The Fourth Cup

FOUR OF CUPS

(the Final Outcome card of my year-end Tarot)

A young man is seated under a tree and contemplates three cups set on the grass before him; an arm issuing from a cloud offers him another cup. His expression notwithstanding is one of discontent with his environment.

Divinatory Meanings: Weariness, disgust, aversion, imaginary vexations, as if the wine of this world had caused satiety only; another wine, as if a fairy gift, is now offered the wastrel, but he sees no consolation therein.

This is also a card of blended pleasure.





THE FOURTH CUP

Dec. 24

One cup inspires with a flash
of recollection; the next one
gallops the breadth of noctal
steppes in its greed for union.
The third cup unites again
boy Cupid with his mother
in the nuptials of first bliss.
Three cups and you’re done,
the crooners insist: three nights
in paradise, three stations
in the heart’s purgatory,
three stanzas buttoned with
a song-ending couplet,
bedding with a rhyme
two heats in one final line.
The eternal round persists
in threes, refusing to fare
further, endlessly in love
the with the same old tale,
repeating it in every precinct
and station of a life, striving
and swinging for the same
sweet wife who shores Elysian
dreams with an ever-crashing
kiss. Such rapture never
bores of that grinding metronome
which enflames but cannot burn,
yearns but never welcome,
refrains but not conclude.
The fourth cup offers itself
again and again but we
refuse to hearken to its voice
sitting as we do dejected
at the base of the tree
with arms heavily folded,
jonesing for one more shot
of that first triadic blue.
New ideas get added to
the round but do not change it;
they’re just new positions to try
out in the same old
wooing of starry unions,
a bit of spice for a trice
of nights, a salt flavor to
refresh the tongue with
with some of that old ocean
quaver. Difficult indeed to take
up that fourth cup and drain
what it really offers, leaving
mother for the real wife,
waking life from its sloshy
sappy origins with slaps of
something truly else -- a leap
so radical it doesn’t have a name
nor fits an enquiry and yet
is there, like a bold new
road behind the mewling
manger just ahead. How to
offer this fourth cup a
surface for its leap,
free of culture’s sad gravity
and futurity’s mad gravitas?
Those ends are dying
of each other’s thirst,
enrapt and warped by that
fool who crowns the brain.
What speaks of its own accord
without certainty’s seductive
swash? It may not be
possible with a pen, or
the impossibility may be just
the door it needs to walk
out from the wilderness
and join the tribe at last
who are lost there too.
Let make of desolation
a scripture not so much
modern as post-cultural,
a divinely broken mess which
choirs salt agons with torn throats.
Those wounds are eyes and see
what I cannot, the one who’s
too shy of the blade that hacks
the feeding tube away, freeing
the boy at last to go and birth
a man. Lord, if this is the
ripening doorway of Your will,
then teach my tongue its ways.
Lord knows I’ve said enough
about the first three cups; to
drink of them past surfeit
is to nail myself to the throne
at the bottom of the brine
and age forever there, melancholy,
mute and misty for the bed
I never found. I pray You
free these wings at last to
turn the other way in
the song which offers more
than love itself, that love
be freed to pour the fifth
and sixth and seventh cups
that we were meant to savor.