Aidan Kelly: Including Paganism
[For an overview of this poem and its complete title, please see the previous blog.]
Second Theme
7. Sunlight
When the whirled is all inhuman
Flower, what can I say
To the angel flaming
Flower-spectrumed in Eden?
Shall I ask this angel
Who’s got my mind in hock,
Who burns my eyeballs green,
Who strips the gears of my soul
Naked, for wisdom? No,
It’s the always instant
Of knowing nakedness
That makes us men. When self
Begins to speak again, the leaf
Will mean again, and be
Less real. I will decide,
And see an abstract leaf.
8. The Judgement of the Leaf
Impairative of an impeerious god:
Not to turn away
From chaos, no matter how
It burns my fundamental rock.
Faced or unfaced,
Chaos doesn’t disappear.
It’s never overcome;
It’s always there,
And any order is in ignorance
Of chaos, and every poem’s a mask
That makes and cannot cure dis pair,
And reason’s deck tells no fortunes,
Cannot trump a leaf in sunlight,
And thought is ugly imitation
Of this leaf, and every word’s
A ruen of some mythology.
Yet fire is just a mask.
Everything’s a mask.
There are no masks.
There is no mystery
A leaf is everything
It seems, and more.
It’s searching
Makes it metaphor.
So, there’s only history.
9. The Voice of the Hermit
The Ding an sich’s inhuman, man;
don’t mess with it. It doesn’t
care if you burn or not.
Besides, there’s no way back;
and nothing turns; forget your globe.
You’ve got to go on.
You can get anywhere from hear.
Going direct is fast, deepends
On knowing that you’re hear,
But going by the hypersphear,
That’s through so much Terra
Incognita you need a Palomar to see
all the way inside yourself.
The guide-books never tell you
that; all they give
you is a waterglass.
Third theme
10. Isis Unvaled
The First Person is God the Lover.
The Second Person is God the Beloved.
The Third Person is God the Love.
God the Beloved is both male and female,
And creation is the naming of names
By the Word, who is male,
On the Matrix, who is female.
Intellection differentiates.
Perception differentiates.
Even self-awareness differentiates.
What integrates?
You’re trying too hard.
But it revolves around Merry. The whirled
Is all ways infinitely veri us
And immaculate.
Come on, admit it:
She always was God.
11. The Lovers
They say his mother never loved.
That sure as hell makes her
Some bloodless goddess for the hypocrites.
Before he thinks about the desert,
Conceives himself a cock to rouse the world,
He and Madeleine fuck, and therefore love.
I hear him whisper like the leaves
In Augustine’s garden, hear him sweating
On Madeleine’s breasts, hear them rock,
Hear him whisper just before they come,
“Do unto me as I do unto you.
The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.”
12. The Horned God
1. Those who think
Fucking is good
Are on the side of God.
2. Those who think
Fucking is evil
Are on the side of the devil.
3. Christ sits at God’s rite side
And is God’s rite hand.
4. Satan sits at God’s left side
And is God’s left hand.
5. Neither hand knows
What the other hand’s doing.
6. Sex is a metaphor.
13. Isis Valed
Lady, Eden was the world
When Adam, uninformed by sex
Or word, was not yet man.
Since mercy masks us from the sword,
From all of God in every path,
Can we sing the virgin leaf
That’s Eden if we saw it flame?
Hail, graceful lady,
By whose grace I see
The leaf flame in itself!
But, Lady, how can we perceive
That now you are the second Eve
By whose fruit we are reprieved
From the cell where first Eve falls,
Deceived into a single self?
14. The Star
The Lady is not mayd
By words, but we
Sing by words
The unmayd thing
We never say
That makes us sing.
Although I am the tree
I think I see,
Somehow, Lady,
Let me sing,
Let my song be, the thing
Itself, the tree.
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