Revelation
It has been my ambition
To capture the world of illumination in a rhyme,
To smell the hidden consciousness of things,
To abide by the trigger and sepulcher of my will,
Until the truth, like a fallen apple,
Falls into the gravity of my hands.
So when the animal of my birth
Brings me to autumn again,
And every color been looted
From the vault of the earth,
And the skies thicken with the migrations south,
And the bees reinterpret the mystery of death,
And black potatoes rot in the fields
And the crows, like shrill priests, call in the morning,
And the stars have dumped their laughter into our dreams,
And our computers wait for a higher intelligence,
And darkness enfolds us in an oval insight,
I break out,
A squadron of birds, flowing on the waves,
Ululations, libations, peregrinations in the wind,
Grab, as she goes skyward,
The bright blue chariot of my desire with the fingers of the morning,
Pull myself, like an acrobatic spider,
Back up into the Black Dot and Bindu of creation.
Up, up through and out the last sutures of the skull to close,
Sealing in the cathedral of blood, time and bone.
There is a river here, luminous, full of aqueducts,
Flowing through every dimension.
Swamps fall into it, and the hands of fisherman,
And the next morning's moan of battlefields and dogs.
And fruit falls into it,
And the eyes of children not yet born,
And small trees that believe they are a thousand years old,
and forms the angels no longer play with,
And expressions of light that dissolve all memory.
Here the Dogon guard the library,
Every book of vibration catalogued, sealed
In the ritual of heartbeat and star
Known to the pharaohs and priests of Egypt,
Orbiting and impregnated in the dark rites of Sirius
Still on view, gaping and alert,
To open the heart swimming in the skull,
Like an ancient sea, to the dark inner ports
Where beauty, the breath and geometry
Fix the alignments, cast the nets,
Track the resonance between star and star.
If a woman were the sea
She would know this. She would take
A black oyster from my nativity,
Fling it out to sisters in the distant wind
And wait for a voice beyond death
To bring it back from salt and the religions of fire,
From leather and desire
Wrapped in my moody corpse of memory and disorder.
There is a legend that the world is new,
But I know it is old,
Older than shoes cast off by a traveling god,
Older than sorcery, older than pumice,
Older than the world behind the world
Where enigmas gather,
Where bold silver streaks out,
Where a cold finger in the weaponry of time
Plunges through stomachs,
Pulls out diseases, pulls out secrets like soiled intestines,
Until the dream coarsens into matter and time.
I have seen this river before,
Subtle as quince rind,
Moving between blisters that shadows make,
Smelling of brine, the muliebrity of queens,
An olive's excursion into the roundness of the sublime.
Tell me, when you reach the floor of beauty,
Where I stand,
Where shall I encounter numerology and ghosts,
Quantums of evidence the stones know,
The moody operetta of leaves mixing with snow?
Come with me,
Discover a day without licenses,
A day where colors rarely seen
Come back to us, crawling to us,
Hand over hand, smothered in immense solitudes,
Gracious as elk, with the fortitude of boulders
Unearthed by great rivers and glaciers,
A vagabond of brute and intolerable truth
Revealed by the wheels and blood of this hour.
I will take out the back of my eyes and give them to God.
I will renounce heredity, take my chances
On coming back as a saint or goat or small red fish.
Strangers will walk by my tomb.
Blue wings will come out, affix to their toes.
Always there is a storm and appetite in my heart.
Copyright © 2010 Edward Bruce Bynum |
