XVII.
Now it’s sunset
it’s springtime
almost, and in sunset-beams
the cat’s curled up
on the mattress asleep.
From the cold
insulated
without penitence
or need to repent
his pre-Adamite depth.
Still chilly but
with snow now gone
paving crazy in
thawing streets
the wind is a blessing.
In the wind’s
benediction
the record of the spring
wind is the record
of the autumn wind.
Spring and autumn
the seasons for norms
the months with neither
beach-holidays nor
ski-resort-holidays.
Winter and summer
the seasons for Norns
one gone one not
realised but wanting
to be frozen.
Stamp up and down
now it’s cold rock-hard
now it’s soft soil
waiting for the
gardener’s hand.
XVIII.
There is an unveiling of svelte loveliness throughout the town.
Without asking, simply look and watch as the spring air lights up.
There are no fireflies yet, not for several months in these parts.
But even so the sudden lightness into the evening bravely blazes.
So put on the shoes with the thin soles and possible holes growing.
Let your feet tread the firmness of the streets and pavements alone.
Go down to the drugstore and around to the little brick town library.
It is best, it is best, at times like this to be out alone with your soul.
Distract the soul but do not let it become too certainly distracted.
Cradle the soul but do not choke it, do not, do not let it suffocate.
Holding a parasol, mutual love, human body and public body unite.
The song of the city is high and shrill, its repentance and its fast.
The city fasts, the city repents, the city makes known its suffering.
Its body courses with electricity in pulsing floods into the grey night.
It is unshaven and wears clothes wildly mismatched from different eras.
Watch and you will see its behaviour come to resemble a waking man’s.
A sleeping woman is the true form of the city in her third-floor garret.
She lives above the café and the art gallery, alone together with another.
The black iron of the fire escape casts slanting bars across her window.
The public body claims a prisoner, behind old sharp black iron teeth.
The city has deeply-held desires, as the countryside certainly does also.
City lives among tracts of countryside still, on a string with her sisters.
Like the crown of the seven sisters in the heavens courses the long highway.
The white and red streaks along the highway are the jewels in the holy crown.
XIX.
Oh! The stars are changing
The bear of course remains in its place
the plough of course Orion of course
but beneath, something new and wild and strange:
the southern sparks suddenly scattered on
the anvil of—
Come together, come all the wilderness
Come one come all come together
The great god Pan lives in his kind killer
in a new, unrecognised
Arcadia.
XX.
The carpet of the room
about to be torn up, is strewn
with mementos of childhood
and teenagehood.
Yawning she waits
for her, and upon
her-in-her-self
Anatomical ear is circumscribed
and traced through with bodiless
feeling, the coldness of wet hair
reeking, framing the face its muscles
working into a thin smile.
Waiting for desire
wanting to lose
nothing less than all—
It comes in a flash—the
sunlight and the falling dust
upon the dirty
rug and the dim
hard wood of the stairs.
The history of the world
could be held in the dim
filtering light
from Calvary to here—!
Cry out! –For over, lost are
the days of your simplicity
Take them again cupped in
the palm of your ashen hand.
XXI.
The dust on the face
The dust in the world
The dust that is the body—
all things dust and
all things dusting
all things without form
supplication is their wont
A simple supplication
A simple wish
Small prayer to
: A Heaven that goes on
Despite everything
Despite its own sense of
Being empty at the top
—A Heaven that goes on.
XXII.
We were not ready; nor did we wish
For anything to be like this.
Simply to live and laugh and fish…
We did not want to feel like this.
The tide, in the circle of the stars
The flash of life, like a school of herring
The spark when the soul is torn away—
We did not want to feel like this.
The sin that had scarcely left the bone
The desire to atone in service to others
The standing-at-attention in obedience—
We did not want to feel like this.
When high up in the summit of the skies
When the daimyo had once cried aloud
When the sky and sea mingled in rage—
We did not want to feel like this.
Breath is dead and out to dry.
Breath is but the dream of ash.
Breath is without form, all flux—
We did not want to feel like this.
