Canon

 

 15. Innocence: The Sorceress

 Blake told you and told you: you never heard.

There’s only the single speechless word.

It verberates your wordy skies,

It multiplies your bawdy ground.

As sound is unified with word,

The Lord is unified with sound.

 

I am She who dances on the face

Of the waters, ignorant of light.

Over, ever, harrowing your rock,

I dance the clothless customs of the air.

I swing my heels in demption’s tree,

I toss you down the deeming fruit,

I sing you down the song you ask,

I burn untouched in flower flames:

Untouched, I am what each word names.

 

To sing of history, or of a trinity,

Or of the tree, sing me.

All moves in threes, and I

Am the ground of every trinity:

I make you real to sing.

You must eat from every tree:

All root in me.

In everything I sing:

All you can sing is me.

 

16. The Hanging Man

He has to die, that’s history,

Be Second Fruit of Second Tree;

So intellect betrays him into being

Messiah in spite of everything.

His mystic cousin, Judas Iscariot,

His light through arab deserts where the bands

Of angels teach him the work of the chariot,

The only one who understands

The plan and carries out the act

He asks, despairs when prophecy

Fails, hangs on the left-hand

Branch of that betraying tree.

Left-handed, out intellect

Betrays us for ourselves by light.

Poet, can you say your hands

Know about each other in the night?

You’ll never know about St. Judas; pray

For him, or light, on All Saints’ Day

 

17. Soared and Balances

That thing in itself, the tree:

It sings in Moses’ rod,

In the crucified beam,

Above St. Judas’ neck,

Over Arthur’s grave,

Is all our bones and floods,

And its fruit our blood and brains,

Our selves we ring for May and Yule—

Both trees, both fruits:

The conscience we taste the fruit with,

Kali dancing in the Bo tree

Where Ezekiel sings in the ringing fire

Of the chariot, wheel in a wheel

And four by four, way in the middle of the air.

 

18. The Whirled

How can we sing what else history might be:

A beau to pluck us each into another chants?

We’re angel grubs who’ve forgotten how to spin

The thread we pluck to sing the world we’d have,

The wings that would unfold our shoulders,

Quires among the burning flowers,

The bellying stars, the secret cunt of plenum

Where darkness condenses to a spark,

Superangelic face among the nebulae.

 

How can we care enough for history

To sing each singular second, or a trinity—

Ourself, an other, both—or sing

The chasms we cross to name a thing,

Or Marx’s “Love makes me believe

It is all real”?

                                    Why, sing Second Eve:

Sing the Lady to sing

History: our whole experience

Is we only redeem our innocence

By losing it. To sing everything,

Even the tree, sing the Lady:

She’s where our tree roots, and we

Can only know our trinity through

Her, who makes us reel to sing.

Everything sings the Lady:

                                                She sings too!

 

19. The Moon

Who’ll see why I sing the Lady?

Who’ll think I’ve turned Papist again?

I walk straitbacked past the church;

I kneel to flowers

And still I work, somewhat wooden,

At my aesthetic desk,

Telling you of time

And mind again, but always

Just so much, and more

Unsaid, outside, that tree.

 

Finn Alley

 20. The Hearofont

I’m always glad to walk away

From ruens, back to the city

Where enjinns create freedom

And poesies flurrish on sidewalks,

Humming to myself,

“I can’t get no . . .

San Francisco. . .”

O, there are other Byrds hear!

The Airplane’s an algorhythm enjinn

Of Innocence, and time’s

A Möbius strip, flames

In our looping: what church

Will be founded on this rock,

What moss on these Stones?

“Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand!”

Yes, it’s playing the Avalon this Easter

 

21. The Fool

Through city fog my strange walk’s a dance.

As if some old wind off theTigris

Or time had condensed into stone,

This temple sits, waiting for its Gibbon—

O, I’ll be its barbarian,

Or maybe a Christian—

A sanddune on fogshore

Where history curls, coils, brakes

Like distant drums, an angel’s sigh,

And I am the last

Of a long line of semaphores,

Wigwagging news of battles

No one will ever hear the end of,

Or who’s playing,

Or even what’s the score.

I dance only the last metaphor,

Beginning to spiral myself

A thread of invisible silk.

Coda: The Chariot

 Poet, poet, does anyone pay

A Goddamned bit of attention

To anything you say?

But all you lovers,

Don’t think the revolution’s over:

It hasn’t begun.

Chaos is never overcome.

O never forget to face the chaos.

An hour a day facing chaos

Is more courageous than fresh cunt,

Does more than either beer orMiltoncan

To real the dumb schillerings:

In earthquake aura,

In quicksilver message,

In history flower,

In atom of self, I am

(Look, up in the air, it’s)

Chaos-facer,

His every now’s a new,

Innocent as seventeen’s aurora,

O falcon.

 

FALCON!