On Noctilucence

NOCTILUCA

My tribe comes from cold depths
To burn surficial seas with ice,
summer’s wild doubloons
Spilled like silver bullion

From the moon’s first treasury.
Such lavishness would be
Usury in more conscious,
Abler hands, but look,

We are just a cell or two
Of partial fire, mere protoplastic
Ire, each of us a shard
Among a trillion singing folk,

A galaxy whose depths
Perfect the spinning stars,
More ghostly than lumniescent
the gleam we vastly are.

Leaping squid and dolphins flash
The silver sea we burn to ash.







THE ARCHANGEL MANANNAN

I am the stone that was rejected,
Oran’s mouth reburied in the ground
Upon which brighter abbeys of
The soul were firmly mortared,

Bereft of fish and moon and gale.
In my heart of cooled star-
Milk I margin every next-
Crashing strand God can’t be

Found on, or won’t, every shore
A page from Eve’s salt breviary,
A petticoat of Yes as present as
The surf exhales its absent No.

Inside and down the ancient
Faith I ward the door to dreams,
That heaven of much later dread
I alone have fins to tread.

Put me in your poem exactly where
Your aching arches cry Not Here.





Jesus said, “If they say to you, ‘Where do you come from?’ Say, ‘We come from the light;’ the place where the light itself {first} came into being’ ... If they say to you, ‘Who are you?’ Say, ‘We are the children {of the light}, and we are the chosen of the living Father.’ If they ask you, ‘What is the sign of the Father in you?’ Say to them, ‘Movement and rest.’”

-- The Gospel of Thomas 50, in NHL 123


GENUS LOCII

April 22

Again and again I come
Back to you, blue ocarina,
Finger the ocher stops
And blowing up a tide

To wash bright and clean
All shores. I was taught
In part by our tribe of tooters
Though none plays quite like

This, as far as I can tell,
Or care to know. It may be
Blind habit or a blander
Angel, perched immobile on

The singer’s tomb, astride
A cocked and feral fish &
Aiming his rude trident where
Only salt monsters flaunt

And dare. Each day I write the lines
My totem hauls on dreadful tines.