Peek-A-Booty (Hints and Glimpses)

SEA-WRACK

April 26

We don’t survive desire. That’s
The point. Long ago it hauled
Me under with its sweet salt
Wave, subsuming me in the blue

Of my pent loins. It had me
And kept me where the sun
Don’t shine, tucked smartly in
The cheeks and crevasses of

A roundness too great to name,
Drowning every sense it sated
With insatiables of More.
For years I have lived beneath

The sea of her disclosing wave,
A spilt and split so faulted man,
Ever at the cusp of her farewell
In plunged and scattered swells,

The tidal man who left the shore
Forever pounding at an opened door.



SICKLEMAN AND NAIAD

April 26

My song grows wilder as I drown
Down the mere of darker days,
Death crawling up the chimney
Hurling a pale, precise perfume

From the peripheries and fronts
Where I’m doggedly engaged—
Acquaintances, co-workers,
Friends and in-laws struck

By fated fatal arrows,
Killing them and crippling
Us. And then the world
Is sour, gas-crunched, war-

Shriven, too bright in
The hellbent bragadoccios
Of bling and clout, building
Big and bigger houses on

The rims of coming fire.
Yet how sweet the dying choir!

***

The author of the Secret Book (of John) stresses that the insights (the) spiritual intuition (of epinoia) conveys are neither complet nor certain: instead, epinoia conveys hints and glimpses, images and stories, that imprefectly point beyond themselves toward what we cannot now fully understand.

Thus the author knows that these very stories are to be taken neither literally nor too seriously; for these, too, are merely glimpses that, as Paul says, we now know only “in a mirror, darkly.” (1 Cor. 13:12).

Yet, however incomplete, these glimpses suffice to reveal the presence of the divine, for the Secret Book says that, apart from spiritual intuition, “people grow old without joy, and die ... without knowing God.” (Apocryphon of John 30:2-4, in NHL 115)

-- Eileen Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas



HINTS AND GLIMPSES

I see a fish flash in the wave
And the goddess lifts her skirt,
Offering a peek at salt divine:
That’s all we get of You,

Blue heaven, exasperation
At the lip of wild infinitude.
Salt roads are paved with
Fleeting hints, each shard of

Moon on water a cobblestone
Of naked wonder plunged
In darker mystery. Not much
To build a learned abbey on

But that’s the point, to
Train the voice to sing
The sides of eels, hurl arias
Whose tippytoes tweak

Roused nipples of abyss,
Disclosing all in one lost kiss.



IN A MIRROR, DARKLY

April 26

Not much but infinitely more
Than days would be without
You, my blue surprise, ever
Slipping from the wave

Which foams to nothingness.
What would I be without
Those thwocks from nowhere
Which pierced me to the quick?

Big bra in the oak, first flash
Of pantied ass, blue eyes
Inviting me to chase a fleeting
Curve, my wife in bed last night

Smiling at a joke, our cat
Now looking at me so
Dreamily there in the window
Of a spring-hatched 5 a.m.:

A thousand scales of silver swoon
Comprise a fish-god’s deepest moon.