rumble in the cove
beyond a shirr of cypress
staggering down to white surf.
Cormorants scud the air,
mark the temporal slate
with sweeping arches;
tenuous inhabitants
in a tear of veils, burnt in time.
Grey moon, auburn sun
locked in contentious years,
divide these headlands,
send leaden cylinders
incessantly onto the battered cape
while all is being irretrievably swept
beneath the plane of the ecliptic
towards distant unknown shores.
On this savage blade of land
eternity itself is wearing away
under the dominion
of unattainable spheres,
driven by indifferent
and relentless momentum
until the last stars rain down
in the waste hells of time.