The Snow Angel's Homily

THE SNOW MAN

Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place


For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.


MY TRADITION

Dec. 21, 2005

My tradition has no roof
against a winter’s night.
No son have I to sing
on through except
who reads into the
rents gods tore in
me, who sighs in
recognition of a sort
and, so affirmed, gets
back to their own
orphanned work
All this will be erased
soon enough, or set upon
a tide which has its own
purposes in all I read
and wrote. A third rider
gripped my haunches
from below, urging me
to ends I never knew
or named though the
gallop was sustaining,
religion enough for me.
And for all I thought
and dreamed, love was
the ninth most perplex
wave, beautiful and
elegant in the curve
to fold, wild in the
most wanton crash ever,
elemental in that ebbing
hiss which farewells
with a kiss and then
is just an ocean I
forever walk the far
shores of, never to
hold see or hold her again.
That romance is also
writ to lose, these poems
carved on sand which the
sea loves to wash until
all words are lost, even
the language of one
heart’s quest for itself
in the confusion of
souls with mates.
All gone, consumed
by entropies I’ll
never fully name,
much less congeal.
With no hands to
hold this I will
walk off from the
page, leaving behind
sand castles or
cathedrals where candles
burn the night and
douse, like souls
and sails in the
washes of first light.
I am the cave and dome
of one entire world,
both shaman and hack
about the ways of God
as I was made to see
Him, filling books of
words that no one will
read, singing loud to
every hell and heaven
though not a leaf disturbs.
He’ll seal me like
a Lascaux when I’m dead,
twenty five thousand
years of ache lost to
upper later worlds.
Raw deal? It’s my joy!
For I sang loud, and my
gods heard!


***

INTO THE WIND

late November 2000

I stepped down from
the poet’s stone
into the wind
of song and fell
slowly here. What
angels attend me
are brute and
old as stone:
Fanged dolphins
slashing the waves
and great birds
whose wings lift
this silence
into a raw
unnamed aerie
where cold winds
rule. Beings of
wind, wood,
and wave,
give me eyes
and voice
in your rages.
May I be real
in the dirt
and derange
of my desire.
Ignite these
bones in
your raging fire.

***

PROLOGUES TO WHAT IS POSSIBLE

Wallace Stevens

I.
There was an ease of mind that was like being alone at sea,
A boat carried forward by waves resembling the bright backs of rowers,
Gripping their oars, as if they were sure of the way to their destination,
Bending over and pulling themselves erect on the wooden handles,
Wet with water and sparkling in the one-ness of their motion.

The boat was built of stones that had lost their weight and being no longer heavy
Had left in them only a brilliance, of unaccustomed origin,
So that he stood up in the boat’s leaning and looking before him
Did no pass like someone voyaging out of and beyond the familiar.
He belonged to that far-foreign departure of his vessel and was part of it,
Part of the speculum of fire on its prow, its symbol, whatever it was,
Part of the glass-like sides on which it glides over the salt-stained water,

As he travelled alone, like a man lured on by a syllable without any meaning,
A syllable of which he felt, with appointed sureness,
That it contained the meaning into which he wanted to enter,
A meaning which, as he entered it, would shatter the boat and leave the oarsmen quiet
At the point of central arrival, an instant moment, much or little,
Removed from any shore, from any man or woman, and needing none.




An Amazulu sorceror told his frineds “that he has dreamt that he is being carried away by a river. He dreams of many things, and his body is muddled and he becomes a house of dreams. And he dreams constantly of many things, and on awaking says to his friends, ‘My body is muddled to-day; I dreamt many men were killing me; I escaped I know not how. And on waking, one part of my body felt different from other parts; it was no longer alike all over.’”

-- Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 55-6


WHEN ANGELS SIN

Dec. 22, 2005

For God spared not the angels that
sinned, but cast them down to Hell,
and delivered them into chains of
darkness to be reserved unto Judgment.

-- 2 Peter 2:4

And the angels which kept not their
first estate, but left their own habitation,
he hath reserved in everlasting chains
under darkness unto the judgment of
the great day.

-- Jude 6

Lord knows it’s hard enough for
mortals not to sin, but what tempts
those big wings to fly dark nights?
You’d think their fortitude against
blue tempts to be celestial,
girdered with the dizzy sense
of how much further they must fall.
Or did they know, who had
only known the right hand of
the Father, whose every utterance
was psalmodic, the pure white
spunk of silvered starry praise?
Last night I dreamt of going
with my partner in poetry readings
to a play he was stage-managing
at a bar somewhere in this town,
a place which summed all the
ones I entered with great hope
and desire and blue thirst (every
bar I’ve drunk in, then). We talked
about his play and what problems
to expect, but I was mostly plotting
drinks, what and how much here,
where to go to next as I walked
home, how much cash I had
to drink, how many more drinks
I might cadge somehow along the way
and who I might meet and romance
along the way. The inside of this
bar proved to be the outside of
this winter’s night, the bar set
in a field facing Lake Dora, that
broad water somehow also the stage.
I ordered a beer and then a shot
of tequila and drank both down
fast, dreaming what that booze must
feel like on the tongue, and what
reciprocates in kind spreading
wilder wings as the hooch spread
out and down. I found a tree beneath
some trees facing the lake and sat
there a while, waiting for the show
to start, promising myself to watch
a bit before tearing off to drink
my way home, my mind revelling
in all the drinks ahead and what
black doors they’d open my
reverie gossamered with that second
to third drink glow we call in AA
the Golden Moment -- eternal
and sweet for ten minutes or so
which we leave as we drink down
to the bottom of the night.
I woke up on the couch at 4 a.m.
(having settled there an hour before)
utterly relieved to be both sober
and at home, far from the black
iniquities I dreamed. Recalling
now that dream I wonder what
could have knocked those legion
angels from their first estate,
what arrows from whose quiver,
what sort of gold-tipped barb of
eros -- feathered in thanatos --
could have shot so high
to pierce them through and
make ‘em such rebel divers from
the height of stars, singing down
the depths of hell. I can only
guess my dreams are theirs,
my leaks their ocean roar.
Shots of Rebel Yell delved
up by abyssal Jezebels
with circummortal cleavage
can woo the nth of heaven
into the greasy bung of Hell.
Let’s have some sympathy
for those augments the devil
deputized into honky tonks;
they are truly just the augment
of desire, that tidal ache
for shores not found on
any continent. Their wings were
molted in our hearts when
I and Thou were cleaved
in one kiss of welcome and
surrender to forever parting ways.
Who does not hallow every
heaven to the harrows of their hells?
If They truly wait in chains
and darkness for our judgment
then I light a candle here for Them,
enemy combatants in God’s war
against essential sin, Their glut
and frenzy all the bottles in my
dream I dreamt, my relish Theirs as
I lifted that mug of cold draft beer
up to my lips, surrendering all these
years of saying No to one more sip,
that one substantial draught which
drowns heaven in a wilder bliss.
Fare thee well, blue augments,
and fare me forward through that
dreadful pass You faltered in so
I can live another day of this.
May I never lose respect for
the clout of endlessness which
You are every link to. By Your
chains, this paper kiss, this
dry and paupered boozeless bliss
which wings my hell to heaven.