As upon the Mount of Olives
when the Paraclete seemed gone
As far closer to this centre
when Masamune’s day was done
As beneath the clouds of pumice
when the sky had lost the sun
So here, so now, so ever, so ever
we do not want to feel like this.
Such a thrill of feeling
Such is what is in us
Such is what is important and—
We do not want
We never want
Nor deserve
To feel like this.
XXIII.
Coming up for air—
the water is cold but the sky
gleams colder still, letting
grey beams slice down as
lightless light
through the gateless gate.
At that gate into the field
the cows stand lowing
grass working in their mouths
ruminating and remembering.
‘Yes yes’ they say
‘we are here, here
‘by this post-and-rail
‘fence, being
‘together.’
Need they repenting? Must they, must they—?
The ash is in
the black and white that
can be grey
of the Holstein’s coat
but now—but now—not yet.
‘We are together’, they say
in absolute placidity
Their placidity comes
their placidity
goes but coming
or going it is still
calm and gentle
and all things of warm
earth.
XXIV.
Light closed off
lets love come down
on the old shingled roofs
of this town—
Light let out
brings love in torrents
through the power-lines’
crackling currents—
Light emitting
has love blazing
and the roofs
and power-lines raising—
Light turned down
makes love glow
like the firefly’s
splendid show—
So there, so there, so
anybody
Red lips stained or
grey lips bloody
can see, through the orbit of the substantial
eye—
The beating heart
and bloody torrent
that says out of love
and out of destructive love—
‘Thou shalt not fly.’
XXV.
Loneliness waxes and wanes like the moon
Or like the twisting flashes of a school of minnows
Beneath a dappled spangle of sunlight over still water
First together, next apart, now together, like a wild hornpipe.
Grant O grant that the emptiness of the pool
May be the progenitor of a broader fullness showing
That the light of the sun and the light of the moon filtering
Can show, or can give, the wider reality of the sparkling waters.
Water and light
Shining
(through the being of
the river here)
The trickling sounds
Of dreams.
Falling out, falling in, falling down
The hard rain, the ashen drift
The sudden and harmful germination
Of that-which-in-germination conquers—
Let conquest not
come upon us in the raiment of
supposition of germane glory
XXVI.
The conceit of a cat
makes itself depend upon
the comfort of everyday
guardianship.
Panthers in the old woods
would take it up in themselves.
Do you still remember
how it felt when He tore us
sweetly
apart?
His feet and His blood and His body and His hands
His back and His forehead and His sweat and His tears
The sun is shining
but above the Pine Barrens
the wind is still in its
slipstream.
Life is beating
in dark hold and
fastness where human
feet
have not walked
nor might ever.
Life, redness in greenness, is
simply here now upon us.
XXVII.
The wind in the summit
blows the wisps across
the face of the sky
Slowly, now quickly
In tandem or torrent
Or loneliness of silver.
At sunset, the sunset hitting
the waters of the wide river
—At that sunset, the incarnate
nature of the light stirs the deep
deep red, blazing heartlessly
—but with a soul contained in a sort of
mindless mentality.
Mild pain is the lot
of penitence
truly, truly in
‘Mildness’ it can
show itself.
When they cried ‘repent, repent!’
When they cried that aloud and
When they cried that loudly and
When they beat it with a low thrill
The pain was the pain of sun
On water, the pain of wind
Across a face not prepared
To be buffeted and blown about
A scrap in the fated warm currents.
XXVIII.
In sunset, the tavern
lights are coming on.
Golden lads and girls
sing jazzy or sub-jazzy songs
in the dimness of that comfortable place.
Upon the stage, beneath the red-tinged lights
A red-lipped singer holds a microphone
Bending beneath the vault of dark fake sky
At such a time and in this sort of world
The very image of a Valkyrie.
The song—it comes
Flowing from the mouth in sweet
and acrid torrents
The song of happy despair
The song of rejoicing in the repentance of iniquity
The song of love as the ecstatic escape from
the dangerous borderland
of absolute emptiness
emits—shines—is taken in itself and in
entirety—
She is the very image of
A girl to battle born
Her hand around the microphone
Her hair tied back and shorn.
