"Welter & Waste at the Otanabee River" Welled up, clogged, staggering A body in mind in mood Evocative lucid images Appears at once and falls Away on cyclical paths Lost upon some shoreline suggesting ground somewhere somewhen someplace again & again. Like Kells’ book Like songlines Dreamtime creation telling forth genealogies of the rocks falling on deaf ears Like breath’s rise and fall forgotten Like water ultimately untraceable unless pooled, damned damnation dammed. The water belonging to the birds present as much as to those who bottle, pipeline, cook it all up within some wasteland econ-alchemy some state, some nation… Like the story of turtles all the way down Something feasting upon persons Some unholy eucharist My daily bread Remembrance? A people gathered singing, sighing, signing an autograph of Sabbath spirit holding in place womb-like Selfsame children of God I have forgotten my testimony I bear witness to amnesia My breath is becoming a cigarette slowly burning mind-aflame unto stub stepped upon trodden tradition My heart is a candle lit every beat a winding down an epiphany then an eulogy So, I’m lost in wonder wandering along a stony path When the signs are broken down, left behind forgotten, overgrown תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ Abysmal breaking and entering, polyphony, static Ought I to scour the archives and reconstruct? Ought I to go on rendering the known and unknown anew by name? No! I’m content to wander into wonder Let all the “let it be’s” be wondrous Let mind be filled with gods’ voices commanding, consoling, damning Let it be a dam built until fear, pain, ecstacy, ennui, hope, desperation falls apart Until my house is at rest, albeit some ramshackle rubble Until I can leave, at night, and repent of violence Sitting now, as it were, at a bench outside buildings of learning to name our membership; a dual-contract with this place one of our many that old tale of a shipwreck made beautiful by the recurring screw-up of the plans we made for trying to have dominion. Like the difference between the way of this river and the tarred trails that brought me here Like what I am like sitting here compared to what I thought was a beaver scurrying away as if I am likely to be dangerous Like a cleared space made pleasant with lawn and benches It is a difference of perception amidst the genius of the self-same place I’m ignorant, as it were, of the various sciences of symbols the clans have learned to employ: how to represent everything in measurements how to be informed about the codes and conduct I lack as it were just enough difference from the beaver to belong to all the angelic beings gesticulating some erotic logic pitched beyond the range of normal; and I’m sufficiently unlike the beaver to be too far up the totem pole for the beaver’s kind to at least treat me with common curiosity let alone courtesy. I should be filled with anxious claws that cling to tear apart a living for my family I should be pumping out bulletins and tracts spelling out in convincing detail my worth my worth in being employed in this great enterprise of restoring the shipwreck to its heyday nevermind the pounding surf the chance of making it to the barely visible shoreline I can scrub, I can paint, I can entertain the crew with jigs, work-songs, hymns Heck! I’ll even pump out an anthem The dual-contract then: with what we are anyway and the vast, long haul of trying to live like kings enclaved within a vast, dark, cave quite some god-imaging trip A shipwrecked citizen, as it were, dropping messages into bottles into the world-wide-webbed reservoir watching my bottles drift away calling it poetry It’s not like I know what I am doing. Revisiting genesis, Stumbling hard over the gospel. The dual-contract is a membership among people who recognize a way of seeing that is believing that is named, taught, caught… reality as it were. A learned set of oscillating habits, a second nature a living question after some first nature, if there ever was such a thing. “Thing”? Nasty speculation about the thresholds of life. What I know is this: Just as there is this making sense from left to right there is a beginning. A beginning such as birth. An arrival on the scene, arriving unconsulted, piping loud, mostly in tact… …then named and kept warm in some plastic brooding box Given a name related to God being love one creature among many others, dealt a hand… …then the seemingly slow soggy seeping in of Peter’s baptismal imitation of Jesus’ water-walking ways which b.t.w. imitated in turn brooding Mama Spirit, lover of the deep… …baptismal waters inscribing the crackling hairline fissures bearing the weight of glory, light playing atonement, luminous darkness …then the wrecking ball gathering speed then the violence then the silence then the remnant. when the kingdom comes when the will indwells way when the earth groans MERCY when sins bear forgiveness when the age-old trial ends in delivered liberation when power flows freely into the husks of mouthed words~ justice, mercy, charity~ Then I will exult in the name rubbed tongues of flame speaking me hallow into the welter and waste by the skin of my teeth. Then I will exult in the suffering beauty gazing forth in and through this knowing becoming pilgrimage toward the Jerusalem imagined, the Jerusalem torn in tension between the gospel and the history we think we know~ freedom road where all the roads are headin’ anyhow~ I will exult when this damned damnation dammed cracks and crashes into resurrection. I will exult when your name is reconciled.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 03:30:45 +0000
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