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MAGUS

Jan. 22, 2006

Eins andern knecht soll
nemand seyn,
der fu sich bleyben
kann alleyn.

“Let no man belong to
another, who can belong
to himself.”

-- Motto of Paracelsus

Old and new I am,
so much of both
you paraphrase me mad,
a Faust and a Frankenstein,
defrauding both nature
and its data like
hell’s own con man,
bilking the devil of
his jade. These white
wings -- perplex and
difficult.yes, spreading
polyphonic wild shade --
are greater than your
brightest combustions,
they sail over your best
cognitions in salvos
of song-singing soar.
I am the lover who clones
his beloved and then marries
both, I summon imps of nano
to leap like salmon
back into God’s ejaculate
of stars., I mint gold from
forges whose candescence
only the dying see between
throw and sigh. Shall I go on?
I blaspheme both priest
and engineer with
such blue empiricals; I
am a strange god’s dream,
prophetic yet peripheral,
an exalt door opened
between the hips of salt
extremes. You can’t see me
in the tabloids or on TV
but you sense me augur
between turning pages
and changed channels, an
infernal, surflike hiss
between the one and zero
which makes divides divine,
all ones and zeroes rapt
and unitive and masks.
I am the augment in the code
no instrument yet names,
the hallow bower not yet
found in the steppes of
blizzarding white noise.
Here is my arctic vatic,
the singing drum of my pulse.
Sylphs and seraphim dance
on the rims of coke-spoons
and misty bridges so many
have jumped from trying
to leap the high falling water
I alone master and further.
It isn’t quite heaven
nor the drift of sated lovers
nor the bland dissolve
at the business end
of careening falls that
I augment with my addled
mix of cant and futurity,
but take all of those in
account when surmising
the leys my blue dark
sings into view, the outlines
of a dragon far older
than any this world has seen,
perhaps every other,
at least for now.
Account every sleeping cat
precious in the lucre of
this hour where all is dark
and dank and still in the
swoon of our sleep which
soon wakens to see all I
have dreamed. Between
the curve of those cats
and the vulupt rollers
of my wife beneath the
covers of a bed upstairs
there are here and only
three words I’ve been
cooking since God poured
into my brain from
his high starry loins.
Now the whole world
is brewing three drops
of a flavor Gwydion my
elder stole from the pot
of the witch Cerridwen,
revealing in that taste
an epiphany or gestalt
or poppy-nightmare of
a wave just who we are
in that raiment of the
rainbow no longer one
spectra but the next,
shining with all the
grace and serenity
of a sleeping cat.
I will disappear when
you rouse; you will
walk crying my name
for an age through
old orchards but I will
be gone, like the sigh
of jaded breeze, the
ringing absence to the age,
returning only the
when the next cusp
of times bids me
beacon and welcome
and perplex the
addled stew of
tomorrows. And I
won’t bear a trace of
this garb in the flying
fish of things which
evolve from the next
things you can’t see, like
the shade of a cloud
racing over a wave
which hasn’t surged
into the marge of a shore
you don’t know eases
out from the middle of
that madness which
makes less of more
in a riven and ecstatic
wave of the hand or
wand -- a benediction
to exalt all shores
in the surf-seeming
world-ending roar
of my song.



A WALK BY THE SEA

Jan 21, 2006

At last, a walk by the sea --
after all the fantasias and
digressions and brag-rolls
of the tongue, this simple
strand an hour before dawn
where the sea laps
diligently against the shore,
humble and serene
like a sleeping mother
or a song too old for its age.
It is enough just to walk
in the naissance of late
dark down a sandy lane
with no horizon greater
than the black sea to my
left and be still, the
true son I was meant to be,
rapt and washing my praises
back with slaps on a shore
ever right here, on a page
in the heart I’ll ever write
down and never get right,
filling a gospel
with every divine word
lost in the surf.
At the end of my walk
I will leave its book on the sand
like a conch for first light,
filled with the sound of
the sea’s vaster rooms
or my breath as I mouthed
its words in your ear
as I walked down a beach
by the sea, each step a song
of salty waves and blue ardors
washing and ebbing to here.