They fall back with a hush
As in a mighty rush
The solipsistic crush
Destroys the song of peace.
She stands tall and straight as a rush
Against the flooding crush
Of unrepenting hush
Desiring just that peace.
XXIX.
In darkness the clock
chimes but once.
Night comes on
the lamps are on
in the lamplight
the cat is snoozing
the pub-goers boozing
Pile the dirt on my grave
kiss to my head
let me come in my own way
to the place where the evening-
cicadas shrilly shriek
beneath the Milky Way.
Lord, I am sorry. Everybody—
I am sorry
I extend
shamefast ashyface in this
darkness before
sunrise.
Given a gift pay the price for it
told a secret ask who knows it
let in on high break it down lowly
So long the offering
Come down on us come down—!
XXX.
The world is glowing.
Clouds glow
over the darkness in
the midst of town.
Don’t blame me
Don’t blame me
Run, run, run against it
Make it your target
Go for it, shining
Aim for it, blazing
Glittering seize it
Your happiness that was lost.
Your happiness that was lost
in welter of sin and sadness
by fire or flood
by sizzling snowmelt—
That may have been
a million years’ worth. Certainly
More than you put in front
of it. More than you paid
You have lost.
What did we lose
to live this sort
of life?
How much did we lose
to make this great
gain?
What has gone
to let all this
come?
What would we give
to choose whether to
do it again?
XXXI.
Run, run, O eternal
Jump, jump, let it save you
Be, be, here together
In this glowing world.
Fast, fast, on this journey
More, more, oh so desperate
Come, come, to the gateless
Gate of the world.
See, see, here before you
Smell, smell, the golden censers
Hear, hear, the proclamations
Of the ending world.
Kiss, kiss, under the lanterns
Clap, clap, in high delight
Love, love, be together
A gift to wash the world.
Joy, joy, coming always down
Beauty, beauty, new in presence
Kindness, kindness, truth of penitence
Break down and wash this world!
Scrub, scrub the world! Rinse, rinse the world!
Cleanse, cleanse the world!
Drown it or burn it if you must to cleanse it!
Only do not deny us
The possible character of
Our penitent kindness.
XXXII.
The world is made, the world is made and wrecked
A thousand times within tumultuous thoughts
Of travellers who rest amidst the ruins
That were the haunts of girls with lions’ hearts
In shining days before calamities.
The maidens’ reign, which never came to pass
But was the fond and fervent faithful dream
Of strung-out shamans and sharp-eyed acolytes
Held in turn in dreary suburban minds’
Imaginative eye, was in that place.
The folks who lie there, beginning and ending the world
Within their heads a million times a day
In mind-born flames or mind-born twists of wind
Have built themselves a faith of many forks
But forks taken easily in lethargic days.
Flowing and racing, dream-borne waters come
To fill their heads with half-remembered ghosts
Of families, of friends, of enmities
Of loyalties and ideologies
Painted across their postlapsarian blank.
Blankly breaking, the waves of dreams surpass
The sin rubbed like ash into a gushing wound
In sheer effect, sheer change brought to these souls
But cannot grant them peace, rest only, and
Cannot exalt this noble house again.
Half-dead, half-happy, contentedly they lie
Upon the floor of a Valkyrie’s blasted house
Wondering what should be regretted when
Feeling no need to understand the fact
That to regret, bleary-eyed, is not to repent.
XXXIII.
Lastly, the blue wildness
comes through in radiance
and the inner sky of a
small comfortable house
becomes as sea.
The house was built long decades ago
more than a century indeed gone by
and taken and spindled and made to fit
the specifications of eight or nine
generations—
corniced at one point at another
pastoral
the walls lour.
The blue colour flows around
A blue loudness and a blue
brightness, a blue
brighter than sunflowers and a blue
louder than horns.
Until in the fullness
of a day in its parallel heart-tug
of a night in its moon’s
suddenly golden glow
Brightness is in the dark, brightness twisting
darkness in the halls like a gorgon’s hair,
breathing
unsuspected perhaps unwished benedictions
upon the eremitic spare room and the farther stair.
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