Concerning First Snow and the Wedding Feast

i

For his first miracle he turned water to wine

at the wedding,

                        my friend mulled wine—

                                                             cheap

Riesling is exactly right for a few things.

                                                            We know

winter when it comes: green is a dream

or a perpetual reality.

                                 What did we expect?

                                                                  Jeremiad

weathermen know the reason for the darkening sky.

Surely their mind is cold,

                                      colder than the sycamore:

Da stieg ein Baum. O reine Übersteigung!

Winter flora and the dying god—

                                                  mistletoe,

the eschatological kiss.

                                   All ends begin

with a broken vow and the threat of frost or fire.

ii

The prayer: 

                  By the rising creek we waded through snow,

faces frozen in tears of forgotten Zion.

On the sycamores we hung our exiled dreams, 

                                                                      the sign

that we were the remnant,

                                        for our mind was our captor

requiring an occasional poem or song or prayer.

But what when imagination runs dry,

                                                        or memory,

and our tongues stick to the roofs of our mouths?

The damnation of Edom:

                                      Jacob I loved, Esau

I hated:

            the mind is, I believe, Jacob in symbol;

Esau, the body—

                           I have heard said

there is great danger in the body, the dancer to Robarts. 

But tricks and cheats are of the mind.

                                                         Jacob lived

up to his name,

                        essence lain bare as the foundations

of Israel—and on this rock…

                                            How can a rock become a parish?

Blessed shall he be who takes these little ones

and dashes them against the rock.

                                                    When I forget, remember,

O Lord, against the flesh (both mind and body).

iii

Eyes nearing rapid movement, 

                                              pure

expression of crystal dreams seeking last

joys of the Sabbath:

                               the frozen angels

underfoot shaded by night shadows

and wind-loosed leaves.

                                      White-washed

grass is smothered to something like cement

along the path I never paved to the door,

a reminder of things I never did and never

will do.          

            Who then devised this torment?

Eliot asked.

                   But snow is nothing like refining

fire, not burning but concealing—

                                                   though both

represent the end:

                            redemption, at least for some.

My wife caught a snowflake on her lip like cake

frosting. 

             The wedding cake was red velvet;

the icing,

              not butter cream,

                                         was too sweet,

and heaven is too good,

                                     and the grass is too

strong,

           opening long gashes in shoe leather. 

December, month of marriage, 

                                               of earth-startling

annunciations, tradition of modernity’s true virginity.

To Fulke Greville, In Absentia (With apologies to Geoffrey Hill)

That love, genesis of the mind, suffers

faults is its triumph

and cloistered

consolation. Could he try

to be clearer?

The waste is, perhaps, Sion — chosen

once upon a time (where all

stories begin) to lie

in shadows. I know

it’s debatable. I

know. 

You saw it the same

as I; our vision is the same

and suffers the same myopia:

haze-engulfed Golgotha,

crucifix hidden beneath

degenerate miasma —

the empty tomb forgotten.

To us even sin finds doom —

everything ends in such. What

I want to know: What virtue

deserves the name? Bravery runs

to self-ruin and idols

breed from the mind.

The Tree did not beget

knowledge, but a kind of ego

centrism, trophæum peccati, not true

self-knowledge, but sensory deception.

What can you trust, Brooke,

that is neither mind nor sense?

Calvin’s admirable gifts

from the Creator

lost among the fallen

organs of perception would never

lead you to boast since

all light is lost in understanding. How

depressing he is. Couldn’t

he please say something nice?

Two glasses — mirrors — there are: one,

imagination; the other,

fatal.  Rotting old age reminds

one of gangrenous life

in lineament or air, the well-

defined and the ethereal equally

equivocal. No, they are not

the same but display

similitude, if one cares to know,

though I doubt one does. 

We, you and I, Brooke, forget

the scales … you know,

from the eyes? Easily

forgotten, though not trivial.

Confound his rhetoric, neither

logical nor grammatical. Who could
follow? Unseen Damascus

right where I left it — left

the road entirely.  Who

have I become?

                                          

Poet blind to eschaton, to something

more than iniquitous

deformity, to power

and truth, almighty and eternal,

the end is near. The end

has its own genesis with its

own fruit, the mirror

of transgression, admittedly

figurative as well as fatal — such is poetry:

union of Christ

and imagination.  They are not

the same, only similar. 

Self-love, a related self

of piety, cannot survive in acute

knowledge of depravity, as such:

choosing not to be chosen

is everyone’s first choice — all

chamber-pots for the Almighty. Can’t

he say something nice? I’m

trying. It’s not easy.

The First Time I Saw a Hooker

She was not what you would call pretty—
spinning, dangling, 
                                        showing off her cherry-

apple clutch and matching lips.   
                                                                 Her heeled

feet pointed to every flaw and revealed
each crease in the over-tread sidewalk.

Even young boys would stop to gawk
through minivan windows. 
                                                        My own mother

couldn’t help but look and told me her
body was for sale, and images
of Frankenstein buying limbs for his
monster defined whoredom for me for years.

She stood beneath the railroad tracks. 
                                                                               The sheer

hose stretching up her legs, completely inept
in the cool autumn air, at least kept
razor burn from bidders’ sight. 
                                                                Shadows

held her eyes like night, like the deep throes
of the event horizon—
                                             where past and present looked

in all directions at all times—
                                                           that sucked

all light dry and left empty
dilated rounds staring back at me.

I will wait alone now for the memory
of a forgotten woman selling an arm, a knee,
a slouching breast, a moan—
                                                           I will wait

by the silent tracks where men look and debate
the shapes in the swirling dust, finding their dreams

in every imprint in the cement and in the rising steam
of a passing train,  
                                     envisioning the teetering whore

searching for what I could not give her.

