This is a book of poems in the floating genres of open inspiration and Rumiesque narrative, taking a journey to Morocco, visiting Marrakech, being visited by William Blake in vision. golden bees, yellow roses. the long and winding road from the divine affirmation of our birth to the double affirmation of death and its afterlife, all its twists and turns made sweeter by serious (and often humorous) imaginal utterance.
A Rock
A ROCK
A rock sat on its rocky pile one day
and contemplated its existence
“I may have been tossed here” he thought to
his schistose self his minute cragginess his mountainous
minuteness
“by some agency out of the blue torn from some
far rock bed or thrust up from some seismic bowels
but here I am now in all kinds of
weather presently sitting in the heat of the sun
wondering out loud to myself what I’m
doing here rather than say gathering moss down some
hill slope sitting in some serene Zen garden
stubbing the toe of someone whose toe deserves to be stubbed”
The earth suddenly shook and crashed open and the pile he
sat on plummeted a number of yards below and
so did he landing on what was his head before and
now was his base
When he caught his breath again the rock said
“It’s been an adventure really
when I think of all the places I’ve
been in the last two or three millennia
alone!”
An ant came along and crawled up and over it
“God of rocks be praised!” he said
“I’m home!”
5/24/2004 (from Underwater Galaxies)
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A Visit with Mr. Blake
William Blake across from me sits here
insisting on whatever it is he insists on and a
great red cape opens up to show an illuminated city he says
is Jerusalem
Not quite the one over there in Palestine
but translucent walls and gates of light as only
Blake can envision
Even pinkish and silvery angels elongatedly
bending above it barely discernable in the
clouds and blowing on long glass trumpets
I look into the lively fire in his eyes those
limpid English blues of his and his
mild-mannered countenance and his almost
whispery elocution of these weighty matters in which
the whole cosmos is swept along in calamitous clouds
and he levels a look at me his right hand raised by his
face and says
“Behold the things we feared have come to pass
but the things we feared the most
may still be abated”
Black horses of smoke whinnying horribly and various
towers tumbling forward
I gaze through transparent Mr. Blake across
wispy ruins that run on for miles hoping he’s
right as usual
“Shall I sing you a song?” he says
I nod and he sings in a soft falsetto of things so
elementally near they become distant as if in a
play within a play in the mind
of the Divine upraised finger of light attesting to what among
all these phantasms is real
and of the graves of the terrestrially wronged
who open their stony mouths to
sing with one voice the sweet
mercy of God and their
ultimate rectification against all forms of
injustice including tyrannies theological
and while he continues singing I can
almost see the Holy One’s smile like buttery golden flakes
slowly descending over everything
Mr. Blake
your hat
the wide-brimmed felt pilgrim’s hat you
wore when you first came here
Your stick
with which you touch the stars Mr. Blake
all aglitter
and the tiny chanting flames you
leave in the air
5/26/2004 (from Underwater Galaxies)
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