Inside Out

Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, “These nursing babies are like those who enter the kingdom.”

They said to him, “Then shall we enter the kingdom as babies?”

Jesus said to them, “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter (the kingdom).

-- Gospel of Thomas, 22

***

The Challenger set out from Portsmouth in the year 1873 and traced a course around the globe. From bottoms lying under miles of water, from silent deeps carpeted with red lcay ooze, and from all the lightless intermediate depths, net-haul after net-haul of strange and fantastic creatures came up and were spilled out on the the decks. Pouring over the weird beings brought up for the first time into the light of day, beings no man had ever seen before, the Challenger scientists realized that life existed even on the deepest flor of the abyss.

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

***


The external fascade of the temple imposes the “law of men.” The nuptial interior subverts it. But if the interior becomes the exterior, the world is threatened by the adolescent diable au corps that then invades it. So the world strikes back an strikes to kill. Sacrifice and heirogamy are two forces taht presuppose each other, are superimposed over each other and interlocked. They oppose each other, but they also support each other. Eahc is the aura of the other. The girl who is going to be sacrifice seems to be waiting for her spouse. While the background to every erotic pleasure is dark and bloody. Everything that happens is a pendular motion between these two forces. Facing each other, each in its gaze reflects the other. Heirogamy tends toward destruction of the law, whereas sacrifice reonstructs its bloody base. All it takes to upset this equilibrium is a ‘successful love.’ But history makes sure the equilibrium survives.

-- Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony




THE DREADFUL
MIRACLE

May 17

That I found love at all
was a miracle, and a terrible
one at that. Those first
few nights far out to
sea with her absolved
my entire life before,
inverting my every
split and rupture
the world into pure
collapsing union.
Each plunge, each
rapture in a woman’s
arms not meant
to be found in this life
undammed the life
drowning dry canonicals
down an incessant tide
of Yes. Her shape
dreaming next to me
at dawn defied
even my birth,
flooding the source
in pure audacity;
it was a wash surprising
most to me but also
made in one gasp
the world a different
place, pre-Flood, pre-Fall,
absolving every sin
my fathers predisposed
me to. The last of
my Christian faith was
lost in that embrace;
so too all faith in books
and words for love --
my nouns poor aqueduct
for nights my verbs
could never rollick
through with such force
and gusto. And when
the world broke back
in two as she drove away
for good, even though
I felt more solitary
than ever for having
failed at love, the
ruined life to come
defied the wound
for having believed
in love at all. Thus
even absence was
a specie of blue presence,
holding to her
lavish shape in
every wave of ghostly
seem: a holiness
inside such words
as “never.” Contact
and loss are both
egregious to a world
bred for collusion
and miasma,
watering the heart
and then heaving it high
like a moony cenotaph
to carillon love’s disaster
on the very tide it
dreams. I write here
in the house love built,
steeling for another day
now with words on paper
and then palm on sole
when I stroke the bottoms
of my wife’s feet.
Protest is futile, I whisper,
when a cop car rushes
down our quiet street.
Love only if you dare, I
say to the space on the
couch where our cat curls,
a space one day
I’ll only see as empty.
Each gouge and tear
just makes me fuller
with that old quiescent sea
that rocked for an entire night
my harborage in Thee.


***

A TASTE FOR GRIT AND WHATEVER

Jack Gilbert


More and more it is the incidental that makes
him yearn, and he worries about that.
Why should the single railroad tracks
curving away into the bare December trees
and no houses matter? And why is it
the defeated he trusts? Is it because
Pittsburgh is still tangled in him that he
has the picture on his wall of God’s head
torn apart by jungle roots? Maybe
growing up in that brutal city left him
with a taste for grit and whatever it was
he saw in the titanic rusting steel mills.
It might be the reason he finally moved out
of Paris. Perhaps it is the scale
of those long ago winters that makes him
restless when people laugh a lot.
Why the erotic matters so much. Not as
pleasure but a way to get to something darker.
Hunting down the soul, searching out the iron
of Heaven when the work is getting done.

-- from Refusing Heaven (2005)




DAY OFF FROM WORK

May 18


Without love the work could not
be so difficult, its ardor so
savagely tenacious. It matters
greatly that his wife cried “I’m so
isolated!” in the dark of his sleep,
that the next day he downloaded
procedures for Chinese adoption.
It will take 18 months to
complete and cost 20 thousand
dollars. It matters also
that he took the next day off
from work so he could be home
to be there for the bug guys
when they showed up to treat
their bedroom for drywood termites.
It matters that he blackened
the soles of his feet moving
all the storage of their marriage
out and back into the closet
they had to mist with poison.
It matters that the album of hers
he found was filled with photos
of men she had mentioned only
in passing -- good-looking guys
from the 1980’s smiling on couches,
their eyes bright desire, each
assembled so as to suggest a
book of failures. He looks at the one
framed picture she stored in that
box of the two of them together
from that week in Pennsylvania
when they vowed to marry. Perhaps
she put that picture there when
he left her that bad season now
six years past. It matters that
after the exterminators
left he stashed all that stuff back
into the attic, momentoes and
books meant for a coming yard sale,
big plastic witches and smiling pumpkins,
and all those boxes of shoes,
an inexplicable dozen bed pillows
still in their wrappers. The
cat alert at the threshold
inspecting his work as he
bent low again and again
and crawled on wet boards.
The day breezy and cool-ish
and bright, perfect for his
gratitude for being in the same
house as his heart. He could have
showered and then lounged after
setting everything that matters
back in the places she had assigned;
he could have read a novel
for a while up on the recently
painted upper deck:
But instead he then labored
for three late hours in the front
yard, tearing up sod to extend
the garden, spading the tough
St. Augustine grass & shaking off
the dirt by whacking clods against
a nearby palm tree. He was soon
filthy in the hard work of what
matters, indescribably happy.
When she got home from
her day of taking her father to
physical therapy (he’s recovering
from a stroke) & taking gifts to
her mother for her 75th birthday
he could hardly move from the
couch. She thanked him for his
work saying she should have been
there and then told him that her
sister’s mother-in-law died the
last night from lung cancer, drowned
in her own fluids. They eat takeout
fried chicken and potato salad
and a delightful fruit salad (sweetness
upon sweetness in soft cusps
of fleshy juice) watching a bit
on the Knights Templar on the
History Channel, trying to stay
up for the “American Idol” results show.
But she passes out from the effect
of the Tylenol PM pills she took
for the day’s bad headache. He
sits for a while in the living room
with cool breezes fanning every which
way, trying not to think of the
hard day waiting for him ahead,
not knowing how much further into
the outside love will take him,
how much work it will take,
whether they’ll get any breaks at all
nor if that matters in any way
to the salt roads they fell to
when at last each said I do
and for ten hard years have
found a way to make that matter.