Doubt: Zechariah, Father of John the Baptist

Old priest who couldn’t believe

in the absurdity of the miracle,

you knew the story of Abraham:

the resurrection of the flaccid member,

of Sarah’s baptized cleft,

how they doubted and still conceived.

You knew and so you prayed,

not expecting your prayers to be heard.

This Day of Atonement your lot was to burn

incense in the temple surrounded

by bent knees and upstretched arms.

Statistically, someone would be answered,

and in the swirling haze of scented air

Gabriel brought you a reply from beyond

nature.  Maybe you thought it was delirium—

because even then, in those dumb old days, everyone knew,

even you, that the elderly didn’t give birth.

In the Holy of Holies, you counted yourself

of greater substance than the Divine,

the Bread of Presence on the table before you

seemed barren for so many years, as unreal

as its shadow cast from the meager light of the lampstand—

better the bulging bellies of pagan idols

resting on the hearth or the headrest. 

I wonder, How could you believe,

never having seen, if your faith was like mine?

Your doubt was punished with 9 months

of silence, a microcosm of the tight-lipped era

of prophecy that also ended with the birth of your son.

When truth returned, its flame rested on your head first.

Eclipse

i

The sun sets behind the earth

     as the mind’s soiled smock of day’s end

tosses heavenward:  it spreads like a finger-painted gull

            and floats on body-heat thermals

            remaining in the air only so long

     before descending as recollection must.  Eyes linger

on the outline of form shifting as memory takes hold—now black,

now white, the nameless glow of sunspots

in the eyes:  all colors of the eclipse

     are of greatest moment.  Mimesis: the shape

of man (image of God)  occludes sunlight as the martyr

attempts recollection. 

The arms spread in the wing-span

     of a featherless bird in flight, but the wings droop. 

Ink stains hands and imprints the brain—white smock turning grey

as sleep convinces mnemon to yield in due season. 

ii

What is a lunar eclipse

     but a promise of passing time? they come

every so often, preceding the lunacy we conceive

through prescription—inscribed

before we had a choice

     that was lost in the flames of a twice-burned house…

it burned from within and without, the divining passions foreordained

and read in the dregs of stale beer

breathed life into similitude

     before the foundations of the earth in the great song

and dance of creation that predicts no change in the immense pleasure

of consummation, and you know what has elapsed… 

the house burned from within and without,

     you see it is a metaphor, a euphemism, I am telling you

something important:  progeny, the still-born, the ill-conceived, the sparse

fecundity that drives them is not all inclusive

Wrens

The open door invited a last look

     into the limits of the land of lost horizons,

     relegated to rear patios guarded by a thin

screen door blown for a moment to the crook

of walled corners, open to the idea that brooks

     no defense for intrusion.  Flight of passion

     drove you two to the cloister within

spider-soaked mesh windows you shook

free of their hay dust and feverish insights.

     From vast expanse you fled for the place of promise

where chirpings in ceaseless renown shorten to a sigh,

     an asthmatic quick gasp that dims bright

prospects in light of the overblown reality of compromise

     and the farce of freedom in someone else’s life.

In Fast Fall

In fast fall

when leaves brown

before red & yellow

and boughs bend and create

the long-arched tunnel

of limbs branching

barren twigs

that barely hide the sun

over the road,

a piece

of the broken body of the unknown

animal lies

in fractured shadows.

Acorns drop with age,

and the wind’s growl deepens

in the echo of the hollows.

What significance

inserts itself

into the remainder—

virility left in a mound

by the curb?

Husbandry on Neck Creek (Revision)

Penance

The undernourished mare

dies beside my car

on the Sabbath. 

The cancerous hound

cannot be buried

in clay iced over. 

In winter the creek is

no place for old pets.

Spring

In terrifying thorny cases,

thistle grows with purple

spring blooms in great patches

no sweat or toil brings to bear. 

The sight of ivy and sumac

recalls the itch on my arms.

Ancient hedera pollutes water:

animals no longer drink

or embrace with impunity.

Revelation

Young boys lust for fire,

a pile of gasoline and a bic

to take care of it all. 

They would steal

and scorch an acre by the creek,

swing from vines and land bellyup

in leavings of cattle from upstream

and be lucky to survive the depth.

Fall

Marked for defeat, unable

to convince scorched earth

to yield, the labor

of husbandry never ends.

Approaching Prayer

When he was young, words

came easily, the naming

of portraits in the maternity ward,

lyrics to children’s songs.

But now, reconciliation,

the theme of memory,

is lost like the moon

behind late September’s ceaseless clouds.

He recalls Adam:

Before he had yet begun to work

by the sweat of his brow,

before those many curses

and the perpetual decline that now

defines what has become history,

before first born and first

death     rivalry     sacrifice,

he was given the impossible task of naming.

In the silence of early fall,

of dew that will never rise,

in the room where words

are all there is,

and thought,

he remembers that Adam

hadn’t been there when light

was named and so became,

when land and sea

were formed with a word,

or when, having been molded,

he was brought to life

with a whisper.

In some proto-Babel jargon,

Adam began to create

by naming—a woman,

a garden—after a model

he had never heard before. 

And here, in the empty upper room

of his house, where

a mosquito, having fed

to satiety on his legs,

leaves him with something

far more than blood,

no words come,

creation ceases

for a time,

the whole world pauses

its diurnal grind

and awaits the final reconciliation

of a day’s end:

Now I lay me down to sleep

and pray the egregious prayer

that the Lord will keep

some of the work for himself.