And maybe the important thing about art is not that it can touch the sublime – which it can – but that it is a kind of pit, in which we can
enact the ritual
recklessness
of our blood,
a cleansing fire of expenditure
which leaves,
gleaming in its ashes,
a trace of
noble elements.
Wherein all that is passing seeds the future
but that the germ
must have its soil
and thus the counterpoint
dances in our eyes
a twinkling contrapunto
that focuses and releases
the iris pulsing
between the moon and the milky-way
and every man
undone
for a greater good
an Entirety.
The great swing of stars and space loops around
again,
& migrants again attain
once distant shores;
swallows swooping all about
& preening on our ledges,
all movements of the great clock tick
& whirr & chime the summer hour
once again!
And there’s no end,
in the air or on a whale’s
road, or here, in human fretting,
to the great longing
seeking unobtainable, indefinable
goals
& that the looking is our only constant,
migrant souls seeking feeding grounds,
& yet,
all around the whole family
of creation swirls
in a symphony of the same great search
& so it all goes,
ourselves included;
and what anxiety need the clock spring, dial or chime harbour?
It all fits even as it flits, late or early,
time governing, even so; and yet
enveloped in the Entirety.
When modesty came to my house
she entered against an angry barrage
bombastic ballooning ego careering overbearing
so,
o ashamedly,
loud
all the louder for coming from a quiet soul
that had fallen in the way
of all that shouts
:shouts crowd out
build deaf solid states
block hearts and shake
pent rages
blindness: close the world down.
On which errand of noise
and self, I shot out
& modesty,
startled,
flew in.
Wild spirit on the wing,
a swallow entering
in the night my house all ablaze in
manufactured light
a journey that in minutes
took me into a lifetime –
and left me
swallowing –
and Ezra sought paradise
while wise Dante
stuck with fire
a man of sense
& a no-man, with nonsense
for a spirit
a great heart
run ragged
O I know,
that we might give credence to
the accomplishments of the Florentine,
who gave us this scaffolding
but as to innocence,
a man, like Ruskin’s foxgloves,
all explicit in his
confusions
nonetheless rising up
with good-hearted phallic stupidity
Therein is the angel’s flight!
Do we enter now the era of non, that is, of
ubi?: the age, at last, when we may
specify
any era,
whatever time,
our point, our spectrum
just choose – the databases
from which we can
reconstruct
this and that.
& Ezra saw it, knew even after his own
analysis had stopped, that the
European mind had stopped
& all in its train…
Only the seafarer’s or wanderer’s boats
are left to enshrine the remaining
sacred stand: that choice, through which
God is always denied, must be abandoned
and power, through which denial is maintained
must be ameliorated,
and the great voice
LISTENED TO
and has any of us
the guts?
A prophet will arise
in the shadow of these crumbling
towers,
a prophet
& a simple man,
needing no media
the holy man
dancing again
untouchable
whose wisdom
is given
& will bear no working at
and who will be the destroyer
of all constructed knowledge
the wiper-out of information
the spender,
the squanderer of all
intellectual capital
but who will create
& lay up store
Capital of the spirit
of the imagination
the spiritual & cultural
founts of all.