Sagehood: A Return                                                                                    

You never went as you have come:
The salvo and the reverb that stole
The thunder’s loud axe and came back–
We will tell you what! – with a dove’s coo.

Yes, Dreaded son, First-in-Line-of-Iron-Forgers!
Whose skull crushed rock like pottery
Whose bone cracked bone like bamboo,
One in whose hands iron became dry wood!

We fearfully awaited your harvest of death
When we had awaited the god of iron,
Awaited the days of volcanicity and fire:

The furnace we feared will forge the metal,
The blood we dreaded will knead the mud,
Matter for the temple of your return!

But you surprised us with your innocuousness.
For here we are tonight, concerting by simple hearth,
Massaging the old and taming rheumatisms,
Nursing the very wise diseases of age,
And living an unexpected peace!

Yes, those soils of distant lands and years
Long settled on your retired feet –
Pacific accretions – harvests of peregrinations
That tamed the thunder of your sensitivities.

Isn’t it the very soil where we sowed wise seeds
Gleaned from the growth of your wintry locks?
Isn’t it the same earth of time and pilgrimage,
Same from which your now pious hand’s midwifery
Teaches us at this dawn to unravel sagacious scriptures,
Symbols stitched to the patterns of the Apocryphal braids
Of your pilgrim hair?

December 18, 2002



Cult Hymns for Men
 
Distance rolls, closing in, with late night drums,
Sacred instruments that gong restricted pockets
Of nocturnal societies awake
While the village sleeps within
And that male trance without--
The ceremony of death wisped
In the smoke of this nightsong.

Rain has just faded out –
Its own music seeped down wet;
While dry skins over hollowed wood
Roll clearer with peremptory beat now:
They call in the potent night –
A tall patch of sacred forest
In a low and open savannah
Brushed in nocturne motif.
 
       Bowels of concealed crafts,
       Necromantic rivalries:
       Shards of glass and razor for meal,
       Tongues of fire for thirst quenchers!

The cult breathes a patriarchal soul;
Womankind lies within roused
By the stridulation of forbidden song –
And indeed heed –
Interdiction and malediction admonished:
                O woman,
                  Lunacy looms without!
She who squats to ease the vessels 
Dares not traverse that threshold,
The dark world without, mysterious and male:
Sacred night club of the circumcised phalluses –
The occult philharmonic plays tonight:
                   O Mother of children
                   Your womb is no sacrifice tonight!

Session men in the keg rattle dancers in the gourd
And spirits breathe wind and bleed keen music
Out of bladed violins…
The tongues of birds are heard only by catchers:
Let the initiated unravel their own riddle, now!
                    O woman beware: apocryphal orchestrations!
                    Stick to your harem,
                    The curse sings around your eaves tonight.



Mysteries

Convolute smoke of early dawn
Curled in the clasp of your hands,

To –

Tantalizing cloud of whorled dusts
That has fogged twenty-four suns:

Baffling beginnings of dreams
Sourcing the eternal river of myth;

And every cosmic sense, everything else,
Is faded, blurred, to faithful speculation.

Flawed integuments of fossilized argument-
Peals of emptied shells that soothsay doubt.

The shell of my canoe bobs down the river– 
Down into the jaws of a shrouded and hungry sea.

But I’m not afraid; not afraid of Nothing.
The sky is an infinite substitute
               
 For the emptiness of no return.

The sky that reflects the sea,
The sea that refracts the sky.



Death of Faith                                                 

I wake up every Sabbath
In a wilderness of shrines-
Throngs lost in hysteria of tongues and songs,
A frenetic idolatry of pantheons of pandemonium.

I wake up searching for a congregation of flowers
Whose buds are still fresh with the virginity of dew
Distilled from the innocence of natural dawn, true.

But each dusk before the volatility of the rising moon,
I’m lulled to sleep with cusps of atheistic potions
As the lunar hours
Pull high tides of fanatical and hysterical seas
That will settle earth’s trembling leaf
With the scarlet dew of bad salt by sunrise.

I wake up every Sabbath
In synagogues of lusty crusaders
And long for love in the breasts of the heathen.
I wake up every Sabbath
Blinded by the blades of the believers
And I grope for primitive peace of animistic caves.

Because I die a breed of death in the dawn of every Sabbath.

January 31, 2005